By Martin McKenzie-Murray
The true story of Sydney's shadowy Nugan Hand Bank, and its connections in the 1970s to the CIA, arms dealing and the Asian drug trade, may be closer with the discovery of Michael Jon Hand alive and well in Idaho.
Peter Butt still hadn’t found his man. For years he’d been chasing a shadow. Which wasn’t surprising. Butt’s target was a former Green Beret, CIA operative and gun runner. Michael Jon Hand was also one of Australia’s most notorious fugitives, co-founder of the Nugan Hand Bank – a funhouse of financial chicanery and a preferred laundering site for the Golden Triangle’s drug money.
Hand fled Australia after the bank’s collapse in 1980, aided by a false passport and disguise. Butt tells me the trail mostly went cold after about 1982, when declassified ASIO documents recorded a sighting of Hand on the Nicaragua–Honduras border. I have seen the cable, sent from ASIO’s Washington, DC, office to “Scorpion” – the codename for the director-general of the intelligence agency. The document reports that an Australian police officer, Inspector Paul Lawrence, was sent to the States on the trail of Hand. Lawrence wanted ASIO to confirm for him what a source had supplied – that Hand was training the Puma Battalion, a band of Nicaraguan rebels that was receiving United States support. Neither ASIO nor the FBI seemed moved to help the police officer.
Read the full story: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au...an-hand-bank-fugitive-found-us/14474196002625
The true story of Sydney's shadowy Nugan Hand Bank, and its connections in the 1970s to the CIA, arms dealing and the Asian drug trade, may be closer with the discovery of Michael Jon Hand alive and well in Idaho.
Peter Butt still hadn’t found his man. For years he’d been chasing a shadow. Which wasn’t surprising. Butt’s target was a former Green Beret, CIA operative and gun runner. Michael Jon Hand was also one of Australia’s most notorious fugitives, co-founder of the Nugan Hand Bank – a funhouse of financial chicanery and a preferred laundering site for the Golden Triangle’s drug money.
Hand fled Australia after the bank’s collapse in 1980, aided by a false passport and disguise. Butt tells me the trail mostly went cold after about 1982, when declassified ASIO documents recorded a sighting of Hand on the Nicaragua–Honduras border. I have seen the cable, sent from ASIO’s Washington, DC, office to “Scorpion” – the codename for the director-general of the intelligence agency. The document reports that an Australian police officer, Inspector Paul Lawrence, was sent to the States on the trail of Hand. Lawrence wanted ASIO to confirm for him what a source had supplied – that Hand was training the Puma Battalion, a band of Nicaraguan rebels that was receiving United States support. Neither ASIO nor the FBI seemed moved to help the police officer.
Read the full story: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au...an-hand-bank-fugitive-found-us/14474196002625
