United States and state-sponsored terrorism
[1] From 1981 to 1991, the United States provided weapons, training, and extensive financial and logistical support to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, who used terror tactics in their fight against the Nicaraguan government.
[3] At various points the United States also provided training, arms, and funds to terrorists among Cuban exiles, such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.
[5][6] Starting in 1959, under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government had the Central Intelligence Agency recruit operatives in Cuba to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage.
[15] Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, wrote of the campaign:[16] In its determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration heedlessly embarked upon what was, in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism... the actions of the United States toward Cuba during the early 1960s bear comparison with Iranian and Syrian support for proxies engaging in terrorist activities against IsraelAmong the most prominent of these terrorists were Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who were implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane.
[19] Bosch eventually ended up in the Dominican Republic, where he joined the effort to consolidate Cuban exile militants into the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU).
[19][21][25] Bosch was also implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane flying to Havana from Venezuela in which all 73 civilians on board were killed, although Posada and he were acquitted after a lengthy trial.
[19] Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent who has been designated by scholars and journalists as a terrorist,[a] also came into contact with Castro during his student days, but fled Cuba after the 1959 revolution, and helped organize the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
CIA documents released in 2005 indicate that the agency "had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner."
[17][39][40][41][42][43] After a series of arrests and escapes, Carriles returned to the CIA fold in 1985 by joining their support operations to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, which were being run by Oliver North.
[53] The U.S. Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was "an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks", a flight risk and a danger to the community.
[59][60] Paramilitary violence and terrorism there was principally targeted to peasants, unionists, indigenous people, human rights workers, teachers and left-wing political activists or their supporters.
[67] In a secret supplement to his report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough encouraged the creation and deployment of a paramilitary force to commit sabotage and terrorist acts against communists, stating: A concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later.
This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.
Among other policy recommendations, the US team advised that "in order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges, any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature.
These documents have been made public at the website "Pepes Project"[80][81] The Years of Lead was a period of socio-political turmoil in Italy that lasted from the late 1960s into the early 1980s.
[85] According to the investigation of Italian judge Guido Salvini, the neo-fascist organizations involved in the strategy of tension, "La Fenice, Avanguardia nazionale, Ordine nuovo" were the "troops" of "clandestine armed forces", directed by components of the "state apparatus related to the CIA.
[87] In 1998, Milan judge Guido Salvini indicted U.S. Navy officer David Carrett on charges of political and military espionage for his alleged participation in the Piazza Fontana bombing et al. Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official of the U.S.-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio (Uncle Otto), who served as the CIA coordinator in Northeastern Italy in the sixties and seventies.
The newspaper la Repubblica reported that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man in Milan, was discovered in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio.
It also alleged that Pino Rauti (current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party), a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (New Order) subversive organization, received regular funding from a press officer at the U.S. embassy in Rome.
"So even before the 'stabilising' plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome", the report says.
Taviani also alleged in an August 2000 interview to Il Secolo XIX newspaper: "It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation.
[92] In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and established a revolutionary government in Nicaragua.
[126] These funds were run through the National Security Council, by Lt. Col. Oliver North, who created an organization called "The Enterprise" which served as the secret arm of the NSC staff and had its own airplanes, pilots, airfield, ship, and operatives.
[129] For this purpose, the National Security Council authorized the production and distribution of publications that looked favorably at the Contras, also known as "white propaganda," written by paid consultants who did not disclose their connection to the administration.
Cockburn wrote that "[t]he manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, clearly advocated a strategy of terror as the means to victory over the hearts and minds of Nicaraguans.
[144] The court eventually ruled in favor of Nicaragua, and judged that the United States was required to pay reparations for its violation of International law.
[153] As disclosed to The Sunday Times by CIA sources, "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia".
[166] An investigation by journalists Phil Sands and Suha Maayeh revealed that rebels supplied with weapons from the Military Operations Command in Amman sold a portion of them to local arms dealers, often to raise cash to pay additional fighters.
Some MOC-supplied weapons were sold to Bedouin traders referred to locally as "The Birds" in Lajat, a volcanic plateau northeast of Daraa, Syria.
[167] Another study conducted by Conflict Armament Research, on behalf of the European Union and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, found that external support for anti-Assad Syrian rebels "significantly augmented the quantity and quality of weapons available to [ISIL] forces",[168] including, in the most rapid case of diversion they documented,[168] "anti-tank weapons purchased by the United States that ended up in possession of the Islamic State within two months of leaving the factory.
