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.
Jan 14, 2001
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.
Jan 10, 2001
Tufts has obligation to bring unbiased speakers | 10 The Tufts Daily | January 25, 2001
To the Editor:
I stood up once at a chairs' meeting and asked members of the administration whether the short list of prospective Fares Lecture Series speakers was composed based on the speakers' appeasement of Saddam Hussein — through arms sales credits and taxpayer-underwritten loans — prior to the '91 Gulf War. The question was not asked in jest.
George Bush, James Baker, and Margaret Thatcher had all qualified with flying colors. Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell is per haps an exception. As head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he may not have been involved in the Bush White House decision to lavish $5 billion in credits and loans — on which Iraq defaulted — upon Hussein in the years leading up to Operation Desert Storm.
I do not contest the administration's right — and need — to raise money from both controversial and unbiased sources. I even laud student exposure to people whose ideas I oppose. However, in the inter est of the same students' development, both intel lectually and as citizens, the administration also has an obligation to showcase eminent individuals whose points of view lie neither on the right nor the far right. Jerry Meldon, Associate Professor
Mar 30, 2000
Behind the Elian Case | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on March 30, 2000
The Elian Gonzalez case has centered on the fate of a six-year-old boy and the no-risk politics of talking tough about Fidel Castro. But the controversy also underscores the moral ambiguity of the U.S. diplomatic position on Cuba for the past four decades.
The boy landed among those old antagonisms when he was pulled from the Straits of Florida on Thanksgiving Day after an over-crowded 17-foot powerboat capsized killing Elian’s mother, her boyfriend and other passengers. Legal principle required that the boy promptly be returned to his surviving father.
But anti-Castro politics soon intervened. The powerful Cuban-American National Foundation labeled Elian “another child victim of Fidel Castro.” Hard-line elements of the Miami community seized on the case as another way to do battle against their old enemy in Havana. Politicians, including Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, voiced opposition to sending the boy back to Cuba.
Little noticed by the U.S. news media, however, was the fact that some of the Cuban-Americans fanning the flames had long-standing ties to anti-Castro terrorism. Some also collaborated with drug-tainted right-wing forces that carried out bloody human rights violations in the 1970s and 1980s. Their commitment to family values and the rule of law might have been drawn into question.
For instance, one prominent Miami-based spokesman on the Elian case is Jose Basulto. A Bay of Pigs veteran, Basulto has acknowledged past involvement in terror attacks on Cuba in the 1960s as well as work for Argentina’s military government, a regime that tortured and “disappeared” an estimated 30,000 political dissidents from 1976-83 -- and allegedly financed some of its operations with drug proceeds.
Basulto’s experiences in secret wars against Castro and other leftists dated back to 1959. In that year, Castro’s revolutionary army overthrew a Mafia-connected dictator, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, and Basulto emigrated to the United States. In Miami, he and his friend Felix Rodriguez signed up with the CIA-backed Brigade 2506. They were infiltrated into Cuba before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
After the invasion failed, Basulto and Rodriguez escaped back to Miami, where they nursed grievances over alleged U.S. betrayal. They also continued work for CIA-funded groups and plotted new ways to strike at Castro.
On Aug. 24, 1962, the 22-year-old Basulto manned a 22mm cannon aboard a boat that had maneuvered 200 yards off the coast of Miramar, west of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the Hornedo de Rosita Hotel, a crowded tourist spot that also housed Soviet bloc specialists. At 11:30 p.m., Basulto opened fire, shattering windows and sowing terror but failing to kill Castro (who wasn’t there) or anyone else.
Reflecting back on these activities 35 years later, Basulto acknowledged that “we were pretty [lousy] terrorists, let me tell you.” [Washington Post Magazine, May 20, 1997]
On March 20, 1963, Basulto and 50 other Bay of Pigs veterans enlisted in the U.S. Army with commissions as second lieutenants. Basulto received psychological warfare training at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Benning, Ga. After leaving the Army, he returned to the shadowy world of anti-Castro politics in Miami.
[One of Basulto’s Cuban comrades in the U.S. Army was his friend, Felix Rodriguez, who would go on to a long career in the CIA before representing Vice President George Bush’s office in Central America during the 1980s.]
In the years after the Army, Basulto claimed he adopted the pacifist teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. But outside experts believe Basulto remained active in the anti-Castro terrorist underground.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Basulto seemed to confirm that suspicion. He said: “About that time in my life, I have only one thing I want to say. We had come to the conclusion that the only hope for the Cuban people lay in the physical elimination of Fidel Castro.”
