A Graveyard Smell
excerpted from the book
Overthrow
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
p195
The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all
"what the President ordered." They were not rogue operations.
Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and
CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created
the CIA and assigned it "duties related to intelligence affecting
the national security." The first thing all four of these
coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously,
willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws
of the United States.
"The finger should have been pointed at presidents, and not
the intelligence group," Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona
complained after the CIA was vilified for fomenting these coups.
Their second common feature is that in
all four cases, the United States played the decisive role in
a regime's fall. It did not simply give insurgents tacit encouragement
or discreet advice. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed
campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South
Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen - certainly not in
the same way or at the same time - if Washington had not acted
as it did.
Each of these four coups was launched
against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the
arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led
to the installation of a repressive dictatorship.
p196
Whatever else these operations may have been, they were not victories
for democracy. They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American
ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans
hold dear.
The reason was straightforward. When people
in countries like Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were
free to speak, many criticized the United States and supported
political movements that placed their own national interests ahead
of those of outside powers. Once these critical voices were forcibly
silenced, Americans were able to believe that anti-American feelings
had disappeared. The truth was quite different. Those feelings
festered and became steadily more intense.
p196
[[U.S.] Ambassador [to Guatemala] John Peurifoy
"Communism is directed by the Kremlin
all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn't
know what he is talking about."
p197
Presidents and others had no doubt the Soviets were manipulating
Mossadegh, Arbenz, and Allende. That turned out to have been wrong.
The three leaders had differing views of Marxism-Mossadegh detested
it, Arbenz sympathized with it, Allende embraced it-but they were
nationalists above all. Each was driven mainly by a desire to
recover control over natural resources, not to serve world Communism,
as Americans believed.
p198
Americans who think about and make foreign policy have traditionally
been Eurocentric. Most of what they understand about the world
comes from their knowledge of European history and diplomatic
tradition. They grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries,
and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor
countries to assert control over their natural resources, however,
has never been an issue in Europe. This hugely powerful phenomenon,
which pushed developing countries into conflict with the United
States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience
of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently
as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés
accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere.
"No and I don't care," Kissinger
replied. "Nothing important can come from the South. History
has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts
in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes
to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance."
This attitude made it easy for powerful
Americans to misunderstand why nationalist movements arose in
Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. Behind these movements,
they saw only the hand of Moscow. That made intervention seem
almost a form of self-defense.
In 1954, President Eisenhower secretly
named James Doolittle, a celebrated air force general who had
retired and become a Shell Oil executive, to conduct "a comprehensive
study of covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency."
In his confidential report, Doolittle concluded that because the
Soviet threat was so profound, the United States must fight back
with no quarter.
It is now clear that we are facing an
implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by
whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such
a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.
If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts
of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop
effective espionage and counter-espionage services and must learn
to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more
sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against
us.
p199
John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and others who shaped United
States foreign policy during the Cold War were utterly uninterested
in the details of life in individual countries, and cared not
the slightest whether the regimes that ruled them were dictatorships,
democracies, or something in between. Their world was defined
by a single fact, the Cold War confrontation between Moscow and
Washington. Nations existed for them not as entities with unique
histories, cultures, and challenges but as battlegrounds in a
global life-or-death struggle. All that mattered was how vigorously
each country supported the United States and opposed the Soviet
Union.
p200
After the 1953 coup in Iran, the triumphant Shah ordered the execution
of several dozen military officers and student leaders who had
been closely associated with Mohammad Mossadegh, and also of Hussein
Fatemi, Mossadegh's foreign minister. Soon afterward, with help
from the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, the
shah created a secret police force called Savak, which became
infamous for its brutality. Among its most notorious directors
was General Nematollah Nassin, who as a colonel had played an
important role in Operation Ajax.
It would have been too risky for the shah
to order Mossadegh executed. Instead he arranged for the old man
to be tried for treason and found guilty. Mossadegh was sentenced
to three years in prison and the rest of his life under house
arrest in his home village of Ahmad Abad. He served his sentence
in full and died in 1967, at the age of eighty-five.
... The main results of the 1953 coup
were the end of democracy in Iran and the emergence, in its place,
of a royal dictatorship that, a quarter of a century later, set
off a bitterly anti-American revolution.
... The shah did not tolerate dissent
and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade
unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian
dissidents could find a home was in mosques and religious schools,
many of which were controlled by obscurantist clerics. Through
their uncompromising resistance to the regime, these clerics won
the popular support that secular figures never achieved. That
made it all but inevitable that when revolution finally broke
out in Iran, clerics would lead it.
p201
John Kennedy had prodded the shah to change his ways, but the
shah outlasted him. Subsequent presidents were happy to take his
money and encourage his excesses. Richard Nixon, who with Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger developed a strategy of cooperating with
dictators who allowed their countries to be used as platforms
for the projection of American power, made him an ally. In 1975
Gerald Ford and Kissinger received him in the White House. Two
years later, Jimmy Carter did the same.
