Sep 12, 2016

Obama was wise to hold back on Syria in 2013 | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe Sep 12 2016

(12 Sep 2016 )

Fortunately, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir Putin brokered a deal whereby Assad relinquished his deadly arsenal, which helped dissuade Obama from bombing Syria in retaliation for Assad's purported authorization of the sarin attack. 

Jun 6, 2013

How Wall St. Bailed Out the Nazis | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on June 6, 2013


The amoral calculations of Wall Street insiders guided Washington’s post-World War II decision to give many Nazi war criminals a pass if they’d help in the Cold War against the world’s socialist movements. CIA Director Allen Dulles was just one of the ex-investment-bank lawyers pushing the trade-off, writes Jerry Meldon.
Near the end of World War II, the secret collaboration between U.S. spymaster Allen Dulles and Nazi SS officers enabled many German war criminals to escape prosecution and positioned them to fan the flames of post-war tensions between the former allies, the United States and the Soviet Union.

In that way, the Old Nazis — aided by Dulles and other ex-Wall Street lawyers — prevented a thorough denazification of Germany and put the Third Reich’s stamp on decades of atrocities during the long Cold War, spreading their brutal death-squad techniques to faraway places, especially Latin America.


Former CIA Director Allen Dulles.
Former CIA Director Allen Dulles

Though the World War II generation has largely passed from the scene and the Cold War ended more than two decades ago, the consequences of Dulles’s actions in those final days of World War II are still reverberating in Germany.

One of the after-shocks was felt in a Munich courtroom just last month, with the opening of the trial of Beate Zschape, a 38-year-old neo-Nazi who is accused as an accessory to two bombings, 15 bank robberies and ten murders between 2000 and 2007 by the terrorist cell, the “National Socialist Underground” (NSU).

Two male fellow gang members reportedly took their own lives to avoid arrest before Ms. Zschape torched their hideout and turned herself in, in November 2011. But the back story is no less disturbing.

Nine of the NSU’s ten murder victims were immigrants, eight of them Turkish, one Greek. All ten were slain execution-style by the same Ceska Browning pistol. Yet it took more than a decade for police forces across Germany and the country’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), to connect the dots that would link the homicides to Germany’s xenophobic neo-Nazi netherworld.
 
Troubling Background

But the question is whether the missed connections resulted from incompetence or complicity. Last summer, following reports of the massive shredding of BFV’s files on right-wing extremists, the head of the agency tendered his resignation. Then in November, Der Spiegel reported:

“Four parliamentary committees [are] dissecting the work of law enforcement units four department heads have already resigned. The government’s failures in fighting rightwing terrorists have plunged [the BFV] into the worst crisis since it was … set up in postwar Germany to stop precisely the kind of extremist thinking that allowed the Nazis to rise to power in the 1930s. The discovery of the NSU and its crimes has shaken the system to its core.

“The more secrets come to light, the clearer it becomes how extensively intelligence agencies had infiltrated right-wing extremist groups. The trio of neo-Nazis that made up the NSU was surrounded by informants linked with [the BFV].   One of the big questions is whether [the BFV] actually strengthened military right-wing groups.”

How the BFV worked at cross-purposes coddling neo-Nazis while supposedly constraining them is not entirely surprising in light of the circumstances surrounding the BFV’s birth.

West Germany’s first parliamentary elections in 1950 propelled into the chancellorship, Konrad Adenauer a stalwart of the same party as that of current German chancellor Angela Merkel, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

When Adenauer named Dr. Hans Globke as his Secretary of State, the West German chancellor laid his cards on the table. Globke’s checkered past included wartime service at the helm of the Nazi Interior Ministry’s Office for Jewish Affairs. He drafted the infamous Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of German Blood and wrote the “Commentary” that provided the rationale for genocide.

The Interior Minister who signed the Nuremberg Laws, Dr. Wilhelm Frick, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged in October 1946. Globke would appear to have been culpable, too, having advanced his career during Nazi rule. His immediate supervisor, Interior Ministry Legal Counsel Bernard Loesner, resigned following Hitler’s decision to proceed with the extermination of European Jewry. When Loesner stepped down, Globke stepped up and left his fingerprints on the Final Solution.

But Globke was not only spared the fate of some colleagues tried at Nuremberg but emerged as an important figure in shaping post-war West Germany. In the 1961 book, The New Germany and the Old Nazis, T.H. Tetens, a German economist who worked for the U.S. War Crimes Commission, noted that Globke controlled every department of West Germany’s government in Bonn and “has done more than anyone else to re-Nazify West Germany.”

Ex-Nazis Everywhere

Der Spiegel revisited the same subject in a March 2012 article headlined “The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany.” It reported that two dozen cabinet ministers, a president and a chancellor had belonged to Nazi organizations.

The article reported that historians were poring through voluminous BFV files “to determine how many of the
Nazi dictatorship’s helpers hid under the coattails of the domestic intelligence service in the earlier years of the Federal Republic” and whether “the protection of the young, optimistic constitution [had been] in the hands of former National Socialists.”

Berlin historian Michael Wildt told Der Spiegel he was convinced that the postwar police and intelligence services had been riddled with former Nazis. Entire government departments and agencies, he said, “covered up, denied and repressed” their murky history which evoked the following mea culpa from Der Spiegel’s staff:

“It’s a charge that doesn’t just apply to politicians and public servants, at least not in the early years of the republic. Senior members of the media, including at Spiegel, proved to be unwilling or incapable of sounding the alarm. This isn’t surprising, given the number of ex-Nazis who had forced their way into editorial offices.”

Author T.H. Tetens noted the irony in Dr. Globke, “[the] former key administrator in the Final Solution, [having] full control over the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.” Had he lived long enough, Tetens might have suggested that the BFV be renamed the Office for the Protection of Neo-Nazis.

Tetens might also feel vindicated by recently released CIA documents describing another branch of German intelligence that Globke’s controlled, the vast spy network run by Adolf Hitler’s former espionage czar, Lt. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, a.k.a. the “Gehlen Organization,” a.k.a. “The Gehlen Org” or, simply, the “Org.”

Until 1955, when West Germany became a sovereign state, the Gehlen Org operated nominally under the aegis of James Critchfield of the CIA which paid for the Org’s intelligence product. In reality, Gehlen ran the Org from its creation in 1946 until his retirement in 1968. In 1956, the Org officially became Germany’s foreign intelligence service and was renamed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

Recently, the BND has been declassifying its files to come clean about its postwar origins. Documents released to date by both it and the CIA confirm suspicions that, at least in the Gehlen years, the Org/BND was little more than a U.S.-bankrolled “sheep-dipping” operation for fugitive Nazis.

