INTRODUCTION TO THE
ORIGINAL EDITION
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum
Our fear that communism might someday take
over most of the world blinds us to the fact
that anti-communism already has.
Michael Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse
[This introduction is presented, with some modifications,
as it appeared in 1986. At that time the Soviet Union still
existed and the cold war was very much alive. It is presented
here because it offers a concise history of the cold
war and a background to understanding the impetus behind,
and the nature of, the many American interventions
throughout the world.]
It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a
Vietcong officer said to his American
prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read
American books and saw American films,
and a common phrase in those days was `to be as rich and as
wise as an American'. What
happened?"{1}
An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan,
an Indonesian or a
Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a
Chilean or a Greek in the decade
subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility
enjoyed by the United States at
the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by
country, intervention by
intervention. The opportunity to build the war-ravaged world
anew, to lay the foundations for
peace, prosperity and justice, collapsed under the awful weight
of anti-communism.
The weight had been accumulating for some time; indeed, since
Day One of the Russian
Revolution. By the summer of 1918 some 13,000 American troops
could be found in the
newly-born Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Two years
and thousands of casualties later, the
American troops left, having failed in their mission to "strangle
at its birth" the Bolshevik state, as
Winston Churchill put it.{2} The young Churchill was Great
Britain's Minister for War and Air
during this period. Increasingly, it was he who directed the
invasion of the Soviet Union by the
Allies (Great Britain, the US, France, Japan and several other
nations) on the side of the
counter-revolutionary "White Army". Years later,
Churchill the historian was to record his views of
this singular affair for posterity:
Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly
not; but they shot Soviet
Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil.
They armed the enemies
of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk
its battleships. They
earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war -- shocking!
Interference --
shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to
them how Russians settled
their own internal affairs. They were impartial -- Bang!{3}
What was there about this Bolshevik Revolution that so alarmed
the most powerful nations in the
world? What drove them to invade a land whose soldiers had
recently fought alongside them for
over three years and suffered more casualties than any other
country on either side of the World
War?
The Bolsheviks had had the audacity to make a separate peace
with Germany in order to take
leave of a war they regarded as imperialist and not in any
way their war, and to try and rebuild a
terribly weary and devastated Russia. But the Bolsheviks had
displayed the far greater audacity of
overthrowing a capitalist-feudal system and proclaiming the
first socialist state in the history of
the world. This was uppitiness writ incredibly large. This
was the crime the Allies had to punish,
the virus which had to be eradicated lest it spread to their
own people.
The invasion did not achieve its immediate purpose, but its
consequences were nonetheless
profound and persist to the present day. Professor D.F. Fleming,
the Vanderbilt University
historian of the cold war, has noted:
For the American people the cosmic tragedy of the interventions
in Russia does not
exist, or it was an unimportant incident long forgotten. But
for the Soviet peoples and
their leaders the period was a time of endless killing, of
looting and rapine, of plague
and famine, of measureless suffering for scores of millions
-- an experience burned
into the very soul of a nation, not to be forgotten for many
generations, if ever. Also
for many years the harsh Soviet regimentations could all be
justified by fear that the
capitalist powers would be back to finish the job. It is not
strange that in his address
in New York, September 17, 1959, Premier Khrushchev should
remind us of the
interventions, "the time you sent your troops to quell
the revolution", as he put it.{4}
In what could be taken as a portent of superpower insensitivity,
a 1920 US War Department report
reads: "This expedition affords one of the finest examples
in history of honorable, unselfish
dealings ... under very difficult circumstances to be helpful
to a people struggling to achieve a
new liberty." {5}
History does not tell us what a Soviet Union, allowed to develop
in a "normal" way of its own
choosing, would look like today. We do know, however, the
nature of a Soviet Union attacked in
its cradle, raised alone in an extremely hostile world, and,
when it managed to survive to
adulthood, overrun by the Nazi war machine with the blessings
of the Western powers. The
resulting insecurities and fears have inevitably led to deformities
of character not unlike that
found in an individual raised in a similar life-threatening
manner.
We in the West are never allowed to forget the political shortcomings
(real and alleged) of the
Soviet Union; at the same time we are never reminded of the
history which lies behind it. The
anti-communist propaganda campaign began even earlier than
the military intervention. Before
the year 1918 was over, expressions in the vein of "Red
Peril", "the Bolshevik assault on
civilization", and "menace to world by Reds is seen"
had become commonplace in the pages of
the New York Times.