Basulto insisted that he dropped out of politics in the 1970s. But his old political passions apparently were rekindled by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
After Reagan’s victory, American ultraconservatives sought out the Argentines to fight the new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John Carbaugh, an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., first broached the idea with the defeated remnants of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard who were licking their wounds in Honduras.
Carbaugh then flew to Buenos Aires for talks with Argentine intelligence officers who agreed to assist the contras. [For details, see Roy Gutman’s Banana Diplomacy.]
In March 1981, two months into the Reagan-Bush administration, Argentine leader, Gen. Roberto Viola, made a state visit to Washington. After Viola’s trip, President Reagan authorized the CIA to begin collaborating with Argentina’s contra-support operation.
When word of this Argentine training agreement reached Miami, anti-Castro Cubans began shipping out to Central America, optimistic that the road to Havana ran through Managua. Basulto was one of the volunteers who advised “Argentine forces in Central America,” he acknowledged to a Wall Street Journal reporter. [WSJ, Aug. 9, 1988]
According to William Turner, a former FBI agent who kept tabs on Basulto’s anti-Castro activities, the Cuban émigré served as an adviser to Argentine intelligence officers who were training the contras in methods of torture. [Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1996]
Years later, congressional investigators learned that the Argentine intelligence services had turned to the drug trade to finance their regional anti-communist operations.
In sworn U.S. Senate testimony, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse, a financial officer for the Argentine intelligence services, said Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez contributed more than $30 million to finance the Argentine-backed “Cocaine Coup” in Bolivia in June 1980 and to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels and other paramilitary operations in Central America. Sanchez-Reisse said Suarez’s $30 million was laundered through businesses in Miami. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
In 1998, a CIA inspector general’s report also found that contra operatives subsidized their activities with cocaine smuggling into the United States. Through the decade, as this contra-connected cocaine trafficking continued, the CIA took special steps to head off criminal and congressional investigations that threatened to reveal the secret, the inspector general’s report admitted. [See Lost History.]
Although Basulto was not mentioned in the CIA report, the inspector general found that other Cuban-Americans who had volunteered to assist the contras were moonlighting as drug traffickers or were serving as money launderers for the Medellin cocaine cartel.
The Argentine military also had an odd way of demonstrating its commitment to family values.
During the Argentine "dirty war," when the military’s secret police captured a pregnant female deemed subversive, they would subject the woman to a Caesarean section or induce labor. They then would give the baby to a military family and murder the new mother, usually by shackling her naked to other captives and then dumping her from a plane into the ocean to drown. Sometimes, the infants were literally raised by their mothers’ killers.
For his part, Basulto underwent a dramatic public makeover in the 1990s. He transformed his image from renegade terrorist to the leader of a humanitarian group called Brothers to the Rescue, an organization that mixed the rescue of Cubans crossing to Miami by sea with provocative flights over Cuba that dropped anti-Castro propaganda.
Basulto’s operation led to a new crisis in U.S.-Cuban relations on Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuban MiGs shot down two of the group’s unarmed planes after they left Cuban airspace. Four pilots died, but Basulto escaped in a third plane. Because of the incident, President Clinton agreed to sign the Helms-Burton Act, a law that tightened the U.S. economic embargo against the island.
Basulto was back in action again after the rescue of Elian Gonzalez. Basulto launched his group’s planes for an unsuccessful search for other survivors. He also cranked up the rhetoric as the boy’s status became an international cause celebre.
“This is not a simple case of delivering a child to his father,” Basulto said. “It’s delivery of a child to a government. He’ll be like an orange and they’re going to squeeze the last drop of juice from him.” [USA Today, Jan. 6, 2000]
Later, Basulto hailed Elian’s survival as a case of Divine Intervention against Castro’s Cuba. “This was a clear case of a miracle,” Basulto declared. “When they found Elian, he was surrounded by dolphins,” the mammals presumably sent by God to protect the boy. However, the fisherman who pulled the boy out of the water and the U.S. Coast Guard reported no dolphins in the vicinity at the time of the rescue. [The New Republic, Jan. 24, 2000]
When 100 demonstrators marched on the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of an initial U.S. government decision to return Elian to his father, Basulto was drawing headlines again. He denounced the marchers as dupes of Castro. “They’re following directives from Cuba,” he charged. [Dallas Morning News, Jan. 30, 2000]
The onetime “terrorist” had helped transform the Elian tragedy into a propaganda club against his old enemy, Fidel Castro.
