Behind The Klan’s Karibbean Koup Attempt

Behind The Klan’s Karibbean Koup Attempt — Part II, By Ken Lawrence

May 7th, 2017 | Author: admin_ORD

Foreword: This is a text transcript of the article by Ken Lawrence on which Dave Emory and Nick Tuck based their radio show, found online under the title “Duke And Friends’ Involvement In Operation Red Dog / Bayou of Pigs”.

Source: Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 16, March 1982, $2.50

Behind The Klan’s Karibbean
Koup Attempt

Part II

By Ken Lawrence

Grenada was the target. The aim was to overthrow the revolution led by the New Jewel Movement and to return the ousted tyrant, Eric Gairy, to power.

Mercenary leader Michael Perdue of Houston, Texas, began plotting his counterrevolution as soon as he read published accounts of the revolution in the spring of 1979. First he sought out Gairy, met him in San Diego, and put forward this proposition: for a price, Perdue would overturn Maurice Bishop’s government and reinstate Gairy as prime minister. Gairy agreed and told Perdue to proceed.

David Duke’s Men

Perdue then contacted his old friend in New Orleans, David Duke, one-time Nazi and former Grand Wizard of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, now leader of the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Duke helped by putting Perdue in touch with several of his contacts, beginning a tangled web of international fascist intrigue and high finance.

One of Duke’s referrals was to German-born Wolfgang W. Droege, an organizer for the KKK in Canada whose father had been a personal friend of notorious Nazi war criminal Julius Streicher. Another was Don Andrews, former head of the Western Guard, Canada’s neo-Nazi group. A third was J. W. Kirkpatrick, a prominent attorney in Memphis, Tennessee, whose ties to Duke and the Klan had never been publicly revealed.

Each of these men eagerly joined the burgeoning conspiracy against the young revolution in tiny Grenada. Droege became second-in-command of the invasion force. Andrews recommended using the island of Dominica as a base for the attack on Grenada, and, on the recommendation of his friend Arnie Poli, invested in a Dominican coffee firm to furnish cover for intelligence-gathering trips and supply shipments. Kirkpatrick and an unidentified associate contributed $10,000 to help finance the plot. Perdue later said he got another $45,000 from James White, a business associate.

Grenada Abandoned

In Toronto they worked out a plan for the attack. It called for Gairy to accompany the landing party from Dominica and lead his Grenadian supporters. But Gairy refused; he was unwilling to land until the mercenary force had captured police headquarters and the army barracks. The argument that ensued between Perdue and Gairy ended their partnership, and Perdue began to consider other possibilities.

Arnie Poli, who had originally helped set up the base on Dominica, had been kicked out of the coup plot after he spent $3,000 of the group’s money on high living in Miami while failing to carry out his assigned task of purchasing a boat, but not before he had mentioned to Perdue that Patrick John had been ousted from the office of prime minister of Dominica and desired to return to power. Although John rebuffed several initial attempts to contact him, he eventually returned Perdue’s call after he lost the July 1980 election to Eugenia Charles. (Ironically, one of the plotters, Don Andrews, may inadvertently have helped bring to power the very government he later sought to overthrow. It was he who informed Charles about interim prime minister Oliver Seraphin’s deal, negotiated by finance minister Michael Douglas, to sell Dominican passports to stateless Iranian supporters of the Shah for $10,000 — one of several scandals that discredited Seraphin’s government to the benefit of Charles’s Freedom Party.)

A Nazi Paradise

Patrick John signed a contract with Perdue, dated September 20, 1980, promising Perdue’s company, Nortic Enterprises, $150,000 in cash and banking, gambling, agriculture, tourism, and lumber concessions that were to be tax exempt for 20 years. Droege later said that the mercenaries also intended to establish a cocaine refining plant in Dominica. The plans were not simply to pillage the island’s treasures, however. Don Andrews wanted Dominica to become a base for international distribution of white supremacist propaganda. Martin Weiche, Andrews’s Nazi colleague, envisioned eventually expelling all the Black inhabitants and building an “Aryan” fascist paradise on the island that Canadian Ku Klux Klan leader Alex McQuirter said “needs white order and white government.” McQuirter’s U.S. counterpart, Don Black, had boasted in high school that he would one day take over a country. Mississippi racist agitator Paul Haecker, a personal friend of several of the mercenaries, described their aims in a letter to the Jackson Daily News: “There are only about 70,000 people on Dominica. Miami absorbed 100,000 Cubans. Why don’t they send the 70,000 to Mississippi and put them on food stamps and welfare? Then let all the white racists go to Dominica. Furnish us enough supplies to get our economy started, and then we won’t bother the rest of the country any longer.”

