David Dean - From Vietnam to 9/11, via the CIA
by Anthony C Heaford --- @mancunianquiet on twitter --- Updating (work-in-progress)
David Dean was just nineteen years old in 1969 when he proved himself an all American hero on Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. The quote below is about Dean and captures what a hellish experience that must have been for a teenager:
“Private Dave Dean, one of the stretcher bearers for Lyden, felt as if he were in a bad dream, a terrible nightmare that try as he might, he could not awaken from. Dean had likewise been good friends with Lyden, and having to carry his friend now - a man he had partied with on many weekends at Lake Charles just outside of Fort Polk - was almost more than he could bear. And now the rain on top of it all, and all the wild shooting and screaming… it had to be a dream. A moment later, he found out for sure that it was not a dream. It was real, as real as NVA manoeuvring at the column from the draw. He and three other bearers dropped Lyden, fell into the oozing mud, and cut loose at the pith helmets emerging from the jungle below. Half a dozen M16s ripped away at the enemy soldiers on both sides of him. Dean picked up his corner of the poncho a moment later and started struggling forward again. But a little farther down the trail he again had to stop, this time to shoot at snipers who were in the trees in the draw. He fired and he fired, but in the rain, he could not tell if he was hitting anything or not.”
- Hamburger Hill: The Brutal Battle for Dong Ap Bai by Samuel Zaffiri
Fifty years later, on 8 January 2020, Dean committed suicide by drowning in Lake Hartwell – prompted by my public allegations linking him to the CIA and of providing material support to future 9/11 terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1997 Yemen. This report details the basis for my allegations against Dean.
I think this is David Dean aged nineteen in Vietnam, next to a photo of sixty-nine year old Dean taken for a Czech engineering company's website in 2019
Dean's friend, twenty-one year old Sergeant Michael Lyden, was killed-in-action by an enemy rocket propelled grenade on 15 May 1969
I first met Dean in 1988 when he was introduced to me as the new US sales agent for my family’s engineering export business in Manchester, JM Heaford Ltd. He was visiting England to help staff our sales stand at a printing industry exhibition in Birmingham; I was eighteen years old, working for the family business as a gofer during my summer holiday between school and college. Contrary to my being told he was a new sales agent it was clear other employees already knew Dean very well – well enough for the senior service technician David Hughes to goad and tease Dean about his military service over drinks one night at our hotel. Dean brushed off that ‘teasing’ with a smile so Hughes moved on and asked him to tell us about the kings and queens of England. It turned out Dean knew every monarch of England since Egbert of Wessex (802-839 AD) and their place in history – an impressive yet curious feat of memory, the significance of which I wouldn’t discover for another thirty years. One curiosity I noted about Dean was he avoided having his photo taken – literally ducking and hiding when I photographed our sales stand in Birmingham, something that made David Hughes laugh quietly to him self while he smiled down at Dean who was hiding besides him. Whatever the reason Dean was hiding from my camera for, Hughes already knew Dean well enough to not say anything about it. Dean did tell me a little about his military career during that visit; after being prompted by my brother Paul he confirmed he’d fought on Hamburger Hill - a hot topic at the time due to the movie of the same name being released in 1987. When I asked where else he’d served Dean only told me his military career had ended suddenly when he “broke nearly every bone in my body” in a parachute training accident. He described landing in triple canopy jungle and his parachute catching in the top branches, leaving him to swing like a pendulum into a tree trunk. Surprised that such training was taking place in a war zone, my follow-up question was if that training had been in Vietnam. Dean said it was in Vietnam before telling me that after recovering from his injuries he’d managed a bar / brothel by the USA's Clark air base in the Philippines for the rest of the war. Again it was thirty years before the significance of those details became apparent to me, when in December 2019 I discovered the only such parachute training occurring in Vietnam after May 1969 (the battle of Hamburger Hill) was run by a US special forces legend, Billy Waugh. Waugh had served in Korea, was one of the most famous members of the infamous Studies and Observation Group in Vietnam before becoming a CIA contractor from the 1970s until his last mission in 2001 Afghanistan. Waugh was present at the battle for Hamburger Hill and worked closely with Dean’s 101st Airborne Division, which when combined with Dean’s parachute training accident made it highly likely they knew each other. But the key detail that linked Dean and Waugh for me was Waugh’s admission in his 2004 autobiography that he’d worked with Al Qaeda operators in 1990s Yemen, where I was sent to install a machine by JM Heaford Ltd in September 1997 – a machine sale Dean had setup. The Yemeni factory where I was installing the machine was located 17-miles south of a town called Al Qaidah, was staffed almost exclusively by Pakistanis, and is where I met 9/11’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before being taken to a clandestine meeting 1-mile from Al Qaidah town.
