Viewpoint | One of Our Own Terrorists Comes in from the Cold | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily April 26, 2005

“What a fix he’s in!”

I can hear it now. A Miami attorney pleads on behalf of 78-year-old Luis Posada Carriles, who four weeks ago emerged from the shadows to seek political asylum in South Florida.

“Protect him from the brutal prisons of Fidel Castro and that Venezuelan Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez [both of whom want him handed over to face murder charges]!! After what this great patriot and freedom fighter has done for the United States, he deserves the Medal of Honor, not extradition!”

Indeed, Posada has done a lot for Uncle Sam since the CIA trained him for the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of his native Cuba. In the ensuing four-plus decades, both on and off the Washington payroll, he has waged a bloody personal vendetta against the Cuban patriarch, both directly through an endless series of assassination plots, and indirectly through bombings including the 1976 sabotage of a Cuban airliner that claimed 73 innocent lives. In 1985, after bribing his way out of a Venezuelan prison where he had been incarcerated for the Cuban plane bombing, Posada took charge of the Reagan team’s contra supply operations in El Salvador.

In light of that record, and the precedents set by our current president and his father, which are itemized below, you have to admit that Posada has a case for asylum:

* In 1990, after intense lobbying by Jeb Bush – which 10 years later won votes in Miami’s Little Havana that would help swing a presidential election – George H. W. Bush Sr.’s Justice Department shut down INS proceedings to expel the most notorious of all anti-Castro bombers, Dr. Orlando Bosch – after the Cuban-born pediatrician served time in Venezuela for co-masterminding the Cubana plane crash.

* On Christmas Eve 1992, the same President Bush, then a lame duck, pardoned Iran-Contra conspirators, including former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams. In so doing, Bush Sr. salvaged both his hide and the family’s good name. Iran-Contra Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh planned to pressure Weinberger into disavowing Bush’s claim that, while Reagan’s VP, he had been out of the Iran-Contra conspiracy loop. The pardoned Abrams, who had admitted lying to Congress, is deputy National Security Advisor under George W. Bush.

In fact, the Bush Jr. White House has been the nation’s leading employer of Iran-Contra conspirators, rehabilitated and otherwise. Recall the brief stint of Reagan’s indicted National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter. At Bush Jr.’s Homeland Security agency, before press exposure of his brainchild, the Total Information Awareness Project, he put fear in the hearts of privacy-cherishing Americans.

And just last week Congress rubber-stamped Bush Jr.’s nominee as National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. As Reagan’s ambassador to Honduras in the ’80s, the man whose task it will now be to reform the CIA coordinated contra actions in close collaboration with the same CIA and Honduran generals knee-deep in cocaine trafficking and death squad slayings.

So it’s understandable that Posada – who as recently as August was languishing behind bars for one of his Castro assassination plots when a lame duck Panamanian president … pardoned him – considers this a good time to hang up his grenades.

I believe Posada took the pardon as a signal that – despite what his lawyer might say – he’s not in a fix.

No, I think Posada believes the fix is in.

Mom’s last wish for Pinochet | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily

When a Santiago judge in mid-December indicted former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet for one murder among the thousands he allegedly ordered, I imagined how the glimmer of vindication would have delighted my mother who had passed away 10 days earlier in a Miami Beach hospital. Few acts of political violence had troubled Mom more than another one of those murders, the 1976 assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in broad daylight on the streets of Washington, DC.

I thought as well, how ironic it was that she had lived so close to the erstwhile epicenter of anti-Castro extremism, “Little Havana,” the preferred watering hole of CIA-trained Cuban exile terrorists – three of whom Pinochet bankrolled to bomb Letelier’s car. Mom died convinced the truth would never come out, and she was not without reason for believing so. Then CIA director George H. W. Bush had stonewalled the initial FBI investigation, leaving it dead in the water for years.

Americans have long since lost interest in terrorism – unless, of course, we’re the targets. And why not? Thanks to the Elian Gonzalez affair and, before that, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” rhetoric, the anti-Castro brigadistas are no longer recalled as “terrorists” but as “freedom fighters.” This is the opposite of present day Washington D.C.’s regard for Osama bin Laden and his Islamic extremist cohorts, whom Reagan hailed as freedom fighters when the CIA was paying them billions to kill Russians in Afghanistan.

Throw in talk radio, “embeds,” and a stenographic White House press corps, and it’s easy to understand why Americans asked “why us?” on Sept. 11. To resume contact with reality we need to confront Washington’s primary role in Latin America’s decades-long nightmare of military dictatorship. We need to acknowledge that the “post-factual era” began with the first inauguration of Ronald Reagan, not George W. Bush.

