The charmed life of a terrorist: Many countries helped to shape the monster named Stefano delle Chiaie | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Sunday Globe, April 5, 1997

 

An exceptional 30-year career in the shadowy netherworld of international terrorism ended suddenly last week when Venezuelan authorities arrested 51-year-old Stefano delle Chiaie outside an apartment in Caracas.

            The 5-foot-tall delle Chiaie was extradited to Rome on Tuesday. There, he faces major criminal charges in connection with two attempted coups d’etat and the masterminding of the bloodiest of the terrorist acts that have plagued the Italian peninsula over the last 18 years.

            Delle Chiaie’s alleged operations included a December 1969 bombing at Milan’s Piazza Fontana that left 16 dead, the murder of a judge in 1976, the August 1980 bombing at Bologna’s central train station in which 85 persons were killed and attempted fascist takovers [sic] of the Italian government in 1970 and 1974.

            In an Italy that experienced World War II and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, it is [deletion] difficult to comprehend the remarkable survival of a man who not only espoused but attempted to carry out the violent restoration of fascist-style law and order. The answer, it appears, lies in the postwar popularity of the Italian Communist Party and the preoccupation of rightist forces in Italy, including powerful figures in intelligence and law enforcement, with preempting a communist victory.

            Because of this preoccupation, delle Chiaie, as charged by several Italian judges, enjoyed the protection of Italian law enforcement authorities. Indeed, an internal document of one Italian intelligence agency, a copy of which was obtained by three British journalists and cited in the 1984 book, “The Nazi Legacy,” identifies delle Chiaie as “an informer of the Rome central police.”

            However, by tolerating some of delle Chiaie’s activities in return for whatever undercover work he might provide, the authorities only added fuel to the terrorist fire. For the tactic adopted in the early ‘60s by extremists, including delle Chiaie’s Avanguardia Nazionale, was “the strategy of tension.” A contemporary fascist tract stated:

            “Our belief is that the first phase of political activity ought to be to create conditions favoring the installation of chaos in all the regime’s structures … the first move we should make is to destroy the structure of the democratic state under the cover of Communist activities.”

 

            Long trail of terrorist activities

 

            In following this approach, delle Chiaie reportedly began organizing the penetration of leftist activist organizations. The strategy worked to perfection.

            In the aftermath of the powerful explosion on Dec. 12, 1969, at the Banca del Agricultura in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, the leader of a group of left-wing anarchists was arrested. Within a week, 150 more anarchists suspected were rounded up. That same week, according to “The Nazi Legacy,” an Italian military intelligence memorandum was circulated internally. It asserted that delle Chiaie was the true mastermind.

            The fate of that memo is unclear. What is known is that the Italian judicial system took 13 years to exonerate the anarchists and indict delle Chiaie and is Avanguardia cohorts.

            By then, delle Chiaie was long gone. He reportedly managed, in the interim, to organize and take part in the Dec. 7, 1970, midnight occupation of the ministry of interior in Rome – which, for some unknown reason, was called off before dawn – and a similarly abortive coup in 1974.

            Although delle Chiaie was never arrested in Italy, he found it propitious to find bases of operation abroad. In the early ‘70s, according to numerous published accounts, he operated both out of Spain, then under the grip of Franco’s dictatorship, and out of Portugal, under the similarly fascist Marcello Caetano. Delle Chiaie, according to Fredric Laurent’s “Orchestre Noir,” collaborated with Spanish secret police in their battle with Basque separatists and with the Portuguese against leftist opponents of the regime. While in Spain, he ingratiated himself with the exiled Argentine dictator Juan Peron and his right-hand man, Jose Lopez Rega.

            Caetano was overthrown by the Portuguese military in 1974. The Spanish dictator Franco died in 1975. When democracy returned to Iberia, delle Chiaie fled to South America.     

            Peron had returned to Argentina to reclaim the presidency in 1973. His eminence gris, the fascist Lopez Rega, became the minister of the interior. While in Spain, he had already assembled his personal death squad, the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance, with delle Chiaie’s assistance. Buenos Aires became delle Chiaie’s new home.