During February and March 1919, a US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee
held hearings before
which many "Bolshevik horror stories" were presented.
The character of some of the testimony
can be gauged by the headline in the usually sedate Times
of 12 February 1919.
DESCRIBE HORRORS UNDER RED RULE. R.E. SIMONS AND W.W. WELSH
TELL
SENATORS OF BRUTALITIES OF BOLSHEVIKI -- STRIP WOMEN IN STREETS
--
PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE
BY
MOBS.
Historian Frederick Lewis Schuman has written: "The net
result of these hearings ... was to
picture Soviet Russia as a kind of bedlam inhabited by abject
slaves completely at the mercy of
an organization of homicidal maniacs whose purpose was to
destroy all traces of civilization and
carry the nation back to barbarism."{6}
Literally no story about the Bolsheviks was too contrived,
too bizarre, too grotesque, or too
perverted to be printed and widely believed -- from women
being nationalized to babies being
eaten (as the early pagans believed the Christians guilty
of devouring their children; the same
was believed of the Jews in the Middle Ages). The story about
women with all the lurid
connotations of state property, compulsory marriage, "free
love", etc. "was broadcasted over the
country through a thousand channels," wrote Schuman,
"and perhaps did more than anything else
to stamp the Russian Communists in the minds of most American
citizens as criminal perverts".{7}
This tale continued to receive great currency even after the
State Department was obliged to
announce that it was a fraud. (That the Soviets eat their
babies was still being taught by the John
Birch Society to its large audience at least as late as 1978.){8}
By the end of 1919, when the defeat of the Allies and the
White Army appeared likely, the New
York Times treated its readers to headlines and stories such
as the following:
30 Dec. 1919: "Reds Seek War With America"
9 Jan. 1920: "`Official quarters' describe the Bolshevist
menace in the Middle East as
ominous"
11 Jan. 1920: "Allied officials and diplomats [envisage]
a possible invasion of
Europe"
13 Jan. 1920: "Allied diplomatic circles" fear an
invasion of Persia
16 Jan. 1920: A page-one headline, eight columns wide: "Britain
Facing War With
Reds, Calls Council In Paris."
"Well-informed diplomats" expect both a military
invasion of Europe and a Soviet
advance into Eastern and Southern Asia.
The following morning, however, we could read: "No War
With Russia, Allies To
Trade With Her"
7 Feb. 1920: "Reds Raising Army To Attack India"
11 Feb. 1920: "Fear That Bolsheviki Will Now Invade Japanese
Territory"
Readers of the New York Times were asked to believe that all
these invasions were to come from
a nation that was shattered as few nations in history have
been; a nation still recovering from a
horrendous world war; in extreme chaos from a fundamental
social revolution that was barely off
the ground; engaged in a brutal civil war against forces backed
by the major powers of the world;
its industries, never advanced to begin with, in a shambles;
and the country in the throes of a
famine that was to leave many millions dead before it subsided.
In 1920, The New Republic magazine presented a lengthy analysis
of the news coverage by the
New York Times of the Russian Revolution and the intervention.
Amongst much else, it observed
that in the two years following the November 1917 revolution,
the Times had stated no less than
91 times that "the Soviets were nearing their rope's
end or actually had reached it."{9}
If this was reality as presented by the United States' "newspaper
of record", one can imagine only
with dismay the witch's brew the rest of the nation's newspapers
were feeding to their readers.
This, then, was the American people's first experience of
a new social phenomenon that had
come upon the world, their introductory education about the
Soviet Union and this thing called
"communism". The students have never recovered from
the lesson. Neither has the Soviet Union.
The military intervention came to an end but, with the sole
and partial exception of the Second
World War period, the propaganda offensive has never let up.
