This is a story that makes for a great movie script but there are some that would push back especially those involved during the Reagan years and the Contra arms deal.
The newspaper article found here expands even further, naming more names.
A Nugan Hand branch in the Thai opium-producing country, for example, abutted the office of the American Drug Enforcement Administration – and even shared a receptionist with it. Important American companies in Saudi Arabia backed Nugan Hand’s aggressive sales there to American workers; big investment money was raked in, sometimes being carried away in plastic garbage bags, much of it disappearing forever. In 1979, Nugan Hand hoped to gain United Nations money to settle Indochinese refugees in the Turks and Caicos Islands, seen as ideal Caribbean transshipment points on the narcotics routes from South America.
FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker
It was one of the greatest disappearing acts of modern times.
Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.
Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.
If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.
Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”
Two years after fleeing Australia, in 1982, when the CIA was involved in a covert operation to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Hand was working as a military adviser in the region where the anti-Sandinista “contras” were based, according to an Australian intelligence document, which was declassified earlier this year.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The CIA has previously denied it had any links to Hand.
Hand had been a Green Beret in Vietnam and a CIA operative in Laos before moving to Australia, where he and Frank Nugan, a wealthy playboy, established the Nugan Hand Bank in 1973, with $80. Hand fled Australia seven years later, after Nugan was found dead inside his Mercedes-Benz, his left hand holding the barrel of a .30-caliber rifle a few inches from his head, his right hand near the trigger.
During an inquest into Nugan’s death, Hand testified that the bank was insolvent, owing investors large and small some $50 million. The inquest ruled Nugan’s death a suicide, a finding many Australians found dubious.
With depositors and law enforcement authorities in pursuit, Hand, with assistance from a former CIA officer, secured a forged Australian passport, donned a false mustache and beard, and fled Australia in June of 1980. He flew to Fiji, then on to Canada, from which he could cross into the United States without a visa.
The Sydney Morning Herald first reported on Butt’s findings on Monday. In a segment that aired Sunday night, Australia’s 60 Minutes filmed Hand/Fuller emerging from a pharmacy at a shopping mall in Idaho Falls. He has a full beard and neck brace, and was wearing sunglasses and a blue checked shirt. He refused to answer any questions or speak at all when confronted by 60 Minutes reporter Ross Coulthart.
Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.
Colby was forced to resign when it was reported that the agency had been engaged in illegal spying on American citizens. He became a legal adviser to Nugan Hand, and on the back of his business card were handwritten dates when someone, presumably Colby, would be in Hong Kong and Singapore.
As reporters began digging into Nugan Hand, they found that Colby wasn’t the only individual with an intelligence or military background involved with the bank.
“Nugan Hand had enough generals, admirals, and spooks to run a small war,” Jonathan Kwitny, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, wrote in the definitive book about the bank, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA.
