Robert Evans and Christopher Wong expose the World Anti-Communist League as a Nazi death squad network, linking Gladio's Italian fascists to Operation Condor and Taiwan's KMT Political Warfare Academy. They detail how "Blowtorch Bob" Roberto de Busson trained at Beitou before assassinating Archbishop Romero in 1980, while Major General John K. Singlab facilitated Contra funding via the Unification Church. Ultimately, this history reveals a global right-wing terror apparatus that exported genocide across Latin America, proving that post-WWII decisions to retain Nazi collaborators enabled decades of state-sponsored murder. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:31
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Red Brigades Mystery00:15:20
Hello, peasants.
I am Robert Evans, the grand damn of the podcasting scene, the queen of England of casting pods, here to welcome you back to the internet's premiere podcast, the only good podcast on the internet, behind the bastards.
I have a serious question.
Did somebody bully you into watching Bridgerton on Netflix?
I don't know what any of those words mean, but I know that none of them are in the Bible.
That was such a good comeback.
I have nothing to say.
Christopher Wong is here.
This is great.
Hi, Christopher.
I'm here.
How are we doing?
I had a moral spiritual crisis while writing the second part of this episode, but whether I was going to do the thing I'm about to do.
And so I'm going to just do it to you.
I love it when people do things to me.
We're just going to do it.
Robert, have you ever fallen down the gladio rabbit hole?
Oh, God.
Now, let me tell you about this, Christopher, because I think about gladiases all the time.
And the big question in my mind is, right, do you go with an original Italian pattern?
Okay.
Or do you go with like the Iberian pattern, which most people will agree is a superior stabbing weapon, but doesn't have quite as much of the historic cachet, because, right?
Like, that's not the first fucking Punic War weapon.
So I don't know.
I think I'm probably just going to get several different Gladiuses.
And I think that that's probably going to be good for me.
But everyone needs a Gladius.
It's the ultimate bisexual killing weapon because it's double-edged and extremely sharp on all sides.
And so I think that, you know, everyone, we have to stand a bisexual weapon of imperialist aggression.
And that's why I support the Gladius.
You know, okay, I think if you force me to buy one Gladius, I think I would go with the traditional one because again, like, you know, you can't say that.
I mean, Sophie, that is in Chris's contract, right?
That's all of our cool zone employees are legally required to own a Gladius.
Otherwise, we can't draft you to take over.
Because Chris, when we have to go take back and burn Carthage to the ground, what are you going to do without a Gladius?
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
Well, you've got strong Principie energy, too.
So I feel like a polearm would work well for you.
Well, I mean, this is the thing, right?
Because your sword, if someone has gotten close enough to you to use a sword, right?
Like this is your sort of like last resort personal defense weapon, but a pike.
Now, that's what I just said you have strong Principie energy.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, you know, my thesis on this, right, is this allows you, this allows you to get it to get a more traditional original pattern of Italian Gladius, right?
Because the thing that you are depending on, right, for your life is the pike.
And that means the Gladius doesn't is the symbolic importance of the Gladius is able to shine through.
When we hired you, I thought to myself, this here is an individual who doesn't go by the cucked post-Marian reforms Republican military.
And that's why you're on this team, because you understand that you need Triaria and Hischati and Pringapie in order to like...
Oh, sorry, it was Triaria with the ones with polearms.
Anyway, I fucked up this whole pre-Marian reforms Roman Republican military joke.
Can I just say that?
Like getting the kind of infantry you were supposed to be wrong.
Yes.
Stop talking, Chris.
Episode, go.
Okay.
Okay.
So, Gladio.
All right.
Gladio.
Yeah.
How much do you know about this?
So, yeah, I mean, a modest amount.
Like, Gladio was the CIA being like, oh, no, this, Italy and some other areas might vote for leftists.
So we should set up a series of stay-behind networks to repeatedly murder left-wing media and political and organizing figures and wage what is effectively like an extended insurgent campaign in countries that are quote unquote allies of ours on paper.
Yeah, that's that's pretty, well, okay, that's most of it.
There's a thing on Twitter where if you mention this about there's like a segment of Twitter.
This is one of a number of things you don't want to have a conversation about on the Twitters.
Yeah.
And, you know, okay, we're going to get more into the part of this that involves the rogue Masonic Lodge in a bit.
Now, okay, yeah.
So, so this is this is the, yeah, the, the, this, the sort of, yeah, Gladio is the code name specifically of the Italian version of these stay-behind networks.
There's, there's, these things are originally established by Allied command after So World War II, and then they get armed and trained By the CIA.
And, you know, the theory behind this, right, is that like, okay, if the USSR invades Europe, the Allies are like, well, we're going to lose because the USSR has a better land army than we do.
But the theory is they're going to have this network of like guerrilla units in place to start an anti-communist resistance.
Yeah, I'm going to read the actual, I'm going to read from the National Security Directive 10-2 that authorized this whole thing.
So it authorizes a vast program of propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, refugee liberation programs, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements to be done so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility.
So that the U.S., the U.S. in the foundation.
How many different things that are official government documents include the phrase so the U.S. can possibly deny responsibility?
That's just good.
That's just good for us.
You know, this is how you know the program is going to go incredibly well and there's going to be zero problems with it ever.
Yep.
And yeah, so there's a bunch of these things across Europe.
There's one in Belgium, they're in Denmark, they're in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland, and also the UK.
I don't know why the UK somehow didn't mention this.
I'm fine with that one.
I'm just in generally okay with us fucking with the UK, but everywhere else is like, yeah.
So they kill like an enormous number of people.
They're composed of a lot of these people are literally just fascists who they were like, hey, you don't like communists.
We'll hand you a gun.
There's a bunch of anti-communists.
They have, you know, they have people in the state security services.
So you've got like your soldiers, your cops, your spies.
They're all involved in this.
And, you know, you can already see the sort of similarities to Condor from last episode, right?
Like this is a parallel network of soldiers, spies, and paramilitaries that the regular government, A, doesn't know about and B is being run sort of, is being like internationally coordinated covertly.
And these networks are heavily armed by weapons caches that are spread around all of these countries.
And these things have, they've got guns in there, they've got explosives, they've got borders.
Okay, don't let's, I feel like you said weapons caches, like it, like in a negative way.
And I just don't think that's very fair.
Well, you know, there's, look, the only way to stop a bad guy with a weapons cache is a good guy with a weapons cache.
But unfortunately, and this is the real problem here, is that the Soviet Union were pussies for the entire Cold War.
It didn't give everyone weapons caches.
So they did not give them a bad guy with weapons caches.
That's what everybody says about the Soviet Union.
They did not give enough people weapons cache.
No, that is what I say.
It did.
It was coward, absolute coward stuff.
So, okay, so come on.
Yeah, look, you gotta, you gotta give, you gotta give your guys something, man.
The U.S. is handing out scorpion machine pistols like they're fucking candy in Europe.
Yeah, like, like, come on.
Like, the USSR is like making you buy their AK-47s.
Like, come on, we don't have any money.
We're gonna buy an AK-40.
It's terrible stuff.
Now, okay, nominally, these things are supposed to fight a communist invasion, but like the actual thing they're there to do is to just like fight any leftists of any kind from like electoral social democrats, like anarchists.
And again, I mean, this is very much a proto-Operation Condor.
It's the same goals, the same tactics, the same command structure.
And like, so the command structure that's left behind in Greece, for example, it becomes known as Prometheus.
And it plays a huge role both in the Greek Civil War and also in Greece's 1967 right-wing military coup.
We never talk about that.
Yeah, we never do.
It's really like the whole history of Greece from that period to the military coup.
It's like, yeah, like Churchill, World War II was happening.
And then Churchill was like, oh my God, the communists are going to win.
And so he just put the Nazis back in charge and the Nazis started doing the Holocaust again.
Yeah.
There's a very fun history of Churchill in Greece that is fine.
It's fine and good and nothing bad ever happened from it.
There wasn't another military dictatorship.