-----
Jerry Meldon is chair of the chemical engineering department at Tufts University.
Back to Front
The boy landed among those old antagonisms when he was pulled from the Straits of Florida on Thanksgiving Day after an over-crowded 17-foot powerboat capsized killing Elian’s mother, her boyfriend and other passengers. Legal principle required that the boy promptly be returned to his surviving father.
But anti-Castro politics soon intervened. The powerful Cuban-American National Foundation labeled Elian “another child victim of Fidel Castro.” Hard-line elements of the Miami community seized on the case as another way to do battle against their old enemy in Havana. Politicians, including Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, voiced opposition to sending the boy back to Cuba.
Little noticed by the U.S. news media, however, was the fact that some of the Cuban-Americans fanning the flames had long-standing ties to anti-Castro terrorism. Some also collaborated with drug-tainted right-wing forces that carried out bloody human rights violations in the 1970s and 1980s. Their commitment to family values and the rule of law might have been drawn into question.
For instance, one prominent Miami-based spokesman on the Elian case is Jose Basulto. A Bay of Pigs veteran, Basulto has acknowledged past involvement in terror attacks on Cuba in the 1960s as well as work for Argentina’s military government, a regime that tortured and “disappeared” an estimated 30,000 political dissidents from 1976-83 -- and allegedly financed some of its operations with drug proceeds.
Basulto’s experiences in secret wars against Castro and other leftists dated back to 1959. In that year, Castro’s revolutionary army overthrew a Mafia-connected dictator, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, and Basulto emigrated to the United States. In Miami, he and his friend Felix Rodriguez signed up with the CIA-backed Brigade 2506. They were infiltrated into Cuba before the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
After the invasion failed, Basulto and Rodriguez escaped back to Miami, where they nursed grievances over alleged U.S. betrayal. They also continued work for CIA-funded groups and plotted new ways to strike at Castro.
On Aug. 24, 1962, the 22-year-old Basulto manned a 22mm cannon aboard a boat that had maneuvered 200 yards off the coast of Miramar, west of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the Hornedo de Rosita Hotel, a crowded tourist spot that also housed Soviet bloc specialists. At 11:30 p.m., Basulto opened fire, shattering windows and sowing terror but failing to kill Castro (who wasn’t there) or anyone else.
Reflecting back on these activities 35 years later, Basulto acknowledged that “we were pretty [lousy] terrorists, let me tell you.” [Washington Post Magazine, May 20, 1997]
On March 20, 1963, Basulto and 50 other Bay of Pigs veterans enlisted in the U.S. Army with commissions as second lieutenants. Basulto received psychological warfare training at Fort Bragg, N.C., and Fort Benning, Ga. After leaving the Army, he returned to the shadowy world of anti-Castro politics in Miami.
[One of Basulto’s Cuban comrades in the U.S. Army was his friend, Felix Rodriguez, who would go on to a long career in the CIA before representing Vice President George Bush’s office in Central America during the 1980s.]
In the years after the Army, Basulto claimed he adopted the pacifist teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. But outside experts believe Basulto remained active in the anti-Castro terrorist underground.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Basulto seemed to confirm that suspicion. He said: “About that time in my life, I have only one thing I want to say. We had come to the conclusion that the only hope for the Cuban people lay in the physical elimination of Fidel Castro.”
Basulto insisted that he dropped out of politics in the 1970s. But his old political passions apparently were rekindled by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.
After Reagan’s victory, American ultraconservatives sought out the Argentines to fight the new leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. John Carbaugh, an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., first broached the idea with the defeated remnants of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard who were licking their wounds in Honduras.
Carbaugh then flew to Buenos Aires for talks with Argentine intelligence officers who agreed to assist the contras. [For details, see Roy Gutman’s Banana Diplomacy.]
In March 1981, two months into the Reagan-Bush administration, Argentine leader, Gen. Roberto Viola, made a state visit to Washington. After Viola’s trip, President Reagan authorized the CIA to begin collaborating with Argentina’s contra-support operation.
When word of this Argentine training agreement reached Miami, anti-Castro Cubans began shipping out to Central America, optimistic that the road to Havana ran through Managua. Basulto was one of the volunteers who advised “Argentine forces in Central America,” he acknowledged to a Wall Street Journal reporter. [WSJ, Aug. 9, 1988]
According to William Turner, a former FBI agent who kept tabs on Basulto’s anti-Castro activities, the Cuban émigré served as an adviser to Argentine intelligence officers who were training the contras in methods of torture. [Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1996]
Years later, congressional investigators learned that the Argentine intelligence services had turned to the drug trade to finance their regional anti-communist operations.
