John Singlaub
'An Anti-Communist's Anti-Communist'
At 100 years old, John K. Singlaub died on January 29, 2022. Singlaub, a far-right Cold Warrior, major general in the US Army, and founding member of the CIA, had an extensive career dating back to the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services. He was an advisor of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), and a recipient of its Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom. According to Lee Edwards, who co-founded the VOC, Singlaub was “an anti-communist’s anti-communist” and “especially helpful in our selection of South Koreans for our Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.” That included South Korean general Paik Sun-yup (1920-2020), who collaborated with imperial Japan. The VOC website also promotes Singlaub’s autobiography. This just scratches the surface of Singlaub’s ties to this organization, but let’s work our way backwards.
In 2021, Singlaub stepped down as the chairman of “America’s Future,” a conservative nonprofit organization founded in 1946 that was eventually taken over by anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly. Before she died in 2016, Schlafly co-authored The Conservative Case for Trump with Ed Martin, a former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party who is the president of America’s Future and the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles. In 2018, the latter awarded its inaugural “Maj. General John K. Singlaub Award for Service to America” to Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama and short-lived national security advisor to Donald Trump who became a hero of QAnon and Christian fascists in the United States.
“Gen. Singlaub supervises our granting of this award and he recommended Lieutenant General Michael Flynn,” according to Ed Martin. In his acceptance speech, Flynn said, “I’m standing here as a reflection of Jack Singlaub… I commit to General Singlaub, and to you tonight, that I will never stop fighting…” Martin and Flynn had more than one “special visit” with Singlaub later that year. In 2020, Singlaub sent a letter (co-signed by Martin) to Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr asking him to “show courage now by supporting Lt. Gen. Flynn as the American hero he is.” Later that year, the Justice Department dropped charges against Flynn and Trump pardoned him.
“General Michael Flynn is America’s Future,” announced Ed Martin in 2021. Flynn succeeded Singlaub as the chairman of the board. Under new management, America’s Future came to be led by Flynn, his family members, and Tracy Diaz, “one of QAnon’s earliest influencers.” The organization contributed almost a million dollars to Arizona Republicans’ “fraudit” of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County. In a long article on Mike Flynn’s political ambitions for The New Republic, gonzo journalist Matt Farwell wrote, “Flynn found in Singlaub a kindred spirit, an Obi-Wan looking for a Luke before becoming one with the Force, with a priceless Rolodex full of sympathetic right-wingers with means who owed him favors.”
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established in 1994 by the fringe National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC), the far-right leadership of which was close with Singlaub. A review of his 1991 autobiography in the Los Angeles Times called it “dangerous,” because it promoted “low-level, low-visibility guerrilla warfare in lieu of diplomacy.” The following year, the U.S. chapter of the World League for Freedom and Democracy (WLFD), essentially an arm of the Taiwanese government, was reconstituted under Singlaub’s leadership. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, this organization was better known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which Singlaub led in the mid-to-late 1980s. The principal co-founders of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation ran the original US branch of the WACL.
According to Keith Allen Dennis, an expert on the history of the World Anti-Communist League, “Singlaub’s WACL became a global network for coordinating a privatized Cold War, managing private channels for sales of weapons and ammunition, military equipment, medical supplies and foodstuffs, and hard cash to supply the global ‘freedom fighter’ network.” In his book The Coors Connection, journalist Russ Bellant writes that “Singlaub informed Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey and National Security Council staff of his actions and operated with their assent, if not under their direction.” Keith Allen Dennis explains that Singlaub’s ravings about a supposed “unconventional warfare gap” between the US and Soviet Union meant “a prescription for Dirty War, whenever and wherever needed.”
Singlaub, like Michael Flynn in 2014, was forced into an early retirement, which just started a new chapter in his career. As the chief of staff of US forces in South Korea, the Major General spoke out against and derailed President Jimmy Carter’s pledge to withdraw US troops from the country. In retirement, Singlaub and Flynn each created a private intelligence agency, but Singlaub, unlike Flynn, apparently rebuffed the kooks who encouraged him to lead a military coup. Singlaub founded the Western Goals Foundation with Congressman Larry McDonald, who became the leader of the fringe, conspiracist John Birch Society shortly before he died on Korean Air Lines Flight 007. Focusing on McDonald’s role in Western Goals, journalist Zach Dorfman wrote for Politico in 2018 that he “built his own mini-deep state—a foundation that worked with government and law enforcement officials to collect and disseminate information about supposed subversives.”
John Singlaub quickly became a prominent figure in the American Security Council, a hard-right Cold Warrior think tank. He co-chaired its Coalition for Peace Through Strength which supported Ronald Reagan and other Republican political campaigns, including Chuck Grassley for Senate in Iowa. Looking back, the heavy-handed anticommunist fear-mongering of the ASC and its Coalition could be an inspiration for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Singlaub became obsessed with Nicaragua. He feared that Soviet influence in Central America would flood the United States with refugees, including Communist agents, who would carry out so much economic sabotage that the US would have to pull its troops from overseas to “put down the problem.”
According to The Iran Contra Connection by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, “In the 1979-80 period General Singlaub, having linked his political future to that of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, twice traveled to Central America to forge an alliance between the Reagan campaign and the local backers of what would later become the contra army” in Nicaragua. Also in 1980, Singlaub gave a speech to the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League in Australia, which drew him into the WACL and introduced him to “the Stetskos.”
