12-12-2011, 11:46 AM
The following Peter Dale Scott essay has been cited in a few different books (including some by Scott himself) but seems to be fairly hard to find online. It first appeared in Issue #12 of Robin Ramsay's British magazine Lobster' in 1986, and was written (as Scott notes in his preface) several years before that. Scott has since returned to a few of these subjects in greater detail, but I still find this essay illuminating as an exercise in joining the dots.
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Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S.
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by Peter Dale Scott
CONTENTS
Preface
Tolerated Crime and Tolerated Murder
The CIA-Mafia-Narcotics Connection and the U.S. Press
Protection for Intelligence Assets
Assassins, Narcotics and Watergate
Domestic Repression and DEA Narcotics Enforcement
CIA, DEA, and Their Assassination Capacity
DEA, Crime and the Press Today
The U.S.A. and Transnationalised Repression
Drugs and Parafascism: Orlando Bosch and Christian David
Post-war Nazi Networks and the United States
The Case of Otto Skorzeny
Fascism and Parafascism
Transnational Parafascism and the CIA
The U.S., Chile and the Aginter Press
After Watergate: the Chilean-Cuban Exile Alliance
World Parafascism, Drugs and Crime
International Fascista in Action
World Parafascism and the U.S. Chile Lobby
The CIA and the Politics of Countervalence
Post-war Disposal Problems: De Gaulle and Watergate
Disposal as a Flight from Public Control: Thailand
Suppression by Proxy: the Superclient States
Economic Recession and Arms Sales Increases
Conclusions
From 'Political' to 'Human': the Lessons of Watergate and Vietnam
Preface
This essay was written in the summer of 1977. I lost track of it in subsequent summers, when I first suffered a major illness, and then was side-tracked into preparation of a trade book on the Kennedy Assassination (Beyond Conspiracy) that was eventually killed by its publisher on the eve of its appearance. I am grateful to Lobster for reviving 'Transnationalised Repression'. Though the essay starts from events of the seventies (Watergate, the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, the Nixon war on drugs) which have since passed into history, the essay also builds to a general overview of transnationalised backing for right-wing repressive forces, or parafascists, that operate on the fringes of state intelligence and security systems.
Except in details, I have not attempted to update the essay, whose general thesis has been unfortunately only too corroborated by ensuing events. The assassins of Letelier did in fact go to jail, but with sentences that were either token, or soon reversed in higher courts. On a higher level, the fall of the Shah in Iran and of Marcos in the Philippines have been followed by new revelations of those dictators' links to private as well as public forces in the United States. Indeed the speculation reported in this essay (at footnote 159), that Asian bribes had influenced Nixon's Vietnam interventions through the Watergate period, seems only too relevant today, as we learn how much money had been channelled by Marcos into U.S. political campaigns over the last decade and a half. The thesis of "Transnationalised Repression" also seems only too relevant to U.S. politics in Nicaragua, as we learn of support for the Contras from first Argentina and Israel, and now allegedly from South Africa.
The restrained optimism of the essay's conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug- running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that policy's visible centre. In 1977 I was concerned about the access of foreign parafascists and WACL publicists to the office of Senator Thurmond and the staff of the National Security Council. Today General Singlaub, the President of WACL, has access, through his support work for the Contras, to the Reagan White House (cf. footnote 50).
In my view, this continuing demoralisation of U.S. foreign policy and the concomitant trivialisation of domestic U.S. political debate, makes my modest hopes for change through "new human groupings", or what since the fall of Marcos has become famous as "people power", not less but more relevant. It is not that I am at all sanguine about the possibilities for such transpolitical change outside the traditional political system. It is just all the clearer that such new human forces, however weak and immature at present, are ultimately our best hope.
PETER DALE SCOTT
Tolerated Crime and Tolerated Murder
On September 21, 1976, a sophisticated bomb killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American friend while they were driving to work down Washington's fashionable Embassy Row.
Two weeks later, on October 6, a Cuban commercial airliner exploded in mid-air over the Caribbean, killing all 73 passengers on board.
Confessions in the latter case implicated Dr. Orlando Bosch Avila, a Cuban emigre then living in Venezuela and a veteran of at least three anti-Castro plots with CIA and/or Mafia backing. Bosch, in turn, had participated enough in the planning of the Letelier assassination by Cuban exiles to give information leading to subpoenas for several former CIA Cuban proteges in the United States, one of whom has since been sentenced to jail for refusing to testify.
If past U.S. history is to repeat itself, the killers of Letelier, if they have not indeed been correctly identified as part of the CIA/Mafia milieu will not be sent to jail. (1) In 1943, the prominent Italian-American anti-fascist editor, Carlo Tresca, was murdered in the streets of New York. The case against New York Mafioso, Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family, might have seemed air-tight; he was under surveillance at that time, for parole violation, and thus was placed in the murder vehicle at the time and place of the killing. But he was not arrested or brought to trial and shortly after a leading anti-Communist informant for the FBI claimed to have learnt that the Communist Party was responsible for the killing. (2) Today - i.e. in 1977 - Galante is commonly referred to as the head of the United States' Mafia.
In 1956, a distinguished emigre scholar from the Dominican Republic, Jesus de Galindez, was kidnapped on the streets of New York and flown to his home country, where he was almost certainly murdered by order of his political enemy, the dictator Trujillo. In this case, a former FBI agent, John Joseph Frank (who had worked for the CIA as well as a Trujillo lobbyist) pleaded nolo contendere for his role in chartering the kidnap plane; he was let off with a $500 fine. Ten years later Life reported that the plane had been chartered by Mafioso Bayonne Joe Zicarelli, another member and a 'fast' friend of Trujillo whom he had supplied with over $1 million worth of arms. (3)
More recent revelations indicate that both killings have escaped adjudication because of their proximity to current intelligence-Mafia collaborations. We know now that by January 1943, when Tresca was killed, two U.S. intelligence services, OSS and ONI (Naval Intelligence) were in direct negotiation with Meyer Lansky for the provision of Mafia collaboration with the Allied invasion of Sicily. In exchange for this, Lucky Luciano would be released from jail by Governor Dewey and deported to his native Italy.
The underboss of Luciano's family, Vito Genovese, had already been deported to Italy and must have figured in the OSS-ONI-Mafia plans, since immediately following the U.S. occupation we find him running massive black market operations from his post as official translator for the chief of the Allied Military Government, a former senior Democratic politician and Lieutenant-governor from New York.Recent Mafia histories report that the anti-fascist, Tresca, was killed by Galante on orders from Genovese, who was then running narcotics traffic from North Africa, with the blessing of Mussolini. (4) Genovese was already wanted in the U.S. for another murder charge, yet when a young army CID captain arrested him, he was able to predict confidently that he would escape conviction. So he did - until new narcotics charges in 1958. The only witness in the murder case was conveniently murdered while in protective custody in a Brooklyn jail. (5) A vigorous prosecution of the Tresca case was even less likely than of the earlier murder case, since national security could easily rationalise the decision not to risk exposing any intelligence-Mafia contacts in court.
The same intelligence-Mafia background overshadows the Galindez affair. We now know that in 1961, when the U.S.-CIA shifted from Trujillo to those around him, three M1 carbines were provided by the U.S. Embassy, on CIA authority, to those who soon afterwards assassinated Trujillo. The recipient of the arms was one Antonio de la Maza, whose brother Octavio had been implicated in the Galindez killing (he was suspected in 1957 of murdering the pilot of the kidnap plane in Santa Domingo, in order to silence him). (6) At this time, the CIA was in contact, through former FBI agent, Robert Maheu, with Mafia figures Sam Giancana, John Roselli and Santo Trafficante - in the hope of arranging the assassination of Fidel Castro. Trafficante, by most accounts at this time was succeeding Meyer Lansky in the role of chief organiser for the world heroin traffic, put together by Luciano, Lansky and Genovese after World War 2. (7) A confidential White House memorandum of January 25, 1971, prepared one week after Jack Anderson's disclosure of Maheu's role in the CIA-Mafia plot, noted that Maheu "was a close associate of rogue FBI agent John Frank, generally believed to have engineered the assassination of Jesus de Galindez in New York City on March 12 1956, on behalf of the assassinated Rafael Trujillo." (8)
The memo's author, Jack Caulfield, was in a position to speak authoritatively. From 1955 to 1966 he served with the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) where he was assigned to a number of political plots involving other countries. (9)
The foregoing facts suggest how embarrassing it would be to see court convictions of those close to this high level CIA-Mafia connection. Subsequent Justice Department initiatives to prosecute Maheu, Giancana and Roselli were frustrated by the invocation of their CIA immunity. We now know of an official CIA memo in 1962 informing that a pending prosecution of Maheu (and possibly Giancana) "would not be in the national interest". (10)
The third, and most powerful collaborator with Maheu, Santo Trafficante, has never faced indictment despite repeated indications that he has succeeded Lansky as the top organiser of the world heroin traffic. (11)
One should not immediately conclude that the CIA-Mafia connection is unassailable, or the only relevant factor in US politics. A New York Times editorial called for vigorous prosecution in the Galindez case, just as the Washington Post has done recently in the Letelier case. Justice in the Tresca and Galindez killings was demanded repeatedly by U.S. socialist leader Norman Thomas, who himself enjoyed a CIA connection of sorts; just as Galindez had a special relationship to Thomas' "left" section of CIA (the International Organisations Division), while Frank and Maheu worked with the CIA's competing right-wing (Western Hemisphere and Security).
The CIA-Mafia-Narcotics Connection and the U.S. Press
The fact remains that prior to about 1970, the invocation of an alleged "national interest" seems to have protected those actively involved in the intelligence-Mafia connection from serious harassment by either the courts or the establishment press. (For the sake of verifiability we shall define the 'establishment media' as including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time-Life, Newsweek, Readers Digest and the three major television networks). Since Watergate, and the dramatic collapse of the press-government anti-Communist consensus, it in possible that this relative immunity is no longer unassailable. First in conjunction with Vietnam, then in conjunction with Watergate and since around 1974 in conjunction with the CIA itself, the establishment press has begun to reveal marginal details of the post-war CIA-Mafia connection and even of its involvement in the post-war restoration of the world heroin traffic.
But the revelations of the past few years make the establishment media before 1970 appear guilty not merely of silence but of active collusion in disseminating false official cover-ups of the facts. Take, for example, the post-war development of new opium growing areas in non-Communist South-east Asia to replace fields which the Chinese revolution now denied to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. For two decades the most flagrant of official Thai and KMT involvement in this traffic, to say nothing of the US infrastructure support, was systematically downplayed by the U.S. Narcotics Bureau, with the necessary collaboration of the U.S. establishment media. (12)
The key figures in this official U.S. cover-up were U.S. Narcotics Commissioner, Anslinger - a Treasury official - and his West coast chief, George White, a former OSS official and CIA consultant who had represented OSS in the Operation Underworld negotiations with Meyer Lansky.
For years Anslinger would uncritically transmit KMT propaganda about a world-wide Red Chinese opium conspiracy and document it persuasively with evidence of what he knew very well was in fact the KMT's own narcotics traffic. Thus, Anslinger would use the term 'Yunnan Opium' to describe the opium grown under KMT auspices in Burma, Laos and Thailand; and would document the involvement of officials from the Bank of Canton, without noting that this was controlled by the Soong family of Taiwan. (13)
Supporting these misleading charges, George White announced, in 1959, the breaking of what was reported in the New York Times as "the biggest Chinese narcotics operation 'that we've come across'". White also spoke of 270 pounds of heroin "mostof it from a vast poppy field near Chungking". (14) Only in the local San Francisco papers, where the arrests and the trial occurred, did one learn that a key co-conspirator in the case (not prosecuted) was Chung Wing Fong, identified as a former official in Chinatown's powerful Six Companies (key overseas KMT supporters) and also of the Chinese Anti-Communist League here. (15)
The Chinese Anti-Communist League was, in fact, a U.S. branch of the KMT's world- wide intelligence network. Fong, a former President of the pro-KMT Hip Sing tong, had been spared arrest by timely U.S. Government intervention. When he visited Hong Kong in 1958 "the American consul in Hong Kong seized his passport and he was ordered to Taipei/Taiwan". He and others were then named as unindicted co- conspirators "because they are out of U.S. jurisdiction." (16)
White's carefully worded but wholly misleading claims of a Chinese Communist (rather than anti-Communist) conspiracy were later supported in official Narcotics Bureau (FBN) reports by so-called 'documentary evidence' which came from the pro- KMT defendants. (17) Such elementary distortions by 'responsible' officials of the true facts about the international heroin traffic were still being repeated as late as 1973, though they have since been officially refuted by the new Drug Enforcement Agency. The latest accusation against China was made by two veteran New York crime fighters, Frank Rogers - city-wide prosecutor of narcotics cases - and Brooklyn District Attorney, Eugene Gold at a press conference. Rogers showed reporters a plastic bag on which the words 'Peoples' Republic of China' were printed in English and Chinese. (18) Needless to say, such distortions could never have succeeded if 'responsible' papers like the New York Times had not followed the Narcotics Bureau in suppressing the locally published facts about men like Chung Wing Fong.
