-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Great Heroin Coup - Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism
Henrik Kruger
Jerry Meldon, Translator
South End Press©1980
Box 68 Astor Station
Boston, MA 02123
ISBN 0-89608-0319-5
240pps - one edition - out-of-print
Orginally published in Danish
Smukke Serge og Heroien
Bogan 1976
--[21]--
TWENTY-THREE
THE MIAMI CONSPIRACY
Early in 1980 Alan Pringle, head of the DEA's Miami office, told an
Associated Press reporter that Miami banks constitute "the Wall Street" of
the drug dealers. To the reader of this book that should come as no surprise.
Nor should Patrice Chairoff's claim to me that Miami was the main station of
the Fascist front organization, World Service. Yet the significance of Miami
in the netherworld of international fascism remains one of America's better
kept secrets.
In June 1976 Herve de Vathaire, the financial director for Mirage jet
manufacturer Marcel Dassault, spent a week in Miami together with soldier of
fortune Jean Kay of Spain's neo-Fascist Paladin group.[1] While there they
had several meetings with Cuban exiles. Upon their return to France the two
disappeared with over $1.5 million in aircraft corporation funds. It was then
reported that the money went to support Christian Falangists fighting in
Lebanon, but some French observers believe it financed two great French bank
robberies.
On the weekend of 17-18 July 1976, twenty men set out on an expedition
through the sewers of Nice to the Societe Generale Bank. There they stole
upwards of $10 million. When the robbery's mastermind, Albert Spaggiari, was
arrested that October, he fingered La Catena, cover name for a coalition of
Spanish and Italian Fascists, the Paladin group in particular. Most of the
take went to finance their operations.
A second sewer heist was executed in August 1976, this time at the Societe
Generale Paris branch on Ile Saint-Louis. The amount was $5 million.
Immediately after the Nice heist, Spaggiari travelled to the U.S. and
contacted the CIA. According to a confidential source, he had also been in
Miami shortly before the heist. The French Le Point and L'Aurore reported
that the agency was compelled to pass on its information about Spaggiari to
French authorities.
In early 1977, Spanish police arrested Jorge Cesarsky of Argentina's Fascist
terror organization, the AAA, and Carlos Perez, a Miami-based Cuban exile, in
connection with a string of murders of young Spanish leftists. According to
the Spanish daily El Pais, Perez and a large number of other Cuban exiles
were in Spain as part of a newly created Fascist International.[2]
In 1976 OAS and Aginter Press terrorist Jean-Denis Raingeard was in the
United States seeking the support of such right wing leaders as Senator Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina for an OAS coup in the Azores in the wake of
Portugal's left wing military revolution. The coup, if successful, would
bring a rightist government and U.S. control over the militarily strategic
Atlantic archipelago. According to an FBI investigation of Raingeard, on 19
November 1969 the Bureau had sent Portuguese police a questionnaire on his
connection to an OAS front (Aginter Press). The questions concerned a prior
Raingeard trip to Miami, during which he had a run-in with the law. When
asked about Raingeard's troubles, the State Department's Portugal desk
officer in 1975, William Kelly, said: "I would prefer not to address the
question of the French Connection."[3]
What are European Fascists doing in Miami before and after major operations?
Why are Miami-based Cuban exiles executing contracts on young Spaniards? Why
was the main station of the CIA-supported Fascist front World Service in
Miami? Why did bank robber Spaggiari contact the CIA in the United States?
Miami is the center of a huge conspiratorial milieu whose personnel wind
through the Bay of Pigs, attempts on Castro's life, the JFK murder and the
great heroin coup, and which is now reaching out with a vengeance to Latin
America and Europe.
To trace the roots of this milieu we must refer to the immediate aftermath of
World War II, when the CIA began its close cooperation with Adolf Hitler's
espionage chief, Reinhard Gehlen, and the Soviet general, Andrei Vlassov, of
Russia's secret anti-Communist spy network. Vlassov's organization was
absorbed into Gehlen's, which evolved into a European subsidiary of the CIA.
U.S. and German agents mingled in Berlin and West Germany, paving the way for
inroads into U.S. intelligence by former Nazis, SS agents, and Russian
czarists.
Headquarters of the CIA/Gehlen/Vlassov combine, staffed in the mid-fifties by
4000 full-time agents, were in Pullach, near Munich.[4] There Gehlen sang to
the tune of more than one piper, having remained in touch with the old Nazi
hierarchy relocated in Latin America, whose coordinator, Otto Skorzeny, was
in Spain. Skorzeny had infiltrated the Spanish intelligence agency DGS, and
effectively controlled it single-handedly.
With the onset of the Cold War, Gehlen's agents were recruited by the CIA for
assignments in the United States, Latin America and Africa. One agent,
reportedly, was Frank Bender, allegedly alias Fritz Swend, a key figure in the
Bay of Pigs invasion.[5]
U.S. historian Carl Oglesby sees the origin of much of the CIA's later
sinister record in the alliances it forged almost immediately upon its birth,
with the Gehlen/Vlassov organization and, through Operation Underworld, with
the Lansky crime syndicate: "Everything after this [the Gehlen alliance], on
top of Operation Underworld, was probably just a consequence of this merger.