But first things first. Droege brought in a Canadian mobster, Chuckie Yanover, who was looking for a new base for his operations. Yanover and his associate, Charles Kim, went to reconnoiter Dominica, taking hundreds of aerial photographs. The first major setback occurred when details of the planned coup attempt leaked out and Patrick John was jailed. But Perdue’s band modified their arrangements and went ahead.

Operation Red Dog

The plan was to land the mercenary force on Dominica between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m., to capture the police station, and to free John. John’s forces would then take over the government while Perdue and his men would “slip into the wilderness,” leaving the impression that only local forces had overthrown Eugenia Charles. It was dubbed “Operation Red Dog.”

Most of the mercenary recruiting was done by Wolf Droege. In Canada he lined up KKK leader Alex McQuirter. McQuirter’s girl friend, Mary Anne McGuire, was sent to Dominica as a spy. Using his Klan connections in the U.S., Droege drew in Don Black of Birmingham and Joe Danny Hawkins of Jackson. Hawkins then brought in fellow Mississippi Klansmen William Waldrop and George Malvaney, while Black recruited Michael Norris of Tuscaloosa. Hawkins also put Perdue in touch with his long-time KKK associate, L.E. Matthews, who reportedly furnished financial backing and explosives. Christopher Anderson, former police chief of Kiowa, Kansas, answered Perdue’s ad in Le Mercenaire. Klan organizer Larry Jacklin of Listowell, Ontario, and Nazi Robert Prichard of Raleigh, North Carolina, joined up.

Lies and Security Lapses

All were recruited under false pretenses. Perdue told them he was a Vietnam veteran with combat mercenary experience in Uruguay and Nicaragua. He claimed he had backing from the CIA and the State Department, and that former Texas governor John Connally and U.S. Representative Ronald Paul of Houston knew what he was doing and approved of it. He told them they would be fighting communism in Dominica.

Security was lax from the very beginning, not only in Dominica where John and his collaborators, and then Mary Anne McGuire, were arrested, but in the U.S. and Canada as well. For five months Perdue and Andrews conferred about their plans by calling to and from pay telephones, apparently unaware that all such calls are automatically monitored by authorities. Reporter Gordon Sivell of Toronto radio station CFTR notified a friend in the Ontario Provincial Police of the plot after he had learned the details from Poli, McQuirtcr, and Perdue. McGuire’s cables to the plotters, relayed by CFTR staff, were probably monitored by all three governments. Mercenary trainer and FBI informer Frank Camper of Dolomite, Alabama, was aware that Perdue was recruiting for an assault on Dominica. It seems likely that the authorities would keep tabs on advertisers in publications like Le Mercenaire. The captain of the Manana, the boat chartered by Perdue to carry the raiding party to Dominica, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “an unofficial federal informant. He enjoys keeping his eye on harbor activities and has provided information before to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents here. He knew the agents by their first names. He even had a Coast Guard Auxiliary decal on his boat’s window, which Perdue failed to notice.” (Perdue was sent to this man, Mike Howell, by David Duke, who got the referral from his girl friend’s father, Sheldon Udel.) Perdue had even attempted to purchase Israeli Uzi submachine guns from police acquaintances.

There is nothing unusual about government authorities being aware of mercenaries’ conspiring, although this case may set a record for the sheer number of security lapses. But given the scope of any such plot — weapons purchase and storage, finance, transportation, and recruiting almost no coup attempt of this sort can really be kept a secret. Many times knowledgeable governments tacitly support such ventures, but in this case both the U.S. and Canada decided to intervene and scuttle the plot, because they had helped install Eugenia Charles’s government and didn’t want to lose such a loyal, conservative friend.

