PoliticalWarfare.org

US should investigate Congressman McGovern's FARC ties

Has the FARC used a US Congressman as a channel to influence Washington's policy toward Colombia? If so, how? Was the congressman an innocent in all this, or was there something more nefarious? These are important questions that the House Ethics Committee and Justice Department should investigate.

At issue is Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the main figure in Congress behind trying to cut off vital support for Colombia's military, and stopping a free trade arrangement that would help the country's economy. The Wall Street Journal has alleged that McGovern is a FARC sympathizer. McGovern has a long record of sympathy for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and other leftist revolutionaries.

Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, pictured with McGovern and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is already under criminal investigation in her country for collaborating with the FARC.

Information contained in the laptop computer of the FARC's then-#2 commander, Raul Reyes, suggests McGovern may have gone over the line in building a liaison with the terrorist organization, and that the FARC may have had a plan to advance its interests through other members of McGovern's political party. The Colombian military killed Reyes and captured his computer on March 1. The Colombian Supreme Court says data from that computer, including 900 emails, are grounds for investigating Cordoba. McGovern says his actions were simply part of an innocent effort to help free FARC hostages.

Cordoba appears in the Reyes computer documents as advising FARC not to release hostage Ingrid Betancourt, the senator and former Colombian presidential candidate who was rescued last week. Cordoba wanted to use the hostage releases not as ends in themselves, but as means of improving the image of Hugo Chavez, according to the documents. In an October 27, 2007 email to Reyes, Cordoba called Chavez "my commander." (Click here for the original report, in Spanish, appearing in Colombia's Semana magazine.)

The FARC leader with the nom de guerre Cesar who led the unit holding Betancourt told Reyes in a December 11, 2007 email that Cordoba had urged the FARC to keep Betancourt as a hostage. The Colombian military captured Cesar when it rescued Betancourt and the others last week.

Cordoba, a leftist well known for her FARC ties, was briefly an official Colombian interlocutor last year to negotiate a FARC hostage release under an arrangement with Chavez. US immigration officers held Cordoba for more than two hours at New York's JFK airport last month, despite the fact that she had a diplomatic passport. (She is shown in the photo conversing with FARC Commander Reyes.)

McGovern is a top congressional opponent of the US-Colombia free trade agreement, and helped persuade Speaker Pelosi to sink the pact last April. McGovern has also tried to cut the US military aid to Colombia that has been decisive in taking down the FARC. These points are important, because nearly everything McGovern has done concerning Colombia has undermined that country's progress against, and arguably aided, the narcoterrorist group. The question is, has McGovern been malicious in intent, or just misguided? More importantly, did a foreign terrorist group use a US congressman as an agent or asset to influence and change US foreign and defense policy?

Anyone who has watched Jim McGovern as I have over the past 20-plus years, back to when he was a congressional staffer helping the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Cuban-backed guerrillas in El Salvador, knows that he has a soft spot, to put it politely, for the Latino extreme Left. The proposal of a McGovern-FARC go-between - an international negotiations setup involving US Members of Congress and pitting them against the Colombian and US governments - is a carbon copy of the same tactics McGovern promoted to save the Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN guerrillas from total defeat in the 1980s. That proposal appeared in the captured Reyes computer.

Nothing in the record suggests that McGovern ever publicly criticized the FMLN for killing American military personnel, or tried to use his influence to get the FMLN to stop killing American servicemen back when he had influence with the guerrilla group. McGovern denies he is a FARC sympathizer. He has gone on record of late criticizing the FARC for its brutality - but then, so have Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The Wall Street Journal commented on McGovern's FARC flirtation last March, when the contents of Reyes' computer became public. Journal editors ascribe McGovern's opposition to a free trade deal with Colombia to his sympathies toward the other side: "We think the documents reveal something else entirely: Some Democrats oppose the Colombia trade deal because they sympathize more with FARC's terrorists than with a US antiterror ally."

Is Congressman McGovern a witting collaborator or an unwitting dupe? What does he have to say about Senator Cordoba? He should come clean right away - and he should justify how his attempts to cut off the Colombian military would have succeeded in taking down the hemisphere's most notorious terrorist group. The House Ethics Committee should launch a probe immediately. So should the Justice Department. Wittingly or unwittingly, Members of Congress should not be agents of influence for foreign terrorists and regimes.

