United States and state-sponsored terrorism

Starting in 1959, under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government had the Central Intelligence Agency recruit operatives in Cuba to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage. Among the most prominent of these terrorists were Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who were implicated in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane. Bosch was also held to be responsible for 30 other terrorist acts, while Carriles was a former CIA agent convicted of numerous terrorist acts committed while he was linked to the agency. They and other Cuban exiles involved in terrorist acts, including Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero, two exiles who murdered the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, were released by the administration of George W. Bush. Orlando Bosch Bosch was a contemporary of Fidel Castro at the University of Havana, where he was involved with the student cells that eventually became a part of the Cuban revolution. However, Bosch became disillusioned with Castro's regime, and participated in a failed rebellion in 1960. He became the leader of the Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR), and also joined efforts to assassinate Castro along with Luis Posada Carriles. He was the head of Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which the FBI has described as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization". In 1968, he was convicted of firing a bazooka at a Polish cargo ship bound for Havana that had been docked in Miami. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and released on parole in 1974. He immediately broke parole and traveled around Latin America. The U.S. Justice Department recorded that Bosch was also responsible for 30 other attacks. He returned to Miami, where he was arrested for violating parole. The Justice department recommended that he be deported. However, Bush overturned this recommendation, and had him released from custody with the stipulation that he "renounce" violence. Following the invasion, Carriles was trained for a time at the Fort Benning station of the U.S. Army. He then relocated to Venezuela and became the first head of the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP), Venezuela's intelligence agency, and came into contact with Orlando Bosch. Along with Bosch and others, he founded the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, which has been described as an umbrella of anti-Castro terrorist groups. After a series of arrests and escapes, Carriles returned to the CIA fold in 1985 by joining their support operations to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, which were being run by Oliver North. His job included air dropping military supplies, for which he was paid a significant salary. He later admitted to playing a part in the Iran-Contra affair. In 1997, a series of terrorist bombings occurred in Cuba, and Carriles was implicated. The bombings were said to be targeted at the growing tourism there. Carriles admitted that the lone conviction in the case had been of a mercenary under his command, and also made a confession (later retracted) that he had planned the incident. Human Rights Watch stated that although Carriles might no longer receive active assistance, he benefited from the tolerant attitude of the U.S. government. In 2000, Carriles was arrested and convicted in Panama of attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro. Likewise, the US government has refused to send Carriles to Cuba, saying he might face torture. His release on bail on April 19, 2007, elicited angry reactions from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. The U.S. Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was "an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks", a flight risk and a danger to the community. On September 9, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed the District Court's order dismissing the indictment and remanded the case to the District Court. On April 8, 2009, the United States Attorney filed a superseding indictment in the case. Carriles' trial ended on April 8, 2011, with a jury acquitting him on all charges. Peter Kornbluh described him as "one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history" and the "godfather of Cuban exile violence." == Colombia ==

was the head of a counterinsurgency team sent to Colombia in 1962 by the US Special Warfare Center. Yarborough was one of the earliest proponents of "paramilitary ... and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." The first Colombian paramilitary groups were organized by the Colombian government following recommendations made by U.S. military counterinsurgency advisers who were sent to Colombia in the early 1960s during the Cold War to combat leftist politicians, activists and guerrillas. Paramilitary groups were responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian conflict. According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups were responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia in a given year during the 80s and 90s. Paramilitary violence and terrorism there was principally targeted to peasants, unionists, indigenous people, human rights workers, teachers and left-wing political activists or their supporters. Plan Lazo In October 1959, the United States sent a "Special Survey Team", composed of counterinsurgency experts, to investigate Colombia's internal security situation, due to the increased prevalence of armed communist groups in rural Colombia which formed during and after La Violencia. In a secret supplement to his report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough encouraged the creation and deployment of a paramilitary force to commit sabotage and terrorist acts against communists, stating: The new counter-insurgency policy was instituted as Plan Lazo in 1962 and called for both military operations and civic action programs in violent areas. Following Yarborough's recommendations, the Colombian military recruited civilians into paramilitary "civil defense" groups which worked alongside the military in its counter-insurgency campaign, as well as in civilian intelligence networks to gather information on guerrilla activity. Among other policy recommendations, the US team advised that "in order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges, any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature." It was not until the early part of the 1980s that the Colombian government attempted to move away from the counterinsurgency strategy represented by Plan Lazo and Yarborough's 1962 recommendations. Armed Forces Directive No. 200-05/91 In 1990, the United States formed a team that included representatives of the U.S. Embassy's Military Group, U.S. Southern Command, the DIA, and the CIA in order to give advice on the reshaping of several of the Colombian military's local intelligence networks, ostensibly to aid the Colombian military in "counter-narcotics" efforts. Human Rights Watch concluded that these intelligence networks subsequently laid the groundwork for an illegal, covert partnership between the military and paramilitaries. Human Rights Watch argued that the restructuring process solidified links between members of the Colombian military and civilian members of paramilitary groups, by incorporating them into several of the local intelligence networks and by cooperating with their activities. In effect, HRW believed that this further consolidated a "secret network that relied on paramilitaries not only for intelligence, but to carry out murder". As an example of increased violence and "dirty war" tactics, Human Rights Watch cited a partnership between the Colombian Navy and the MAS, in Barrancabermeja where: "In partnership with MAS, the navy intelligence network set up in Barrancabermeja adopted as its goal not only the elimination of anyone perceived as supporting the guerrillas, but also members of the political opposition, journalists, trade unionists, and human rights workers, particularly if they investigated or criticized their terror tactics." The Cali cartel provided $50 million for weapons, informants, and assassins, with in hope of wiping out their primary rivals in the cocaine business. Both Colombian and U.S. government agencies (including the DEA, CIA and State Department) provided intelligence to Los Pepes. == Italy ==