In sworn U.S. Senate testimony, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse, a financial officer for the Argentine intelligence services, said Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suarez contributed more than $30 million to finance the Argentine-backed “Cocaine Coup” in Bolivia in June 1980 and to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels and other paramilitary operations in Central America. Sanchez-Reisse said Suarez’s $30 million was laundered through businesses in Miami. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
In 1998, a CIA inspector general’s report also found that contra operatives subsidized their activities with cocaine smuggling into the United States. Through the decade, as this contra-connected cocaine trafficking continued, the CIA took special steps to head off criminal and congressional investigations that threatened to reveal the secret, the inspector general’s report admitted. [See Lost History.]
Although Basulto was not mentioned in the CIA report, the inspector general found that other Cuban-Americans who had volunteered to assist the contras were moonlighting as drug traffickers or were serving as money launderers for the Medellin cocaine cartel.
The Argentine military also had an odd way of demonstrating its commitment to family values.
During the Argentine "dirty war," when the military’s secret police captured a pregnant female deemed subversive, they would subject the woman to a Caesarean section or induce labor. They then would give the baby to a military family and murder the new mother, usually by shackling her naked to other captives and then dumping her from a plane into the ocean to drown. Sometimes, the infants were literally raised by their mothers’ killers.
For his part, Basulto underwent a dramatic public makeover in the 1990s. He transformed his image from renegade terrorist to the leader of a humanitarian group called Brothers to the Rescue, an organization that mixed the rescue of Cubans crossing to Miami by sea with provocative flights over Cuba that dropped anti-Castro propaganda.
Basulto’s operation led to a new crisis in U.S.-Cuban relations on Feb. 24, 1996, when Cuban MiGs shot down two of the group’s unarmed planes after they left Cuban airspace. Four pilots died, but Basulto escaped in a third plane. Because of the incident, President Clinton agreed to sign the Helms-Burton Act, a law that tightened the U.S. economic embargo against the island.
Basulto was back in action again after the rescue of Elian Gonzalez. Basulto launched his group’s planes for an unsuccessful search for other survivors. He also cranked up the rhetoric as the boy’s status became an international cause celebre.
“This is not a simple case of delivering a child to his father,” Basulto said. “It’s delivery of a child to a government. He’ll be like an orange and they’re going to squeeze the last drop of juice from him.” [USA Today, Jan. 6, 2000]
Later, Basulto hailed Elian’s survival as a case of Divine Intervention against Castro’s Cuba. “This was a clear case of a miracle,” Basulto declared. “When they found Elian, he was surrounded by dolphins,” the mammals presumably sent by God to protect the boy. However, the fisherman who pulled the boy out of the water and the U.S. Coast Guard reported no dolphins in the vicinity at the time of the rescue. [The New Republic, Jan. 24, 2000]
When 100 demonstrators marched on the Immigration and Naturalization Service in support of an initial U.S. government decision to return Elian to his father, Basulto was drawing headlines again. He denounced the marchers as dupes of Castro. “They’re following directives from Cuba,” he charged. [Dallas Morning News, Jan. 30, 2000]
The onetime “terrorist” had helped transform the Elian tragedy into a propaganda club against his old enemy, Fidel Castro.
-----
Jerry Meldon is chair of the chemical engineering department at Tufts University.
Back to Front
Feb 1, 2000
Letters to the editor: CORRUPTION IN GERMANY | By Jerry Meldon | published in the Boston Globe Feb 1, 2000
While "Kohl-ed" (editorial, Jan. 27) slaps the wrist of Helmut Kohl for accepting $1 million in illegal donations on behalf of his party, Germany's Christian Democratic Union, it misleadingly suggests that power first corrupted Kohl during the tail end of his 16-year chancellorship. In fact, Kohl's meteoric rise was greased by the even greater sums that illegally lined the pockets of the CDU and its coalition partner, the Free Democrats.
The primary benefactor was the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, the Flick Group, coincidentally the only major German firm to refuse reparations to its wartime slave laborers.
Although the web of venality uncovered by Der Spiegel was tangled, two of its threads stood out. One linked Flick to Kohl's predecessor atop the CDU, Rainer Barzel, via $700,000 he received for phantom legal services after handing the CDU chairmanship to Kohl.