The U.S. Connection 

And this troubling history goes back even further to the days of World War II when the American intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, fell under the control of a group of Wall Street lawyers who saw the world in the moral grays of business deals, measured less by right and wrong than by dollars and cents.

In the introduction to The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, author Burton Hersh identifies this common denominator: “In 1941 [the year of America’s entry into the war}, an extraordinarily nimble New York antitrust attorney named William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan inveigled Franklin Roosevelt into underwriting the first encompassing intelligence instrumentality, the Office of the Coordinator of Information [OCI].

“Donovan’s profession was relevant, and it was no accident that all three [of The Old Boys’] load-bearing protagonists Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner achieved status in America by way of important Wall Street law partnerships.
“The faction-ridden [OCI] gave way in 1942 to the [OSS]. From then on a civilian-directed, operationally oriented spy service would top the wish list of America’s emerging power elite.”

These Wall-Street-lawyers-turned-spymasters brought their moral relativism and their ardor for aggressive capitalism to their World War II decision-making. Thus, they created an opening for Nazi war criminals who after Germany’s crushing defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943 saw the writing on the wall regarding the future of the Third Reich and started hedging their bets.

As the war ground on for two more years, thousands of them took steps to evade post-war prosecutions, in part, by arranging protection from British and American officials. Most of those American officials served in U.S. intelligence agencies, either Army intelligence or the civilian-run OSS, the CIA’s forerunner.

OSS spymaster Allen Dulles played into this Nazi game in spring 1945, as Soviet, British and American forces were converging on Berlin. Dulles engaged in negotiations for the separate surrender of German forces in Italy with SS General Karl Wolff.

It apparently didn’t bother Dulles that Wolff, like many of his SS brethren, was a major war criminal. After September 1943, when Italy withdrew from the Axis and made peace with the Allies, Wolff’s troops committed an average of 165 war crimes a day executing his orders to liquidate the Italian resistance and terrorize its supporters.

(In 1964, a German judge sentenced Wolff to 15 years in prison for various war crimes, including ordering the deportation of 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp.)

Pushing the Envelope

Initially, Dulles met with Wolff in defiance of orders from the dying President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The contacts also were behind the back of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whose army had not only turned the tide of the war at Stalingrad but was still doing the bulk of the fighting. As Hitler’s Third Reich neared the end of its days, six out of every seven German divisions were lined up against the Red Army.

Ultimately, Dulles secured authorization for what was code-named “Operation Sunrise,” but his determination to consummate a deal with Wolff didn’t stop at negotiations. When the Italian resistance set a trap for Gen. Wolff, Dulles saved him in what his OSS colleague (and future Supreme Court Justice) Arthur Goldberg described as treason.
Moreover, when Soviet spies informed Stalin about the Dulles-Wolff assignations which continued even as the Red Army suffered 300,000 casualties in a three-week period the ensuing brouhaha played right into Hitler’s own game plan for survival.

Desperate to bolster the morale of his collapsing army, Der Fuehrer seized on the dissension opening in the ranks of the Allies. He gave his generals the following pep talk (as transcribed in Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War):
“The states which are now our enemies are the greatest opposites which exist on earth: ultra-capitalist states on one side and ultra-Marxist states on the other. [Their] objectives diverge daily and anyone can see how these antitheses are increasing.

“If we can deal it [the alliance] a couple of heavy blows, this artificially constructed common front may collapse with a mighty thunderclap at any moment.”

Indeed, Wolff’s surrender overtures to Dulles might have been an attempt to both save his own skin and help Hitler drive a wedge into the “artificially constructed common front.”

The overall value of Dulles’s negotiations toward ending the war also was dubious. Less than one week before the general armistice ending the War in Europe, Dulles offered Nazi officers an advantageous deal, letting one million German combatants surrender to British and American forces on May 2, 1945, rather than to the Russians.

By surrendering to the British and Americans, most of these Germans not only avoided harsh treatment from the Russians but high-ranking Nazi officers benefited from the Truman administration’s quick pivot from its war-time alliance with Stalin to the Cold War confrontation with Moscow.

President Harry Truman’s staunchly anti-communist advisers, including Secretary of State James Byrnes, persuaded Truman to default on FDR’s commitment to a thorough postwar denazification of Germany, one in a series of decisions which enabled thousands of war criminals to avoid justice and permitted many to assume key positions in the new West German government.

Steering the Cold War

Yet, the use of Nazis by U.S. intelligence agencies had the additional dangerous effect of letting the Nazis influence how the United States perceived its erstwhile allies in Moscow. Washington formulated much of its early Cold War policies based on information about Moscow’s intentions that originated with Gehlen’s blemished agents.

These infamous Final Solution perpetrators included:
  • Willie Krichbaum, reportedly the Gehlen Org’s top recruiter. As the senior Gestapo official for southeastern Europe, Krichbaum managed the deportation of 300,000 Hungarian Jews for extermination.
  • Dr. Franz Six, former Dean of the Faculty of the University of Berlin and Adolph Eichmann’s immediate supervisor in the Ideological Combat branch of the SS security apparatus. In 1941, according to a report he wrote (which Christopher Simpson cites in Blowback: The First Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis, and its Disastrous Effect on our Domestic and Foreign Policy), a Six-led SS commando group murdered 200 people in the Russian city of Smolensk, “among them 38 intellectual Jews.” Wanted for war crimes, Six joined the Gehlen Org in 1946, but later was betrayed by a former SS officer working undercover for a US/UK dragnet for fugitive Nazis. In 1948, a U.S. military tribunal sentenced him to 20 years for war crimes including murder. After serving four, he was granted clemency by John McCloy, another Wall Street lawyer then serving as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Six then rejoined the Org.

  • Gestapo captain Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” who escaped via the so-called “rat lines” to South America, where he then worked with right-wing intelligence services and organized neo-Nazi support for violent coups against elected and reformist governments, including the 1980 “cocaine coup” in Bolivia. After decades of spreading Nazi techniques across Latin America, Barbie was arrested and returned to France where he was given a life sentence in 1984 for ordering the deportation of 44 Jewish orphans to the death camp at Auschwitz
  • SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who dodged postwar prosecution for developing mobile gas vans and administering their deployment to murder some 250,000 Eastern Europeans, mostly Jewish women and children. The appearance of Rauff’s name on the list is interesting because, as the Milan-based SS intelligence chief for northwestern Italy in 1945, he was Gen. Wolff’s liaison with Allen Dulles.
According to a 1984 Boston Globe Op-Ed by former U.S. Justice Department lawyer John Loftus, Rauff, after playing his part in Operation Sunrise, calmly turned himself in and told agents of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) that he had made surrender “arrangements [with] Mr. Dulles to avoid further bloodshed in Milan.”

