The Colonels Corner Hidden Terrors by AJ Langguth Part 6

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Transcript

0:00 co-host and for some reason it won't take it it's probably because it was in the in the middle of kicking me out of my space again which interestingly enough for probably the last 10 days it has not done that so I don't know if there's an update I haven't um updated or what's going on but it just kicked me out again so

0:34 I think we're on target, Colonel. That's the issue. I think you're right. Bridget, if you can hear me, I sent you the co-host and it kicked me out. There you go. It says you got it. It kicked me out when I gave it to SR-71. So just be mindful of that. Okay. Now, Rumble.

1:05 Won't let me go live. It keeps. Let's try to do this again. You must be striking a nerve here lately. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Oh, my gosh. Now it will not load. Hold on. Enter. There we go. Go live. All right.

2:05 Now it's working. There's always going to be something. All right. So I do have an announcement. If you will remind me, Bridget, because there will be more people in the room towards the end. When we finish with the material, I do want to make an announcement. Okay. So we are reading Hidden Terror by A.J. Languth.

2:39 We're on chapter four. Let's begin. So this one, this chapter starts with the very few of the U.S. citizens living in Brazil didn't like the coup. They kind of were neutral on the police advisors, depending on where they lived and the aggressiveness of the police advisors.

3:20 The closer their ties to Brazil's business and military circles, the more strongly they believe that the coup was long overdue. It didn't trouble the military advisors that overnight there was a change in their role. There's another guy who was also there whose first initial was you. He went by Alexis Johnson. And of course, we know about Byron Ingalls.

3:56 In February of 1963, Dan Mitterrand had been transferred to Rio, where he began to spend more time with the police upper echelon, like the colonels. The people in the national police very much liked him because he got quote-unquote results. They also liked all of the equipment that he was able to procure for them.

4:31 revolvers, radios, riot control equipment. He also was able to get more people into the police academy in Washington, D.C. because he had left there before coming to Brazil. He introduced the policeman's notebook, a standard procedure used in the U.S. to keep track of everyone that they encountered. Mitterrand's job expanded with his new

5:02 assignment to Rio, and he worked very closely with the state police. One of the colonels who said that he had never driven an actual police car, he had only ever driven an army jeep, and they were using, again, American procured sedans for police work. Mitterrand spent

5:36 four hours with the new commander discussing budgets, distribution of equipment, the assignment of men. And after they ran through all of the major topics, he would repeat the discussion with the commander's top 12. And then what they expected was to take the curriculum that Dan was presenting to all of them. And in turn, the next echelon would train 12 more and then 12 more and 12 more.

6:08 He spent a lot of time at the police barracks. Mitterrand, obviously, was fluent in Portuguese, which was the primary language used. For months before the coup, the officers had grievances, each day sharing the most recent outrages committed against them by Gouliart's supporters. Supposedly, their kids were shunned because no one liked the police.

6:44 That's all going to be unleashed. As the military regime tightened controls over the Brazilian press, few U.S. advisers around the national police were arguing against the censorship, even though it set a dangerous precedent. Again, none of these CIA coups ended up with a democracy. They all ended up with a dictatorship and primarily militarily led.

7:14 with military officers, as we established earlier, that was trained in the United States. The military regime's leading economist, Roberto Campos, was sensibly ordering the national priorities by favoring industrial development over all other goals. Coming from the world's leading industrial nation, they knew they foresaw better than the impatient Brazilian students that

7:45 Their way was the best way to do things. The generals are saying, sure, share the pie, but let's make it a bigger pie before we divide it. And that was basically the opening to the privatization and the U.S. oligarchs expanding their presence in Brazil. Over the early years of the police program under Kubitschek, Quadros, and even Goliart,

8:12 Most of the U.S. advisers, unless they were CIA officers using the USAID program for cover, had not faced the problem of political subversion. Now there was a new class of criminals, the political rebels, and they had sympathies with the population. Advisors like Mitterrand might have faced a dilemma, but they had their own way of dealing with it.

8:42 The policemen from both Brazil and the United States knew how to deal with subversives. Subversives were trying to infiltrate institutions like schools, labor unions, and church, which is the allegation that they used for themselves to infiltrate all of those things. The danger might be clear, but the means of dealing with it was not.

9:18 gone to Brasilia with his hundreds of thousands of files to set up Brazil's first national intelligence service. The acronym was SNI. But sometimes the material in those dossiers were hard to prove. Thousands of men and women, according to the police, were escaping their judgment and punishment in the wake of the coup. As it turned out, there was a solution at hand.

9:49 The Washington students at International Police Academy would later be shown a film called The Battle of Algiers. Now, keep in mind that the Battle of Algiers was the French keeping Algeria as a slave colony. The film portrayed policemen loyal to France regrouping at night into secret squads.

10:18 that wrecked reprisals on Nigerian nationalists, bombing their homes and killing their families. So while the National Police Academy in Washington, D.C. didn't tell them to do those things, there was a series of movies shown to the students there that basically put those ideas in their head and they were joking after the movie.

10:47 That was kind of like just shrugged off like, yeah, that's what they had to do. So this is how they get out of saying, oh, well, that stuff wasn't in our curriculum. But your curriculum didn't show you showing those movies either. For years, the tough suburbs of Rio, gangs had contested control over different illegal activity. When a gang leader needed to eliminate a rival.

11:21 he would pay a policeman to do the job for him. The U.S. advisors knew of this practice, and in the years before the 64 coup, they used it as one of the arguments for raising a policeman's pay. Yet the practice of off-duty murder was never stamped out, only channeled into new purposes. The year of the military takeover, Rio policeman named Milton La Croque was murdered by a criminal.

