Shadow Warfare by Larry Hancock

Author:Larry Hancock [Hancock, Larry; Wexler, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023574
Publisher: Counterpoint

Considering that David Morales was the single-known senior CIA/military officer in contact with all the Southern Cone military groups, acting as a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the period leading up to as well as the actual formation of the Condor pact, we can only speculate on his personal impact. Given Morales’s documented extreme anticommunism, his longtime involvement with blacklisting and infrastructure warfare, and his personal aggressiveness, his advice would certainly have had an impact on the offices he was advising. It would also be difficult to imagine that his training included a heavy emphasis on issues of operational restraint. And as we review the ultimate consequences of the Condor program in the remainder of this chapter, it is very likely that with the rise of death squads, the torture of tens of thousands of civilians, an equal number kidnapped and “disappeared,” and a combined death toll in the hundreds of thousands, neither the CIA nor the Joint Chiefs might have been happy to fully acknowledge Morales’s final remarks that his responsibility had been to ensure that U.S. policies were coordinated, supported, and carried out by the nations he was advising.

In 1972 another longtime counterinsurgency professional, Felix Rodriguez, moved from supporting Phoenix field operations in the Saigon region of Vietnam to a new post in Argentina. He describes being personally requested by the commanding general of the Argentine army, whom he had briefed on intelligence and counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. Rodriguez was working with and for Tomas Sanchez de Bustamante, commander of the 1st Army and the federal police, the second most powerful military figure in Argentina at that time. As a CIA employee, he worked under commercial cover in Argentina, specializing as an advisor in counterterrorism and “low-intensity” warfare. He stayed in that position until 1973.478

During their Latin American activities, both Morales and Rodriguez would have been working under the CIA Western Hemisphere chief, and as of 1972 that was none other than Ted Shackley. While Morales and the other Vietnam alumni who moved into Latin American work might have seen Phoenix in action in the field, Ted Shackley would have had the broader, headquarters view. Among other duties, Shackley had overseen CIA activities in support of the Phoenix project. He had arrived in Saigon from Laos in 1968, in the earliest days of Phoenix development. While the overall infrastructure warfare program had been administratively assigned to CORDS (civil operations and revolutionary development support) the CIA provided the financing for most of its key elements, as well as staff personnel in Saigon and field officers in the provinces. When Shackley took over from William Colby as chief of Saigon station in 1968, he had to become familiar with both the operational and political issues relating to Phoenix operations. In fact Shackley became personally notorious for coopting Phoenix intelligence assets for CIA control and use. Many of Shackley’s Vietnam personnel, including David Morales, Felix Rodriguez, Tony Sforza, and Rudy Enders (all JM WAVE Cuba project alumni) worked either in or around Phoenix in Vietnam and went on to serve in Latin America.

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