At least one of the people associated with Transmaritania was a CIA agent: Antonio Arguedas Mendieta, who served as minister of interior during the Barrientos regime and had been on the CIA’s payroll for many years when he entered into business with Klaus Barbie.
A year after Barrientos took power, Che Guevara vanished from the radar of the CIA. CIA director Richard Helms believed that the revolutionary had been killed after a supposed rupture with Fidel Castro following Che’s fiery public advocacy of a revolutionary line at a moment when Fidel was moderating his rhetoric. Helms was wrong. Che spent more than a year in the jungles of the Congo, helping orchestrate a revolutionary movement to oust the CIA-installed dictator Mobutu. Then in 1967 CIA agents in Bolivia had learned that Che was leading a revolution among the peasants in the Bolivian Andes. A detail squad of CIA officers and Green Berets were sent to La Paz. Four of the new advisers were Cuban veterans of the CIA’s previous plots against Che and Castro, including Aurelio Hernández and Fé1ix RodriAguez.
At this critical hour, the CIA once again sought out Barbie’s help. Acting through intermediaries in the Barrientos government such as Ovando Candía and Arguedas, the Agency opened a conduit that would last through the 1970s with Barbie sending back a steady stream of information to his handlers at Langley. Barbie, given his close association with General Ovando Candía, almost certainly played a role in the tracking down and murder of Che Guevara.
In true Nazi fashion, General Ovando Candía demanded proof of Che’s identity after he had been shot on Barrientos’s orders. The general originally ordered that Che’s head be cut off and sent back to La Paz. Fé1ix Rodríguez, the CIA man who had looted Che’s watch and a pouch of his pipe tobacco from his body, claims he pursuaded the general that this might be counterproductive. Ovando relented, commanding instead that Che’s hands be amputated and embalmed. His body was buried near the airstrip at Vallegrande, and exhumed and returned to Cuba in 1997.
Ultimately, Che’s preserved hands and his diary ended up in the possession of Interior Minister (and CIA asset) Antonio Arguedas. But in 1968 Arguedas turned on the Barrientos regime, secretly released Che’s diary of his Bolivian campaign to the public and fled to Cuba with the guerrilla leader’s embalmed hands.
In 1969, Barrientos died when his Gulf Oil helicopter crashed under suspicious circumstances. His death paved the way for General Ovando Candía’s short-lived presidency. Ovando’s government lasted less than a year before he was ousted in an election by the nationalist General Juan José Torres. Torres released Che’s comrades Regis Debray and Ciro Bustos from prison and made dangerous overtures to the Chilean government of Salvador Allende and to Castro’s Cuba. His government also seized lands owned by foreign corporations, including the lucrative mineral rights controlled by Gulf Oil.
This turn of events did not come as welcome news for the CIA, which had invested so heavily in Bolivia. Another coup was plotted. This time the general of choice was Hugo Banzer Suárez, a man trained by the US military at Fort Hunt and at the Escuela de Golpes (the School of the Americas) in Panama. Banzer proved to be such a prize student that he earned the Order of Military Merit from the US military; he was also a longtime friend of Klaus Barbie, who was to play a crucial role in the coup.
The coup against President Torres culminated in August 1970, a week before President Torres was scheduled to journey to Santiago, Chile for a meeting with Salvador Allende. Even in Bolivia, the overthrow of the Torres government became known for its extreme violence and the lengths the new regime took to eradicate leftist elements in the country. Universities were shut down as “hotbeds” of radicalism, tin miners were once again violently suppressed, more than 3,000 leftists and union organizers were hauled in for interrogations and “disappeared.” The Soviet embassy was shut down, and relations with Cuba and Chile cooled. Gulf Oil was swiftly compensated for its seized properties.
Barbie defended the violent nature of the Banzer coup to Brazilian journalist Dantex Ferreira by saying that Torres’s leftist sympathies posed a threat to all of South America. “What Bolivia did in ’67 to defend herself against a coup by Che Guevara was also condemned in many parts of the world,” Barbie said.
