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

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Mia is joined by Robert to continue discussing the World Anti-Communist League's rampage through Italy and Latin America.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?

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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello peasants, I am Robert Evans, the grand dam of the podcasting scene, the Queen of England of Casting Pods. Here to welcome you back to the internet's premier podcast, the only good podcast on the internet, Behind the Bastards. I have a serious question. Did somebody bully you into watching Bridgerton on Netflix? I don't know what any of those words mean, but I know that none of them are in the Bible.

That was such a good comeback. I have nothing to say. Christopher Wong is here. This is great. Hi Christopher. I'm here. Hi Chris. How are we doing?

I had a moral spiritual crisis while writing the second part of this episode, but whether I was going to do the thing I'm about to do, and so I'm going to just do it to you. Okay, I love it when people do things to me. We're just going to do it. Robert, have you ever fallen down the Gladio rabbit hole? Oh, God. Now, let me tell you about this, Christopher,

because I think about gladiases all the time. And the big question in my mind is, right? Do you go with an original Italian pattern? Okay. Or do you go with like the Iberian pattern, which most people will agree is a superior stabbing weapon, but doesn't have quite as much of the historic cache. Because right, like that's not the first fucking punic war weapon.

So I don't know. I think I'm probably just going to get several different gladiases. And I think that that's probably going to be good for me, but everyone needs a gladius. It's the ultimate bisexual killing weapon, because it's double edged and extremely sharp on all sides. And so I think that, you know, everyone, we have to stand a bisexual weapon of imperialist aggression.

And that's why I support the gladius. You know, okay, I think if you forced me to buy one gladius, I think I would go with the traditional one, because again, like, you know, you're sure. I mean, that is in Chris's contract, right? All of our cool zone employees are legally required to own a gladius. Otherwise, you can't draft you to take over. Because Chris, when we have to go take back

and burn Carthage to the ground, what are you going to do without a gladius? Well, I mean, here's the thing. You've got strong prank-a-pie energy, too. So I feel like a polearm would work well for you. Well, I mean, this is the thing, right? Because if someone has gotten close enough to you to use a sword, right?

This is your sort of like last resort personal defense weapon, but a pike. That's why I said you had strong prank-a-pie energy. So, you know, my thesis on this, right, is this allows you to get a more traditional, original pattern of Italian gladius, right? Because the thing that you are depending on, right, for your life is the pike. And that means the gladius doesn't,

the symbolic importance of the gladius is able to shine through. When we hired you, I thought to myself, this here is an individual who doesn't go by the cucked post-Marian reforms, Republican military. And that's why you're on this team, because you understand that you need Trieriai and Hisjati and prank-a-pie in order to like... Oh, sorry, it was Trieriai with the ones with polearms.

Anyway, I fucked up this whole pre-Marian reforms, Roman, Republican military joke. Can I just say, please stop... By getting the kind of infantry you were supposed to be wrong, yes? Stop talking, Chris, episode, go. Okay, I'm already gladio, sorry. All right, gladio, yeah. How much do you know about this?

So, yeah, I mean, a modest amount. Like, gladio was the CIA being like, oh no, this... Italy and some other areas might vote for leftists, so we should set up a series of stay-behind networks to repeatedly murder left-wing media and political and organizing figures and wage what is effectively like an extended insurgent campaign in countries

that are quote-unquote allies of ours on paper. Yeah, that's, well, okay, that's most of it. There's a thing on Twitter where if you mention this about... There's like a segment of Twitter that goes completely insane. This is one of a number of things you don't want to have a conversation about on the Twitters. Yeah, and, you know, okay, we're going to get more into the part of this that involves the rogue Masonic Lodge in a bit.

Now, okay, yeah, so this is the, yeah, the sort of... Yeah, gladio was the codename specifically of the Italian version of these stay-behind networks. These things are originally established by Allied command after World War II, and then they get armed and trampled by the CIA, and, you know, the theory behind this, right, is that like, okay, if the USSR invades Europe, the allies are like, well, we're going to lose

because the USSR is a better land army than we do. You know, but the theory is that they're going to have this network of guerrilla units in place to start an anti-communist resistance. Yeah, I'm going to read the actual... I'm going to read from the National Security Directive 10.2 that authorizes this whole thing. So it authorizes a vast program of propaganda,

economic warfare, preventative direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, refugee liberation programs, and supportive indigenous anti-communist elements. To be done so that any U.S. government responsibility

for them is not evidence to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility. So the U.S. in the foundational thing... I love how many different things that our official government documents include the phrase, so the U.S. can plausibly deny responsibility.

That's just good. That's just good for us. You know, I mean, this is how you know the program is going to go incredibly well and there's going to be zero problems with it ever. Yep. And yeah, so there's a bunch of these things across Europe, there's one in Belgium, there in Denmark, there in France, Germany, Greece,

Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Austria, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland, and also the U.K. I don't know why the U.K. so much didn't mention this. I'm fine with that one, I'm just in generally okay with us fucking with the U.K. But everywhere else is like, yeah. So they kill like an enormous number of people.

They're composed of, a lot of these people are literally just fascists who they were like, hey, you don't like communist, we'll hand you a gun. There's a bunch of anti-communists, they have people in the state security services, you've got like your soldiers, your cops, your spies, they're all involved in this. And you can already see the sort of similarities

to Condor from last episode, right? This is a parallel network of soldiers, spies, and paramilitaries that the regular government A doesn't know about and B is being run sort of, is being like the internationally coordinated covertly. And these networks are heavily armed by weapons caches that are spread around all of these countries. And these things have, they've got guns in there,

they've got explosives, they've got borders. Okay, don't, let's, I feel like you said weapons caches like in a negative way. And I just don't think that's very fair. Well, you know, there's, look, the only way to stop a bad guy with a weapons cache is a good guy with a weapons cache. Exactly, this is a good guy with a weapons cache.

But unfortunately, and this is the real problem here, is that the Soviet Union were pussies for the entire Cold War, it didn't give everyone weapons caches. So that is what everybody says about the Soviet Union. It did not give enough people weapons caches, that is what I say. It did, it was coward, absolute coward stuff. So, okay, so these are,

Come on. Yeah, look, you got it, you got to give, you got to give you guys something, man. The US is handing out scorpion machine pistols like they're fucking candy in your, like, come on. Yeah, you got it. Like the USSR is like making you buy their AK-47s, like come on, we don't have any money,

we're gonna buy an AK-47. It's terrible stuff. Now, okay, normally these things are supposed to fight like a communist invasion, but like the actual thing they're there to do is to just like fight any leftists of any kind from like electoral, social democrats, like anarchists. And again, this is very much a proto-operation condor.

It's the same goals, the same tactics, the same command structure, and like, so the command structure that's left behind in Greece, for example, it becomes known as Prometheus, and it plays a huge role both in the Greek Civil War and also in Greece's 1967 right-wing military coup. We never talk about that. Yeah, we never do.

It's really like, the whole history of Greece from that period to the military coup, it's like, yeah, like Churchill, World War II was happening and then Churchill was like, oh my God, the communists are gonna win and so he just like put the Nazis back in charge and the Nazis started giving the Holocaust again. Yeah, there's a very fun history of Churchill in Greece.

That is... Yeah. Fine. It's fine and good and nothing bad ever happened from it. There wasn't another military dictatorship. They didn't like kill the northerners or the people. And you know, there's also like, there's stuff here. Part of what's going on here is,

I'm just gonna read this from McSherry. Washington insisted on a secret clause in the North Atlantic Treaty. This is the treaty that forms NATO. The secret services of all joining nations to establish their own branches of the secret army and oppose communist influence even if the population voted for communist and free elections.

