James Jesus Angleton, the legendary head of Central Intelligence Agency counterintelligence, warned me in the 1970s that a group of right-wing, anti-Castro Cubans had become assassins for a number of conservative governments around the world with the CIA’s blessing.
I reported and wrote a series of stories for the News Journal newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, on this group of Cuban Nationalist Movement extremists. One of the stories was about a bizarre assassination in South Africa of a government official and his wife in their home. That official, Robert Smits, had discovered a secret slush fund in a South African government bank account in Washington, D.C. My story connected the murders of Smits and his wife, Cora, to a scandal that threatened the racist regime in South Africa at the same time the Reagan White House was supporting it.
The story I wrote received little traction either here in the United States or the apartheid-controlled media in South Africa.
President Ronald Reagan, his Vice President and former CIA director, George Bush, and their political allies like Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the apartheid government of South Africa, were all aware of the anti-Castro Cuban connection to this hit squad. The Reagan administration actually protected the perpetrators by using government resources to intervene on their behalf.
One of the hit teams’ murders was the bombing death of an American woman named Ronni Kappen Moffit in Washington, D.C. The cover-up by U.S. officials in the Justice Department and CIA allowed the suspects to go free without further legal action.
The Reagan government rewarded organizations that were involved in these murders – the Bureau of State Security in South Africa and DINA, the intelligence directorate of Chile – for allowing and helping to cover up CIA-condoned violence.
Last week reporter James Myburgh in South Africa revisited my original story and uncovered some very curious additional material the apartheid-controlled press added to my story on the murders for local consumption. For the record, I never received so much as a phone call from the South African police. Here is James’ story and my original article.
