Sunday, October 13, 2013

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



 
Come together
Together as one
Come together
For Lucifer's son
--Ghost B.C.,"Monstrance Clock"


Welcome to the fourth installment in my examination of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). While the general tendency of those who have examined the WACL (and they are few and far between) is to liken it to a conservative rival to "liberal" establishment international think tanks such as the Round Table groups or the Trilateral Commission the reality is far more complex.

While both the Round Table groups and the Trilateral Commission have long been linked to the US intelligence community their primary purpose in this capacity seems to of been as a propaganda organ. The WACL also performed such a role, but in many ways it functioned as a full-blown intelligence network unto itself. As has been discussed a great lengths in the prior three installments (which can be found here, here, and here), the WACL was deeply immersed in the international drug trade shortly after the end of the Second World War. By the 1980s it had become one of the largest (arguably the largest) drug cartels in the entire world, with long-standing ties to the international heroin trade and eventually assuming a major role in Latin American cocaine trafficking as well.


Due to such activities the group naturally had close ties to the US intelligence community. Many researchers have even gone so far as to dismiss the WACL as a total construct of said community, but this would be a mistake in this researcher's opinion. The WACL had its origins with two organizations (officially) – the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) and the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL). Both organizations, but especially the latter, had wealthy patrons behind them – patrons who formed close relationships with high-ranking figures in the US military and intelligence community. These figures in turn would continue to support the forces behind the ABN and the APACL even when such forces have become pariahs amongst "mainstream" (i.e., the much fabled Eastern Establishment) American powerbrokers.

As was noted in part one of this series, the APACL received much of its financial support from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) party and Yoshio Kodama, an Imperial Japan war criminal and the longtime head of the yakuza. For decades Chiang and Kodama were the two largest drug lords in the Far East, achieving a near-monopoly over the world heroin supply in the early 1970s. They had already become fabulously wealthy from the drug trade long before this and put much of this money towards supporting far right wing causes the world over.


Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (top) and Yoshio Kodama (bottom)
They were initially given support for this endeavor by General Douglas MacArthur and his longtime intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby. This is a topic that will be discussed in much greater depth in a future series though for the time being the curious reader can find much more information on MacArthur and Willoughby in the final installment of a series I wrote on the American Security Council (another far right wing lobby group that was closely linked to the WACL for decades). For our purposes here it is important to note the latter backers Chiang and Kodama acquired, namely those from the OSS ( and later, the CIA).


General MacArthur (top) and General Willoughby (bottom)
These assets seemingly formed close ties with Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT during the Generalissimo's last stand on mainland China before the Maoist revolution was complete and the KMT fled to Formosa (later Taiwan). As a result, many researchers generally referred to them as the "China Cowboys." Some of the more colorful figures in this merry band include: General John K. Singlaub (the future chairman of the entire WACL); longtime CIA man Ray S. Cline (another figure who played a key role in the WACL, as we shall see in a moment); famed mercenary and arms dealer Mitchell WerBell III (who also played some type of role with the WACL, as noted in part three); businessman William Pawley (who would become deeply involved with the American Security Council), Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt, General Claire Chennault (founder of Civil Air Transport, later known as Air America, a key cog in the KMT opium network) and Paul Helliwell (another major player in Civil Air Transport).



Mitch WerBell III (top), William Pawley (middle) and E. Howard Hunt (bottom), three of the more notorious "China Cowboys"
Aside from Singlaub, Cline probably had the most significant (and likely longest standing) involvement in the WACL. He also played a key role in establishing (along with Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo) Taiwan's Political Warfare Cadres Academy, an institution that would factor heavily into the WACL's intelligence operations.
"Chiang Ching-kuo had graduated from the Sun Yat-Sen University in Moscow in 1927. Deemed a 'revolutionary cadre' by his communist instructors, he was appointed as an alternative member of the Communist Party. He had also attended the Whampoa Academy, a Soviet-run school in China than instructed its pupils, both communists and Nationalist, in the art of political warfare. The generalissimo's son put his instruction to good use; by the time of his affiliation with Cline, he had already been in control of the Kuomintang's secret police... for at least a decade and had personally overseen purges in which dozens of Kuomintang officers were executed. Throughout his subsequent rise to the top, from defense minister to premier and, finally, to president, Chiang Ching-kuo had a steadfast ally in Ray Cline.
"In the late 1950s they joined forces to create an instrument of war that continues to have a hidden impact of events throughout the world: the Political Warfare Cadres Academy. Today, much of the international recruitment for this academy is coordinated through the World Anti-Communist League.
"Although the regime describes political warfare as a system 'to remove obstacles to national unity within and to resist aggression from without,' political warfare is actually the ideological base that the Kuomintang has used to maintain Taiwan as a police state and to infiltrate, expose, and liquidate any opposition that may be suspected to exist at any level of society, even down to the family level. Through the use of political warfare, armed with the fiat of permanent martial law, the nationalists have built what is probably one of the most pervasive internal security and spy networks in existence. Fully one-fifth of the population is believed to be involved in this warfare, and activities ranging from lecturing soldiers and workers in political 'correctness' to surveilling one's own children, parents, and neighbors for the authorities. The tool used to perpetuate the system is the Political Warfare Cadres Academy, housed on a hillside in Peitou, just outside the capital.
"Patterned after the Soviet model of political officers, commissars, and informants, the academy is the training ground for the General Political Warfare Department, a branch of the Minister of National Defense. It's primary function, as with the Soviet model, is to ensure party (in this case, Kuomintang) control of the military through political indoctrination. Kuomintang cells, called 'political departments' and composed graduates of the academy, are established in every military unit down to company size. These political commissars watch over troops, as well as the non-academy officers, test their political awareness, and submit regular status reports to the General Political Warfare Department on each person. 'The surveillance or inspection function of the company political officer is by far his most ominous duty. Each member of the unit has the responsibility to report on dissidence and deviant political attitudes, which may be observed on the part of his comrades.' The commissars' primary loyalty is not to the military, but to the Party, and according to former American advisers in Taiwan, in disputes between army and political officers, the latter always win.
"The General Political Warfare Department conducts a vast array of operations. It runs radio stations, publishing houses, and even movie studios. It also has counterintelligence units to locate subversives and psychological warfare units to supervise political warfare campaigns and promulgate propaganda, as well as civil affairs units for the purpose of infiltrating behind enemy lines during an invasion to generate support for the Kuomintang. All of these different units undergo training at the academy."
(Inside the League, Scott & Jon Lee Anderson, pgs. 56-57)

Chiang Ching-kuo (top) and Ray S. Cline (bottom)
The Political Warfare Cadres Academy would go on to play a major role in training in the Central American death squads of the 1980s, among other things.
"To achieve unity with anti-communist countries, the 'General Political Warfare Department enlisted cultural, educational, social and economic organizations in this campaign. Virtually all individual and governmental activities, domestic and international, were expected to proceed from an ideological perspective.' To this end, the Nationalists expanded the League throughout Latin America, creating the regional affiliate, the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL) in 1972. The Kuomintang did not view such organizations as mere public relations forums, but rather as the 'organizational warfare' aspect of their global political warfare scheme.
"In their search for new allies and in their efforts to retain old ones, the Nationalists in Taiwan were willing to do much more than simply orate about the need for a common anti-communist strategy at League conferences. They also use their League connections to render a mutually beneficial service to their right-wing allies in South and Central America. Through the offices of the World anti-Communist League, they offered to train the police, military, and security forces of the region in unconventional warfare, interrogation, and counterterror tactics at their Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Peitou.
"In the past decade, most Latin American nations accepted the Taiwanese offer; this has created a continental fraternity of thousands of high-ranking officers who are united by their anti-communist convictions and the Kuomintang-taught creed, 'you have to be as cruel as the enemy' to win...
"The Kuomintang scheme is conducted through one of their 'organizational warfare' arms, the World Anti-Communist League. This Taiwanese version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers in Latin America is developed in two stages, each coordinated through the offices of the League. The plan has already been pursued and accomplished in countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala.
"First, through its liaisons in the League, the Kuomintang identifies the political party in a Latin country that is the most militantly anti-communist. The political party chosen to be represented in the League is invariably the one that has already actively proven its anti-Communist mettle or else displays the ability and will to do so. Following the Kuomintang model, the chosen party establishes a nationwide intelligence and counterterror network. These paramilitary groups are then gradually incorporated into the nation's armed forces. This is usually accomplished when, in a moment of national crisis, the army turns to the civilian bands for support, or when it is too impotent to curb them.
"In so doing, the paramilitary 'party' effectively takes over those branches of the military with which it operates, just as the Kuomintang did in prerevolutionary China.
"The first phase of the Kuomintang model was well illustrated in Guatemala and El Salvador. In each, the death squad apparatus that became institutionalized in the military was first created by a psuedopolitical party. In Guatemala, this party was the National Liberation Movement (MLN) of Mario Sandoval Alarcon; in El Salvador, it was first the National Conciliation Party (PCN) and later the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) of Roberto D'Aubuisson. It is no coincidence that the World Anti-Communist League chapters from Guatemala and El Salvador have predominantly been composed from these parties. Nor is it coincidence that El Salvador's ARENA, the so-called 'death squad party,' has a structure remarkably similar to the Kuomintang."
(ibid, pgs. 134-136)
the seal of the Political Warfare Cadres Academy
The Kuomintang was likely not the only organization in the WACL that contributed to the spread of death squads throughout Latin America (and beyond) in the post-WWII era, however. As was briefly noted in part one, the rise of Nazi Quisling regimes in Eastern Europe followed a path remarkably similar to the one taken by death squads in Latin America. Many of the Quislings also began as paramilitary "political parties" engaged in vigilantism that contributed to the destabilization of their respective regimes and opening the door for a fascist take over. And like the Kuomintang-trained parties of Latin America, these Quislings put loyalty to their party as well as the Nazi party (which frequently provided financial support, among other things, for their Quislings) above the interests of the nation.