If ever there was a country which has
blossomed forth under enlightened leadership," Carter said
in his banquet toast to the shah, "it would be the ancient
empire of Persia."
Soon after that banquet, angry crowds
began surging through the streets of Tehran and other Iranian
cities crying "Death to the American shah. That amazed many
in the United States. Worse shocks lay ahead. The cleric who emerged
as the revolution's guiding figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
turned out to be bitterly anti-Western. His movement became so
powerful that at the beginning of 1979, it forced the shah to
flee into exile. A few months later, the new Khomeini regime sanctioned
the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran and the taking
of American diplomats as hostage.
The hostage crisis deeply humiliated the
United States, destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency, and turned
millions of Americans into Iran haters. Because most Americans
did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953,
few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they
called "the great Satan."
Years later, one of the Iranian militants
involved in the embassy takeover wrote an article explaining why
he and his comrades had carried it out. It was, he said, a delayed
reaction to Operation Ajax, when CIA agents working inside the
American embassy staged a coup that brought the shah back to power
after he had fled the country.
p203
Guatemala is a far smaller, weaker, and more isolated country
than Iran, but the leader the United States imposed after the
1954 coup, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, followed a repressive
course much like the shah's. During his first weeks in power,
he abolished the banana workers' federation, revoked the Agrarian
Reform Law, banned all political parties and peasant groups, and
ordered the arrest of thousands of suspected leftists. His secret
police chief, who had held the same office under the former dictator
Jorge Ubico, outlawed subversive literature, specifically including
all works by Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. With this burst of repression,
the foundation was laid for a police state that plunged Guatemala
into bloody tragedy over the following decades.
p204
The man who directed his [Arbenz] overthrow, John Foster Dulles,
was determined to convince the world that Arbenz had been a Communist
all along ...
... Dulles concluded that he had to destroy
the Arbenz government for two reasons: because it was molesting
United Fruit and because it seemed to be leading Guatemala out
of the American orbit and toward Communism.
... Many Guatemalans were naturally outraged
by the coup, and after it became clear that democracy would not
return to their country on its own, some turned to revolution.
p205
To combat this threat, the Guatemalan army used such brutal tactics
that all normal political life in the country ceased. Death squads
roamed with impunity, chasing down and murdering politicians,
union organizers, student activists, and peasant leaders. Thousands
of people were kidnapped by what newspapers called "unknown
men dressed in civilian clothes" and never seen again. Many
were tortured to death on military bases. In the countryside,
soldiers rampaged through villages, massacring Mayan Indians by
the hundreds. This repression raged for three decades, and during
that period, soldiers killed more civilians in Guatemala than
in the rest of the hemisphere combined.
Between 1960 and 1990, the United States
provided Guatemala with ! hundreds of millions of dollars in military
aid. Americans trained and armed the Guatemalan army and police,
sent Green Beret teams to accompany soldiers on antiguerrilla
missions, and dispatched planes from the Panama Canal Zone to
drop napalm on suspected guerrilla hideouts. In 1968, guerrillas
responded by killing two American military advisers and the United
States ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein.
This bloodiest of all modern Latin American
wars would not have broken out if not for Operation Success. During
the decade when Guatemalans lived under democratic rule, they
had legal and political ways to resolve national conflicts. After
dictatorship settled over the country, all space for political
debate was closed. Tensions that would have been manageable in
a democratic society exploded into civil war.
p207
In 1996, under the auspices of the United Nations, Guatemalan
military commanders and guerrilla leaders signed a peace treaty.
That did little to resolve the huge inequalities of life in Guatemala,
where two percent of the people still own half the arable land,
but it did end a long, horrific wave of government repression.
It also led to the establishment of a Commission on Historical
Clarification that was assigned to study the violence and its
causes. The commission's report put the number of dead at over
200,000, and said soldiers had killed 93 percent of them.
p210
After the coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, General Augusto
Pinochet and the other officers who seized power with him moved
quickly to consolidate their power. Pinochet soon became the ruling
junta's dominant figure. Several of his military rivals died unexpectedly,
most notably his minister of defense, General Oscar Bonilla, who
was killed in a helicopter crash in 1975. Others chose early retirement.
Thus strengthened, Pinochet declared himself president of the
junta and then president of the republic.
