Bush Sr. and El Salvador

On 25 November 1975, leaders of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met, with Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA (the Chilean secret police), in Santiago de Chile, officially creating the Plan Condor.<7> However, cooperation between various security services, in the aim of "eliminating Marxist subversion", previously existed before this meeting and Pinochet's coup d'état. Thus, during the Xth Conference of American Armies held in Caracas on September 3, 1973, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, head of the Brazilian army, proposed to "extend the exchange of information" between various services in order to "struggle against subversion".<8> Furthermore, in March 1974, representatives of the police forces of Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A death squad, to implement cooperation guidelines in order to destroy the "subversive" threat represented by the presence of thousands of political exilees in Argentina.<8> In August 1974 the corpses of the first victims of Condor, Bolivian refugees, were found in garbage dumps in Buenos Aires.<8>

The CIA underwent a major reorganisation in 1974 after William Colby fired counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, and exposed the CIA's "family jewels" at a Congressional Hearing conducted by Representative Otis Pike (D-NY). Chaos became the International Terrorism Group (ITG), and the repository of some of the "hip pocket" operations that forced Angleton from the Agency. The ITG remained buried in the bowels of the CIA until it was resurrected as Howard Bane's Office of Terrorism in late 1977. The Iran hostage crisis and the disaster of Desert One enabled Ronald Reagan to steal the presidency, denounce Carter's Human Rights crusade, and initiate a new foreign policy based on combating terrorism.

In 1981, Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, saw the political possibilities of turning Bane's Office of Terrorism into a "back-channel" mechanism, like Chaos under Angleton and Richard Ober <2>, for conducting secret "hip pocket" operations outside the normal chain of command. Casey replaced aging Howard Bane with CIA officer William Buckley, a special warfare expert who had managed the CIA's Counter-Terror Program in Vietnam from 1969-1972. Buckley renamed Bane's unit the Office of Domestic Terrorism, and the ODT became the official manifestation of the off-the-shelf Enterprise formed by Bush père, while he was Director of Central Intelligence (Jan. 1976-Jan. 1997), and his anti-terrorism guru, the CIA's Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, Theodore Shackley <3> in mid-1976 <4>

The ultimate object of Reagan Administration policy was the destruction of the Soviet Union through the application of "low-intensity warfare" in Afghanistan; counter-terror in the Middle East; and pro-active terror in Latin America. Effecting this policy involved a number of illegal covert actions, and so Casey had to run his Counter-Terror Network outside the CIA itself, through a cabal of secret agents throughout the government, acting under his direction through a group of veteran CIA officers who embrace the same essentially fascist world view. Like Chaos, the Counter-Terror Network had a secure communications system, as Peter Dale Scott observed, "that excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints."

As Scott notes, "The counter-terrorism network even had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, codenamed Flashboard, by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad."

Casey laid the groundwork for this Counter-Terror Network in 1981, when he appointed David Whipple as the CIA's National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counter-terrorism. A veteran CIA officer with extensive service in the Far East, Whipple had been serving as the CIA's station chief in Switzerland, where he'd conducted successful counter-terror operations, before being summoned back to headquarters to take on the job as Casey's NIO for counter-terrorism.

According to Whipple, Casey's staff consisted of 16 NIOs, eight of whom were responsible for geographical divisions, while the other eight were responsible for issues, such as narcotics, counter-intelligence, nuclear weapons, economics, and in Whipple's case, counter-terror. Under Casey's direction, every government agency established a counter-terror office as part of this secret apparatus. Whipple as NIO co-ordinated them all, collating all the information they provided at CIA headquarters. In consultation with Casey, Whipple assisted the CIA's division chiefs, making sure their station chiefs were properly handling counter-terror issues in their designated areas.