Arrest and Trial

The ten mercenaries were arrested last April 27 as they headed for Geohegan’s Harbor near New Orleans whence they intended to set sail on a ten-day voyage to Dominica.

It did not lake long for seven of the, to plead guilty — especially since the leader., Perdue, was the first to strike a deal with the government. The Los Angeles Times reported that the State Department was heavily involved in the plea bargaining. Two of the seven, George Malvaney and Larry Jacklin, were given indeterminate sentences as youth offenders; they could be released almost immediately. The other five –Perdue, Droege, Waldrop, Prichard, and Anderson — were each sentenced to three years.

Three others chose to fight the charges, and it was through their trial that many of the conspiracy’s details became public. Each had a different apparent motive. Don Black, Grand Wizard of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, used the trial as a platform to promote himself and his Klan. Joe Danny Hawkins, who has a long record of Klan-related convictions and only recently had been released after serving a three-year federal sentence for a firearms violation, had more to lose than any of the others. Michael Norris of National Alliance, a dangerous neo-Nazi group, believed that he could convince the jury he was just a dumb country boy lured into something he didn’t fully understand, and apparently he was right.

They went on trial in June. Norris was acquitted, but Black and Hawkins were convicted and each sentenced to three years; both have appealed their convictions and are currently out on bond. Though disappointed in his two-count conviction, Black said, “It could have been worse, a lot worse.” Hawkins commented, “We won one. Mike’s loose. That’s important.”

Black’s defense must have shamed his racist followers. Asked by the prosecutor, “Do you believe, for example, that everyone is equal?” Black answered, “Under the law, yes.” Asked, “Do you believe in equality of opportunity?” he gave the same answer. He testified concerning his motive for participating in the coup attempt. “I supported Reagan and the reason why is we need a strong national defense. More and more countries are being swallowed up by communism and it was important to stop it in Dominica because it is in our hemisphere.” (A State Department witness ridiculed the defense assertion that Dominica was threatened by communism.) Black’s lawyer, Patrick McGinity, a former federal prosecutor, praised Black in his closing argument to the jury. “He believes in America. He believes in the Constitution. He believes in the equality of man. He believes in God, in this country, and for what it stands.” He called Black “highly principled, definitely outspoken, and not afraid to take a stand for what he believes in. He is a strong, conservative, active young American. He is a doer. We need more people like him.” Somewhat more truthfully. Hawkins’s lawyer, David Craig, called his client “a redneck, a Confederate-flag-carrying Son of the South who wanted to do something to fight communism.”

The day after Hawkins and Black were convicted, assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsay Larson flew to Dominica to offer evidence against Patrick John and his backers on the island. In a hearing in October, charges against live former members of the Dominican Defense Force, Major Frederick Newton and Corporals Ronnie Roberts, Howell Piper, Hubert Charles, and Walton Phillip were dismissed. Captain Malcolm Reid and two former employees of Dominica’s Public Broadcasting and Information Service, Julian David and Dennis Joseph, were acquitted. Patrick John, as of this writing, has not been tried.

Only Mary Anne McGuire, the KKK spy from Canada, was convicted by the Dominican court. She has been sentenced to three years without parole, and since her trial has attempted suicide twice. Stephen Hammond, who attempted to rescue McGuire, has been deported to his native England. (Hammond was called Harold Phillips Wood in our first installment; according to Judy Stoffman of Canada’s Today magazine this was merely the name shown on Hammond’s illegally procured passport.)

Will Canada Prosecute?

There is still a possibility that indictments may be returned against some of the plotters in Canada. Police passed their dossier and a recommendation to prosecute to the provincial attorney general in September. One source says that the U.S. government has offered to release Droege “if he would sing against Chuckie up here, but Wolf won’t talk to the police. He’s hanging tough.” Another says Mary Anne McGuire will probably be released by Dominica if she agrees to testify against Andrews in a Canadian trial.

