The Earlier 9/11 Acts of Terror

Exclusive: As the U.S. government sets off on a new “war on terror” in the Middle East on the eve of 9/11’s 13th anniversary there is little national memory of how U.S. authorities tolerated waves of terror in the Western Hemisphere, including earlier 9/11 slaughters, writes Jonathan Marshall.

By Jonathan Marshall

Americans collectively woke up to the threat of domestic terrorism on the morning of Sept.11, 2001. Nearly 3,000 people died in the fiery destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, the attack on the Pentagon and related airplane hijackings.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Chileans had their own deadly wake-up call on Sept. 11, 1973, when coup plotters overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende after blasting the presidential palace with bombs and heavy artillery. The military junta went on to kill more than 3,000 people, imprison and torture tens of thousands of political victims, and send tens of thousands more into exile.

Anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Eduardo Arocena.

Anti-Castro Cuban terrorist Eduardo Arocena.

Though largely forgotten today, blowback from the U.S.-backed Chilean coup came to haunt North Americans in the form of deadly terrorist attacks, including a number falling in September and even on the forbidding date of Sept. 11 in years predating the al-Qaeda atrocity. In those cases, the perpetrators were not Islamic militants, nor were they angry Marxists intent on avenging Washington’s complicity in the Chilean military’s crimes. Instead, the killers were right-wing extremists bent on carrying their cause to U.S. soil.

The most shocking such case of blowback terrorism was the car bombing of former Chilean government minister Orlando Letelier and a young colleague on the streets of Washington D.C. on Sept. 26, 1976, just past the third anniversary of the coup.

Until 2001, it was the worst act of international terrorism committed in the United States. FBI investigators eventually determined that the remote-controlled bomb had been set off by members of the fascist Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM), directed by an American-born agent of the Chilean secret police.

Attacks at the UN

Few Americans remember the Letelier murder, but how many ever knew of the related creation of one of America’s longest-running terrorist organizations on Sept. 11, 1974? How many know of that group’s brazen murder of a Cuban diplomat, the first case of terrorist violence against a United Nations diplomat, on the streets of New York on Sept. 11, 1980? Or of the same group’s coordinated attacks against the Mexican consulates in New York City and Miami, and the Miami office of a noted magazine, all on Sept. 11, 1981?

The terror group’s name was Omega 7. Its founder was a fanatical anti-Castro Cuban exile named Eduardo Arocena, who used the nom-de-guerre “Omar” to take credit for the group’s two assassinations and more than 30 bombings over a span of almost nine years as the group eluded police and FBI investigators.

One Justice Department official called Arocena “probably the most dedicated patriot in the Cuban field that the law enforcement community has ever experienced in seven years of bombings and murders.” (Imagine a U.S. official calling Osama Bin Laden “the most dedicated patriot in the Islamist field that the law enforcement community has ever experienced.”)

As the FBI reported in 1993, “The main areas of operation for the Omega 7 were the New York, New Jersey, and Miami, Florida, areas. Its primary targets were representatives of the Cuban Government or any individual, organization, facility, or business that dealt with or supported in any way, the communist government of Fidel Castro.

“The majority of Omega 7 attacks were bombings, shootings, and assassinations. Its terrorist attacks were usually well-planned and flawlessly executed. Many of the Omega 7 members were veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion who were trained in demolition, intelligence, and commando techniques. Their expertise, combined with the financial resources available to them through the exiled Cuban community, gave the Omega 7 an almost unlimited potential for terrorist activity.”

Not a Stereotype

Short and pudgy, with a fondness for three-piece suits and classical music, Arocena did not fit any usual stereotype of a terrorist mastermind, but he committed his adult life to violence. “I am obsessed by Communism, which has held my country prisoner,” he explained years later.

Arocena was born in Cuba in 1943. He left school when Fidel Castro took power in 1959. After a stint loading sugar at his hometown port of Caibarién, followed by national success as a welter-weight wrestler, Arocena secretly began fighting Communism. As he would testify years later, he joined a clandestine group to “burn cane fields, burn down industrial development places, to keep our eyes on the regime. . . . We carried out intelligence work, which [was] then passed on to foreign agencies.”

