Olivers Army By Jonathan Marshall City Paper, July 17, 1987, 14-19.

Before Americans stampede to elect Oliver North president in 1988, they should take another look at the charismatic and much-decorated lieutenant colonel. He's not just a fearless soldier ready to duke it out with Abu Nidal or fall on his spear to save his superiors. He's also the man who, in the name of "Project Democracy," built a far-flung covert network staffed by notorious terrorists and financed by the international narcotics traffic. You won't learn about that side of North from the televised Iran-Contra hearings. The select committee is looking for its smoking gun in the wrong place: the White House. Over in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, the gunpowder smells stronger. Legislators there recently heard testimony that one of North's top field operators, a man who met repeatedly with Vice President George Bush and members of his staff, moved $10 million in cocaine money to the contras. The same operative, himself a minor terrorist of some repute, sponsored and protected in Central America another drug-linked terrorist whose grisly deeds put the exploits of most Lebanese-based killers to shame. The subject of that hearing was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and former CIA agent stationed--by arrangement of Bush's top national security aide--at the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, where he oversaw logistics for the contra air supply operation. The testimony against him came from a specialist in money laundering who is now serving 35 years in a federal penitentiary. The $10 million, according to the witness, came from the "Medellin cartel," the Colombian drug syndicate responsible for as much as three-quarters of the cocaine distributed in the United States. The cartel did not donate to Rodriguez out of political sympathy for the contras. It was buying protection from agencies of the U.S. government. Rodriguez probably asked nothing for himself. A committed anti-communist, he even complained on the contras' behalf to North and Bush's aides about scandalous overcharging on weapons sales to the resistance by retired Gen. Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, co-managers of the Iran arms fund in Switzerland. Rodriguez was not one to mix personal profit with politics. But he was one to mix drugs and politics. The $10 million cocaine payoff through Rodriguez was not as aberrant as it might seem. After he left the Agency in the late 1970s, Rodriguez teamed up in business with an arms merchant active in Central America, Gerard Latchinian. In late 1984, Latchinian was arrested in Miami for taking part in a cocaine-financed plot to murder the president of Honduras. Latchinian and his coconspirators apparently aimed to restore to power a disgraced former Army general who had exceptionally close relations with the CIA. Oliver North intervened unsuccessfully with the State Department to save the head of that plot from justice. Rodriguez was also inclined to mix terrorism with politics. Although today just another middle-aged counterinsurgency specialist, he was once a dashing undercover warrior for the CIA. Trained in sabotage, explosives and psychological warfare, Rodriguez infiltrated Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs landing to create havoc behind enemy lines. From bases in Costa Rica in 1963 and 1964, Rodriguez blasted away at Cuban economic targets. In his most notorious operation, he set ablaze a Spanish cargo vessel carrying toys, garlic and cork to Cuba. His commandos killed three ship's officers including the captain and wounded 17 sailors. But if the proud and stiffly erect Rodriguez who appeared before the Iran-Contra committee embodied two of the dirtiest sides to Oliver North's operation, he was not alone. The real scandal beginning to emerge is how the White House recruited an entire underground army from the ranks of Cuban exiles who terrorized the Western hemisphere and flooded the world with drugs.

