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The Untouchable Narco-State: Guatemala’s Army defies DEA

November 18, 2005/in The Texas Observer/by Frank Smyth

Original story including links to cited classified U.S. cables here.

(See also related links pegged to the release of this story by Harvard University’s NiemanWatchdog.org and George Washington University’s National Security Archive:
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfmfuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00152
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB169/index.htm).

The alert went out across the state this past July. A McAllen-based FBI analyst wrote a classified report that the Department of Homeland Security sent to U.S. Border Patrol agents throughout Texas. About 30 suspects who were once part of an elite unit of the Guatemalan special forces were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen. The unit, called the Kaibiles after the Mayan prince Kaibil Balam, is one of the most fearsome military forces in Latin America, blamed for many of the massacres that occurred in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war. By September, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested seven Guatemalan Kaibiles, including four “deserters” who were still listed by the Guatemalan Army as being on active duty.

Mexican authorities say the Kaibiles were meant to augment Las Zetas, a drug gang of soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn from Mexico’s own special forces. It’s logical that the Zetas would turn to their Guatemalan counterparts. In addition to being a neighbor, “Guatemala is the preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipment of cocaine to the United States,” the State Department has consistently reported to Congress since 1999. In early November, anti-drug authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala told the Associated Press that 75 percent of the cocaine that reaches American soil passes through the Central American nation.

More importantly, perhaps, the dominant institution in the country—the military—is linked to this illicit trade. Over the past two decades, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has quietly accused Guatemalan military officers of all ranks in every branch of service of trafficking drugs to the United States, according to government documents obtained by The Texas Observer. More recently, the Bush administration has alleged that two retired Guatemalan Army generals, at the top of the country’s military hierarchy, are involved in drug trafficking and has revoked their U.S. visas based on these allegations.

The retired generals, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Francisco Ortega Menaldo, are Guatemala’s former top two intelligence chiefs. They are also among the founders of an elite, shadowy club within Guatemala’s intelligence command that calls itself “la cofradía” or “the brotherhood,” according to U.S. intelligence reports. The U.S. reports, recently de-classified, credit la cofradía with “engineering” tactics that roundly defeated Guatemala’s Marxist guerrillas. A U.N. Truth Commission later found the same tactics included “acts of genocide” for driving out or massacring the populations of no less than 440 Mayan villages.

Guatemala’s military intelligence commands developed a code of silence during these bloody operations, which is one reason why no officer was ever prosecuted for any Cold War-era human rights abuses. Since then, the same intelligence commands have turned their clandestine structures to organized crimes, according to DEA and other U.S. intelligence reports, from importing stolen U.S. cars to running drugs to the United States. Yet not one officer has ever been prosecuted for any international crime in either Guatemala or the United States.

There is enough evidence implicating the Guatemalan military in illegal activities that the Bush administration no longer gives U.S. military aid, including officer training. The cited offenses include “a recent resurgence of abuses believed to be orchestrated by ex-military and current military officials; and allegations of corruption and narcotics trafficking by ex-military officers,” according to the State Department’s 2004 report on Foreign Military Training.

While some in the Bush administration and Congress want to restart foreign military training, others are concerned about the inability of the Guatemalan government to rein in its military. “The reason that elements of the army are involved so deeply in this illicit operation is that the government simply does not have the power to stop them,” said Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who sits on the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Committee on International Relations and is the Chairman of the Department of Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations.

Guatemala is hardly the first military tainted by drugs; senior intelligence and law enforcement officers in many Latin American nations have been found colluding with organized crime. But what distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them. The Bush administration has recently credited both Colombia and Mexico with making unprecedented strides in both prosecuting their own drug suspects and extraditing others to the United States. But Guatemala, alone in this hemisphere, has failed to either prosecute or extradite any of its own alleged drug kingpins for at least 10 years.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations have tried and failed to train effective Guatemalan police, while saying little or nothing about the known criminal activities of the Guatemalan military. That finally came to an end in the past three years under Republican Rep. Cass Ballenger, a staunch conservative from North Carolina, who served as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.

“Clearly, the Guatemalan government has not taken every step needed to investigate, arrest, and bring drug kingpins to justice,” said then-Chairman Ballenger in 2003 before he retired. Echoing his predecessor, the new Chairman, Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton, commented through a spokesman that he wants to see the same alleged ringleaders finally brought “to full accountability.”

Until that happens, drugs from Guatemala and the attendant violence will continue to spill over the Texas border.

Guatemala has long been sluggish in efforts to take legal action against its military officers for human rights violations. That impunity has since spread to organized criminal acts as well. The turning point came in 1994, when Guatemala’s extraditions of its drug suspects came to a dead stop over a case involving an active duty army officer. The case highlights both the terrible price for those who seek justice in Guatemala and the timidity of the United States in demanding accountability.

A military intelligence officer back in the early 1980s, Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa briefly trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1988. Two years later, the DEA accused him of smuggling drugs to locations including Florida, where DEA special agents seized a small plane with half a metric ton of cocaine, allegedly sent by the colonel.

State Department attorneys worked for more than three years to keep Guatemala’s military tribunals from dismissing the charges, and finally brought Ochoa’s extradition case all the way to Guatemala’s highest civilian court. The nation’s chief justice, Epaminondas González Dubón, was already well respected for his integrity. On March 23, 1994, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court, led by González Dubón, quietly ruled in a closed session (which is common in Guatemala) four-to-three in favor of extraditing Ochoa.

Nine days later, on April 1, gunmen shot and killed González Dubón behind the wheel of his own car in the capital, near his middle-class home, in front of his wife and youngest son. On April 12, the same Constitutional Court, with a new chief justice, quietly ruled seven-to-one not to extradite Ochoa. The surviving judges used the same line in the official Constitutional Court register—changing the verdict and date, but not the original case number—to literally copy over the original ruling, as was only reported years later by the Costa Rican daily, La Nación.

The Clinton administration never said one word in protest. The U.S. ambassador in Guatemala City at the time, Marilyn McAfee, by her own admission had other concerns, including ongoing peace talks with the Guatemalan military. “I am concerned over the potential decline in our relationship with the military,” she wrote to her superiors only months before the assassination. “The bottom line is we must carefully consider each of our actions toward the Guatemalan military, not only for how it plays in Washington, but for how it impacts here.”

Four years after the murder, the Clinton administration finally admitted in a few lines buried in a thick report to Congress: “The Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court had approved [the] extradition for the 1991 charges just before he was assassinated. The reconstituted court soon thereafter voted to deny the extradition.”

Ochoa may not have been working alone. “In addition to his narcotics trafficking activities, Ochoa was involved in bringing stolen cars from the U.S. to Guatemala,” reads a “SECRET” U.S. intelligence report obtained by U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. “Another military officer involved with Ochoa in narcotics trafficking is Colonel Julio Roberto Alpírez de Leon.”

Alpírez, who briefly trained at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1970, served “in special intelligence operations,” according to a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report. A White House Oversight Board investigation later implicated him in the torture and murder of a Marxist guerrilla leader who was married to the Harvard-trained lawyer Harbury, and in the torture and mysterious decapitation of an American hotelier named Michael Devine. Col. Alpírez, since retired, has denied any wrongdoing and he was never charged with any crime.

But Ochoa, his former subordinate, is in jail today. Ochoa was arrested—again—for local cocaine dealing in Guatemala City, where crack smoking and violent crimes, especially rape, have become alarmingly common. Ochoa was later sentenced to 14 years in prison, and he remains the most important drug criminal ever convicted in Guatemala to date.

Until now, the DEA had never publicly recognized the bravery of Judge González Dubón, who died defending DEA evidence. “The judge deserves to be remembered and honored for trying to help establish democracy in Guatemala,” said DEA senior special agent William Glaspy in an exclusive interview. Since the murder, the DEA has been all but impotent in Guatemala.

The impunity that shields Guatemalan military officers from justice for criminal offenses started during the Cold War. “There is a long history of impunity in Guatemala,” noted Congressman William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who is also a member of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee. “The United States has contributed to it in a very unsavory way dating back to 1954, and also in the 1980s,” he added, referring to a CIA-backed coup d’état in 1954, which overturned a democratically elected president and brought the Guatemalan military to power, and to the Reagan administration’s covert backing of the Guatemalan military at a time when bloodshed against Guatemalan civilians was peaking.

It was also during this Cold War-era carnage that the army’s la cofradía came into its own.

“The mere mention of the word ‘cofradía’ inside the institution conjures up the idea of the ‘intelligence club,’ the term ‘cofradía’ being the name given to the powerful organizations of village-church elders that exist today in the Indian highlands of Guatemala,” reads a once-classified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable. “Many of the ‘best and the brightest’ of the officers of the Guatemalan Army were brought into intelligence work and into tactical operations planning,” it continues. Like all documents not otherwise attributed in this report, the cable was obtained by the non-profit National Security Archives in Washington, D.C.

According to the 1991 cable, “well-known members of this unofficial cofradía include” then army colonels “Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas” and “Ortega Menaldo.” (Each officer had briefly trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, in 1970 and 1976, respectively.)

The intelligence report goes on: “Under directors of intelligence such as then-Col. Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas back in the early 1980s, the intelligence directorate made dramatic gains in its capabilities, so much so that today it must be given the credit for engineering the military decline of the guerrillas from 1982 to the present. But while doing so, the intelligence directorate became an elite ‘club’ within the officer corps.”

Other Guatemalan officers called their approach at the time the practice of “draining the sea to kill the fish,” or of attacking civilians suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas instead of the armed combatants themselves. One former Guatemalan Army sergeant, who served in the bloodied province of Quiché, later told this author he learned another expression: “Making the innocent pay for the sins of the guilty.”

CIA reports are even more candid. “The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the guerrilla[s] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” reads one 1982 Guatemala City CIA Station report formerly classified “SECRET.” The CIA report goes on, “When an Army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” Forensic teams have since exhumed many mass graves. Some unearthed women and infants. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala in what stands as Central America’s bloodiest conflict during the Cold War.

The violence left the military firmly in control of Guatemala, and it did not take long for this stability to catch the attention of Colombian drug syndicates. First the Medellín and then the Cali cartels, according to Andean drug experts, began searching for new smuggling routes to the United States after their more traditional routes closed down by the mid-1980s due to greater U.S. radar surveillance over the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas.

“They chose Guatemala because it is near Mexico, which is an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long-established mafia,” explained one Andean law enforcement expert. “It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.”

DEA special agents began detecting Guatemalan military officers running drugs as early as 1986, according to DEA documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. That’s when Ortega Menaldo took over from Callejas y Callejas as Guatemala’s military intelligence chief. Over the next nine years, according to the same U.S. documents, DEA special agents detected no less than 31 active duty officers running drugs.

“All roads lead to Ortega,” a U.S. drug enforcement expert said recently. “Even current active-duty officers may have other ties with retired officers. They have a mentor relationship.”

U.S. intelligence reports reveal the strong ties that cofradía high-level officers cultivated with many subordinates, who are dubbed “the operators.” “This vertical column of intelligence officers, from captains to generals, represents the strongest internal network of loyalties within the institution,” reads the 1991 U.S. DIA cable. “Other capable officers were being handpicked at all levels to serve in key operations and troop command,” this U.S. report goes on. “Although not as tight knit as the cofradía, the ‘operators’ all the same developed their own vertical leader-subordinate network of recognition, relationships and loyalties, and are today considered a separate and distinct vertical column of officer loyalties.”

