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Honduras coup: Nice job, but here's how to do it better next time

Remember when the Bush administration failed to support the Venezuelan military coup against Hugo Chavez? The US was so caught up in the Jimmy Carter-inspired obsession with "process" over substance that it stood by and let the coup fail.

How different modern Latin American history would be if the US had backed the brave Venezuelan officers and civilians who dared challenge the man who would abuse the democratic system to become an aggressive dictator.

Across Latin America, the Chavez model of political subversion of existing democratic and legal structures is taking root, with extremists taking power through Venezuelan petrodollar-funded covert operations to topple pro-western governments and create a Bolivarian "near abroad."

The US has done nothing to try to stem the trend. Nothing. Democrat or Republican - American leaders have handed the playing field over to Chavez and his Cuban and Iranian allies. It's been a pathetic show.

How refreshing it was to see that humble Honduras is the only country in the region not to lose its political cojones and that, to keep its Chavez-backed president from violating the constitution, its other institutions acted.

And act they did. With the apparent support of the Supreme Court and the Congress, the Honduran Army removed lawbreaking President Manuel Zelaya from power yesterday, rousing him from bed in his pajamas, spiriting him aboard a military aircraft, and dumping him unceremoniously in Costa Rica. The Congress accepted a letter purporting to be Zelaya's resignation and the Supreme Court backed the move.

Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and Barack Obama all objected. To her credit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a bit of wiggle room, didn't quite condemn the operation or embrace Zelaya, and certainly didn't agree with Chavez and Castro.

I've known the Honduran military since working with them in support of the Nicaraguan contra resistance fighters 25 years ago, and they're a good, patriotic, hardy lot.

But they're not politically sophisticated internationally, and the same is true of the Honduran political elite. They don't know how to play the media game. And this could prove the un-doing of the cause of the Good Guys against the Bad Guys of Chavez who have subverted democracy.

It's all about process. As Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush proved in Venezuela, it's not really democracy that the US wants. It's legalistic process that matters. Just like the bureaucrat who doesn't care if you've really complied with a regulation, all that matters is the piece of paper that certifies that you did comply. Whether or not you really did. So Chavez can build his dictatorship simply by working through the democratic system and subverting it, and his model has been replicated again and again in the Americas. All to the cheer of do-gooders and demokracy-uber-alles fanatics alike.

And when the Good Guys step in to stop the nonsense, they are condemned because they are working outside The Process. It's not about principle.

So here's how our Honduran friends can fix things right away, or if Zelaya somehow returns to power, how they can get it right next time.

Zelaya is a nut and illegal political agent of a foreign power who has alienated practically everyone in Honduras. He can hardly get TV time. His own party unanimously abandoned him, voting to agree to his resignation and the alleged "coup." The rest of the democratically elected congress called on the military to take action against him, too. So did the Supreme Court.

What the army did incorrectly was not work The Process well enough. It didn't get enough lawyers involved. It didn't hire the K Street legal whorehouses with the mercenary expertise and paid talking heads that everybody else hires to do their propaganda work for them in Washington. This includes the embassies and ambassadors of the Organization of American States (OAS), which the US has surrendered to the Latin Left.

These political mercs are overwhelmingly liberal, with excellent ties to the media elites and the present US administration. Like a good hooker, their hourly rates are expensive, but they are usually worth the investment.

They can be paid to help temper opposition to your coup from within the State Department, the Administration, and the softie think tanks that prefer creeping dictatorship through democratic means than freedom restored at gunpoint.

Have a good spokesman from your own country who speaks American English and can get on all the TV shows. And don't forget Spanish-language TV. It's not enough to have a command of the language; the person must be engaging, attractive, quick-witted and informed, with a good presence before the cameras. Honduras needs its own Arturito Cruz for this purpose (i.e., attractive and glib, if not principled, though principles would be nice) - before the coup is staged. The representative must be able to work with the legal whorehouses of K Street who can book him or her at think tanks, with lawmakers, administration officials and the media.