In 1943 Life magazine devoted an
entire issue in honor of the Soviet Union's accomplishments,
going far beyond what was
demanded by the need for wartime solidarity, going so far
as to call Lenin "perhaps the greatest
man of modern times".{10} Two years later, however, with
Harry Truman sitting in the White
House, such fraternity had no chance of surviving. Truman,
after all, was the man who, the day
after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, said: "If we
see that Germany is winning, we ought to
help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany,
and that way let them kill as
many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious
in any circumstance."{11} Much
propaganda mileage has been squeezed out of the Soviet-German
treaty of 1939, made possible
only by entirely ignoring the fact that the Russians were
forced into the pact by the repeated
refusal of the Western powers, particularly the United States
and Great Britain, to unite with
Moscow in a stand against Hitler;{12} as they likewise refused
to come to the aid of the
socialist-oriented Spanish government under siege by the German,
Italian and Spanish fascists,
and even sold arms to Hitler and Mussolini..
From the Red Scare of the 1920s to the McCarthyism of the
1950s to the Reagan Crusade against
the Evil Empire of the 1980s, the American people have been
subjected to a relentless
anti-communist indoctrination. It is imbibed with their mother's
milk, pictured in their comic books,
spelled out in their school books; their daily paper offers
them headlines that tell them all they
need to know; ministers find sermons in it, politicians are
elected with it, and Reader's Digest
becomes rich on it.
The fiercely-held conviction inevitably produced by this insidious
assault upon the intellect is that
a great damnation has been unleashed upon the world, possibly
by the devil himself, but in the
form of people; people not motivated by the same needs, fears,
emotions, and personal morality
that govern others of the species, but people engaged in an
extremely clever, monolithic,
international conspiracy dedicated to taking over the world
and enslaving it; for reasons not
always clear perhaps, but evil needs no motivation save evil
itself. Moreover, any appearance or
claim by these people to be rational human beings seeking
a better kind of world or society is a
sham, a cover-up, to delude others, and proof only of their
cleverness; the repression and
cruelties which have taken place in the Soviet Union are forever
proof of the bankruptcy of virtue
and the evil intentions of these people in whichever country
they may be found, under whatever
name they may call themselves: and, most important of all,
the only choice open to anyone in the
United States is between the American Way of Life and the
Soviet Way of Life, that nothing lies
between or beyond these two ways of making the world.
This is how it looks to the simple folk of America. One finds
that the sophisticated, when probed
slightly beneath the surface of their academic language, see
it exactly the same way.
And lest we think that such beliefs belong to an earlier,
less enlightened period, it should be
noted that in the fall of 1987, two years after Gorbachev,
when a Gallup poll asked Americans
whether they agreed that "There is an international Communist
conspiracy to rule the world", 60
percent replied in the affirmative; only 28 percent disagreed.{13)
To the mind carefully brought to adulthood in the United States,
the truths of anti-communism are
self-evident, as self-evident as the flatness of the world
once was to an earlier mind; as the
Russian people believed that the victims of Stalin's purges
were truly guilty of treason.
The foregoing slice of American history must be taken into
account if one is to make sense of the
vagaries of American foreign policy since the end of World
War II, specifically the record, as
presented in this book, of what the CIA and other branches
of the US government have done to
the peoples of the world.
In 1918, the barons of American capital needed no reason for
their war against communism other
than the threat to their wealth and privilege, although their
opposition was expressed in terms of
moral indignation.
During the period between the two world wars, US gunboat diplomacy
operated in the Caribbean
to make "The American Lake" safe for the fortunes
of United Fruit and W.R. Grace & Co., at the
same time warning of the Bolshevik threat to righteousness
from the likes of Augusto Sandino.
By the end of the Second World War, every American past the
age of 40 had been subjected to
some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation
period needed to produce a
malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own,
independent of its capitalist father.
Increasingly, in the post-war period, middle-aged Washington
policy makers and diplomats saw
the world out there as one composed of "communists"
and "anti-communists", whether of nations,
movements or individuals. This comic-strip vision of the world,
with American supermen fighting
communist evil everywhere, had graduated from a cynical propaganda
exercise to a moral
imperative of US foreign policy.
Even the concept of "non-communist", implying some
measure of neutrality, has generally been
accorded scant legitimacy in this paradigm. John Foster Dulles,
one of the major architects of
post-war US foreign policy, expressed this succinctly in his
typically simple, moralistic way: "For
us there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those
who are Christians and support free
enterprise and there are the others."{14} As several
of the case studies in the present book
confirm, Dulles put that creed into rigid practice.
It is as true now as ever that American multinationals derive
significant economic advantages
from Third World countries due to their being under-industrialized,
under-diversified,
capitalist-oriented, and relatively powerless.