(Click here for Senator Cordoba's webpage containing Congressman McGovern's letter criticizing the Colombian government for breaking off the "Chavez initiative" to negotiate with the FARC. Another page on Cordoba's website contains a quote by McGovern: "I am very disappointed by the termination of the Chavez facilitation initiative." http://www.piedadcordoba.net/indexprincipal.html. A link to the full text is dead.)

Paranoid FARC executes 26 of its own

So paranoid is the Colombian FARC guerrilla group that it executed 26 of its own combatants - more than a third of an entire unit of 70 fighters.

And that was before last week's hostage rescue. The pace of executions, according to a former hostage, was painfully slow. They took place over a five-month period of internal tribunals, where commanders tried to root out traitors from their ranks.

With hundreds of FARC members deserting or defecting to the government every month, taking with them priceless intelligence about the internal workings of the organization, the command structure is eating itself alive. Defectors helped military intelligence understand the anxieties of individual FARC commanders, allowing the army to build psychological profiles and devise ways to exploit them to save the hostages.

Those defectors, plus broken communications and internal paranoia, have been an important asset to the army. Colombian military intelligence officers who planned the rescue said that the FARC's own disarray and demoralization have been the army's best counterinsurgency weapon.

Another victory to apply to the fight against Islamist extremists. Does anyone remember how, not so long ago, American and international politicians were denouncing US and Colombian counterterrorism policy as wrong-headed, needlessly tough, and so on? That the FARC was too powerful to defeat? That our Colombian allies didn't have their act together and didn't deserve our support? That our whole approach was misguided? Where are those politicians today, so long after having helped boost the FARC's morale?

Click here for a good Washington Post recap of the rescue planning.  (Photo: Hundreds of thousands march against FARC in Cali, Colombia.)

'Brutal psychological hit' against FARC

Audacious thinking, clever use of defectors, three-way electronic intercepts, copycatting precedents set by Hugo Chavez, exploiting broken command and control, and playing on the targets' egoes were among the elements of Colombia's successful hostage rescue this week, what a senior Colombian officer calls a "brutal psychological hit" against the FARC.

Today's Wall Street Journal captures these elements, showing how the skillful use of psychological means can defeat terrorists and other extremists:

• Taking advantage of a leadership crisis within the FARC, to compromise communications and make FARC units think they were transferring the hostages to the group's new leader;
• Infiltrating the FARC leadership and command structure with penetration agents;
• Copying Hugo Chavez's propagandistic recovery of hostages last January and February, by re-enacting a similar scenario with Russian helicopters painted with similar color schemes;
• Using deception to communicate between FARC leaders and the guerrillas' security detail guarding the hostages, disinforming the security detail to move the hostages to a location where they would be transferred by a helicopter under ostensible FARC control;
• Hollywood-style acting classes for undercover Colombian military intelligence officers, taught by American acting coaches and FARC defectors, to make the officers look and act like real FARC men - even mimicking the way the guerrillas walk and talk;
• Coaching to make a Colombian officer look like an Australian leftist;
• Dressing cameramen to look like they were from Chavez's Telesur satellite TV channel, copying Telesur's participation in the previous rescues (see video embed);
• Using "more cunning than firepower."

"The plan had a chance of working because, for months, in an operation one army officer likened to a 'broken telephone,' military intelligence had been able to convince [former senator and presidential candidate Ingrid] Betancourt's captor, Gerardo Aguilar, a guerrilla known as 'Cesar,' that he was communicating with his top bosses in the guerrillas' seven-man secretariat. Army intelligence convinced top guerrilla leaders that they were talking to Cesar. In reality, both were talking to army intelligence," according to the report.

Fruits of the operation include:

• Rescue of high-value hostages whom the FARC never had any intention of releasing;
• Provoking recriminations within the FARC, further splintering the organization and causing more desertions and defections;
• Further demoralizing the FARC and its supporters;
• Humiliating the FARC's strongest supporters, including Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, both of whom praised the rescue and criticized the FARC, with Castro calling the FARC "cruel" and Chavez telling the FARC to free all hostages and to disarm;
• Boosting the standing of Colombian President Uribe and the US strategy to assist Colombia;
• Increasing the domestic and international prestige of the Colombian military, which has made huge strides in its professionalism over the past decade;
• Causing liberal and left-wing groups to concede that their go-soft negotiations approach was wrong, and that Uribe's tough approach was the right thing to do.

The Wall Street Journal carries this precious quote from a top NGO leader who had criticized Uribe's approach and urged a soft line: "I have to recognize that the strong hand has prevailed," said Robert Menard, a liberal human rights activist and founder and secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. "Our insistence on the need to negotiate with the FARC, hoping they would release their most valuable card, was foolish."