Which is great. Freedom and democracy people. That's good shit. That's good freedom. Nothing says freedom and democracy like secret armies. Yeah. I should mention, it's not formally part of I. It's not formally like one of the things considered part of Gladio or like the state-behind networks.

But they do literally the same thing in Japan too. That's where the Japanese ruling party, modern ruling party comes from. And oh boy, do these state-behind networks oppose communism and free elections. They raid elections in Greece. They raid elections in Italy so the communists can't win. But you know, like while all this is happening, on a macro level, what is happening here

is that the CIA is giving a bunch of Nazis guns and high explosives. And what I say Nazis, like what I mean is that to take a random example, the state-behind network in West Germany literally hired Klaus Barbie and was composed of ex-members of the SS. We have talked about that because Klaus Barbie was also integral in the creation of the modern CIA for some similar reasons.

Yeah, and then also also also showed up doing a cocaine coup funded by the Mooneys and a bunch of other rule that got Muslim people in Bolivia in 1980. That one was fine. It was good. It was good and fine. Yeah, and in Italy in particular, this whole like give fascist guns thing goes exactly as badly as you would expect it to.

In 1972, someone sets off a car bomb in a small Italian village called Pettiano. And originally this is blamed on the Red Brigades who are this sort of like leftist like urban guerrilla group that later turns out to be infiltrated to like all hell. But we're not actually going to get into the Red Brigades here because if we did and if I actually had done the moral kidnapping in this episode, this episode would be like 35 hours long

and also I'd be found dead in my driveway. Like that about three weeks. You'd be you'd be found covered in shrapnel made out of pasta. Yeah, because it's Italians. You know, the thing about this, like I am joking about this, but they're legitimately were like a not insignificant number of people who tried to write about this and were killed. So it's great.

Gabbagool jammed down their throat. No. Choked to death on what's something else that's Italian. Um, um, pepperoni pepperoni. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Murdered by being historically bad at fielding cavalry. That's also very Italian.

That was a Roman Empire joke. I'm really, I'm really proud of you for not bringing up spicy meatball. Oh, it's a spicy meatball. You know, my, my, my, my, my original plan for this was I was just going to read every single name in an Italian accident and do no other Italian jokes. But because luckily I have Robert here to do the Italian jokes. Oh, I'm, I, my life is an Italian joke.

Based. Mm hmm. It is based. Bread pilled, I guess. Fucking terrible Italian bread. So, okay. So this is bombing, right? It kills, it kills some people.

It specifically it's like targeted against the police. And. Okay. So, so the, the, the rubber kids get blamed for this. And the immediate response to Italian government is they do a mass crack down on the left. Hundreds of communists. And now it turns out Robert, that bombing, not done by the red

brigades. Oh, good. Actually done by a fascist group named Ordine Norevo, or a new order. I think the guy responsible for this Vincenti Visacuera was tried by an Italian judge in the 80s. And he revealed some stuff. And by some stuff, I mean, it turns out that the bombing was done

by C4 taking from gladia weapons caches, which the prosecutors knew about because they immediately covered it up to blame someone else. See, that's very Italian of them. Yeah. I mean, although Chris, you do have to take into account, given the way C4 looks, this may have been an accidental bombing because it looks a lot like pasta dough.

They might've just been trying to make, they might've just been making a ravioli, you know? Sometimes you make the ravioli and you blow up the carbonari. Oh, Italians. So it turns out that the bombing, yeah. So it's done with gladia weapons caches. It's almost certainly was directed by the Italian

government. And this becomes the opening salvo most known as the strategy of tension, which is the government carrying out terrorist attacks from the fascist right. And then staging attacks that are claimed to be from the communist anarchist left. So you get people scared enough to trust the government and reject the incredibly powerful Italian left, which they

spend this whole time smearing as terrorists. And this, this, this has all come down to us today in the fact that anytime people on the left do something cool and illegal, you get a bunch of assholes on Twitter being like this is operation gladio style false flag. The thing I need to point out about this to people who believe this, if you go back and look at the history of what these guys are doing, it wasn't like, they weren't

like graffitiing someone's driveway. Like they were doing train bombings. Yeah. They were bombing. They were massacring civilians. Hundreds of people. Like guys, guys, the level of thing that they're doing is just not even remotely applicable to what's happening now.

Stuff that's objectively bad as opposed to stuff that's objectively based. Yeah. Like they don't, they don't do anything cool. They only, they only just, they, the only thing that they do specifically in order to discredit the left is kill civilians. And so I don't know, maybe, maybe like, look, if, if you

want to get all conspiracy brain about it, like, I don't know, maybe in five years. Massacring civilians bad no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on. Like, like, okay. The other thing I want to point out is that like, okay, so the, there were a bunch of conspiracy theorists in Italy in the 70s and 80s when this is happening, when this is

happening, right? And they're conspiracy, the conspiracy theory they have is that the Rembergades don't exist. And they're like, they're entirely fictitious and the government has made up a group of fake terrorists. And this is not true at all. The Rembergades were a real thing. They were, they got all the conspiracy theorists who were

living in like the most conspiracy written part of like the history ever, all got it completely wrong. So you guys also don't have it right. And the things that are this, we're not, we're not literally living in exactly the same thing of American Gladio. It's not the same thing. Please stop.

Oh, by the way, also the Italian red brigades not named the red brigades because of communism, but because of pasta sauce. Yeah, definitely. They were also called the marinara brigades. Yeah. The marinara brigades. That's what everyone's mostly known as.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's because they turn people into chunky marinara. So delicious. Viji Guerra, who's, who's the guy who is put on trial for this bombing claims that new order is actually a cat's ball for NATO in the CIA, which like, okay, so like partially he's doing this because he's been arrested

for a bombing and he's like, how do I get out of this? The CIA told us to. But, you know, but also on the other hand, right, the bombs that he used to make this are from CIA Gladio caches. So draw your own conclusions about who's responsible for this and how we got ahold of a bunch of weapons from CIA NATO stay behind network caches.

And it turns out that that new order and another fascist group called. I don't go to a national. Or national. Yeah, these people are also heavily involved in Operation Condor. And when I say heavily involved, what I mean is that I.

So one of the, one of these, one of the members of actually I think it's a member of both groups is this guy named Stefano Dileciari. I have no idea that his name has two eyes in it and there's a vowel in the middle. Look, it's Italian names. Incomprehensible names. Yeah.

So this guy, Pinochet met with him personally to talk about the assassination that he was trying to do. And one of the assassination that he's trying to do is the failed assassination of Christian Democratic politician, Bernando Layton. And this, the Christian Democrats are kind of weird here because like the Chilean Christian Democrats originally support the coup against Allende, but then

like Pinochet takes over and they were like, this whole Pinochet thing, maybe it's bad. And so they turn against Pinochet and here's McSherry and what happened next. Avangaria Nationale and Odino Nuevo also collaborated in Condor operations. Assassins from Avangaria Nationale, the terrorist organization of Italian neo-fascist Stefano Dileciari

attempted the latent assassination in Rome. They left the couple for dead after gunning them down in the street. The couple was severely wounded but survived. At the other side, the leader of Odino Nuevo and Avangaria Nationale boasted that Dileciari and his Italian fascists coordinated with the Chilean National Intelligence Directorate as well as the

secret services of the Franco regime in Spain and admitted that his forces carried out the latent attack at Dino's request. So Stefano Dileciari, by the way, so while wanted by the Italian police for this assassination, shows up at the Latin America Anti-Communist Confederation's meeting in Buenos Aires in 1980. And this is like a recurring theme for these

people, for Italian fascist terrorists. One of the new orders, like highest-ranking members was this guy named Elio Massigardi, who's like, he did a bunch of terrorist attacks and bank robberies in both Italy and France. So he flees to Paraguay after another judge attempts to prosecute these new order guys. And he winds up getting shot while his car is

stuck in a traffic jam in Rome. And at this point, Elio Massigardi just runs away and he goes to Paraguay and then he shows up as part of the European delegation of the World Anti-Communist League's meeting in Asuncion in 1979. And again, while he's at this meeting, he's like near the top of the Interpol Most Wanted list. And he's just at this meeting, like chilling.

