9-11, an academic’s libels and Letelier’s treason
Gerard Jackson
First published in The New Australian, September 2002
Professor Quiggin used his blog to falsely accuse me of defending the murder of Allende’s Marxist-Leninist Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976.
He then accused me of using Stalinist tactics (sic) to justify Letelier’s murder on the grounds that Letelier was a KGB agent. According to Quiggin I obtained this information about Letelier from William F. Jasper a writer for a journal called The New American.
Let me make it perfectly clear that I have never heard of William F. Jasper nor have I ever had dealings with the The New American. And that includes reading it.
Now Quiggin declares that even if Letelier “was a KGB agent ... This would not of course justify murder.” A sentiment with which I am in perfect agreement. Belonging to any intelligence agency, even one was as murderous as the KGB should not be a death warrant.
But it’s blindingly obvious that if a leading politician in a Western country was an active KGB agent then that should immediately bring into question his patriotism and professed belief in democracy. Quiggin and his fellow travelling leftists know this and that is why the issue of Letelier’s KGB connection causes them acute embarrassment.
The facts are indisputable. Letelier worked for the KGB through Castro’s KGB-controlled DGI (Dirección General de Inteligencia) and East Germany’s MFS (Ministerium fur Staats-Sicherheit, which was modelled on the KGB). Unfortunately for the KGB — and Quiggin’s argument — when Chile’s intelligence service blew up Letelier’s car the contents of his brief case remained intact. Naturally the FBI photocopied the documents.
These documents exposed Letelier as a KGB agent with extensive links to Cuban and East German officials (read agents) as well as to Politburo and Central Committee members, every one of whom, as Quiggin well knows, was a dedicated democrat that, like Letelier and Allende, loved democracy.
(Allende demonstrated his commitment to democracy with the ringing declaration: “Cuba in the Caribbean and a Socialist Chile in the Southern Cone will make the revolution in Latin America.”)
The briefcase also revealed Letelier’s extensive communications with Beatrice Allende Ona, Allende’s daughter and the wife of Louis Fernandez Ona, one of Castro’s highest-ranking DGI officers, both of whom were living in Havana.
In one of his Letters to this charming couple Letelier revealed his democratic ambitions for Chile with this chilling statement: “Perhaps some day not far distant we can also do [in Chile] what has been done in Cuba.” (FBI File WFO # 185-425. As far as I know, William F. Jasper is not the author of this file. However, perhaps Quiggin knows something I don’t).
It was also shown that Letelier was in frequent contact with Clodomiro Almeyda head of Chile’s Marxist Popular Unity coalition, and Carlos Altamirano Orrego, head of the Chilean Socialist Party and the same freedom-loving man who said “revolutions are not made with votes.”
The day before the coup, Altamirano was caught trying to seize the navy on Allende’s behalf. After fleeing to the late and unlamented East German Democratic Republic he was made a prominent member of the WPC (World Peace Council).
This was done on the instructions of veteran Stalinist Ponomarev, chief of the International Department of the Central Committee which controlled the WPC.
Both of these democrats were living in East Germany and were controlled by the HVA.
There is also a letter from Havana, written by Beatrice Allende Ona, that referred to lump sum payments of $US5000 to Letelier from the party, meaning, in this instance, East Germany. In fact, Letelier was getting $1000 a month through Havana.
Letelier also used Julian Rizo’s, a high-ranking officer in the DGI’s American station, to communicate with his Havana contacts. In 1975 he was known to have met with this DGI officer at least five times.
Teofilo Acosta was another high-ranking DGI officer with whom Letelier had dealings and who operated out of the Czechoslovakian embassy in Washington. (Readers should note that Letelier’s DGI contacts were always high-ranking officers).
All attempts to deny the source of the payments have been exposed as lies.
Readers might ask why the KGB preferred to use DGI and HVA officers to handle Letelier directly instead of its men. The Soviets were successfully using the notorious Washington-based IPS (Institute for Policy Studies) as a front for its activities.
Its fear was that if Letelier was directly linked to the KGB it would ruin their IPS operation. In fact, the pro-Soviet activities of the IPS were so brazen that Brian Crozier, the co-founder of London’s prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict, could publicly state:
The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.