Cofradía officers extended their reach even further, according to another U.S. intelligence cable, as the mid-level officer “operators” whom they chose in turn handpicked local civilians to serve as “military commissioners [to be] the ‘eyes and ears’ of the military” at the grassroots.

Few criminal cases better demonstrate the integration between the Guatemalan intelligence commands and drug trafficking than one pursued in 1990 by DEA special agents in the hot, sticky plains of eastern Guatemala, near the nation’s Caribbean coast. This 15-year-old case is also the last time that any Guatemalans wanted on drug charges were extradited to the United States. Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, a.k.a. “Archie,” was a long-time local “military commissioner,” and the elected mayor of the large town of Zacapa. U.S. embassy officials informed (as is still required according to diplomatic protocol between the two nations) Guatemalan military intelligence, then led by Ortega Menaldo, that DEA special agents had the town mayor under surveillance.

Vargas and two other civilian suspects were then arrested in Guatemala with the help of the DEA. Not long after, all three men were extradited to New York, where they were tried and convicted on DEA evidence. But the DEA did nothing back in Guatemala when, shortly after the arrests, the military merely moved the same smuggling operation to a rural area outside town, according to family farmers in a petition delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City in 1992 and addressed simply “Señores D.E.A.”

“[B]efore sunrise, one of the planes that transports cocaine crashed when it couldn’t reach the runway on the Rancho Maya,” reads the document which the peasants either signed or inked with their thumbprints. The document names the military commissioners along with seven local officers, including four local army colonels whom the farmers said supervised them.

One of the civilian military commissioners the peasants named was Rancho Maya owner Byron Berganza. More than a decade later, in 2004, DEA special agents finally arrested Berganza, along with another Guatemalan civilian, on federal “narcotics importation conspiracy” charges in New York City. Last year, the DEA in Mexico City also helped arrest another Guatemalan, Otto Herrera, who ran a vast trucking fleet from the Zacapa area. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described Herrera as one of “the most significant international drug traffickers and money launderers in the world.”

Yet, not long after his arrest, Herrera somehow managed to escape from jail in Mexico City. Not one of the Guatemalan military officers the farmers mentioned in their 1992 petition has ever been charged. As the DEA’s Senior Special Agent Glaspy explained, “There is a difference between receiving information and being able to prosecute somebody.”

In 2002, then-Chairman Ballenger forced the Bush administration to take limited action to penalize top Guatemalan military officials thought to be involved in drug trafficking. “The visa of former Guatemalan intelligence chief Francisco Ortega Menaldo was revoked,” confirmed State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher in March 2002, “under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act related to narco-trafficking, and that’s about as far as I can go into the details of the decision.”

By then, Ret. Gen. Ortega Menaldo had already denied the U.S. drug charges, while reminding reporters in Guatemala City that he had previously collaborated with both the CIA and the DEA dating back to the 1980s. Indeed, a White House Intelligence Oversight Board has already confirmed that both the CIA and the DEA maintained at least a liaison relationship with Guatemalan military intelligence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was run by Col. Ortega Menaldo.

The CIA, through spokesman Mark Mansfield, declined all comment for this article.

Eight months after revoking Ortega Menaldo’s visa, the Bush administration again cited suspected drug trafficking to revoke the U.S. entry visa of another Guatemalan intelligence chief, Ret. Gen. Callejas y Callejas. But after the news broke in the Guatemalan press, this cofradía officer never responded publicly, as Ortega Menaldo did, to the U.S. drug allegation.

Rather than confront the impunity that allows Guatemalan military officers to traffic drugs, many of the country’s elected officials seem to be going in the opposite direction. Not long after the Bush administration named the two retired cofradía intelligence chiefs as suspected drug traffickers, members of the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG party, which was founded by another retired army general, introduced legislation in the Guatemalan Congress that would remove civilian oversight over the military in criminal justice matters.

Throughout the Cold War period, Guatemala’s civil justice system seldom had the opportunity to try officers for any crime. Instead officials submitted themselves to military tribunals. In the 1990s, civilian courts began for the first time tentatively to exert their authority to process military officers for crimes like drug trafficking. But the proposed legislation stipulates that any officer, whether active duty or retired, may only be tried in a military tribunal, no matter what the alleged crime. A court martial is normally reserved for crimes allegedly committed by military personnel in the course of their service. If this law is passed, however, it would ensure that Guatemalan officers accused of any crime, from murder to drug trafficking, could once again only be tried by their military peers.

“This would be a new mechanism of impunity,” noted José Zeitune of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and author of a 2005 report on the Guatemalan judiciary.

As Chairman, Ballenger accused the FRG party, which enjoys a plurality in the Guatemalan Congress, of drug corruption. The FRG was founded by Ret. Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt. A controversial figure, he launched a coup d’etat in 1982 to become president of Guatemala just as the intelligence officers of la cofradía were rising.

The new vice-chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee is Jerry Weller III, a Republican from Illinois. He recently married Zury Ríos Sosa, who is Ret. Gen. Montt’s daughter. Unlike other members of the Subcommittee, Weller, through his spokesman, Telly Lovelace, declined all comment for this article.

Congressman Weller’s father-in-law groomed Guatemala’s last president, an FRG member named Alfonso Portillo, who fled the country in 2004 to escape his own arrest for alleged money laundering, according to a State Department report. During President Portillo’s tenure, one of his closest companions inside the National Palace was the cofradía co-founder Ortega Menaldo, according to Guatemalan press accounts.

Today the shadowy structures of Guatemala’s intelligence commands are so embedded with organized crime that the Bush administration, for one, is already calling on the United Nations. Putting aside its usual criticisms of the international body, the administration supports a proposal to form a U.N.-led task force explicitly called the “Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Armed Groups and Clandestine Security Apparatus” in Guatemala. So far the only nation to yield its sovereignty to allow the United Nations a similar role is Lebanon, where U.N. investigators are digging into the murder of a former prime minister.

The proposed U.N. plan for Guatemala also enjoys the support of its new president, Oscar Berger, a wealthy landowner and lawyer who is well respected by the U.S. administration. But the proposed U.N. Commission is encountering resistance from FRG politicians like Weller’s wife, Ríos Sosa, who is also an FRG congresswoman.

So what are U.S. officials and Guatemalan authorities doing to stop the military officers involved in drug trafficking?

“In terms of public corruption against both the army and others, [Guatemalan authorities] have a number of investigations underway, right now,” then-Assistant Secretary Robert B. Charles said earlier this year at a State Department press conference. But, in keeping with past practices, not one of these suspected officers has been charged in either Guatemala or the United States.

More troubling still is a recent case involving those Mexican soldiers-turned-hitmen, the Zetas. This past October 22, seven members of the Zetas were arrested in a Guatemalan border town with weapons and cocaine. The Associated Press reported that, according to Guatemalan authorities, the Zetas came to avenge one of their members who had been killed in Guatemala. Despite the evidence against the men, a little more than a week after their arrests, Guatemalan authorities inexplicably set them free.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been writing about Guatemalan drug trafficking since 1991 in publications including The Progressive, The Sacramento Bee, The Washington Post, the Village Voice, The New Republic, Salon.com and The Wall Street Journal. He has been a special correspondent for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Economist. He is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com.

Behind the Badge: Meet the GOP’s Law Enforcement Front Group

July 30, 2004/in The Texas Observer/by Frank Smyth

Original story found here.

Kirk Watson cannot forget the first time he saw it. Watson, a former Austin mayor, was running as the Democratic nominee for state attorney general. Only about 10 days remained before the 2002 November election. His campaign was in full gear. On that Sunday, Watson planned to visit dozens of churches. It was early in the morning in a Dallas hotel room and the candidate was shaving with the television on in the background.

He didn’t see the initial visuals of the commercial as the screen scrolled past stirring images of surgeons saving lives and the state Capitol building. A somber voice intoned “Personal injury lawyers like Kirk Watson have made millions suing doctors, hospitals, and small businesses, hurting families and driving up the cost of healthcare. Greg Abbott is different.”

By this point Watson was standing before the television, holding his razor, his face still lathered. “A respected Supreme Court Justice,” the voiceover in the ad continued, “Greg Abbott believes in common sense lawsuit reform and Greg Abbott supports the swift and aggressive prosecution of sexual predators and child pornographers. Greg Abbott has a plan for Texas. To learn more, log on now. [www.leaa.org] Law Enforcement Alliance of America.”

Watson rapidly called his campaign manager, smearing the phone with shaving cream. He had only one question: Who in the world was the LEAA?

“We have to find out,” he told his campaign manager.

Over the remaining 10 days leading up to the election, the mysterious group with the strong law-and-order moniker spent about $1.5 million for ads that ran in every major media market in Texas, gunning down Watson and lifting up the GOP’s Abbott (Ironically, it was Watson who had received an honorary commission in the Austin Police Department while Abbott sued and won millions on a lawsuit after a falling tree left him paralyzed). While the Texas media buy in the Abbott-Watson race seems to have been the largest for any single state, the LEAA also spent millions for commercials against candidates in at least four other states in 2002. In some places, like Mississippi, the LEAA dropped more money on ads than all the candidates combined.

And Watson is still waiting for an answer to his question. The former mayor notes that he, not Abbott, received the endorsement of the Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, which is the largest police group in the state. Two years later, he still wants to know who was behind the LEAA? Who funded the campaign against him and why?

One agency tasked with policing groups like the LEAA is the Internal Revenue Service. But the IRS doesn’t appear to be interested. It has designated the non-profit LEAA as “a social welfare organization.” Under this tax designation, the LEAA can legally “educate” voters about issues but, it cannot advocate for the election or defeat of a candidate. The IRS forbids such organizations from “direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.” When big money is the key to demolishing political opponents, the biggest advantage that any “social welfare” group like the LEAA enjoys is that it is legally allowed to keep all its donors, even the largest ones, hidden.

Currently, the LEAA is under investigation by a Travis County grand jury as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the 2002 campaign. Did the LEAA cross the line between “education” and “advocacy?” Did the LEAA serve as a key component in a coordinated GOP plan to skirt campaign finance laws and funnel prohibited corporate money into Texas politics? Was the author of that plan U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), whose principle objective was to redraw congressional lines so that more Republicans would be elected?

Those who track campaign money believe that the LEAA represents a troubling trend. “LEAA is one of a new breed of shadowy front groups that is willing to serve as a corporate money conduit and attack dog to benefit GOP candidates,” says Craig McDonald of the public policy organization Texans for Public Justice. “Its ‘issue ads’ are a mere hoax. When GOP candidates need a political attack from a so-called law-and-order group, they appear to funnel money to the LEAA to carry it out.”

What’s beyond dispute is the result of Greg Abbott’s ascension to attorney general. Without the attorney general’s approval, DeLay never would have been able to push through his redistricting plan. It was Abbott who was the first to rule that the state could pursue mid-decade congressional redistricting. This November, if Republicans do as well as expected, the GOP could lock in their controlling majority in the House of Representatives for years to come.

One day in late May, I decided to pay the LEAA a visit, so I drove less than 20 minutes from my office in Washington, D.C., to the edge of the I-495 beltway around the capital. I parked my car in a lot next to a northern Virginia office building filled with medical, accounting, and employment firms and the headquarters of the LEAA, an organization that bills itself as “the nation’s largest non-profit, non-partisan coalition of law enforcement personnel, crime victims, and concerned citizens.”

I took the elevator to the LEAA’s suite 421, consisting of a handful of cramped offices.

