Behind the Bastards - Part One: The World Anti-Communist League: A Study in Nazi Death Squads

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Mia Wong is joined by Robert to find out where all the Nazis went after World War II. FOOTNOTES: http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=FCBA44E70A8712285AB8B9ABEBEB1866 http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=EC08834904C20CC6CDB3EBC4E57506F7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/02/23/daubuisson-death-comes-to-the-executioner/df5839ff-fe39-4a51-ac3c-7f4e38e0d5f2/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292475976_NATO's_secret_armies_Operation_GLADIO_and_terrorism_in_Western_Europe https://archive.ph/lzdCY http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2022/04/fifth-man-paolo-bellini-found-guilty-of-the-1980-bologna-massacre/ https://files.libcom.org/files/NATOs_secret_armies.pdf https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jasenovac https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/FUNDAMENTALLY-FREUND-Remembering-Croatias-Auschwitz-of-the-Balkans-453128 https://www.history.com/news/mothers-plaza-de-mayo-disappeared-children-dirty-war-argentina https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1245&context=umialr https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2022/01/23/2003771895 https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/2021/08/41-years-on-remembering-the-bologna-bombings/ http://eial.tau.ac.il/index.php/eial/article/view/1654 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1977/01/30/for-those-who-will-never-again-be-human/9eeeb8ef-224a-4532-adc4-786249b02c50/ https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10264 https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/genocide-of-the-ache-people-of-paraguay-will-be-tried-in-argentina See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's assassinating my John Lennons? Why? Why? Why, why, Sophie? Why did I say that? I don't know. Why would anyone say such a terrible thing? That's what I want to know. Robert, I'm simply asking you why you would start, like, why?

I don't know. Nobody knows, Sophie. That's the most important thing is that no one knows why things happen. Or where they happen. I disagree. Or who they happen to. But this is behind the bastards. It is? Podcast. Bad people.

Tell you all about them. And normally, this is a podcast where I read a story about a bad person to somebody who's coming in cold. But today, I am the person who is chilly, who is coming in frigid, frost on my shoulders. As I talk to my good buddy, Chris. Chris, how are you doing? Doing okay. It is thundering incredibly ominously, which I feel like is a good sign for the story. Excellent.

Yes, ominous thunder, nothing better. Turn up your mic pickup. Let's get some of that on the line. It's like, I can like feel stuff shaking a little bit. It is a pretty impressive thunder round. Yeah, that's good. How are we? What are we today?

What are we talking about? Who are we? Where are we? Robert, we were told that after the war, the Nazis vanished without a trace. That is what I know about Nazis, that they went away forever after the war. Still dream of a master race. The history books, they tell us of their defeat in 45. But Robert, why did they all come out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died?

Now, okay, I've done my obligatory chumbawomba. And so now I can answer your question. You did. That was a good chumbawomba. I liked it. Thanks, Chris. I'm going to have to throw a, I'm going to have to womb us some chumbas later on here, but I'll let that be something that we build too.

The funny thing is, my favorite version of that song actually isn't the chumbawomba version. It's the, what was it? The Stockholm's Women's Anti-Fascist Choir did a version of it that rules very good. Oh, that does sound nice. Yes, it's very exciting. And the other thing that's exciting is that the answer to that question is that it turns out after the day the Nazi died, the Nazis came out of the woodwork and they all joined the World Anti-Communist League. Ah, there we go.

There we go. This is the subject of today's story. Yes. These guys. Guys, oh, a bunch of real freaks and weirdos. Now, somewhat weirdly, for a story that is about a lot of Nazis, we're actually not starting in Germany. The actual story here. That's fair.

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the sort of consistent themes of this entire episode is stuff happening around the orbit of the Soviet Union. And so the, I guess you could technically start the story in Ukraine, but I didn't do that. And instead I'm starting it in China in the year 1923. And this is a year in which the Soviets are going to create a monster that will haunt them until the day the USSR collapses. And that monster is called the KMT or the Chinese Nationalist Party. Now, okay, people who know the history of this are going to be like, Chris, have you lost your mind? What do you mean the Soviets created the KMT?

And the answer is yes, I have lost my mind, but it is for reasons that are completely unrelated to this. It's for reasons that are related to the Daily Show we all agreed to do. Yeah, that. Yeah, also this episode. But yes, the Daily Show. I, whew. What a good idea that was. Good ass idea.

I cannot believe I was sober while I agreed to that. Incredible, genuinely baffling decisions. Yeah. I'm very happy we got multiple other people brought on to deal with that problem we created for ourselves. I was going to say Robert and I were not sober when we agreed to that deal. Oh, I mean. That explains a lot. I was sober last in 2009.

So anyway, maybe 2010. Yeah, that's pretty recent. So, OK, so we've actually talked about this period all the way back in the warlord episode about the Chinese warlord period that I did. So the Nationalist Party or the KMT is by Chinese standards, even in like, you know, 1923. They're a pretty old political formation by Chinese standards. It's founded in 1894 by Sun Yat-sen. Oh, wow, I had no idea it went back that far. Yeah, well, it's kind of weird.

So it's there are two different dates you see about it found that there's one date where Sun Yat-sen starts an organization that joins another organization. But yeah, it's pretty it's pretty it's really like the oldest of the sort of continuous like Chinese revolutionary groups that come out of the sort of pre overthrow of the Qing Dynasty era. And, you know, it does a lot of stuff. They do a bunch of revolutions. But by 1923, they're just a disaster. They're a complete mess. They're an organizational mess or political mess, militarily is a mess financially is a mess. Like this is supposed to be like a mass political party, right? They're trying to take over all of China.

They don't they don't even have a newspaper. It is it is this is this is China's Democratic Party. Yeah. And the USSR, you know, having failed in their attempt to sort of bring revolution to the West via like the Red Army storming through Eastern Europe, the consequences of which we will get back to in a second. The USSR sort of turns its attention east and some get send the Bolsheviks come to an agreement in which the Soviets start sending advisors and weapons to arm the KMT and the war against the sort of Chinese warlords. And chief among those people is a guy named Mikhail Borodin. Actually, I don't know if it's Michael or Mikhail. It should be Mikhail.

If they're Russian, you always say Michael is Mikhail. Yeah. Mikhail Borodin, who's he's like, oh, yeah, that's a Russian ash name. Yeah. He's he's a he's like a Mikhail Borodin. Yeah. That's a good one. He's like he's like the Bolsheviks Bolshevik.

Like he's a very, very old school like guy guy guy who left the Bund and joined the Bolsheviks in like 1903. Yeah. He has this like impeccable sort of revolutionary credentials. Yeah. Smelled linens morning breath like that that close. Yeah. Yeah. And to make one of the worst mistakes the USSR has ever made, which is pretty impressive.

If you look at the history of the USSR. Yeah. Yeah. Which includes the largest lake in the world that they killed. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. And like this one, I probably killed more people than than losing that lake, which is. Yeah.

Look, I look, I'm a big believer that like fuck lakes, fuck them all, kill every lake. I mean, look, hey, you, you too can become the Soviet Union. Wait, wait, wage a protracted people's war against lakes. Exactly. This, this is my opinion. When the revolution comes, the first thing we need to deal with is not the fascists. You know, it's not, not, not like control of the far right in Florida or wherever. We got to nuke the great lakes, not the cities.

We got to nuke the lakes themselves. That's the only thing that's going to protect us. So I know, I know what you're going to say, but I need you to listen to a song called the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. And then tell me those lakes don't have some vengeance coming. We're not blowing up the lake. We could. We shouldn't.

