This is the very strange story of the time Dolph Lundgren starred in a piece of apartheid propaganda.Sources:Bellant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. South End Press, 1991.Abramoff, Jack. Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth about Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist. WND Books, 2011.Easton, Nina. Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade. Simon & Schuster, 2000.Ivon, David. “Touting for South Africa: International Freedom Foundation.” Covert Action Information Bulletin, 1989.Blumenthal, Sidney (December 1983). "Let Lehrman Be Reagan". The New Republic.Cachalia, Firoz and Mervyn Shear. WITS: A University in the Apartheid Era. Wits University Press, 2022.https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-02-13-apartheid-stratcom-agents-trump-edwin-feulner/ https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-11-13-atrocious-crimes-apartheid-hitmans-brutal-confessions-serve-as-a-warning-for-south-africans/ https://mg.co.za/article/2008-05-29-the-spy-who-lost-it/ https://mg.co.za/article/2001-03-23-the-height-of-hypocrisy/ https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/sites/default/files/pdf_files/SNSep83.pdf https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files4/SNNov83.pdf https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files4/SNOct80.pdf https://staging.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files3/pam19870826.026.009.583.pdfhttps://antifainfoblatt.de/aib24/suedafrika-machtkampf-krieg-auf-kleiner-flammehttps://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/48870988/volume-36-number-07-university-of-the-witwatersrand https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/38832258/volume-36-number-13https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/06/293602.html?c=on https://www.sahistory.org.za/sites/default/files/archive-files2/pam19811200.026.009.580.pdf https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/ https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/06/world/4-rebel-units-sign-anti-soviet-pact.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/10/world/reporter-s-notebook-angola-s-children-of-war.htmlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20060128022735/ http://www.alternet.org/story/13134/https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAWCHC/1996/3.pdf https://www.georgeherald.com/News/Article/Local-News/robert-hall-pioneer-in-medical-equipment-dies-20170711 https://mg.co.za/article/1996-04-04-noseweek-case-takes-a-new-turn/https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/73gould.pdfhttps://www.salon.com/2005/08/17/abramoff_2/ https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/09/movies/south-africa-helps-us-film-makers-in-namibia-with-troops-and-trucks.html https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/abramoff-lobbying-congressSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets.
7,000 bodies out there?
Or more.
A forgotten asylum cemetery.
It was my family's mystery.
Shame. Guilt.
Propriety. Something keeps it all buried deep.
Until it's not.
I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now streaming.
What do you know about the Happy Face killer?
He's my father.
It's so good to see you, Missy.
Experience the thrilling new series.
He said he killed another woman.
Inspired by a true life story.
If I don't deal with him, he will never leave us alone.
You don't see how that we're the same, do you?
Anna Lee Ashford and Dennis Quaid star.
I am not responsible for what my dad did.
This going how you hoped?
Happy Face, new series, now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarcki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A very strange meeting took place in June of 1985.
This was long before the days of email and video conferencing.
If you wanted to hammer out an agreement, you had to get everyone in the same room.
Perhaps you could invite everyone to your office, or rent a conference room at the Marriott.
But the attendees at this meeting would have had a hard time booking flights to Washington, D.C. So they settled on something a little less orthodox.
And they couldn't exactly just call up the men on their invite list, either.
The logistics were going to be a nightmare.
Dana Rohrabacher, President Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, Personally flew to a safe house in Tegucigalpa to hand-deliver an invitation to Adolfo Calero, leader of the Nicaraguan Contras.
Anti-communist activist Jack Wheeler was in touch with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and Laotian rebel leader Pau Cajer.
And Grover Norquist had plenty of contacts who could get him in touch with Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan insurgent force UNIDA.
Given the guest list, they had pretty limited options when it came to finding a venue.
State Department officials made calls.
Only two governments were willing to offer their public support for such a summit.
Israel and South Africa.
Politically, that was a minefield.
So one of the attendees offered to host.
They could hold the meeting at the Unita base camp in the Angolan town of Jamba.
American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, arranged for the South African military to handle security.
It was all coming together.
With funding from the president of Rite Aid, Jack Abramoff was going to get the world's leading anti-communists into one room.
I'm not sure this meeting accomplished much in terms of advancing the Reagan doctrine.
But at that rebel base in southern Angola, Jack Abramoff reconnected with an old friend, a South African military intelligence operative he'd first met on a visit to Johannesburg in 1983.
And while Oliver North met with armed men in the sweltering heat, Abramoff was brainstorming his next project and meeting with the man who would fund it.
Whether or not Jack Abramoff's strange summit had any impact on the course of the Cold War is a question for someone else.
I can only tell you about the time the South African government secretly paid an ambitious young American lobbyist to make one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
*Music*
This is a side story.
I really couldn't resist it.
I think you'll understand.
I've been writing this story, this story about Monica Huggett, about South Africa, about the Apartheid International.
I've been writing it for so long that I'm having trouble letting it go.
So I will try to wrap it up next week.
I know there are so many other weird little guys I've promised to tell you about, and we'll get to them.
But I've invested so much in this story that I want to make sure I end it properly.
And I could tell I just didn't have that this week.
I don't talk a lot about my personal life in public, online, because as an expert on weird little guys, I really hate to think about them thinking about my personal life.
But I guess I'm going to have to let you all in on this one eventually anyway.
I'm actually getting married in a couple of weeks, and it Turns out that having a wedding is kind of a whole ordeal.
I'm not really the arts and crafts type.
