The World Anti-Communist League Inside The League Essays

The World Anti-Communist League: "Inside The League" by Scott Anderson, and Jon Lee Anderson Reviewed by Chip Berlet "Inside The League: The Shocking Expose Of How Terrorists, Nazis, And Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated The World Anti-Communist League." Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson. Dodd Mead, New York, 1986. 352 pages. $19.95 hardcover. ISBN 0- 396-08517-2. Publication date May 28, 1986. For over ten years progressive researchers in this country and in Europe have been uncovering evidence linking certain American conservatives and rightists to racist and fascist movements around the globe through a shadowy organization called the World Anti-Communist League. Now the book "Inside the League" exposes the hidden nature of the League and documents in devastating detail a parade of League-affiliated authoritarian ideologues marching from the death camps of Nazi Germany into the parlors of Reagan's White House. The idea for the book came when Jon Lee Anderson was researching a series of columns on Latin American death squads for Jack Anderson, (Jon Lee's employer but not his relative). Enlisting the aid of his brother Scott, the two first began tracing the connections between the death squads but soon were unravelling networks and alliances that involved terrorists, Nazi collaborators, racists, assassins, anti-Jewish bigots, and right- wing anti-communist American politicians. The one factor all had in common was their involvement with the World Anti-Communist League. The Latin American death squads, for instance, were found to be linked through an umbrella group of Central and South American rightists called the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL). CAL in turn was affiliated with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), lead by a retired U.S. Major General, John Singlaub. Singlaub boasts WACL is the coordinating body for raising private aid for the Contras, a task support ed explicitly by the Reagan White House which has sent government officials and glowing letters of support to WACL meetings in recent years. WACL also serves as an umbrella for several Eastern European emigre groups founded and lead by Nazi collaborators, and there is far more. As the Anderson brothers write: "We have examined the World Anti-Communist League...because it is the one organization in which representatives of virtually every right-wing extremist movement that has practiced unconventional warfare are to be found. The League is the one constant in this netherworld; whether looking at Croation terrorists, Norwegian neo-Nazis, Japanese war criminals, or American ultra-rightists...." (p. x, Author's Note). WACL is more than a club for aging facists and their modern- day hero-worshipers, it serves as the primary coordinating body through which anti-communist groups meet and debate and implement strategies to prop up anti-Communist authoritarian regimes and defe at popular movements for social and political liberation around the world. The current strategy is to avoid when possible the use of military troops - and use instead a process called "unconventional warfare". This practice is employed by the Reagan administration but couched in popular terminology with calls for supporting heroic "freedom fighters" such as the Contras. The Scott brothers explain: "As defined by a League member who advocates its use, unconventional warfare includes 'in addition to terrorism, subversion and guerilla warfare, such covert and non-military activities as sabotage, economic warfare, support to resistance groups, black and gray psychological operations, disinformation activities, and political warfare.' "Certainly the Nazi forces of World War Two and the rightist death squads of El Salvador and Guatemala today are among this century's most accomplished practitioners of this unconventional warfare," write the Andersons. They note that many historia ns have made the comparison before them, but point out "What has not been as well publicized is that the Salvadoran rightist killing peasants today learned his methods from the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe, and that he didn't receive this knowledge through the reading of books but through careful tutoring" through the network established by the World Anti- Communist League. It is this group that President Reagan has praised for playing "a leadership role in drawing attention to the gallant struggle now being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day." A list of persons involved over the years with WACL is printed on the back cover of "Inside the League." Among the more notable: Yaroslav Stetsko, a Nazi collaborator who in July 1941 presided over the extermination of 7,000 Jews; Stefano delle Chiaie, a fugitive Italian terrorist wanted for robbery, kidnapping and murder; Mario Sandoval Alarcon, architect of the Guatemalan death squads; Chirila Ciuntu, a Romani an fascist who participated in a 1941 massacre of Jews; Ray Cline, former deputy director of the CIA; Jess Helms, Republican Senator from North Carolina;