After WWII many of the Quisling parties became involved with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), one of the two founding organizations behind the WACL. Indeed, it has long been assumed that the Quislings totally dominated the ABN and while this is almost certainly true, it would appear that there was an even more sinister (and powerful) organization behind the Quislings in the ABN. Researcher Kevin Coogan dubbed it "the Order," though there is no indication this name was actually used. Regardless, "the Order" was likely a reality, was well-funded, and maintained a European-wide (and later international) network of affiliate groups, many of them also linked to the WACL.


One of the key figures in this network appeared to be the notorious Italian fascist and occultist Julius Evola. While many may scoff at such a notion consider that Evola was deeply involved with SD, the chief intelligence organ of the SS, throughout the war (and possibly even before). His work during the final few years of it are especially bizarre.
"Evola's SD work you at the end of the war is shrouded in mystery. Historian Richard Drake says that while he was in Vienna, 'Evola performed  vital liaison services for the SS as Nazi Germany sought to recruit a European army for the defense of the Continent against the Soviet Union and the United States.' According to his own account, Evola spent his time living incognito while doing 'intellectual' research. But what kind of research?
"While Evola was in Vienna, the SD supplied him with a series of arcane text plundered from private libraries and rare book collections. The SD bureau that provided him with these documents was Amt VII, an obscure branch that served as an RSHA research library. With this precious archive, Evola closely studied masonic rituals and translated certain 'esoteric text' for a book called Historie Secrete des Societes Secretes. It never appeared because Evola claimed that all his documents were lost during the Russian bombardment.
"I believe that Evola's Vienna project was intimately linked to the development of what I call 'the Order,' a new kind of Knights Templar designed to successfully function sub rosa. Well before the end of World War II, the intelligence and financial networks of the Third Reich were hard at work preparing underground networks to survive the coming Allied occupation. Escape lines to South America and the Middle East were organized. Bank accounts were created in Switzerland and other neutral nations to finance the underground with plunder the Nazis had looted from occupied Europe. But how was this secret empire to be managed, except by a virtually invisible 'government in exile'?
"For years Evola had been fascinated by knightly orders as expressions of the Kshatriya caste of warrior aristocrats. In the former structure of the SS, he saw the precursor to a new Ordenstaat, a State ruled by an Order. He also understood the great advantages provided by medieval orders of chivalry due to their transnational composition. Proceeding orders, like the Knights Templar and the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, were pan-European, the separate national sections... unified through a Council, presided over by a Grand Master. After the collapse of fascist state power, a new Order, an 'invisible college' of sorts, was needed not only to manipulate bank accounts and travel schedules, but to have policymaking functions. Nor could it simply be run under the auspices of the Vatican, since Evola believed that Rome's downfall had been caused by the acceptance of Christianity by the dominant faction of the Roman elite. The Emperor Constantine's official embrace of the 'gentle Nazarene' in 313 A.D. had accumulated, a hundred years later, in Alaric's sack of Rome. With the American chewing-gum imperials threatening in the West, and the new Hun sweeping in from the East, was the situation in 1945 really so different? The Order was a vessel for those 'Hermetic' elements of the Conservative Revolution, old ruling class, and new Nazi elite not entirely beholden to the political, cultural, and religious 'Guelf' wing of the European aristocracy, which remained ideologically loyal to the continued propagation of the ruling Christian mythology.
"This account of the origins of the Order is obviously speculative, and I advance it is hypothesis, not fact. Yet if I'm correct the SD really did have a need for Evola's unique talents. With his extensive knowledge of matters esoteric and occult; his fascination with secret societies and knightly Orders; his Waffen SS transnationalism; his ties to some of the highest figures in fascism, Nazism, and movements like the Iron Guard; and his loyal service to the SD, Baron Evola was a perfect candidate to help theorize a new underground Order. As the SD's equivalent of Albert Pike, the former Confederate Army general who designed the rituals for the Scottish Rite Masons in the late 1800s, Evola's task was to help create the inner organizational and ritual structure for the Grand Masters of a secret Shamballah whose financial nerve center was carefully hidden away in Swiss bank accounts.
"With the war rapidly coming to an end, however, the Order lacked the time to implement its plans. With support from the top RSHA leadership, a deception game was begun with both Allied intelligence and the Catholic Church. Utilizing Wall Street and Vatican fears of communism, some of Himmler's top cronies, like SS General Karl Wolff, became Damascus-road converts to a 'kinder, gentler' SS eager to establish friendly relations with both the Americans and the Holy See."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 320-321)
Baron Julius Evola
Within the post-WWII fascist underground (especially in Europe) these two separate camps – the "traditionalist" who favored a close alliance with the United States, industrial and religious leaders (most especially the Vatican, which had long been fascinated with the notion of fascism as a counterbalance to communism), the military, and the old guard aristocracy; and the "revolutionary" camp that pursued Evola's pagan Order – at times came into conflict with one another (especially over whether the United States or the Soviet Union represented the greatest threat to Europe), but more often than not they favored collaboration.

In some ways this is best exemplified by the Iron Guard, one of the most notorious Eastern European Quislings. Publicly the Guard was fanatically Orthodox but it also seemed to have possessed some type of occult doctrine, as noted in the third installment of the series. Not only did the Guard have ties to Baron Evola, but also the famous mythologist Mircea Eliade, who was an actual member of the Guard.

the logo of the Guard
But more on the Guard in a moment. Coogan goes to speculate that "the Order" also acquired its own powerful patrons within the CIA at the end of WWII.
"Behind the strategy of tension there lurked what appears to have been a devil's pact between the Order and Allen Dulles. Until Dulles was named CIA director by President Eisenhower (and his brother, John Foster Dulles, became secretary of state), operational links to the Nazi underground came primarily from the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), headed by Dulles protégé Frank Wisner, the former chief of OSS operations in Bucharest, Romania. After the war, Dulles, Wisner, Angleton, and the OPC's Carmel Office virtually ran covert operations in Italy as their private affair.
"The OPC's budget was $4.7 million in 1949. Three years later, when Dulles was still only CIA deputy director, if it reached $82 million. OPC personnel then jump from 302 to 6,954. OPC was officially incorporated into the CIA in 1952, as the Agency's Directorate of Plans. In 1956, after President Eisenhower established the Killian Commission to investigate the Agency, it was discovered that more than half of the CIA's personnel and 80 percent of its budget had been devoted not to intelligence-gathering, but to psychological and political warfare programs. Throughout this entire time, the Dulles network was intimately involved in complex deals with factions inside the postwar SS.
"Did Dulles offer to protect elements of the SS in return for its support for CIA-backed anti-Soviet operations in Europe and the Third World? Did he think that granting the Order a certain autonomy was a small price to pay for bring it into the American camp? Might he even have been personally compromised in some way, or manipulated by the Dulles family psychiatrist, Carl Jung? Men Among the Ruins, then, may have been less a concession by Evola to American power than a signal that some sort of understanding reached by Dulles and Wolff at the end of the war was now fully operational."
(ibid, pg. 334)
Allen Dulles
Was the emergence of the World Anti-Communist League a part of this arrangement? As noted above, Evola had maintained close ties to the Iron Guard throughout World War II. Members of the Guard, most notably Horia Sima, would go on to play a major role in the founding of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, the European chapter of the League. Two Italian neo-fascist groups with close ties to Evola, Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and Ordine Nuovo, also developed relations with the League by at least the 1970s.

What's more, the Iron Guard also formed close ties with Los Tecos, a secret society overseen for years by a Mexican national who spent World War II as a guest of the Nazi regime in Berlin. The Tecos, who were superficially a fanatical traditionalist Catholic order yet still possessed occult overtones, would go on to found the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL). This served as the Latin American chapter of the League from 1972 until 1984 when it was kicked out over revelations of the Tecos involvement. Many believed the Tecos still maintained ties to the League for years afterwards, however. But I digress – Much more information on Los Tecos, especially their possible role in the Latin American cocaine trade, can be found in part three.

Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the long time head of Los Tecos
Thus, Evola's network may have had ties not just throughout the European chapter of the League, but also amongst the Latin American members as well. This raises the possibility that behind the curtain of the WACL was a vast international fascist network that brought together veterans of Imperial Japan as well as Nazi Germany and affiliated Quisling regimes into a pact with powerful far right forces within the CIA and US military. What's more, the value of the League would only grown to the latter as the years went on.

The relationship between the League and the CIA became especially crucial when countless CIA and military men were purged in the 1970s following the revelations of the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee and continuing through the Carter administration. In many cases the individuals purged were among the most right-wing and reactionary elements in the CIA and military, more than a few of them with ties to the WACL (most notably Cline and Singlaub). In many cases they continued their own personal intelligence operations in conjunction with the WACL and like organizations as well as sympathetic elements still within the US intelligence community and military years after their service was officially terminated.


