Document:The Government Sector extract from The "Terrorism" Industry
This page is an extract (chapter 4 'The Terrorism Industry: The Government Sector') from Ed Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, The "Terrorism" Industry, 1989, Pantheon, pages 50-72. It is reproduced with the permission of Ed Herman.
Contents
Introduction
The terrorism industry manufactures, refines, and packages for distribution information, analysis, and opinion on a topic called "terrorism." The industry comprises, first a public sector of govern¬ment agencies and officials who establish policy and provide opinions and selected facts about official acts and plans on terrorist activity in speeches, press conferences, press releases, hearings, reports, and interviews. It includes, also, a private sector of think tanks and research institutes, security firms that deal in risk analysis, personal and property protection, and training, and a body of terrorism "experts." The industry's experts are associated mainly with the institutes and think tanks, some of which are affiliated with academic institutions, but officials and analysts of security firms are also regarded as authorities on terrorism, emphasizing the practical aspects of control.
There are important structural connections between the public and private sectors, with the latter often sponsored by and serving as a virtual arm of the former. The officials of security firms are frequently drawn from government security services, and they depend on their relationships and earlier ties for prestige, references, referrals, and informational support. Sometimes security firms are also vehicles for the implementation of covert state policy. The officials and experts of the institutes move, as in a revolving door, between the nominally separate public and private spheres, and they are encouraged and supported by both government and the private corporate system.
The main function of the private sector of institutes and experts is to enhance the credibility of the official view by presenting this view, with minor variants, through purportedly "independent" agencies. If governments are known to lie, independent authorities are needed to give the public and media an alternative source that presumably does not simply parrot the official view. The private sector of the terrorism industry serves to satisfy this demand for independent but credible authorities. The fact that the institutes a~ experts are not independent of the government and do reiterate the official line is unrecognized by the mass media; for them, the supplementing of the government view with those of private industry experts provides "balance" in the presentation of news and opinion.
The Government Sector
Governments play a major role in the terrorism industry, both directly and indirectly. Directly, they establish policy, implement it, and explain and justify the policy to the public. When "terrorism" becomes a featured aspect of government policy and propaganda, as in the Reagan era in the United States, the governmental invest¬ment and role escalate. It is our view, also, that the Western establishment's intense focus on terrorism has not been based on any major threat, but rather has been contrived and inflated for ideological and propaganda purposes, with a selected focus on retail violence designed to obscure and justify further Western-based primary violence. Under these circumstances, the ideological and propaganda aspects of terrorism are actually the predominant features of policy on the subject, and the government propaganda effort will bulk large.1
Since the Nixon years, the U .S. State Department has had an Office to Combat Terrorism (or some equivalent), and the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI have long had personnel allocated to "counter-terrorism." Given the greater concern over terrorism in the 1980s, the funds allocated to this area have been greatly increased. By 1985 it was estimated that the government was spending $2 billion and employing 18,000 people to deal with terrorism, much of this money and personnel apparently slated for physical security.2 The executive bodies that dealt with the subject were enlarged, and an attempt was made to coordinate their activities with the creation in 1985 of the Vice-President's Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, which included the heads of the State, Defense, Treasury, and Transportation departments, the attorney general, directors of the CIA and Office of Management and Budget, and others. It included groups for analysis, review, and liaison under a task force executive director. The FBI was assigned the role of lead agency in dealing with terrorist activity in the United States; the State Department has primary responsibility for terrorism abroad, and the State Department heads an Interdepartmental Group on Terrorism that includes over a dozen other agencies and departments.
The military forces built up to deal with terrorism and related matters have been extensive and were an important part of the overall Reagan era military buildup. After the failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran, the Department of Defense established its own counterterrorism organization with permanent staff and specialized fighting personnel. The growth of Special Operations Forces (SOFs) was "one of this administration's highest priorities," Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told Congress in 1984, and active duty SOF manpower was enlarged by 30 percent between 1981 and 1985, and was planned to rise by 80 percent by 1990. Outlays on SOFs grew from $441 million in 1981 to $1.7 billion in 1987.3 These cadres have been especially active in Central America in military exercises, training programs, and covert military operations. An important feature of these forces and their operations is the apparent fusion of counterterrorism with general low-intensity warfare missions and operations in the Third World.4 This is in conformity with our view that counterinsurgency warfare is the principal form of counterterrorism, the focus on Abu Nidal and plane hijackers providing a more acceptable frame of reference and cover for the prime modes of counterterrorism. That it is in reality an approved terrorism is indicated by the fact that Oliver North, coordinating the funding and operational activities of the contra army, was the NSC's official in charge of counterterrorism.