How can a naive, trusting, democratic republic give its secrets to crime and
its innermost ear to the spirit of Central European fascism and expect not to
see its Constitution polluted, its traditions abused, and its consciousness
of the surrounding world manipulated ultimately out of all realistic
shape."[6]
Well put. Moreover, it is ironical that Europe's contribution to U.S. fascism
is now returning home and threatening the continent in a conspiracy supported
by U.S. economic and clandestine forces. The forces Oglesby speaks of were
united during and after the Bay of Pigs affair, and their bedfellows were big
businessmen with their own private interests. The merger was toasted in Miami.
The Bay of Pigs invasion itself was not the most important phase in the
development. That was CIA Station JM/Wave and its Operation 40, the agency's
secret war on Cuba from the summer of 1961 until the end of 1965 -four years
during which a truly conspiratorial powerhouse was forged in Miami. Station
JM/ Wave was unique in the annals of the CIA, as attested to by then Deputy
Director of Intelligence Ray S. Cline: "It was a real anomaly. It was run as
if it were in a foreign country, yet most of our agents were in the state of
Florida.
People just overlooked the fact that it was a domestic operation."[7]
With the start of its secret war, the new station became the agency's largest
and the command post for its anti-Castro operations worldwide. Its annual
budget of $50-100 million financed the activities of 300 permanent employees,
most of them case officers who controlled an additional several thousand
Cuban exile operatives. Each major CIA station had at least one case officer
assigned to Cuban operations who ultimately reported to Miami. In Europe all
Cuban matters were routed through the Frankfurt station, which in turn
reported to JM/Wave.
JM/Wave covered anything and everything Cuban, wherever in the world it might
be. Cuban representatives were shadowed in Japan, and a Cuban exile-led
commando unit was sent to Helsinki to sabotage the 1962 International
Socialist Youth Conference.[8] As JM/ Wave was closing down in 1967, the
agency sent another team of saboteurs to France to contaminate a shipment of
lubricant bound for Cuba with a bacterial substance developed under its
mind-control project, MK-ULTRA. When poured in oil, it would ruin motors and
other machines.[9]
I mention these scattered incidents only to elucidate the situation around
the October 1965 murder of the exiled Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben
Barka in Paris. Ben Barka must have been JM/Wave's number two target after
Fidel Castro between the fall of 1963 and the end of 1965. Castro in 1963 had
asked Ben Barka to arrange the first Tricontinental Congress, which was to be
held in Cuba in January 1966. The conference, aimed at Third World solidarity
against U.S. imperialism and support for Castro and Cuba, would signal a
major setback for JM/Wave and the CIA's plans for Latin America, where all
the agency's major operations in the 1962-66 JM/Wave era were focussed.
In 1963 the agency masterminded a revolution in Honduras, another in the
Dominican Republic, and a third in Guatemala. In 1964 it assisted in General
Branco's military coup in Brazil. In 1965 the Special Forces joined U.S.
Marines in suppressing civil war in the Dominican Republic, and in 1966 the
CIA aided and abetted Colonel Ongania's military coup in Argentina.
Cuba was an especially hot number in 1965. Led by JM/Wave personnel, the CIA
had planned a new invasion of the island to follow one of its attempts to
assassinate Castro. The planners included Howard Hunt and James McCord.[10]
Unlike the Bay of Pigs invasion, this time the agency was offering leadership
in addition to training and financing. However, one by-product of the 1965
intervention in the Dominican Republic was the aborting of the plan to invade
Cuba.
The CIA, station JM/Wave in particular, must have been anxious to know Ben
Barka's plans for the Tricontinental Congress, and to sabotage them if
possible. And time was running out after Ben Barka's September 1965 visit
with Castro. Thus the key to solving the Ben Barka murder case appears to lie
with three men: JM/Wave chief Theodore Shackley, Morocco station chief Robert
Wells, and the head of the CIA station in Frankfurt.[11] CIA contract agent
Fernand Legros is also known to have associated with Ben Barka in Geneva —
the same Legros who frequented Miami, the Bahamas, and other spots in the
Caribbean.[12]
When JM/Wave was dismantled, Shackley and his staff left Miami for Laos,
leaving behind a highly trained army of 6000 fanatically anti-Communist
Cubans allied to organized crime and powerful elements of the U.S. far Right.
