In 1985 the Washington Times sponsored a fund for the Contras who committed atrocities, and trafficked drugs to the US
▲ Two women carry the coffin of a child killed by a Contra landmine in Managua, July 4, 1986. Thirty-one unarmed civilians, including women and children, were killed when the truck they were riding in struck a Contra landmine. The truck was carrying a 50-gallon barrel of gasoline.
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Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who fancied himself the new Messiah, had founded his newspaper, The Washington Times, in 1982 partly to protect Ronald Reagan’s political flanks and partly to ensure that he had powerful friends in high places.
In the so-called “Koreagate” scandal of the late 1970s, Moon’s religious cult had been exposed as a money-laundering front [see KCFF scam and ROFA scam] for South Korean intelligence and other corrupt right-wing political forces in Asia (including some elements of organized crime).
As a result, Moon had been convicted of tax evasion and spent time in federal prison. He was determined to prevent a recurrence of those investigations and thus began pouring what came to total several billion dollars of his mysterious money into the Washington Times, creating a propaganda bulwark for the Republican Party and guaranteeing himself a phalanx of powerful defenders.
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From ‘United States and state-sponsored terrorism’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponsored_terrorism
In the 1980s the Sandinista government of Nicaragua did not attempt to create a communist economic system; instead, their policy advocated a social democracy and a mixed economy. The government sought the aid of Western Europe, who were opposed to the U.S. embargo against Nicaragua, to escape dependency on the Soviet Union. However, the U.S. administration viewed the leftist Sandinista government as undemocratic and totalitarian under the ties of the Soviet-Cuban model and tried to paint the Contras as freedom fighters.
The Sandinista government headed by Daniel Ortega won decisively in the 1984 Nicaraguan elections. The U.S. government explicitly planned to back the ‘Contras’ (who were a collection of various rebel groups that had been formed in opposition to the rise of the new Sandinista government) as a means to damage the Nicaraguan economy and force the Sandinista government to divert its scarce resources toward the army and away from social and economic programs.
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Edited from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua
When the hereditary dictatorship of the Somoza family was deposed by the Sandinistas in 1979, the Somoza family’s worth was estimated to be between $500 million and $1.5 billion – gained through massive corruption.
In 1980, the Carter administration provided $60 million in aid to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, but the aid was suspended when the administration obtained evidence of Nicaraguan shipment of arms to El Salvadoran rebels. In response to the coming to power of the Sandinistas, the ‘contras’ formed.
[The US government viewed the leftist Sandinistas as a threat to economic interests of American corporations in Nicaragua and to national security. US President Ronald Reagan stated in 1983 that “The defense of [the USA’s] southern frontier” was at stake. “In spite of the Sandinista victory being declared fair, the United States continued to oppose the left-wing Nicaraguan government.”]
The Reagan administration authorized the CIA to help the contra rebels with funding, armaments, and training. The contras operated out of camps in the neighboring countries of Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south.
▲ Contras in Nicaragua on the southern front.
The contras engaged in a systematic campaign of terror amongst the rural Nicaraguan population to disrupt the social reform projects of the Sandinistas. Several historians have criticized the contra campaign and the Reagan administration’s support for it, citing the brutality and numerous human rights violations of the contras. LaRamee and Polakoff, for example, describe the destruction of health centers, schools, and cooperatives at the hands of the rebels, and others have contended that murder, rape, and torture occurred on a large scale in contra-dominated areas. The United States also carried out a campaign of economic sabotage, and disrupted shipping by planting underwater mines in Nicaragua’s port of Corinto, an action condemned by the International Court of Justice as illegal. The U.S. also sought to place economic pressure on the Sandinistas, and the Reagan administration imposed a full trade embargo. The Sandinistas were also accused of human rights abuses.
In the Nicaraguan general elections of 1984, which were judged to have been free and fair, the Sandinistas won the parliamentary election and their leader Daniel Ortega won the presidential election. …
▲ A demonstration against Reagan’s illegal support of the Contras.
After the U.S. Congress prohibited federal funding of the contras in 1983, the Reagan administration nonetheless illegally continued to back them by covertly selling arms to Iran and channeling the proceeds to the contras (the Iran–Contra affair), for which several members of the Reagan administration were convicted of felonies. The International Court of Justice, in regard to the case of Nicaragua v. United States in 1984, found, “the United States of America was under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by certain breaches of obligations under customary international law and treaty-law committed by the United States of America”. During the war between the contras and the Sandinistas, 30,000 people were killed.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras#Human_rights_violations
The United States began to support Contra activities against the Sandinista government by December 1981, with the CIA at the forefront of operations. The CIA supplied the funds and the equipment, coordinated training programs, and provided intelligence and target lists. While the Contras had little military successes, they did prove adept at carrying out CIA guerrilla warfare strategies from training manuals which advised them to incite mob violence, “neutralize” civilian leaders and government officials and attack “soft targets” — including schools, health clinics and cooperatives. The agency added to the Contras’ sabotage efforts by blowing up refineries and pipelines, and mining ports. Finally, according to former Contra leader Edgar Chamorro, CIA trainers also gave Contra soldiers large knives. “A commando knife [was given], and our people, everybody wanted to have a knife like that, to kill people, to cut their throats”. In 1985 Newsweek published a series of photos taken by Frank Wohl, a conservative student admirer traveling with the Contras, entitled “Execution in the Jungle”:
The victim dug his own grave, scooping the dirt out with his hands… He crossed himself. Then a contra executioner knelt and rammed a k-bar knife into his throat. A second enforcer stabbed at his jugular, then his abdomen. When the corpse was finally still, the contras threw dirt over the shallow grave — and walked away.