11:51 nicknamed Horseface. LaCroix's friends on the force vowed to revenge him by killing 10 gangsters. In a short time, it became clear they were basically crazy in their seeking of revenge. The bodies of 30 gang members were found dumped at a roadside and in remote fields. Pinned to the bodies were

12:24 were handwritten notes. I was a thief or I stole drugs. And it was signed, the death squad. That was the police. Even under military regimes, which was substituting army trials for civilian ones, the police found justice lagging. So the quick, sure judgments of the population began to spread. La Croix's murder

12:57 was finally trapped on a farm. After he was shot to death, each policeman unloaded his gun into the corpse. Such ritual killings had been clean in its own way, but bodies began turning up with marks of torture, cigarette burns, knife marks, and the death squads also started courting publicity for their execution.

13:27 In Rio, a man calling himself Red Rose alerted newspapers to where they could find the latest dead body. In Sao Paulo, public relations were handled by an officer with the code name White Lily. Although some members of the death squads maintained a formal fiction that they themselves were not involved, they let their identities be known among the elements of the public.

13:54 because they thought that they would admire them. One such officer was Sergio Fernando Flory, 31 years old at the time of the coup and very ambitious. The son of a coroner who had died when the boy was 11, Flory, with his slicked back hair, was a member of the death squads. He made himself famous.

14:23 as word circulated about his executions throughout Brazil. Flurry enjoyed the attention. The Sao Paulo police was only one of several branches of the government in the city that had begun to collect information about subversives. Each of the armed services had their own intelligence branches and did this as well. Henning Albert Boysland, the president of the Liquid Nation,

14:54 gas company, acted on these concerns. Boylson had come to Brazil from Denmark as an official of Firestone Rubber Company. We've seen Firestone in several of our stories. 17 years later, he became a naturalized Brazilian citizen. He moved easily through the prosperous society, picking up a host of influential friends, like former minister

15:24 Helio Botreo, Ernesto Giesel, the president of Petro Boss, and General Sarmento. Those were all of his acquaintances. He occupied a house in a very wealthy area. The suspicion that Boylston was a CIA agent grew when he began soliciting money for a new organization to be called OBAN.

15:57 O-B-A-N, in honor of basically like bandits. The explorers and treasure hunters who had once trekked across Latin America is what it was named after. OBAN united the various military and police intelligence services in a crusade that went well beyond its jurisdiction.

16:28 Boylson and his cohorts put heavy pressure on fellow businessmen to donate money to Obigan. Their message was not so important from De Pravis. Only Boylson could draw on a squad of volunteers from the military and police. He could guarantee results. It was not long before the U.S. subsidiaries based in San Paolo

16:57 were calling on the U.S. consulate asking for guidance. Should they contribute to OBAN? The political section of the American embassy said use your own judgment. They were staying out of it, although one of their people was actually associated with it. At least one U.S. businessman, after making such a call, did receive a follow-up visit from a consular officer.

17:28 who told him approvingly about the contributions of other U.S. companies because, in his words, it was to ensure civil peace. In 1965, another development helped to reinforce the interest of Brazil's military in the quote-unquote communist threat. At LBJ's urging, Castillo Branco joined the U.S. in sending troops to the Dominican Republic.

18:00 Among the Brazilian units to go north were two Marine battalions. Since the U.S. military command understood the difficulty Brasilia would face in explaining casualties, the Brazilian role was largely defensive. U.S. troops were to hold and expand the international corridor, while the Brazilian Marines were to do their part by demonstrating hemispheric unity for the invasion. In other words, it was all bullshit to say that it was a joint force.

18:30 They were kept well back of any boundaries. To the young Brazilian troops, the situation soon became demoralizing. They had come to save a sister republic from that quote-unquote communist threat, although what was going on in the Dominican Republic was very much like what had just went on in Brazil. There wasn't a communist threat. Yet instead of welcoming them with flowers, the people were very hostile.

18:58 because they knew who was behind the unrest in the Dominican Republic. From the U.S. camp came stories of GIs who would go out dancing with attractive women and be found the next morning with their throats slit. One incident involved a band of Dominican boys who came to the edge of a Brazilian encampment and pelted them with stones. At first, the Brazilians ignored them.

19:26 The second day, the boys returned. They were only children, nine or ten years old. They reasoned they could be won over. But the boys shouted insults and ran away. The third day, the boys came with grenades. Several Brazilian troops were killed. At home, they were listed as military accidents or that they had died in traffic accidents. From that time on, the Brazilian Marines

19:57 Open fire on anything that moved. Whatever other effect on the Dominican Republic, the 1965 invasion led to an outpouring of U.S. aid to the dictatorial government that was installed. Some $100 million ended up and a new Office of Public Safety program for them as well.

20:23 Within three years, one third of the 18 police advisors that were there were CIA officers operating under Office of Public Safety cover. In Washington, the Office of Public Safety had remained immune to public embarrassment as it went about two of its chief functions, allowing the CIA to plant men in local police sensitive areas around the world.

20:52 And after careful observation on their home territory, bringing to the U.S. prime candidates to enroll and become CIA employees themselves. In other words, they were using the Office of Public Safety as a ruse in order to go in and recruit local police all over the world to become CIA agents.

21:21 Besides the course at the International Police Academy, the CIA was sending foreign police officers to its own clandestine center, a four story townhouse in Washington, D.C. There, under the name of International Police Services, Inc., Asian, African and Latin American police were trained in surveillance, the use of informants and other police methods. They were processed as though.

21:51 this course were also administered through the USAID. Along with foreign students, the Institute trained U.S. officers destined for South Vietnam. And we know how that turned out. As head of the Office of Public Safety, Byron Engel was more sensitive than his CIA colleagues to the need for keeping his program uncompromised by any overt acknowledgement.

22:20 that spying was going on. His new associates at the Office of Public Safety heard him arguing heatedly with a CIA officer in Langley, Virginia, as he tried to retain some measure of being a separate entity. Throughout the early 60s, Engel succeeded, although his efforts did not end the campaign within USAID against his police program. One USAID official,

22:50 was sufficiently concerned about the first reports of torture out of Brazil to start checking the requisition orders from the Office of Public Safety. Electric shocks, he knew, were usually administered with military-filled telephones, and over those he had no control, but he could try to prevent generators being sent under the guise of USAID to be used for the same torture.

