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November 8,
2001
Homeland
Insecurity by Douglas Valentine
Part Four
The Terrorism Account
Goes Underground
As noted earlier, terrorism and counter-terrorism
are the same thing, and as Michael McClintock notes in Instruments
of Statecraft, CIA instructors in the early 1970s "trained
students in making criminal terrorist devices and in assassination
methods." A four-week course took place at the Border Patrol
Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, where students were given courses
in terrorist concepts, fabrication of terrorist devices, and
assassination weapons. As McClintock notes, the Los Fresnos "Bomb
School" officials offered courses "not in bomb disposal
but in bomb making."
It is critically important to understand
that members of the CIA's paramilitary Special Operations Divisions
are the people who provide this instruction, and that they themselves
are the world's leading experts in the various tools of the terror
trade.
The abolition of the Bomb School in 1974,
however, did not deter the CIA's terror experts, and they devised
other methods of training foreign secret policemen and paramilitaries
to terrorize communist insurgents. Much of the training took
at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, or was
conducted by the SOD's stable of counter-terrorists, working
undercover as private consultants.
Nor did the CIA's unilateral terror operations
cease with Nixon's resignation, in utter disgrace, in August
1974, nor did it abate with the ascension of America's first
"unpresident" Gerald Ford. Not even a series of Congressional
investigations into CIA abuses, starting in 1974 and continuing
through 1977, could keep the CIA from making its appointed rounds.
And it's no coincidence that the current President's father,
in one brief year, oversaw one of the CIA's most horrendous terror
campaigns.
CIA terror activities flourished from
January 1976 until January 1977 under DCI George H. W. Bush,
with much of the terror taking place in Latin America, through
a network of proxy foreign intelligence service united under
Operation Condor (the CIA's version of Phoenix in South America)
and operating closely with several CIA-supported anti-Castro
Cuban terrorist groups, including CNM (Cuban Nationalist Movement),
CORU (Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) and
Omega Seven. Two Cuban terrorists with direct ties to the CIA,
Luis Posada Carrilles and Dr. Orlando Bosch, blew a Cuban plane
out of the sky in October 1976, killing 73 people. But the CIA
never pursued either man, and neither was ever convicted of the
crime. On the contrary, the CIA protected them, because both
were involved, through DCI Bush, his Assistant Deputy Director
of Operations, Ted Shackley, and the Chilean secret service,
DINA, in the 21 September 1976 assassination of Chilean diplomat
Orlando Letelier in downtown Washington, D.C. As in most other
terror incidents committed by the CIA's assets while Bush was
DCI, that crime too has gone unpunished.
The ITG continued to exist under DCI
Bush, but only in an analytical capacity, and Bush's anti-terrorism
expert, Ted Shackley, managed actual counter-terror operations
out of his hip pocket. Having managed the CIA's counter-terror
and interrogation center programs in Vietnam, as chief of station
from 1969 through 1971, Shackley was well qualified for the anti-terrorism
job. He was aware of where the effort needed to be directed,
and terrorist training camps in Libya, Angola, and Iran ranked
high on his list of targets, along with established terrorist
organizations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
But Shackley and Bush were painfully
aware that Gerald Ford was considered illegitimate by the American
public, and was destined to lose the 1976 elections to whatever
candidate the Democrats threw at the Republicans. And so in mid-1976
they began contracting the important work to mercenaries and
SOD operators who voluntarily retired or resigned. It was arranged
for these contractors to obtain employment in a few select foreign
intelligence services, and several proprietary oil equipment,
shipping and computer consulting companies established by veteran
CIA agent, and notorious "rogue elephant," Edwin P.
Wilson. Having resigned from the CIA in 1971 to pursue million
dollar business ventures in several terrorist-infected nations
around the world, and having been fired from the Office of Naval
Intelligence's super secret Task Force 157 in April 1976, Wilson
was the perfect deniable "deep cover" agent.
Thus in mid-1976, at the direction of
DCI Bush and ADDO Shackley, the secret government's counter-terror
apparatus, manifest as a private enterprise owned and operated
by "Death Merchant" Wilson and his unsavory associates
(including Shackley himself, CIA officer Tom Clines, Hussem Salem,
and perhaps, as a silent partner, Air Force General Richard Secord,
in EATSCO--the Egyptian American Transport and Services Company),
began its slow and steady descent off the CIA's organizational
chart.
As a result of this shell game, little
changed when President Jimmy Carter named Admiral Stansfield
Turner as his Director of Central Intelligence. In response to
negative publicity about the CIA's reign of terror under Bush,
and his right wing predecessors, and in response to Carter's
policy of stressing "Human Rights" over covert action,
Turner drastically reduced the SOD in size, firing 600 employees
in what became known as the Halloween Massacre of October 1977.