The Posada-Cubana Airlines Connection The Iran-Contra committee showed no interest in the background of Rodriguez or his associates. It portrayed him as a man of principle, concerned by excessive gouging of the contras and by North's decision to bring into the contra operation several associates of Edwin Wilson, the former CIA agent imprisoned for supplying explosives and terrorist training to Libya. Thus when Rodriguez blurted out a startling admission of his own support for a fugitive international terrorist, the committee passed over it with almosst studied silence. Senator William Cohen, R-Maine, asked the triggering question. What about Ramon Medina, one of the Cubans based in El Salvador who made the contra supply operation tick? "Ramon Medina is Luis Posada Carriles, a friend of mine," Rodriguez answered. "And you know the story that we escaped from a country." Cohen apparently didn't. "I'm sorry?" "Well," Rodriguez replied, "you know the story that he was an individual who escaped from the country. He was a man that I considered honorable, an individual that, for one reason or another, didn't have a proper legal procedure where he was, that during 10 years, he has been waiting for a trial . . . and I helped him. I am the only one responsible for him to be there, nobody else, and I don't regret what I did, sir." Confused or uninterested, Cohen changed the subject. Yet Rodriguez had just confessed to springing his fellow CIA-trained exile Luis Posada from a Venezuelan jail. Posada had been held there on charges of planning perhaps the greatest terrorist outrage of the 1970s: the mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines DC-8, on its way from Barbados to Havana in October 1976. That massacre took the lives of all 73 passengers, including Cuba's gold-medal winning fencing team. Rodriguez or an ally arranged the payment of $28,600 in bribes to prison officials to get Posada out of jail and then free of the country in 1985. Posada followed Rodriguez to where the action was: Central America. Although no court trial ever found Posada guilty of the airline bombing, he had the motive, means and opportunity. A former security agent of the pre-Castro Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Posada received demolitions and weapons training from the U.S. Army and CIA in the early 1960s, which he used with Rodriguez to bomb Cuban sugar mills and attack fishing vessels. In 1967, while still on the CIA payroll, he joined the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, to fight a Cuban-sponsored insurgency. Accompanied by several other Cuban exiles in that agency, he rose by 1970 to become chief of operations. The next year he used his post to aid a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro in Chile. A political shift finally forced him out of DISIP in 1974. He began manufacturing machine gun silencers and opened a private detective agency, which employed several other Cubans. One of those exiles was Hernan Ricardo. Interrogated by Venezuelan authorities shortly after the airline crash, he admitted planting the bomb and implicated Posada. His confession (later repudiated), included details of the "pencil" detonator used to set off the device. Ricardo also said he had been recruited by the CIA in 1971 and given explosives and firearms training. Just after the aircraft took off, Ricardo called a friend in Venezuela and said, "Tell Posada the truck has left with a full load." When Venezuelan police raided Posada's premises, they found a hand-written intelligence report on security at Cuban diplomatic missions, airline offices and Caribbean flights--including the very flight that never made it home. Ricardo and another associate fingered not only Posada but another, even more notorious, exile: Orlando Bosch. Venezuela jailed him as well.

An enthusiastic soldier in the CIA-sponsored war against Castro, Bosch broke with the Agency in the early 1960s to pursue his own more militant policy. After directing attacks on a Japanese freighter in Tampa, a British vessel off Key West and eight diplomatic and tourist offices from New York to Los Angeles to punish nations doing business with Castro, Bosch was finally arrested while firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbor in 1968. Paroled in 1972, Bosch became a fugitive two years later after a grand jury called him to testify about the murder of a rival exile leader. In short order, his Cuban Action group took credit for bomb blasts against the residences of Cuban commercial officials in Chile, a Panamanian Embassy and the Cuban-Venezuelan Friendship Institute and for the attempted assassination of a Cuban news correspondent in Mexico. Bosch found a willing sponsor and protector: the Chilean secret police, DINA. It harbored him until December 1975, when Bosch went abroad again on a mission to murder a radical-left nephew of the late Chilean president Salvador Allende. Arrested in Costa Rica (where authorities accused him of also targeting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), Bosch was expelled via Somoza's Nicaragua to the Dominican Republic. The CORU Summit It was in the Dominican Republic that Bosch enjoyed his greatest triumph: the unification of fractious exile organizations into a grand terrorist coalition. At a secret conference in Bonao, Bosch brought together representatives from Alpha 66, the Bay of Pigs veterans organization Brigade 2506, the fascist Cuban