Now, the other part of what's going on here, and this is the part that actually breaks people's brains, is an organization called the P2 Masonic Lodge or Propaganda Duea. So, I should make this clear from the top. P2 is a rogue Masonic Lodge that was expelled by the masons before they do the stuff we're about to talk about. And it's run by this guy named Licio Guelli,

who's like, he's an old, old school fascist. Like, this is a guy who at 17 years old went to Spain and fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and then like joined the SS. And P2 operates as this kind of like shadow state inside the Italian state. It has like a bunch of members in sort of various parts of the Italian government, including the military,

the intelligence services. It buys the country's largest newspaper. And by like the late 70s and like the very beginning of the 80s, it's basically running the Italian state. But hilariously, in 1981, the Italian police are raiding this guy's house for like completely unrelated corruption stuff. And they find a briefcase that just literally has

the P2 organizations plan to take over the government in it. And they also find, in Licio Guelli's apartment when they raid it later, they find a list that has everyone in the organization. And the people in this thing are wild. There's the heads and deputy heads of four different Italian intelligence services. The chief of the general staff of the army,

there's a bunch of people who are like very senior members of the Argentinian junta. The guy, yeah, the Stefano de la Chiana, the fascist we've been talking about, who showed up at the World Communist League meeting, he's in this. The guy who founded AAA, that the Argentinian death squad from last episode, also in this. And then the most famous member of this group

is a guy named Silvio Berlusconi. Oh! Yeah, yeah, it's great. Great. He was part of the secret rogue Masonic Lodge that took control of the government and was like planning to do a fascist coup and take everything over to destroy communism.

And to get an indication, if you want like a sneak peek of where this is eventually going, who wins this whole war, like he is, Silvio Berlusconi was the longest serving prime minister in the history of Italy. Well, okay, post way. Longest serving prime minister after Benito Mussolini. Yeah, so this is going great. The P2 stuff is like all over the place.

It's really hard to sort out like who exactly did what. Like there are evidence from some of these trials that are like happening now, like in 2022. Evidence is still coming out. What we can say is that they seem to have been involved in the 1980 Bologna train bombing, which killed 85 people and injured another 200 people. And because it's a bombing, it was originally initially

blamed by anarchists. But lo and behold, evidence now suggests it was actually fascist using gladio explosives backed by P2s, contacts and Italian intelligence. There's like, they do other stuff. There's decent evidence. They planted a fake story about Jimmy Carter's brother meeting PLO leader, Yasa Arafat in the U.S.

Press to try to get Ronald Reagan elected. Oh, yeah. I mean, and really they could have just, well, we'll talk about the bank, the crime bank that Jimmy Carter was affiliated with later. But that's another story for another day. Well, speaking of crime banks, I'm not going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about Branko and Barrosiano

and Robert Calvi, the man known as God's Banker, turning up dead under Black Fires Bridge. Because if I talk about this, I'll be here until like 2077 and also 3,000 people will just like fall from the ceiling with knives and assassinate me. But what I can say about this is that Gladio, as much as people sort of exceptionalize what Gladio is, Gladio is basically a mirror version of the U.S.'s own parallel

so to stay behind networks abroad. And these are things like the first observation group, which is a U.S. Special Forces group that was deployed to do terrorism in South Vietnam, like back in the 50s, when the U.S. was still doing this whole thing that they claimed they weren't in South Vietnam. Yeah, and Robert... Yeah, 50s is literally, yeah, anyway, whatever.

Robert, you know what else is a model for fascist death squads? Oh, well, this podcast actually. When Sophie and I sat down to plan how behind the bastard was going to work, you know, first question we asked was like, how are we going to organize the division of labor to make this work? And both at the same time, it was amazing. Instantly looked each other right in the eye

and said at the same time, fascist death squads. And that's why we still use that organizational method today for this show. Yeah, and this is why we're sponsored by... That's right, that's right. Primarily... Elements of the... All united in operation of fascist death squads,

which we support 100% here at Behind the Bastards. The Dead Squad podcast. No notes. Thank you, Sophie. 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.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. 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. 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 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 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 podcasts. We're back. And you know, thinking about fascist death squads makes me think about death squads. You just you just really wanted to do it. I did. I did, Sophie.

You know what I love? Making our editor bleep things. I do. I do. I do it. I do it just for you, Sophie. Well, it's really it's really no big deal for me. I just type an edit note. I know. I know. I just want you to feel like you're part of the team, Sophie.

I run the team, Robert. I am the team. That doesn't sound like something I'd hear because Sophie, that's very confusing to me because I take a lot of credit for running the team. So, you know, pretty weird. You're sitting on the bench most of the time, but okay. Well, speaking of benches, uh, uh,

uh, Babe Ruth. You saw somebody list that on the Twitter thread that I posted about you knowing a sports reference. That doesn't count. Okay. Well, let's return to the story. You know, I could do a Babe Ruth segue here, but I'm just not going to. So, well, all of this stuff is going on in Italy.

The league is getting up to just some other unfathomable atrocities across Latin America. And one of the main engines of these atrocities, it turns out, is the KMT back in Taiwan. Now, last episode, we talked about how the KMT was the original death squad party. Um, and the Taiwanese spend most of the Cold War using the World Anti-Communist League

to sort of export their model of anti-communist death squad party abroad. Um, the KMT call this, there's sort of like, they have like a method, right? They have this thing. And the method is called political warfare. And this is essentially, political warfare is the KMT basically going, okay, so like, what if we do, what if we did like, like, like, almost like a pair over the top parody of communist indoctrination or, but like,

like, to our own people for anti-communism? Like, they have, they have Soviet style communists, like literally, so like commissars, whose job it is to like, maintain ideological and party discipline in the military, but they're anti-communists this time. Like, everyone is trained to spy on each other. We did it. Yeah, it's great. It's like, we've defeated communism by taking every bad aspect

of like, anything you can find in a communist state and just doing it for anti-communism? Question, Mark? They developed this model of like, war called the War of the Masses, which is literally their version of Maoist guerrilla warfare. Um, it is awesome how all of these guys, like, crib particularly from Mao, even like one of the ones in the United States,

because there's like, well, clearly it works. You know, he was really good at, he was really, really good at... He was, you gotta give Mao credit where it's due. Yeah. The man had his areas of expertise. Yeah, it was exactly that. Yeah. Nothing else to do with agriculture or...

No. Yeah. Oh boy. Famously good at agriculture. The guy who... reads Starving Ghosts. Yeah. So... Good book.

Yeah, the KMT is like, it's like, it's like a right-wing parody of what a communist police said is, but it's anti-communist, and they're also huge on this thing called counter-terror. And I think most people listening to this, you're gonna hear counter-terror, and assume that I'm talking about like, some counter-terrorism thing, and like...

