Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 3 Num. 17

("Quid coniuratio est?")

CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE DEATH OF COLONEL JIMMY SABO

Tom Valentine's guest on Radio Free America (Shortwave, 5.065 MHz, mon-fri, 9 pm cst) on November 14, 1994 was private investigator Gene Wheaton. Mr. Wheaton has been looking into the suspicious death of the late Colonel Jimmy Sabo. Following is my transcription of that interview.

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[Awesome sounds of John Phillip Souza's "Stars and Stripes Forever"]

ANNOUNCER

It's Radio Free America, the talk show for intelligent Americans, with your host, Tom Valentine.

Radio Free America is brought to you by The Spotlight [CN -- Note: Throw mud here.] Call 1-800-522-6292 for your subscription.

And now, the newspaper that "tells it like it is" presents Tom Valentine.

TOM VALENTINE:
Hello, everybody! Welcome back to Radio Free America.

We're beginning the week with a bang, right now, by recalling a guest, a man who's been a guest on this show a couple of times. He is, he's an extraordinary guy, he's an investigator. He came here before to talk about the crash of the aircraft at Gander, that killed so many young Americans in the military. And he put it together... That was one of the few air crashes in which the evidence, instead of being combed through, was buried as fast as they could possibly bury it.

Well, we have another mystery. And my guest is investigating that mystery. I want to welcome back to Radio Free America Mr. Gene Wheaton. Hi, Gene.

GENE WHEATON:
Hi, Tom. How ya doin'?

VALENTINE

I understand that you've got another story that you're lookin' into now.

WHEATON

That's correct. I'm looking into the murder of a Marine Corps colonel, Jimmy Sabo(sp?), out here in the Marine Corps air station at El Toro, in 1991.

VALENTINE

I had read that that was a suicide!

WHEATON

That's what they wrote it off as. However, we have conclusive medical, scientific evidence that the man was murdered.

VALENTINE

All right.

A lot of people have no idea, even though I understand this was on ABC's "Dateline", or somethin' like that, television...

WHEATON

...Connie Chung's show.

VALENTINE

Connie Chung did it [the TV show, not the murder -- CN]. A lot of people don't know a thing about it, including me.

WHEATON

O.K. On the 22nd of January, 1991, between 8:30 and 9:00 o'clock in the morning, Colonel Sabo was found shot to death in his back yard, in the housing area of the Marine Corps air station at El Toro, California.

VALENTINE

So this is quite awhile ago. It wasn't just something that happened recently.

WHEATON

No. It's... The investigation initially was closed down real quickly, calling it a suicide. A year later, while I was investigating the Gander crash, the family contacted me and asked me to assist them. And I've been working on this since the spring of 1992.

VALENTINE

So when you were on this show before, you were already in the midst of this one.

WHEATON

That's right. And it's an ongoing investigation. I've been called back to Washington by the commandant of the Marine Corps to brief his staff. I've been called back to the Department of Defense and the Pentagon to brief them on it. And it's a heavy case, involving covert operations that are sort of renegade that some Marine Corps units got involved in, that would cause a scandal if they became public.

VALENTINE

I see.

Gene, before we go any further into this thing, how about your background, your military background and so forth.

WHEATON

I've served in the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Army. And I was a police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm a retired special agent with the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, retired as a chief warrant officer, from the Army. [I] served in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Italy. I have a degree in police science, and a masters in public administration. I teach some criminal justice courses to police officers out here in California.

VALENTINE

All right. You've "been around"; it's pretty obvious, then.

Let's go into this. This then is not necessarily a CIA or a Mena, Arkansas-type thing.

WHEATON

No, not necessarily. There are some inter-relations to the operations going on in Mena, Arkansas. As we got into this case, we found that civilian contractors were flying in and out of U.S. military bases and using the protection of legitimate flights to conduct some illegal operations. And the Marine Corps air station in El Toro happened to be one of those bases.

VALENTINE

Now how'd you determine that?

WHEATON

Well, it was a long, tenacious investigation, as I said, that's still going on. A surprising thing that came out last year was that 32 C-130 Hercules aircraft have been pilfered out of U.S. military channels, and funneled through the Department of Agriculture to civilian, covert operators who used to be part of the old southeast Asia, "Air America" [CN -- notorious as a front for CIA drug smuggling] crowd. And they get sweetheart contracts to haul weaponry around the world, and then their tail numbers are cleared so that they can come back into the United States without clearing through customs, landing at military bases and civilian airports. And they're allowed to run their own, privatized, smuggling operations to help support their little airlines, between government flights.

