Leo Wanta: A View of the World of Black Ops, Part 1

Leo Emile Wanta, a 63 year-old Appleton, Wisconsin native, is acknowledged to be a very effective commodities trader and international financier. Los Angeles commodities trader and Democratic operative Tom Hanneghan is no fan of Wanta but called him a "brilliant engineer" with "lots of technical skills." Wanta A worked for the U.S. intelligence agencies@ and A helped bring down the Soviet communist government.@ His government service included working for the U.S. Treasury, the CIA, and the NSC. He worked for the 1988 Bush campaign and raised $50,000 for Bush=s reelection. His activities as a US government operative are shrouded in mystery, but what little is known about them reveals that there is a vast world of clandestine activity that powerfully effects events.

Wanta claimed to be Ronald Reagan=s favorite “junkyard dog." He went to work for the US government in 1963 , working for the DEA and CIA, and became a Republican operative in 1965. In 1988, the Associated Press carried stories about his selling 30,000 automatic pistols to Manuel Noriega. It has been speculated that the guns had homing devices that later enabled the US to find Noriega=s security people. He was known to travel frequently with General Vernon Walters, an US ambassador to the UN, and visited FBI head William Sessions through the secret entrance to his office.

While fronting various Treasury operations abroad, he accumulated a fortune for himself. A prime front for the Treasury was his Aneko Credit PTE, LTD in Singapore. He also conducted business for the CIA through a front named Miracle Investments and AmeriTech, which seems to be partly owned by the CIA. He has been accused of working covertly to drive down the price of gold on the international market, but there is very little information on it. His 1992 tax documents listed his net wealth at $432 billion. It is likely he was fronting much of that for the government. He was a specialist in currency swaps and in selling and trading arbitraged guaranteed currency deposits called "prime bank guarantees" to banks for the US Treasury. Unfortunately, his funds and those of the Treasury were commingled, and the government continued to use his funds after he was no longer in a position to direct their use.

His great accomplishment was destabilizing the Russian currency in 1990-1991. One of his firms was New Republic/USA Financial Group Ltd. was used in this operation. US journalist Claire Sterling, who has a record of being friendly to the CIA, described the Great Ruble Scam in Thieves' World ( Simon and Shuster, 1994). Wanta came off as a scoundrel but a highly effective one.


In fact, he was working in cooperation with Israel and China and used the services of the Russian mafiya to acquire vast amounts of counterfeit rubles. He started with over a hundred billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury, money he repaid with interest. The idea was to accumulate rubbles and then present them for redemption as payment to debts owed the Soviet Union of for redemption other currencies or gold. Speculation with real currency against the rubble was also involved. Marc Rich, an Israeli agent and US citizen was also involved. The Chinese and Israelis helped him accumulate rubles on the black market. The accumulated funds were used to bring down the ruble and were used in part by the Chinese to pay debts. Some rubles were sold to east European countries, who also paid down their debts. Still others were used to buy 2000 tons of Russian gold. The rubble was pegged at $1.20 to a rubble, but they could not be legally purchased. Wanta and others started with more than a hundred billion from the US treasury and other funds and bought the currency at about .28 and sold them to people with debts to Russia at .88.