Our Man in Morocco | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on September 17, 1999

When referring to Arab leaders, official Washington holds few compliments higher than "moderate" and "Western-oriented," though the adjectives rarely attach to political values such as democracy, human rights or pluralism.

The death of King Hassan II of Morocco on July 24 was a case in point. U.S. government eulogies and press retrospectives hailed the late monarch for his long service as a reliable client of Western diplomacy, with little note of his autocratic, corrupt and bloody rule.

"Over his 38-year reign, King Hassan II demonstrated time and again his leadership, his courage and his willingness to embrace change," declared President Clinton.

In an editorial, The Washington Post hailed the deceased monarch as "a figure who earned a reputation far beyond his region for moderation and reason. … His was an important contribution to regional stability." [WP, July 26, 1999]

During his life, Hassan also won high praise from President Bush for dispatching a contingent of royal Moroccan troops to join U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf War. At a White House dinner on Sept. 26, 1991, Bush praised Hassan's "commitment to shared ideals" and counted Hassan as a participant in "building a New World Order."

To his credit, Hassan did promote Arab-Israeli negotiations. He helped bring Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat to Camp David in 1978 and brokered other sensitive contacts between Middle Eastern antagonists.

But Morocco's 29 million people benefited little from Hassan's "moderation" and his "commitment to shared ideals." While Hassan ruled with an iron fist and accumulated vast wealth, one-third of his subjects lived in poverty, about one-quarter were unemployed and about half could not read or write.

Amid the backwardness and repression, Hassan lived a royal life as an international jet-setter. In a less-flattering tone than found in the U.S. press, the French newspaper, Le Monde, detailed Hassan's accumulated fortune which was estimated at $1.6 billion.

The king owned more than 20 palaces and villas scattered around Morocco, real-estate holdings in the United States and Europe, bulging stock portfolios and offshore bank accounts, many placed in the names of trusted advisers. Reportedly, Hassan's wealth also derived from the transiting of cocaine through Morocco and from the sale of homegrown cannabis. [Le Monde, July 26, 1999]

Little of this information was noted in the United States, however. Hassan earned this final wink apparently because U.S. officials appreciated his help on Washington's Middle East diplomacy and his collaboration on sensitive intelligence operations, such as funneling support to CIA-backed Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi.

But the urbane king, who studied in France and spoke several languages, also gained favor by indulging influential Americans in the romantic mystery of Morocco. He let them play out their "Arabian Nights" fantasies in luxurious desert settings.

One of the best known of these exotic galas was the 70th birthday party for publishing magnate Malcolm Forbes at his villa in Tangiers in 1989.

At an estimated cost of $2 million, Forbes -- calling himself "Ali-Dada" -- feted 800 of the world's leaders in business, media and government. The guest list glittered with the likes of The Washington Post's Katharine Graham, ABC's Barbara Walters, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

King Hassan spiced up the event by lending 200 horsemen in Moroccan costume and 750 folk performers. Hassan also hosted a lunch for the celebrants at the Tangier Country Club. (One of the organizers of this Moroccan bash was Malcolm Forbes's son, Steve, now a Republican candidate for president.) [People, Sept. 4, 1989]

Hassan's hospitality apparently earned him a warm spot in the hearts of many of the news executives who set the tone of U.S. press coverage.

Unlike the late Zairian dictator Mobutu Seke Zeto, another African leader who exploited his close ties with Washington to plunder his nation's wealth, the regal Hassan never suffered the harsh scrutiny that dogged Mobutu, a black African born in a humble village who came to power via the military.

Yet, Hassan ran Morocco almost as ruthlessly as Mobutu governed Zaire. Like Mobutu, Hassan crushed independence movements in outlying territories, eliminated political rivals with the help of Western intelligence services, and lived a life of luxury amid the poverty of his countrymen.

Born on July 9, 1929, Hassan was the oldest child of Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Youssef.

At the time of Hassan's birth, most of Morocco was a French protectorate. After World War II, however, Hassan's father, the Sultan, supported a popular movement for independence.

The French responded by forcing the Sultan into exile in 1953. But the challenge to French rule was just beginning. In 1954-55, an independence movement known as the National Union of Popular Forces [UNFP] led uprisings across Morocco.

