George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Contras, or attacking their opponents--calling them ``extremists,'' etc.--it is likely to have
been planted by the U.S. government, by the George Bush-NSC ``private donors'''
apparatus.
March 17, 1983:
Professional assassinations manager Felix I. Rodriguez met with Bush aide Donald P.
Gregg, officially and secretly, at the White House. Gregg then recommended to National
Security Council adviser Robert `` Bud '' McFarlane a plan for El Salvador-based military
attacks on a target area of Central American nations including Nicaragua. Gregg's March
17, 1983 memo to McFarlane said: `` The attached plan, written in March of last year,
grew out of two experiences: ``--Anti-Vietcong operations run under my direction in III
Corps Vietnam from 1970-1972. These operations [see below], based on ... a small elite
force ... produced very favorable results. ``--Rudy Enders, who is now in charge of what
is left of the para-military capability of the CIA, went to El Salvador in 1981 to do a
survey and develop plans for effective anti-guerrilla operations. He came back and
endorsed the attached plan. (I should add that Enders and Felix Rodriguez, who wrote the
attached plan, both worked for me in Vietnam and carried out the actual operations
outlined above.) ``This plan encountered opposition and skepticism from the U.S.
military.... ``I believe the plan can work based on my experience in Vietnam....''@s7
Three years later, Bush agent Rodriguez would be publicly exposed as the supervisor of
the covert Central American network illegally supplying arms to the Contras; that
exposure of Rodriguez would begin the explosive public phase of the ``Iran-Contra
scandal.'' Rodriguez's uncle had been Cuba's public works minister under Fulgencio
Batista, and his family fled Castro's 1959 revolution. Felix Rodriguez joined the CIA, and
was posted to the CIA's notorious Miami Station in the early 1960s. The Ted Shackley-E.
Howard Hunt organization there, assisted by Meyer Lansky's and Santos Trafficante's
mafiosi, trained Rodriguez and other Cubans in the arts of murder and sabotage.
Rodriguez and his fellow CIA trainees took part in numerous terror raids against Castro's
Cuba. Felix Rodriguez recounted his early adventures in gun-running under false pretexts
in a ghost-written book, Shadow Warrior:
Just around the time President Kennedy was assassinated, I left for Central America. I spent
almost two years in Nicaragua, running the communications network for [our enterprise].... [O]ur
arms cache was in Costa Rica. The funding for the project came from the CIA, but the money's
origin was hidden through the use of a cover corporation, a company called Maritima BAM,
which was [Manuel] Artim's initials spelled backwards. Periodically, deposits of hundreds of
thousands of dollars would be made in Maritima BAM's accounts, and disbursed by Cuban
corporation officers. The U.S. government had the deniability it wanted; we got the money we
needed.... In fact, what we did in Nicaragua twenty-five years ago has some pretty close parallels
to the Contra operation today.@s8
Rodriguez followed his CIA boss Ted Shackley to Southeast Asia in 1970. Shackley and
Donald Gregg put Rodriguez into the huge assassination and dope business which
Shackley and his colleagues ran during the Indochina war; this bunch became the heart of
the ``Enterprise'' that went into action 15 to 20 years later in Iran- Contra. Shackley
funded opium-growing Meo tribesmen in murder, and used the dope proceeds in turn to
fund his hit squads. He formed the Military Assistance Group-Special Operations Group
(MAG-SOG) political murder unit; Gen. John K. Singlaub was a commander of MAG-