From: Daniel Hopsicker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> By request (I heard the sound of one hand clapping) another chapter from Barry and the "Boys"... Who Are 'the Boys?' There came a moment in our investigation into the CIA drug smuggling through Mena Arkansas when we asked Russell Welch--the criminal investigator for the Arkansas State Police who kept pestering his superiors to do something about the massive criminal activity taking place under his nose--what difference it would have made to him if had known that Barry Seal's intelligence connections stretched as far and wide as the eye could see. "I was concerned about the Mena airport," he told us calmly. "That was my sole focus. When journalists come up here to Mena and start poking too far into who Seal knew they end up going off the deep end." Today we understand what he means. Because probing into Barry Seal's connections into the 'Dark Side' world of clandestine services led us into a bewildering fog-shrouded Okefenochee swamp teeming with gangsters, arms dealers, corrupt politicians, and current and former CIA and military officers, all of whom, collectively make up the secret government, the organization with no name, that we have chosen to characterize as "the Boys." At first it looked as if the Bay of Pigs might be the place to wade into that swamp, to begin to untangle the various alliances and Barry's Seal's role in them, since many of the principals in this action will later become involved in the major incidents of what Professor William Chambliss calls "state-organized crime." Every member of the Watergate break-in, for example, had been involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and at least one, the infamous Frank Sturgis, had known Lee Harvey Oswald. But there had been an even earlier event, we learned, which served as a model and a blueprint for the Bay of Pigs, and that had brought many of the major characters we will see later together for the first time. As we interviewed the remaining witnesses to Big Jim Garrison's probe into the colorful New Orleans milieu of the Kennedy Assassination, we learned that many of the actors had their bow in history at the coup the CIA staged in 1954 in tiny far-off Guatemala, just as others of us were settling down to watch our first episodes of Captain Kangaroo. When, seven years later, the emotional anti-Castro Cubans took to heart the CIA's gung-ho "contractual specialists," known affectionately as the "cowboys," (while spurning their CIA cases officers) the men they admired were already veterans of the coup in Guatemala. It served as an out-of-town tryout for the stunts the Boys will later pull State-side. It is amazing how many of the players in the defining events of our lifetime played Triple A ball together in the tiny Central American country which is the very definition of the term "banana republic," a term which has its roots in the domination by United Fruit of Central and South American governments. "The Starting Lineups" Allen Dulles selected Richard Bissell as a special assistant -"an apprentice," as Bissell described it--and he immediately went to work on the coup plan, code-named PBSUCCESS. Bissell will later run the CIA's Bay of Pigs. The CIA chain of command in the Arbenz operation includes, at the top, Bissell, Deputy Director Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, and Colonel J.C. King. And somewhere in there is Nelson Rockefeller, whose Latin American interests seemed endangered by Arbenz. Rockefeller joins the Eisenhower Administration as something called an Assistant for Cold War Strategy. David Atlee Phillips, a spook who was born on Halloween in 1922, was selected to set up a clandestine radio station in Mexico -- the Voice of Liberation --which pretended to be broadcasting from within Guatemala and orchestrated a crescendo of false reports about legions of rebels which didn't exist and major battles which never took place. Phillips would later term the technique, which he would use again and again, as "the big lie." E. Howard Hunt, later anointed the Propaganda Chief of the CIA's anti-Castro operations, was "an officer who had worked brilliantly on the Guatemala Project," according to one pipe-smoking CIA man. Among the New Orleans contingent was Guy Banister. A close friend and adviser of Bannister's told the New Orleans States-Item that the veteran FBI agent was a key liaison man for U.S. Government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America, through the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean. The League was said by the aide "to have been used by the CIA in its engineering of the 1954 overthrow of the leftist Arbenz regime in Guatemala." Another from the Crescent City is Seymour Weiss, Director of Standard Fruit and connected with Carlos Marcello, and the equally-interesting Banister associate Maurice Gatlin, who is visited in New Orleans before the coup by a certain Guatemalan Colonel Barrios, who has four trigger men with him as bodyguards and is about to lead a revolutionary force against Arbenz." Gatlin tells the FBI, "Armas is standing ready for another invasion. He has spent $3 million in the last year. Armas was in New Orleans three weeks ago and I talked with him at that time. He had money supplied by the CIA." He furnished the Agency intelligence on Guatemala, Maurice Gatlin told the FBI, but commented that the CIA "was on probation" with him because its predecessor, the OSS, was "thoroughly infiltrated by Communists. Francisco Franco of Spain had used the appropriate techniques to