Kind, like, there are counter-terrorism stuff that is just counter-terror, but... Counter-terrorism. I've known a lot of professional counter-terrorism people and hung out with them while they did counter-terrorism. And boy, it looks a lot like terrorism. Yeah, well... We can talk about the Iraqis...

Yeah, counter-terrorism forces more some other day. The thing with this, right, is counter-terror... Counter-terror is just cutting out the whole sort of middleman thing. Counter-terror is just the state go literally going, we're the terrorists now, our plan to win this war is we're going to terrorize the population through kidnapping, assassinations, and massacres until they don't support guerrillas anymore.

Hooray! Yeah, and this is... I mean, the KMT are like pioneers of this. The U.S. Army teaches this to people, and everyone we're about to talk about is just obsessed with counter-terror. This is like 80% of what they do is, oh my God, what if we did every atrocity we're accusing our enemies of, but significantly worse?

And one of the places they learn this stuff is the Political Warfare Academy in Taipei, which starts taking students from militaries all across Latin America. Why don't we have a Political Warfare Academy, Sophie? That's true. We should have one. We should... It's in the budget for next year. Okay, all right, good. That's good.

Okay, Sophie, we need to make this very clear right now. I am going to run the Political Warfare Academy so that all the officers that I train will be personally loyal to me so that I can successfully overthrow Robert in a military coup. Yeah, this seems like a good plan for me. It's so funny that you think that he would need to be the one that's overthrown when I... I am in charge. I've always just been the figurehead of this.

I want to be the fingerhead. I don't want to do the actual work, which is why I'm not overthrowing Sophie. No, I want to be like... That seems awful. Dear God. I just want to be the podcast equivalent of... Oh, what was one of the guys who was just a figurehead? Late... Oh, what's his name?

I was thinking Star Wars, the fake queen Amidala. Yes, I was going to say with Star Wars, I want to be the... Oh, I don't even know enough about Star Wars. Whatever, let's continue. Okay. So, okay, so you have this Taiwanese school, the Americas thing, and like, okay, so there are a lot of people who get trained in a lot of like, you know, schools to do counterterror.

But like, okay, even people who've been to the school of Americas, of the Americas, like, they talk to people who come back from political warfare training and are like, those guys got weird. Like, they're like too into this. They use people who are in death squads. Like, we'll talk about people who came back from Taiwan and were like, those guys are a bit weird. These guys are a bit much.

And, you know, the KMT starts like, exporting this model. I'm going to quote from inside the league here about what they were doing. First, through its liaisons in the league, the KMT identified the political party in a Latin country that was the most militantly anti-communist. The party chosen to be represented in the league is invariably the one that was already proven as anti-communist metal or displays the ability and will to do so.

Following the KMT model, the chosen party establishes a nationwide intelligence and counterterror network. These paramilitary groups are then gradually incorporated into the nation's armed forces. This is usually accomplished when, in a moment of national crisis, the army turns to these civilian bands for support, but when it is too impotent to curb them. One of the parties they choose is the MLN in Guatemala, which is founded by this guy named Mario Salvador Alacrone.

And this is a guy who once said... God, that sounds like an airport Italian restaurant right there. I mean, he's definitely fascist enough to be an Italian. Or to work at an airport. Yeah. Two incredibly fascist places. This is a guy... I'm going to read this quote from him.

I could perhaps accept the label of fascist. Sandoval told a French reporter in 1981, in the historical sense of the word, were it not for the fact that it refers to a type of socialism, albeit national socialism. So this is a guy who fascism is too socialist for him? Okay, buddy. It's incredible.

This is the guy who is the head of the Guatemalan chapter. Coming after the Nazi party from the right. No, that's literally his ticket. This is the guy who's the Guatemalan, the head of the Guatemalan chapter of the World Anti-Communist League for basically his entire life. Mario Sandoval Alacrone, he's an old school Guatemalan right-winger.

He's one of the guys who did the 1954s, back coup against the democratically elected Yacobo Arbenz. So he's been around. And he's also one of the people behind the White Hand, which is basically the most feared and bloodthirsty West Squad in Colombia until the army fully takes over and starts doing the genocide stuff against the Maya population in the 1980s.

Now, lest you think Sandoval Alacrone did not do the genocide, he absolutely is. Anytime you read anything about the genocide, the first part of the genocide is them talking about the stuff that he did in the 60s and 70s, including just the White Hand. They have this fairly famous thing where in the 1970s, there's all these agricultural cooperatives forming.

And the White Hand, again, these are just people forming co-ops, and the White Hand just walks in and slaughters them all. Okay, I haven't been able to figure out the exact extent to which he was involved in the fall on genocide that started in 1980. I mean, there's no way he didn't want the genocide to happen, but the thing about it that's weird is that

his political enemies are in power when the genocide starts. And this is in some sense like a reflection of how deeply just genocidal the entire sort of Guatemalan political class is, right? Because like, his enemies get put in power and they still do a genocide. But I mean, he's definitely still killing people. Like, there's definitely his squadron

still murdering people in the streets. It's kind of unclear exactly how involved he was in the army, just like exterminating people. But do you know who was actively involved on the level of directly backing the military? The KMT. Oh. I thought you were doing an ad plug and I was going to have to say

the products and services that support this podcast. Which they were. Probably yes. But the KMT specifically here. So, all right. I guess I previewed this last episode when I was talking about the whole thing about how the U.S. refused to recognize the People's Republic of China

as a legitimate government of China until 1979. And in 1979, the U.S. finally flips and recognizes the PRC as legitimate government of China instead of recognizing the KMT's Rump government in Taiwan. And almost all of the world's like... Rump. Yeah, look. Almost all the countries in the world recognize the PRC.

One of the ones that doesn't, and the people who don't, it's like Rhodesia and South Africa, like apartheid South Africa. And one of the other countries is Guatemala. And so, Taiwan and Guatemala remain are incredibly close political allies. The Guatemalan army like sends officers... Well, but I mean, they're so...

have such directly tied interests. Taiwan, Guatemala, both... What? They both really like killing communists. Islands in the South Pacific? That is the case. That's the thing. They really like killing communists. And so, yeah, the Guatemalan army sends a bunch of officers to Taiwan's political warfare academy.

Taiwan sells them weapons. It sends military advisors and trainers to Guatemala. And so, there are... I just, I love, you know, it's just, it's always beautiful when people come together around shared interests. Yeah, international solidarity between... Solidarity for...

Okay, probably. I'm gonna start... I'm gonna start a rousing chorus. If the people's flag is deepest red. That's right. And so, one of the things that... What ends up happening here is that there's a bunch of Taiwanese military advisors.

There's Taiwanese political warfare pamphlets, like flooding one everywhere. And all of this is going on when the government, when the Guatemalan government starts doing the genocide. LMAO. Sorry, wait, that's not an LMAO situation. No, it's real bad. I mean, we'll get to something that's kind of LMAO in a second.

But... In the immediate thing here, by the end of the genocide, the Guatemalan government has killed 200,000 people and wiped, like, just in their entire, like, cultures that are gone. Like, their whole languages that are just wiped out, like, it's...

Like, just unbelievably horrifying. Yeah, if you've ever... Spend any time in Guatemala and talk to some, like, older people. Like, there are towns, significant chunks of them where, like, the army is still not allowed in. Yeah. Like, they are effectively, like, autonomous because

the gen... Yeah, as a result of, like, the fucking genocide. Like, fucking... An experience you will regularly have, or at least 10 years ago you regularly have, is, like, turning a street corner. And there's just 40 or 50 people lining a street, all missing legs and arms and hands.