A textbook operation - one for the history books of how to do things exactly right. Notably, the US was closely involved with this Colombian operation. Now, if we can do this type of thing with the Islamists, we'll be doing just fine.

Colombia's amazing rescue operation - and the political death of the FARC

Hugo Chavez helped dig the FARC's grave a little deeper earlier this year when he sent in a white helicopter to ferry out hostages, and video crews to reap propaganda benefits.

I wondered why the Colombians would ever allow Chavez to send in the white Venezuelan helicopter to bring some prisoners held by the FARC to Venezuela. It looked like a big propaganda boost for Chavez at the time, as it certainly was. Apparently the Colombians had something bigger in mind: using Chavez's media stunt as a precedent to camouflage a daring mission of their own.

How else to rescue 15 hostages without anyone getting hurt?

This week the Colombian army sent in its own white helicopters, unmarked Russian Mi-17s supposedly under FARC control, on the gutsy freedom mission. The captives - the most important of an estimated 700 in terrorist hands - included former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, 11 Colombian policemen and three American private military contractors.

News coverage justifiably focuses on the amazing nature of the mission, which took months for the Colombians to prepare. Rescuing the three Americans, who were Defense Department contractors assisting a US-Colombian counternarcotics program, was a top priority of Admiral James Stavridis, head of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).  Initial news reports say that Colombian agents infiltrated the FARC at its highest levels, penetrated the FARC security detail in charge of the hostages, and mounted a complex deception operation to move the hostages on a 93 mile trek through the sweltering mountains to a point where the Colombian army could extract them.

Undercover Colombian agents wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and posing as FARC terrorists arrived at the extraction point in a unmarked white helicopters, allegedly to move the hostages to visit an unspecified international delegation. Once the 15 hostages were safely aboard and taken from the area, the agents identified themselves as Colombian military and announced that the captives were free.

It was a fantastically successful operation. And there's more mileage to be squeezed from it. Right now, the FARC is discredited, broken and factionalized. Its longtime leader is dead, the Colombians killed other senior commanders, FARC sponsor Chavez has rhetorically become very harsh against the organization, and the rescue has humiliated the group further. Even better, the Colombian military revealed it had infiltrated the FARC's seven-person central secretariat as well as the most sensitive parts of the group's security apparatus.

This means that FARC commanders can no longer trust one another. They must now become especially suspicious of one another: Who among them is a spy for the Colombian or American governments? Who has already betrayed who to whom? Who will sell out next?

Isolated extremist groups like the FARC tend to breed paranoia in their ranks, and this paranoia will only heighten as uncertainties swell about where the organization is headed now that its leadership is dead, compromised or factionalized. About 300 FARC members are defecting monthly, the group has lost its hero status and is widely viewed in Colombia as a mafia, and President Alvaro Uribe, who led the no-compromise fight, is the considered the most popular president in Colombia's history.

This is great news! Over the next few months, Colombia and its friends should play on FARC's divisions, humiliation and fears to goad FARC commanders to turn against one another, do one another in and sell one another out. Helping the FARC self-destruct is a big part of the game.

We can thank Hugo Chavez for the white helicopter idea. And also for the use of video camera crews to provide propaganda support for his "rescues" earlier this year. According to Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, the Colombian planners deliberately mimicked the precedent he set, and they fooled the FARC completely. Gracias, Hugo!

(Time magazine has a rather good analysis, if late in the game.)

Photo: Venezuelans protest the FARC at a Caracas rally, February 2008. The placards read, "No more FARC." 

Brilliant results: Chavez proves we can goad our adversaries into doing our work for us

All it took was to expose raw battlefield intelligence and let the facts speak for themselves. The release of the contents of captured FARC computers has forced Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez on the defensive and deliver an astonishing propaganda blow to the narcoguerrillas whom he has been backing.

The sweet results came in yesterday, when Chavez unexpectedly caved under international pressure and publicly gave the FARC a propagandistic heave-ho. Here's the point: Hugo Chavez can be pressured to sell out his friends! His comments are an enormous psychological blow to the 44 year-old guerrilla movement, which through various means has lost several of its top leaders recently.

In an information operation that cost practically nothing, Colombia and its US ally has goaded Hugo Chavez has run a crippling PSYOP against the FARC that we could never do on our own. All we (or most probably, the Colombians who aren't as reticent as we are to release intelligence to fight a good international political warfare battle) had to do was quickly declassify the material and set it out for the world to see. The rest was up to international public opinion, including some great diplomatic work, to set up Chavez to deliver the message that we and the Colombians could not.

