The CIA, Narcotraffickers, GLADIO, and CONDOR
The World Anti-Communist League
The history of Anti-Communism in the globe is one that connects disparate interests of a vocal minority, and it might be that no organization epitomizes this so clearly as the World Anti-Communist League. Bringing together the leadership of the John Birch Society (John Singlaub) with several other organizations it occupied a position of what Stefano Delle Chiaie would later describe as his goal. That is, it was the Black Orchestra years before he would personally be involved in its fully developed clandestine activities.
The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
Singlaub recruited some of the worst of the former black and brown shirts, immediately recruiting the Anti-Bolshevik Nations. They were led at the time by former Ustashe member Yaroslav Stetsko, right hand man of Stepan Bandera, and Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideology of Hitlerism. To clarify the fuhrer of Croatia, Ante Pavelic once said, “a good ustashi is one who can use a knife to cut a child from the womb of its mother.” An apt description of a man held responsible for the murder of 700 people.1
Stetsko was one of the best of the Ustashe, by their own estimation. A devout opponent of any sort of parliamentary democracy he had been placed in prison for refusing to stop murdering Ukranian leadership. As you may imagine, governments do not take kindly to having their men killed. His cruelty and violence became his great boon as soon the Nazi government snatched him from prison and gave him support to prepare for the kind of dirty work they needed done for Operation Barbarosa. Upon his release he rounded up 1,000 Jewish Ukranians almost immediately and turned them over, per Raul Hillberg. Hillberg would go on to say that the Nazis would confine themselves to shooting adults, leaving the Ukrainians to kill children.
Amongst the Eastern European’s to join him were Ciuntu, a member of the fascist organization known as The Legion of the Order of Saint Michael. Better known as the Romanian Iron Guard, its paramilitary branch. By the time that the World Anti-Communist League was formed it was masquerading as an expat organization. The reason for their later flight from Romania was an uprising, drawing ideology from Nazi Germany and White Russian movements they had a self perception as Romanian Orthodox warrior-monks. Their uprising would be described as follows:
Sixty Jewish corpses were discovered on the hooks used for carcasses. They were all skinned....and the quantity of blood about was evidence that they had been skinned alive2
The army would put down the uprising but not before 300 more were killed as a path of butchering people, tearing them to shreds, quite literally, and anti-semitic pogroms was left in their wake. Following their destruction by the Romanian prince, a side effect of building a parallel intelligence structure, one must imagine, most of the leadership fled to Germany and then Spain, where they would join a network of other exiled fascists. Those who didn’t formed 13 person cells. These cells, ostensibly created to propogate the faith spent their money almost entirely on preparations for war and waited. 3
This is where the European anti-communist networks truly begin to develop, as we will see soon, the connections of fascists in hiding in Spain, stay behind networks. Many of these were helped in their escape by the ODESSA program and the Ratlines, both of which often simply get lumped in under the banner of PAPERCLIP. The difference being that unlike the PAPERCLIP agents these were primarily intelligence agents rather than the doctors and scientists from fascist governments. Helped by Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic they would go to Rome,4 and in this way most Ustashe leadership managed to escape even as the true refugees of the war were returned home.5
Asian People’s Anti-Communist League
But we would need more than only Eastern Europe to truly make a World Anti-Communist League and so, beginning in 1956 Stetsko begins to make overtures to Chiang Kai-shek. The APACL was in appearance a collection of individual leaders operating collectively to fight their imagined red menace. The reality was something different entirely. The network was built, funded, and operated with a combination of funding from the CIA and the Korean intelligence agencies.
Within these bounds there is a man who will loom large for much of the rest of this story, Ray S. Cline, who is the real power behind most of the organization. He, along with the rest of the Kunming CIA station would become formative for the criminal network that results under the WACL, and his efforts would certainly not go to waste in establishing their Asian forerunner. Former vice-director of the CIA, he was then the station chief of Taiwan.6 Who would in a twist of irony in 1984 publish, "Terrorism: The Soviet Connection." Perhaps he was simply misinformed about his own role in history.
The representatives of the organization were:
Park Chung-hee, future dictator in the Republic of Korea, currently working under Syngman Rhee
Ryochi Sasakawa, Japanese war criminal and financier
Yoshio Kodama, friend of the Abe family, Yakuza leader, kingmaker in post-war Japan who provides security to Eisenhower
Sun Myung Moon, the infamous founder of the Moonies
Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines
General Prapham Kulapichtir in Thailand
Colonel Do Dang Cong from Vietnam7
Much of the work that is done by this group in covert operations can be traced back to a US school. The, “Political Warfare Cadres Academy”. The work done there was in many ways similar to the soon to be born SoA, and existed for a reason. Where the anti-communist terrorists in Europe had developed tactics during much of World War 2 the countries that were colonies had had little development towards this. The resultant schools allowed for training and development of dedicated intelligence specialists and terrorists who could study under people like Otto Skorzeny, Bill Donovan, and Stetsko. The training was brutal, according to one graduate of the school they were told to watch their leader ad if they saw signs of weakness? They had to kill him.
Kodama and Sasakawa were incredibly wealthy, they had made their fortune and become anti-communist financiers, largely intending to capitalize on a new booming business, the export of terror. Kodama was the more brutal of the two, he once sent a knife to the minister of finance with the offer that he could decide to kill himself or defend himself with it. He went to jail but the minister was killed the day he was released by a different Yakuza member. They would both end up in prisons concurrently for murder plots, Sasakawa was already a millionaire by the age of 30 however.