It is equally true that the consequence of American interventions
has frequently been to keep
Third World countries in just such an underdeveloped, impotent
state.
There is thus at least a prima-facie case to be made for the
contention that the engine of US
foreign policy is still fueled predominantly by "economic
imperialism".
But that the consequence illuminates the intent does not necessarily
follow. The argument that
economic factors have continued to exert an important and
direct influence upon United States
interventionist policy in modern times does not stand up to
close or "micro" examination. When all
the known elements of the interventions are considered, scarcely
any cases emerge which
actually conform to the economic model, and even in these
the stage is shared with other factors.
The upshot in the great majority of cases is that tangible
economic gain, existing or potential, did
not, and could not, play a determining role in the American
decision to intervene. The economic
model proves woefully inadequate not only as a means of explanation,
but even more so as a tool
of prediction. In each of the most recent cases, for example
-- Grenada, El Salvador, and
Nicaragua -- American intervention was foreseen and warned
of well in advance simply, and only,
because of the "communist" nature of the targets.
But no one seriously suggested that some
treasure lay in these impoverished lands luring the American
pirates. Indeed, after the conquest
and occupation of Grenada, the US business community displayed
a marked indifference to
setting up shop on the island, despite being implored to do
so by Washington for political
reasons. In other cases, where the American side failed to
win a civil war, such as in China,
Vietnam and Angola, Washington put up barriers to American
corporations having any commercial
dealings with the new regimes which were actually eager to
do business with the United States.
But this, as mentioned, is the "micro" way of looking
at the question. One can just as legitimately
approach it from a "macro" point of view. Seen from
this perspective, one must examine the role
of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. The members
of this network need enemies -- the
military and the CIA because enemies are their raison d'être,
industry, specifically the defense
contractors, because enemies are to be fought, with increasingly
sophisticated weaponry and
aircraft systems; enemies of our enemies are to be armed,
to the teeth. It's made these
corporations wealthier than many countries of the world; in
one year the US spends on the
military more than $17,000 per hour, for every hour since
Jesus Christ was born. The executives
of these corporations have long moved effortlessly through
a revolving door between industry and
government service, members in good standing of the good ol'
boys club who continue to use
their positions, their wealth, and their influence, along
with a compliant and indispensable media,
as we shall see, to nourish and perpetuate the fear of "communism,
the enemy" now in its seventh
decade and going strong. Given the nature and machinations
of the
military-industrial-intelligence complex, interventions against
these enemies are inevitable, and,
from the complex's point of view, highly desirable.
In cases such as the above-mentioned Grenada, El Salvador,
and Nicaragua, even if the
particular target of intervention does not present an immediate
lucrative economic opportunity for
American multinationals, the target's socialist-revolutionary
program and rhetoric does present a
threat and a challenge which the United States has repeatedly
felt obliged to stamp out, to
maintain the principle, and as a warning to others; for what
the US has always feared from the
Third World is the emergence of a good example: a flourishing
socialist society independent of
Washington.
Governments and movements with such programs and rhetoric
are clearly not going to be
cold-war allies, are clearly "communist", and thus
are eminently credible candidates for the
category of enemy.
Inextricably bound up with these motivations is a far older
seducer of men and nations, the lust
for power: the acquisition, maintenance, use and enjoyment
of influence and prestige; the
incomparable elation that derives from molding the world in
your own beloved image.
In all these paradigms, "communist" is often no
more than the name ascribed to those people who
stand in the way of the realization of such ambitions (as
"national security" is the name given for
the reason for fighting "communists"). It is another
twist of the old adage: if communists didn't
exist, the United States would have to invent them. And so
they have. The word "communist" (as
well as "Marxist") has been so overused and so abused
by American leaders and the media as to
render it virtually meaningless. (The Left has done the same
to the word "fascist".) But merely
having a name for something -- witches or flying saucers --
attaches a certain credence to it.
At the same time, the American public, as we have seen, has
been soundly conditioned to react
Pavlovianly to the term: it means, still, the worst excesses
of Stalin, from wholesale purges to
Siberian slave-labor camps; it means, as Michael Parenti has
observed, that "Classic
Marxist-Leninist predictions [concerning world revolution]
are treated as statements of intent
directing all present-day communist actions."{15} It
means "us" against "them".