Notwithstanding the media hagiography upon his death, Reagan was the master of flipping reality on its head. He not only heaped praise upon bin Laden’s minions, but also the nun-raping Salvadoran death squads and the hospital-bombing Nicaraguan contras. He even deemed these contras as being “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” When even the hyperbole fell short of its goals, the Reagan team manufactured front groups to manipulate public opinion.

They created the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) to marshal support for the contras, who had been assembled by the CIA from the remnants of deposed dictator Somoza’s secret police to oppose Nicaragua’s leftist government. A grateful Reagan invited CANF director Jorge Mas Canosa, a successful exile businessman and inveterate Castro-hater, to the White House.

As a sideline, Mas Canosa used his deep pockets to play “sugar daddy” to some of the more notorious Cuban extremists. When a technicality voided Guillermo Novo’s prison sentence for the Letelier assassination, Mas Canosa found the anti-Castro bomber and drug trafficker a job as an information officer for the CANF.

When the CIA sought a demolitions expert to train the contras, it sent out a call to the legendary anti-Castro bomber and long-time agency operative Luis Posada Carriles. However, Posada was languishing in a Venezuelan jail on charges of masterminding the decimation of a Cuban airliner two weeks after the Letelier murder. Posada magically got hold of $25,000 to bribe his way out of prison and join the contras in Nicaragua. In his memoirs he names Mas Canosa as his benefactor.

Mom would have gagged in the ambulance taking her home from the Miami Beach rehab hospital had she noticed that part of Biscayne Boulevard had been renamed “Jorge Mas Canosa Boulevard.” However, she noticed little and suffered a second stroke before peacefully passing away. Shortly thereafter, on the eve of a Chilean judge’s determination of his fitness to stand trial, Gen. Pinochet had another of his own remarkably well-timed strokes. Mom would have wished him the health he will need to face his accusers.

The Bush Family's Favorite Terrorist | By Jerry Meldon & Robert Parry | published in Consortium News April 25, 2005

 While the Bush administration holds dozens of suspected Muslim terrorists on secret or flimsy evidence, one of the world’s most notorious terrorists slipped into the United States via Mexico and traveled to Florida without setting off any law enforcement alarms.

Though the terrorist’s presence has been an open secret in Miami, neither President George W. Bush nor Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has ordered a manhunt. The U.S. press corps has been largely silent as well.

The reason is that this terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, was a CIA-trained Cuban whose long personal war against Fidel Castro’s government is viewed sympathetically by the two Bush brothers and their father. When it comes to the Bush family, Posada is the epitome of the old saying that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

The Bush administration – which has imprisoned Jose Padilla and other alleged Muslim “enemy combatants” without trial – has taken a far more lenient approach toward the 77-year-old Posada, who is still wanted in Venezuela for the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976 that killed 73 people. Posada also has admitted involvement in a deadly hotel bombing campaign in Cuba in 1997.

Political Pardons?

More recently, in April 2004, Posada and three other Cuban-Americans were convicted in Panama of endangering public safety in a bomb plot to assassinate Castro. The men were pardoned in August 2004 by outgoing Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso amid rumors that Washington had sought their freedom to boost George W. Bush’s standing with the Cuban-American community in the election-battleground state of Florida.

Two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters. While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil. [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada has now followed his compatriots back to the United States, albeit surreptitiously from Mexico. Posada’s lawyer Eduardo Soto has said his client will soon come out of hiding and seek asylum from the U.S. government. Federal immigration officials say they might reject Posada’s asylum request, but are unlikely to deport him to any country where he would face prosecution for terrorism. [Miami Herald, April 14, 2005]

Venezuelan authorities say they have a standing request with the United States for Posada’s extradition in connection with the Cubana Airline bombing. But the Bush administration is not expected to honor that request because Venezuela’s current government of Hugo Chavez has close ties to Cuba.

Bush Embarrassment

A thorough investigation of Posada also could prove embarrassing for the Bush family, since the Cubana Airline bombing was part of a wave of right-wing terrorism that occurred in 1976 under the nose of then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush.

If Posada ever told his full story, he might shed unwelcome light on how much the senior George Bush knew about the terrorist attacks in 1976 and the Iran-Contra operation a decade later, where Posada also showed up.

One of Posada’s co-conspirators in the Panamanian bomb plot, Guillermo Novo, was implicated, too, in the right-wing terrorism that flared up during George H.W. Bush’s year in charge of the CIA.