They didn't like kill Norazar's people.
And there's also like, there's stuff here.
Part of what's going on here is I'm just going to read this from Mick Sherry.
Washington insisted on a secret clause in the North Atlantic Treaty.
This is the treaty that forms NATO, requiring the secret services of all joining nations to establish their own branches of the secret army and oppose communist influence, even if the population voted for communists and free elections.
Which is great.
Freedom of democracy.
That's good shit.
That's good freedom.
Nothing says freedom and democracy like secret armies.
Yeah.
Well, I should mention it's not formally part of like it's not formally like one of the things that's considered part of Gladio or like the stay-behind networks, but they do literally the same thing in Japan too.
That's where the Japanese ruling party, modern ruling party, comes from.
And oh boy, do these stay-behind networks oppose communism and free elections.
They rigged the elections in Greece, then they raided elections in Italy, so the communists can't win.
But you know, like while all this is happening, on a macro level, what is happening here is that the CIA is giving a bunch of Nazis guns and high explosives.
And when I say Nazis, like what I mean is that to take a random example, the State Behind Network in West Germany literally hired Klaus Barbie and was composed of ex-members of the SS.
We have talked about that because Klaus Barbie was also integral in the creation of the modern CIA for some similar reasons.
Yeah.
And then also, and then also also showed up doing a cocaine coup funded by the Moonies and a bunch of other role people and believed that it was fine.
It was good.
It was good and fine.
Yeah.
And in Italy in particular, this whole like give fascist guns thing goes exactly as badly as you would expect it to.
In 1972, someone sets off a car bomb at a small Italian village called Petiano.
And originally this is blamed on the Red Brigades, who are this sort of like leftist, like urban guerrilla group that later turns out to be infiltrated to like all hell.
But we're not actually going to get into the Red Brigades here because if we did, and if I actually had done the Morrow kidnapping of this episode, this episode would be like 35 hours long.
And also I'd be found dead in my driveway like about three weeks from now.
You'd be found covered in shrapnel made out of pasta.
Yeah.
Because it's Italians.
You know, the thing about this, like, I am joking about this, but there legitimately were like a not insignificant number of people who tried to write about this and were killed.
So found with Gaba Gul jammed down their throat.
Now, choked to death on a, what's something else that's Italian?
Pepperoni.
Pepperoni.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Murdered by being historically bad at fielding cavalry.
That's also very Italian.
That was a Roman Empire joke.
I'm really proud of that.
I'm really proud of you for not bringing up spicy meatball.
Ah, it's a spicy meatball.
You know, my original plan for this was I was just going to read every single name in an Italian accent and do no other Italian jokes, but because luckily I have Robert here to do the Italian jokes first.
Oh, my life is an Italian joke.
Based.
It is based.
Bread killed, I guess.
Constant killed.
Terrible Italian bread.
So, okay, so there's this bombing, right?
It kills some people.
Specifically, it's like targeted against the police.
And okay, so the red brigades get blamed for this.
And the immediate response to the Italian government is they did do a mass crackdown on the left.
They arrest hundreds of communists.
And now, it turns out, Robert, that bombing, not done by the Red Brigades.
Instead, actually done by a fascist group named Ordine Norevo or New Order.
I think the guy responsible for this, Vincenti Visacuera, was tried by an Italian judge in the 80s.
And he revealed some stuff.
And by some stuff, I mean, it turns out that the bombing was done by C4 taking from Gladio weapons caches, which the prosecutors knew about because they immediately covered it up to blame someone else.
See, that's very Italian of them.
Yeah.
I mean, although, Chris, you do have to take into account, given the way C4 looks, this may have been an accidental bombing because it looks a lot like pasta dough.
They might have just been trying to make, they might have just been making a ravioli, you know?
Sometimes you make the ravioli and you blow up the Cabanado.
Oh, Italians.
So it turns out the bombing.
Yeah, so it's done with, it's done with Gladio weapons caches.
This almost certainly was directed by the Italian government.
And this becomes the opening salvo most donous as a strategy of tension, which is the government carrying out terrorist attacks from the fascist right and then staging attacks that are claimed to be from the communist anarchist left.
So you get people scared enough to still trust the government and reject the incredibly powerful Italian left, which they spend this whole time like smearing as terrorists.
Yes, and this has all come down to us today in the fact that anytime people on the left do something cool and illegal, you get a bunch of assholes on Twitter being like, this is Operation Gladio style false flag.
The thing I need to point out about this, the people who believe this, if you go back and look at the history of what these guys are doing, it wasn't like, they weren't like graffitiing someone's driveway.
Like they were doing train bombings.
Yeah, they were bombing.
They were massive.
They killed like hundreds of people.
Like, guys, guys, the level of thing that they're doing is just not even remotely applicable to what's happening now.
It's still subjectively bad as opposed to stuff that's objectively based.
Yeah, like they don't, they don't do anything cool.
They only, they only just, the only thing, the thing that they do specifically in order to credit the left is kill civilians.
And so, I don't know, maybe, maybe, like, look, if, if you want to get all conspiracy brain about it, like, I don't know, maybe in five years.
Massacring civilians, bad no matter what side of the police.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, like, okay, if the other thing I want to point out is that, like, okay, so the, there were a bunch of conspiracy theorists in Italy in the 70s and 80s when this is happening when this is happening, right?
And the conspiracy theory they have is that the red brigades don't exist and that like they're entirely fictitious and the government has made up a group of fake terrorists.
And this is not true at all.
The red brigades were a real thing.
Breaking People's Brains00:08:28
They were, they got it.
All the conspiracy theorists who were living in like the most conspiracy-ridden part of like the history ever all got it completely wrong.
So you guys also don't have it right.
And the things that are this is where we're not we're not literally living in exactly the same thing of American Gladio.
It's not the same thing.
Please stop.
Oh, by the way, also the Italian Red Brigades not named the Red Brigades because of communism, but because of pasta sauce.
Yeah, definitely.
They were also called the Marinara Brigades.
Yeah, the Marinera Brigades locally known as.
Yeah, yeah, it's just because they turn people in the chunky marinara.
So delicious.
Vichy Guerra, who's who's the guy who is put on trial for this bombing, claims that New Order is actually a cat's ball for NATO and the CIA, which like, okay, so like partially he's doing this because he's been arrested for a bombing and he's like, how do I get out of this?
Ah, the CIA told us to.
But, you know, but also, on the other hand, right, the bombs that he used to make this are from CIA Gladio caches.
So draw your own conclusions about who's responsible for this and how we got a hold of a bunch of weapons from CIA, NATO, staying behind network caches.
And it turns out that that new order and another fascist group called Avangaria Nacional, or now.
Yeah, these people are also heavily involved in Operation Condor.
And when I say heavily involved, what I mean is that, so one of the, one of these, one of the members, actually, I think he's a member of both groups, is this guy named Stefano de la Chiari.
His name has two I's in it, and there's a vowel in the middle.
Look, it's Italian names.
Incomprehensible.
So this guy, Pinochet met with him personally to talk about the assassination that he was trying to do.
The assassination that he's trying to do is the failed assassination of Christian Democratic politician Bernando Layton.
And this is the Christian Democrats are kind of weird here because the Chilean Christian Democrats originally support the coup against Allende, but then like Pinochet takes over and they were like, this whole Pinochet thing, maybe it's bad.
And so they turn against Pinochet.
And here's McSherry and what happened next.
Avangaria Nacional and Ordino Nuevo also collaborated in Condor operations.
Assassins from Avangaria Nacional, the terrorist organization of Italian neo-fascist Stefano della Ciani attempted the latent assassination in Rome.
They left the couple for dead after gunning them down in the street.
The couple was severely wounded, but survived.
Arlo to the side, the leader of Ordine Nuevo and Avangaria Nacional boasted that Dele Ciani and his Italian fascists coordinated with the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate, as well as the secret services of the Franco regime in Spain, and admitted that his forces carried out the latent attack at Dino's request.