One of the probable fruits of this collaboration was the notorious Operation Condor, a joint operation involving various intelligence agencies from nations within South America's Southern Cone. Many of these South American nations in turn had ties to the WACL, most notably Argentina's notorious Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA). What 's more, while Operation Condor is generally depicted as only involving South American nations it also included members of European neo-fascist groups, anti-Castro Cubans, and even American "contract" agents, among others.
"The brainchild of the Chilean secret police (DINA), Operation Condor was created in 1976 to coordinate the security forces of Latin American right-wing governments, enabling them to track and hunt down their enemies. Through joint intelligence-gathering and -sharing, a leftist who had fled Brazil, for example, can be located in Argentina. Then 'Phase Three' could be initiated.
"Phase Three, according to a top-secret 1979 report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was obtained by columnist Jack Anderson, 'involves the formation of special teams from member countries assigned to travel anywhere in the world to non-member countries to carry out "sanctions" – including assassination – against Condor enemies...'
"It now seems likely that the car-bomb killing of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976 (orchestrated by an American contract agent of the Chilean secret police and conducted by anti-Castro Cuban exiles) and the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton (shot by an Italian fascist on orders from Chile, with the 'credit' taken by Cuban exiles) are examples of the work of Condor. There are other cases throughout Latin America with Condor imprint, from liberal Uruguayan politicians murdered in Argentina to Chilean dissidents killed in Bolivia.
"Officially, Operation Condor was dismantled after American authorities became aware of it and exerted strong pressure on the dictators responsible. In reality, it is simply change form; Latin American governments continue to carry out 'trans-national terror,' now often contracting out its assignments to private groups. One of those private groups was the World Anti-Communist League, specifically its Latin American affiliate, the CAL."
(Inside the League, Scott & Jon Lee Anderson, pgs. 142-143)
the victims of Operation Condor
As noted above, I suspect the League was involved in such shenanigans well before 1977 – they are the most obvious organization to have the international contacts necessary for operations on such as scale. It was not, however, until 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States that the WACL truly became a well oiled killing machine. This path was set when William Casey assumed the black throne of the CIA upon taking the directorship. Casey had a very novel idea for how the Agency could engage in the "dirty work" that would be necessary to end the Cold War once and for all in the post-Church Committee era.
"In the 1980s Casey and Vice President Bush, using convert networks, embarked on a number of their own initiatives. Some of these were actively opposed by other cabinet members and also – in the case of the Contras – by the Democratic-controlled Congress. The result was the conduct of operations by a cabal of inner cadres, working with proxies and off-the-boats assets like the Saudi GID and BCCI. Americans do not yet have access to the true history of that era."
(The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 116)
William Casey
This lack of access was in no small part due to the private aid network established by Casey and Bush I during the final showdown of the Cold War. It was an ambitious plan that plunged Soviet Quislings into brutal "unconventional" wars in Central Asia (most notably Afghanistan), southern Africa, and Central America. The organization that seemingly took the lead in this private aid network, which would destabilize massive chunks of the Third World throughout the 1980s, was the World Anti-Communist League.
"... At the center of the 'private aid' network was the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). WACL was born in the late 1960s as an outgrowth of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a consortium of right-wing Asian government leaders... by the 1970s WACL had become a meeting ground for U.S. rightists, European neo-Nazis, and Latin American death squad figures. In 1981, the rotating leadership of WACL went to (retired) Major General John Singlaub's U.S. chapter, the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF). Singlaub volunteered himself as a 'private aid' coordinator for the Reagan administration. Through his worldwide WACL contacts, Singlaub offered military advisers to the Nicaraguan Contras, and brokered some of the administration's third-country, covert supply deals.
"The fatal September 1984 helicopter crash of two U.S. mercenaries on a supply mission over Nicaragua punctuated the role of the 'private' Contra supply network. By then, the leading Contra fundraisers in the United States fell into several categories: paramilitary mercenary outfits (Soldier of Fortune magazine, Civilian Military Assistance, the Air Commando Association), Christian Right 'ministries' (Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the Catholic Knights of Malta), and the network of conservative movement political lobbies (American Security Council, Citizens for America, the Council for Inter-America Security, and numerous others). As early as 1984, Pat Robertson had used his tax-exempt 'religious' television broadcasts to raise a reported $3 million for the Contras' Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (FDN). The Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, through its various front groups, likewise became a mainstay of the Contra supply network. In 1985, in one project that made for strange political bedfellows, the Unification Church-owned Washington Times established the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund with an additional $100,000 donation from Moonie leader Bo Hi Pak, and an additional $20,000 from Jeane Kirkpatrick. The fund's board members included neoconservative activist Michael Novak and Midge Decter. At the height of the fundraising campaign, in the mid-1980s, journalist investigators wondered about the credibility of the supply network's claims of 'private' donations, estimated at $25 million. Many of the fundraising groups welcomed media attention for the delivery of supplies and their meeting with Contra forces. No doubt, 'private' supply missions were approved – if not arranged – by field officers of U.S. intelligence agencies responsible for covert operations in the staging area of southern Honduras. For public relations purposes, the 'private' Condor benefactors had an interest in exaggerating their fundraising successes. As with any effective covert operation, the element of 'plausible deniability' was key. Citizen Singlaub's 'private' network performed the role of an overt lightening rod for much of public criticism over the Contra aid. Only after the Iran-Contra scandal began to unravel did the scope and size of the Contra funding operation begin to come to life."
(Roads to Dominion, Sara Diamond, pgs. 219-220)
General John Singluab
Much of the funding Singlaub procured for the Contras likely was "private," in that it came from CIA-protected drug traffickers within the WACL. This source of funding was instrumental in achieving the objectives of the Reagan administration in Central America. As was discussed in part two, the WACL and its close alley, the American Security Council (which shared a lot of membership overlap with the WACL), likely played a key role in supporting the Mujahedin in Afghanistan as well. The WACL and the American Security Council (ASC) were also involved in procuring aid for "anti-communist" forces in southern Africa, most notably Angola's UNITA and the Apartheid South Africa-backed RENAMO party of Mozambique.
"Some of the same New Right groups active in the supply network to the Nicaraguan Contras joined forces on behalf of UNITA and RENAMO. These included the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), Soldier of Fortune mercenary magazine, Howard Phillips' Conservative Caucus, Jack Wheeler's Freedom Research Foundation, Lewis Lehrman's Citizens for America, and many others. Jerry Falwell spoke publicly on behalf of South African president P. W. Botha and pledged to work to defeat a proposed sanctions bill. Christian Voice-member and publisher David Balsiger organized the RAMBO collation to coordinate Christian Right and New Right supporters of southern African 'freedom fighters.' The RAMBO coalition held demonstrations against Chevron Oil Corporation's business dealings with Angola and distributed propaganda subsidized by the South African government to hundreds of thousands of U.S. readers.
"As in the case of Central American 'freedom fighter' projects, these 'private' groups evaded government scrutiny on a variety of potential legal violations, including tax-exempt status, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the Neutrality Act. While U.S. intelligence agencies surveilled and disrupted law-abiding liberal and leftist foreign-policy groups, the federal government turned an acquiescent eye toward all manner of anticommunist movement activity."
(ibid, pg. 223) 

UNITA (top) and RENAMO (bottom) banners
Thus, the WACL's activities went far beyond their "public" role in Central America and also stretched into other major "unconventional warfare" fronts in Central Asia and southern Africa. As the head organization behind this "private" aid network they provided both funding (that was likely heavily derived from drug trafficking by WACL member groups) and training to these "freedom fighters." It's long been suspected that the WACL's role went beyond even this, and also involved recruiting mercenaries from member groups to further assist the "freedom fighters." These things combined with the decades-spanning relations WACL affiliates had with death squads and international intelligence operations such as Operation Condor seem to indicate that the WACL did not simply assist Casey and Bush I, but were deeply involved in the planning of this epic showdown with the Soviet Union.

Before wrapping things up, it behooves me to point out the bizarre appearance of yet another secret society in this bloody narrative, namely the legendary Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), better known as the Knights of Malta. As noted above, the SMOM was involved in the "private" aid network, but it's influence likely stretched far beyond this role. You see, CIA director William Casey was himself a Knight of Malta and this seems to have played heavily into the director's actions. Salon noted:
"...the membership of Reagan-era CIA director Bill Casey in the Knights of Malta has been a fact widely reported in the press and never denied by Casey himself. Historian Joseph E. Persico, a former Republican speechwriter for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the co-author of Colin Powell’s autobiography, includes Casey’s membership in a routine list of charitable accomplishments, in his sympathetic biography Casey: from the OSS to the CIA (Penguin 1990). (Casey’s membership is asserted on Page 105 of the paperback.)
"Years earlier, Casey was listed publicly as a member in both Mother Jones (07/1983) and the Washington Post (12/27/1984). The implications of Casey’s membership are even alluded to in Bob Woodward’s “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987,” in which Casey’s deep Catholicism and the Catholic Church’s opposition to Nicaragua’s left-leaning Sandinista government are both recurring topics..."
Knights of Malta cross
Casey was not the first SMOM member to forge close ties with the WACL and its affiliate groups either. As noted above, the three individuals chiefly responsible for conscripting Julius Evola's WACL-linked "Order" into the CIA's Cold War strategy for Europe were Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and James Jesus Angleton. Of these three men, at least two were members of the SMOM: Dulles and Angleton. This researcher has seen Wisner widely cited as a member of the SMOM as well but has been unable to confirm this in a reputable source.

Angleton would go on to join the American Security Council (ASC) after he was drummed out of the CIA in the mid-1970s. He has also been widely linked to the Agency's drug trafficking schemes, as I noted before here in my examination of the ASC.

Angleton
Another SMOM member who became involved with WACL affiliates was William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the founder of the OSS, the predecessor organization to the CIA. Donovan was involved, along with ASC member and old China Cowboy William Pawley, in setting up Civil Air Transport (CAT). CAT, later known as Air America, would become deeply involved in the CIA's joint drug trafficking operations with Chiang Kei-Shek's KMT party.

"Wild Bill"
Thus, it would seem that the SMOM had established strong ties to the WACL and the fascist underground behind it years before the WACL was officially founded. In this context, it makes Casey's decision to lean on the WACL to guide his "freedom fighters" strategy rather inevitable. The SMOM and WACL were well acquainted with one another by then and implicitly aware of the "dirty work" that would soon be necessary.