Novo was convicted of conspiracy in the bombing deaths of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who were killed on Sept. 21, 1976, as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C.

That terror attack, which was organized by Chile’s secret police with the aid of Novo and other anti-Castro Cubans, was the first case of state-sponsored terrorism in the U.S. capital. The bombing was part of a broader assassination campaign ordered by right-wing South American dictatorships under the code name “Operation Condor.”

If the Letelier-Moffitt murders had been solved quickly, there was a danger the revelations could have hurt Republican election chances in 1976, when President Gerald Ford was in a tight race with Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Linking the Chilean government to an audacious terror attack in the heart of the U.S. capital would have revived critical press coverage of the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Chile’s elected socialist government in 1973, a coup that had put in power Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who, in turn, launched “Operation Condor.”

At the time of the Letelier-Moffitt car bombing, Bush’s CIA had evidence in its files that implicated Pinochet’s secret police in the plot to kill Letelier, an outspoken critic of the military regime. But Bush’s spy agency withheld the incriminating information from the FBI and misdirected the investigation away from the guilty parties. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Airline Bombing

Two weeks after the Letelier assassination, right-wing terrorists struck again, planting a bomb onboard the Cubana airliner as it left Barbados. Seventy-three people onboard, including the Cuban national fencing team, died.

That investigation soon led to two of Posada’s employees who had stepped off the plane in Barbados. Police suspected that Posada, who worked as an intelligence officer for the Venezuelan government, and another Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, were the masterminds. A search of Posada’s Caracas apartment discovered Cubana flight schedules and other incriminating evidence.

Both Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela, but the men denied the accusations and the case became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects also possessed knowledge of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets. The case lingered for almost a decade.

Meanwhile, despite the CIA’s misdirection play on the Letelier-Moffitt murders, the FBI managed to crack the case in 1978. Chilean intelligence agent Michael Townley was arrested as were Novo and other Cuban exiles who had assisted Townley in planting and detonating the bomb. Townley, Novo and other defendants were convicted, but in 1981, Novo’s conviction was overturned on a technicality.

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington, the momentum for solving the Letelier-Moffitt conspiracy dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism. Though the Letelier-Moffitt evidence pointed to the highest levels of Chile’s military dictatorship, including intelligence chief Manuel Contreras and Gen. Pinochet, the Reagan-Bush administration backed away from demands that the architects of the terrorist attack be brought to justice.

All around, life was looking up for anti-Castro extremists. Novo landed a job as an “information officer” for the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, which was founded by Cuban exile Jorge Mas Canosa to press the anti-Castro cause in Washington. U.S. government grants soon were flowing into Mas Canosa’s coffers.

Iran-Contra Link

Posada also gained his freedom during the Reagan-Bush years. In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe prison guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and who was overseeing secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels. After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and was assigned the jobs of managing munitions and serving as paymaster for pilots in the contra-supply operation.

After one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the fugitive accused terrorist to justice.

In 1992, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.”

After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

Protecting Bosch

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch, Posada’s co-defendant in the Cubana Airlines bombing, had snuck into Miami from Venezuela. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by federal officials who warned that the United States could not credibly lecture other countries about cracking down on terrorists while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when President George H.W. Bush pardoned Bosch, allowing the unapologetic terrorist to remain in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Guatemala, after surviving an assassination attempt that disfigured his face, Posada returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald story. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States. “This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama. Panamanian authorities arrested Posada, Novo and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety. [CBSNews.com, Aug. 27, 2004]

Four months after the sentencing, lame-duck Panamanian president Moscoso – who had friendly ties to George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts, citing her fear that their extradition to Venezuela or Cuba would mean their deaths. Despite press reports disclosing that Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it had pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles.

Double Standards

The anti-Castro terrorists returned from Panama to the United States amid Bush’s “War on Terror,” but the old Cold War rules – turning a blind eye to anticommunist terrorism – still seemed to apply.

Rather than demonstrating that the United States will not tolerate murderous attacks on civilians regardless of the cause, the Bush administration and the major U.S. news media have largely ignored the contradictions in the U.S. government’s benign neglect toward anti-Castro terrorism compared to the aggressive tactics against Islamic terrorism.

While U.S. law has been stretched to justify the arrests and indefinite incarcerations of Islamic extremists, often without evidence of participation in any violent act, anti-Castro Cubans – even those with long records of violence against civilians – are allowed refuge and financial support within the politically influential Cuban-American community in South Florida.

Instead of the throw-away-the-key attitude shown toward Islamic terror suspects, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorists enjoy get-out-of-jail-free cards.

As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11, fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.”