Fearing capture, he stowed away on a ship bound for Morocco in 1965 and made his way to New Jersey the next year. Safe on American soil, he quickly found that his passion for fighting Castro was shared by tens of thousands of fellow exiles and at least some Washington officials. In early 1969, with hundreds of compatriots, he received training by unnamed “American agents” in demolitions techniques at camp in the Florida Everglades. To his bitter regret, the group was disbanded after the promised invasion of Cuba came to nothing.

Eager for action, he grew close to members of the radical CNM, founded by the fascist ideologue Felipe Rivero in 1960. After joining the CIA’s ill-fated landing at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Rivero went his own way. In 1964 he called for a worldwide campaign of terrorism against Cuban targets, which the group initiated with a bazooka attack against the United Nations building, where Ernesto “Che” Guevara was giving a speech. Years later, the CNM was among the first and most ardent anti-Castro Cuban groups to ally with the Chilean military regime and its secret police after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup.

Founding a Terror Cell

Celebration of the Chilean coup likely explains Arocena’s decision to found his own terrorist group, Omega 7, on its one-year anniversary. Omega 7 drew support from the CNM to the point where authorities for many years believed, incorrectly, that the two organizations were identical.

Omega 7 committed its first act of terrorism on Feb. 1, 1975, setting off a bomb at the Venezuelan consulate on 51st Street in New York City to protest that government’s recent resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba. In June 1976, it set off a bomb at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations.

Then, on Sept. 16, 1976, the group bombed a Soviet cargo ship docked in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Arocena worked as a longshoreman. Arocena himself swam out to plant the bomb on the ship’s hull with magnets. He built the device with help from the CNM’s Chilean-trained demolition expert Virgilio Paz. Only days later, Paz would travel from Union City to Washington to help carry out the Chilean regime’s plot to assassinate Orlando Letelier. The Omega 7 job explains why the Chilean agent in charge of the Letelier mission would report that his assignment had to wait several days because “the CNM was engaged in some other operation which required their immediate attention.”

Many other acts of terror would follow. One day after Christmas in 1977, Omega 7 bombed the Venezuelan Mission to the United Nations, to protest Venezuela’s imprisonment of Cuban exile Orlando Bosch on charges of blowing up 73 passengers aboard a Cubana Airlines jet the previous year. The next year, Omega 7 bombed the Cuban Mission to the U.N. for the third and fourth times, the Mexican Consulate in New York, and Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, to protest a performance by a Cuban orchestra.

In 1979, among other attacks, it bombed the Cuban Mission a fifth and sixth time (injuring two policemen), set off high explosives at the Soviet Mission to the U.N. (injuring four policemen and two mission employees), tried to assassinate Fidel Castro during his visit to the U.N. General Assembly in October, and murdered moderate exile Eulalio Jose Negrin in front of his son with a silenced MAC-10 machine gun to punish his “traitorous” parlays with Havana that led to the release of 3,000 political prisoners. The group also tried to plant a suitcase bomb on a TWA flight from New York to Los Angeles, but it exploded prematurely before being loaded.

Hard to Crack

With the attack on the Soviet mission, the FBI finally moved Omega 7 to its highest priority target list. The tight-knit organization proved impossible to crack, however. In March 1980, only a fluke accident saved Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations from being incinerated when his car bumped another and a powerful remote-controlled bomb fell off its gas tank to the ground. Arocena had built the bomb using military-grade explosives supplied to the CNM by the Chilean secret police.

An attaché with the Cuban Mission, Félix García, was not so lucky. On Sept. 11, 1980, the seventh anniversary of the Chilean coup and the sixth anniversary of Omega 7’s founding, the group murdered him while he was driving to work from his apartment in Queens. Arocena’s partner Pedro Remón cut García down with a burst from a MAC-10. Arocena drove the hit car.

