-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Inside The League
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson�1986
Dodd, Mead & Company
79 Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN 0-396-08517-2
322pps �out-of-print/one edition
[in print/first edition available from:
W. Clement Stone, P M A Communications, Incorporated]
--[1]--
I
Inside The League
ONE
We maintain that the freedom-loving peoples must work in close cooperation to
overcome the evil force of communism and strengthen their unity to expand the
sphere of freedom.
Preamble to the WACL Charter
THE EVENING CROWDS on Calle Atocha on January 23, 1977, had already thinned
by nine-thirty. Tourists, who never frequented that middle-class shopping
street in the heart of Madrid, were inside the cafes in Plaza Mayor or
strolling along the ornate Gran Via. By ten o'clock, the Madrilenios had
joined them. Calle Atocha was virtually deserted. At ten-fifteen, no one
noticed the two young men in long coats on the corner.
Jose Fernandez Cerra casually gazed up and down the four-lane street. The
movie at Cine Consulado hadn't let out yet, but he noted with satisfaction
that the shops�the little place at number 42 that sold watches, the Icartua
stationery store, the photo kiosk�were all closed. Only the lights of the El
Globo bar showed activity, but even there the waiters were mopping the
floors. Just beyond El Globo was the stairway leading down to the Metro
station and, in the little triangle of grass and sidewalks and park benches
that were the Plaza San Martin, the large illuminated clock said it was
ten-twenty. Jose gazed at the building before him: number 55 Calle Atocha.
It was a dreary five-story building. The ground floor was occupied by a
branch of the Banco Hispano Americano, dark and shuttered at this hour. The
second floor was of the same drab concrete, the large windows giving onto
small balconies enclosed by wrought-iron grills. The top three floors were of
brick, alternating red and white, giving it a reticulated effect. Most of the
rooms were dark, with shutters pulled tight, but not the apartment Jose was
watching. On the third floor, light shone through the slats and voices were
heard. Jose walked to the entrance and Carlos Garcia Julia followed.
The green front doors were open, and the two men ignored the intercom system.
They had expected the doors to be locked�after all, 1977 was a violent time
in Spain. Their luck held as they crossed the foyer and started up the
stairs, passing the small window of the sleeping watchman's room. They walked
softly up the creaking wooden stairs, keeping close to the wall where the
boards had a firmer foundation. The stairs wound their way around an open
elevator. Its ropes and pulleys looked ancient, but it wasn't for safety
reasons that Jose and Carlos had opted to walk.
They reached the second floor, passed the closed door of a pension,
and continued up into the darkness. They stood outside the oak door on the
third floor and waited for their eyes to adjust to the weak light, the sole
illumination coming from the glow of the dirty sky-light one floor above.
Carlos stuck his hands into his coat pockets as Jose rang the buzzer.
The eight men and one woman in the room fell silent at the sound of the
buzzer. The lawyers�some communists, some merely liberal, all active in labor
law�were having a reunion of sorts, and their number was complete�they had no
idea who could be arriving at this late hour. Maria Dolores Gonzalez Ruis
rose from her chair and left the smoke-filled front room.
As soon as the bolt was lifted, Jose and Carlos burst through the door. Maria
Dolores fell silent upon seeing the pistol aimed at her head. Following their
hushed orders, she led the two intruders into the conference room.
"Get against the wall!" Jose shouted at the stunned men.
"What's going on?" one of the lawyers demanded as they stood against the
white wall. "What do you want?"
Neither Carlos nor Jose answered.
With the eight men and Maria Dolores facing the wall, Carlos took the safety
off his gun. Jose turned to him and nodded. Carlos started at the left, Jose
at the right, each working toward the center, as they carefully put a bullet
into the back or head of each of the nine occupants of apartment three.
As the bodies fell, the intruders reloaded and bred into the heap. The room
became thick with gunpowder. The screams of shock turned into moans of pain
and the deep wheeze of the dying. Carlos and Jose calmly put away their guns,
stepped out onto the staircase into the chaos of half-dressed residents
awakened by the gunfire, descended to the street, and disappeared.
Jozo Damjanovic was a man driven by one consuming passion, and he had carried
it with him from Europe to South America: to find officials of the
Yugoslavian government and kill them.
