The World Anticommunist League

The World Anticommunist League (WACL): Origins, Structures and Actions
Pierre Abramovici
Contribution
International conference on Transnational Anticommunism
University of Fribourg (Switzerland) 26-29 october 2011
There is a type of militant, no-compromise anti-communism that can be referred to as “fighting
anticommunism”. Many of the groups that adopted this approach during the Cold War were
gathered together in the only transnational organization that achieved global representation: the
World Anticommunist League (WACL). Although the WACL came into existence in response to the
activities of the Soviet Union and the World communist movement during the 1950s and 1960s, its
origins go back to the Bolshevik revolution.
Anti-Bolshevism
On 11 November 1918, after the signing of the armistice that ended World War I, a new kind of
ideological war began. Seventeen nations and a multitude of armies or armed bands coalesced under
the white flag (or their own colors) against the Bolshevik regime. In many ways more of an
extension of World War I than a civil war, it involved an intervention by the Western allies to
overthrow the Bolshevik regime in order to protect their commercial, industrial and financial
interests, and to defeat the communist threat.
There were several anti-communist groups that arose in the Soviet sphere and which played a role
in the Civil War. Firstly, the Ukrainians, who set out to regain their lost independence which they
had held for only a few months in 1920. The foremost body representing their interests was the
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a movement that for the next 70 years would be
plagued by the conspiratorial activities of several security services. Secondly, there were the
Caucasian nationalists, particularly the muslims, the most rebellious of the peoples of the Russian
Empire. Several eminent members of this group lined up under the Pan-Turkish banner. Those on
the left who joined the communists soon became disillusioned by the dominance of Russian
chauvinism, and they returned to the (clandestine) opposition. Thirdly, there were other irredentist
nationalists from the Baltics and Byelorussia. All these groups operated separately from the White
Russians, who only wanted a return to the ancien regime and refused to recognise radical border
changes to the Russian imperium. The White Russians were therefore as much competitors as they

were allies in the anti-Bolshevik cause. Following the defeat of the Whites and the consolidation of
Soviet control from Moscow, the nationalists looked for other allies. By the late 1930s there were
links with German military intelligence (the Abwehr). Outside help was needed both to end
communist rule and re-assert independence.
1
In the second half of 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet union, the Abwehr organized Ukrainian
nationalists into units under German command and used them in front of the regular troops and the
SS extermination battalions. The aim of this tactic was to open the path for the Wehrmacht with
units that would be welcomed as liberators, particularly in Lvov, previously known as Lemberg in
the Austro-Hungarian empire, in the Western part of the Ukraine. These Ukrainian forces seized the
opportunity to declare a “Free state of Ukraine“, but this lasted less than a week before being
supressed by the Germans. It nevertheless would be used later as a model for all Ukrainian demands
for nationhood.
At the end of 1943, in the forest of Jytomir (Galizia, in the western part of the Ukraine), these same
Ukrainian nationalists held the first clandestine congress of the Antibolshevik Blok of Nations
(ABN), creating at the same time the Ukrainian National Army (UPA). The UPA then took part in
attacks on the retreating Wehrmacht, while at the same time harassing the Red Army, the communist
partisans, and the Jews (due to their suspected communist sympathies). The UPA, consisting of
around 70,000 guerrillas, were joined by fragments of the SS Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Russian, and
Cossack batallions, as well as Hungarian, Rumanian, Soviet, Baltic and Georgian deserters. Many
of these dispersed former elements of the German army ended up in Western displaced persons
camps.
The Americans, British, and French began to take an interest in the UPA, especially when it became
apparent that some of its units continued their struggle against the Red Army after 1945. This anti-
communist guerrilla warfare went on for several years. In the context of the many anti-Soviet forces
that were active in the mid-1940s, the Ukrainians were undoubtedly the best organized and the most
dangerous threat to Soviet dominance. Stalin mobilized considerable forces against the UPA (with
Nikita Khrushchev playing a leading role) and forced the repatriation of millions on the borders of
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union in an efforot to defeat them. The UPA was
finally subdued in 1954, but its influence would continue via the various actors who later
1
Christopher Simpson, Blowback, America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, London 1988; John Loftus, America’s Nazi Secret, Trine Day, 2010 (second printing of The Belarus
Secret, Alfred Knopf, 1982); Wolodimir Kosyk, L’Allemagne National-Socialiste et l’Ukraine, L’Est Européen,
1990, the most interesting pro-ukrainian book in regard of its propaganda contents.

congregated in the WACL.
Through the 1950s the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, in combination with the ABN,
undertook a consistent and high-profile lobbying campaign in West Germany, Canada and the
United States to secure exclusive representation of the international anti-Soviet emigration. In 1959
this also resulted in the US Congress passing a law to create an annual Captive Nations Week, a
highly visible recognition by the United States of the continuing Soviet domination of Central and
Eastern Europe. The event also commemorated the mostly short-lived attempts to assert national
independence from Russia and the Soviet Union in 1920 (and 1941 for Ukraine). This inolved, in
some cases, the promotion of pseudo-nationalist causes that were based on a minimum of
credibility, such as surrounding the alleged nation of the Idel-Ural for a race of people who
probably never existed. Nevertheless, Captive Nations Week would continue for three decades.
Since the collapse of Soviet Union, Captive Nation Week remained still valide with other purposes
especially the July 2011 President Obama Proclamation which reflected the intention of the US
government again the use of violence and repression and to support the right of people to choose
their leaders.
The Asian Anti-Communists
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, while Europe (and Germany) was treated as the prime site for the
East-West power struggle, the ‘hot wars’ were all being fought on the Pacific Rim: China’s civil war
resulted in a communist victory, the Indochina war dragged on, and the outbreak of the Korean War
seemed to herald a new wave of communist expansion. For the anti-communist movements across
Asia, much depended on the Guomindang led by Chiang Kai Chek, the anti-communist nationalist
and former head of the Chinese State. Following the loss of mainland China to Mao Tse-Tung‘s
forces, CIA covert operations began to be run out of Taiwan. Chiang was supported by the “China
lobby” in the United States, a powerful network of congressmen and business interests that
promoted the anti-communist struggle in Asia and possessed considerable influence in Washington
up to the end of the Reagan era. Making use of this support, Chiang himself financed various anti-
communist movements in Asia and was also assisted by Ukrainian members of the ABN,
“specialists” in clandestine warfare, who were sent over by their American mentors. They trained
the secret police and covert action personnel, and contributed with the creation of Radio Free Asia,
the Taiwanese equivalent of the Munich-based Radio Free Europe. [reference for ABN support for
Chiang? Impossible, ALL the documents from ABN contained support of Chiang till his death and
then his son Chiang Ching Kuo ! See ABN Correspondence, for example]