At the time, the French were reeling from other rebellions in their empire, losing in Indochina in 1954 and battling for control of Algeria. So, in 1956, the French chose to grant Morocco independence while maintaining close ties by installing a reactionary pro-French monarchy.

For that purpose, the Sultan returned from exile and became King Mohammed V. Prince Hassan, who was fast gaining a reputation as an international playboy, worked with his father to consolidate the monarchy's power. One of the chief goals was to neutralize the UNFP and its charismatic intellectual leader, Mehdi Ben Barka.

In 1957, Prince Hassan enhanced his personal power by assuming command of the Royal Moroccan Army which then was divided between officers who had favored independence and those who were pro-French. In 1960, the prince survived the first of several assassination attempts, an attack that the monarchy blamed on Ben Barka and the UNFP.

When King Mohammed V died a year later, the prince ascended to the throne as Hassan II. He pushed through a new constitution that guaranteed some political rights, but the king retained the power to dissolve the legislature and control the army.

In July 1963, Moroccan authorities caught wind of another plot to assassinate Hassan. Ben Barka, who had denounced the "theocratic and feudal regime" for re-imposing "the medieval structure of traditional Moroccan society," was again blamed. A year later, Ben Barka was sentenced to death in absentia, along with 10 other colleagues from the UNFP.

Amid bloody anti-government riots in June 1965, fires swept Rabat and Casablanca. Hassan dissolved Parliament, declared a state of emergency and assumed absolute power. Some opposition figures were executed and others fled abroad.

From his exile base in Geneva, Ben Barka had continued to criticize Hassan's rule. Ben Barka also emerged as an international leader of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World nations, countries favoring neutrality in the Cold War. The United States, however, considered the Non-Aligned Movement a threat to Western solidarity and effectively a front for communist influence.

In 1965, Ben Barka was elected chairman of the movement's first Tricontinental Congress to be held Jan. 3-10, 1966. The United States was especially alarmed because the location for the Congress was Havana, Cuba, a choice that promised to enhance Fidel Castro's international stature.

Henry Tasca, U.S. ambassador to Morocco, held discussions with Moroccan Interior Minister, Gen. Mohammed Oufkir. Tasca then contacted the CIA's station in Paris about the possibility of facilitating Ben Barka's return to his home country. [Time, Dec. 29, 1975]

Yet, whether Washington really wanted Ben Barka back in Morocco, and if so, why, remain unanswered questions to this day.

As it turned out, a French journalist lured Ben Barka from Geneva to Paris with the prospect of speaking to a French film director working on a documentary about imperialism. On Oct. 29, 1965, Ben Barka and a friend were walking on Paris's busy Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Pres, on their way to meet the filmmakers, when a patrol car pulled up and two men jumped out flashing badges.

The two Parisian police detectives pulled Ben Barka into the car, whose occupants also included a French narcotics officer and an agent of the SDECE, the French intelligence service.

The car took Ben Barka to a house in a Paris suburb. The building was owned by Georges Boucheseiche, a heroin-trafficking gangster on the SDECE payroll. There, Boucheseiche and other thugs interrogated and tortured Ben Barka.

According to some accounts, Oufkir was present during the interrogation, possibly seeking the combination to a safe containing records of the Non-Aligned Movement. However, some journalists, such as Henrik Kruger in The Great Heroin Coup, have cast doubt on Oukfir's personal involvement.

The following night, Ben Barka was flown out of Paris and disappeared. His body has never been recovered.

The incident, however, had international ramifications. It enraged French president Charles deGaulle, who dispatched a personal emissary to King Hassan. DeGaulle unsuccessfully demanded Oufkir's extradition.

"Someone has taken me for a complete idiot," deGaulle fumed.

Convinced of CIA involvement, deGaulle cracked down on French operatives whom he suspected were CIA lackeys. Several of these operatives received stiff jail sentences. But the precise role of the CIA in the Ben Barka case has never been clarified.

There was reason, however, to suspect an American hand in Ben Barka's disappearance. Besides Washington's sensitivity about Castro and the Non-Aligned Movement, the Johnson administration at the time was moving aggressively around the world to thwart perceived Third World adversaries.

Most notably, President Johnson was escalating U.S. involvement in Indochina. But he also dispatched Marines to the Dominican Republic, sent experts to improve the efficiency of Guatemalan security forces and allowed U.S. officials to hand over names of suspected communists to Indonesian generals engaged in exterminating hundreds of thousands of Indonesians.

