Secret Societies, Narcoterrorism, International Fascism, and the World Anti-Communist League Part II

Welcome to the second installment in my examination of the mysterious World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In a sense the League functioned not unlike long time bugaboos of the conspiratorial right such as the Round Table group and the Trilateral Commission. But whereas the Round Table groups and the Trilateral Commission were chiefly driven by American and European banking interests the WACL was thoroughly reactionary. During the 1970s and 1980s the League emerged as a powerful international body that brought together far right wing regimes across the world.

Within the United States it frequently worked in conjunction with the American Security Council (ASC, an equally mysterious group that I have written at great length on here, here, here and here), a organization that many WACL members also held membership in. Frequently the agenda of the WACL/ASC crowd would come into conflict with the highly Eurocentric and Anglophilic Round Table group and it's American branch, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

As discussed at length in part one, the origins of the WACL lay with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a group originating in Nazi Germany and dominated by "former" Nazi Quislings; and the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (ASAPC). The ASAPC was founded by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and would eventually receive significant support from the Korean CIA, cult leader Sun Myung Moon and Japanese yakuza chief Yoshio Kodama. Much of the financial support for the ASAPC as well as Moon's Unification Church was likely provided by the Korean CIA as well as the massive profits Chiang and Kodama made from drug trafficking.

the Generalissimo (top) and Kodama (bottom)

By all accounts the opium empire that Chiang and Kodama erected was vast. German researcher Henrik Kruger would even go so far as to allege that Chiang's Kuomintang party (KMT) and other assorted over and underworld allies cornered the world opium market in the early 1970s after what Kruger dubbed the "great heroin coup." It resulted in the almost total eradication of the Marseilles-based Corsican mafia, the so-called "French Connection," that had dominated the world opium trade since the end of the Second World War.

"When the heroin flow from Marseilles was shut off in 1972-73, two new sources of supply immediately filled the vacuum. Southeast Asia – Laos, Burma and Thailand – suddenly produced vast amounts of white no. 4 heroin, the type that supposedly could only be produced by Marseilles chemists. The high quality heroin went primarily to the 40 percent of all U.S. heroin addicts who were living in New York, and who were accustomed to Marseilles heroin. The other new source was Mexico. But it's product, the less pure 'brown sugar,' served mainly to regulate the market and to generate new customers.

"The remarkable switch from Turkey-Merseilles-U.S.A. to Southeast Asia-Mexico-U.S.A. shifted billions of dollars and the power that comes with it. Such a market revolution could not have happened without astute planning and direction, which demanded political savvy and political cooperation. The plans of this tremendous heroin coup were on somebody's drawing board before Nixon and Georges Pompidou met in early 1970. They were made long before Attorney General John Mitchell and French Justice Minister Raymond Marcellin met in Paris on 26 February 1971, when they sign the anti-narcotics agreement that led to the eradication of the Corsican drug Mafia. Most probably they were in place by 1968...

"Involved in one way or another in the planning, the execution, or both, were: President Nixon and part of the White House staff; Meyer Lansky's corrupt gangster syndicate – in particular its Cuban exile wing run by Florida capo Santo Trafficante, Jr.; the Cuba/China lobby; ultrareactionary forces in Southeast Asia; primarily the Kuomintang Chinese on Taiwan and in the Golden Triangle; and intelligence and law-enforcement factions of the CIA and BNDD/DEA.

"It was, needless to say, not a willful conspiracy of all the above. But we can assert with reasonable certainty that the CIA, Trafficante, and other mafiosi, certain Southeast Asians, and some people in the White House must have been in the know."

(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pgs. 121-122)

Kruger would go onto speculate that the WACL had been one of the principal groups behind this coup.

"In my opinion, the central manipulator in the whole narcotics scheme was the CIA, or rather a faction within it. It is erroneous to treat the agency as a monolith. Various lobby groups have their own agents in the company, generating internal power struggles that reflect political polarization external to the CIA. There are, doubtless, CIA factions wholeheartedly in favor of ending America's policeman and oppressor roles, and in favor of social democratic rather than right wing regimes... Within the agency there remain powerful groups promoting continued support of 'old friends' in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The China/Cuba lobby has traditionally been one of the most influential within the CIA, and there's little reason to believe that the situation seriously changed...

"The evidence suggests that the forces behind the unofficial policy were able to place many of their loyal CIA agents in the DEA, and in such private intelligence agency covers as Intertel and Wackenhut, where they continue their tasks while letting the agency washing its hands. Intelligence is still gathered by the CIA, but some of the dirtiest operations are now performed by 'former' agents.

