You're welcome flyjack
Looking at the CIA anti communist ops in Guatemala,, WOW.. links to Vietnam.. Hahneman was also in Vietnam.
If Hahneman was a CIA operative/contractor that would explain the lack of information about the hijacking and a "possible" coverup or "suppression" campaign.
CIA in Guatemala
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Prior to President Johnson's term in 1963, Dwight Eisenhower preached about how there was a time that America's end goal was to rid of communist governments. His wording in 1963 proved that it seemed that at least in this former president's opinion that the nation was beginning to go a different direction.[6] President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to invade Guatemala with
private military contractors.[35] In support of this, CIA Director William Raborn was tasked with finding evidence to support the President's belief that Guatemala was a Cuban puppet state. Raborn was unsuccessful in finding such evidence. In late 1965 Ambassador Mein requested help from the United States with fighting terrorist and kidnapping in Guatemala.[36] John P. Longan was selected for this job and to create a plan. Longan set up a meeting with Guatemala's Ambassador, chief of station, CAS, and chief public safety advisor to present his plan of action to high ranking police and military officials, including the chiefs of the Judicial Police, the National Police (PN) and the Treasury Guard (GH). After multiple meetings these agencies obviously were distrustful of each other and could not agree upon a plan of action. Longan advised Guatemalan these officials to establish "frozen area plans" for police raids (cordon and search) and the development of a "joint operations plan" for inter-agency coordination.[36]
A major feature of the new pacification strategy was the synchronization of the military and police forces in carrying out extralegal counter-terror activities. With money and support from US advisors,
President Enrique Peralta Azurdia established a Presidential Intelligence Agency in the National Palace, under which a telecommunications database known as the Regional Telecommunications Center or La Regional existed, linking the National Police, the Treasury Guard, the Judicial Police, the Presidential House and the Military Communications Center via a VHF-FM intracity frequency. La Regional also served as a depository for the names of suspected "subversives" and had its own intelligence and operational unit attached to it.[37]
This network was built on the 'Committees against Communism' created by the Central Intelligence Agency after the coup in 1954.[38]
The Guatemalan army general staff launched "Operation Limpieza" -Operation Cleanup-, an urban counterinsurgency program under the command of Colonel Rafael Arriaga Bosque. This program coordinated the activities of all of the country's main security agencies (including the Army, the Judicial Police and the National Police) in both covert and overt anti-guerrilla operations. Under Arriaga's direction, the security forces began to use extralegal tactics against the PGT.[39] In 1966, the CIA station in Guatemala addressed the capture and execution of five people who reportedly had entered into Guatemala from Mexico, illegally. These men were tortured for two days and then executed by security officers.[40] Among the victims was the leader of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez . These actions occurred within the context of a series of coordinated joint raids by combined forces of the Judicial Police and the G-2 (the operational unit of military intelligence, S-2) in which 28 PGT members and associates were seized by Guatemalan security forces in early March 1966 and subsequently vanished. The incident became famous as the first case of mass "disappearance" in Guatemala's history and one of the first uses of forced disappearances as a counterinsurgency tactic in Latin America.
In July 1966, president Julio Caesar Mendez Montenegro signed a pact which gave the army and security services the green-light to apply "any means necessary" in fighting insurgents and internal opposition groups. The Army General Staff subsequently assumed all control over the security forces and appointed Vice-Defense Minister, Col. Manuel Francisco Sosa Avila as the main "counterinsurgency coordinator". In addition, the Army General Staff and the Ministry of Defense took control of the Presidential Intelligence Agency - and by extension La Regional and the entire affiliated intelligence network - and renamed it the Guatemalan National Security Service (Servicio de Seguridad Nacional de Guatemala - SSNG).[41]
Within the framework of CIA supported counterinsurgency, a close relationship developed between right-wing paramilitary organizations and the security structures. Many civilian vigilantes linked to the MLN and right-wing paramilitary groups were simply absorbed by the Guatemalan Army G-2 in subsequent years. They operated as confidenciales or "military commissioners" and were attached to local army garrisons throughout the country. One Guatemalan high official acknowledged that over 3,000 MLN members collaborated with the Army. The most notorious of the right-wing paramilitary groups operating during the 1960s was the MANO, also known as the Mano Blanca ("White Hand"). Initially formed by the extreme-right MLN party as a paramilitary front in June 1966 to prevent President Méndez Montenegro from taking office, the MANO was quickly coopted by the army as an auxiliary force.[42] The MANO - while being the only death squad formed autonomously from the government - had a largely military membership, and received substantial funding from wealthy landowners.[43] The leader of the MLN and its paramilitary arm was Mario Sandoval Alarcon (later vice-president from 1974–78). Sandoval Alarcon was a paid CIA asset for at least 30 years, starting in the 1950s.[44] The MANO also received information from military intelligence through La Regional, with which it was linked to the Army General Staff and all of the main security forces.[45]
In January 1967 a special counter-terror unit labeled the Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army (SCUGA) under the command of Colonel Maximo Zepeda was created.[46] The CIA Station in Guatemala planned to expand its operations to include an intelligence-gathering network through SCUGA. The purpose of SCUGA was to collect information through the arrests and interrogation of what they deemed to be revolutionaries of communism. It carried out 'special assignments' that included abduction and assassinations of local authorities that the CIA deemed disruptive and "real and alleged communists."[47] The CIA itself referred to the SCUGA as a "government-sponsored terrorist organization...used primarily for assassinations and political abductions"[48]
In March 1967, after Vice-Defense Minister and counterinsurgency coordinator Col. Francisco Sosa Avila was named director-general of the National Police, a special counterinsurgency unit of the National Police known as the Fourth Corps was created to carry out extralegal operations alongside the SCUGA.[49] The Fourth Corps was an illegal fifty-man assassination squad which operated in secrecy from other members of the National Police, taking orders from Col. Sosa and Col. Arriaga.[50]
Links with the Phoenix Program
During the period of counterinsurgency and police militarization under Col. Sosa Avila, the PN worked closely with the USAID Office of Public Safety (OPS), which largely operated as a front for the CIA. Between 1966 and 1974, the OPS help militarize the PN and provided extensive training to Guatemalan security services in areas of counterinsurgency, intelligence gathering and interrogation. By 1970, more than 30,000 Guatemalan police officers had received some form of OPS training.[51]
US government Biographic Register and Foreign Service Lists reveal that many of the same American OPS and other functionaries operating in Guatemala were also involved in Vietnam, particularly in Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).[52] A component of CORDS was the CIA's Phoenix Program (1968–72), which was in part a covert program of selective assassination aimed at eradicating the Vietcong's civilian support base which killed at least 41,000 suspected VC sympathizers and cadre according to South Vietnamese government statistics.[53]
Central to Phoenix was the use of death squads; also known as "killer-teams", "counter-terror teams" or more euphemistically as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). These units would kill or abduct ("neutralize") suspected NLF cadre and synpathizers. Suspects were then taken to interrogation centers where they were tortured in an attempt to gain intelligence on VC activities in the area.[54] The information extracted was used to task the death squads with further killings.[54] An analogous pattern of selective terror was set in motion in Guatemala in the mid-1960s, where operational intelligence was extracted from captured suspects, collated, and used to designate additional targets for liquidation units. When asked about the origins of the death squads in Guatemala in a subsequent interview, General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores (military president from 1983–86) stated that they were initiated "in the 1960s with the CIA".[55]