Charges could be brought under a section of the Canadian criminal code that makes it an offense to conspire in Canada to do something in another country that is against the laws of that country. The section carries a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment. Yet, as Canada’s Black newspaper Contrast editorialized in late October, “Alex McQuirter has freely admitted his part in the conspiracy to overthrow the government of [Dominica]. Eight months have elapsed since McQuirter’s role in the abortive coup was revealed … [He’s] still on the loose.”

Klan

It seems doubtful that anyone from Toronto radio station CFTR will be charged, even though its staff was in on the plot and served as intermediaries by carrying McGuire’s coded spy messages to the conspirators in Canada. The station’s management may face some embarrassing questions when their broadcast license is up for renewal, however. (CFTR’s actions in this case were similar to those of U.S. networks in the past. In 1966 CBS helped fund a plot called “Project Nassau” to overthrow “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti, then to use Haiti as a base for operations against Cuba. That plan fell through when former CIA contract agent Mitchell WerBell double-crossed his CBS co-conspirators. Just last year ABC was involved in a coup plot, later cancelled, against Haiti’s current ruler, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, organized by former Congo and Rhodesia mercenary Mike Williams. In each of these cases the media were willing to risk a lot of bloodshed for the sake of an exclusive story.)

Second Coup Try

Yet another coup attempt aiming at restoring Patrick John’s rule* was thwarted just before Christmas. This one involved many of the same former members of the Defense Force who had been charged in the previous plot but had been released or acquitted. One of them, Howell Piper, was killed in the attack on police headquarters and the central prison, along with a police officer. Six hours later another former soldier was shot and killed by police after he had raised his hands to surrender, according to eyewitnesses. Ten others were wounded, including Police Commissioner Oliver Phillip. Following this attack the government declared an emergency and assumed special powers, including arbitrary search and arrest, a ban on political gatherings, and strict press censorship. There was apparently no outside support for this latest coup attempt.

Although the plotting has been the work of discredited former officials partly backed by outside fascistsm Prime Minister Eugenia Charles has used these episodes as a pretext for a crackdown on leftists and a general escalation of political repression. The Dominica Liberation Movement says “a reign of police terror” has descended upon the island since the original state of emergency was declared, including the brutal killing of a youth, John Rose Lindsay, in police detention, and the routine use of torture during interrogation. Eleven other police killings have also been protested by the DLM. Newspapers from Cuba and Grenada have been banned by the government. DLM general secretary Bill Riviere protested a “police rampage” last June. “Young men and some women were punched in the head and jaw, kicked in the groin, slapped in the face, a few were gun-butted in the head and others in the chest and stomach, and some were kicked in the face and head as they fell to the ground. These blows were accompanied by insults of the worst kind. One victim lost a number of teeth and another’s head and face were severely battered. Yet in the end not a single one of them has been charged.”

Dominica’s Economic Crisis

After the December coup attempt, police detained two members of the DLM Political Committee and ransacked its headquarters. The two were later released, but one of those arrested and held for a longer time, a leader of the National Workers Union, Rawlins Jemmot, is described as “close to DLM.” The actual reason for the crackdown on these forces is the public’s growing discontent with the government’s economic policies. In November 1980 the Charles government negotiated a loan of EC$37 million from the International Monetary Fund. (One U.S. dollar equals about 2.7 Eastern Caribbean dollars.) The routine terms of austerity demanded by IMF have hit the island hard — a ceiling of ten percent on wage and salary increases until November 1983; a freeze on public sector jobs; and a ban on subsidies to state bodies, all of which are heavily in debt. Taxes have nearly doubled. The DLM says Christmas 1981 was the hardest ever, with the price of 9.6 cents per pound being offered to banana farmers at a lime when they need 19 cents to survive. Bananas account for 75 percent of Dominica’s export earnings. Unemployment continues to be very high, especially among youth who constitute 60 percent of the population, while the doors to foreign employment have closed to them one by one — Britain in the fifties, the U.S. and Canada in the sixties, the Virgin Islands in the seventies, and Guadeloupe and St. Martin, just recently.