fight Communism," Gatlin told the FBI, not, perhaps, realizing that he was preaching to the choir. >From Miami came Johnny Rosselli, and Clare Booth Luce's "great friend," CIA "made guy" William Pawley, involved in the CIA's overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala through a CIA front called the Pacific Corporation, an offshoot of Pawley's Flying Tigers airlines. Pawley will later front for some of the CIA's anti-Castro activities, and Henry Luce's wife Luce will fund some anti-Castro Cubans which the House Committee on Assassinations will have great good reason to suspect of being involved in the JFK hit. Also from Miami came pilot Donald Edward Browder, who was associated with Jack Ruby in arms smuggling into Cuba as early as 1952, and is another of those 'soldier of fortune' types, busy as a bee since 1947, when he stole a cache of machine guns from an Army base in Augusta, Georgia . Also in '47, a Federal Grand Jury in Tulsa, Oklahoma indicted him for unlawfully exporting a P-38 airplane to Havana, Cuba, as well as with conspiracy to smuggle arms from Florida to Cuba, which were destined for a revolution in the Dominican Republic against General Raphael Trujillo." "He was one of the people who provided training and some operational support for the air part of the (Guatemala) operation," said his surviving son Joseph. "My dad got shot down in that operation. And when the surviving members of the Jacob Arbenz Government fled, they took some prisoners with them. My dad was in an unofficial prison that the Mexican Government let the Guatemalan exiles run in Mexico." The "home team" contingent from Alexandria, Virginia was represented by, among others, Samuel Cummings, the President of Interarms, one of whose first deals is supplying M-l rifles, bought in Britain, for the CIA-organized coup in Guatemala. In a decade of dictators, business boomed. Cummings sold arms to Haiti's Francois Duvalier, the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and Cuba's Fulgencio Batista. When Batista fled Cuba before a shipment of his Armalites arrived, the resourceful Cummings flew to Havana to demonstrate the assault rifles for a new customer. "Fidel Castro picked up that Armalite and knew what to do with it immediately," he recalled "Bananas are a matter of the gravest national security." In the overwhelmingly rural nation of Guatemala in 1954, less than three percent of the landowners owned over seventy percent of the arable land. In this positively medieval world farm laborers were roped together by the Army for delivery to the low-land farms, where they were kept in debt slavery by the landowners, who paid them annually a less-than-princely sum of $87. Arbenz appropriated 240,000 acres of United Fruit's uncultivated holdings, which he distributed to approximately 100,000 landless peasants, and offered the Fruiters $525,000, United Fruit's own declared valuation for tax purposes. The company was not amused. The fruit company's influence among Washington's power elite was impressive. Former Director of the CIA Walter Bedell Smith was seeking an executive position with United Fruit at the same time he was helping to plan the coup. He was later named to the company's board of directors, as was Allen Dulles. In his autobiography, Undercover, Hunt recalls that he recommended the ouster of Jacob Arbenz shortly after he was elected, but his superiors at the CIA refused to act until Arbenz threatened the profits of United Fruit. Then the lawyer who represented United Fruit, Ernest Cuneo, pressured the CIA leadership into taking action against Arbenz. In March 1953, the CIA approached disgruntled right-wing officers in the Guatemala army and arranged to send them arms. The following month, uprisings broke out in several towns but were quickly put down by loyal troops. The Eisenhower administration resolved to do the job right the next time around. Bananas had become, clearly, a matter of national security. When the CIA overthrew the Arbenz regime in Guatemala from bases in Honduras and Nicaragua in 1954, the only U.S. facility used was a former naval air base at Opa-Locka, Florida, on the outskirts of Miami, where the CIA airlifted supplies to its Central American camps and E. Howard Hunt, then a "disinformation" expert, prerecorded doomsday broadcasts to terrorize the Guatemalan people on invasion day. In late January 1954 the operation appeared to have suffered a serious setback when Photostat copies of "Liberation" documents found their way into Arbenz's hands. A few days later, Guatemala's newspapers published copies of correspondence signed by Castillo, Somoza and others, revealing the existence of some of the staging, training and invasion plans, involving, amongst others, the "Government of the North". But the State Department labeled the accusations of a US role "ridiculous and untrue" and said it would not comment further because it did not wish to give them a dignity they did not deserve. Said a Department spokesperson: "It is the policy of the United States not to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This policy has repeatedly been reaffirmed under the present administration." But the training of rebel forces was taking place, on Momotombito, a volcanic island (actually the top of a volcano) which had earned its sonorous name from the sound the Indians thought it made when it rumbled. And Somoza was heavily involved, in the plans to overthrow Arbenz. The Nicaraguan dictator leased his country out as a site for an airstrip and for training hundreds of men--Guatemalan exiles and US