In Morocco, Ben Barka's disappearance removed a thorn from Hassan's side. But the king's autocratic rule continued to inspire attempts to overthrow his regime.

On July 10, 1971, Hassan celebrated his 42nd birthday with a gala at his seaside palace near Rabat. With about 400 prominent Moroccans in attendance, a force of 1,000 rebellious troops attacked, killing nearly 100 guests, but missing the king who hid in a bathroom.

When Hassan emerged from the bathroom, he is reputed to have confronted a rebel leader and recited the first verse of the Koran. Supposedly, the rebel knelt and kissed the king's hand, sparing Hassan and giving loyal troops time to counterattack. More than 150 rebels died and a dozen senior officers linked to the plot were executed.

In 1972, Hassan was stunned again when his longtime henchman, Oufkir, turned on the monarch. Oufkir ordered Moroccan jet fighters to shoot down Hassan's plane as it was about to land.

The fighters knocked out one engine and continued to strafe the plane on the ground. This time, according to legend, the quick-thinking king survived by grabbing the radio and convincing the rebels that the "tyrant" was dead.

With that assassination plot foiled, Hassan meted out harsh justice to Oufkir. Loyalist Gen. Ahmed Dlimi reportedly shot the disloyal Oufkir in the stomach, and Hassan personally finished off Oufkir with a shot through the general's trademark sunglasses. Oufkir's widow and six children were placed under a house arrest that continued for nearly two decades.

In 1975, Hassan moved to assert Moroccan authority over the Western Sahara, where an active independence movement, called the Polisario, had been fighting for freedom from Spain.

Hassan wanted to add Western Sahara's phosphate deposits to Morocco's and thus dominate the world market. In pursuit of that goal, Hassan's air force bombed and napalmed camps set up for the war's refugees. [Inquiry, May 26, 1980]

Faced with the Moroccan repression, many residents of the Western Sahara fled to Algeria. Seeking to solidify Morocco's control, Hassan trucked 350,000 civilians into the disputed region to stage a march. Hassan also began a campaign to relocate enough Moroccans into the area so they would hold the majority in any referendum on sovereignty.

Meanwhile, on the international front, Hassan took steps to guarantee a secure conduit of U.S. weapons and a better reputation for Morocco in the halls of American power.

Morocco hired a P.R. firm headed by former U.S. Sen. Charles Goodell to "improve public understanding in the United States of the right of Morocco to purchase armaments in the U.S."

But bad press still plagued Hassan's government. The Belgian Association of Democratic Jurists sent a medical team to Morocco where it found that Moroccan political prisoners were left in total isolation, chained to the ground, suspended head down or beaten on the soles of their feet until they lost consciousness. [NYT, May 26, 1980]

Over the years, leading human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, documented numerous cases of abuses under Hassan's government: imprisonment without trial, suppression of political dissent, torture and murder of dissidents. Morocco was widely judged to have one of the worst human rights records in the Arab world.

Toward the end of his reign, Hassan did take some hesitant steps toward democracy and political tolerance. Abdurrahman Youssufi, a socialist and former political prisoner, became prime minister after his political bloc dominated recent elections.

But Hassan kept tight control over how much political freedom was permitted. Abraham Serfaty, another opposition leader, was refused permission to return to Morocco, and Islamic leader Abdessalam Yacine has remained under house arrest for 10 years.

Hassan insisted, too, that his longtime ally, Driss Basri, continue to control the powerful Interior Ministry as he has done for 20 years.

Before his death, Hassan commented that "in the long term, in the course of a reign, and in the conduct of governments, there are often obligations which are incompatible with [people's] rights." [Manchester Guardian Weekly, July 28, 1999]

Now, Hassan's death has passed the broad powers of Morocco's monarchy onto his son, King Mohammed VI, the 18th regent of the 333-year Alaouite dynasty.

U.S. officials and leading editorialists have expressed hope that the new king will continue the "moderate" and "Western-oriented" policies of his father.

Testing Democracy: Elections in Algeria and Turkey | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on April 13, 1999

Amid bitter civil strife, Algeria and Turkey hold elections this week that will test the two countries’ commitment to democracy when voters favor Islamic-oriented candidates. Algerians go to the polls on Thursday and Turks vote on Sunday.