In 1966, following the Tricontinental Congress which proceeded without Ben
Barka, a counterfront, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), was chartered
in Seoul, South Korea by hardline reactionaries from the world over. That
same year Aginter Press, sponsored by WACL and the intelligence agencies of
the United States, France, and Portugal, was created in Lisbon as a cover for
OAS terrorists and other European Fascists. Led by the Frenchman Yves
Guerin-Serac, its aim was the subversion, through espionage, sabotage and
murder, of all that the Tricontinental. Congress had stood for.[13]
In that same period Cuban exile activist organizations sprouted all over
Miami's Little Havana. They spawned, in turn, terrorist subgroups like Alfa
66 and Omega 7, whose more notorious leaders -Guillermo and Ignazio Novo,
Orlando Bosch, and Nasario Sergen -had all been trained by the CIA. Between
1965 and 1971 they staged sporadic acts of sabotage and assassinations, with
Guillermo Novo repeatedly arrested only to be released each time. Cubans,
terrorists among them, were also being paid by Santo Trafficante and the
Syndicate to help spin their intricate U.S. narcotics web. And they also
found the time for dirty tricks on behalf of Richard Nixon and his White
House staff.
However, incidents like Operation Eagle of 1970—when the BNDD rounded up
Cuban exile drug traffickers and found many to have been trained by the
CIA—had made the Cubans an increasing embarrassment to the agency. As the
seventies began the CIA's Cubans had become an angry, confused, and divided
lot, who felt betrayed by their former employer. Still, they experienced a
comeback midway through 1971, when the powers-that-be, CREEP in the fore,
again sought their services. And in 1973, with the military in power in
Chile, they found a new employer in the ruthless Chilean secret police, DINA.
Other dictators south of the border have since followed suit.
In 1974-75 a reign of terror struck Miami's Cuban community as opponents of
Orlando Bosch were liquidated.[14] The campaign continued well into 1976,
during which Miami was rocked by over 700 bombings.[15] And that year there
was a notable upsurge in Cuban exile activity beyond the territorial U.S.
On April 6 two Cuban fishing boats were attacked and destroyed, and one
fisherman was killed. On April 22, a bomb exploded at Cuba's Lisbon embassy,
killing two and seriously wounding several others.
In June 1976 in the Dominican Republic town of Bonao, the Cuban Action
Movement, Cuban National Liberation Front, Brigade 2506, F-14 and the Cuban
Nationalist Movement merged as Bosch's Coordination of United Revolutionary
Organizations (CORU).[16]
On July 5 a bomb exploded at the office of Cuba's UN delegation. On July 9
another went off at Kingston airport in Jamaica, in baggage about to be
loaded onto a Havana-bound Cuban flight. The next day there was an explosion
at the Bridgetown, Barbados office of British West Indian Airways, which also
represented Cubana de Aviacion.
On July 17 bombs went off in the Cuban airline office and embassy in Bogota,
Colombia. On July 23 a Cuban technician was killed in Merida, Mexico trying
to stop the abduction of the Cuban attache. On August 9 terrorists kidnapped
two diplomats assigned to the Cuban embassy in Buenos Aires. On August 18 a
bomb exploded at the Cubana de Aviacion office in Panama.
On September 21 Chile's former Secretary of State, Orlando Letelier, and his
coworker Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed in Washington when a bomb decimated
their car. On October 6 yet another explosion gutted a Cuban airliner off
Barbados, killing seventy-three. On November 7 one exploded at the Cubana de
Aviacion office in Madrid. Finally, on November 9 kidnappers seized an
Argentine employee of the Buenos Aires Cuban embassy.
Orlando Bosch's army of anti-Castro Cuban terrorists was responsible for all
these acts. When the Cuban airliner went down, Bosch himself was arrested in
Venezuala.
But the extremists had not waited until 1976 to take part in international
terrorist operations. In 1975 one hundred anti-Castro Cubans joined European
Fascists in the Army for the Liberation of Portugal (ELP). From neighboring
Spain, the ELP -whose core comprised Aginter Press OAS veterans -attempted to
overthrow Portugal's progressive military regime.[17]
The 1975 attempt in Rome on the life of Chilean Christian Democratic Party
leader Bernardo Leighton was a joint action of DINA, the youth wing of the
Italian Fascist party, MSI, and anti-Castro Cubans.[18] The 1976 murder of
Letelier and Moffit, a DINA/CORU job, was planned in Miami. Four of the five
Cubans involved in it were CIA veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.[19] The
Leighton attempt and Letelier murder were each coordinated by the
American/Chilean DINA agent, Michael Townley.
The common denominator in CORU, as well as Internacional Fascista—a combine
of anti-Communist extremist organizations chartered at an October 1976
meeting in Rome attended by CORU representatives[20]— appears to have been
the CIA, or at least a faction thereof. CORU's headquarters are in Miami.
Originally, it was sustained by tight collaboration with the CIA and the
Chilean junta's secret police. According to the Cuban former CIA agent Manuel
d'Armas, the CIA coordinated DINA's acts with CORU's, and supplied the latter
with funds, advisors and explosives. The head of DINA's Miami-based force was
reportedly Eduardo Sepulveda, the Chilean attache in Miami and a top dog in
DINA.[21]
Internacional Fascista is the outgrowth of many years of planning in Madrid
by the late Nazi, Otto Skorzeny, who in the fifties had worked for the CIA.