and Central American mercenaries--in the use of weapons and radio broadcasting, as well as in the fine arts of sabotage and demolition. "Let's put on a show!" Thirty airplanes were assigned for use in the "Liberation," stationed in Nicaragua, Honduras and the Canal Zone, to be flown by American pilots, and the most powerful military element in the coup was the CIA's air force of P-47 Thunderbolts and C-47 transports operating out of Managua International Airport. The pilots were Americans, like daredevil Jerry Fred DeLarm, a slim, short, hawk-featured man who liked to lay a .45 down on the table in front of him when talking to a stranger. DeLarm, a native of San Francisco, was a barnstorming, adventurous flier well known in Central America, who had been flying in the area since he was nine, with his father, a pioneer pilot named Eddie DeLarm. When World War II broke out, he went to the Pacific, and shot down two Japanese Zeros over Saipan. But by 1950 DeLarm was back in Guatemala, where he was doing sky-writing and aerial broadcasts for Arbenz. Promised $20,000, he was understandably disturbed when the money did not come through after Arbenz won. And that, DeLarm reflected later, was when he first began to suspect Arbenz was a Communist. Another of the legendary cowboys flying for the CIA's air force was William "Rip" Robertson, a hulking Texan who was nearly fifty when he showed up in Guatemala to be one of the "boys." Robertson transferred to the CIA after fighting in the Pacific war as a Marine captain. During the Guatemalan coup he dispatched a pilot to bomb a Soviet ship, which accidentally sent a British merchantman to the bottom instead, forcing the CIA to quietly indemnify Lloyds of London to the tune of $1.5 million. Robertson's CIA handlers were not pleased, but used him again at the Bay of Pigs because he had become such a good buddy of the Somoza family in Nicaragua. Much Barry Seal will make an equally good impression on the Somoza family, when he pilots the last plane out of Nicaragua as the Sandinistas take over, with Somoza's brother-in-law safely aboard. The Canal Zone was set aside as a weapons depot from which arms were gradually distributed to the rebels who were to assemble in Honduras under the command of Colonel Carlos Castillo before crossing into Guatemala. Soviet-marked weapons were also gathered for the purpose of being planting inside Guatemala before the invasion to reinforce US charges of Russian intervention. And, as important as arms, it turned out, hidden radio transmitters were placed in and around the perimeter of Guatemala, including one in the US Embassy. In early June, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, agreed to a "suggestion" by director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles that the Times keep a Times foreign correspondent out of Guatemala while the coup was going on. A CIA commander in the Guatemala coup, Col. Albert Haney, had found that two years earlier the correspondent, Sydney Gruson, had attended parties in Mexico City at which Czechoslovak diplomats had been present, and was politically suspect, Dulles said. The offensive began in earnest on June 18, with planes dropping leaflets over Guatemala demanding that Arbenz resign immediately or else various sites would be bombed. CIA radio stations broadcast similar messages. That afternoon, the planes returned to machine-gun houses near military barracks, drop fragmentation bombs and strafe the National Palace. "Even the 'boys' can look stricken at times" That same day Carlos Castillo-Armas and his army crossed the Honduran border into Guatemala, after his CIA-sponsored air force had just bombed San Jose, a large Guatemalan port city. The troops of Carlos Castillo-Armas dug in just inside the Guatemalan border, where they waited for further air strikes. After the forces of Jacob Arbenz took out most of CIA's exile air force, the CIA immediately resupplied them with new aircraft. Under constant air attack, Jacob Arbenz began to panic. Over the following week, the air attacks continued daily--strafing or bombing ports, fuel tanks, ammunition dumps, military barracks, the international airport, a school, and several cities; nine persons, including a three-year-old girl, were reported wounded; an unknown number of houses were set afire by incendiary explosives. One especially nice touch: during one night-time raid, a tape recording of a bomb attack was played over loudspeakers set up on the roof of the US Embassy to heighten the anxiety of the capital's residents. When Arbenz went on the air to try and calm the public's fear, the CIA radio team jammed the broadcast. The primary purpose of the bombing and the many forms of disinformation was to make it appear that military defenses were crumbling, that resistance was futile, thus provoking confusion and division in the Guatemalan armed forces and causing some elements to turn against Arbenz. The psychological warfare conducted over the radio was directed by Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame, and David Atlee Phillips, a newcomer to the CIA. When Phillips was first approached about the assignment, he reportedly asked his superior, Tracy Barnes, in all innocence, "But Arbenz became President in a free election. What right do we have to help someone topple his government and throw him out of office?" 