Oluf palme
© GoogleSven Olof Joachim Palme (1927-1986)
On February 28 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in the streets while returning home with his wife after a movie. His killers were never brought to justice. Palme was a victim of the World Anti-Communist League or WACL. Palme had defied the American Empire one too many times. First he angered the empire by opposing the war in Vietnam, enraging the Nixon administration by marching in solidarity with the North Vietnamese ambassador and in opposition to the genocidal war being waged on the people of Vietnam in the name of stopping the spread of communism. He further angered the empire by his friendly ties to Castro's Cuba and Allende's Chile (later overthrown by fascists.) But it was his interference in the Iran-Contra schemes that finally got him killed. Palme maintained friendly ties with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, providing vital assistance in holding their elections. He had also blocked a deal to Iran from the Bofors arms firm being delivered via another of Secret Team member Richard Secord's CIA front companies. In response Olof Palme was gunned down by WACL, and because of WACL's ties to Swedish intelligence the killers were never brought to justice.

However, thanks to the work of investigative journalist Henrik Kruger we know the killer was probably Miro Baresic aka Tony Saric, a Croatian fascist who had been convicted of torturing the Yugoslavian ambassador to Sweden to death. After being convicted of that crime, "escaping", and then being recaptured, Baresic was freed along with other Ustashe (the Croatian fascist party) terrorists like Jozo Damjanovic when the Ustashe hijacked a Swedish airliner and threatened to blow it up with all 86 passengers if Sweden refused to release them. He was flown to fascist Spain, which was also the base for the Nazi underground led by Otto Skorzeny, "Hitler's favorite commando" turned mercenary and arms merchant. Baresic was imprisoned briefly for appearances' sake, but Spain refused to send him back to Sweden, instead sending him to Paraguay, another fascist safe haven.

Baresic had then found employment, like many former Ustashe, with the regime of genocidal Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who offered refuge and employment to many fascist war criminals and had a private bodyguard of Ustashe killers. Jozo Damjanovich would "accidentally" assassinate the Uruguayan ambassador to Paraguay, supposedly mistaking him for the Yugoslavian ambassador. Baresic became the right-hand man of Condor operative and CIA man Pastor Coronel, like all Condor leaders a sadistic torturer and murderer. The US turned a blind eye when Baresic began working for the Paraguayan embassy in Washington, DC. However, they were forced to deport him when two FBI agents not in on the secret of America's alliance with fascists and terrorists became suspicious of Baresic after he won a Karate tournament (actually many martial arts schools are sponsored by WACL) and raced around the auditorium with a Croatian flag. They decided to find out who he was and were shocked to discover he was an internationally wanted terrorist and assassin. Embarrassed, the US government sent him back to Sweden to stand trial. However, instead of receiving harsh punishment he was treated like a celebrity, given a suitcase full of cash and frequently allowed to leave the prison, including on the day of the Palme assassination. Thus the assassination of Olof Palme revealed the existence of an international fascist conspiracy. WACL provided the links between Croatian fascists, Swedish fascists, Paraguayan fascists.

Yet this is only the tip of the Iceberg when it comes to WACL. WACL is undoubtedly one of the most important organizations that most people have never heard of. WACL played a far greater role in history than anyone (with the exception of researcher Dave Emory) ever realized. It was closely connected to the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the death of JFK, the string of coups that swept Latin America for decades and has, after a brief interruption begun, to sweep Latin America again. It was involved in the wars in Angola and Mozambique. WACL members founded and led the Latin American death squads that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. WACL was instrumental in both the start of the "cold war" and its end with the destruction of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. WACL helped get Nixon, Reagan and Bush into office. WACL was tied to terror attacks, hijackings, bombings and assassinations. It was deeply involved in the global drug trade. It served to keep fascism alive after its defeat in World War 2.