"We cannot, of course, discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency, or left in protest against its more moderate line. However, that implies that a renegade CIA faction now runs an independent secret service, aided by lobby interest – i.e., not Intertel, but an even more powerful 'third force.' If that is so, I can come up with only one lobby group with the relevant motives as well as the power to back them – the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). WACL can mobilize CIA agents closely associated with the China/Cuba/Chile lobby, especially the large contingent of former agents of the Gehlen/Vlassov organization (the intelligence agency run by Hitler's master spy Reinhard Gehen, which became the BND, the West German equivalent of the CIA).

"E. Howard was clearly the China/Cuba/Latin America lobby's, man. That he is also tied to WACL is suggested by the fact that William F. Buckley, Hunt's close friend for twenty years and the godfather of his children, was one of the WACL's top U.S. supporters. Also connected to the same lobby groups are Lucian Conein and the State Department's former intelligence chief, Ray S. Cline, who continues to be a frequent guest at the Taiwan WACL stronghold."

(ibid, pgs. 192-193)

legendary National Review publisher William F. Buckley (top), OSS/CIA/DEA assassin Lucian Conein (middle) and good old China cowboy Ray S. Cline (bottom), all early supporters of the League

But no sooner had the coup been completed than Afghanistan began to rapidly overtake the Golden Triangle as the major opium producing region of the world. That what would soon become a valuable US alley would support themselves by trafficking drugs is hardly surprising – in point of fact, this pattern had been firmly entrenched by the US's long alliance with the China lobby during the preceding years. And yet the initial support for the Afghanistan rebels seemingly came not from the China Lobby/WACL faction within the US intelligence community but from Jimmy Carter's NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, a co-founder of the Trilateral Commission.

"In May 1979, the ISI put CIA in touch with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen warlord with perhaps the smallest following inside Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was also the leading mujahideen drug trafficker, and the only one to develop his own complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan)...

"... The question is rather why Brzezinski agreed to an alliance with this drug connection, and proceeded almost immediately to protect it from critical snoops like David Musto... It is important to establish why the United States accepted an arrangement whereby of the $2 billion It supplied to the mujahideen in the 1980s, Hekmatyar, a leading drug trafficker, is estimated to have received more than half.

"Let me clarify the blowback from Brzezinski's two decisions: Hekmatyar and Saudi-backed Islamist Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – the two principal instruments of his policies – became, far more conspicuously than Osama bin Laden, the protectors of the first al Qaeda plots against America. Al Qaeda itself can be traced principally to the thousands of Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) followers that Egypt released in the 1980s to fight in Afghanistan..."

(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg 74)

Zbigniew Brzezinski (top) and Afghan drug lord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

While it's tempting to speculate that Brzezinski's mujahedeen represented some type of counter coup of the heroin market the reality is that elements of the WACL and the Fascist International are present just beneath the surface of the Afghan support network. The chief US lobbyist for the mujahedeen was of course Democratic Representative Charles Wilson of Texas. Wilson in turn was a member of the American Security Council, a group whose membership shares more than a little overlap with the WACL, as noted above.

"One such interest was the American Security Council, which took an active interest in lobbying for an increased effort in Vietnam in the 1960s, and in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Charles Wilson himself was a member of the American Security Council Task Force on Central America. An ASC staff member, Odilie English, toured Afghanistan several times in the 1980s, before becoming the PR director for the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, and more recently lobbyist for the Northern Alliance. The chair of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, Major General Milnor Roberts (ret.), was vice president of the ASC."

(Drugs, Oil, and War, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 6)

Representative Charles Wilson (top) and General J. Milnor Roberts (bottom)

General Milnor Roberts was also a chairman of the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF), the American branch of the WACL. The WACL's 1984 and 1985 conventions voted to support the mujahedeen as well. What's more, the WACL was maintaining close ties with the Middle East Security Council and the Arab League as well as the House of Saud by the late 1970s. Beyond this, the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood (which played a major role in the guerrilla war in Afghanistan against the Soviets) trace back to the Nazi regime.

"The Ikhwan settled primarily in Egypt, where they joined the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood created by Hassan Al Banna in 1928. He was a devout admirer of and corresponded with young Adolf Hitler. 'In heaven all off, on earth, Hitler' was their battle cry. Hassan's Muslim Brotherhood became a fully-integrated arm of the German intelligence and propaganda networks during WWII. They specialized in acts of terrorism and assassinations of Allied troops, promising German General Erwin Rommel that he would not find a single Allied soldier left alive when he arrived in Cairo.