On its rolls are former SS agents, OAS terrorists, hatchet men for Portugal's
dreaded secret police (PIDE), terrorists from Spain's Fuerza Nueva, Argentine
and Italian Fascists, Cuban exiles, French gangsters from SAC, and former CIA
agents hardened by terror campaigns in Operation 40, Guatemala, Brazil, and
Argentina.
Besides CORU, Internacional Fascista's militants have at various times
numbered the Army for the Liberation of Portugal (ELP) and its Aginter Press
contingent under Yves Guerin-Serac; the Italian Ordine Nuovo led by Salvatore
Francia and Pierluigi Concutelli; Spain's Guerillas of Christ the King,
Associacion Anticomunista Iberica and Alianza Anticomunista Apostolica (AAA),
which is not to be confused with the Argentine AAA that is also represented
in Internacional Fascista; and the Paladin group.
SS Colonel Skorzeny was the kingpin of the Paladin mercenary group until his
death in 1975.[22] Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, formerly of Joseph
Goebbels' propaganda ministry, was its operating manager.[23] Headquartered
in Albufera, Spain,[24] its actual nerve centers were Skorzeny's
Export-Import offices and cover firm M.C. located at a Madrid address shared
with a front for the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE under Colonel Eduardo
Blanco,[25] and also an office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.[26]
The cozy relationship of Spanish right wing terrorists with U.S. and Spanish
intelligence is further underlined by the SCOE's purchase in the
mid-seventies of WerBell's silenced M10 machine pistols, prior to which the
ideal terrorist weapon had been unavailable in Europe.[27] Shortly
thereafter, the M10 turned up in the hands of Spanish and Italian
terrorists.[28]
A melange of former OAS and SAC figures, and West German rightist activists
and mercenaries, Paladin joined terrorist actions in Europe, Africa, Latin
America, and even Southeast Asia. Along with Italian Fascists, Paladin is
responsible for the 17 December 1973 bombing of Rome's Fiumicino airport
which claimed thirty-two lives.[29] On behalf of the Spanish government
Paladin kidnapped and murdered leaders of the Basque ETA and in 1974-76
engineered some fifty bombings in Basque country.
Paladin's bankrollers included Skorzeny's weapons empire and Libyan
head-of-state Moammer Qadaffi.[30] The Skorzeny-controlled World Armco, with
main offices in Paris, was registered in the name of Paladin manager von
Schubert.[31] Upon the death of Skorzeny in 1975, von Schubert moved to
Argentina, but returned six months later to reorganize. In the spring of 1976
he raised eyebrows with a want ad in the International Herald Tribune for a
pilot, navigator, captain, three demolitions experts, two camouflage experts,
two specialists in Vietnamese, and two in Chinese. Applicants were directed
to a Paladin office in Spain.
Internacional Fascista was a crucial first step toward fulfilling the dream
not only of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid exile, Jose
Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese,
the Italian Fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the
hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA
counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.[32] They, and other Nazi and
Fascist powers throughout Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world
order built on a Fascist Iron Circle linking Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, La
Paz, Brasilia and Montevideo.
In 1973 their goal seemed near. Chile's President Allende had been
overthrown. Peron had regained the Argentine presidency after seventeen years
of exile. Hugo Banzer was still in control in Bolivia, as was Alfredo Stroessn
er in Paraguay, and other right wing military regimes ruled Brazil and
Uruguay. When he returned to Argentina, Peron brought with him Lopez Rega as
an advisor. The latter would wield great influence over both the aging
president and his wife Isabel, and import hatchet men from Spain to help the
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) slaughter the Argentine Left.
In 1976, however, Fascist plans suffered a setback. Isabel Peron, who had
succeeded her late husband, was ousted from office and Lopez Rega was chased
out of Argentina.[33] Argentina's contingent of international terrorists then
followed Lopez Rega back to Spain, and were joined there by several of their
Argentine colleagues, among them Commissioner Morales and Colonel
Navarra.[34] Portugal's revolution, and the liberation of Mozambique and
Angola that followed, further complicated the Fascist game plan. However,
Third World terrorist actions continued.
In 1976 a seven-man Fascist commando group dispatched from Spain was arrested
in Algeria following an act of sabotage. Its leader identified himself as
Aurelio Bertin. In truth he was Jay S. Sablonsky, a native Philadelphian also
known as Jay Salby.[35] Another member of the unit disclosed that he had
contacted it in Madrid through one Gille Maxwell, an American working for a
real estate agency run by the former U.S. Air Force colonel August Woltz.[36]
Salby was a ringleader of Aginter Press, and later the ELP.[37] Together with
Guerin-Serac and other Euro-Fascists, he had worked for the CIA in Guatemala
from 1968 to 1971 in the unprecedented terror campaign which followed the
August 1968 assassination of U.S. ambassador Gordon Mein.[38] The campaign,
allegedly set in motion by Mein's successor Nathaniel Davis, was modelled
after Vietnam's Phoenix program. It afforded an early glimpse at the teamwork
of European Fascists with Miami-based, CIA-trained Cuban exiles. According to
Amnesty International, some 30,000 people were either killed or disappeared
in Guatemala in the decade beginning in 1962, the worse of it coming in
1970-71.[39]]
A later-released FBI document revealed that Salby and former OAS terrorist
Raingeard (mentioned at the start of this chapter) had been in Miami in 1969,
on leave from participating in mass murder in Guatemala.[40] Correspondence
in 1971 from Aginter Press leader Serac to Sablonsky is addressed to Jay
Salby, Seaboard Holding Corp., 1451 NE Bayshore, Miami.[41] Raingeard again
shuttled between Miami and Guatemala in late 1973.[42]
As to Ambassador Davis, he moved on to bigger things in Chile.[43] A
terrorist contingent which would train commandos for the Chilean Fascist
party, Patria y Libertad (whose co-leader was reportedly Davis's next-door
neighbor), followed soon on his heels from Guatemala. After a coup d'etat
replaced Salvador Allende with Augusto Pinochet's military junta, some
terrorists moved on to Argentina, while others, Salby among them, rejoined
Aginter Press in Portugal.