For his role in helping to plot Banzer’s bloody takeover of Bolivia, Klaus Barbie was made an honorary colonel, and he became a paid consultant to both the Ministry of the Interior and the notorious Department 7, the counterinsurgency wing of the Bolivian army. Both institutions were thoroughly penetrated and funded by the CIA. Indeed, records from the CIA and the Bolivian government show that Barbie passed information to the CIA on suspected Soviet and Cuban agents in South America. He also sent back to Langley copies of documents he stole from the Peruvian embassy and information on the operations of the Chilean intelligence agency, DINA.
A Bolivian report on Barbie speaks glowingly of his service to the Banzer government: “One of the most important aspects of Barbie’s work was advising Banzer on how to adapt the military effectively for internal repression rather than external aggression. Many of the features of the Army which were later to become standard were first developed by Barbie in the early 1970s. The system of concentration camps … became standard for important military and political prisoners.”
The Nazi also continued to advise the military’s secret police on methods of interrogating prisoners, which seem not have to evolved much since his days in Lyons. “Under Barbie, they [the Bolivian military] learned to use the techniques of electricity and the use of medical supervision to keep the suspect alive till they had finished with him.”
The Bolivian government paid Barbie $2,000 a month for his consulting services. But this was just a small portion of his take. He was also earning enormous profits from arms sales to the Bolivian military. Many of these purchases were paid for using funds provided by the US government, which was underwriting the cost of the Bolivian military.
The 1970s were a heady time for Barbie. He lectured widely on the new South American fascism, often at candlelight vigils in so-called Thule halls adorned with Nazi flags and other iconography from the Third Reich. The war criminal also traveled freely. During the late 1960s and 1970s Barbie visited the US at least seven times. Incredibly, he also journeyed back to France, where he claims to have laid a wreath on the tomb of Jean Moulin.
Catholic missionaries and priests were one of the groups that Barbie and Banzer went after with particular zeal, since Banzer believed that they had “become infiltrated with Marxists.” Priests were hauled in for interrogation, harassed, tortured and killed. One who was murdered was an American missionary from Iowa named Raymond Herman. This repression campaign against liberationist clergy became known as the Banzer Plan, and it was enthusiastically adopted in 1977 by his fellow dictators in the Latin America Anti-Communist Confederation. This crackdown was also backed by the CIA, which provided information to Barbie’s men on the addresses, backgrounds, writings and friends of the priests. Barbie also was at the heart of the US-sponsored Condor Operation, a kind of trade association of South American dictators, who merged their forces in an effort to stamp out insurgencies wherever they broke out on the continent.
Banzer’s startling consolidation of power was backed by millions from two friends, the German-born industrialist Eduardo Gasser and the cattle rancher Roberto Suárez Gómez. But Suárez also had another business. He oversaw one of the world’s most profitable drug empires. Gasser’s son, José, would later join Suárez in this billion-dollar enterprise, as would Hugo Banzer’s cousin, Guillermo Banzer Ojopi, two of Bolivia’s top generals, the head of the customs office at Santa Cruz and Klaus Barbie.
Suárez’s drug syndicate became known as La Mafia Cruzeña. He enjoyed a near monopoly on the most productive coca-growing fields in the world: 80 percent of the world’s cocaine originated from his fields in the Alto Beni. He was the primary supplier of raw coca and cocaine paste to Medellín cartel. Suárez maintained one of the largest private fleets of aircraft in world, which he used to fly mu
ch of his coca paste to Colombian cocaine labs. The cocaine planes were launched from one of Suárez’s network of private airstrips. Other coca paste was shipped to Colombia via Barbie’s firm, Transmaritania.
As Suárez’s operation grew into a multibillion dollar empire, he turned to Barbie for help with his burgeoning security needs. Barbie duly assembled his band of narco-mercenaries, which the Nazi christened Los Novios de la Muerte, the fiancés of death. Their ranks included two former SS officers, a white Rhodesian terrorist, and Joachim Fiebelkorn, a neo-fascist madman from Frankfurt.
Barbie assigned fifteen bodyguards to follow Suárez’s every footstep. He ensured that Colombian buyers made their payments and sent armed bands of Novios on forays into the jungle to destroy the operations of rival drug lords. The weapons for Barbie’s men were provided gratis by the Banzer government, which in turn had bought them from Barbie’s arms company.