So Stefano delle Ciane, by the way, so while wanted by the Italian police for this assassination, shows up at the Latin America Anti-Communist Confederation's meeting in Buenos Aires in 1980.
And this is like a recurring theme for these people, for Italian fascist terrorists.
One of New Order's highest-ranking members was this guy named Elio Masogardi, who's like, he's in a bunch of terrorist attacks and like bank robberies and Italy, both Italy and France.
And so he flees to Paraguay after another judge attempts to sort of like prosecute these New Order guys.
And he winds up getting shot while his car is stuck in a traffic jam in Rome.
And at this point, Elio Massagardi just like runs away and he goes to Paraguay.
And then he shows up as part of the European delegation of the World Anti-Communist League's meeting in Asunción in 1979.
And again, while he's at this meeting, he's like near the top of the Interpol Most Wanted list.
And he's just at this meeting, like chilling.
Now, the other part of what's going on here, and this is the part that actually breaks people's brains, is an organization called the P2 Masonic Lodge or Propaganda Due.
So, oh, God.
Okay, so I should make this clear from the top.
P2 is a rogue Masonic lodge that was expelled by the Masons before they do the stuff we're about to talk about.
And it's ran by this guy named Licio Guelli, who's like, he's an old old school fascist.
Like, this is a guy who at 17 years old went to Spain and fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and then like joined the SS.
And P2 operates this as kind of like shadow state inside the Italian state.
It has like a bunch of members in sort of various parts of the Italian government, including the military and the intelligence services.
It buys the country's largest newspaper.
And by like the late 70s and like the very beginning of the 80s, it's basically running the Italian state.
But hilariously, in 1981, the Italian police are raiding this guy's house for like completely unrelated corruption stuff.
And they find a briefcase that just literally has the PT organization's plan to take over the government in it.
And they also find in Lisho Grelli's apartment when they raid it later, they find a list that has everyone in the organization.
And the people in this thing are wild.
There's the heads and deputy heads of four different Italian intelligence services.
The chief of the general staff of the army.
There's a bunch of people who were like very senior members of the Argentinian junta.
The guy, yeah, the Stefano Deliciane, the fascist we've been talking about, who showed up at the World Communist League meeting, he's in this.
The guy who founded AAA, the Argentinian death squad from last episode, also in this.
And then the most famous member of this group is a guy named Silvio Berlusconi.
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
Great.
He was part of the secret rogue Masonic Lodge that took control of the government and was planning to do a fascist coup and take everything over to destroy communism.
And to get an indication, if you want a sneak peek of where this is eventually going and who wins this whole war, he is a Silvio Berosconi was the longest serving prime minister in the history of Italy.
Well, okay, longest serving prime minister after Benito Mussolini.
Yeah, so this is going great.
The P2 stuff is like all over the place.
It's really hard to sort out like who exactly did what.
There are evidence from some of these trials that are like happening now, like in 2022.
Evidence is still coming out.
What we can say is that they seem to have been involved in the 1980 Bologna train bombing, which killed 85 people and injured another 200 people.
And because it's a bombing, it was originally initially planned by anarchists, but lo and behold, evidence now suggests it was actually fascists using Gladio explosives backed by P2s, contacts, and Italian intelligence.
There's like they do other stuff that there's decent evidence they planted a fake story about Jimmy Carter's brother meeting PLO leader Yasa Arafat in the U.S. press to try to get Ronald Reagan elected.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, and really they could have just, well, we'll talk about the bank, the crime bank that Jimmy Carter was affiliated with later, but that's another story for another book.
Well, speaking of crime banks, I'm not going to talk about, I'm not going to talk about Branco, Banco and Borosiano and Robert Calvey, the man known as God's Banker turning up dead under Blackfriars Bridge, because if I talk about this, I'll be here until like 2077 and also 3,000 people will just like fall from the ceiling with knives and assassinate me.
So, but what I can say about this is that Gladio, as much as people sort of exceptionalize what Gladio is, Gladio is basically a mirror version of the U.S.'s own parallel.
So to stay behind networks abroad.
And these are things like the first observation group, which is a U.S. special forces group that was deployed to do terrorism in South Vietnam, like back in the 50s, when the U.S. was still, you know, doing this whole thing that they claimed they weren't in South Vietnam.
Yeah, and fascist is literally, yeah, anyway, whatever.
Robert, you know what else is a model for fascist death squads?
Oh, well, this podcast, actually.
Sophie and I, when Sophie and I sat down to plan how Behind the Bastards was going to work, you know, first question we asked was like, how are we going to organize the division of labor to make this work?
And both at the same time, it was amazing, instantly looked each other right in the eye and said at the same time, fascist death squads.
Competitive World Reality00:04:45
And that's why we still use that organizational method today for this show.
Yeah.
And this is why we're sponsored by and the that's right.
That's right.
Primarily elements of the all united in operation of fascist death squads, which we support 100% here at Behind the Bastards.
The dead squad podcast.
No notes.
Thank you, Sophie.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Political Warfare Parody00:13:04
We're back.
Oh, and you know, thinking about fascist death squads makes me think about death squads.
You just really wanted to do it.
I did.
I did, Sophie.
Uh-huh.
You know what I love?
Making our editor bleep things?
I do.
I do.
I do it just for you, Sophie.
Well, it's really, but it's really no big deal for me.
I just type an edit note.
I know.
I know.
I just want you to feel like you're part of the team, Sophie.
I run the team, Robert.
I am the team.
That doesn't sound like something I'd hear because Sophie, that's very confusing to me because I take a lot of credit for running the team.
So, you know, pretty weird.
You're sitting on the bench most of the time, but okay.
Well, speaking of benches, Babe Ruth.
You saw somebody list that on the Twitter thread that I posted about you knowing a sports reference.
That doesn't count.
Okay.
Well, let's return to the story.
You know, I could do a Babe Ruth segue here, but I'm just not going to.
So while all of this stuff is going on in Italy, the league is getting up to just some other unfathomable atrocities across Latin America.
And one of the main engines of these atrocities, it turns out, is the KMT back in Taiwan.
Now, last episode, we talked about how the KMT was the original Death Squad party.
And the Taiwanese spend most of the Cold War using the World Anti-Communist League to sort of export their model of anti-communist Death Squad Party abroad.
The KMT call this, there's their sort of like, they have like a method, right?
They have this, they have this thing, and the method is called political warfare.
And this is essentially political warfare is the KMT basically going, okay, so like, what if we do, what if we did like like almost like a pair over the top parody of communist indoctrination, but like to our own people for anti-communism?
Like they, they, they have, they have Soviet-style communists, like literally like commissars, whose job it is to like maintain ideological and party discipline in the military, but they're anti-communist this time.
Like everyone is trained to spy on each other.
Yeah, it's great.
It's like we've defeated communism by taking every bad aspect of like anything you can find in a communist state and just doing it for anti-communism question mark.
They developed this model of like war called the war of the masses, which is literally their version of Maoist guerrilla warfare.
It is awesome how all of these guys like crib particularly from Mao, even like a bunch of the ones in the United States, because there's like, well, clearly it works.
Yeah, he was really good at it.
He was really, really good at it.
He was.
You got to give Mao credit where it's due.
Yeah.
The man had his areas of expertise.
Yeah, it was exactly that.
And nothing else to do with agriculture or...
No.
Famously good at agriculture.
The guy who reads Starving Ghosts.
Yeah.
So.
Good book.
Yeah.
The KMT is like, it's like, it's like a right-wing parody of what a communist police set is, but it's anti-communist.
And they're also huge on this thing called counter-terror.
And I think most people listening to this, you're going to hear counter-terror and assume that I'm talking about like some counter-terrorism thing.
And like kind of there are counter-terrorism stuff that is just counter-terror, but counter-terrorism.
I've known a lot of professional counter-terrorism people and hung out with them while they did counter-terrorism.
And boy, it looks a lot like terrorism.
Yeah, well, counter-terrorism.
Let's talk about the Iraqis counter-terrorism forces.
What is that?