Relations between the Soviets and the IPS were so intimate that the latter sent a cleanup crew racing to Letelier’s home to remove incriminating documents, beating even the FBI. When FBI agents tried to gain entry their path was blocked by Mark Schneider, a close friend of Letelier’s with links to the IPS. Schneider was also a Teddy Kennedy aid. So what was a Kennedy aid doing ‘cleaning up’ after a KGB agent?
Handling Letelier indirectly really didn’t matter that much because in 1970, under pressure from Moscow, Castro dismissed the DGI’s chief, Manuel Piñeiro Losada, replacing him with José Méndez who was then unofficially put under the command of General Vitaly Petrovich Semënov who had been sent by Moscow for that purpose.
I put it to Quiggin and other apologists for Letelier that the man’s KGB activities, of which I have only cited a few, are indisputable evidence that far from working to restore democracy to Chile he was in fact working to impose a Castro-like totalitarian state on the Chilean people. And that’s why Letelier’s KGB connection is so important.
Quiggin claimed that the CIA was in someway part of the coup. Not even the rigged Church Committee could find a shred of evidence to support that allegation. Not content with that item of misinformation, he then implied that Maggie Thatcher was also partly responsible for the coup because she, according to Quiggin’s leftwing thought processes, “viewed the economic and social disorder of the 1970s as calling for the kind of authoritarian government that could impose the necessary discipline.”
To Quiggin, the only person not responsible for the coup was the Marxist wannabe-dictator Allende.
There’s a certain irony in laying the blame for the coup at the CIA’s feet when Letelier himself was miffed because the agency was not interfering enough, or in the right way. Letelier had devised a cunning plan to import weapons into Chile while simultaneously discrediting the CIA. A ‘captured’ American pilot would ‘confess’ that he was a CIA agent who had been flying weapons into the country to arm the opposition. (FBI Report File # 185-789-1079).
(Incidentally, Frank Church, from whom the committee got its name, was directly linked to the IPS. Backed by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet, co-founders of the IPS, and using Saul Landau and — you guessed it — Orlando Letelier, along with IPS assistants and researchers, Church was able to clear the KGB, the DGI and the Chilean left of any wrongdoing. Nice one, Frank).
Outraged because I pointed out that it was absurd to consider Pinochet particularly evil considering Castro’s enormities, and condemning him for ignoring Castro, Quiggin made the pathetic excuse that his condemnation of Brezhnev amounted to a condemnation of Castro because he was Castro’s patron!
That the brutal Brezhnev was also Allende’s patron seems to have escaped Quiggin’s attention. Anyway, to assert, as he did, that condemnation of one automatically amounted to the condemnation of the other is bizarre. It wasn’t until I cornered him on his hypocrisy that he finally attacked Castro, while still clinging to his ideological fiction that Pinochet was the more evil of the two.
Quiggin’s response to my comments is important because it confirms the way the left applies double standards to support its arguments. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski pointed out: First, the left uses different moral standards to make judgments.
This is how Quiggin can judge Castro (the man who sponsors international terrorism) more lightly than Pinochet. Second, leftists use different assumptions to judge capitalist countries when compared with socialist regimes.
The former are beyond redemption while the latter are judged according to their professed intentions. Third, left-wingers invariably argue that the negative consequences of socialist regimes have nothing to do with socialism; that they are usually a leftover from the previous capitalist regime.
This is why is why Quiggin can, without a twinge of conscious, minimise Castro’s crimes by ignoring them while simultaneously treating Pinochet as particularly evil. And in a leftwing sense Pinochet is particularly evil because he ‘turned back the clock’ by overturning a ‘progressive regime’, a “beacon” as Quiggin put it.
Once again, a case of a wannabe Castro being judged by his alleged good intentions rather than his attempt to turn Chile into a Cuban-style totalitarian regime. Therefore, to the left being ‘progressive’ is, by definition, the same as being moral, the logic of which boils down to the end always justifying the means.
Hence Quiggin can condemn Stalin, Brezhnev, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, etc., without once drawing attention to the socialist roots of these tyrants, the systems that made them and their vicious deeds possible. Does he honestly think these people came from nowhere?