And it's... Not because they all had separate accidents. Yeah. Like, it's... Guatemala's fucking dope is shit. Guatemalan people, very nice. The degree to which that country got fucked over

is one of the things that makes me angriest in... the world. Yeah, it is... breathtakingly horrible. And as a side note here, when the UN does... the UN eventually in the 90s does an investigation of the genocide.

And Taiwan refuses to cooperate. And to this day, to the best of my knowledge, the documents about exactly what Taiwan was doing during the genocide are still classified. So, that's fun. That's great. Yeah.

So... Mario Sandoval Alacran's recruitment into the league, like, it wasn't just about sort of Taiwanese diplomatic relations. He's brought in as, and they literally call him the grandfather, the godfather of death squads. Like, everyone just calls him the godfather. It's...

Fucking Italians. Okay. Sure. So, you know, he's brought in to train other death squad leaders. And one of those guys is... Roberto... See, this guy's a French name. I think it's... Debusson?

Something like that. Debusson. So, he is a guy who would say things like... and I... he said this to a journalist. Quote, you Germans are... were very intelligent. You realize that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them?

Oh boy. So, his nickname is Blowtorch Bob and... Oh, Jesus. Yeah, do you want to guess why his nickname is Blowtorch Bob? I really don't want to guess. Yeah. I'm going to be fair with you. I would prefer not to guess on that. I will just tell you it's because

he was famous for just using Blowtorch to torture prisoners. Oh! Well... Yeah. This is actually a similarity that he has with our producer Sophie. I don't use a Blowtorch.

Okay. Well... it's a can of hairspray with a lighter, Sophie. It works similarly. Well, at least get your facts straight if you're going to accuse me of something. This is... this is how we... handle problems like... that time...

I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this joke. Neither do I. Please continue. So, Roberto Debusson... he goes to the leagues meeting in Buenos Aires in 1980 and he asked for help running death squads. And... he becomes Sandoval at a Kronz like Protégé.

And this... he also goes to Taiwan and spends time at the KMT's Political Warfare Academy. Here's... from inside the league about his time there. In an interview with a French reporter in 1987, Debusson said that

the courses he took in Beto, which is... Beto is a district in Taiwan. Yeah, Beto. Yeah. Or a bunch of people who came over from China like wind up. This is where the academy is. In 1977 was quote, the best class I ever studied.

Those lessons are what I applied when I organized. We started organizing civic groups. Political war is different from military war. It is different in its space. The political war is defined at 360 degrees. The military war is a war in space, but there is one military front, one theater of operation.

In the military war, people could participate, young men especially. In political warfare, everyone participates. Political warfare, Debusson said, is psychological warfare against the enemy? I started psychological warfare against the communists. I denounced their program,

their treason, their infiltrations into the government. The political warfare was a complement to the armed fight. And so... Taiwan is not the only country that's supporting this guy. At that same league, meaning in 1980, he meets with representatives of the Argentinian police state

to ask for more training to fund his death squads. And we should go back to Operation Condor for a second. Remember, this is how Condor started. Condor starts with a bunch of people at CIA meetings coming together and going, hey, we should kill communists together. The thing about

Condor is that Condor had originally been a project of what's called the Southern Cone, which is a region of Latin America covering Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, sometimes like Paraguay and part of Brazil. And what this 1980 meeting of the C.I.L. was doing was exporting a new version of Condor

in North Central America. This is sending it to El Salvador, to Honduras, to Nicaragua. Here's from their predatory state. The 1980 W.A.C.L. meeting, well, it's a communist league meeting in Buenos Aires seemed to have been a defining event in exporting the Condor system

from the Southern Cone. The meeting brought together various right-wing forces, intelligence agents, and military officers, including many involved in Condor to strategize about ways to accelerate the world anti-communist crusade. In March 1980, the Senate and Eastern media announced that the

CIA was interfering in Nicaragua and El Salvador and training former National Guard troops in Honduras. So, Debucion like gets his Desquad training and a year later in 1981, he founds Arena, which is his own sort of Salvadoran Desquad party. And then

he also does something that puts him in a very rare category of bastard. He kills a saint. Ooh, had they been sainted when he killed them or was getting murdered part of what made him a saint? Getting murdered is how he became a saint. Dope.

I mean, kind of did him a favor. Yeah, maybe. I feel like he would rather have been alive than a dead saint, but well, I don't know. I will not claim to understand the mind of the high-level Catholic clergy. Yeah. I was about to say, I don't know if that matters.

I'm going to guess not. Because that's like being the LeBron James. Okay, now we're just repeating names. Yeah, we got to give you more. We got to give you more names to have better talking points. I just need to watch that

Adam Sandler movie again. The one with the footballs. And the tall guy. It's a good movie. You should watch it. It's a pretty good movie, Sophie. So that saint is a guy you probably actually have heard of. That's Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Oh, yeah. He lived a long life. Yeah, he lived a long life until 1980 when Debussy had him assassinated. And as McSherry points out, his assassination really looks like a condor killing. It has all of the elements of it.

And Debussy has taken his lessons to heart really fast. And this whole project that he's doing, this whole thing, he's trying to get everyone who's been doing the sort of like training desquads to help him make his own desquads. This works incredibly well. His desquads are trained by Argentina and Taiwan,

mentored by Mario Sandoval at a crone. They kill something like 40,000 people during this Salvadoran Civil War. Yeah. 40,000 is a kind of low estimate. It's possible it was much... I've seen people blame... There's a question as to

how many people were killed by the desquads and how many people were actually killed by the military. I've seen estimates of like 20,000 people higher than this because they're attributing all of the people killed. Death squad numbers are like when people ask me how many beers I've had at like 3.30 in the morning

numbers. You're going to be off by a margin and it's usually going to be under. Yeah, you're almost certainly. You're almost certainly there's more of them. And, you know... So this is what we call in the trade, extremely bad. Now, Robert, as you well know,

Ronald Reagan and his staff sold weapons to Iran to secure prisoner releases and fund Nicaraguan desquads. But do you know who else sold weapons and questionable arm seals to fund desquads? Our sponsor is the... Uh-huh, that's right. With the...

We believe pandas are good and so is arming paramilitary groups. And peep peep peep peep. I think most people think that I'm joking here. I'm actually literally not. They actually literally did this. So yeah, go read the Buzzfeed article.

And it was fine. I think it was 7 countries. I haven't looked into this in too long. Chris, I don't like death squads being in 7 countries funded by the... Yes. That's how you sound. 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 gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation 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 was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure we're gonna get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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 Podcast, 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 and 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 podcasts. We're back! Do you like my Chris voice, Chris? Yeah! I feel like my register is slightly higher than that.

It is, I'm going to be honest, the same as my Sophie voice. I have one voice that I do for people. This is why you're a professional. This is why I'm the professional. This is exactly right. This is why I'm the leader of this junta.

Speaking of junta, actually not speaking of junta. I guess the Argentinian junta is going to be involved later. But when we left off, the US was about to get involved in this series of incredibly sketchy arm deals with Iran and Hezbollah, and we had to fund death squads.

That's what you like to hear. Unfortunately, before we can... No, it's... Yeah, it's not. I guess you could probably find people on the left who are like, Iran Contra was good because they were giving weapons to Iran. But then there's the whole funding in the Contras thing,

so it's kind of like... It is fun. There's a lot of... lazy left-wing analysis of the tanky style shitty left-wing analysis where everyone wants their clear set good guys and bad guys,

and then you look at the reality, which is like, boy, China and the United States wound up backing a lot of the same militant groups during the Reagan years. It kind of kept happening over and over again. Weird. Weird that the Reagan administration...