The thing with this, right, is counter-terror, counter-terror is just cutting out the whole sort of middleman thing.
Counter-terror terror is just the state go literally going, we're the terrorists now.
Our plan to win this war is we are going to terrorize the population through kidnapping, assassinations, and massacres until they don't support guerrillas anymore.
Hooray!
Yeah, then this is, I mean, the KMT are like pioneers of this.
The U.S. Army teaches this to people, and everyone we're about to talk about is just obsessed with counter-terror.
Like, this is like, this is like 80% of what they do is, oh my God, what if we did every atrocity we're accusing our enemies of, but like significantly worse?
And, you know, one of the places they learned this stuff is the Political Warfare Academy in Taipei, which is, you know, it starts taking students from militaries all across Latin America.
Why don't we have a political warfare academy, Sophie?
That's true.
We should have one.
We should, we should, it's in, it's in the budget for next year.
Okay, all right, good.
That's, that's good.
Okay, Sophie, we have to make this very clear right now.
I am going to run the political warfare academy so that all the officers that I train will be personally loyal to me so that I can successfully overthrow Robert in a military coup.
Yeah, this seems like a good plan for me.
It's so funny that you would think that he would need to be the one that's overthrown when I am in.
Oh, no, I've always just been the figurehead of this.
Oh, no, here's the thing.
I want to be the fingerhead.
I don't want to do the actual work, which is why I'm not overthrowing Sophie.
No, I want to be like that seems awful.
Dear God, I just want to be the podcast equivalent of, oh, what was one of the guys who was just a figurehead?
Late.
Oh, what's his name?
I was thinking Star Wars, the fake, the fake queen, Amidala.
Yes, I was going to say with Star Wars, I want to be the.
I don't even know enough about Star Wars.
Whatever.
Let's continue.
Okay.
So, okay, so you have this Taiwanese school of the Americas thing.
And like, okay, so there are a lot of people who get trained in a lot of like, you know, schools to do counter-terror.
But like, okay, even people who've been to the School of Americas of the Americas, like they, they talk to people who come back from political warfare training and are like, those guys got weird.
Like, they're like too into this.
You see, this, like, like, people who are in death squads, like, will talk to, we'll like talk about people who are like, came back from Taiwan and were like, those guys are a bit weird.
These guys are like, those guys are a bit much.
And, you know, the KMT starts like expoing this model.
I'm going to quote from Inside the League here about what they were doing.
First, through its liaisons in the league, the KMT identified the political party in a Latin country that was the most militantly anti-communist.
The party chosen to be represented in the league is invariably the one that has already proven its anti-communist metal or displays the ability or displays the ability and will to do so.
Following the KMT model, the chosen party establishes a nationwide intelligence and counter-terror network.
These paramilitary groups are then gradually incorporated into the nation's armed forces.
This is usually accomplished when, in a moment of national crisis, the army turns to these civilian bands for support or when it is too impotent to curb them.
One of the parties they choose is the MLN in Guatemala, which is founded by this guy named Mario Salvador Alecron.
And this is a guy who once said that sounds like a that sounds like an airport Italian restaurant right there.
I mean, he's definitely fascist enough to be an Italian.
Or to work at an airport.
Yeah.
Two incredibly fascist places.
This is a guy.
Okay.
I'm going to read this quote from him.
I could perhaps accept the label of fascist, Sandoval told a French reporter in 1981, in the historical sense of the word, were it not for the fact that it refers to a type of socialism, albeit national socialism.
So this is a guy who fascism is too socialist for him?
Okay, buddy.
It's incredible.
And this is the guy who is the head of the Guatemalan chapter.
Coming after the Nazi party from the right.
Yeah, no, this literally is thinking.
This is the guy who's the Guatemalan, like the head of the Guatemalan chapter of the World Anti-Communist League for like basically his entire life.
Mario Sandoval Adacron was he's an old school like Guatemalan right-winger.
Like he's one of the guys who like did the 1954 CA back coup against the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz.
So like he's been around and he's also one of the people behind the White Hand, which is basically they're the most feared and bloodthirsty death squad in Colombia until like the army fully takes over and starts doing the genocide stuff against the Maya population in the 1980s.
Now, lest you think Sandoval Adacron did not do the genocide.
He absolutely is.
Anytime you read anything about the genocide, like the first part of the genocide is him talking about like the stuff that he did in the 60s and 70s, including just like the White Hand.
They had this fairly famous thing where like in the 1970s, there's all these agricultural cooperatives forming.
And the White Hand, and again, these are just people like forming co-ops.
And the White Hand just walks in and slaughters them all.
And okay, I haven't been able to figure out the exact extent to which he was involved in the full-on genocide.
It starts in 1980.
I mean, there's no way he didn't want the genocide to happen.
But the thing about it that's weird is that his political enemies are in power when the genocide starts.
And I mean, you know, this is in some sense like a reflection of how deeply just like genocidal the entire sort of Guatemalan political class is, right?
Because like his enemies get put in power and they still do, they still do a genocide.
But I mean, he's definitely still killing people.
Like there's definitely his esquad just ongoing people in the streets.
It's kind of unclear exactly how involved he was in the army, just like exterminating people.
But do you know who was actively involved on the level of directly backing the military?
The KMT.
So I thought you were doing an ad plug and I was to say the products and services that support this podcast, which no word.
I mean, probably yes.
But yeah, the KMT specifically here.
So, so, all right.
I guess I previewed this last episode when I was talking about the whole thing about how the U.S. like refused to recognize the People's Republic of China as legitimate government of China until 1979.
And in 1979, the U.S. finally flips and like recognizes the PRC as legitimate government of China instead of recognizing the KMT's rump government in Taiwan.
And almost all of the world's like...
Rump.
Yeah.
Look.
Like almost all the countries in the world recognize the PRC.
One of the ones that doesn't, I mean, you know, and the people who don't, it's like, it's like Rhodesia and like South Africa, like apartheid South Africa.
And one of the other countries is Guatemala.
And so Taiwan and Guatemala remain are incredibly close political allies.
The Guatemalan army like sends all the people.
I mean, they're so, have such directly tied interests.
Taiwan, Guatemala both.
Well, they both really like killing communists.
South Pacific?
That is.
That's the thing.
They really like killing communists.
And so, yeah, the Guatemalan army sends a bunch of officers to Taiwan's political warfare academy.
Taiwan sells them weapons and sends military advisors and trainers to Guatemala.
And so they're all.
Love, you know, it's there's just it's always beautiful when people come together around shared interests.
Yeah, international solidarity between solidarity for okay, probably gonna start gonna start a rousing chorus if the people's flag is deepest red.
That's right.
Oh, and yeah, and so one of the things that what ends up happening here is that there's a bunch of Taiwanese military advisors.
There's Taiwanese political warfare pamphlets like floating around everywhere.
And all of this is going on when the government, when the Guatemalan government starts doing the genocide.
LMAO.
Sorry, wait, that's not an LMAO situation.
No, it's real bad.
I mean, we'll get to something that's kind of LMAO in a second, but in the immediate thing here, by the end of this genocide, the Guatemalan government has killed 200,000 people and wiped, like, there are entire cultures that are gone.
Like, there are whole languages that are just wiped out.
Like, it's like, yeah, if you've ever spend any time in Guatemala and talk to some like older people, like, there are, there are towns, significant chunks of them, where like the army is still not allowed in.
Like, they are effectively autonomous because the genus, yeah, as a result of like the fucking genocide.
Like, fucking an experience you will regularly have, or at least 10 years ago, you'd regularly have, is like turning a street corner and there's just 40 or 50 people lining a street all missing legs and arms and hands.
And it's not because they all had separate accidents.
Seven Countries Death Squads00:08:22
Yeah.
Like, it's Guatemala's fucking dope as shit.
Guatemalan people, very nice.
The degree to which that country got fucked over is one of the things that makes me angriest in the world.
Yeah, it is, it is breathtakingly horrible.