To highlight the Bush administration’s inconsistency, Sanchez cited a 2002 speech by Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith declaring that in the post-Sept. 11 world “moral clarity is a strategic asset” and that the United States could no longer afford double standards toward the “evil” of terrorism.

But Feith’s admonition appears to have fallen on deaf ears in George W. Bush’s White House and in Jeb Bush’s governor’s mansion. Neither scion of the Bush dynasty has any intention of turning Posada, the aging “freedom fighter,” over to Fidel Castro’s Cuba or to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

Whatever proof there is against Posada for actual acts of violence, it’s a safe bet that the evidence will be judged as inconclusive, that Posada will be portrayed more as a victim than a villain. He’ll get every benefit of the doubt.

The Bush family has made the larger judgment that when it comes to protecting anti-Castro terrorists, double standards can be useful for protecting unpleasant family secrets and for garnering votes in South Florida.

Jerry Meldon is an associate professor (chemical and biological engineering) at Tufts University. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com.

Tufts Students and US Foreign Policy: A Call to Citizenship | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Tufts Daily, September 16, 2003

 

Two years after the ghastly events of 9/11/01 George W. Bush’s squint-eyed Marlboro Man persona has changed little. Steadfast, he declares his unwavering commitment to rid the world of terrorists who, he says, despise our freedom, democracy and free market ethos. He sees nothing but success abroad even as he eats crow soliciting UN intervention in Iraq. How much longer will you accept at face value what he says?

The terrorist attacks of 2001 shocked, wounded and frightened all Americans, most of whom responded with angry calls for revenge and tough-sounding bumper stickers.

The president’s confident, determined demeanor won the hearts of many, making them forget the president’s dubious 2000 electoral mandate, the sensational revelations of Wall Street’s criminal venality, White House links to the Enron Ponzi scheme, and Mr. Bush’s sponsorship of tax relief for the rich just when the economy headed south.

We’ve stood by passively as the Bush administration, in pursuit of its war on terrorism:   

• Invaded Afghanistan, ousted the Taliban from Kabul, then couldn’t locate the Taliban’s sponsor and number one guest Osama Bin Laden. Not only were our troops redeployed to Iraq before stabilizing Afghanistan, Washington has withheld financial assistance promised to the government of Hamid Karzai – whose authority evaporates at the outskirts of Kabul while regional warlords pocket millions trafficking in heroin, of which Afghanistan is again the world’s primary source. History is also repeating itself on the battlefield, where regrouped Taliban and Al Qaeda forces are again waging guerrilla war against coalition forces, leaving Washington and its partners little choice but to dispatch reinforcements lest the Karzai government – and the entire country – fall.

Meanwhile in Iraq:

• We’ve won yet another war against a vastly inferior enemy but are evidently clueless about maintaining the peace; and Saddam Hussein, like Bin Laden, still haunts us. Mr. Bush’s continued insistence that Baghdad aided the 9/11 hijackers – his justification for invading Iraq, along with those elusive weapons of mass destruction – has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. One-hundred-thirty thousand American soldiers are not magnets for vengeful Islamic militants who – inflamed by Washington’s unwavering support for Israel and the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt; and its partnership with the corrupt, repressive, but oil-rich rulers of Saudi Arabia – are leaping at the opportunity to site GI’s in their crosshairs. Under these circumstances it is the moral imperative of Tufts students –

who are among the very brightest and most privileged citizens of these United States, and are attending a university that prides itself on promoting citizen ship – to:

•  keep yourselves informed about potential and actual consequences of US foreign policy
• do so by tapping a variety of information sources
• discuss what you learn with classmates, family and friends
• participate actively in what the approaching presidential election promises to be a nationwide debate about priorities and policies

If not, you might as well be living in a military dictatorship like the one Gen. Augusto Pinochet headed in Chile following a CIA-instigated coup d’etat on September 11, 1973.

 

How the CIA opened the door to ex-Nazis: a CIA officer's calamitous choices | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News 15 May 2003

OBITUARIES can barely scrape the surface of anyone's 86-year life. That's especially true for a covert intelligence officer whose responsibility for top-secret decisions -- and their consequences -- is rarely acknowledged.

But long before he succumbed to cancer on April 22, at the age of 86, retired CIA official James Critchfield had owned up to two of his decisions that were so momentous that they still influence the course of international events. One opened the CIA's doors to ex-Nazis. The other cleared the way for Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq.

Critchfield made the first of his fateful decisions soon after he joined the fledgling CIA in 1948. Three years earlier, Hitler's master spy for the Eastern Front, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, had surrendered to US forces. He then proposed a deal. In return for his freedom, he would turn over his voluminous files on the Soviet Union along with his former agents who had scattered across Europe.