23:17 This official soon came to believe that his watchfulness was useless. There were many legitimate purposes for small generators, and to ban them outright on the assumption that they would be used to abuse people may cripple the USAID program. Ultimately, he decided one had to trust the humanity and discretion of police advisors. That was a big mistake.

23:45 But when put to the test during the Kennedy administration, the Office of Public Safety quickly demonstrated that there were few hesitations about breaking the rule to achieve their success. Since the irregularities were all for the quote-unquote best cause, Engel had not feared any reprisals from the president or anyone else. In 1962, for example, a group of Venezuelan

24:18 Citizens, inspired supposedly by Castro, formed an Armed Forces of National Liberation and set out to discredit the elected president, Benton Court. The FALN wanted to persuade voters to boycott elections the following year. Although the group never totaled more than 500 members, by fanning out, they were able to bomb a luxury hotel,

24:48 burn a Sears and Roebuck warehouse, here's Sears again, and attack the U.S. Embassy. When Franco loaned several Impressionist paintings for an exhibit in Caracas, the FALN carried out several of the pieces. The Venezuelan police seemed helpless to act, even when patrolmen were being shot down in the street.

25:15 Under the pressure from Kennedy's administration, Engel borrowed four Spanish-speaking officers from the LAPD that had been trained by the CIA and sent them to Caracas to give intensive classes in police work. Had the mission been exposed, the Kennedy administration might have been forced into a round of excuses and apologies. Had any of the L.A. cops been killed, there would have been no provision for contact.

25:44 compensating their families because it was all off the record. What was behind the scenes? That was behind the scenes. The public image of Engel's program remained positive. Bobby Kennedy, now a senator in New York, had been happy to address the first class that completed the training in Washington's police academy. Graduation came one month before the military coup in Brazil. Kennedy warned the class,

26:14 that the world today is buffeted by winds of change. At the academy, however, most of the actual training seemed aimed at preventing that change, although the intention was seldom committed to paper. The training syllabus, which was not classified, had never been released to the press, and one of the International Police Academy officials explained that to do so would be communist fodder.

26:47 And we didn't want to help them. The training sheets that were eventually made available were very vague. The foreign policemen themselves understood why they were being sent to Washington. Even before the coup in July 1963, one Brazilian officer described the academy to the governor of Sao Paulo as, quote, the latest method in the field of dispersion.

27:21 of strikes and striking workers, unquote. He would learn, he said, how to use dogs, clubs, and modernized mechanisms to repress labor efforts. And again, this is on purpose because the entire mission of the CIA overseas is to squash effective labor movements for the oligarchs.

27:54 doing business in these countries. The basic academy ran 15 weeks and was offered twice a year in French, several times in Spanish, and for African and Asian in English as well. The first two and a half months were spent in the standard introductory course. The last four weeks was advanced training in 10 specialties, including immigration and customs control, protection of dignitaries,

28:23 criminal violence control, which dealt with airline security, bomb threats, kidnapping, extortions, and assassinations. And what we found in other books is the bomb threats was basically taught as on a curriculum piece of paper, how to dismantle a bomb while at the same time teaching them how to make the bomb.

28:52 That was done in Texas. As far as kidnapping, extortion, and assassination, they weren't there to prevent that. They were there to do that. Candidates were expected to be between the ages of 21 and 45, which oftentimes got waived, especially if they wanted to send high school seniors. Dan Mederone had become skilled at screening applicants for this program. His successor,

29:26 was not so adept. His successor basically did not have a high view of the candidates and didn't think most of them warranted the money used to send them to the United States. Brazilian officers attending the International Police Academy often came away with believing

29:55 that the courses, like those that had been offered in Panama, were beneath them. 60% of the student body came from Central and South America. And some Brazilians didn't like attending class with Costa Ricans and Guatemalans. And that goes back to the comment that we've made often of the prejudice of Latin America within itself.

30:23 There is definitely a pecking order there, and they don't even like being in the same room. The highlight of each course was an exercise first developed during the school days in Panama. It was called Operation San Martin. San Martin was an imaginary country with an equally non-existent capital called Rio Bravo. Its neighbor and enemy was called Mau Land.

30:55 like in Mao in China. Few foreign students recognized that the map of Rio Bravo was actually an aerial photograph of Baltimore with overlays of imposing government buildings and streets renamed in Spanish. The warm-up exercises were simple. A dignitary was arriving from a friendly country. How would students deploy their policemen to protect him?

31:24 Infiltrators from Malian were staging a national disturbance. The villains in every semester, this delighted the students, were instructors from the International Police Academy faculty. Their mugshots emphasizing a sinister look. One instructor kept his hair crew cut and his name during the exercises was the Nazi.

31:55 A dozen IPA students were divided into three groups. One joined the instructors in creating the problems, writing communist propaganda, plotting this disruption, and one faction made the decisions for putting the insurrection down. And the other group was composed of onlookers and judges. The chief of police from Somali, an accomplished player,

32:24 complained afterwards that the exercise was harder than any comparable situation in real life. The exercise was held at the Police Operations Control Center, a room in a nearby building. Students chosen to suppress the demonstrations were connected by telephones and teletypes to a control booth. Such direct communications they found to be a burden. One line connected directly to the prime minister who demanded action.

32:57 provided it did not embarrass his party. One of the instructors called from the control booth with snacks, like, my problem is the reporters on the scene. They're getting in the way. They're interfering with our police work. So again, driving a narrative. The instructor repeatedly called over and over about what they were going to do about the reporters.

33:31 And he kept etching it up. GD it. You've got to do something. You've got to do something. And then one of the students yells out, OK, OK, we'll arrest them. So during the course, it says, I'm getting calls from AP and UPI. I'm catching hell, the prime minister says. The student police chief had to improvise a way out of the ordeal.