After the destruction of the USSR it was vital in spreading fascism throughout eastern Europe from the Baltics to Yugoslavia, although until Ukraine few noticed and sadly even after Ukraine people still aren't paying attention. Under the umbrella of WACL were many of the most infamous CIA operations like Operation Paperclip and related ops aimed at recruiting Nazis and other fascists, the Phoenix Program, Operation Condor, Operation Gladio. The escaped Nazis and fascists as well as some of the key players in the Phoenix Program, Gladio, and Condor were often also WACL members. In other words WACL was the perfect CIA front group uniting "all the evils of the world", as I called it after witnessing the coup in Ukraine.

Like the Ukraine coup, WACL united "respectable" western politicians with outright fascists. Ronald Reagan, who was both a "respectable" politician (i.e. a bloodthirsty imperialist) and a crypto-fascist, said of WACL "Your Dream is Our Dream, Your Hope is our Hope." Then he shook the hand of Ukrainian fascist war criminal and WACL member Yaroslav Stetsko. With the destruction of the USSR their dream was fulfilled but under a new name (the hilariously Orwellian World League for Freedom and Democracy). WACL continued its same role, a nightmare for everyone else, reinstalling fascist regimes in places like Croatia and Ukraine. If today we are faced with a second cold war it is largely thanks to the continuing legacy of WACL.

To use Ukraine as an example of the decades-long impact of WACL, one needs only study the Dobriansky family. Lev Dobriansky was chairman of the ABN the (Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations), an important umbrella group within WACL uniting all the groups who had fought for the Nazis and dreamed of carving up the USSR so they could regain control of the territories they had controlled or hoped to control during World War 2. Reagan appointed Lev Dobriansky ambassador to the Bahamas, doubtless for the purpose of money laundering, drug trafficking (why else send a Ukrainian fascist to the Bahamas during the Iran-Contra era?), and possibly even involvement with the WACL-linked death squad school Mitch Werbell had founded there. His daughter Paula Dobriansky became a top Reagan foreign policy adviser. Now Andrij Dobrianksy, who I assume is Lev's Grandson (I found him by accident on Twitter), is running a propaganda campaign on behalf of the fascist Ukraine junta and against the Russians. Another famous Ukrainian Fascist and top WACL member was Yaroslav Stetsko; he was given a top leadership role despite his well-documented role in carrying out genocidal war crimes against Jews, Russians, Poles, Gypsies, and of course Ukrainians - only one of many war criminals in WACL's ranks, although the Ukrainians were one of the most powerful and influential groups in WACL dominating the ABN.

Ukrainian fascists were only one of many sinister elements involved with WACL, although they held a particularly prominent role. WACL united Latin American death squads, Croatian and Cuban terrorists, Japanese gangsters, the Moonies' bizarre and dictatorial sex cult, scientific racists, Waffen SS veterans, high-ranking Nazis, Saudi princes, supporters of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia, supporters of America's Jim Crow apartheid (well into the 19880's), Corsican gangsters, KMT drug dealers, right-wing Asian, Latin American, European, Middle Eastern and African Dictators, Italian and Mexican secret societies, bishops, priests, ministers, generals, special forces vets, military men, spies, secret police, mainstream western politicians, academics, and journalists. And of course many of the "Secret Team", like Ray Cline, Theodore Shackley, Howard Hunt, and Lucien Conein, were deeply involved in the creation and manipulation of WACL. Given this scandalous membership it is amazing that so few have ever bothered to investigate WACL. It sounds like something out of a bad movie plot, but it was all too real.

sidney reilly
British spy Sidney Reilly.
WACL's origins stretch back to the Russian Revolution nearly 100 years ago. Sidney Reilly, the infamous British super-spy, founded one of its precursors, the Anti Bolshevik League, funded by American fascist Henry Ford and other rich fascists who would go on to back Hitler. Reilly who was actually a Ukrainian Jew by birth who grew up near the now infamous city of Odessa. (Ironic given his alliance with the virulently racist White Russians, who often massacred any Jews they could find during Russia's civil war and long before.) Reilly had risen to become Britain's top agent and after the Russian October Revolution they sent him to attempt to overthrow the revolution. He hoped to make himself a dictator like his idol Napoleon. Reilly ultimately failed but he was involved in spurring on the "Social Revolutionaries" terror campaign whose victims included Lenin and the German Ambassador Mirbach. Reilly was also involved in a number of failed coup attempts. The revolutionary government eventually decided to have him arrested for his numerous crimes and plots but he narrowly managed to escape. He was sentenced to death in absentia. Outside he organized the "White Russian" emigres and their fascist supporters in a global anti-bolshevik league stretching across Europe and the Americas with branches as far away as Japan. These White Russians were the original Gladio-style stay-behind network used as tools of the imperialist and fascist countries in their covert war on the Soviet Union.