And "them" can mean a peasant in the Philippines,
a mural-painter in Nicaragua, a
legally-elected prime minister in British Guiana, or a European
intellectual, a Cambodian
neutralist, an African nationalist -- all, somehow, part of
the same monolithic conspiracy; each, in
some way, a threat to the American Way of Life; no land too
small, too poor, or too far away to
pose such a threat, the "communist threat".
The cases presented in this book illustrate that it has been
largely irrelevant whether the
particular targets of intervention -- be they individuals,
political parties, movements or
governments -- called themselves "communist" or
not. It has mattered little whether they were
scholars of dialectical materialism or had never heard of
Karl Marx; whether they were atheists or
priests; whether a strong and influential Communist Party
was in the picture or not; whether the
government had come into being through violent revolution
or peaceful elections ... all have been
targets, all "communists".
It has mattered still less that the Soviet KGB was in the
picture. The assertion has been frequently
voiced that the CIA carries out its dirty tricks largely in
reaction to operations of the KGB which
have been "even dirtier". This is a lie made out
of whole cloth. There may be an isolated incident
of such in the course of the CIA's life, but it has kept itself
well hidden. The relationship between
the two sinister agencies is marked by fraternization and
respect for fellow professionals more
than by hand-to-hand combat. Former CIA officer John Stockwell
has written:
Actually, at least in more routine operations, case officers
most fear the US
ambassador and his staff, then restrictive headquarters cables,
then curious, gossipy
neighbors in the local community, as potential threats to
operations. Next would
come the local police, then the press. Last of all is the
KGB -- in my twelve years of
case officering I never saw or heard of a situation in which
the KGB attacked or
obstructed a CIA operation.{16}
Stockwell adds that the various intelligence services do not
want their world to be "complicated"
by murdering each other.
It isn't done. If a CIA case officer has a flat tire in the
dark of night on a lonely road,
he will not hesitate to accept a ride from a KGB officer --
likely the two would detour
to some bar for a drink together. In fact CIA and KGB officers
entertain each other
frequently in their homes. The CIA's files are full of mention
of such relationships in
almost every African station.{17}
Proponents of "fighting fire with fire" come perilously
close at times to arguing that if the KGB, for
example, had a hand in the overthrow of the Czechoslovak government
in 1968, it is OK for the
CIA to have a hand in the overthrow of the Chilean government
in 1973. It's as if the destruction
of democracy by the KGB deposits funds in a bank account from
which the CIA is then justified in
making withdrawals.
notes
What then has been the thread common to the diverse targets
of American intervention which has
brought down upon them the wrath, and often the firepower,
of the world's most powerful nation?
In virtually every case involving the Third World described
in this book, it has been, in one form or
another, a policy of "self-determination": the desire,
born of perceived need and principle, to
pursue a path of development independent of US foreign policy
objectives. Most commonly, this
has been manifested in (a) the ambition to free themselves
from economic and political
subservience to the United States; (b) the refusal to minimize
relations with the socialist bloc, or
suppress the left at home, or welcome an American military
installation on their soil; in short, a
refusal to be a pawn in the cold war; or (c) the attempt to
alter or replace a government which
held to neither of these aspirations.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that such a policy of
independence has been viewed and
expressed by numerous Third World leaders and revolutionaries
as one not to be equated by
definition to anti-Americanism or pro-communism, but as simply
a determination to maintain a
position of neutrality and non-alignment vis-...-vis the two
superpowers. Time and time again,
however, it will be seen that the United States was not prepared
to live with this proposition.
Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh of Iran, Sukarno of Indonesia,
Nkrumah of Ghana, Jagan of
British Guiana, Sihanouk of Cambodia ... all, insisted Uncle
Sam, must declare themselves
unequivocally on the side of "The Free World" or
suffer the consequences. Nkrumah put the case
for non-alignment as follows:
The experiment which we tried in Ghana was essentially one
of developing the
country in co-operation with the world as a whole. Non-alignment
meant exactly what
it said. We were not hostile to the countries of the socialist
world in the way in which
the governments of the old colonial territories were. It should
be remembered that
while Britain pursued at home co-existence with the Soviet
Union this was never
allowed to extend to British colonial territories. Books on
socialism, which were
published and circulated freely in Britain, were banned in
the British colonial empire,
and after Ghana became independent it was assumed abroad that
it would continue
to follow the same restrictive ideological approach. When
we behaved as did the
British in their relations with the socialist countries we
were accused of being
pro-Russian and introducing the most dangerous ideas into
Africa.{18}
It is reminiscent of the 19th-century American South, where
many Southerners were deeply
offended that so many of their black slaves had deserted to
the Northern side in the Civil War.