Under the guise of combatting terrorism and civil unrest, the Reagan administration also reorganized, and greatly expanded the powers of, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Louis O. Giuffrida, a retired National Guard general who once created a contingency emergency plan to round up "militant negroes" while at the Naval War College, was appointed by Reagan to head FEMA. Giuffrida had previously served under Governor Reagan as the director of Operation Cable Splicer, designed in the late 1960s to allow for mass arrests and detentions of antiwar demonstrators in California. He also commanded the California Specialized Training Institute, which by 1978 had graduated some 14,000 trainees - among them members of the National Guard, army, and local and state police, and representatives from private corporations and foreign military establishments - in counterterrorism tactics.5
Between February and July 1982, Reagan signed a series of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDs) which granted FEMA, under the direction of the National Security Council, broad-ranging powers for emergency mobilization in the case of terrorist incidents and civil emergencies. He also mandated the creation of a new senior-level board, the Emergency Mobilization Preparedness Board (EMPB), which counted Giuffrida and Oliver North among its members. According to Diana Reynolds, a series of 1983 FEMA¬designed amendments to the Defense Production Act, the Defens~ Resources Act, and the Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpiling Act granted powers to both FEMA and the Department of Defense to institute martial law, seize private property, and take control of the means of production, as well as the banking and communications systems, in the case of a declared "emergency."6 In addition, FEMA arrogated additional "emergency czar" powers to itself beyond the scope of the law and directives, and Attorney General William French Smith eventually admonished National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane in a letter dated August 2, 1984, protesting the seizure of powers by FEMA and "the expansion of the definition of severe emergencies to encompass 'routine' domestic law enforcement emergencies. "7
The Los Alamos National Laboratory also offered its services to FEMA in the area of counterterrorism. In a report entitled Los Alamos Technical Capabilities: Concepts for Assisting the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Its Various Missions, the laboratory placed a number of projects at the agency's disposal, among them "technol¬ogies to identify stressed individuals at a distance without their knowledge; technology to enhance or degrade human performance, to trace personnel, and to identify individuals according to their genetic 'protein mutations.' From the R&D platter, FEMA could have selected rapid entry and breaching technology or capabilities in using microwave radiation to stun, kill or create perceptual distortions in 'mammalian organisms.' "8 According to the report, such technologies could be developed in minimal time because they were based upon capabilities already known.
The perceived need for a fully developed antiterrorism strike force at home also led to the revitalization of state militias, called State Defense Forces (SDFs). Such paramilitary civilian volunteer organizations obtain their statutory authority under title 32, section 109, of the United States Code. The Code also stipulates, however, that such forces cannot be federalized, hence the National Guard has been seeking to revise those regulations (specifically Army Reserve Regulations AR 850 and AR 250) which impede the full coordination of SDF under federal leadership in the event of an emergency. Forty-three states have passed, or have pending, enabling legislation allowing the SDF organizations to be made subject to federal jurisdiction in the case of civil emergencies. There are currently about 100,000 members in these rejuvenated special state militias, represented nationally by the State Defense Force Association of the United States, a lobbying group.
SDFs do not as yet receive federal monies and are supported only minimally by their own states. As a result, in some states, SDF programs have been funded using private and corporate donations. Combined with the fact that SDFs are not subject to military regulations (they are, and remain, civilian organizations), who controIs their membership and functions is uncertain. They have similarities to paramilitary organizations in the Third World, which have performed dirty jobs for the army while permitting official plausible deniability. The abuses that have occurred within the SDFs are suggestive. For example, the Texas State Guard was forced to disband one of its units in 1984 when the unit commander, Robert Holloway (a former Rhodesian mercenary), refused to have his men dress in official State Guard uniforms, preferring instead to have them clad in combat outfits. Because the unit received about half of its funding from private sources, however, it remained generally, intact despite loss of state support. The SDF's chief recruiter in Utah, who once hosted a radio show for white supremacists, was found distributing literature on behalf of the paramilitary group Aryan Nation from his recruiting booth at a gun show. 9
As we have noted, information gathering and the dissemination of news and propaganda are a central part of the government's "counterterrorism" operation. The various responsible agencies have long collected and produced data on terrorism incidents, written and sponsored papers on the problem and its control, organized and participated in conferences on terrorism, and provided speakers and witnesses in hearings and at public gatherings. One of the early major conferences on terrorism, held in Washington in 1976, was organized by the State Department, and a sizable fraction of the witnesses testifying in congressional hearings on terrorism have been State Department representatives.10 The State Department now has a much enlarged information-propaganda operation. There is an Office of the Ambassador-at-Large for Counterterrorism, whose function is mainly "public diplomacy," a euphemism for propaganda. This official is in charge of the Public Diplomacy Working Group, whose function is "to generate greater global understanding of the threat of terrorism and efforts to resist it."11 He spends a great deal of time addressing a variety of audiences, including those provided by the Voice of America and Worldnet (a government-owned TV network linking Washington to U.S. embassies and missions throughout the world).
Terrorism was one of the ideological centerpieces of the Reagan administration's "public diplomacy" effort, which was judged by the GAO to have to have involved "prohibited, covert propaganda . . . beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities. . ."12 According to Robert Parry and Peter Kornbluh, William Casey and WaIter Raymond, Jr., served as the campaign's chief architects. ~aymond, described by one official as the CIA's leading propagandiexperi,w"as detailed to the NSC staff in 1982 in order to help establish the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean.13 With a budget of $1 million a year, plus eight full-time professionals on loan from other agencies, OPD, in the words of one senior official, carried out "a huge psychological operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in denied or enemy territory."14 This operation involved not merely a large-scale propaganda effort, but systematic intimidation of journalists, media executives, and legislators, who were accused of swallowing Sandinista propaganda, accepting bribes, and demonstrating a lack of patriotism.15 In its first year of operation, among other activities OPD booked more than 1,500 speakers, published 3 books on Nicaragua, distributed materials to 1,600 college campuses, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers, and 107 religious organizations. It also succeeded in planting sympathetic op-ed pieces in several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. A very large part of this propaganda effort involved the creation and dissemination of outright disinformation. The claims that the Sandinistas were running a "terrorist country club,"16 had admitted a design for a "revolution without frontiers,"17 were persecuting Jews,18 had installed a constitution which referred to the FSLN as the "vanguard of the people" and "codified the Sandinista party's absolute power,"19 and were actively engaged in the narcotics trade20 all involved the blatant misreading or fabrication of evidence. The MIC crisis of November 1984, designed to divert attention from the Nicaraguan election, was an OPD disinformation operation.21 The claim that the bombing of Eden Pastora's press conference at La Penca in 1984 was the work of a Basque terrorist group (ETA) was an OPD fabrication, which had been prepared in haste just prior to the bombing attack.22
