Conclusion

The Iran-Contra scandal halted much of these paramilitary campaigns in the late 1980s. That was because it required many of the most important actors, John Singlaub among them, to spend much of their time testifying in Congress and preparing legal defenses, rather than working overseas. Within a few years, the collapse of the Soviet Union made the anticommunist international obsolete. Still, the ideas and impulses that had animated it lived on. Those legacies were most evident in the rise of the private military firms abroad and the radicalization of the right-wing paramilitaries at home.

Covert Warriors for Hire

In the late 1970s, a new set of Americans took up the dream of a global anticommunist revolution. Many were high-ranking CIA and military officers who had been forced from their jobs by the Ford and Carter administrations in the wake of the Vietnam War. As Congress passed new laws constraining the United States’ clandestine services, these ex-soldiers and spies argued that the state’s deteriorating covert war-making abilities signaled a broader decline in U.S. power. To remedy that, retired covert warriors such as U.S. Army General John Singlaub, a thirty-year veteran of special operations, entered the world of conservative activism, which promised both steady pay and power in retirement. Working in the shadow of the state, they sought to revitalize a form of combat to which they had dedicated their lives. Some even started private military firms to fill in for the U.S. government. Meanwhile, hundreds of American men, mostly disgruntled Vietnam veterans, sought new lives as mercenaries, first in Southeast Asia and then in Rhodesia and Angola. In the late 1970s, these two camps of revanchist Americans—retired covert warriors and aspiring mercenaries—established patterns of paramilitarism that would transform the anticommunist international in the Reagan era.

Crossroads of Conservatism

The rise of the US conservative movement in the 1960s opened new possibilities for the anticommunist international. Marvin Liebman, William F. Buckley, Clarence Manion, and other leaders helped create an international crossroads that linked conservative activists, students, businessmen, politicians, and media figures from the United States to kindred forces abroad. In the Caribbean basin, these influential Americans allied themselves with authoritarian right-wing regimes in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and lent support to Cuban exiles bent on retaking their homeland from Fidel Castro. In Southeast Asia, they joined leaders from Taiwan, South Korea, and South Vietnam in calling for greater Asian involvement in the Vietnam War. They also collaborated on psychological warfare campaigns to sway the hearts and minds of ordinary people in Vietnam and other zones of conflict. In Africa, conservative Americans worked on behalf of Moïse Tshombe’s breakaway regime in the Congo, before shifting their efforts to the newly independent, white-supremacist state of Rhodesia. Moving in ever-wider arcs abroad, U.S. conservatives brought home parables about the kinds of action needed to purge the United States of any vestige of communism.

Private Wars in Central America

Growing more confident, John Singlaub and other retired covert warriors launched a series of paramilitary campaigns in Central America in the 1980s. As the Reagan administration faced stiff resistance about its wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador from Congress and the American public, many on the right concluded that the private sector was best suited to channel money, weapons, supplies, and advisors to embattled paramilitary groups. Starting in 1981, Singlaub and his allies organized rallies, sponsored television and radio programs, and published books, pamphlets, and articles to raise millions of dollars in private donations from wealthy individuals and businesses, international groups, and grassroots organizations. Then they used these funds to establish private military aid programs that they hoped would not only fill in for the United States military and intelligence services but also do a better job for less money. This struggle against foreign enemies, made possible by will and weapons, simultaneously legitimized a growing paramilitary subculture in the United States. For it presented a vision of combat in which ordinary citizens took up arms to fight communism.

The Flames of Anticommunist Revolution

The anticommunist international emerged in the early years of the Cold War. As many right-leaning movements around the world grew dissatisfied with the US government and its response to the apparently rising tide of communism, they sought common cause with each other. In the United States, activist Marvin Liebman, an erstwhile socialist turned fierce anticommunist, labored tirelessly to link the burgeoning US conservative movement to new allies abroad. Journeying through Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, Liebman bonded with an array of right-wing groups, especially the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Through these connections, leading US conservatives grew convinced that homegrown forces—especially paramilitaries they called “freedom fighters”—were in the vanguard of an unfolding international revolution.

Introduction

The introduction opens with the story of John Singlaub, a retired US Army general who spearheaded covert campaigns to aid anticommunist freedom fighters in Asia, Africa, and Latin America the 1980s. Singlaub’s work serves as an entry point into the anticommunist international—a globe-spanning network of conservative and right-wing forces that worked in concert across the Cold War era. Drawing upon convictions that dated back to the 1950s, Singlaub and many others hoped to foment a worldwide anticommunist revolution, liberating humankind from the threat of totalitarianism. Breaking with conventional histories that portray these forces as backwards-looking reactionaries, this book argues that the Cold War Right was internationalist in its orientation and revolutionary in its aims.

Rebels for the Cause

In the mid-1980s, John Singlaub and those around him tried to globalize the covert war campaigns they had launched in Central America. By 1985, he and others were working to support paramilitary forces in not only Nicaragua and El Salvador but also Afghanistan, Angola, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Speaking in a language of masculinity and brotherhood, they linked these disparate conflicts into a joint struggle that promised a final triumph over the Soviet Union by dragging it into a series of unwinnable wars. As Reagan entered his second term, retired covert warriors and a legion of conservative activists strove to make that plan into a reality. They traveled to Afghanistan, Angola, and Southeast Asia to meet with rebels in the field. They solicited donations from individuals, businesses, churches, and international groups to lobby Congress. They utilized a variety of media outlets to valorize the world’s freedom fighters in U.S. political culture. And they tried to give rebel groups whatever weapons and supplies they could. Combined, all of this activity constituted a relatively unpublicized, private, and multinational paramilitary operation.

Revolution and Counterrevolution

In the early 1970s, U.S. conservatives’ proliferating connections to kindred movements abroad proved difficult to manage. When an attempt to lead a new group called the World Anti-Communist League ended in disaster, Americans began to turn their back on the anticommunist international. It was too radical and too uncontrollable, some said. As Americans withdrew from the movement, new leaders emerged. In Latin America, much of which fell under the sway of authoritarian military dictatorships in the 1970s, right-wing civilians and state officials mobilized a network of security forces, private groups, mercenaries, and paramilitaries to purge their societies of suspected subversives and eliminate their opponents abroad. They would make the anticommunist international more lethal.