Here we are confronted with yet another shadowy, little addressed secret society lurking behind the WACL. While there is much written online about the SMOM, it is virtually all nonsense. The conspiratorial right has long insisted that the Knights of Malta were interchangeable with the Knights Templar and part of the broader "Masonic conspiracy." And yet researcher John J. Robertson, whose Born in Blood is generally regarded as the most compelling work linking the medieval Knights Templar to Freemasonry, argued that the Knights of Malta and the Knights Templar/Freemasons were mortal enemies of one another. In the Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences thirty-third degree Freemason Albert Mackey says of the Knights of Malta:
"The Knights of Malta are the militia of the Pope, and are sworn to total obedience by a blood oath which is taken extremely seriously and to the death. The Pope as the head of the Vatican is also the head of a foreign national power."
Knights of Malta banner
Needless to say, I don't put much credence in the Masonic linkages. But regardless, the appearance of the SMOM in the WACL --along with other such secret societies as the Triads, the Green Gang, the yakuza, the Black Dragon Society (all of which were briefly addressed in part one), Los Tecos, "the Order," etc --and the power these groups wielded in it, is most curious. The WACL seemingly functioned in much the same way the conspiratorial right has long believed organizations such as the Round Table groups were controlled by the "Illuminati," and yet many WACL members were even more obsessed with the Freemasonic-Judaic-Communist conspiracy than the average Alex Jones listener. But I digress --Back to the wrap up.


When it was all said and done the Soviet Union lay broken and shattered to the four winds amidst wave after wave of nationalist uprisings throughout the Third World and later even Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Germany emerged reunited and at the center of a pan-European political structure that had been the dream of the Evolan wing the Fascist International since the rise of the SS. And it all came about at the cost of a colossal loss of life throughout the globe.

The number of deaths that the WACL and its affiliates are responsible for is difficult to calculate. One would have to begin by factoring in the lives lost both in the Korean War and Vietnam, as KMT drug money was used to fund the extensive lobbying necessary to plunge the United States into both wars (a topic discussed in part one of this series). From there one would have to factor in the numerous political assassinations and terror acts committed by WACL affiliates throughout the 1970s as part of Operation Condor and other such projects.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of individuals who were murdered by the Latin American death squads the WACL had spent decades funding and training. There are also the millions more who lost their lives in Afghanistan and the "unconventional warfare" zones in southern Africa where WACL affiliates also lent their "expertise" and funding support. Then there are the deaths that are still occurring, most notably in war-ravaged Afghanistan and drug cartel-ravaged Mexico (the role the WACL played in the rise of the Mexican cartels was noted in part three), as a result of the WACL's foreign policy.


And yet, this is only scratching the surface. As one of the largest drug cartels in the world for decades, the WACL also bears ample responsibility for the millions of individuals who lost their lives to drug addiction and drug trafficking. Given that long-time WACL affiliates such as Jesse Helms and members of the Christian Right were heavily involved in crafting the War on Drugs, the WACL must also be held accountable for the untold number of ruined lives and broken homes (to say nothing of the epic prison population in the United States) brought about by the decision to treat drug addiction as a crime and not a health problem in he United States.


Needless to say, this leaves a rather considerable amount of blood on the hands of the WACL, the ASC, the SMOM and their handmaidens in the Christian Right. Certainly the US military, the CIA and other branches of the US intelligence community also deserve a far share of the blame, but these private groups frequently played a crucial role in role in the shadow Cold War that has rarely been acknowledged. Even the alternative media, especially the conspiratorial right, has opted to almost totally ignore this globe-spanning blood shed of these organizations while continuing to crow about the "One-World-Communist-Dictatorship-Under-the-UN." While communism is not doubt an abomination also responsible for the deaths of millions the alternative presented by the WACL and the Fascist International can hardly be said to possess any type of moral high ground whatsoever.

But it is the former to which the conspiratorial right has focused the bulk of its efforts while engaging in a total blackout of the later. As we shall see in the next series, there is a very damning, if little explored, reason for this state of affairs. Stay tuned.




Sunday, October 6, 2013

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


"The owls are not what they seem"
--old Twin Peaks proverb


Welcome to the third installment of my examination of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), a mysterious international organization that seems to have operated somewhat as the conspiratorial right has alleged that the Trilateral Commission or the Round Table groups function. But while those groups primarily concerned themselves with forging a consensus amongst elites, dissimulating propaganda and a bit of intelligence gathering the WACL was far more extreme.


It actively sought to bring together far right groups the world over for a unified front against communism. But this front was not simply talk – the WACL was fully committed to helping its members combating communism with intelligence, military, and financial assistance. I've chiefly focused upon the source of this financial assistance – namely, drug money –over the course of the first two installments of this series (which can be found here and here). In this installment I shall wrap up with the drug angle of the WACL by focusing in on what was possibly one of the group's greatest, if least acknowledged, triumphs: a cocaine coup that toppled the legendary Medellin cartel and replaced it with drug traffickers more in line with the WACL's agenda.

To consider this possibility a few points must be made about the development of the illicit cocaine trade. Jon Roberts, a former soldier for the Gambino crime family and later one of the top U.S. smugglers for the Medellin cartel, broke it down as thus:
"... Don Ochoa was not a ridiculous figure. He was a fine breeder of racehorses, but his greatest accomplishment was building the Medellin Cartel. The Colombians made more money in a few years the Mafia did in a hundred years.
"To understand what the Ochoas did, I need to break down a few things for you. Drug smuggling in Florida was invented by the Cubans. Many of the Cubans that the Mafia brought to Miami when Castro came in got recruited by the government to fight in the Bay of Pigs. When the invasion didn't work out, they went back to working for the nightclubs on 79th Street. When American kids started smoking weed in the 1960s, the Cubans, trained by the CIA in how to use boats and planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion, decided to put their skills to use by smuggling weed. That's how the smuggling business started. They'd go down to wherever the pot grew in Jamaica, Columbia, or Mexico and pick it up and take it to Miami."
(American Desperado, Jon Roberts & Evan Wright, pgs. 296-297)
Don Ochoa
The Cubans were hardly the ones to start smuggling in Florida but they (along with their Syndicate backers) would dominate the trade there by the late 1960s. What's more, the Cubans were chiefly responsible for creating the post-WWII market for cocaine. Recreational cocaine use first began again after the war on a large scale in Cuba during the pre-Castro 1950s. When the mafia and their Cubans fled the nation after the revolution the Cubans brought their habit with them and likely played a key role in developing the nation wide market for cocaine in the United States during the following years.
"The 'Cuban Mafia' that federal narcs say is the rotten core of the big Miami narcotics apple – marijuana and high-grade cocaine smuggled by plane and boat from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru – utilizes the routes' contacts and techniques for transporting Caribbean contraband that were developed by the CIA during the Secret War. In many cases the CIA and the Mafia share the same bad apples...
 "The Operation 40 drug smuggling appears to have been part of a much larger network stemming from the CIA-Mafia alliance to assassinate Castro. A joint federal-state task force reported that in 1974 four Cubans from Miami met secretly in Las Vegas with Anthony 'The Ant' Spilotro, a big man in the Chicago Mafia family whom the feds claim overseas the mob's Vegas operations from a jewelry store and is known to jangle loose diamonds in his pocket the way lesser hoods jangle keys. Three of the Cubans were former associates of Dr. Fernando Penabaz, a prominent Havana lawyer who fled the island, took part in the Bay of Pigs, and wrote a bitterly anti-Castro book with the purple title Red Is the Island. Dr. Penabaz was caught up in the 1970 Miami drug sweep and is serving a twenty-year sentence in the Atlanta penitentiary for smuggling nine and a half pounds of cocaine. The fourth Cuban was said to be a partner of the late Juan Restoy.
"The task force report said the four Cubans were part of the smuggling network of Santos Trafficante, Jr., the Florida Mafia boss who had collaborated with the CIA on the Castro assassination plots. Spilotro reportedly gave the Cuban quartet $500,000 to 'seed' a Vegas cocaine ring to peddle nose powder to the 'high rollers.' All four were Bay of Pigs veterans and subsequence Secret War noncoms whose CIA training and experience left them well qualified to handle the smuggling end of the operation. 'The CIA not only taught these individuals how to use weapons,' the task force report asserted, 'but made them experts in smuggling men and material from place to place under Castro's nose. This training seems to of been applied here.' One of the disgruntled investigator said the CIA had given the Cubans vital Latin American contacts and familiarized them with 'every port and inlet into this country.'"
(Deadly Secrets, Warren Hinckle & William Turner, pgs. 373-374)
Santos Trafficante, Jr.
As noted in the second installment in this series, researcher Henrik Kruger believed that long time Florida drug kingpin Santos Trafficante, Jr. had also played a key role in a CIA-linked coup that forced the French Corsican Mafia out of the world heroin market. Kruger also speculated that this coup ultimately traced back to the World Anti-Communist League, which had long received funding from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and yakuza chief Yoshio Kodama, the two largest drug lords in the Far East for decades. The anti-Castro Cubans had long been linked to the World Anti-Communist League.
"... This community is also represented in the World Anti-Communist League. Andres Nazario Sargen, the president of Alpha 66, a Cuban émigré group accused of bombings and assassinations throughout the United States, is a long-standing member of the League."
(Inside the League, Scott & John Lee Anderson, pg. 248) 
Andres Nazario Sargen
Alpha 66 co-founder Antonio Veciana was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1974. This is hardly the only link between the organization and criminal activity. Colonel William Bishop, a former CIA contract employee who had dealings with Alpha 66 in the early 1960s, alleged to journalist Dick Russell that the group had ties to Trafficante even then:
"I was to obtain additional funding, I'll say this and no more, from the [crime] Syndicate out of New Orleans, for Alpha 66. At that point in time, Rolando Masferrer was the key bagman, for lack of a better term, for Alpha 66. Primarily the funding came through the Syndicate, because of Masferrer's connections with those people back in Cuba. He had ties with Santos Trafficante, Jr., and other criminal elements. Organized crime, pure and simple. He also had different ties with Jimmy Hoffa [the Mob– affiliated Teamster union leader]..."
(The Man Who Knew To Much, Dick Russell, pg. 333)

But I digress. The Cubans would firmly dominate the cocaine trade until the mid-1970s when they began to face some stiff competition. Gangster Jon Roberts noted:
"With pot, the easy part was growing it, the hard part was smuggling it. Cocaine was different. Coca leaves only grow in certain parts of Columbia and Bolivia, and you can't just pick the leaf and snort it up your nose. Making cocaine is a process. It takes chemicals. It takes workers. It takes time. You need a factory to make it in.
"At the end of the process, you get a product that in the 1970s was worth ten times its weight in gold. Many Colombians rose to the challenge of making cocaine. The smarter ones didn't just want to throw a $50,000 kilo onto a boat driven by a Cuban and wave good-bye. They wanted to control the whole process."
(American Desperado, Jon Roberts & Evan Wright, pg. 298)
The Columbians Roberts is talking about are of course the Medellin cartel and they would firmly establish their own distribution network in the United States by the 1970s outside of Cuban control. The popular perception is that this was the outcome of the so-called "Cocaine Wars," a contest which resulted in the Colombians driving the Cubans from the field. The reality is quite different.