What was at stake in these high-level cover-ups was nothing less than the CIA's basic strategy for the containment of Communism in East and South-East Asia, which (as documents published with the Pentagon Papers have confirmed) relied heavily on the opium growing KMT troops of the Burma-Laos-Thailand border areas and their contacts with the pro-KMT secret societies in the overseas Chinese communities. (19) Through its 'proprietaries' like Civil Air Transport (CAT) and Sea Supply Inc., the CIA had provided logistic support to the anti-Communist 'assets' in the region, whose profitable involvement in the narcotics traffic very soon took priority over their political responsibilities. No doubt the CIA branch responsible (the Office of Policy Co-ordination, or OPC) could rationalise its role in restoring the narcotics traffic in this area with the thought that it was merely prolonging a regional practice common both to the imperialist powers of Britain, France and Japan, and to the native rulers of Thailand and Kuomintang China.
Protection for Intelligence Assets
In 1953-4, as the Eisenhower Administration faced growing KMT resistance to its proposed disengagement from Korea and Indochina, so also the CIA disengaged somewhat from its disreputable OPC proteges in Thailand as their opium trafficking became notorious. By 1959, Council on Foreign Relations spokesmen, backed by the influential CIA-backed Conlon Report, were even suggesting some kind of normalisation of relations with mainland China. This context of detente makes all the more remarkable the propaganda activities of the Narcotics Bureau and George White in the 1959 Hip Sing opium case. In effect, the FBN was covering up for the KMT- narcotics network overseas, even while attempting to crush its movement of heroin into the continental United States. Such a two-faced policy was probably impractical, in as much as in 1959 the world's only sizeable population of heroin addicts was in the U.S. It was, however, understandable in terms of national policy, if one recollects in 1959 all the leading anti-Communist U.S. proteges of the region - Ngo dihn Nhu of South Vietnam, Sarit Thanarat and Prapas Charusathien of Thailand and Phoumi Nosavan of Laos - were profiting in one way or another from the KMT narcotics traffic. (20)
The fact remains that in 1959 the official U.S. position on the KMT troops was that it was no longer supplying them and therefore in no position to control their narcotics activities: the U.S. arms which Burma found at the KMT camps in 1961, still packed in boxes showing their trans-shipment through a Californian air force base, just weeks before, had gone first to Taiwan and then to Burma in a CAT-Air America plane leased by an affiliate of the KMT-Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League. This is a disturbing analogy with the present status of the former CIA Cubans operating around Orlando Bosch. Like the KMT troops, they too have now been officially disowned by the CIA because of their illegal activities and are now supported by other governments and intelligence agencies, most notably the governments of Chile, of Nicaragua and of the Dominican Republic. (21) More specifically, a chief reason for the closing down of the last of the CIA's Miami station JM/ Wave operations - a counter intelligence operation under Joaquin Sangenis Perdomo, usually referred to by its original CIA name of Operation 40 - was because one of the group's CIA planes had been apprehended in the act of smuggling narcotics into the U.S. (22)Today, no one seems to deny the illegality of the CIA's domestic JM/Wave station in Miami, which employed from 300 to 700 U.S. agents and from 2,000 to as many as 6,000 Cubans. (23) An Bill Moyers has noted, "seducing the press was critical" to JM/Wave's maintenance in Miami; the CIA secured "explicit agreements with the press here to keep their secret operations from being reported, except when it was mutually convenient ... It amounted to a massive conspiracy to violate the country's Neutrality Acts and other federal, state and local laws as well". (24)
Assassins, Narcotics and Watergate
Seven years after the event, to its credit, the New York Times finally revealed a little of the story about the wind-up of the CIA's Operation 40 because of its narcotics activities.(25) It did so an part of a series of stories exposing operations for which the CIA's counter-intelligence chief, James Angleton, had been responsible, and Angleton himself has recently confirmed (to author Edward Jay Epstein) the published suggestions that these stories were being leaked by Angleton's chief enemy within the agency, CIA Director, William Colby, an part of a successful campaign to force Angleton's resignation. (26)
What concerns us, as in the case of the KMT-Hip Sing narcotics case, is the refusal of the New York Times to tell the most significant features of the Operation 40 narcotics story:
(a) Operation 40, originally, at least, included professional assassins. According to the former New York Times reporter, Tad Szulc, it was originally designed by Sangenis as part of the Bay of Pigs planning "to assure that a post-Castro regime contained no trouble makers", i.e. men opposed to Howard Hunt's political protege, Manuel Artime. (27) (As political action officer for the Bay of Pigs operation, Hunt would almost certainly have been responsible for this phase of Operation 40). Szulc adds that "According to well informed Cubans, Operation 40 also had a second task; that of assassinating, if necessary, political leaders who stood in the way. It was reported that the project included a hand-picked task force of professional killers". (28)
(b) The New York Times failed to name the Bay of Pigs veteran who, in its words, "was part of the group and who was accused by the Federal authorities of being a large cocaine smuggler [and] was killed in a gun battle with the Miami police". (29) This was Juan Restoy, arrested in June 1970 as part of the Justice Department's 'OperationEagle', against what Attorney General Mitchell called "a nation-wide ring of wholesalers handling about 30% of all heroin sales and 75 to 80% of all cocaine sales in the United States". (30) Of the three Cuban ringleaders of this network, one had his conviction thrown out on a technicality, and the third, Bay of Pigs veteran Jorge Alonson Pujol y Bermudez, was eventually released and placed on probation. (31)
© Of the nine Cubans who came to Washington for the Watergate break-in of June 1972, at least four, and possibly all nine, had been members of the Sangenis counter intelligence phase of 'Operation 40'.
Bernard Barker testified that Felipe de Diego, who, with Barker and Rolando Martinez, had previously burgled the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist for Howard Hunt and the Nixon White House, "had been a member of Operation 40";(32) this aspect of Barker's testimony was neither reported by the New York Times nor included in its transcripts of the Watergate Hearings. Other members of the Sangenis operation included Barker himself, who, according to Helms, was fired by the CIA when "we found out that he was involved in certain gambling and criminal elements". (33) A third member was almost certainly Eugenio Martinez who, back in 1957, had been part of an anti-Batista assassination plot funded by former Cuba president Carlos Prio Socarras. In November 1963 Martinez skippered the ill-fated Rex mission from Florida against Cuba, a mission involving the Somoza family of Nicaragua.
To sum up, the New York Times systematically ignored or understated the involvement of 'Operation 40' in political assassinations, the world heroin network, and Watergate. Exactly the same can be said about the Times and entire establishment press coverage before this year: in all its thousands of words about the so-called 'Plumbers' of Watergate itself it never mentioned that the Nixon White House had recruited, for the ostensible purpose of combating the drug traffic, an illegal covert action team with links to organised crime and (through 'Operation 40') the drug traffic itself. At its peak the Sangenis operation had some 150 Cubans; and we know now from a recent CBS news interview of Bernard Barker by Bill Moyers, that no less than 120 ex-CIA Cubans were recruited for 'Operation Diamond' under the Hunt-Liddy 'Plumbers Unit' at the White House. (34) This group included "people superbly trained in explosives" and "specialists in weapons": as Bill Moyers observed, it too was "a small secret army". Barker dissented from Moyers' allegations that Operation Diamond was preparing to perform political "kidnappings" and "assassinations", but only on semantic grounds: ("there is a difference between assassination and killing .... The word 'kidnap' sounds to me like a term used in - in law. Remember that I'm a CIA agent, CIA background. We neutralise these things. We don't think... in criminal terms".)(35)
According to the CBS-Moyers programme:
the secret army was not to be disbanded after Watergate. It was to be used in President Nixon's drug war, in Barker's words, "to hit the Mafia using the tactics of the Mafia". (36)
Barker and his colleagues, meanwhile, hoped that their participation would help lead to the "liberation of Cuba". (37) He explained that the key to this liberation lay in helping Mr Hunt, "in the way where hundreds of Cubans have been helping [ie the CIA and the U.S. armed services] in Africa, in Vietnam and in other areas of the world." (38)
Domestic Repression and DEA Narcotics Enforcement
All this should be very disturbing. Liddy's own original plans for Operation Diamond, after it moved from the cover of White House narcotics enforcement to the Committee to Re-elect the President, also included political kidnappings and "men who have worked successfully as street-fighting teams at the CIA". (39) At that time, when San Diego was the projected Republican convention site, Liddy had proposed that Hunt recruit some "400 or 500... Bay of Pigs veterans who were located in the southern California area"; Hunt actually obtained print-outs of the available veterans, from Brigade 2506 Veterans Association (the AVBC) in Miami.(40)
These plans for organised governmental violence were by no means wholly forestalled by the timely exposure of Hunt's Cubans at the July 17 1972 Watergate break-in.Some of them have survived Nixon's fall from power and are today officially established under the guidance of narcotics control. To see how this could happen, however, we must look at the co-ordinated use of ex-CIA assets for 'black operations' which followed the Watergate arrests.
One Watergate-related Nixon horror never investigated by either the Ervin or the Church Committee was the use of Hunt's ex-CIA Cuban, Pablo Fernandez, as a provocateur planning to protest at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. Fernandez, who in May 1972 had been recruited by Hunt's aid Barker to 'get' Daniel Ellsberg at an anti-war rally in Washington - whether by merely punching him or possibly by more serious violence, is not clear. In June and July, under the overall guidance of Robert Mardian at the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, Fernandez, working with the Miami Police and the FBI, was recruited to offer machine guns to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in the hope that this would produce some sort of overt act of violence. A Miami police detective later confirmed to the Miami Herald that 'We were hoping for the overt act necessary to produce a charge of conspiracy". (41) The ensuing court case against Scott Camil and the other VVAW leaders saw apparent perjury by a Justice Department representative on the subject of government informants, and a break-in at the office of Camil's lawyer which (in the words of the Times correspondent, Anthony Lukas) is one of many unsolved break-ins which "may have been carried out by 'contract' operatives hired by the CIA". (42)
Scott Camil himself, after being acquitted along with the other VVAW defendants, was reindicted after being first set up and then shot and almost killed by DEA narcotics agents. (The national establishment media, whose attention helped expose the false government testimony by the Nixon administration at the first trial, showed little interest in the second.) But Camil was only one instance where the government's expanded 'war on drugs' was used, at least under Nixon, to harass selected political targets - and possibly in support of major CIA covert operations against countries like Cyprus, Argentina, Lebanon and Chile.
It must be kept in mind that OSS and CIA has been using the connections of the international heroin traffic for covert operations virtually without interruption since 'Operation Underworld' in 1943. At first these operations may have been tactical rather than strategic: to expel the Fascists and forestall the Communists in Italy, to break Communist control of the French docks during the first Indochina War, to support a string of anti-Communist puppets in Southeast Asia. But as a former CIA agent and publicist confirms, this intelligence-Mafia connection was seen as vitally important.
Nixon himself has left office, and the public style of his two successors has been visibly muted, but none of the repressive legislation which his administration put together for the silencing of dissent has been repealed; and indeed the Carter administration has taken up Nixon's demand for an Official Secrets Act which would provide criminal sanctions against future Daniel Ellsbergs.