A new slogan. A nuke for every lake. A nuke for every lake. Christopher. Well, for all the great ones. Do not take his side. Fuck them lakes. That is the official stance of cool zone media on that.

It is not. Nuke the lakes. Nuke the lakes. Yeah. Absolutely. It's pretty good for everybody. It'll bring in tourism to whatever cities people have on those fucking lakes. It'll be good for people.

No, that's just science. Absolutely. That's just mathematics. The spit is going on so long. Please. Please save us from this. Chris. So speaking of saving people from things.

So. Bored in with Sonya sensor of help and approval turns the KMT into like a modern mass political party with this sort of centralized organization and the centralized political apparatus. They get an actual like ideology. And as is going to become very important later on in the story, the party starts to develop political and ideological discipline. And as part of this effort, the nationalists send Chiang Kai-shek to the USSR to study Soviet military and ideological techniques. And when he comes back, they put him in charge of a sort of new Soviet style military academy from which he is going to build an absolutely enormous power base in the army because he's the guy who is now training all of the officers. But the Soviets are like, this is fine. They call him the red general like Chiang Kai-shek like shakes hands with Stalin.

And everything seems to be going great, except there's there's there's one minor problem here. Chiang Kai-shek is not a communist. He is not. He left us at all. He's like base. Basically, he's a gangster who's like kind of nationalist. Now, the other thing that that's that's extremely bad about all of this is that Sonya Sen dies in 1925. And Chiang Kai-shek is pretty rapidly able to take control of the party.

Now, and the everything that's happening here is that even by a sort of Soviet standards, right? I mean, this is this is pre Stalin like fully taking control. So even by Soviet standards, the the the new sort of KMT organization is incredibly centralized. And the person at the top of it has an enormous amount of political power. And so, you know, Chiang Kai-shek takes over the party and he also sort of personally commands the loyalty of the new generation of officers who've been trained by the Soviets. He has a bunch of Soviet weapons. And, you know, the result of this is that he now has the best army of any Chinese political faction. And what has happened here is that the Soviets have in essence like they've built a party in their own image, right?

They've built this party that's designed with this sort of like ruthless efficiency and stamping out kind of revolutionaries. And they have handed it to a fanatical anti-communist drug lord who immediately turns around and uses it to massacre like the entire Chinese urban working class in the first of his white terrorist. Now, that seems bad for organizing. Yeah, it's not good. My favorite part, I think I told the story in the last episode. My favorite part about this, though, is that like, okay, so Chiang Kai-shek is like killing the communists, right? It's like in 1927 and the communists are like, they go to the Soviet Union, they're like, hey, what should we do? And the Soviet Union is like, they're having some kind of like Trotsky and Stalin are having some kind of argument.

And the line that comes out of them is like, well, you guys have to like stay allied with this party that is murdering you. And it's just like, and then they all die, right? He kills something like a million people. Okay, so that's a pretty serious set of crimes against humanity there. Yeah, yeah, it's really bad. And this is the Soviets doing great stuff. But, you know, okay, so Chiang Kai-shek kills about a million people trying to wipe out the Chinese left. But we can we can ask ourselves another question, which is how did this actually go for Chiang Kai-shek in the long term?

And this is a question that can be answered by answering the very simple question. Robert, who actually won the Chinese Civil War? Was it China? Technically. So it went well. Yeah, it went great. Yeah, this is why Taiwan and China are currently one country run by the Chinese National Party. By the same government, yes.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, if you listen to America for roughly a generation and a half, Taiwan is China and the only Chinese government that we need to worry about. Yeah, we will come back to that because that turns out to be a thing in this story. But, you know, so Chiang Kai-shek, like the net effect of Chiang Kai-shek's like incredibly vehement anti-communism is that he creates another monster who is going to absolutely destroy him. That person, of course, being Mao Zedong. And, you know, when you sort of like take kind of macro view of this, right, this whole thing is a cycle, right? The Bolsheviks are the monster that sort of capitalism unleashed when they crushed the Paris commune. The Bolsheviks create the modern KMT and the KMT, you know, like slaughters the entire urban like Chinese Communist Party and they, you know, they unleash another monster by turning the CCP into the sort of the peasant army that Mao is going to use to crush the KMT themselves after World War II.

But, you know, the problem here and the problem for this story is that Mao didn't actually finish off the KMT that, you know, they retreat to Taiwan after losing the Civil War. And they're able to do this because in 1947, the KMT forces that were occupying Taiwan do what they call the February 28th incident. And it's kind of complicated. We will one day do a full thing on this. But the basics of it is there's an uprising in Taiwan against the sort of brutality of the KMT occupation. And the KMT kills something like 20,000 people in a week. And this is like, you know, this is a genuine horror, right? They're beheading students. That is a lot of people to kill in a week. Yeah.

I think I could kill maybe 5,000 people in a week. Yeah. I mean, you have to. With the resources we have here at Coolzone Media. Yeah. Top's 5,000. I think if we, I think you can do 5,000. If we pull everyone else together, we can get that number up to maybe seven. Yeah. We have a lot of staff now. Yeah. We do have a lot of staff now. We have a lot of staff now. Sophie, can we, can we get some of the numbers people to just, to just run that by so we, we have some options on the table?

Sure, Robert. Okay. Thank you, Sophie. Yeah. So, so the, you know, the KMT is like, they're like cutting people, like cutting parts of people's faces off and like taking them. It's really bad. This is like, this is like, this is basically like the foundational like crime of modern Taiwanese political history. And it's, there's like a huge portion of like all of the politics that are going to happen in Taiwan from then until like now are in large part because of this. And if you read books about Chiang Kai-shek, like, well, the books are not about Chiang Kai-shek, but where like Chiang Kai-shek shows up for some reason. This is like the crime that they always talk about.

And, you know, it is really bad. But the thing you have to understand about Chiang Kai-shek is that like, this is probably not even in his top 10 war crimes. Like this is a man who once killed 400,000 civilians by blowing up a single dam. After the February 28th incident, Taiwan until like the 90s is under this thing, this thing called the white terror where, you know, the government disappears, much people, they kill a bunch of people, they torture a bunch of people. But the thing is, again, this is his second white terror, right? Man. And you know, that's something he and I have in common because that's what people call me when I've had a couple too many.

Can you tell me that much? You know, actually, I feel like I should actually have looked into Chiang Kai-shek's drug use more because this guy is running a lot of drugs. But, you know, but the thing about these white terrorists, right, is that like, okay, the white terror that he does in Taiwan is like a genuine horror, right? It's also, he kills something like a 25th of the people at the first white terror killed. Like this guy. Well, that's good. So he's moving in the right direction, a couple more terrorists and he won't be killing anybody at all. Well, I mean, the thing that Chiang Kai-shek does, we're going to see in the story is that he stops.

Okay, he doesn't stop killing people in Taiwan, but like the number of people he kills in Taiwan go down over time. That's good. That's progress. Yeah, this is sort of a win. The number of people he kills in every other country just starts like rapidly increasing as time goes on. Yeah, I mean, you got, look, you're going to kill the people somewhere. So I feel like still progress. Yeah, we're only going to do a, we're going to do a soft white terror in Taiwan and we're going to do a hard white terror in Guatemala.