A second thread linked Flick to two Free Democrats who succeeded one another as Germany's finance minister. They were paid for two favors.
The first favor was the $175 million tax waiver they granted Flick following the sale of Daimler-Benz to Deutsche Bank. The second was the Free Democrats' withdrawal from its governing coalition with the Social Democrats and ensuing formation of a coalition government with the CDU.
JERRY MELDON
Sep 17, 1999
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.
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.
Apr 13, 1999
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 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.
Jan 31, 1999
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.
Jan 3, 1999
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.
Oct 25, 1998
Kohl's Defeat & Hitler's Ghost | By Jerry Meldon | published in Consortium News on Oct. 25, 1998
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's defeat finally has ushered the World War II generation off the stage as leaders of major Western nations. For Germany, however, the change has a different significance than it did for the victorious Allies.
Adolf Hitler's long shadow extended over many of West Germany's post-war political leaders, especially after the Cold War brought a premature end to the de-nazification program. In the name of economic and political stability, the Allies struck deals with many of Hitler's supposedly less despicable accomplices, deals that shaped the Kohl era.
Kohl himself was not implicated in the crimes of World War II. He counted himself lucky to have been under military age -- 15 years old -- when the war ended. Like many young Germans, he belonged to the Hitler Youth. But he shoulders no personal guilt from the war.
The same is not true for many of Kohl’s financial backers. Kohl was one of the Christian Democrats who benefitted from secret ties to former Nazi industrialists, the same men who assisted Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and '30s.
Indeed, if the West had not relented on its German de-nazification program, Kohl might never have climbed to the pinnacle of national leadership, let alone come to dominate German politics for the past 16 years.
Through his career -- and his hushed connections to Hitler's old allies -- Kohl personified an ambivalent political class which, on one level, denounced the atrocities of the Holocaust while, on another, protected some of the business executives who benefitted from Jewish slave labor.
Kohl owed much of his political ascendance to one corporate giant which refused to pay reparations to wartime slave laborers, the powerful holding company known as the Flick Group. During his tenure, Kohl also rejected demands for slave-labor compensation through a government fund.
Yet, amid the laudatory press accounts of Kohl’s career, little has been written about these shadowy connections, how in the early 1970s, the Flick Group and other conservative industrialists tapped Kohl, then a little-known regional governor, for leadership of the Christian Democratic Party.
Forty years earlier, the Flick Group’s founder, Friedrich Flick, had been a pillar of the pre-war German steel industry and a bankroller of the Nazi Party. Flick was part of Heinrich Himmler's exclusive Circle of Friends, a group of wealthy Germans who made annual donations to Hitler's SS. [See Robert Wistrich’s Who’s Who in Nazi Germany.]
The financial backing helped Hitler consolidate political control over Germany and begin the persecution of European Jews. The money also earned Flick the opportunity to tour the Dachau concentration camp, presumably to view the source of his labor force. Through World War II, Flick kept his plants humming with the forced labor of some 48,000 workers. Four out of five of Germany’s slave laborers died. [See Wistrich.]
After the war, some industrialists stood trial along with Hitler’s political and military elites. At Nuremberg, the Allies sentenced Flick to seven years in prison for abusing slave laborers. But the Allies were not as harsh as they could have been. They let Flick retain one-third of his industrial holdings.
Soon, Washington was more worried about the rise of international communism than the residue of German fascism. With the start of the Cold War, the United States curtailed the de-nazification program in the name of stability. In 1950, John McCloy, U.S. high commissioner for Germany, granted Flick clemency and released him.
A free man, Flick set to work rebuilding his business empire. As the West German economy rose from the ashes, Flick bought interests in hundreds of firms, including major shares of Dynamit Nobel and Daimler-Benz.
His old connections and new investments transformed him, again, into a man of immense wealth and power.
But Flick could not fully escape his past. His surviving slave laborers and the descendants of those who died were demanding reparations for the wartime work at his plants and at other factories where Flick now was a major shareholder.
The Conference of Jewish Materials Claims approached Flick on behalf of 1,300 claimants. They sought $1.5 million from Dynamit Nobel, which then was 80 percent owned by Flick. As cited by Benjamin Ferencz in his book, Less Than Slaves, Dynamit Nobel subsidiaries had used war-time slave labor from Buchenwald and Dachau provided by the SS at the company's request.
Flick representatives negotiated with the Claims Conference for six years. McCloy, the former high commissioner, even returned to Germany in 1969 to help hammer out a settlement. But McCloy faced an unyielding Flick Group executive named Eberhard von Brauchitsch.