They had genuinely thought that the blacks should have been
grateful for all their white masters
had done for them, and that they were happy and content with
their lot. A Southern physician,
Samuel Cartwright, argued that many of the slaves suffered
from a form of mental illness, which
he called "drapetomania", diagnosed as the uncontrollable
urge to escape from slavery. In the
second half of the 20th-century, this illness, in the Third
World, has usually been called
"communism".
When Washington officials equate nationalism or self-determination
with "communism", there are
times when they are "correct". At other times, they
are "wrong". It doesn't particularly matter, for in
either case they are referring to the same phenomenon. Although,
in this book, the Soviet Union,
China, various communist parties, etc., are sometimes referred
to as "communist", this is primarily
a shorthand convenience and a bow to custom, and is not meant
to infer a political ideology or
practice necessarily different in any way from those governments
or parties not referred to as
communist. Emphasis is placed upon what these bodies have
actually done, not upon reference
to what Marx or Lenin wrote.
Perhaps the most deeply ingrained reflex of knee-jerk anti-communism
is the belief that the
Soviet Union (or Cuba or Vietnam, etc., acting as Moscow's
surrogate) is a clandestine force
lurking behind the facade of self-determination, stirring
up the hydra of revolution, or just plain
trouble, here, there, and everywhere; yet another incarnation,
although on a far grander scale, of
the proverbial "outside agitator", he who has made
his appearance regularly throughout history ...
King George blamed the French for inciting the American colonies
to revolt ... disillusioned
American farmers and veterans protesting their onerous economic
circumstances after the
revolution (Shays' Rebellion) were branded as British agents
out to wreck the new republic ...
labor strikes in late-19th-century America were blamed on
"anarchists" and "foreigners", during
the First World War on "German agents", after the
war on "Bolsheviks".
And in the 1960s, said the National Commission on the Causes
and Prevention of Violence, J.
Edgar Hoover "helped spread the view among the police
ranks that any kind of mass protest is
due to a conspiracy promulgated by agitators, often Communists,
`who misdirect otherwise
contented people'."{19}
The last is the key phrase, one which encapsulates the conspiracy
mentality of those in power --
the idea that no people, except those living under the enemy,
could be so miserable and
discontent as to need recourse to revolution or even mass
protest; that it is only the agitation of
the outsider which misdirects them along this path. Accordingly,
if Ronald Reagan were to
concede that the masses of El Salvador have every good reason
to rise up against their
god-awful existence, it would bring into question his accusation,
and the rationale for US
intervention, that it is principally (only?) the Soviet Union
and its Cuban and Nicaraguan allies
who instigate the Salvadoreans: that seemingly magical power
of communists everywhere who,
with a twist of their red wrist, can transform peaceful, happy
people into furious guerrillas. The
CIA knows how difficult a feat this is. The Agency, as we
shall see, tried to spark mass revolt in
China, Albania, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in Eastern
Europe with a singular lack of
success. The Agency's scribes have laid the blame for these
failures on the "closed" nature of the
societies involved. But in non-communist countries, the CIA
has had to resort to military coups or
extra-legal chicanery to get its people into power. It has
never been able to light the fire of
popular revolution.
For Washington to concede merit and virtue to a particular
Third World insurgency would,
moreover, raise the question: Why does not the United States,
if it must intervene, take the side of
the rebels? Not only might this better serve the cause of
human rights and justice, but it would
shut out the Russians from their alleged role. What better
way to frustrate the International
Communist Conspiracy? But this is a question that dares not
speak its name in the Oval Office, a
question that is relevant to many of the cases in this book.
Instead, the United States remains committed to its all-too-familiar
policy of establishing and/or
supporting the most vile tyrannies in the world, whose outrages
against their own people confront
us daily in the pages of our newspapers: brutal massacres;
systematic, sophisticated torture;
public whippings; soldiers and police firing into crowds;
hunger, runaway unemployment, the
homeless, the refugees, the tens of thousands of disappeared
persons ... a way of life that is
virtually a monopoly held by America's allies, from Guatemala,
Chile and El Salvador to Turkey,
Pakistan and Indonesia, all members in good standing of the
Holy War Against Communism, all
members of "The Free World", that region of which
we hear so much and see so little.