By the mid-1970s the Bolivian economy was in ruins. Banzer, following the advice of his close friend from Santa Cruz, Roberto Suárez, concocted a bold plan to save Bolivia: he ordered the nation’s ailing cotton fields to be planted with coca trees. Between 1974 and 1980 land in coca production tripled, prompting one DEA agent to note, “Someone out there planted a heck of a lot of trees.” This tremendous upsurge in supply sharply drove down the price of cocaine, fueling a huge new market and the rise of the Colombian cartels. The street price of cocaine in 1975 was $1,500 per gram. By 1986 the price had fallen to about $200 per gram.
“The Bolivian military leaders began to export cocaine and cocaine base as though it were a legal product, without any pretense of narcotics control,” recounted former DEA agent Michael Levine. “At the same time there was a tremendous upswing in demand from the United States. The Bolivian dictatorship quickly became the primary source of supply for the Colombian cartels, which formed during this period. And the cartels, in turn, became the main distributors of cocaine throughout the US. It was truly the beginning of the cocaine explosion of the 1980s.”
Banzer’s take from the drug trade reportedly tallied at several million dollars a year. It was an enterprise he shared with his family and friends. By 1978, Banzer’s private secretary, his son-in-law, his nephew and his wife had been arrested for cocaine trafficking in the US and Canada. Embarrassed by these revelations, Banzer stood down in 1978 and promised free elections in 1979. Despite widespread fraud and voter intimidation, the right-wing parties unexpectedly lost the elections, an event that prompted the infamous cocaine coup of 1980.
This time the coup plotters were led by General Luis Arce Gómez, Roberto Suárez’s cousin, and his partner General Luis García-Meza. Arce Gómez, then head of Bolivia’s military intelligence agency, had been using the military to assist Suárez’s drug running since early 1970s. In plotting the coup, Arce Gómez called on the services of his close friend, the man he called “my teacher,” Klaus Barbie. The CIA was posted on the events leading up to the coup and, in fact, had been given a tape recording of a planning session involving Arce Gómez, Roberto Suárez and Klaus Barbie.
To aid the cause, Barbie recruited the help of the Italian terrorist Stefano “Alfa” Delle Chiaie. At the time, Delle Chiaie was on the move, following the murder in Washington, D.C. of the Chilean Orlando Letelier by the Italian’s associate Michael Townley, the American agent in the employ of Pinochet’s secret police. Delle Chiaie brought with him to Bolivia a group of 200 Argentine terrorists, veterans of the “dirty war.” In a nod to William Colby’s Vietnam assassins, Delle Chiaie called his band of murderers “the Phoenix Commandos.”
Delle Chiaie had his own ties to the CIA that stretched back to the close of World War II. The young Italian, who battled his way up through street gangs in Rome and Naples, became the protégé of Count Junio Valerio Borghese, the Italian fascist known as the Black Prince. Borghese headed up Mussolini’s intelligence apparatus and hunted down and killed thousands of Italian resistance fighters. At the close of the war, Borghese was captured by Italian Communists, who were intent on seeing the butcher put to death for his crimes. But when the CIA’s legendary James Jesus Angleton, then with the OSS, learned of the Black Prince’s impending fate, he rushed to Milan and saved Borghese from the firing squad. The Black Prince spent a few months in prison and then went to work in the CIA’s campaign to suppress the Italian left.
Delle Chiaie was recruited from his street gang into the neo-fascist group the P-2, where he intimidated Italian Communists, initiated a string of bombings and, in 1969, plotted a coup against the Italian government. When that coup failed, Delle Chiaie and Borghese fled to Franco’s Spain, where they supervised covert attacks on Basque separatists. From Madrid, Delle Chiaie launched his career as an international consultant on right-wing terrorism, lending his services to Jonas Savimbi, leader of the CIA-backed UNITA forces in Angola; José Lopez Rega, architect of Argentina’s death squads; and the Chilean dictator helped to power by the CIA, Augusto Pinochet.