The Years of Lead was a period of socio-political turmoil in Italy that lasted from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. This period was marked by a wave of terrorism carried out by both right-wing and left-wing paramilitary groups. It was concluded that the former were supported by the United States as a strategy of tension. General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, stated that his men in the region of Venice discovered a right-wing terrorist cell that had been supplied with military explosives from Germany, and alleged that US intelligence services instigated and abetted right-wing terrorism in Italy during the 1970s. According to the investigation of Italian judge Guido Salvini, the neo-fascist organizations involved in the strategy of tension, "La Fenice, Avanguardia nazionale, Ordine nuovo" were the "troops" of "clandestine armed forces", directed by components of the "state apparatus related to the CIA." Piazza Fontana bombing The Piazza Fontana Bombing was a terrorist attack that occurred on December 12, 1969, at 16:37, when a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura (National Agrarian Bank) in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 17 people and wounding 88. The same afternoon, three more bombs were detonated in Rome and Milan, and another was found undetonated. In 1998, Milan judge Guido Salvini indicted U.S. Navy officer David Carrett on charges of political and military espionage for his alleged participation in the Piazza Fontana bombing et al. Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, an Italian official of the U.S.-NATO intelligence network, and "collaboratore di giustizia" Carlo Digilio (Uncle Otto), who served as the CIA coordinator in Northeastern Italy in the sixties and seventies. The newspaper la Repubblica reported that Carlo Rocchi, CIA's man in Milan, was discovered in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio. Paolo Emilio Taviani, the Christian Democrat co-founder of Gladio (NATO's stay-behind anti-Communist organization in Italy), told investigators that the SID military intelligence service was about to send a senior officer from Rome to Milan to prevent the bombing, but decided to send a different officer from Padua in order to put the blame on left-wing anarchists. Taviani also alleged in an August 2000 interview to Il Secolo XIX newspaper: "It seems to me certain, however, that agents of the CIA were among those who supplied the materials and who muddied the waters of the investigation." Guido Salvini said, "The role of the Americans was ambiguous, halfway between knowing and not preventing and actually inducing people to commit atrocities." According to Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the terrorist attack was supposed to push then Interior Minister Mariano Rumor to declare a state of emergency. == Nicaragua ==