By this point, I had already called the headquarters and sent a fax, on both occasions, with the same request. What I wanted was the LEAA’s Form 990s. These publicly available tax documents, while not naming contributors, list how much the organization spends and where the money goes. By law, one can show up in person at the IRS-registered address of any non-profit group and simply ask for its Form 990. The law requires the group to provide a copy “generally” on the “day of the request.” There are even minor fines for not doing so.

The receptionist said that LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds was not in. I showed her a copy of IRS regulations. I pointed out that now I was here in person, and was legally entitled to walk away with the form. There was another person in the office, who identified himself as the webmaster of www.leaa.org. While I waited, he went to call Deeds. He returned and told me “Mr. Deeds would honor my request.” When I pressed for more information, he said that there was no more.

On June 4, I sent Deeds an e-mail requesting the same information, which I copied to the IRS Media Relations Specialist for northern Virginia, James C. Dupree. In keeping with IRS policy, regional spokesman Dupree declined to say what, if anything, he or the IRS did with my request. To ensure that the IRS got it, I sent a letter of complaint to the IRS enforcement office for non-profit groups, which is based in Dallas, Texas, on July 1. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen had already complained in writing about the LEAA to the same IRS office on May 14 (Public Citizen eventually obtained some of the LEAA’s older Form 990s from the IRS).

At press time, the fines that could conceivably be levied against Chief Operating Officer Ted Deeds for ignoring two separate and ongoing requests for the LEAA’s 990 are more than $3,600, if the IRS were to enforce the law. “Responsible persons of a tax exempt organization who fail to provide the documents as required may be subject to a penalty of $20 a day for as long as the failure continues,” reads the tough language on the IRS website. “There is a maximum penalty of $10,000 for each failure to provide a copy of an annual information return.”

Four grand is no more than petty cash for a multi-million dollar non-profit like the LEAA, which had a budget in 2001 of nearly $5 million, according to a Form 990 obtained by Public Citizen. But $3,600 is not necessarily an insignificant amount for Ted Deeds, who is the official responsible, and who earned $82,500 operating the LEAA in 2001, according to the same form 990.

What Deeds has yet to provide to either the Observer or Public Citizen is the LEAA Form 990 for 2002. This is just one of the reasons why, according to Taylor Lincoln, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, the LEAA is the worst of its breed. Lately, Public Citizen and Lincoln have been collecting data on 30-odd non-profit groups involved in political campaigns, asking each one for copies of their Form 990s. “[The LEAA] are the only group which has not abided by its obligation to provide the form,” said Lincoln.

“A social welfare organization” like the LEAA is not supposed to be involved in politics, at least not full-time, according to the IRS website. “[A] social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.” Moreover, “any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax.”

One way to tell whether an activity is “primary” is how much the group spends on it. The LEAA spent only $43,050 on “political expenditures” according to its Form 990 in 2000, and far less, only $2,500, on “political expenditures” in 2001. But in both years the LEAA spent $2.43 million and $3.47 million, respectively, on what the LEAA told the IRS was “enhancement and education to further the understanding of and the need for revision in the current criminal justice system and education of the public into second amendment rights.”

The certified public accountant who prepares the LEAA’s IRS filings is Nanette K. Miller, whose office is in Washington, D.C. I asked her whether these “enhancement and education” expenditures were properly filed, or whether they should have been recorded instead as “political expenditures.”

“He’d be the one you have to ask,” she said, referring to LEAA Operations Director Ted Deeds. “I can’t disclose anything without talking to him, anyway.”

Deborah Goldberg of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that groups like the LEAA are taking advantage of a loophole involving the difference between federal and state laws. Since the Supreme Court upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform legislation in 2003, it no longer matters what “magic words” groups like the LEAA use, says Goldberg. Whether or not they run “issue ads” or explicitly endorse a candidate, such groups must disclose their contributors for any ads they run during federal races. But they only need to do so for ads they run during state races if the state itself has such a law. “Both Texas and Mississippi,” said Goldberg, are among the states that do not.

Of course, the LEAA is hardly the only IRS-registered “social welfare” organization doing “public education.” One such group on the opposite side of the nation’s political fence is MoveOn.Org, which had a budget of $4.48 million in 2003, on par with the LEAA’s budget in 2001. While LEAA refuses to disclose its latest balance sheet, MoveOn.Org provided its Form 990s in compliance with the law. Moreover, while the LEAA has no “political” entity registered with the IRS, MoveOn has two other registered political groups, a Voter Fund and a Political Action Committee, both of which are required by law to disclose every contributor who donates $200 or more.

IRS officials confirm that the LEAA filed a balance sheet with the IRS for 2002. By law, anyone should be able to obtain this form from the IRS. But after more than four months, the IRS has still failed to produce the document in a “timely manner” in violation of the laws governing the agency.

A month ago, Mark W. Everson, the man President Bush tapped to be commissioner of the IRS, promised Congress that the agency was finally going to clean up dirty non-profits. “It’s fair to say this problem has crept up over time, and our response has lagged,” replied Commissioner Everson under questioning from senators, adding that the IRS would be reviewing non-profit groups as soon as this summer to start enforcing the law.

“It’s obvious from the abuses we see that there’s been no check on charities,” complained the chairman of the finance committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican. Chairman Grassley went on, “Big money, tax free, and no oversight have created a cesspool in too many cases.”

But which non-profit “cesspools” will the IRS clean up first?

IRS officials said that Commissioner Everson is most concerned about non-profit groups and their affiliates whom the IRS suspects of either engaging in criminal fraud to deceive contributors or of hiding taxable income from the IRS. The latter includes environmental trusts, said the IRS official, who added, “[Everson] was not talking about the issue you raise.”

What about a little enforcement when the “law-and-order” group breaks the law?

“It would be a violation of federal law for us to comment on a specific entity,” said Bruce Friedland, public affairs specialist at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., declining to answer questions about why the IRS has failed to sanction the LEAA. All Friedland would say was, “This is a matter that the IRS takes very seriously.”

Commissioner Everson previously served in the Justice Department and in the Immigration and Naturalization Service back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. More recently, Everson left a job in Dallas as vice-president of a multi-billion dollar, Texas-based food service company, to serve President Bush first in the Office of Management and Budget, where he reportedly earned a reputation for efficiency.

But the IRS under his leadership hardly looks efficient when it comes to the LEAA.

The Law Enforcement Alliance of America was reportedly started in 1991 by a grant from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which set up the LEAA just eleven miles away from its own headquarters in northern Virginia. Tax records from both groups show that the NRA has continued to finance the LEAA. But the LEAA’s mission appears to have expanded since its early days, as a Republican election machine controlled from Washington, D.C., has increasingly come to rely on “issue” ads as part of its national strategy. The Law Enforcement Alliance has been allying itself with other groups connected to the GOP as part of this growing effort. In the process, the LEAA’s bank account has grown and its message has changed depending on the circumstance. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Texas, where the LEAA found new friends in the Texas Association of Business (TAB), and a political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) founded by House Majority Leader Tom Delay.

In 2002, TRMPAC and TAB were busy supporting candidates and pushing “issue” ads in an effort to remake the Texas Legislature. And indeed, after a slate of 19 Republican state representatives and senators won victory, they proceeded to elect DeLay’s close friend Tom Craddick (R-Midland) speaker of the House and push through, not only mid-decade congressional redistricting, but a host of giveaways for the corporate financiers of the campaign. A central link among all these groups and a likely target of the Travis County grand jury is John Colyandro.

Colyandro was the executive director of TRMPAC. He also worked on Greg Abbott’s campaign. According to a deposition in a civil suit filed by some of the losing Democratic candidates, Colyandro admitted that he contacted the LEAA to see if they would get involved in Texas legislative races. He has denied involvement in the LEAA’s television ads against Watson. Remarkably, four ads created for the $1.9-million TAB “issue” ad campaign mysteriously ended up with LEAA logos on them.

The ads were hardly subtle. “Mike Head is on the side of convicted baby killers and murderers,” read one. “When suspected crack cocaine traffickers and marijuana dealers found themselves in jail, Paul D. Clayton came to their aid,” read another.

The movement of the ads between the groups seems to indicate coordination between them, which could violate their tax status. This could become an important point in the grand jury proceedings as it brings into question how “independent” their “independent expenditures” really were.

The LEAA may also be channeling funds into other state races for America’s largest “business league,” reported The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents more than three million firms, and includes an Institute for Legal Reform that carries out what its spokesman calls “voter education” in both national and state elections across the nation.

While the LEAA’s big issue is gun rights and criminal justice, the Chamber’s big issue is tort reform and limits on lawsuit damages. The organization has spent millions to support candidates on the lawsuit-reform bandwagon. “There are 42 supreme court races, and 11 attorney general races” in different states this year, said Sean McBride, vice president of communications for the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform.

The Chamber, like the LEAA, favors unaccountable voter education drives. “We do not give contributions directly to candidates,” said McBride. “We take a hard look at those races in cooperation with business groups or other non-profits in those states.”

Do the non-profits include the LEAA?

Chamber spokesman McBride declined to comment.

When also asked about the LEAA, the Chamber’s General Counsel, Steve Bokat similarly replied, “I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

No matter who is writing checks to the LEAA, its budget has increased nearly fivefold in just seven years. From 1995 through 1998, the NRA donated more than $500,000 a year to the LEAA, covering either nearly or slightly more than half of the LEAA’s budget, according to tax records from both groups obtained by the Observer. But the LEAA’s budget has swelled in recent years from $1.32 million in 1997 to $4.48 million by 2001. There is speculation the group spent even more money in 2002.

In addition to its presence in Texas, the LEAA has fought hard in Mississippi, which has long been the scene of pitched battles between trial lawyers and business interests. Two years ago, the LEAA sponsored smear ads in Mississippi against one 12-year sitting state Supreme Court justice. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was active in Mississippi Supreme Court races in years past as well, but, in 2002, neither the Chamber nor its ads were anywhere in sight, while LEAA ads were everywhere.

What was odd about the LEAA’s campaign against this sitting Mississippi justice, Chuck McRae, was that, unlike many previous targets of the LEAA, he was a proud gun owner and the LEAA had no beef with him about gun rights. However, many businesses and, especially, doctors opposed Judge McRae’s re-election, complaining that he was too plaintiff-friendly in his Mississippi Supreme Court decisions. The LEAA’s ads, meanwhile, attacked him that year for overturning at least one murder conviction, and for voting against the disbarment of an attorney charged with stealing money from his own clients.

“What we find with a lot of these ‘front groups’ is that they adopt innocuous-sounding names that your average person is more likely to identify with than the chamber of commerce,” said Public Citizen’s Taylor Lincoln. “Take the Law Enforcement Alliance of America. Who is against law enforcement?”

It’s unclear whether the Travis County grand jury has tried to contact John W. Chapman, the chairman of LEAA’s board of directors, to ask him what he knows about the 2002 Texas campaign. It wouldn’t be hard; he’s just up the road on I-35. Chapman is a former police officer for juvenile offenses in Killeen, Texas. He joined the LEAA after the mass shooting by a lone gunmen in a Luby’s cafeteria there in 1991. On the LEAA website, www.leaa.org, Chapman can be seen in one photo shaking hands with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and in another photo with a past NRA President. (Chapman declined to comment for this story.)

State officials in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kansas have accused the LEAA of illegally pumping money into their state’s electoral campaigns in violation of this group’s so-called “social welfare” status.

One judge in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, Paul F. Lutty Jr., issued a temporary restraining order against the LEAA over its ads in the Keystone State in 2001. But even those who disagreed with LEAA ads, like the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said the county judge’s ruling was a violation of free speech.

