ustxtxb_obs_1986_12_19_50_00012-00000_000.pdf

convention in Dallas may or may not have been aware of the seamy history of the World Anti-Communist League, but either way, they had fallen in with a bad crowd. Just how bad is made clear by Inside the League, the result of a two-year investigation by the brothers Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. The book compiles more information than the reader may actually want to know about the World AntiCommunist League, and about the international social conditions from which ultra-right groups have sprung. The reporting is comprehensive and the tone is even-keel. The book is never shrill, but seldom subtle. From the very first pages, the reader is plunged into the world of brutal, seemingly random murders. Nine leftist lawyers in Spain , are executed in an apartment where they had held a reunion. The Uruguayan’ ambassador in Paraguay is gunned down by a Croatian, who thinks he is shooting a Yugoslav diplomat. A Guatemalan reformist is chased through the streets of his country and killed by machine gun fire. A Chilean exile is assassinated on a sidewalk in Rome. The authors then leave us with a report on the 1979 WACL convention in Paraguay. Men connected with each one of the brutal murders and in one case, the actual assassin were all present at that convention. “With the creation of the World Anti-Communist League, there came into existence a worldwide network of fascism,” they write. It is an international fraternity of counter-terror, and one that has received, on more than one occasion, an approving nod from Ronald Reagan. With that introduction comes a torrent of historical detail, about Romanian, Ukrainian, and Croatian Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, and how they went into post-war exile, often escaping with the help of the Catholic Church or U.S. intelligence services, to Canada, Paraguay, or the United States. “There are living relics scattered in every corner of the globe,” according to the authors. Romanians run the Iron Guard out of Madrid. Croatians kindle the memory of the Ustashi fascists who sided with Hitler and helped to do away with perhaps a million Serbs. Ukrainians started the AntiBolshevik League of Nations, which is still a strong bloc in the World Anti-Communist League. The authors not only detail the current involvements of the Eastern Europeans with the League, but go into some depth about the actual collaborations of such leaders while Hitler was in power. Similarly, the reader is introduced to South Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese fascist sympathizers active with the League. The many links with Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church are documented. The extremism of the Mexican Tecos movement, which has tended to fixate on the “secret power of Jewry and Freemasonry,” has been a longstanding feature of WACL’s political personality. Not that these elements haven’t been a source of concern to the “respectable” anti-communists in the League in fact, fault lines have occasionally developed over how much tolerance to extend to the farthest of the far-out. The Tecos, for example, got to be= a problem. In the early 1970s an internal investigator for WACL looked into charges of antiSemitism among the Mexican members and found the charges warranted. In 1973 the Americans met in Washington to decide what to do about it. ‘The meeting, according to the authors, “was a study in cowardice.” After much debate over whether to declare that “anti-Semitism is incompatible with anti-communism,” Reed Irvine \(later of proposed a compromise resolution: “Anti-Semitism is incompatible with enlightened civilized conduct and we condemn the communist states for the practice of it.” In the mid-’70s, as the Mexicans stayed on, such strains helped bring about the collapse of the American chapter of the League, and many of the activists went off to concentrate on New Right politics in America. Europeans also squabbled over the involvement of leaders some felt were too closely tied with the Nazis. But while some .members of the League were redrawing World War II battle lines, the fronts offering actual anti-communist combat were in the Third World, especially . in Central America. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 anti-communists took heart and “a new, more action-oriented and dangerous League took shape.” An important factor in the revitalized League was the formation of a new American chapter, the United States Council for World Freedom, under the leadership of retired Major General John K. Singlaub. Singlaub is an advocate of “unconventional warfare,” by which he means, in his words, “low-intensity actions, such as sabotage, terrorism, assassination and guerrilla warfare.” The general is a veteran of such special skills, having played a part in the Operation Phoenix counter-terror program during the Vietnam War. His contacts reach around the globe, into the U.S. military, and, as was disclosed last spring, have reached right into the basement of the White House, where he received advice from the recently banished Lt. Col. Oliver North on coordinating the private aid-tothe-contras network. As chairman of WACL in 1985, Singlaub used his contacts with wealthy Texans and Californians to raise money that Congress was temporarily unwilling to spend on foreign covert wars. He also set about on a “repackaging” of the somewhat tarnished image of the League, holding pres conferences to openly defend “unconventional warfare,” and arguing that the most extreme elements of the League, notably the Mexican-dominated Latin American affiliate, had been purged. The second half of Inside the League, which documents continuing ties to Central American death squads, strongly suggests that there is less reason than ever to extend legitimacy to the “new” anti-communist league. Much of the information here is the result of Jon Lee Anderson’s bold interviews with admitted death squad leaders, who agreed to talk to him anonymously. While working for columnist Jack Anderson \(to whom he is the existence of death squads in Honduras. His source explained, “We wanted to do the things the police couldn’t legally do,” and went on to detail the connections among death squads in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. “Our movements are coordinated out of Mexico. That’s where CAL is located,” Anderson’s source said. CAL was the acronym for the Latin American AntiColumnist Confederation, the affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League. The League claims that CAL is no longer a part of WACL, but many of the members of CAL are now members of the new Latin American affiliate. In arguing that strong ties to death squads remain, the authors discuss the case of Mario Sandoval Alarcon of Guatemala. Sandoval has a long history with the National Liberation Movement, which calls itself “the party of organized violence”in Guatemala. According to the authors, Sandoval is “the mastermind of his nation’s death squads, which have killed tens of thousands of people in the past two decades.” This assessment is based on the word of several sources, from American diplomats to Guatemalan army members to other death squad members, who call -Sandoval “The G9dfather.” Yet Sandoval has been a prominent participant in affairs of the World Anti 12 DECEMBER 19, 1986