Nationalist Movement, Cuban Action and other militant groups to declare war against pro-Castro targets throughut the hemisphere--including the United States. The umbrella name they chose was CORU: Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations. "The story of CORU is true," Bosch told an interviewer in 1977. "There was a meeting in the Bonao mountains of 20 men representing all different activist organizations. It was a meeting of all the military and political directors with revolutionary implications. It was a great meeting. Everything was planned there. I told them that we couldn't just keep bombing an embassy here and a police station there. We had to start taking more serious actions." A CORU war communique published in August 1976 suggested just what actions he had in mind. It promised the organization would "attack airplanes in flight." Later the organization took credit for the October Cubana Airlines bombing, along with 50 other bombings in Miami, New York, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Argentina over the next 10 months. Luis Posada, who would later serve on the front lines with Oliver North's secret army, attended the Bonao meeting. So did at least two exiles implicated in the September 1976 car bombing of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and a colleague on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. That extraordinarily brash assassination was directed and paid for by the Chilean secret police but carried out by Cuban exile subcontractors on DINA's payroll. According to Bosch, the CORU exiles "discussed Orlando Letelier at the meeting, and the fact that (his) campaign (to discredit the junta abroad) was bothering some of our friends in Chile. Chilean officials told me many times when I lived there that they wanted him dead." When Venezuelan police raided Posada's office, they discovered a map of Washington showing Letelier's daily work route. The Cuban who actually pulled the switch on Letelier's life never came to trial. Jose Dionisio Suarez went underground just before his indictment. A hit-man in pre-Castro Cuba, later a used car salesman, he too attended the CORU summit. Even after doing the job that put him in the history books, he continued to leave his mark. The FBI suspected him as late as 1979 of two bombings at Kennedy Airport, one in New Jersey and one at the Soviet mission to the United Nations. In the same period he even visited Bosch in a Venezuelan jail, bringing with him a younger, up-and-coming terrorist who would make waves as the leader

of Omega 7, a group that terrorized New York and New Jersey with bombings and assassinations from 1975 to 1982. Dionisio Suarez, like Rodriguez and Posada, could not resist the lure of another anti-communist fight. In the late 1970s he was linked to Somoza's National Guard. By 1982 he was in Guatemala helping to train the contras. Small wonder that these terrorists made their way to Central America. The communist enemy was familiar, the cause gave them a chance to avenge the late General Somoza, who financed and harbored their antiCastro bases, and the company was congenial. By the early 1980s, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica were positively crawling with armed Cuban exiles. Among them were at least three other participants at the elite Bonao terrorist convention: Frank Castro of the Cuban National Liberation Front; Juan Perez Franco, president of Brigade 2506; and Armando Lopez Estrada, former military chief of the same Bay of Pigs veterans organization. At the CIA's request, Lopez Estrada began recruiting Cuban exiles to advise the Costa Rica-based contras in 1983. Before that government kicked him out in the summer of 1986, he said "The U.S. Government sent me to Costa Rica to do intelligence work and serve as liaison to . . . the Nicaraguan contras with the purpose of providing them with advisors and military equipment." In an interview with CBS News in late 1976, Lopez Estrada took credit for backing CORU attacks against diplomatic and commercial targets in Panama, Guatemala, Trinidad-Tobago, Colombia and Mexico. "We use the tactics that we learned from the CIA because we--we were trained to do everything," he explained. "We are trained to set off a bomb; we were trained to kill; we were trained to infiltrate inside Cuba; we were trained to do everything." In 1977 he told a Miami reporter, "I sympathize with Dr. Bosch and I am trying the best I can to join with CORU because I think when we are together we are stronger." Along with these giants in the Terrorist Hall of Fame came a host of lesser, if no less ruthless, individuals. Luis Crespo, a CIA-trained follower of Frank Castro who blew off his hands in a bomb accident in 1974, trained Somocista contras in the Everglades in 1981. So did Hector Fabian, who admitted running Orlando Bosch's New York operations for eight years. And so did Alpha 66, a fanatic organization represented both at Bonao and before the World Anti-Communist League, a coalition noted for its military support of the contras under the leadership of retired Gen. John Singlaub. Drug Connections Abundant testimony from convicted drug pilots, mercenaries, gun-runners and money launderers implicates North's contra supply effort in a vast arms-for-drugs traffic. "It was guns down, drugs back," says Gary Betzner, a pilot who flew that run for the contras. Investigations by subcommittees of the House