Whipple monitored Buckley's Office of Domestic Terrorism, and its staff that included an operations chief, intelligence analysts, photo interpreters, and several case officers. Because it had the authority to access any division's files and to co-opt its most precious penetration agents, the ODT was resisted by the divisions -- especially by the Near East Division, which was on the front lines of the war against terrorism. Thus in 1983 Casey sent his pet, William Buckley, to Beirut to personally oversee counter-intelligence operations there. And he conscripted Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council, as his penetration agent inside the NSC. Notably, Whipple served as North's case officer in this monumental misadventure.

North was a Vietnam veteran, cut from the same ideological mould as G. Gordon Liddy (the deranged former FBI agent who, as one of Nixon's infamous Plumbers, burglarised the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist) and William Buckley. How he got the job has never been explained, but in1982 North was named the NSC staff co-ordinator for crisis management. Vice President Bush was in overall charge as chair of the cabinet-level Crisis Management Committee. Starting in February 1983, North, according to Scott, developed a secret Crisis Management Center, and "a plan (REX 84) to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a US military invasion abroad."

Sound familiar? In light of the recent national emergency, it is not surprising that North's plan called for "the round-up and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some twenty-six thousand) and aliens (perhaps as many as from three to four thousand), in camps such as the one in Oakdale, Louisiana." And just as the vast majority of Congresspersons went along with the draconian anti-terror legislation passed on 29 October, Senator Daniel Inouye in 1986 cut off all debate about North's plan to suspend the Constitution when Congressman Jack Brooks raised the issue during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings.

North next formed a personal relationship with Vice President Bush in the winter of 1983, when they inspected El Salvador's death squad commanders. After that North's stock soared, and in April 1984 he created the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TWIG) specifically to rescue several American hostages, including Buckley, held in Lebanon. North became TWIG's chairman, and in October 1985 he managed its first successful operation -- the capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro.

A few months earlier, in June, after the hijacking of a TWA Flight 847 to Beirut, Bush created the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism. According to Scott, as the NSC's liaison to the Task Force, "North drafted a secret annex for its report which institutionalized and expanded his counter-terrorist powers, making himself the NSC coordinator of all counter-terrorist actions."

On 20 January 1986, North's efforts were crowned with National Security Decision Directive 207, making him chief co-ordinator of the Administration's counter-terror program, and providing him with a secret office and staff known as the Office To Combat Terrorism. Working through the inter-agency Operations Sub-Group (OSG), North co-ordinated the secret Counter-Terror Network and retired Air Force General Richard Secord's Enterprise in a series of mind-boggling illegal operations, including illegal arms sales to Iran through Israel's counter-terrorism expert Amiram Nir; illegal Contra drug smuggling by through CIA asset Manuel Noriega in Panama, by a group of anti-Castro Cubans, all of whom were directly connected to Bush through his chief of operations, Donald Gregg, via Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez (all Phoenix Program <5> veterans); illegal arms supply operations to the Contras through right-wing domestic terror groups; and the repression of domestic dissent on a massive scale unmatched until the recent assaults mounted on the civil liberties of American citizens by fundamentalist Attorney General John Ashcroft and the US Congress.

As Scott notes, "the Office to Combat Terrorism became the means whereby North could co-ordinate the propaganda activities of Carl "Spitz" Channel and Richard Miller (and) the closing of potential embarrassing investigations by other government agencies."

The ranking members of this Counter-Terror Network included: Donald Gregg (Bush's National Security Advisor); CIA officer Charles Allen (Whipple's replacement as Casey's Counter-Terror National Intelligence Officer in 1985); Robert Oakley at the State Department's Office of Counter-Terrorism (a former CIA officer with experience in political operations in Vietnam, Oakley co-chair of North's Operations Sub-Group until mid-1986); Richard Armitage (a member of the Enterprise) at the Defense Department, Lt. Gen. John Moellering at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FBI Counter-Terror Chief, Oliver Revell, and, wonder of wonders, Michael Ledeen at the National Security Council.

The question seems to be, did the years of Bush "neglect" give Latin American democracies enough of a head start to weather renewed US "interest". I hope so.