So, you know, and like, I think the thing with Chiang Kai-shek, right, is the reason he's not remembered as one of the sort of like great historical, world historical monsters. Like again, this is a guy like killing 20,000 people in a week is like Tuesday for Chiang Kai-shek. And like the only reason he's not remembered as the sort of like monsters that he's overshadowed once again by like the sort of the trio quad thing of Mao Stalin, Hitler and Churchill. Yeah, there's a lot of people doing like he killed a million people and that's that's pretty good numbers any other year. He's probably got like, yeah, I mean, he's probably got like three or four million. Yeah, which in that solid look, don't get me wrong, solid numbers. Historically, like if you're if you're three, four million dead, pretty good, you're doing real good as a war criminal on a historic level.

But man, first half of the 20th century. That shit doesn't even get you on the board. No, like you're like a like a sea lister. It's the LeBron James's of genocide are out in the streets in those days. And there's there's a lot of them. Like this fucking Scotty Pippin ass mass murderer ain't going to cut it. How was that, Sophie? Was that was that a good basketball?

I mean, it depends on who you're asking. But yes, thank you. Acceptable, but very subjective. I approve. Scotty Pippin was the only other basketball player I could think of. I assume he's not as good as LeBron James. I mean, he would say he is, but. Mm hmm.

Yeah. Yep. So with Chiang Kai-shek, but sorry, bro. I mean, look, the thing with Chiang Kai-shek is that Chiang Kai-shek has the ability to shoot you if you don't agree with him. I don't think Scotty Pippin has the ability to sort of like mobilize an entire death squad apparatus to make everyone think that he's better than LeBron James. No, no. The only basketball player who had a solid death squad apparatus was of course, Shaq. Are we just going to see how many basketball players you could remember?

I liked it. I mean, it also, once again, did work. Thank you. I recently watched the new Adam Sandler basketball movie, so I'm very knowledgeable about basketball. What was funny about that, Sophie, is like every third second in that movie, somebody comes on screen and you, I can tell whenever they come on that like, oh, that's a famous basketball guy. And I'm supposed to have a reaction to the fact that he's in this movie too. But it means nothing to me every time.

Yeah. You didn't have me there to be like, that's who that is. And you're going, I don't care. And then. That's Blamisma blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. He's the best touchdown.

Go Patriots. You were doing so well. Okay. Also, that's, yeah, don't ever say that in front of Chris, by the way. Chris really hates the Patriots. I will. I will. I will.

I will go back to my Taiwanese roots and give me the desk. Yeah. I don't know if you knew this, but Chris really fucking hates the Patriots. Well, I guess no one's going to be doing a whole in one. I don't know. Wow. Brave. Let's get back to the story.

And Chaka Shack in a lot of ways is he is incredibly ahead of his time. Yeah. So, so, okay, you can talk about sort of like the periods of anti-communism, right? And, you know, he has this problem that he's working in, he's working in a period of anti-communism in which the Nazis exist. And, you know, while the Nazis are around the Nazis is just sort of like the top dog of anti-communism, although Chaka Shack was ally with the Nazis. And like his son was in the Weimar and he almost led like a, but he almost led like,

not a division, but he almost led like troops into Poland. The only reason he didn't was that he got pulled back to Taiwan to like fight off the Japanese. Yeah. But, you know, this is one of those, one of the areas of Nazi history that people don't get enough, which is that like, while Nazis are pretty much tied directly into like white supremacist shit today, the OG Nazis were extremely willing to work with people who were from a variety of different like ethnic groups and including fight with them. There was an Indian and Pakistani military unit in the SS.

Because again, racism changes over time like everything else and innovates. Yeah. I mean, like, I've talked about this before, but like, yeah, there were Nazi military advisers like leading Chinese troops in the battle of Shanghai. It's very weird. But, you know, Chaka Shack, like, he loses this war, but he really has the prototype for the sort of second phase of anti-communism, which is that if you look at the KMT, right, he, it has an incredibly centralized party, ideological party apparatus.

It has a bunch of desk wads and is funding itself as an anti-communist dictatorship via the drug trade. So he is doing, he is like 40 years ahead of everyone who was doing anti-communism. And so two of the two journalists whose book I'm going to be using for a lot of this, Scott and John Lee Anderson, they're two journalists who grew up in Taiwan under the military dictatorship. And they call this model of anti-communist party the desk wad party for reasons that we will see shortly. And yeah, they're, they're, they're going to spend a lot of time exporting this to other places.

Now, what's sort of interesting is that Chaka Shack was like hated by like every American officer who had to interact with him during World War II, which like, yeah, yeah, no, no shit. Like, yeah, me too, buddy, I also hate this guy, but I'm admittedly biased because his government tried to publicly execute one of my great uncles. Okay. Well, what was your great uncle doing though? How was he dressed? He was just pretty well.

He, there's, there's, there's a long story. There's a long story about what exactly happened there. But, and he did, he did in fact survive. However, I'm still holding against him for trying to publicly execute him. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, you know, it's weird. While the civil war is going on and Dream World War II, everyone hates him, but the moment

he loses the civil war, he becomes the cause celeb of what's called the China lobby in the U.S. who are these like hardline anti-communist who's things that they, they want to like help Chiang Kai-shek. And he's just incredible delusion that one day he's going to like invade China again and retake the homeland. Like, and like he, like the government in Taiwan made my mom who was like five seeing songs about how they were going to reclaim the motherland one day, it was just good. Yeah.

This place is like, like it is a just sort of incredibly neurotic, like sort of totalitarian military dictatorship. Yeah. I feel, I mean, first off squad goals. But yeah, that, that, that, that sounds like it could be a problem to live under. Yeah. But you know, and of course, like the people who backed them, of course, are the best and brightest of the people in American politics.

You have Douglas MacArthur. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's a good one, right? This is, this is fresh after he attempted to start a nuclear war in order to distract from the fact that he had completely fucked the war in Korea. Yep. There's another very famous person you probably know, Joseph McCarthy, better known for other

works. Yeah. God, of course. Yeah. Joe McCarthy. Slick Joe, known for. Great guy. Nothing bad.

Yeah. Yeah. Great. And so, so the KMT and their American allies start like looking for other sort of like fanatical anti-communist like a list of their cause. And this search eventually leads them to the formation of the World Anti-Communist League. One of the people who they find is Park Chung Ki, who is the built. Well, okay.

He's the second military dictator of South Korea. I keep saying we're going to do an episode about him one day and I promise we will. There's so much wild ass, especially in this period, Korean history that people in the United States don't know fuck all about. Yeah. It's really good shit. This guy like, this is a guy who, so he fought for the Japanese in World War II. And okay.

So like there are a lot of Japanese people who were forced to like conscripted into fighting the Japanese army. Sure. It was a military dictatorship. Yeah. That's the way it is. Park Chung Ki is not one of those guys. He fought for the Japanese Emperor because he loved like, from pure ideology, he was

like, he looked at the Japanese Emperor and was like, oh, shit. I love this. And you know, like he is, he is incredibly fascist. Like this is the guy who Nobisuke Kishi talked to after the war and was like, whoa, buddy, you got to tone the fascism shit down a little bit. Like it's, it's, it's wild. And you know, but like, like just, okay, utterly inexplicably. This is the second like second communist decision in this episode that I'm just like, what are

you guys doing? They, they, the communists let him join the Communist Party. And this is like baffling to me, right? Like here is a dude who literally fought for the Japanese on purpose. And you know, the Communist Party looks at him and goes like, what should we do with him, boss? I know, let's let him in the party. And so he like immediately gets arrested and just instantly like the fastest ratting

I've ever seen in my entire life, just like rats on his comrades to the government, which like, like, okay. So I am in principle against snitching. I also like really don't understand what the communists were expecting was going to happen here. Like you brought in a guy who fought for the Japanese army on purpose. Of course he was instantly going to betray you. Like really baffling stuff.

