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October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
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November 8,
2001
Homeland
Insecurity by Douglas Valentine
Part Five
The Turning Point
The take-over of the American Embassy in Tehran
on 4 November 1979 propelled Howard Bane and the Office on Terrorism
into the limelight. Twenty-one years later, the CIA is still
reeling from the event, which saw all its files fall into enemy
hands, and every one of its agent networks exposed throughout
the region. This seminal event, which had an impact on the American
public not unlike that of 11 September, marked the beginning
of the propaganda war between the Great Satan and the Islamic
fundamentalists, at the time represented by Iran's Ayatollah
Khomeni, and allowed Ronald Eagan to crush Jimmy Carter in the
1980 presidential election.
In the wake of the Embassy take-over,
President Carter ordered Howard Bane to work with General "Shy"
Meyer, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, and Delta Force, to come up
with a plan to rescue the 53 hostages. As Bane notes, the plan
was based on a covert action to obtain current intelligence on
the status of the hostages, including several top CIA officers.
Bane needed this intelligence information in order to know where
to direct the black and gray propaganda necessary to disguise
the CIA's actual intentions. There was also a need to train Delta
Force to operate in the Iranian desert.
The required intelligence was obtained,
but as is well known, the government's first major counter-terror
operation, the Desert One rescue mission, failed to get off the
ground. Sand clogged the aircraft and on 25 April 1980, eight
soldiers were killed. To Ronald Reagan and George Bush's delight,
the hostage situation continued unabated for another six months,
and enabled them to characterize Jimmy Carter throughout the
campaign as someone who did not take security seriously.
Just as merrily George W. Bush capitalized
on the 11 September catastrophe, the Great Communicator shamelessly
rode the Iranian hostage tragedy into the White House. As in
Chile, the secret to success was persuading the middle class
to support the cause of freedom. After defeating bumbling George
Bush (the CIA's preferred candidate) in the primary, Reagan repudiated
Carter's Human Rights crusade, and in the wake of the hostage
crisis, declared a totally disingenuous war against terrorism.
The seizure of the embassy had shaken the American public as
never before, and Reagan played on that infantile fear. Indeed,
terror was the organizing principle in his campaign. His avowed
and central principle, written in stone, was of never negotiating
with terrorists, as Jimmy Carter was attempting to do, and of
restoring America to its rightful position as the most powerful
and feared nation in the world.
Meanwhile, according to eyewitness Ari
Ben-Menasche, Reagan's campaign manager, William J. Casey, had
arranged for vice presidential candidate and former CIA director
George Bush to meet with Iranian officials in Paris on the weekend
of 18-19 October 1980. In exchange for holding the hostages through
the election, then releasing them, Reagan, Bush and Casey agreed
to sell weapons to Iran, which had been invaded in September
1980 by CIA asset Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
The secret deal, called the October Surprise,
allowed Reagan, Bush and Casey to steal the presidency. The fact
that the hostages were released on the day of Reagan's inauguration
highlighted the fact that a secret deal had been made. But the
American media had already been compromised by the National Security
elite's four-year old disinformation campaign, and under the
Great Communicator, the major TV networks and newspapers would
become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Israeli Lobby and
America's reactionary right wing.
Terrorism
As Growth Industry
The final chapter in the history of the
national security elite's campaign of terror against the American
people began with Reagan and his successful efforts to destroy
the Soviet Union. It was advanced through the presidencies of
George H. W. Bush, and the aberration called Bill Clinton, and
has achieved its apotheosis under George W. Bush.
Upon assuming office, Reagan declared
that he would replace Carter's Human rights crusade with an all-out
war on terrorism, and to implement this policy he appointed OSS
veteran William Casey as Director of Central Intelligence. Casey
immediately reconstituted the SOD under Rudy Enders, wrapped
anti-terrorism in a veil of black and gray propaganda, and began
mounting terror operations worldwide through a hip pocket operation
managed by a secret team of counter-terror experts.
Many old Phoenix veterans staffed several
key positions in the Reagan, Bush and Casey regime. SOD chief
Rudy Enders had managed the CIA's counter-terror teams in Vietnam's
III Corps in 1965-1966, and 1970-1972. On his second tour, Enders
worked under the direction of III Corps Regional Officer in Charge,
Donald Gregg. During the Reagan Administration, Gregg would serve
as Vice-President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor.
In Vietnam, Gregg, Enders, and Enders'
deputy Felix Rodriguez, a crazed anti-Castro Cuban associated
with some of the CIA's most ruthless terrorists, managed III
Corps' Phoenix Program. In this capacity the trio developed what
they called the "Pink Team" plan for identifying, capturing,
and killing specific members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.
In 1981, after a survey in Latin America,
Enders assigned Rodriguez to El Salvador specifically to implement
an updated version of the Pink Plan against the political leadership
of the insurgency. After receiving approval from Bush, through
Greg, the strategy was applied uniformly throughout Central America
and resulted in the proliferation of death squads and the formation
of the world's largest narco-terrorist group, the Contras, with
the able assistance of Panama's Manuel Noriega, one of the CIA's
most famous assets ever. Veteran field hands from the Phoenix
Program were re-hired by the SOD and assigned to security forces
and death squads in numerous nations around the world. Everywhere
they went they carried a field manual developed by the U.S. Army
Special Forces for use in the Phoenix Program.