34:03 The students telephoned for a bus, ordered the reporters released, briefed them on rioting, then drove them back to the scene to let them see for themselves. Besides the training exercises, San Martin was the locale of a film shot in Panama called The First Line of Defense. The instructors memorized a short introduction in Spanish. It went like this.

34:28 The events you will see take place in the mythical Latin American Republic of San Martin, but they are not fictitious events. They really happened. You will see the people of San Martin are mostly favorable to their government, else it could not stand, and that the police work with the people and are truly the first line of defense. In the film, the center of subversion was the National Committee for Agarian Reform.

34:58 acronym CONTRA. Once an organization of student reformers, it had fallen into the hands of others. Across town, more strangers, possibly communists, disrupted a meeting of striking workers from a fertilizer factory. The plot involved a police spy, a Czechoslovakian gun smuggler who had guns in a box marked sugar.

35:30 and a riot outside the factory that became too frenzied for the police to handle. The chief ceded responsibility to the military, and the army dispelled the protesters with tear gas, fire hoses, and other means. As the film ends, two police drew the moral for several of the smiling children. A new day has dawned over this city. Civil police

35:58 enjoyed the people's confidence because they had restored peace. The IPA officials anticipated that some of the students might object to the film. To cope with them, the instructor was told to break in at any sign of restiveness to assure the class that the film presented only suggestions on how to proceed, not directions. They pertained to the amount of

36:28 Hold on a second. My computer's doing weird things. They pertain to the amount of equipment at disposal of the police chief. The inequalities between the U.S. supplies and that of that the students had at home became glaringly obvious. They also were exposed to more when they went to Fort Myers for field training in riot control. Inevitably, they came back impressed with.

37:03 gas masks, shields, batons, riot guns, pepper shot, and rubber bullets. The instructor was expected to turn any shortcomings into a challenge, basically going back to their countries and demanding these types of supplies. They also said that gave them like hints in other practical efforts.

37:34 The Academy also showed more conventional training, like a 12-minute film called The Police Baton that was created by the LAPD, one called The Third Challenge made by the Department of Defense, the use of tear gas, which was basically created by a PR firm working for Lake Erie Chemical Company. In Brazil, the local advisors also used a film.

38:05 on interrogation that was created by the FBI. They dubbed it in Portuguese. During class hours at the International Police Academy, discussions of domestic politics was not allowed. The academy's official liked to point out that whether you were in Somalia, Ethiopia, or Brazil, you were all dealing with the same thing.

38:35 And that was the communist threat. Few students missed the purpose behind the International Police Academy. The academy had been set up to train police to fight, quote unquote, communism. Wherever it existed, it didn't matter if it was a woman, a student, or your neighbor. If they were dubbed a communist, they had to be neutralized.

39:12 Even students not considered sufficiently qualified to be passed on to the CIA for professional intelligence work, they were instructed on how to effectively combat communism. One of the things that they said, there was a guy by the name of Jack Goin, G-O-I-N. He was a specialist in what was called preventative law enforcement.

39:46 In his illustration, if you were a rural policeman and you've stopped to talk with a farmer about his sick cow, in the course of the conversation, you ask him, have you seen any strangers? Do you know anything about your neighbors? That type of thing. U.S. advisors had coped with local customs to varying degrees of ingenuity.

40:16 Foreign policemen coming to the United States similarly found native practices confounding. At first, grading at the academy was a problem because one of the colonels that came brought his major aid with them and the major was in the classroom with him and he outperformed the colonel. That couldn't be allowed. So they stopped grading. A third world student.

40:44 was arrested for shoplifting from a local drugstore. He later said that he waited for the clerk, but when the clerk took too long to get to him, he just took the shit and left. And he said, I had intent to go back and pay for it, but in the interim, the CIA went to the drugstore and made sure.

41:11 that they dropped the charges because if they didn't, it was going to be an international national security problem. Once an African student was picked up on a rape charge during a lineup, the victim had positively identified him and those charges were dropped too. Many Black students arrived at the International Police Academy certain.

41:42 that racism was going to blight their stay. However, they quickly found out that most of the population in Washington, D.C. was also Black, to their surprise. Because, of course, back home, they had heard all about the racist Americans. Okay. The Office of Public Safety had been sending police training teams to South Vietnam, and as the years passed, the stories would reach Washington, D.C.

42:16 and become increasingly disturbing. Around the U.S. embassy in Saigon, there were allusions to torture and the murder of political prisoners once they were captured, with the agents of the United States in the same room. Similar reports had started to come in from places like Iran, Taiwan, Greece, and then Brazil.

42:48 But the official position of USAID and the Office of Public Safety is we don't have anything to do with torture. Before discussing the procedure of questioning, students were briefed on what were the best physical surroundings in order to conduct interrogations. And of course, they basically said, you know, leave the lights on the entire time, no windows, a two-way mirror.

43:21 And they were taught like communication signals so that there wasn't any conversation between the two interrogators and that you generally had a good cop and a bad cop, all of those types of things. And then they told them about the signs that you look for, you know, like heavy breathing or raising pulse.

43:47 Or sweating. And it's not like somebody who knows they're going to be tortured wouldn't display all of those things anyway. So it goes on and gives a little bit more detail. And they also got to the point where they were telling them to bait the prisoner into a confession. And most of the police from these different countries.

44:22 First question was why not just beat the shit out of them to begin with when they got through all of the technicalities, which of course is what they wanted them to do anyway. And then one instructor argued that any torture could be ineffective because some people don't feel pain. Others, he suggested, could be reduced to pleas and trembling without even a hand laid on them.

44:53 A former policeman from the Southwest advised students, bring in the transformer and electrical wires. The first man who hits a prisoner, if you hit the prisoner first, the International Police Academy instructors was telling you that's not the right thing because sometimes you can get information out of them without ever hitting them. So one Brazilian policeman interrupted.