"The Arab Nazis remain the only segment of the Third Reich that was never punished or even dismantled. After the war, the British Secret Service hired the Ikwahn terrorists, and used them as a fifth column in an attempt to destroy the infant state of Israel in 1948. When Gamal Nasser and the leftists took over Egypt, they banned this huge army of Arab Nazis, now numbering nearly three quarters of a million strong. In the 1950s the same Robber Barons who helped fund and create the original Saudi Ikwahn, convinced there Saudi partners to take them back. The Saudis gladly accepted the Nazi refugees from the Egypt Ikwahn and gave them citizenship...

"The Dulles brothers sold the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist groups to the ever-gullible Eisenhower as a counterweight to the Arab Communist. It was a tragic error. History records the Muslim Brotherhood as the parent organization of every subsequent Sunni terrorist group from Hamas to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Mohammed Qutb, the brother of the chief Nazi propagandist, was the personal tutor of young Osama bin Laden...

"The last time the Robber Barons took the Arab Nazis out of the closet was in the early 1980s, when the Muslim Brotherhood was reinforced in America to recruit the second generation of Arab fascists fight as Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the Spiritual Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood and head recruiter of the Mujahideen movement, was Osama bin Laden's religious mentor..."

(America's Nazi Secret, John Loftus, pgs. 14-16)

Further complicating the matter is the fact that the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, of which WACL mega-funder Yoshio Kodama dominated for decades, was one of the chief Asian forces behind the founding of the Rockefeller/Brzezinski-dominated Trilateral Commission. While the Trilateral Commission has typically been linked to the Round Table group and the Council on Foreign Relations it appears to be far less Anglophilic than the those groups.

The chief backer of the CFR had been the deeply Anglophilic J.P. Morgan, who had longstanding ties to the great British banking houses. The Rockefeller clan, who hailed from Ohio and who had never been entirely accepted by the nation's old guard Yankee elite, at times found themselves at odds against the J.P. Morgan faction of the American Establishment. Rockefeller and Morgan were the chief power brokers in the United States for much of the first half of the twentieth century. For years the Morgan faction had been the senior partners but the Rockefeller clan arguably became the most powerful family in America for much of the second half of the twentieth century while the Morgan faction went into decline.

John D. Rockefeller (top) and J.P. Morgan (bottom)

The Rockefeller clan did not seemingly have quite the same degree of attachment to the mother country as did Morgan and the CFR clique. The Trilateral Commission seems to have been an attempt at forging an international coalition that shared many of the same goals of the Round Table group/CFR while avoiding some of the rabid Anglo-isms of the former groups and including the emerging Asian power brokers that had long been aligned with the WACL/ASC faction. It also seems to have reluctantly embraced the more extreme measures of this latter faction as well if Afghanistan is any indication.

Trilateral Commission logo

Thus, it would seem that the Trilateral Commission and WACL wings of the international power structure were collaborating in this instance of global destabilization. Who this left ultimately in control of the region's opium trade is difficult to say but a loss of opium dollars at this point would not have adversely effected the finances of the WACL due to another surging drug market they became deeply involved in beginning in the 1970s: Cocaine from Latin America.

That various groups backed by the WACL were involved in trafficking cocaine by the 1970s there can be little doubt of. By the 1980s several of the major death squad-linked organizations aligned with the WACL were brazenly engaged in the cocaine market. The most blatant was instance of this was the support given to the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN), the largest of the Nicaraguan contras, by WACL chairman John Singlaub (a former general and CIA man who had been involved with the so-called "China cowboy" clique within the Agency).

"As chairman of the World Anti-Communist League, Singlaub made the revitalized international brotherhood the spearhead of these private groups anxious to actively combat communism everywhere; a principal target was Nicaragua.

"Since then, Singlaub claims to have raised millions of dollars in aid for the Contras and has made frequent trips to the FDN base camps on the on the Honduran border. He has also formed a private training academy for Salvadoran police forces and Nicaraguan contras, since the U.S. government will not..."

(Inside the League, Scott Anderson & John Lee Anderson, pg. 238)

General John Singlaub

Singlaub was extending WACL aid to the FDN at the same time the contra was becoming deeply involved in cocaine trafficking. The two key figures in this were Nicaraguan drug lord Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, a former head of agricultural imports under Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. After Somoza was overthrown by the Sandinistas Blandon went into exile where he helped found the FDN. Meneses came up with the means by which they could raise funds for the contra.