In Loftus’s words, Dulles “promised that none of the [surrender] negotiators would ever be prosecuted as war criminals. When Truman and Stalin discovered what Dulles [had been up to], there were outraged orders to call off Sunrise [But] Dulles went ahead anyway, with Truman’s reluctant concurrence [Dulles] kept his bargain Rauff was released.”

Christopher Simpson confirms in Blowback that “each of the SS officers involved in Operation Sunrise [escaped] serious punishment despite the fact that each was a major war criminal. A U.S. military tribunal tried [SS intelligence chief] Walter Schellenberg, who had helped trap and exterminate the Jews of France. He was convicted but freed shortly thereafter under a clemency [order] from the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John McCloy…

“Wolff was sentenced to ‘time served’ in a [British] denazification proceeding in 1949, then released without objection from U.S. authorities. Fifteen years later a West German court tried Wolff a second time. He was convicted of administering the murder of 300,000 persons, most of them Jews, and of overseeing SS participation in slave labor programs.”

Fleeing to Latin America

However, when the war ended, neither the Gehlen Org recruitment program nor Wall Street lawyer McCloy’s clemency rulings had begun, leaving tens of thousands of war criminals desperate to relocate in secure foreign outposts. SS Col. Rauff just happened to have the right connections to make that happen.

In Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and Soviet Intelligence, Australian investigative reporter, Mark Aarons, and former Justice Department lawyer Loftus reconstruct how Rauff became the mass murderers’ travel agent of choice.
Shortly after the Wolff/Dulles surrender negotiations were successfully completed on April 29, 1945, Rauff was arrested by unidentified Americans and delivered to an OSS unit led by James Angleton, the future CIA counter-intelligence chief.

From its description by Aarons and Loftus, Angleton’s team appears to have been tracking communists in the Italian underground which would have been consistent with Washington’s postwar policy of backhanding leftwing resistance leaders, from European partisans to Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, irrespective of the magnitude of their contributions to the Allied cause.

Angleton’s team reportedly debriefed Rauff at length, probably about what he had learned when he carried out Wolff’s orders to liquidate the resistance. After Angleton’s team released him, Rauff established contact with his former SS colleague Friederich Schwendt who was already on the payroll of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) and, like Rauff himself, was wanted for murder.

Schwendt was also a master counterfeiter. He laundered his product through banks, obtaining legitimate Western currency in return enough, in fact, that over the next three years, Rauff was able to furnish thousands of fellow war criminals false identities and one-way tickets to South America.

Rauff himself wound up in Chile, where he later reportedly advised Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s ruthless secret police.
As for Allen Dulles, he became director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Under his leadership, the CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and replaced them with anti-democratic dictatorships. To this day, neither country has fully regained its democratic footing.

After the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy sacked Dulles, but Dulles did not wander far from the centers of power. After JFK’s assassination two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Dulles to serve on the Warren Commission’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder.

Dulles died on Jan. 29, 1969. However, even today, seven decades after Dulles opened the door to U.S. collaboration with Nazi war criminals, his decision continues to infect government actions around the globe.

Jerry Meldon, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, is the English translator of The Great Heroin Coup, by Danish journalist Henrik Kruger, and an occasional contributor to ConsortiumNews.com.

Dec 29, 2011

CHILE'S FLAWED MODEL: Glaeser ignores brutality of Pinochet | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe Dec 29 2011

EDWARD L. GLAESER suggests that Deval Patrick has a lot to learn from economists and from the recent history of Chile, which the governor visited last month ("In economists' paradise, lessons for US," Op-ed, Dec. 19). Unfortunately, Glaeser begins by distorting Chilean history, and thus misses the lessons that should have been drawn from it.

"After Pinochet took power in 1973", Glaeser writes, "he eventually turned to a cadre of free-market economists, the `Chicago Boys,' " who, like Glaeser, received their PhDs at the University of Chicago. "Chile's subsequent rapid growth allowed economists to retain some influence."

Pinochet didn't just take over. He violently overthrew Salvador Allende, a socialist who had nationalized Chilean corporations. Pinochet then implemented the Chicago Boys' privatization and deregulation plan. Rapid growth followed. But that was a bubble, and in 1982 the economy tanked and unemployment reached 30 percent - ten times what it had been under Allende.

Sep 19, 2011

Democracy in crisis: the CIA’s narcotics connection | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily September 19, 2011

In May 1971, upwards of 17 years into the Second Indochina War and not long before the Watergate scandal brought down Richard Nixon, a photograph of South Vietnam’s vice president appeared on the cover of Ramparts Magazine. Next to him were the words: “Marshal Ky: Biggest Pusher in the World?”

It turned out not to be an unfair question.

Nguyen Cao Ky had been stashing away profits from the booming trade in heroin — the drug to which hundreds of thousands of GIs were coming home hopelessly addicted. But he was one of many such CIA proteges. And it fit a pattern that has continued to the present day.

During the Carter and Reagan administrations’ war to oust the Soviet army from Afghanistan in the 1980s, local warlords and their Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Saudi−bankrolled handlers in Pakistani military intelligence pocketed billions derived from the traffic in heroin. It was not by chance that Afghanistan supplanted Southeast Asia as the source of 60 percent of the world’s supply. (The CIA’s collaborators included Osama bin Laden and the Islamic fundamentalist jihadists who would form the nucleus of al−Qaida, having been armed to the teeth by the Washington.)

Afghan heroin production was at a low point after September 1996 when the Taliban, having vanquished the feuding warlords, marched victoriously into Kabul. But it rebounded with a vengeance when U.S. Special Forces routed the Taliban in the wake of Sept. 11. The Taliban recovered with a vengeance when the Bush White House, having swallowed its own disinformation about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” made the fateful decision to divert U.S. forces to Iraq.

The profiteers reportedly included Afghan power broker and reputed CIA asset Ahmed Wali Karzai, the recently assassinated brother of President Hamid Karzai.

Throughout the war in the ’80s to oust the Russians from Afghanistan, and the current decade−long war in Afghanistan — the stated aims of which have variously included the pursuit of Al−Qaida, the routing of the Taliban, the stabilization of Afghanistan and all of the above — the CIA’s drug−trafficking Afghan and Pakistani assets, with rare exception, have led charmed lives thanks to get−out−of−jail free cards printed in Washington.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has a long history of treating war zones as “enforcement−free zones” when it comes to CIA assets. It did that in Indochina in the ’60s and ’70s. During that same era, it did that for CIA−trained Cuban exile terrorists attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro. And it did it again in Central America in the ’80s— contemporaneously with the Washington−sponsored anti−Soviet jihad in Afghanistan — when the CIA−trained “contras” terrorized the Nicaraguan countryside to destabilize the Sandinista government. After the Sandinistas ousted the ruthless long−timeWashington ally, Anastasio Somoza, Reagan famously dubbed the contras “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”

In and of itself, CIA complicity in the global drug trade is morally indefensible. But it is especially reprehensible when it supports illegal wars like the current one in Afghanistan, which drain the national treasury to prop up corrupt foreign despots and provide a distraction from social inequities here at home. The late Japan scholar Chalmers Johnson, author of “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope” (2010) among other important books, warned that a nation can pursue such endless wars or it can have a democracy, but it cannot do both.

