Post-war Nazi Networks and the United StatesThe 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: {{|QB| "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 SkorzenyThe 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 banker who, 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 ParafascismIn 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, was not as a fascist politician but as a parafascist mercenary asset, analogous to those German Freikorps leaders employed by German industrialists in 1919 to murder Communist activists, but unlike them, active in the transnational arena.
Let us adumbrate this distinction. Fascism is a fully-fledged political movement, marked by a demagogy, a mass party, the cult of violence, and a militant ideology emphasising nationalism and militarism against both bourgeois democracy and its concomitant, international capitalism. [94] Parafascism, which in Germany -but not Italy- preceded Fascism, is content to operate covertly, without ideological fanfare or grass-roots organisation; to destroy its Communist opponents by those same techniques of organised violence - above all murder - which fascist ideology eulogises. Fascism aspires to autonomous political power: parafascism, at least in the short run, is a service, often remarkably apolitical, to protect the power of others. Especially since World War 2, traditional fascism has tended to be anti-American, and opposed to the global reach of transnational banks and corporations - the very forces which parafascists like Skorzeny and his disciples, as well as Orlando Bosch, have been only too happy to serve.
It follows that, at least in the short run, parafascism rather than fascism is the current danger to democracy and human values. Parafascism rather than fascism can be said to have murdered Orlando Letelier, even though of all the feuding anti-Castro fractions, that of the suspected Novo brothers (the MNC or Christian Nationalist Movement) was the only one to claim an explicitly authoritarian ideology.
But the distinction between fascism and parafascism is less clear in practice. Reliance on the tolerated crimes of organised parafascist gangsters is an inimical alternative to democratic procedure, not a supplement to it. Perhaps its most immediate result is to force a determined left-wing movement into mimetic violence and terrorism. It may even desire this, since a militant movement relying on small arms and specialists in the use of them is, as we saw in the case of the Uruguayan Tupamaros, all the more prone to penetration by parafascists like Christian David.
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and now Thailand are all countries where, in the last 15 years, parafascism has been followed by the fascist overthrow of democracy. Reliance on parafascist assets in Europe has, as we shall see, led to the establishment of a shadowy but credible Internacional Fascista there. So parafascism is not merely abhorrent in itself, and a threat to exposed individuals like Letelier. In so far as it appears to represent part of a world-wide trend towards fascism, it represents a threat to democracy, even in the United States.
Transnational Parafascism and the CIAIn its search for disciplined criminal operators, the CIA originally drew upon narcotics traffickers, notably the Italian networks of Luciano in Marseilles (1948-50). Later the CIA drew on the French gangsters employed for penetration and assassination purposes by Colonel Pierre Fourcald of French intelligence (SDECE). (The CIA already knew Colonel Fourcald from its collaboration with his Service Action Indochine - a special warfare operation financed by the sale of opium to the world-wide Corsican networks.) [95] It is rumoured in Europe that QJ/WIN, "the foreign citizen with a criminal background", who was recruited by the CIA in Europe to assassinate Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, was none other than the famous French heroin financier and SDECE assassin, Joe Attia, who Fourcald once defended as "an absolutely extraordinary agent". [96]
But the relationship between the CIA and Skorzeny's parafascist services became more complicated in the 1960s, as democracies disappeared in South America while the world's major powers and industries competed fiercely in the rest of the third world, using whatever covert resources were available. As Skorzeny approached retirement, in Spain his place was taken by his former Egyptian subordinate Dr. Gerhardt Hartmut von Schubert, who slowly developed a small international squad of commandos, the so-called Paladingruppe, from former French Foreign Legionnaires, paratroopers and barbouzes. [97] The successive tumult of French politics supplied him and other similar services with waves of recruits whose proven capacity for violence was no longer desired at home. Thus the former anti-Gaullists of the OAS were joined by their one-time mortal enemies, the counter-terrorist barbouzes of Foccart's Service d'Action Civique. (SAC).