As Fascist terror then struck Europe, Davis became the U.S. ambassador in
Bern, Switzerland. By coincidence, DINA's chief of foreign operations, Pedro
Ewing, set up an office in the same city. The southern European Left, most
vocally the Italians, then protested repeatedly against the presence of
Davis, who was regarded as a coordinator of the terror. Eventually he was
relegated to the happy hunting ground of the foreign service, the Naval War
College in Newport, Rhode Island.
In 1976-77 Internacional. Fascista made its presence felt often in Europe.
West Germany's Fascist and neo-Nazi groups doubled. After Spain and Italy,
though, it was in France that the Fascists were most industrious, with the
old standbys from SAC assuming a new role. When 7000 SAC agents were fired in
1972-73, many joined Fascist groups in Spain -Paladin in particular.
Paladin's OAS contingent let bygones be bygones.[44]
What has made sleuth work difficult is Internacional Fascista's attempts to
camouflage itself as an arm of the Left. When General Joaquin Zenteno Anaya,
Bolivia's ambassador to France, was shot down in Paris in May 1976, a caller
to the police claimed the Che Guevara Brigade had murdered him to avenge the
1967 capture of Guevara in Bolivia. An eyewitness, moreover, claimed to have
recognized the assailant as the infamous left wing terrorist Carlos, However,
one month later the Nouvel Observateur reported that the assassination had
been planned at Madrid's Consulade Hotel by Bolivian intelligence agent
Saavedra and three terrorists from the Paladin group. Furthermore, inspection
of Zenteno Anaya's politics revealed his opposition to Bolivian President
Banzer, and allegiance to ex-President Torres, whose murder in Argentina
followed shortly after Zenteno's. Then it was the turn of former Chilean
foreign minister Orlando Letelier to be murdered by Chilean and Cuban
terrorists in Washington-soon after which the establishment U.S. press,
citing CIA and FBI sources, pointed the finger at the Chilean left.
In connection with these assassinations it's appropriate here to quote, in
its entirety, a recent report entitled "Latin America: Murder Inc.": "A still
classified staff report on 'questionable foreign intelligence operations' in
the United States, prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on
international operations, sheds some new light on cooperation in security
matters between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.
According to the Senate report, which has been leaked to the press in the
United States, the joint operation is known as 'Condor.' The Senate report
mentioned a 'phase three' of Operation Condor, which involved the formation
of special teams to carry out 'sanctions,' including the assassination of the
enemies of its constituent governments.
"The best known killing of this type was the bomb attack on Orlando Letelier
in September 1976 in Washington. Condor's role in this emerged during the
testimony of the FBI agent, Bob Scherer, who investigated the case and gave
evidence at the trial of Michael Townley. He testified to the use of Condor
as the channel by which the Chilean DINA chief, General Manuel Contreras,
tried to get U.S. visas for two of the agents involved.
"An impressive list of murders may now be laid at the door of Operation
Condor. These include the killings of General Carlos Prats of Chile and Juan
Jose Torres of Bolivia in Argentina, the Uruguayan politicians Hector
Gutierrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini, also in Argentina, Bolivia's General
Joaquin Zenteno Anaya and Uruguay's Colonel Ramon Trabal in Paris, and the
attempted assassination of the Chilean senator, Bernardo Leighton.
"The Senate report disclosed that Condor had considered establishing its own
operational base in Miami in 1974, but that this was headed off by a CIA
protest 'through regular intelligence channels.' In this case, the CIA
informed the Chilean DINA of United States displeasure and no Miami station
was opened. According to the Senate report, the FBI concluded early in its
investigation of the Letelier assassination that the murder might have been
carried out as a third phase of Operation Condor.'
"Presumably 'third phase' will now go into the lexicon of euphemisms
alongside the CIA's 'to terminate with extreme prejudice.' The fact that the
operation was well known to the United States at least five years ago makes
nonsense of its shocked surprise at the time of Letelier's death. "[45]
. The advent of democracy in Spain was fought bitterly by Internacional
Fascista. At least seventy lives fell victim to the struggle within the first
half of 1977. On January 24 Fascists armed with machine pistols stormed a
midtown Madrid attorneys' office and opened fire on twelve lawyers who had
defended leftists. Six of the lawyers were killed, the rest were seriously
wounded. Over the next three days right wing terrorists murdered four others,
two of them students, which led to the arrest of Carlos Perez, the Cuban
exile associated with the Argentine AAA.