And as a side note here, when the UN does, the UN eventually in the 90s does an investigation of the genocide, and Taiwan refuses to cooperate.
And to this day, to the best of my knowledge, the documents about exactly what Taiwan was doing during the genocide are still classified.
So that's fun.
That's great.
Yeah.
So Mario Sandoval Aldecran's recruitment into the league, like it wasn't just about sort of Taiwanese diplomatic relations.
He's brought in as, and they literally call him the grandfather, the godfather of death squads.
Like everyone just calls him the godfather.
It's fucking Italians.
Okay, sure.
Yeah.
And so, you know, he's brought in to train other death squad leaders.
And one of those guys is Roberto.
See, this guy's a French name.
I think it's, I think it's Debusson, something like that.
Debusson.
Roberto de Busson.
And he, so he, he, he is a guy who would say things like, and I, he said this to a journalist: quote, you Germans are, were very intelligent.
You realize that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Um, and so his nickname is Blowtorch Bob.
And uh, David Roberts.
Yeah, do you want to guess why his nickname is Blowtorch Bob?
I really don't want to guess.
Yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to be fair with you.
I prefer not to guess on that.
I will just tell you it's because he was famous for just using Blowtorch to torture prisoners.
Oh, well, yeah.
He's this is actually a similarity that he has with our producer, Sophie.
I don't use a blowtorch.
Okay.
Well, it's a can of hairspray with a lighter, Sophie.
It works similarly.
Well, at least get your facts straight if you're going to accuse me of something.
This is how we handle problems.
Like that time.
I don't know.
I don't know where I'm going with this joke.
Neither do I. Please continue.
So Roberto Debussion, like, so he goes to the league's meeting in Buenos Aires in 1980, and he asks for help running death squads.
And he becomes Sandoval Aldacron's, like, protégé.
And he also goes to Taiwan and spends time at the KMT's Political Warfare Academy.
Here's from Inside the League about his time there.
In an interview with a French reporter in 1987, De Abusion said that the courses he took in Beitou, which is Beitou is a district in Taiwan.
Yeah, Beidou.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, or a bunch of people who came over from China like wind up.
This is where the academy is.
In 1977 was, quote, the best class I ever studied.
Those lessons are what I applied when I organized.
We started organizing civic groups.
Political war is different from military war.
It is different in its space.
The political war is defined in 360 degrees.
The military war is a war in space, but there is one military front, one theater of operation.
In the military war, the young people could participate, young men especially.
In political warfare, everyone participates.
Political warfare, De Abusion said, is psychological warfare against the enemy.
I started psychological warfare against the communists.
I denounced the program, their treason, their infiltrations into government.
The political warfare was a compliment to the armed fight.
And so Taiwan is not the only country that's supporting this guy.
At that same league meeting in 1980, he meets with representatives of the Argentinian police state to ask for more training to fund his death squads.
And we should go back to Operation Condor for a second, because remember, this is how Condor started, right?
Condor starts with a bunch of people at CIL meetings, like coming together and going, hey, we should go communist together.
And, you know, the thing about Condor is that Condor had originally been a project of what's called the Southern Cone, which is like a region of Latin America covering like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, sometimes like Paraguay and part of Brazil.
And what this 1980 meeting of the CIL was doing was exporting a new version of Condor north to Central America.
This is sending it to El Salvador, to Honduras, to Nicaragua.
Here's from the predatory state.
The 1980 WACL meeting, well, anti-communist league meeting in Buenos Aires seemed to have been a defining event in exporting the Condor system from the Southern Cone.
The meeting brought together various right-wing forces, intelligence agents, and military officers, including many involved in Condor, to strategize about ways to accelerate the world anti-communist crusade.
In March 1980, the Sandinista media announced that the CIA was interfering in Nicaragua and El Salvador and training former National Guard troops in Honduras.
So De Abusion gets his death squad training.
And a year later in 1981, he founds Arena, which is his own sort of Salvadorian death squad party.
And then he also does something that puts him in a very rare category of bastard.
He kills a saint.
Ooh, had they been sainted when he killed them?
Or getting murdered part of what they did?
Getting murdered is how he became a saint.
Dough.
I mean, kind of did him a favor.
Yeah, maybe.
I feel like he would rather have been alive than a dead saint.
But, well, I don't know.
I will not claim to understand the mind of the high-level Catholic clergy at all.
I was about to say, I don't know if that's the only thing that's happening.
I mean, I'm going to guess not.
Because that's like being the LeBron James.
Okay, now we're just repeating names.
Yeah, we got to give you more.
We got to give you more names so you have better talking points.
I just need to watch that Adam Sandler movie again.
The one with the footballs.
And the tall guy, and he's Spanish.
It's a good movie.
You should watch it.
It's a pretty good movie, Sophie.
So that saint is a guy you probably actually have heard of.
That's Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
He lived a lot.
He lived long life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He lived long life until 1980 when Dave Busion had him assassinated.
And, you know, as McSherry points out, like, his assassination really looks like a condor killing.
Like, it has all of the sort of elements of it.
And, you know, Dave Busion has taken his lessons to heart really fast.
And this whole project that he's doing, this whole thing, he's trying to get everyone who's been doing the sort of like training death squads to help him make his own desquads.
This works incredibly well.
His death squads are trained by Argentina and Taiwan, mentored by Mario Sedafa Cron.
They killed something like 40,000 people during this El Salvadorian Civil War.
Yeah.
Like, and 40,000 is like a kind is a kind of low estimate.
It's possible it was much high.
I've seen, I've seen people blame.
I mean, okay, so like there's a question as to like how many people were killed by the death squads and how many people were actually killed by the military.
And I've seen estimates of like 20,000 people higher than this because they're attributing like all of the people killed.
Death squad numbers are like when people ask me how many beers I've had at like 3.30 in the morning numbers, right?
You're going to be off by a margin.
Yeah, and you're almost gonna be under.
Yeah, yeah, you're almost certainly.
You're almost certainly, there's more of them.
And, you know, so this is what we call in the trade extremely bad.
Now, Robert, as you well know, Ronald Reagan and his staff sold weapons to Iran to secure prisoner releases and fund Nicaraguan death squads.
But do you know who else sold weapons and questionable arms deals to fund death squads?
Our sponsors, the uh-huh, that's right.
Uh, with the we believe pandas are good, and so is arming paramilitary groups.
And I, people, people, I, I, I, I think most people will think that I'm joking here.
I'm actually literally not.
They, they actually literally did this.
So, uh, yeah, go, go, go read the Buzzfeed article.
Yeah, it was seven countries.
Death squads in seven.
I think it was seven countries.
I haven't looked into this in too long.
This Is Why I'm Professional00:04:10
I'm Chris.
I don't like death squads being in seven countries funded by the yes.
That's how you sound.
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I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
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Find out on Mostly Human.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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Say you love me.
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So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Luck And The Predatory State00:15:29
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
You like my Chris voice, Chris?
Yeah.
I feel like my register is slightly higher than that.
It is, I'm going to be honest, the same as my Sophie voice.
I have one voice that I do for people.
This is why you're a professional.
This is why I'm the professional.
This is exactly right.
This is why I'm the leader of this junta.
Speaking of juntos, actually not speaking.
I don't think it's, well, I guess the Argentinian junta is going to be involved later.
But when we left off, the U.S. was about to get involved in a series of incredibly sketchy armed deals with Iran and Hezbollah in order to fund death squads.
But that's what you like to hear.
Unfortunately, people before we can know, it's...
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not.
I mean, I guess you could probably find people on the left who are like a red contra was good because they were funding, because they were giving weapons to Iran.
But then there's the whole funding the contras thing.
So it's kind of like it is fun.
There's a lot of like when you like look at, I don't know, the kind of lazy left-wing analysis of the like the tanky style, like shitty left-wing analysis where like, you know, everyone wants, you know, their clear set good guys and bad guys.
And then you look at the reality, which is like, boy, China and the United States wound up backing a lot of the same militant groups during the Reagan years.
It kind of kept happening over and over again.