Billy Waugh and Al Qaeda in Yemen
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's base & Al Qaidah town in Yemen
The Machine Sale to Yemen
I worked with Dean again at industry exhibitions in 1990 Düsseldorf and in 1991 Chicago before leaving the family company in 1993 to go backpacking. I rejoined the company in 1996 and the next time I saw Dave Dean was at another industry exhibition in April 1997 Chicago – Dean’s home town. There were five of us working the sales stand in Chicago: me, Dean, my other brother Nigel, my father and his old friend Jerry Stevens (a British military veteran and our electronic control systems contractor). Shortly after arriving at the sales stand on 14 April 1997 Dean checked his watch before speaking quietly with my father. My father said Dean wanted to show him something before they wandered away together. What made their absence notable was the $100,000 machine sale that we – me, Nigel and Jerry - made while they were gone. Ten minutes after they’d left the stand three middle aged Arab businessmen approached and asked me to demonstrate our flexographic printing plate mounting machine for them. Within twenty-minutes the Arabs were walking away having signed a contract for our highest specification machine purchased at list price (no negotiation). What was curious is they knew nothing about printing but did have a list of about $3-million worth of machinery they’d need to setup a new printing factory from scratch, and an exhibition guide with all the sales stands they needed to visit for said purchases marked on a floor plan map. Clearly there was someone helping but not accompanying them – I now think that person was Dave Dean, my reasoning for which will become apparent. As the Arabs left our stand we saw a group of half-a-dozen men discretely following the big-spending Arabs on their shopping spree, watching whose sales stands they visited. Jerry declared “There’s something very suspicious about them”, talking about the Arab businessmen who’d just arranged for payment to be made up front via an off-shore Cayman Islands company, and all for a third-party end customer in Yemen whose name they made up and factory address they refused to give. Nigel replied, “Don’t ask any questions, they just paid list price for our top machine!”
Ten minutes later Dean and my father returned, clearly having had a serious conversation. My father feigned surprise at the $100,000 machine sale we'd made in their absence. Dean very strangely declined his US sales territory commission of several thousand dollars, as though he wanted no documented link to this sale – the first reason for my thinking Dean had written the Arab’s shopping list for them. That night we celebrated in Dean's private bar called the Skybox, a curious place inside a warehouse in Chicago's O'Hare airport's cargo handling area. The next morning a senior British diplomat visited our sales stand and that night my father, Dean and their associates dined at the very exclusive Morton's Steak House (a favourite CIA entertainment venue). My father and I dined together at Morton's the next evening and at the end of the week Dean, my father and I drank in Dean's Skybox. What was curious that last evening is my father and Dean were sat at the far end of the bar with a guy they called Baron. The only thing I knew about Baron was I was kept as far away from him as possible by Dean's girlfriend Joanne, as they were huddled in deep conversation. Speculating now and in light of Dean's links to Billy Waugh, I suspect Baron might have been Robert 'Baron' Bechtoldt - another Studies and Observations Group veteran of Vietnam.
April 1997: The CMM printing industry exhibition at McCormick Place Chicago
My photos from April 1997
My April 1997 diary
There were a few other incidents / context of note that week in Chicago which help paint the bigger picture to these events:
  • This was the first time Dean and my father had met since about 1992, when Dean had tried to blackmail my father in a honey trap. Circa 1990 Dean had introduced my father to a young and attracted female Italian sales agent who my father engaged as JM Heaford Ltd’s representative and began an affair with. When the honey trap was sprung, instead of submitting to Dean’s blackmail my father confessed all to my mother, who forgave him, and he sacked Dean. But a few months later Dean was reengaged as JM Heaford Ltd’s sales agent, indicating that despite his betrayal Dean still had a lot of power and influence over my parents’ business decisions.
  • Around the same time Dean was reengaged as our sales agent my brother Paul moved to America and began working for Dean directly, installing the machines he’d sold on our behalf. One of those installations was in 1994 Yemen, in a factory owned by the same Arab businessmen who’d just spent $3-million in Chicago but who were presented to me as a supposedly new customer. This was a very deliberate deception and combined with both Paul and Dean’s absence from the sales stand in Chicago, is the second reason I believe Dean was coordinating events from the shadows. That 1994 machine sale to Yemen played a big part in JM Heaford Ltd winning a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1995 – whatever the nature of these sales it was clearly all endorsed by the British Crown.
  • Someone had told Dean about some trouble I’d had while backpacking in the Philippines in 1994 after being busted by the police while foolishly smoking a joint outside of a bar in Manila. That caused the police to confiscate my passport until I had paid an informal fine to the judge, upon which they replaced my passport with a new one they’d arranged to be issued from the back door of the British embassy. When I saw Dean in Chicago one of the first things he told me was I should’ve called him from Manila. He said he still had high level contacts there who could have resolved my legal problems without charge – demonstrating the type of corrupt contacts Dean still had there from his time running a brothel by Clark air base. The genuinely surreal part of this interlude is that I believe I randomly saw Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the Bojinka plot terrorist cell while I was in Manila, as  detailed here. And now, three years later, I was in Chicago helping sell machinery destined for KSM’s front company in Yemen.
  • At the end of the exhibition Dean and I had packed up our sales stand early and were sat waiting for a forklift truck to move the wooden crates. As we were waiting Dean told me about the teamster union corruption at these trade shows and how we could be waiting all day unless we paid a bribe. And then as the first forklift came into sight it came straight to our stand, its driver jumping off and greeting Dean like an old friend, a wad of dollars passing with their handshake. Once our crates had gone, we were the first exhibitors free to leave and finished the working day off with cocktails at one of Chicago’s best hotel bars – Dean’s corrupt connections giving us a privileged life.