Yeah. I mean, the Korean communists. But so in 1961, he coos the governments and he's the guy who like really fully brings Korea on board with this whole sort of like world anti-communist league thing. He starts sending like generals and like KCAA guys to the league. The moonies are also a big part of this. I'm not going to talk about them here because we have talked about the moonies a lot. Yeah.

Go listen to a lot and then make your own electronically fired blunderbuss. Yeah. That's that's the official stance of this show. I look, I just think they deserve it. So the other major group that that's involved in the creation of the world anti-communist league is called the anti-bullshit block of nations to the ABN. And the ABN are a bunch of people who they're united by like two things. One is that they really hate the Soviets.

The second thing they're united by is that they did the Holocaust. Okay. Well, that's bad. Yeah. Yeah. The ABN was founded by a guy named Yaroslav Stetsko who I think if you've been like looking into Ukrainian history in the last like, you know, year, you probably you might know who this guy is.

He's the guy who was chosen by Stefan Bandera to be the second in command of newly formed organization. If Ukrainian nationalists. I'm glad that didn't wind up going anywhere. Oh, yeah. No, look, it completely stalled out. They never ended up fighting. Things are fine.

Everything's great. Look, like they did not end up fighting for the Nazis during Operation Barbarossa. He, Stetsko does not walk into the city of Lvov alongside a bunch of guys from the Weimar and immediately start doing the Holocaust. None of this ever happens. They didn't kill 7000 people in like, I think I think a week. Most most of you were honestly compared to Kychek numbers. That's that's rookie.

Yeah. I mean, it's weird because like, okay. So like in any other group of people, like this guy is, you know, a world historical monster. He's kind of on the B team in terms of like the people in this episode, maybe the C team. So the thing that he does is so he gets into Lvov and he immediately declares like a new independent like Ukrainian state with him as a leader. And I'm just going to read from the speech that he gave when he was declaring this independent

Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian state will crop will closely cooperate with great national socialist Germany, which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler will create a new order in Europe and throughout the world. The Ukrainian army will fight together with the Allied German army for the new order in the world. Well, it didn't quite happen. So that's.

Yeah. But yeah. I mean, yeah, this number for choosing one is that the Nazis lose two is that he instantly gets arrested because the Nazis were like, Hey, you guys didn't tell us that you were going to declare an independent state. Like, yeah. Oh, we do not. We don't we don't want there to be a Ukraine.

Yeah. I know. And this is something we're in agreement with the Russians about actually. Yeah. We don't want this country to exist. Yeah. And, you know, so you just want to prison instead to go like just go like after after the war, he will claim that like he was put in a concentration camp and the Nazis like

persecuted him. And like, this is kind of true, but like, OK, so the thing that they put him under is called quote, honorary arrest. Yeah. And he's like, he's in like the nice prison and they let him out like a few times like during this while this is going on, so you can coordinate more stuff. And in 1944, they let him out just like entirely because the war is going so badly. They were like, screw it, let's throw the Ukrainians at the Russians.

And he and Bandera formed this thing called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fights the Red Army. And they also do some like incredibly half-assed fighting of the Nazis, which was like largely as best I could tell this largely seems to be so they could like say that we fought the Nazis. I'm going to read a passage here from the book, transnational anti-communism in the Cold War about what happened next at the end of 1943 in the forest of, oh, God, I don't know how to pronounce this, Joe Tamir, Gazalia, the western part of Ukraine.

These same Ukrainian nationalists held the first clandestine Congress of the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations, the ABN, creating at the same time the Ukrainian national army, the UPA. The UPA then took part in attacks on the retreating Weimar while at the same time harassing the Red Army, the communist partisans and Jewish citizens due to their suspected communist sympathies. The UPA consisting of around 70,000 guerrillas were joined by fragments of the SS's Ukraine, Belarusian, Russian and Kozak battalions as well as Hungarian, Romanian, Soviet, Baltic and Georgian deserters.

Now the author is being like a bit too kind to the UPA here. The main reason that they are, quote, that they quote, harass Jewish citizens is because like an enormous number of these are just people or just like fanatical anti-Semites. But this is the birth of the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations. And again, like, Stetsko, this is a guy who fought for the Nazis. He probably has a lowest body count of the next like four groups I'm going to talk about. Also in the anti-Bolshevik bloc of nations, something called the Croatian Liberation Movement.

The Croatian Liberation Movement was led by a guy named Stefan Heffer, who formed it alongside Ante Pavlovic, who is the founder of the Ustasha. Now the Ustasha are a Croatian fascist organization that fought alongside the Nazis and were given control of the new sort of Croatian fascist puppet state with Ante Pavlovic as its leader. Here's from the Holocaust Museum about what happened next at a concentration camp called Czodosovic. I did learn how to pronounce it and then I immediately forgot. Yeah.

Look, there's a lot of concentration camps. Yeah. Well, this is the third largest camp in Europe. So this is from the Holocaust Museum. Between its establishment in 1941 and its evacuation in April 1945, Croat authorities murdered hundreds of thousands of people at Czodosovic. Among the victims were between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbian residents of the so-called independent state of Croatia, between 12,000 and 20,000 Jews, between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma, between

5,000 and 12,000 ethnic Croats and Muslims who were political opponents of the regime. The Croat authorities murdered between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serb residents of Croatia and Bosnia during the period of Ustasha rule. More than 30,000 Croatian Jews were killed either in Croatia or at Auschwitz. And to put this into perspective, that is over 75% of all Croatian Jews who were killed by the Ustasha during the Holocaust. And the thing about this camp is that unlike the rest of the concentration camps in Europe, they don't have gas chambers.

They are doing all of these killings by hand. And it's not just that they're doing this by hand. I'm going to read this, I think, from the Jerusalem Post. Yeah, I mean, that's the fucking Ustasha. Yeah. Yeah. The late Jasa Alemani, who served as president of the Belgrade Jewish community, described Ustasha as barbaric, saying that the murders were predominantly carried out manually.

Very seldom did they use bullets, he said, because they believed the victims didn't inherit it. Alemani described some of the Ustasha's methods, which included cutting the eyes out of their victims and slitting their throats, throwing life prisoners into brick furries and poisoning children. And you know, you've talked a lot on this show about how the Nazis, like, were trying to execute Jews by firing a squad and they couldn't psychologically handle it. And that's, you know, that's why the gas chambers are the Ustasha can do this.

Yeah. Like they keep doing this through the entire war. Yeah. And there's, I mean, one of the many stories about the Holocaust that I wasn't told enough is that, like, the actual German SS were not nearly the most brutal war criminals on the Nazi side. The Ustasha's fucking nightmare people. And like, if you look at what's happening in the fucking Balkans during this period

of time, like, what's going down and what becomes Serbia and Bosnia and how the genocides are being conducted there by Nazi allies, like, it's a lot of the same thing, which is like, oh, we'll just we'll just strangle people. We'll just cut their heads off by the thousands. Like we don't need to waste bullets on this shit. We don't need to gas chambers. Like the the as is often the case in wars, like the nastiest fucking shit happens in these these places like the Balkans and chunks of Eastern Europe that and with soldiers from

those areas where, like, there's there's already when the war hits kind of a heightened level of acceptance of violence just because of shit in the recent past and like the the the most nightmare stories come from a lot of those those places kind of on the fringes of the Nazi power. Yeah. And like these like the Ustasha like gets to a point where like there there there is there are like there are instances where like the Nazis just banned their units because they're like what they're doing are like, hey guys, like, yeah, you're a bit far.

