BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—

FORMER theology student Arnold Vaatz did not have to consult the angels to understand that he would not get rich from his salary as a deputy in the Bundestag alone. Just like his Spanish colleague Jorge Moragas, he soon realized that he could rent out his visceral anti-communism by accepting the proposals of the State Department.

Born in Weida (East Germany) in 1955, Vaatz studied mathematics in Dresden and a correspondence course in theology in Altenburg, according to his official biography. A self-confessed "dissident," he refused to undergo his military service and received a six-month "sanction" that he completed, he says, in a state metallurgy firm.

Barely had the GDR dissolved than he resurfaced as a member of the right-wing Christian Democratic Union and later as a parliamentary deputy for the state of Saxony (1990-1998).

In 1996, he was selected to join the Federal Executive Committee of the CDU and, as is natural, he was elected as a federal deputy in 1998.

In 2002, the insatiable Vaatz reached the vice presidency of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group (the latter being the Christian Social Union of Bavaria) in the Bundestag.

When, in November 2005 in Prague, the so-called International Committee for Democracy in Cuba (ICDC), a faction of out-and-out anti-communists and former professional dissidents –salaried by the White House – was created to attack the island.

Vaatz was in the frontline. Financed through notorious State Department intermediaries, the group was then made up of ultra-right representatives from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Bulgaria and Spain.

Directed by Mirek Topolanek, president of the Civic Democratic Party of the Czech Republic, the ICDC’s priority mission was to repeat throughout Europe attacks on the EU’s so-called "tolerance" toward Cuba and noisily support the troop of collaborators with the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

At that time, Vaatz had the opportunity to find affinity with the chief of one of the most loaded checkbooks of the anti-Cuban machine, veteran CIA agent Frank Calzón, head of Washington’s Cuban Freedom Center.

Calzón is one of the stars of the recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which exposed the incredible trail of funding for the counterrevolution, with a waste of more than $65 million in just one decade. A former mercenary with the Alpha 66 and Abdala terrorist groups, this agent linked to the Bush clan, he gobbled up more than five million dollars of the booty himself.

With an open bar and first-class conditions, Vaatz was able to fraternize on this first opportunity with several of his counterparts: Slovak Pavol Hrursovsky, Bulgarian Philip Dimitrov, Czech Tomas Pojar and, most of all, his prosperous Spanish counterpart Jorge Moragas.

Clearer than water: the ICDC secretary was in Prague, Czech Republic, in the very offices of People In Need, a pseudo-NGO which appears in the Bush Plan for the annexation of Cuba, together with Reporters Sans Frontières, another Trojan horse repeatedly used against the island for years.

Inundated with subsidies from USAID, the NED, and the Republican Party’s IRI, since 1993 People In Need has provided more than $40 million in "donations" and other "humanitarian aid" to groups and factions allied to Washington in various parts of the world.

Last December 22, Laura Wides-Múñoz, a journalist with Associated Press in Miami, made an extensive report into the subsidies paid by Washington to organizations that, under the pretext of human rights, have the paid orientation to tarnish Cuba’s image in the media. People In Need appeared in this extensive report as one of the groups awarded privileges by the anti-Cuban machinery of the U.S. government.

Vaatz has not lost a single dollar of those gained from the veritable propaganda circus managed by Caleb McCarry, the proconsul appointed by the White House for the Bush Plan.

There, thanks to his Spanish buddy Moragas, Vaatz has also discovered the kindness of the pompously name Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies (FAES), a million dollar right-wing foundation created by José María Aznar, financed by the usual U.S. sources and advised by the Cuban-American mafia.

In 2005, Vaatz made a short visit to Cuba that did not develop into the "show" that had been planned.

Multiplying his paid speeches, he was one of the "star" lecturers some months ago in Brussels at a forum organized by the ICDC, alongside former president of the Czech Republic, failed dramatist Vaclav Havel, and fugitive terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner, arrested in Havana in 1960 when he devoted his time to planting bombs in stores.

Last May, Vaatz strongly supported the International Society for Human Rights, an explicitly anti-communist organization that organized a seminar on the subject of Cuba at the Communications Center in the Dresdner Bank in Frankfurt.

All McCarry’s wage earners were present (in a disciplined way) at the plenary session of the event including: Frank Calzón, Pedro V. Roig (General Director of Radio and TV Martí, currently under investigation), Sylvia Iriondo (subsidized by USAID), Ramón Colas (also subsidized by USAID), and former "commander" Huber Matos, linked to drug trafficking.

When exposing the omnipresent corruption on Radio and TV Martí, The Chicago Tribune revealed last December 24 how Pedro Roig had contracted his wife’s nephew as head of personnel and paid a former client of his to be a comedy scriptwriter.

Tireless, last November 11 Vaatz took part in a forum entitled "Liberty and Democracy in Latin America" in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the very same Silvia Iriondo and Huber Matos also reappeared, as well as Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, former member of the terrorist Organización para la Liberación de Cuba, whose Directorio Democrático Cubano received $3 million from USAID, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The meeting took place in the garden of the former Uruguayan president Luis Alberto Lacalle, another CIDC member, and was attended by Armando Calderón, ex-president of El Salvador; Rexhep Meidani, ex-president of Albania; and Jorge Paz Zamora, ex-president of Bolivia. Supposedly, they are all universal points of reference in relation to human rights.

The meeting also included one of the most notorious Miami terrorists, Angel Francisco De Fana Serrano, arrested in California in 1995 with an arsenal of weapons for a terrorist attack on Cuba. De Fana is identified with the Alpha 66 group, even in FBI files.

Vaatz was present a few days later when Manuel Espino Barrientos, national leader of the Mexican PAN (the party of Fox and Calderón) was elected president of the right-wing Christian Democrat Organization of America (OCDA) during its last congress in Santiago de Chile.

According to the Mexican La Jornada daily, Espino was elected under pressure from Cuban-American organizations.

The next day, in the National Auditorium, (December 1, 2006), Espino applauded the first speech by the new president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón beside the Miami mafioso capo Marcelino Miyares.