As the Cuban newspaper Granma described the reaction, “UN diplomats were in uproar. For the first time ever, terrorists had used violence against the legitimate representative of a UN member country. . . . Three times on the following day, UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim expressed his horror at the crime. He communicated with the U.S. representative at the United Nations, demanding that full measures be taken to guarantee the safety of all the Cuban personnel in New York, and insisted that the tragic event be thoroughly investigated. . . .

“Secretary of State Ed Muskie called it a reprehensible act and asked for all the relevant federal agencies as well as the New York police department to cooperate in the investigation. . . . Donald McHenry, Washington’s ambassador to the UN called the crime a blot on the United States. Nevertheless, both Muskie and McHenry refrained from specifically condemning the anti-Cuban terrorism . . .

“At the UN, Cuban ambassador Raúl Roa Kourí affirmed with total clarity: ‘these groups of professional killers have various locations in the country that hosts our international organization. Their members and leaders make public statements to New York’s Spanish-language press and hold public meetings on the streets, crudely boasting of their criminal intentions.’”

The Unraveling

The Sept. 11, 1980 murder of Cuba’s diplomat began the undoing of Omega 7. A joint FBI-New York Police Department terrorism task force eventually tracked a rental car ticketed across from the Cuban Mission that day to Arocena. Toll records also connected Arocena in the period of the murder to his key compatriots in Omega 7, giving investigators their first clear glimpse of the organization’s membership.

Omega 7 was far from spent, however. One year after its assassination of García, the organization unleashed a wave of new attacks. On Sept. 11, 1981, it fire-bombed the Miami offices of Replica magazine, which had called for normalizing relations between Havana and Washington. It also bombed the Mexican consulates in Miami and New York that day to protest that government’s warm relations with Cuba, causing more than $2 million in damage to the Miami building alone.

Where did Omega 7 get the resources to pull off so many meticulous operations? An FBI report in 1993 noted: “Although current information is incomplete, it appears that some Cuban exile businessmen in the Union City, New Jersey, area clandestinely funded Omega 7 and other Cuban anti-Castro groups. The businessmen established a network which would collect money in the form of ‘taxes’ from all segments of the Cuban community who were able to contribute and then divide the money between the various groups they supported. . . . Current reporting, although fragmented, suggests that the businessmen, who may still be active in funding anti-Castro groups, were involved in the flow of over $100,000 to the various groups.”

Additionally, the FBI learned that Arocena and Omega 7 received about $150,000 from a major marijuana trafficker who asked the organization to collect money owed him by other Cuban exiles and business associates in the drug trade. (Arocena agreed to murder one such associate who had stolen 40,000 pounds of marijuana, but dropped the assignment when he learned that his target was in jail.) Omega 7 members also received legal defense funds from at least two drug-connected Cuban exiles.

A grand jury investigation of Omega 7 from 1979 to 1982 went nowhere, but an ideological split in Omega 7’s ranks finally gave the FBI a huge break. Fearing for his life at the hands of Pedro Remón and other disaffected associates, Arocena began talking with surprising candor to Special Agent Larry Wack about the history and operations of the organization. Arocena then went underground in Miami but continued their dialog through calls from pay phones. Their talks,all recorded,built an impeccable case against the man who called himself “Omar” and his terrorist associates.

Belated Roundup

On Oct. 2, 1982, federal agents finally arrested three key members of Omega 7 in New Jersey and Arocena’s chief triggerman turned nemesis, Remón, in Miami. They were charged with transporting explosives used in the attempted assassination of the Cuban ambassador in March 1980.

Not until July 22, 1983, was Arocena finally arrested in Miami, with an arsenal of machine guns, pistols, rifles, knives, disguises, and a remote-control transmitter. A jury would find him guilty the following year on 25 charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, transporting explosives, possession of bombs and perjury. He received a sentence of life plus 35 additional years. A year later, a Miami judge added another 20 years to his sentence after a separate conviction for bombing seven businesses and consulates in that city from 1979 to 1983.

Arocena’s sentence was a rare exception to the mild fate of most Cuban exile terrorists. The Miami Herald’s Juan Tamayo noted in 1998, “Amid reports that Cuban exile leaders financed bombings in Havana, conspirators, cops and prosecutors agree that anti-Castro plotting in South Florida is not only common but almost tolerated.”