Well, I mean, there's a thing a number of things because like, again, it's bad for morale. Like Nazis, Nazis are complaining about what some of these units are doing. Yeah. This isn't what soldiers do, right? Is the attitude some folks have like it's it's it's a mess. Yeah. And so Stefan Heifer, who he's going to become an important role in anti-communist leader and a member of the sort of block of nations.

He seems like a good guy. He was the governor general of Barenja County with the new Nazi Croatian state and Anton Pavlovic, who's again the founder of the Ustashi is the found one of the founders of the Croatian Liberation Movement, which is the Croatian representative at the A.B.N. It's great. Cool. Yeah. Do you know what these guys went on to have careers?

It's great. It's good. This is great, Robert. Is it products and services? Yeah. Let me tell you, confusingly, we are sponsored by the Ustashi. A lot of people will say why are you sponsored by the Ustashi and I'll say you should check out their promo code.

How are we doing, Sophie? No words. No words. I've got nothing. I got nothing. I'm not happy about that. No, I just got nothing. Okay.

All right. Well, that just, that happened. Here's ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yes. All right. So meanwhile, the Romanian delegation of the ABN is a bunch of people from the Iron Guard,

who is a Romanian fascist organization that did this dream of fascist uprising in 1941. A mob of several hundred attacked the Sephardic Temple, American correspondent Leigh White reported at the time, smashing its windows with stones and battering down its doors with length of timber. All objects of ritual prayer books, shaws, Talmuds, Torahs, altar benches and tapestries were carried outside and piled into a heap which is soaked in gasoline instead of fire. A number of Jewish pedestrians were herded together and forced to dance in a circle around the bonfire.

When they dropped an exhaustion, they were doused in gasoline and burned alive. And I cut that description off. It gets way worse after that. Yeah. If doused in gasoline and burned alive is like the start of the ramp up. Yeah. That's before we really put our foot on the gas. It gets like, they are, all I will say about that is they are incredibly, they are incredibly

specific in how they use their antisemitism to kill people. It's like, it's stuff you couldn't, it's stuff you couldn't write a serial killer doing because, yeah. And this is, this is, this is the Romanian delegation to the ABN. Belarus's delegation is called the Belarusian Liberation Movement. It's representative is a guy named Dmitri Kazmovich who was appointed by the Nazis as the chief of police of Smolnesk where he exterminated Jews and communists. Smolensk.

Smolensk. Yeah. Yeah. He was a commando unit to fight the Soviets and was eventually smuggled out of a refugee camp by British intelligence and worked for the American army. Oh, good. It's great. And, and yeah.

He also, he founded this entire thing as a way to spy on the Soviets for the US. And at this point we should mention that like this entire like just literal group of people who did the Holocaust is funded by both the US and the UK. The ABN is like all over American politics. Like they, they successfully lobbied the US to doing, to doing this thing that like, I'm pretty sure by the time this comes out, Biden will have also done his version of it, which is called a captive nation week, which is like all presidents still do this to this day.

It's supposed to be this thing that like honors nations held captive by authoritarian governments. Oh, that's nice. It's the, it's the, it's the political equivalent of the like slapping a drowning handmaid. There you go. Well, and I also like, I really want to like just take a moment to appreciate that the United States government, which is a state that literally holds hundreds of indigenous nations captive and occupies their land declares captain's win week that sets the 1600s.

Hmm. That doesn't sound like the America I learned about in Texas. Yeah, no. And again, like they do this because, because some dipshits from the Ustashi told them 70 years ago. Well, I'm glad that our honor of captive nations is the honor of the captive nations of, of racists in particular. That's good.

Yeah. It's all, it's also fun because if you look at the declarations of this, the only states that are like ever mentioned are states that can be like somehow vaguely tied to communism. So like, you know, they'll talk about like, we need to, Oh, I bet these guys had a fucking hard on for Rhodesia. Oh yeah. Yeah. And even Biden, Biden released like his statement last year, it talks about like, it talks about

like Nicaragua talks about like Cuba, it literally no mention whatsoever of Saudi Arabia, which again, in, in, in, in my lifetime has invaded what, at least two, possibly three countries on top of the Saudi Arabia that that doesn't sound like the country that Joe Biden would fist bump. Come on. No. So the, the ABN starts working, I imagine Joe Biden fist bumping a new stashy militant. That's, that's good.

Reagan got pretty close. Yeah. Reagan did get close, Reagan did get close. I don't know, Biden's a 50-50 on that shit. The only thing he's consistently good on is hating the British, which I do respect. I do respect that about this. So the, the ABN starts talking with Chen Kaishak through a bunch of contacts and they, they, they help train Taiwan's secret police and they also help set up Radio Free Asia, which

is incredibly fun. Now, now contact between the ABN and the Taiwanese government leads to a 1966 beating of Chen Kaishak's Asian People's Anti-Communist League in South Korea with representatives of sort of the, the whole global anti-communist movement comes together to do something. And 170 representatives from 60 nations show up. And what's interesting about this first Christ, like what's interesting thing here is this isn't all fascists, the very first meeting where they're trying to figure out who, what is going to happen, who's going to be in this.

There's like, there were like social Democrats who show up to this. There are like, yeah, sure. They're conservatives and all of these people immediately get run out. There's, there's this group called the Assembly of Captive European Nations who like, they're not like great people, but they also like didn't literally, well, actually can't verify they didn't literally do the Holocaust, but they aren't literally the leaders of the Ustashi. And they try to become like, yeah.

Not literally running a group so bad that the SS was occasionally like, oh guys, might need to pump them brakes. The bar for anti-communism is like, like the, the, the bar of like how bad you have to be for the anti-communist not to accept you is like, yeah, really, really, really low. And like these people keep tripping over it. And yeah, you know, and these guys are like, you know, they, they, they, they, they try to, I cannot emphasize enough that the dudes we're talking about are quite literally people that like Heinrich Himmler would read reports about what they were doing and need to have

a stiff drink. Yeah. Like it's, and these guys, you know, so the, the, the sort of moderates try to become the delegation from Eastern Europe. And the ABN just like runs them out because the ABN is already like tight with the Taiwanese and Taiwanese are, you know, one of the major sort of power blocks here. And the result of this is that, you know, from, from the formative meeting of the world anti-communist league, this is just going to be a fascist organization.

And you know, okay. So we've now met two of the three sort of main power blocks in the world anti-communist league, right? There's the, there's the East Asian blocks centered around Taiwan and South Korea and they also, they have support from like South Vietnam and like Singapore and the Philippines. But yeah, the, the, the core there is sort of Taiwan and South Korea. There's, there's the ABN fascists in Europe who are, again, the Ustasi and the iron guard and like their people.

And now it's time to make group number three. This is the Latin American anti-communist confederation or Cal. Cal is originally a front group for a group called Los Tecos who are a fascist desk squad from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Oh, Mexican fascists. Oh yeah. These guys are great. Yeah.

And the, the modern iteration of Tecos was founded by a guy named Carlos Cuestra Gallardo, who was a Mexican Nazi who was doing something in Berlin during World War II. We don't know what. There are various rumors, some of them including him like being part of the, of the group who like decides on the final solution. Like we don't know. There's rumors he was Hitler's secretary like it's very unclear if he's doing something to support the Nazis.