As one further illustration of OPD "information" methods, the State Department responded to the numerous reports of contra atrocities by issuing its own report, purportedly cataloging equally gruesome Sandinista crimes. The document was written by Wesl Smith, described by State Department officials as a "Mormon student." Smith claimed to have interviewed hundreds of eyewitnesses I while in Nicaragua. During a Washington press conference held to introduce Smith and his findings, however, it became clear that he had actually been ill and confined to his Managua hotel room for the duration of his fact-finding trip, and that his tales were derived! from a single source. Oliver North's courier, Robert Owen, later I testified that Smith's report was actually underwritten by his company, the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Assistance (IDEA). Leslie Cockburn describes Smith as "a foot soldier in Oliver North's network and a veteran of the administration's propaganda battles over human rights abuses in Nicaragua."23 North's own view, which the mass media never took to heart in handling OPD information, is: "There is great deceit [and] deception practiced in the conduct of covert operations. . . . They are at essence a lie."24
Given the new role of terrorism in 1981, the CIA also began a sharp adjustment of the "facts" that would allow it to show that terrorism was skyrocketing in importance and that the West in general and America in particular were the main victims. In the first CIA annual report issued under the new Reagan-era director, William Casey, no definition of terrorism was included, Casey preferring "flexible" usage that would allow the manipulation of numbers.25 A preliminary estimate on terrorism by Bruce Clark, director of the CIA's National Foreign Assessments Center (NFAC), was rejected by Casey and sent back for revisions because "it did not support Mr. Haig's assertions" and, in fact, suggested that there was no such thing as "international terrorism," only scattered groups with their own agendas, which for the most part were not connected with the Soviet Union.26 Clark soon retired from his post at NFAC, citing "personal reasons," and was replaced by John McMahon, the CIA deputy director of operations. Shortly thereafter, Casey rejected a DIA study of terrorism which, like its CIA counterpart, had failed to find evidence of Soviet direction and substantial support. The numbers that had been provided on terrorist incidents and their growth were also felt to be deficient, a problem remedied by the addition to the terrorism category of "criminal activities," "hoaxes,' and "threats" of terrorism. By this route, the 1980 figure of terrorist "incidents" (760) was increased nearly threefold over the 1979 figure (260).27
Casey, like Haig, had been impressed by Claire Sterling's findings of a centrally controlled Soviet network, unaware, along with Haig, that the core evidence in Sterling's work rested on CIA disinfor¬mation "blown back" to the U.S public, and to Casey and Haig, via Sterling. Bob Woodward reports that a senior review panel, appointed by Casey to assess CIA estimates of Soviet involvement in terrorism, discovered that Sterling had relayed a story that "was part of an old, small-scale CIA covert propaganda operation. . . . Gordon [Lincoln Gordon, chairman of the review panel] found the sequence particularly telling: from CIA propaganda to Sterling's book galleys, to Haig's reading of the galleys, to Haig's press conference, then Haig's comments picked up in the New York Times article by Sterling, then finally in Sterling's book."28 Intelligence analyst Gregory Trev¬erton contends that the CIA analysts assigned the task of checkin~ out Sterling's sources found that "virtually all of them were CIA disinformation - articles planted by covert operators in various media. "29
In addition to executive department interest, Congress also con¬tributed to the increased focus on terrorism with numerous hearings and reports. It has been a long-standing American tradition for "nativist" and reactionary elements in the Congress to obtain control of "internal security" committees in times of Red scares and to use these committees as forums to generate hysteria and to push their own ideologicallines.30 This happened again in the 1970s and 1980s. Most notable in the 1980s was the work of the Denton Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, which held numerous hearings on terrorism, put out many reports on the subject, and provided a substantial publicity windfall to the far-right faction of the terrorism industry. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, who headed the subcommittee, was a committed (and eccentric) reactionary who fitted well into the Dies-McCarthy-Lusk committee tradition.31 Table 4-1 shows a tabulation of the witnesses who appeared before twenty congressional hearings on terrorism in 1980-86, of which eight were held by Denton's committee. It is noteworthy that official witnesses from the executive branch (rows 1-3) accounted for 41.6 percent of the total. Equally interesting, however, is the prominence of Denton and other congressional witnesses making statements to the committees. They account for 16.7 percent of the total witnesses (Denton himself making 6.3 percent of the statements).
Table 4-1
Witnesses in Twenty Government Hearings on Terrorism, 1980-1986
WITNESS NAME OR CLASS NUMBER PERCENT State Department 29 23.0 FBI 9 7.1 DEA and other federal 14 11.1 Congressional 21 16.7 Denton (8) 6.3 East (3) 2.4 Leahy (3) 2.4 Spector (2) 1.6 McConnell (2) 1.6 Wyden (1) 0.8 Rinaldo (1) 0.8 Humphrey (1) 0.8 Police 9 7.1 Foreign officials 2 1.6 Foreign turncoats1 8 6.3 Nathan Adams (Reader's Digest) 1 0.8 J. B. Bell 1 0.8 Martha Crenshaw 1 0.8 Yonah Alexander 1 0.8 William Colby 1 0.8 Arnaud de Borchgrave 1 0.8 Daniel J ames2 1 0.8 Jeane Kirkpatrick3 1 0.8 Michael Ledeen 1 0.8 Robert Moss4 1 0.8 Claire Sterling 1 0.8 Paul Henze 1 0.8 Nina Shea 1 0.8 Robert Kupperman 2 1.6 Brian Jenkins 1 0.8 Robert Goldman (Americas Watch) 1 0.8 Joseph Hassett (ACLU) 1 0.8 Charles Maechling (Carnegie End.) 1 0.8 Other5 15 11.9 Totals 126 100
1. The Denton Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism heard testimony from eight former ANC and SWAPO members brought over from South Africa to testify on the Red takeover of the South African liberation movements, summarized in a committee report of November 1982, Soviet, East German and Cuban Involvement in Fomenting Terrorism in Southern Africa. 2. Daniel James's Red Design For the Americas, rationalizing the overthrow of the Arbenz government of Guatemala, was published in 1954 by John Day, a CIA conduit. His connections with the CIA have been long and deep. See L. Wolf, "Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History," CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 21 (Spring 1984), p. 32. 3. Kirkpatrick was the sole witness in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, State-Sponsored Terrorism, 99th Cong., 2nd sess., Jan. 28, 1986. 4. Moss was the only witness at a hearing of the Denton subcommittee, Terrorism: The Role of Moscow and Its Subcontractors, 97th Cong., 1st sess., June 26, 1981. 5. This includes four academics, a Brookings Institution analyst, five lawyers, a representative of a security firm, and four others.