VALENTINE

Amazing stuff! And somebody fairly high-up has to approve this. Of course, the fourth-floor bureaucrats could do this without anybody knowin' it, couldn't they?

WHEATON

Yes. It's a networking of a covert operation sub-culture of a very small group of people that are implanted in the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council, and the Pentagon.

VALENTINE

And you've run into these people before. We haven't got any time for you to comment on it, but we'll bring you back to that point.

My guest is Gene Wheaton, as you heard, [an] investigator with excellent credentials. I'm Tom Valentine, this is Radio Free America.

[...commercial break...]

All right, we are back, live. This is Tom Valentine coming at ya from stormy southwest Florida.

Out in California I have Gene Wheaton as my guest. Gene is investigating the... Well I guess it's not necessarily a case, or something that has got a name, does it, Gene?

WHEATON

Well, it does have a name. It is the... We have briefed the Department of Defense and they have re-opened an investigation into the thing. And it is into the circumstances surrounding the death of Colonel Jimmy Sabo, the number 3 man at the Marine Corps air station at El Toro. He was a Marine fighter pilot in Vietnam, 28 years in the Marine Corps. [He] had a distinguished record there.

And when I got into this, I stumbled across the covert operators to the extent that it rattled headquarters in Marine Corps up so badly, that the commandant invited me back to Washington to brief his staff on it.

After I finished briefing the staff at the commandant of the Marine Corps, I went to the National Institute of Health and various government medical agencies in Washington to get some expertise on the circumstances around a shotgun blast to the head of a man. And I needed the world's top forensic pathologists and the top respiratory pathologists, to study the autopsies and the death photos, to determine whether this man could've actually killed himself or not.

VALENTINE

And those experts agreed that he could not have.

WHEATON

That's correct. The shotgun blast blew out the pons medulla and pulpified the cortex of the brain and severed the spinal cord. And yet we have a major bruise, like a goose-egg bump, on the back of his head where he had been struck. And the shotgun blast destroyed all of the capability to breathe, and yet we can prove, through the aspirated blood in his lungs, that he breathed blood for several minutes after a major injury to his head. But before the shotgun blast went off.

VALENTINE

Mm-hmm [understands]. So he got clubbed and then shot.

There was a CIA fella who was found with a gun, and it was almost impossible for him to reach the trigger... I believe over in Australia, the famous Nugan-Hand. I think it was, was it Nugan? Not Michael Hand. Michael Hand is still alive. But Nugan was found dead. And the investigators there say, well they don't know how he could've killed himself with that rifle.

WHEATON

That's Frank Nugan, of the Nugan-Hand Bank, which was a laundering bank for narcotics money comin' out of southeast Asia, out of Laos and Cambodia during the covert war there. He was found shot to death in his automobile with a high-powered rifle, and he had former CIA director Bill Colby's business card in his pocket. And a huge amount of that money, $150 million or so out of that bank, disappeared and has never been accounted for.

VALENTINE

Yes, and Michael Hand has never shown back up.

WHEATON

That's right.

VALENTINE

But he's still alive!

WHEATON

Yes, I'm sure he is.

VALENTINE

And he's probably got an alias and he might be listening right now [laughs].

WHEATON

[unclear]

VALENTINE

Yeah, well it's a bad world out there. There's an awful lot of things going on.

So this fellow, Colonel Jimmy Sabo, evidently, he got wind of something going on.

WHEATON

Yes. The week before he died, the inspector-general himself, of the Marine Corps, General Hollis Davison(sp?) and his staff, came out to El Toro to investigate the activities of Jimmy Sabo's superiors. However, this was the result of a whistleblower operation where someone was "blowing the whistle" on contractor aircraft getting sweetheart deals for hauling weaponry to the Persian Gulf War. And the people above Jimmy Sabo deflected the inspector-general away from themselves and tried to get Jimmy Sabo to take an administrative reprimand and retire, to "take the rap" for his superiors.

He refused to do it. And the night before he died, he had a major clash with his superiors, and stated that he was going to, the next day, "blow the whistle" on the illegal, covert operations. And the next morning, he was found dead.

[...to be continued...]

I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."

Brian Francis Redman bigxc@prairienet.org "The Big C"

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