Clients for Von Schubert's Paladins ranged from the West German firm Rheinmetall to the Greek intelligence service (KYP) under the ambitiously fascist junta of the Greek colonels which lasted from April 1967 to July 1974. The KYP, which the CIA originally organised and always remained close to, played a major role - along with Exxon and its Greek-American partner Tom Pappas - in the 1967 coup. The KYP, always in collaboration with the CIA, then expanded its activities tenfold in the other countries of Southern Europe where democracy was weak or non-existent - Italy, Spain and Portugal. [98]
In the case of Italy the KYP became involved in fascist (MSI) plotting against the slowly decaying Christian Democratic government. So did the CIA, according to revelations in the suppressed House Congressional Report on Intelligence - the so-called Pike Report - whose unprecedented suppression has itself been attributed to the domestic political strength of the CIA. [99] The Pike Report revealed that the U.S. Ambassador in Rome had channelled CIA money to Vito Miceli, chief of the Italian intelligence (SID), for distribution to right-wing groups. Miceli was subsequently arrested for his role in the KYP-supported coup of Prince Valerio Borghese, the fascist MSI leader, in December 1970.[100]
The CIA's subsidy to Miceli, like its efforts in 1970 to foment a military coup against Chilean President-elect Allende, can be construed as a culmination of previous support to fascist and parafascist groups in more marginal democracies, but it is important to discern what was new in these intrigues. In contrast to the role of the CIA in the coups of Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1975) and Greece (1967), the CIA under Nixon had never before intervened so directly on behalf of privilege against an established democracy. Retired CIA spokesman, David Phillips, in exculpating his own role in the 1970 anti-Allende operation, has blamed it on Richard Nixon - neglecting to mention that the CIA drew on U.S. contacts with the Chilean Right (particularly the military) which had been carefully cultivated over a period of years and which were continued, in fact intensified, up to the successful military coup of September 1973. [101]
The U.S., Chile and the Aginter PressIn particular the CIA had subsidised a right-wing conspiratorial Chilean parafascist group - Patria y Libertad, headed by former CIA contacts like Julio Duran - which received special counter-revolutionary training from former French OAS operatives close to the Skorzeny - von Schubert Paladingruppe. These operatives were then part of the Lisbon-based Aginter Press, a cover for a world-wide network of counter- terrorist services, which functioned chiefly out of the old Portuguese colonies. Some of these Aginter operatives, including an American, Jay Sablonsky, had already taken part with former CIA Cubans and U.S. Green Berets in the great Guatemalan counter-terror of 1968-71, when some 50,000 people are estimated to have been killed. Aginter Press operatives were also present in Chile for the September 1973 coup. [102]
The Portuguese coup of April 1974 forced the Aginter Press OAS operatives to abandon Lisbon (and their files) abruptly. Some of these French rightists plotted vainly with right-wing General Spinola against the Portuguese centrists who enjoyed the support of President Ford's State Department. Their strategy envisaged an independent Azores, which would then function as an offshore base for covert operations against the Portuguese mainland and elsewhere.
The plan failed, but not before it had demonstrated the ability of the OAS plotters to establish contacts with the staffs of U.S. Senator, Strom Thurmond, and with a businessman enjoying contacts with the Gambino Mafia family, with the CIA, and with two of the Cuban exiles questioned by a grand jury in connection with the killing of Orlando Letelier. Meanwhile, other Aginter operatives, including their leader Yves Guerin-Serac, had escaped to the Paladingruppe headquarters in Albufereta, Spain, and thence to Caracas, the present headquarters of Orlando Bosch. Their travel was facilitated through fresh passports supplied via the French parallel police (SAC) networks of their long-time collaborator Jacques Foccart. [103]
After Watergate: the Chilean-Cuban Exile AllianceThere is no doubt that the decline and fall of Richard Nixon in 1973-4, along with the flood of revelations which washed him out of office, meant - at least in the short run - a weakening of U.S. support for reaction overseas. After the Chilean bloodbath of September 1973 the tide turned briefly the other way, as a paralysed Washington didnothing to prevent the fall of Caetano in Portugal (April 1974) and of the Greek colonels (July 1974). By early 1976, following the death of Franco in Spain and the Lebanese civil war, it appeared that the organised headquarters of multinational parafascism (Aginter Press and the Paladingruppe) might be driven from the Iberian peninsula to scattered points in Latin America and Africa.
Likewise, the hopes of the Cuban exiles seemed much dimmer after the resignation of the U.S. president who, years before, had arranged for the Bay of Pigs; who had used Artime, the alleged would-be assassin of Castro and Torrijos, to launder the White House Watergate defence money; and whose close friend, Bebe Rebozo, was directly involved with Cuban exiles prominent in both the efforts to reoccupy Cuba and the international narcotics traffic. All through 1976 the FBI and Miami police moved increasingly to crack down on right-wing Cuban terrorism in Miami and elsewhere, especially after the talk in Washington of resuming trade with Cuba.
When a confidential informant told the Miami police that Henry Kissinger might be assassinated during his trip of 1976 to Costa Rica, Orlando Bosch, who was also in Costa Rica on a false Chilean passport from the Chilean intelligence service (DINA), was jailed for the duration of Kissinger's visit. [104] The friend who helped arrange his release, former Bay of Pigs leader, Manuel Artime, could not exercise as much influence back in the United States as in the Nixon era, when he had formed the committee to launder White House money from his other friend, Howard Hunt, to the Cuban Watergate defendants. [105]
With the election of President Carter, the hopes of the Cuban revanchists appeared to have turned definitely from the U.S. government to the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America, above all Chile, Nicaragua and Guatemala. According to former Cuban exile Carlos Rivero Collado, the Chilean-Cuban exile alliance was formed shortly after the Chilean coup of September 1973, when the junta sent one of the representatives of its intelligence network DINA, Eduardo Sepulveda, to be Chilean consul in Miami. Sepulveda quickly contacted Ramiro de la Fe Perez, a Bay of Pigs veteran terrorist leader who once faced Florida charges for piracy. [106] Sepulveda reportedly promised material support for Cuban right-wing terrorism in exchange for help in promoting the junta's image in the United States.