One of the largest LEAA campaigns after Texas was a 2002 attorney general race in Illinois, where the LEAA spent a reported $1.3 million. The group attacked a Democratic candidate, Lisa Magidan, telling voters that she “has never tried a single crime,” while pointing out that the Republican candidate, Joe Birkett, was an experienced prosecutor. This time the LEAA’s Executive Director James Fotis characterized the ads as “freedom of speech.”

Indeed they are. But since running such ads amounts, as the LEAA’s own IRS filings show, to the group’s primary activity, if the IRS were to determine that these expenses should be filed as “political” instead of “educational,” not only would the LEAA lose its “social welfare” status and be required to pay taxes on its political campaigns, but it would also be required finally to shed light on its contributors.

There are others who criticize the LEAA for different reasons. Jim Pasco is executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. It’s the nation’s largest law enforcement association with more than 300,000 members. The Grand Lodge Fraternal Order of Police is based in Nashville, Tennessee, and has more than 2,100 local lodges nationwide. The FOP also has a National Legislative Office that occupies three floors of a Capitol Hill townhouse.

“It’s absurd to suggest that LEAA represents the law enforcement community,” said Pasco, who is himself a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special agent.

These two groups have worked together. Both the Fraternal Order of Police and the Law Enforcement Alliance backed a federal law, now awaiting President Bush’s signature, that will allow off-duty as well as retired police officers to carry concealed weapons in any state. But on other issues, from state supreme court to attorney general races, Pasco says the LEAA does not represent America’s law enforcement personnel.

“There is no way on God’s green earth that the LEAA could spend millions of dollars on campaign ads,” said Pasco. “It’s not their money.”

How much money the LEAA spent in 2002 and who provided it is anybody’s guess. Since the LEAA and the IRS refuse and fail, respectively, to give a proper public accounting, the mystery will remain unsolved for the time being. More importantly, in the absence of a legal deterrent, who knows what plans are being laid for the LEAA to strike once again in October, 10 days before the election?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His work can be seen at www.franksmyth.com. Additional writing and reporting for this article was contributed by Jake Bernstein.

Colombia Briefing: Bad Press

September 1, 2001/in The Comittee to Protect Journalists/by Frank Smyth

The original story ran here on the Committee to Protect Journalists website

This Colombian warlord cultivates journalists. He also murders them. For Carlos Castaño, it’s all about image.

Bogotá — On May 3, 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño to its annual list of the ten worst enemies of the press. Six weeks later, a reporter from the Paris daily Le Monde caught up with Castaño in northern Colombia and asked how he felt about the distinction.

“I would like to assure you that I have always respected the freedom and subjectivity of the press,” said the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Colombia’s leading right-wing paramilitary organization. “But I have never accepted that journalism can become an arm at the service of one of the actors of the conflict. Over the course of its existence the AUC has executed two local journalists who were in fact guerrillas.” He no longer remembered their names.

Since 1999, in fact, forces under Castaño’s command have been linked to the murders of at least four journalists, the abduction and rape of one reporter, and threats against many others, according to CPJ research. “Against the violent backdrop of Colombia’s escalating civil war, in which all sides have targeted journalists, Carlos Castaño stands out as a ruthless enemy of the press,” CPJ’s citation noted.

This self-confessed murderer of journalists is now turning to the local press in an effort to rehabilitate his image in Colombia. To that end, Castaño has launched a uniquely Colombian public relations campaign, seemingly modeled after tactics employed by legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar. Not unlike Escobar, Castaño’s strategy combines a charm offensive with forthright acknowledgements of the AUC’s use of terror.

While Escobar attacked journalists who favored his extradition to the United States to face drug trafficking charges, Castaño attacks any journalist whom he suspects of cooperating or even sympathizing with Colombia’s left-wing rebels. This year, Castaño admitted that he had murdered journalists and tried to bomb a newspaper for its alleged communist sympathies. He has been implicated in many other attacks on the press in recent years.

In November 2000, Castaño granted an exclusive interview to the Bogotá weekly Semana. The reporter asked whether Castaño thought he deserved to be compared to the late Escobar. “There is no way you can compare me with a monster like that,” replied Castaño. “While he sought to destroy the country, I intend to save it.”

Old war

Eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War remains hot in Colombia. The U.S.-backed Colombian military has been fighting against various Marxist guerrilla organizations (see sidebar) for nearly forty years. The army frequently collaborates with private paramilitary groups, including the AUC, which the Colombian government has outlawed. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that half of the army’s 18 brigades were sharing intelligence and other resources with rightist paramilitary groups, most of them under Castaño’s command.

Since the 1980s, both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas have increasingly been supported by profits from Colombia’s burgeoning trade in illegal drugs.

Carlos Castaño is Colombia’s top paramilitary leader as well as the country’s leading fugitive. He is currently wanted on multiple murder, kidnapping, and arms trafficking charges dating back to 1988. He is also “a major drug trafficker,” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Last April, U.S. ambassador to Colombia Anne W. Patterson told the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador that if Castaño is involved in drug trafficking, “and we think he is,” the United States might one day seek to prosecute him in the United States.

Childhood memories

In 1981, when Carlos Castaño was 15 years old, his father was kidnapped and murdered by leftist guerrillas. At 23, he allegedly participated in a series of massacres of banana pickers in northwestern Colombia. Also known as “Monoleche” (Milkwhite) because of his fair complexion, Carlos allegedly killed at the side of his brother Fidel, and both brothers joined Colombia’s first national paramilitary organization, “Death to Kidnappers” (MAS).

According to DEA documents, MAS was founded in 1981 by Escobar’s Medellín cartel. But the Castaño brothers and Escobar later fell out. Fidel Castaño became chief of operations for a paramilitary strike force called “Los Pepes” (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar). Following Fidel’s mysterious 1994 disappearance in northern Colombia, Carlos emerged as Colombia’s leading anti-communist militant.

Three years later, Carlos Castaño unified a number of regional rightist groups to form a national paramilitary organization called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). In 1997, Castaño admits, he ordered the massacre of 49 peasants in rural Mapiripán, eastern Colombia. Since then, Castaño and his allies have committed about 80 percent of Colombia’s human rights abuses, according to Human Rights Watch. The Colombian Defense Ministry reports that rightist paramilitaries carried out three-fourths of the country’s massacres last year.

“Guerrillas, whether in uniform or civilian clothes, remain a legitimate military objective,” Castaño said on camera on March 1, 2000, when he showed his face to Colombians and others for the first time. “I know this violates international humanitarian law.”

On May 30 of this year, Castaño issued a cryptic online communiqué announcing his resignation as military commander of the outlawed AUC. Days later, he announced that he was forming a nonviolent political organization, linked to the AUC, that would seek legal recognition in Colombia (none was granted). And he continued to grant interviews.

AUC meets the press

Journalists have figured prominently among Castaño’s victims. In January 1999, for example, Castaño repeatedly threatened Alfredo Molano Bravo of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador after Molano wrote a story about anti-communist paramilitary groups and their ties to Colombian drug traffickers.

In June 1999, AUC members threatened Carlos Pulgarín, a reporter for Bogotá’s largest daily, El Tiempo, after Pulgarín wrote an article about paramilitary assassinations of indigenous activists. Pulgarín fled to Peru, where his movements were apparently monitored; he later received telephone threats in Lima.

On September 16, 1999, two assassins on a motorcycle shot and killed Guzmán Quintero Torres, editor of the northern Colombian daily El Pilón. Quintero was investigating several AUC-linked murders at the time, including the 1998 slaying of television journalist Amparo Leonor Jiménez Pallares, who was killed after she reported that local paramilitary forces had murdered peasants.

On September 9, 2000, AUC paramilitaries abducted and killed a rural community leader named Carlos José Restrepo Rocha, who ran two small regional publications. AUC fliers were left next to Restrepo Rocha’s bullet-ridden corpse, but the motive for this particular murder remains unclear. Later that year, AUC members threatened Eduardo Luque Díaz, of the daily La Nación, at his office and home, demanding that he reveal the whereabouts of a family he had mentioned in a story.

On April 27 of this year, Flavio Bedoya, a southwesternColombia correspondent for the Communist Party weekly La Voz, was murdered. Colleagues believed the murder was linked to a series of highly critical reports that Bedoya had published in La Voz since the beginning of April about collusion between the security forces and outlawed right-wing paramilitary gangs in southern Nariño Department.

One month after Bedoya’s death, the AUC tried unsuccessfully to bomb the Bogotá offices of La Voz. Castaño took responsibility for the incident a few days later.

On October 31, 2000, rural community radio station director Juan Camilo Restrepo Guerra was summoned to a meeting by rightist paramilitaries who were apparently incensed by his sharp criticisms of the local administration. Restrepo Guerra’s brother drove him on a motorcycle to the rendezvous site. The paramilitaries shot Restrepo Guerra dead in front of his brother, who has since declined to testify and has gone into hiding.

Journalists who choose to remain in Colombia despite Castaño’s intimidation privately admit that they censor their own reports to protect themselves and their families. “Of course I censor myself,” said one threatened journalist who elected to stay. “You have to tell the story, but there are some things I can’t include.”

Carrot and stick

Although journalists all over Colombia have been threatened and attacked for daring to criticize the AUC, Castaño has also used the press to launch a PR offensive. The formerly reclusive leader has “gained public visibility in the national and international media with disconcerting ease,” according to a March 2001 report by the United Nations human rights office in Colombia.

“Carlos Castaño, Colombia’s fugitive paramilitary leader, unleashed a national stir when he stepped from the shadows and submitted to a ninety-minute, one-on-one interview, televised on March 1 [2000],” wrote then-U.S. Ambassador Curtis W. Kamman in a recently declassified U.S. embassy cable. “The 35-year-old Castaño appeared intelligent, articulate, well-poised, and, above all, very charismatic.”

Nearly one in five Colombian adults watched at least half the program, about the same percentage that supports Castaño, according to opinion polls. Since that first television appearance, Castaño has made himself freely available to both domestic and foreign reporters.

The Garzón murder

While Castaño has been linked to numerous attacks on the press, he currently faces just one criminal charge over an attack on a journalist. The charge, aggravated homicide, relates to the 1999 murder of Colombian television host Jaime Garzón. According to the official charge sheet, Castaño ordered Garzón’s murder because of the journalist’s role in negotiating the release of hostages held by leftist guerrillas.

The 39-year-old Garzón was a morning news host for the Caracol network and a regular columnist for the weekly magazine Cambio. But Garzón was best known for his work as a television comedian who used humor to criticize all factions in the civil conflict. He specialized in uncannily accurate impersonations of Colombian officials and other notables and was so popular across Colombia that in 1997, then-presidential candidate Andrés Pastrana Arango appeared live with other candidates on his TV show.

Garzón regularly traded on his stature as a well-respected broadcaster to negotiate for the release of victims of guerrilla kidnappings. He also served on an independent commission that mediated between the government and the leftist guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN).

Two points emerge clearly from the Garzón case. First, some of Colombia’s most dangerous criminals work for Carlos Castaño; and second, not even famous and well-connected journalists are safe from him.

On August 10, 1999, Garzón heard that Castaño was planning to kill him. The news was conveyed by a Colombian senator named Piedad Córdoba, who chaired the Senate’s human rights committee at the time. In late 1998, Castaño’s men kidnapped Córdoba and held her for nine months. During that time, Castaño told Córdoba that Garzón was on his list of targets. Castaño read her excerpts from what he said were transcripts of Garzón’s private telephone conversations. He claimed that the transcripts proved Garzón was really a guerrilla.