On 22 February 1977 Madrid police discovered a factory where Italian Ordine
Nuovo Fascists had manufactured hand guns. The building had been rented from
an order of nuns by Otto Skorzeny's friend, Mariano Sanchez Covisa.[46]
Following up their discovery, the police investigated a bankbox in the name
of Italian Fascist kingpin Elio Massagrande. In it they found a small fortune
and three gold bars traceable to the $10 million bank robbery masterminded by
OAS alumnus Albert Spaggiari.[47] This led to the roundup of most of Spain's
Italian Fascist elite: Stefano della Chiaie, Marco Pozzan, Elidore Pomar,
Clemente Graziani, Salvatore Francia, Flavio Camp, Mario Rossa, Enzo
Salzioli, plus Massagrande and his wife Sandra Cricci.[48]
Spanish authorities, however, were pressured by the Italians' local
protectors, and the terrorists were soon released. Many of them headed to
Argentina and eventually returned to Europe.[49] Massagrande and one Gaetano
Orlando went to Paraguay, where they were arrested in December 1977 and
released within days on orders from dictator Stroessner. There they
remained.[50]
In August 1977 the Spanish AAA stole jewels worth $20 million from the
cathedral at Oviedo. The police recovered most of the jewels when several
terrorists were stopped at the Portuguese border. That same month
Internacional Fascista's Italian, Spanish, Argentine, and Cuban exile
terrorist contingents were represented at a Taiwan assembly of the World
Anti-Communist League.[51]
In April 1978 the parties behind Internacional Fascista formed an umbrella
organization, Euro-Droit (Euro-Right) as a response to Eurocommunism.[52]
Charter members included Georgio Almirante's Italian Fascist party (MSI),
Spain's Fuerza Nueva led by Blas Pinar, France's Forces Nouvelles (PFN) led
by Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, Belgium's Front National and Greece's
Rassemblement General.[53] In May Almirante and others represented Euro-Droit
at the WACL assembly in Washington.[54] On 27 June 1978 Euro-Droit met in
Paris,[55] and on July 18 its leaders met in Madrid with Latin American
observers including Ricardo Courutchet of Argentina.[56] Its representative
at the April 1979 WACL assembly in Paraguay was Fuerza Nueva's Pinar.[57]
Finally, in 1979, several Euro-Droit members were elected to the first
European Parliament.
The springboard of this chapter was what I deem The Miami Conspiracy.
Inevitably I am drawn to suspect that international Fascist operations are,
to some degree, directed from Miami. World Service, the cover organization
Patrice Chairoff told me was based in Miami, was of the same ilk as Aginter
Press, whose agents Raingeard and Salby were in and out of Miami. Miami
Cubans joined Aginter Press terrorists in Guatemala. The Nice bank robber
Albert Spaggiari was allegedly in Miami before his heist, and was definitely
in touch with the CIA in the U.S. after it. Ten months later money and gold
stolen from the bank were in the safe-deposit box of an Italian terrorist
leader in Spain. Mirage director de Vathaire and Paladin agent Kay flew to
Miami before their theft of Mirage millions, and met there with Cuban
exiles.[58] One hundred Florida-based Cubans joined the Aginter Press-ELP
army in Spain, where they became involved in acts of terrorism. Michael
Townley and other DINA agents were in Miami to plan the murder of Orlando
Letelier, and Townley also engineered an attempt on Bernardo Leighton's life
in Rome.
The old JM/Wave operation is born again. Only it is no longer confined to
Cuba and the Third World, but now encompasses a bitter struggle against a new
enemy, Eurocommunism. The home town of CIA fronts like the Sea Supply
Corporation, Double-Chek Corporation, Zenith Technical Enterprises, Gibraltar
Steamship Corporation, and Vanguard Service Corporation, and the site of
ominous Fountainebleau. Hotel meetings between Santo Traffiicante, Sam
Giancana, John Roselli, Robert Maheu, William Harvey, and Meyer Lansky,
remains the birthplace of conspiracy. And to close the circle, let us not
forget that gangsters and former espionage agents among Internacional
Fascista and CORU's minions were knee-deep in the heroin trade; that still
floating in the quagmire are extraordinary, international agents E. Howard
Hunt and Fernand Legros[59]; and that several Spaggiari gang bank robbers had
been the close associates of both Francois Chiappe and Christian "Beau Serge"
David, whom this book was, at one time, to have been all about.[60]
pps. 203-219
--[Notes]--
1. L'Express, 13 September 1976.
2. El Pais, 3 February 1977.
3. F. Strasser and B. McTigue: "The Fall River Conspiracy," Boston, Novem-
ber 1978.