Anyway, whatever. It's a good time. Yeah, but before we can get any further into Iran Contra, we have to introduce the last major World Anti-Communist League figure we're talking about, and also a Iran Contra co-conspirator, Major General John K. Siglab.

So, John K. Siglab is... He is the most spooked out spook who ever tortured an innocent civilian. Boy, there is competition for that title. Okay, I'm not even gonna... I literally can't do his entire

resume here because it would take up like 40 to 50% of the entire episode would just be me reading his resume. He starts as an OSS guy behind Nazi lines in World War II, and then he gets transferred to the Pacific to teach Chinese forces guerrilla tactics against the Japanese. And would that

he had died a hero there because his next posting is as the CIA desk chief for China in 1949? Somehow... There's a lot of his things in his career that I read that don't make any sense to me. He... somehow also was involved in

the establishment of the Ranger Training Center at Fort Benning. He then becomes the deputy station chief of the CIA in South Korea during the Korean War, and this is the thing I don't understand at all. So, he's the deputy station chief of the CIA, right? He somehow also is commanding a combat battalion?

I have no idea how this works. Don't ask me. It's baffling. I don't get it. Yeah, that's a little odd. I have no idea. This guy is just like the spook spook. Here's what I'm inside the league about

what he got up to next. As commander of the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force, known as MACSOG, great acronym by the way, MACSOG, really? SINGLAB was one of the on-site commanders of Operation Phoenix, the American-directed assassination

and counter-terror program. Robert, do you remember that episode that Garrison did on Eel Horse? I do. Although, I will tell you a fan came up to me during one of the live events I did recently

and informed me that there's a specific kind of antibiotic that they give. This fan is a horse person. She told me there's an antibiotic that they give horses that if you eat the meat, it will give you horrible cancer immediately.

So, yeah, that's going to limit the number of I was going to just steal a horse from somebody's horse farm. You know, just capture one horse and eat it. But now, I feel like I have to be careful to make sure it hasn't been given this antibiotic

that will turn it into cancer meat. Because, that'll probably be bad. Yeah, but on the other hand, what a way to go. I ate cancer-inducing course meat. I got a horse meat cancer. Like, this is something somebody like 1742

dies of. Chris actively encouraging Robert to eat cancer meat so that he can overthrow him. I was going to make Garrison eat most of the horse. This is called political warfare, Sophie. I know, I see it happening

and I'm proud. Yeah, doing a horse meat gladio. Yeah. So, do you remember the part about the the thing I remember about that episode

about eel horse was Garrison stopping me after a meeting and saying, Chris, have you ever heard of an ancient Chinese remedy of people sticking eels up their asses? The only thing I could think of that involved East Asia and people

with eels was the thing about how people would rape people with eels during the Vietnam War. Oh, yes. Yeah, so that was this guy. That's him. He's the guy who raped people with eels.

And, you know, this is this guy. The thing he's doing, Project Phoenix, their job is specifically to assassinate civilians. It's to find civilians who are sympathetic to North Vietnam and just kill them. That's what he's doing. A bunch of the work from Project Phoenix,

which again, he's the guy running. If I just weigh into this army manual that's passed out at the School of the Americas, that's about how to do terrorism and how to assassinate people. And eventually that gets leaked and there's this huge scandal, but it doesn't affect him at all. He eventually goes back to the army at some point.

He flips randomly back and forth between the CIA, the army and the Rangers. And I don't know what's going on with this guy's career. It's incredibly bizarre spook shit. And so he's made the chief of staff of the U.S. forces in South Korea, but he gets like incredibly pissed off

that Carter wants to pull troops out. So he like publicly denounces the president and Carter's just like, you can't do that. Like, you're a general. And so he just fires him. But this, of course, makes him incredibly popular with the U.S. right. And he eventually helps found a new

American chapter of the world anti-communist league and becomes the head of the league. Here's some inside the league. The new American chapter of the United States Council for World Freedom U.S. CWF Terrible Acronym Terrible Acronym was born. Yeah, like Cal is a good

acronym. U.S. CWF Terrible 0 out of 10. Jesus Christ, come on. So the U.S. CWF was born. It was created by a loan of really $20,000 from Taiwan.

What Sing Lab was able to create was a body of powerful. And you could really make money go further back then. Oh, yeah. No, like $20,000. You could do a ran contra with $20,000. Yeah. I mean, Sophie and I recently put $20,000 into a series of militant endeavors

and we barely assassinated the former prime minister of Japan. Hey, podcast. Finish. Episodes. Not even not even gonna nearly got us in trouble on that one. Nearly got us in trouble on that one. Pulled it out though. Nobody

nobody were fine. Dodging dodging prosecution like Neo and the Matrix. That's right. Boy, howdy. Let's continue dodging prosecution like Shinzo Abe didn't dodge anyway. Robert.

What? So Sing Lab is able to create like a powerful and respected body of American conservatives, the likes of which the leak had never seen before. As the USCWF grew, this new leak chapter came to include high-ranking former officers of the American army

and intelligence community. Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, became its vice chairman. While a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Albert Keon was his treasurer. On the advisory board was General Lewis Walt, former commander of Marine Corps forces in

Vietnam, and Ray Sleeper, retired Air Force Colonel. So this new American chapter. Somebody needs to do an R.E.M. song, like a parody of an R.E.M. song about Ray Sleeper using the R.E.M. song, Day Sleeper to talk about it anyway.

That is not the R.E.M. parody. I thought you were going to go for it. That was better than I expected. Ray Sleeper, Day Sleeper, which is a great R.E.M. song. Don't get me wrong, but it would also be a funny anyway. Somebody out there can figure it out. So this is like the most feted out organization I've ever encountered.

And SYNCLAB had already been a liaison to the Reagan Administration. In 1979, he and another CIA guy named Daniel Graham went to Guatemala to convince Reagan to back the government. So Reagan does, and guess what? Death Squad

killings immediately increase. And everyone else in the Republican party sort of falls in line. They're like, oh, this is fine. And here's what happened next. The election of Reagan coincided with the bloodiest outbreak of Guatemalan death squad actions in history. Almost 500 deaths a month, almost all attributed to the right

were being recorded by the American, were being reported by the American Embassy. But even that figure was considered low by most other monitoring groups. Piles of mutilated corpses were being discovered every morning throughout the country, and a concerted campaign to eliminate the centrist parties was underway in Guatemala City. From July

1980 to June 1981, 76 leaders of the Christian Democratic Party and 10 officials of the Social Democratic Revolutionary Front were assassinated, who most were murdered by gunfire from passing cars, the trademark of the MLN. And this is all happening at the same time as the genocide, which Reagan is like, yeah,

no, go ahead and do this. And so Reagan's big thing is that he wants to expand Death Squad activity everywhere. His primary target is Nicaragua. And I guess we should probably explain why they hate Nicaragua so much. So in 1979, the left of Sandinista is finally ousted

the U.S.-backed at Somoza's dictatorship and tried to end the literally centuries-old reign of genocidal line-downing oligarchs. And this is, you know, because all of the rest of the Latin American world in class is also genocidal line-downing oligarchs. This sparks a lot of what we've been talking about.

