W. E. Gutman

The reprieve granted last September by Congress to the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)

must be viewed as both symbolic and premonitory. Having survived its third and narrowest challenge yet -- seven votes short of seeing its funding slashed and its doors shut down for good -- the SOA, tainted by heredity and damned by history, may well be on its last leg, a limb further compromised by nagging rumors that students and faculty alike have allegedly used the base to launder the ill-gotten profits from narco-trafficking and other federal crimes. With information obtained by this writer, these rumors could well give fact new life. It could also ring the death knell for a 50-year old institution which, in a self-serving symbiosis with its maker, the CIA -- also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year -- has played a sinister role in Latin America.

Information presented here is based on depositions gleaned on behalf of an SOA critic whose anonymity will be protected until public congressional inquiries are convened to examine the weight and veracity of the testimonies that follow. Minor alterations to the original depositions were made in the interest of space and clarity.

Major Joseph Blair, U.S. Army, ret--Maj. Blair retired from the U.S. Army in 1989 after 20 years of service, earning a Bronze Star for valor and five meritorious Service medals. An ROTC graduate from Marquette University, Blair was commissioned a lieutenant and dispatched to Vietnam. He was promoted to captain and assigned to general staff as assistant to then-Deputy Ambassador William F. Colby, the Saigon station chief and later CIA director (1954-75). After Vietnam, Blair received additional training in logistics at the Army War College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was promoted to major in 1979 and assigned to NATO headquarters where he took part in classified operations involving nuclear weapons. Back in the U.S. Blair earned a master's degree and was sent to Guatemala, where he served as military attache, then to the U.S. Southern Command at Quarry Heights, Panama. He was then posted to U.S. Army Infantry headquarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, present site of the SOA. In 1986, he taught logistics to senior Latin American officers attending the Command and General Staff Course at the SOA, from which he received the highest possible ratings in performance reviews by his superiors until his retirement in 1989. As a reserve officer, Blair was activated for duty during the Gulf War. He also acted as a sponsor and host to foreign officers visiting the SOA through 1992.

Blair has publicly criticized the SOA in newspaper articles and op/ed columns since 1993, risking alienation by former colleagues and friends, and at the cost of some damage to his marriage. [His wife, Rosa, comes from a well-to-do Guatemalan family. She has been bitterly opposed to his polemic against the SOA, which has cut her off from friends and relations in Latin America].

In light of his impeccable credentials, service record and reputation, Blair's accusations, undergirded by his willingness to accept responsibility for his own role, cannot be easily dismissed.

"...Once it was transferred [from Fort Gulick, Panama] to Fort Benning, the SOA became the best location in the U.S. for Latin American military to launder drug money and other funds obtained illegally in their Countries," says Blair -- an advantage resulting from the conjunction of ready cash, lax security and local banks eager for business.

"Throughout the 1980s students attending the SOA routinely arrived with large quantities of U.S. cash which did not pass through any Latin American central banks" [not subject to rigorous scrutiny at U.S. Customs]. "Every day of the week foreign soldiers whose commanding officers earn about $1,000 a month, entered the U.S. with tens of thousands of dollars stuffed in their pockets, uniforms, duffel bags." How does Blair know? "Hell, we helped them count the dough!"

The most egregious case, according to Blair, was the return of Peruvian Col. Vicente Campodonico in 1992, this time as an instructor. Records of his attendance in 1992 were destroyed. "He had been a student of mine and he came back as a guest instructor. I was his host. I picked him up at the airport and brought him home. He began to stack bundles of cash on my kitchen table and we counted over $200,000. [Campodonico] said he wanted to buy a restaurant. I gathered he was close to Peru's former president, Alan Garcia, who was impeached on corruption charges and fled the country.

"Students received their official paychecks by mail from their country's attache in Washington. They often handed senior guest instructors (who acted as purchasing agents) large amounts of cash, along with shopping lists from their superiors. In social settings, they'd discuss how their fellow officers enjoyed spending their 'plata de droga.'