One of Pinochet's first acts after the
coup was to order a nationwide series of raids on leftists and
other supporters of the deposed regime. The harshness with which
this campaign was conducted, the tens of thousands of people who
were arrested, the conditions under which they were held, and
the fact that many were never seen again set the tone for what
would be years of repression. The regime ordered summary executions
for scores of leftist leaders. Many more died at the hands of
soldiers and rightist thugs who swept through pro-Allende slums,
called poblaciones, beating and killing as they rampaged. On October
8, Newsweek reported that city morgues in Santiago had received
a total of 2,796 corpses since the coup, most with either crushed
skulls or execution-style bullet wounds. Four days later, the
New York Times also placed the death toll in the thousands.
p211
In 1976, Henry Kissinger traveled to Santiago to deliver a speech
to the Organization of American States. The day before his public
appearance, he met privately with Pinochet to assure him that
although his speech would include a few perfunctory references
to human rights, it was "not aimed at Chile."
"My evaluation is that you are a
victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your
greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going
communist," Kissinger told Pinochet. "We welcomed the
overthrow of the communist-inclined government here. We are not
out to weaken your position."
p213
Thirty-one years after the coup [in Chile] a government-appointed
commission in Chile concluded that during the years of dictatorship,
"torture was a state policy, meant to repress and terrorize
the population." It identified 27,255 people who were tortured
during the years of military rule, and President Ricardo Lagos
announced that each of them would receive a lifetime pension.
Soon afterward, a judge ordered Pinochet, then eighty-nine years
old, placed under house arrest pending trial on charges of kidnapping
and murder. The commander of the Chilean army, General Juan Emillo
Cheyre, then made a historic admission.
"The Army of Chile has taken the
difficult but irreversible decision to assume the responsibility
for all punishable and morally unacceptable acts in the past that
fall on it as an institution," General Cheyre said. "Never
and for no one can there be any ethical justification for human
rights violations."
p214
Despite its remarkable success in reinventing its democracy, Chile
remains a shattered nation. The 1973 intervention and the long
period of dictatorship that followed have deeply scarred its collective
psyche. Many Chileans, like many Americans and others around the
world, ultimately came to believe that this was another in a line
of American coups that turned out badly for almost everyone involved.
p214
The coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile had much in common. All
three countries were blessed with rich natural resources, but
those resources fell under foreign control. When nationalist leaders
tried to take them back, the United States responded by turning
their countries into bloody battlegrounds. Iran, Guatemala, and
Chile were brought back into the American orbit, but at a staggering
human and social cost.
... The covert coups of the Cold War era
were carried out quite differently from the invasions and stage-managed
revolutions that the United States used in deposing regimes in
the period around 1900. Much of what motivated them, however,
was the same. Each country whose government the United States
overthrew had something Americans wanted-in most cases, either
a valuable natural resource, a large consumer market, or a strategic
location that would allow access to resources and markets elsewhere.
Powerful businesses played just as great a role in pushing the
United States to intervene abroad during the Cold War as they
did during the first burst of American imperialism.
Their influence alone, however, was never
enough. Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests
coincided with ideological ones. In Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the American ideology
was that of Christian improvement and "manifest destiny."
Decades later, in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, it
was anti-Communism. During both eras, Americans came to believe
it was their right, and even their historical obligation, to lead
the forces of good against those of iniquity.
"For us there are two sorts of people
in the world," John Foster Dulles once asserted. "There
are those who are Christians support free enterprise, and there
are the others."
p216
Some of those who directed Cold War interventions, like john Foster
I Dulles, devoted their lives to the service of American corporate
power. Others, like Henry Kissinger, had no real interest in business
and even regarded it with disdain. All of them, however, believed
that only malicious regimes would try to restrict or nationalize
foreign companies.
Directors of large corporations were the
first to wish Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador
Allende overthrown. They persuaded leaders in Washington, who
had somewhat different interests, to depose them. In each case,
government stepped in to lead a parade that had already formed
for other reasons. Ideology and economic interest combined to
drive the United States to intervention.
The Americans who conceived, authorized,
and carried out covert plots against the governments of Iran,
Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile considered them to have been
great victories. From the perspective of history, they do not
look that way. In all four countries, they led to increased repression
and reduced freedom. Beyond their borders, they also had profound
effects. They intensified and prolonged the Cold War by polarizing
the world and choking off possibilities for peaceful change. They
undermined Americans' faith in the CIA, thereby making the agency
less effective. Around the world, they led millions of people
to conclude that the United States was a hypocritical nation,
as cynical as any other, that acted brutally to replace incipient
democracies with cruel dictatorships.
Overthrow
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