Facing years behind bars, Robert M. Sensi might now be compelled to reveal state secrets that would help expose what martyred journalist Danny Casolaro termed “The Octopus”
In early December 2025, a former CIA agent named Robert M. Sensi was arrested on narcoterrorism, narcotics distribution, and money-laundering charges.
Sensi stands accused, along with Paul Campo, a former head of financial operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), of participating in narcotics trafficking and laundering $750,000 for Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) through real estate deals and by converting cash into crypto-currency—with promise to launder another $11.25 million.
Additionally, the Department of Justice alleges that Sensi and Campo tried to sell the CJNG explosive-packed drones and other military-grade weapons, including AR-15 and M16 rifles, M4 carbines, grenade launchers and rocket-propelled grenades, and that they offered advice on producing fentanyl.
The U.S. government has acknowledged that Sensi worked for the CIA in the 1980s when he handled sensitive documents as a liaison between the CIA and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), which was at the heart of the money-laundering operations in Iran-Contra.
The Iran-Contra scandal erupted in 1986-87 when it was revealed that CIA operatives and members of the National Security Council (NSC)—under the direction of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush—were covertly arming Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (Contras), which Congress had barred pursuant to the 1984 Boland Amendment.
Financing of the Contras came through illicit drug trafficking and arms sales with Hezbollah and Iran, which had officially cut off ties with the U.S. following the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Sensi’s importance to Iran-Contra came not only through his work for BCCI but also the Kuwaiti Royal Sabah family, a key U.S. proxy in the Middle East that served as an intermediary for illicit arms deals between the CIA and regional terrorist groups.[1]
When he was murdered in a West Virginia hotel room in August 1991, journalist Danny Casolaro had in his briefcase copies of two checks—for $1 million and $4 million—made out by members of the Kuwaiti royal family to arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar through BCCI’s Monte Carlo branch for the purchase of TOW missiles from Iran.[2]
The TOW missiles purchased by the Kuwaiti royal family through BCCI were sent to Iran and the profits were used to purchase arms that were sent to the Contras.
Sensi played a crucial role in the deal by transferring the funds from the checks for the TOW missiles to BCCI.
At the time, Sensi was working for Faisal Saud Al-Fulaij, the secret owner of BCCI and former Kuwait Airways chairman, who also owned Financial General Bankshares with Democratic Party grandee Clark Clifford, who was himself implicated in the BCCI scandal.[3]
Sensi, additionally, served as chairman of the Ambassador’s Club of the Republicans Abroad Division of the Republican National Committee (RNC), which led him to travel to Europe, the Middle East and Latin America in a fundraising role.[4]
He further worked for William Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican in the 1980s and Robert Gray, Chairman of Hill & Knowlton representing the Kuwait government and the Contras.[5]
Casolaro was likely murdered to prevent him from providing the copies of the BCCI checks to a congressional investigating committee headed by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), which had pushed for the indictment of key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal.
The checks provided smoking-gun evidence of illicit arms sales that could have helped put powerful people in prison, including then President George H. W. Bush, who chaired the 44/12 Committee, which was in charge of all worldwide covert operations under Ronald Reagan and pardoned Iran-Contra felons being prosecuted by independent counsel Lawrence Walsh.
Connection Between Sensi and Bush
CIA investigator Peter Osborne established a connection between Sensi and Bush, who appointed Theodore Shackley—a key figure in Iran-Contra—to direct worldwide CIA covert operations when Bush was CIA director in 1976.
The connection came through Bush’s attorney, Jerris Leonard (1931-2006) who also served as attorney for Sensi and his main CIA associate, Richard Hirschfeld, and co-directed a company in Panama, Aalamin Impex Corporation, providing legal and financial services, that Sensi founded in 1983.[6]
Sensi and Leonard had worked together with a Colonel Robert Castor who was involved in smuggling operations in support of anti-Castro rebels in Cuba and met at one time with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin, who had known intelligence and Mafia links.
Sensi is thought to have recruited Castor to work with Leonard at his companies in Panama and involved him in illicit Iran-Contra drug and arms smuggling.
Sensi had further direct contacts with Bush in his function as chairman of The Ambassador’s Club of the RNC’s Republicans Abroad Division and through his involvement in the “October Surprise,” which Bush helped coordinate.
The “October Surprise” occurred when the CIA, in collaboration with the Reagan presidential campaign—chaired by William Casey—bribed the Iranians to delay the release of American hostages taken during the 1979 Iranian Revolution against the Shah (a U.S. client) to help Reagan win the 1980 election.[7]
CIA operative Larry J. Kolb detailed how Bush directly planned CIA operations when he was vice president that Sensi helped coordinate, including to help free American hostages in Beirut and to recruit spies in Iran.[8]
Fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi, Sensi visited to the White House so frequently in the mid-1980s for meetings with Bush and CIA Director Casey that he would be waved through by White House security without having to provide any credentials.[9]
CIA officer Miles Copeland told Kolb that Sensi was valued as a “fixer…adept at solving problems with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Customs, [and] local police.”
In 2004, Sensi tried to undermine the John Kerry presidential campaign and support George W. Bush by getting Kerry to hire as one of his fundraisers Robert A. Farmer, who had worked in partnership with a Muslim ex-convict and drug dealer and supplied some elements of al-Qaeda with telecommunications equipment.[10]
As part of the quid pro quo, L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and staunch ally of the Bushes, gave one of Sensi’s companies that he co-owned with Richard Hirschfeld a contract for a satellite phone company that made Sensi richer.[11]
“Tentacles of the Octopus Are Still Alive”
Peter Osborne believes that Danny Casolaro was on the brink of publicly exposing Bush at the time of his death in 1991.