In fact WACL has many origins, but most restrict the study of the group to the cold war era. The early history of the league is the history of the birth of fascism itself. Another fascinating forerunner of the league was the Promethean League, organized by the Polish fascist Marshall Jozef Pilsudski government, which united the many of the same elements that are currently among Russia's greatest enemies. Poland, Ukraine and Turkey plus the entire Turkic-speaking population of Central Asia were to be organized through the Promethean League to wage war on the Soviet Union. After Nazi Germany conquered Poland, it took over the Promethean League as part of their eastern strategy or ostpolitik and eventually trained SS battalions of Ukrainians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Azerbaijanis along with other Soviet minorities. After the war the CIA would recruit this same network and for those paying attention their descendants are still being used to wage covert and open war on Russia.

anti-comintern pact
© WikimediaAnti-Comintern Pact countries in dark red (non-signatories).
Finally there was the Anti-Comintern Pact created by the Nazis and involving far more countries than most people remember. We have been trained to think of the Axis as only Italy, Japan and Germany. However, this limited view is merely the residual effect of cold war propaganda. In reality much of Central and Eastern Europe became fascist before or during World War 2. However, as the victorious Red Army marched west and overthrew the fascist regimes in its path, installing communist governments, Britain and America began to pretend that these countries had been part of the "free world" instead of the fascist world so that they could convince their people that the Soviet Union was trying to conquer the world. A fact few besides Michael Parenti bother to point out. The same lies would be repeated around the world from fascist Taiwan and South Korea, to Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, South Africa; all - no matter how repressive - were part of the "free world." It is no coincidence that these countries were all top WACL members as well. Of course this practice of labeling fascist countries as part of the "free world" continues into our own time, most recently in the fascist coup in Ukraine, portrayed in the shameless western media as a triumph for democracy and "western values."

In any case, to return to the Anti-Comintern Pact, it united the fascist countries of Europe and Asia, places like Hungary and Romania. In Romania there were the fanatical Iron Guard who not only killed their victims in the goriest manner imaginable; they got so carried away that they would would on one memorable occasion dance, pray, cry and kiss in celebration amidst the mangled pieces of their victim. Their most gruesome crime involved using a literal slaughterhouse to hang their Jewish victims by meathooks, slaughter some of them in mockery of kosher butchers and skin other of their victims alive. During the cold war they took over the Romanian Orthodox church, which made the SS men into bishops. Nixon had war-criminal-turned-bishop Viorel Trifa lead the opening prayers of the senate in 1955.

The Anti-Comintern Pact also served to unite the many fascist movements of the world who were mobilized to spread propaganda. When Germany invaded Yugoslavia it created an independent Croatia that committed some of the worst atrocities of the war. They Installed Ante Pavelic as the Croatian Fuhrer, or Poglavnik, as he was called in Croatian. The Croatians targeted Jews, Gypsies, and all non-Croatians of course, but their most numerous victims were the Serbs. In the midst of World War 2 and with the blessing of the Vatican, they waged a fascist crusade against the Orthodox Serbs; their motto was to kill a third, convert a third, and to force the final third to flee. They loved to save bullets by using knives to slice up their victims. They collected eyes as proof of their bodycount. In fact their crimes were so shocking, even the some of the Nazis became disgusted. However, after the end of World War 2 the Croatians would be a vital component of the ratline smuggling fascist war criminals to safety in the West. The Croatians would become one of the most powerful groups in WACL during the cold war and after the destruction of the Soviet Union would seize Croatia, break away from Yugoslavia and ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs with the help of NATO and the mercenary firm MPRI.