Judiciary Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee stand ready to expose the alliance forged by the contras and the Colombian drug cartel to finance the anti-Sandinista war in return for airstrips, guards and political protection. The drug connection was almost an almost inevitable product of the White House decision to import the old CORU apparatus into Central America. For both CORU and its constituent organizations had long financed their bombings and assassinations through the sale of marijuana, cocaine and heroin. CORU itself owed most of its resources to a shadowy, Florida-based business empire called World Finance Corp., headed by a Cuban who saw action at the Bay of Pigs. The subject of investigations by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami and local Dade County police, WFC was said by a staff report of the House narcotics committee to "encompass a large body of criminal activity, including aspects of political corruption, gun running, as well as narcotics trafficking on an international level." The CIA managed to kill the federal probe of WFC's drug connections, but not before investigators learned that those profits were financing CORU operations. WFC's building manager, a CIA-trained member of Orlando Bosch's Cuban Action group, was implicated along with other Bosch proteges and Armando Lopez

Estrada of Brigade 2506 in a plot to kidnap of the Cuban consul in Merida, Mexico. That July 1976 operation was one of CORU's first. It resulted in the death of the consul's chauffeur and the arrest of three of the conspirators. One of the latter later escaped from jail with the help of yet another exile who died several years later in the service of Somoza's National Guard. The Cuban Nationalist Movement, represented at the CORU summit and responsible for the Letelier assassination, spent as much time running drugs as fighting Castro. Two of the Letelier defendants were caught in 1978 with cocaine (or a fake substitute) they planned to sell to finance their flight from prosecution. And two top CNM leaders implicated in the same assassination, who first gained notoriety in 1964 by attacking the United Nations with a bazooka, had worked with the head of the Cuban drug mafia in Miami. The CNM also had a Mexican heroin connection through another CIA-trained Cuban. The director of an associated terror group, Omega 7, once complained that "The Nationalist Movement ... publicly pretended to be revolutionary, while at the same time, they were nothing more than traffickers." Ironically, he used the CNM to make contact with a leading marijuana smuggler, then sold Omega 7's services as a bill collector for $150,000. According to a staff report of the House narcotics committee, a leading pro-contra Nicaraguan drug smuggler used Omega 7 safe houses to expand his network in the United States and Central America. One of the Miami Cubans most often named in connection with running guns and drugs for the contras is reported by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff to be a business partner or close associate of Frank Castro, the Cuban National Liberation Front representative at the CORU meeting. Castro went into the drug trade in a big way in the late 1970s, working for two other Bay of Pigs veterans, Jose Antonio Fernandez and Jose Medardo Alvero-Cruz. The subject of several drug indictments, Castro played an important role in the importation of one-and-a-half million pounds of marijuana by 1981. One of his other associates, Brigade 2506 representative Rene Corvo, is reported to have used the contras to guard cocaine shipments out of Costa Rica. The CIA connection After Watergate, the Church Committee hearings on intelligence abuses and now the Iran-Contra scandal, a cynical nation hardly wonders why an administration so hot in its public rhetoric against drugs and terrorism should have tolerated or even collaborated with some of the world's most notorious traffickers and terrorists in the name of democracy. But the hypocrisy is not this administration's alone. President Kennedy first unleashed the Cuban exiles. Under his auspices, the CIA trained, armed and directed them in deadly sabotage attacks. Kennedy and later presidents condoned almost any outrage against Cuba so long as the violence originated from bases abroad. Above all that was true under President Ford, CIA director George Bush and deputy CIA director Vernon Walters. In 1976, when Costa Rica tried to hand Orlando Bosch back to the United States for parole violation, the Ford administration rejected the offer, allowing him instead to move on to the Dominican Republic and hold CORU meeting. That meeting was organized by a longtime CIA agent working in the Dominican Republic. When informants told the FBI and CIA what had transpired at the CORU meeting, no agency of the US government thought to warn Cubana Airlines, Orlando Letelier or any other target of impending terrorist attacks. Neither the FBI attache in Caracas, who had close contact with the Cubana Airlines bomber Hernan Ricardo, nor the CIA, which had long had Ricardo and Luis Posada on its payroll, took any visible steps to discourage their bombing spree. The Chilean secret police director, Manuel Contreras, helped to finance these and other CORU outrages. When he came to Washington in August 1975, reportedly to discuss joint operations against the Latin American left, the CIA gave him red carpet treatment. But his secret visit to CIA deputy director Gen.