CIA, DEA, and Their Assassination Capacity
It is true that on June 11, 1973, the Justice Department abolished the Intelligence Evaluation Committee which had co-ordinated the harassment of Camil in Miami, for which the special grand juries had collected political intelligence, and which had, in its first two months of existence alone "compiled computerised dossiers on nearly 14,000 Americans, including selected political officials and moderates". (43) The IEC was secretly terminated on June 11, 1973, or shortly after press accounts of Dean's highly- bowdlerised revelations concerning IEC which he was about to make to the Ervin Watergate Committee. Such evasive tactics do not mean very much in today's age of computerised intelligence. Revelations about Army surveillance of U.S. citizens before another of Senator Ervin's Committee in 1970 had led to the formal termination of that programme on June 9, 1970, which we now know was four days after White House planning had begun on the escalated Huston Plan which resulted in the IEC.(44) Public assurances that the Army's intelligence dossiers had been destroyed were misleading, if we are to credit subsequent reports that:
on 29 July 1970, the day after the President moved to reconsider the Huston Plan, army intelligence had given the entire print-out of its civilian surveillance computers to ISD (i.e. IEC in Mardian's Internal Security Division). (45)
In like vein the CIA's new director, William Colby, as part of his reorientation of the CIA towards foreign targets, terminated, in 1974, the CIA's Operation Chaos for the surveillance of U.S. citizens in conjunction with the IEC (though when the Rockefeller Commission reported this fact 15 months later it noted that the Chaos "files and computerised index are still intact"). (46) Two years earlier CIA director Helms, in response to U.S press reports about CIA involvement in assassinations, had directed that "no such activity or operation be undertaken, assisted or suggested by any of our personnel". (47) But the official reports on both of these controversial operations ignore the relevant fact that a high level 1968 meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations of CIA veterans and their colleagues in the New York-CIA financial establishment had already agreed CIA operations had become too visible and too bureaucratic, and in future should be left, where possible, in the hands of "private organisations, many of the personnel of which would be non-U.S ... hands of third parties, particularly third country nationals". (48)
A series of working groups to implement these proposals were officially recognisedwhen Richard Nixon, in 1969, appointed Franklin Lindsay, a CIA veteran and chairman of the chief working group (as well as of the Rockefeller-financed Itek Corp.) to head up an advisory panel on reorganisation of the CIA. (49)
In the ensuing years many of the key 1968 proposals were implemented by successive CIA directors, most notably the recommendation that the ageing CIA bureaucracy had become too large and should be dramatically cut back. In the context of this reversion to "unofficial cover", the March 1972 Helms injunction against assassination seems to have been a case of carefully locking the door of an already empty stable. Nine months earlier Lucien Conein, the CIA's case officer in the Diem assassination and a high level contact with the heroin trafficking Corsican Mafia, resigned from CIA, to be brought back at the suggestion of his old OSS colleague Howard Hunt into the White House narcotics effort. There, Conein (by his own admission) supervised a special unit which would have the capacity to assassinate selected targets in the narcotics business. (50)
A memo of late May 1972, drafted by Hunt's superior in narcotic matters, Egil Krogh, reports on what is apparently President Nixon's authorisation for the Conein assassination squad, with the staggering budget of $100 million in non-accountable funds:
According to Krogh's detailed 'Outline of Discussion with the President on Drugs', the President agreed to 'forceful action in [stopping] International trafficking of heroin in the host country'. Specifically the memorandum of the meeting noted, 'it is anticipated that a material reduction in the supply of heroin to the U.S. can be accomplished through a $100 million (over three years) fund which can be used for clandestine law enforcement activities abroad and for which BNDD would not be accountable. This decisive action is our only hope for destroying or immobilising the highest level of drug traffickers.'....According to Krogh, this [flexible law enforcement..for clandestine activities] would be used for underworld contacts and disruptive tactics, with the eventual goal of destroying those deemed to be heroin traffickers. (51)
According to the Washington Post at least twelve other CIA operatives, all of them first-generation (i.e. naturalised) Americans, joined in this BNDD assassination squad. (52)
In the fall of 1971:
Hunt also approached the Cuban exile leader, Manuel Artime, in Miami and - according to Artime - asked him about the possibility of forming a team of Cuban exile hit men to assassinate Latin American traffickers still outside the bailiwick of United States law. (53)
Artime told other reporters that the anti-narcotics operations would take place in Panama (pinpointed after the arrest of the son of Panamanian Ambassador to Taiwan on July 8, 1971 - the day Hunt spoke to Conein in the White House) after Frank Sturgis independently told the press that in 1971 he had joined Hunt in an investigation of the drug traffic reaching the U.S. from Paraguay through Panama. (54)
This lends strength to the recurring rumour that Hunt's narcotics activities included an assassination plan against the Panamanian President Torrijos, whose brother had been fingered by U.S. Customs commissioner Ambrose as a major heroin trafficker. (55)
DEA, Crime and the Press Today
If these reports are true, we can reasonably conclude that the old CIA-organised crime connection. though technically banished from the CIA after Jack Anderson's exposure of it in January 1971, was still pursuing its old political objectives under White House -narcotics cover in 1971-2, pending its intended integration into a new superagency, the Drug Enforcement Agency of July 1, 1973, which many observers have compared to a domestic CIA. Hunt and Artime had both been associated with previous CIA assassination plots against Castro, who, at that time, had been named by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as the man behind the heroin trade of anti-Castro Cubans. Torrijos, too, was at least as much a political as a narcotics target: he and Chilean President Salvador Allende were the only heads of state to defy the CIA-enforced ban on friendly relations with Castro's Cuba. Barker and Artime, as we have seen, had been allegedly dropped from the CIA for their involvement in criminal activities - the latter for smuggling activities from a Costa Rica base owned by Anastasio Somoza, the patron of Torrijos' current enemy Orlando Bosch. According to an FBI report on Frank Sturgis in 1972, when Hunt recruited him and Barker for Watergate "sources in Miami say that he is now associated with organised crime activities". (emphasis added) (56)
When this FBI claim was made part of the highly publicised Senate Hearings in February 1973 on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray, the New York Times and Washington Post, then locked in battle with Nixon, declined to report it. The press interviews with Artime and Sturgis about their anti-narcotics activities were likewise ignored at the time, as were all the growing indications that the White House, under the guise of anti-narcotics activities, had begun to assemble a secret parallel police, with an assassination potential, from former CIA assets dropped after the exposure of their associates in the narcotics traffic.
This reticence or resistance to expressing the criminal scope of Watergate was assuredly not inspired by a desire to protect President Nixon. It indicates, I believe, an understanding at high levels, that when right-wing CIA assets are formally 'disposed of', their potential usefulness to other employers should not be diminished. Take for example, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) itself which now employs somewhere between 50 and 100 CIA agents in addition to Conein and his twelve assassins.
Of all the 'White House horrors' to come out of the so-called 'plumbers' in Room 16, DEA is perhaps the most dangerous. A super-agency, whose very statutory authority is open to challenge, it has been plagued from the outset with serious charges of illegal behaviour, high-level corruption, and protection of Mafia figures in the narcotics traffic. Its first designated chief, Myles Ambrose, resigned before taking office in May 1973, after it was disclosed he had visited the Texas ranch of a suspected smuggler, Richard Harper, who was under indictment for an arms shipment aimed at the overthrow of the Castro government. (57) It was Ambrose, we should remember, who fingered the brother of the Cubans' target, Omar Torrijos. His deputy and successor, John Bartels, either resigned or was fired after reports by a Congressional committee that he had been in the company of a suspected courier of narcotics to Washingtonfrom Laredo, the nearest city to the Harper Ranch. (58)
Walter Minnick, the nominal author of 'Reorganisation Plan No 2' that produced DEA, was, with Hunt, Liddy and their superior, David Young, one of the four key figures in the so-called 'Plumbers' at Room 16. It was Young, a former Rockefeller employee, who wrote the orders leading to the first Plumbers break-in at the office of Dr. Fielding (Ellsberg's psychiatrist). It was Young and Minnick with whom John Ehrlichman discussed the Watergate break-in and cover-up on the Monday morning after the break-in.(59) Yet Young, who authorised the break-in, escaped state prosecution for the Fielding break-in by co-operating in a pre-emptive federal indictment; while Minnick, throughout the thousands of words on the Watergate scandals, was never once listed in the index of either the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The same papers were either reticent or grossly misleading about activities which Hunt and Liddy performed, without Nixon's knowledge, on behalf of Intertel, the private intelligence group now controlling the Nevada casinos of the CIA-linked Howard Hughes organisation. Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post actually used a Hunt story given them by Robert Bennett, the Washington head of the CIA front and Howard Hughes PR firm where Hunt worked at the time, as part of their litany of 'White House horrors'; even though the 'horror' in question - an interview with one Clifton DeMotte about Edward Kennedy and Chappaquiddick - had been suggested to Hunt, not by the White House, but by Robert Bennett himself. (60)
Senator Baker's Minority Report about this and other CIA aspects of Watergate was, in turn, grossly distorted by the Post. (61). This is hardly surprising; the Baker Report revealed a CIA report from Bennett that Woodward was "suitably grateful" for the DeMotte and other "fine stories" which Bennett had been "feeding" Woodward; and also an arrangement between Bennett and attorney Edward Bennett Williams to "kill off" revelations of the CIA's relationship to Bennett's agency, the Mullen Company. Edward Bennett Williams, the lawyer who previously had done work for the CIA with his and their Mafia contact, Robert Maheu, was, at this time, both the attorney for the Democratic National Committee in their suit about Hunt's Watergate break-in, and also the attorney for the Washington Post. (62)
In short, the Washington Post was not at arms length from the CIA-Howard Hughes- Intertel complex, whose involvement in the Watergate scandal was hardly indicated by their reporters' stories. In like manner, the Washington Post barely reported the Congressional revelations in 1975 about scandals in DEA, where one of the agents scrutinised by the Jackson Subcommittee Report is one of the two agents (let us call them X and Y) said to have boasted widely inside DEA of their personal contact with - and plans to retire to - Intertel. The Jackson Subcommittee investigated the DEA for its improper favours to the Howard Hughes-Intertel interests and also to the Robert Vesco-IOS interests. Although these two supergroups have been depicted as competitors vying to acquire the same Paradise Island casino, the fact remains that both have had dealings with the CIA, and also with Cuban exile groups planning to oust Fidel Castro. (63)
An even more critical article in Playboy about DEA, calling it an 'American Gestapo', describes how, in April 1974, a DEA intelligence team was ready to go on a major narcotics operation involving the flow of Mexican drugs to "a Las Vegas associate of [New York Mafia chief] Joseph Colombo":
Instead ... the agent in charge barked out a sharp dozen words or so and ordered the project dropped. "He informed us that he didn't want us wasting our time on organised-crime probes, that the real problem was the Mexicans and we were to drop this." (64)
It would appear that the old CIA-Mafia narcotics connection was still alive and well in the new DEA, especially when we consider that (according to reliable sources) the responsible 'agent in charge' was the same X (acting in conjunction with Y); that X had almost been forced to leave the Narcotics Bureau because of the scandals under his jurisdiction as New York Regional Director; and that X became the agent in charge of CIA veteran Lucien Conein and his assassination squad. The same sources say that the suspected courier who associated with DEA Director Bartels has also admitted to being 'friends' with the suspected Mafia ringleader, the "Las Vegas associate of Joseph Colombo".
The U.S.A. and Transnationalised Repression
Both inside and outside the U.S. narcotics enforcement is particularly susceptible to corruption. It is also inescapably a political matter, especially in those areas of covert intelligence and operations which, up to now, have been concerns of the CIA. It is undeniable that DEA has picked up at least one former CIA operation - that of trainingand equipping foreign police forces - after this was terminated by Congress in 1974. Congressional investigations had disclosed that the Office of Public Safety, responsible for those training programmes, had become involved in programs of torture and even wholesale assassination in Vietnam (Colby's Operation Phoenix) and in Latin America. As a consequence of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act, OPS and its some 400 positions in Latin America were abolished. The Act however, did not affect AID's new International Narcotics Program set up with CIA participation alongside OPS in mid-1971 - about the time that Conein and other CIA agents migrated from CIA to the Narcotics Bureau. A subsequent report by the General Accounting Office, investigating DEA and INC to see if Congressional intentions had been circumvented, disclosed in effect that:
(a) By Fiscal Year 1974 DEA had 400 agents in Latin America, or roughly the number of abolished OPS positions;
(b) police equipment transferred abroad under the INC jumped $2.2 million in Fiscal Year 1973 to $12.5 million in Fiscal Year 1974, almost exactly offsetting the decrease resulting from the abolition of OPS. Essentially, the same equipment was being forwarded to the same units: the chief change was in the name of the authorisation.
As State Department Narcotics adviser Sheldon Vance testified in 1976, the U.S. maintains no control over the disposition which the receiving country will make of the equipment and trainees. In fact, from Mexico to Argentina, receiving countries - following the example of Richard Nixon in the United States - have not hesitated to use narcotics aid to deal with domestic insurgency, by the simple expedient of identifying insurgents with narcotics. In May 1974, at a special press conference to publicise the stepped-up U.S.-Argentine anti-narcotics program, Argentine Security Chief Lopez Rega announced (in the presence of U.S. Ambassador Robert Hill):
We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerillas after attacks who were high on drugs. Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerilla campaign as well.
Soon afterwards, a visiting DEA team held training seminars for 150 Argentine policemen, while the Argentine penal code was amended to give the Federal Police direct nation-wide jurisdiction to make investigations and arrests in narcotics-related cases. (65) The latter development, if not the former, seems to have been important to the development of Lopez Rega's dreaded 'death squads' of 1974-5, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA). Like the White House Cubans, these squads specialised in extra-legal kidnappings and murders. Dozens and perhaps hundreds of leftists were killed by the AAA before Lopez Rega, whose responsibility was established by an Argentine Congressional investigation, was forced to leave the country as a fugitive in the Fall of 1975.
Drugs and Parafascism: Orlando Bosch and Christian David
All this has a very direct bearing on the career of Orlando Bosch, who boasts of having collaborated with the AAA in the murder of two Cuban diplomats as late as August 1976. (66) It is quite possible that this collaboration was facilitated through the international narcotics traffic, since both Lopez Rega and Bosch, along with other high-level security figures in Latin America, have been accused of financing their anti- Communist activities in part through cocaine. (67) Bosch's daughter and son-in-law, Miriam and Carlos Rogers, were arrested in June 1977 on charges of smuggling cocaine, while his other son-in-law, Ruben Blinder, is said to be a member of the AAA. In 1975 a provincial Argentine investigation into a cocaine estancia near the Bolivian border, which was said (by the admittedly hostile Argentine military intelligence) to have involved Lopez Rega and his son-in-law, was frustrated by a timely federal intervention.