At one pivotal negotiating session, Ferencz wrote, "McCloy had been up late the night before [meeting with Flick representatives] and his stomach was upset. ... Von Brauchitsch pounded out his legal argument ... that the rejection of the claim was justified. ... What [McCloy] recalled most vividly was that during ... the von Brauchitsch tirade [McCloy had to] run out of the room several times to vomit."
Despite McCloy's determination, the final answer from Flick's negotiators was no. Flick was no longer a penitent who needed McCloy's mercy.
Just as Flick quickly had regained his form as a business tycoon, he also reestablished himself as a political kingmaker. The Flick Group was pouring money into the coffers of the Christian Democratic Party.
By the time of his death in 1972 at the age of 90, Flick left $1 billion to his playboy son and passed on to his corporate heirs a powerful network of political and financial influence.
When Willy Brandt's Social Democrats defeated the Christian Democrats in 1972, von Brauchitsch was among the West German industrialists who engineered a changing of the guard in the Christian Democratic leadership. The old Christian Democratic leader, Rainer Barzel, stepped down -- and into a lucrative post at a Frankfurt law firm. Barzel managed to earn $700,000 in legal fees from the Flick Group for what Der Spiegel depicted as phantom services.
The choice to replace Barzel was a little-known regional governor, named Helmut Kohl. Overnight, Kohl was a national figure.
In the years that followed, Kohl and Barzel returned the favors for their corporate patrons. According to Der Spiegel, Barzel exploited his political contacts to pass on inside scoops to Flick executives. Then, in 1976, at the Flick Group's urging, Kohl put Barzel in charge of a key legislative commission on national finances.
The Flick Group also built up its political chits in the Free Democratic Party, which was the junior partner in the Social Democrats’ ruling coalition.
According to handwritten notes by von Brauchitsch -- which later were obtained by German prosecutors -- the Flick Group enriched two finance ministers from the Free Democrats, Hans Friderich and Count Otto von Lambsdorff. The ministers had waived $175 million in taxes which the holding company should have paid on its 1974 sale of Daimler-Benz stock to Deutche Bank, for 20 times the purchase price.
Von Brauchitsch's diary also indicated that the Flick Group's generosity may have extended to Kohl. "I intend to fit out Herr Kohl exactly as we did the other gentlemen," the diary read.
Kohl later admitted to legislative investigators that he accepted secret Flick Group payments totaling $53,000 from 1977-79. But he claimed that he deposited the money in the Christian Democratic treasury.
The German press reported that the sums were nearly four times that amount, but no funds were traced to Kohl personally. The so-called "Wassergate" affair was soon forgotten.
In 1982, the Free Democrats -- apparently lured by the lucrative relationships available from thriving German industrialists -- abandoned the coalition with the Social Democrats. Kohl's Christian Democrat prevailed in the next election and formed a coalition with the Free Democrats.
Kohl's Cold War attitudes fit neatly with President Reagan's obsession with the Evil Empire. In 1985, in one of the most controversial actions of Reagan's presidency, Kohl persuaded Reagan to mark the 40th anniversary of the World War II armistice with a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the cemetery at Bitburg.
At Bitburg, Reagan joined in paying homage to German dead who included 47 members of the dreaded SS.
That same year, the Flick Group cashed out its astounding growth arising from post-war investments which were cobbled together by convicted war criminal Friedrich Flick. Deutsche Bank purchased the Flick Group for $2 billion. Only later did the bank pay surviving Dynamit Nobel slave laborers their long-awaited back pay, $2 million.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Kohl rushed to reunite the two Germanies. His hasty actions and rosy promises have been blamed for Germany's current economic morass. The troubles include 20 percent unemployment in the East, a jobless rate that has sparked a rise in neo-Nazi "skinhead" violence against foreign-born workers.
On the issue of Nazi-era slave labor, Kohl remained adamant in rejecting proposals for a government-sponsored fund. Kohl argued that Germany already had paid tens of billions of dollars in reparations for the Holocaust and that enough was enough. [NYT, Oct. 20, 1998]
In September, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder finally ended Kohl's long reign. Schroeder won the national election by offering vague promises to resolve Germany's economic problems.
Since the election, however, Schroeder has moved to resolve class-action lawsuits stemming from the slave-labor issue. Schroeder arranged meetings with top industrialists to review options for settling the disputes.