It's all about spin, not democracy. If it was about democracy, the people who complain so bitterly about the coup would have been militantly opposed to an anti-democratic regime like Chavez's for funding political subversion across the hemisphere. But it isn't. It's about political power. That's why Jimmy Carter and the State Department supported Chavez over Venezuelan democracy, and why it's so important to use political tools as weapons. One of the weapons is spin. Sad but true. Use it well. Buena suerte, hermanos catrachos!

The spies from SAIS

Why is it that the most notorious Cuban spies in Washington have a connection with the same graduate school of international affairs?

Ana Belen Montes (pictured at left), the convicted Cuban spy who infiltrated the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Former SAIS Professor Walter Kendall Myers (pictured at right) has a PhD from SAIS, and was a faculty member there from 1971 until his arrest on June 4, 2009.

Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, were open sympathizers with the Castro government, as was Montes.

A Myers lecture at SAIS raised suspicions about him.

Of course, thousands of patriotic Americans have graduated from or taught at SAIS, so there might not be any connection at all. But one has to wonder: Why would a place that fancies itself as the premier graduate school in international affairs not offer a counterintelligence studies program? Why would a school like SAIS not prepare its graduates to defend themselves against recruitment by hostile foreign intelligence services?

A look at the Johns Hopkins University course catalog shows that the institution does not offer counterintelligence courses. The only mention of counterintelligence in the course catalog is part of a course on "Competitive Intelligence," but that offering is at JHU's Carey Business School, not SAIS.

The only advanced school I know about that offers counterintelligence studies for its international affairs grad students is the Institute of World Politics, where I teach. Our founder and president, by the way, holds advanced degrees from SAIS. But then, SAIS wasn't interested in his counterintelligence curriculum.

Makes me worry about the integrity of the SAIS program in Nanjing, China, and how the school is working to protect its students from being exploited by Beijing's aggressive espionage service. My hunch is that SAIS is doing nothing substantive to help its students defend themselves from being compromised or recruited by Chinese spies.

Why would any prospective American diplomat, intelligence officer, military officer or public official invest their time and money at a school that doesn't offer education in counterintelligence? And why would any grad school not want to educate their students to be aware of the counterintelligence threats out there? These are questions that potential graduate students should be asking when searching for a place to study for a master's degree or PhD.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee: Still stuck in the Cold War

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) is making headlines again as only she can - by being on the wrong side once again.

Her latest hobby horse is her recent trip to Cuba for a visit with Raul Castro - Fidel's little brother who for decades ran the army, secret police, intelligence services, hard currency laundering operations.

Lee led a congressional delegation to Havana for a 4-1/2 hour meeting with Raul Castro, telling reporters, "All of us are convinced that President Castro would like normal relations and would see normalization, ending the embargo, as beneficial to both countries." Reuters reported that Lee's delegation "avoided specifics" with Castro "but were struck by his humor, impressed by his involvement in Third World causes and firm in their belief that he wants to end U.S.-Cuba enmity."

The meeting between Castro, Lee, and five other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, took place in secret without the customary presence of a US State Department official. No reporters attended, and according to the New York Times, Cuban television, which covered the visit, offered no details of what was said.

Xinhua, the Chinese propaganda agency, described the Castro-Lee meeting as a "closed-door discussion, whose details were undisclosed."

Barbara Lee presently chairs the Congressional Black Caucus. Her radicalism dates at least to the early  1970s when she was a confidential aide to Black Panther Party "Minister of Defense" Huey Newton (pictured at right, with shotgun). She has a long history of support for the Castro regime and its surrogates. She provided counterintelligence support to the regime in Grenada in 1980, tipping off the Cuban-backed government to a possible anti-communist spy in the office of Marxist-Leninist premier Maurice Bishop.

At the time, she was a member the staff of Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-CA), whom she succeeded in Congress.

US military forces liberated Grenada in October 1983 (pictured at left), which President Ronald Reagan ordered.

Lee opposed the US-led ouster of Grenadian General Hudson Austin (pictured below), who had murdered Maurice Bishop, his former ally, in a coup just days before.