            While based in Argentina, according to Stuart Christie’s 1984 delle Chiaie biography, “Portrait of a Black Terrorist,” delle Chiaie frequently slipped over the border to Chile. The dictator, Augusto Pinochet, had joined delle Chiaie’s growing list of patrons. In return, the Italian neofascist orchestrated the attempted assassination of one of Pinochet’s leading critics in exile, former Chilean general Bernardo Leighton.

            On the night of Oct. 6, 1975, in Rome, Leighton was shot in the neck. His wife was shot in the spine. The couple, however, survived.

 

            A sojourn in Bolivia

 

            Delle Chiaie maintained his base in Argentina even after Peron’s demise and through the start of the 1976-83 “dirty war” against subversion, for which several Argentine generals are now living out their days behind bars.

            Then, in late 1979, the Argentine government reportedly dispatched delle Chiaie to neighboring Bolivia, where he would come under the wings of the resident Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

            According to Penny Lernoux’s “In Banks we Trust,” Barbie was in charge of a paramilitary death squad, one of whose tasks was to serve as enforcers for the Bolivian cocaine traffickers. The traffickers included Bolivian generals. The same generals preempted the August 1980 Bolivian election with a coup d’etat.

            Barbie and delle Chiaie would continue as political and narcotics enforcers until the generals allowed an election in October 1982. Immediately afterward, Barbie was extradited to France, where next month he will finally go on trial for crimes against humanity, allegedly committed while he was Gestapo chief in occupied Lyon.

            Delle Chiaie fled Bolivia in the same period, narrowly avoiding arrest by Italian and Bolivian authorities who stormed the cocaine stronghold. The Italians wanted delle Chiaie not only for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, but also for the July 1976 murder in Rome of Judge Vittorio Occorsio – who was seeking to indict him – and for masterminding the August 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station.

            He would remain free, his whereabouts unknown until one week ago.

            Stefano Delle Chiaie was described recently by Danish journalist Henrik Kruger, an internationally recognized authority on neofascism, this way: He started out, Kruger said, as an ordinary terrorist, but became an intelligence-created monster who was allowed to travel freely over borders and perform his sinister crimes. A murderous tool for the ultra-right and for intelligence forces in Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and numerous Latin American countries. They all had a part in the monster, and they are all nervous about what he might tell.

 

 

Another CIA cocaine connection? | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Middlesex News, January 12, 1997

 

If you were startled by stories of cocaine trafficking by CIA-linked supporters of the contras during the Reagan administration’s war against Nicaragua, sit down before you read this. A federal grand jury recently indicted Venezuelan general Ramon Guillen Davilla on charges of smuggling cocaine here by the ton between 1987 and 1991, while he headed a unit whose mission was drug interdiction in cooperation with the CIA.

Gen. Guillen, whose case begs for a serious investigation into CIA narcotics activities, allegedly shipped some 22 tons of cocaine. The roughly six tons per year place him in a class with Mexican drug lord and former FBI most wanted, Juan Garcia Abrego, who was convicted in October of smuggling seven tons per year.

What was the CIA doing with a thug like Guillen? The Reagan administration, which revitalized the Agency after it had been stripped down by Jimmy Carter, ordered the CIA to establish a narcotics interception program together with Venezuelan authorities. But drug interdiction is the mission of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and in the late ‘80s there was particularly bad blood between the agencies.

Star DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar had been murdered in Guadalajara, Mexico, in February 1985 by application of a Phillips-head screwdriver to his skull. The culprits included drug kingpin Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, whose airline was the primary contra supplier, and his partner in heroin smuggling, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a major contra donor, according to the DEA. Among their co-conspirators were Mexican politicians on the drug lords’ payroll, and officials of the Mexican Directorate of Federal Security – a later-disbanded agency that worked closely with the CIA.

But all it took was common sense to persuade the DEA’s Caracas agent-in-charge to nix a December 1989 plan by the CIA and Gen. Guillen’s unit to ship a ton of cocaine to the US – purportedly to snare local dealers.