Hitler, he's, you know, woke Hitler, hiring, hiring people from all backgrounds. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, if these guys are. We stand and integration focused king. Yeah. Yeah. All you have to do is be like so unfathomably anti-Semitic that like even the other anti-Semites

eventually are like, you guys are too much. You can't say this out loud like. And so, so he survives the war and he goes back to Mexico to help and help establish this like network of like fascist Mexican priests who hide people from like the iron guard and other like fascist collaborators. These guys are like. They're like. Yeah, these are.

anti-Semitic. Yeah. There's like the liberation theology priests and then there's who they start killing very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And these guys are like, like they're convinced that the UN is a Jewish conspiracy.

They like, they rave constantly about Marxist, the Zionist and the Freemasons. And they also think that Vatican II when the church tax like a bit to the left is a good enough reason to just literally start killing Catholic priests, even though again, all of these people are Catholics. I mean, a bit to the left, all they did was change the fucking liturgy to be in English like. Or not English. Not Latin.

Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, this is, this is all these people just go like, but there's an entire group like this. Yeah. There's a lot of like Francoists who like sort of go ape like it's like, yeah, just lose their minds. That is one of my favorite things about Catholicism is when you get like these Vatican II conspiracies

where the church is literally like, well, our religion's dying because nobody understands what the fuck is going on in these, in these, in, in services and stuff. Perhaps we could slightly modernize it so that people can understand what's being said. These guys think the Pope is Jewish. They literally think this is classic Jewish person, the Pope. Yeah. It's like, it's this whole thing. And so the tech also like, they're a death squad, right?

They kill people. Yeah. And the league comes to them and are like, hey, you guys are anti-Semitism, you guys are death squads. Like go find other anti-communist death squads in Latin America and recruit them so we can talk to them. And they do. Like these guys are literally their football talent scouts, but for death squads, well,

that's good. I mean, look, you know how I feel about death squads, Chris. If you're not getting the good, like somewhere out there is the LeBron James of killing a lot of people and pushing their bodies into a crudely dug pit. And if you don't find them, you know, another death squad is going to get them. And then you're not going to win the, Sophie, what is the basketball award for good at basketball? MVP. Yeah.

You're not going to win the MVP. So yeah. Look, you got it. Well, the other thing, again, this is very important, right, because Robert's so proud of himself. You done it. Thank you. Thank you.

So cool. Thank you, Sophie. First in one of my hobbies, I'm learning a real Heisman Trophy Day for the death squad people. No. Oh, okay. I'm going to turn this through a baseball metaphor, which is that, OK, so the other thing that's happening here, right, is that you have, you have to build up your roster,

right? And you have to, you have to, you have to build up here to build up your sort of like your, your minor league system. You have to do this so that you can train other death squads. And these guys are about to become the fucking nineties mariners of building up death squads. They have, they have a bullpen so deep, they can fucking like, they, they, they, they, they can, they, they can kick out literal hall of fame power hitters because they don't need more hitting.

They have so many death squads and there's the Wade Boggs of death squads in this period, by which I mean, who is drinking 70 beers on a flight from, I don't know, Stockholm to Smolensk. Oh, what is this guy named Jo Mo? Oh God, I can't remember his last name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's that guy who hilariously kind of isn't going to come up and there's a lot of people

who did a lot of assassinations who were in the, who were in the league, who we're not going to talk about because they're like just D-listers because there's so many. So the thing about the CAL is that they, they're very quietly one of the most important organizations in the history of the Latin American Cold War and almost nobody's ever heard of them. But one of the things that they do is in 1973, so these meetings, right, you get a bunch of death squads showing up to it and you get a bunch of countries like sending their intelligence services to these meetings to go like talk about with other countries and right wing anti-communist intelligence services.

And in one of these meetings in 1973, the dictatorships of Brazil and Paraguay agreed to exchange information and sort of like coordinate security measures to the CAL. Now, Paraguay at this point is ruled by Alfredo Straussner, who is one of the, the World Anti-communist League's biggest supporters, the man, like this guy like personally hosts several World Anti-communist League conferences. He also, like, he, he, he sold eight year olds into sex slavery. He, like, the worst thing that he does is he does this genocide against the indigenous Achei population.

I'm going to read from the Washington Post in 1977. And by the way, when I read this thing, you have to understand this, this is from 1977. There were like 20 more years of the genocide that are going to happen after this. Quote. 30% of the Achei population living in Paraguay since in 1968 have since disappeared. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty bad.

Yeah. And you know, where did they go? Well, okay. They got raped, tortured and murdered by settlers who were doing a genocide and just take their land. There were like, there are these Achei hunters whose job is literally to go out and kidnap Achei people and like force them to live on these like reservations, quote, unquote, on their farms.

Like they're doing slave raids or selling children. That seems like somebody should stop that. Yeah. No one ever does. Nobody should deal with that. No one ever does. Okay. This goes on for the like the entire 30 years of like the Strassner dictatorship.

Okay. And now in 1973, Strassner starts coordinating his police suppression with the Brazilian dictatorship to the CAL. The next year, the CAL's Coordinating Council meets Rio de Janeiro. The Coordinating Council has representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay and also there's a bunch of Cuban exiles. Okay.

So, you know, what are they doing there? This is from the book, Creditorial States. The purpose of the meeting was to receive information and to exchange experiences concerning communists and pro-communists in order to adapt methods that could be applied throughout the continent. It was important because one of the main resolutions sought to establish a system to exchange confidential information among member nations. Now, people who know you're sort of like Cold War Latin American history are starting

to perk up right now because if you studied like this stuff, that list sounds really familiar and it should be. There's a couple of allies thrown into the list, but those are the countries that are involved in Operation Condor. And that meeting of the World Anti-Communist League's Latin American affiliate, the CAL, was one of the first steps towards setting up the Condor system. The next year, I guess you call it a more official meeting, but there's a meeting of intelligence services from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to sort

of expand cooperation further and this turns into Condor. So all right, what is Operation Condor? The last two quotes that I sort of pulled are from this book called Creditorial States, Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. It's a very good book. I recommend people read it. It was written by a Long Island University political science professor named Jay Pratis McSherry.

And I'm going to use the intro that she uses to this, which is describing what happened to a guy named Martin Almada, who's the guy who writes the forward to the book. Just to give you a sense of what this stuff actually looks like. In 1974, Martin Almada was dragged out of his house in Paraguay in the middle of the night by our friend Alfredo Strossner, after which she was tortured for 30 days for quote intellectual terrorism and intellectual terrorism. Well, so they bring him in and they're trying to figure out what he did, right? And the only thing this guy did was he was like a leader in a teacher's union and he

was like using the teaching methods of public theory. And so for this, they torture him, they force his wife to listen to his screams over the phone for 10 days and then they told her that he'd been killed at which point his wife dies from a heart attack. I don't like that story at all. And the other thing is interesting about, OK, so in some sense, right, like this is just this is a thing that military dictatorships do, but those wacky military dictatorships all.

OK. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, like normally when you get kidnapped by a dictatorship, right, there's a bunch of soldiers and like spooks from your country. Right. When it's always been my experience when I've been kidnapped by a military dictatorship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one, it's one, you know, it's a dictatorship in one country.

But when this guy gets kidnapped, there's military attaches from Argentina, from Brazil, from Bolivia, from Chile, from Uruguay. And eventually, Amada gets released from prison after like his giant hunger strike and there's a huge international campaign and he starts trying to figure out what the fuck happened to him. And it turns out that Martin Amada and his wife have become very early victims of Operation Condor. Oh, they're ground trailblazers.