CIA defector Philip Agee has charged that the Brazilian dictatorship, established with U.S. encouragement and participation in 1964, was, in turn, responsible for the spread of fascism to Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay in February 1973, and Chile in September 1973. (68) Recent French books report that in this same general period former French members of the anti-Gaullist Secret Army (OAS), along with their opposite numbers from the pro-Gaullist barbouzes, worked for the security forces of Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay ... and Venezuela and Argentina, where the Peronists returned to power in May 1973. Among the rewards sought by these men were diplomatic passports, for some of these Frenchmen were working simultaneously as part of the international Ricord narcotics network. (69)
One key figure in this network was Christian David, of whom a U.S. account blandly notes "reports that he infiltrated Uruguay's Tupamaro guerillas and identified several for the police". (70) French accounts add that David, based in Argentina and possessing an Argentine diplomatic passport in the name of Carlos Eduardo Devreux- Bergeret, also collaborated regularly with the Argentine and Brazilian political police in conjunction with the French intelligence service. (71) An encyclopaedic study of David by the Danish journalist Henrik Kruger speculates that David's activities (which also included projects in Venezuela and Bolivia) were also co-ordinated with CIA, noting that CIA-OPS agents Dan Mitrione and Claude Fry were advising the anti- Tupamaro effort. (72).
In Argentina David worked under the direction of the OAS veteran Francois Chiappe, another member of the Ricord gang. (73). In 1972 Chiappe and David were both arrested in BNDD's crackdown on the Ricord network; Chiappe, however, was liberated 'by error' when the Peronistas came to power in Argentina with the election of Hector Campora in May 1973. Shortly afterwards, under the command of Lopez Riga's close subordinate Colonel Jorge Osinde, Chiappe and Colonel Gardes, another OAS veteran, took part in the Ezeizi airport massacre of June 20 1973.(74) The same article that explored Lopez Rega's links to the cocaine traffic claimed that the cocainemoved north from the Salta estancia to Paraguay, the former headquarters of Ricord, where "one of Lopez Rega's closest allies, Colonel Jorge Sinde, became Ambassador". The cocaine there was handled by General Andres Rodriguez, who, according to Jack Anderson, was one of the three top Paraguayan officials who had worked directly with Ricord. (75)
Post-war Nazi Networks and the United States
The evidence, in short, suggests that while individuals like David, Chiappe and Ricord can rise and fall, the connection in Latin America between narcotics and para-legal repression is an old and enduring one. In its post-war phase it can be traced to the exfiltration to Latin America of wanted Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. Ricord himself, arriving in Paraguay via a Nazi escape route, had been one. (76) Originally arriving in Latin America thanks to networks like Die Spinne with the collaboration of such eminences as Gustav Frupp von Bohlen and Vatican titular Bishop Alois Hudal, a few of these in situ anti-Communist 'assets' turned to narcotics and gun running. (77) Of these, a ringleader was the wanted Nazi mass murderer Klaus Barbie, alias Altmann, who prospered in Bolivia until 1972 as the business partner of the Admiral in charge of Bolivia's 'navy'. Ricord's Latin American traffics were associated with the Barbie-Schwend Nazi narcotics gun running network, which in turn had been financed by illegal wartime Nazi operations. (78) Author William Stevenson has charged that "the normal police investigative agencies of Britain andthe United States" were "hamstrung" in their pursuit of this illicit network: "it seemed as if the bureaucrats, the Establishment intelligence agencies, and the departments concerned with foreign affairs had intervened". (79)
The key to this Allied protection of post-war Nazi networks, Stevenson shrewdly surmised, was the U.S. decision in 1945 to take over and subsidise the Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard von Gehlen. Gehlen in turn helped place numerous former Nazis as his agents in other countries, some (like Barbie) as employees of import-export firms established by his own agency, others as local representatives of Krupp, Daimler-Benz and other large West German firms. The Gehlen network, financed by the CIA but not directly controlled by it, soon had agents employed in a number of activities in violation of U.S. law, from illegal arms sales and narcotics trafficking (the two often going together) to murder.
When the Gehlen Org became the West German Intelligence Service in 1956, CIA support, though not terminated, was drastically reduced. (80) And, as a rule, the CIA has not exercised direct operational control over the Gehlen Org's ex-Nazis. Instead, the relationship, to the satisfaction of all concerned, has become more complex and inscrutable. For example, in the 1945-50 period, the U.S. State Department generally - in contrast to some of its more powerful members, such as Ambassador Adolf Berle and then Assistant Secretary Nelson Rockefeller - was opposed to Juan Peron, the most important patron in Latin America of the ex-Nazi Spinne network. (81)
U.S. opposition to networks of ex-Nazis like Barbie and Ricord appeared to be unrelenting in the period of 1970-72, when Nixon, with important help from the CIA, pressured and eventually destroyed the Ricord network of French Corsican drug traffickers in Latin America. But even the Ricord crackdown, so often recounted by Customs and BNDD flacks as proof of U.S. determination and success in the war against drugs, has been seen in other countries as an effort to gain control over the drug traffic, not to eliminate it. Even the respectable French newspaper Le Monde has charged bluntly that the arrest of Ricord and his Corsican network, which had become highly competitive with the U.S. Mafia, was due to a "close Mafia-police-Narcotics Bureau collaboration" in the United States, the result of which was to shatter Corsican influence in the world-wide narcotics traffic, and create a virtual monopoly for the U.S. Italian Mafia connections (whose key figures were Santos Trafficante in America and Luciano Liggio in Europe). (82) An authoritative French book on the drug traffic has added that the fall of Ricord, for which "the Mafia was possibly responsible" followed a campaign by an Italian representative of the Miami Mafia, Tomasso Buscetta, to regain control of the runaway Ricord operation. (83)
Though Le Monde's alarming accusation has been passed over in silence by the responsible U.S. press, it is in fact partly confirmed by Newsday's Pulitzer Prize- winning book, The Heroin Trail. Newsday notes that Buscetta "was ordered by the Mafia to go to South America", where he acted as "the representative of Luciano Liggio". (84) Newsday adds that "Buscetta was ordered out of the U.S. as an undesirable by the Justice Department in 1970"; it does not mention that Buscetta had earlier been released from a U.S. jail "through the direct intervention of an [Italian] Christian Democrat MP". (85)
In both countries, it would appear, Buscetta had powerful connections.
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the elimination of the Ricord network by Nixon and the BNDD in late 1972 was promptly followed by the establishment of a new Latin American drug network with international fascist connections, under the leadership of Alberto Sicilia Falcon, a Cuban exile. When arrested by Mexican police in 1975, as the chief of Mexico's largest heroin ring, Sicilia told police that he was a CIA protege, trained at Fort Jackson as a partisan in the secret war against Cuba. According to Mexican authorities, he was also working in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he returned to Miami in early 1973. He also told the Mexican police of a special 'deal' with the CIA. They eased his way for heroin shipments and, in return, his organisation smuggled weapons for terror-groups in Central America - groups whose activities forced their governments to be more dependent on U.S. aid and advice. He built up his ring in less than two years, and as the daily Mexican El Sol de Mexico said:
"How could he do that without help from a powerful organisation?"
Falcon started to create his huge ring in 1973, and the Mexican police started to watch his operations from the beginning of 1975. He was operating from a house in Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of Mexico City. Almost daily he had long visits from one of his neighbours, and the Mexican police decided to find out the identity of the visitor who was trying to hide his face under large hats and behind sunglasses. One day agents got hold of a bottle which had been in the hands of the visiting neighbour. They sent the bottle to the FBI and the answer was quick - the man was Sam Giancana. Falcon was arrested and Giancana sent back to the U.S. where he was killed one year after his return. In Sicilia Falcon's house the Mexican police found papers from two Swiss banks telling that Falcon had $260 million in the bank. In April 1976 Falcon and three of his top gang members escaped jail through a 97 meter tunnel, dug by outsiders and lit up with electric light. Three days later Falcon was caught again. According to Der Spiegel he told his full story under torture-like conditions, and, after spelling it out, he said he was afraid that the CIA would kill him. He demanded to be brought to an isolated cell under special guard in the newest prison 'Reclusorio Norte'. (86)
If Der Spiegel's charges are correct. they suggest a possible explanation for Playboy's disturbing charges that DEA officials close to Intertel (and hence, it must be said, to the CIA), were shielding a Mafia higher-up in the Mexican heroin connection (a man who coincidentally happened to have graduated, like Sam Giancana, from the Chicago Mafia). It would appear that in the mid 1970s, as in the 1940s, the U.S. turned for help in combating the Left to the milieux of right-wing parafascist gangsterism (such as the Aginter Press - of whom more shortly) and of narcotics. Indeed, the more closely we look at the evidence, the more such disturbing alliances appear to have been, not just occasional, but virtually continuous.
Even if we ignore the Der Spiegel story, there are many indications that the United States has repeatedly used, and hence encouraged, the parafascist successors (such as Aginter Press) of the Nazis who escaped after World War 2 to Latin America. On the surface the opposite might appear to be the case, since the global U.S. interest in multinational trade and capital movements has tended to oppose post-war variants of fascism as a state ideology - most notably Peronism in Argentina. But where Communism - either indigenous or international - is feared, parafascism, even where mistrusted by the U.S. as a form of government, has still been supported and used by the CIA as an 'asset' or resource.
The Case of Otto Skorzeny
The key figure in the post-war organisation of Nazi remnants was S.S. Major Otto Skorzeny, acting in collaboration with his close war-time colleague and personal friend, General Reinhard von Gehlen. First, Gehlen made a deal in 1946 with U.S. intelligence leaders like General Donovan and Allen Dulles, transferring his former anti-communist Nazi intelligence network to the future CIA. (The financial details were allegedly arranged by Walter Reid Wolf, a Citybank official on loan to CIA, who made similar arrangements in 1951 for the CIA's Air America Inc.). Then Skorzeny was acquitted at a brief trial at Nuremberg, when his U.S. defence attorney produced a British army officer (actually a secret service agent) who testified that what Skorzeny had done (i.e. shoot prisoners), he would have done also. Although Skorzeny faced further charges in Denmark and Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to walk away from his prison camp. He soon found a berth in Peron's Argentina, "amply supplied with Krupp money" (87). By 1950, when Gehlen was functioning at Munich on a CIA budget, Skorzeny had opened an 'unconventional warfare' consultancy under cover in Madrid, the post-war home of his father-in-law Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht, the bankerwho, with Gustav Krupp, had delivered levies from German industry to Hitler's Reich leader Martin Bormann, had likewise been acquitted at Nuremberg and protected by the British from serving an independent eight year sentence for his Nazi activities. As a Krupp sales representative, Skorzeny became an influential figure in, first, Argentina, and then in Franco's Spain - especially after he and Schacht (another Krupp representative) negotiated "the biggest post-war deal between Spain and Germany, for the delivery in 1952 of $5 million worth of railway stock and machine tools". (88)
In this period Skorzeny lectured at Spanish universities on the 'new warfare' that would turn to such techniques as 'assassinations and kidnappings'. (89) His offer to recruit a foreign legion of ex-Nazis to aid the Americans in Korea was vigorously supported in the United States by those elements in the Spain-China lobby - many of them right-wing Catholics - who later would support similar proposals from the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League. Though these offers were not publicly accepted by the U.S., some Gehlen and KMT personnel, from about 1950, began to train what became the U.S. Special Forces, as well as the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.
Following the rise of Nasser to power in 1952-53, with CIA support, Nasser asked his CIA contact, Kermit Roosevelt, for help in reorganising the Egyptian intelligence services. Roosevelt wired Dulles; Dulles approached Gehlen; Gehlen suggested Skorzeny; and Skorzeny accepted when the CIA agreed to supplement his modest Egyptian salary. He did so partly on the urging of Schacht, who himself went to Indonesia as an advisor to Sukarno and advance man for Krupp. (90)
The consequences of this CIA favour to Nasser and the Nazis were to be widespread and long term. Skorzeny left Egypt after about a year, but he left behind him about 50 former S.S. and Gestapo men, many of them recruited from Argentina and neighbouring countries by Skorzeny's Nazi colleague in Buenos Aires, Colonel Hans- Ulrich Rudel. Among these was the chief post-war theorist of Nazism in Latin America, Peron's friend, Johannes von Leers, a wanted war criminal who, like Rudel, had escaped to Argentina with Vatican help. After the fall of Peron, Von Leers temporarily left his Argentina Nazi paper Der Weg and, under the alias of Omar Amin, directed Nasser's propaganda against Israel. His assistant in this work was another former member of Goebbels' propaganda ministry, Dr. Gerhardt Harmut von Schubert, who later moved on to a similar task in Iraq. (91)
Skorzeny's legitimisation by the CIA at Cairo gave him new status in the countries which had to worry about American public opinion: Germany, South Africa and Spain. German Chancellor Adenauer and General Gehlen (still on the CIA payroll) could now lend active support to Skorzeny's private political warfare agency in Madrid, along with right-wing German businessmen in the post-war Circle of Friends. (92) At the same time, as former CIA agent Miles Copeland wrote in 1969, Skorzeny "to this day remains on the best of terms ... with the American friends who were instrumental in getting him to Egypt in the first place". (93) One of these friends, apparently, was, as we shall see, his fellow arms salesman and veteran of CIA operations in Egypt, Kermit Roosevelt.
Fascism and Parafascism
In 1939 Britain and the United States were forced into fighting German Nazism, an aggressive ideological movement for political expansion and mercantilist autarky, which threatened the alternative Anglo-Saxon system for world trade and investment. Skorzeny himself, like his father-in-law Hjalmar Schacht, steered relatively clear of post-war political fascist movements. His self-perceived role, and that which made him useful to his British and American friends, w...