Yeah, like the genocide in Guatemala, the massacres in El Salvador, a lot of this stuff was triggered by the right-wingers just sort of like seeing someone else being like, hey, maybe you guys shouldn't have the total literally power of her life and death and the ability to murder anyone you want in order to keep your land. And they just

they just lose it and start doing genocides. And another country they turned into a war zone is Honduras. Now, the man largely responsible for this, at least initially, was Cristalval Alvarez Martinez, a school of the Americas graduate who was also trained

by the Argentinean junta and their own sort of dirty war stuff. Cristalval Alvarez Martinez is floating around the same sort of like C.A.L. Mililu as like all the other Desquad guys you've talked about. And at that same 1980 conference of the league in Buenos Aires, he asks

and gets help from the Argentinean army. But what makes Cristalval Alvarez Martinez different from the other Desquad leaders that we've talked about is that, you know, so he's absolutely doing Desquads along the sort of Argentinean dirty war model like right down to like

like right down to the sort of Argentinean triple threat of kidnapping, electroshocks torture and throwing people out of helicopters. But he's also attempting to get training for a bunch of Nicaraguan, like Nicaraguan National Guard people who'd fled across the border in Honduras after like losing the war.

And this is enormously successful. Like literally everyone is just like falling over themselves to train these people to a new army of Contras. And in 1981, he gets made the head of Honduras Armed Forces. And this is where all the sort of threads start to converge

both the Chileans and Argentinians help Alvarez Martinez train a unit that becomes known as Battalion 3-16, which was in charge of killing, quote, enemies of the state. After Alvarez Martinez made formal sort of secret contact with the Contras beside Nicaragua

itself, he starts like coordinating intelligence with them and the Argentinians also helped start like training the army of Contras in the camp at Honduras. The Argentinians also start working even closer with the CIA which is pretty incredible but they get closer. Here's from predatory states.

Gen. Guillermo Suarez Mason, the powerful commander of Argentina's First Army Corps was instrumental in the creation of the Extra-Territorial Task Force or the GTE, a unit of Battalion 601 that carried out secret intelligence operations outside of Argentina.

Sencha's Risse said that the GTE was based in Florida with the authorization of the CIA. Suarez Mason himself presided over the 4th Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist League World Anti-Communist League Affiliates in 1980 and the World Anti-Communist League

reportedly donated $8 million to pay for the deployment of Argentine officers to Central America. Suarez Mason fled Argentina after transition to democracy in 1984 and according to one human rights organization all over North arranged a false visa

for him to enter the U.S. North had been discussing with him the formation of a continental counter-insurgency force, a concept that, again, evokes Operation Condor. So this is great. The Argentine assassination unit is running out of Miami.

Oliver North is giving this guy who almost certainly would have just been shot. Like, yeah, answers to the U.S. You know what's fun about Oliver North now that you're saying all this is that I watched him on TV every night

on Fox News when I was a kid. Yeah, it's fun. My parents' Big Ollie North fans. Yeah. It's great that he did so many crimes and he's just still around today doing bad stuff.

So not wanting to be left out of this death squad party, Taiwan also sends military advisors to train the Contras and the Captain Honduras. I mean, it's really like everyone is there, like the Moonies are there, the Soldier of Fortune magazine is flying weapons in, like SIG Labs, like there.

And a couple of them get killed in the helicopter and get shot down. Which is extremely funny. There's a really, really fun story of some Soldier of Fortune guys getting the fuck murked out. Yeah, it's amazing. Also, there's a pretty good song from a Canadian country music artist I like called Student Visas.

That's about this period. Check it out. I don't know. I just want to imagine, like, just think about what is it like in these camps? It's like Bohi Pak, because the Moon's Lieutenant is showing up there and he just sees some guy

from, I don't know, he sees some CAA guy. It's like, hey, Bob, I haven't seen you since we did the cocaine coup in Bolivia. It's like every single person who's ever funded a death squad is just simultaneously running around these camps. And it's like... And part of what's going on here

is that SIG Lab, like through the sort of CAL networks we've been talking about that are funding all these death squads, like, gets the Reagan administration like, fully in touch with involved in training these contras as well. The Reagan administration is so heavily involved in this stuff that

Mario Salvador Alicron literally shows up at his inaugural ball in 1981, which is great. The CAA, meanwhile, is so heavily involved in the contra camps in Honduras that quoting McSherry Alvarez, who's the

hunter and intelligence guy who's now hiding in the military, running this stuff, was so close to the CAA station chief in Honduras, Douglas Winters, that Winters asked him to be the godfather of his adopted child. Ronald. It's incredible. And Ronald Reagan later awarded him

the Legion of Merit in 1983. So this is... Love Ronald Reagan, a guy who never did anything wrong. And until 1984, this was going great. And by going great, I mean, the CAA, Argentina, Taiwan, and the Moonies are having a great

time partying in the jungle and murdering communists. In Honduras itself, the Nicaraguan contras have just straight up turned into their own death squads who are murdering people. Okay, so there are death squads that's supposed to murder people in Nicaragua, right? But they're also just murdering people in Honduras. And then they also just start killing people

in the Nicaraguan refugee camps in Honduras. So this is a good time. And back in the US, Congress actually does something for once ever and is like, Reagan, you can't give money to these guys who are burning children alive. Which, you know, fairly sensible thing.

The woke mob comes for the child burners. Yeah, look, look. Burning and burning children is a... Oh god, I can't remember. I can't remember the name of the thing that... Part of American tradition and history. It is a strong American culture.

Yeah. You're not supposed to burn children to death? Since whom? Since when? That's what I gotta ask. Our forefathers burned children to death. They're forefathers burned children to death. And by God, one of these days will burn children to death. Yeah.

If we're lucky. It'll be great. Wow, Sophie. Noted anti-American. You are falling down on the job like... Scottie Pippen? Unfortunately, it's a visual gag,

but a robber just got a towel thrown at him. It was extremely funny. Yeah, one of our corporate mandates is that someone always has to be in the room with me to get angry when I say things that shouldn't. I did that with my mind. That was so cool. Yeah.

You really professor Xavier'd that one. That's another famous basketball player. Oh, my God. Okay, Chris. So, as we talked about in our episodes with the Moonsies, this is the moment that Reverent Moon truly becomes the father of Iran Contra by personally throwing money

in supplies at the Honduran camps to keep them in the fight when the CIA couldn't. And this is also where John Singlab currently the head of the World Anti-Combinist League becomes incredibly important. He starts doing this series of fundraisers all over the world. He goes to Honduras.

He's in these Contra camps. He's flying in weapons and supplies with a soldier of fortune guy. And he is actually raising some money from the Contras. But this whole thing is really a charade. And this is a key part of how Iran Contra works because you have this figurehead guy

who any CIA money can just go through. And it looks to all the world like, oh, hey, this guy is raising money for freedom fighters. And as kind of silly as this whole thing is this part of the operation is so successful that no one finds out about it until

the Iran end of Iran Contra falls apart completely and people start following the money trails around. And Singlab is deeply involved in this enough that his liaison to the Reagan administration is he's just talking to Oliver North.

And during the later investigation, there's a real attempt to go after his organization, the United States Council for World Freedom, which again is the U.S. chapter of the world. They try to go after it. They don't quite get it, but it's in the documents. And

while all of this is going on Singlab's trying to do a rebrand of the league because it turns out that having a bunch of people who if you talk to them will immediately start screaming about Zionist communism and Jewish conspiracies is I guess now it's good for recruiting,

but back then it was not great for recruiting people. And the goal of this is to bring in more mainstream conservatives. And one of these mainstream conservatives is John McCain who is better known for other work like telling a reporter, quote, I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live. Oh boy. Yeah.

