World Anti-Communist League

The World Anti-Communist League (WACL) was founded in 1966 in Taipei, Taiwan. It has since been renamed the World League for Freedom and Democracy.
WACL was conceived as an expansion of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a regional alliance against communism formed at the request of Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the Korean War.Craig Pyes,"Private General," New Republic, Sept 30, 1985.; Fred Clarkson,"Behind the Supply Lines," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter, 1986.;Joe Conason and Murray Waas, Village Voice, Oct 22, 1985.;Peter Stone,"Private Groups Step Up Aid," Washington Post, May 3, 1985. The Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL) had roots in the China Lobby, a group dedicated to stopping official international recognition of the Chinese Communist government. The China Lobby had U.S. government connections, and allegedly Ray Cline of the CIA assisted this group in establishing the Taiwanese Political Warfare Cadres Academy in the late 1950s.Thomas Bodenheimer and Richard Gould, Rollback: Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989). The founders of APACL were agents of the governments of Taiwan and Korea, including Park Chung Hee who later bacame president of Korea; Yoshio Kodama, a member of organized crime in Japan; Ryiochi Sasakawa, a gangster and Japanese billionaire jailed as a war criminal after World War II; and Osami Kuboki and other followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church.Peter Stone,"Contras' of the World Unite," Sunday Times-Times of London, Sept 15, 1985.; Robert Parry and Brian Barger,"Reagan's Shadow CIA," New Republic, Nov 24, 1986.; Fred Clarkson,"Behind the Supply Lines," Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter, 1986.; Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated The World Anti-Communist League (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1986).;Joe Conason and Murray Waas, Village Voice, Oct 22, 1985. Sasakawa provided major funding for Moon and the Unification Church. When Park became president of South Korea after the 1961 coup, he adopted the Unification Church as his political arm.Thomas Bodenheimer and Richard Gould, Rollback: Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989). 
==Background==
==US branch==
Jim Lobe reports:
:McCain, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, was, of course, an enthusiastic supporter of the Afghan “freedom fighters” and the “Reagan Doctrine” that supported them and other insurgent groups in countries Washington considered to be Soviet clients in the 1980s. As reported in a very good article by the Associated Press earlier this week, McCain served on the board of advisers of the U.S. section of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the Phoenix-based U.S. Council for World Freedom, through at least 1984 and, according to his account, asked to have his name removed from the Council’s letterhead in 1986 (presumably just as the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Council’s chief, ret. Gen. John Singlaub, played a key role), was breaking. As noted by AP, States News Service placed McCain at a Washington Council event that honored one of Hekmatyar’s comrades in 1985.In an excellent 1986 book by Scott and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League, the two brothers report on WACL’s September 1985 meeting in Dallas in which, among many other people with rather questionable backgrounds, participants included Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the head of Guatemala’s long-ruling “party of organized violence” (MLN); Yves Gignac, a former chief of the French Secret Army Organizations (OAS) “who spent five years in prison for his role in an assassination plot against Charles de Gaulle;” Chirila Ciuntu, an official of the Romania’s Iron Guard during World War II, then being sought for war crimes; and John Kosiak, a top Nazi collaborator in Byelorussia at the same time. “Yaroslav Stetsko, the Ukrainian who presided over the massacre of 7,000 Jews in the city of Lvov, was represented by his wife, Slava.” So far as I know, McCain did not attend, and Singlaub told AP the congressman and future senator and presidential candidate was never an active member. At the same time, Singlaub said he had no recollection of McCain ever resigning from the board, and there is no published account that I could find in which McCain expressed regret for his association with the group.Reagan Palled Around with Terrorists, Too, LobeLog, 9 October 2008
==Contact, References and Resources==
===Contact===
===Resources===
*Rightweb, World Anti-Communist League
*Wikipedia World League for Freedom and Democracy
*Chip Berlet, McCain Advised Ultra-Right Group Tied to Death Squads, 7 October 2008.
===References===