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Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S.
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by Peter Dale Scott
CONTENTS
Preface
Tolerated Crime and Tolerated Murder
The CIA-Mafia-Narcotics Connection and the U.S. Press
Protection for Intelligence Assets
Assassins, Narcotics and Watergate
Domestic Repression and DEA Narcotics Enforcement
CIA, DEA, and Their Assassination Capacity
DEA, Crime and the Press Today
The U.S.A. and Transnationalised Repression
Drugs and Parafascism: Orlando Bosch and Christian David
Post-war Nazi Networks and the United States
The Case of Otto Skorzeny
Fascism and Parafascism
Transnational Parafascism and the CIA
The U.S., Chile and the Aginter Press
After Watergate: the Chilean-Cuban Exile Alliance
World Parafascism, Drugs and Crime
International Fascista in Action
World Parafascism and the U.S. Chile Lobby
The CIA and the Politics of Countervalence
Post-war Disposal Problems: De Gaulle and Watergate
Disposal as a Flight from Public Control: Thailand
Suppression by Proxy: the Superclient States
Economic Recession and Arms Sales Increases
Conclusions
From 'Political' to 'Human': the Lessons of Watergate and Vietnam
Preface
This essay was written in the summer of 1977. I lost track of it in subsequent summers, when I first suffered a major illness, and then was side-tracked into preparation of a trade book on the Kennedy Assassination (Beyond Conspiracy) that was eventually killed by its publisher on the eve of its appearance. I am grateful to Lobster for reviving 'Transnationalised Repression'. Though the essay starts from events of the seventies (Watergate, the murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, the Nixon war on drugs) which have since passed into history, the essay also builds to a general overview of transnationalised backing for right-wing repressive forces, or parafascists, that operate on the fringes of state intelligence and security systems.
Except in details, I have not attempted to update the essay, whose general thesis has been unfortunately only too corroborated by ensuing events. The assassins of Letelier did in fact go to jail, but with sentences that were either token, or soon reversed in higher courts. On a higher level, the fall of the Shah in Iran and of Marcos in the Philippines have been followed by new revelations of those dictators' links to private as well as public forces in the United States. Indeed the speculation reported in this essay (at footnote 159), that Asian bribes had influenced Nixon's Vietnam interventions through the Watergate period, seems only too relevant today, as we learn how much money had been channelled by Marcos into U.S. political campaigns over the last decade and a half. The thesis of "Transnationalised Repression" also seems only too relevant to U.S. politics in Nicaragua, as we learn of support for the Contras from first Argentina and Israel, and now allegedly from South Africa.
The restrained optimism of the essay's conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug- running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that policy's visible centre. In 1977 I was concerned about the access of foreign parafascists and WACL publicists to the office of Senator Thurmond and the staff of the National Security Council. Today General Singlaub, the President of WACL, has access, through his support work for the Contras, to the Reagan White House (cf. footnote 50).
In my view, this continuing demoralisation of U.S. foreign policy and the concomitant trivialisation of domestic U.S. political debate, makes my modest hopes for change through "new human groupings", or what since the fall of Marcos has become famous as "people power", not less but more relevant. It is not that I am at all sanguine about the possibilities for such transpolitical change outside the traditional political system. It is just all the clearer that such new human forces, however weak and immature at present, are ultimately our best hope.
PETER DALE SCOTT
Tolerated Crime and Tolerated Murder
On September 21, 1976, a sophisticated bomb killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American friend while they were driving to work down Washington's fashionable Embassy Row.
Two weeks later, on October 6, a Cuban commercial airliner exploded in mid-air over the Caribbean, killing all 73 passengers on board.
Confessions in the latter case implicated Dr. Orlando Bosch Avila, a Cuban emigre then living in Venezuela and a veteran of at least three anti-Castro plots with CIA and/or Mafia backing. Bosch, in turn, had participated enough in the planning of the Letelier assassination by Cuban exiles to give information leading to subpoenas for several former CIA Cuban proteges in the United States, one of whom has since been sentenced to jail for refusing to testify.
If past U.S. history is to repeat itself, the killers of Letelier, if they have not indeed been correctly identified as part of the CIA/Mafia milieu will not be sent to jail. (1) In 1943, the prominent Italian-American anti-fascist editor, Carlo Tresca, was murdered in the streets of New York. The case against New York Mafioso, Carmine Galante of the Bonanno family, might have seemed air-tight; he was under surveillance at that time, for parole violation, and thus was placed in the murder vehicle at the time and place of the killing. But he was not arrested or brought to trial and shortly after a leading anti-Communist informant for the FBI claimed to have learnt that the Communist Party was responsible for the killing. (2) Today - i.e. in 1977 - Galante is commonly referred to as the head of the United States' Mafia.
In 1956, a distinguished emigre scholar from the Dominican Republic, Jesus de Galindez, was kidnapped on the streets of New York and flown to his home country, where he was almost certainly murdered by order of his political enemy, the dictator Trujillo. In this case, a former FBI agent, John Joseph Frank (who had worked for the CIA as well as a Trujillo lobbyist) pleaded nolo contendere for his role in chartering the kidnap plane; he was let off with a $500 fine. Ten years later Life reported that the plane had been chartered by Mafioso Bayonne Joe Zicarelli, another member and a 'fast' friend of Trujillo whom he had supplied with over $1 million worth of arms. (3)
More recent revelations indicate that both killings have escaped adjudication because of their proximity to current intelligence-Mafia collaborations. We know now that by January 1943, when Tresca was killed, two U.S. intelligence services, OSS and ONI (Naval Intelligence) were in direct negotiation with Meyer Lansky for the provision of Mafia collaboration with the Allied invasion of Sicily. In exchange for this, Lucky Luciano would be released from jail by Governor Dewey and deported to his native Italy.
The underboss of Luciano's family, Vito Genovese, had already been deported to Italy and must have figured in the OSS-ONI-Mafia plans, since immediately following the U.S. occupation we find him running massive black market operations from his post as official translator for the chief of the Allied Military Government, a former senior Democratic politician and Lieutenant-governor from New York.Recent Mafia histories report that the anti-fascist, Tresca, was killed by Galante on orders from Genovese, who was then running narcotics traffic from North Africa, with the blessing of Mussolini. (4) Genovese was already wanted in the U.S. for another murder charge, yet when a young army CID captain arrested him, he was able to predict confidently that he would escape conviction. So he did - until new narcotics charges in 1958. The only witness in the murder case was conveniently murdered while in protective custody in a Brooklyn jail. (5) A vigorous prosecution of the Tresca case was even less likely than of the earlier murder case, since national security could easily rationalise the decision not to risk exposing any intelligence-Mafia contacts in court.
The same intelligence-Mafia background overshadows the Galindez affair. We now know that in 1961, when the U.S.-CIA shifted from Trujillo to those around him, three M1 carbines were provided by the U.S. Embassy, on CIA authority, to those who soon afterwards assassinated Trujillo. The recipient of the arms was one Antonio de la Maza, whose brother Octavio had been implicated in the Galindez killing (he was suspected in 1957 of murdering the pilot of the kidnap plane in Santa Domingo, in order to silence him). (6) At this time, the CIA was in contact, through former FBI agent, Robert Maheu, with Mafia figures Sam Giancana, John Roselli and Santo Trafficante - in the hope of arranging the assassination of Fidel Castro. Trafficante, by most accounts at this time was succeeding Meyer Lansky in the role of chief organiser for the world heroin traffic, put together by Luciano, Lansky and Genovese after World War 2. (7) A confidential White House memorandum of January 25, 1971, prepared one week after Jack Anderson's disclosure of Maheu's role in the CIA-Mafia plot, noted that Maheu "was a close associate of rogue FBI agent John Frank, generally believed to have engineered the assassination of Jesus de Galindez in New York City on March 12 1956, on behalf of the assassinated Rafael Trujillo." (8)
The memo's author, Jack Caulfield, was in a position to speak authoritatively. From 1955 to 1966 he served with the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services (BOSS) where he was assigned to a number of political plots involving other countries. (9)
The foregoing facts suggest how embarrassing it would be to see court convictions of those close to this high level CIA-Mafia connection. Subsequent Justice Department initiatives to prosecute Maheu, Giancana and Roselli were frustrated by the invocation of their CIA immunity. We now know of an official CIA memo in 1962 informing that a pending prosecution of Maheu (and possibly Giancana) "would not be in the national interest". (10)
The third, and most powerful collaborator with Maheu, Santo Trafficante, has never faced indictment despite repeated indications that he has succeeded Lansky as the top organiser of the world heroin traffic. (11)
One should not immediately conclude that the CIA-Mafia connection is unassailable, or the only relevant factor in US politics. A New York Times editorial called for vigorous prosecution in the Galindez case, just as the Washington Post has done recently in the Letelier case. Justice in the Tresca and Galindez killings was demanded repeatedly by U.S. socialist leader Norman Thomas, who himself enjoyed a CIA connection of sorts; just as Galindez had a special relationship to Thomas' "left" section of CIA (the International Organisations Division), while Frank and Maheu worked with the CIA's competing right-wing (Western Hemisphere and Security).
The CIA-Mafia-Narcotics Connection and the U.S. Press
The fact remains that prior to about 1970, the invocation of an alleged "national interest" seems to have protected those actively involved in the intelligence-Mafia connection from serious harassment by either the courts or the establishment press. (For the sake of verifiability we shall define the 'establishment media' as including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time-Life, Newsweek, Readers Digest and the three major television networks). Since Watergate, and the dramatic collapse of the press-government anti-Communist consensus, it in possible that this relative immunity is no longer unassailable. First in conjunction with Vietnam, then in conjunction with Watergate and since around 1974 in conjunction with the CIA itself, the establishment press has begun to reveal marginal details of the post-war CIA-Mafia connection and even of its involvement in the post-war restoration of the world heroin traffic.
But the revelations of the past few years make the establishment media before 1970 appear guilty not merely of silence but of active collusion in disseminating false official cover-ups of the facts. Take, for example, the post-war development of new opium growing areas in non-Communist South-east Asia to replace fields which the Chinese revolution now denied to Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. For two decades the most flagrant of official Thai and KMT involvement in this traffic, to say nothing of the US infrastructure support, was systematically downplayed by the U.S. Narcotics Bureau, with the necessary collaboration of the U.S. establishment media. (12)
The key figures in this official U.S. cover-up were U.S. Narcotics Commissioner, Anslinger - a Treasury official - and his West coast chief, George White, a former OSS official and CIA consultant who had represented OSS in the Operation Underworld negotiations with Meyer Lansky.
For years Anslinger would uncritically transmit KMT propaganda about a world-wide Red Chinese opium conspiracy and document it persuasively with evidence of what he knew very well was in fact the KMT's own narcotics traffic. Thus, Anslinger would use the term 'Yunnan Opium' to describe the opium grown under KMT auspices in Burma, Laos and Thailand; and would document the involvement of officials from the Bank of Canton, without noting that this was controlled by the Soong family of Taiwan. (13)
Supporting these misleading charges, George White announced, in 1959, the breaking of what was reported in the New York Times as "the biggest Chinese narcotics operation 'that we've come across'". White also spoke of 270 pounds of heroin "mostof it from a vast poppy field near Chungking". (14) Only in the local San Francisco papers, where the arrests and the trial occurred, did one learn that a key co-conspirator in the case (not prosecuted) was Chung Wing Fong, identified as a former official in Chinatown's powerful Six Companies (key overseas KMT supporters) and also of the Chinese Anti-Communist League here. (15)
The Chinese Anti-Communist League was, in fact, a U.S. branch of the KMT's world- wide intelligence network. Fong, a former President of the pro-KMT Hip Sing tong, had been spared arrest by timely U.S. Government intervention. When he visited Hong Kong in 1958 "the American consul in Hong Kong seized his passport and he was ordered to Taipei/Taiwan". He and others were then named as unindicted co- conspirators "because they are out of U.S. jurisdiction." (16)
White's carefully worded but wholly misleading claims of a Chinese Communist (rather than anti-Communist) conspiracy were later supported in official Narcotics Bureau (FBN) reports by so-called 'documentary evidence' which came from the pro- KMT defendants. (17) Such elementary distortions by 'responsible' officials of the true facts about the international heroin traffic were still being repeated as late as 1973, though they have since been officially refuted by the new Drug Enforcement Agency. The latest accusation against China was made by two veteran New York crime fighters, Frank Rogers - city-wide prosecutor of narcotics cases - and Brooklyn District Attorney, Eugene Gold at a press conference. Rogers showed reporters a plastic bag on which the words 'Peoples' Republic of China' were printed in English and Chinese. (18) Needless to say, such distortions could never have succeeded if 'responsible' papers like the New York Times had not followed the Narcotics Bureau in suppressing the locally published facts about men like Chung Wing Fong.