The Medellin cartel would certainly use more than its fair share of violence during its rise to power, but it's preferred method of taking out the competition was by underselling it. The Medellin cartel effectively became the Walmart of cocaine and in order to ensure that the profits continued to flow under this business model the Colombians frequently collaborated with anti-Castro Cuban distributors such as Alberto San Pedro and money-launders like Ramon Milan Rodriguez to keep the sales ever growing. Collaboration between the Medellin cartel and the anti-Castro Cubans was generally the norm despite the media hype.
"People in Miami got very uptight about all the bodies piling up. The Colombians got a reputation for being crazy. At the street level Colombians fought amongst themselves... Despite their balls, the Colombians could not dominate the streets in Miami. They were outnumbered by the Cubans twenty to one. In the long run the Cubans would always kick their asses.
"From the start, smart Colombians like the Ochoas understood they could not work alone. They were happy to sell to Cubans, Italians – anybody with money. They weren't completely irrational people."
(ibid, pg. 392)
Thus, much of Miami's famed Cocaine Wars was played out amongst lower levels Columbians and post-Mariel Cubans (who found themselves at odds with the anti-Castro Cubans frequently) fighting amongst themselves and each other, but not the upper level Medellin people or the anti-Castro Cubans. Still, this violence would play a role in the Medellin cartel's downfall, as shall be discussed in greater depth in a moment.

I've found nothing to directly link the Medellin cartel to the League but the Medellin folks were hardly the budding Marxist revolutionaries the Reagan administration attempted to depict them as. In point of fact, the Ochoas (the ruling family behind the Medellin cartel) would help found death squads in Columbia to combat left-wing revolutionary groups (as did various drug lords associated with WACL backed "freedom fighters," as noted in part two of this series) in Columbia.
"This was certainly true in late 1981, when the Medellin cartel had openly created the organization called Muerte a Secuestrador (MAS), 'Death to Kidnappers.' The vigilante group's original mission was to find Marta Ochoa, the daughter of Medellin cartel leader Fabio Ochoa, who had been kidnapped by the leftist terrorist group M-19. Numbering between a thousand and fifteen hundred people, the M-19 gained international recognition in 1980, when he captured the Dominican embassy and held U.S. Ambassador Diego Asencio and eighteen other diplomats hostage for two months. The siege ended peacefully when the Colombian government agreed to allow the guerrillas to fly to Havana. In 1981, presented with evidence that the Castro government have been training M-19 guerrillas and infiltrating them back in the Columbia, President Turbay suspended relations with Cuba...
"After Marta Ochoa's rescue, assassination squads using the MAS name were implicated in the deaths of dozens of journalists, labor leaders, human rights activists, lawyers, professors, and other citizens with real or purported connections to the left. Human rights activists charged that the death squads were driven by radical rightist elements within the Colombian military who wanted to undermine Betancur's cease-fire so that they would be free to wage war on the guerrillas... Betancur as the Attorney General, Carlos Jimenez Gomez, to look into the operations of the MAS squads. In early 1983, Jimenez Gomez reported that he had identified fifty-nine active-duty military personnel on MAS squads. Military leaders responded that the charges were an insult to the Army's honor, refused to allow Army personnel to be tried in civilian courts, and promised that every soldier would contribute a day's pay to defend the colleagues accused of death squad activity.
"Jimenez Gomez could not prove that the Medellin traffickers continued to back MAS death squads. He concluded that MAS was not a single entity, but 'a state of mind,' a nom de guerre use by a number of cliques and gangs. Lara Bonilla charged that the traffickers were still supporting the death squads, but he did not offer incontrovertible proof. Certainly there was circumstantial evidence that the right and the traffickers were sometimes allied – notably Carlos Lehder's sponsorship of 'patriotic Saturdays,' at which he gave fanatical speeches praising Adolf Hitler, and the allegations that he offered paramilitary training for young men who joined the National Latin Movement. Another interesting, though inconclusive, scrap of evidence was the organizational chart DEA agents found on a lower-level member of the Medellin cartel. Disclosed in November 1984 at hearings of President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime, the chart listed 'Muerte a Secuestradores' along with 'police and military' among the functions of the enforcement arm of the Ochoa family. The commission's final report did not explore the Medellin-MAS connection further, but DEA officials who helped the commission prepare the report said they believed that the traffickers were involved in some death squad activity after 1981."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 158-159) 

What's more, the Medellin cartel was almost certainly involved in funding the Contras with cocaine money.
"... a Costa Rican shrimp company called Frigorificos de Puntarenas, S.A. This consisted of a small fleet of fishing boats based in the humid Pacific Coast village of Puntarenas, and an import company in Miami called Ocean Hunter, which brought Frigorifico's catch into the United States. In reality, however, it was 'a firm owned and operated by Cuban-American drug traffickers,' according to a 1988 Senate subcommittee report.
"That conclusion was based partly on the Congressional testimony of former Medellin cartel account Ramon Milan Rodriguez, a suave Cuban-American who was the cartel's money-laundering wizard until his arrest in Miami in 1983, when he and $5 million in cash were taken off a Lear Jet bound for Panama. Frigorificos, he testified, was one of an interlocking chain of companies he created to launder the torrents of cash that were pouring into the cartel's coffers from its worldwide cocaine sells. Drug money would go into one company and come out of another through a series of intercompany transactions, clean and ready to be banked or invested. In 1982, Frigorificos was taken over by a group of major Miami-based drug traffickers, who beg-based drug traffickers, who began using it.
"Milian, a graduate of Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, told Kerry's committee that he used the firm to launder a $10 million donation from the Medellin cartel to the Contras, a detonation he said was arranged by and paid to a former CIA agent, Cuban Felix Rodriguez. Kerry's committee didn't believe that tell, especially after Milian flunked a lie detector test on the question.
"But during the drug trafficking trial of Manuel Noriega several years later, one of the government star witnesses, former Medellin cartel transportation boss Carlos Lehder, confirmed under oath that the cartel had given the Contras $10 million, just as Milian had testified. Lehder said he arranged for the detonation himself."
(Dark Alliance, Gary Webb, pgs. 238-239)

Carlos Lehder is an especially interesting figure. He was one of the first Columbians to open up Miami from the Cubans for the Medellin cartel. Eventually he would set up of his own fiefdom on a tiny island belonging to the Bahamas known as Norman's Cay. "Coincidentally," Norman's Cay had been used by mercenary and Watergate "plumber" Frank Sturgis in the 1960s as a staging ground for attacks on Cuba.
"Sturgis also flew 'green light' missions (approved by the CIA) parachuting agents into Cuba, and 'over the beach' boat sorties infiltrating agents and dropping supplies. He 'borrowed' tiny Norman's Cay in the Bahamas from its Canadian industrialist owner as an advance base for fuel and provisions caches and a radio shack to communicate with guerrillas inside Cuba..."
(Deadly Secrets, William Hinckle & William Turner, pg. 54)
Norman's Cay
This was not the only indirect link Lehder had to the Nixon White House. He apparently received a most peculiar guest at Norman's Cay as well.
"Another frequent guest, according to DEA intelligence reports, was Robert Vesco, the fugitive con man, who was hiding out in the Bahamas. The tycoons, so the story went, whiled away the hours firing machine guns at lizards and coconuts."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pg. 114)
Robert Vesco
Vesco would of course become quite an embarrassment for Nixon.
"Moreover, one cannot overlook Nixon's particular connection to IOS-multimillionaire Vesco, who until recently was in exiling Costa Rica, where he allegedly financed the smuggling of narcotics. Vesco provided covert financial aid to Nixon's reelection campaign, and was closely associated with Nixon's brother Edward and nephew Donald, Jr. Richard Nixon himself is alleged to have met secretly with Vesco in Salzburg, Austria. The White House, finally, came to Vesco's aid in a case brought against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission, just as an investigation of his narcotic activities was similarly choked off."
(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pg. 156)
During his time in Costa Rica Vesco approached the legendary mercenary and arms dealer Mitch WerBell III (who also happened to have been a part of the old OSS "China cowboys" clique) with a modest proposal.
"In 1973 WerBell was busy with other projects as well. Early that year he was approached by Marti Figueres, the son of outgoing Costa Rican president Pepe Figueres, who wanted to buy WerBell's entire stock of 2,000 silenced Ingrams. Figueres was acting on behalf of Robert Vesco, the freebooting fugitive American financier who had sacked Bernie Cornfield's financial empire. The feds were after Vesco for seeking to influence an SEC investigation of an illegal $200,000 cash contribution he made to the infamous 1972 Nixon campaign. He fled to Costa Rica, where he surrounded himself with right-wing Cuban bodyguards. Vesco was welcome with open arms by Pepe Figueres, who displayed an unabiding affection for fugitive rich men. But the incoming president, Daniel Oduber, had made it perfectly clear that Vesco would not find the climate equally salubrious during his administration. Vesco watchers speculated that Vesco wanted the large supply of Ingrams to seize Costa Rica from Oduber.
"The deal offered fringe benefits to WerBell. He could manufacture his Ingrams in Costa Rica, free from nettlesome U.S. export license restrictions. There was fringe benefits to Vesco too – an-armed-to-the-teeth home base from which to indulge his most megalomaniac plans, which included some sort of  supercapitalistic nation-state tax haven, not a little dabbling in the lucrative international drug market, a private army, and a gambling empire all his own..."
(Deadly Secrets, William Hinckle & William Turner, pgs. 397-398)
Mitch WerBell III
The deal didn't ultimately go through but Vesco was able to stay in Costa Rica until 1978, when Oduber was voted out of office. Oduber alleged that the Nixon administration had deliberately bungled the extradition request they had sent for Vesco to Costa Rica.