Both the Army and the CIA considered Gehlen a hot potato. They decided to assign someone the task of weighing the pros and cons of his offer. That someone turned out to be James Critchfield, a highly decorated Army colonel who had led wartime units in Europe and North Africa and had greatly impressed senior CIA personnel.

Critchfield was transferred to the Gehlen compound in Pullach, Germany. After a month or so of deliberation, he concluded that Washington would gain substantial advantage over Moscow by annexing the "Gehlen Org" into the CIA. He recommended that the agency do so and it did.

For the next four years, Critchfield remained Gehlen's CIA handler in Germany. Then, in 1952, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose Gehlen as the initial chief of the BND, West Germany's post-war intelligence agency. Critchfield said Gehlen -- on his death bed 27 years later -- thanked Critchfield for his vital assistance in the post-war period.

War criminals

SECRET documents declassified by the Clinton administration show that the CIA's collaboration with the ex-Nazis was not merely a marriage of convenience. It was more like a deal with the devil.

The documents reveal that Gehlen had hired and protected hundreds of Nazi war criminals. The more notorious of these Hitler henchmen included Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man in orchestrating the Final Solution, and Emil Augsburg, who directed the Wansee Institute where the Final Solution was formulated and who served in a unit that specialized in the extermination of Jews. Another was the former Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior whose signature appears on orders written in 1943 for the deportation of 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz for killing.

Furthermore, the Gehlen Org was so thoroughly penetrated by Soviet spies that CIA operations in Eastern Europe often ended in the murder of its agents. To top it off, the Org fed the CIA a steady diet of misinformation that fanned the flames of East-West hostility -- and thus assured the Org the continued patronage of Washington.

Many historians of the CIA's early days have concluded that letting the ex-Nazis in was the CIA's original sin, a moral failure that also resulted in the distortion of the intelligence given US policymakers during the crucial early years of the Cold War.

Critchfield of Arabia

CRITCHFIELD'S second fateful decision was in the Middle East, another flashpoint of Cold War tensions.

In 1959, a young Saddam Hussein, allegedly in cahoots with the CIA, botched an assassination attempt on Iraq's leader, Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim. Hussein fled Iraq and reportedly hid out under the CIA's protection and sponsorship.

By early 1963, Qassim's policies were raising new alarms in Washington. He had withdrawn Iraq from the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, made friendly overtures to Moscow, and revoked oil exploration rights granted by a predecessor to a consortium of companies that included American oil interests.

It fell to Critchfield, who was then in an extended tenure in charge of the CIA's Near East and South Asia division, to remove Qassim. Critchfield supported a coup d'etat in February 1963 that was spearheaded by Iraq's Baathist party. The troublesome Qassim was killed, as were scores of suspected communists who had been identified by the CIA.

Critchfield hailed the coup that brought the Baathists to power as "a great victory." Yet the reality is that the coup further destabilized an Iraq that had survived on the edge of crisis since its creation as a British mandate, with arbitrarily selected borders, in the wake of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The 1963 coup also paved the way for another momentous political development. Five years later, Saddam Hussein emerged as a leader in another Baathist coup. Over the next decade, he bullied his way to power, eventually consolidating a ruthless dictatorship that would lead to three wars in less than a quarter century.

After invading Iraq and ousting Hussein from power in April 2003, US occupiers of Iraq outlawed the Baath party that James Critchfield and the CIA had helped install in the 1960s. Critchfield died two weeks after Hussein's government was toppled.

In retrospect, the United States and the world paid -- and continue to pay -- a high price for the clandestine decisions made by Critchfield and his unaccountable CIA cohorts. As was true of many other "intelligence" decisions, actions perceived to be short-term political gains turned out to be long-term calamities, leading to corruption, disorder and human suffering.

Today, with the Washington information flow again tightly controlled and short on factual support, Critchfield's choices are a reminder that un-elected officials, operating in secret, still make policy decisions -- and that their actions can affect the lives of millions in the US and around the world.

A CIA Officer's Calamitous Choices | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on May 15, 2003

Obituaries can barely scrape the surface of anyone's 86-year life. That's especially true for a covert intelligence officer whose responsibility for top-secret decisions – and their consequences – is rarely acknowledged.

But long before he succumbed to cancer on April 22, at the age of 86, retired CIA official James Critchfield had owned up to two of his decisions that were so momentous that they still influence the course of international events. One opened the CIA's doors to ex-Nazis. The other cleared the way for Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq.