Titled "Psychological Operations
In Guerilla Warfare," the manual specifically states that
"Guerilla warfare is essentially a political war,"
and that "the human being should be considered the primary
target." Once the mind had been reached, the manual said,
the "political animal" was defeated, without necessarily
receiving bullets.
"Guerrilla warfare is born and grows
in the political environment; in the constant combat to dominate
that area of political mentality that is inherent to all human
beings and which collectively constitutes the "environment"
in which guerrilla warfare moves, and which is where precisely
its victory or failure is defined.
"This conception of guerrilla warfare
as political war turns Psychological Operations into the decisive
factor. The target, then, is the minds of the population, all
the population: our troops, the enemy troops, and the civilian
population."
The essential element in these psychological
operations was "implicit terror," as applied through
Armed Propaganda Teams, as developed in Vietnam. When "implicit
terror" failed to convince people to join the cause, the
explicit terror of torture and summary execution were applied.
Here it is wise to note that the soldiers
being trained and assigned to the Office of Homeland Security
will ultimately perform the same "psywar" function,
of implicitly terrorizing the American public, through their
uniforms and arms, into submission. Suspected terrorists and
their sympathizers can expect to receive explicit terror.
Through a junta headed by Oliver North
at the NSC, and a group of secret agents in the Enterprise originally
formed by Ed Wilson, and managed after 1983 (when Wilson was
convicted of selling 20 tons of C-4 explosive in 1977 to Libya's
Moammar Quadaffi) by retired Air Force General Richard Secord,
Casey used profits from the illegal sale of weapons to Iran,
and the profits from CIA-protected drug smuggling through Panama,
to fund the Contra terror campaign in Nicaragua.
To cover these illegal terror operations--and
a separate, immense covert action, which involved the recruitment
and training of Moslem mercenaries, including Osama bin Laden,
to repel the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus bleed
the Soviet Union into oblivion--Casey penetrated the Office of
Public Diplomacy within the State Department. A totally illegal
CIA domestic operation, Casey's hijacking of the Office of Public
Diplomacy enjoyed the tactic approval of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Part of the reason for this incredible oversight was
the fact that CIA officer Robert Simmons was staff director of
the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the Vietnam War, Simmons
had advised a CIA Interrogation Center for 18 months in Phu Yen
Province. Today, unbelievably, he is now a Congressman from Connecticut.
Totally sympathetic to Casey's policy, Simmons was unable to
provide any information about illegal CIA covert actions, including
the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, to those Committee members
who might have objected. Thanks to Simmons and the Committee's
chairman, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), the Office of Public
Diplomacy, under Otto Reich, had free reign to inundate the media
with black and gray propaganda, thus protecting all of Casey's
illegal activities.
"A staff report by the House Foreign
Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988) summarized various investigations
of Mr. Reich's office and concluded that "senior CIA officials
with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence
and psychological operations specialists from the Department
of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating
in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through
an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly
to the National Security Council rather than through the normal
State Department channels. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid
contracts, S/LPD established and maintained a private network
of individuals and organizations whose activities were coordinated
with, and sometimes directed by, Col. Oliver North as well as
officials of the NSC and S/LPD. These private individuals and
organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing
Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media. This network
raised and funneled money to off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman
Islands or to the secret Lake Resources bank account in Switzerland
for disbursement at the direction of Oliver North. Almost all
of these activities were hidden from public view and many of
the key individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed
by the Iran/Contra Committees."" 11
The Office of Public Diplomacy was so
successful in manipulating the media, that it was able to convince
the public that Reagan had not approved the funding of the illegal
Contras from profits from illegal secret arms sales to Iran--even
after he confessed to the crime, with a glistening Hollywood
tear in his eye, on national TV in November 1986. Likewise all
Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal were
successfully subverted, and George Bush was elected president
in 1988, despite his integral role in what was the most egregious
violation of the Constitution in American history. What amounted
to a military coup went unpunished, due to the success of the
CIA's psychological warfare capabilities, and its near absolute
control of the major American media.
The current Bush Administration, incidentally,
is considering nominating Otto "Third" Reich as Assistant
Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs.
Prelude
To Disaster
While Casey initiated covert terror actions
around the world and in America, the Office of Terrorism was
reorganized to serve an essentially clandestine purpose. Casey
thrived on "hip-pocket" operations and compartmentalization,
and as DCI he took a more active role managing specific operations
than any of his predecessors.
Thus, as a replacement for Howard Bane,
Casey chose William Buckley, a veteran CIA officer who'd spent
much of his career undercover as an officer in the U.S. Army
Special Forces. Buckley served several tours in Vietnam, managing
counter-terror and counter-intelligence operations, and from
1969 until 1972, under Ted Shackley, he was the director of the
CIA's national counter-terror program in Vietnam.