Yeah.
Weird.
Weird that the Reagan administration.
Anyway, whatever.
It's a good time.
Before we can get any further into a Ran Contra, we have to introduce the last major World Anti-Communist League figure we're going to be talking about and also a Ran Contra co-conspirator, Major General John K. Siglab.
So John K. Siglab is, he is the most spooked out spook who ever tortured an innocent civilian.
Boy, there is competition for that.
Wait, wait, okay, I'm not even going to, like, I literally can't do his entire resume here because it would take up like 40 to 50% of the entire episode would just be me reading his resume.
He starts as an OSS guy behind Nazi lines in World War II, and then he gets transferred to the Pacific to teach Chinese forces guerrilla tactics against the Japanese.
And would that he had died a hero there because his next posting is as the CIA desk chief for China in 1949?
Somehow, and there's a lot of his things in his career that I read and don't make any sense to me.
He somehow also was involved in the establishment of the Ranger Training Center at Fort Benning.
He then becomes the deputy station chief of the CIA in South Korea during the Korean War.
And this is the thing I don't understand at all.
So he's the deputy station chief of the CIA, right?
He somehow also is commanding a combat battalion.
I have no idea how this works.
Don't ask me.
It's baffling.
I don't get it.
Yeah, that's a little odd.
I have no idea.
This guy is just like the spook spook.
Here's from Inside the League about what he got up to next.
As commander of the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force, known as Max SOG, great acronym, by the way, Max Sog, really?
Singlab was one of the on-site commanders of Operation Phoenix, the American-directed assassination and counter-terror program.
And Robert, do you remember that episode that Garrison did on Eel Horse?
I do.
I do.
Yeah.
Although I will tell you, a fan came up to me during one of the live events I did recently and informed me that there's a specific kind of antibiotic that they give.
This fan is a horse person.
She told me there's an antibiotic that they give horses that if you eat the meat, it will give you horrible cancer immediately.
Oh.
Yeah, that's going to limit the number of...
I was going to just steal a horse from somebody's horse farm.
You know, just capture one horse and eat it.
But now I feel like I have to be careful to make sure it hasn't been given this antibiotic that will turn it into cancer meat.
I mean, that'll probably be a bad.
Yeah, but on the other hand, what a way to go.
I ate cancer inducing horse meat.
I got a horse meat.
This is cancer.
Like this is something someone in like 1742 dies of.
Yeah.
Chris actively encouraging Robert to eat cancer meat so that he can overthrow him.
I was going to make Garrison eat most of the horse.
This is called political warfare, Sophie.
I know.
I see it happening and I'm proud.
Yeah, doing a horse meat gladio.
Yeah.
So you remember the part about the so the thing I remember about that episode about eel horse was Garrison stopping me after a meeting and saying, Chris, have you have you ever is there have you ever heard of an ancient Chinese remedy of people sticking eels up their asses?
And the only thing I could think of that involved East Asia and people with eels was the thing about how the people people would rape people with eels during the Vietnam War.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
So that was this guy.
That's him.
He's the guy raping people with eels.
Um, and and you know, this this is this is this is this guy.
The thing he's doing, Project Phoenix, their job is specifically to assassinate civilians.
It's to find civilians who are sympathetic to North Vietnam, like North Vietnam, and just kill them.
That's what he's doing.
Um, a bunch of the work from Project Phoenix, which again, like he's the guy running, um, it finds its way into this army manual that's passed out of the School of the Americas that's about like how to do terrorism and how to assassinate people.
And eventually, that gets leaked, and there's this huge scandal, but it doesn't affect him at all.
Um, he eventually goes back to the army at some point, and this is where the he flips randomly back and forth between the CIA, the army, and like the Rangers.
And I, I don't, I don't know what's going on with this guy's career, it's it's incredibly bizarre spook shit.
Um, but and so he's made the chief of staff of U.S. forces in South Korea, but he gets like incredibly pissed off that Carter wants to pull troops out, so he like publicly denounces the president.
And Carter's just like, you can't do that, like you're a general, you know, and so he just fires him.
But this, of course, makes him like incredibly popular with the U.S. right.
And he eventually helps found a new American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League and becomes the head of the league.
Here's some inside the league: the new American chapter, the United States Council for World Freedom, USCWF, terrible acronym, terrible, was born.
Yeah, like Cal Cal is a good acronym.
USCWF, terrible, zero out of 10.
Jesus Christ, come on.
So the USCWF was born, facilitated by a loan of nearly $20,000 from Taiwan.
What Sing Lab was able to create was a body of powerful people.
Really make money go further back then.
Oh, yeah, no, like $20,000.
You could do a ran-contra with $20,000.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, Sophie and I recently put $20,000 into a series of militant endeavors, and we barely assassinated the former prime minister of Japan.
Hey, podcast, finish episodes.
Not even, not even going to be a good idea.
Nearly got us in trouble on that one.
Nearly got us in trouble on that one.
Pulled it out, though.
Nobody, nobody's fine.
Dodging, dodging prosecution like Neo in the Matrix.
That's right.
Oi howdy.
Let's continue.
Dodging prosecution like Shinzo Abe didn't dodge anyway.
Robert.
What?
Chris.
So Sing Lab was able to create like a powerful and respected body of American conservatives, the likes of which the league had never seen before.
As the US CWF grew, this new league chapter came to include high-ranking former officers of the American Army and intelligence community.
Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, became its vice chairman.
While a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Albert Kayan, was its treasurer on the advisory board was General Lewis Walt, former commander of Marine Corps forces in Vietnam, and Ray Sleeper, retired Air Force Colonel.
So this new American chapter, somebody needs to do an REM song, like a parody of an REM song about Ray Sleeper using the REM song Day Sleeper to talk about it.
Anyway, that is not the REM parody.
I thought you were going to go for that.
That was Day Sleeper, Day Sleeper, which is a great REM song.
Don't get me wrong, but it would also be a funny thing.
Somebody can figure it out.
Yeah, let someone else do that.
And, you know, so this is like the most feted out organization I've ever encountered.
And Sing Lab had already been like a liaison to the Reagan administration.
In 1979, he and another CIA guy named Daniel Graham went to Guatemala to convince Reagan to back the government.
So Reagan does.
And guess what?
Death squad killings immediately increase.
And, you know, everyone else in the Republican Party sort of falls in line.
They're like, oh, this is fine.
And here's what happened next.
The election of Reagan coincided with the bloodiest outbreak of Guatemalan desquad actions in history.
Almost 500 deaths a month, almost all attributed to the right, were being recorded by the American, were being reported by the American embassy.
But even that figure was considered low by most other monitoring groups.
Piles of mutilated corpses were being discovered every morning throughout the country, and a concerted campaign to eliminate the centrist parties was underway in Guatemala City.
From July 1980 to June 1981, 76 leaders of the Christian Democratic Party and 10 officials of the Social Democratic Revolutionary Front were assassinated.
Most were murdered by gunfire from passing cars, the trademark of the MLN.
And this is all happening at the same time as the genocide, which Reagan is like, yeah, no, go ahead and do this.
And so Reagan's big thing is that he wants to expand desquad activity everywhere.
And his primary target is Nicaragua.
And I guess we should probably explain why they hate Nicaragua so much.
So in 1979, the leftist Sandinistas finally ousted the U.S. back to Somoza's dictatorship and tried to end the literally centuries-old reign of genocidal landowning oligarchs.
And this is, you know, because all of the rest of the Latin American ruling class is also genocidal landowning oligarchs.
This sparks a lot of what we've been talking about.
Yeah, like the genocide in Guatemala, the massacres in El Salvador, a lot of this stuff was triggered by the right-wingers just sort of like seeing someone else being like, hey, maybe you guys shouldn't have the total, literally, power over life and death and the ability to murder anyone you want in order to keep your land.
And they just lose it and start doing genocides.
And another country that they turn into a war zone is Honduras.
Now, the man larger responsible for this, at least initially, was Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, a School of the Americas graduate who was also trained by the Argentinian junta and their own sort of dirty war stuff.