"Of course narcotics were only one of many sources, including extortion, protection rackets, bribes and rake-offs from their own budgets. Occasionally, one would brag, 'hey, we take ten grand a pop for every plan that lands.'

"A big part of the attraction to studying or teaching at the SOA was the opportunity to shop. Visiting officers would get multiple-entry visas. If they were here five days, they'd spend four shopping. We would take them on shopping sprees and they'd plunk down cash for cars, stereos, electronic equipment, appliances, computers, cameras, clothing, toys, jewelry and guns." Guns were a popular item, says Blair. "The SOA had its own gun dealer on staff -- a sergeant who got his federal license from the BATF and sold [the students] everything, including machine guns."

Despite the existence of an elaborate U.S. banking regulatory structure, "SOA students could walk into any Fort Benning branch bank and be given a cashier's check to purchase a new car without having to apply for a loan."

Accompanied by Blair or other field-grade officers, "students had no problem obtaining a check for 10, 15, even 20,000 dollars payable to a car dealer, or getting a credit card with a five-, 10-, or 20,000-dollar limit without a credit report! They were great credit risks: Typical new car loans were for a period of less than a year. They would buy $20,000 cars and pay them off in a year or less. Many SOA students bought several cars in a single year!

"Felipe Ochoa, a colonel from Guatemala, came to the SOA as a student in October 1986. He bought a brand new BMW. A few weeks later, he claimed it had been stolen, presumably collected the insurance, and bought another one. He worked under Defense Minister Gen. Hector Gramajo [the notorious architect of the U.S. funded scorched-earth dirty war against the domestic opposition to the military dictatorship]. Ochoa was later reassigned to the SOA as an instructor.

"Dominican Lt. Col. Eduardo Tejada, an SOA instructor from January to August 1987, bought 12 cars in one year. I don't know the source of his income, or what he did with the cars. But given the relationship between some elements of the military and drug traffickers, you'd have to be pretty naive not to suspect that drugs were involved at some point.

"When these guys showed up with big wads of cash, the banks would run the money through a counting machine that also detected forgery. Counterfeit currency was commonplace, but identification of such at the banks had no noticeable effect on Latin American depositors. They did not seem to consider a counterfeit bill as a personal loss. How much passed into the local [U.S.] economy is anybody's guess.

"Money laundering was standard operating procedure at the SOA," Blair affirms. "The banks never questioned the source of funds. We walked them in, and they just washed it through." SOA students quickly learned the ropes, according to Blair. "Consequently, they would routinely make multiple deposits in a single week of between five and nine thousand dollars to avoid a paper trail of these transactions [limited to $10,000 by the U.S. Treasury Department].

"Given what we know about the ties between the military and drug traffickers, and given the entrepreneurial ability to turn a buck -- and their ingenuity in exploiting any perceived openings -- I would not be surprised if they weren't bringing in coke. It defies the laws of probability that they weren't and I can't believe that the American officers who commanded the School weren't aware of the threat. Yet, I never saw any attempt to check visitors' bags or any close surveillance or security on arrival or departure. It would have been considered humiliating, an insult."

An incident recounted by Blair -- the death of Lt. Col. Julio Rivera -- raises particular concerns about the manipulation of SOA records and the role U.S. military may have played in aiding and abetting in a flourishing drug trade. "Rivera had been in charge of logistics support for SOA students in the later 1980s." [SOA documents list a Major. Pedro Rivera, Director of Evaluation under then Commandant Jose Feliciano, in 1993]. "A fellow retired officer called me in the spring of 1994 to say that Rivera had been caught dealing cocaine in El Salvador, where he was stationed as an advisor to the Salvadoran Army. When arrested, Rivera allegedly pulled the pin on a hand grenade and died in the conflagration. If true," Blair maintains, "the story raises the possibility that U.S. officers may have collaborated in narcotrafficking schemes with the very forces they were supposed to train in drug interdiction.

Sgt. Major Guy Wayne Strickland, U.S. Army, ret.--Wayne Strickland served 20 years in the U.S. Army, retiring in 1992 with the rank of sergeant major after the Gulf War, where he served with an armored brigade. Earlier, he served in Vietnam, Europe and Panama. He taught land warfare weapons and tactics courses at the SOA from 1984 to 1992.