A fanatical Croatian nationalist, Damjanovic had dedicated his life to a
deadly war against the Tito regime, which had incorporated his homeland into
the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Damjanovic had been one of a
group of terrorists who had stormed the Yugoslav Embassy in Stockholm in 1971
and killed two diplomats. After a brief stint in a Swedish jail, other
Croatian terrorists had hijacked a plane and won their freedom. Damjanovic
and his cohorts had then gone underground to Spain, eluding Interpol and
various European police agencies for three months. In July 1973, they had
found their savior in the form of General Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator of
the South American country of Paraguay.
Stroessner was in West Germany visiting his ancestral home of Hof when
contact with him was made by the Croatian fugitives. They were on the run,
the Paraguayan strongman was told, and needed a safe asylum. Stroessner, a
longtime guardian of Nazis and right-wing terrorists, readily agreed.
Damjanovic and eight others were given safe passage to Paraguay, where they
were put to work training Stroessner's secret police and personal bodyguard
squad.
That had been three years ago, and the Croatians chafed under their isolation
from the front lines of their war with Yugoslavia. As international
fugitives, however, they could not risk returning to Europe. In 1976, they
decided to strike in the only avenue open to them-locally. The new
Yugoslavian ambassador to Paraguay seemed an appropriate target, one whose
assassination would put the hated Titoists on notice that the Croatians had
not disappeared.
This was the reason why Jozo Damjanovic was waiting on a Streetcorner in
Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, on June 15, 1976. Seeing the black
limousine making its way through the traffic, he removed his pistol from its
holster, tucked it under his arm, and waited.
Carlos Abdala, the new Uruguayan ambassador to Paraguay, looked out the
window of his limousine at the main shopping street of the capital. He was
getting used to Paraguay, though Asuncion had none of the excitement or
cosmopolitan flavor of Montevideo, the capital of his homeland. It was really
more of an overgrown cow town; its few tall buildings and fancy shops gave
way to slums and shantytowns and then to the great flat expanse of pampas
that made up most of Paraguay.
StiII, it was a safe assignment. There was virtually no crime in Paraguay,
except for that which was sanctioned by the government of Alfredo Stroessner.
Paraguay was the smuggling and black-market hub of South America, but there
was no murder or rape or anti-state activities to speak of. As his limousine
pulled to the curb and the chauffeur jumped out to open the door, the
ambassador really had nothing to fear as far as his personal security was
concerned.
Which is why Carlos Abdala, stepping from the car, was probably more
surprised than frightened by the burly young man who stepped toward him with
an upraised pistol.
"Freedom for Croatia!" Jozo Damjanovic shouted before firing the bullet that
ended the life of Ambassador Abdala.
Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Ana, stepped from the taxi on Via Aurelia in
Rome and, gathering up their shopping bags, walked toward the entrance of
their apartment building. They didn't see the young man who had awaited their
return and who now fell into step behind them.
It was October 6, 1975. Bernardo Leighton was sixty-six years old and an
exile from his native Chile. A cofounder of the Chilean Christian Democratic
Party and leader of its most liberal branch, he had fled his homeland two
years earlier after the bloody coup that overthrew the elected leftist
government of Salvador Allende. During his exile in Rome, he stayed active in
his opposition to the right-wing military government of General Augusto
Pinochet. Because he maintained contact with liberal political forces within
Chile and was a respected voice in the international brotherhood of Christian
Democrats, Leighton worried the Chilean government, and some months earlier
they had decided to silence him.
Getting rid of the politician presented a logistical problem. Although it was
an international pariah after the savagery of the 1973 coup, the Pinochet
government had been slowly achieving, if not respect, at least recognition,
in other capitals, and it just would not do for it to be known that this
government was in the habit of murdering its opposition in other countries.
The assassination of Leighton was therefore to be a contract job.
The young man with the handlebar moustache three feet behind the Christian
Democrat pulled out a 9-mm Beretta, pointed it at the politician's head, and
pulled the trigger. Bernardo Leighton pitched face forward on the sidewalk.
Ana stared in shock at her fallen husband until she too was shot in the back.
The gunman hesitated for a moment, debating whether to administer the coup de
grace with a couple of close-range shots to their heads- deciding they were
already dead or dying, he turned and fled.
Bernardo survived his massive head wound and recovered. Ana was partially
paralyzed and remains in a wheelchair. Their attacker was not immediately
identified, and no arrest was made. Four days later, the Cuban Nationalist
Movement, a right-wing Cuban exile group in New Jersey, took credit for the
shootings; they imparted details that the Italian police said only the
assailiant could have known. Why a group of anti-communist Cubans in the
United States would want to kill a liberal Chilean in Italy was a question
that wouldn't be answered for some time.