What was at stake in these high-level cover-ups was nothing less than the CIA's basic strategy for the containment of Communism in East and South-East Asia, which (as documents published with the Pentagon Papers have confirmed) relied heavily on the opium growing KMT troops of the Burma-Laos-Thailand border areas and their contacts with the pro-KMT secret societies in the overseas Chinese communities. (19) Through its 'proprietaries' like Civil Air Transport (CAT) and Sea Supply Inc., the CIA had provided logistic support to the anti-Communist 'assets' in the region, whose profitable involvement in the narcotics traffic very soon took priority over their political responsibilities. No doubt the CIA branch responsible (the Office of Policy Co-ordination, or OPC) could rationalise its role in restoring the narcotics traffic in this area with the thought that it was merely prolonging a regional practice common both to the imperialist powers of Britain, France and Japan, and to the native rulers of Thailand and Kuomintang China.
Protection for Intelligence Assets
In 1953-4, as the Eisenhower Administration faced growing KMT resistance to its proposed disengagement from Korea and Indochina, so also the CIA disengaged somewhat from its disreputable OPC proteges in Thailand as their opium trafficking became notorious. By 1959, Council on Foreign Relations spokesmen, backed by the influential CIA-backed Conlon Report, were even suggesting some kind of normalisation of relations with mainland China. This context of detente makes all the more remarkable the propaganda activities of the Narcotics Bureau and George White in the 1959 Hip Sing opium case. In effect, the FBN was covering up for the KMT- narcotics network overseas, even while attempting to crush its movement of heroin into the continental United States. Such a two-faced policy was probably impractical, in as much as in 1959 the world's only sizeable population of heroin addicts was in the U.S. It was, however, understandable in terms of national policy, if one recollects in 1959 all the leading anti-Communist U.S. proteges of the region - Ngo dihn Nhu of South Vietnam, Sarit Thanarat and Prapas Charusathien of Thailand and Phoumi Nosavan of Laos - were profiting in one way or another from the KMT narcotics traffic. (20)
The fact remains that in 1959 the official U.S. position on the KMT troops was that it was no longer supplying them and therefore in no position to control their narcotics activities: the U.S. arms which Burma found at the KMT camps in 1961, still packed in boxes showing their trans-shipment through a Californian air force base, just weeks before, had gone first to Taiwan and then to Burma in a CAT-Air America plane leased by an affiliate of the KMT-Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League. This is a disturbing analogy with the present status of the former CIA Cubans operating around Orlando Bosch. Like the KMT troops, they too have now been officially disowned by the CIA because of their illegal activities and are now supported by other governments and intelligence agencies, most notably the governments of Chile, of Nicaragua and of the Dominican Republic. (21) More specifically, a chief reason for the closing down of the last of the CIA's Miami station JM/ Wave operations - a counter intelligence operation under Joaquin Sangenis Perdomo, usually referred to by its original CIA name of Operation 40 - was because one of the group's CIA planes had been apprehended in the act of smuggling narcotics into the U.S. (22)Today, no one seems to deny the illegality of the CIA's domestic JM/Wave station in Miami, which employed from 300 to 700 U.S. agents and from 2,000 to as many as 6,000 Cubans. (23) An Bill Moyers has noted, "seducing the press was critical" to JM/Wave's maintenance in Miami; the CIA secured "explicit agreements with the press here to keep their secret operations from being reported, except when it was mutually convenient ... It amounted to a massive conspiracy to violate the country's Neutrality Acts and other federal, state and local laws as well". (24)
Assassins, Narcotics and Watergate
Seven years after the event, to its credit, the New York Times finally revealed a little of the story about the wind-up of the CIA's Operation 40 because of its narcotics activities.(25) It did so an part of a series of stories exposing operations for which the CIA's counter-intelligence chief, James Angleton, had been responsible, and Angleton himself has recently confirmed (to author Edward Jay Epstein) the published suggestions that these stories were being leaked by Angleton's chief enemy within the agency, CIA Director, William Colby, an part of a successful campaign to force Angleton's resignation. (26)
What concerns us, as in the case of the KMT-Hip Sing narcotics case, is the refusal of the New York Times to tell the most significant features of the Operation 40 narcotics story:
(a) Operation 40, originally, at least, included professional assassins. According to the former New York Times reporter, Tad Szulc, it was originally designed by Sangenis as part of the Bay of Pigs planning "to assure that a post-Castro regime contained no trouble makers", i.e. men opposed to Howard Hunt's political protege, Manuel Artime. (27) (As political action officer for the Bay of Pigs operation, Hunt would almost certainly have been responsible for this phase of Operation 40). Szulc adds that "According to well informed Cubans, Operation 40 also had a second task; that of assassinating, if necessary, political leaders who stood in the way. It was reported that the project included a hand-picked task force of professional killers". (28)
(b) The New York Times failed to name the Bay of Pigs veteran who, in its words, "was part of the group and who was accused by the Federal authorities of being a large cocaine smuggler [and] was killed in a gun battle with the Miami police". (29) This was Juan Restoy, arrested in June 1970 as part of the Justice Department's 'OperationEagle', against what Attorney General Mitchell called "a nation-wide ring of wholesalers handling about 30% of all heroin sales and 75 to 80% of all cocaine sales in the United States". (30) Of the three Cuban ringleaders of this network, one had his conviction thrown out on a technicality, and the third, Bay of Pigs veteran Jorge Alonson Pujol y Bermudez, was eventually released and placed on probation. (31)
© Of the nine Cubans who came to Washington for the Watergate break-in of June 1972, at least four, and possibly all nine, had been members of the Sangenis counter intelligence phase of 'Operation 40'.
Bernard Barker testified that Felipe de Diego, who, with Barker and Rolando Martinez, had previously burgled the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist for Howard Hunt and the Nixon White House, "had been a member of Operation 40";(32) this aspect of Barker's testimony was neither reported by the New York Times nor included in its transcripts of the Watergate Hearings. Other members of the Sangenis operation included Barker himself, who, according to Helms, was fired by the CIA when "we found out that he was involved in certain gambling and criminal elements". (33) A third member was almost certainly Eugenio Martinez who, back in 1957, had been part of an anti-Batista assassination plot funded by former Cuba president Carlos Prio Socarras. In November 1963 Martinez skippered the ill-fated Rex mission from Florida against Cuba, a mission involving the Somoza family of Nicaragua.
To sum up, the New York Times systematically ignored or understated the involvement of 'Operation 40' in political assassinations, the world heroin network, and Watergate. Exactly the same can be said about the Times and entire establishment press coverage before this year: in all its thousands of words about the so-called 'Plumbers' of Watergate itself it never mentioned that the Nixon White House had recruited, for the ostensible purpose of combating the drug traffic, an illegal covert action team with links to organised crime and (through 'Operation 40') the drug traffic itself. At its peak the Sangenis operation had some 150 Cubans; and we know now from a recent CBS news interview of Bernard Barker by Bill Moyers, that no less than 120 ex-CIA Cubans were recruited for 'Operation Diamond' under the Hunt-Liddy 'Plumbers Unit' at the White House. (34) This group included "people superbly trained in explosives" and "specialists in weapons": as Bill Moyers observed, it too was "a small secret army". Barker dissented from Moyers' allegations that Operation Diamond was preparing to perform political "kidnappings" and "assassinations", but only on semantic grounds: ("there is a difference between assassination and killing .... The word 'kidnap' sounds to me like a term used in - in law. Remember that I'm a CIA agent, CIA background. We neutralise these things. We don't think... in criminal terms".)(35)
According to the CBS-Moyers programme:
the secret army was not to be disbanded after Watergate. It was to be used in President Nixon's drug war, in Barker's words, "to hit the Mafia using the tactics of the Mafia". (36)
Barker and his colleagues, meanwhile, hoped that their participation would help lead to the "liberation of Cuba". (37) He explained that the key to this liberation lay in helping Mr Hunt, "in the way where hundreds of Cubans have been helping [ie the CIA and the U.S. armed services] in Africa, in Vietnam and in other areas of the world." (38)
Domestic Repression and DEA Narcotics Enforcement
All this should be very disturbing. Liddy's own original plans for Operation Diamond, after it moved from the cover of White House narcotics enforcement to the Committee to Re-elect the President, also included political kidnappings and "men who have worked successfully as street-fighting teams at the CIA". (39) At that time, when San Diego was the projected Republican convention site, Liddy had proposed that Hunt recruit some "400 or 500... Bay of Pigs veterans who were located in the southern California area"; Hunt actually obtained print-outs of the available veterans, from Brigade 2506 Veterans Association (the AVBC) in Miami.(40)
These plans for organised governmental violence were by no means wholly forestalled by the timely exposure of Hunt's Cubans at the July 17 1972 Watergate break-in.Some of them have survived Nixon's fall from power and are today officially established under the guidance of narcotics control. To see how this could happen, however, we must look at the co-ordinated use of ex-CIA assets for 'black operations' which followed the Watergate arrests.
One Watergate-related Nixon horror never investigated by either the Ervin or the Church Committee was the use of Hunt's ex-CIA Cuban, Pablo Fernandez, as a provocateur planning to protest at the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami. Fernandez, who in May 1972 had been recruited by Hunt's aid Barker to 'get' Daniel Ellsberg at an anti-war rally in Washington - whether by merely punching him or possibly by more serious violence, is not clear. In June and July, under the overall guidance of Robert Mardian at the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, Fernandez, working with the Miami Police and the FBI, was recruited to offer machine guns to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, in the hope that this would produce some sort of overt act of violence. A Miami police detective later confirmed to the Miami Herald that 'We were hoping for the overt act necessary to produce a charge of conspiracy". (41) The ensuing court case against Scott Camil and the other VVAW leaders saw apparent perjury by a Justice Department representative on the subject of government informants, and a break-in at the office of Camil's lawyer which (in the words of the Times correspondent, Anthony Lukas) is one of many unsolved break-ins which "may have been carried out by 'contract' operatives hired by the CIA". (42)
Scott Camil himself, after being acquitted along with the other VVAW defendants, was reindicted after being first set up and then shot and almost killed by DEA narcotics agents. (The national establishment media, whose attention helped expose the false government testimony by the Nixon administration at the first trial, showed little interest in the second.) But Camil was only one instance where the government's expanded 'war on drugs' was used, at least under Nixon, to harass selected political targets - and possibly in support of major CIA covert operations against countries like Cyprus, Argentina, Lebanon and Chile.
It must be kept in mind that OSS and CIA has been using the connections of the international heroin traffic for covert operations virtually without interruption since 'Operation Underworld' in 1943. At first these operations may have been tactical rather than strategic: to expel the Fascists and forestall the Communists in Italy, to break Communist control of the French docks during the first Indochina War, to support a string of anti-Communist puppets in Southeast Asia. But as a former CIA agent and publicist confirms, this intelligence-Mafia connection was seen as vitally important.
Nixon himself has left office, and the public style of his two successors has been visibly muted, but none of the repressive legislation which his administration put together for the silencing of dissent has been repealed; and indeed the Carter administration has taken up Nixon's demand for an Official Secrets Act which would provide criminal sanctions against future Daniel Ellsbergs.