In his celebrated April 1967 sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew the connection:

“Who are we supporting in Vietnam today? … It’s a man by the name of General Ky, who fought with the French against his own people and … said … [that his] greatest hero … is Hitler… A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death… I am disappointed with our failure to deal… with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead−end road that can lead to national disaster.”

An assassin’s bullet spared Dr. King the disappointment of discovering just how well−justified his pessimism had been.

If you are interested in hearing two authorities discuss CIA complicity in the global drug trade, you should consider attending tonight’s event in Cabot Auditorium, which begins at 7 p.m.

May 30, 2011

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Cheap shot at professor, stunning nod to Summers | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe May 30, 2011



The two in one cheap shot at Cornel West and applause for Larry Summers leaves me gasping for air ("Cornel West: Summers was right," May 24). Rupert Murdoch will want to hire who- ever wrote the editorial parodying West's legitimate disgust with a president who has difficulty uttering the words "poor" or "unemployed." The Wall Street Journal must have a beat for someone who, in the same breath, took the opportunity to heap praise on Summers, the man ousted from Harvard's presidency after insulting women and African-American faculty, and the man who, while deputy secretary and secretary of the treasury, eviscerated the Glass- Steagall Act that might have stood in the way of the Wall Street financial meltdown. 



JERRY MELDON Medford

The writer is an associate professor in the chemical and biological engineering depart- ment at Tufts University.

Jul 14, 2009

The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on July 14, 2009


Sourced from: https://consortiumnews.com/2009/071409a.html

The CIA's Ghosts of Tegucigalpa

Billy Joya, security adviser to Honduras’s post-coup-d’etat President Roberto Micheletti, offered the following explanation for the armed forces’ June 28 insurrection ousting democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya:
Joya said Zelaya had been following the same “Marxist-Leninist strategy” for tightening his grip on power that Chilean President Salvador Allende had in 1973 when Gen. Augusto Pinochet toppled Allende.

At least, Joya is right about this much: The assault on Honduras’s fragile democracy was reminiscent of Pinochet’s 1973 putsch. But Joya’s justification says more about where he and Micheletti are coming from than it does about Zelaya, whose real offense was to run afoul of the Honduran oligarchs.

The Organization of American States and United Nations have condemned the coup and demanded Zelaya’s reinstatement. But the Obama administration has been characteristically cautious, expressing displeasure and suspending military ties, but stopping short of economic sanctions that might lead to some second thoughts among the coup leaders.

Does the White House’s chariness reflect fear that a reinstated Zelaya might take some revenge by releasing records revealing Reagan-era CIA collaboration with brutal Honduran generals and their drug kingpin partners?
Does Obama prefer, as he does regarding George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, to never look backwards even when the history involves serious crimes?

Pleasing the Putschists

  Obama's disinterest in history would please Micheletti and his fellow putschists, not least Billy Joya, who in the early 1980s was a captain in Battalion 3-16, a brutal Honduran intelligence unit that was trained and equipped by the CIA.
A 1995 Baltimore Sun investigation of Reagan-era crimes documented the battalion’s use of shock and suffocation devices and its murder of 184 victims. The U.S. Embassy knew what was going on, but continued to work closely with Battalion 3-16’s leaders.

The CIA got into bed with homicidal uniformed Hondurans because the Agency - Washington’s primary tool for achieving goals antithetical to American values - has always operated that way.

Indeed, the story of how Nazi-like tactics spread across Latin America and other parts of the world can be traced back to the days just after World War II. Washington – in the name of “fighting communism” – recruited fugitive Nazi war criminals like SS Capt. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyon, France, who escaped across so-called “rat lines” to South America and helped organize right-wing intelligence services.

In those years, the newly formed CIA embraced not only ex-Nazis but their methods. Nazi war criminals smuggled to South America taught Nazi torture techniques to the region's intelligence services.

“Butcher of Lyon” Barbie did it in Bolivia. SS Col. Walter Rauff, developer of mobile gas vans and answerable for some 90,000 deaths during World War II, did likewise in Chile for Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The Carter-Reagan Divide

Breaking with this collaboration in the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter embargoed arms sales to South America’s more flagrant human rights violators. However, when Carter left the Oval Office, the old ways returned with a vengeance under Ronald Reagan.

Even before the 1980 election, members of the ruling elite in Guatemala – where death squads had been operating with impunity for decades – were confident that Reagan’s victory would revive Washington’s holy war against communism.
They were confident because two pillars of the American far right, Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea until Carter sacked him for insubordination, and retired Gen. Daniel Graham, a former senior official at the CIA who advised the Reagan campaign, had assured them.

As if to underscore the message, the Republicans invited Guatemalan Mario Sandoval Alarcon, “Godfather” of Central American death squads, to Reagan’s inaugural ball.

In the years that followed Guatemala’s bloodbath would get even bloodier where more than 100,000 would die. Ditto for El Salvador, where some 75,000 lives would be snuffed out as the CIA helped another right-wing military crush peasant and labor uprisings.

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration would go on the offensive because leftist Sandinista guerrillas had defeated the ruthless and corrupt Somoza dynasty in 1979, some 43 years after Washington had installed it.
Determined not to let Nicaragua become another Cuba, the Reagan administration went to work countering the revolution by reorganizing the remnants of the Somoza dictatorship’s National Guard, which was blamed for slaughtering some 50,000 Nicaraguans in 1978 and 1979.

In the early 1980s, Reagan hailed this ragtag army as “freedom fighters.” To the rest of the world, they were the “contras” and were widely regarded as drug-tainted terrorists. (In a private conversation with senior CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, even Reagan accepted some of that reality, calling the contras “vandals.”)

Death-Squad Veterans

Right-wing Argentine intelligence units and the CIA began whipping the contras into shape in Honduras, which had the misfortune of bordering Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua – the three hot spots for Reagan’s determination to draw a line against leftist gains in the region.

Honduras would trade in its traditional “Banana Republic” moniker for “Pentagon Republic.”

In establishing the contra operation, the CIA collaborated with Argentine instructors whose prior work had included organizing a “dirty war” that had tortured and killed tens of thousands of dissidents in Argentina.

On March 17, 1981, President Reagan hosted Gen. Roberto Viola of Argentina, who was about to be sworn in as president. Extending the general his best wishes, Reagan promised Viola that he would lift the embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed on U.S. arms sales to Buenos Aires.