Bush and “the Octopus” network that he oversaw used specialized computer software stolen from entrepreneur Bill Hamilton to launder in CIA-run banks trillions of dollars in gold bullion that had been seized from the Japanese at the end of World War II (known as “Yamashita’s gold”).[12]
According to Osborne, some of this money was filtered through a CIA front company the Bush family helped establish called Ignite! Inc.[13]
In an interview with the Uncontrolled Opposition radio program, Osborne and his attorney Daniel Sheehan, whose investigations of the CIA go back to the 1980s, emphasized that Sensi and the covert team headed by Bush was not a rogue element but an integral part of the CIA’s global criminal operations sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
The CIA cabal headed by Bush used the cover of anti-communism to support fascist governments worldwide and enrich themselves and their cronies.[14]
Sheehan stated that Sensi’s arrest shows that the “tentacles of the Octopus [corrupt CIA network] that Danny Casolaro was working to expose are still alive and involved in the same kinds of covert activity and criminal operations such as moving dirty money through global networks that have gone on under the CIA for decades.”
The hope now is that, since Sensi is facing years in prison, that he might be compelled to lay bare the truth—if he is not forced to sign a gag order or killed in prison first.
Sheehan asked: “Wouldn’t it be great if John Kerry came out of retirement with Jack Blum to spearhead a new investigation in collaboration with a new House committee that has been set up to press for the release of sensitive classified documents?”
Blum had been Kerry’s lead investigator who told Osborne when he interviewed him that, if Danny was “waving the checks down in CIA country, what did he think would happen to him [suggesting he would be murdered].”
Sheehan said: “Kerry and the others could do a great public service and cement their legacy by exposing and helping to root out a criminal syndicate that Danny Casolaro gave his life to try to expose and that has corrupted the U.S. government over decades.”
Background information on Sensi can be found in Larry J. Kolb, America at Night: The True Story of Two Rogue CIA Operatives, Homeland Security Failures, Dirty Money, and a Plot to Steal the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election—by the Former Intelligence Agent Who Foiled the Plan (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007). In the late 1980s, Sensi was convicted of mail fraud, defrauding the government and stealing $2.5 million from his former employer, Kuwait Airways, which was related to his work for the CIA. Sensi’s job for the CIA appears to have involved hooking up foreigners and employees of foreign government-owned companies with CIA officers so they could “assess their suitability in CIA intelligence collection activities.” On June 9, 1986, Sensi met with CIA Director William Casey at the agency’s headquarters to discuss a business trip Sensi planned to take to Iran in which he agreed to pass information he could gather on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and to try to recruit spies. Sensi did further work for the CIA assisting in arming anti-communist rebels in Angola; working to persuade the Sierra Leone government to allow U.S. satellite tracking stations to be placed there; and engaging in a scheme to procure military-grade helicopters for an unspecified Middle East country. ↑
Casolaro’s best friend, Ben Mason, stated that Casolaro had shown him the copies of the BCCI checks and the Monte Carlo transaction records that he had in his possession. ↑
The Kuwait Royal family’s complicity in Casolaro’s murder is apparent in that Casolaro’s last girlfriend, Wendy Golden, was invited by the Crown Prince of Kuwait while Casolaro was in Martinsburg, West Virginia, when he was murdered, to spend a week at the Watergate Hotel, where Sensi worked in the Kuwait Embassy. Sensi was the one to make the arrangement to procure young women for the Kuwaiti Crown Prince and other Kuwaiti government officials when they stayed at the Watergate—in addition to other tasks like bribing professors to improve grades and doctors to amend records of embarassing diagnosis such as venereal diseases. ↑
Kolb, America at Night, 8. ↑
Hill & Knowlton became famous for representing the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S., who gave false congressional testimony to indicate that Iraqi troops who had occupied Kuwait were ripping the incubators from newly born babies—an atrocity fabrication designed to mobilize public opinion in support of the 1st Persian Gulf War. ↑
See also Kolb, America at Night, 84, 86, 188, 189. Leonard was a former Republican State Senator from Wisconsin (1961-1969) and Republican Majority leader in the Wisconson Senate who was appointed by Richard Nixon as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the early 1970s. According to Kolb, one of Leonard’s jobs when he first began representing Bush was to insulate him from the Watergate scandal. Hirschfeld had worked for a period as a lobbyist for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. ↑
See Craig Unger, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House (Boston: Mariner Books, 2024).When Unger asked Sensi about whether the “October Surprise” was real, he replied, “One hundred million per cent. Absolutely. Unequivocally. And you can print it.” ↑
Kolb, America at Night, 7, 36, 85, 86. ↑
Kolb, America at Night, 26. Sensi was born in a suburb of Chicago and trained for a period as an opera singer in Italy before graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in political science from Loyola University in 1970. ↑
Kolb, America at Night, 120, 201. If Farmer’s background were exposed, it would have caused a serious scandal for the Kerry campaign. ↑
Kolb, America at Night, 136. ↑
For more detail on Yamashita’s gold, see Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold (London: Verso, 2005). ↑
Ignite! Inc. was an educational software company owned by Neil Bush, George H. W. Bush’s brother. ↑
For insights into the Bush crime family, see Roger Stone and Saint John Hunt, Jeb! and the Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