neo nazi andriy parubiy stepan bandera
Mr. Parubiy commemorating the Ukrainian WWII Nazi leader Stepan Bandera
There were also of course the Ukrainians like Stephen Bandera, and Mykola Lebed, who ordered their followers to join the Waffen SS and vied with the Croatians in their gory savagery. One of their specialties was the use of saws to dispatch their victims. There were Latvians like Waffen SS death-squad leader Alfred Berzins. There were Belorussians, Hungarians, Romanians, Estonians, Lithuanians and many more fascists who formed Nazi death squads and then went on to form the membership of WACL's ABN branch, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. There was also an American Friends of the ABN group with branches in every major American city and a membership composed largely of escaped war criminals.

The Anti-Comintern also was allied to many groups in the West. France, England, the United States, Latin America (especially Argentina) all had fascist movements united under the Anti-Comintern Pact. This western fascism is another element suppressed from the history books. In the United States alone there were over 750 fascist groups by 1939. American fascism was also closely tied in with supporters of American apartheid system called Jim Crow and with the violent suppression of unions. It also often took a religious guise whether Protestant fundamentalist christians or right-wing Catholic demagogues like father Caughlin. It was backed by a large section the American oligarchy, people like Henry Ford (who inspired Hitler) or Irinay Dupont, who had his own massive fascist paramilitary, the Black Legion, which killed labor organizers and targeted minorities. Its most famous victim was Malcolm X's father. But of course the subject of American fascism could fill a book on its own. So before ending this tangent I'll only mention that one of these fascist groups, the American Vigilance Committee of Harry Jung, was a direct part of the Nazi Anti-Comintern Pact and was the precursor to what was in many ways the most important American WACL branch, the ASC (American Security Council), which inherited Jung's list of 1 millions suspected subversives (and Jews), which was used to draw up the McCarthy-era blacklists. ASC became the most influential lobby on behalf of the military industrial complex. Overt American fascism didn't end with the war or even with the triumph of the civil rights movement. During the Iran-Contra era 1980-1986, American fascists, Nazis, KKK, and other racist paramilitaries committed over 3000 acts of political violence. These groups had links to intelligence agencies and the police. David Duke for example was definitely an FBI informant and probably a CIA agent, given his involvement in Laos's secret war. Many of these groups had links to WACL, which was strongly supportive of racist groups in America and around the world. Roger Pearson, a "scientific racist", a Nazi, a eugenist, a segregationist, would even head the American branch of WACL in the late 70's.

So to review, WACL's precursors included: 1) The Anti-Bolshevik League, founded by Sidney Reilly, uniting the proto-fascist "White Russian" counterrevolutionaries. 2) The Promethean League, which formed the template for Nazi recruitment of Ukrainians and Turkic fascists. The Grey Wolves, who made news last fall when they killed a Russian pilot in Syria, are direct descendants of this alliance. So are the Ukrainian fascists of today, waging their genocidal war on Novorossia (the breakaway Donbass region of Ukraine). Incidentally the man responsible both for the Nazi-trained Turkic legions and head of the Ukrainian Waffen SS division (the Nachtingall division) was a man named Theodore Oberlander. He would go on to be an important German WACL member after the war. Finally, there was 3) the International Anti-Comintern Pact, which combined the world's fascist countries and the world's fascist movements into one giant organization, absorbing both its precursors. For more on the precursors of WACL I highly recommend that subversive classic The Great Conspiracy by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, which describes the 30 years of overt and covert war waged on the Soviet Union from the time of the October Revolution up until World War 2.

Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen (1902-1979).
With the end of World War 2, the US would recruit General Gehlen, the Nazi head of intelligence for the eastern front, and along with him all of the surviving remnants of the forces that made up the Anti-Comintern Pact. (See my June 2014 article Nazis and the CIA for more on this topic. It was Gehlen's recruitment that sparked the Cold War. He fed the West false intelligence of an imminent Soviet invasion, which they pretended to believe, while at the same time the West used Gehlen to wage a bloody covert war on the Soviets using his fascist network, especially the Ukrainians who he managed for the OPC/CIA.)