“Other than an occasional federal gun charge,” two reporters for Salon observed in 2008, “Nothing much seems to happen to most of these would-be revolutionaries. They are allowed to train nearly unimpeded despite making explicit plans to violate the 70-year-old U.S. Neutrality Act and overthrow a sovereign country’s government. Though separate anti-terror laws passed in 1994 and 1996 would seem to apply directly to their activities, no one has ever been charged for anti-Cuban terrorism under those laws. And 9/11 [2001] seems to have changed nothing. . . .

“The federal government has even failed to extradite to other countries militants who are credibly accused of acts of murder. Among the most notorious is Luis Posada Carriles, wanted for bombing a Cuban jet in 1976 and Havana hotels in 1997. It is, perhaps, a testament to the power of South Florida’s crucial Cuban-American voting bloc — and the political allegiances of the current president [George W. Bush].”

Fitting this mold was the fate of Arocena’s chief partner in crime, Remón, who pleaded guilty and received a sentence of only 10 years (less than many Guantánamo inmates have served without a conviction). After his release, he teamed up with Posada, who had been trained in demolition by the CIA and carried on its payroll for many years.

Despite evidence of his role in the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing and his admitted campaign to bomb hotels and restaurants in Cuba in 1997, Posada told a New York Times reporter in 1998 that American authorities never attempted to question him. “As you can see,” he said, “the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. don’t bother me, and I am neutral with them.”

Tolerating Foreign Attacks

Why did Posada fare so much better than Arocena? His close connection to the CIA undoubtedly helped. Just as important, he played by the rules, terrorizing Cuba from abroad, not at home. The FBI’s Larry Wack explained to Arocena that his only crime was committing terrorism inside the United States:

“Whatever you people have going outside the United States in Communist countries, we decided amongst us a long time ago that you were not going to tell us about it. And we were not gonna push the issue because it did not concern any, anything inside the United States. . . . Because that is out of our jurisdiction, we told you we were not going to try to interfere with anything that you guys were doing out of the country, and we have stuck to that.”

Wack’s view of official U.S. policy was confirmed just a few years after Panamanian police arrested Posada, along with Omega 7’s Pedro Remón and the CNM’s Guillermo Novo, in 2000 for plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro during a visit to that country. Pardoned in 2004, Remón and Novo returned as free men to the United States, with less hassle than some hapless traveler who ticks off an airport security officer. Posada also returned, and after a battle over his immigration status, not terrorism, he, too, retired to Miami. (Orlando Bosch, now dead, had a street named after him in Miami, where he was treated as a hero.)

As we pause on this 9/11 to remind ourselves of the horrible killing of innocents committed by a gang of extremists 13 years ago, we should reserve some anger for policymakers and law enforcement officers who discredit the cause of justice by ignoring or even protecting other terrorists in our midst depending on their politics. These more obscure bombers and assassins may have called themselves freedom fighters, but their crimes were as evil, and deserve the same punishment, as the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.

Jonathan Marshall is an independent researcher living in San Anselmo, California. His last article for Consortium News was “Unjust Aftermath: Post-Noriega Panama.” 

19 comments for “The Earlier 9/11 Acts of Terror

  1. September 11, 2014 at 17:31

    Has Jonathan Marshall forgotten the Mountain Meadows Massacre? In 1857 on September 11 Mormon terrorists attacked a wagon train in Utah killing about 120 men women and children; the third deadliest terror attack in the U.S.

    It is striking that the perpetrators worshiped the same petty jealous desert god as Timothy McVeigh and Al Qaeda.

    • Abe
      September 11, 2014 at 18:19

      Those petty jealous desert god worshippers are nuthin’ but trouble.

  2. Abe
    September 11, 2014 at 17:30

    In 1976, a magic briefcase stuffed with documents, ‘discovered’ in the bombed car in Washington, D.C., ‘proved’ that Letelier was a ‘Cuban spy.’