Strickland confirmed Blair's account of the routine processing of Latin American troops without the inconvenience of a U.S. Customs check. "We'd get the call to go to the airport with a bunch of trucks. They'd file off a C-140 Starlifter, and we'd walk 'em through the hangar to the other side, and they'd get on buses. Our own men would load their bags on trucks. We'd take'em to the barracks and drop off their gear. They could have been carrying anything."

Strickland also confirmed that low-salaried non-com students would routinely spend thousands of dollars at a clip on used as well as late model cars. "Sometimes we'd let them loose at the shopping mall, and we'd have to help them carry their goodies."

Strickland's wife, Brenda, operations manager for Rhodes Furniture store in Columbus, Georgia, says she had witnessed strange spending patterns. "High-ranking officers would bring in all these credit applications, which were summarily approved even though they had no credit history -- supposedly because our government guarantees that they can't leave the country without paying their bills. They liked the idea of putting a third down with no interest for six months. This was not cheap furniture; only the best. And these weren't small purchases; they'd buy six, seven, ten thousand dollars worth. We'd deliver the merchandise to their houses and when they were ready to leave, we'd help them pack and ship it home. They always paid off their balance -- who knows how."

According to Strickland, the salesman SOA students preferred was "invariably" Miguel Smith, son-in-law of Col. Miguel Garcia, one of the commandants at the SOA. This arrangement suggests the high probability that U.S. military personnel or their relatives directly benefitted from the apparent lack of interest in the source of large amounts of cash held by their students and guest instructors.

Click on the image to see a
magnified version of a
de-classified document:

Billy Winn, Editor, Editorial Page, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Columbus, Georgia. -- Owned by the R. W. Page Corp, a subsidiary of the Knight-Ridder chain since 1974, the Ledger-Enquirer has traditionally supported the military, and more specifically the SOA which it served as an unofficial voice. But the paper's defense of the SOA has cooled over the years, particularly in light of some of its alumni's involvement in horrific human rights abuses, and especially since the takeover by John Greenman as publisher. Winn has since run several opinion pieces by Blair, and has written his own series, including a critique of the SOA. According to Winn, Greenman has indicated that a drug scandal would tip the scales of his paper against the SOA.

Winn acknowledges his paper's qualified support for the SOA. He also admits that Columbus, a city of 250,000, has long had a drug problem associated with Fort Benning, home of the SOA, where over 20,000 troops are stationed. "I'm not aware of any systematic investigation by military or civilian law enforcement authorities of possible money laundering or narcotrafficking by foreign students and instructors at the SOA." When apprised of Blair's allegations in April, Winn said: Maybe that's something we should look into. I'll talk to some people and see what I can unearth. If Winn has "unearthed" anything, he's not telling.

Thomas M. Class, Sr., Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Blair is on record as having faced Class with allegations of drug-running and money laundering at the SOA. Class refused to be interviewed. "Any FBI agent who talks to the press without authorization about an investigation ought to be fired," he said. When asked if this meant that an investigation was in fact taking place, he replied," I'll neither confirm nor deny any investigation -- nor that I have ever talked to Major Blair or anyone else."

Col. Roy Trumble, Commandant, SOA

Trumble and McIver also declined to supply a current budget, staff roster, or curriculum and course description, citing the investigation. They referred all questions about the SOA to the School's home-page <http://home.fia.net/~soa.>.

Predictably, the SOA, which has trained, supplied and coddled the "internal security" forces of 17 Latin American and Caribbean nations -- and whose alumni continue to bask in the benevolent glow of immunity -- has so far evaded a fatal in vivo dissection. The world -- and U.S. taxpayers who have been footing the bill for the past 50 years -- may have to wait for an actual post-mortem to view and get a full whiff of the SOA's malodorous entrails.

W. E. Gutman is a Connecticut-based investigative journalist and a frequent contributor to Honduras This Week.