The CIA officer in charge of the covert war, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, admitted to the House Intelligence Committee staff in a secret briefing in 1984 that the Contras were routinely murdering “civilians and Sandinista officials in the provinces, as well as heads of cooperatives, nurses, doctors and judges”. But he claimed that this did not violate President Reagan’s executive order prohibiting assassinations because the agency defined it as just ‘killing’. “After all, this is war—a paramilitary operation,” Clarridge said in conclusion.
▲ The CIA “assassination manual,” authorized by CIA supervisor Duane Clarridge, provided illustrated instructions in Spanish on how to make a bomb and blow up a local police station. Other pages explained how to assassinate victims with a rope, wire, belt, pistol, rifle, shotgun, machine gun, or explosives.
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From a special report by Robert Parry December 9, 2010
White House aide Oliver North’s chief Contra emissary, Robert Owen, made this point in a March 17, 1986, message about the Contras leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Emphasis in original.]
That business was cocaine trafficking to the US.
… Another break in the long-running Contra-cocaine cover-up was a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Bromwich.
According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes.
Bromwich’s report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses’s drug operation and his financial assistance to the Contras. For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s the CIA allowed the Contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds.
CIA Inspector General Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress, and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government… . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analysts.
from Big Media’s Guilt in Gary Webb’s Death
By Robert Parry (A Special Report) December 9, 2010
https://consortiumnews.com/2010/120910.html
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Former CIA agent David MacMichael:
“Once you set up a covert operation to supply arms and money, it’s very difficult to separate it from the kind of people who are involved in other forms of trade, and especially drugs. There is a limited number of planes, pilots and landing strips. By developing a system for supply of the Contras, the US built a road for drug supply into the US.”
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The Washington Post reported on the drive to support the Contras by the Washington Times.
By Michael Isikoff May 7, 1985
The Washington Times said yesterday that it is sponsoring a worldwide fund-raising campaign to collect $14 million for the “contra” rebels in Nicaragua and has received a $100,000 commitment for the cause from the paper’s owners, the Unification Church.
The Times campaign, coming just two weeks after the House rejected President Reagan’s request for the same amount of aid to the contras, is among the most ambitious publicly announced initiatives so far to raise private money specifically for the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, the Times’ editor, who has championed the contra cause on the paper’s editorial page, announced in a front-page editorial yesterday that the newspaper is setting up a non-profit, public corporation that will oversee fund raising for the contras and that will operate independently of the paper’s news operations. …
De Borchgrave said he thought up the idea for the campaign on Sunday and won quick approval from Col. Bo Hi Pak, the top deputy to Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon and president of News World Communications Inc., the parent company of the Times.
Pak “thought it was a great idea” and immediately pledged $100,000 to the drive, he said. …
The Times initiative comes while a number of closely related conservative groups such as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) and the United States Council for World Freedom have been conducting independent fund-raising drives to funnel military and other aid to the contras. …
But the full scale of private-sector aid to the contras has been difficult to determine, in part because many of the groups involved in raising money have described their efforts as being humanitarian aid to refugees in Honduras, where many of the families of Nicaraguan contras are living.
One such group that has acknowledged providing refugee assistance is Causa, the Unification Church’s anti-Communist political arm that is also headed by Pak.
▲ Advertisement in The New York Times, March 16, 1986, signed by over 200 religious leaders.
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From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras
In his 1997 study on U.S. low intensity warfare, Kermit D. Johnson, a former Chief of the U.S. Army Chaplains, contends that U.S. hostility toward the revolutionary government was motivated not by any concern for “national security”, but rather by what the world relief organization Oxfam termed “the threat of a good example”:
It was alarming that in just a few months after the Sandinista revolution, Nicaragua received international acclaim for its rapid progress in the fields of literacy and health. It was alarming that a socialist-mixed-economy state could do in a few short months what the Somoza dynasty, a U.S. client state, could not do in 45 years! It was truly alarming that the Sandinistas were intent on providing the very services that establish a government’s political and moral legitimacy.
The government’s program included increased wages, subsidized food prices, and expanded health, welfare, and education services. And though it nationalized Somoza’s former properties, it preserved a private sector that accounted for between 50 and 60 percent of GDP.
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Bolivia’s government-protected cocaine shipments helped transform Colombia’s Medellín cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market.
It fell to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the vendetta against those who reported on the cocaine-Contra connection.
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In Bolivia, Moon disciple Tom Ward and the former Hitler SS Officer, Klaus Barbie were often seen together
How Sun Myung Moon’s organization helped to establish Bolivia as South America’s first narco-state.
FFWPU President of IAPP Prosecuted for Money Laundering and Drug Smuggling in US Court; may be connected to UC / FFWPU Leadership
The Unification Church and the KCIA – ‘Privatizing’ covert action: the case of the UC
CAUSA and the Catholic Church in the 1980s
CAUSA and Three South American Terror Generals