I really would rather be watching grainy videos of old Aryan Nations World Congress meetings than making place cards and seating charts and trying to figure out how to do floral arrangements.
But here we are, nevertheless.
Honestly, I'm really lucky that I have a job where I can just follow my heart.
And let my curiosity lead me wherever we happen to end up.
Because if I have to write a 7,000 word research project every week, my heart's gotta be in it.
And this week, I could not resist the siren song of a bad 80s action movie.
It was just too weird to only mention in passing it had to be its own episode.
Because as I was writing the conclusion to this long, strange saga of Monica Huggett Stone, I had originally planned to devote just a little bit of time to the political connections of the far-right in the United States and the pro-apartheid activist movements in South Africa.
But I was wrapping up my research connecting Monica to David Duke's 1996 Senate run when I realized I'd
something massive.
It wasn't just the likes of David Duke who were terribly interested in the continuing success of apartheid.
No, it wasn't just the extreme fringes at all.
There were large swaths of Reagan conservatives who were deeply embedded in this.
The deeper I dug, the more obvious it became that a lot of the very big names in American conservative politics are tied up in this story.
Not with Monica.
Like I said, this is a side story.
But in the 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa was a battleground in the Cold War, and the South African government was a big player in this perceived fight against Soviet influence on the continent.
So even as public disgust with apartheid complicated having open dealings with the country, American conservatives saw South Africa as a critical partner.
In the ideological struggle against communism.
And we'll get into some more about those connections in the next episode, because they continue into present-day politics.
In the time it's taken me to write these episodes, that situation has continued to evolve, and there's certainly some strange connections to the past in the story of South African Ambassador Ibrahim Razoul's recent expulsion from the United States.
But today, we're not talking about Ibrahim Razoul.
We're talking about Red Scorpion, the 1988 action movie starring Dolph Lundgren.
I guess we have to do a little background first.
I'm not too proud to admit that when I started poking around the edges of this story, I
knew enough about Jack Abramoff to tell you that's that lobbyist who got into trouble when I was in high school, I think.
And we don't really have to get into the thing Abramoff is most famous for.
His 2006 conviction for mail fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials.
He did a little time in federal prison for crimes he committed in connection to his work as a lobbyist for Native American tribes, seeking to influence legislation on gambling.
That happened later in his life, but I did want to mention it because that's the only thing I knew about him, and I just want to reassure you, yes, he did.
And obviously you have to start somewhere in politics.
You don't just find yourself in the center of a web of corruption involving multiple sitting congressmen right out of the gate.
And Abramoff got his start in politics in college, working as a volunteer on Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and serving as the chairman of the Massachusetts Alliance of College Republicans.
After graduation, he was elected as the chair of the College Republican National Committee, with the help of a man who would become his close friend and longtime collaborator, Rover Norquist.
Together, the pair made it their mission to transform the College Republicans from a resume-padding social club into a vicious, militant political tool.
They pushed out the old car, the men they considered wishy-washy country clubbers, and they remade the organization into what Abramoff called the sword and the shield of the Reagan Revolution.
And he was a busy man in the early 80s.
In addition to his duties as the chair of the College Republicans, he was the front man of a group called the USA Foundation.
And that group mainly appears in a couple of news stories in 1984, in connection to a series of rallies that he organized celebrating the anniversary of the US invasion of Grenada.
They don't really seem to have done much public-facing work.
That was perhaps by design.
The Foundation seems to have mostly existed to raise money.
Traditionally, the college Republicans had relied almost exclusively on the Republican National Committee for their budget.
But Abramoff had something bigger in mind.
He wanted autonomy, and he wanted immunity from the nagging oversight of the old guard.
So he made his own money.
I once again find myself appreciating the work of an unsavory source.
The archivists at the Liberty University Jerry Falwell Library have done a really phenomenal job of digitizing their collection of old documents related to the conservative caucus.
A lobbying group whose board Abramoff served on.
And one of the documents in that collection is a memo that Abramoff sent to a big donor listing off his accomplishments as chair of the College Republicans in 1984 in hopes of securing a big check.
And he says the USA Foundation, under his leadership, had hosted a delegation of South African student leaders on a trip to Washington in January of 1984.
And at that meeting, they'd made plans with those South African students from a group called the Students' Moderate Alliance to co-host an international student conference later that year at a resort in the South African Bantustan of Bofuthaswana.
That same archive contains a 1984 letter from one of Abramov's colleagues, a right-wing think-take veteran named Amy Moritz.
And it's a letter to William F. Buckley.
And in that letter, Moritz openly admits to operating multiple front groups.
And then she opines on the effectiveness of various other right-wing groups operating around the country.
And one of the groups she offers an opinion on is Abramoff's USA Foundation.
And she describes it as operating out of the Heritage Foundation, which is an intriguing aside that I can't offer you any explanation for.
But through his USA Foundation, it seems that Abramoff had finally found a way to pair his ideological inclinations with personal profit.
The USA Foundation took in hefty donations from corporations in exchange for sicking the college Republicans on student groups that were bad for business.
So landlords in San Francisco paid to have student groups organizing for rent control, pushed off California campuses.
Campbell's Soup.
Paid them to undermine student support from migrant farmworkers unions.
It was, I guess, another front group.
With the added bonus of being able to solicit tax-exempt contributions, which he could then use to fund the political activities of the college Republicans.
So these companies, they're not just donating to some think tank.
They're not donating to awareness-raising or policy papers.
They're investing.
