FRANK TERPIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP09S00048R000100020009-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 16, 2011
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: November 10, 1983
• Content Type: MISC

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RADIO N REPORTS, INC.
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FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM
Morning Edition STATION WAMU-FM
NPR Network
DATE November 10, 1983 7:45 A.M.
SUBJECT
Frank Terpil
C' Washington, D.C.
BOB EDWARDS: Frank Terpil worked for the Central
Intelligence Agency for many years. But in the early 1970s,
Terpil left the agency to work for himself. Among other things,
he sold eavesdropping equipment to, Uganda's dictator Idi Amin,
hired assassins on behalf of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, and
provided terrorist training to several factions in the Middle
East. It was, he admits, a nasty and often corrupt business, but
Terpil says he did not have a,-monopoly on such affairs. He says
his biggest competitor was the CIA.
Tepril has been a fugitive for three years now. But in
this exclusive interview with Jim Hogan, Terpil explains. why he
doesn't want to return to the United States.
Here's Hogan's report.
JIM HOGAN: Frank Terpil is an angry man with-nothing to
lose and a great deal to say. That he has nothing to lose is
owing to t?he fact that he's a man on the r.un, a fugitive in
flight from a 53-year sentence, Interpol, and the intelligence
services of at least three countries, including his own. He's
lost everything: his business, his home and his family. But
what makes, him angry, he says, is that it was all. taken from him
without a' fair trial. According to Terpil, he his cohort,
Gary Korkola (?), had no choice but to become fugitives. A trial
-in absentia and a harsh sentence were.inevitable because they
couldn't afford to plea-.bargain. Any sentence would have been
too long. .
?FRANK TERPIL: We had already been'told that we'll be
dead, no matter if we received one year or two years. . We would
be dead, we.would be taken, we'd be-finished, we'd be killed.
OFFICES IN: WASHINGTON D.C. S NEW YORK ? I C)S AN(:FLFS ? r-wrnrs IT ^ ^~ ~R PRINCIPAL CITIES
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And this was a prime factor in our leaving.
HOGAN:- Terpil believed that he'd be killed in prison
because he knew too much. And one of the things that he knew too
much about, he says, was an alleged U.S. intelligence operation
in which flights were made to the Golden Triangle, a remote area
on the border between Burma and Thailand.
TERPIL: What was on the plane? Gold., -Ten million
bucks at a time in gold. It was going to the Golden Triangle to
pay off the warlords, the drug lords. What the idea was, they
could. not -- in the. Golden Triangle, you could not buy people.
Money meant nothing because they were making more money on the
drugs. You had to buy warlords. How'd you do it? You gave them
more money than their product -- for their product.
Now what do you do with all the opium? You reinvest it
in your own operations. Now...
HOGAN: Wait a minute. You don't reinvest opium. You
have to sell it.
TERPIL: You sell it.
HOGAN: The ostensible purpose of the operation was to
remove large quantities of opium from the world marketplace. In
reality, Terpil says, the opium was diverted, resold, and the
profit laundered through a consortium of banks in the Far East.
TERPIL: And what you did is now you've got an accele-
/rated:fund. And all of a subject it became a project that was in
a tailspin. You were getting more money than you knew what to
. hell to do with.
HOGAN: Most of the money, Tepril insists, was rein-
vested and used to fund covert intelligence operations in
Indochina and elsewhere. A key role in the scheme was played by
the Nugen-Hand (?) Bank, an Australian-based financial institu-
tion whose top executives included many former high-ranking
military and CIA officials. The founders of that bank, Frank
Nugen and Michael Hand, have since met unhappy ends. Nugen was
found shot to death in the Australian Outback three years ago.
While former U.S. intelligence operative Mike Hand has disp-
-peared entirely, as indeed have many of the bank's records.
Some of those records probably concerned Frank Terpil's
sometime partner Edwin P. Wilson, an important client of the
bank's. According to Terpil, Wilson used the bank to finance the
.purchase of classified military hardware. Himself a former CIA
agent, Wilson represented Libya in a. meeting with the American
manufacturer of that equipment.
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TERPIL:.. Who was the buyer? Wilson. Where did they
meet? Moscow. Where does the money come from? Singapore.
Where does it go through? Nugen-Hand.
HOGAN: While the Nugen-Hand Bank has since collapsed,
Terpil says that nothing has changed but he center of operations.
Action central is now Miami.
TERPIL: That's the base. The whole goddam thing has
moved down there. Where did they come from? Laos. Where was it
before? - Golden Triangle. Where did the money come. from?
Nugen-Hand.
HOGAN: To understand Frank Terpil is no easy task. To
the courts, he's a criminal. To his friends and family, he seems
almost a martyr. And to the intelligence community, he's just a
rogue. They see his association with Idi Amin-and Qaddafi as
repugnant, his arms sales deplorable. He exports violence, they
say, and does so for profit.
But Terpil says that he is neither guiltier nor more
innocent than the military establishment as a whole. He points
to Pentagon arms sales to Latin America, to CIA operations in
Indochina, and to U.S.'support'for strongmen such as Ferdinand
Marcos and madmen such as Pol Pot. It's a view with which his
Third'World hosts would seem.t.o agree.
TERPIL: Leaders of various-countries do not consider my
-- or.they may consider my case more of a martyr case. They
don't. consider that I've really done anything criminal or
violent, any more so than their people. So I do enjoy sympathies
of what you might consider some of the Third World countries.
While they don't consider me a hero, they don't consider a
criminal, either.
EDWARDS: Jim Hogan's interview with Frank Terpil appear
in this month's issue of Penthouse magazine.
Te*rpil's former associate, Edwin Wilson, was sentenced
yesterday in U.S. district court to 25 years in prison for trying
to kill two prosecutors, five government witnesses, and a
busines.s associate. Wilson already is serving long prison terms
for shipping arms to Libya.
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