'For a moment," wrote Phillips later, "I detected in his face a flicker of concern, a doubt, the reactions of a sensitive man." But Barnes quickly recovered and repeated the party line about the Soviets establishing "an easily expandable beachhead" in Central America. Because of the "success" of the Guatemalan coup d'etat, veterans of that affair are later selected by CIA "covert plans" Deputy Director Richard Bissell to help with attempts to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro's Cuba. Among those chosen by Bissell is E. Howard Hunt. The CIA intervention in Guatemala stirred up a great deal of ill will toward the United States in Latin America. Even moderate, pro-United States leaders in the region, who had shunned the Arbenz regime, now complained about a Yankee double standard that used "free world" rhetoric against communism but that ignored the transgressions of right-wing tyrants. "Life magazine knows who signs the checks." Heated protests against the United States broke out during this week in June in at least eleven countries and was echoed by the governments of Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile which condemned American "intervention and "aggression." Life magazine noted these protests by observing that "world communism was efficiently using the Guatemalan show to strike a blow at the U.S." Arbenz finally received an ultimatum from certain army officers: Resign or they would come to an agreement with the invaders. The CIA and the American Ambassador, James Peurifoy, had been offering payments to officers to defect, and one army commander reportedly accepted $60,000 to surrender his troops. With his back to the wall, Arbenz made an attempt to arm civilian supporters to fight for the government, but army officers blocked the disbursement of weapons. The Guatemalan president knew that the end was near. One result of the Guatemala coup was to install Carlos Marcello as major criminal presence in the country by 1957, according to the inestimable Professor Peter Dale Scott in "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK." Gambling in the capital became the province of one of Meyer Lansky's associates. And two major figures in accounts of CIA-Mafia plots to kill Kennedy, John Martino and Johnny Roselli, begin to pass through regularly. Howard Hunt and his make-work let's-start-a-war-and-make-some-real-money CIA cohorts were undoubtedly pleased at one unintended side effect of the coup: the radicalization of a 25-year-old Argentine doctor named Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who had been living in Guatemala. Guevara's experience in Guatemala had a profound effect upon his political consciousness, stated his then-wife, Hilda Gadea. "Up to that point, he used to say, he was merely a sniper, criticizing from a theoretical point of view the political panorama of our America. From here on he was convinced that the struggle against the oligarchic system and the main enemy, Yankee imperialism, must be an armed one, supported by the people." Thus it was that the educated, urbane men of the State Department, the CIA and the United Fruit Company, the pipe-smoking, comfortable men of Princeton, Harvard and Wall Street, decided that the illiterate peasants of Guatemala did not deserve the land which had been given to them, that the workers did not need their unions, that hunger and torture was a small price to pay for being rid of the scourge of communism. In October, Ambassador John Peurifoy sat before a congressional committee and told them: "My role in Guatemala prior to the revolution was strictly that of a diplomatic observer ... The revolution that overthrew the Arbenz government was engineered and instigated by those people in Guatemala who rebelled against the policies and ruthless oppression of the Communist-controlled government." "Sing a song of Quetzals" Somebody should have told his wife, Betty Jane Peurifoy, who in the days after the coup penned some commemorative verse labeling her hubby "pistol-packing Peurify:" "Sing a song of quetzals/ Pockets full of peace!/ The junta's in the Palace/ They've taken out a lease./ The commies are in hiding,/ Just across the street/ To the embassy of Mexico/ They beat a quick retreat./ And pistol packing Peurifoy/ Looks mighty optimistic/ For the land of Guatemala/ Is no longer communistic!" Castillo celebrated his 'liberation' of Guatemala by arresting thousands on suspicion of communist activity, many of whom were tortured or killed, and the passing of a law which disenfranchised three-quarters of Guatemala's voters by barring illiterates from the electoral rolls. He gave the land back to United Fruit, outlawed all political parties, labor confederations, and peasant organizations, closed down opposition newspapers, and burned "subversive" books, including Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. The terror carried out by Castillo was only the beginning, and as many as 150,000 people would be killed in violence that would continue with hardly a pause for 40 years. In the early 1980s, the military destroyed 440 entire Mayan villages: houses, crops, animals, and people. Often everyone present was massacred, after the women and girls were mass raped. It is in the sidelights of the Guatemala affair that the outlines of what is to come can be seen in rough draft form. Examples abound: the Carlos Castillo government, post-coup, gets almost a billion in aid' from the U.S., but is judged inept. The CIA is described as being "dismayed." In July of 1957 President Castillo is shot and killed just as he and his wife sit down to dinner at the Presidential Palace. ("It does not pay / The CIA/ To dismay," Betty Peurifoy might have written, but she and her husband had been transferred to Laos.) Castillo's killer is identified as Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, an unlucky young man who was also very possibly clinically-depressed, because after killing the President he immediately commits suicide with the very same rifle he used in the assassination, according to the first authorities to arrive on the scene after the shooting, all military men, including the Minister of Defense, as luck would have it. "A lone nut shows the way for lone nuts everywhere" The Guatemalan Government described the hapless Romeo Vasquez Sanchez to the press as a "Communist fanatic" who was expelled from the Guatemalan Army six months earlier for "Communist ideology," but had somehow then managed to worm his way into the Presidential Palace Guard, the slippery communistic fellow. The Ministry claimed to have a--quelle surprise!