The restrictions on civil liberties found in the communist
bloc, as severe as they are, pale by
comparison to the cottage-industry Auschwitzes of "The
Free World", and, except in that curious
mental landscape inhabited by The Compleat Anti-Communist,
can have little or nothing to do
with the sundry American interventions supposedly in the cause
of a higher good.
It is interesting to note that as commonplace as it is for
American leaders to speak of freedom and
democracy while supporting dictatorships, so do Russian leaders
speak of wars of liberation,
anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism while doing extremely
little to actually further these causes,
American propaganda notwithstanding. The Soviets like to be
thought of as champions of the
Third World, but they have stood by doing little more than
going "tsk, tsk" as progressive
movements and governments, even Communist Parties, in Greece,
Guatemala, British Guiana,
Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere have gone
to the wall with American complicity.
During the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency instigated
several military incursions into
Communist China. In 1960, CIA planes, without any provocation,
bombed the sovereign nation of
Guatemala. In 1973, the Agency encouraged a bloody revolt
against the government of Iraq. In
the American mass media at the time, and therefore in the
American mind, these events did not
happen.
"We didn't know what was happening", became a cliché
used to ridicule those Germans who
claimed ignorance of the events which took place under the
Nazis. Yet, was their stock answer as
far-fetched as we'd like to think? It is sobering to reflect
that in our era of instant world-wide
communications, the United States has, on many occasions,
been able to mount a large- or
small-scale military operation or undertake another, equally
blatant, form of intervention without
the American public being aware of it until years later, if
ever. Often the only report of the event or
of US involvement was a passing reference to the fact that
a communist government had made
certain charges -- just the kind of "news" the American
public has been well conditioned to
dismiss out of hand, and the press not to follow up; as the
German people were taught that
reports from abroad of Nazi wrong-doings were no more than
communist propaganda.
With few exceptions, the interventions never made the headlines
or the evening TV news. With
some, bits and pieces of the stories have popped up here and
there, but rarely brought together
to form a cohesive and enlightening whole; the fragments usually
appear long after the fact,
quietly buried within other stories, just as quietly forgotten,
bursting into the foreground only
when extraordinary circumstances have compelled it, such as
the Iranian hostage crisis which
produced a rash of articles on the role played by the United
States in the overthrow of the Iranian
government in 1953. It was as if editors had been spurred
into thinking: "Hey, just what did we
do in Iran to make all those people hate us so?"
There have been a lot of Irans in America's recent past, but
in the absence of the New York Daily
News or the Los Angeles Times conspicuously grabbing the reader
by the collar and pressing
against his face the full implication of the deed ... in the
absence of NBC putting it all into real
pictures of real people on the receiving end ... in such absence
the incidents become non-events
for the large majority of Americans, and they can honestly
say "We didn't know what was
happening."
Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: "One
of the delightful things about
Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory."
It's probably even worse than he realized. During the Three
Mile Island nuclear power plant
accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo
Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto
News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily
housed at a hockey rink --
mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered
that none of them had heard
of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank.{20}
And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled
when some 50 prospective
jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and
"none of them knew who Hitler
was".{21}
To the foreign policy oligarchy in Washington, it is more
than delightful. It is sine qua non.
So obscured is the comprehensive record of American interventions
that when, in 1975, the
Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress
was asked to undertake a study of
covert activities of the CIA to date, it was able to come
up with but a very minor portion of the
overseas incidents presented in this book for the same period.{22}
Yet, all the information is there for the reading. I have
not had access to the secret archives of the
CIA or other government agencies. The details of the interventions
have been gathered from
books, newspapers, periodicals, and US Government publications
freely available in one library
or another. But for all that has made its way into popular
consciousness, or into school texts,
encyclopedias, or other standard reference works, there might
as well exist strict censorship in
the United States.
The reader is invited to look through the relevant sections
of the three principal American
encyclopedias, Americana, Britannica, and Colliers, after
completing this book. The image of
encyclopedias as the final repository of objective knowledge
takes a beating. What is tantamount
to a non-recognition of American interventions may very well
be due to these esteemed works
employing a criterion similar to that of Washington officials
as reflected in the Pentagon Papers.