They were buying fake grassroots organizing to compete in the marketplace of ideas on their behalf.
But Jack Abramoff wasn't content to sit in Washington and hold fundraisers.
He was, after all, the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution.
And in the early 80s, that meant getting out there and fighting Soviet influence wherever it existed, or wherever it was imagined to exist.
For some conservatives, the growing bad press about apartheid was just a highly effective KGB propaganda operation.
And so it was as chair of the College Republican Committee that Jack Abramoff first visited South Africa in 1983.
The trip was an effort to strengthen ties between student groups internationally.
And as part of that mission, he met with Russell Crystal, the leader of a group calling itself The Students' Moderate Alliance It wouldn't be officially revealed until 1992, so nine years after this meeting,
that the Students' Moderate Alliance had been entirely a project of the South African Security Police, designed to discredit and disrupt student organizing by groups like the National Union of South African Students, or NUSAs, a primarily English-speaking anti-apartheid group on university campuses.
But even more than a decade before the truth was exposed, student groups in South Africa saw right through Russell Crystal.
I found newspapers and zines put out by college students dating as far back as the organization's founding in 1980 mocking the obvious charade of this organization calling itself moderate.
They immediately spotted what was obvious National Party propaganda.
Old issues of a Noosis-aligned student newspaper published by the South African Students' Press Union don't hold back.
A 1980 issue covering the student council election at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, usually just shortened to Wits University, calls the Students' Moderate Alliance a neo-fascist group, and it dismisses them as joke candidates.
Although one of those joke candidates did win.
Russell Crystal's brother Lance.
By 1983, the same paper reported that Russell Crystal, also a student at Witwatersrand, had offered to help right-wing student groups at other schools pay the cost of printing their anti-NUSIS pamphlets.
It was also widely believed that Crystal's Students' Moderate Alliance was behind some mysterious pamphlets that had been popping up at campuses all over the country.
The pamphlets were made to appear as though NUSIS had authored them.
They bore the organization's name at the bottom and they mimicked the style of real NUSIS flyers.
But they misrepresented the group's views and attempted to link the group to illegal activity.
They were such an obvious attempt to discredit the group that the vice chancellor at Wits University issued a statement that whoever had created the flyers quote, does not have the best interest of students, Or of the country at heart.
The university administration also noted that, quote, the nature and countrywide method of their distribution suggests that the persons responsible for them command resources beyond those typically available to student organizations.
And throughout the 1980s, student newspapers in South Africa ran stories about the impossible level of funding The Students' Moderate Alliance seemed to have access to.
They had unlimited numbers of these glossy, expensive-looking, professionally made pamphlets.
And in one case, there was even proof that the pamphlets had been printed in a National Party office.
In 1982, a student newspaper obtained a sworn statement from someone who'd been detained under Section 22. That's the provision that allowed for preventive detention without charges.
Largely a tool used to harass and intimidate anti-apartheid activists.
And on this particular occasion, this detainee was taken up to the 10th floor of the Johannesburg police station to be questioned.
The 10th floor was occupied by the security branch of the police.
The police who were tasked with intelligence gathering, handling informants, and running death squads.
And there on the 10th floor, this detainee saw a familiar face.
It was Russell Crystal.
And the sworn statement read in part, quote, I saw Crystal on the 10th floor of John Forster Square.
He was neither handcuffed nor accompanied by the security police.
He appeared calm and under no duress.
When his brother Lance Crystal was elected to the Witt Student Council in 1980, he refused to sign a statement that all student representatives were asked to agree to.
But they would not involve themselves in espionage on campus.
Lance Crystal reportedly said, quote, I do not want to be held responsible for any patriotic urge that might occur during my term of office.
An official university inquiry from the mid-80s determined that the Students' Moderate Alliance clearly had, quote, lavish funding from anonymous sources.
In addition to his Students' Moderate Alliance, Russell Crystal also founded the National Students' Federation.
The Wits student newspaper sent a reporter to the group's conference in 1984.
It was held at a luxury hotel in downtown Johannesburg, with little finger sandwiches served on silver platters.
Russell Crystal was elected as the group's president, and the leader of the Students' Moderate Alliance chapter at the University of Cape Town was elected to the group's executive board.
That student, a young Arthur Kemp, is someone whose name might sound familiar if you listen carefully.
He would later author the hit list found in the possession of Chris Haney's assassin in 1993.
That student newspaper reporter in 1984 concluded the article about the conference with a quote from a Noosa student leader.
They aren't just making wild accusations.
When they speculate about possible state funding for Crystal's student groups.
Just a few years earlier, something called the Information Scandal had broken, and the government had been forced to admit to the existence of something called Project Anne-Marie, a years-long propaganda campaign aimed at undermining anti-apartheid activism at home and anti-apartheid opinion abroad.
Four high-ranking government officials We're forced to resign in disgrace, including Prime Minister Forster.
The Secretary of Information not only resigned, but fled the country, only to be extradited back from France to face fraud charges.
It turned out that throughout the 70s, millions of dollars had been spent from the defense budget to do, in part, exactly what these students feared was happening again.
Form front groups, And so that student organizer told the paper, While we would want to shy away from individualizing political differences,
where the true motives of people are being obscured, it has at times been necessary to draw the links between such individuals and the National Party and security police.
We believe that the NSF represents a growing attempt to stifle opposition to apartheid.
It would take almost a decade to get the government to admit it, but she was right.