45:30 and said, let's cut out the bullshit. If I can get you to swear that no policeman in the United States ever slapped a prisoner, I'll kiss your ass. That's pretty blunt. By the mid-60s, enough of the students had been exposed to U.S. intelligence methods in their own country to take the International Police Academy's instruction about nonviolence and throw it out the window. For example, in South Vietnam,

46:04 One of the U.S.-trained police officers began his list of three methods of interrogation with torture and said that it may or may not bring results. But he thanked the free world, the U.S. most of all, for making interrogations more effective by adding technical equipment to do it with.

46:35 Ovali, a detective in Colombia's secret department, said that a government must kill or capture guerrillas in order to reassure the population that the rebel cause cannot prevail. Inspector Madhop Rana of Nepal wrote that an interrogator could extract valuable information either by getting a subject drunk or injecting him with truce serum.

47:07 He also discussed starving a man, hitting him, or subjecting him to steady drops of water on his head. But he concluded that those things should be used as a last resort because sometimes, again, people just talk. Another guy from Nepal reported that the International Police Academy's faculty reported that

47:37 He had beaten suspects after he became the district inspector in 1964. He had seen other interrogators grow careless, though, and hit tender parts of the body so that the suspect died. And we didn't want that to happen because a dead man can't talk. One Brazilian officer sent to the United States in 1967 brought along memories of a discussion he had had.

48:08 In his police group the year before, a police squad had just brought in a young mulatto suspected of belonging to a resistance group. The suspect had been beaten during his capture, but not severely enough to require hospitalization. In 1966, this particular police barracks did not use equipment to torture prisoners. But if a suspect refused to speak,

48:39 He would be kicked and punched. The Brazilian officer watched the bloody man being brought in and knew what he had in store for him. Visiting his office that day was an official from the U.S., a pleasant sandy-haired man in his 40s who spoke excellent Portuguese. When he first began to call, he had introduced himself as the political officer at the U.S. Embassy, which meant he was CIA. He had asked about

49:08 He did not ask about anything sensitive. Instead, he seemed willing to talk for hours about various topics. He came back three times, never in a hurry. Now the Brazilian police said to him, I don't like seeing a prisoner brought in with a black eye or cuts on his head. It reminds me too much of what I heard about my father's life under Vargas. The embassy man agreed with him. But you policemen have a very bad job.

49:38 They want protection from people that are communists. And it's your job to protect them. They don't see how dangerous they are. That one person may have enough information to save innocent lives. And again, there's no communists doing bad things in Brazil. So what life are you going to save from a non-existent threat?

50:15 So the embassy man goes on and says, I was in the military police when I was stationed in Germany after the war. We used to talk about what we'd have done if we'd ever got a hold of a Nazi. The Brazilian police officer said, yeah, but that was war. The CIA embassy guy said, yes, and so is this. Okay, moving on. There was a building.

50:54 Called the car barn. Which we talked about in an earlier show. And. It says that. It was apparent that the men. Who wanted. That were predisposed to take a soft line. Would go to the car barn. And. They would be over beers. Talk to. Sharing war stories. To heighten.

51:26 the threat of what was facing them that they didn't see at the current time. One of the Office of Public Safety people that had recently returned from South Vietnam had all kinds of war stories to share with them over beer about how you could never allow that to happen in your country. In other words, they were just scaring the hell out of them.

51:58 They used stories about how vicious the Viet Cong was, how they planted bombs and blew up people. Other Brazilian police had begun to wonder whether there was a decent way to resolve the conflict facing their own country and its intelligence services without going through all of this. There was a rebel movement in Brazil, but it was generally believed.

52:29 that the rebel movement was a result of the overthrow of their government. The government of Arthur Silva, who was a hardline general who had assumed the presidency on the retirement of Castillo Branco, was depending on his intelligence network to break up any rebel movement. Inevitably,

52:58 There was a new intelligence apparatus, this one called the SNI, that they turned to for help. Many Brazilian officers worked closely with the CIA and were suspected of accepting pay from the CIA officers. This would in turn infuriate the people who weren't selected to work with the CIA because the guys that did got more money. So there became a competition among...

53:30 the police to work for the CIA. The commanding officers seemed to favor cooperating with the CIA. This brought praise and promotions to those who did because the CIA had tons of access to equipment. A well-connected police commander who wanted new supplies of tear gas did not have to fill out any requisitions to USAID.

54:06 If he had a person in his unit that had basically been selected to be a student for the CIA because it came through the CIA and they had stores of that in Panama under an organization called the Technical Services Division. Mitterrand had functioned so capably that many Brazilian officers thought he was a CIA officer himself.

54:36 By 1968, the rumor had traveled far enough that when the East German publisher named Julius Motter brought out a book entitled The Who's Who and CIA, he actually listed Dan Mitterrand as a CIA agent. Mitterrand was merely smart and ambitious enough to cooperate.

54:58 with the CIA to its fullest. But those of us who know, he worked for the Office of Public Safety, which is USAID, which is a CIA front. So he, in effect, was a CIA asset agent. That's a distinction without a difference. Brazilian police officers at the headquarters were alert to the hierarchy at the U.S. Embassy. In 1966 and 67,

55:25 Brazilian police were hard-pressed for information about subversives. The Brazilian Navy had amassed all of those files, but they weren't sharing their information. It was about that time that the police and army began to torture, kidnap, and in some cases assassinate prisoners. Older policemen briefed the younger officers on the ways that they should extract information.

55:56 as far back as the Vargas years, but now it had gotten much more precise thanks to the Office of Public Safety. Dan Mederone was quoted as saying, a dead prisoner could not tell anyone very much. He preferred torture. The CIA and the Brazilian Intelligence Office, SNI, were pressing the...

56:28 police for results, and nothing loosened a prisoner's tongue quicker than pain. Now, you can see, again, just like in the exercise where you had the prime minister pressuring the cops to do something with the reporters, they implement that in the field by putting pressure on the police to get results, i.e. names, and that in turn promotes the torture.