Turner also scraped Air America, the CIA's private air force,
and named James Glerum, a former executive with Air America,
as Evan Parker's replacement as head of the SOD.
But Turner's purge merely earned Carter
the same degree of hatred the national security elite naturally
felt toward Clinton, and thanks to the off-the-shelf "Enterprise"
established by Bush and Shackley, the purge failed to curb CIA
abuses. Holding their hatred close to their hearts, those CIA
terror experts still on the payroll burrowed deep within the
labyrinth at Langley headquarters, and began courting their right
wing supporters in the media, academia, private enterprise, and
the Republican Party. To assure Carter's defeat in the 1980 elections,
they instructed their domestic assets in the intricacies of political
warfare--Phoenix-related skills such as population control through
psychological warfare, discrediting and compromising one's political
enemies through covert actions, the development of political
cadre within the officer corps, the placement of indoctrinated
military officers in control of civilian security forces like
the OHS, and, of course, selective terror and assassination.
Psychological operations were especially
important in the covert political war being waged by the right
wing during the Carter Administration. In the shadows of this
propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the American public,
the CIA's privateers mounted covert actions below the radar of
top Carter Administration officials. They forged secret alliances
with proxy nations, such as Israel and Taiwan, which taught Latin
American landowners how to organize criminals into vigilante
death squads, which then murdered and terrorized labor leaders,
Human Rights activists, and all other enemies of the various
oligarchies, including our own. To compensate for the reduction
in size of the SOD and the loss of the CIA's air force, the military
branches began beefing up their own terror capabilities. The
Army assembled Delta Force, the Air Force formed its own special
operations unit, and the Navy organized SEAL Team Six.
In these ways the national security elite
was able to subvert Carter's Human Rights policy, just as they
were able to characterize Clinton as immoral and unpatriotic,
and establish the basis of public mistrust that would enable
them to drive Carter from office through a disingenuous political
and psychological warfare campaign in 1980. 9
The Office
of Terrorism
This is an historical overview, and in
order to fully inform potential dissidents and subjects of homeland
insecurity, it is necessary to pause and go back in time, briefly.
By late 1977, when Howard Bane was assigned
as chief of the CIA's new Office of Terrorism, the threat of
international terrorism had captured the imagination of the world.
Terror incidents had been increasing since the 1967 Six-Day War,
when the Israeli Army, anticipating an attack by its neighbors,
occupied vast tracks of Palestinian territory. (The Six Day,
notably, occurred simultaneously with the birth of Phoenix and
Chaos.) In response to the Israeli land grab, Wadi Haddad formed
the Popular Front of the Palestinian Liberation Organization
(which itself was formed in 1964).
Popular Front terrorists staged the world's
first major terrorist act in 1968, hijacking an El Al 707 passenger
aircraft en route from Rome to Tel Aviv, and forcing it to land
in Algiers. After a month of negotiations the passengers were
released unharmed. But no land was returned to the Palestinians
and instead, the Israelis started bombing Palestinian terrorist
training camps in Jordan. The cycle of violence escalated and
on 6 September 1970, in an event that hauntingly resembled that
of 11 September, Haddad ordered the simultaneous hijacking of
four airliners bound for New York. 10
In February 1972 a Popular Front team
hijacked a Lufthansa airliner with 172 passengers, including
Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Robert Kennedy. Again there were
negotiations, and a ransom was paid, and Kennedy and the other
hostages were released. But the policy of negotiating with terrorists
began to lose its appeal after Palestinian terrorists seized
a group of Israeli athletes and their coaches at the Munich Olympics.
The situation ended with a gun battle in which nine Israeli athletes
and five terrorists were killed.
Meanwhile, more and more dissident groups
began to adopt terror as a method of waging political war. Chief
among them were the PLO's Black September, Germany's Baader-Meinhof
gang, France's Action-Direct, and Italy's Red Brigade. Carlos
the Jackal became a famous terrorist for hire and held OPEC hostage
in 1976. By 1977 the notion of state-sponsored terrorism had
also emerged, and was attributed to Libya and Iraq, both of which
were said to have Soviet backing.
As a result, DCI Turner directed Howard
Bane to organize the CIA against the new threat of terrorism.
But according to Bane, counter-terrorism was a "hot potato"
and a "low priority," and because of the seemingly
endless Congressional investigations into CIA abuses, Turner
was "hung up" on the definition of terror. He was insisting
that CIA officers refer to counter-insurgency as "low intensity
warfare," and in his effort to polish up the CIA's image,
Turner renamed the ITG the Office of Terrorism.
Again, it was just a shell game, and
the Bush-Shackley Enterprise continued to operate off the reservation.