U.S. Military Aid

After the first Klan-Nazi coup attempt, Prime Minister Charles flew to Washington to ask for US military aid, which is being given in several forms. The State Department arranged a U.S. $60,000 grant, and a number of Dominican police are now undergoing training in Panama. U.S. arms and ammunition have heen donated through Edward Seaga’s government in Jamaica. Dominica will join Barbados, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia in a regional coast guard service while negotiations are under way toward the creation of a regional army; meanwhile the Barbados Defense Force, beefed up and modernized by the U.S., will be on call while the Dominican police force is expanded and given a paramilitary component. A CIA source told Robert Alan Michaels, writing for Caribbean Review, that Dominica is also being defended by a “western European nation or nations,” probably France and Britain. (Michaels also concurs with CAIB’s report of CIA involvement on behalf of Eugenia Charles and the Freedom Party in the July 1980 election.)

While it is clear that the U.S. had strong reasons to nip the Klan-Nazi conspiracy in the bud, what if the plotters had stuck to their original aim of overturning the Grenada revolution? It is possible that U.S. and Canadian author-

KKK (continued from page 50)

ties might have looked the other way and permitted the attempt. Some aspects of the plot that are still being kept secret are suggestive. Why, for example, of the 12, 40, or 80 backers of the coup, depending on which report you choose to believe, were only two indicted by the grand jury? Why are the identities of the others not disclosed? Perhaps because the U.S. government has something to hide.

Similarly, why was no action taken against the unidentified “several others” the Los Angeles Times said refused to answer the grand jury’s questions? In this respect David Duke is a significant figure. He was central to the original plot and never denied his role in it; he rebuffed the grand jury, yet no action at all was taken against him. This plus the highly suspicious fact that Duke sent Perdue to a boat captain who was an ATF informer lends some credibility to old charges leveled by Duke’s Klan rivals that he’s a government agent. If so, it would suggest that the U.S. looked favorably on the intentions of this ragtag band of Klansmen, Nazis, and gangsters as long as they kept their sights firmly set on Grenada.

One cannot be certain, however. It seems unlikely that a group this weak and incompetent could pose a significant military threat to the Grenada revolution, even if assisted by Eric Gairy’s filth column on the island. But a failure by such a group is likely to sharpen the alertness of Grenadians to the threat their country faces from the U.S. Prime Minister Maurice Bishop documented the seriousness of the danger in a letter to then U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim last August. He pointed out that the U.S. NATO military manoeuver called “Ocean Venture 81,” the largest such exercise since World War Two, had as its target a fictional group of Caribbean islands called Amber and the Amberdines, a thinly disguised reference to Grenada and the Grenadines. The practice amphibious landing took place on the southeastern tip of the Puerto Rican island Vieques, which corresponds to an area of Grenada that actually is called Amber. Other equally obvious similarities were shown. With an attack of this magnitude being practiced, it does seem improbable that a small and inept band of mercenaries would be considered a serious U.S. option.

Another puzzle the U.S. hasn’t answered concerns two unidentified members of the invading party. Perdue contracted with Howell to transport twelve, yet only ten were arrested. Who were the other two? One was probably Canadian Klan leader Alex McQuirter. He had originally been slated to lead one of the mercenary groups, but couldn’t join the group in New Orleans because he was barred from the U.S. in January 1981. What about number twelve? No one has yet identified the missing mercenary.

There remains, finally, the question of what action the Canadian government will take, if any. At our press time a representative of the Ontario attorney general’s office told CAIB, “There has been an active investigation for a number of months. It is rapidly drawing to a close, and there will either be action or an announcement in the immediate future. Beyond that we cannot comment.”

FLASH: As CAIB went to press, it was learned that the Canadian authorities had brought charges against Alex McQuirter and Charles Yanover.

* This is taking the published news reports at face value. In Dominica, rumors abound. One story has it that Patrick John was not to be released and his Dominica labor Party restored to power, but that he was to be killed, along with his rival Oliver Seraphin, leader of the Democratic Labor Party. Another version blames the rising on United Labor Party leader Michael Douglas. The prime minister has hinted that the Dominica Liberation Movement was responsible, a charge vigorously denied by the DLM.