Richard John Brenneke (December 5, 1941 – July 23, 2015[1]) was an American businessman who testified in 1988 that he had worked in Southeast Asia with the Central Intelligence Agency's Air America,[2] among other roles.
[5][6] The Task Force's report stated that Brenneke "played a central role in falsely propagating the October Surprise allegations for financial and person reasons".
[10] According to journalist Frank Snepp, "throughout the mid '80s Brenneke courted a bunch of would-be weapons dealers" and "began traveling to Europe as an apprentice arms broker for the Farnham-Ottokar Trust" in late 1984.
[11] In July, shortly after that trip, Brenneke wrote to propose a weapons deal to Nicholas Davies who had been accused by Seymour Hersh of being an Israeli intelligence agent and partner to Ben-Menashe in a London-based arms company.
[13][15] In February 1987, The New York Times reported that over an eight week period it had obtained information about the Demavand project "from more than 4,000 pages of confidential telexes, contracts, correspondence and other documents and interviews with 150 Government officials, arms dealers, intelligence sources and others".
[16] Brenneke told the newspaper that private arms dealers made efforts to sell US weapons to Iran in 1983, and Pentagon officials who learned of it allowed it to continue.
[14] Brenneke also added to his earlier claims stating that what he relayed to Menarchik included information that he had learned from US intelligence sources that profits from the sale of weapons to Iran would be used to purchase arms for the Contras.
[17] Brenneke's documents included a December 1985 report to him from Delaroque claiming that John Poindexter had verbally approved the sale of TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran through a private Israeli company.
[13] In December 1986 Brenneke was listed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as one of 16 of a "cast of characters" involved in the Iran-Contra affair, describing him as "An Oregon real estate developer with extensive contacts in Iran.
"[18] On April 23, 1987, Brenneke told the Detroit Free Press that Iranian authorities gave him intelligence information to pass along to the United States government as an inducement to allow him and his associates to sell them weapons in late 1984.
[15] He said that he then passed the information to Lt. Col. Larry Caylor, with United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, and Lt. Col. George Alvarez, a Marine Corps counterintelligence, who forwarded some of it to Menarchik.
That testimony was called slanderous by then-Vice President Bush, and a 1989 Senate committee report concluded that Brenneke never had the Central Intelligence Agency connections he claimed.
"[citation needed][19] Dubious statements from Brenneke contributed to the Mena scandal, one facet of the conspiracy theory that the CIA aided in the smuggling of drugs to raise profits for the Contras.
[citation needed] Brenneke said that on the night of October 18, 1980, Rupp had flown William Casey from Washington's National Airport to Paris' Le Bourget Airfield for a series of secret meetings.
"[citation needed] In July 1990, Brenneke provided documents to Italian journalists regarding Licio Gelli and Propaganda Due (P2), asserting CIA support for their activities.
[26] Adler's work was the subject of a chapter in Robert Parry's book, "Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery" and she was interviewed by PBS' Frontline in this regard, aired in April 1992.