Years earlier WerBell had been involved in the founding of the earliest Latin America chapter of what would become the World Anti-Communist League. It tied into the CIA's overthrow of Guatemala in 1954.
"In 1953-54 the CIA drew on old China hands with exposure to KMT traffic (Chennault, Willauer, William Pawley, Howard Hunt) to set up the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, an operation which at least contemplated the use of 'Puerto Rican and Cuban gangsters.' As part of this operation, we see CIA officer Howard Hunt, a veteran with his friend Lucien Conein and Conein's friend WerBell of OSS operations in China under Helliwell, helping in 1954 to set up would eventually become the Latin American branch of the KMT-backed World Anti-Communist League. (Four years later, the chairman of this group was the Guatemalan attorney of New Orleans Mafia leader Carlos Marcello...)"
(The Great Heroin Coup, "Foreword," Peter Dale Scott, pg. 16)
As recently as 1978 WerBell was engaged in political activism with General John Singlaub, the eventual chairman of the WACL.
"... in 1978 he was involved in far Right politics with the likes of Major General John K. Singlaub (who had been relieved of his command in Korea after outspoken criticism of President Carter), a members of the American Security Council – the key U.S. link to the far Right's international umbrella organization, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL)..."
(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pg. 182)
General John Singlaub
In fairness, Vesco and WerBell reportedly loathed one another, making collaboration after the Costa Rican debacle unlikely. Still, Lehder's relationship with Vesco at least seems to indicate that he was near the same circles the WACL traveled in. Beyond this, Lehder had a fanatical obsession with Adolf Hitler and Nazism in general. Jon Roberts, one of the top Americans involved in the Medellin cartel, remarked:
"Carlos Lehder hero-worshiped Hitler. He talked about this openly. I don't care who you are, if you talk about how you want to make a Nazi state in South American and become the new Hitler, people will lose confidence in you."
(American Desperado, Jon Roberts & Evan Wright, pg. 318)
Co-author Wright added:
"Lehder was a Colombian of German extract. Originally a car thief in Medellin, he pioneered use of the Bahamas as a transportation hub for moving the Ochoas' cocaine into Miami. He was among the first Colombians to push aside Cuban smugglers. By the late 1970s, he fell out of favor with the Ochoas because of his megalomania – insisting he sit on an enormous gilded throne during business meetings – and because of his adoration of Adolf Hitler, which he expressed by wearing swastikas and greeting associates with Nazi salutes. In 1987 he was extradited to the United States, where he is serving a long prison sentence despite his request to be transferred to prison in the 'Fatherland' – Germany – where he believes he would be more comfortable."
(ibid, pg. 299n)
Carlos Lehder
"Incidentally," the Medellin cartel's standing with elements within the US intelligence community began to wane about the same time Lehder started to fall out of favor with the cartel. Later on Lehder would play a crucial role in linking the Medellin cartel to Cuba in the minds of the American public.
"In January 1985, a few days after the Colombian National Police had pounded through the Colombian-Brazilian frontier in yet another futile search for him, Carlos Lehder coolly summoned a Spanish television crew to his jungle sanctuary... In the television footage, he looked none the worse for wear of life on the run. Surrounded by guards with automatic weapons, gold chains cascading down his chest, Lehder bared his glittering white teeth and declared that he was devoting his millions to the destabilization of the Colombian government.
"'I'm here to dialogue with... M-19,' he announced. 'Ours is a revolutionary fight against the United States and the oligarchic monarchy. The bonanza is a revolutionary means to fight against the oligarchy and imperialist – and to stop extradition...'
"It was a wild and confused jumble of leftist and rightist rhetoric. One minute, Lehder  boasted that he intended to arm the urban guerrillas, the next minute he was singing the praises of Adolf Hitler. 'Cocaine is the Latin American atomic bomb,' he sneered. 'The stimulant that [North Americans] need is fueling the Latin American revolution. They need it to function and their dollars give sustenance to the Latin revolution. We will fight against the imperialist who try to corrupt us. We will fight to get the dollars to liberate ourselves.'
"At DEA headquarters, Bud Mullen and Jack Lawn watched the tape intently. Were these the ravings of a coked-up egomaniac? Or was Lehder really planning to bless the terrorists with billions?
"Ever skeptical of the narcoterrorism theory, Lawn looked into Lehder's claim that he was joining forces with M-19. Lawn could find no evidence that Lehder really did so, and Colombian military officials told him that they believed that Lehder was stoned on cocaine and rambling. They did not think the luxury-loving Carlos was meant for the aesthetic life of a revolutionary...
"The pragmatic assessment of the DEA officials was not acceptable to Reagan's more ideological advisors. Reagan's men were absolutely convinced that M-19, the drug cartel, the Cubans, and the Sandinistas were all in bed together, and they did not let facts, or the absence of them, stand in their way..."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 194-195)

In reality, the Medellin cartel was selling cocaine to both the Sandinistas and the Contras, and likely Cuba and the anti-Castro Cubans as well. This was done out of a purely capitalistic principal – namely, that they would sell to anyone with money. This went for distributors in the United States as well, with the Medellin cartel selling to other Colombians as well as their rivals and frequently spurring violence in the inner cities as a result.

Elements within the United States intelligence community were fine with the Medellin cartel flooding the nation with cocaine, so long as they sold the coke only to "freedom fighters" and such like. Their decision to do business with the revolutionaries as well the spiraling violence in American cities (which was becoming a major political liability for the Reagan administration by the mid-1980s) was exactly the kind of instability elements within the OSS, and later CIA, were hoping to avoid when they began collaborating with organized crime in the 1940s. Thus, the Medellin cartel had become a liability and it needed to be replaced.

With the assistance of Lehder and Barry Seal (an alleged Bay of Pigs veteran, though I have not been able to confirm this) the Reagan administration had firm "evidence" linking the Medellin cartel to the Sandinistas. This gave the United States justification to militarily intervene in Columbia to crush the Medellin cartel.
"The enlarged U.S. presence in Columbia... produced not order but a major escalation of Medellin cartel violence. This reached a peak in 1989, when a Colombian commercial airliner was blown up, killing all 110 passengers.... In September, the new Bush administration, treating such violence as a national security matter, launched the Andean initiative with a new NSDD, authorizing an expanded role for the U.S. military in the Latin American drug war. At the same time, the CIA station in Bogota grew to the size of nearly one hundred, making it the largest CIA station in the world.
"Although the new U.S. interagency presence brought the latest technology to the pursuit of targeted drug traffickers, a key role continued to be played by alliances with other traffickers, notably the Cali cartel...
"Escobar's ability to run his drug operations while nominally in prison ended only with his death. It seemed for a while that the traffic would be dominated by the more accommodating Cali cartel, who style was to work through government rather than against them. But events changed in June 1994, with the release of tapes of an intercepted phone call, suggesting strongly that the Cali cartel had put $3.5 million into the electoral campaign of the eventual winner, Ernesto Samper. The revelations allowed the U.S. government to take stern measures with the weakened Samper government, and by August 1995 the three major leaders of the Cali cartel have been arrested...
"According to the DEA, the drug trade in Colombia has become more decentralized with the breakup of the Cali cartel. A Colombian expert has a different perspective: he estimates (and the DEA appears to agree) that with the effective dismantling of the two big cartels an increasing share of Colombian drug exports is now controlled by cartels in Mexico..."
(Drugs, Oil, and War, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 88-89)

The transition from the Medellin cartel to the Cali cartel and finally the Mexicans ones as the dominate force in cocaine trade played out under the auspices of the Guadalajara cartel. Its leader, Miguel Angel "El Padrino" Felix Gallardo, has become something of a legendary figure and for good reason: the operations of the Guadalajara cartel were so vast that the modern day TijuanaJuarez, Sonora and Sinaloa cartels were spawned from it. Felix Gallardo's cartel was one of the largest cocaine trafficking networks ever assembled.
"Felix Gallardo was specializing in moving cocaine on a scale that had been accomplished only by Columbia's Medellin cartel. It appeared, in fact, that he had the potential to restructure the entire Mexican drug-trafficking industry so that it became a pipeline for South American cocaine...
"The DEA agents knew very little about Felix Gallardo's current operations, although the agency had been aware of him since 1975, when DEA agents found out he had formed a partnership with Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, the cocaine chemist who had been the South American connection for Alberto Sicilia Falcon..."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 128-129)
Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo
The relationship between Matta Ballesteros and Alberto Sicilia Falcon, a Cuban who became a major drug trafficker in Mexico, is most interesting. Sicilia Falcon seems to have been close to the WACL network. In point of fact, he is possibly the trafficker who took over the South America routes when the Corsican heroin network (largely controlled by famed gangster Auguste Ricord) was destroyed in the alleged WACL-backed heroin coup discussed briefly in part two of this series.
"Somehow Sicilia, a twenty-nine-year-old Cuban exile from Miami, was able to emerge as the ringleader of the so-called 'Mexican connection,' which promptly filled the vacuum created by the destruction of the Ricord network in 1972... The new Sicilia network... was operating by May 1972, and had 'revenues reliably established in the hundreds of millions of dollars' by the time of Sicilia's arrest in July 1975.
"... one learns that Sicilia told the Mexican authorities who had arrested him that he was a CIA agent, and had been trained at Fort Jackson (as had at least one of Nixon's Watergate Cubans) for possible guerilla activity against Cuba. Allegedly he had also worked in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he returned to the U.S. in early 1973. He also, according to Mexican police, spoke of a special deal with the CIA; the U.S. government had turned a blind eye to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied CIA weapons to terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments to accept you U.S. conditions for security assistance.
"... Sicilia was a Cuban exile who had come to Mexico from Miami, where he had links to the Cuban exile community, and had personally negotiated for manufacturing rights to the celebrated 9mm Parabellum machine pistol, better known as the Ingram M-10.
"Parabellum was a Miami-based arms sales firm set up a soldier-of-fortune, Gerry Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliergo IV, whose father had been close to Batista. Parabellum in turn was sales representative for Hemming's friend Mitch WerBell III, a mysterious White Russian, OSS-China veteran, small arms manufacturer, and occasional US intelligence operative, with unexplained relations to the CIA, DEA, and the major drugs-for-arms deal for which he was indicted but acquitted... . Another client interested in producing the Ingram M-10 machine pistol in Latin America, under license from WerBell, was the international fugitive and Nixon campaign contributor, Robert Vesco."
(The Great Heroin Coup, "Foreword," Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 7-8) 
Alberto Sicilia Falcon
Thus, Sicilia Falcon may have had ties to WerBell, who seems to have played some type of role in establishing a chapter for what would eventually become the WACL in Latin America, as well.