According to Washington Post writer George Crile:
State Department files indicate that the Chileans were offering safe haven, passports and even the use of diplomatic pouches to some Cuban terrorists. One government investigator says that a remote control detonating device, used in the assassination of the exile leader Rolando Masferrer in 1975 [Orlando Bosch's one time room-mate and later enemy], had been brought into the United States in a Chilean diplomatic pouch. [107]
For its part, the Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506 Association, with Nixon gone and their go- between Howard Hunt in jail, gave its first Freedom Award in 1975 to Chilean junta leader, General Pinochet. Meanwhile, at least since 1975, Bosch was drawing money and a false passport supplied by DINA, whose national security advisor, Walter Rauff, was a Nazi war criminal wanted for the murder of 97,000 Jews in gassing vans. Rauff, who escaped via the Vatican monasteries of Bishop Hudal in 1947, became a leading representative of the Skorzeny network in Chile. [108]
In late 1974, junta Ambassador Julio Duran, a long-time CIA contact and organiser of Patria Y Libertad, appeared at a Miami Cuban rally organised by Sepulveda's contact Ramiro de la Fe Perez. [109] One year later junta Ambassador Mario Arnelo, reportedly the organiser of the Chilean Nazi party, appeared on a Union City, New Jersey platform with three persons who would later become prime suspects in the murder of Orlando Letelier; Guillermo Novo, Dionisio Suarez and Alvin Ross. [110] In July 1976 the junta Secretary of Culture attended the Miami congress of the terrorist organisation Alpha 66, one of the most active U.S. participants in the KMT-Gehlen- World Anti-Communist League (WACL).
After the junta's condemnation in 1975 by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights which had been refused permission to enter Chile, and especially after the election of Jimmy Carter, who had made human rights a foreign policy election issue, the United States showed increasing disenchantment with the Chilean junta along with their exile Cuban terrorist proteges. U.S. industry, mindful of a Congressional cut-off of military aid to Chile in 1974, had been slow to risk investing in Chile; and indeed the success of Letelier in dissuading private and public foreign investors and banks is the most frequently cited motive for his assassination.
World Parafascism, Drugs and CrimeIn general, the fall of Nixon and the eventual election of Carter cut off the CIA subsidies to the Right, which does much to explain the recent financing of both West European fascists and Chile's Cuban proteges by criminal activities, including narcotics. In late 1974 Italian Interior Minister Andreotti produced revelations of a tie- in between the followers of MSI leader Prince Borghese (who had recently died after fleeing to Spain) and organised kidnappings and bank robberies of the Italian Mafia (specifically a northern Italian cosca or gang, the so-called 'Anonima Sequestri', headed by the afore-mentioned Luciano Liggio and Tomasso Buscetta). [111]
A similar tie-in between neo-fascism and crime became evident in France in 1976 following two spectacular, probably related crimes. In June 1976, Jean Kay, a Paladingruppe veteran of the Katanga and Biafra independence campaigns, helpedembezzle $1.5 million from the French Mirage jet company, funds which reportedly went to a right-wing organisation with members in Italy, Lebanon, Britain, and elsewhere. [112] One month later, Albert Spaggiari, a veteran of the famous OAS Delta-6 commando of Roger Degueldre, as well as of the Indochina and Algerian campaigns, stole $12 million from a Nice bank which his gang reached through a tunnel from the city sewers. Spaggiari claimed to have given his money to an Italian fascist organisation in Turin called La Catena, which the police could not trace. They did, however, link Spaggiari to "the Turin-based CIDAS group and the French GRECE group, both fascist organisations". [113] Later, the police speculated that Spaggiari's loot, along with the funds extorted by Jean Kay in the assault-de Vathaic blackmail scandal, found their way to the Christian Falangist Party in Lebanon. [114]
In June 1977, as we have already noted, Orlando Bosch's daughter and son-in-law were arrested for attempting to smuggle $200,000 worth of cocaine. There are, moreover, grounds for suspecting an organised connection between the criminal activities of the European neo-fascists and the Cuban exiles. Both Kay and Spaggiari visited Miami in the summer of 1976, where, according to Henrik Kruger and the Journal de Dimanche (September 5 1976), Kay met with Cuban exiles. (The even more suggestive contact between Spaggiari and the CIA, in Miami, will be discussed in a moment.)