Chavez is not a brilliant strategist. To the contrary. It's easy to set him up. He's an egomaniac and a bigmouth. He's a tactician. He can be outmaneuvered. And so it was proven in this case. This is an important lesson for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Here's the astonishing story, as reported from Medellin on June 10 by London's Daily Telegraph:

The Venezuelan president said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] were "history", and called on them to release their hostages and end a decades-long war with the government.

"Enough of so much war, it is time to sit down and talk of peace," he said. "The guerrilla has passed into history.

"You in the FARC should know something: You have become an excuse for the empire to threaten all of us," he said, referring to the United States. "The day that peace arrives in Colombia, the empire will have no excuses."

He directly addressed the organisation's leader, Alfonso Cano, to tell him to release their hostages "in exchange for nothing".

The comments were a complete change of tack for Mr Chavez, who earlier this year asked the European Union to take the FARC off its list of terrorist organisations and recognise it as a legitimate guerrilla army. . . .

What might have prompted the change in heart are the contents of computers seized from guerrilla camp bombed in March by the Colombian air force in Ecuador.

Colombia troops violated Ecuadorean sovereignty to carry out the bombing raid, but killed the FARCs top commander, "Raul Reyes", and seized his corpse and three computers.

They allegedly contain proof that Mr Chavez gave the FARC $300 million and was exploring the possibilities of supplying them with weapons.

Hawks in Washington have already called for Venezuela to be added to the list of nations that sponsor terrorism, on which Mr Chavez's close allies Cuba and Iran lurk. . . . Officially accusing Mr Chavez of supporting the FARC could involve applying economic sanctions, including a ban on dealing with Venezuelan companies, as is the case with Cuba. . . .

Mr Chavez comments are just the latest in a series of setback that have the FARC reeling and put them in their most vulnerable position in 44 years of fighting. 

Chavez further validates this blogger's long-held view that the US and its allies release as much raw battlefield intelligence as possible to the public, in order to expose their enemies, turn the propaganda tide, and put the bad guys on the defensive. As much for the Islamist enemy as for the FARC and others. I argued this last year in Fighting the War of Ideas like a Real War.

Such an information warfare tactic helps the good guys win while saving lives and shortening the conflict.

Only a fool would think that Chavez will actually cut off the FARC completely. For now, that's almost beside the point; we must assume he will continue and we must continue to expose him. What our side must do now, though, is to pocket a pivotal political victory and drive that psychological stake through the hearts of the FARC and its ideological supporters around the world: Hugo Chavez has abandoned them, sold them out, and called them a threat to the progressive movement. The FARC is shaken. It's time to break the organization's will to fight, and then break its will to become a political force.

Jorge Castañeda, Mexico's foreign minister under Fox, had spied for Cuba, according to declassified report

Jorge Castañeda Gutman, the Foreign Secretary of Mexico under former President Vicente Fox who seemed to delight in hammering the United States, was a spy for the Cuban government, according to a Mexican newspaper.

Citing a declassified report in the Mexican National Archives from the defunct Federal Security Directorate (DFS), El Universal reports that Castañeda served as a spy and agent of influence for the Castro regime from 1979 to at least 1985.

No word yet from Castañeda for his version of events.

The report says that Jorge Luis Joa Campos, chief of the Mexico section of Cuba's General Intelligence Directorate (DGI), recruited Castañeda in 1979. Castañeda reportedly "surprised" the DGI with his productivity as a spy.

The 215-page DFS report shows that Castañeda not only passed secrets to Cuban intelligence, but served as an agent of influence to make propaganda for the regime in Havana. Thirty-seven pages of the report were redacted. Castañeda is influential among US policymakers on Western Hemisphere issues. He has also been a columnist for Newsweek and the New York Times.

As Foreign Secretary under conservative President Fox, Castañeda disappointed US leaders by moving Fox sharply to the left on international issues. He shepherded Mexico on to the United Nations Security Council and used the council as an international forum to hammer Washington. Despite Fox's proclaimed "special relationship" between Mexico and the US, Castañeda made it one of his top priorities to dismantle the successful inter-American security system that had been in place since the Rio Treaty of 1947.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks aborted Castañeda attempts (Brazil invoked the mutual defense treaty on the United States' behalf), but Mexico's Department of Foreign Affairs was one of the last in the world - holding out with Qatar which had been supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong-il - to extend official condolences to the American people.