Not once does he ask why the worst rose to the top in these socialist regimes. Instead he tries to sanitise history by selectively choosing dictators, concentrating on Brezhnev. But why this creature? He certainly wasn’t any worse than Kruschev, whose activities in Leningrad and the Ukraine left his hands dripping with blood.
It was Kruschev who sent the tanks into Budapest, who ordered Nagy’s execution, who authorised the building of the Berlin Wall, and who gave permission to machine gun strikers and demonstrators in the city of Novocherkassk. But not a word of this from Quiggin. Why? Is it because he knows that to draw attention to what is obvious to any thinking person would be to condemn his own socialist fantasies and well as those of Marx and Lenin?
Quiggin’s response has been that of a political cultist, to whom the truth has been revealed. Those who refuse to recognise the revealed truth are to be cast aside or, as in my case, censored.
Like all cultists Quiggin has no intention of allowing the foundations of his faith to be swept away by “established facts.” He would much prefer to live a fantasy rather than face reality. This attitude is common among socialists. Whenever I encounter it I think of the likes of Theodore Dezamy (1808-1850) who in deadly earnest spoke of the “sublime devotion which constitutes socialism.”
In the last century we had Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), an old-time Bolshevik giving his mystical version of the socialist state where “the fusion of personal lives into one colossal whole, harmonious in the relations of its parts, systematically grouping all elements for one common struggle — struggle against the endless spontaneity of nature….”
We are now in the first decade of the 21st century, yet despite the last century’s socialist horrors Quiggin and his ilk have learned nothing. So what has this to do with 9-11?
Rather a lot, unfortunately. You see, Allende was overthrown on 11 September 1973.
Quiggin couldn’t resist the temptation to raise Allende’s ghost as an indirect way of telling America that it got what it deserved on 9/11. Isn’t that right, Mr Quiggin? Just another example of the spite and vindictiveness of left-wingers.
Now I don’t expect anything, including common sense or even common decency, from the likes of Quiggin but what am I to make of Mr Jason Soon? Mr Soon apparently believes himself to be a libertarian, and yet he joined with Quiggin in attacking me, calling me aggressive, which is true, while appearing to insinuate that I’m paranoid, which is not true.
Behaving like this while ignoring Quiggin’s libellous smears and intolerant behaviour does not suggest to me that Mr Soon is capable of exercising balanced judgment. But then I suspect that Mr Soon’s knowledge and personal experience of the left is of a very limited nature.
Moreover, a moment’s reflection should surely have made him realise that his accusation that I’m Manichean is sorely misplaced because Manichean is precisely what the left is. Of course, his confusion on this matter could be due to the belief that the mere recognition of the existence of evil makes one Manichean. In which case it would appear that Mr Soon may be suffering from an embarrassing dose of post-modernism.
Mr Soon is associated with the Sydney CIS (Centre for Independent Studies). The CIS was set up by Greg Lindsey over 25 years ago and has done enormous good in keeping alight and trying to spread the classical liberal flame in Australia, no mean feat I fear. It would be a great pity if the efforts of the CIS were tarnished in any way by the political misjudgement of one associate.
On a final note, in the near future I intend to write an account of the Chilean coup. I shall dedicate to John Quiggin and his fellow freedom-loving socialists.
Note: On July 13, 1994, Castro ordered the Cuban coastguard to attack the 13 de Marzo, a tugboat that was carrying fleeing dissidents and their children to the US. When coastguard caught up with the tug, the women held up their children in full view of the coastguard.
It made no difference. Forty-two people were systematically murdered. Among them were Yausel Eugenio Pérez Tacoronte (11), Yaser Perodín Almanza (11), Helen Martínez Enríquez (6 months), Juan Mario Gutiérrez García (10), Yisel Borges Alvarez (4), José Carlos Nicole Anaya (3), Angel René Abreu Ruiz (3) and Cindy Rodríguez Fernández (2). This massacre was carried out on the orders of Castro — Allende and Letelier’s socialist role model.
The response of our progressive journalists, commentators and academics to this atrocity was to ignore it. I guess they were too busy occupying themselves with the evil Pinochet.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 13 December 2004