After Córdoba was released in June 1999, she told Garzón that Castaño was planning to eliminate him. During the second week of August, Garzón learned that Castaño had ordered him killed by the end of that week. On August 10, desperate to get in touch with Castaño, Garzón visited La Modelo prison, a maximum-security installation in Bogotá where several important AUC figures are incarcerated.

According to the charge sheet, Garzón met with Ángel Custodio Gaitán Mahecha, also known as “The Baker,” and with Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, also known as “Popeye.” Velásquez was an early 1990s Escobar loyalist who later transferred his allegiance to the AUC. Both were well-connected members of the Colombian underworld.

Gaitán used his cell phone to call Castaño. He handed the phone to Garzón, who pleaded with Castaño to spare his life. Castaño called Garzón a son of a bitch who supported the guerrillas and added that he was a coward who didn’t have the guts to meet him face to face. Before hanging up, the two men arranged to meet the following Saturday, August 14.

On August 13, a motorcycle-riding gunman shot Garzón dead at a traffic light just four blocks from his office. A few hours later, Castaño himself called Garzón’s radio show and denied responsibility on the air. Velásquez and Gaitán also claim they had nothing to do with Garzón’s death.

The gunman who shot Garzón allegedly belonged to a criminal band known as La Terraza. In the past, La Terraza carried out attacks for the late Pablo Escobar. However, Castaño admits he has hired La Terraza to carry out a number of crimes in recent years, including kidnappings. The official government charge sheet accuses him of hiring La Terraza to kill Garzón.

On August 3, 2000, three months after Castaño was formally charged with Garzón’s murder, he invited seven La Terraza leaders to a meeting in northern Colombia. Authorities later discovered all seven of their corpses near a local road. Meanwhile, Castaño issued a communiqué saying that the AUC had executed them for giving leaders like him a bad name.

Three months later, several young men who claimed to be La Terraza members surfaced in Medellín. Wearing masks, they taped a television interview in which they claimed to have committed many kidnappings and murders on behalf of the AUC, including the Garzón assassination. During the interview, they claimed that Castaño was planning to kill them and their families with the help of local police and military forces. Castaño did not deny the accusation. In March 2001, he told El Tiempo that only one or two members of the band were still alive.

War on El Espectador

On May 24, 2000, a suspected AUC militant tried to abduct Ignacio Gómez, an investigative reporter with El Espectador, in downtown Bogotá. The man who failed to trick Gómez into boarding a “taxi” that day matched the composite sketch of an AUC suspect in the massacre of 49 peasant farmers at Mapiripán in 1997.

Gómez had just published a story that documented the Colombian Army’s collaboration with the AUC in the Mapiripán massacre. That same day, Gómez found an envelope with his name stenciled on it in his mailbox at work. The envelope contained a photocopy of a recent article by Jineth Bedoya, one of his colleagues at El Espectador.

Bedoya had reported that La Modelo prison guards were allowing AUC inmates to keep guns in their cells even after clashes between them and other inmates that left 25 prisoners dead, 18 wounded, and an undetermined number missing, according to a United Nations report on the incident.

Bedoya and her editor, Jorge Cardona, received identical envelopes. An hour and a half later, Bedoya’s telephone rang. Gaitán was calling from his cell in La Modelo. He offered Bedoya the opportunity to interview him at the prison at 10:00 a.m. the next day. He promised the 25-year-old reporter an exclusive and asked her to come alone.

Cardona insisted on accompanying Bedoya and on bringing a photographer. The three El Espectador journalists arrived at La Modelo shortly before 10:00 a.m. on May 25. Prison guards told them to wait.

The visitors waiting area is just inside the entrance to La Modelo, although many visitors prefer to wait in the street just outside the entrance. Cardona and the photographer walked to a nearby concession stand to buy sodas, leaving Bedoya standing in front of the prison entrance. She stayed within view and earshot of the waiting area in case the guards cleared them to enter the jail.

Bedoya disappeared during the few minutes it took her colleagues to buy the sodas and return to the prison entrance. The prison guards claimed they had seen nothing.

At 8 p.m., the police reported that Bedoya had been admitted to a police medical clinic in the city of Villavicencio, a three-hour drive from La Modelo. A taxi driver found her lying with her hands tied in a garbage dump on the outskirts of town. She had been drugged, brutally beaten, and sexually assaulted. Bedoya was found in a state of nervous collapse but eventually recovered from the attack and returned to work at El Espectador.

During the assault, the men told her in graphic detail about all the other journalists whom they planned to kill, including her colleague Gómez. They did not explain why they chose to free her. A week later, Gómez fled to the United States.

No suspects have been charged in the attack on Bedoya. Gaitán and Velásquez both denied any role in her abduction, as do La Modelo prison authorities.

In a June 2000 interview with El Tiempo, Castaño also disclaimed responsibility for Bedoya’s ordeal. He acknowledged that Gaitán was his subordinate, but claimed that Gaitán had assured him he was not involved.

On the evening of September 7, 2001, Gaitán was murdered in a prison called La Picota. He was apparently killed by leftist guerrilla inmates in retaliation for last year’s jailhouse massacre at La Modelo.

The hunt for Castaño

Since the death of Pablo Escobar, no Colombian has terrorized so many members of the Colombian press, to say nothing of Colombian society in general. Carlos Castaño’s extraordinary assault against local journalists comes as the Colombian government is receiving a record amount of U.S. aid. On September 10, as U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell was about to leave on a visit to Colombia, the State Department formally designated the AUC as a terrorist organization.

Yet U.S.-backed Colombian forces have so far been powerless to stop Castaño. As a result, he has enjoyed complete impunity for his crimes. The Attorney General’s Office was the only Colombian law enforcement agency that even tried to pursue Castaño. Earlier this year, its civilian agents launched a series of raids against the AUC. But they complained of working without the support of the military or other government bodies. “In this struggle…the Attorney General’s Office has been alone,” chief investigator Pablo Elías González told El Tiempo in June 2000.

At that time, the AUC had just kidnapped seven members of González’s staff while they were exhuming the corpse of an alleged AUC victim in Cesar State. All seven investigators remain missing and are presumed dead at the hands of Castaño’s men.

Leftist guerrilla attacks on the press

Carlos Castaño is by no means the only threat to the embattled Colombian press. The country’s two main leftist guerrilla organizations, the ELN and the FARC, have both threatened and kidnapped dozens of journalists in recent years.

The FARC kidnapped seven journalists in October 1999 and held them for five days. El Tiempo editor Francisco Santos (who was once kidnapped by Pablo Escobar) has also been threatened by the FARC and is now living in Spain. And RCN television correspondent Claudia Gurisatti received FARC threats last year after the station aired her interview with Castaño. Both Santos and Gurisatti have since fled into exile.

There are indications that FARC was responsible for the December 13, 2000, killing of radio station director Alfredo Abad López, according to reliable Colombian sources. Abad was the director of Voz de la Selva (“Voice of the Jungle”), an affiliate of the national Caracol radio network in the southern Colombian city of Florencia. Just before his death, Abad had conducted an on-air discussion on whether the government should renew its grant of a Switzerland-sized chunk of territory to the FARC. A majority of the callers apparently opposed renewal.

The FARC has also been linked to the July 6 killing of José Duviel Vásquez Arias, who took over as news director of Voz de la Selva after Abad was murdered. Vásquez’s last broadcasts dealt with an AUC communiqué announcing changes in local leadership and promising to refrain from kidnapping and extortion.

On May 23, 2001, FARC guerrillas briefly detained three employees of the Medellín daily El Colombiano, according to the Colombian press freedom organization FLIP (Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa). Correspondent Gustavo Gallo Machado, photographer Donaldo de Jesús Zuluaga Velilla, and driver Ramón Morales were held for several hours, and their vehicle was damaged. That same day, FLIP reported, an urban faction of the ELN distributed a pamphlet directed at all Colombian journalists, who were warned to avoid partiality.

Frank Smyth is an investigative reporter and CPJ’s Washington representative.

A Brave Guatemalan Judge Challenges Corrupt Brass Hats

August 13, 1999/in The Wall Street Journal/by Frank Smyth

Original article can be found here.

Something new and promising happened in Guatemala last month when Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentenced ex-Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz to 14 years in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is one of at least 31 current or former Guatemalan military officers the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has suspected of running drugs. But no Guatemalan officer of his rank has ever received such a lengthy sentence. He has one final appeal available, which may yet set him free.

In American eyes, Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is a recidivist criminal. In 1990, DEA special agents set him up in a sting operation; they claim that he sent half of a metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Fla. He was indicted in absentia in federal court. The U.S. demanded his extradition but after Guatemala’s top judge ruled in favor of the extradition and was subsequently murdered, the ruling was later reversed by the same high court. The murder remains unsolved. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz was caught running cocaine again three years later, leading to his arrest and last month’s conviction.

Guatemala has a major problem bringing present or former military officers suspected of felonies to justice. “Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution,” wrote the State Department in 1994, complaining that suspects like the former Lt. Col. Ochoa Ruiz were merely discharged from military service. “In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities.”

The Clinton administration has largely chosen to ignore military involvement in Guatemalan drug trafficking, in part because for much of its first term it was focusing on a peace agreement, finally concluded in 1997, to end Guatemala’s 35-year civil war. It feared that raising the impunity issue would disrupt the peace process. Earlier this year the State Department reported that Guatemalan traffickers are now moving 200 to 300 metric tons of Colombian cocaine a year to northern markets, up sharply from about 50 tons in the early 1990s. That is, according to State Department officials, at least half of all the cocaine reaching the U.S. Most of the cocaine coming in through Mexico transits through Guatemala as well.

Former or current military officers, who for years have enjoyed a high degree of impunity, often protect Guatemalan criminal syndicates. According to a signed petition from Guatemalan peasants that was presented to the DEA, one syndicate led by military officers and a mayor killed locals who resisted abandoning the land they farmed, which the trafficking syndicate wanted for clandestine runways. Ex-mayor Arnoldo Vargas Estrada was later convicted of drug trafficking in federal court in New York. The four Army colonels named by the peasants in the same petition were never charged anywhere.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu undertook to clean house in the military when he began his four-year term in 1996. The State Department reports that last year he discharged even more “military officers thought to be involved in corruption and smuggling.” But one of the bravest steps taken by anyone in Guatemala so far was last month’s sentencing of Mr. Ochoa Ruiz by Judge Molina Lara. It was the Bush administration that first requested Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition in 1991. The Guatemalan military later discharged him explicitly to put distance between his name and the institution. But that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over the former officer in 1993 in order to dismiss the U.S. extradition case against him, citing a “lack of evidence.”

The Clinton administration appealed the case three times, all the way to Guatemala’s top judicial body, the Constitutional Court. The presiding judge, Epaminondas González Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having made a historic, independent ruling in 1993 when he declared unconstitutional the imposition of martial law by the country’s then-president, Jorge Serrano. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition case reached Judge González Dubon’s bench less than a year later, and in March 1994 he signed an order to extradite the former officer and circulated it to the court’s other judges to sign as well. On April 1, as Mr. González Dubon was returning with his family from an Easter day-trip, four men assassinated him as his wife and son looked on.

How did the Clinton administration react? Neither President Clinton nor his ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, said a word about it. They remained silent when, on April 12, the Constitutional Court’s surviving judges quietly overturned the late Judge González Dubon’s ruling and set Mr. Ochoa Ruiz free. Apparently the Clinton administration saw no reason to publicly protest this reversal of its efforts to bring a suspected drug trafficker to justice.