The government has also played a very important indirect role in the production of information (and disinformation) on terrorism. It has encouraged and provided crucial support to the private sector of the industry, some of whose members qualify as quasi¬governmental. The Rand Corporation, a "private" think tank spon¬sored by the D.S. Air Force, has a section devoted to terrorism. The important Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CS IS) had as an early senior official Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, and the organization has long been in a revolving¬door relationship with the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department. As is shown in chapter 7, many other accredited "private experts" have worked for military and intelligence organizations and maintain ongoing relationships with them. These institutes and experts work in tandem with government agencies to supply a proper perspective and suitable information on terrorism to the public. They are also important vehicles for specific government propa¬ganda.32 This point is applicable to government-media relationships as well, where the government has long used selected reporters, papers, and magazines as vehicles for the placement of black propaganda.33 The government also provides covert financial sup¬port as well as privileged information to its favorite institutes and experts, hiring them as consultants, subsidizing and distributing their writings, and giving them publicity in government-sponsored con¬ferences, hearings, and press briefings.34
Other Governments: The International Linkages
Foreign governments within the Free World are also regularly engaged in the manufacture and distribution of information and propaganda on "terrorism," and they all take essentially the same Free World line as that outlined by Shultz in 1984 (see chapter 3). All of them sponsor and covertly support private sector terrorism institutes, security firms, and experts. Some of these will be reviewed below in connection with our discussion of the private-sector institutions in Great Britain, Canada, Israel, and South Africa.
At this juncture we want to stress the international linkages and solidarity of the Western governments in their concern with terrorism. This is of special interest because many of the governmental participants and their individual agents are themselves notorious terrorists. We will see that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and its subsidiary organization, the Confederation of Associations for the Unification of the Americas (CAUSA), and the closely affiliated World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which are sponsored by and are sponsors of terrorist governments, organizations, and individuals, have numerous interlocks and other relationships with the U .S. and Israeli institutes and experts of the terrorism industry.
The Moon system is closely linked to the South Korean government and its intelligence agency, the KCIA, and the system is properly regarded as "an agent for the South Korean government."35 The Fraser Committee report of 1978 cited a CIA analysis which claimed that the longtime head of the KCIA, Kim Tong Pil, had "organized" the Unification Church and used it "as a political tool," and the report itself details the mutually supportive relations between the Moon system and Kim Tong Pil and the KCIA.36 Moon's longtime chief aide has been Colonel Bo Hi Pak, a former high official of the KCIA, while the church's political arm, CAUSA, was founded in 1980 by Pak and Kim Sang In, who had been the KCIA's station chief in Mexico. Moon's funding has come in part from his share In state-controlled Korean businesses, including the Tong-il armaments company (which has done business with the Pentagon as well as serving the South Korean government).37
The Moon organizations have cultivated ties with a large number of the world's most notorious anti-Semites, terrorists, and regimes of terror. The executive director of CAUSA in 1981 was Warren Richardson, formerly general counsel for the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. CAUSA has held "anticommunist" seminars and established warm relations with military and death squad leaders in Paraguay, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina (before 1983), and Mexico, among others. During the height of state terror in Uruguay, in 1977-80, the Moon system invested heavily in hotels, newspapers, and the printing business in that country. After the fascist military putsch in Bolivia in July 1980, one of the first foreign "dignitaries" to arrive with greetings for the newly installed president, General Garda Meza, was CAUSA's Bo Hi Pak. Nine months after the coup, on May 31, 1981, CAUSA held a celebratory conference in La Paz's Sheraton Hotel where Pak declared that God had chosen Bolivia as the nation destined to "conquer communism" in Latin America. In 1983, after the ouster of Garda Meza, the Bolivian Ministry of the Interior claimed that the Unification Church had contributed $4 million to help plan and execute the coup. The church's representative in Bolivia, Tom Ward, had maintained close and ongoing ties to Klaus Barbie, and served as a middleman for CIA payments to an Argentinian intelligence agent named Alfredo Mingolla in 1981.38
Moon himself is openly contemptuous of democracy,39 and his organizations support repressive legislation40 and help fascists on a global basis, from Le Pen in France to the death squad leaders of Latin America. Within the United States, the Moon organizations have been important financial backers of Richard Viguerie,41 whose service in organizing the New Right was an important contribution to the rightward political drift of this country in the 1970s and 1980s. Clarkson makes a convincing case that "in coalition with right-wing secular and religious groups the Moon organization is attempting to create a broad-based mainstream fascist movement in America."42 Moon's dedicated anticommunism and enormous resources43 have given him a free hand to buy allies, subsidize right-wing causes, and acquire (and operate at a loss) newspapers and magazines in the United States and elsewhere in the Free World.