The End Customer in Yemen
The three Arab executives shopping in Chicago represented a London company called Longulf Trading, a subsidiary of the Yemeni Hayel Saeed Anam (HSA) Group – the company where my brother Paul had installed the machine in 1994. But in 1997 Chicago that connection was hidden and they said they were just purchase agents for a third party in Yemen whose name they made-up - first saying GenPak but then changing it to GemPak when told GenPak was an existing company. When I was installing the machine in Yemen I was told the correct name was YemPak, an abbreviation of Yemen-Pakistan collaboration which made sense as most of the employees there were Pakistanis. The Longulf executives also refused to give a delivery address beyond Sanaa airport despite as I later found out the machine’s final destination was the HSA Group’s headquarters in the city of Taiz. Payment was made via the Cayman Islands using a shell company of which three HSA executives had become directors of just a month before, in March 1997. That shell company was called Atlantic Investments, setup in 1994 by three members of the St Clair-Morgan family of Jersey (another British tax haven), at least one of whom had previously been implicated in money laundering and illegal arms trading. There can be no doubt this clandestine activity and subterfuge using shell companies was intended to hide the true destination of the machine we’d just sold.
The HSA Group has an interesting history intimately tied to the British Empire having been established in the then British Crown colony of Aden in 1938. Soon after the British were kicked out of Aden in 1967 so was the HSA Group, their assets reputedly being confiscated by the Arab nationalists of South Yemen, and when they relocated their HQ to Taiz, 17-miles south of Al Qaidah town. They opened their London office Longulf Trading in 1977 and today are a multi-billion-dollar global conglomerate with offices around the world that, as Fox News reported in 2004, “overlap in locations that are hubs of normal commerce, but also served as hotspots of Al Qaeda meetings and finance”. HSA’s first documented link to terrorism financing started in 1982 when a director gave his power of attorney to a known terrorism financier and which was used in 1984 to establish a shell company called MIGA (Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber) in Lugano, Switzerland. In 2002 the United Nations and the U.S. government described MIGA as “a hub of Al Qaeda finance: A terrorist chamber of commerce”. Despite the HSA’s documented links to MIGA they weren’t mentioned in the US or UN reports but the known terrorism financier was named and sanctioned. Those sanctions were lifted in 2007 without explanation or consequences for those implicated, as reported by the LA Times in an article titled “ When is a terrorism figure no longer one?” The HSA director was questioned about his links to MIGA but was able to explain that away by saying he'd forgot he'd given his power of attorney to a known terrorism financier. Fox News also reported on a HSA Malaysian based subsiduary's corruption in the UN's 1990s Iraqi oil-for-food program and potential link to terrorism financing.
Another significant HSA Group purchase, one potentially linked to Dave Dean again, was made in 1996. In August 1996 the HSA Group used the US embassy in Yemen and the State Department in Washington to source two separate batches of industrial quantities of chemicals which when combined provided the key chemical components for the manufacture of TNT explosives, as used by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Two of the HSA Group's Pakistani employees I met in 1997 Yemen told me they were chemical engineering graduates. How does that link to Dean? His company in Chicago was called Dean Printing Systems, listed as “offering equipment, chemistry, electronics and supplies for the rotogravure industry”. If I am correct about Dean setting up our machine sale to HSA in 1997 Chicago, it seems reasonable to suspect Dean was also involved in the supply of those TNT component chemicals but with the same degree of separation Dean managed in Chicago by ensuring he and my father weren't present for the actual sale and by refusing his sales commission.
2004 Fox News report implicating the HSA Group
HSA sourcing TNT chemicals via the US embassy
The British Crown
It’s not a coincidence that I can link the HSA Group, my father and Billy Waugh to the British Crown, and explains why Dave Dean had memorized every English monarch since 802 AD. That memory feat wasn’t for pub quizzes or the like – it was background research for his role as a Deep State operator.
JM Heaford Ltd’s endorsement by the Crown is clear in their winning two Queen’s Awards for Export Achievement, one in 1995 that I’ve already mentioned and the first in 1987. That first award came after my father had sold and installed a printing machine in El Salvador’s government mint in 1986, where my father told me his government driver had driven him past a recently executed young man lying on the pavement (blood still seeping from a head wound my father said). Given the nature of El Salvador’s CIA backed government in the 1980s I suspect that’s where my father may have first met Dean (or his associates). But I don’t think that was my father’s first involvement with Intel agencies / the Deep State; His father, my grandfather, was personal accountant to an heir of the Cunliffe-Brooks banking dynasty, Dick Cunliffe, who was also his brother-in-law and my father’s uncle. His father was also a member of the White Shield Club with perhaps a dozen members, all Manchester’s most prominent business interests represented, who met informally one Saturday a month, alternating between members’ homes. That prestigious membership was passed to my father upon my grandfather’s death and so, it is fair to say the family is well connected and worldly too. His two brothers (my uncles) and his eldest daughter spent much of the 1970s/80s/90s living and working as accountants in the Bahamas, Switzerland and Dubai. Aged about sixteen my father made his own way in life starting a draughtsman’s apprenticeship at Manchester’s Metropolitan Vickers (Metro-Vicks) engineering company, one with its own links to Intelligence agencies. The  1933 Metro-Vicks Affair HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-Vickers_Affair"  erupted when six of their employees were arrested in the Soviet Union accused of industrial sabotage and spying. And so Metro-Vicks could’ve been my father’s entry point into that world of industrial espionage too – he was very active with Metro-Vicks old boys clubs all his life. Around 1970 his Uncle Dick Cunliffe started an engineering firm in Manchester called George Moulton Successors (GMS), making specialist