4. E.H. Cookridge: Gehlen, The Spy of the Century (Random House, 1971).
5. L. Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).
6. C. Oglesby: The Yankee and Cowboy War (Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976).
7. T. Branch and G. Crile III: "The Kennedy Vendetta," Harper's, August 1975.
8. Ibid.
9. J.D. Marks: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (Times Books,
1979).
10. T. SzuIc: Compulsive Spy (Viking, 1974).
11. According to Patrice Chairoff: Dossier B ... comme. Barbouzes (Alain
Moreau, 1975), three agents assigned to the CIA's West German station were in
on the plot: Otto-Karl Dupow, Friedrich Stoll and Paul Welles.
12. It was while station JM/Wave was in full swing that the Cuba-based French
intelligence (SDECE) agent Thyraud de Vosjoli teamed up with the CIA.
Particularly interesting is de Vosjoli's close friendship with
Leroy-Finville, who was jailed—in the Ben Barka case. Furthermore, in his
book Le Comite (Editions de I'Homme, 1975), de Vosjoli refers to a certain
Legros in the same affair.
13. It is interesting, in light of the 1965 murder of Ben Barka and the 1966
appearance of Aginter Press, to note that CIA agent Howard Hunt was in Madrid
in 1965-66, following cancellation of the planned second invasion of Cuba
(Szulc, op. cit.). In Madrid, Hunt's family lived in an apartment owned by
the brother of his good friend, William Buckley, as reported by Hunt in Underc
over (Berkeley-Putnam, 1974). Buckley was one of the Americans instrumental
in the creation of WACL, and was later in contact with an agent of Aginter
Press, according to Frederic Laurent in L'Orchestre Noir (Stock, 1978).
14. Portugal's revolution and the ensuing defeat in Angola of the
CIA-supported FNLA by the Cuba-supported MPLA no doubt conspired to make
Bosch's work easier.
15. S. Landau: They Educated the Crows (Transnational Institute/Institute for
Policy Studies, 1978).
16. Anon.: "Miami, Haven for Terror," The Nation, 19 March 1977.
17. Counterspy, Vol. 3, No. 2,1976.
18. J. Dinges: "Chile's Global Hit Men," The Nation, 2 June 1979.
19. Landau, op. cit. Recently the FBI reportedly assigned "highest priority"
to seizing members of the Union City, New Jersey-based Omega 7, a group of
anti-Castro Cubans responsible for twenty bombings in the New York City
metropolitan area between 1 February 1975 and 13 January 1980 (New York
Times, 3 March 1980).
According to the well-informed investigative reporter Jeff Stein ("Inside
Omega 7," Village Voice, 10 March 1980), high-ranking New York City law
enforcement officials "believe that nothing can be done to stop the terrorist
wave without vigorous federal intervention -and so far Washington has
remained silent." Stein also reports that Omega 7 has been supported by other
anti-Castro groups including the Cuban Nationalist Movement (Northern Zone),
five of whose members were indicted in connection with the Letelier murder.
The name of Gustavo Marin — president of another, university-based exile
group, Abdala, headquartered on Twenty-Ninth Street in New York City —
appears on police files as an Omega 7 suspect. In 1974 Marin and Abdala
teamed up politically with Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in
support of the Moonies , fast to save Richard Nixon.
Stein also reports rumors of an alliance of anti-Communist terrorist groups
involving the Croations, in particular, whose bombing activities have
recently been on the rise. Its funding, according to FBI sources, is coming
from Paraguay and that Nazi haven's recent arrival from Nicaragua, Anastasio
Somoza. Yugoslavia recently requested a U.S. crackdown on the Croation
National Congress headed by Janko Skrbin, whose extradition as a war criminal
the Yugoslavs seek for his collaboration with the Germans in the
"independent" Fascist state of Croatia from 1941 to 1945 (New York Times, 23
March 1980).
These allegations are particularly interesting in lights of the revelations
in Latin America Political Report (29 April 1977) that the Croation
representative of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in Paraguay, Dinko
Zakic, had used $3.5 million from the WACL's regional organization, the
Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana (CAL), to finance Croatian
terrorist activities. These included the murders of the Uruguayan ambassador
in Paraguay (an apparent mistake) and the Yugoslav ambassador in Sweden (not
a mistake).
20. Information, 22 February 1977; prior to the Rome meeting there had been
planning sessions in Lyons in 1974 and Barcelona in 1975.
21. Litteraturnaja Gazeta, November 1976.
22. Liberation, 24 and 25 March 1974.
23. Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 September 1974. 24. Chairoff, op. cit.
25. Le Nouval Observateur, 7 June 1976.
26. L. Gonzalez-Mata: Cygne (Grasset, 1976).
27. Laurent, op. cit.
28. Cambio 16, 20 February 1977; Time, 2 February 1977; Laurent, op. cit.
29. Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 September 1974.
30. Ibid.
31. E. Gerdan: Dossier A ... comme Arms (Alain Moreau, 1974). 32. Laurent,
op. cit.