In 1978 Buckley was assigned to Damascus,
Syria, and in mid-1979 he trained President of Egypt Anwar Sadat's
bodyguards. Buckley was assigned to Islamabad, Pakistan in 1979,
and in November 1979 he became involved in planning for the Iran
Embassy hostage rescue operation. In February 1981 he was assigned
to train the SOD's own counter-terror team at Fort Bragg, and
to reorganize CIA's counter-terrorism office.
Buckley was profoundly influenced during
his first tour in Vietnam, when he saw a Buddhist monk immolate
himself. Buckley was convinced, like rat-eater Liddy, that Americans
must become as fanatically self-sacrificing as their suicidal
enemies if they were to persevere. Apparently Casey shared this
philosophy, and when they met in March 1981, he and Buckley formed
an affinity. Buckley became Casey's close advisor, and they traveled
together to Saudi Arabia in April to pave the way for the construction
of secret military bases, now occupied by U.S. counter-terror
forces arrayed against Al Qaeda, and to obtain private funding
for Casey's Contra terror campaign.12
The first step in this secret war of
terror was the October 1981 assassination of Sadat by the bodyguards
Buckley had trained. The assassination nullified the Camp David
Accords President Carter had worked so hard to achieve. Israel
was now free to target PLO bases in Lebanon, and in May 1982,
Israeli General Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon, and, through his
paid assets in the Christian Phalange militia, organized one
of the greatest terror acts of all time--the massacre of hundreds
of Palestinian men in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
Currently serving as the elected Prime
Minister of Israel, the world's greatest human rights abuser
and second largest sponsor of state-terrorism, Sharon may be
indicted as war criminal for this despicable act, in the same
Belgian court that may try Nixon's ferocious National Security
Advisor, Henry Kissinger, for war crimes committed during the
Chilean coup.
In August 1982 Buckley returned to CIA
headquarters to revamp and coordinate Reagan's anti-terrorism
policy, through what was called the Domestic Terrorism Group.
According to author Mark Perry, "For six months Buckley
and the government officials hammered out a policy." The
result was that the CIA maintained responsibility for foreign
counter-terror operations, while the FBI acquired the domestic
"internal security" terrorism account.
Under the direction of Attorney General
Edwin Meese, the FBI went about its internal security task with
ideological fervor, harassing, discrediting, and stifling each
and every Peace group that sought to educate the public about
the CIA's human rights abuses. Citizens opposed to CIA death
squads in Guatemala and El Salvador fared the worst, because
the Reagan Administration, with the earnest assistance of its
right wing supplicants in the media, was eminently able to equate
peace with an unpatriotic support for terrorism.
It was all a Big Lie, of course, but
the national security elite is willing to deceive the public
for the greater good of its internal security. In the case of
Reagan's "freedom fighters," as he called the terrorist
Contras in Nicaragua, it was done under the rubric of counter-terrorism,
to protect the CIA's illegal activities from coming to light.
The Office of Homeland Security will
undoubtedly serve a similar disinformation function for the Bush
Administration, although all pretenses that the CIA is not involved
in domestic counter-terrorism have been dropped. The CIA has
been "unleashed."
In so far as spying on U.S. citizens
with suspected links to foreign terrorists was an on-going, albeit
top secret priority since Chaos, it was impossible for the CIA
not be involved in domestic counter-terror in 1981. But in that
naïve era the myth needed to be maintained, and for that
reason Buckley suggested to Casey that the Domestic Terrorism
Group be renamed the International Anti-terrorism Group. "Buckley's
plan," Perry said, "called for a coordinated effort
to combat security breaches under the leadership of the NSC director,
who'd be in charge of monitoring the agencies that were responsible
for domestic law enforcement."
Citing Pentagon officials, Perry says
that the Domestic Terrorism Group became a part of the Army's
Intelligence Support Activity, and that Buckley's plan for an
independent CIA office disintegrated as a result. Casey re-assigned
Buckley as the CIA's chief of station in Beirut following the
March 1983 bombing of the American Embassy. Buckley arrived in
June or July, but failed to prevent the attack on the U.S. Marine
Corps barracks, on 23 October 1983, that killed 241 Marines.
On 16 March 1984, Buckley was kidnapped
by Hezbollah guerrillas, and after being tortured for months,
died in captivity in Tehran in June 1985, shortly after a March
1985 car bomb, reportedly planted by the CIA or the Phalange
militia, and intended for terrorist suspect Hussein Fadallah,
killed 80 Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah reportedly passed a copy
of Buckley's 400-page videotaped confession to Casey in May 1986.
Perry speculates that Buckley was part
of secret, hip pocket operation into Iran, to recruit members
of Iran's junior officer corps. Be that as it may, the Reagan,
Bush, Casey reliance on covert actions had only worsened the
problem of terrorism, creating one disaster after another, and
severely escalating the cycle of violence. With Congress conducting
a number of official inquiries into CIA abuses, the time had
come to take terror operations out of escapading Bill Casey's
hip pocket, and create a new office within the CIA to manage
the situation.
Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Six:
The Counter-Terror Network
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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