Four months later, in the Village Voice I accused another military officer, Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio, the former Air Force commander, of allegedly using military aircraft to transship cocaine. In a hastily called press conference, Guatemala’s then-defense minister, Gen. Mario René Enríquez, threatened to spend his “last personal penny” suing me for libel. Ambassador McAfee called her own press conference two days later and announced that Gen. Pozuelos Villavicencio was indeed a DEA suspect. The general was never charged nor did any lawsuit ever materialize.

Some important gains have been made under President Arzu, but Guatemala still has a long way to go and fear is still an overriding consideration for all judges. The record of impunity is one reason Colombian traffickers have made alliances, with Guatemalan military officers. Considering the price paid to finally convict Mr. Ochoa Ruiz, it is no wonder that the cocaine traffic through Guatemala expanded so rapidly.

—-
Mr. Smyth, a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” (Norton,
1999) writes regularly for Intellectual-Capital.com.

The Holy Warrior: Is This the Man Behind the Bombings?

August 31, 1998/in The New Republic/by Peter Bergen & Frank Smyth

Original article can be found here.

Osama Bin Ladin is not an easy man to find, and he plans on keeping it that way. A multi-millionaire from Saudi Arabia, he is considered by the U.S. government to be “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.” Law enforcement officials from a half-dozen nations would like to question him about his possible role in at least nine terrorist conspiracies. More recently, bin Ladin’s name has surfaced in connection with last week’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He is “high on the list” of suspects, says one White House official. So maybe it’s not surprising that, since 1996, bin Ladin has taken refuge in one of the most inaccessible regions in the world: southern Afghanistan.

If you wish to meet with him, as one of us did for an interview that aired on CNN back in May of 1997, you must first get hold of an intermediary–like Khaled al-Fauwaz, a spokesman for a Saudi opposition group, called the Advice and Reformation Committee. Al-Fauwaz lives far from the tumult of the Middle East, in the quiet North London suburb of Neasden. Serving flavored coffee and a plate of dates in his modest 1940s Tudor-style home, he is at pains to make clear that he does not work for Bin Ladin. Nor does he necessarily condone all of Bin Ladin’s views. But, if you can assure him that you are not an agent of the CIA, well, then he may find a way to put you in touch with the shadowy Saudi.

And so the journey begins. Al-Fauwaz directs you to Peshawar, Pakistan, where you are to await further notice. Several days after your arrival, one of Bin Ladin’s followers makes contact and instructs you to make your way across the winding Khyber Pass into neighboring Afghanistan. You arrive in the border town of Jalalabad and settle into a rundown hotel. And then you wait.

A week passes. Finally, late one afternoon, a curtained van arrives. You are bundled inside and the van sets off toward the mountains, along the Kabul road. Suddenly the van stops, and you are given blindfold-like dark glasses to wear as you change to a four-wheel-drive vehicle for the drive up rough mountain tracks. Several times during the journey, heavily armed men emerge from the darkness shouting for your convoy to stop. At one point you are told that, if you are carrying any type of tracking device, now is the time to say so. Later discovery of such a device, it is suggested, will not be pleasant for you. At the final checkpoint the guards run a beeping scanner over you and your bags to make sure you’ve been telling the truth.

At long last, your vehicle pulls into a rock-strewn valley about 5,000 feet above sea level — just below the snow line. It is near midnight. The air has a cold bite to it, and the ground crunches underfoot as you are led to a small mud hut lined with blankets. At one o’clock in the morning, Bin Ladin enters the room. You are told you have an hour to speak with him before he moves on. He does not like to remain in the same place for very long.

At first glance, Bin Ladin does not look like a master terrorist with a core of several thousand committed followers at his command and up to $250 million in his bank account. He is dressed simply — wearing a white turban and robe under a camouflage jacket and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle across his shoulder. But he is a tall man with an aquiline nose and an aristocratic demeanor. His followers treat him with the utmost deference, which he seems to take as his due. And, though he speaks in a near whisper, his talk is of bitter injustice and merciless revenge. The United States, he said in that CNN interview, “has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and criminal” by supporting Israel and imposing sanctions on Iraq. But it is the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina, “the holiest place of the Muslims,” that most outrages Bin Ladin — this, he says, is why he has declared a jihad on the United States.

Is this the man behind the carnage in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam? So far, no evidence links Bin Ladin to the bombings. And there are plenty of other possible suspects to consider — including a Somali and a handful of Sudanese and Iraqis recently rounded up for questioning in Tanzania. However, the coordination with which the two attacks were carried out suggests a well-financed and experienced group — the kind often connected to the Middle East.

And, among those with such connections, Bin Ladin is certainly a credible suspect. Last February, as the United States seemed primed to launch strikes against Iraq, Bin Ladin joined with several other leading Islamist radicals, speaking on behalf of the World Islamic Front, in calling on Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies–civilian and military.” Significantly, the CIA Counterterrorist Center issued a statement saying: “These fatwas are the first from these groups that explicitly justify attacks on American civilians anywhere in the world … this is the first religious ruling sanctifying such attacks.”

Then, on May 26, Bin Ladin held a press conference that, in the words of a State Department advisory, implied “that some type of terrorist action could be mounted within the next several weeks.” And on June 21, according to Abdul-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, members of the groups that signed the fatwa met in Peshawar, Pakistan, to set upon an undisclosed plan of action. In a June advisory on the fatwa, the State Department affirmed that “we take these threats seriously, and the U.S. is increasing security at many U.S. government facilities in the Middle East and South Asia.” Africa was not mentioned.

That Bin Ladin’s call to holy war is greeted with such gravity is a measure of his unique status in the world of terrorism. His was a privileged youth — the kind you would expect for the seventeenth of 52 children born to the founder of the Bin Ladin’s Group, a Saudi Arabian construction company worth an estimated $5 billion. Though by the tender age of 16, Bin Ladin had already become involved with Islamist political groups in his native Saudi Arabia, it was the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 that radicalized him. Only days after it began, Bin Ladin, then in his early twenties, flew to Afghanistan to help organize the first Islamist guerrilla fighters — young idealists like himself who flocked to the war from all over the Muslim world.

Bin Ladin eventually became a key leader of these “Afghan Arabs,” whose numbers reached about 20,000. He financed housing for them in Peshawar, Pakistan. He bankrolled the Ma’sadat Al-Ansar military camp in Afghanistan, which trained both local and international volunteers. And Bin Ladin himself fought in many battles, including the 1989 siege of Jalalabad — a key contest with the Soviets. The USSR’s subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan made a profound impression: as Bin Ladin said in the CNN interview, “In this jihad the biggest benefit was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed.”

Bin Ladin returned to Saudi Arabia a hero. But he quickly became disillusioned with the ruling House of Saud, which he characterizes as spendthrift, corrupt, insufficiently Islamic, and — most objectionable of all — subordinate to the United States. Soon he was at odds with the authorities, and in 1991 he and his immediate family — that is, his four wives and an unknown number of children — left for Sudan.

Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front (NIF) gave Bin Ladin a warm welcome, but it never quite trusted him, assigning military intelligence agents to keep tabs on their Saudi guest. Ironically, after working closely with Bin Ladin for four years, one of these agents — who has since left his post — became an admirer. According to the ex-agent, for a time Bin Ladin and the NIF “had a convergence of interest.” The NIF has tried to expand the reach of political Islam into black Africa, and it has backed Islamist and even Christian extremist groups against the neighboring states of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda.

Bin Ladin, however, may have even bigger aspirations. According to the ex-Sudanese agent, “his strategy is to form an international organization to head toward what he calls the Khalifa.” An important concept in Islam, the Khalifa refers to a leader chosen by the most knowledgeable Muslims to lead the umma, or worldwide Muslim community. A Bin Ladin associate suggests it’s unlikely that Bin Ladin aspires to be the Khalifa himself. Instead, he hopes to create the conditions for the Khalifa to emerge by uniting the most radical Islamist forces.

Toward this end, beginning in 1990, even before his own arrival, Bin Ladin brought hundreds of veterans from the Afghan war to Sudan. These holy warriors first came to help the NIF fight non-Muslim rebels in southern Sudan. Later they made up Bin Ladin’s personal security force. According to the State Department, they also helped run at least three military training camps that Bin Ladin created and financed.

Bin Ladin’s Sudanese camps soon became important centers for international terrorists. According to the ex-Sudanese agent, groups came to train there from Algeria, Tunisia, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Philippines, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Somalia. In his CNN interview, Bin Ladin said that he has also dispatched his own followers to equally far-flung places — Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, and Somalia — while financing extremist groups in Algeria and Egypt.

The first successful attack on Americans that Bin Ladin is believed to have been involved in came in Somalia in 1993 — where a total of 30 U.S. soldiers were killed in several incidents. In his interview with CNN, Bin Ladin said that some of the men involved in at least one of those operations were “Arab holy warriors who were in Afghanistan” — men who looked to him as a leader. The ex-Sudanese intelligence agent confirms this account, adding that the men had been trained at Bin Ladin’s Sudanese camps and that “they set up a base in Somalia and smuggled weapons to it from Ethiopia.” Does the United States believe bin Ladin was responsible? Philip Wilcox, the State Department’s then-chief counter-terrorism official, has said, “We take him at his word.” And Wilcox has added that there is solid evidence that bin Ladin forces also attempted to bomb U.S. servicemen in Yemen while they were on their way to the Somalia operation. A State Department report even claims bin Ladin admitted to the bombing, which killed two people but no U.S. soldiers.

U.S. officials also have circumstantial evidence tying bin Ladin to another famous act of anti-American terrorism: the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center. After that attack, its mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he lived in a house for Islamic radicals that bin Ladin funded. In 1996, Yousef was convicted of a separate plot to blow up several U.S. passenger planes. U.S. officials say Yousef’s convicted conspirator in that plot, Wali Khan Amin Shah, served under Bin Ladin in Afghanistan.

In his CNN interview, Bin Ladin said he had “no connection” to the World Trade Center bombing but did say that Sheik Rahman is a widely respected Muslim cleric against whom the United States “fabricated” what he called “a baseless case.” Bin Ladin also insisted he had nothing to do with the bombing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia at Riyadh in 1995 and Dhahran in 1996 — though, again, he expressed admiration for those who carried out the attacks. All the same, U.S. officials would like to talk to Bin Ladin about both of these incidents as well.

Of course, at the moment it is the African bombings that are uppermost in the minds of U.S. officials. And one key reason to take a close look at Bin Ladin is that his followers are no strangers to either Kenya or Tanzania. According to a source within the Saudi opposition movement, for the past three years Bin Ladin has had a “significant presence” in both nations. What’s more, this source says, two years ago one of Bin Ladin’s key lieutenants drowned in Lake Victoria — which lies within the borders of both Kenya and Tanzania. That account is confirmed by a U.S. official who says that Bin Ladin’s “head military guy” died there in a ferry accident in May 1996. The U.S. official says that the man, a former Egyptian army officer who went by the nom de guerre of Abu Abaida al Panjshiri, gained combat experience in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

To be sure, it’s highly possible that, even if Bin Ladin is the behind the embassy bombings, he may do no more than express his “admiration” for the operation — not out of modesty but out of necessity. In 1996, the Sudanese government, under heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and the United States, finally expelled Bin Ladin. Afghanistan, which is largely ruled by the Taliban, a movement of religious-students-turned-warriors who share Bin Ladin’s extreme interpretations of Islam, may be his last refuge. And the Taliban, who are hoping for international recognition for their regime, know that enthusiastic support for Bin Ladin will only hurt their cause. So they have cut a deal with Bin Ladin: he can stay, but only so long as he promises not to participate in “political” activities in other countries.