According to the report in El Universal, published February 4, Castañeda also spied on his own father, Jorge Castañeda y Álvarez de la Rosa, who served as Foreign Secretary under President Jose Lopez Portillo in the 1980s, and "pressured him to make decisions under Havana's dictates."

El Universal reports that, as Fox's foreign secretary, he would later begin undoing Mexico's close diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Last year, Castañeda surprised observers by calling for an "ideological and political struggle" against Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez - but not without demanding a poison pill concession from the United States to allow virtually uncontrolled immigration over its southern border.

Dude in Che hat denounces US for Cuba 'spy' request

ABC News is breathlessly reporting in an "exclusive" interview from Bolivia that an American Fulbright scholar wearing a Che Guevara hat says that the State Department asked him and Peace Corps volunteers "to basically spy" [sic] on Cuban and Venezuelan operatives in the Andean country.

John Alexander van Schaick (pictured), who received his Fulbright scholarship from the State Department, expressed shock and dismay that the State Department would ask him to pitch in against Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Fulbright programs and the Peace Corps are supposed to be off-limits for intelligence collection purposes, but the issue here is the student's indignation about being asked to serve his country - and the fact that he gave the interview while wearing a Che Guevara hat.

Van Schaick's hat proclaims, "Che Vive" (Che Lives). We checked with our buddy Felix Rodriguez, the CIA man who handed Che to his Bolivian executioners, and are assured that the Fulbright scholar's hat has its facts wrong.

ABC published a Spanish translation of the story on ABCNews.com.  (By the way, for proper Che hats and shirts, check out Che Mart at www.che-mart.com.)

State Department kicks Salvadoran ally in the face

Here's a great way to reward the only country in the hemisphere that still has troops in Iraq and is one of our last solid Latin American allies: Give a high-level diplomatic reception to its Marxist opposition.

This is precisely what the State Department did today to our ally El Salvador, poking it in the eyes or worse by receiving a delegation from the Marxist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) - the group that murdered US Marine Embassy guards in the notorious Zona Rosa massacre, among other things.

The formerly Soviet-backed organization, which still sports the communist red banner and celebrates its Stalinist namesake, Salvadoran Communist Party founder Farabundo Marti, set down its arms to avoid defeat 15 years ago. But it still finds common cause with the FARC narcoterrorists of Colombia, Fidel Castro, Palestinian terrorists and other extremists.

Now Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is bankrolling the FMLN's attempt to defeat the pro-US government of El Salvador in the 2009 elections - and Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon is right there to help. He's greeting FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes with full diplomatic recognition, ignoring the fact that the meeting boosts the credibility of the Marxist opposition party in what most observers agree will be a tight election.

Meanwhile, Funes is in Washington meddling in American internal political affairs, saying he hopes the Democrats win the 2008 presidential elections here. All the Democrat candidates for president should disavow his endorsement, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hugo's tasteless tuna

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is sending cans of tuna to Peruvian earthquake victims - with a picture of himself on the label.

Joining Chavez on the tuna can is Lt. Col. Ollanta Humala, his favored candidate to become president of Peru.

"Thousands of cans of tuna with photos of the Venezuelan president and his Peruvian subordinate Humala are being distributed in the disaster zones," the Lima newspaper Expreso reports.

The cans were shipped to the stricken areas of Pisco, Ica, Chincha and Cañete. Relief workers gave Expreso access to the Venezuelan aid. The tuna labels also feature a red "O" that was the symbol of Ollanta's political campaign, and contain political slogans linking Ollanta with the "Bolivarian Republic" of Venezuela.

The labels were printed specifically to take advantage of the earthquake, as the heavy-handed language shows. Here's a direct translation of one of the sentences on cans distributed in Ica, where a quarter of the city's buildings were destroyed: "In front of the national disaster that happened to Peru, and overall to our Ica region, the Peruvian Nationalist Party, with our leader Ollanta makes itself present, together with our sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose president is our brother Hugo Chavez, is due to the fact that the current Peruvian government acts in an inefficient manner, slow and heartless, and heedless of the pain of the victims and leaving them at the mercy of hunger, thirst and criminal gangs." 

Countdown to shutdown in Venezuela

A human rights group is counting the days and hours until Venezuela's doomed opposition television station, RCTV, is shut down on instructions of dictator Hugo Chavez. Thirteen days to go, as of this posting.

To track the count and take part in the action items, visit FreeRCTV.net.  In Spanish, it's RCTVlibre.com.

The sites are a project of the Human Rights Foundation.