The forerunner of W ACL, the Asian People's Anticommunist League, was organized in 1954 by the secret police of Taiwan and South Korea. At that time, Ray Cline was CIA station chief in Taiwan, and the league was very possibly a CIA project.44 The WACL itself, established in 1966, has always been a locus of activity of the extreme right. In addition to being founded by the right-wing regimes of Taiwan and South Korea, it has always included a very strong Nazi, fascist, and anti-Semitic contingent. The semifascist Moon system and CA USA have been important constituent members, and WACL has accommodated the "death squad right" of Latin America. The WACL power base in Japan centers in the Unification Church, two ex-fascists-Ryouchi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, both class I Japanese war criminals of World War II-and organized crime.45
The Latin American Anticommunist Confederation (CAL), organized in 1972 by the Political Warfare Department of Taiwan as a regional chapter of WACL, included the violently anti-Semitic neo-Nazi Mexican organization, the Tecos, and "within a short time some of the most notorious killers, sadists, drug traffickers, and terrorists in Latin America could be found under the CAL umbrella."46 The 1975 Banzer Plan - named for Hugo Banzer, Bolivia's right-wing dictator - to harass and murder activist and progressive laity, clergy, and bishops throughout Latin America, was put into effect in ten different countries through CAL initiatives, and scores of religious were murdered in the years that followed.47 In September 1980, the annual CAL conference was held in Argentina, presided over by General Suarez Mason, a central figure in the ongoing mass murder of the "Dirty War." Also in attendance were Mario Sandoval Alarcon (who once declared, "I am a fascist"), the Guatemalan death squad leader, who was as well a guest at the 1980 Republican convention in Dallas; Garda Meza, the Bolivian dictator sponsored by the Argentinian junta and the Bolivian drug cartel; Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson; Stefano delle Chiaie, Italy's most 'wanted terrorist; and John Carbaugh, an aide to Senator Jesse Helms (and in 1984 an official U .S. observer testifying to the fairness of the Guatemalan election).
In 1984, WACL came under the leadership of retired U .S. Major General John Singlaub. Singlaub, who had been pushed into retirement during the Carter years for insubordination in opposing policies of which he disapproved, was a veteran of counterinsurgency warfare and a simpleminded exponent of holy war against the infidel. He has extensive ties within the organized right, is close to the Soldier of Fortune magazine adventurers and mercenaries (he attended their conference on terrorism in Puerto Rico in 1979), and has long been affiliated with the American Security Council (ASC) and its right-wing network. Singlaub is an old friend and ally of Ray Cline, who is also a veteran participant in WACL affairs, along with Roger Fontaine, an official of Reagan's National Security Council, Alex Alexiev of Rand, William Mazzocco, formerly of AID, and numerous other V.S. intelligence, military, and other government figures, past and present.
Singlaub was also close to the Reagan White House. From April 1983 until October 1984 he chaired an official Pentagon panel established to design V.S. policies toward developing countries. The panel also included Brigadier General Heine Aderholt, a contributing editor to Soldier of Fortune, and another half dozen extreme right¬wing military officers and academicians.48 In April 1984, Singlaub met with President Reagan and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and was named "the chief fund-raising contact" to the contra army in Central America.49 With this choice, the president plucked from the world of the paramilitary/neo-Nazi fringe a man who had spent the six years since his forced retirement from the army in some of the most powerful and dangerous organizations on the U.S. and international extreme right, where his associates included former Nazis, Nazi collaborators, anti-Semites, leaders of death squads, and a motley crew of mercenaries. Reagan honored these with a warm greeting to WACL at its 1984 gathering, asserting that the organization was playing a "leadership role" in the "gallant struggle being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day." Within a year, at Bitburg, Reagan would pay his respects to the Waffen-SS.50
The spectacle of the "antiterrorist" administration contracting with a set of right-wing terrorists to underwrite illegal terrorist attacks on a small neighboring country should have raised some questions in the press about the locus of terrorism. The arrangement with Singlaub and W ACL was made two months before the Jonathan Institute conference of 1984, at which Shultz located international terrorism in Moscow and spoke about the V.S. devotion to the rule of law and civilized conduct. But the press reported his line without raising questions (see chapter 8). As we will see, the W ACL is linked extensively to the V.S. terrorism industry, including the experts of the Hoover Institution, CSIS, and other groups. These linkages to real terrorists add poignancy to the media's heavy dependence on these authorities to identify "terrorists."
There is, in short, a continuity and solidarity between the extreme right and right-wing regimes, including many individuals and gov¬ernments who are major terrorists, and the governments and the more respectable elements of the West concerned with the subject of terrorism. Taiwan, South Korea, Reverend Moon, Botha, Shamir and Rabin, Reinhard Gehlen,51 the death squad leaders of Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador, Ray Cline, and Ronald Reagan have all been fighting "terrorism" together, and they mean the same thing in their use of the word. Each of these parties has had a role to play. The governments protect their agents as best they can. Thus in the midst of the murder of thousands of Indian peasants in Guatemala in 1982, Reagan visited Rios Montt and found him to be a devoted democrat getting a "bum rap." Reagan found Botha's regime to be "reformist" and deserving of "constructive engagement." The Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie wandered through Latin America for years, serving various terror regimes, with an impunity that led the head of the Italian secret service organization SISDE to admit to the Italian Parliament in 1984 that (in a journalist's paraphase) "the fascist leader is evidently given great protection first of all by the South American secret services. [But furthermore] he pointed out that the American secret services had given very inadequate help to their Italian counterparts in attempting to capture delle Chiaie."52 Delle Chiaie even entered the United States on a plane from South America on September 9, 1982, and was not apprehended by U.S. authorities, nor were the Italian police informed of his visit. This parallels V.S. lack of interest in and even use of the major Cuban refugee terrorists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada.53
A further major responsibility of the prestigious and respectable elements of the terrorism industry is to enhance the credibility of its working agencies and operatives by favorable association. Reagan's warm greeting to WACL gave it an aura of respectability as well as favorable publicity. The extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation") gained the same benefits by the regular participation of high Reagan administration officials in its affairs. The CSIS acquired respectability: by the association of former government officials Henry Kissinger James Schlesinger, and Anne Armstrong, and board members from the corporate elite such as Louis Gerstner of American Express and John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers. The credentials of the less savory elements of the industry who serve as experts, like Francis and Moss at Heritage, and Alexander, de Borchgrave, Henze, Sterling, and Ledeen at CSIS, are thereby elevated. These can then push extreme right-wing positions on the "MacNeil/Lehrer News-hour," other TV network news shows, and papers such as the New York Times as members of respectable establishment institutions.