In the meantime, Bane moved into the
Chaos office in Langley's basement, in the room behind the vault
door. An avid proponent of covert action, he'd served as chief
of the North Africa Division, and as chief of station at The
Hague prior to his return to headquarters in late 1977. He was
nearing the end of his career, and was expecting to be named
head of a division, and he approached his new assignment with
all the energy of a man seeking to enshrine his legacy.
As Bane describes it, the Chaos office
was a windowless room as large as the ground floor of a house,
divided into cubicles. Ten to twelve little old ladies running
around in tennis shoes, all the operations were compartmentalized,
and there was a "vault mentality." Little was happening.
The acting chief was the ITG operations officer, and his job
was mainly following U.S. citizens overseas.
So Bane summoned everyone to a staff
meeting and said, "Let's advertise ourselves to divisions."
He set up a reference system to service each of the divisions,
and each little old lady became an expert in regard to a particular
geographical area. Next Bane started meeting with his counterparts
at State, Treasury, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House and
the National Security Agency. As the Office of Terrorism began
to serve a visible function, Bane was able to move it from the
basement vault to a fourth floor suite with windows. The office
received new computers, and the old girls started entering profiles
of the world's new terrorists into it. Bane was awarded an operations
officer, and recruited several disgruntled CIA officers, who
began to replace the women as his liaison officers to the divisions.
And he began working closely with SOD chief Jim Glerum to beef
up the operational forces at his command.
Delta Force had been created by U.S.
Army colonel Charles Beckwith in response to the numerous, well-publicized
terrorist incidents that occurred in the 1970s. Delta, and later
the Navy's elite counter-terrorist unit, SEAL Team Six, were
to serve as the CIA's front line forces in the nascent war against
terror. Within the context of the new strategy of low intensity
warfare, the Office of Terrorism and the anti-terror experts
in the CIA's SOD and Delta Force had adopted a new lexicon, in
which anti-terrorism was the term for broad policy, and counter-terrorism
was used in regard to specific, immediate actions.
Bane sought and acquired a bigger budget,
and started improving and developing the government's formal
technological counter-terror capabilities -- things like silenced
weapons and covert eavesdropping equipment for use in hostage
rescues. Bane also worked to obtain a fleet of black helicopters
for use by counter-terror units. His own original contribution
was a Crisis Management Training Program team, composed of a
psychiatrist and a few case officers, which advised U.S. and
foreign law enforcement officers on how to negotiate with, and
outwit, terrorists.
After all this, Bane set up a two-man
intelligence unit at Delta headquarters at Fort Bragg, and hooked
them up to his office computer. At this point Delta became a
"customer" of CIA intelligence. Bane's Office of Terrorism
also sent daily reports, which profiled known terrorists and
their activities, to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the
FBI. Very quietly his unit began to coordinate actual counter-terror
operations. "Say someone in Frankfurt had access to the
Red Army," Bane explains. "Then Delta would send a
team."
Bane's Office of Terrorism handled each
incident on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether or not
it was defined as "international terrorism," meaning
the terrorists crossed borders or had foreign support, or "domestic
terrorism," in which case the terrorists were operating
within their own country. If the incident related to domestic
terrorism, the CIA's Office of Terrorism could not get involved,
unless specifically authorized through a presidential executive
order called a "finding."
The need for a "finding" was
a nagging bureaucratic stumbling block, and as an example, Bane
cites the time Colombia's M19 terror group took 20 foreign diplomats,
including the American ambassador, hostage at a party at the
Dominican Embassy. Thinking the trans-national nature of the
incident qualified it as "international terror," Bane,
with the approval of the State Department's terrorism unit, launched
a Delta operation in conjunction with the CIA's new SOD chief,
Rudy Enders. Bane provided intelligence on the terrorists while
Enders and his assistant, Burr Smith, provided Delta with the
equipment it needed to stage a rescue operation. Meanwhile the
Crisis Management Team assembled in Florida, and prepared to
jump into Colombia.
But the operation came to a screeching
halt when the CIA's Assistant Deputy Director of Operations,
John Stein, was forced to reveal the operation to Turner's Deputy
Director of Operations, John McMahon.
As Bane recalls, McMahon asked him, "Are
you trying to send us all to jail?" McMahon then put the
operation on hold until Carter issued a finding. Bane was forced
to call his officers back to Langley, where they waited while
'the lawyers" met with members of Carter's national Security
Council staff. Only after the lawyers gave their approval did
Carter issue the required "finding."
In another situation Bane was not allowed
to help mount a covert action to rescue Italy's Prime Minister
Aldo Moro, because Moro's Red Brigade captors were Italian nationals,
and were deemed to be operating domestically.
"Colby," Bane sighs, "felt
that covert action should be equated with intelligence. He said
it was better than sending in Marines."
Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Five:
The Turning Point
Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the
author of The Phoenix
Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA's torture
and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY
a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.
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