The Reich Stuff
By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
May 6, 2004
Veteran of the Iran/Contra scandal, apologist for terrorists, Cuba
basher, bullying Latin America envoy for President Bush, and lobbyist
for the alcohol, tobacco and armaments industries – Otto Juan Reich
has done it all, both inside and outside of government. This week, Reich
announced that next month he will be leaving his post as the White
House special envoy to the Americas and joining Team Bush’s
reelection campaign. While it’s too soon to know how Karl Rove and
company will use him, keep your eye on Florida where Reich has
longtime connections to the right-wing Cuban exile community.
In late 2001, unable to get his nominee past the Senate, President Bush
handed Reich, a native of Cuba and an alumnus of the Iran/Contra
scandal, a recess appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for
Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich’s term expired in December 2002; a
month later, Bush found another spot for him on his Latin American
team. Now, Bush figures Reich will be more useful in getting him
re-elected.
Reich, along with Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, was one of a trio
of Iran/Contra alumni to re-emerge in the Bush Administration as Latin
America policy operatives, something reporter Bart Jones pointed out in
a January 2003 piece in the National Catholic Reporter. (In his new
book “The Politics of Truth,” former Ambassador Joseph Wilson claims
that Abrams, who still works with the administration, may have helped
reveal to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame,
was a CIA covert operative. Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, has been nominated to become the first ambassador
to Iraq after the June 30 so-called handover. He is expected to be
confirmed by the Senate without being held accountable for his
mishandling of human rights violations while working in Honduras during
the 1980s.)
“There isn’t a single democratic leader in Latin America that doesn’t
reject and deplore the role that our government played in Central
America during the 1980s,” Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador
to El Salvador, told Jones in 2003. “To choose men like Elliot Abrams
and Otto Reich is an insult.” Larry Birns of the Washington, DC-based
Council on Hemispheric Affairs called the trio the “least talented Latin
America team either in Republican or Democratic administrations that I
have witnessed in monitoring this scene for 35 years.”
Hemispheric Bully
In his recent incarnation, Reich seamlessly continued his career as an
anti-democratic bullying bureaucrat. Questions about his participation in
the April 2002 aborted coup in Venezuela remain a he-said, she-said
matter: A recent report in Sojourners magazine, citing The Guardian
newspaper, said that Abrams “gave the go-ahead to the coup leaders,”
and Reich, who was a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, “met
numerous times with [businessman Pedro] Carmona, the head of the
short-lived junta.”
During the recent presidential campaign in El Salvador where Antonio
Saca of the conservative ARENA Party, and Schafik Handal, of the
party of the former rebels, the FMLN, faced off against each other,
Reich told Salvadoran reporters, “We are concerned about the impact
that an FMLN victory would have on the commercial, economic, and
migration-related relations that the United States has with El Salvador.”
An Action Alert issued by the Religious Task Force on Central America
and Mexico says, “Reich went on to say that the United States could
not have the ‘same confidence in an El Salvador led by a person who is
an admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.’”
Still unclear is what role Reich had in the recent forced removal of
Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and other efforts to interfere in
the electoral process in Bolivia and Nicaragua.
This much is clear: Reich has made a career of harassing and threatening
the hemisphere’s countries. During a visit to Barbados shortly after the
invasion of Iraq, Reich didn’t disguise his displeasure with the decision
of Caricom – the Caribbean Community – not to support the war. “It is
not the kind of support that we expect from friends,” Reich said on Chat
Room, the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s TV program. “We
listen very carefully to what our friends say and we’re very disappointed
by some of the statements. We’re not violating international law, neither
is Great Britain or any of the other countries and I would urge Caricom
to study very carefully not only what it says, but the consequences of
what it says.”
Using the not-so-veiled threat of limiting trade to the U.S. from
Caribbean countries that didn’t support the war on Iraq, Reich said,
“What do I tell a member of Congress if I go asking for increased
access for Caribbean products, for example, and he says, ‘Well, they
didn’t support us in our time of need’?”
Reich has been a hyperbolic critic of both Cuba’s Fidel Castro and
Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez. “He simply
memorizes the names of those he considers to be communist, which
means if you are for the normalization of relations with Cuba, you’re a
communist,” Larry Birns told Bart Jones. “Reich is looking for villains.
He’s looking for some commies.” When he announced his resignation
this week, he told reporters he was sorry he couldn’t do more to bring
down the Castro regime. Then he added this caveat: “A dictatorship still
doesn't exist in Venezuela, but one has to be very careful.''
Iran/Contra Scandalista
From 1981 to 1983, Reich served in the Reagan administration as
assistant administrator of the Agency for International Development
(AID) and then became the first director of the State Department’s
Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, where
he served until 1986. It was at the OPD where Reich left his mark.
At the OPD, Reich “manufactured op-eds that were passed off to the
U.S. media under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders as he berated
editors and journalists he deemed too soft on the Sandinistas or too
tough on the Reagan administration,” wrote Alec Dubro of Foreign
Policy in Focus.
A National Security Archive report titled, “Public Diplomacy and
Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan
Reich,” documented Reich’s questionable activities. A Comptroller
General of the U.S. found Reich engaging in “prohibited, covert
propaganda activities” and going “beyond the range of acceptable
agency public information activities.”
An October 30, 1987 letter and report by the General Accounting
Office found that Reich’s office “generally did not follow federal
regulations governing contractual procedures.” A month later, the
Congressional Iran/Contra committees’ report found that “n fact,
‘public diplomacy’ turned out to mean public relations-lobbying, all at
taxpayers’ expense.”
And a September 1988 House Foreign Affairs Committee staff report
on Reich’s office concluded that “senior CIA officials with backgrounds
in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological
operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply
involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and
propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department
of State…. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid contracts, [OPD]
established and maintained a private network of individuals and
organizations whose activities were coordinated with, and sometimes
directed by, Col. Oliver North as well as officials of the NSC and
S/LPD.
In May 2002, in what can only be characterized as an Orwellian move,
Reich was named to the Board of Visitors at the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the
School of the Americas (SOA). The WHISC's charter “requires a
Board of Visitors to monitor the school, to ensure that the curriculum
emphasize ‘human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of
the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society,”
according to CounterPunch. While he was U.S. ambassador to
Venezuela, “Reich used his office to help Orlando Bosch, a known
terrorist, get into the U.S.,” says CounterPunch. “Bosch was convicted
of firing a bazooka at a freighter in Miami, and accused of bombing a
Cuban jet, killing 73 people.”
In between government stints, Reich lobbied on behalf of the alcohol
(Bacardi), tobacco (British American Tobacco) and armaments
industries (Lockheed Martin).
And all along, Reich has been the darling of Florida’s right-wing Cuban
exile community. According to Dubro, Reich, a strong supporter of the
embargo on Cuba, “remained in the propaganda business…
broadcast[ing] the exile line, denouncing baseball exchanges and the
return of Elian Gonzalez and trade delegations to Havana.”
In 2003, the Cuban American National Foundation heartily approved of
Reich’s special envoy appointment: "Ambassador Reich brings
exceptional vision and commitment to this position. His record of
accomplishment and success bodes well for the advancement of our
national interests in this hemisphere," said CANF Chairman Jorge Mas
Santos.
This Cuban community connection may help explain Reich’s latest stint
with the Bush campaign. Right now, Reich’s role in the campaign is
unclear. But that seems to be just the way he likes things.
Bill Berkowitz is a freelance writer covering right-wing groups and
movements.
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