But, although Bin Ladin has so far remained silent on the African bombings, his name has already emerged in connection with other, less circumspect groups. One organization that has come forward to claim responsibility for the bombing, the Liberation Army for the Islamic Sanctuaries, has cited the same objective that motivates Bin Ladin: namely, the desire to drive the United States from all Muslim lands, especially in the Arabian peninsula. The group explicitly told the Cairo Arabic daily al-Hayat that it was partly inspired by Bin Ladin. (Of course, all claims of responsibility in such cases should be greeted with a grain of salt.)

Bin Ladin is also associated with the one group that gave warning of attacks before the bombings. A week prior to the blasts, Egypt’s Islamic Jihad told an Arabic newspaper in London that it would strike back at the United States in retaliation for compelling Albania to extradite three Egyptian Islamic volunteers back to Egypt. The Islamic Jihad organization is one of the groups that Bin Ladin helped train in Sudan. And it joined with his organization in both the fatwa calling for retaliation against the United States last May and the meeting to discuss a more concrete plan of action last June.

Ultimately, it may turn out that Bin Ladin served not as a direct organizer of the African embassy bombings but as the inspiration for them. Bin Ladin’s message and example are reverberating throughout the Arab world. As Al-Quds Al Arabi editor Abdul-Bari Atwan explained it in a CNN interview, “Younger generations, especially those Islamic fundamentalists, are looking for a hero, and Mr. Bin Ladin fits the bill.”

One Man’s Private Jihad

August 18, 1998/in The Village Voice/by Frank Smyth & Jason Vest

He became a potentially hostile blip on the U.S. intelligence radar screen as early as 1991, when he arrived in Sudan. He said he had come to build roads, but according to a former Sudanese intelligence agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity, he also set up pan-Islamist camps where recruits from countries like Bosnia, Chechnya, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Somalia were given military training.

His blip intensified in the early 1990s, when his name came up in the international manhunt for Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani who shot up the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters. It grew stronger still in 1996, during the probe of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. He would call the perpetrators of that act ”heroes.”

Though both CNN and ABC have interviewed him in the past 17 months, it’s only in the wake of the August 7 East African embassy bombings that the name Osama bin Laden has become widely known to Americans. In the worldwide Muslim community, however, bin Ladin has been a controversial figure for several years. Some, like his followers, now venerate him with the title ”sheik,” even though he is not a cleric. Others, like Salah Obdidallah of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, consider him a criminal who kills and ”hides behind a beautiful religion.” (The New York office of the FBI tends toward Obdidallah’s view; according to reports, Gotham-based agents are arguing they should direct the Kenya and Tanzania cases based on substantial but uncorroborated information tying bin Ladin to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as the thwarted plan to blow up other city buildings and tunnels.)

Though the government and the fourth estate have a notorious history of jumping the gun when it comes to blaming ”Middle East radicals” for big explosions (recall Oklahoma City and TWA Flight 800), fingering bin Ladin for a role in the embassy bombings is by no means unreasonable — and not just because one of the reportedly confessed bombers has admitted to being a follower. Not only does bin Laden have the motive, means, and opportunity, but in light of his personal jihad, the bombings are thoroughly understandable. While bin Ladin is neither a mainstream Muslim nor the paragon of sanity (one consulting CIA psychologist’s assessment holds that he is a ”malignant narcissist” who views people as objects either to be killed or protected), if he is responsible for the bombings, it’s imperative, Middle East experts say, that his actions and motivations be examined not just in terms of a terrorist threat, but in the context of current Arabian politics, U.S. foreign policy, and Islamic theology.

”If this was done by bin Ladin — who is definitely a fringe character — part of what we should be focusing on is what the bombings are reflective of in the Islamic world vis-a-vis the U.S. right now,” says Sam Husseini, former spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. ”I think these bombings will cost him many people’s sympathies. But before August 7, I think he was beginning to achieve folk-hero status in some parts of the Middle East, because he’s doing what no one else is — standing up to the U.S. over some very legitimate grievances.” And the fact that bin Ladin has successfully stood up to and beat another superpower — the USSR, in Afghanistan — gives him a resolve not necessarily found in other terrorists.

One cannot understand bin Ladin without understanding his relationship to his native Saudi Arabia — arguably the center of a concentric circle of Islamist angst. In various interviews, bin Laden has described himself not as a terrorist, but as a defender of the true faith against a corrupt Saudi monarchy that has committed sacrilege by allowing an (infidel) U.S. army presence in sacred Muslim land. ”After the Americans entered the Holy Land, many emotions were roused in the Muslim world — more than we have seen before,” bin Ladin recently told ABC News. Indeed, it has not been lost on terrorist experts — and Bin Laden watchers in particular — that the bombings came on the anniversary of the first U.S. Desert Shield troop deployment inside Saudi Arabia.

While many secular Saudis don’t necessarily share bin Ladin’s angry zeal, they do simmer with resentment at the Saudi elite’s hypocrisy and the American presence, says Scott Armstrong, a national security expert who has conversed with figures sympathetic to bin Ladin. And they have a point. As one former State Department foreign service officer candidly characterized the situation in a 1996 interview, ”The role of the U.S. military presence there is to make sure the Saudis can defend themselves in a pinch, but still be reliant on us for real defense. [Saudi Arabia] is a strategic position we don’t want to withdraw from.” The officer also said that, despite public pronouncements, many Saudi elites privately flout Islamic rules against indulging in Western vices such as alcohol and Baywatch.

To bin Ladin this amounts to a sellout and blasphemy by the Saudi upper crust. That same ruling class, in one of the many ironies of bin Laden’s life, have indirectly financed his terrorist operations. The 17th of 52 children sired by Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnate, Osama controls $250 million of the $5 billion Bin Laden family kitty — money made largely by building homes, offices, and mosques for the House of Saud. But since the age of 16, when he became involved with radical religious groups, bin Laden has been less interested in making money than using it in defense of his concept of Islam.

Truly radicalized by the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, bin Ladin, then 22, became one of the early founders and financiers of what became the Mujahadeen, the Afghan rebellion. Not only did he build safe houses, roads, and tunnel complexes for these insurgents, but he bankrolled training camps and arms purchases. And he did it all alongside another group pursuing its own jihad against the Soviets — the Central Intelligence Agency, which is now charged with tracking him down.

Not content to merely be an underwriter of the resistance, bin Ladin also fought in some particularly fierce battles, including the siege of Jalabad, which marked the end for the Soviets in Afghanistan. This was, for bin Ladin, a defining and empowering moment, which cements his faith to this day. As he told CNN, it destroyed ”the myth” of the invincible superpower.

Having helped vanquish the Soviet colossus, he returned home a celebrated hero and leader of the opposition movement to the House of Saud, charging the regime with moral turpitude. But when the Saudis allowed U.S. troops to deploy in the land of the Two Most Holy Places — Mecca and Medina — bin Ladin abandoned Saudi Arabia for a more like-minded country: Sudan, where the radical National Islamic Front (NIF) had taken control in 1989.

Even before he moved to Sudan, bin Ladin was already backing the NIF. In 1990, he arranged for hundreds of Mujahadeen veterans to travel to Sudan in order to fight alongside the NIF against non-Muslim guerrillas. According to an ex-Sudanese intelligence agent who knew bin Laden, hundreds more came over in the next few years. Many became instructors at training camps he financed. During his five years in Sudan, bin Ladin’s camps trained hundreds of recruits from places like Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Somalia. The course of instruction, says the ex-agent, focused on three major areas. One was the fabrication of travel documents. The second was low-tech covert communications — from basic encryption to use of invisible ink. In light of recent events, however, it is the third area that may be most interesting: the use of small arms and explosives.

According to the ex-agent, bin Ladin dropped $15 million on one shipment of Chinese and Iranian arms — as well as explosives from Czechoslovakia, most likely Semtex. While several terrorist outfits have access to the plastic explosive, which is believed to have been used in the embassy bombings, bin Ladin was much more likely to use it because of his multinational intelligence network. According to the ex-agent, while in Sudan, bin Ladin set up an ”advisory council” of at least 43 separate Islamist groups. Many of them are active worldwide, and bin Ladin admitted on CNN that he has sent Islamist combatants to places as far-flung as Bosnia and Tajikistan.

During his years in Sudan, the government came under increased international criticism and pressure. By 1996 the U.S. was indirectly backing anti-Muslim rebels in the southern and eastern parts of the country. The Clinton administration also pressured Sudan to expel bin Ladin. But instead of couching its criticism of Sudan in terms of its human rights record, which is reviled the world over, the U.S.’s approach reinforced bin Ladin’s view that it was gunning for Islam.

At about the same time the Saudi government started to bring its financial and political power to bear on the Sudanese NIF to at least rein bin Laden in, if not expel him. ”When they insisted initially that I should keep my mouth shut, I decided to look for a land in which I can breathe a pure, free air to perform my duty in enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong,” bin Laden told CNN last year. His destination: his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan, now controlled by the ultra-conservative Taliban. He remains holed-up there to this day, still directing various Islamist military activities.

In interviews with both Arabic-and English-speaking journalists, bin Laden has often cited the U.S. approach to Sudan as an example of the assault on global Islam — a situation, he says, that justifies his sending followers to fight in such far-flung places as Chechnya, Bosnia, and Somalia. He also frequently condemns the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq, as well as U.S. support of Israel. ”His main focus is Saudi Arabia, but he doesn’t have enough Saudis or Afghans to accomplish what he wants,” says Armstrong. ”He wants to see Islamist states left alone to be Islamist states. And within the Islamist world, he’s willing to join in any coalitions to get critical mass.”

The extent of his involvement, however, varies, and just how active a role he takes in certain actions isn’t entirely clear. In the case of a 1995 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, bombing — in which five American servicemen were killed — a federal grand jury in Manhattan continues to probe his suspected role. And he was never indicted in the World Trade Center bombing, though several current and former intelligence officials indicate they strongly suspect he had some connection. One of the convicted bombers, for instance, fled to Pakistan after the incident, where he hid out in a house for Islamist radicals that bin Laden had funded. Additionally, bin Ladin and Wali Khan, a convicted conspirator on another bombing, are ”good friends” according to bin Ladin, who fought alongside Khan in Afghanistan.

As far as other actions are concerned, ”Someone might suggest something and bin Ladin might say, ‘yeah,”’ says a former CIA Middle East analyst. ”A lot of these [terrorist acts] are cooked up ad hoc. And while I believe some of bin Laden’s communications have been intercepted, part of what makes him so dangerous is that he’s so low-tech and his people are so scattered. Communications for the planning of this were probably innocuous channels–letters, innocuous-sounding phone calls from relatives’ houses.”

The apparent confession in the embassy bombings appears to have clarified things considerably, however. According to Monday’s Washington Post, Mohammed Sadiq Howaida — picked up for using a phony passport on a flight in from Kenya — has not only confessed to a role in the bombing, but has told authorities he was acting for bin Ladin. Larry Barcella, an ex-assistant U.S. attorney who specialized in terrorist cases, predicts relatively quick indictments for bin Ladin and his associates.

There is, however, the issue of apprehending bin Laden, whose remote location in Taliban territory does not lend itself to easy warrant service. In the meantime, national security expert Armstrong offers a suggestion: ”The CIA might do better to figure out what the U.S. could do to support our friends without making regimes so ostentatiously corrupt that they end up giving credence to bin Ladin.”