CIA, DEA, and Their Assassination Capacity
It is true that on June 11, 1973, the Justice Department abolished the Intelligence Evaluation Committee which had co-ordinated the harassment of Camil in Miami, for which the special grand juries had collected political intelligence, and which had, in its first two months of existence alone "compiled computerised dossiers on nearly 14,000 Americans, including selected political officials and moderates". (43) The IEC was secretly terminated on June 11, 1973, or shortly after press accounts of Dean's highly- bowdlerised revelations concerning IEC which he was about to make to the Ervin Watergate Committee. Such evasive tactics do not mean very much in today's age of computerised intelligence. Revelations about Army surveillance of U.S. citizens before another of Senator Ervin's Committee in 1970 had led to the formal termination of that programme on June 9, 1970, which we now know was four days after White House planning had begun on the escalated Huston Plan which resulted in the IEC.(44) Public assurances that the Army's intelligence dossiers had been destroyed were misleading, if we are to credit subsequent reports that:
on 29 July 1970, the day after the President moved to reconsider the Huston Plan, army intelligence had given the entire print-out of its civilian surveillance computers to ISD (i.e. IEC in Mardian's Internal Security Division). (45)
In like vein the CIA's new director, William Colby, as part of his reorientation of the CIA towards foreign targets, terminated, in 1974, the CIA's Operation Chaos for the surveillance of U.S. citizens in conjunction with the IEC (though when the Rockefeller Commission reported this fact 15 months later it noted that the Chaos "files and computerised index are still intact"). (46) Two years earlier CIA director Helms, in response to U.S press reports about CIA involvement in assassinations, had directed that "no such activity or operation be undertaken, assisted or suggested by any of our personnel". (47) But the official reports on both of these controversial operations ignore the relevant fact that a high level 1968 meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations of CIA veterans and their colleagues in the New York-CIA financial establishment had already agreed CIA operations had become too visible and too bureaucratic, and in future should be left, where possible, in the hands of "private organisations, many of the personnel of which would be non-U.S ... hands of third parties, particularly third country nationals". (48)
A series of working groups to implement these proposals were officially recognisedwhen Richard Nixon, in 1969, appointed Franklin Lindsay, a CIA veteran and chairman of the chief working group (as well as of the Rockefeller-financed Itek Corp.) to head up an advisory panel on reorganisation of the CIA. (49)
In the ensuing years many of the key 1968 proposals were implemented by successive CIA directors, most notably the recommendation that the ageing CIA bureaucracy had become too large and should be dramatically cut back. In the context of this reversion to "unofficial cover", the March 1972 Helms injunction against assassination seems to have been a case of carefully locking the door of an already empty stable. Nine months earlier Lucien Conein, the CIA's case officer in the Diem assassination and a high level contact with the heroin trafficking Corsican Mafia, resigned from CIA, to be brought back at the suggestion of his old OSS colleague Howard Hunt into the White House narcotics effort. There, Conein (by his own admission) supervised a special unit which would have the capacity to assassinate selected targets in the narcotics business. (50)
A memo of late May 1972, drafted by Hunt's superior in narcotic matters, Egil Krogh, reports on what is apparently President Nixon's authorisation for the Conein assassination squad, with the staggering budget of $100 million in non-accountable funds:
According to Krogh's detailed 'Outline of Discussion with the President on Drugs', the President agreed to 'forceful action in [stopping] International trafficking of heroin in the host country'. Specifically the memorandum of the meeting noted, 'it is anticipated that a material reduction in the supply of heroin to the U.S. can be accomplished through a $100 million (over three years) fund which can be used for clandestine law enforcement activities abroad and for which BNDD would not be accountable. This decisive action is our only hope for destroying or immobilising the highest level of drug traffickers.'....According to Krogh, this [flexible law enforcement..for clandestine activities] would be used for underworld contacts and disruptive tactics, with the eventual goal of destroying those deemed to be heroin traffickers. (51)
According to the Washington Post at least twelve other CIA operatives, all of them first-generation (i.e. naturalised) Americans, joined in this BNDD assassination squad. (52)
In the fall of 1971:
Hunt also approached the Cuban exile leader, Manuel Artime, in Miami and - according to Artime - asked him about the possibility of forming a team of Cuban exile hit men to assassinate Latin American traffickers still outside the bailiwick of United States law. (53)
Artime told other reporters that the anti-narcotics operations would take place in Panama (pinpointed after the arrest of the son of Panamanian Ambassador to Taiwan on July 8, 1971 - the day Hunt spoke to Conein in the White House) after Frank Sturgis independently told the press that in 1971 he had joined Hunt in an investigation of the drug traffic reaching the U.S. from Paraguay through Panama. (54)
This lends strength to the recurring rumour that Hunt's narcotics activities included an assassination plan against the Panamanian President Torrijos, whose brother had been fingered by U.S. Customs commissioner Ambrose as a major heroin trafficker. (55)
DEA, Crime and the Press Today
If these reports are true, we can reasonably conclude that the old CIA-organised crime connection. though technically banished from the CIA after Jack Anderson's exposure of it in January 1971, was still pursuing its old political objectives under White House -narcotics cover in 1971-2, pending its intended integration into a new superagency, the Drug Enforcement Agency of July 1, 1973, which many observers have compared to a domestic CIA. Hunt and Artime had both been associated with previous CIA assassination plots against Castro, who, at that time, had been named by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as the man behind the heroin trade of anti-Castro Cubans. Torrijos, too, was at least as much a political as a narcotics target: he and Chilean President Salvador Allende were the only heads of state to defy the CIA-enforced ban on friendly relations with Castro's Cuba. Barker and Artime, as we have seen, had been allegedly dropped from the CIA for their involvement in criminal activities - the latter for smuggling activities from a Costa Rica base owned by Anastasio Somoza, the patron of Torrijos' current enemy Orlando Bosch. According to an FBI report on Frank Sturgis in 1972, when Hunt recruited him and Barker for Watergate "sources in Miami say that he is now associated with organised crime activities". (emphasis added) (56)
When this FBI claim was made part of the highly publicised Senate Hearings in February 1973 on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray, the New York Times and Washington Post, then locked in battle with Nixon, declined to report it. The press interviews with Artime and Sturgis about their anti-narcotics activities were likewise ignored at the time, as were all the growing indications that the White House, under the guise of anti-narcotics activities, had begun to assemble a secret parallel police, with an assassination potential, from former CIA assets dropped after the exposure of their associates in the narcotics traffic.
This reticence or resistance to expressing the criminal scope of Watergate was assuredly not inspired by a desire to protect President Nixon. It indicates, I believe, an understanding at high levels, that when right-wing CIA assets are formally 'disposed of', their potential usefulness to other employers should not be diminished. Take for example, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) itself which now employs somewhere between 50 and 100 CIA agents in addition to Conein and his twelve assassins.
Of all the 'White House horrors' to come out of the so-called 'plumbers' in Room 16, DEA is perhaps the most dangerous. A super-agency, whose very statutory authority is open to challenge, it has been plagued from the outset with serious charges of illegal behaviour, high-level corruption, and protection of Mafia figures in the narcotics traffic. Its first designated chief, Myles Ambrose, resigned before taking office in May 1973, after it was disclosed he had visited the Texas ranch of a suspected smuggler, Richard Harper, who was under indictment for an arms shipment aimed at the overthrow of the Castro government. (57) It was Ambrose, we should remember, who fingered the brother of the Cubans' target, Omar Torrijos. His deputy and successor, John Bartels, either resigned or was fired after reports by a Congressional committee that he had been in the company of a suspected courier of narcotics to Washingtonfrom Laredo, the nearest city to the Harper Ranch. (58)
Walter Minnick, the nominal author of 'Reorganisation Plan No 2' that produced DEA, was, with Hunt, Liddy and their superior, David Young, one of the four key figures in the so-called 'Plumbers' at Room 16. It was Young, a former Rockefeller employee, who wrote the orders leading to the first Plumbers break-in at the office of Dr. Fielding (Ellsberg's psychiatrist). It was Young and Minnick with whom John Ehrlichman discussed the Watergate break-in and cover-up on the Monday morning after the break-in.(59) Yet Young, who authorised the break-in, escaped state prosecution for the Fielding break-in by co-operating in a pre-emptive federal indictment; while Minnick, throughout the thousands of words on the Watergate scandals, was never once listed in the index of either the Washington Post or the New York Times.
The same papers were either reticent or grossly misleading about activities which Hunt and Liddy performed, without Nixon's knowledge, on behalf of Intertel, the private intelligence group now controlling the Nevada casinos of the CIA-linked Howard Hughes organisation. Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post actually used a Hunt story given them by Robert Bennett, the Washington head of the CIA front and Howard Hughes PR firm where Hunt worked at the time, as part of their litany of 'White House horrors'; even though the 'horror' in question - an interview with one Clifton DeMotte about Edward Kennedy and Chappaquiddick - had been suggested to Hunt, not by the White House, but by Robert Bennett himself. (60)
Senator Baker's Minority Report about this and other CIA aspects of Watergate was, in turn, grossly distorted by the Post. (61). This is hardly surprising; the Baker Report revealed a CIA report from Bennett that Woodward was "suitably grateful" for the DeMotte and other "fine stories" which Bennett had been "feeding" Woodward; and also an arrangement between Bennett and attorney Edward Bennett Williams to "kill off" revelations of the CIA's relationship to Bennett's agency, the Mullen Company. Edward Bennett Williams, the lawyer who previously had done work for the CIA with his and their Mafia contact, Robert Maheu, was, at this time, both the attorney for the Democratic National Committee in their suit about Hunt's Watergate break-in, and also the attorney for the Washington Post. (62)
In short, the Washington Post was not at arms length from the CIA-Howard Hughes- Intertel complex, whose involvement in the Watergate scandal was hardly indicated by their reporters' stories. In like manner, the Washington Post barely reported the Congressional revelations in 1975 about scandals in DEA, where one of the agents scrutinised by the Jackson Subcommittee Report is one of the two agents (let us call them X and Y) said to have boasted widely inside DEA of their personal contact with - and plans to retire to - Intertel. The Jackson Subcommittee investigated the DEA for its improper favours to the Howard Hughes-Intertel interests and also to the Robert Vesco-IOS interests. Although these two supergroups have been depicted as competitors vying to acquire the same Paradise Island casino, the fact remains that both have had dealings with the CIA, and also with Cuban exile groups planning to oust Fidel Castro. (63)
An even more critical article in Playboy about DEA, calling it an 'American Gestapo', describes how, in April 1974, a DEA intelligence team was ready to go on a major narcotics operation involving the flow of Mexican drugs to "a Las Vegas associate of [New York Mafia chief] Joseph Colombo":
Instead ... the agent in charge barked out a sharp dozen words or so and ordered the project dropped. "He informed us that he didn't want us wasting our time on organised-crime probes, that the real problem was the Mexicans and we were to drop this." (64)
It would appear that the old CIA-Mafia narcotics connection was still alive and well in the new DEA, especially when we consider that (according to reliable sources) the responsible 'agent in charge' was the same X (acting in conjunction with Y); that X had almost been forced to leave the Narcotics Bureau because of the scandals under his jurisdiction as New York Regional Director; and that X became the agent in charge of CIA veteran Lucien Conein and his assassination squad. The same sources say that the suspected courier who associated with DEA Director Bartels has also admitted to being 'friends' with the suspected Mafia ringleader, the "Las Vegas associate of Joseph Colombo".
The U.S.A. and Transnationalised Repression
Both inside and outside the U.S. narcotics enforcement is particularly susceptible to corruption. It is also inescapably a political matter, especially in those areas of covert intelligence and operations which, up to now, have been concerns of the CIA. It is undeniable that DEA has picked up at least one former CIA operation - that of trainingand equipping foreign police forces - after this was terminated by Congress in 1974. Congressional investigations had disclosed that the Office of Public Safety, responsible for those training programmes, had become involved in programs of torture and even wholesale assassination in Vietnam (Colby's Operation Phoenix) and in Latin America. As a consequence of the 1974 Foreign Assistance Act, OPS and its some 400 positions in Latin America were abolished. The Act however, did not affect AID's new International Narcotics Program set up with CIA participation alongside OPS in mid-1971 - about the time that Conein and other CIA agents migrated from CIA to the Narcotics Bureau. A subsequent report by the General Accounting Office, investigating DEA and INC to see if Congressional intentions had been circumvented, disclosed in effect that:
(a) By Fiscal Year 1974 DEA had 400 agents in Latin America, or roughly the number of abolished OPS positions;
(b) police equipment transferred abroad under the INC jumped $2.2 million in Fiscal Year 1973 to $12.5 million in Fiscal Year 1974, almost exactly offsetting the decrease resulting from the abolition of OPS. Essentially, the same equipment was being forwarded to the same units: the chief change was in the name of the authorisation.
As State Department Narcotics adviser Sheldon Vance testified in 1976, the U.S. maintains no control over the disposition which the receiving country will make of the equipment and trainees. In fact, from Mexico to Argentina, receiving countries - following the example of Richard Nixon in the United States - have not hesitated to use narcotics aid to deal with domestic insurgency, by the simple expedient of identifying insurgents with narcotics. In May 1974, at a special press conference to publicise the stepped-up U.S.-Argentine anti-narcotics program, Argentine Security Chief Lopez Rega announced (in the presence of U.S. Ambassador Robert Hill):
We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerillas after attacks who were high on drugs. Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore, the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerilla campaign as well.
Soon afterwards, a visiting DEA team held training seminars for 150 Argentine policemen, while the Argentine penal code was amended to give the Federal Police direct nation-wide jurisdiction to make investigations and arrests in narcotics-related cases. (65) The latter development, if not the former, seems to have been important to the development of Lopez Rega's dreaded 'death squads' of 1974-5, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA). Like the White House Cubans, these squads specialised in extra-legal kidnappings and murders. Dozens and perhaps hundreds of leftists were killed by the AAA before Lopez Rega, whose responsibility was established by an Argentine Congressional investigation, was forced to leave the country as a fugitive in the Fall of 1975.
Drugs and Parafascism: Orlando Bosch and Christian David
All this has a very direct bearing on the career of Orlando Bosch, who boasts of having collaborated with the AAA in the murder of two Cuban diplomats as late as August 1976. (66) It is quite possible that this collaboration was facilitated through the international narcotics traffic, since both Lopez Rega and Bosch, along with other high-level security figures in Latin America, have been accused of financing their anti- Communist activities in part through cocaine. (67) Bosch's daughter and son-in-law, Miriam and Carlos Rogers, were arrested in June 1977 on charges of smuggling cocaine, while his other son-in-law, Ruben Blinder, is said to be a member of the AAA. In 1975 a provincial Argentine investigation into a cocaine estancia near the Bolivian border, which was said (by the admittedly hostile Argentine military intelligence) to have involved Lopez Rega and his son-in-law, was frustrated by a timely federal intervention.