In March 1979, Manuel Colom Argueta, leader of Guatemala's United
Revolutionary Front (FUR) political party, gave an interview in which he
frankly described the political scene in his country. Although it was
reformist, despite its name the FUR was hardly revolutionary. From a wealthy
landowner family, Manuel Colom was a liberal democrat who sought to push his
policies�land reform, dissolution of the oligarchy, curbing of human-rights
abuses�through participation in whatever semblance of democracy existed in
Guatemala. Just a few days before the interview, Colom's party had received
the government permission necessary to campaign in the upcoming elections.
Shortly thereafter, he received a call from a friend of his in the
ultra-right party, the National Liberation Movement (MLN).
"Quit, Manuel the man told him, "if you don't, they're going to finish you."
But Manuel Colom had been battling the Guatemalan institutions of fraudulent
elections, death squads, and political assassinations for too long to stop
then. Even the threat from the MLN, which was blamed for organizing the
nation's death squads and for carrying out a two-decade campaign of terror,
did not dissuade him.
"Mario Sandoval Alarcon," he said in the interview, referring to the head of
the MLN, "is a buffoon straight out of the middle ages. The army uses him a
lot, but he also knows how to use the army.... He knows how to blackmail the
army.... He wants to polarize the political struggle, to make himself and his
movement indispensable as 'bastions against communism.' "[1]
At eight o'clock on March 22, Manuel Colom left his home in Zone 15 in
Guatemala City and headed for his office downtown. He had been taking
different routes from his home to the office for safety reasons, but he
apparently didn't notice the helicopter that followed him that morning.
He worked in his office until about ten-fifteen, when, glancing out at the
normally busy Calle 5, he noticed that the street was virtually deserted. It
was a familiar sight in Guatemala, this prelude to an assassination, and
Manuel reacted quickly. Getting on the phone, he called his political
contacts in Guatemala's various political parties.
"Who is it for?" he asked each of them.
No one knew or would tell until he reached his contact in the MLN.
"It's for you, Manuel."
Colom descended to the alley and climbed behind the wheel of a car while his
bodyguards piled into another. They raced out the building's back entrance
and managed to speed past one roadblock before the bodyguards' car careened
and crashed, riddled with machine-gun fire.
Alone, Manuel raced through the city and reached the airport road. On the
straight stretch, though, he looked back to see motorcycles gaining on him.
One of them, carrying two men, caught up and came abreast. The passenger drew
out a machine pistol, aimed it at the head of the FUR leader, and squeezed
the trigger. Manuel Colom was dead, one more of the thousands of Guatemalans
to fall victim to the right-wing death squads and political assassins in 1979.
When the U. S. ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, walked into the
auditorium housing the thirteenth annual conference of the World
Anti-Communist League in Asuncion, Paraguay, on April 24, 1979, he was not
warmly received. The ambassador, who several years later would achieve fame
and notoriety for his outspoken opposition to American policies in El
Salvador ' was an unexpected visitor to the conference, and when the
participants caught sight of him, the proceedings came to a virtual halt.
What Robert White had intruded upon was a meeting of the leaders of
conservative movements from around the world. Government ministers were
present, as were religious leaders and notable conservatives from the United
States. It was, by outward appearances, a polite gathering of
anti-communists, dedicated to fighting totalitarianism and communist
expansion from around the world. But it was in fact another meeting of the
organization that unites and gives a common front to the most brutal and
deadly extremists to be found anywhere.
Among those attending was Blas Pinar, the leader of the Spanish political
party, Fuerza Nueva. Two members of his organization had gunned down the nine
lawyers on Calle Atocha in 1977. Nearby was the aging, mustachioed Giorgio
Almirante, leader of Italy's fascist MSI party, it was Pierlugi Concutelli, a
member of the youth wing of the MSI, and not Cuban exiles, who had shot
Bernardo Leighton and his wife on the streets of Rome four years before.
Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the head of Guatemala's MLN, the political party
responsible for institutionalizing the death squads that had killed Manuel
Colom, was a distinguished main speaker. And somewhere around the conference
hall, seeing to the safety of conference chairman President Alfredo
Stroessner 7 was Jozo Damjanovic, the assassin of Carlos Abdala.
pps.1-9
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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