disappointing. One rare successful mission infiltrated some 5,000 anti-communists of Eastern European origin into the Soviet Union and its satellites. These agents were trained at a facility named Oberammergau, site of the yearly staging of one of Hitler’s favorite diversions, the unambiguously anti-Semitic Passion Plays. The organization was severely compromised when it was infiltrated by communist moles -- as were the CIA and the British MI6. One of the double-agents was the illustrious Harold “Kim” Philby, spy-extraordinaire who served the communist cause until his death in Moscow in 1988.
Gehlen employed hundreds of “ex-Nazis,” among them Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s right-hand-man and commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. Brunner was responsible for the slaughter of 140,000 Jews. His death has never been confirmed; he was believed to be still alive in 2007. The CIA turned a blind eye and, owing the exigencies of the Cold War, even took part in some of Gehlen’s operations.
Robert Wolfe, historian at the U.S. National Archives wrote that
“U.S. Army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army -- and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.”
In appreciation for his work, Gehlen, Hitler’s Eastern Front intelligence chief who organized and took part in atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, was awarded the Knights of Malta’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of Merit. [In 1988, the American branch of the Knights of Malta pinned the Grand Cross on Ronald Reagan “for devotion to Christian principles.”] People in Central America still remember Reagan as the man who funneled millions of tax dollars to repressive and often brutal regimes whose U.S.-trained death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
One of the Knights of Malta’s main spheres of influence is Latin America, where fascists and escaped Nazis were given a warm welcome. The late Chilean strongman, General Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-stooge and convicted human rights violator, was a Knight. So is deposed Peruvian dictator, human rights violator and embezzler, Alberto Fujimori, America’s “man in Lima” until his arrest in 2005. So was the late Argentinean president Juan Peron who, recently declassified CIA documents suggest, laundered Nazi gold through the Vatican Bank subsidiary, Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982. The Vatican Bank is widely believed to have channeled covert U.S. funds to Poland’s Solidarity trade union and transferred laundered money from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to the Contras through Banco Ambrosiano.
The scandal, “characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy,” would prompt Congress to conclude that “a cabal of zealots” (members of Reagan’s cabinet, later the Bush-1 administration) violated the Hughes-Ryan Act and the Boland Amendment by failing to inform congressional intelligence committees about its covert actions in the Middle East and Central America. There are those who wonder to this day why Ronald Reagan wasn’t impeached and George H. W. Bush indicted for their approval of black missions. (Passed in 1974, the Hughes-Ryan Act requires the president of the United States to report all covert operations of the CIA to at least one Congressional committee. The Boland Amendment was a triad to amendments enacted between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. assistance to the CIA-financed Contras in Nicaragua.)
“After World War II,” Roman Catholic writer Penny Lernoux writes in her People of God,
“the Vatican, the OSS, elements of the SS, and various branches of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta joined … to help Nazi war criminals escape….”
Documents reveal that New York Cardinal Francis Spellman, head of the Knights in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s was directly involved in the 1954 right-wing military coup in Guatemala during which at least 200,000 indigenous Maya were massacred and in which the CIA has acknowledged complicity. [Spellman was also linked to organized crime by his long involvement with Archbishop Paul Macinkus of Chicago, former head of the Vatican Bank, and a suspect in the highly suspicious death of Pope John Paul I a month after his
Guatemala’s reputation as a habitual human rights violator, with “disappearances,” torture and wholesale murder topping the list of crimes, is well earned. Although civilian regimes have been in place since 1986, development of a civil society and democratic institutions continues to limp along, stunted by the legacy of a brutal past and further obstructed by a corrupt and apathetic judicial system disinclined to prosecute human rights violators. Gone amok, trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas (antiseptically rechristened the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001) the Guatemalan military, the national police and urban constabularies have repeatedly stained the “Land of Eternal Spring” red with blood.
Who helped bankroll the “Dirty War” in Central America? Benefactors include an oddball assortment of powerful confederates. Among them is Robert Macauley, founder and chairman of AmeriCares, the New Canaan, Connecticut-based disaster relief agency… and the Knights of Malta, the Vatican’s mouthpiece, a patron of the CIA and a regular conduit into the Isthmus. Sympathizers and cheerleaders include the once-presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan, and W. R. Grace Company head, the late J. Peter Grace, a devout Catholic associated with CIA-assisted coups and known to have tried to scuttle progressive international labor movements. Grace, who once referred to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a “homo” and former New York Mayor David Dinkins as a “pinkins,” also had a fondness for Nazis. In 1958, he interceded to facilitate the immigration of Dr. Otto Ambros, one of the developers of Zyklon-B gas, used with deadly efficiency in Nazi extermination camps. Convicted at the Nuremberg trials for mass murder and for supplying slave labor, Ambros was later hired by Grace as a consultant. Other leading players in a scenario scripted by the religious right, U.S. spydom and the military, lay bare the magnitude of their collective agenda. They were all eventually identified and exposed in the press, all the eager instruments of a strategy aimed at destabilizing fledgling democratic regimes and replacing them with docile plutocratic minions willing to underwrite America’s politico-economic objectives while endorsing the Vatican’s unfinished crusade.
What special bonds do Robert Macauley, J. Peter Grace and the Knights of Malta share? They all have close ties to the CIA and profess a strong penchant for ultra-right-wing causes. AmeriCares, whose declared mission is to offer relief worldwide “regardless of race, religion or political persuasion,” became active in Central America in the early 1980s, ferrying donations to U.S.-backed military regimes. It also contributed to and took sides in U.S.-engineered armed conflicts and routinely flew its armada into ideological battlefields directly linked to U.S. strategic interests.
Macauley had a long and intimate relationship with George Herbert Walker Bush -- they were childhood chums –- and he was a frequent guest at the U.S. intelligence apparatus Bush was to head as CIA director. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the former president’s deftly marketed “Thousand Points of Light” which, like all capitalistic solutions to severe socio-economic problems, did nothing to relieve misery in Central America and everything to further bolster the ruling pro-U.S. kleptocrats.
In 1985, disgraced Lt. Col. Oliver North got Unification Church head, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to fund $350,000 worth of supplies to the Contras. Three years earlier, the U.S. had withheld assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua, which had been devastated by a hurricane. It couldn’t get its planes in fast enough when Violetta Chamorro, whose presidential campaign had been sponsored by the U.S. to the tune of $9 million, defeated the Sandinistas. On 28 February, 1990, barely three days after the election, AmeriCares’ first shipment brought in 23 tons of medical supplies “with love, from the people of the United States to the people of Nicaragua.” Nicaraguan diehard Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo took possession of the first shipment and turned it over to the well-connected Knights of Malta for distribution to a select list of recipients. President H. W. Bush’s youngest son,
