On Deane Hinton, Reagan’s Nominee for Ambassador to El Salvador | by Jerry Meldon | Unpublished manuscript, April 1981

 

A career foreign service officer who graduated from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1952, Deane Hinton has long been identified with that group of US diplomats whose role it is to protect [deletion] US business overseas, the copper industry in particular. Prior to his first embassy leadership role, he was a major figure in the Agency for International Development (AID), whose Office of Public Safety is now recognized to have been a front for CIA collaboration with the police apparatuses of US client dictators. The major Central American hotspot of the sixties was Guatemala, one of whose exports is copper. In the peak period of the civil war that has bloodied Guatemala since the United Fruit/CIA coup of 1954, Hinton was the local AID director from 1967 to 1969. (US ambassador Mein was assassinated in 1968, escalating the reign of terror waged by the military government and its paramilitary death squads trained by the Green Berets and European neo-fascist mercenaries.) In a 1971 staff memorandum prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, the US police training program in Guatemala was described as a failure that had resulted in the US becoming “politically identified with police terrorism.”

            Having proven his worth in Guatemala, Hinton was moved in 1969 to Chile, where he remained AID chief until 1971. Part of his role there, of course, was to regularly monitor the actions of the Allende government and the Chilean Copper Corporation, and to pass on such information to Anaconda, Kennecott and other US copper companies fearful of the eventual nationalization of their vast holdings. In 1971 Hinton was named Deputy Director of the National Security Council’s Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, whose mission it was to recommend policy towards countries which expropriated the holdings of US corporations.

            It is interesting to note the parallels between the careers of Hinton and Nathaniel Davis, another Fletcher graduate who became the ambassador to Guatemala in the wake of Mein’s 1968 assassination. Davis, who gained a reputation for stuffing the pockets of grateful Guatemalan generals during the reign of terror, followed Hinton to Chile, where he became the US ambassador in 1971 and remained so until one month after the CIA-sponsored coup of September 1973.  

            In the summer of 1974 Hinton became the US ambassador to Zaire, another of the world’s major copper producers. Shortly thereafter, at the start of 1975, Kissinger also named Nathaniel Davis Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Davis replaced Donald Easum, whose removal from office followed shortly after his statement on Zambian TV that US support for “continued South African participation in the UN is continuously under/review [sic]. It is not concrete and forever.” Easum had been widely respected throughout black Africa and hailed by Zaire’s dictator Mobutu – no enemy of the US – as a “great diplomat” with “accurate knowledge of decolonization and apartheid problems”. By contrast Davis came to Africa with no background in the region’s affairs and the ominous reputation he’d gained in Latin America.

            Before long the CIA had the United States supporting South Africa’s client army in Angola’s civil war, with neighboring Zaire serving as a base for CIA operations. In a surprise move, Davis resigned his State Department post, apparently uneager to have one more Chile under his belt. Hinton, for his part, found himself expelled from Zaire in the aftermath of an alleged CIA coup attempt against Mobutu.

            Davis briefly assumed the ambassadorship of Switzerland, which evoked the vehement protests of the Swiss and Italian lefts. Any suspicions of foul play were, if anything, magnified by the simultaneous opening in Geneva of the European headquarters of Chile’s notorious secret police, DINA. Davis soon found himself relegated to foreign service burial ground at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

            Hinton, meanwhile, has avoided the limelight since 1975, first as US emissary to the Common Market, and more recently as the Assistant Secretary of State for Business and Economic Affairs. He’s ripe for action, and that, no doubt, awaits him in El Salvador.

 

ISRAEL, TOO, SELLS WEAPONS ABROAD | Letter to the editor from Jerry Meldon | published in the New York Times Feb. 21, 1981

 

To the Editor:

Irving Schechtman admonishes France for its shipment of arms to Iraq and for supplying Arab countries with material that might lead to an ''Islamic'' A-bomb aimed at Israel (letter Feb. 11). But such words from an American are like the pot calling the frying pan black.

The world's premier merchant of death is the United States.

Moreover, are we to judge Israel -as Mr. Schechtman judges France -by the clients for its armaments? Israeli arms sales to the third world exceed $1 billion annually. Somoza of Nicaragua continued receiving Israeli arms and using them on his own citizens until they chased him to Paraguay. In earlier conflicts between the dictatorships of El Salvador and Honduras and between those of Chile and Argentina, Israeli arms were the common denominator. Argentina's rampant anti-Semitism proved no bar to the purchase from Israel of guided missiles and French-made Mirage fighters.

When generals bankrolled by cocaine traffickers short-circuited Bolivia's recent steps toward democracy, Israel was part of the rush to recognize the brutal new regime. This was history repeating itself: Israel had been second in line, behind the U.S., to recognize the Pinochet-led junta in Chile in 1973.