Though Argentina’s hand in training the contras is well known, its broader role in the CIA’s Central America “counterinsurgency” operations is not as well appreciated, nor is the price Hondurans paid for the fact that the Honduran Army officers with whom the CIA worked most closely made the murderous Argentines their role models.

  Initially, the Argentine dirty warriors taught Honduran soldiers and the contras how repression was handled in Buenos Aires, including, torture, high-profile assassinations and “disappearances,” the secret murder of political targets.

  According to J. Patrice McSherry, author of Predatory States, “Some of the Argentine officers involved were key Condor figures … Condor was extended to Central America.”
What was Condor?

In Operation Condor, South American intelligence teams joined forces to operate across borders to kidnap and assassinate their countries’ political exiles, essentially denying them safe haven anywhere in the world.

That explained how corpses of Bolivian refugees would turn up in Buenos Aires garbage dumps in August 1974. One month later, in that same city, a car bombing claimed the lives of Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife. Prats had opposed the 1973 coup d’etat led by Gen. Pinochet that overthrew Chile’s progressive president, Salvador Allende.

Despite release of historical documents about this right-wing international terror campaign, the mainstream U.S. media has devoted little attention to Operation Condor, in part it would seem because of the background roles of respected American leaders such as former CIA Director George H.W. Bush and ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
A 1978 State Department document, discovered by Prof. McSherry in 2001, provides evidence that the U.S. government facilitated communication among the intelligence chiefs who were collaborating in Operation Condor.

In the document, a cable from U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay Robert E. White to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance says Washington’s link to Condor might be exposed by an ongoing investigation into the Sept. 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt in broad daylight in Washington, D.C.

Letelier, like Prats, had been an outspoken critic of Chilean strongman Pinochet. And like Prats, Letelier was murdered in a car bombing that Pinochet’s intelligence agency, DINA, had assigned to Michael V. Townley, an American expatriate closely linked to CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles and European neo-fascist terrorists.

  Notably, George H.W. Bush was CIA director at the time of the Letelier murder and Agency informants had attended a meeting three months earlier at which the terror operations were discussed. Bush then helped stonewall the ensuing FBI investigation. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Disrupting the Peace

Prior to the Argentines’ arrival in Honduras, the country had enjoyed relative peace, isolated from the violence across the country’s borders with Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Soon, however, the Honduran police and armed forces would begin their own murderous campaign against a tiny group of domestic guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers.

  In 1979, Honduran chief of police Amilcar Zelaya Rodriguez formed the secret Grupo de los 14, a goon squad that specialized in the disappearance and torture of state enemies. After President Reagan and Vice President Bush took office in 1981, the violence in Honduras escalated.
Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez assumed control of Grupo de los 14. In Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League, Scott and Jon Lee Anderson characterized the Honduran officer as follows:
General Alvarez did not invent Honduran paramilitary squads, but he was the man who streamlined them, integrated them into the armed forces, and allowed them to conduct a dirty war.
A vitriolic anticommunist who graduated from Argentina’s Colegio Militar in 1961, Alvarez would maintain contact with his instructors there, most notably Jorge Rafael Videla, who would head the Argentine junta during the Argentine dirty war’s bloodiest period.

In addition, Alvarez received advanced training at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone, where he attended the School of the Americas, known to critics as the “School of the Assassins.”

With his ambition, ruthlessness and sleaziness, Alvarez was just the man the CIA was looking for. Alvarez had Grupo de los 14’s members undergo counterinsurgency training by U.S., Argentine and Chilean instructors. The group expanded over time and was renamed Batallion 3-16.

One of the group’s instructors, Ciga Correa, had been a member of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (“Triple-A”), a death squad that operated on the front lines of Argentina’s dirty war. One of his Triple-A missions was the 1974 Operation Condor assassination of Gen. Prats.

In an offshoot of Operation Condor, Correa joined an Argentine unit in Guatemala City that targeted suspected Argentine guerrillas who had fled to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

Under the tutelage of Correa and his associates, Alvarez’s thugs kidnapped, tortured, murdered and “disappeared” Honduran guerrillas and their supporters, whose numbers had swelled following the Sandinista triumph next door in Nicaragua.

Flash Forward to 2001

In 2001, Society of Helpers Sister Laetitia Bordes read that President George W. Bush planned to nominate John D. Negroponte to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. At the time, she recalled a face-to-face meeting in 1982 with Negroponte in his office as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras.

She had made the journey to ask a nagging question: What had happened to 32 women who had fled to Honduras to escape El Salvador’s death squads in the months following the March 24, 1980, assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador?
 
Sometime after arriving in Honduras, the women had been forcibly taken from their living quarters and shoved into vans, never to be seen again. Negroponte, who had worked closely with Gen. Alvarez, dissembled, disavowing knowledge of the women’s whereabouts and insisting that the U.S. Embassy kept its hands out of Honduran government affairs.

Twelve years after that encounter, Sister Laetitia realized that Negroponte had lied to her. She read a Honduran Human Rights Commission report on the torture and disappearance of political prisoners. It specifically mentioned Negroponte’s complicity in human rights violations.

In 1996, Sister Laetitia read a Baltimore Sun interview with Jack Binns, Negroponte’s predecessor in Tegucigalpa. Binns recalled that a group of Salvadorans, including the women about whose whereabouts Sister Laetitia had inquired, had been captured on April 22, 1981, tortured by members of the Honduran Secret Police, placed aboard Salvadoran military helicopters and, after taking off, thrown out of the helicopters. Binns added that U.S. authorities had been informed about the incident.
The Honduran government eventually recognized 184 disappearances in that era: 39 Nicaraguans, 28 Salvadorans, five Costa Ricans, four Guatemalans, one American, one Ecuadoran, one Venezuelan and 105 Hondurans. Human rights organizations believe the numbers were considerably higher. (Ultimately, President George W. Bush selected Negroponte for a string of important assignments: U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Ambassador to Iraq, the nation’s first “Intelligence Czar” and, finally, in 2007, Deputy Secretary of State.)

Military Turmoil

In early 1982, Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova promoted Negroponte’s sidekick, Grupo de los 14 leader Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, to the rank of general. Before the year was over, Alvarez had decimated Honduras’s tiny guerrilla movement and was promoted to Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

The appointment bred resentment in more senior officers – and as Hondurans grew fed up with their country’s exploitation by Washington as a base for the Nicaraguan contras, the resentment among Gen. Alvarez’s enemies grew.

The boil burst in March 1984, when Honduran Air Force commander Gen. Walter Lopez Reyes spearheaded an internal military coup that drove Alvarez into exile in the United States. The violence in Honduras soon tapered off.