In 1954, at the end of the Korean War, Chiang visited his Korean counterparts Syngman Rhee to
discuss further collaboration. Communist victories in China and Indochina and insurgencies in
Malaya and the Philippines lent a sense of urgency to these deliberations, and with the support of
the China lobby and CIA, Chiang and the Koreans created a new transnational organisation, the
Asian Peoples Anticommunist League (APACL). South Vietnam would soon join to form the third
pillar. The APACL, run from its headquarters in Tai’pei, would make good use of the propaganda
value of Captive Nations Week in the ensuing decades to link its cause with the Europe-focused
anti-Soviet campaign. This was particularly the case in the 1970s following the normalization of
relations between mainland China and the United States. APACL would provide the fulcrum around
which the future WACL would turn, both in terms of the size of its membership and in terms of the
support it enjoyed from the China Lobby in the United States. [correct interpretation] Having said
that, the question of who the principal enemy actually was - the Soviet Union or the People's
Republic of China - remained an unresolved issue in the WACL. Using the APACL, Taiwan pushed
the case of the illegitimacy of the communist regime in mainland China at every opportunity. Much
of this was motivated by nothing more than a desire to avenge the defeat of 1949.
The Latin Americans
The development of trransnational anti-communist movements in the Latin American continent was
connected, paradoxically, to the lack of any substantial organized local communism. The archives
of the Comintern have revealed that Moscow only began to build a communist network there from
the late 1940s onwards. As a result, anti-communism in Latin America had a broader purpose, it
being used as a label to legitimise state power against all “subversive” threats to social order, such
as the trade unions, student movements, and radical elements in the Church.
Through the training received in the US military academies, the ideology of national security was
passed on to political and military elites throughout the continent, with a special emphasis on the
Brazilians. The East-West conflict was used to condemn all the (potential) “enemies of the state” as
members of the Movimiento Comunisto Internacional (International Communist Movement),
setting them up as direct threats to national security. Not only that, but this approach was set in the
context of continental security, a view only strengthened by the victory of Fidel Castro in Cuba in
1959 and the fear that Havana would export the revolution across the region. For many years this
was used to legitimate the repressive tactics of dictatorial military regimes acting in the name of law
and order.

One of the hard-line anti-communist organizations that emerged at this time was the Anticommunist
Popular Front, created by Jorge Prieto Laurens. Laurens came to prominence in 1954 as the
organizer of the first American Congress against Soviet Intervention in Latin America. Held during
27-30 May 1954 in Mexico City, its main objective was to denounce the regime of Jacobo Arbenz
in Guatamala. With the CIA-backed coup against Arbenz less than a month away, the Congress was
used as a show of support for the rebellion of Colonel Castillo Armas. Declassified documents
confirm the leading role of the CIA in the Congress, and follow-up events were held in Brazil in
1955 and Peru in 1956.
2
The correspondence between the Latin America Congress and the
formation of the APACL, both in 1954, point to a new level of coordination in transnational anti-
communism.
In 1955, following the Rio de Janeiro, Brazil conference, Dr Ku, the leader of the APACL who
attended the event, used the APACL bulletin to call for a “World Anticommunist League” to cement
the bond between the Asian and Latin American networks.
3
Laurens, increasingly active across
Latin America, attempted to solidify the link with the World Anticommunist Congress in Mexico
City in 1958, inviting delegates from five continents. This ambitious attempt to unite all anti-
communist factions failed, but the effort would soon be taken up again, this time in Europe. [I don't
know why it failed]
Suzanne Labin and the European Network
In 1960-61 the French publicist and political activist Suzanne Labin organized two important
international conferences: the first, on The Political Warfare of the Soviets, was held in Paris during
1-3 December 1960, and the second, The Communist Threat to the World, held in Rome during 18-
22 November 1961. The list of participants is enlightening because in terms of the personnel
involved these events prefigured the WACL. Labin also used them as platforms to launch the idea
of a world organization to consolidate the still separate regional anti-communist organizations.
These two conferences also signified the political convergence of the “fighting anti-communists”, in
particular the Soviet bloc emigrés grouped around the ABN, with the social democratic and
Christian democratic circles and the more moderate conservative right-wing. Labin herself had a
background in French social democratic networks. The Brazilian Admiral Penna Botto, known for
his public stance as an anti-communist (which brought him to participate actively in the military
coup of 1964), attended the conferences as the leader of the Continental Anticommunist
2
See www.foia.cia.gov : 1954 Guatemala coup - Kugown Operations
3
APACL Bulletin No. 7 Vol II, (September 1955)