56:57 Some police advisors argued that intense but not lethal pain was more humane than beating. Their CIA contacts endorsed this view. When Brazilian intelligence officers began to use field telephones to administer electric shock, it was U.S. agents who informed them of which level and how to apply the electricity to the electronic leads.

57:28 and where to place them on the body. Word was passed that the CIA could supply more than tear gas, and the laboratories both at the Technical Service Division in Panama and in Washington had devices that would make the pain so sharp that a prisoner would break quickly and not force a police interrogator to hurt him repeatedly. The Brazilian police, who heard

57:57 These reports did not receive the new mechanisms immediately. They resorted to using the field telephones with electrical leads. They had been given the requirement to produce information, and they were going to do so. From the viewpoint of policemen, however, Mitterrand was also their patron, their mentor, the keeper of their professional conscience.

58:25 Stories came up in different areas about the torture of prisoners, and his former Brazilian colleagues debated what Mitterrand would do if a police officer began to abuse a prisoner in front of him. One officer said he'd just leave. He wouldn't tell you to stop. In the middle of 1967, Mitterrand was called back to teach at the IPA, and it was a lucky time to be leaving Brazil because the

58:55 rebellion against the CIA-installed dictator was growing. Mitterrand had spent five years in Brazil by that time. Later, the Office of Public Safety would claim to have taught over 100,000 policemen in Brazil, which ended up being one-sixth of the total police force. Dan Mitterrand had personally trained thousands of them.

59:25 That's a good place to stop because we're going to get a little bit more into that. And we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the stuff that happened in Brazil before, after Mitterrand left, but that he started. And I'm going to summarize it.

59:58 Because a lot of the details are gruesome, like really, really gruesome. So not that I don't want to share them with you. We will talk just in general about a couple of examples so you get the gist of it. But there's a lot of it in this book. So I don't think we need to draw that out. You can definitely get the idea with a summary.

1:00:25 And then we move on to Mitterrand's arrival in Uruguay. So with that, we will open it up. I got you back, Bridget. SR-71, did you have anything? Thank you, Colonel. And thank you all for attending today and everybody on Rumble as well. I thought it kind of funny that they have an issue with grading.

1:01:17 Specifically, if you're one of the commanding officers versus the undergraduate, if you want to look at it in that sense, the whole deal just sort of blows my mind away when I look at what's really going on here and what they're really trying to accomplish, what they did accomplish, is it just...

1:01:48 Well, I look at it and I see the results. So I and the results are just abound everywhere they go. So I think, yeah, the whole point of making that distinction, in my opinion, is that you are dealing with a huge male macho.

1:02:19 psyche, to the extent that, as I pointed out, there's a pecking order of nationalities of prejudice that exists throughout Latin America. And within any one of those ecosystems, the thought that once you become an army colonel, that you have a brilliant major that's your aid, and he's actually smarter than you.

1:02:48 You cannot allow that to be demonstrated in public. Now, you may love having the smart major as your aid to keep your ass out of trouble. But if that is going to be displayed to someone that you're basically sucking up to, like the U.S., that's not going to be allowed. And it demonstrates to me the mentality of the people.

1:03:16 that were occupying these positions where every part of it was a hierarchy of control. And you begin to see how things like torture and the brainwashing of this non-existent threat that is around every corner.

1:03:47 Starts to. To be widespread. Throughout the entire. And it lends itself. Kind of as a crutch. In order for them to do. Their most primal. Instinctive. Evil shit. Because now they've been handed. Kind of a get out of jail free card. Because I can do all of the shit. And that was part of the whole.

1:04:14 Thing that came across to me originally, Brazil had a history, although the army, like in Turkey, had stepped in many times to basically get rid of a president. But they immediately followed that with elections. It had a long history of being a very peaceful country. And we saw that in Chile, too. Chile.

1:04:42 So this long history of, I don't want to use this word, but it's the only word that comes to mind, docile. The Americans are looking for a primal way to enrage people to the point of killing their fellow countrymen. And they're doing that to destabilize the country so American oligarchs can come in and rape all their shit out of there.

1:05:12 They have a very well thought out way of doing that, which required them to have the persona of, you know, kind of the male macho thing, pitting each other against each other by selecting some to be CIA assets. And they used every technique to manipulate these people so that they are.

1:05:42 now completely out of their original element and easier to control. Because once you remove someone from a safety netting, they're much easier to control. I like that word primal, Colonel. That's the only way you can describe it. You hit it on the head. Yeah, because what we're going to cover tomorrow is very primal.

1:06:19 Bridget, did you have anything you wanted to add? The torture. I mean, these are really sadistic people. Sometimes it just blows my mind as to how they found and recruited and trained so many sadistic. Because not every person is mentally equipped to carry out torture. And that is what they...

1:06:55 What the main focus in every one of these operations seems to be. And it is just shocking. So, you know, they had to have had a psychological profile on how to find those people. You know that. Right. Right. Yeah. You know, and that's and I guess, you know, it goes back in my head, you know, and you just as every layer of this onion is opened.

1:07:26 You rethink and rethink and rethink. And like you said, they have psychological written and tests that the CIA requires before you or any agency, any company that you have to go into. And I would, in theory, almost like to analyze one of those tests from years ago.

1:07:53 Because it's like, what did it what was it that they were looking for to to develop this? These sadistic monsters, you know? Yeah. So someone over on Rumble said somewhat ironic. They were using a telephone to make people talk. The edge of reason. Right. Right. You're right. That is definitely the height of irony. And Mayor Sarge, God bless him.

1:08:25 He's talking about having to splice a field phone while on the move. And he had a metal knife in his hand, which gave him a shock, which then became obscenity city. So he knows what it feels like. But obviously, you receiving a shock on your hand that made you cuss like a sailor would be very different than where they were placing these leads on these people.

1:08:56 which we will get to. SR71? Thank you, Colonel. I was pondering the same thing that Bridget's comments on were earlier. And one of the things that's crossed my mind is I'm wondering about the intersection between MKUltra and this type of program. Whether it's here or not, I really don't know.