Other members of the counterterrorism network have the responsibility of instructing Third World military personnel and police on the nature of communism and subversion and the need to stand ready to displace weak elected governments with regimes of law and order (e.g., at the Pentagon's School of the Americas in Panama).54 Others train them in the techniques of law and order, including the interrogation and control of unruly peasants and the tracking down and dispatch of subversives (Panama, Taiwan, Fort Benning, various police academies). The CIA also supplied training for the security forces of Egypt in the 1950s, using numerous Nazi killers obtained through the Gehlen network, including SS Sturmbannfuhrer Alois Brunner.55 Brunner, Eichmann's top trouble-shooter, estimated by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to have been personally responsible for the murder of 128,500 people, had explained to Berlin Lawyer Kurt Schendel that French Jewish orphans must be killed, too, as they were "future terrorists."56
At least since the 1960s, such instruction has been extended to paramilitary security forces like ORDEN, in El Salvador, trained by U .S. and Argentinian personnel. 57 The vice-president's task force of 1986 records as a continuing responsibility of U .S. counterterrorism forces the need to provide "training and assistance to civilian security forces of friendly governments."58 The "civilian security forces" of the friendly countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Philippines, and at various times Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, are more commonly known as death squads. They and the affiliated military forces in Latin America and South Africa are assigned the task of killing "terrorists." The different roles within the terrorism industry illustrate the familiar case of "distributed functions."
The solidarity of the Western government counterterrorism network is shown not only in linkages and a common viewpoint and line on terrorism, it is also displayed in exchanges of information, friendly intelligence relationships, and the toleration of intelligence, political, and propaganda activities on the part of friendly powers. The warm relation between the CIA and South Africa's BOSS (Bureau of State Security), noted earlier, illustrates a general pattern. The CIA helped organize the Taiwan and South Korean intelligence agencies, and relations between all three have been close. The CIA was also a sponsor of and adviser to the intelligence agencies of the national security states in Latin America, such as Chile's DINA, and information exchanges and friendly relations have continued up to the present. The United States tried hard "to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among the Latin American countries," as General Robert Porter explained in 1968.59 One of the products of this effort was Operation Condor, a cooperative endeavor of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay to collectively monitor and murder dissidents who had taken refuge in neighboring countries. Hundreds were killed in this Free World terrorist operation.60
This cooperative spirit also enabled South Korea to engage in extensive bribery of U .S. politicians from the 1950s onward, and through the agency of Reverend Moon's organizations, to own newspapers and subsidize numerous right-wing organizations in the, United States and throughout the Free World. Similarly, South Africa was able to acquire and invest in newspapers and magazines and to subsidize institutions in Great Britain, France, and the United States to help it propagandize Western audiences.61 In Great Britain, where South Africa has close links to the business community and Tory party, the South African Department of Information secretly sponsored and financed the Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI) in 1976 and thereafter, to disseminate its propaganda through books, other publications, and conferences.62 Of course, the United States itself was able to do the same thing even more extensively in its allied and client countries, mobilizing resources and manipulating elections on a very large scale in the Philippines and Italy, for example.63 In England, the CIA organized and subsidized Brian Crozier's Forum World Features (FWF), which was transformed later into the Institute for the Study of Conflict, a British right-wing think tank and propaganda agency operating much the same way as CSIS and Heritage, though on a smaller scale. Money flows easily within the Free World to sustain right-wing ideological institutions.
Notes
1. This point was actually suggested indirectly in the press, which noted in 1981 that "some officials question whether terrorism is an appropriate focus for the foreign policy of the United States." This is followed by a sentence noting that a meaningful policy on the subject "has failed to crystallize," consistent with the hypothesis that it was "noise" and not real action that was the heart of "policy." Philip Taubman, "U.S. Tries to Back Up Haig on Terrorism," New York Times, May, 1981.
2. Public Report of the Vice-President's Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, Feb. 1986, p. 10.
3. For full details, see Stephen D. Goose, "Low-Intensity Warfare: The Warriors and Their Weapons," in Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low-Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency, and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 80-111.
4. Goose notes that "Special Operations Forces are America's experts in guerrilla and antiguerrilla warfare, in sabotage, and in counterterrorism operations" (ibid., p.81).
5. Diana Reynolds, "A State of Emergency or a Police State? Emergency Planning in the Reagan Era," unpublished manuscript, 1989, pp. 8-9; UPI, "California Specialized Training Institute," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 1978.
6. Reynolds, "State of Emergency," p. 17.
7. Quoted in ibid., p. 46.¬
8. Ibid., p. 19.
9. Ibid., p. 43.
10. See table 4-1 below.
11. Public Report, p. 34.
12. Quoted in Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, abridged ed. (New York: Times Books, 1988), p. 44.
13. "Reagan's Pro-Contra Propaganda Machine," Washington Post, Sept. 4, 1988, p. C-1.
14. Sklar, Washington's War on Nicaragua, p. 245.
15. See Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (Washington: Institute
for Policy Studies, 1987), pp. 160-66.
16. A phrase of Edwin Meese. See the analysis of this claim in Extra! Oct.-Nov. 1987, p. 10.
17. For an analysis of this disinformation theme, see Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua: How Washington Constructs Its Case for Counterrevolution in Central America (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987), pp. 11,33,41.