He said that no one ever talks about it because anti-Asian racism wasn't real until 2020. It was invented by Donald Trump. It wasn't like the previous two people that ran before him were also unbelievably

fucking racist. And so, okay, but this whole sort of like campaign to clean the league up, like, you know, it does do one thing, which is that Singlab finally kicks out the CAL. I think it was in 1983, he finally kicks them out.

But you know, all the death squad people like somehow keep showing up to their meetings. The only people who actually kicked out of the techos because they're just like too openly anti-Semitic. Here's from inside the league about how like deeply these changes actually went. Still, there were problems in selling this

new and improved league for not very much just changed. John Kosak, the Belarusian-Nazi collaborator remains chairman of his delegation, the Croatian Liberation Movement, the international Ustasa Brotherhood that Ante Pavlovic established in Argentina in 1956 was still the official Croatian

league chapter, as was the Bulgarian national front, which had been formed in 1947 by the Bulgarian legionaries who had advocated the extermination of the nations Jews. Mario Salvador Alcron, the grandfather of Central American death squads was in attendance.

And although Jaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian premier who had officiated over the murder of approximately 7,000 residents of Lvov in one week in 1941, was too ill to come, his wife Slava was there to represent the Ukrainian-Nazi collaborators. Oh, good.

I was really worried for a second when he said he was too ill to come, but I'm glad she was. She was able to make that. Yeah, yeah. This new league, it's exactly the same as the old league, except the scale of operations increases, right? Alongside running around Contra, like anti-communist rebel groups from across

the world just start showing up and placing orders for weapons, I'm pretty sure they give weapons to Charles Taylor, although that one was slightly sketchy. Yeah, it's fun. They definitely send weapons to

a bunch of right-wing incredibly weird guys in Mozambique who they give surface-to-air missiles, guns, and bazookas. And if you remember how we talked about how Reverend Moon backed Pol Pot and how that aid was mostly propaganda but a bit of money, so the same

Cambodian soldiers ally with Pol Pot come to the league and the league just gives them a bunch of guns and weapons. They're funding Pol Pot. The league is also constantly raising money for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan where Siglab also winds up doing liaisoning for the CIA.

It really looks like this whole thing is sort of just accelerating into a new... By the way, quick note, because this can't be referenced enough. Everybody likes to say, oh, when we armed the Mujahideen, we were just giving weapons to the Taliban. No, we were giving weapons to the people who molested children on such a grand scale

that it allowed for the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Get it right, folks. Yeah. That was the Pakistanis who were... Yes, yes. Well, yeah. So...

It looks like this whole thing is accelerating into like a new, even more bloody phase of the Cold War. And, you know, this is what the authors of Inside the League are writing this in 1986. This is what they think is going to happen. You know, the League is going to play an even more central role in the Cold War.

And then they won. The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. They collapsed. The Cidadistas fell. The Mozambique abandoned Marxist Leninism. Vietnam, which was already on its way to becoming a capitalist market economy withdrew from Cambodia, which is also now a capitalist market economy. And now Vietnam's glorious people security

forces regularly train with American police officers from a variety of states, including Oregon. And also, I... I'm about 90% sure they get trained by the Israelis, too, because it's great. Oh, yeah. I mean, honestly. Yeah.

Who doesn't? Am I right? Yeah. So it's all good. I do want to make one quick note, which is that Mozambique is my favorite country in terms of, like, the word for people who come from that country, because I find saying Mozambican to be incredibly satisfying,

spelling it's even better. Oh, I fucking love that word. I don't know why. Just feels good. Try it. Try it for yourself. It is great. Mozambican. Say and spell Mozambican. I cannot spell Mozambican. It feels good. It's easier to spell Mozambican than it is Mozambique, because you don't have

that weird fucking cue in there. Check it out, people. Spell Mozambican. Improve your day. That's not a joke. That's just a real thing. Yeah. So the guys who assassinate ambassadors live long enough to see Yugoslavia fall.

The small guerrilla groups that were in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are all exterminated. The government that comes after Pinochet privatizes even more state-owned companies that Pinochet did. Reverend Moon opens a car company in North Korea. China is now the world's second largest capital

of this economy, and, like, even Cuba has special economic zones. So, yeah, it drifted this sort of new world of their own creation. The World League for Freedom and Democracy. But the organization is a rump of its former self, but it still meets in Taiwan, even though Taiwan, like,

overthrew the KMT, but, you know, it still meets there. But, again, like, the, you know, the... Even Taiwan, where, like, the KMT is, like, built or dictatorship fell. It's like, well, there's still a capitalist economy. And that's because we live in their world now.

We live in the world where all of these people, all of these fucking Nazis, got everything and it sucks ass. And it's going to stay that way... It's going to stay that way unless... Mm-hmm. All right. Well... Here's the thing, folks.

You know how to stop this from happening? Shoot all of the Nazis? Would you win the war? Yeah, fucking kill all the Nazis. It's the same lesson with Confederates, right? Yeah. There's a... The lesson from World War II

and the lesson from the U.S. Civil War is the same, which is, when you beat a bunch of racists in a war, kill a lot more of them than you think you're going to need to. You're going to want to not kill as many of them, because... No, kill a fuckload more of them.

Like, everybody sit down right after you in the war. Sit down. What is this fucking voice you keep doing? It's so bizarre. What? It's my voice that I do when I'm being other people. It's like zombie Mickey Mouse. I'm Sophie.

I don't like Robert's voices. It's how you sound. Robert's video with another towel. I know. I did that with my mind again. What's really key is, after you say whatever you're saying in the fake voice for the person, then you got to say,

what do you do? Yeah. Well, this was a great episode, Chris. Thank you for writing it and for allowing me to have a vacation where I went and shot machine guns in the desert. That was necessary.

And thank you all at home for listening to the podcasts that we make. And until next time, remember, I am the Jesus Christ of podcasting. How's that, Sophie?

Are we good? You're fired. I've really been on one today. I don't know what it is. I've really been wild in today. I don't know what's going on. Vacation Robert is a mood. It's a vibe. I've been having a vacation. I'm on a pretty heavy dose of cratum. I'm going to be honest with you here.

It's good stuff. It's good stuff. Vacation all I ever wanted. Vacation had to get away. Does Vacation Robert have a book to plug by chance? No.

Yes. Vacation Robert has a book to plug? What book is Vacation Robert plugging? That's a great question, Sophie. Scholars debate what book I wrote, but a lot of them seem to believe that it's called After the Revolution

and that you can find it if you Google After the Revolution or if you go to the thing that I'm looking up by trying to find where it is on our subreddit because somebody said that I should plug these guys and they were right. You can get it everywhere, like all of the places

that books are sold. So if you're somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you can have the Jeff Bezos shit get them. Or you can look it up on fuck. I'm having to scroll quite a bit. Disasters. You can do this.

What a massive failure for me. While you do that, I'm going to plug our good friend Props new cold brew at terraformcoldbrew.com. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, definitely check that shit out. It's gorgeous. And listen

to hood politics. And stream Props music and follow Prop. This has just turned into like a huge prop plug. I think it's bookshop.org. You can find my book there. You can probably find Props Book there. Let me look it up. Let me look at Props Book

on bookshop.org. Let me look at terraform on bookshop.org which connects you to indie bookstores. Boy, there's actually, yes, Props Book is on there along with the book Terraforming Mars by some guy I've never heard of. Shout out to that guy.

Terraform in action by Scott Winkler which has what looks like an Ottoman Janissary on the front. It's going on there. Anyway, bunch of weird books. Go check them out. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 we 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. 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,

and Apple Podcasts.