1:09:27 Or if there was any collusion between the two at some given point to say, oh, this is how we get what we really want. Well, I think there's definitely overlap. I mean, the truth serum drug was part of MK Ultra and it is part of their toolkit in the torture. Also, the psychological profiling was created during the MK Ultra psychological.

1:09:57 um warfare area so yes there's definitely overlap between the two so good um good point and again i think all of the information over all of those years that they were doing all of the different variations artichoke um ultra all of those things um bluebird they were gaining more and more psychological

1:10:34 profiling information. And you can bet that that is part of how they selected the police officers that they were going to turn into CIA agents, both in the field and at the academy. So there's definitely significant overlap there. It's a giant, you know, and we talk about it being a giant web.

1:11:07 I guess you could say more like a fabric or a tapestry where these MK Ultras, Bluebird, so on, so on. All these operations are just making a more cohesive network fabric that they're building on, building on, building on. And that is also why it is so important to recognize in today's headlines.

1:11:37 Like all these drug busts, they're ripping some of those major cords out of that tapestry. Definitely. And it is, you know, there is only so many, just like pulling on a thread on a sweater. There's only so many you can pull before it all comes apart. It cannot stay together. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So.

1:12:08 Let me get to the big announcement. The follow-up phone call to the initial contact from the podcast called Redacted happened today. So we are still in the discussion phase of whether or not I will be doing a short segment on their regular show.

1:12:39 or kind of a long segment that will be its own show. But Natalie, the wife, reached out to me today and was very apologetic, saying that they had completely missed the follow-up that they had promised a few months ago.

1:13:11 Shortly, I will be announcing when that's going to happen. For those of you who don't know, Clayton Morris and Natalie Morris are a couple that have a show called Redacted. Clayton Morris used to be on Fox Sunday morning show where Pete Hedset was before Pete was around.

1:13:37 And he left Fox and him and his wife set up their own podcast. And it has about 2 million followers. So I was thrilled when he recently, within the last couple of months, went on Tucker, Clayton Morris did, went on Tucker Carlson and actually said the words Operation Gladio.

1:14:04 Those of you who've been with me for a long time know I was just tickled pink about the fact that those actual words gets mentioned to large audiences because no one will talk about it. And so through Alpha Warrior again, he reached out to J.J. Carroll and J.J. Carroll had me on his show. We did like a one hour segment on his show.

1:14:33 And J.J. Carroll actually knows Clayton Morris. And so he passed the information on to Clayton that, hey, I just interviewed someone that knows a whole bunch about Operation Gladio. You should have her on. And so around spring break, Clayton had reached out to me and said that they would follow up after spring break. And then I didn't hear from him again. And so she reached out to me this morning and we are blessed that she did.

1:15:02 And I'm looking forward to that happening. And so we will record if that's the route they decide to go because their show is broken up into like 15 minute segments. And as you guys know, after hundreds of hours of Operation Gladio research, it would be hard to distill Operation Gladio in 15 minutes. So I suggested that a longer form would.

1:15:32 probably be better, maybe even two or three. And so they're going to talk it over and get back with me. So I will keep you guys updated as that happens. So again, you guys have been amazing in reposting the information that I put out there and getting the visibility. We just went over 45,000.

1:16:01 followers on X that happened within the last 24 or 48 hours. That's all because of you guys. You reposting my information gets to other new people, gets to other new people. And we have grown this over the last couple of years with your help.

1:16:23 And I am eternally grateful to each and every one of you who shows up here every day, who participates, who shares information, who tags me in posts. All of that stuff matters, especially on X, because that is how your account gets traction. I told you guys that the ability to interface on X, it has been.

1:16:53 extremely important in spreading the word. And I owe you guys a huge thanks for that. Also, Donnie Vision, thank you for reminding. Please, if you're watching on Rumble, give us a thumbs up. It does matter. We have a growing audience over on Rumble as well.

1:17:17 We're almost to 10,000 on X. And as far as I'm concerned, we started off with like five. So to be that close, we have gotten over almost 1.4 million views of content on Rumble. Obviously, you guys know if you've ever been there, there's hundreds of hours of video on Rumble for anyone that's interested in.

1:17:45 knowing anything about Operation Gladio and expands, you know, and that's not counting any of the views. I think the one show on Alpha Warriors, like one of the very first shows we did, has almost 100,000 views just for the one show. So again, I owe all of that to you guys for being there, showing up wherever I show up.

1:18:12 Since we're talking about psychologically, I do want to share this with you guys. I don't talk about this very often, but I can't tell you what it's like. The difference when you speak in public and you go into a room where you basically know no one there and you give a speech, which is very different than walking into a room that like.

1:18:41 when I was on active duty, walking into commander's call and, you know, giving a speech as the commander where you literally know everybody in there. Those are completely different dynamics. There was times when I worked on a joint task force that I had to go in and brief senior officers and I didn't really know them. That's a completely different feeling. And when I...

1:19:08 go on someone else's podcast and I see in the comments, all of you there, that is like bringing my family with me. And I cannot tell you psychologically what the difference that makes to me, but it is huge. And it just kind of relaxes me. I know I'm among people who know what we're talking about. And it's just, it's a wonderful feeling.

1:19:37 And I don't talk about it that often, but I did want to share that with you. It is an amazing feeling. So thank you all very much for being here and going through this journey with us. Especially shout out to Bridget and SR71 for keeping the chat over on Rumble free from all the weirdos and doing the yeoman's work behind the scenes and getting rid of bots on X.

1:20:06 that basically mess up your space. So a lot of hard work goes on behind the scenes, and I can't thank you guys enough for being part of it. It's been a long road. It's been a long road. It's been a long road. With some potholes along the way, but by God, we're making waves, and the ripples are turning into white caps. Yeah, I agree with that assessment. We love you, Colonel.