18. For a discussion, see Extra! Oct.-Nov. 1987, p. 13.
19. These straightforward fabrications were made by Elliott Abrams in op-ed columns in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 29, 1987, and similarly in an editorial in the Washington Post, Se pt. 22, 1987.
20. This OPD story, initiated in July 1984 and enlarged in March 1986, rested on the testimony of Barry Seal, a convicted drug dealer who avoided a lengthy jail term by reaching an agreement with the government. Seal produced a blurry photo which supposedly showed Nicaraguans and Colombians loading cocaine onto a cargo plane. Several months later this same cargo plane crashed into a Nicaraguan hillside during a contra resupply operation, leading to the capture of Eugene Hasenfus. The DEA itself regularly denied the existence of evidence that Nicaraguan officials were involved in drug dealing. See, e.g.,Joel Brinkley, "Drug Agency Rebuts Reagan Charge," New York Times, March 19, 1986, p. A-3. The most remarkable feature of this line of disinformation is that the evidence for contra involvement in the narcotics trade, and Reagan administration protection of the contra drug traders, was overwhelming. See Kornbluh, Nicaragua, pp. 201-5; Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control: The Stmy of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms PiPeline, and the Contra Drug Connection (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), passim.
21. This disinformation effort is discussed in Herman and Chomsky, Manufac¬turing Consent, pp. 137-39.
22. This important disinformation claim was prepared under contract for OPD, then disseminated through gullible media conduits, notably ABC "World News Tonight" and MacNeil/Lehrer, and then used by OPD as information derived from independent journalists. For a valuable account, see Johan Carlisle, "Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign," Propaganda Review (Winter 1988), pp. 5ff.
23. Cockburn, Out of Control, p. 145.
24. Quoted by Klare and Kornbluh, Low-Intensity Warfare, p. 16.
25. It would also allow the manipulation of identification of terrorists. In 1984,
it was noted in regard to a decision memorandum of April 1984 that some officials "say they see real difficulties in the fact that the decision memorandum does not define terrorism, yet calls for condemning it in all its forms." [Leslie Gelb, "Admin¬istration Debating Antiterrorist Maneuvers," New York Times, June 6, 1984.] This is not a difficulty but an advantage if the real interest is political and there is no objection to terrorism per se.
26. Philip Taubman, "D.S. Tries to Back Dp Haig on Terrorism," New York Times, May 3, 1981; John Kelly, "Casey's Terrorism Math," Counterspy, June-Aug. 1983, p. 9; Ralph McGehee, "Terrorism," Zeta Magazine, Feb. 1988, p. 60.
27. Kelly, "Casey's Terrorism Math," p. 9.
28. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 129.
29. Gregory F. Treverton, Covert Action (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 165. For a piece of CIA disinformation that ends up as the key alleged fact in Sterling's book, see chapter 7, p. 172.
30. The most famous of these committees were the Dies committee of the late 1930s and the McCarthy committee of the early 1950s. For a brief overview of the
history and role of these committees, see Frank Donner, "Intelligence as a Mode of Governance-The Role of Congress," chap. 11 in The Age of Surveillance (New York: Vintage, 1981).
31. "The born-again Denton advocated the death penalty for adulterers and proposed legislation requiring citizens of Communist countries to obtain written permission before attending sessions of Congress." Pell, The Big Chill, p. 191. See further, in chapter 5, the account of the National Freedom Forum, a creation of Denton.
32. See below, in chapter 5 under CSIS and chapter 7 under Robert Moss, for some examples. For the reciprocal process, where private sector disinformation is used by the government, see chapter 5 under JINSA.
33. Black propaganda is unattributed material, or material attributed to a nonexistent source, or false material attributed to a real source. For the differences from "white" and "gray" propaganda, see Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam, 1975), pp. 63-64. A favorite trick of the CIA and State Department in Latin America has been the use of planted stories alleging Cuban subversion. See the case of Ecuador, described in detail by Agee from his experience there as a CIA officer in that country, in Inside the Company, pp. 104-322. More generally, see John Crewdson and Joseph Treaster, "The C.LA.'s 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views," "Worldwide Propaganda Network Built and Controlled by the C.LA.," and "C. LA. Established Many Links to Journalists in U.S. and Abroad," New York Times, Dec. 25-27, 1977; Brian Freemantle, CIA (New York: Stein & Day, 1985), chap. 7; William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed, 1986), passim.
34. Illustrations are given in chapters 5 and 7 below as well as in the works cited in the previous note.
35. Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The True Story of How Nazis, the Unification Church, South American Death Squads, and the American New Right Have Joined Forces to Fight Communism (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 106.
36. See Fred Clarkson, "'Moon's Law': 'God Is Phasing Out Democracy, CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 27 (Spring 1987), pp. 42-43.
37. Robert Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, TongsunPark, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980), passim. Former congressman Edward Derwinski, appointed to be George Bush's cabinet secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, attempted to foil Rep. Donald Fraser's investigation into the so-called Koreagate scandal. As the Boston Globe editorialized on January 16, 1989, "In 1977, the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency for the northeastern United States contacted [Fraser] . . . to say he would defect and reveal what he knew about South Korean operations in this country. Derwinski, the ranking Republican on the committee, was the only person Fraser informed. Shortly after Derwinski knew about the defector. The KCIA also knew.” (“In the Veteran’s Interest?”) An obstruction-of-justice case was brought against Derwinski by the Justice Department, but was later dropped because the evidence was deemed too sensitive to be made public.
38. Kai Hermann, "Klaus Barbie: A Killer s Career, CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 25 (Winter 1986), pp. 15-20.
39. Clarkson," 'Moon's Law,' " cites numerous direct statements by Moon showing this, apart from the antidemocratic thrust of his organizational efforts and lines of support.