Undaunted, the CIA went over the special agent’s head. But its agents were again rebuffed, this time at DEA headquarters.

Despite the rejection, and a federal statute forbidding importation of illicit drugs without DEA approval, the shipment went through – with CIA authorization.

The CIA has issued no statement regarding Guillen’s November indictment – which is understandable, for the Agency must weigh its words to a public already astir with tales of the contras and cocaine. Especially since, as the Miami Herald noted, Gen. Guillen was once the CIA’s “most trusted man in Venezuela.”

Indeed, the question in certain officials’ minds must be whether Guillen can be trusted not to talk.

 

 

Kerry’s curious silence | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Middlesex News, November 1, 1996

 

  As much as I’ve admired him for 25 years, I can’t figure John Kerry out. Is it the disarming politeness? Or is it political acumen that seals his lips on the politically delicate – and currently hot – issue of cocaine trafficking by CIA-connected supporters of the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan-Bush era? After all:

The subject serendipitously resurfaced in August in a widely publicized series in the San Jose Mercury News, suggesting that the contra-connected cocaine influx during the Republicans’ White House watch, helped fuel – and perhaps ignited – the crack epidemic that has ravaged America’s ghettos.

Landmark hearings held by Kerry’s Senate Intelligence Subcommittee documented the Reagan/Bush team’s indifference to the narcotics-strewn criminal records of major contra suppliers.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing held October 23rd – in response to the public furor that followed August’s news sensation – Kerry’s former top investigator Jack Blum testified that an “absolute stonewall” was erected by the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, to keep Kerry’s 1987-89 inquiry from evidence tying the contras to cocaine. The head of that division was Bill Weld.

Sure, the Mercury News’s series has come under attack, especially by the Washington Post. But little in the Post’s 5,000-word critique would assuage CIA critics, least of all the statement that (Nicaraguan cocaine trafficker Jose) “Blandon handled only about five tons of cocaine during a decade-long career.”

Moreover, not only is the CIA/cocaine connection a fact of life – but the Mercury News’ stories resonate with a well-established history of CIA collaboration with and protection of major narcotics traffickers. In postwar France, the newly created Agency recruited thugs from dormant Corsican mafia to terrorize Socialist politicians. The mafiosi, reinvigorated and protected by its new ties to intelligence and the Gaullist party, proceeded to establish the “French Connection” that would ship tons of Southeast Asian heroin to the streets of New York City.

Several years later the CIA assembled a small army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Like the Corsicans before them, veterans of the abortive invasion would use Agency ties to skirt the law and avoid jail – at least till the end of the decade. On June 21, 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs collared 150 suspects in what the BNDD termed the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement.” [sic] According to then attorney general John Mitchell, the Justice Department had broken up a “nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin sales and 75 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States.” Two-thirds of those arrested were Bay of Pigs veterans.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s in Indochina, CIA-supported guerilla [sic] armies in Laos – and Washington-backed South Vietnamese dictators – profited directly from trafficking in Southeast Asian heroin, with U.S. east coast-based Sicilian mafiosi now in cahoots with the Corsicans.

Then in the ‘80s, while the Agency was orchestrating the contras’ war of terror against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, the Reagan/Bush White House would pump $2 billion into another army of “freedom fighters” waging guerrilla war in Afghanistan against Russian soldiers. The CIA’s top guerilla warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would later be exposed as a major heroin trafficker – and trainer of anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Over this long and sordid history, the most serious and fruitful Congressional inquiry into CIA aiding and abetting of narcotics traffickers has been Senator John Kerry’s. So it’s a mystery why Kerry refuses to make political hay of it.

When Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis opposed Vice President George Bush in the 1988 presidential race, Dukakis seemed incapable of uttering the phrase “contra drug trafficking” – despite the ammunition Kerry’s inquiry was providing.

Now Kerry himself has steered clear of the subject – despite its freshness in voters’ minds, the tightness of his senatorial race, and the allegation, according to Jack Blum, that (Deputy Attorney General) “Weld put a very serious block on any effort we made to get information.” Why, John?