Yeah. Do you know who else were victims of Operation Condor? No one. The products and services that support this podcast. Exactly zero of those. They almost certainly all supported this. That's who supports our podcast. Matt, if only the if only the Ustashi had been the target of Operation Condor, we would

all live in a better world. No, no. But instead, they're they're they're big into the podcast game and, you know, there are major backers of the island where we'll let you hunt children for for for sport and for food and for food. It's unethical just to hunt kids for trophies. You know, got to cook them. Hmm.

Risk it. Oh, God. The woman was on that. Sophie, that's what the ad. That's the ad. I'm just reading the ad as it was sent to us by the and the Ustashi people. Okay. Is the promo code with how many Ems?

Good. That's at least nine Ems. Yeah. Okay. Here's the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh boy, we're back. I'm Robert. No segue, I'm immediately just going to read a description of how condo worked. Don't ever do that voice again. That was uncomfortable. Please continue. Sophie. No.

No. Sophie. I hated it. Hi. Hi. Hello. How are you? Good.

You? How's it going? Great. Chris, take over, please. The condor system consisted of three levels. The first was mutual cooperation among military intelligence services to coordinate political surveillance of targeted dissidents and exchange intelligence information. The second was covert action, a form of offensive unconventional warfare in which the role

of the predator remains concealed. Several condor squadrons carried out covert cross-border operations to detain, disappear, exiles, and transfer them to their countries of origin where most disappear permanently. Through the most secret level was condor's assassination capability known as phase three. Under phase three, special teams of assassins from member countries were formed to travel worldwide to eliminate subversive enemies. Phase three was aimed at political leaders especially feared for their potential to mobilize will-depending or organized broad opposition to the military states.

What condor is, right, is a bunch of countries, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and later Peru, working together to form multinational desk squads and using them to... They have these desk squads and kidnapping teams and they use them to target internal enemies and subversives who, it turns out, is just literally anyone who doesn't support the government. I'm going to read a quote from an operative of Dina, which is Pinochet's National Intelligence Directorate, which is like, they're like the secret police but also the CIA. Oh, good.

They're great and by great I mean... Yeah, they sound like cool guys. Yeah. One Dina operative explained Dina's strategy as follows. First, the aim was to stop terrorism. Then possible extremists were targeted and later those who might be converted into extremists. Another little language is used in 1977 by Argentine general Ibidrico St. Jean, when he said, first we kill all the subversives, then we kill all their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then all those who remain indifferent.

Ah, maybe take notes on that, people who remain indifferent. Yeah, they're going to kill you too. Unless you are an active supporter of the regime and also you never piss anyone off ever somehow miraculously, they're going to kill you too. That's great. This works on two levels. On the one side, there's these internal purges, which are aided by intelligence from other Conrader countries.

For example, in 1976, the Argentinian army stages a coup and takes control of the country. They start what's known as the Dirty War, which the government disappears 30,000 people who become known as Disaparacidos. One of the fun tactics of the Argentinian army and their desk wads was to keep pregnant women alive just long enough to force them to have their babies and then kill them and steal the babies, which... Okay, that doesn't sound like good behavior. Sure.

Yeah, and you know, okay, all of these guys are retwing Catholics, and I'm not even going to bother spelling out the comparisons of forthbursts in the U.S. I will leave that metaphor as an exercise for the listener. These killings were done, like, partly they're done directly by the state and partly they're done by states of point, desk wads. In Argentina, that desk wad is called the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, or AAA. Oh, that is the same AAA that helps me when I need my cart out? Yes.

You know, I genuinely can't. So I think the court, I'm about to read, they're making a AAA joke, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm going to say yes, just based on the long lines that you have to stand in that place. I buy it. In November 1973, the AAA detonated a bomb in the car of Senator Kipilato Eurigorion. That's a gnarly name of the Union Civica Eradical, which is hilariously a moderate party. The first claim, its first claim terrorist attack, the senator was severely wounded.

He was the victim of another bomb in 1975 and was tortured and interrogated by army officers in that year. They told him, quote, you want to know about the AAA? Well, we're the AAA. We put the bomb in your car. Oh, well, that's nice of them to say so. Yeah. It's also worth noting, so the AAA, they get kind of absorbed into the Argentinian military,

but they kind of still operate under the, I don't know, after the military coup in 1976, they're more inside the state than they are outside of it. But they also host a 1980 meeting of the C.I.L. and Buenos Aires after they were sort of semi-absorbed. They're also heavily involved in the one anti-communist league, and we're going to come back to that 1980 meeting because it also was very important, but that'll be for next episode. For now, we should talk about how Condor actually worked a bit more. McSherry describes it as a peristatal organization, in that it's technically inside or tied to the state, but operates completely in secret, and it has a unified command structure that

involves operatives from intelligence services, from the military, there's cops, there's right-wing civilians and paramilitaries, but again, the secrecy of this means that even other parts of the military don't know that they exist. As we've seen on AAA, Condor makes use of paramilitaries, sometimes like folding them directly in the chain of command, sometimes they just basically do contract killings out to other fascist paramilitaries, and their whole command structure remains entirely unregistered. It is by its very nature outside of the sort of bounds of the state bureaucracy. Everything is unmarked, untagged, secret, or black ops.

Its officers are commissioned literally as special agents. It operates as a secret parallel state alongside the official state, and I want to pause here for a second. To think about the extent to which American and British pop culture is entirely centered around valorizing this stuff, pop culture is completely obsessed with secret agents. There's 25 Bond movies. There are five different Call of Duty black ops games. The last black ops game is literally you working for Ronald Reagan to do stuff for the CIA,

and if you think about what this stuff is, all of this black ops stuff, you look at the sort of purest expression of it in Latin America, it's literally just this tyrannical parallel state used job is to kill subversives. It's the death squad machine, and it's like this is our entire pop culture is about making everyone think the death squad machine is cool. Well, but the death squad machine is drunk all the time, and that's pretty neat. Yeah, but here's the thing. I went to university, and I therefore know that you can be drunk all the time without

being a death squad. We had very different college experiences. That's a story for another day, am I right? I mean, admittedly, we are on our third college paramilitary in this episode, so. That's right, that's right. Just like how? Don't do it. We were on sportsman basketball.

You were doing so well. We were so proud of you. Yeah, it was like four for four. Touchback first down? No. Three pointer. Oh, no. Nailed it.

Nailed it. Uh-huh. So, we now have a picture. We have an incredibly lackluster picture of the nature of basketball. We have a better picture of the internal structure of Condor. But the thing is, Condor is a multinational operation, and a huge part of it is doing what the modern CIA would call extraordinary renditions. And this means that they're just like kidnapping dissidents who, for example, fled from Chile

to Paraguay, and that you bring them back to Chile, and you torture and execute them. And as this program goes on, they start assassinating people like all over the world. And these people, they're not just getting murdered, they're getting horribly tortured. The bodies that people find are heavily mutilated, they're stab wounds, they're heavily burned. The Argentinian classic is just dropping people both dead and alive out of helicopters. And well, at least they're not discriminating between dead or alive. That's true. Everybody gets dropped out of a helicopter.