Russell Crystal's National Student Federation and Students'Moderate Alliance were both entirely the creation of the apartheid government.
you you you Thank you.
There's a type of soil in Mississippi called Yazoo clay.
It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation.
It's terrible, terrible dirt.
Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried.
Until they're not.
In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery.
7,000 bodies out there?
Or more?
All former patients of the old state asylum.
And nobody knew they were there.
It was my family's mystery.
But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets.
Nobody talks about it.
Nobody has any information.
When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, Nothing's ever as simple as you think.
The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
I'm Larison Campbell.
Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music
Hi listeners, I'm Anna Sinfield, the host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast, and I'm really excited to share these gripping interviews with you.
On the show, our mission is straightforward.
We tell stories where women win.
And I wanted to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of The Girlfriend Spotlight, as well as season one and season two of The Girlfriend's, 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription.
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Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of The Girlfriend Spotlight one week ahead of everyone else.
Available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers.
So, head to Apple Podcasts, search for I'm Israel Gutierrez and I'm hosting a new podcast, Dub Dynasty,
the story of how the Golden State Warriors have dominated the NBA for over a decade.
The Golden State Warriors once again are NBA champions!
From the building of the core that included Klay Thompson and Draymond Green to one of the boldest coaching decisions in the history of the sport.
I just felt like the biggest thing was to earn the trust of the players and let the players know that we were here to try to help them take the next step, not tear anything down.
Today, the Warriors dynasty remains alive.
In large part because of a scrawny 6'2 hooper who everyone seems to love.
For what Steph has done for the game, he's certainly on that Mount Rushmore for guys that have changed it.
Come revisit this magical warrior's ride.
This is Dub Dynasty.
The Dubs Dynasty is still very much alive.
Listen to Dub Dynasty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
you you you Thank you.
Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves.
We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves.
A wrap-away, you've got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself.
Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth.
Never stop being a dad.
That's dedication.
Find out more at fatherhood.gov.
Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
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While I was researching this segment, I found a small collection of old issues of the Wits Student, that student newspaper at the University of the Witwatersrand.
It's such a fascinating window into the past.
It's just a college newspaper.
It's written by 20-year-olds.
And there are articles about how to get more information about university-sponsored insurance.
There are articles about the tennis team's latest match-ups and reviews of David Bowie albums and John Irving novels.
There's gossip about student groups and classified ads for bicycles and piano lessons.
But in those same pages, those same student journalists are writing stories about the editor of another student paper disappearing.
At the hands of the security police, held in detention without charges.
There are headlines like, 20th WITS student detained, and the police won't say why, and they don't know when they'll be back.
Mixed in with these write-ups about student theater productions, there are images of riot police with dogs and shotguns marching through campus.
Anyway, all that to say, it's possible.
That Jack Abramoff didn't know he was meeting with a government-funded front group led by an intelligence asset when he visited Johannesburg in 1983.
Again, the actual facts wouldn't come out until 1992.
Maybe he didn't know.
It was sort of an open secret, though, and he would have been able to figure it out had he spent five minutes doing his due diligence.
But if we take his word for it, he never had any idea.
It was obvious to those teenagers in Johannesburg and to the university administrators.
Kristol himself never refuted allegations that he was connected to the security police.
Even allegations that surfaced in 1982.
But maybe Abramoff never asked.
There are some clues here that might lead you to suspect...
That he did know.
Not long after returning from this trip, the National College Republican Committee formally adopted a resolution pledging their support to the students' moderate alliance in their fight against communism.
The resolution condemned Soviet aggression and claimed that South Africa was plagued by deliberate KGB propaganda.
But it didn't actually mention apartheid.
At all.
When Abramoff gave a speech at the Republican National Convention in August of 1984, that was his parting message.
That he's mobilizing college-age voters to re-elect Ronald Reagan because America can only be free if Ronald Reagan is free to fund the anti-communist death squads.
Today's students know that support of anti-Soviet freedom fighters and victory over communism And so it is to our party that they come.
It is with us that they trust our dreams.
And it is in us that they place their hopes.
And so it is for them that we must win in November.
It is for them that we must re-elect Ronald Reagan.
And it is for them that we must restore liberty and righteousness throughout the world.
Thank you.
By 1985, Jack Abramoff had a new gig.
He was the executive director of Citizens for America, a lobbying group funded by Rite Aid heir Louis Lehrman.
This was very explicitly just a privately funded mouthpiece for Ronald Reagan.
Lehrman was the founder, funder, and leader of CFA, but it hadn't actually been his idea.
It was Reagan mega-donor and producer,
But they needed the right man for the job.
It was President Reagan himself who called up Lehrman and sold him on the idea.
Lehrman later described the call saying, quote, Our first purpose is to induce a mutation in the climate of opinion in America.
Among opinion leaders.
So about a year and a half into the existence of CFA, Lehrman hired Jack Abramoff as its executive director.
And in that role, Jack Abramoff was meeting almost daily with Oliver North.
You see, Ronald Reagan very much wanted to fund the anti-communist forces in Nicaragua.
But because of their horrific and ongoing human rights abuses, Congress had passed a series of ever-tightening restrictions on the kind of U.S. aid that they could receive.
And by 1985, Ronald Reagan couldn't legally send the Contras any U.S. money at all.
So they put their heads together and they found what they thought was a creative little loophole.
Congress didn't actually say that they couldn't send the Contras.
Any money.
They said that they couldn't send them any U.S. government money.
Money that had been appropriated by Congress.