The companies include such giants as the auto manufacturers, Daimler-Benz and BMW; the electronics giant Siemens; and chemical firms, such as Hoechst and BASF. They reportedly fear the suits could result in vast court-ordered compensation plus severe damage to corporate images.
Volkswagen already has announced a $20 million fund to settle claims by its former slave laborers.
With Kohl’s departure, Germany finally might be able to close this dark chapter of its history and exorcise one more ghost from Adolf Hitler’s fascist era.
Adolf Hitler's long shadow extended over many of West Germany's post-war political leaders, especially after the Cold War brought a premature end to the de-nazification program. In the name of economic and political stability, the Allies struck deals with many of Hitler's supposedly less despicable accomplices, deals that shaped the Kohl era.
Kohl himself was not implicated in the crimes of World War II. He counted himself lucky to have been under military age -- 15 years old -- when the war ended. Like many young Germans, he belonged to the Hitler Youth. But he shoulders no personal guilt from the war.
The same is not true for many of Kohl’s financial backers. Kohl was one of the Christian Democrats who benefitted from secret ties to former Nazi industrialists, the same men who assisted Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and '30s.
Indeed, if the West had not relented on its German de-nazification program, Kohl might never have climbed to the pinnacle of national leadership, let alone come to dominate German politics for the past 16 years.
Through his career -- and his hushed connections to Hitler's old allies -- Kohl personified an ambivalent political class which, on one level, denounced the atrocities of the Holocaust while, on another, protected some of the business executives who benefitted from Jewish slave labor.
Kohl owed much of his political ascendance to one corporate giant which refused to pay reparations to wartime slave laborers, the powerful holding company known as the Flick Group. During his tenure, Kohl also rejected demands for slave-labor compensation through a government fund.
Yet, amid the laudatory press accounts of Kohl’s career, little has been written about these shadowy connections, how in the early 1970s, the Flick Group and other conservative industrialists tapped Kohl, then a little-known regional governor, for leadership of the Christian Democratic Party.
Forty years earlier, the Flick Group’s founder, Friedrich Flick, had been a pillar of the pre-war German steel industry and a bankroller of the Nazi Party. Flick was part of Heinrich Himmler's exclusive Circle of Friends, a group of wealthy Germans who made annual donations to Hitler's SS. [See Robert Wistrich’s Who’s Who in Nazi Germany.]
The financial backing helped Hitler consolidate political control over Germany and begin the persecution of European Jews. The money also earned Flick the opportunity to tour the Dachau concentration camp, presumably to view the source of his labor force. Through World War II, Flick kept his plants humming with the forced labor of some 48,000 workers. Four out of five of Germany’s slave laborers died. [See Wistrich.]
After the war, some industrialists stood trial along with Hitler’s political and military elites. At Nuremberg, the Allies sentenced Flick to seven years in prison for abusing slave laborers. But the Allies were not as harsh as they could have been. They let Flick retain one-third of his industrial holdings.
Soon, Washington was more worried about the rise of international communism than the residue of German fascism. With the start of the Cold War, the United States curtailed the de-nazification program in the name of stability. In 1950, John McCloy, U.S. high commissioner for Germany, granted Flick clemency and released him.
A free man, Flick set to work rebuilding his business empire. As the West German economy rose from the ashes, Flick bought interests in hundreds of firms, including major shares of Dynamit Nobel and Daimler-Benz.
His old connections and new investments transformed him, again, into a man of immense wealth and power.
But Flick could not fully escape his past. His surviving slave laborers and the descendants of those who died were demanding reparations for the wartime work at his plants and at other factories where Flick now was a major shareholder.
The Conference of Jewish Materials Claims approached Flick on behalf of 1,300 claimants. They sought $1.5 million from Dynamit Nobel, which then was 80 percent owned by Flick. As cited by Benjamin Ferencz in his book, Less Than Slaves, Dynamit Nobel subsidiaries had used war-time slave labor from Buchenwald and Dachau provided by the SS at the company's request.
Flick representatives negotiated with the Claims Conference for six years. McCloy, the former high commissioner, even returned to Germany in 1969 to help hammer out a settlement. But McCloy faced an unyielding Flick Group executive named Eberhard von Brauchitsch.
At one pivotal negotiating session, Ferencz wrote, "McCloy had been up late the night before [meeting with Flick representatives] and his stomach was upset. ... Von Brauchitsch pounded out his legal argument ... that the rejection of the claim was justified. ... What [McCloy] recalled most vividly was that during ... the von Brauchitsch tirade [McCloy had to] run out of the room several times to vomit."