Regime documents that US troops captured, now stored at the National Archives, show Lee's involvement with the Grenadan and Cuban governments.

When Lee received an envelope containing anti-regime material that had been mailed from Bishop's office, she immediately warned Bishop's ambassador to the Organization of American States, Dessima Williams. Williams sent Lee's counterintelligence tip back home to Bishop and musing about suspects. The memorandum read,

"Comrade:

"On May 14, 1980, Barbara Lee called to say she had received a piece of anti-PRG [People's Revolutionary Government] propaganda stamped from the Prime Minister's Office, post-marked in Grenada. We collected it May 15, and it is herewith attached.

"Some obvious questions are: -

"What concerns us is: How is is possible for such vicious anti-government propaganda to be mailed and stamped from the Prime Minister's Office to a friendly Congressional Office?

"Who?
"How?
"Barbara says that all those U.S. persons who went to Grenada for The First Anniversary [of the revolution] have been receiving G.I.S. News Releases regularly. Should this be so? To her knowledge, no one else except she has received this particular piece of anti-PRG material.

"Please advise us at an early time if this was a known or unknown error; if a conspiracy and/or sabotage, and how to handle it.

"Neither 'Shampoo' Norbert Douglas our Security Officer at the Mission here, nor I have a clue on this. Only speculations:

"1. Stanley Cyrus?
"2. A spy inside the Ministry?
"3. Is Roberta Salper involved? (see materials on her attached).
"Please advise."

Click here for a PDF of the letter: Download Barbara Lee 1980 memo

Lee and Dellums' chief of staff, Carlottia Scott, had been trying to promote the regime for a few years before finally getting Dellums to become personally involved in discrediting the Reagan Administration's assessment that a large Cuban-built airstrip at Point Salines was designed to handle heavy Soviet military aircraft.

Dellums was then Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Military Construction. He used that post to claim jurisdiction, and held his own "investigation" of the airstrip. Through the subcommittee, he concluded in a report that the airstrip was for civilian purposes only - mainly tourism - and was not for the Soviet bloc military.

The thing is, Lee and Scott wrote the report in collaboration with the regime - and sent it back to Bishop for his editing and approval before making the document public as a congressional report.

Scott was widely rumored to have been romantically involved with Bishop. Her personal letters, captured in Bishop's office after the US liberation, lend credence to those reports. One of the letters begins, "My darling comrade leader."

In a typewritten letter to Bishop on US House of Representatives letterhead, dated April 28, 1982, Scott describes how she and Lee got Dellums involved in promoting the Grenadan regime, and how Dellums processed his visit to the island during a stayover in Havana before returning to Washington.

Addressed to Bishop as "My Dearest, Just a brief note to let you know that I still love you madly," Scott wrote:

"I really need to talk to you face to face to share some thoughts that Ron [Dellums] has. I don't know if you realized it or not but Ron has become truly committed to Grenada and has some very positive political thinking to share with you. He feels that he can best be of assistance in a counseling manner and hopes to be able to discuss these thoughts in the near future. He just has to get all to [sic] his thoughts in order as to how your interests can best be served. Ron, as a political thinker, is the best around and Fidel will verify that in no uncertain terms. When matched against the best of them, Ron always comes out ahead (even with Fidel). He is so far ahead of his time that it scares me at times but I have learned to deal with it over the years.

"When we left Grenada and arrived in Barbados, we met with what I would call a very ugly American, Ludlow Flowers, the Deputy Ambassador to B'dos from the U.S. In the most awesome exchange of dialogue, Ron battled this ass to the bitter end on U.S. policy toward Grenada. You would have been proud."

Scott described what she, Dellums and Lee were doing to run influence operations in Congress on behalf of the Cuban-backed government:

"We are now in the process of pulling together the report for the Armed Services Committee, preparing testimony for the Inter-American Affairs Committee Hearings on Grenada, and in the process of trying to come up with a strategy to bring the U.S. and Grenada to the negotiating table."