Money from the budget of a U.S. agency.
There are other kinds of money.
And so the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran.
And they used that money, money that had never been appropriated by Congress, to fund the Contras.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
Don't email me to explain it.
I know I just don't want to write a thousand words about the Iran-Contra affair, but I don't think anyone wants to hear that anyway.
So if this story is new to you, all you need to know right now is that Ronald Reagan was absolutely unwilling to let Congress stand in the way of his desire to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
And a lot of people eventually got into some trouble when that loophole idea turned out to be pretty illegal.
And here's where we finally pick back up with that strange story we opened with.
As director of the CFA, Abramov convinced his boss, Louis Lehrman, that this summit of anti-communist rebel leaders would be a public relations victory for Ronald Reagan.
Congress had just shut down the last bit of USA to the Contras in Nicaragua, and they'd soon be hearing a bill on aid to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA forces in Angola.
Reagan insisted that arming what he called freedom fighters was actually self-defense for the United States.
The idea was that these rebel groups are fighting Soviet influence abroad, and that's a necessary thing in these last days of the Cold War.
So Abramov's plan was to get them all in one room and brainstorm a strategy for convincing the world that these notorious human rights abusers are indeed Reagan's freedom fighters.
And that's how Jack Abramoff ended up on a South African charter plane to Angola to spend four days in a tent with Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and the leaders of the Contras and the Mujahideen.
The whole affair sounds like it would make for a darkly funny comedy, and apparently someone did make a movie about Jack Abramoff in 2010.
It's called Casino Jack.
I think Kevin Spacey plays Jack Abramoff.
I didn't watch it, but apparently there is a scene in that movie depicting this event.
On their flight from Johannesburg to Angola, the plane they took had to fly very low and change course frequently to avoid detection by the Cubans who were in Angola.
And this left the entire delegation just miserably airsick.
There were several reporters along for the ride, and I found multiple accounts that almost everyone on the plane spent the entire flight taking turns vomiting in the plane's filthy toilet.
And after they landed on a makeshift airstrip somewhere in the bush in southern Angola, they endured a two-hour car ride in old Jeeps over unpaved roads before arriving at the secret location of the United Base Camp.
Jack Abramoff later wrote that because he couldn't travel on the Sabbath, he had actually departed for Jamba a day earlier than the rest of the delegation.
And that just seems so thoughtful, doesn't it?
I'm sure he was just being polite.
He was just trying to make a new friend.
There's no source that indicates a reporter was on that flight.
I can't find anything written about what they might have talked about.
So we can only guess what a rabid Reaganite and the leader of the Nicaraguan Contras As bad as the journey was, it wasn't much better after they'd arrived.
This was Jamba, not D.C. There was no Ritz-Carlton.
There was no plumbing.
There was no air conditioning.
They slept on cots in thatched huts.
The delegation from the Mujahideen was using Abdulrahim Wardak's son as a translator, and Abramoff would later claim that he seemed to be struggling, often offering only a few words in translation for very long statements.
A write-up in the New York Times says the Laotian translator kept referring to their Angolan host, Jonas Savimbi, as Mr. Zimbabwe.
And when the group's wealthy patron, Louis Lehrman, presented these rebel leaders, each with their own framed copy of the United States Constitution, they didn't even pretend to be impressed.
When the group sat down to get to business, Lehrman read them a letter from Ronald Reagan, appearing to endorse the summit.
And it read in part, We have to be moved by the example of men and women who struggle every day.
At great personal risk for rights that we have enjoyed since birth.
Their goals are our goals.
But in reading this letter aloud, Lehrman omitted a pretty important line in the president's letter.
It wasn't addressed to this group.
It was addressed to Lehrman alone, and it was not intended to convey the president's endorsement of or promise of aid to Anyone there?
In Jack Abramoff's memoirs, though, he claims, quote, there wasn't a dry eye in the house at the end of the letter.
He goes on to say, the words of Ronald Reagan meant the world to this group.
That particular characterization of this moment is notably absent from every other account I read.
One account published in the conservative Washington Examiner says there wasn't even enough food for everyone there.
Jack Abramoff keeps kosher, so he packed an entire suitcase with his own provisions for the trip.
And he departed from Angola a little bit early, before the event was entirely over.
The Washington Examiner reports that as he's leaving, he's auctioning off his remaining cans of tuna fish, reportedly for as much as $20 a can.
Grover Norquist dubbed the event the Democratic International.
The press called it the Jamboree in Jamba.
And the attendees signed a pact that read, We free peoples fighting for our national independence and human rights, assembled at Jamba, declare our solidarity with all freedom movements in the world and state our commitment to cooperate to liberate our nations from these Soviet imperialists.
In a later piece in Harper's Magazine, columnist Thomas Frank called the declaration a bit of high-flown falderol written by Grover Norquist that aimed for solemnity, but sounded more like the work of a fifth grader who'd been forced to memorize the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence and has gotten them all jumbled up somehow.
I mean, honestly, sick burn on Grover Norquist.
Adolfo Calero, the representative from the Contras, clarified to reporters that the pact didn't call for any exchanges of troops or weapons.
It was kind of just vibes.
When the American delegation got home, Louis Lehrman discovered that Abramoff and Norquist had been blowing through money with reckless abandon.
And they'd spent nearly $3 million out of the budget of Citizens for America.
Lehrman claims he fired them.
Abramoff says he quit.
Who knows?
But by the end of the summer of 1985, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist no longer worked at Citizens for America.