That's it. The quality. Yeah. And, you know, and the other thing is, they're not just killing like completely random like nobody or like, you know, incredibly minor activists. They're killing people who are like very high profile and very famous. Like in 1976, they killed the former president of Bolivia, Juan Jose Torres and Buenos Aires. And, you know, one of the favorite tactics that they use for sort of getting away with

this stuff is that they'll kill a bunch of people and then blame it on the left murdering each other. But like, that's not actually enough to cover up. We killed the president of Bolivia. Well, we killed the president of Italy, too, but nobody has a problem with that. We're going to go. We will we will get to that. Actually, we I will mention it and then pointedly not explain it next episode.

That's good. That's good. If you want to learn more about the assassination of the fucking prime minister of Italy, just listen to Alex Jones's show the next time Steve is back on because he's the one who did it. You can hear from the next wall. OK, OK. To be fair.

Infowars contributor, the guy who killed the prime minister to be fair, to be fair. All right. There are a lot of people who are involved in killing the prime minister. We cannot give Steve Pachett the whole credit for the team role was involved. It's not just magic and biggie, Tom. Who's someone who is who is else on the team, Sophie? Are you trying to make a Magic Johnson, Larry Bird reference right now? That's the one.

Larry Bird. Lawrence Bird. To be fair, I'm OK with you fucking up his name. Magic Johnson and Larry Flint again, again, heroes very OK with you fucking up his name. Go for it. Whatever you want. Good. All right.

Back to the game. So OK. You know, it is incredible. It is so obvious that like people that like there's something going on here that's assassinating people that like even like even journalists are just starting to write articles that are like, yeah, there's probably something going on here. And so, Robert, you might be asking yourself, what is the United States, the champion of democracy and human rights and the leader of the free world doing about a bunch of death

squads murdering anybody doesn't actively support a military dictatorship? And the answer is sometimes they write a few strongly worded letters. They do this like twice. They write a few strongly worded letters, mostly they do nothing. And then the other part of the time, they're actively helping them do it. So to get a sense of like the level of impunity that Condor had from the US government, the political counselor of the US embassy in Ecuador, sorry, in Uruguay, you know, did the right thing for once.

And he he he and a basically they figure out that a Brazilian labor leader is about to be like kidnapped and assassinated by these guys, and he helps this guy escape. And in retaliation, a bunch of dudes in ski masks, I grabbed him off the street and broke every vertebrae in his neck and back. And again, this guy works for the US embassy, and they broke every single vertebrae in his neck and upper back. And the US does nothing. And yeah, what would you what would you expect us to do?

You know, you know, okay, so like every once in a while, you'll do one of the things that happens with the Red Contra rights that they like kind of they accidentally get a DA agent killed. And after that, the US just goes like absolute ape shit. Like it's just like, okay, but this guy is an embassy guy. You'd think that like if you kill if you like, like almost kill a guy from your embassy, like something would happen. But like, no, no, it doesn't happen at all.

Absolutely not. Yeah. And you know, speaking of the government doing nothing in 1976, agents of the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate, working with right wing Cuban exiles from the CIL, a car bomb and man named Orlando Ledier in Washington, DC. Ledier had been the socialist foreign minister under a day and he's just like implacable foe of Pinochet. And the Chileans are like, yeah, what does kill him?

And so, you know, they do it, right? They just they kill him in literally in Washington, DC with a car bomb. And the guy who does it is an American Dina operator named Michael Townley. And he serves five years in prison and then gets FBI witness protection. Oh, so there are there are an enormous number of people in this country who have served more time in prison for literally having weed than this guy is serving for doing a car bomb assassination in Washington, DC. Yeah, that seems yeah.

Yeah. It's great. And this this is like during the Carter administration to nothing happens. Nothing. I think it's true. The Carter. I'm pretty sure. Yeah.

76. I think it's true. One is that the CIA is systematically lying under oath to Congress about whether it like what it knew about Condor. And the other reason is that the U.S. is actively helping them that there's your channels. This one is that there's good evidence that the CIA actively helped the Chilean government kidnap and murder multiple American citizens. But it's actually much worse than that because so Condor as as a sort of network is running

off of this encrypted American telecommunication network and equipment that is based in the Panama Canal Zone. Now, Robert, I'm going to I'm going to ask you, what was the U.S. government running in the Panama Canal Zone in the 1970s? They were just helping boats, you know, they love boats. We're big boat people, America, and we like to keep them moving. What was the other thing we were running there? Just boats.

Just boats. Just boats. Yeah. Just boats. There was a guy named Manuel Noriega, who was famous because he was good at boats. Yeah. Yeah. We also cocaine.

Just boats. We also have a very famous boating school there called the School of the America. That's a great case to learn how to boat. If you want to learn how to be on a boat school of the because it's the school of how to like take your boat across the Americas. That's why they call it the School of the Americas. Yeah. All of the Americas is for boats.

Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, that's right, baby. It's the School of the Americas. We're doing the School of the Americas again. And it turns out that I'm going to just going to read this from predatory states. As one military graduate of the School of Americas put it, the school was always a friend for other special operations, covert operations. So they're using the School of the Americas as cover to run a covert assassination network.

It's going to kill like an incredible number of people, including multiple U.S. citizens, some of whom were killed on American soil. It's great. Yeah. That's like, I don't know what that's like. It's something basketball. You know, and that's that's that's just thumbs down from Sophie on that one on that terrible basketball metaphor.

That's just that's where we're going to leave it today with the World Anti-Communist League having helped spawn and carry out Operation Condor alongside their friends, the CIA. Well, if your friend is the CIA, you can find the rest of our shows on the Internet. You know what, actually, here's a little we should do a little bit of house cleaning here, because folks have been yelling about this on a couple of different things. Go for it. So people are always like, hey, there's some weird edit thing or there's some clip or something is wrong here.

And I have to tell you all right now, none of that has to do with us. It has to do with like whatever fucking weird ass app you're using. And usually it's Spotify, Spotify or it's fucking podcast, Republic or like Podfucker or whatever goddamn bespoke ass pod app the motherfuckers use. Just fucking use an RSS anyway, whatever. People are weird. I don't know what to tell them, but there's really nothing, nothing particularly that we can do.

I can give you advice. Here's how podcasts work. Can I give some advice? Yes, Sophie. If you notice that your thing is being funky on Spotify, delete it, refresh your feed, re-download it. If the episode sounds fucked up, instead of hopping online and assuming that it's us, hop onto your phone, delete it, re-download it, and it'll probably be fine.

Because here's the thing. This show gets downloaded like 10 million times a month on like a thousand different goddamn apps. And like that just introduces a lot of different ways for things to get all fucky in weird ways. Like, we do our best with quality control, but we have no control over like podcasts, cum guzzler or whatever app you like to use. So try re-downloading the show before you yell at Sophie on the internet about how the

pod, podemy app that was sodomy and pod that I mixed together isn't working right, okay? It's fine. I do love it when people are like, hey, do you know why your podcasts are fucked up and then they'll just like name some app I've never heard of? And it's like, I don't know. Maybe it's because you're using some weird goddamn app I've never heard of to download a fucking podcast. What do you want from us?

We can't, we can't, we don't even know how many apps are out there people are using to download our fucking shows. And everyone is like, my audio is skipping, yeah, that's Spotify. You can't see it, but I'm smiling on the outside while dying on the inside. Like a winner. Speaking of winners, Chris, where can people follow you? You can find me at ItMe's CHR3 on Twitter. Yeah, that's it, don't look for me anywhere else, you won't find me.

Yeah. Look for me behind you whenever you feel afraid, because that's where I'll be, stealing your wallet. I'm ending it on that. 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become

the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.