In both countries, the specter of military intervention hovers over the polls, especially if voters continue to show popular support for parties that advocate stronger adherence to Islamic traditions. After recent elections, military-backed officials in both countries blocked the will of voters who had favored Islamic parties over parties that were both more secular and more corrupt.

The Algerian crisis began in the late 1980s. Algerians had grown tired of a quarter century of one-party rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN), the political arm of the guerilla army that won independence from France in 1962. Algeria was suffering, too, from an economic downturn caused by a precipitous drop in oil and gas prices.

In 1988, runaway unemployment sparked riots and convinced the FLN that it should allow multiparty competition in elections. The political opening benefited the Islamic Salvation Front, known as the FIS. In December 1991, FIS candidates won a landslide victory in the first round of national elections.

Two weeks later, however, Algeria's army canceled the second round because the FIS was the odds-on favorite to win. The coup forced the resignation of President Chadli Bendjedid, who had been in office for more than a decade and had promoted the opening of Algeria’s electoral process. The army's rationale for the coup: it was saving the country from an anti-democratic Islamic movement.

Soon afterwards, the military declared a state of emergency. The FIS was dissolved as a legal political party and the political violence intensified. The Bush administration, which had close ties to the secular Algerian government, made no protest against the army’s move.

The new president, Mohammed Boudiaf, sought negotiations with the Islamic militants as well as the resignation of the army chief-of-staff, General Mohamed Lamari. After challenging the military, Boudiaf was assassinated, a murder widely blamed on military hard-liners.

Soon after Boudiaf’s death, a full-scale civil war erupted. The violence often pitted government-sponsored death squads against Armed Islamic Groups [GIA], a force whose leaders included fundamentalist extremists. By 1996, massacres were occurring almost daily. In nighttime attacks, armed men would hack women and children to death. Frequently, nearby police would stand by passively.

In Turkey, corrupt governing politicians -- some connected to neo-fascist movements and organized crime – have undermined public confidence in recent years. Some of those secret links literally crashed into public view in November 1996 when a speeding black Mercedes collided with a tractor near the village of Susurluk. The crash killed three people: a top police official, a leader of the neo-fascist Grey Wolves and a Mafia hit woman.

Subsequent investigations revealed that senior Turkish officials had maintained close ties to both the Grey Wolves and organized crime as strategies for eliminating political opponents and crushing Kurdish separatists.

In the face of this government corruption, the Islamic Welfare Party gained ground. It won a plurality in a national election and assumed the leading role in a coalition government that took office in Ankara in 1996.

But the fear of "anti-democratic" Islam reached a fever pitch in 1997. A military-backed state prosecutor outlawed the Islamic Welfare Party on the grounds that the party violated the 75-year-old rule of secular government as enunciated by Turkey's modern political father, Mustapha Kemal.

The prosecutor also banned Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, Welfare’s leader, from politics for five years. Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, which had tacitly supported Algeria’s coup against the popular will, the Clinton administration acquiesced to the power grab by Turkey’s military. Washington sent the helicopters and other military equipment used by Turkey’s army in a scorched earth campaign against Kurdish separatists.

Critics of the Turkish coup argued that the Islamic Welfare Party advocated only modest changes in the secularism of modern Turkish society, such as closing government offices at 4:30 p.m. during Ramadan holy days and loosening restrictions against women wearing headscarves.

This week’s elections represent new tests of pluralist democracy for both countries.

In Turkey, where legislative offices are at stake, the Islamic Welfare Party has been reincarnated as the Virtue Party. Despite last-minute attempts to ban the Virtue Party as well as a pro-Kurdish party, both opposition groups will appear on the ballots.

In Algeria, the presidency is at stake. Dr. Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, a former Algerian prime minister and son of an Islamic scholar, supports negotiations with the banned FIS. Mouloud Hamrouche, another candidate, also supports dialogue with the Islamists. But the frontrunner appears to be Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is supported by powerful generals.

In Turkey, tyranny and terror deface a democracy: [City Edition] | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe Jan 31 1999

 

Consider these scenes from a country that the United States considers a democracy:

A Mercedes careering down a remote highway in November 1996 collides head-on with a tractor. The victims in the fatal accident turn out to be strange bedfellows: a policeman, an underworld fugitive, a beauty queen, and a politician who controls a private militia hired by the government to fight separatist Kurds. The discovery of them together speaks volumes about the alliances that govern the nation.