But back to the Guadalajara cartel. As noted in part two, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros (who was the source of much of the cocaine in Mexico from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s, initially for Sicilia Falcon and later for Felix Gallardo) had been involved deeply in the Contra supply network. He had ties to the Medellin cartel but seemingly had even older ones to their Cali rival.
"It seems clear that the CIA had had an ongoing relationship to some paramilitary units, dating back at least to the creation of the Muerte a Sequestradores (MAS) in 1981. In the 1980s MAS functioned as a working collation between the army and the drug cartels against FARC... and there are signs that the CIA endorsed this alliance. One is Santiago Ocampo, then head of the Cali cartel (and president of MAS), was able to travel into and out of the United States without difficulty, to the frustration of DEA officers who had him targeted... And Ocampo's drug ally in Honduras, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, was untouchable until the U.S. Contra support effort was closed down in 1988."
(Drugs, Oil, and War, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 85-86)
Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros
As noted above, the MAS was also supported by the Medellin cartel in the early years but it seems the Cali cartel played a much greater role in the death squad. Given Matta Ballesteros' ties both to the Guadalajara and Cali cartels it seems likely that he was one of the chief figures in shifting the supplying of Columbian cocaine from the Medellin cartel to the Cali one. What's more, he had previously been involved in establishing the Sicilia Falcon's Latin America network after the WACL-backed take down the Corsican/Ricord network. Was Matta Ballesteros being given encouragement from WACL-linked individuals/groups to now participate in a cocaine coup against the Medellin cartel?

If so, then the chief benefactor of this coup would ultimately be the Guadalajara cartel and its predecessor cartels which still play a major role in the Latin American cocaine trade (along with other Mexican cartels). And "incidentally," the city of Guadalajara from which the cartel took its name just happened to be the base of operations for a bizarre secret society involved in founding one of the longest-standing Latin American branches of the WACL. Let us first consider the origins of this secret society, which is known as Los Tecos (also known as the Owls).
"In these early days, the Tecos were not strictly a fascist organization; they were basically devout Catholics and traditionalists who took up arms to defend the old, established order. That changed, however, after World War II. Through the efforts of two men, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany and an Argentine Jesuit priest who admired Hitler, the Tecos became the spiritual mentors for many of the continent's neo-Nazi movements and, eventually, the coordinators of death squads throughout Central America.
"Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the creator of the modern-day Tecos, spent World War II in Berlin. His exact roll or function there is unknown. Some say he was a secretary to Hitler; others say he was a confidant of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue who formulated the German anti-Jewish policy, and who was executed at Nuremburg. Whatever his role, Cuesta Gallardo was almost certainly used by the Germans in the hope of establishing a private Mexican army that would be sympathetic to Nazi goals on the United States's southern border. When Germany's plans for global conquest didn't work out, Cuesta Gallardo returned to Mexico but remained an ardent fascist and anti-Semite.
"Cuesta Gallardo settled in Guadalajara, the financial center of Mexico and its second-largest city...
"Cuesta Gallardo was not idle in his Guadalajara lair. He envisioned a renaissance of the Tecos, this time committed not only to fighting the anti-clerics in Mexico, but also to battling all enemies wherever they existed throughout the world. Those enemies included the United States, Jews, Freemasons, and most of the hierarchy of the Vatican church, for they were all, according to Cuesta Gallardo, conspirators in the Jewish- Freemason-Communist plot to take over the world.
"When Cuesta Gallardo embarked on this mission in the late 1940s, he could count among his allies the 'Nazi priest' whom he had met while he was in Germany. These Catholic clerics had collaborated with Germany and its allies during the war; many were not priest, but were regular war criminals who, with church assistance, had donned robes to facilitate their escape. They were now scattered throughout Western Europe and Latin America. The Tecos' present ties to the 'religious leaders' of the Croatian Ustasha and the Romanian Iron Guard most certainly date from the leader's tenure in Berlin."
(Inside the League, Scott Anderson & John Lee Anderson, pgs. 73-74)
Carlos Cuesta Gallardo
The Tecos became involved with the League in the 1970s around the same time that the Tecos-dominated Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG, a college that was founded by Cuesta Gallardo in 1935) began to take off.
"By 1975, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara had a budget of ten million dollars, in  what Vice-Dean Antonio Leano, a high-ranking Teco, called a 'miracle' of American and Mexican philanthropy. That miracle was the result of the funds provided by the U.S. government through the Agency for International Development (AID) and American philanthropic foundations. Between 1964 and1974, they had bestowed nearly twenty million dollars in grants to the Tecos' university.
"In all probability, some of the foundation and government officials responsible for clearing the grants to the university were not aware that it was dominated by the Tecos. Yet it is  a rather glaring oversight. Within the various university departments could be found most of the Tecos' top leaders, men responsible for  previously delivering scathing attacks on the Vatican, Judaism, and, in fact, the United States...
"With the influx of American financial assistance, the Tecos at the Guadalajara campus were able to finance their nonacademic programs. According to a Mexican political analyst who infiltrated the Tecos and attended their secret meetings, the grants and scholarship funds received from the United States were laundered through the university for Teco use...
"Their political activities were many. In addition to furthering their ties with neo-Nazis in Europe and South America and subsidizing the publication of their anti-Semitic magazine, Replica, the Tecos also now had the funds to establish political front groups, such as FEMACO (Mexican Anti-Communist Federation) and the IACCD (Inter-American Confederation of Continual Defense), to serve as liaisons to right-wing death squads; they became part of the World Anti-Communist League in 1972.
"Operating under the front group FEMACO, the Tecos' power within the League became enormous. Not only was Raimundo Guerrero made an executive board member, but the Mexicans proceeded to draw in their violent brethren from throughout Latin America, with little or no review by the League's Asian godfathers. Since they had created the entire Latin network, the Tecos naturally assumed leadership of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL)."
(ibid, pg. 78-79)
the Autonomous University of Guadalajaral logo
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID, or simply AID) is long alleged to have had ties to the CIA and operated the notorious International Police Academy. AID was of course also linked to drug trafficking and Chiang Kai-Shek's KMT party.
"Puttaporn Khramkhruan, a Thai national, was arrested in 1973 for smuggling fifty-nine pounds of pure opium into the U.S. via JFK airport. Citing national security interests, the agency had the case squelched, and Khramkhruan was sent back home. However, the House subcommittee eventually established that he was a CIA operative in Thailand. In fact, he was on the payroll of a CIA proprietary using the Agency for International Development (AID) as a cover for training the corrupt Thai border police. Furthermore, Khramkhruan told a DEA investigator that he had been an officer in the KMT army and guarded opium mule caravans."
(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pg. 173)
Khramkhruan's ties to opium trafficking and the KMT (which was for years the ruling party in Taiwan) are most interesting as Kruger goes to allege that funding for FEMACO and CAL (the Mexican and Latin American branches of the WACL, respectively) in the 1970s came chiefly from Taiwan.
"Spearheading WACL's Latin American drive is the Confederacion Anti-comunista Latinoamericana (CAL), which is connected to the Federacion Mexicana Anticomunista (FEMACO). Financial support for these organizations is allegedly supplied through Shuen Shigh Kao, a Mexican-based agent for Taiwan intelligence..."
(ibid, pg. 196n)
the KMT seal
Was AID being used to launder KMT drug money to regional branches of the WACL in the 1970s? The possibility is not as outlandish as it initially sounds when one considers that this was the period when the WACL first began to become internationally and publicly active after largely working in the shadows during its early years.

But back to the Tecos. So far I've established that their power base, the city of Guadalajara, was also the eventual base of operations for the Guadalajara cartel. Beyond this, the major architect of the modern-day Tecos, Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, seems to share a similar last name to Guadalajara cartel head Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. This researcher has been unable to determine whether the two were related in someway, however.

There is another curious link to the Tecos and the Guadalajara cartel that is even more compelling. It concerns the murder of journalist Manuel Buendia in 1984, whose death was eventually blamed on Federal Security Directorate (DFS) director Antonio Zorrilla Perez. The DFS is one of the most notorious institutions in Mexico's blood-soaked history.
"Formed after World War II, the DFS started out as Mexico's answer to the CIA and the counterintelligence division of the FBI. The internal security police force developed an unsavory reputation during civil unrest in the early 1970s, when DFS agents were accused of resorting to torture, assassination, and disappearances to crush urban guerrilla groups. In 1977, a secret police unit called the Brigada Blanca, the White Brigade, thought to be an offshoot of the DFS and extreme elements of the military, formed death squads to eliminate the violent left. Popular outcry forced Lopez Portillo to dismantle the White Brigade in 1980..."
(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 203-204)
the White Brigade in action
It has long be alleged that the White Brigade continued to function after their official disbandment on behalf of the DFS, which had long enjoyed a "special" relationship with the CIA.