    In 2001, magic passports, ‘discovered’ in the rubble in New York on 9/11, ‘proved’ that three buildings at the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed by airplanes piloted by ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’

    • Mike H
      September 11, 2014 at 23:21

      No magic briefcase … just what Leitler was carrying on him when he was killed.

    • Abe
      September 12, 2014 at 01:29

      Yeah, sure Mikey, ’cause you’re a ‘fixer.’

  3. Hillary
    September 11, 2014 at 17:13

    “ including a number falling in September and even on the forbidding date of Sept. 11 in years predating the al-Qaeda atrocity “
    Says Jonathan Marshall
    ..
    Yes both the Chilean and the U.S. 9/11 were indeed master strokes and many in Chile and the U.S. believe the official stories put out..
    ..
    In Chile death squad justice was instituted. At issue was terrorizing Chileans. Instilling fear and crushing resistance were prioritized. Military commanders were ordered to go all out to solidify junta power.
    ..
    Victims were buried in unmarked graves. Some were so mutilated before being executed was General Joaquin Lagos explanation for not returning many bodies to family members.
    .
    Nixon vowed to make Chile’s economy scream
    After the 1970 election, Kissinger said:“I don’t see why we need to stand idly by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.
    ..
    Today Chile remains one of Latin America’s most unequal societies as a result of the Chicago School.
    ..
    As for the US 9/11 many still believe the “Official Conspiracy” that boozing, coke-snorting, lap-dancer-dating, pork-chop-relishing “radical Muslim suicide hijackers” commanded by a terminal ill kidney patient in a cave in Afghanistan seized four planes and use two of them to conduct high-tech controlled demolitions of three skyscrapers.
    http://www.voltairenet.org/auteur125605.html?lang=en

  4. Mike H
    September 11, 2014 at 16:52

    Former Chilean government minister and Cuban spy Orlando Letelier. I fixed that for you.

  5. bfearn
    September 11, 2014 at 12:29

    When Obama became president a senior aide said to him, “Mr. President this is a tough job, you are going to have to kill people. Do you think you can do that?” Obama replied that yes, he could.

    It is this widely held belief that killing people solves problems when in fact it causes so many other problems. Until ‘leaders’ and others understand that killing is no solution we will have to deal with a world that doesn’t work.

  6. Abe
    September 10, 2014 at 23:08

    On 11 September 1944, the Soviet 47th Army moved into the Praga suburb of Warsaw, on the east bank of the river Vistula. The opposing German 73rd Division was weak and collapsed quickly.

    The famous Warsaw Uprising had started 45 days before, when the Red Army units advancing from Western Ukraine appeared on the city’s doorstep. The Polish Home Army was counting on the Soviets to capture the city in a matter of days. The Soviets did not extend any effective aid to the insurgents, and German defense forces did not experience any significant Soviet pressure during that period.

    Between 150,000 and 180,000 civilians, and thousands of captured insurgents, were killed in the suppression of the uprising. Polish resistance fighters were not considered by Germans as combatants; thus, when captured, they were summarily executed. One hundred sixty-five thousand surviving civilians were sent to labour camps, and 50,000 were shipped to concentration camps, while the ruined city was systematically demolished.

  7. Abe
    September 10, 2014 at 21:59

    On the night of 11 September 1944, the German city of Darmstadt suffered a devastating air raid. No. 5 Group the Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed the city with a force of 226 Avro Lancaster bombers and 14 De Havilland Mosquitos, targeting the medieval city center where the houses were constructed from wood.

    The raid killed an estimated 12,300 inhabitants and rendered 66,000 homeless out of a total of 110,000 inhabitants. The more than 800 year old historical city center was destroyed by 99%. 78% of all buildings of Darmstadt were destroyed beyond repair. Darmstadt had a few industrial targets of note, a Merck chemical factory (far away from the city center) being one of them.

    The Germans held the raid as an example of RAF “terror bombing.” Darmstadt became one of the German cities with the highest rate of killed civilian population.

    Also on 11 September 1944, the U.S. 28th Infantry Division claimed the distinction of being the first American unit to enter Germany.

