When Chavez entered the army's academy in the early 1970s, a project by Venezuela's Communist Party to infiltrate the ranks with sympathizers was 10 years old. The project eventually fractured into ideological splinters, and Chavez became the head of a small group of leftist officers in the early 1980s that opposed the conservative government. In 1992, then-Lt. Col. Chavez led this group in a failed coup to topple President Carlos Andres Perez, an attempt that made him a national figure and paved the way for his election six years later.
Despite their different backgrounds,(Rear Adm. Carlos) Molina was too accomplished for Chavez to overlook: an officer with two master's degrees, fluent in four languages and an expert in signals intelligence, anti-submarine warfare and weapons systems on the frigates and destroyers that account for most of Venezuela's surface fleet. In November 2000, Chavez named Molina his national security adviser. Molina helped create an "intelligence center" at Miraflores, the presidential palace, designed, in the words of Chavez aides, to "monitor the social situation around the nation." Chavez opponents viewed the operation as another step toward a police state. Although part of Chavez's inner circle, Molina said last week, "I was a trusted man, but only relatively so."
Molina said he was alarmed by what he saw in his national security role. Without offering evidence, Molina said he discovered Chavez's "ties with and sympathies for" Colombia's Marxist guerrillas fighting a U.S.-backed government next door. He said Chavez brought in Cuban advisers to control dissent at home. Chavez has denied both charges. But Molina said that, beyond those specific security concerns, he became convinced that Chavez was carrying out a communist project that he began when he was a young army officer. "The evidence couldn't be more clear -- his attacks on civil society, the media, the church -- that he is turning this country into a large class struggle," Molina said.
After eight months, Chavez dismissed Molina. The president offered him the ambassadorship to Greece, which Molina declined. According to non-U.S. diplomats here who know him, Molina began last November to plan for Chavez's ouster with a group of dissident officers led by Air Force Col. Pedro Soto. But the sources said Molina broke with the group to join with a more powerful faction of senior navy and national guard officers who ended up in the provisional government this month. Soto is now one of three officers seeking asylum in the Bolivian embassy here. On the day of the coup, he was in Washington, attending a House committee hearing where Otto J. Reich, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, was testifying. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a staunch Castro opponent, introduced Soto as a "great patriot."*** Full article