THE CIA HIT LIST

                            THE CIA HIT LIST

The following story was found on the LogoPlex BBS.  It is originally

from The SPOTLIGHT newsweekly.  --Joe Gaut

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  [ Edited, for spacing and linebreaks only, by Roy B. Scherer, 23 SEP 93 ]

EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT By Lawrence Wilmot

Murder on a major or minor scale - whether it involved "terminating" an

individual target or decimating an unruly population - is a routine tactic of

the CIA. Although theoretically prohibited by law from killing anyone, the CIA

may well have been responsible directly and indirectly for more violent deaths

over the past 45 years than the U.S. Army, cold-war historians suggest. One

former CIA officer, John Stockwell, claims the agency's worldwide covert

actions have cost "millions of lives." An updated roster of the CIA's victims

would fill hundreds of pages, a SPOTLIGHT reporter exploring the subject

discovered recently. Among the agency's best-known assassination targets:

- In June, 1959, Col. Ahmad Bukkiting, an Indonesian officer, was waylaid and

murdered in his car in Central Sumatra. He was reportedly suspected of trying

to drop out of a CIA-organized military coup against Indonesia's Sukarno

government.

- On January 17, 1961, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo (now Zaire)

was murdered by indigenous forces paid and armed by the CIA. The official

explanation: Lumumba was "a Soviet pawn." The real reason: A financial

consortium controlled by David Rockefeller had set its sights on the region's

rich mineral resources. A compliant and utterly corrupt leader was installed,

Mobutu Sese Seko, whose legendary skimming of foreign aid has turned him into

one of the world's wealthiest men.

- In May, 1961, Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the long-ruling strongman of

the Dominican Republic known as a pro-U.S. nationalist, was shot to death in

his chauffeur-driven limousine by a hit team of local officials recruited and

armed by the CIA. The official explanation: Trujillo was a "human rights"

offender who tended to "terminate" his rivals. The real reason: One of the

enemies liquidated by Trujillo, Dr. Jesus Galindez, was a key CIA undercover

agent.

- In 1961-62, the CIA organized several strikes against Dr. Francois

"Papa Doc" Duvalier, Haiti's sinister dictator. He survived, but a hit team

headed by Clement Barbot, who had been a Haitian presidential bodyguard before

he went to work for the CIA, managed to kill one of Duvalier's daughters and

members of his staff. The reason: White House fears that Duvalier was a

dangerous madman.

- South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated along with his

brother, Ngo Dinh Ngu, by the CIA in 1963, reportedly on direct orders from

the White House.

- On November 22, 1963, during a visit to Dallas, President John F. Kennedy

came under the guns of a hit team whose trail has been traced to the CIA. The

same day, the CIA's chief of clandestine services, Desmond FitzGerald, held a

secret meeting in a Paris hotel room to hand a Cuban contact a poison-tipped

ball-point pen designed to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro. Kennedy died;

the communist dictator survived the CIA's assassination attempt.

- In March, 1965, a French inspection team headed by Col. Roger de Tassigny

traveled through Laos and Vietnam gathering evidence on the booming narcotics

trade supervised and protected by CIA agents. Departing Saigon in a U.S.

helicopter, they were killed in a mid-air explosion. Theofficial explanation:

an accident. The real reason: The CIA saw the investigation as a threat and an

attempt to sabotage its covert networks throughout Indochina.

- Salvador Allende, president of Chile, was overthrown and killed during a

CIA-engineered coup in 1973, in which the intelligence agency conspired with

Chilean military officers to murder the president and install a military junta.

- In June, 1973, Rodolfo "El Cojo" Cisneros and Mario Avila, the reputed

leaders of a Mexican marijuana gang, were shot to death in Panama. Their

murders were part of a top-secret CIA operation code named "Deacon II,"

designed to "eliminate narcotics kingpins beyond the reach of conventional

U.S. law enforcement," in which more than a dozen drug suspects were

reportedly killed.

- Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, in exile from his country after the coup

for his criticism of the CIA's takeover, was killed in a 1976 car bombing in

Washington. All signs point to a CIA hit in the heart of the nation's capital.

- In January, 1978, a team of CIA operatives smuggled a bomb aboard a Cuban

airliner making a refueling stop in Barbados. The plane exploded shortly after

takeoff, killing all 83 aboard. The official explanation: The bomb was

supposed to go off while the airliner was still on the ground, causing heavy

damage but no loss of life, but accidentally went off late. The truth: The

explosives detonated on schedule. The CIA had no regrets for Cuban casualties.

- On January 26, 1980, Francis John Nugan, chairman of the Nugan Hand Bank,

was found shot to death in his Mercedes limousine in Lithgow, Australia.

Nugan's murder - he was found to have been a clandestine CIA money broker and

arms smuggler - is now attributed to the CIA by Australian authorities.

- In retaliation for what it assumed to be Iranian support

for the resurgence of militant Moslems - particularly in Lebanon, where

American hostages included William Buckley, the local station chief of the

agency - the CIA waged a sustained campaign of terrorism and assassination

against Iran from 1981 through 1990. At least 14 key members and religious

leaders of Iran's fundamentalist government were killed or gravely injured.

The agency denied involvement.

- As part of this campaign mentioned above, the CIA tried to kill Sheik

Mohammed Fadlallah, spiritual leader of a faction suspected of kidnaping

Americans, in 1986 with a massive carbomb. The sheik escaped, but 80

bystanders were killed.

- In October, 1987, Rolando Maferrer, an exiled Cuban arms dealer and

right-wing militant, was killed by a car bomb in Miami. After years of

investigation, his murder has now been linked to the CIA.

- On August 11, 1988, Malcolm McHugh, a Canadian arms dealer, was killed by a

gunshot in his Brussels apartment. He had reportedly surprised a team of CIA

burglars going through his files in search of evidence of illicit trade with

Cuba.

- On August 17, 1988, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's president and military

strongman, died in a mid-air explosion of his aircraft. His death came after a

sharp dispute between his government and the CIA over conduct of the civil war

in Afghanistan bogged down in a bitter deadlock, and is now generally ascribed

to the agency by Pakistani investigators.

- In October, 1989, Whitman Conte, an American pilot, was killed in South

Africa by a bomb hidden in the luggage compartment of his small plane. Long

involved in CIA-sponsored diamond-smuggling flights, Conte was reportedly

preparing to sell his story to the media when he was silenced.

- In September, 1990, an exiled Egyptian teacher, Maloof Haddad, was murdered

in Paris for alleged terrorist activities involving U.S. diplomats and the

1975 slaying of Saudi Arabia's oil minister.

- Derek Swanepool, a British journalist, made repeated visits last year to the

Philippines collecting evidence on reported payoffs received by U.S. officials

and CIA agents who helped overthrow the government of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

In February, 1993, he was found shot to death in his hotel room. Swanepool

had reportedly turned up pay-dirt that would have led to high-level

indictments among the Washington national security bureaucrats who ousted

Marcos. Sources familiar with CIA tactics and motives say it was an agency hit.

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The story above is taken from The SPOTLIGHT newspaper, published weekly in

Washington, D.C. by Liberty Lobby. Subscriptions, $36/year. Contact, The

SPOTLIGHT, 300 Independence Ave., SE, Washington, D.C. 20003, or call

(202)546-5611.

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