1:20:35 And we're absolutely proud of you. Let me tell you that much. Oh, you blew me away today. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so not for the much. I will be back. OK, so I just want to look at my calendar real quick. So tomorrow we have four o'clock and then we have the Alpha Warrior show.

1:21:04 And then we have the Noon podcast on Thursday with Warhamster. And I will get the word out as soon as I hear anything from Redacted. I will let you guys know. So thanks for being here and I will see you tomorrow.

Entities here

Brazil25 USAID19 CIA17 International Police Academy15 Dan Mitterrand14 Washington, D.C.9 Byron Engle6 Panama Canal5 Death Squads5 Henning Albert Boysland5 Operation Gladio4 Venezuela4 National Police Board4 Dominican Republic4 Armed Forces of National Liberation3 MKUltra3 Vietnam3 São Paulo3 Serviço Nacional de Informações3 Milton La Croque3 OBAN3 1965 Dominican Republic Intervention3 Robert F. Kennedy2 Project Bluebird2 Los Angeles Police Department2 Nepal2 CIA Technical Services Division2 Sergio Fernando Flory2 Operation San Martin2 João Goulart2 Huberto Castelo Branco2 Getúlio Vargas2 Red Rose1 White Lily1 Hélio Bicudo1 Ernesto Geisel1 General Sarmento1 The First Line of Defense1 Julius Mader1 Ovali1

Claims made here

A.J. Langguth founded Hidden Terrors host_asserted ▶ 2:05

“Now it's working. There's always going to be something. All right. So I do have an announcement. If you will remind me, Bridget, because there will be more people in the room towards the end. When we …”

Alexis Johnson member_of National Police Board book_quoted ▶ 3:20

“The closer their ties to Brazil's business and military circles, the more strongly they believe that the coup was long overdue. It didn't trouble the military advisors that overnight there was a chang…”

Byron Engle member_of National Police Board book_quoted ▶ 3:20

Dan Mitterrand trained National Police Board book_quoted ▶ 4:31

“revolvers, radios, riot control equipment. He also was able to get more people into the police academy in Washington, D.C. because he had left there before coming to Brazil. He introduced the policema…”

Dan Mitterrand supplied_arms_to National Police Board book_quoted ▶ 4:31

Roberto Campos member_of Brazil book_quoted ▶ 7:14

“with military officers, as we established earlier, that was trained in the United States. The military regime's leading economist, Roberto Campos, was sensibly ordering the national priorities by favo…”

Henning Albert Boysland member_of Firestone book_quoted ▶ 14:54

“gas company, acted on these concerns. Boylson had come to Brazil from Denmark as an official of Firestone Rubber Company. We've seen Firestone in several of our stories. 17 years later, he became a na…”

Henning Albert Boysland founded OBAN book_quoted ▶ 15:24

“Helio Botreo, Ernesto Giesel, the president of Petro Boss, and General Sarmento. Those were all of his acquaintances. He occupied a house in a very wealthy area. The suspicion that Boylston was a CIA …”

Lyndon B. Johnson ordered_assassination_of 1965 Dominican Republic Intervention book_quoted ▶ 17:28

“who told him approvingly about the contributions of other U.S. companies because, in his words, it was to ensure civil peace. In 1965, another development helped to reinforce the interest of Brazil's …”

Byron Engle headed USAID book_quoted ▶ 21:51

“this course were also administered through the USAID. Along with foreign students, the Institute trained U.S. officers destined for South Vietnam. And we know how that turned out. As head of the Offic…”

Armed Forces of National Liberation carried_out_attack Venezuela book_quoted ▶ 24:18

“Citizens, inspired supposedly by Castro, formed an Armed Forces of National Liberation and set out to discredit the elected president, Benton Court. The FALN wanted to persuade voters to boycott elect…”

Byron Engle recruited Los Angeles Police Department book_quoted ▶ 25:15

“Under the pressure from Kennedy's administration, Engel borrowed four Spanish-speaking officers from the LAPD that had been trained by the CIA and sent them to Caracas to give intensive classes in pol…”

Robert F. Kennedy member_of International Police Academy book_quoted ▶ 25:44

“compensating their families because it was all off the record. What was behind the scenes? That was behind the scenes. The public image of Engel's program remained positive. Bobby Kennedy, now a senat…”

International Police Academy trained National Police Board book_quoted ▶ 29:26

“was not so adept. His successor basically did not have a high view of the candidates and didn't think most of them warranted the money used to send them to the United States. Brazilian officers attend…”

Jack Goin member_of International Police Academy documented ▶ 39:12

“Even students not considered sufficiently qualified to be passed on to the CIA for professional intelligence work, they were instructed on how to effectively combat communism. One of the things that t…”

Ovali member_of Colombia documented ▶ 46:35

“Ovali, a detective in Colombia's secret department, said that a government must kill or capture guerrillas in order to reassure the population that the rebel cause cannot prevail. Inspector Madhop Ran…”

Madhop Rana member_of Nepal documented ▶ 46:35

Artur da Costa e Silva succeeded Huberto Castelo Branco documented ▶ 52:29

“that the rebel movement was a result of the overthrow of their government. The government of Arthur Silva, who was a hardline general who had assumed the presidency on the retirement of Castillo Branc…”

Julius Mader exposed Dan Mitterrand documented ▶ 54:36

“By 1968, the rumor had traveled far enough that when the East German publisher named Julius Motter brought out a book entitled The Who's Who and CIA, he actually listed Dan Mitterrand as a CIA agent. …”

Dan Mitterrand member_of USAID documented ▶ 54:58

“with the CIA to its fullest. But those of us who know, he worked for the Office of Public Safety, which is USAID, which is a CIA front. So he, in effect, was a CIA asset agent. That's a distinction wi…”

USAID front_for CIA host_asserted ▶ 54:58

CIA installed Artur da Costa e Silva host_asserted ▶ 58:55

“rebellion against the CIA-installed dictator was growing. Mitterrand had spent five years in Brazil by that time. Later, the Office of Public Safety would claim to have taught over 100,000 policemen i…”