"The owls are not what they seem"
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)
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)
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)
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
Tijuana,
Juarez,
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.
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