Yaroslav and Slava Stetsko led the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a component of the WACL that Scott and Jon Lee Anderson described as the “largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.” A year before the Iran-Contra scandal came to light, Singlaub said he works “through them,” meaning the ABN, before correcting himself: “with them.”
Yaroslav Stetsko also led the OUN-B, or “Banderite” faction of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which played an important role in the “Holocaust by Bullets” in western Ukraine. Later in World War II, the OUN-B formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which ethnically cleansed Poles and hunted Jews, and the Nazis tried to utilize as a “stay behind army” before the CIA had the same idea. By 1982, John Singlaub visited the OUN-B headquarters building in Munich, started praising the memory of the UPA, and adopted the rhetoric of the ABN about supporting the “Captive Nations” as “the West’s strongest ally and… the only realistic alternative to nuclear war.”
Following his 1980 trip to Australia, the government of Taiwan loaned Singlaub money to establish the U.S. Council for World Freedom, the most successful US branch of the WACL. According to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, “Singlaub’s outspoken advocacy of unconventional warfare… would dramatically change the function of the League.” But he didn’t dramatically change the makeup of the League, as some have claimed, including our last “Victim of Communism.” Singlaub is unfairly credited with “purging” the WACL of its extremist elements (what he called the “the death squad activity”), specifically from Latin America, and really just Mexico in particular. “The people in WACL from Latin American now are good, respectable anti-communists,” he said, but “nothing had really changed,” said the Andersons.
1983 marked the 40th anniversary of the OUN-B establishing the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, and the 25th annual Captive Nations Week. Singlaub joined an honorary committee to commemorate the ABN, and chaired the steering committee that planned the Captive Nations ceremony in Washington, which Yaroslav Stetsko attended. Without Singlaub, Stetsko wouldn’t have gotten to shake hands with Reagan at the White House.
Later that year, invited to give the keynote speech at a commemoration in Los Angeles of the 50th anniversary of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine, Singlaub quickly pivoted to talking about World War II. He referred to Josef Stalin as Adolf Hitler’s “ally and fellow socialist.” According to Singlaub, “Some inmates of this giant concentration camp,” meaning the Soviet Union, “welcomed the Germans as liberators” and “natural allies.” While sympathizing with Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, he re-imagined the famine as a “pre-meditated, carefully planned extermination of nearly seven million Ukrainians.”
Unfortunately, this holocaust has not received the attention that it should. It took the Soviet Government one year to destroy 7 million people. It took the Nazis 5 years to destroy 6 million people, using sophisticated technology. While the Nazis were defeated and while their works against humanity have been widely distributed, communicated, and published, this particular crime by the Soviets is less known.
The following year, Ronald Reagan was re-elected to a second term, Congress banned military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, and John Singlaub joined a “Special Warfare Advisory Group that presented recommendations on Low Intensity Conflict [‘unconventional warfare’] to the US Department of Defense.” Singlaub also took over the WACL, which he subsequently involved in the Iran-Contra affair, along with the Western Goals Foundation.
Reagan’s White House recruited Singlaub’s WACL as a source of funding for the Contras. As reported by journalists Robert Parry and Brian Barger in 1986, “The secret White House program reunited an old-boys network of former CIA operatives dating back to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.” According to The Iran Contra Connection, published in 1987, “the CIA secret war in Laos and Vietnam was crucial in generating today’s ‘secret team’ behind the covert Iran-contra supply operation. It was in that Laotian war that the key players got to know each other.”
From 1966-68, John Singlaub commanded the Studies and Observations Group, a top secret “joint unconventional warfare task force” during the Vietnam War, which apparently made him “one of the on-site commanders” of Operation Phoenix, the CIA’s secretive assassination program that murdered thousands of Vietnamese civilians. 20 years later, after the Iran-Contra affair spilled into the open, journalist Peter Tarr reported for the Los Angeles Times that he “turned up evidence that the counterinsurgency strategy advocated by Singlaub and other private American citizens on the far right for use in Central America now had taken firm root in the Philippines.”
Another decade later, CNN reported that in 1970, the Studies and Observation Group (SOG) used sarin nerve gas to “wipe out a Laotian village believed to be harboring American military defectors.” According to CNN, its exposé of Operation Tailwind was “based on eight months of reporting and interviews with more than 200 people.” After a fierce backlash from Washington, CNN retracted the story and fired some of the producers responsible, but the latter claimed that the network simply buckled under pressure. Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered the Pentagon to “investigate” and in July 1988 held a press briefing with former SOG commander John Singlaub to refute the story.
Singlaub claimed that he warned CNN producer April Oliver, who was fired, that Operation Tailwind had nothing to do with US defectors or nerve gas. “We would say, ‘April, it did not happen. You’re on the wrong track. It did not happen — either of those two accusations.” After Singlaub sued for defamation, Oliver sued him back, and revealed that Singlaub was one of her confidential sources. “He protesteth too much. He knows what he said to me. He knows the story is true,” said Oliver. According to her notes, this is how their last interview ended.
Oliver: ''Just one last time, your own personal understanding of Tailwind is that it was a mission in which CBU-15, GB [deadly sarin nerve gas], was used at least twice on the village base camp and on extraction, and that the target was a group of American defectors.''
Singlaub: ''You are not going to use my name on this, are you?''
Oliver: ''No sir, you are on background as a senior military official.''
Singlaub: ''Yeah, that's my view.''
Next week, we’ll take a look at Lee Edwards, a co-founder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who described Singlaub as “an anti-communist’s anti-communist.”