But luckily for Abramoff, he'd used his time in Angola to reconnect with an old friend.
That summit had also been attended by representatives from right-wing student groups from South Africa, led by none other than Russell Crystal.
you you Thank you.
It's thick, burnt orange, and it's got a reputation.
It's terrible, terrible dirt.
Yazoo clay eats everything, so things that get buried there tend to stay buried.
Until they're not.
In 2012, construction crews at Mississippi's biggest hospital made a shocking discovery.
7,000 bodies out there?
Or more.
All former patients of the old state asylum.
And nobody knew they were there.
It was my family's mystery.
But in this corner of the South, it's not just the soil that keeps secrets.
Nobody talks about it.
Nobody has any information.
When you peel back the layers of Mississippi's Yazoo clay, Nothing's ever as simple as you think.
The story is much more complicated and nuanced than that.
I'm Larison Campbell.
Listen to Under Yazoo Clay on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I love you.
Hi listeners, I'm Anna Sinfield, the host of the Girlfriend Spotlight podcast, and I'm really excited to share these gripping interviews with you.
On the show, our mission is straightforward.
We tell stories where women win.
And I wanted to let you know that you can get access to all episodes of The Girlfriends Spotlight, as well as season one and season two of The Girlfriends, 100% ad free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription.
Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
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got you.
Pre-game to greater things.
Start building your retirement plan at thisispretirement.org brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council.
Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends?
We are friends.
Los Angeles 2021.
A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance.
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
Bloom generally targeted people with money.
And I was not alone.
He took over 100 people for over $15 million.
One of the victims was his own grandmother.
I was married to David for almost 10 years.
It was insane.
I was barely functioning, and I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me.
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy.
Charge David!
I'm Caroline DeMore.
Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Abramov soon found himself as the head of a newly founded DC-based think tank called the International Freedom Foundation.
It has the same sort of nebulous, meaningless mission statement as any number of think tanks.
They promoted freedom and democracy and the free market.
It looked like just another slick lobbying organization designed to bring in high-dollar donations for newsletters about the evils of communism.
And I guess that's kind of what it was.
Except almost all of the money came directly from the South African government.
It was given the codename Project Pac-Man by South African military intelligence.
And Abramov's new think tank received $1.5 million per year, every year, from 1986 through 1992, to fund Operation Babushka, the codename given to this propaganda campaign aimed at undermining the African National Congress,
Shaping international opinion about apartheid and combating efforts by American politicians to impose sanctions on South Africa.
The truth didn't come out until 1995.
That's when former South African security policeman Paul Erasmus testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the existence of the Stratcom unit.
Short for...
Strategic Communications, which I guess is kind of a cute name for propaganda and disinformation.
Erasmus admitted to his own role in a years-long disinformation campaign smearing Winnie Mandela.
And he's spoken publicly over the years about the close relationship STRATCOM had with U.S.-based conservatives.
People like Edwin Fulner, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation.
And people like prominent Council of Conservative Citizens member Robert Slim.
Slim, interestingly enough, is someone whose name I found twice.
Once in the 1980s, when he was sending faxes to leaders of the conservative caucus, offering to set up meetings for them with Eugene Terreblanche on their next trip to South Africa.
And then again in 2012, his name comes up in connection with Monica Stone's South Africa project rallies.
So now I wonder how far back those two go.
But in 1995, a spokesman for the South African military did confirm in a statement that, quote, the International Freedom Foundation was a former South African defense force project.
Former South African spy Craig Williamson explained to a reporter in 1995 that the IFF was a tool of political warfare meant to undermine the African National Congress.
But that they'd taken care to run the operation to prevent the people they dealt with from realizing that, quote, they were involved with a foreign government.
They ran their organization, but we steered them.
Craig Williamson is not a good man.
He personally murdered several prominent anti-apartheid activists and he ordered the killings of many others.
One bomb he sent was meant for a married couple critical of the apartheid regime, but it only did half the job.
It killed Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter.
Her husband, Marius Schoon, returned home to find their two-year-old son had been alone in the house with their bodies for hours.
No, Craig Williamson is not an honorable man, but I do think he's telling something Close to the truth here.
He had to, if he wanted amnesty for all those murders.
And he did have a rather astute observation about the particular gullibility of American conservatives.
Saying to a reporter in 1995, We decided that the only level we were going to be accepted was when it came to the Soviets and their surrogates.
So our strategy was to paint the ANC as communist surrogates.
The more we could present ourselves as anti-communist, the more people looked at us with respect.
People you could hardly believe cooperated with us politically when it came to the Soviets.
All they had to do was slap anti-communism on the top of the page, and Republican leaders would sign on to a project without any follow-up questions.
Senator Jesse Helms served as chairman of the IFF's advisory board.
But when this news came out, his spokesman claimed that Helms had never even heard of such an organization and certainly wasn't involved in it.
Congressman Dan Burton led a delegation to observe the 1982 election.
elections in Namibia, and that trip was paid for by the IFF.
Both Burton and Congressman Robert Dornan frequently attended and spoke at and wrote for IFF events and publications.
They, too, denied.
Having any idea that their tabs had been paid by the South African government.
Congressman Philip Crane served on the organization's board for three years.
But when the news broke in 1995, his spokesman claimed that he'd never actually attended any meetings.
And honestly, it is kind of possible that those congressmen just never asked where the money came from.
They probably could have figured it out if they tried.