CIA Tegucigalpa station chief Donald Winters, who had asked Alvarez to be the godfather to his adopted daughter, was reassigned elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the contras – a brutal and ineffective fighting force – were becoming a headache for the White House. Reports of the CIA mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and a CIA training manual that sanctioned the assassination of civilians undermined support for Ronald Reagan’s Central American proxy wars.

Anticipating congressional cutoff of funding for the contras, the White House convened a National Security Planning Group meeting on June 25, 1984. The meeting was marked by heated debate about whether seeking third-country support for the contras would expose President Reagan to impeachment.

Vice President Bush asserted that soliciting the contra aid would be lawful unless the United States promised to give the third parties something in return. Nonetheless, Reagan personally approved, with Bush’s active involvement, special aid for Honduras as an implicit quid pro quo for helping the contras.

According to the minutes of a Feb. 7, 1985, meeting of high-level Reagan administration officials, which were released at the later trial of Reagan’s point man for the contras, Lt. Col. Oliver North, the “principals agreed … to provide several enticements in exchange for … continued support” of the contras.

Twelve days after the meeting, Reagan released millions of dollars in economic aid to Honduras.
The Drug Connection

The Reagan administration also did what it could to protect its Honduran friends who ran afoul of the law.

On Nov. 1, 1984, the FBI arrested eight men in Miami and charged them with plotting to overthrow the Honduran government and assassinate President Suazo. The alleged aim of the scheme, which was financed by $40 million in cocaine profits, was to reinstate Gen. Alvarez as Chairman of Honduras’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The Honduran government asked Washington to hand over Alvarez, but he remained safe within U.S. borders, even benefiting from a $50,000 Pentagon contract for a six-month study of “low-intensity conflict” in Central America.
  Alvarez also reportedly spent time as the house guest in Miami of international arms trader Gerard Latchinian, one of the richest men in Honduras, where he was known as the “ambassador of death.” Latchinian got 30 years in prison for his role in the drug-financed coup/assassination plot.
What made the stench even worse was Washington’s treatment of Alvarez’s chum, Gen. Jose Bueso-Rosa. Bueso had served as Army Chief of Staff and was an avid supporter of the contras until Alvarez’s March 1984 ouster – following which Bueso was demoted to military attaché in Santiago, Chile.

For his role in the assassination plot, Bueso turned himself in to federal authorities in Miami. In June 1986, he pleaded guilty to two federal counts of “traveling in furtherance of a conspiracy to plan an assassination” and was sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison.

The light sentence must have been related to Oliver North’s appeals to State and Justice Department officials for intervention on Bueso’s behalf. Two U.S. government officials, one serving and one retired, testified as character witnesses at Bueso’s sentencing hearing, and the Reagan administration submitted an appeal for leniency that read in part:

“General Bueso-Rosa has always been a valuable ally to the United States. As chief of staff of Honduras’s armed forces he immeasurably furthered U.S. national interests in Central America. He is primarily responsible for the initial success of the American military preserve in Honduras. For this service he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the President of the United States, the highest award that can be presented to a foreign military officer.” [See Scott and Marshall’s Cocaine Politics.]

Reagan also had awarded the Legion of Merit to Gen. Alvarez.

‘Lenient’ Sentence

The presiding judge decided that the additional information trumped the Justice Department’s description of the assassination conspiracy as “the most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.” A senior Justice Department official called the five-year sentence meted out to Bueso “lenient.”

But it wasn’t lenient enough for Oliver North. As authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall reported, North sent a note to his then boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, saying there remained one “problem.”
  The general was the man with whom North and three other senior U.S. officials had “worked out arrangements” for contra support, and Bueso had entered a guilty plea on the assumption that he would be given time at a minimum security prison “for a short period [days or weeks] and then walk free.”
“Our major concern,” North wrote, “is that when Bueso finds out what is really happening to him, he will break his longstanding silence about the [contras} and other sensitive operations.” [Emphasis added.]

North and some of his colleagues were therefore going to “cabal quietly … to look into options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence. Objective is to keep Bueso from feeling like he was lied to in legal process and start spilling the beans.”

Poindexter reassured North: “You may advise all concerned that the President will want to be as helpful as possible to settle this matter.” In the end, the Justice Department blocked clemency or deportation, and Bueso-Rosa served his time and kept his mouth shut.

But the late 1984 timing of Bueso’s drug-financed assassination plot suggests that it may have been one of those other sensitive operations that Oliver North cagily referred to in his note to Poindexter. The Honduran general’s drug/assassination conspiracy may have been part of the Reagan administration’s elaborate plans to sustain the contras.

  A revitalized Honduran connection would have guaranteed Tegucigalpa's crucial support. The coup’s failure led to Plan B: economic leverage with President Suazo. And because a congressional ban on aiding the contras, known as the Boland Amendment, made that impeachable, it became a top priority to conceal Reagan’s and Bush’s roles.
The Bush family name was further protected by President George H.W. Bush’s Christmas Eve 1992 pardons to six key Iran-Contra defendants, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. To save his own skin, Weinberger was expected to incriminate Bush in the Iran-Contra cover-up.

Bill Clinton’s opposition to the Iran-Contra investigation when he assumed the presidency in 1993 also helped spare Bush from having to answer a new round of questions from special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh.

Walsh’s truncated investigation had touched on – but failed to pursue – the contra-cocaine aspect of the Iran-Contra Affair, of which the Bueso-Rosa/Latchinian conspiracy was just the tip of a narcotics-filled iceberg.

Consortiumnews.com’s Robert Parry, the late Gary Webb and others – with no help, indeed with resistance from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times – have painstakingly established that the contras were the beneficiaries of and in some cases in cahoots with drug traffickers. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]

Digging Deeper

So let’s delve a bit further into the Honduran Connection.

   A 1983 US Customs report noted that the Honduran cargo firm SETCO Air was headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Class I DEA violator in partnership with “American businessmen who are … smuggling narcotics into the United States.”
Six years later, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, headed by John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, issued a multi-volume report, “Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy.”

The report noted, among other sensational findings, that SETCO Air was “the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the FDN [Nicaraguan Democratic Force], carrying at least a million rounds of ammunition, food, uniforms and other military supplies for the Contras from 1983 to 1985.”

In other words, unfazed by the 1983 Customs report that had identified Matta Ballestero as a Class I violator – which meant drug kingpin, top of the food chain – the Reagan administration retained his airline for another two years as the contra’s chief mover of supplies.

Yet what makes Matta’s case special is just how far Washington would go to keep him in business. In 1970, Matta marked himself as a big-time trafficker when he was arrested at Dulles Airport outside Washington for importing 54 pounds of cocaine. But he was sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison, and a year later he tiptoed out the door and didn’t come back.

By 1973, the DEA considered Matta important enough to entrap in a sting operation. But either the narcs blew it or someone told them not to try.