Critchfield made the first of his fateful decisions soon after he joined the fledgling CIA in 1948. Three years earlier, Hitler's master spy for the Eastern Front, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, had surrendered to U.S. forces. He then proposed a deal. In return for his freedom, he would turn over his voluminous files on the Soviet Union along with his former agents who had scattered across Europe.

Both the Army and the CIA considered Gehlen a hot potato. They decided to assign someone the task of weighing the pros and cons of his offer. That someone turned out to be James Critchfield, a highly decorated Army colonel who had led wartime units in Europe and North Africa and had greatly impressed senior CIA personnel.

Critchfield was transferred to the Gehlen compound in Pullach, Germany. After a month or so of deliberation, he concluded that Washington would gain substantial advantage over Moscow by annexing the "Gehlen Org" into the CIA. He recommended that the agency do so, and it did.

For the next four years, Critchfield remained Gehlen's CIA handler in Germany. Then, in 1952, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose Gehlen as the initial chief of the BND, West Germany's post-war intelligence agency. Critchfield said Gehlen – on his death bed 27 years later – thanked Critchfield for his vital assistance in the post-war period.

War Criminals

Secret documents declassified by the Clinton administration show that the CIA's collaboration with the ex-Nazis was not merely a marriage of convenience. It was more like a deal with the devil.

The documents reveal that Gehlen had hired and protected hundreds of Nazi war criminals. The more notorious of these Hitler henchmen included Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man in orchestrating the Final Solution, and Emil Augsburg, who directed the Wansee Institute where the Final Solution was formulated and who served in a unit that specialized in the extermination of Jews. Another was the former Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior whose signature appears on orders written in 1943 for the deportation of 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz for killing.

Furthermore, the Gehlen Org was so thoroughly penetrated by Soviet spies that CIA operations in Eastern Europe often ended in the murder of its agents. To top it off, the Org fed the CIA a steady diet of misinformation that fanned the flames of East-West hostility – and thus assured the Org the continued patronage of Washington.

Many historians of the CIA's early days have concluded that letting the ex-Nazis in was the CIA's original sin, a moral failure that also resulted in the distortion of the intelligence given U.S. policymakers during the crucial early years of the Cold War.

Critchfield of Arabia

Critchfield's second fateful decision was in the Middle East, another flashpoint of Cold War tensions.

In 1959, a young Saddam Hussein, allegedly in cahoots with the CIA, botched an assassination attempt on Iraq's leader, Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim. Hussein fled Iraq and reportedly hid out under the CIA's protection and sponsorship.

By early 1963, Qassim's policies were raising new alarms in Washington. He had withdrawn Iraq from the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, made friendly overtures to Moscow, and revoked oil exploration rights granted by a predecessor to a consortium of companies that included American oil interests.

It fell to Critchfield, who was then in an extended tenure in charge of the CIA's Near East and South Asia division, to remove Qassim. Critchfield supported a coup d’état in February 1963 that was spearheaded by Iraq's Baathist party. The troublesome Qassim was killed, as were scores of suspected communists who had been identified by the CIA.

Critchfield hailed the coup that brought the Baathists to power as "a great victory." Yet the reality is that the coup further destabilized an Iraq that had survived on the edge of crisis since its creation as a British mandate, with arbitrarily selected borders, in the wake of World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The 1963 coup also paved the way for another momentous political development. Five years later, Saddam Hussein emerged as a leader in another Baathist coup. Over the next decade, he bullied his way to power, eventually consolidating a ruthless dictatorship that would lead to three wars in less than a quarter century.

After invading Iraq and ousting Hussein from power in April 2003, U.S. occupiers of Iraq outlawed the Baath party that James Critchfield and the CIA had helped install in the 1960s. Critchfield died two weeks after Hussein's government was toppled.

In retrospect, the United States and the world paid – and continue to pay – a high price for the clandestine decisions made by Critchfield and his unaccountable CIA cohorts. As was true of many other "intelligence" decisions, actions perceived to be short-term political gains turned out to be long-term calamities, leading to corruption, disorder and human suffering.

Today, with the Washington information flow again tightly controlled and short on factual support, Critchfield's choices are a reminder that un-elected officials, operating in secret, still make policy decisions – and that their actions can affect the lives of millions in the U.S. and around the world.

Bush, 9/11 and Dr. K | By Jerry Meldon | published in The Tufts Daily December 3, 2002

President Bush’s choice of Henry Kissinger to direct a probe of FBI and CIA miscues prior to Sept 11, 2001 is both rich in irony and par for the course. Why irony? Because of the unique role played by the former Secretary of State in evoking anti-Americanism in the oil-rich Middle East and, more globally, thanks to his grand opus: the CIA-backed overthrow of Chile’s freely elected government on Sept 11, 1973. Deja vu?