An article written in 1989 in Covert Affairs, a magazine founded by a former CIA officer turned critic of the agency, noted that the International Freedom Foundation managed to establish itself very quickly.
And in under two years, they were very clearly well-funded and had well-established ties to both the international extreme right wing
And to the intelligence communities in multiple countries.
The group's support for both the South African government and the Nicaraguan Contras earned them the designation of, quote, an organization to watch, from the magazine's editors.
And the author is careful here.
He doesn't make any outright allegations, but the implication is very strong that this isn't a grassroots organization.
But maybe they didn't know.
I can accept that that's possible.
But Jack Abramoff would also vehemently deny that he'd had any clue that money wasn't clean.
And I find that a lot harder to believe.
Russell Crystal, the South African intelligence asset who'd helped Abramoff start the IFF in the first place, ran the organization's branch office in Johannesburg.
And Crystal would later admit that The Johannesburg office was less of a branch and more of a nerve center.
It was really the center of the operation and he was the one deciding how much money would get sent to D.C. And sometimes when the bookkeeping got a little sloppy, he would just have the military intelligence office make those wire transfers directly.
In 1989, the state of New York asked the nonprofit to just provide an accountant's statement that their financial records were accurate.
That's not terribly unusual for a nonprofit bringing in a lot of money.
But they couldn't do it.
Or wouldn't.
And they were subsequently legally barred from soliciting donations in the state of New York.
Financial records that were produced later show that in 1992, the organization's revenue dropped to half of the level in prior years.
That was, not coincidentally, the year that South African President de Klerk Ended funding for such programs as a show of good faith during negotiations with the African National Congress.
The end of that official funding didn't end the IFF right away.
In 1993, the IFF commissioned a report that was designed to paint the ANC as the true villains.
You know, things are really almost over in 1993.
The election is coming.
Apartheid is falling.
But they commissioned this report to say, well, Aren't those the bad guys?
Should we really be compromising with these people who are doing these terrible things?
And the funding for that report was funneled through a slush fund operated by Lucas Mangope, the apartheid collaborationist president of the semi-sovereign Bantustan of Bofu Tetswana.
The IFF would close its doors for good later that year.
But that's really quite enough about old demos buried in the archives of conservative think tanks.
I promised you I was going to tell you about the 1988 cinematic abomination, Red Scorpion.
To give you a brief idea of what the movie is about, it stars Dolph Lundgren as a Soviet special forces operative assigned to assassinate the leader of an anti-communist guerrilla force in the fictional African country of Mombaka.
And the movie opens with Lundgren called before this sinister cabal of communist military leaders from Cuba and the Soviet Union.
And they show him this slideshow of these evil freedom fighters.
It's totally very odd because the movie is from the perspective of Dolph Lundgren's character, a Soviet special forces soldier.
And he is a communist and he is our protagonist.
And he is going to kill these anti-communists.
It's satirically, right?
Because the anti-communists are the heroes in his world.
So it's a little difficult to tell what the movie is trying to achieve because he doesn't successfully write satire.
For much of the movie, Dolph Lundgren is just sort of roaming the African bush dressed in a rather striking manner.
He's removed his outer shirt and he's ripped his khaki pants into these tiny little shorts.
And on the surface level, this is just that sort of 80s action movie aesthetic where you're seeing the sort of shining, sweaty pecs of this enormous muscle man.
But I think there's more to this particular choice.
We have this gigantic blonde Swede and he's been outfitted in what I have to assume As a very intentional recreation of the iconic uniform of the Silu Scouts, the notoriously brutal Rhodesian Special Forces.
And when I sat down to watch this movie, I realized almost immediately that Abramov had based the film on his own experience in Angola.
just backwards, right?
The man he paid to write the actual screenplay based on his notes, a man named Arne Olsen, later said that Abramov explicitly told him that Mambaca is supposed to be Angola, and he'd written the character of the rebel leader Sundata to
represent Jonas Savimbi.
So Abramov obviously came up with the plot of this movie in 1985, when he met with those anti-communist leaders.
So he just took that story and he inverted it.
So he just took what he knew and he reversed it to make the bad guys in his mind the bad guys of his movie, regardless of who the bad guy was in real life.
Some of the actions taken in the film by these villainous Cuban soldiers are things that we know South African special forces did in multiple conflicts throughout the region.
Russian soldiers in the movie drop some sort of toxic chemical from a plane on innocent civilians of Mambaka.
And in real life, there were later revelations about something called Project Coast, South Africa's chemical and biological warfare program.
There were horrific tales of chemical agents being tested on detainees, specifically detainees from the Angolan conflict.
And they used biological weapons to wipe out villages in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia spanning years.
But in the movie, these anti-communist rebels, led by this Savimbi stand-in, are noble freedom fighters.
And this Soviet killing machine has been sent to destroy them, but he has second thoughts and etc.
etc.
There is an extended sequence with no dialogue where a Kalahari bushman is teaching Dolph Lundgren to hunt warthogs.
I don't know, I was kind of looking at my phone at that point.
Dolph Lundgren is basically just playing Ivan Drago again.
He's fresh off playing that Russian boxer in Rocky IV.
I guess he's just kind of a one-note guy.
The only interesting character in the whole movie is that Kalahari bushman who rescues our protagonist from certain death in the desert.
He's played by Rahobstan, an elder in the Komani clan of the San people.
He was 95 years old when the movie was filmed.
And I was kind of curious about who they got to play this role.