printing machinery – rotogravure proof presses. Dick Cunliffe employed my father who became GMS’s managing director. My father’s hard work and Dick Cunliffe’s business acumen paid off in 1977 when GMS was given a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement after selling printing machinery in places like the US Treasury in Washington, Mexico, Brazil and many other countries too. He was a very frequent flyer in the 1970s, we’d moved to a bigger house in 1977, and he appeared to have everything in life – family, travel, success. And then Dick Cunliffe died in 1979 and the remaining directors of GMS's owners replaced my father as managing director with someone called Damian McCurdy. I don’t know why that happened, but it caused my father to walk out of GMS, unemployed with five children and a mortgage. I’m not putting these names into the public domain out of spite or malice. I’m including these details because I think they’re significant to solving 9/11. I believe the split with GMS’s directors after Dick Cunliffe’s death, and my father’s US connections evolved within the world of entities like the  Yankees and Cowboys, two competing factions within the trans-Atlantic Deep State. I often wonder if the Society of Merchant Venturers of Bristol might have played a role, and about my mother’s family Free Masons connections. That is pure speculation on my part but given my father’s customers included the US Treasury, his family links were to banking dynasties, and his three Queen's Awards (1977, 1987, 1995), I think it’s fair to say this was all quite high-level stuff. After leaving GMS he worked as a British sales agent for an American company called Pamarco for a while then in 1982 he and another former GMS employee Peter Hughes began to design their own rotogravure proof press in direct competition to the Cunliffe family-owned GMS. But then he reneged on Hughes when he and my mother registered their own business building rotogravure proof presses. Hughes started his own business building rotogravure proof presses in communist Hungary and married a Hungarian wife. When reemployed by my parents in 1996 one of my first tasks whilst on a bogus delivery trip was to take a discrete photo of Hughes’s house and car in Devon. From those early days my father remained personally indebted for the rest of his life to a friend who helped him, Alan Burgess, an Englishman with an American wife living in Miami. I’m not sure of his role but I think it was significant given my father's forty years of gratitude to him. My parents worked incredibly hard, sacrificing much but rewarded with business success, especially in America through David Dean's sales agency, Dean Printing Systems. If asked to guess when my father entered industrial espionage, I’d say the 1970s based on his career path described above and my memories of the time. I’d also speculate that much of his success in the 1980s and 90s was linked to his Deep State connections and his ability not to question his customers about recently executed young men lying in the street near their factories, like at the government mint in 1986 San Salvador.
The Hayel Saeed Anam Group's links to the British Crown are obvious too, from their founding in 1938 Aden, their ejection from Aden at the same time the British were kicked out, and up to the modern day. In 1993 a HSA director and Longulf Trading's chairman, Dirhem Abdo Saeed, was a founding member and an honorary chairman of the British-Yemeni Society. Other members of that society include a lot of British diplomats, oil company executives and Cambridge University alumni - clearly a British Establishment endorsed body.
CIA contractor Billy Waugh's link to the British Crown comes from perhaps his most famous operation - the capture of Carlos the Jackal in 1994 Sudan. I've read that after Waugh had detained the Jackal in Sudan both the American and French governments refused to send a plane to extradite him but the British government did send one. Whatever political / diplomatic machination may have been behind that, and given that Waugh was supposedly contracting for the CIA, if I am correct it shows clear backing of Waugh's 1990s activities by the British Crown. I suspect that after their experiences in Vietnam and anger at their own government, Waugh & Dean's loyalties weren't exclusive to Washington or Langley (the CIA's HQ).


Work-in-Progress...



Most significantly, after witnessing the April machine sale in Chicago and before being sent to Yemen in September, I gave my first 9/11 warning. I’d flown from Boston’s Logan airport on 11June and was so shocked at the complete absence of security that I stopped at the aircraft door to tell the aircrew. From arriving at the airport in a taxi I’d only had to show a credit card as identification and had not undergone any security checks – I could’ve carried any weapon onto that flight in my hand luggage. I raised this concern with the hostess checking boarding passes but she just smiled and said “Don’t worry, that’s normal”. As the nearly empty plane ascended and I noted the unsecured cockpit door I realised how easy it would be for hijackers to take control of an aircraft and how, with basic pilot training, they could then use that aircraft as a kamikaze piloted missile. That was the moment I predicted a 9/11 style attack and distinctly remember turning in my seat to survey the other passengers, literally looking for potential hijackers on that flight. Scared that raising such a concern could be confused as a threat I decided to wait until I reached the customer the next morning, where someone could vouch for me being a regular business traveler. That customer was Sunworthy wallpaper printers in Toronto where upon my arrival I repeated my fears from the flight and actually refused to start work until the factory manager had assured me he’d pass my warning and my business card details on to a security contact he said he knew. In retrospect I now realise the first person Bob Wilton will have called was the Canadian sales agent who’d arranged my visit – Dave Horsman of Canflexographics, a friend and work colleague of Dave Dean. There was no feedback to my warning from Bob Wilton and although I don’t remember discussing my warning with Dave Horsman I do remember that when we played golf together that week he asked me a curious question at a golf tee he called the Devils Pulpit. Thinking at the time that my 9/11 style hijacking fear had been passed on, I didn’t mention it again until 22 September, when the Pakistani employees at the factory in Yemen asked me about visiting New York as tourists. I gave them the same warning but this time including the fact I’d accidentally carried my box-cutters on several domestic flights without being stopped. I’ve detailed those chain of events in My 9/11 Timeline.