33. Since 1976, when General Jorge Videla led a military coup in Argentina,
some 15-20,000 Argentines, according to Amnesty International, have
disappeared. At a 4 February 1980 news conference in London, Amnesty related
reports of former Argentine concentration camp inmates, that prisoners are
"tortured with electric cattle prods ... drugged and dropped unconscious from
a plane into the sea" (Boston Globe, 5 February 1980). Just prior to that
report, President Jimmy Carter's special envoy, Lt. Gen. Andrew Goodpaster,
had told Argentine officials that the Carter administration would consider
asking Congress to revoke 1978 human rights legislation prohibiting U.S.
weapons sales to Argentina.
34. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 February 1977.
35. El Moudjahid, 5 March 1976.
36. Ibid.
37. In Portugal Salby/Sablonsky was known as Joaquin Castor. Colonel
Corvacho, the commandant at Oporto, confiscated Salby's false Guatemalan
passport, issued to him in the name of Hugh C. Franklin, by Guatemala's
Montreal consulate.
38. Liberation, 11 and 12 December 1974 and 19 July 1976.
39. Amnesty International recently announced that 2000 Guatemalans had been
killed for political reasons during the "alarming upsurge" in violence in the
eighteen-month period ending in December 1979. Many of the murders are
carried out by "semi-clandestine death squads" created to combat the left,
which, according to an earlier Amnesty report, "act with complete impunity"
from the nation's military rulers (New York Times, 6 December 1979). Total
U.S. military aid to Guatemala for the 1946-75 period was $39.3 million -see
N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
(South End Press, 1979).
40. Boston Phoenix, 14 March 1978.
41. Laurent, op. cit.
42. Ibid. Guatemala has always had a magnetic attraction for right wing
terrorists. According to Rend Louis Maurice's The Heist of the Century, bankro
bber Albert Spaggiari, a former member of the OAS, stopped over in Guatemala
before his 1976 visit in the U.S. with the CIA.
43. Nathaniel Davis and William H. Sullivan, who presided over the CIA's
secret war in Laos and later over the Tehran embassy during the fall of the
Shah, each graduated in the class of 1947 from the distinguished Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University outside Boston.
44. What remains to be seen is whether the Gaullist party presently led by
Jacques Chirac has also teamed up with Fascists by way of SAC. In May 1976 Mar
seilles' mayor and one of France's leading Socialists, Gaston Deferre,
accused the Gaullists of reestablishing "the notorious SAC barbouze corps" to
crack down on leftists -see H. Kruger and N. Levinsen: Fascismens
Internationale Net i Dag (Bogan, 1977). Deferre charged the Gaullists with
exploiting their position in power to once again open prison gates to release
murderers and other hardened criminals, as extensively as during the 1960,61 r
ecruitment for the battle against the OAS in Algeria. The rebuilding of the
barbouze corps convinced Deferre that the Gaullists would use force to remain
part of the ruling coalition. He and other leftist politicians demanded a
National Assembly debate on whether to dissolve SAC as a threat to French
democracy, comparing it to the Nazi SS. Within SAC and the Gaullist party as
well, old-timers who would not dream of working with the OAS have struggled
with new blood more interested in power than the prolongation of past
vendettas. It is in light of this and SAC's role in Internacional Fascista
that one should view the many "affairs" that shook France in 1976 -e.g., the
Agret and de Vathaire affairs, the murders of journalist Rend Trouve and
former Vice Foreign Minister Jean de Broglie, and the two great bank
robberies.
45. Latin America Political Report, 17 August 1979.
46. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 March 1977; International Herald Tribune, 24
February 1977.
47. According to the 18 October 1979 issue of Rolling Stone, Massagrande was
himself in on the heist.
48. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 5 March 1977.
49. Information, 21 July 1977.
50. The Leveller, October 1978.
51. Cuadernos para el Dialogo, 1 October 1977.
52. Agence France-Presse, 20 April 1978; Triunfo, 29 April 1978; Metro, 19 Jul
y 1978.
53. Metro, op. cit.
54. Washington Post, 28 May 1978.
55. Metro, op. cit.
56. Politiken, 19 July 1978.
57. Fuerza Nueva weekly magazine, 19 May 1979.
58. Journal de Dimanche, 5 September 1976.
59. A great art forgery trial, which the French spent three years preparing
against Legros, was dropped in early 1977 when the star witness, the
Hungarian painter Elmyr de Hory, died of an overdose of pills in his home on
Ibiza shortly after he was informed of his extradition to France to testify.
Legros' army of defense lawyers then wasted little time having the case
dismissed — see L'Aurore, 26 January 1977. At nearly the same time, fate
claimed another of Legros! close acquaintances, the gangster Didier Barone,
who had been closely in touch with the Felix Lesca mob and Christian David.
Barone was shot and wounded by three men as he and his wife Gisele were on
their way home one day. Gisele fled. Barone disappeared without a trace. In
Alain Jaubert's Dossier D ... comme Drogue (Alain Moreau, 1974), Barone is
also described as a specialist in forged paintings.
60. France Soir, 27 October 1976.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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