Skip ahead to 1998. Fifty women march peacefully -- as they have each weekend for three years -- bearing photos of "disappeared" spouses and sons. Police suddenly close in, brutalizing several "Saturday Mothers" and arresting 30 of them. A human rights official lodges a protest and is promptly jailed, along with 157 others.

These two scenes might suggest Iraq or another certified police state. But they took place in Turkey, a country described as a republican parliamentary democracy. Not coincidentally, it is also a key ally and key beneficiary of US aid.

Geography, plus Ankara's earlier anticommunism and the secularism it enforces today despite an overwhelming Islamic populace, explain Washington's generosity. Turkey's neighbors include Iran, Syria, oil-rich nations of the former Soviet Union, and Iraq. US aircraft fly over the region from Turkish bases.

But policies based on pragmatism alone undermine our credibility as a beacon of democracy. Before continuing to embrace Turkey, we would do well to consider the reality.

For 75 years, Turkey has been in the grip of its armed forces and the generally corrupt politicians who govern when the military allows. Turkey fights an ongoing war against Kurdish separatists, sinking $8 billion a year into the effort, even though -- with an inflation rate of 100 percent -- it can ill-afford to do so.

Last fall, Turkey raised the Middle East tension level by threatening Kurdish guerilla warlord Abdullah Ocalan's protectors in Syria, a country already inflamed by Turkish diversion of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and increasing military links to Israel. Meanwhile, the man serving as prime minister until April is the same official who headed a 1974 administration that ignited a war with Greece over the island of Cyprus.

If all that is not Byzantine enough, there is the continuing corruption of the government. After the 1996 accident that revealed the alliance of the government and the underworld, finance minister Mehmet Agar (who had met with the occupants of the car just before the crash) was charged with aiding terrorists and underworld hitmen. The ensuing inquiry led the government to admit that its security officials were responsible for many of the unsolved homicides and disappearances that have puzzled investigators for decades. It also acknowledged that secret police employed right-wing death squads and narco-criminal gangs to kidnap and murder Kurds and other dissidents.

That band, known as the Grey Wolves, murdered hundreds of public officials, journalists, students, lawyers and Kurds. The Grey Wolves were handled, Ankara now admits, by a unit within the Army's Special Warfare Department which shared a building in Ankara with the US Military Aid Mission.

The gangster who was killed in the Mercedes crash, it turned out, was on the Turkish government payroll. (He was also an accomplice of the would-be assassin who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in 1981.)

It is against this dark history that government-sponsored bloodshed continues today. Last March, five Turkish policeman were convicted of beating a journalist to death. Last May, two men shot Akin Birdal, the founding president of the Turkish human rights association and a longtime critic of Turkey's war against the Kurds. Among those implicated in his murder were a military officer and members of state-sponsored rightist squads.

Last summer, French police arrested Turkish Mafia boss Alattin Cakici, who was wanted in Turkey for extortion and murder. Police seized tapes of his conversations with Turkish cabinet ministers and a diplomatic passport he received from Turkish intelligence.

The "Year of Human Rights" has just ended in Turkey. It would be better if US support for the country ended, too.

Jerry Meldon is chairman of the chemical engineering department at Tufts University.

 

US: Veterans Of The Cia's Drug Wars | High Times

 The CIA's Dope-Smuggling 'Freedom Fighters'

The belated admission last November by the CIA's Inspector General that in fact the Agency has always worked hand-in-glove with international narcotics kingpins caught the mainstream media with their pants down and butts up in the air.  Despite last spring's orgy of coordinated condemnation of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series on CIA-connected drugrunning contras in the 1980s, media prostitutes from the Washington Post to the New York Times to Face The Press were reduced to purveying the truth for once, after the CIA copped to it at last.  But of course they didn't tell all the truth, not out loud.  A typical NY Times `expose' of one of the Agency's most hallowed Cuban `freedom fighters,' for example, somehow omitted to mention all the dope-running he's been involved with over the generations.  HIGH TIMES' faithful chronicler of the CIA's drug wars, JERRY MELDON, fills in the blanks the Times found unfit for print: First Of An Occasional Series.