I believe my June 9/11 warning was the reason I was chosen over the other service technicians to be sent to Yemen in September, and that the Pakistani employees there had been primed to ask me about visiting New York. I believe my June warning was shared with Dave Dean who, together with CIA contractor Billy Waugh, wanted me to repeat the vulnerabilities I’d seen to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s terrorist cell in Yemen. Why would they do that? They were the Deep State operators enacting their bosses’ desire for America to have another ‘Pearl Harbor’ moment – as per the Project for the New American Century’s speculation. And that is, I believe, how we went From Vietnam to 9/11, via the CIA (and Deep State).
Dave Dean and Billy Waugh
Billy Waugh’s Vietnam service is well documented, a significant figure in the recently created MACV-SOG. In this video clip James ‘Sneaky’ White, a US helicopter pilot who flew on SOG missions, states they operated with four 101st Airborne transport helicopters. The official SOG site says they and Sneaky were involved in the July 1970 battle for Fire Support Base Ripcord, a 101st Airborne operation. That information puts Dean’s 101st and Waugh’s SOG very close to each other in time, location, and in an operational sense. Sneaky also talks about ‘strap-hangers’ with specific reference to Waugh accompanying missions he wasn’t assigned to, showing the often informal and unauthorised nature of some of SOG’s activities, especially Waugh's. His role and the timing are further confirmed by this most detailed history of SOG’s HALO* parachute training and operations:
".... by August or September 1970, Waugh was asked by Shungel* to take
over Recon Company at CCN* and continue recruiting for the HALO* team."
*Shungel was Lt Col Dan Shungel, a MACV-SOG commander responsible for reconnaissance missions into Laos and Cambodia.
*CCN is the Command-and-Control North area of operations which included the A Shau Valley, where Dean’s 101st Airborne were operating.
*HALO - High Altitude Low Opening was the specialist parachute technique SOG were using to insert teams behind enemy lines.
That most detailed of documents, The History of HALO Operations Vietnam 1970-71 For The Special Forces Association Chapter I-XVII, also says:
"While taking up the HALO idea, Waugh found a firm ally in Colonel Dan Shungel, the Special Forces officer perhaps best known for his role in the battle at Lang Vei near Khe Sanh in January 1968. Since February 1970, Shungel had taken over as commander of SOG's Ground Studies Group, known as OP 35, which was responsible for reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia and the DMZ. Billy recalls that Shungel literally put his military career at stake in order to get MACV to accept his concept of a HALO mission by select SOG personnel. A freefall enthusiast after receiving HALO training during his prior posting at Fort Bragg, Shungel that summer brought over a trio of skydivers [HALO instructors] to quietly flesh out Waugh's concept."
Waugh jumped on the third HALO mission on June 22, 1971, but his role is best captured in this video quote by MACV-SOG veteran Cliff Newman:
“Billy Waugh comes up: ‘Hey you two, we’re going to put together a HALO mission and you guys are on it’…
I said, ‘Billy I’m a skydiver man, I ain’t a HALO guy’.
He said, ‘You’re a 1-0 [team leader], you got a lot of experience – you’re on it!”
From the available evidence I’m content with my assertion that Dean was injured during Waugh’s HALO training, most likely in summer 1970. He doesn’t appear on any MACV-SOG registers I’ve seen so I assume his parachute accident occurred before his training was complete and before he was badged Special Forces. Dean’s service record should confirm the accident and his subsequent medical discharge dates, records I don’t have access to. But I do know Billy Waugh’s medical discharge date – February 1972 – and his self-professed route into CIA contracting. Waugh said he went from SF operator to postman after his discharge. Dean told me that after his discharge he spent the rest of the war (till 1975) running a go-go bar in the Philippines. He said it was in Angeles city, next to Clark air base - the biggest overseas US air force base in the world at that time. Clark air base had been a CIA and Air America hub since the 1950s and those working there were Dean’s bar customers and his go-go dancer’s clientele. Dean’s connections to powerful Filipinos continued into the 1990s, as demonstrated when I had some legal issues in April 1994 Manila.
I’d spent a night in jail and two weeks on bail after being caught smoking a joint outside a go-go bar. I was able to resolve the matter myself, but Dean later told me he could have sorted it all out with one phone call if only I’d asked. Also in Manila in April 1994 were Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – I think I saw them one night. There was a group of four or five south Asian men walking in the tourist area, ten metres in front of myself and some other backpackers. They turned into the Hobbit House restaurant, not far from this café/bar front with an aeroplane crashing into its upper floors. I do think KSM’s and my paths crossed in 1994 Manila, three years before I was introduced to him in Yemen. Interestingly, I returned to the Philippines on business in February 1998 to install a machine in Manila. It was one of several unusual visits (Jakarta, Manila, twice to Dubai and once in London) I was sent on after my meetings and conversations in September 1997 Yemen. They all strike me as related and in hindsight I wonder about Dean’s involvement in Manila and the true purpose of my visit there. Oh, and the Filipino terror group Abu Sayyaf – they’re named after a CIA asset and strongly supported NATO ally in Afghanistan – Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
A 1990s Manila cafe front
Meanwhile, after his claimed time as a postman, by 1977 Waugh was part of a private military contract to train Libyan special forces and supply them with twenty tons of military-grade C-4 plastic explosives. It was a dodgy enterprise that landed Waugh’s boss Edwin Wilson in prison for twenty years. But because someone at the CIA had given Waugh a camera, he was able to claim he was working – spying - for the agency and thereby avoided prosecution. I’m not sure of Dave Dean’s career path after managing the go-go bar but I expect it was similar to Waugh’s – using his certain set of skills as a military contractor wherever he was tasked. I suspect Dean met my father in 1986 El Salvador, where my father was installing a printing machine and when Dean may have been part of the School of the America’s program of training right-wing Central American dictatorships. My father told me how his customer in San Salvador – the government mint - had driven him slowly passed the body of a recently executed young man lying on the pavement, fresh blood still seeping from a head wound. That’s a textbook School of the America’s intimidation tactic and is why I suspect my father met David Dean in 1986 El Salvador. It is pure speculation on my part but does tie in with when I first met Dean in 1988 Birmingham, and with my father winning a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1987. Clearly whatever did happen in San Salvador was sanctioned by the British Establishment.