But back to Buendia's murder. Unsurprisingly, the alleged master mind of the journalist's murder, former DFS director Zorrilla, was said to be in league with the Guadalajara cartel.
"Captured after two hundred policemen surrounded his hideout near Mexico City, Zorrilla was charged with being the intellectual author of the assassination of Manuel Buendia, a prominent Mexican journalist who had been gunned down on May 4, 1984. Buendia's colleagues had long contended that the murder was the work of a police death squad because Buendia died while investigating drug-related corruption within the DFS. Within minutes of the shooting in Mexico City's Zona Rosa, DFS agents cleaned out Buendia's files, and Zorrilla himself took charge of the murder case, which remain unsolved until Salinas acted.
"After Zorrilla's arrest, Mexican journalist quoting government sources reported that the investigation has determined that the former DFS chief had doled out DFS credentials to Caro Quintero, Fonseca, Felix Gallardo, and other drug traffickers. This report confirmed assertions by DEA attaché Ed Heath that Zorrilla had personally signed Caro Quintero's DFS credentials."
(ibid, pgs. 520-521)

Antonio Zorrilla Pere
It was initially thought, however, that Buendia's murder may have been ordered by the Tecos.
"Some observers suspect that the Tecos recently eliminated at least one well-known person for personal reasons. In April 1984, Manuel Buendia, Mexico's foremost investigative journalist, wrote a three-part series exposing 'Los Tecos,' their secret code of honor, and their control of the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. A month later, leaving his Mexico City office, Buendia was assassinated with four close range shots to the back. His murder is not been solved."
(Inside the League, Scott & John Lee Anderson, pg. 138n)

Manuel Buendia
Is it possible that both theories are correct and that Buendia was murdered because he had discovered that the Guadalajara cartel was controlled by the DFS, which in turn was under the thumb of the Tecos? At least one website seems to think so. Drug Wars states:
"The DFS, the Federal Security Directorate, Mexico's CIA-trained combined CIA and FBI, was created as a subdivision of the Interior Ministry in the 1940's. In the mid-70's it organized Mexico's competing dealers and growers, centralizing all Mexican-based dope distribution. This operation was based in Guadalajara, home of the "Owl" death squads and the CIA's Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Owl base, from which emanated the DFS's "White Brigade" death squads. The centralization enabled the DFS to rake off 25% of the cartel's gross - billions - and to protect its income more efficiently. 
"The Owls were founded by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, a Mexican Nazi who spent World War II in Germany. Hitler's plan was to use Cuesta as his Mexican Quisling. The co-founder of the Owls was Father Julio Meinveille, an Argentine Jesuit. Meinveille is the author of The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, Among the Church and the Reich and Conspiracy Against the Church. These are the Owls' bibles...
"When Manuel Buendia, a famous investigative journalist for Mexico City's daily Excelsior revealed these facts in 1984, he was shot dead. First on the murder scene was the Mexican DFS, whose agents immediately cleaned out Buendia's files, which were said to contain a videotape of high government officials meeting with Mexico's most powerful drug dealers. The engineer of the murder was the head of the DFS, Antonio Zorilla, whom Buendia had trusted as a source and confidant. Buendia was apparently unaware that the DFS shared operational control of the Owls."

This researcher has not been able to definitively confirm the link between the Tecos and the DFS/White Brigade but the group's slogan (as well as its long alleged ties to right-wing death squads) seems to allude to such a vigilante group.
"In recent years, the slogan of the once-obscure Tecos, Contra la guerilla roja, la guerilla blanca ('Against the red gorilla, the white guerrilla), has been put into practice throughout the continent."
(Inside the League, Scott & John Lee Anderson, pg. 72)
Earlier in Inside the League the Andersons would also note that a source alleged to them that CAL members sometimes referred to themselves as White Brigades, among other things.
"CAL, it turned out, was the acronym for the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation. An intelligence informant in Mexico confirmed its existence and described it as a neo-Nazi splinter group formed after World War II.
"'CAL is also called the White Hand, the White Force, and the White Brigade,' the source explained. 'It got its name because it has the backing of powerful people who erase all evidence surrounding a murder.'"
(ibid, pg. xvi) 
Again, I have not been able to confirm definitively that the CAL's White Brigade is the same as the one used by the DFS, but it surely seems more than mere coincidence.

Before wrapping things up, I should address something I'm sure readers are curious about: Yes, there are indications that the Tecos were some type of occult order. Tecos, as noted above, are also known as the Owls. This of course immediately brings to mind the notorious Bohemian Grove, but I've found nothing indicate that there was a connection to the Tecos (in general, the occult symbolism of the Grove is quite obscure).


The Tecos had their origins in a radical traditionalist Catholic vigilante group called Los Cristeros that was founded in the 1910s. Much of the evidence seems to indicate that they stayed within this world view, having deeply embraced (and propagated throughout Latin America) the Freemasonic-Judaic-Communist world government conspiracy theories. And yet they themselves were a secret society with some type of bizarre initiation ceremony.
"In early April 1970, heavily armed police in the northern Mexico city of Hermosillo , sealed off a section of Calle 14 de Abril and, with guns drawn, stormed one of its buildings. In it's cluttered rooms, they discovered Nazi magazines and leaflets, piles of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and codebooks. Most intriguing of all were a half-dozen grotesque papier-mâché masks.
"The masks were props used at initiation ceremonies for one of Mexico's most violent and feared secret societies. The raid was a strike against the Tecos, a network of some three or four hundred neo-Nazis whose members were divided into cells and took oaths of blind obedience to their leaders."
(ibid, pg. 71) 
In general there is very little information available about the rituals of the Tecos. They did have some type of relationship, however, with a mysterious organization also represented in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (which, as noted in part one, was one of the chief organizations behind the original founding of the WACL).
"In particular, the Tecos have close ties with the Romanian Iron Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain, and it could be more than coincidence that Teco 'cells' are composed of thirteen followers, the same number as in the Iron Guard 'nests.'
(ibid, pg. 74n) 
the Iron Guard seal
The Iron Guard, originally known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, was one of the most notorious Nazi Quisling groups. It was, publically, a fanatical far right Orthodox Christian movement that became a political party in Romania in 1927. It was dedicated to the purging of Romania of Jews, foreigners, communists and Freemasons and came to power in 1940 with ample backing from the Nazi regime. The Guard featured one of the most notorious clerical fascists ever, the Orthodox bishop Valerian Trifa.

And yet, despite it's radical Christian front, the Iron Guard also seemingly had occultic undertones. One of its chief backers was Baron Julius Evola, the legendary Italian fascist and esotericist who would have an enormous influence on post-WWII fascist occultism.
"Evola enthusiastically embraced the fanatically anti-Semitic Legion, and in 1938 wrote a series of articles in Guardia that were never reprinted in his lifetime. He praised Codreanu's struggle against 'the Judaic horde' and said that since his earliest days,  'Codreanu a clear idea of what a communist takeover of Romania would mean... the country's total enslavement... to the filthiest tyranny, the talmudic, Israelite tyranny...'
"Evola wrote his articles during a time of crisis. Codreanu's Legion had grown so powerful that Romania's King Carol II launched a series of savage attacks on it. In November 1938, 14 Legion men... were taken out of their prison cells, strangled with ropes, and then reported shot in the back while trying to escape. One Legion supporter who managed to avoid execution was Mircea Eliade, the world famous scholar of religion and one of Evola's closest Romanian friends. After being picked up during the 1938 crackdown, he managed to get himself released from jail and transferred to a sanitarium. His escaped from death was ironic given that there is evidence that he had helped develop the Legion's notorious ' Long Live Death!' ideology. Eliade first read Evola during his student days..."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 317-318)

Julius Evola (top) and Mircea Eliade (bottom)
Mircea Eliade would of course have an enormous influence on the modern occult and metaphysical scenes the world over in the wake of World War II. That the ideology of both Eliade and Evola had an influence on the supposedly fanatical Orthodox Iron Guard is highly probable. Nor was the Guard the only organization affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League with ties to Evola: the Baron had also been deeply involved with the post-WWII Italian fascist groups Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and the Ordine Nuovo. What's more, Evola (a former SD asset) would continue to have ties to former Guardists as well.

And these Guardists in turn were apparently in league with the Tecos, a fanatical traditionalist Catholic organization opposing the Freemasonic-Judaic-Communist conspiracy as a secret society with occult trappings. Stranger still is the fact that this is not the first time I've considered such a seemingly contradictory organization in league with far right wing elements. Regular readers of this blog should immediately be reminded of the Sovereign Order of Saint John, another traditionalist Catholic secret society that has long been accused of occult rituals. The Order was actively involved with the long-time WACL alley the American Security Council, as noted before here.


And with that I shall wrap things up for now. Over the course of the first three installments of this series we've seen the League's extensive involvement in the international drug trade, including a major stake in the world heroin market in the 1970s and possibly a significant chunk of the Latin American cocaine trade by the mid-1980s. We've also seen that behind the two WACL branches most tied to the drug trade, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL) and the Anti-comunista Latinoamericana (CAL) lurks a series of secret societies such as the Chinese Triads, the Japanese yakuza, and Mexico's Los Tecos. The Triads and the yakuza have of course long been linked to the international drug trade. The same should likely be applied to the CAL as well as the WACL as whole. After all, it was seemingly one of the largest drug cartels in the world for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

In the next installment I shall begin to focus in on the WACL's role as an intelligence apparatus as well as the role it played in spreading death squads throughout Latin America. Stay tuned.