She told Bishop about the report they were authoring about the Cuban-built airstrip at Point Salines:

"We hope that this report will serve as a basis for a clear understanding and direct counter to the [Reagan] Administgration's policy based on their militarist lines of thinking. If the issue can be turned around soon, then we hope that all this insane rhetoric will be stopped by the U.S."

That would take some strategizing with Bishop. Scott continued,

"However, the specifics need to be mapped out very carefully. This is only part of what Ron needs to discuss with you in as much as this has to be a team effort. (smile) Ron also has some very clear ideas on the best procedure that should be followed on your end if you agree to proceed in such a manner. Oh well, I won't bore you with all this until we are able to sit down and really discuss it. It is really very hard to put into a coherent statement at this time. As you are well aware I act on emotion a lot of the time and I am very excited about the role that Ron is willing to play after trying to get him to Grenada for so long. I know now that all our efforts have not been in vain."

Dellums' chief of staff then told Bishop that she, the congressman, and Barbara Lee met together in Havana after visiting Grenada:

"Ron had a long talk with Barb and me when we got to Havana and cried when he realized that we had been shouldering Grenada alone all this time. Like I said, he's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revo and making it strong. He really admires you as a person and even more so as a leader with courage and foresignt, principle and integrity. Believe me, he doesn't make that kind of statement often about anyone. The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel. (I've known and worked with Ron for many years and the last time I heard him say something like that was in 1977 after a meeting with Fidel)."

Scott then told Bishop about a courier who would bring Dellums' materials for the hearings to Grenada, and wrote of the report on the Point Salines airstrip:

"Well sweet, I must run. Am doing this as quickly as possible. Just found out that Kojo (Chris) is leaving in a few minutes for the airport. I just wanted you to know that we need to talk and soon. Am sending copies of Ron hearings with him. You will be receiving a formal letter of appreciation for the wonderful trip from Ron soon, (As soon as I get around to writing it. (SMILE) but I have to finish this report first.) For the . . . I really need Selwyn's speech to use in this report. Peggy said he had the tape and it had not been transcribed yet. Please see if he has found it yet. It could be very important. Evfen if we don't use it for the report we could use it for the testimony for the hearings on Grenada in May.

"Love you madly and hope to be able to prove it one of these days. Call me soon . . . ."

Scott signed her initials, then hand-wrote a postscript: "P.S. This is confidential rap as you well know. Let me know when you or one of the comrades will be taking a trip somewhere in this hemisphere so we can talk. Notice I said this hemisphere. So we can plan to meet and talk. Call me."

A PDF of of Scott's letter, the original of which is in the National Archives, can be downloaded here: Download Grenada - Scott letter

When Lee succeeded Dellums in Congress, Scott became her chief of staff.

Congresswoman Lee has some explaining to do. Her secretive Cuba trip looks like a replay of what she did more than 25 years ago for Castro's Grenada ally. Anything Lee says ior does on Cuba is suspect. So is anything that other lawmakers do with her.

Major US and European news organizations covered the meeting but did not publish a list of the congressmen in the meeting. The Cuban Communist Party daily Granma says that the lawmakers were: Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Laura Richardson (D-CA), Bobby Rush (D-IL), Melvin Luther Watt (D-CA), and Barbara Lee. "Also particpating were Patrice Willougby, executive assistant to the [Congressional] Black Caucus, and Eulada Watt, wife of Congressman Melvin Luther Watt," according to Granma.

Congressman Rush says he found Raul Castro "to be just the opposite of how he's being portrayed in the media." AP quotes Rush as saying, "I think what really surprised me, but also endeared to him was his keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities." At times, Rush said, the lawmakers and Castro chatted "like old family members."

Lee says she wants to influence President Barack Obama prior to the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Trinadad and Tobago.

Prior to the trip, Lee told her hometown Oakland Tribune newspaper that the US had to open up to Cuba, but did not demand that the Cuban government open up; she blasted US policy as "based on antiquated Cold War-era thinking." She could have used those words to describe her own views.

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.)