David Dean and my father, John Marland Heaford
I’m not sure of my father’s route into the clandestine world of Intelligence agencies, but it’s essential I explain how I think he became involved with men like Dean in 1986 San Salvador. His father, my grandfather, was personal accountant to an heir of the Cunliffe-Brooks banking dynasty*, Dick Cunliffe, who was also his brother-in-law and my father’s uncle. His father was also a member of the White Shield Club with perhaps a dozen members, all Manchester’s most prominent business interests represented, who met informally one Saturday a month, alternating between members’ homes. That prestigious membership was passed to my father upon my grandfather’s death and so, it is fair to say the family is well connected, and worldly too. His two brothers (my uncles) and his eldest daughter spent much of the 1970s/80s/90s living and working as accountants in the Bahamas, Switzerland and Dubai. Aged about sixteen my father made his own way in life starting a draughtsman’s apprenticeship at Manchester’s Metropolitan Vickers (Metro-Vicks) engineering company, one with its own links to Intelligence agencies. The 1933 Metro-Vicks Affair erupted when six of their employees were arrested in the Soviet Union accused of industrial sabotage and spying. And so Metro-Vicks could’ve been my father’s entry point into that world of industrial espionage too – he was very active with Metro-Vicks old boys clubs all his life. Around 1970 his Uncle Dick Cunliffe started an engineering firm in Manchester called George Moulton Successors (GMS), making specialist printing machinery – rotogravure proof presses. Dick Cunliffe employed my father who became GMS’s managing director. My father’s hard work and Dick Cunliffe’s business acumen paid off in 1977 when GMS was given a Queen’s Award for Export Achievement after selling printing machinery in places like the US Treasury in Washington, Mexico, Brazil and many other countries too. He was a very frequent flyer in the 1970s, we’d moved to a bigger house in 1977, and he appeared to have everything in life – family, travel, success. And then Dick Cunliffe died in 1979 and the remaining directors of GMS's owners replaced my father as managing director with someone called Damian McCurdy. I don’t know why that happened, but it caused my father to walk out of GMS, unemployed with five children and a mortgage.
* I’m not putting these names into the public domain out of spite or malice. I’m including these details because I think they’re significant to solving 9/11. I believe the split with GMS’s directors after Dick Cunliffe’s death, and my father’s US connections evolved within the world of entities like the Yankees and Cowboys, two competing factions within the trans-Atlantic Deep State. I often wonder if the Merchant Venturers of Bristol might have played a role, and about my mother’s family Free Masons connections. That is pure speculation on my part but given my father’s customers included the US Treasury, his family links were to banking dynasties, and his three Queen's Awards (1977, 1987, 1995), I think it’s fair to say this was all quite high-level stuff.
After leaving GMS he worked as a British sales agent for an American company called Pamarco for a while then in 1982 he and another former GMS employee Peter Hughes began to design their own rotogravure proof press in direct competition to the Cunliffe family-owned GMS. But then he reneged on Hughes when he and my mother registered their own business building rotogravure proof presses. Hughes started his own business building rotogravure proof presses in communist Hungary and married a Hungarian wife. When reemployed by my parents in 1996 one of my first tasks whilst on a bogus delivery trip was to take a discrete photo of Hughes’s house and car in Devon. From those early days my father remained personally indebted for the rest of his life to a friend who helped him, Alan Burgess, an Englishman with an American wife living in Miami. I’m not sure of his role but I think it was significant given my father's forty years of gratitude to him. My parents worked incredibly hard, sacrificing much but rewarded with business success, especially in America through David Dean's sales agency, Dean Printing Systems. If asked to guess when my father entered industrial espionage, I’d say the 1970s based on his career path described above and my memories of the time. I’d also speculate that much of his success in the 1980s and 90s was linked to his Deep State connections and his ability not to question his customers about recently executed young men lying in the street near their factories, like at the government mint in 1986 San Salvador.