After 37 years of disappearing like the Cheshire Cat, and consuming most of his nine lives, notorious anti-Castro bomber Luis Posada Carriles reappeared "somewhere in the Caribbean" for a New York Times interview last summer.  The resulting two-part series, published July 14-15, adds interesting details to Posada's bloodstained bio--notably his patronage by Jorge Mas Canosa, the late head of the Cuban-American National Foundation, and a frequent White House guest.

But as is the newspaper of record's wont in covering "intelligence" matters, narcotics went unreported.  Readers unaware of the drug-related charges that have long adhered to Posada Carriles remain in the dark.

In fact, declassified government files cited by Gary Webb in his Dark Alliance series reveal that in January of 1974, the CIA turned down a Posada request to provide one of his associates with a Venezuelan passport, because the Agency "cannot permit controlled agents to become directly involved with drug trafficking," they said with a straight face.  That same year, the DEA was told that Posada had been trading weapons for cocaine with a person "involved with political assassinations." Despite those and earlier reports, Posada would remain on the CIA payroll until February of 1976.

The CIA's Nursery of Narco-Terrorists

The CIA's nexus with Cuban exiles and narcotics originated, of course, with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion attempt on the Cuban mainland, for which the CIA trained a thousand Cuban exiles, and was assisted by Florida gangsters eager to retrieve the halcyon days when Havana was an open city under dictator Fulgencio Batista.

A top-secret element of the invasion plan was "Operation 40," whose personnel included Posada Carriles, future Watergate burglar Felipe de Diego, and sundry Mafia hitmen.  Its objective was to secure the island by eliminating both local politicians and members of the invasion force deemed insufficiently in favor of bringing back Batista as dictator.

Operation 40 remained intact following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which 114 brigadistas died, and was deployed later on in sporadic raids on Cuba.  An Operation 40 task force led in 1967 by Carriles' CIA classmate Felix Rodriguez ( later to find immortality as "Max Gomez," running guns to the dope-trading Contras in Nicaragua and then testifying about it in 1987 before the Senate Iran-Contra investigators ) supervised Bolivian police in the capture and murder of Che Guevara.

Operation 40 had to be officially disbanded in 1970 after one of their planes crashed in southern California with kilos of heroin and cocaine aboard.  But this did not interfere with business., even though later the same year, federal narcs busted 150 suspects in "the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement." President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, celebrated the destruction of "a nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin sales and 70 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States." Mitchell did not mention all the Operation 70 heroes who had been netted in this grand operation.

Prominent among these defendants was Juan Restoy, an Operation 40 alum who had served as a Cuban congressman under Batista's regime.  Restoy's dope network had grown out of the organized-crime empire of Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, whose gambling and black-market empire had flourished in Havana before Castro's takeover ruined it.  ( Trafficante, needless to say, patriotically assisted the CIA in numerous attempts to assassinate Castro over the years.  ) Although Juan Restoy ultimately broke out of jail and was slain in a shootout with federal agents, his narcotics network would remain true to the anti-Castro cause.

Two of Restoy's drugrunners in particular, Ignacio and Guillermo Novo, belonged to the Cuban Nationalist Movement, a far-Right outfit with cells in Miami and Union City, NJ.  It was Guillermo who fired a bazooka across the East River at the United Nations building while Che Guevara was addressing the General Assembly in '64.  Then Ignacio did the same thing at the Cuba pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair in '67.

Lighting Up The Skies

The anti-Castro hard core met in June 1976 in the Dominican Republic and combined forces to become the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations, known by its Spanish acronym as CORU.  Numerous dope-linked terrorists were in attendance--Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo, and so on--who would later assist the Reagan White House in running its contra re-supply operations in Central America.  There was also Frank Castro, the Bay of Pigs vet running the militant Cuban National Liberation Front.  Castro would be indicted in 1983 for smuggling over 500 tons of marijuana, and then have the charges magically dropped after setting up a contra training camp in the Florida Everglades.