And so I looked him up and Rehob San's son David would, years later, after the fall of apartheid, successfully win a legal battle for the return of their ancestral lands.
So the movie sucked, but at least it gave me the opportunity to read a little bit about this rightful restoration of the Comani lands, which are now protected as a UNESCO organization.
It is hard to say exactly how Red Scorpion came to be.
Abramoff's version of events doesn't pass the smell test.
He was Outraged at the allegation that the South African government had played any part in his movie.
But Craig Williamson, that South African spy, is on record claiming the film was absolutely quote, funded by our guys.
And it would certainly be hard to explain away everything about the film if that's not true.
Extras are played by South African soldiers.
South African military hardware is used for props.
Vehicles with South African military license plates were seen on set by cast and crew and reporters.
The South African military provided the production with an old Soviet tank that they'd captured earlier in the Angolan conflict.
And South Africa allowed Abramoff to film the entire movie in Namibia in 1988.
And 1988 was the last year that the South African military was actively occupying much of Namibia, before the UN arrived in 1989 to facilitate the ceasefire and the transition to Namibian independence.
Carmen Argenziano, the American actor cast as the Cuban colonel, later told reporters that actors knew during filming that most of the extras in the movie were South African soldiers.
And during filming, there were rumors on set that there was some kind of intelligence operation.
Argenziano called it very fishy.
Quote, We heard that very right-wing South African money was helping fund the movie.
It wasn't very clear.
We were pretty upset about the source of the money.
We thought we were misled.
We were shocked that these brothers who we thought were showbiz liberals, Beverly Hills Jewish kids, were doing this.
Argenziano recounted one incident at the hotel where all the actors were staying.
Some black Namibian children were playing on the escalator, and the South African soldiers working for the production were shouting racial slurs at the children, chasing them away.
Unnamed sources close to Abramoff told Ken Silverstein, writing for Harper's in 2006, quote, Yes, some people were duped by the IFF.
But Jack wasn't one of them.
As chairman, he understood where the money was coming from.
He knew exactly who he was playing with.
Another source told Silverstein that Red Scorpion had absolutely been a propaganda project, and Abramoff certainly knew it.
Asked in 1987 by the New York Times if the film, which was still in production at that point, was being financed by the South African government, Abramoff gave the incredibly normal-sounding answer that he had raised the money from, quote, Normal film investors.
In his own memoirs, Abramoff repeats his claim that the film had been financed by private investors.
But the only investor he names is, quoting from the book, Robert Hall, a retired physician-turned-investor who owned a vineyard on the Cape of South Africa.
And that's true.
Robert Hall was a retired doctor of sorts.
Who was now an investor of sorts and did own a vineyard on the Cape of South Africa, that's true.
But Abramoff neglects to include that Robert Hall was actually an American oral surgeon.
He'd invented a variety of high-speed drills used in dental and orthopedic surgical procedures, but he fled the United States in the late 1970s to avoid paying millions of dollars to the IRS.
It's a little hard to Google a generic-sounding name like Robert Hall.
There are a lot of guys called Robert Hall who might be a doctor and might live in South Africa.
But luckily for us, this Robert Hall unsuccessfully sued a South African magazine in the 1990s.
A judge in the Cape of Good Hope ruled that the magazine had in fact only been reporting the facts, not defaming Hall.
When they reported, among other things, So,
yeah, just normal investors.
He raised money the normal way.
Jeff Pandin, who worked under Abramov at the International Freedom Foundation, says that Abramov hired Russell Crystal as an executive producer on the film.
And Crystal, in addition to being a state intelligence asset running front groups throughout the 1980s, was at this time serving on President de Klerk's presidential council.
And Abramov absolutely would have known that.
There's just no good faith explanation that can possibly leave you believing That Jack Abramov had no idea that his movie was South African state propaganda.
The film flopped.
Warner Brothers pulled out of the agreement to distribute it after pressure from anti-apartheid activists, led mainly by tennis legend Arthur Ashe.
Shooting delays left the movie wildly over budget, and several actors claim they never got paid.
The International Freedom Foundation folded in 1993.
When the South African funding dried up, apartheid ended.
And by 1995, Jack Abramoff was working as a lobbyist for the Mississippi Ban of Choctaw Indians, one of the clients that he would eventually go to prison for defrauding out of millions of dollars.
And that, I guess, is the story of how apartheid funded a bad action movie and Jack Abramoff ate canned tuna with the Mujahideen.
And half the conservative think tanks in Washington, D.C., secretly collaborated with South African military intelligence.
The American Pronunciation Guide Presents "How to Pronounce South Africa"
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Nellie Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
*music*
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In Mississippi, Yazoo Clay keeps secrets.
7,000 bodies out there?
Or more.
A forgotten asylum cemetery.
It was my family's mystery.
Shame. Guilt.
Propriety. Something keeps it all buried deep.
Until it's not.
I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Under Yazoo Clay.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
you
After a crime, you read the headlines.
But do you know the story?
At the time that I called the police, he knew I had called him and left the house with a firearm and was texting me that he was going to use it.
I'm Hannah Smith.
And I'm Patia Eaton.
We host The Knife, a podcast from the Exactly Right Network that cuts to the heart of the story.
Through in-depth interviews and candid conversations, we'll bring you firsthand accounts of people living through the ripple effects of crime.
Most of us don't know the legal process and because they always tell you this word closure, I really wish people would stop using that word because there is no such thing as closure.
These are the scars that are left behind.
These are the voices you haven't heard.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to The Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarcki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