Dave Dean and me, Anthony C Heaford
There were a few curiosities I noticed about Dean in 1988 at the Birmingham exhibition. I’d been told he was a new US sales agent, at the exhibition to familiarize himself with the product and customers. But it was clear he and my brother Paul were already familiar, as Dean was with David Hughes, the company’s senior service technician who spend months at a time abroad. One evening Hughes goaded Dean to speak about his military service, which he wouldn’t, then teased Dean about his having memorized every English / British monarch’s name, place and politics. While it appeared to be drunken, if curious banter at the time, the connotations are significant. It showed Hughes knew Dean’s military experience extended beyond fighting for his life on Hamburger Hill, and it illustrated Dean’s professionalism. Learning Britain’s history and power structures wasn’t a party trick, it was operational research for a Deep State operator. Hughes laughed at Dean one time in the exhibition hall too when I tried to photograph them both by our main display machine, a rotogravure proof press. As I went to take the photo Dean ducked behind the machine, out of view. Standing up after the photo was taken, he said he’d had to tie his shoelace, causing Hughes to look away quietly chuckling to himself. Dean clearly didn’t want his photograph taken and, whatever the reason, Hughes was in on it. Dean never allowed his photo to be taken in the ten years I knew him so it is spooky that within a year of him allowing his photo to be taken for a Czech company promotional in 2019, Dean was compelled to take his own life.
During our first meeting Dean told me he had no experience in the print industry but did have applicable electronics and chemistry knowledge. Toluene is a key chemical used in both rotogravure printing and the manufacture of TNT explosives. In August 1996 the US embassy Yemen and State Department Washington helped source industrial quantities of toluene for KSM’s Yemeni hosts, the Hayel Saeed Anam Group. Dean Printing Systems is listed as offering equipment, chemistry, electronics and supplies for the rotogravure industry. Dean was thirty-eight years old in 1988 but already had white hair, as seen in his 2019 photo (below). He explained it had turned white overnight, alluding to but not disclosing an extremely traumatic event in his life. I asked what foreign languages he spoke; he said just Spanish. I next saw Dean at an exhibition in April 1991 Dusseldorf, then at the CMM exhibition in his hometown of Chicago later that year. I don’t recall anything of note other than Dean appeared to be liked by all, an integral part of my parent’s business and key to its success. Then about a year later, over dinner at home in Manchester, my parents said Dean had been fired. It felt like a very touchy subject and I didn’t inquire further. Then Dean was quietly reengaged as their sales agent a few months later and again I sensed not to ask why. I now know that Dean had caught my father in an Italian honey trap after recommending a young and attractive Italian sales agent to my father*. My father financed the affair from the company’s accounts that my mother managed and by getting me to drop off £3000 cash to a fashion boutique in 1990 London. He told us it was a bribe he had to pay to a customer in Italy. He’d even spent days and shared a hotel with her when he and I were working together at an exhibition in 1991 Brussels, so he did have a lot to hide. But when the trap was sprung rather than be blackmailed my father confessed all to my mother. She forgave him on the condition Dean was fired for introducing them. She remained a company director but never went to the office again and did accept Dean being quietly reemployed a few months later. Dean went through a second fire / rehire cycle with my family’s business about a decade later; I don’t know the reason why. It does indicate that whoever was benefiting most from Dean’s employment as sales agent for a British engineering export company had a lot of power and influence over my parents’ business decisions.
*This is not salubrious gossip; it shows the true nature of Dean and my father’s relationship, and it is significant to 1997 Yemen too. I met an Italian engineer onsite in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s front company, measuring up for a $1,000,000 Bielloni flexographic printing press whose sale I think Dean setup in April 1997 Chicago.
Around 1993 my father started spending less time in America at the same time my brother Paul* went to live in Louisville Kentucky, working directly for Dean. And I left the family business to go backpacking in December 1993. The family company’s first machine sale to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s financiers, the Hayel Saeed Anam (HSA) Group, was in 1993 too. That machine was installed by my brother Paul in 1994 Yemen - on a HSA Group industrial estate 10-miles from Al Qaidah town - suggesting the sale was setup by Dave Dean. Dean did setup the second machine sale to the HSA Group in 1997, but they used a fake company name and I was told it was the first sale to this customer.
* Paul was initially refused entry to the USA due to a prior drugs conviction. David Dean was able to circumvent those US visa restrictions and get him a resident / work visa, again demonstrating Dean’s high-level contacts and influence.
After backpacking in 1994/95 I was contracting for Air BP at Manchester airport, on the administration side of British Petroleum’s aircraft refuelling division. Then my parents asked if I’d rejoin the family company as an international field service technician. Air BP offered me a coveted permanent contract if I stayed with them; my parents said that being family they’d offer me better job security than BP. I started back at the family firm in October 1996 and was made redundant in April 1998, but not before I’d seen Dean again. We spent a few days together in April 1997 Chicago, at the CMM exhibition being held in McCormick Place. It was the last time we met and was when I saw him at the height of his powers, on top form and as smooth as James Bond.
1997, When Dave Dean’s Plan Came Together
The first time I arrived in Chicago with work I was taken straight to watch the Chicago Bears football team play at Soldier Field, tickets courtesy of Dave Dean. The next time Dean collected me from the airport and we went straight for lunch at a diner. The diner’s theme was the staff being rude and insulting to customers, but I wasn’t let in on the joke until after I’d been roasted by the waitress. When I stepped out of O’Hare airport arrivals on Thursday April 10, 1997, Dean was waiting in a convertible Saab sports car with his beautiful girlfriend driving us. Our first stop was his private bar, the Sky Box, on the other side of O’Hare airport and inside a warehouse in the cargo handling area. We had a drink in the Sky Box with my brother Paul who explained to me that he wouldn’t be at the exhibition starting on the Monday due to work commitments elsewhere. My father, brother Nigel and the company’s electronic specialist Jerry Stephens were all flying over from Britain for the exhibition so Paul being absent was odd. Was he distancing himself because he and Dean knew the Yemeni customers who Paul had installed a machine for in 1994 were going to be at the exhibition in Chicago? In 1997 Chicago those Yemeni customers were introduced to me as new customers, and they used a fake company name too, so that is one possible reason for Paul’s absence.