At this June 1976 convention in Santo Domingo, the CORU mob laid out a plan for major bloodshed, and that fall its myrmidons carried out two of the most sensational terrorist acts ever witnessed in the Western hemisphere.  On September 21, 1976, a car-bomb exploded in broad daylight in Washington, DC, killing Orlando Letelier--formerly foreign minister of Chile, before the CIA helped Gen.  Augosto Pinochet topple the government there and initiate a generation of mass murder and torture.  Pinochet's secret police paid CORU thugs to plant the car-bomb and detonate it in Washington, where it also killed human-rights pioneer Ronnie Moffett.

Two of the CORU thugs on Pinochet's terror budget turned out to be the Novo brothers.  Though then-CIA director George Bush stonewalled the investigation to the best of his patriotic ability, Guillermo was eventually busted in Miami with a pound of coke; he was ultimately found guilty of the Letelier-Moffitt terror homicides, but the conviction was overturned on appeal when his confession was thrown out.  Ignacio's conviction for perjury in the same case was likewise voided on appeal.

Then on October 6, 1976, barely a fortnight after the Washington, DC car-blast, a Cubana Airlines flight out of Miami blew up in the sky over Barbados, killing all 73 on board.  The authors of the bombing were busted in Venezuela: former pediatrician Orlando "Dr.  Death" Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.

Posada had nominally remained a CIA agent only from 1965 to '67, at which point he became the assistant director of DISP, the CIA's sister spook-shop in Venezuela, and later on became director.  After a 1974 run-in with the President there, though, Posada was canned and replaced with a CIA classmate, Cuban exile Ricardo Morales--who claimed to have been an FBI informant when he attended that June '96 CORU session in Santo Domingo.

Salvation In El Salvador

Upon leaving the DISP, Posada opened a private-detective agency in Caracas.  But then after two of his associates were nabbed for planting the bomb on that Air Cubana flight in October '76, Posada also wound up in jail there.  He stayed in jail there, despite Cuban extradition requests, until bribing his way out in 1985.  The CIA's contra-resupply operation was in full swing then, and Posada promptly found employment at the notorious Salvadoran air-force base at Ilopango--where DEA agent Celerino Castillo painstakingly traced contra shipments of cocaine out to the States, and watched his reports being suppressed by his political masters in Washington.

It was Posada Carriles who managed those contra-resupply flights under the direction of his old comrade-in-arms Felix "Max Gomez" Rodriguez, until October 1986, when an old dope plane from the fleet of CIA freedom-fighter Barry Seal was blown out the sky over Nicaragua, exposing the Reagan White House and its whole Iran-Contra operation.

Not coincidentally, the $26,000 with which Posada had bribed himself out of that Venezuelan prison had arrived courtesy of the Cuban-American National Foundation.  It was not until his Times interview last July that Posada acknowledged his gratitude to CANF founder Jorge Mas Canosa for this bribe money.

Mas Canosa, Posada's lifelong CIA compatriot, was a remarkably successful entrepreneur who built a $100 million empire somehow.  But his hiring policies at CANF, which had been set up in 1981 by the Reagan administration to channel support for its Central-American policies, left something to be desired.  After helping defray the Novo brothers' legal fees in the matter of the Letelier murders, Mas Canosa hired them as CANF public-relations flacks.

Mas Canosa similarly underwrote the defense costs of Jose Dionisio Suarez, a codefendant with the Novo bazooka brothers.  Suarez pled guilty to killing Letelier, but jumped bail and continued with what he knew best, blowing up a TWA airliner and firebombing Moscow's UN mission, before becoming the contras' instructor in sabotage and demolition techniques.  At last report, Suarez was a hit man for Colombian dope cartels.

Last fall, as Mas Canosa lay on his deathbed from cancer at 58 ( still successfully lobbying for the Helms-Burton bill that intensified the US trade embargo on Cuba ), his longtime beneficiary Luis Posada Carriles was still going strong after three and a half decades in the shadows.  A Salvadoran arrested in Havana for a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings designed to stifle Cuba's tourist trade told authorities there that Posada Carriles had been his benefactor.

Pretty impressive loyalty for someone who, according to a CIA report, was investigated by them in 1967 for supplying explosives, silencers and grenades to Santo Trafficante's organized-crime hoods.  And not bad considering that the Agency six years later supposedly warned that "Posada may be involved in smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Venezuela to Miami."

But that's one of the advantages of having an employer like the CIA, always ready to overlook such indiscretions--and of talking to a newspaper of record like the New York Times.