The presidential ploy of appointing “blue ribbon” panels to deflect public outrage and undercut independent Congressional investigation of the intelligence establishment is not new. Thirty years ago, the conservative columnist Gary Wills reacted to Kissinger’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the continuation of the War in Vietnam and the prize’s rejection by co-awardee Le Duc Tho, by dubbing him the “Nobel Bomber” recalling the B-52s ordered over Cambodia in 1970 behind Congress’s back and over Hanoi in 1972 amidst peace talks.

As US soldiers continued to die in Southeast Asia, Kissinger built his own legend shuttling across oceans forging lines of communication with China and détente with the Soviet Union.

The legend would be tarnished by defeat in Vietnam and Watergate’s toppling of his commander in chief, Richard Nixon. But Kissinger would retain his grip on foreign policy. Even while preoccupied by Indochina, he orchestrated the CIA-financed destabilization of Chile following the 1970 presidential election victory of the Socialist, Salvador Allende, and under the ensuing pressure to eliminate Allende, exerted by IT&T and other multinational corporations.

The strategy culminated on Sept 11, 1973 in a coup d’etat led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet _ during which Allende purportedly committed suicide, and after which Pinochet’s henchmen tortured and assassinated thousands.

Time and the collapse of the Cold War rationale for their brand of hardball would treat neither Kissinger nor Pinochet kindly. Pinochet was temporarily jailed not long ago in Britain on a warrant for his arrest for the murder of Spaniards in Chile, but old age will spare him more time behind bars. Kissinger is wanted for interrogation by the governments of Spain and Argentina.

The Sept 11, 1973 overthrow of Allende was only the beginning of a Latin American nightmare. Shortly after seizing power, Pinochet initiated “Operation Condor,” a transnational collaborative of military dictatorships which targeted exiled political opponents. Condor extended as far as Washington, where former Allende foreign minister Orlando Letelier and an American coworker were murdered in a car bombing executed by US-based anti-Castro Cubans.

Following their own 1976 coup d’etat, Argentine military brass waged a seven year “Dirty War” against perceived left wing opponents _ prompting the imprisonment, torture and disappearance of some 9,000 Argentines at home and, thanks to Operation Condor, abroad. Recently, declassified files show that the CIA was well aware of Condor.

Yet Washington apparently did nothing about it. The Ford administration, particularly CIA director George H. W. Bush, stonewalled FBI investigation of the Letelier murder. And while speaking with an Argentine diplomat, Henry Kissinger reportedly asked only that the dirty warriors get their job done quickly. Similarly, on a 1975 jaunt to Jakarta, according to other declassified files, Ford and Kissinger were told by Indonesia’s military dictator that they were about to invade East Timor, which had just been liberated by Portugal. Neither Ford nor Kissinger objected. Over the next twenty years 200,000 East Timorese perished while fighting Washington’s staunch ally.

More relevant to the Sept 11 inquiry he is about to oversee is Mr. Kissinger’s impact on the oil-rich Middle East. Anti-American violence during and after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution which ended the CIA-installed Shah’s 26-year dictatorship has ever since dominated formulation of regional US policy. Throughout his reign, particularly during Mr. Kissinger’s tenure, the Shah armed Iran to the teeth. Kissinger, oblivious to growing contempt for the brutal, corrupt monarch and his friends in Washington, talked the Shah into persuading OPEC to hike the price of oil. Why? Because he knew the Shah would spend the additional billions in oil profits on American-made weaponry-- not Iran’s poor, and increasingly angry and fundamentalist, majority.

Mr. Kissinger has cut down his foreign travel since Spain and Argentina expressed interest in interrogating him. However, here at home, he continues to be treated reverentially as the elder statesmen of US foreign relations, not unlike the oft-rehabilitated Richard Nixon. President Bush knows Kissinger won’t embarrass his administration. But news of Kissinger’s appointment will not sit well among latent terrorists. Hopefully, al Qaeda won’t splice his speeches into recruitment videos.

Don’t Shoot until Proven Accurate | by Jerry Meldon | The Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2001

 

The 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty reduced the chances for a nuclear conflagration and is a cornerstone of the last three decades’ thaw in East-West relations. Not long into his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, Secretary of Defense-designate Donald H. Rumsfeld stated that he favors deployment of a national missile defense system when it is technically proven adequate. He later referred to the 1972 treaty as “ancient history.”