Despite McCloy's determination, the final answer from Flick's negotiators was no. Flick was no longer a penitent who needed McCloy's mercy.
Just as Flick quickly had regained his form as a business tycoon, he also reestablished himself as a political kingmaker. The Flick Group was pouring money into the coffers of the Christian Democratic Party.
By the time of his death in 1972 at the age of 90, Flick left $1 billion to his playboy son and passed on to his corporate heirs a powerful network of political and financial influence.
When Willy Brandt's Social Democrats defeated the Christian Democrats in 1972, von Brauchitsch was among the West German industrialists who engineered a changing of the guard in the Christian Democratic leadership. The old Christian Democratic leader, Rainer Barzel, stepped down -- and into a lucrative post at a Frankfurt law firm. Barzel managed to earn $700,000 in legal fees from the Flick Group for what Der Spiegel depicted as phantom services.
The choice to replace Barzel was a little-known regional governor, named Helmut Kohl. Overnight, Kohl was a national figure.
In the years that followed, Kohl and Barzel returned the favors for their corporate patrons. According to Der Spiegel, Barzel exploited his political contacts to pass on inside scoops to Flick executives. Then, in 1976, at the Flick Group's urging, Kohl put Barzel in charge of a key legislative commission on national finances.
The Flick Group also built up its political chits in the Free Democratic Party, which was the junior partner in the Social Democrats’ ruling coalition.
According to handwritten notes by von Brauchitsch -- which later were obtained by German prosecutors -- the Flick Group enriched two finance ministers from the Free Democrats, Hans Friderich and Count Otto von Lambsdorff. The ministers had waived $175 million in taxes which the holding company should have paid on its 1974 sale of Daimler-Benz stock to Deutche Bank, for 20 times the purchase price.
Von Brauchitsch's diary also indicated that the Flick Group's generosity may have extended to Kohl. "I intend to fit out Herr Kohl exactly as we did the other gentlemen," the diary read.
Kohl later admitted to legislative investigators that he accepted secret Flick Group payments totaling $53,000 from 1977-79. But he claimed that he deposited the money in the Christian Democratic treasury.
The German press reported that the sums were nearly four times that amount, but no funds were traced to Kohl personally. The so-called "Wassergate" affair was soon forgotten.
In 1982, the Free Democrats -- apparently lured by the lucrative relationships available from thriving German industrialists -- abandoned the coalition with the Social Democrats. Kohl's Christian Democrat prevailed in the next election and formed a coalition with the Free Democrats.
Kohl's Cold War attitudes fit neatly with President Reagan's obsession with the Evil Empire. In 1985, in one of the most controversial actions of Reagan's presidency, Kohl persuaded Reagan to mark the 40th anniversary of the World War II armistice with a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the cemetery at Bitburg.
At Bitburg, Reagan joined in paying homage to German dead who included 47 members of the dreaded SS.
That same year, the Flick Group cashed out its astounding growth arising from post-war investments which were cobbled together by convicted war criminal Friedrich Flick. Deutsche Bank purchased the Flick Group for $2 billion. Only later did the bank pay surviving Dynamit Nobel slave laborers their long-awaited back pay, $2 million.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Kohl rushed to reunite the two Germanies. His hasty actions and rosy promises have been blamed for Germany's current economic morass. The troubles include 20 percent unemployment in the East, a jobless rate that has sparked a rise in neo-Nazi "skinhead" violence against foreign-born workers.
On the issue of Nazi-era slave labor, Kohl remained adamant in rejecting proposals for a government-sponsored fund. Kohl argued that Germany already had paid tens of billions of dollars in reparations for the Holocaust and that enough was enough. [NYT, Oct. 20, 1998]
In September, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder finally ended Kohl's long reign. Schroeder won the national election by offering vague promises to resolve Germany's economic problems.
Since the election, however, Schroeder has moved to resolve class-action lawsuits stemming from the slave-labor issue. Schroeder arranged meetings with top industrialists to review options for settling the disputes.
The companies include such giants as the auto manufacturers, Daimler-Benz and BMW; the electronics giant Siemens; and chemical firms, such as Hoechst and BASF. They reportedly fear the suits could result in vast court-ordered compensation plus severe damage to corporate images.
Volkswagen already has announced a $20 million fund to settle claims by its former slave laborers.
With Kohl’s departure, Germany finally might be able to close this dark chapter of its history and exorcise one more ghost from Adolf Hitler’s fascist era.
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