Yes, France's amoral policies are reprehensible. But are Israel's any more virtuous? JERRY MELDON, Watertown, Mass., Feb. 12, 1981

German brouhaha | by Jerry Meldon | Article for Inquiry (never printed), June 1979

 On May 23 [deletion], Karl Carstens of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was elected president of West Germany, making him the second former Nazi party member in a row to fill that prestigious post. Herr Carstens is known to have been a rather more ardent National Socialist than was his predecessor, Walter Scheel. That, however, is but the oldest skeleton in the sixty-four-year-old rightist’s closet.

More recently Carstens has faced charges he perjured himself in October 1974 in testimony on weapons deals between the BND (the German equivalent of the CIA) and such clients as Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Greek military junta.

The transactions took place during the sixties under governments headed by the CDU’s Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Carstens, who occupied top-level posts in the German foreign ministry (1960-66), defense ministry (1966-67) and chancellery (1968-69), in 1974 claimed ignorance of any BND dirty work. His signature and comments appear, unfortunately for him, on numerous government documents published earlier this year by the magazine Der Spiegel.

According to the contents of a top-secret eighteen-page letter written in 1973 by BND chief Gerhard Wessel and published by Der Spiegel in December 1978, and in the 1960s, the German intelligence agency entered into a special partnership with the Bonn-based Merex company. Through Merex it unloaded surplus weapons on countries like India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; such deals had been banned by international agreements signed by West Germany. But cover-ups are not an American monopoly, and the deals were classified secret and tendered through such third parties as England, Italy, and the shah’s Iran.

Merex made millions selling planes to both sides in the 1965 India-Pakistan conflict, planes it got from the German and American governments. According to Anthony Sampson in The Arms Bazaar, Merex boss Gerhard Mertens sold the Pakistanis 90 outdated F-86 Sabre jets with the Pentagon’s OK.

Mertens had founded Merex in 1963 with the help of Otto Skorzeny of the SS, his wartime commandant with whom he remained closely associated through the 1960s. Skorzeny was the daredevil who saved Mussolini’s life in 1943, and escaped punishment for war crimes including the alleged torture and murder of over 100 American POWs. According to Der Spiegel and Nouvelle Observateur, he went on to become the postwar head of the Paladin group, an international mercenary combine based in Spain and composed of right-wing soldiers of fortune, including many former OAS terrorists.

When in February 1977 Italian police arrested the neo-fascist leader Pierluigi Concutelli for the 1976 murder of Rome judge Vittorio Occorsio, they discovered, according to the magazine Giorni, not only the murder weapon, but also proof that the right-wing terrorists had been receiving arms shipments from none other than Merex. The middleman was one Guido Giannetini, an informer for the Italian secret police who had close connections in the German BND, and who this past February was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1969 bombing of a Milan bank that took sixteen lives.

In the mid-1960s an Indian magazine revealed the connection between Merex and the BND, which was then headed by Hitler’s master spy on the Eastern front, Reinhard Gehlen. However, that did not put a stop to the arms trade. Instead, the intelligence agency decided, according to Gerhard Wessel’s 1976 testimony, to find “a more proper firm.” But the Merex contracts didn’t run out until 1970, and the BND didn’t look very far for a substitute.

In 1966 the BND joined hands with a Düsseldorf subsidiary of the Dobbertrin company that was run by Gerhard Engel, who had been a lieutenant in World War II. Three years later Engel was joined by Erwin Hauschildt, a BND agent transferred to Dobbertrin with the written approval of Karl Carstens.

As detailed in Wessel’s 1973 letter, Dobbertrin’s activities on behalf of the BND, which also ran through 1970, included weapons sales to both sides in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (a la India-Pakistan), to the Rhodesian and South African governments, and to the Greek colonels.

How much, then, have the revelations affected Karl Carsten’s career? Not much at all, as witnessed by his recent ascent to the presidency. No doubt he was aided by the unwinding of a complicated legal battle two months before the election. A compromise was reached with former Social Democratic parliamentarian Gunther Metzger, who in 1975 had accused Carstens of perjury—only to be accused of the same by Carstens. In a settlement couched in legal jargon, Metzger conceded that Carstens was only “objectively” rather than “subjectively” guilty of perjury in testifying he knew nothing of BND shenanighans.

Der Spiegel recently offered an explanation for the settlement as well as for the unlikelihood of an official investigation. The thesis was that current chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrats, when they were in office as part of a coalition government in 1966, had been informed of the goings-on. Schmidt himself was defense minister from 1969 to 1972. And so Karl Carstens may not be the only one interested in letting bygones be bygones.