During the Cold War three main branches of this fascist international would be regrouped into new CIC/CIA/OPC-backed organizations. First the ACEN (the captive nations), which aimed at destroying communism in the countries of the Warsaw pact. Then there was the ABN the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which went even further seeking to dismember the Soviet Union itself. This brought them into conflict with the NTS, which aimed their efforts at appealing to Russians rather than minorities; they were called Solidarists and they sought to convert Russia's political and military elite to the cause of anti-communism. Their strategy would perhaps be most effective of all, for by Gorbachev's time all sorts of Soviet government officials seemed bent on the destruction of socialism. The NTS had spent decades attempting to recruit any Russian allowed to travel abroad by that point. When the Gorbachev advisers' disastrous market-oriented policies had wrecked the USSR, the ABN strategy of using nationalism to rip apart the Soviet Union came into effect. But of course this is skipping ahead. During the Cold War nobody seemed to take these groups seriously and after the Cold War ended they were all but forgotten. Yet a brief comparison of their strategies with what actually happened to the Soviet Union and afterwards reveal that by failing to investigate WACL historians have completely failed to understand the past 30 years of history. They have completely failed to investigate the real causes behind the most important event of our times: the destruction of the USSR.

Of course it is no mystery why mainstream academia would seek to suppress the history of WACL. This alliance of fascists, gangsters, death squads, and intelligence agencies is one huge scandalous embarrassment. This is what led the authors of the book Inside the League to investigate them in the first place. They discovered the importance of the League during the 80's when interviewing a Honduran death-squad leader. He told them of a bizarre secret society which he believed was coordinating all the death squads of Latin America. They were known as the Tecos, a Nazi secret society based in Mexico whose symbol was the Owl. The Tecos had their origins in the Cristeros during the Mexican Revolution, recruited to battle all progress in the name of the Catholic church. Later they would be regrouped into the Nazi Tecos by a Mexican bishop newly returned from Hitler's Germany. Of course in reality the Latin American death squads were being managed ultimately by the Pentagon and the CIA, not the Tecos, and were a standard tactic in all of America's covert wars from the Philippines to Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina and El Salvador, to name only a few of the more notorious examples. However, the weird Tecos were influential in shaping the ideologies of some of the Latin American fascists and had close ties to the Guatemalans, the Argentines, and the Salvadorans. The Tecos believed that the Vatican had been taken over by a Jewish-Freemasonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, completely ignoring the tight ties between the Vatican and the fascists, especially the Germans, Italians, Croatians, Spain and Portugal. However, with the growth of liberation theology among the low-level clergy who began to side with the poor and to speak out against the endless atrocities of the "dirty wars", the Tecos beliefs could prove useful in justifying the torture and murder of those clergy who adopted liberation theology.

Beginning in Bolivia under the so called "Banzer plan", clergy were increasingly targeted in the various dirty wars. WACL played a huge role in spreading the Banzer plan throughout Latin America. The most famous victim was Archbishop Romero. Perhaps even more shocking was the rape and murder of four American nuns in El Salvador by death squads backed by their own government, which also attempted to cover up their murder. For those who study some of the bizarre gangs operating as part of Mexico's drug war, clearly the Tecos also proved influential among the drug cartels. The Tecos had their own university, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara (AUG), tightly controlled by an inner circle of Tecos, who kept all the students under constant surveillance for subversive thoughts. They even ran a death squad out of the school. The AUG was funded by big American foundations and supported by 13 mainstream American universities. Obviously the CIA was behind it - why else would a Nazi cult receive donations from USAID, the Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations among others? On a pop cultural note, did the Tecos somehow inspire elements of Fear the Walking Dead, which featured an ex El Salvadoran death squad member as a hero? "We had to do it!" he claims, despite the fact that tiny El Salvador killed 75,000 of its people merely to preserve the riches of 13 oligarchical families and to keep the rest of the population in dire poverty to please their evil masters in the CIA and Pentagon. I couldn't help but wonder, since season two was set Mexico and their were owls everywhere (Tecos is short for Tecolotes - owls in Spanish).