Gustavo Alvarez-Martinez is floating around, the same sort of like CAL Mealu U, as like all the other desk squad guys we've talked about, and at that same 1980 conference of the League in Buenos Aires, he asks and gets help from the Argentinian army.
But what, what?
What makes, what makes um Gustavo Álvarez Martinez different from the other desk squad leaders that we've talked about, is that, you know, because so he's absolutely doing death squads along the sort of Argentinian dirty war model, like right down to like, like right down to the sort of Argentinian like triple threat of kidnapping, electroshock for torture and throwing people out of helicopters.
But he's also attempting to get training for a bunch of Nicaraguan, like Ex-Nicaraguan National Guard people who'd fled across the border in Honduras after like, losing the war, and this is enormously successful.
Like literally, everyone is just like falling over themselves to train these people to to a new army of contras.
And in 1981 he gets made the head of Honduras' armed forces, and this is where all the sort of threads start to converge.
But both the Chileans and the Argentinians help Álvarez Martinez train a unit that becomes known as battalion 3-16, which was in charge of killing quote enemies of the state after uh, Álvarez Martinez made formal sort of secret contact with the Contras inside Nicaragua itself.
He starts like coordinating intelligence with them and the Argentinians also helped start like training the army of Contras in the in the camp in Honduras um the Argent.
The Argentinians also start working even closer with the CIA, which is pretty incredible, but they it gets closer um here's from predatory states.
General Guillermo Suarez Mason, the powerful commander of Argentina's First ARMY Corps, was instrumental in the creation of the Extraterritorial TASK Force, or the GTE, a unit of battalion 601 that carried out secret intelligence operations outside of Argentina.
Sanchez Ricier said that the GTE was based in Florida.
With the authorization of the CIA, Suarez Mason himself presided over the fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist League, World Anti-Communist League affiliates in 1980.
And the World Anti-Communist League reportedly donated $8 million to pay for the deployment of Argentine officers to Central America.
Suarez Mason fled Argentina after transition to democracy in 1984.
And according to one human rights organization, Oliver North arranged a false visa for him to enter the U.S. North had been discussing with him.
North had been discussing with him the formation of a continental counterinsurgency force, a concept that, again, evokes Operation Condor.
So this is great.
The Argentina's assassination unit is running out of Miami.
Oliver North is giving this guy, like, who almost certainly would have just been shot.
Like, yeah, enters into the U.S. You know, what's fun about Oliver North, now that you're saying all this, is that I watched him on TV every night on Fox News when I was a kid.
Yeah.
It's fun.
Big Ollie North fans.
Yeah.
It's great that he did so many crimes and he's just still around today doing bad stuff.
So not wanting to be left out of this death squad party, Taiwan also sends military advisors to train the Contras in the camps in Honduras.
It's really like everyone is there.
Like the Moonies are there.
The Soldier of Fortune magazine is flying weapons in.
Sig lab's like there.
And a couple of them get killed in a helicopter gets shot down.
Which is extremely fun.
Yeah, there's a really, really fun story of some soldier of fortune guys getting the fuck murked out of them.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's pretty dope.
Also, there's a pretty good song from a Canadian country music artist I like called Student Visas that's about this period.
Check it out.
I don't know.
I always just like, I just want to imagine like, like, just think about like, what is it like in these camps?
It's like Bohy Pak, who's like the moon's lieutenant, is like showing up there.
And, you know, he like, he just like sees some guy from, I don't know, he sees like some CAA guy.
It's like, hey, Bob, I haven't seen you since we did the cocaine coup in Bolivia.
Killing In Refugee Camps00:11:45
It's like all every single person who's ever funded a death squad is just simultaneously running around these camps.
And it's like, and you know, part of part of what's going on here is that Sig Lab, like through the sort of CIL networks we've been talking about that are funding all these death squads, like gets the Reagan administration like fully in touch with involves in trade with training these Contras as well.
The Reagan administration is so heavily involved in this stuff that Mariel Salvador Alecron literally shows up at his inaugural ball in 1981, which is great.
And the CIA, meanwhile, is so heavily involved in the Contra camps in Honduras that quoting McSherry, Alvarez, who's the Honduran intelligence guy who's now heading the military running this stuff, was so close to the CIA station chief in Honduras, Douglas Winters, that Winters asked him to be the godfather of his adopted child.
It's incredible.
And Ronald Reagan later awarded him the Legion of Merit in 1983.
So this is...
Love Ronald Reagan, a guy who never did anything wrong.
And until 1984, this was going great.
And by going great, I mean the CIA, Argentina, Taiwan, and the Mooney's are like having a great time partying in the jungle and like murdering communists.
In Honduras itself, the Nicaraguan Contras have just straight up turned into their own death squads who are murdering people.
You know, okay, so like they're a death squad that's supposed to murder people in Nicaragua, right?
But they're also just murdering people in Honduras.
And then they also just like start killing people like in the in the Nicaraguan refugee camps in Honduras.
So this is a good time.
And back in the U.S., Congress actually does something for once ever and is like, Reagan, you can't give money to these guys who are burning children alive, Which, you know, fairly sensible thing.
And so immediately every mob comes for the child burners.
Yeah, look, look, if burning and burying burning children is a, oh god, I can't remember.
I can't remember the name of the thing that part of American tradition and history.
It is rooted in American culture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're not supposed to burn children to death?
Who's since whom?
Since when?
That's what I gotta ask.
Yeah, our forefathers burned children to death.
Their forefathers burned children to death.
Multiple people.
Oh, my God, one of these days will burn children to death.
Yeah.
If we're lucky.
It'll be great.
No.
So.
Wow.
Sophie.
Damn.
Sophie.
So, Sophie, noted anti-American.
You are falling down on the job.
Like, Scotty Pippin.
Unfortunately, it's a visual gag, but a robber just got a towel thrown at him.
It was extremely funny.
Yeah.
One of our, one of our corporate mandates is that someone always has to be in the room with me to get angry when I say things that I shouldn't.
Oh, I did that with my mind.
That was so cool.
You really professor Xaviered that one.
That's another famous basketball player.
Oh my God.
Okay.
Chris.
So as we talked about in our episodes with the Moody's, this is the moment that Reverend Moon truly becomes the father of Iran-Contra by personally throwing money and supplies at the Honduran camp to like keep them in the fight when the CIA couldn't.
And this is also where John Siglab, like currently the head of the World Anti-Communist League, becomes incredibly important.
He starts doing this series of fundraisers all over the world.
He like goes to Honduras.
He's like in these Contra camps.
He's like flying in weapons and supplies with the Soldier of Fortune guy.
And he is actually raising some money from the Contras.
But this whole thing is really a Shira.
And this is a key part of how Iran-Contra works because you have this figurehead guy who any CIA money can just sort of like go through.
And it looks to all the world like, oh, hey, this guy's raising money for freedom fighters.
And as like kind of silly as this whole thing is, this part of the operation is so successful that no one finds out about it until like the Iran end of Iran-Contra falls apart completely and people start like following the money trails around.
And Sink Lab is like deeply involved in this enough that his liaison to the Reagan administration is he's just talking to Oliver North.
And during the later investigation, there's a real attempt to go after his organization, the United States Council for World Freedom, which again is the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League.
They try to go after it.
They don't quite get it, but it's in the documents.
And while all of this is going on, Siglab's trying to do a rebrand of the league because it turns out that having a bunch of people who, if you talk to them, will immediately start screaming about Zionist communism and Jewish conspiracies is, I mean, I guess now it's good for recruiting, but like back then it was not great for recruiting people.
And, you know, the goal of this is to bring in more mainstream conservatives.
And one of these mainstream conservatives is John McCain, who is better known for other work, like telling a reporter, quote, I hate the gooks.
I will hate them as long as I live.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He said that.
No one ever talks about it because, you know, anti-Adacian racism wasn't real until 2020.
It was invented by Donald Trump.