On July 17, 1980 the Bolivian cocaine coup unfolded. Liberal newspapers and radio stations were bombed. The universities were shut down. Barbie and Delle Chiaie’s hooded troops, armed with machine guns, swept through the streets of La Paz in ambulances. They converged on the center of resistance, the COB building, the headquarters of the Bolivian national union. Inside was Marcelo Quiroga, a labor leader recently elected to parliament, who had called a general strike. The doors were blasted down, and Los Novios de la Muerte entered, guns blazing. Quiroga was quickly found and shot. Severely wounded, he and a dozen other leaders were taken to army headquarters, where they were beaten and treated to Barbie’s electro-shock machines. The women prisoners were raped. Quiroga’s body was found three days later on the outskirts of La Paz. He had been shot, beaten, burned and castrated.
The following day General García-Meza was sworn in as Bolivia’s new president. He duly appointed General Arce Gómez as minister of interior. Barbie was selected as the head of Bolivia’s internal security forces and Stephano Delle Chiaie was assigned the task of securing international support for the regime, which quickly came from Argentina, Chile, South Africa and El Salvador.
Over the next few weeks, thousands of opposition leaders were rounded up and herded into the large soccer stadium in La Paz. In true Argentine style, they were shot en masse, their bodies dumped in rivers and deep canyons outside the capital. The Novios de la Muerte began dressing in SS-style uniforms and were called upon by Arce Gómez and Barbie to suppress “organized delinquency.”
In a show of support for the international drug war, the new Bolivian regime quickly began a drug suppression campaign. Klaus Barbie was appointed its supervisor. The operation had three objectives: soften criticism from the US and the United Nations of Bolivia’s role in the drug trade; eliminate 140 rivals to the Suárez monopoly; and ruthlessly suppress the regime’s political opponents. Over the next year, the cocaine generals made an estimated $2 billion in the drug trade.
Ultimately, the situation in Bolivia became so flagrant that the regime’s backers in the United States decided to pull the plug. García-Meza was forced to resign in August 1981: he left Bolivia a wealthy man after securing his country’s position as world’s leading supplier of cocaine.
Barbie and Delle Chiaie would remain in Bolivia another year and half. The Italian police and the US DEA planned a raid to capture Delle Chiaie in 1982, but he fled Bolivia after being tipped off by a CIA contact. On January 25, 1983, Klaus Barbie was arrested and later handed over to the French. He was brought back to Lyons and imprisoned at Montluc, the scene of so many of his crimes. After his arrest in Bolivia, Barbie was asked by a French journalist if he any regrets about his life. “No, personally, no,” Barbie said. “If there were mistakes, there were mistakes. But a man has to have a line of work, no?”
But while Barbie languished in prison, the cocaine empire he helped to build flourished. Indeed, after the masterminds of the cocaine coup fled, the situation actually deteriorated. The amount of cocaine produce
d in Bolivia rocketed from 35,000 metric tons in 1980 to 60,000 metric tons a year by the late 1980s. Nearly all of it was marked for sale in the US. The drug accounted for 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. By 1987, Bolivia was racking up $3 billion a year in cocaine sales, more than six times the value of all other Bolivian exports. In 1998 estimated 70,000 Bolivian families remain dependent on the cultivation of coca, though they earn less than $1,000 a year for their arduous work. “If narcotics were to disappear overnight, we would have rampant unemployment,” commented Flavio Machicado, the former finance minister of Bolivia. “There would be protest and open violence.”
In the 1980s, the DEA and CIA went to Bolivia to train and arm the Bolivian police’s anti-drug shock troops, the Leopards. It soon turned out that many of the Leopards had begun a fruitful partnership with the coca growers and drug traffickers. A congressional review in 1985 found that “not one hectare of coca leaf has been eradicated since the US established the narcotics assistance program in 1971.” But the CIA didn’t mind much, because the Leopards turned their guns on Indian insurgents.
The level of official corruption also hardly abated after the exile of Barbie, Arce Gómez and García-Meza. A 1988 report by the GAO described “an unprecedented level of corruption which extends to virtually every level of Bolivian govt. and Bolivian society.” Cocaine lord Roberto Suárez himself announced in 1989 that “since the 1985 elections, all the country’s politicians have been involved in cocaine.” This point was driven home in 1997 when Suárez’s old partner Hugo Banzer once again assumed power as president of Bolivia.
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