Still Seeing Red: The CIA Fosters Death Squads in Colombia

June 3, 1998/in The Progressive/by Frank Smyth

Back in 1989, the CIA built its first counter-narcotics center in the basement of its Directorate of Operations headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Since then, the newly renamed “crime and narcotics center” has increased four-fold, says CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. She says she cannot comment about any specific counter- drug operations, except to say that the agency is now conducting them worldwide.

The CIA was established in 1947 as a frontline institution against the Soviet Union. Today, nine years after the Berlin Wall fell, the agency is seeking a new purpose to justify its $26.7 billion annual subsidy. Besides the crime and narcotics center, the CIA now runs a counterterrorism center, a center to stymie the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and even an ecology center to monitor global warming and weather patterns, including El Nino.

George J. Tenet, the Clinton Administration’s new Director of Central Intelligence, recently told Congress the United States faces new threats in “this post-Cold War world” that are “uniquely challenging for U.S. interests.”

But the CIA remains a Cold War institution. Many officers, especially within the clandestine operations wing, still see communists behind every door. They maintain warm relationships with rightist military forces worldwide that are engaging in widespread human-rights abuses. These ties conflict with the agency’s purported goal of fighting drugs, since many of the rightist allies are themselves involved in the drug trade.

Take Colombia. In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence networks there in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads. These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights, journalists, and other suspected “subversives.” The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs.

Thousands of people have been killed by the death squads, and the killings go on. In April, one of Colombia’s foremost human-rights lawyers, Eduardo Umana Mendoza, was murdered in his office. Umana’s clients included leaders of Colombia’s state oil workers’ union. Reuters estimated that 10,000 people attended his funeral in Bogota.

Human-rights groups suspect that Umana’s murder may have been carried out by members of the security forces supporting or operating in unison with paramilitary forces. At the funeral, Daniel Garcia Pena, a Colombian government official who was a friend of Umana’s, told journalists that before his death Umana had alerted authorities that state security officials along with security officers from the state oil company were planning to kill him.

The killings are mounting at a terrible pace. In February, a death squad mowed down another leading human-rights activist, Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo. He had pointed a finger at the military and some politicians for sponsoring death squads.

“There is a clear, coordinated strategy of targeting anyone involved in the defense of human rights,” says Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International. “Every statement of unconditional support by U.S. lawmakers only encourages these kinds of attacks.”

A new debate is taking place today between human-rights groups and the Clinton Administration over U.S. aid to Colombia. The Clinton Administration has escalated military aid to Colombia to a record $136 million annually, making Colombia the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in this hemisphere. Now the administration is considering even more, including helicopter gunships.

Colombia did not figure prominently on the world stage back in late 1990 and early 1991. Germany was in the process of reunification, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and El Salvador was negotiating an end to its long civil war. But the Bush Administration was not ignoring Colombia. It was increasing the number of U.S. Army Special Forces (or Green Beret) advisers there. And the CIA was increasing the number of agents in its station in Bogota — which soon became the biggest station in Latin America.

“There was a very big debate going on [over how to allocate] money for counter-narcotics operations in Colombia,” says retired Colonel James S. Roach Jr., the U.S. military attaché and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) country liaison in Bogota in the early 1990s. “The U.S. was looking for a way to try to help. But if you’re not going to be combatants [yourselves], you have to find something to do.”

The United States formed an inter-agency commission to study Colombia’ s military intelligence system. The team included representatives of the U.S. embassy’s Military Advisory Group in Bogota, the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, the DIA, and the CIA, says Roach, who was among the military officers representing the DIA. The commission, according to a 1996 letter from the Defense Department to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, recommended changes in Colombia’ s military intelligence networks to make them “more efficient and effective.”

In May 1991, Colombia completely reorganized its military intelligence networks “based on the recommendations made by the commission of U.S. military advisers,” according to the secret Colombian reorganization order, which Human Rights Watch made public in 1996. The U.S. commission of advisers backed the reorganization plan ostensibly as part of the drug war. Yet the secret Colombian order itself made no mention anywhere in its sixteen pages or corresponding appendices about gathering intelligence against drug traffickers. Instead, the order instructed the new intelligence networks to focus on leftist guerrillas or “the armed subversion.”

The forty-one new intelligence networks created by the order directed their energies toward unarmed civilians suspected of supporting the guerrillas. One of these intelligence networks, in the oil refinery town of Barrancabermeja in Colombia’s strife-torn Magdalena Valley, assassinated at least fifty-seven civilians in the first two years of operation. Victims included the president, vice president, and treasurer of the local transportation workers union, two leaders of the local oil workers union, one leader of a local peasant workers union, two human-rights monitors, and one journalist.

Colonel Roach says the Defense Department never intended the intelligence networks to foster death squads. But Roach says he can’t speak for the CIA, which was more involved in the intelligence reorganization and even financed the new networks directly.

“The CIA set up the clandestine nets on their own,” says Roach. “They had a lot of money. It was kind of like Santa Claus had arrived.”

The secret Colombian order instructed the military to maintain plausible deniability from the networks and their crimes. Retired military officers and other civilians were to act as clandestine liaisons between the networks and the military commanders. All open communications “must be avoided.” There “must be no written contracts with informants or civilian members of the network; everything must be agreed to orally.” And the entire chain of command “will be covert and compartmentalized, allowing for the necessary flexibility to cover targets of interest.”

Facts about the new intelligence networks became known only after four former agents in Barrancabermeja began testifying in 1993 about the intelligence network there. What compelled them to come forward? Each said the military was actively trying to kill them in order to cover up the network and its crimes. By then the military had “disappeared” four other ex-agents in an attempt to keep the network and its operations secret.

Since the military was already trying to kill them, the agents decided that testifying about the network and its crimes might help keep them alive. Saulo Segura was one ex-agent who took this gamble. But rather than prosecuting his superiors over his and others’ testimony, Colombia’s judicial system charged and imprisoned Segura. In a 1996 interview in La Modelo, Bogota’s maximum-security jail, Segura told me he hadn’t killed anyone and that his job within the network was limited to renting office space and handling money. Segura then glanced about nervously before adding, “I hope they don’t kill me.”

Two months later, on Christmas Eve, Segura was murdered inside his cellblock. His murder remains unsolved; the whereabouts of the other three ex-agents is unknown. No Colombian officers have been prosecuted for ordering the Barrancabermeja crimes.

In 1994, Amnesty International accused the Pentagon of allowing anti-drug aid to be diverted to counterinsurgency operations that lead to human-rights abuses. U.S. officials including General Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton Administration drug czar who was then in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, publicly denied it. But back at the office, McCaffrey ordered an internal audit. It found that thirteen out of fourteen Colombian army units that Amnesty had specifically cited for abuses had previously received either U.S. training or arms. Amnesty made these documents public in 1996 (full disclosure: I provided the internal U.S. documents to Amnesty; Winifred Tate and I provided the secret Colombian order to Human Rights Watch).

Colombian military officers, along with some of their supporters in the United States, say the line between counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations in Colombia is blurry, as Colombia’s leftist guerrillas are more involved today than ever before in drug trafficking.

Indeed, they are. For years, about two-thirds of the forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and about half the forces of the National Liberation Army (ELN) have been involved in the drug trade, mainly protecting drug crops, according to both U.S. intelligence and leftist sources.

Colombia’s rightist paramilitary groups, however, are even more involved in the drug trade, and they have been for a decade. Back in 1989, Colombia’s civilian government outlawed all paramilitary organizations after a government investigation had found that the Medellin drug cartel led by the late Pablo Escobar had taken over the largest ones.

At the time, Escobar and his associates were fiercely resisting U.S. pressure on the Colombian government to make them stand trial in the United States on trafficking charges. They took control of Colombia’s strongest paramilitaries and used them to wage a terrorist campaign against the state. These same paramilitaries, based in the Magdalena Valley, were behind a wave of violent crimes, including the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers. Investigators concluded that Israeli, British, and other mercenaries, led by Israeli Reserve Army Lieutenant Colonel Yair Klein, had trained the perpetrators in such techniques. In February, Klein and three other former Israeli reserve officers, along with two Colombians, were indicted in absentia for their alleged involvement in these crimes.

The CIA bears some responsibility for the proliferation of drug trafficking in the Magdalena Valley since it supported rightist counterinsurgency forces who run drugs. But the CIA has also helped combat drug trafficking in Colombia. In other words, different units within the agency have pursued contrary goals.

The CIA’s most notable success in the drug war was the 1995-1996 operations that, with the help of the DEA, apprehended all top seven leaders of Colombia’s Cali drug cartel. One of those apprehended was Henry Loaiza, also known as “The Scorpion,” a top Colombian paramilitary leader. He secretly collaborated with the CIA-backed intelligence networks to carry out assassinations against suspected leftists.

A young, techno-minded CIA team led the Cali bust. Heading up the team was a woman. “I’m just a secretary,” she protested when I called her on the phone at the time.

But despite her denials, she was not unappreciated. On September 19, 1995, a courier delivered a white box to her at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. I happened to be in the lobby at the time. She opened the box to find roses inside. They had been sent by the head of Colombia’s National Police, General Rosso Jose Serrano.

Most other agency counter-drug operations, however, have yielded few breakthroughs.

The net result of CIA involvement in Colombia has not been to slow down the drug trade. Mainly, the agency has fueled a civil war that has taken an appalling toll on civilians.

Colombia is not the only place where these two elements of the CIA nave clashed with each other.

In Peru, the CIA coordinates all of its counter-drug efforts through the office of the powerful Intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — even though DEA special agents have produced no fewer than forty-nine different intelligence reports about Montesinos and his suspected narcotics smuggling. It is no wonder that agency counter-drug efforts in Peru have failed.

In Guatemala, the agency has played a strong role in both counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations. As in Peru, the agency has worked with Guatemala’s office of military intelligence, even though DEA special agents have formally accused a whopping thirty-one Guatemalan military officers of drug trafficking. Despite the CIA’s efforts, not even one suspected officer has been tried.

The Clinton Administration finally cut off CIA counterinsurgency aid to Guatemala in 1995 after revelations that an agency asset, Guatemalan Army Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, had been involved in the murder of Michael DeVine, a U.S. innkeeper, as well as in the murder of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leftist guerrilla who was married to the Harvard-educated lawyer, Jennifer Harbury. But the Clinton Administration has allowed the CIA to continue providing counter-drug aid to Guatemala.

Most of the major drug syndicates so far uncovered by the DEA have enjoyed direct links to Guatemalan military officers. One of the largest syndicates, exposed in 1996, “reached many parts of the military,” according to the State Department.

This year, the State Department reports, “Guatemala is the preferred location in Central America for storage and transshipment of South American cocaine destined for the United States via Mexico.”

Mexico is the next stop on the CIA counter-narcotics train. The fact that Mexico’s former top counter-drug officer, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was himself recently indicted for drug trafficking, raises the same old question: What is U.S. policy really all about? Before Gutierrez was busted, the DEA thought he was dirty, while U.S. officials, like General McCaffrey, still sporting Cold War lenses, thought he was clean and vouched for him shortly before his indictment.

Some DEA special agents question the CIA’s priorities in counter-drug programs. Human rights groups remain suspicious of the same programs for different reasons.

“There is no magic line dividing counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency operations,” says Salinas of Amnesty International.

“Given the current deterioration of human rights in Mexico,” an expanded role in counter-drug operations by the United States “could lead to a green light for further violations.”

Testifying before Congress in March, the CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz finally addressed allegations that the CIA once backed Cold War allies like the Nicaraguan contras even though they ran drugs. Hitz admitted that, at the very least, there have been “instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”

What CIA officials have yet to admit is that the agency is still doing the same thing today.