As the war drove forward Sasakawa was released to resurrect his youthful political organizing efforts and bring out the blackshirts, an international symbol of fascism. Kodama would be sent to China as an intelligence agent, both suddenly found themselves released from prison and in a world that didn’t just want their skills, it needed them. Their criminal enterprises would only expand during the war as they saw both of their wealths balloon, Kodama proving himself once again, the less clever but more cruel by looting the Chinese mainland as he cut a bloody trail across it.
One of their financial projects was Sun Myung Moon, founder of an organization called the Unification Church or the Moonies. Some combination of sex cult, where women were “purified of satan” by having sex with Moon, and anti-communist church, the Unification Church practiced austerity in their daily lives. Convenient when the US is preparing to launch a wave of neoliberalization globally, with other WACL members countries being the test subjects. Moon would claim that he had a special muscle that allowed him to talk for long periods of time and be listened to, the muscle we must assume was funding from yakuza, the CIA, and the KCIA.8
Under his leadership the translator for the head of the KCIA would be one of his lieutenants and their trip to the United States would allow the head of the KCIA to meet Colonel Bo Hi Pak. Pak would later become the second in command of the Unification church and head of CAUSA, their political wing. Causa meanwhile would host massive anti-communist events within the United States for evangelicals. Another Kunming officer was busy elsewhere, establishing yet another base of operations for the WACL.
The Latin American Anti-Communist Federation
E. Howard Hunt, later of fame for being involved in both the investigation into the assassination of John F Kennedy and the Watergate break in would be assumed to be made station chief in Mexico in 1950.9 During his time he would found the Mexican chapter of the WACL as well as the CAL, the regional body which would in many ways be a precursor to the CONDOR network.
Many of the torturers who would later form the governments of the CONDOR network during this period saw their training not from the SOA as their later counterparts would, but from the School of Political Warfare.10 The earlier European fascist movements had tried to establish a cult surrounding the leadership of their country or harken back to an artificial past that never was. The Latin American fascists however took a note from the Korean experience of fascism and simply leaned into a pre-existing religion.
If you want to avoid having to develop a new religious base in response to your organization you can simply attack the left wing of one that already exists. the CAL began to launch assaults on the existing catholic authority, especially targeting liberation theology. Codenamed Banzer, the CAL would send out a list of bishops who collaborated with communists.11 This would be most predominantly exposed in one specific event, the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero on March 24, 1980.
The executioner, a narcotrafficker, politician, and leader of The White Hand organization was Nationalist Republican Alliance leader Roberto D’Aubuisson. Both D’Aubuisson’s ARENA and Mario Sandoval Alacron’s National Liberation Movement had the mark of their time in the political warfare school, party structures that mirrored the KMT and methods developed by them.12 Both of these would be incorporated into the CAL, described as a death squad international by the American League's Stefan Possony. Sandoval would be invited to Reagan's inauguration for his work in this field.
Though Sandoval as the political head, it was not born from him. The Tecos were the original spiritual leadership of the ACL, later taken up by Mienville in Argentina. Their war on Pope Paul VI, who they called, “a jew and a drug addict,” was widely admired within the WACL. Horia Sima, head of the Iron Guard would echo their sentiment saying that Christian coexistence with communism was cowardice. The TECOs though admired abroad were nationally weak, and soon they would lose their leadership role to Sandoval.
Worth mentioning here is Pastor Coronel, who would represent Paraguay and who has the unique distinction of being the man who was smuggling partners with Auguste Ricorde, a corsican drug kingpin. As we will see, the ties between Corsican mobsters and the CIA runs deep, and as tends to happen, directly through Kunming. Paraguay, Coronel’s home country became known as the cocaine crossroads, conveniently enough as they were in a prime position to take advantage of expanding drug trade networks during CONDOR.
Europe
In Europe, which we’ll discuss in our next section on the network, the true core of the terrorist network began to be developed in the 1950’s with operation GLADIO. The German intel group, BND, was the host of former Barbarossa era spy Richard Gehlen.
Paladin would be founded by Otto Skorzeny and become a central point from which to distribute former nazis around the world. In addition to this he would make contact with Stefano Delle Chiaie who he would help get to Klaus Barbie in Latin America. Aginter Press would be associated heavily with him and his development of a political network of terrorists. Mengele, Sassen, Eichmann, and Barbie would all owe their Latin America trips to him. The stay behind networks thus had an easy escape.
The French dirty war was mirrored in Latin America, where the Argentine dirty war was fought. The Ecole d’Guerre thus became the sight of much of this training and development, and former OAS members frequently joined Paladin after the war. In Italy, the GLADIO/P2 network had Borghese hiding in Spain and visiting Argentina to show his support to them.
All the while, Suzanne Labin was a tireless organizer for the fascist militias. All the while funneling people to Skorzeny’s School for Saboteurs.
Next time we’ll delve into the NATO backed terror network, arms dealers, and mafiosi within the US and Europe. For now, this background should show how the World Anti-Communist League began to take shape. If you are interested in more work I do, feel free to check out my podcast where we covered Afghanistan and will begin to cover Operation Condor on Tuesday. You can find that here. If you would like to help keep coverage like this going, please subscribe and share this.
From Blowback America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War
Much of this information came from Inside the League, the only full and thorough study of the World Anti-Communist League.
The "Black" Terrorist International: Neo-Fascist Paramilitary Networks and the "Strategy of Tension" in Italy, 1968-1974 by Jeffrey McKenzie Bale
Voltaire Network
Many different sources, primarily those listed above but also Government in the Shadows
Government in the Shadows
Inside the League
The World Anti-Communist League Origins, Structures, and Actions by Abramovici
Inside the League
Stetsko was not Ustashe. He was an Ukrainian Banderite.