Two years later, the DEA learned that Matta had teamed up with Mexican drug kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a tonnage supplier to El Norte with Colombian and Peruvian connections. The partnership would make Matta a billionaire.

A 1978 DEA intelligence report cited by James Mills in his penetrating study, The Underground Empire, noted that Matta had financed a coup d’etat in his native Honduras that was led by his partner, Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Transfer Point

  Even before that coup, Honduras had been the transfer point for half a billion dollars worth of northbound drugs. In the three years following the coup, Matta Ballesteros and President Paz Garcia made Honduras an even bigger cocaine trafficking center.

  As Scott and Marshall note in Cocaine Politics, when these events unfolded, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and it was his administration that overlooked Matta Ballesteros’s behind-the-scenes role in Honduran politics.
However, unlike the Carter administration, the incoming Reagan team didn’t simply turn a blind eye. It found Honduras’s corruption an ideal environment for nourishing the contra war.

Matta’s number one Honduran government enabler after President Paz was Col. Leonidas Torres Arias, the head of military intelligence and a key figure in making the necessary arrangements for opening contra training camps.
In August 1981, Col. Torres met secretly in Guatemala City with Argentine intelligence officer Mario Davico, the CIA’s Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, Honduran Gen. Alvarez Martinez and President Paz Garcia.

A tripartite agreement emerged for waging the contra war on Nicaragua. Argentine intelligence would handle organization, administration and training; the CIA would supply the funds; and Honduras would provide the territory for operational bases.

At the time, Davico was second in command of Argentine Army Intelligence and a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. He would soon relocate to Honduras to teach Alvarez’s Batallion 3-16 the Argentine “dirty war” techniques of arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions and disposal of cadavers.

All three Hondurans – Torres Arias, Alvarez Martinez and Paz Garcia – were considered to be in the pockets of the drug lords. As Scott and Marshall put it: “The CIA relied totally on the cocaine-trafficking military in Honduras to back its plans to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.”

But concerns about drug trafficking did little to dissuade the Reagan administration from teaming up with the Honduran military. That, however, meant that the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration would be operating at cross purposes.

The DEA agent in charge of its recently opened Tegucigalpa office, Thomas Zepeda, had documented the complicity of Col. Torres Arias and other high-ranking Honduran officers in Matta Ballesteros’s drug operations.

But DEA needed the Honduran military’s assistance to arrest Torres and his cronies, and the CIA needed them to support the contras. To avoid a showdown with the CIA, the DEA’s Zepeda proposed that a grand jury be empanelled to investigate corruption in the Honduran armed forces.

But the CIA nixed the idea, no doubt to protect its collaborators. As one high-level diplomat later noted: “Without the support of the Honduran military there would have been no such thing as the contras. It’s that simple … So they got rid of the DEA station.”

The DEA Tegucigalpa station was shut down - in June 1983, just as the CIA station was doubling in size - in a naked move to preclude a serious drug investigation. That same month, Customs asked Zepeda to investigate Matta’s airline, SETCO, which would soon be flying supplies to the contras.

Brutal Murder

But the worst was still to come. Shortly after noon on Feb. 7, 1985, DEA undercover agent Enrique (Kiki) Camarena walked out of the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico for a lunch date with his wife.

Two Jalisco state policemen, two hired killers and a drug lord’s lieutenant drove up alongside, told Camarena “the commandante wants to see you,” and shoved him into their car. They sped to a house that was owned by drug kingpin Rafael Caro Quintero.

Camarena was questioned and tortured there for the next 30 hours. His interrogator, a captured tape would reveal, was a commander in the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Mexico’s FBI. One month later, Camarena’s mutilated body was discovered next to that of his Mexican pilot.

  First it was assumed that the motive for the murders had been raids Camarena had led on vast marijuana plantations, which had cost Cara Quintero and his partners an estimated $5 billion. But the interrogation, it turned out, focused on what Camarena knew about corruption in Mexico’s political hierarchy.

  That would explain why the men who attended the meeting at which Camarena’s abduction was planned reportedly included future Mexico City police chief Javier Garcia Paniagua, and Manuel Ibarra Herrera, the former head of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police.
That same year, Newsweek would describe another attendee as the “boss of bosses of Mexico’s cocaine industry,” a man whose organization was believed to supply “perhaps one third of all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”
A DEA agent described the man as “the kind of individual who would be a decision maker of last resort. He is at the same level as the rulers of Medellin and Cali cartels.” That man was Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and at the planning meeting he reportedly announced “we will soon have the identity” of the DEA agent and he will be silenced.
Matta Ballesteros kept his promise. Camarena was silenced. The method, a forensic specialist determined, was the application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to the skull.

Hair sample analysis would establish Matta’s presence at the silencing. But it was only in 1990 that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles would finally put Matta away for life for cocaine trafficking, racketeering and conspiracy.

Significantly, a witness in the Camarena murder case told the DEA that the CIA had trained Nicaraguan contras on a ranch near Veracruz that was owned by Rafael Caro Quintero, the same drug kingpin who owned the house outside Guadalajara where Enrique Camarena was murdered.
Matta would be arrested in 1986 in Colombia. But he bought his way out of jail with a $2 million bribe and made his way back home to Honduras. That same year, which was three years after Customs had identified Matta as both a Class I DEA violator and the owner of SETCO Air – and after Matta had become a prime suspect in the Camarena murder - the State Department renewed SETCO’s contract to supply the contras.

For two more years Matta would live in luxury in Hondruas, seemingly unconcerned by any prospect of arrest since he still had many friends in high places. His generosity would endear him with Honduras’s abjectly poor masses. They called him Honduras’s “Robin Hood.”

But in March 1988, after the Iran-Contra scandal had devastated political support for the contra war in Washington, a truce was declared in Nicaragua. That eliminated Washington’s use for Honduras, and its need for drug kingpins like Matta and his partner, Mexican drug kingpin Felix Gallardo, who once told a DEA informant that he was “protected” because his drug profits were bankrolling the contras.

Only then were Felix Gallardo and Matta Ballesteros arrested and flown to the United States.

Belated Probe

When CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz belatedly investigated the contra-cocaine connection in the late 1990s, he documented the depth of CIA knowledge of drug traffickers and money-launderers connected to the contra war – and explained the key reason for protecting these criminals.

According to Hitz’s report, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.”

One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”

The CIA's manipulation of Honduran politics in pursuit of that goal was another part of the contra war’s legacy.
Besides the drug lords, other key players also ran afoul of the law or met their own rough justice.