"It was against that backdrop that Meneses and Blandon had been called to Honduras to meet with Enrique Bermudez, where they were told by the new FDN commander to raise money in California. It is understandable that they would have translated this to mean, by any means necessary. After all, crime had ensure the survival of Bermuez's legion in Guatemala. 

"And what was a little cocaine trafficking when compared to kidnapping and contract killings?"

(Dark Alliance, Gary Webb, pg. 75)

Meneses (top) and Blandon (bottom)

Blandon would ultimately engage in far more than just "a little cocaine trafficking." Webb would go on to describe Blandon as such:

"Head of multiton cocaine distribution ring in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1991. First major trafficker to make inroads into South Central Los Angeles in early 1980s, providing the street gangs with their first direct connection to the Colombian cocaine cartels. Longtime supplier to Freeway Rick Ross. Worked as part of the Meneses organization, but struck out on his own in 1985. Founded FDN chapter in Los Angeles. Arrested and convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1992, and became DEA informant..."

(ibid, pg 560)

Blandon and FDN were hardly the only League affiliates involved in cocaine trafficking. There was also Roberto D'Aubuisson, a major in the El Salvador military who would go on to found the "political party" known as Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). One of D'Aubuisson's top aides, Francisco "Chico" Guirola, would be linked to cocaine trafficking.

"... DEA records that said Guirola had been 'reportedly involved in cocaine and arms smuggling in El Salvador and Guatemala' and noted that he was a top aide to Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson...

"Guirola, who attended college in California with one of Anastasio Somoza's nephews, had allowed D'Aubuisson to use his house as a campaign headquarters when he ran for Salvadoran president in 1984. Guirola's passport, which was signed by D'Aubuisson, identified him as a 'special advisor' to the Salvadoran Assembly. He was also caring credentials from the Salvadoran attorney general's office."

(ibid, pgs. 256-257)

Roberto D'Aubuisson

Naturally D'Aubuisson and his ARENA party were members of the WACL as well as occasionally rubbing shoulders with the American Security Council.

"Roberto D'Aubuisson, closely identified with the death squads of El Salvador, is affiliated with the ARENA party and has served as that country's representative to WACL.

"During a 1981 trip to Washington, D.C., Roberto D'Aubuisson was an honored guest at an ASC conference, although D'Aubuisson had already been linked to El Salvadoran death squad activities, including the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The purpose of the D'Aubuisson visit was to enhance his support in Congress."

(Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party, Russ Bellant, pg. 85)

It's also possible Honduran affiliates of the League were connected to the drug trade. Juan Matta-Ballesteros, a distributor for the Medellin cartel, would turn Honduras into a major transit point for cocaine trafficking. He was also linked to the FDN.

"... SETCO, which happen to be owned by the Honduran drug kingpin Juan Matta Ballesteros, a fact that the U.S. Customs Service had known since 1983. 'SETCO was the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the FDN,' the CIA's Inspector General reported. '[Oliver] North also used SETCO for airdrops of military supplies to Contra forces inside Nicaragua.' In fact, that appears to have been the reason behind all of the State Department contracts that were awarded to cocaine smugglers: they were the same people the CIA had hired to do that work when the agency was running the show."

(Dark Alliance, Gary Webb, pg. 348)

Juan Matta Ballesteros

What's more, Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, a close alley of the League, was linked to a coup meant to restore him to power via funds generated by cocaine.

"... Jose Bueso Rosa, had been convicted in 1984 for his part in a bizarre scheme to assassinate the president of Honduras, Roberto Suazo Cordova, and stage a coup d'état, using the proceeds of a giant cocaine sell to finance it. President Suazo had drawn Bueso Rosa's wrath by dumping Honduran Army chief General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, a fanatical anti-Communist who was one of the fathers and chief supporters of the Contras. Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, had been one of Alvarez's top aides, and the cocaine coup was intended to restore Alvarez and his men to power.

"Unfortunately for the plotters, two American military officers they hired to murder Suazo went to the FBI. In late October 1984, a collection of Cubans and Honduran arms merchants were arrested at a remote island airstrip in Florida with 764 pounds of cocaine, valued at between $10 million and $40 million wholesale..."

(ibid, pg. 344)

Gustavo Alvarez Martinez

Clearly, the League seems to have had more than a passing stake in the Latin America cocaine trade. Indeed, there are even some indications that it staged a cocaine coup not unlike the early 1970s heroin coup researcher Henrik Kruger accused the League of. In the next installment in this series I shall consider the possibility of such a cocaine coup against the Medellin cartel. Stay tuned.