However, the Tecos were only one element in the Latin American branch of WACL known as CAL. Far more dangerous were, for example, the WACL branch in Guatemala led by Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the "Godfather of all the death squads". Or his protege in El Salvador, Roberto D'Aubuisson, the murderous "Major Bob". Often the death squads even went under WACL-inspired names like "secret anti-communist army". In Argentina they were called AAA, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. Guatemala and Argentina would both be used by US intelligence to train Latin American death squads, who were usually interchangeable with the police and military, in the tactics of the dirty war. I'll return to Latin America later. Central America was where WACL would play its most public role under the leadership of "Secret Team" member John Singlaub. Singlaub had been fighting America's dirty wars for 30 years, from Korea to Vietnam. 10 years of his record were still classified during the 80's but he had been in charge of the infamous SOG group the CIA-managed special forces group that ran the secret war in Laos and the acted as advisers for the Phoenix Program.

kmt atrocity
On February 28, 1947, the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) Party murdered over 30,000 Formosans.
It is the Asian branch of WACL that played the major role in the creation of the modern WACL. Just as on the western front even before the end of the war the US and Britain were already working with the fascists and preparing to launch the cold war, so too in the east the US was already looking to recruit the Japanese and their collaborators to prevent Asia from slipping from the empire's grip. Thankfully the peoples of China, North Korea and Vietnam would eventually win their independence installing communist regimes, since they had been the ones who had fought first the western imperialists then the fascist Japanese and their traitorous allies (whom the US would try to reinstall against the wishes of their own peoples). In China there was the KMT which had done little in the war against Japan, instead concentrating on battling the communists. At war's end they accepted into their ranks the Chinese forces that had gone over to the Japanese, making them even more hated. They were already despised for their corruption, cruelty and cowardice. Thus despite massive aid and even the huge number of American troops fighting in China, the communists under Mao were victorious. The nationalists were forced to retreat to what is now Taiwan but was then known as Formosa. During the civil war the KMT had launched a brutal occupation of the island and in fact Taiwan is a sort of Israel of the East. The Native Formosans are denied all say in how their island is run and live under the brutal occupation of the KMT.

In South Korea the story was much the same: the US installed elements that had collaborated with the Japanese in their brutal occupation. They only succeeded in installing Synghman Rhee because the ruthless dictator slaughtered all the opposition in South Korea. In Indochina the US aided the French in their failed attempt to regain control of their colony. Then it sent the CIA to build up the corrupt Ngo Dinh Diem regime which slaughtered all its opposition, setting up a corrupt puppet government. It was these three countries along with Japan, which like Germany remained a fascist country underneath its democratic facade, that were to found the asian branch of WACL in 1954: APACL, from which WACL itself would grow in 1966. APACL was formed on the advice of Secret Team member Ray Cline. It was no doubt bankrolled with the profits of the huge Asian heroin trade which the KMT controlled and which South Vietnam was also deeply involved in. South Korea would become involved in the drug trade through the Moonie cult it ran as a front in conjunction with Japanese fascist gangsters and war profiteers Yoshio Kodama and his patron Ryoichi Sasakawa, both of course backed by the CIA. These two would control Japan's one-party "democracy", backing the corrupt Liberal Democratic Party in its decades-long unchallenged rule of Japan. WACL's Asian drug connections would be exposed in the 70's when a Laotian APACL delegate would be busted in Paris with 4 pounds of heroin in his suitcase.