Vernon Walters almost a year later, just as the Letelier hit got underway, was never reported to FBI investigators of that crime. Walters' role in the affair remains murky. The head of Paraguay' secret police suggested that Walters aided the plot by arranging phony visas for two DINA agents. A State Department cable from October 1976 referred to a possible "General Walters connection" to the Letelier assassination and noted that Contreras "considers himself a bosom buddy of the general." Both Vernon Walters and George Bush, who together ran the CIA while CORU was at its peak of violence, returned under Reagan to play key roles in the redeployment of this terrorist apparatus in Central America. Bush's office, as we have seen, planted Rodriguez in El Salvador. It also recruited other CIA-trained Cuban exiles for undercover service to the contras. And it was Walters who, in late 1981, arranged for the contras to receive training from a contingent of brutal military veterans of Argentina's "dirty war." That war, in response to an urban guerrilla movement in the mid-1970s, took the lives of at least 10,000 civilians. The training methods of these Argentine killers contributed not only to contra atrocities in the field, but to the creation of death squads in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador staffed by Nicaraguan exiles. Both Rodriguez and Letelier defendant Dionisio Suarez appear to have worked with the Argentine operation. In light of its direct support to Central American terrorism, the administration's mere sale of arms to the terrorist-backers in Tehran pales in comparison. The secret Oliver North struggled so hard to protect with his shredder and his wall of lies was not simply the diversion of funds from Swiss bank accounts or the violation of the Boland Amendment. It was the wholesale enlistment of the last decade's most vicious terrorists into this decade's covert war. Financed by drugs and trained by CIA proteges in the Cuban exile movement, the contras had become the National Security Council's private army. The truth may yet tarnish the stars and blacken the ribbons on Oliver North's uniform. Glossary of Names Alvero-Cruz, Jose Medardo: Bay of Pigs veteran, Class I narcotics violator. Bosch, Orlando: Author of countless terrorist bombings, including Cubana Airlines. Close to Chilean DINA. CORU summit organizer. Castro, Frank: Bay of Pigs veteran, CORU summit organizer. Class I narcotics violator said to be helping the contras. Contreras, Manuel: Former head of Chilean secret police, DINA. Mastermind of Letelier assassination, financier of Cuban exile groups. Close to Vernon Walters. Crespo, Luis: Convicted bomber, trained contras in Florida. Dionisio Suarez, Jose: Pulled the switch on Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to United States. Active in fascist Cuban Nationalist Movement. Fled United States to help contras. Fabian, Hector: Longtime aide to Orlando Bosch, trained contras in Florida. Fernandez, Jose Antonio: Bay of Pigs veteran, Class I narcotics violator. Imported multi-ton shipments of marijuana with Frank Castro. Latchinian, Gerard: Arms dealer, partner of Rodriguez. Convicted of cocaine-financed assassination plot against president of Honduras. Lopez Estrada, Armando: Former military chief of Brigade 2506. Attended CORU summit. Helped contras in Costa Rica, 1983-1986, on behalf of CIA. Perez Franco, Juan: Brigade 2506 leader, active on behalf of contras. Attended CORU summit.

Posada, Luis: CIA agent, attended CORU summit. Jailed in Venezuela for Cubana Airlines bombing in 1976. Escaped in 1985 to join Rodriguez in Central America. Ricardo, Hernan: CIA agent, employee of Posada. Confessed to Cubana Airlines bombing. Rodriguez, Felix: CIA trained Cuban exile, helped run contra supply operation from Ilopango air base in El Salvador. Active in CIA's war against Castro. Allegedly received $10 million in cocaine money for contras. Walters, Vernon: CIA deputy director under George Bush in 1976. "Bosom buddy" of Chilean secret police chief Manuel Contreras.