40. In japan, the International Federation for Victory over Communism-a Moon front group-has lobbied intensively for highly repressive legislation in the form of an "Anti-Espionage Law." See Chamoto Shigemasa, "The Anti-Espionage Legislation and the Moonies: A Critical Background," Ampo: Japan-Asia Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (1987): 12ff.
41. Sara Diamond, Spiritual Warfare (Boston: South End Press, 1989), pp. 57- 60.
42. Clarkson, " 'Moon's Law,' " p. 46.
43. The Andersons point out that the Unification Church quietly pumped over
$100 million into Uruguay, buying up its biggest hotel and third largest newspaper; has lost $150 million on the Washington Times; and contributes large sums to conservative think tanks and rightist groups, as well as in funding conferences. They quote two former high officials of the Unification Church in japan, who claim that the church sent as much as $800 million to the United States over an eight-year period. The source of the money is unclear: a part comes from the Moon enterprises in South Korea and collections and sales of church members, but some large but uncertain portion may come from the South Korean government, the drug trade, and "flight capital" from wealthy Koreans and j apanese racketeers. Inside the League, pp. 127-30. See also Narusawa Muneo, "Moonie Money: Their Japanese Financial Base Exposed," Ampo:Japan-Asia Quarterly Review 19, no. 3 (1987): 12ff.
44. This is the judgment of the Anderson brothers, Inside the League, pp. 54-56. 45. Ibid., pp. 63ff.
46. Ibid., p. 139.
47. Ibid., pp. 145-46. See also Penny Lernoux, Cry of the PeoPle, pp. 142-45. 48. Others on the panel were General Edward Lansdale, Andy Messing, Edward Luttwak of CSIS, Sam Sarkesian of Loyola University in Chicago, Seal Doss of Ripon College, and Colonel John Waghelstein. The report of this panel is classified.
49. The October 8, 1985 AP wire by Robert Parry that contained this information was inserted into the Congressional Record on October 9, 1985, by Congressman Mineta, who stated that the importance of the news report is that it shows that in response to the Boland amendment, the president established "a secret fund to replace C.I.A. funds" with private and foreign assistance; and that "the President of the United States apparently OK'd nothing less than an international plumbers group. With a wink and a nod. . . [he] turned over U.S. Central American policy to a group of extreme right-wing organizations, and apparently encouraged U .S. allies to become their arms merchants." The quality press and national TV news, however, found this story of little interest.
50. On April 14, 1982, Reagan sent a warm letter of support to the neo-Nazi and racist Roger Peterson, a letter never repudiated by Reagan, but of little interest to the U.S. press. See Joe Conason, “Bitburg: Tip of the Iceberg,” Village Voice, May 7, 1985; Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, The New Right and the Reagan Administration (Cambridge, Mass,: Political Research Associates, 1988), pp.43 – 46.
51. The Nazi’s World War II intelegence chief on the Eastern front:-Gehlen was rehabilitated by the V nited States government and eventually came to head the intelligence agency of "free" West Germany, BND [see Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Systematic Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), chap. 4]. The "close cooperation" between Gehlen's BND and Israel's MOSSAD is described in Roger Faligot, "An Vnholy Alliance," The Middle East, Sept. 1981.
52. Quoted in Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), p. 90.
53. We will see in chapters 7 and 8 that, in conformity with a propaganda model, the V.S. experts and mass media are also not interested in these terrorists.
54. Frequently referred to in Latin America is "la Escuela de Golpes," or "School of the Cou ps."
55. See Simpson, Blowback, pp. 246-63.
56. Ibid., p. 248.
57. Nairn, "Behind the Death Squads."
58. Public Report, appendix H, p. 31.
59. Quoted in Black, U.S. Penetration of Brazil, p. 211.
60. See John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 160, 162, 238-39; Herman, Real Terror Network, pp.
69-73.
61. For its investments in these three countries' media, see Mervyn Rees and Chris Day, Muldergate: The Story of the Information Scandal (Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa, 1980), pp. 30, 40, 49, 129, 142. Although funding rumors are unconfirmed, John McGoff, South Africa's longtime agent in its attempt to acquire V.S. media firms, ended up as a director of the Washington Times. Former Washington Times publisher James Whalen had been editor of McGoff's Sacramento Bee and a director of McGoff's corporate vehicle, Panax. See James Adams, The Unnatural Alliance: Israel and South Africa (London: Quartet Books, 1984), pp. 129-33.
62. A letter reprinted in the Guardian [London] dated Oct. 3, 1980, addressed to Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, the British former regular army officer and Tory MP who headed F ARI, from John Adler at the South African embassy in London, read: "I have been instructed by Pretoria to inform you that the amount allocated to you for 1981 has been cut from R175,000 [$96,000] to R125,000 [$68,000]." [Quoted in John Jennings, Enemy Within: The Freedom Association, the Conservative Party and the Far-Right (London: Blackrose Press, n.d.), p. 9.] F ARI also got funding from V.S. corporations like Lockheed and General Dynamics. In June 1978 FARI held a conference in Brighton, England, on the Western commitment to South Africa, with Brian Crozier, Alan Chalfont, George Tanham [at various times, CSIS and Rand], and numerous South African and British officials in attendance. F ARI official Ian Grieg's book, The Communist Challenge to Africa, was published jointly by F ARI and the South African Freedom Foundation, another South Africa Information Depart¬ ment front. See Richard Shaw, "The British Right and Intelligence," Counterspy, 269 Nov. 1981-Jan. 1982, p. 57; "Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher," Lobster [Great Britain], no. 11 (April 1986), pp. 5 and 40.
63. On the Philippines, see Blum, The CIA, pp. 42-43; on Italy, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 72-74 and citations therein.