Dave Dean and I spent the weekend setting up our impressive sales stand which was in a perfect location – Dean had arranged it all and had really gone to town. At the end of the exhibition, on Thursday, we packed up the stand, re-crating the machines and waited for the forklifts. As we were waiting Dean told me about the teamster union corruption at these trade shows and how we could be waiting all day unless we paid a bribe. And then as the first forklift came into sight it came straight to our stand, its driver jumping off and greeted Dean like an old friend, a wad of dollars passing with their handshake. Once our crates had gone, we were the first exhibitors free to leave and finished the working day off with cocktails at one of Chicago’s best hotel bars. Dean was on top form with little tricks like that all week, and he was revelling in it, years of hard work finally coming together with such finesse.
My father’s agitation was clear when he, my brother Nigel and Jerry Stephens arrived in Chicago on the Sunday. With flights and hotels, expenses and salaries, plus the cost of the exhibition, he was tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket already. Dean remained quietly confident and the perfect host but my father’s irritation with Dean was still apparent as we arrived at the sales stand on the first morning of the show, Monday 14 April. And then an hour or so into the exhibition Dean quietly coaxed my father away from the stand, telling us they were going to look at something and would be back soon. I now know they went to an expensive café overlooking the exhibition hall to watch the Hayel Saeed Anam Group executives arrive at our sales stand. This was Dean’s grand plan coming together, a major event he’d staged managed. By the time the HSA executives left our sales stand they’d already covered our entire exhibition costs by paying list price, money upfront, for our most expensive machine – about $100,000. The HSA executives had a shopping list tucked into an exhibition guide and were visiting each stand on the list, buying everything needed to furnish a printing factory from scratch.
The HSA Group were setting up KSM’s front company by buying $3,000,000 of machinery in Chicago, and using a shopping list I suspect Dean wrote for them. That’s how he knew exactly when to take my father to watch from above, and not be involved. Back at ground level I was the technician who greeted the HSA executives and demonstrate the machine’s operation before handing them on to Nigel and Jerry, the salesmen. They used their London office company name Longulf Trading, professed to know nothing about printing and accepted the first price we mentioned. They explained they were just the purchase agents for a new company in Yemen, but it was clear they made up the end customer's name and they refused to give a delivery address beyond Sanaa airport. As they left the stand the three of us stood in amazement before Jerry stated the obvious – that there was something very suspicious about the sale. But Nigel dismissed that concern by saying:
“Don’t ask any questions, they just paid list price for our top machine.”
Then we all noticed about a dozen men watching and following the HSA/Longulf Trading executives. Their $1,000,000 Bielloni printing press purchase caused quite a stir at the industry trade show and they had an audience. When Dave and my father returned they feigned surprise at our sales success, their mood significantly changed. Behaving very out of character Dean declined the commission he was due on the sale in his territory - several thousand dollars. I now suspect that was to remove any paper trail between him and Longulf and ultimately KSM's front company in Yemen.
My diary notes we went to the Sky Box that night, and I recall we had another important visitor to the stand the next day – a top-level British diplomat from Washington I think. It might be common for British ambassadors to visit such trade shows, but it happening a day after KSM’s London based billionaire financiers had stood on the same carpet is still of note. That night, Tuesday, Dave and my father went out for dinner with other unknown but important people. The exhibition wound down on the Wednesday, Nigel and Jerry flew home and in the evening my father took me to the restaurant he’d dined in the night before – the very exclusive Morton’s Steak House. Morton’s is, or was in the 1990s, a favourite CIA venue. If there was a celebration had by Dean and company after helping to furnish KSM’s front company with machine sales in Chicago, I think it occurred at Morton’s on Tuesday April 15, 1997.
There was a celebration at the end of the week, on Friday 18 April. We shared a meal to celebrate my father’s birthday before going to Dean’s Sky Box for a last drink – there was Dean, his girlfriend Joanne, and a couple of their friends, Mario and Irene. There was someone already at the bar when we arrived – the only person there - a mysterious man sat at the far end of the bar. The only thing of note I remember about him is I was kept as far away from him as possible. As soon as we walked in I was guided to a plastic darts board by Mario and Irene, and kept there all night. Joanne joined the darts game after serving drinks, as Dean my father and the mysterious guy huddled at the far end of the bar deep in discussion. Joanne said his name was Baron, an old friend of Dave. I don’t know how far this goes but the only person named Baron I can find that Dave may have known from Vietnam was SOG veteran Robert 'Baron' Bechtoldt. The last time I clearly remember having a conversation with Dave was on the Thursday, when he introduced me to Bloody Mary cocktails at one of Chicago’s best hotel bars. That’s how I wish I could remember him, but I know too much and have too many questions that’ll never be answered now. How involved was he? Was he just a salesman with dubious contacts making a buck, or a real player, someone calling the shots?