CIA defector Philip Agee has charged that the Brazilian dictatorship, established with U.S. encouragement and participation in 1964, was, in turn, responsible for the spread of fascism to Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay in February 1973, and Chile in September 1973. (68) Recent French books report that in this same general period former French members of the anti-Gaullist Secret Army (OAS), along with their opposite numbers from the pro-Gaullist barbouzes, worked for the security forces of Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay ... and Venezuela and Argentina, where the Peronists returned to power in May 1973. Among the rewards sought by these men were diplomatic passports, for some of these Frenchmen were working simultaneously as part of the international Ricord narcotics network. (69)
One key figure in this network was Christian David, of whom a U.S. account blandly notes "reports that he infiltrated Uruguay's Tupamaro guerillas and identified several for the police". (70) French accounts add that David, based in Argentina and possessing an Argentine diplomatic passport in the name of Carlos Eduardo Devreux- Bergeret, also collaborated regularly with the Argentine and Brazilian political police in conjunction with the French intelligence service. (71) An encyclopaedic study of David by the Danish journalist Henrik Kruger speculates that David's activities (which also included projects in Venezuela and Bolivia) were also co-ordinated with CIA, noting that CIA-OPS agents Dan Mitrione and Claude Fry were advising the anti- Tupamaro effort. (72).
In Argentina David worked under the direction of the OAS veteran Francois Chiappe, another member of the Ricord gang. (73). In 1972 Chiappe and David were both arrested in BNDD's crackdown on the Ricord network; Chiappe, however, was liberated 'by error' when the Peronistas came to power in Argentina with the election of Hector Campora in May 1973. Shortly afterwards, under the command of Lopez Riga's close subordinate Colonel Jorge Osinde, Chiappe and Colonel Gardes, another OAS veteran, took part in the Ezeizi airport massacre of June 20 1973.(74) The same article that explored Lopez Rega's links to the cocaine traffic claimed that the cocainemoved north from the Salta estancia to Paraguay, the former headquarters of Ricord, where "one of Lopez Rega's closest allies, Colonel Jorge Sinde, became Ambassador". The cocaine there was handled by General Andres Rodriguez, who, according to Jack Anderson, was one of the three top Paraguayan officials who had worked directly with Ricord. (75)
Post-war Nazi Networks and the United States
The evidence, in short, suggests that while individuals like David, Chiappe and Ricord can rise and fall, the connection in Latin America between narcotics and para-legal repression is an old and enduring one. In its post-war phase it can be traced to the exfiltration to Latin America of wanted Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. Ricord himself, arriving in Paraguay via a Nazi escape route, had been one. (76) Originally arriving in Latin America thanks to networks like Die Spinne with the collaboration of such eminences as Gustav Frupp von Bohlen and Vatican titular Bishop Alois Hudal, a few of these in situ anti-Communist 'assets' turned to narcotics and gun running. (77) Of these, a ringleader was the wanted Nazi mass murderer Klaus Barbie, alias Altmann, who prospered in Bolivia until 1972 as the business partner of the Admiral in charge of Bolivia's 'navy'. Ricord's Latin American traffics were associated with the Barbie-Schwend Nazi narcotics gun running network, which in turn had been financed by illegal wartime Nazi operations. (78) Author William Stevenson has charged that "the normal police investigative agencies of Britain andthe United States" were "hamstrung" in their pursuit of this illicit network: "it seemed as if the bureaucrats, the Establishment intelligence agencies, and the departments concerned with foreign affairs had intervened". (79)
The key to this Allied protection of post-war Nazi networks, Stevenson shrewdly surmised, was the U.S. decision in 1945 to take over and subsidise the Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard von Gehlen. Gehlen in turn helped place numerous former Nazis as his agents in other countries, some (like Barbie) as employees of import-export firms established by his own agency, others as local representatives of Krupp, Daimler-Benz and other large West German firms. The Gehlen network, financed by the CIA but not directly controlled by it, soon had agents employed in a number of activities in violation of U.S. law, from illegal arms sales and narcotics trafficking (the two often going together) to murder.
When the Gehlen Org became the West German Intelligence Service in 1956, CIA support, though not terminated, was drastically reduced. (80) And, as a rule, the CIA has not exercised direct operational control over the Gehlen Org's ex-Nazis. Instead, the relationship, to the satisfaction of all concerned, has become more complex and inscrutable. For example, in the 1945-50 period, the U.S. State Department generally - in contrast to some of its more powerful members, such as Ambassador Adolf Berle and then Assistant Secretary Nelson Rockefeller - was opposed to Juan Peron, the most important patron in Latin America of the ex-Nazi Spinne network. (81)
U.S. opposition to networks of ex-Nazis like Barbie and Ricord appeared to be unrelenting in the period of 1970-72, when Nixon, with important help from the CIA, pressured and eventually destroyed the Ricord network of French Corsican drug traffickers in Latin America. But even the Ricord crackdown, so often recounted by Customs and BNDD flacks as proof of U.S. determination and success in the war against drugs, has been seen in other countries as an effort to gain control over the drug traffic, not to eliminate it. Even the respectable French newspaper Le Monde has charged bluntly that the arrest of Ricord and his Corsican network, which had become highly competitive with the U.S. Mafia, was due to a "close Mafia-police-Narcotics Bureau collaboration" in the United States, the result of which was to shatter Corsican influence in the world-wide narcotics traffic, and create a virtual monopoly for the U.S. Italian Mafia connections (whose key figures were Santos Trafficante in America and Luciano Liggio in Europe). (82) An authoritative French book on the drug traffic has added that the fall of Ricord, for which "the Mafia was possibly responsible" followed a campaign by an Italian representative of the Miami Mafia, Tomasso Buscetta, to regain control of the runaway Ricord operation. (83)
Though Le Monde's alarming accusation has been passed over in silence by the responsible U.S. press, it is in fact partly confirmed by Newsday's Pulitzer Prize- winning book, The Heroin Trail. Newsday notes that Buscetta "was ordered by the Mafia to go to South America", where he acted as "the representative of Luciano Liggio". (84) Newsday adds that "Buscetta was ordered out of the U.S. as an undesirable by the Justice Department in 1970"; it does not mention that Buscetta had earlier been released from a U.S. jail "through the direct intervention of an [Italian] Christian Democrat MP". (85)
In both countries, it would appear, Buscetta had powerful connections.
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the elimination of the Ricord network by Nixon and the BNDD in late 1972 was promptly followed by the establishment of a new Latin American drug network with international fascist connections, under the leadership of Alberto Sicilia Falcon, a Cuban exile. When arrested by Mexican police in 1975, as the chief of Mexico's largest heroin ring, Sicilia told police that he was a CIA protege, trained at Fort Jackson as a partisan in the secret war against Cuba. According to Mexican authorities, he was also working in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he returned to Miami in early 1973. He also told the Mexican police of a special 'deal' with the CIA. They eased his way for heroin shipments and, in return, his organisation smuggled weapons for terror-groups in Central America - groups whose activities forced their governments to be more dependent on U.S. aid and advice. He built up his ring in less than two years, and as the daily Mexican El Sol de Mexico said:
"How could he do that without help from a powerful organisation?"
Falcon started to create his huge ring in 1973, and the Mexican police started to watch his operations from the beginning of 1975. He was operating from a house in Cuernavaca, 50 miles south of Mexico City. Almost daily he had long visits from one of his neighbours, and the Mexican police decided to find out the identity of the visitor who was trying to hide his face under large hats and behind sunglasses. One day agents got hold of a bottle which had been in the hands of the visiting neighbour. They sent the bottle to the FBI and the answer was quick - the man was Sam Giancana. Falcon was arrested and Giancana sent back to the U.S. where he was killed one year after his return. In Sicilia Falcon's house the Mexican police found papers from two Swiss banks telling that Falcon had $260 million in the bank. In April 1976 Falcon and three of his top gang members escaped jail through a 97 meter tunnel, dug by outsiders and lit up with electric light. Three days later Falcon was caught again. According to Der Spiegel he told his full story under torture-like conditions, and, after spelling it out, he said he was afraid that the CIA would kill him. He demanded to be brought to an isolated cell under special guard in the newest prison 'Reclusorio Norte'. (86)
If Der Spiegel's charges are correct. they suggest a possible explanation for Playboy's disturbing charges that DEA officials close to Intertel (and hence, it must be said, to the CIA), were shielding a Mafia higher-up in the Mexican heroin connection (a man who coincidentally happened to have graduated, like Sam Giancana, from the Chicago Mafia). It would appear that in the mid 1970s, as in the 1940s, the U.S. turned for help in combating the Left to the milieux of right-wing parafascist gangsterism (such as the Aginter Press - of whom more shortly) and of narcotics. Indeed, the more closely we look at the evidence, the more such disturbing alliances appear to have been, not just occasional, but virtually continuous.
Even if we ignore the Der Spiegel story, there are many indications that the United States has repeatedly used, and hence encouraged, the parafascist successors (such as Aginter Press) of the Nazis who escaped after World War 2 to Latin America. On the surface the opposite might appear to be the case, since the global U.S. interest in multinational trade and capital movements has tended to oppose post-war variants of fascism as a state ideology - most notably Peronism in Argentina. But where Communism - either indigenous or international - is feared, parafascism, even where mistrusted by the U.S. as a form of government, has still been supported and used by the CIA as an 'asset' or resource.
The Case of Otto Skorzeny
The key figure in the post-war organisation of Nazi remnants was S.S. Major Otto Skorzeny, acting in collaboration with his close war-time colleague and personal friend, General Reinhard von Gehlen. First, Gehlen made a deal in 1946 with U.S. intelligence leaders like General Donovan and Allen Dulles, transferring his former anti-communist Nazi intelligence network to the future CIA. (The financial details were allegedly arranged by Walter Reid Wolf, a Citybank official on loan to CIA, who made similar arrangements in 1951 for the CIA's Air America Inc.). Then Skorzeny was acquitted at a brief trial at Nuremberg, when his U.S. defence attorney produced a British army officer (actually a secret service agent) who testified that what Skorzeny had done (i.e. shoot prisoners), he would have done also. Although Skorzeny faced further charges in Denmark and Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to walk away from his prison camp. He soon found a berth in Peron's Argentina, "amply supplied with Krupp money" (87). By 1950, when Gehlen was functioning at Munich on a CIA budget, Skorzeny had opened an 'unconventional warfare' consultancy under cover in Madrid, the post-war home of his father-in-law Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht, the bankerwho, with Gustav Krupp, had delivered levies from German industry to Hitler's Reich leader Martin Bormann, had likewise been acquitted at Nuremberg and protected by the British from serving an independent eight year sentence for his Nazi activities. As a Krupp sales representative, Skorzeny became an influential figure in, first, Argentina, and then in Franco's Spain - especially after he and Schacht (another Krupp representative) negotiated "the biggest post-war deal between Spain and Germany, for the delivery in 1952 of $5 million worth of railway stock and machine tools". (88)
In this period Skorzeny lectured at Spanish universities on the 'new warfare' that would turn to such techniques as 'assassinations and kidnappings'. (89) His offer to recruit a foreign legion of ex-Nazis to aid the Americans in Korea was vigorously supported in the United States by those elements in the Spain-China lobby - many of them right-wing Catholics - who later would support similar proposals from the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League. Though these offers were not publicly accepted by the U.S., some Gehlen and KMT personnel, from about 1950, began to train what became the U.S. Special Forces, as well as the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.
Following the rise of Nasser to power in 1952-53, with CIA support, Nasser asked his CIA contact, Kermit Roosevelt, for help in reorganising the Egyptian intelligence services. Roosevelt wired Dulles; Dulles approached Gehlen; Gehlen suggested Skorzeny; and Skorzeny accepted when the CIA agreed to supplement his modest Egyptian salary. He did so partly on the urging of Schacht, who himself went to Indonesia as an advisor to Sukarno and advance man for Krupp. (90)
The consequences of this CIA favour to Nasser and the Nazis were to be widespread and long term. Skorzeny left Egypt after about a year, but he left behind him about 50 former S.S. and Gestapo men, many of them recruited from Argentina and neighbouring countries by Skorzeny's Nazi colleague in Buenos Aires, Colonel Hans- Ulrich Rudel. Among these was the chief post-war theorist of Nazism in Latin America, Peron's friend, Johannes von Leers, a wanted war criminal who, like Rudel, had escaped to Argentina with Vatican help. After the fall of Peron, Von Leers temporarily left his Argentina Nazi paper Der Weg and, under the alias of Omar Amin, directed Nasser's propaganda against Israel. His assistant in this work was another former member of Goebbels' propaganda ministry, Dr. Gerhardt Harmut von Schubert, who later moved on to a similar task in Iraq. (91)
Skorzeny's legitimisation by the CIA at Cairo gave him new status in the countries which had to worry about American public opinion: Germany, South Africa and Spain. German Chancellor Adenauer and General Gehlen (still on the CIA payroll) could now lend active support to Skorzeny's private political warfare agency in Madrid, along with right-wing German businessmen in the post-war Circle of Friends. (92) At the same time, as former CIA agent Miles Copeland wrote in 1969, Skorzeny "to this day remains on the best of terms ... with the American friends who were instrumental in getting him to Egypt in the first place". (93) One of these friends, apparently, was, as we shall see, his fellow arms salesman and veteran of CIA operations in Egypt, Kermit Roosevelt.
Fascism and Parafascism
In 1939 Britain and the United States were forced into fighting German Nazism, an aggressive ideological movement for political expansion and mercantilist autarky, which threatened the alternative Anglo-Saxon system for world trade and investment. Skorzeny himself, like his father-in-law Hjalmar Schacht, steered relatively clear of post-war political fascist movements. His self-perceived role, and that which made him useful to his British and American friends, w...