The Argentine military junta self-imploded in the wake of the disastrous 1982 war with Great Britain over the Falklands/Malvinas islands, leading to a restoration of civilian rule and a judgment by an Argentine court denouncing the military government for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Reagan’s guest, Gen. Viola, was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Honduran Gen. Alvarez Martinez returned to Honduras in 1987 and was silenced by an assassin on Jan. 25, 1989.
The CIA's Clarridge was indicted for perjury and lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

But the ghosts of Tegucigalpa continue to hover over Honduran politics. As Hondurans protest the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, many believe that Washington encouraged and supported the coup. Can anyone blame them?

They haven’t forgotten that during the Reagan era, the CIA and Argentine dirty warriors ran roughshod over their country. They also know that Roberto Micheletti’s security adviser, Billy Joya, was a member of one of those Reagan-era death squads.

They know, too, that Zelaya had been bucking Honduras’s powerful upper class with reforms like a 60 percent minimum wage increase and rejecting Washington’s “free trade” policies. Zelaya also challenged U.S. foreign policy by befriending Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

However badly President Barack Obama may want to look forward not backwards, Washington’s unacknowledged crimes of the past few decades keep intruding on the present.

Jerry Meldon is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Dedicated to the memory of Penny Lernoux. 



Mar 27, 2008

Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Hyde | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News and The Tufts Daily on March 27, 2008

This afternoon, Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who served with distinction in the House of Representatives from 1965 to 1999 and has received over a dozen honorary degrees, will present the keynote speech at the Fares Center’s symposium, “The United States and the Middle East: What Comes Next After Iraq?”

 The title of his talk is “Iraq: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond,” and I imagine that Mr. Hamilton will be thankful not to discuss “Yesterday.”

 Also, he probably would prefer not to re-visit fateful decisions he made while chairing investigations into Republican dirty work, especially those that let George H.W. Bush off the hook and cleared George W.’s path to the White House. Mr. Hamilton’s chairmanship of numerous post mortem inquiries into ill-conceived U.S. foreign affairs have empowered him to decide just how high the veil over the machinery of power would be lifted, if at all.

 As veteran journalist Robert Parry has persuasively argued on Consortiumnews.com, the Bush family name squeaked through the ’80s and early ’90s essentially mud-free for only a few reasons.

The first is that on Christmas Eve 1992, lame-duck president George H.W. Bush pardoned six of his earlier coconspirators in the Iran-Contra affair (the Reagan/Bush White House’s diversion of profits from illegal arms sales to Iran to bankroll Nicaragua’s contra terrorists in defiance of a congressional ban). Until he was pardoned, former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger had been expected to buy clemency by testifying against Bush.

The next reason is that President Bill Clinton cut short a congressional inquiry into Bush’s secret billion dollar loans to Saddam Hussein and Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s Iran-Contra investigation. And lastly, Mr. Hamilton soft-pedaled two key congressional inquiries: the first investigated Iran-Contra and the second examined allegations that the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign team had struck a treasonous deal with the hostage-holding Iranian government.

Conventional wisdom has attributed the target-friendliness of those latter investigations to Mr. Hamilton’s celebrated spirit of bipartisanship. After all, what else could have persuaded Mr. Hamilton to narrow the scope of the Iran-Contra investigation in order to placate Dick Cheney and the rest of the committee’s Republicans? And how else can one explain the committee’s ill-advised decision to immunize the testimony of a man on whom it had the goods, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North (whose operations in the Old Executive Office building had been exposed by Parry)? Thus emboldened, the cocky Col. North proceeded to cover up for Vice President Bush.

Hamilton’s Iran-Contra performance was troubling. But he went several steps further when he chaired the October Surprise Task Force and handed the Reagan/Bush administration a deck full of get-out-of-jail-free cards. In the lead-up to the 1980 election, Republicans feared that Jimmy Carter would pull off an “October Surprise” and talk the Iranians into releasing 52 American hostages.

Carter’s failure to do so cost him the election. However, over the next several years a parade of individuals alleged that he failed only because the Republicans had secretly agreed to arm Iran in exchange for a delay in the hostages’ release.

Heated Republican denials notwithstanding, the fact remained that the Iranians chose to end the hostages’ 444-day ordeal within hours of Reagan’s inauguration. To put nasty rumors to rest, the House Foreign Affairs Committee formed a task force under the co-chairmanship of Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Lee Hamilton. The task force was charged with examining allegations that in the summer and fall of 1980, Republican heavyweights, notably the vice presidential candidate, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and the campaign director, future CIA Director William J. Casey, had secretly flown to Europe to strike the fateful deal. The key issue was the veracity of Bush’s and Casey’s alibis.

In the heat of his 1992 re-election campaign, an angry President Bush accused the task force of waging a “witch hunt.” Obligingly, the task force disclosed that Secret Service records backed his alibi. That prompted Spencer Oliver, counsel to the Foreign Affairs Committee, to challenge the accuracy of the Secret Service records. Oliver also charged the Bush administration with stonewalling the task force.

“They have sought to block, limit, restrict and discredit the investigation in every possible way,” he said. “President Bush’s recent outbursts [about] his whereabouts in mid-October of 1980 are disingenuous at best since the administration has refused to make available the documents and the witnesses that could finally and conclusively clear Mr. Bush.”

“The Bush administration flatly refused to give any more information to the House task force unless it agreed never to interview [Mr. Bush’s] alibi witness and never to release [that person’s] name,” Parry added. “Amazingly, the task force accepted the administration’s terms.”

Hamilton’s treatment of Mr. Bush was outrageously deferential. But it was pitbull-like compared to how he handled the attempts to provide the late Mr. Casey with an alibi. The Republicans first insisted that Casey could not have flown to meet with the Iranians at the alleged time because during that particular weekend he had attended a historical conference in London. But that alibi had to be ditched when historian and conference attendee Robert Dallek reported that Casey had missed a strategically timed morning session.

 No problem. A new alibi was introduced that instead placed Casey at California’s Bohemian Grove retreat. As it turned out, Casey had indeed stayed at the Bohemian Grove, only not on the decisive weekend.

Unfazed, Hamilton’s task force acted as if Casey’s alibi remained solid and issued a report that exonerated both Casey and Bush. Not long afterward, task force co-chair Henry Hyde acknowledged that Casey’s 1980 passport had vanished along with key pages in his personal calendar.

 Unperturbed, Lee Hamilton penned a New York Times Op-Ed in which he cited Casey’s so-called alibi in insisting that his task force’s report “should put the controversy to rest once and for all.” Only later did Robert Parry rummage through the task force’s records to discover a photograph of the 16 men who had been at the Bohemian Grove on that notorious weekend in the summer of 1980 in the company, supposedly, of William Casey. But Casey was not in the photo — a fact that the task force had conveniently neglected to report.

This afternoon the Tufts community will have the opportunity to ask Mr. Hamilton exactly why he has repeatedly kept Americans in the dark about critical episodes in their history. It is an opportunity not to be missed.