From 1979 to 1990, the United States provided financial, logistical and military support to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, who used terrorist tactics in their war against the Nicaraguan government and carried out more than 1300 terrorist attacks. This support persisted despite widespread knowledge of the human rights violations committed by the Contras. The Somoza dynasty had been receiving military and financial assistance from the United States since 1936. Following their seizure of power, the Sandinistas ruled the country first as part of a Junta of National Reconstruction, and later as a democratic government following free and fair elections in 1984. The Sandinistas did not attempt to create a communist society or communist economic system; instead, their policy advocated a social democracy and a mixed economy. The government sought the aid of Western Europe, who were opposed to the U.S. embargo against Nicaragua, to escape dependency on the Soviet Union. However, the U.S. administration viewed the leftist Sandinista government as undemocratic and totalitarian under the ties of the Soviet-Cuban model and tried to paint the Contras as freedom fighters. The Sandinista government headed by Daniel Ortega won decisively in the 1984 Nicaraguan elections. The U.S. government explicitly planned to back the Contras, various rebel groups collectively that were formed in response to the rise of the Sandinistas, as a means to damage the Nicaraguan economy and force the Sandinista government to divert its scarce resources toward the army and away from social and economic programs. Covert operations The United States began to support Contra activities against the Sandinista government by December 1981, with the CIA at the forefront of operations. The CIA provided the Contras with planning and operational direction and assistance, weapons, food, and training, in what was described as the "most ambitious" covert operation in more than a decade. One of the purposes the CIA hoped to achieve by these operations was an aggressive and violent response from the Sandinista government which in turn could be used as a pretext for further military actions. The Contra campaign against the government included frequent and widespread acts of terror. The economic and social reforms enacted by the government enjoyed some popularity; as a result, the Contras attempted to disrupt these programs. In some cases, more indiscriminate killing and destruction also took place. Congress cut off all funds for the contras in 1985 with the third Boland Amendment. As a result, the Reagan administration sought to provide funds from other sources. Between 1984 and 1986, $34 million was routed through third countries and $2.7 million through private sources. These funds were run through the National Security Council, by Lt. Col. Oliver North, who created an organization called "The Enterprise" which served as the secret arm of the NSC staff and had its own airplanes, pilots, airfield, ship, and operatives. U.S. Senator John Kerry's 1988 Committee on Foreign Relations report on Contra drug links concluded that "senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems". Propaganda Throughout the Nicaraguan Civil War, the Reagan government conducted a campaign to shift public opinion toward support for the Contras and to change the vote in Congress in favor of that support. For this purpose, the National Security Council authorized the production and distribution of publications that looked favorably at the Contras, also known as "white propaganda," written by paid consultants who did not disclose their connection to the administration. Another common theme the administration played on was the idea of returning Nicaragua to democracy, which analysts characterized as "curious," because Nicaragua had been a U.S.-supported dictatorship prior to the Sandinista revolution, and had never had a democratic government before the Sandinistas. There were also continued efforts to label the Sandinistas as undemocratic, although the 1984 Nicaraguan elections were generally declared fair by historians. Commentators stated that this was all a part of an attempt to return Nicaragua to the state of its Central American neighbors; that is, where traditional social structures remained and American imperialist ideas were not threatened. The investigation into the Iran-Contra affair led to the operation being called a massive exercise in psychological warfare. The CIA wrote a manual for the Contras, entitled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (''''), which focused mainly on how "Armed Propaganda Teams" could build political support in Nicaragua for the Contra cause through deceit, intimidation, and violence. The manual discussed assassinations. The CIA claimed that the purpose of the manual was to "moderate" the extreme violence already being used by the Contras. Leslie Cockburn writes that the CIA, and therefore indirectly the U.S. government and President Reagan, encouraged Contra terrorism by issuing the manual to the contras, violating Reagan's own Presidential Directive. Cockburn wrote that "[t]he manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, clearly advocated a strategy of terror as the means to victory over the hearts and minds of Nicaraguans. Chapter headings such as 'Selective Use of Violence for propagandistic Effects' and 'Implicit and Explicit Terror' made that fact clear enough. ... The little booklet thus violated President Reagan's own Presidential Directive 12333, signed in December 1981, which prohibited any U.S. government employee—including the CIA—from having anything to do with assassinations." International Court of Justice ruling In 1984, the Nicaraguan government filed a suit in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against the United States. Nicaragua stated that the Contras were completely created and managed by the U.S. Although this claim was rejected, the court found overwhelming and undeniable evidence of a very close relationship between the Contras and the United States. A few months later, the court ruled that it did have jurisdiction in the case, contrary to what the U.S. had argued. == Kosovo ==

in Mitrovica memorial The FR Yugoslav authorities regarded the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as a terrorist group, although many European governments did not. In February 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, condemned both the actions of the Yugoslav government and of the KLA, and described the KLA as "without any questions, a terrorist group". UN resolution 1160 took a similar stance. At first, NATO had stressed that KLA was "the main initiator of the violence" and that it had "launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation". The United States (and NATO) directly supported the KLA. The CIA funded, trained and supplied the KLA. As disclosed to The Sunday Times by CIA sources, "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia". In 1999, a retired colonel said that KLA forces had been trained in Albania by former US military working for MPRI. According to Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly "several years earlier". After the war, the KLA was transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps, which worked alongside NATO forces patrolling the province. In the following years, however, an ethnic Albanian insurgency emerged in southern Serbia (1999–2001) and in Macedonia (2001). The EU condemned what it described as the "extremism" and use of "illegal terrorist actions" by the group active in southern Serbia. Since the war, many of the KLA leaders have been active in the political leadership of the Republic of Kosovo. == Syria ==

The United States has provided extensive lethal and non-lethal aid to many Syrian militant groups fighting against the Syrian government, an ally of Russia, during the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian government has directly accused the United States of sponsoring terrorism in Syria. The United States government was also criticized by Iran for its silence following the beheading of a child by the Islamist group Nour al-Din al-Zenki, a group that is a recipient of US military aid and is accused of many war crimes by Amnesty International. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also accused the United States of supporting ISIS in Syria, claiming Turkey has evidence of U.S. support for ISIS through pictures, photos, and videos. An investigation by journalists Phil Sands and Suha Maayeh revealed that rebels supplied with weapons from the Military Operations Command in Amman sold a portion of them to local arms dealers, often to raise cash to pay additional fighters. Some MOC-supplied weapons were sold to Bedouin traders referred to locally as "The Birds" in Lajat, a volcanic plateau northeast of Daraa, Syria. According to rebel forces, the Bedouins would then trade the weapons to ISIL, who would place orders using the encrypted WhatsApp messaging service. Two rebel commanders and a United Kingdom weapons monitoring organization maintain that MOC–supplied weapons have made their way to ISIL forces. Another study conducted by Conflict Armament Research, on behalf of the European Union and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, found that external support for anti-Assad Syrian rebels "significantly augmented the quantity and quality of weapons available to [ISIL] forces", including, in the most rapid case of diversion they documented, On 11 August 2016, presidential nominee Donald Trump accused president Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton of being the "founders of ISIS". The White House did not comment on Trump's accusation. On 13 June 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the 2024 independent presidential candidate of the US presidential election, said "We created ISIS" during his foreign policy program speech. == See also ==