    Allied forces did not cross the Rhine River until the night of 22 March 1945, when George Patton’s US 5th Division troops quietly crossed the river in boats and established a six-mile deep bridgehead. Patton had wished the Americans to announce that they had crossed the Rhine River before the British. This was the first crossing of the Rhine River by boat by an invading army since Napoleon Bonaparte.

    • Yaj
      September 10, 2014 at 23:34

      Hey Abe:

      The US crossed the Rhine on Sept 11, ’44.

      Then withdrew.

      The US army came from the south of France and this had nothing to do with Patton or any other allied forces coming from Normandy.

      You can read “Decision at Strasbough”, a city most certainly on the Rhine.

    • Abe
      September 11, 2014 at 00:30

      David P. Colley is the author of Decision at Strasbourg: Ike’s Strategic Mistake to Halt the Sixth Army Group at the Rhine in 1944

      How World War II Wasn’t Won
      By David P. Colley
      http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23colley.html

      The Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 24, and its commander, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, looked across its muddy waters into Germany. His force, made up of the United States Seventh and French First Armies, 350,000 men, had landed Aug. 15 near Marseille — an invasion largely overlooked by history but regarded at the time as “the second D-Day” — and advanced through southern France to Strasbourg. No other Allied army had yet reached the Rhine, not even hard-charging George Patton’s.

      Devers dispatched scouts over the river. “There’s nobody in those pillboxes over there,” a soldier reported. Defenses on the German side of the upper Rhine were unmanned and the enemy was unprepared for a cross-river attack, which could unhinge the Germans’ southern front and possibly lead to the collapse of the entire line from Holland to Switzerland.

      The Sixth Army Group had assembled bridging equipment, amphibious trucks and assault boats. Seven crossing sites along the upper Rhine were evaluated and intelligence gathered. The Seventh Army could cross north of Strasbourg at Rastatt, Germany, advance north along the Rhine Valley to Karlsruhe, and swing west to come in behind the German First Army, which was blocking Patton’s Third Army in Lorraine. The enemy would face annihilation, and the Third and Seventh Armies could break loose and drive into Germany. The war might end quickly.
      Devers never crossed. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, visited Devers’s headquarters that day and ordered him instead to stay on the Rhine’s west bank and attack enemy positions in northern Alsace. Devers was stunned.

      • Yaj
        September 11, 2014 at 10:47

        “Devers dispatched scouts over the river. ”

        Making my point.

        Now right, whole divisions didn’t cross. It’s not like the invasion started and was then recalled.

        I didn’t have the book to quote from exactly.

        And then Devers indeed was stopped by higher ups. This is not some decision he just reached on his own.

        As you quote: “Devers was stunned”.

      • Yaj
        September 11, 2014 at 11:39

        Abe:

        I just noted that you’re quoting the New York Times, essay, that essay is what prompted me to read the book–though not in great detail.

        The point, I’m pretty sure that more than scouts crossed the river, but I don’t own the book to reference exactly.

  8. Yaj
    September 10, 2014 at 19:20

    And a conspiracy minded type could make something of fact that Sept. 11 1944 is the date the US forces first crossed the Rhine into the Nazi homeland. (Not really a “terror” event albeit.)

    The US forces had come from the south of France, not Normandy, and crossed at Strasbourg; they were quickly withdrawn. Likely giving Allen Dulles in Switzerland more time to negotiate the surrender, and escape of various high level Nazis to places like Chile.

  9. September 10, 2014 at 17:31

    Whoever wrote the intro paragraph and said the US “tolerated” terrorism is extremely uninformed.

    Try “committed, implemented, and maintained through crucial support”. The US is a barbaric extremist nation.

    Please get real. Denying reality does not help things.

    • John
      September 10, 2014 at 18:30

      The author no doubt agrees with you, but is using a moderate mode of expression to avoid losing a less informed audience.

      • September 10, 2014 at 21:16

        Fair enough!

  10. Abe
    September 10, 2014 at 15:51

    Chile (view minutes 9:15-12:55)
    Top 10 US-Backed Atrocities and Authoritarian Regimes
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5rVD_TXrjo

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