-- 40-page handwritten diary in which the assassin stated "I have had the opportunity to study Russian communism�and have a diabolic plan to put an end to the existence of the man who holds power." Well, that's pretty open and shut! Case closed! The post-coup history of Guatemala is littered with intrigue, coups, counter-coups, and the increasing importance of drug trafficking to Guatemalan politics. Organized crime developed simultaneous connections to both the Guatemalan military secret police and the insurgents in the countryside. Cuban exile narcotics trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcon told Mexican police that "the US Government turns a 'blind eye' to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied weapons to terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments to accept US conditions for security assistance." The "boys" had set up shop in Guatemala. So when Barry Seal is given the keys to the Baton Rouge Armory in 1960, according to his life-long friend Jerry Chidgey, it should come as no surprise that the guns he steals are going to�Guatemala. " I was just a little punk kid with a coffee house, and Barry had a way, he said, that we could make $5000. Somebody had given him the keys to the armory and the gun rack, he told me, and two plainclothes cops were to guard him while he was doing it, and they drove the guns in an unmarked police van out to the Hammond, Louisiana airport where they were loaded into a DC 3 and then flown to Guatemala.. " "The cops said that in exchange for their help they had been promised appointments to the FBI Academy-- which would I guess establish an FBI connection of some kind--but then later I was flying to Dallas and two guys in black suits who I took to be FBI followed me, so I never could quite figure it out. But that was Barry, I guess. Always a bit of mystery there, for sure." After the boys set up shop, Guatemala was like that. A center for intrigue, mischief, and mayhem. Another Guateamalan sidelight--this time with JFK assassination overtones-- concerned the arrest of a black journalist named Alfred Featherston in Guatemala City in 1959 in connection with a plot to assassinate President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes during the latter's visit to Panama. He would later furnish the FBI with information that linked Jack Ruby with Dallas patrolman JD Tippit. "Elvis had already left the building." Yet another "soldier of fortune," Gerald Hemming, remembered Featherston. "He was a black guy� arrested while trying to enter Guatemala in January 1959. He was trying to hit Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes for the Chicago mob. When he was stopped at the border he used the name Martin Borman�.it got him a lot of fucking attention." In 1954, a decision made by the Eisenhower Administration based on the greed of a Guatemalan based US monopoly called the United Fruit Company would lead directly--over forty years later-- to an AP dispatch from Washington DC on a vigil being held outside the White House. The AP said, "With a graphic description of killing, torture and rape, a Roman Catholic nun from New Mexico launched a campaign yesterday demanding an end to secrecy about a U.S. role in repression in Guatemala." "The 36-year-old nun sobbingly told an audience of about 250 people across from the White House, "I was lowered into an open pit packed with human bodies .. . children, women and men, some decapitated, some lying face up and caked with blood, some dead, some alive, and all swarming with rats:' said Sister Dianna Ortiz, describing a 1989 experience in the Central American country." "Sister Ortiz's voice broke as she recounted how her torturers held her hand to the handle of a machete being used to slash a woman, how blood was "spurting like a water fountain" from the woman and how "my screams were drowned by the cries of the woman being cut to pieces." Maybe Featherston, the black journalist, was on to something. When the "boys" left Guatemala, Martin Borman would have felt right at home. -- Daniel Hopsicker The Drug Money Times "All the news that's ripped from print!" http://www.MadCowProd.com "Scandal in contemporary U.S. life is an institutionalized sociological phenomenon. It is not due primarily to psychopathological variables, but is due to the institutionalization of elite wrongdoing which has occcurred since 1963." "Many of the scandals that have occurred in the U.S. since 1963 are fundamentally interrelated: that is, the same people and institutions have been involved." --Prof.David Simon, "Elite Deviance" 5th ed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Give back to your community through "Grow to Give." http://www.onelist.com Deadline is June 19. See homepage for details.