The Moonies, the nickname for Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, played a huge role in bankrolling WACL. It was backed by the Korean CIA, the Japanese Yakuza and doubtless the US CIA. It owns the Washington Times, which it uses to spread right-wing disinformation. Despite believing that Jesus was an utter failure and that Reverend Moon is the true Messiah who will save the world by having sex with his followers, it has many friends and allies on the Christian right like Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson. It also controls a number of politicians with the seemingly bottomless funds which undoubtedly come from the drug traffic. Most authors like to pretend that their funding is a mystery but given their blatant role in Bolivia's cocaine coup and their ties to the drug-dealing Contras as well as through WACL to the notorious KMT drug dealers, and the drug-dealing Sasakawa and Kodama who ran a massive heroin ring out of Manchuria during WWII, we can safely throw caution to the wind and solve the mystery of the Moonies' bottomless funding which allows them to run the Washington Times at a 3-billion-dollar loss and buy up American politicians. Some of this was exposed in a scandal during the 70's and 80's known as Koreagate. Moon is undoubtedly one of the stranger forces behind WACL. Robert Parry of Consortium News has done great work exposing them if you want to read more. Moon's political front group CAUSA was deeply involved in backing death squads and in fact a co-author of Inside the League observed that death squads often wore CAUSA t-shirts.

It was APACL, the Asian Branch of WACL, that would publicly at least give birth to the modern WACL in 1966. Of course the ABN was just as influential in the creation of WACL and in fact Yaroslav Stetsko was a frequent guest of Chiang Kai-Shek, Taiwan's drug-dealing KMT dictator, and was with other ABN members closely tied to APACL. APACL would be founded in 1954 in response to the end of the Korean war and the defeat of the French in Vietnam. The dictators Syngman Rhee, Chiang Kai Shek, and Ngo Dinh Diem would all be founding members with CIA man Ray Cline behind the scenes. It was formed to regroup these fascist forces in support of the CIA's covert wars throughout Southeast Asia, which would evolve into the Vietnam War, the wars in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand and would continue the covert war on China. We can be certain that APACL helped bring these bloody wars which would claim millions of lives into being.

APACL was used also to continue the work of the China lobby, then mired in a bribery and corruption scandal. The same year of 1954, in the aftermath of the CIA coup that toppled Arbenz in Guatemala, a Latin American Branch was also formed. In attendance were Howard Hunt, Lucein Conein, and Mitch Werbell, 3 of the most notorious "Secret Team" members. This Latin American branch would be used to organize the bloody reign of the death squads which would emanate out of Guatemala and El Salvador. Born out of past and future war criminals in conjunction with the machinations of the CIA, WACL play a role in bringing untold bloodshed upon the world. In Indochina, in Central and South America, in Afghanistan, in Southern Africa, WACL would be used to facilitate America's bloody war on the planet, what I call World War 3. And it would continue to play a role in shaping the events of World War 4 from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Syria and Turkey, to name only some of the more obvious examples. WACL would even help give birth to Al Qaeda and in the 80's the Saudis became major WACL sponsors.

However, like my earlier Iran-Contra article I have taken so long introducing the World Anti-Communist League and explaining its origins that once again I must end with a "to be continued".

Sources

For the prehistory of WACL and other fascinating topics I relied on the classic The Great Conspiracy by Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. (Here is The Great Conspiracy in e-book form.) For WACL's modern history I relied on the misleadingly titled Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have Infiltrated The World Anti-Communist League, which is inaccurate since it would be more accurate to say they founded rather than infiltrated the league. It is a fascinating book, although it tends to minimize the US role in being behind nearly everything. Finally Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter's The Iran-Contra Connection also has an in-depth discussion of WACL.

Dave Emory, the world's leading anti-fascist researcher, is the only one who has observed the role WACL has played in recent history. This massive episode from Dave Emory and his then cohost Nip Tuck's Anti-Fascist Archives traces the history of fascism in America from before World War 2 to the 1980's when it was recorded. And these episodes deal with the World Anti-Communist League: A great podcast by Dave Emory based on an article by Hans Kruger about the WACL assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. And here is part 2 on Olof Palme. This Dave Emory podcast contains the mind-blowing part of the WACL archive show dealing with the Promethean League, plus a discussion of the killing of the Russian pilot by the Grey Wolves last fall.

The CIA's own history of its relationship with Ukrainian fascists ends by crediting the Ukrainian emigres for contributing to the disintegration of the USSR.

Robert Parry on the strange and sordid history of Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church.

Robert Parry on Klaus Barbie.

With a Special Thanks to @arrghshell of https://n0p3.net