It wasn't like the previous two people they ran before him were also like unbelievably fucking racist.
And so, okay, but like this whole sort of like campaign to like clean the league up, like, you know, it does do one thing, which is that Siglab finally kicks out the CAL.
I think it's like 1983.
He like finally kicks them out.
But, you know, all the death squad people like somehow keep showing up to their meetings.
The only people who actually get kicked out are the techos because they're just like too openly anti-Semitic.
Here's some inside the league about how like deeply these changes actually went.
Still, there were problems in selling this new and improved league for not very much has changed.
John Kosak, the Belarusian Nazi collaborator, remains chairman of his delegation.
The Croatian Liberation Movement, the International Eustasha Brotherhood that Ante Pavlovic established in Argentina in 1956, was still the official Croatian League chapter, as was the Bulgarian National Front, which had been formed in 1947 by the Bulgarian legionnaires who had advocated the extermination of the nation's Jews.
Mario Salvador Alcron, the godfather of Central American death squads, was in attendance.
And although Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian premier who had officiated over the murder of approximately 7,000 residents of Lvov in one week in 1941, was too ill to come, his wife, Slava, was there to represent the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.
Oh, good.
I was really worried for a second when you said he was too ill to come, but I'm glad she knew she was able to make that.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, so this new league, it's exactly the same as the old league, except the scale of operations increases, right?
Alongside running Iran-Contra, like anti-communist rebel goose from across the world to start showing up and placing orders for weapons.
I'm pretty sure they give weapons to Charles Taylor, although that one was slightly sketchy.
Yeah, it's fun.
They definitely send weapons to a bunch of like right-wing, like incredibly weird guys in Mozambique who they give like surface-to-air missiles, guns, and bazookas.
And if you remember how we talked about how Reverend Moon backed Pol Pot and how that aid was like mostly propaganda, but a bit of money.
So the same Cambodian soldiers ally with Pol Pot come to the league and the league just like gives them a bunch of guns and weapons.
So they're funding Pol Pot.
The league is also like constantly raising money for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, where Siglab also winds up doing like liaisoning for the CIA.
It really looks like this whole thing is sort of just accelerating into a new.
By the way, quick note, because this can't be referenced enough.
Everybody likes to say, oh, when we armed the Mujahideen, we were just giving weapons to the Taliban.
No, we were giving weapons to the people who molested children on such a grand scale that it allowed for the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
Get it right, folks.
Yeah.
That was the Pakistanis who were.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So, yeah, it looks like, you know, it looks like this whole thing is accelerating into like a new, even more bloody phase of the Cold War.
And, you know, this is what the authors of inside the authors of Inside the League are writing this in 1986.
And, you know, this is what this is what they think is going to happen.
You know, the league is going to play an even more central role in the Cold War.
And then they won.
The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and then collapsed.
The Saddistas fell.
The Mozambique abandoned Marxist-Leninism.
Vietnam, which was already on its way to becoming a capitalist market economy, withdrew from Cambodia, which is also now a capitalist market economy.
Vietnam's glorious people's security forces regularly train with American police officers from a variety of states, including Oregon.
Yeah.
And also, I'm about 90% sure they get trained by the Israelis too, because it's like, yeah.
I mean, honestly.
Who doesn't, am I right?
Yeah.
So it's all good.
I do want to make one quick note, which is that Mozambique is my favorite country in terms of like the word for people who come from that country, because I find saying Mozambican to be incredibly satisfying.
Spelling it's even better.
Oh, I fucking love that word.
I don't know why.
Just feels good.
Try it.
Try it for yourself.
Mozambican spell Mozambican.
I cannot spell Mozambican.
It feels good.
It's easier to spell Mozambican than it is Mozambique because you don't have that weird fucking Q in there.
Check it out, people.
Spell Mozambeacon.
Improve your day.
That's not a joke.
That's just a real thing.
Yeah, so the guys who assassinate Yugoslavian ambassadors live long enough to see Yugoslavia fall.
The small guerrilla groups that were in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are all exterminated.
The government that comes after Pinochet privatizes even more state-owned companies than Pinochet did.
Reverend Moon opens a car company in North Korea.
China is now the world's second largest capitalist economy, and even Cuba has special economic zones.
So, yeah, adrift in this sort of new world of their own creation.
The league changes its name to the World League for Freedom and Democracy.
But the organization is a rump of its former self, but it still meets in Taiwan, even though Taiwan overthrew the KMT.
But, you know, it still meets there.
But again, like the like, you know, the, the, the, even Taiwan, where like the K and the KMTs like built or dictatorship fell.
It's like, well, there's still a capitalist economy.
And that's because we live in their world now.
We, we, we live in the world where all of these people, all of these fucking Nazis, got everything that they ever wanted, and it sucks ass.
And it is going to stay that way.
It's going to stay that way unless.
All right.
Well, here's the thing, folks.
You know how to stop this from happening?
Shoot all of the Nazis when you win the war?
Instead of hiring the Nazis when it's the same lesson with Confederates, right?
Yeah.
The real, the lesson from World War II and the lesson from the U.S. Civil War is the same, which is when you beat a bunch of racists in a war, kill a lot more of them than you think you're going to need to.
You're going to want to not kill as many of them because we're going to forgive and move on.
No, kill a fuckload more of them.
Like, everybody sit down right after you win the war.
Kill More Than You Think00:03:47
Sit down.
What is this fucking voice you keep doing?
It's so bizarre.
What?
It's my voice that I do when I'm beating other people.
It's like zombie Mickey Mouse.
I'm Sophie.
I don't like Robert's voices.
Hoodla-doodle-doo.
That's how you sound with another topple.
I know.
I did that with my mind again.
What's really key is after you say whatever you're saying in the fake voice for the person, then you got to say, hoodly doodle-doo.
Anyway.
Well, this was a great episode, Chris.
Thank you for writing it and for allowing me to have a vacation where I went and shot machine guns in the desert.
That was necessary.
And thank you all at home for listening to the podcasts that we make.
And until next time, remember, I am the Jesus Christ of podcasting.
How's that, Sophie?
We good?
You're fired.
I've really been on one today.
Yeah, I don't know what it is today.
I've really been wild in today.
I don't know what's going on.
Vacation Robert is a mood.
It's a vibe.
I'm having a vacation.
I'm on a pretty Pretty heavy dose of Kratom, gonna be honest with you here.
It's good stuff.
It's good stuff.
Anyways.
Vacation, all I ever wanted.
Wow.
Vacation.
Heck.
Does Vacation Robert?
Does Vacation Robert have a book to plug by chance?
No.
Yes.
Vacation Robert has a book to plug.
What book is Vacation Robert plugging?
That's a great question, Sophie.
Scholars debate what book I wrote, but a lot of them seem to believe that it's called After the Revolution and that you can find it if you Google AK Press After the Revolution or if you go to the thing that I'm looking up by trying to find where it is on our subreddit because somebody said that I should plug these guys and they were right.
You can get it everywhere, like all of the places that books are sold.
So if you're somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you can have the Jeff Bezos shit get them.
Or you can look it up on fuck.
I'm having to scroll quite a bit.
Disasters.
You can do it.
What a massive failure for me.
While you do that, I'm going to plug our good friend Prop's new cold brew at TerraformColdBrew.com.
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah, definitely check that shit out.
It's gorgeous.
And listen to Hood Politics.
And stream Prop's music.
And follow Prop.
This has just turned into like a huge prop plug.
I think it's bookshop.org.
Yeah, go to bookshop.org.
You can find my book there.
You can probably find props book there.
Let me look it up.
Let me look up props book on bookshop.org.
It's also called Terraform.
Let me look up Terraform on bookshop.org, which connects you to indie bookstores.
Boy, there's actually, yes, props book is on there, along with the book Terraforming Mars by some guy I've never heard of.
Shout out to that book.
And the book Terraform in Action by Scott Winkler, which has what looks like an Ottoman Janissary on the front.
Not really sure what's going on there.
Anyway, bunch of weird books.
Go check them out.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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