International Fascista in ActionOrlando Bosch's most recent umbrella alliance, CORU (Co-ordination of United Revolutionary Organisations) had just been assembled in June 1976. In October 1976, according to Kruger, CORU representatives attended meetings in Barcelona, Spain, which established a new International Fascista. This comprised elements from the Italian MSI (the Ordine Nuovo of Pino Rauti and Giovanni Ventura), Argentine fascists, the hard-liners of the Spanish Falange (the Fuerza Neuva of deputy Blas Pinar), the Cristi Rey Guerillas of the right-wing and anti-Vatican Spanish Catholic Mariano Sanchez Covisa, Cuban exile terrorists, the remnants of Aginter Press (now known as the ELP, or Portuguese Liberation Army, but still headed by OAS veteran Yves Guerin-Serac), and - always according to Kruger - former terrorist agents of the Skorzeny-von Schubert Paladingruppe and of the CIA. [115]
In January and February 1977, according to the New York and London Times, members or associates of the first five groups were arrested by Spanish police for theirrole in six terrorist murders designed to prevent the forthcoming Spanish general election. Noting the persistent stories in the Spanish press (particularly the liberal El Pais) "of the so-called Fascist International", the New York Times reported the arrest of the Argentine fascist Jorge Cesarsky, linked to both the Fuerza Nueva and to "the right-wing Peronism", and later of his colleague Carlos Perez, a Cuban exile. [116] Cesarsky is said to have been a member of the Argentina AAA (Alianza Anticommunista de Argentina) and the next day a new Spanish AAA (Alianza Anticomunista Apostolica) claimed responsibility for his crime. [117] He was detained as part of a group of twenty-four rightists reported to be of at least six nationalities, including seven Argentines and three Cubans. [118]
Mariano Sanchez Covisa was also arrested twice by police in this period - first with Cesarsky, and one month later with a group of eight Italians. One of these was Giancarlo Rognoni, convicted for his role in an attempt to blow up the Turin-Rome express; this plot, according to Italian left-wing sources, had been financed by the Ordine Nuovo-Giovanni Ventura group, at that time in touch with the Greek KYP agent Costas Plevris. [119]
All of this multinational neo-fascist violence in Spain appeared at first to be mirroring comparable violence on the left by the so-called GRAPO (First of October Anti- Fascist Resistance), to which the New York Times, at first, devoted much attention. But, in mid-January a high Spanish official suggested that GRAPO's Maoist appearance might cloak a right-wing agenda; the London Times later noted its links to a party (the PCER, or Reconstructed Spanish Communist Party), which had been heavily infiltrated by the Spanish police. [120]
The New York Times tended to downplay the right-wing killings, or what it called "the machinations of the so-called Fascist International", as a "last gasp" - albeit violent - before elections in which the right-wing knew it would do badly. (It is true that violence in Spain has subsided since the 1977 elections; but it is also true that fears of right-wing terrorism in Portugal and other parts of Europe have increased.) The New York Times index, which often appears to have been sanitised by the CIA's (or DEA's) computers, considers Communism worth of an Index entry, but not fascism. To my knowledge, the Times has not, in recent years, printed any investigative story on international fascism: it is no longer the paper that dared to note, back in 1923, the almost certainly accurate reports that an obscure German thug called Adolph Hitler was being secretly financed by Henry Ford. [121] It did, however, transmit the intriguing and (I believe) highly significant detail that the Spanish AAA behind the Argentine Cesarsky and the Cuban Carlos Perez "has supporters in Argentina and South Korea". [122] Like the Greek junta, the Park regime has taken steps throughout the world to ensure that it will never be isolated in its authoritarianism.
World Parafascism and the U.S. Chile LobbySouth Korea, since the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, is perhaps the most conspicuous example of a nation whose existence and survival are directly attributed to U.S. support. This does not, of course, mean that every political act is somehow under U.S. control - as Kennedy and Eisenhower learned in their painful travails of Ngo dinh Diem and Syngham Ree. But in certain respects both the government and the economy of South Korea are less powerful, and less relevant to that nation's survival, than the South Korean lobby in Washington.
That such a situation was true of South Vietnam became evident in 1975. Saigon's fall in that year was not attributable to internal political or economic developments: there the situation continued as before to be "hopeless but not serious". The collapse followed the realisation that the once intransigent Vietnam lobby in Washington - which, as we shall see in a moment, was largely continuous with the China Lobby of the 1950s and the South Korean Lobby of the 1970s - no longer regarded South Vietnam as a crucial priority.
In like manner, in 1977, the survival of the para-fascist terrorist groups or 'assets' like the Aginter Press-OAS and CORU-Cubans is less a function of their own criminal resources than of their 'protection' in high places - above all Washington.
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