Rumsfeld’s remarks suggest that President-elect George W. Bush intends to follow through on his campaign vow to deploy a national missile defense system (NMD). On its face, the notion of a system that will defend against incoming enemy missiles is certainly attractive. But its widespread deployment would violate the ABM treaty, which bans such a defense because it could encourage a first strike by a nation able to defend against retaliation. That is, it would undermine the deterrent of mutually assured destruction.

Rumsfeld’s remarks took no one by surprise. In 1998, he chaired the congressionally appointed Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. The panel’s report disputed earlier intelligence estimates that North Korea, Iran and Iraq, regarded as the most likely candidates to stage a missile attack against the U.S., would remain incapable of launching a missile that could strike the U.S. mainland until 2015. It instead urged Washington to continue developing and testing a national missile defense in order to parry a missile attack that North Korea could be in a position to launch as early as 2005. The report underpins Bush’s call for deployment of a NMD.

Republicans have been clamoring to pump additional billions into the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the Reagan administration program to shoot down nuclear missiles with spaced-fired laser and particle beams, ever since technical problems, skyrocketing costs, disarmament talks and the fall of communism persuaded Congress to slice its funding. Horrifying images of the damage inflicted on Israel by Iraqi missiles during the 1991 Gulf War remained fresh in the memory of voters when the Republicans included a national missile defense in “contract with America,” their campaign platform in the 1994 midterm elections. Following the Republican landslide that year, President Bill Clinton began to retreat from his stated opposition to the NMD.

Amid his 1996 reelection campaign, Clinton agreed to three years of research and development on a national missile defense, to be followed by a decision, based on existing and potential threats, to deploy or not. Deployment would take three years. Since then, the goal has been a limited missile-defense system to fend off a single-missile attack from North Korea, Iraq or Iran. This scaled-down missile defense is consistent with the “rogue states” doctrine, which was first formulated before the Gulf War by then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin L. Powell. According to its critics, the doctrine was motivated as much by the Pentagon’s search for a post-Cold War mission as by genuine threats to U.S. security. However, no sooner had the Rumsfeld commission issued its 1998 report than North Korea fired a three-stage missile that crashed into the Pacific. Missile-defense advocates declared vindication.

Critics responded that even if a North Korean missile could reach the West Coast and inflict tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties, the North Koreans would not launch such an attack because it would provoke a massive U.S. nuclear response. Missile-defense supporters countered that it is far more ethical to threaten to shoot down an enemy’s missiles than to annihilate its entire population.

As long as the NMD is debated in such moral terms, the result will be impasse. But in the case of the national missile-defense system, facts allow one to answer some key questions: Does the U.S. need a missile defense—that is, is there a real threat—and is there no reasonable alternative to one? If the answer is “yes” to these questions, then is it worth the time and money to build a reliable NMD?

Missile-defense supporters answer “yes” to all the above. Naysayers claim that even if the answers to the first three are “yes,” which they are not, the answer to the forth is “no.” In the past two decades, Washington has spent $130 billion on SDI/NMD, with little to show for it. Test firings have failed regularly, including key preliminary NMD tests attempted in January and October 1999 and this past July. Even the “success,” which the Pentagon initially deemed unqualified, was later acknowledged as only partial. In the absence of demonstratable success, the Clinton administration left deployment up to its successor.

During Thursday’s hearing, Rumsfeld assured Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that the NMD will be thoroughly evaluated. Hopefully, he meant by an independent team of experts.

Most important, the Pentagon has not yet described, much less demonstrated, a reliable means to deal with what critics consider the NMD’s fatal flaw: the insurmountability of enemy countermeasures. The latter range from launching decoy balloons to shielding warheads within aluminum liquid-nitrogen-cooled shells to avoid sending out heat signatures.

Frank Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration and currently director of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, contends that if relatively simple approaches to overcome enemy countermeasures do not work, we can put “nuclear warheads” on our defensive missiles, relying on thermonuclear explosions, rather than direct impact, to annihilate incoming missiles.

If that option is ruled out, we can develop weapons that will shoot down enemy missiles at the “booster stage,” that is, before a warhead separates from a much larger, slower and more easily tracked three-stage missile. Asked where the detection and firing systems would be located, Gaffney answered, “space.”

Interestingly, Rumsfeld, who is an advisor and donor to the Center for Security Policy and recipient of its annual “Keeper of the Flame” prize, is the chair of another congressionally appointed panel: the U.S. Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization, which is about to issue its report. Rumsfeld did not say to what extent the recommendations of his two panels complement one another.