The New York Times summarized this highly interesting phenomenon
thusly:
Clandestine warfare against North Vietnam, for example, is
not seen ... as violating
the Geneva Accords of 1954, which ended the French Indochina
War, or as
conflicting with the public policy pronouncements of the various
administrations.
Clandestine warfare, because it is covert, does not exist
as far as treaties and public
posture are concerned. Further, secret commitments to other
nations are not sensed
as infringing on the treaty-making powers of the Senate, because
they are not
publicly acknowledged.{23}
The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally
illiterate about the history
of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because
it is not official, heavy-handed or
conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education
and media. No conspiracy is
needed. The editors of Reader's Digest and U.S. News and World
Report do not need to meet
covertly with the man from NBC in an FBI safe-house to plan
next month's stories and programs;
for the simple truth is that these men would not have reached
the positions they occupy if they
themselves had not all been guided through the same tunnel
of camouflaged history and emerged
with the same selective memory and conventional wisdom.
As extensive as the historical record presented here is, it
is by no means meant to be a complete
catalogue of every instance and every kind of American intervention
since the Second World War.
We are, after all, dealing largely with events which were
covert when they occurred and which, for
the most part, remain officially classified. Moreover, with
but a few exceptions, this study does not
concern itself with espionage or counter-espionage other than
in passing. These areas have been
well documented in countless "spy" books. Generally
speaking, the study is confined to the more
significant or blatant cases of intervention: the use of armed
aggression by American and/or
native troops acting with the United States; an operation,
successful or not, to overthrow a
government; an attempt to suppress a popular rebellion or
movement; an attempted assassination
of a political leader; gross interference in an election,
or other flagrant manipulation of a
country's political or economic system.
To serve these ends, the CIA over the years has made use of
an extraordinary arsenal of
weapons. Because of space considerations and to avoid excess
repetition, only selected
examples are given here and there amongst the cases. In actuality,
at least one, and usually
more, of these tactics was brought to bear in virtually every
instance. Principal among them are
the following:
1) CIA schools: in the United States and Latin America, where
many tens of thousands of Third
World military and police personnel have been taught modern
methods of controlling insurgency
and "subversion"; instruction includes techniques
of "interrogation" (often a euphemism for
torture); members of the labor movement learn the how and
why of organizing workers within a
framework of free enterprise and anti-communism.
2) Infiltration and manipulation of selected groups: political
parties, women's organizations,
professional, youth and cultural associations, etc., for electoral
and propaganda purposes; the
creation of unions -- local, regional, national and international
-- set up to counterpoise and
weaken existing labor groups too closely oriented towards
social change and the left.
3) News manipulation: the "hiring" of foreign editors,
columnists and journalists ... "I guess I've
bought as much newspaper space as the A & P," chortled
a former CIA officer one day{24}; the
creation and/or subsidizing of numerous periodicals, news
services, radio stations, books, and
book publishers. Considering all assets, the CIA, at least
until the late 1970s, has run what
probably amounts to the largest news organization in the world;
its propaganda and
disinformation effect is routinely multiplied by world-wide
replay.
4) Economic means: in concert with other US government agencies,
such as AID, private
American corporations, and international lending institutions,
the methods of manipulating and
applying pressure to selected sectors of a country's economy,
or the economy as a whole, are
without number.
5) Dirty tricks department: bugging, wire-tapping, forged
documents, bogus personal letters,
planting of evidence, spreading rumors, blackmail, etc., etc.,
to create incidents or obtain
information to embarrass the left, locally and internationally,
particularly to lend credence to
charges of a Moscow or Havana conspiracy; to provoke the expulsion
of communist-bloc
diplomats or the breaking of relations with those countries;
to foster distrust and dissension within
the left.
Although the cases which follow are presented as more or less
discrete stories, fixed in time and
with beginnings and ends, this is done mainly to keep the
information within manageable bounds
and to highlight the more dramatic turns of events, and is
not meant to indicate that there was no
significant CIA activity in the particular country before
or after the years specified. The reader
should therefore keep in mind that the above types of operation
as well as others are all ongoing
programs, carried out routinely in numerous countries, including
many not listed in this book. This
is the Agency's "job", what its officers do for
a living.
"The upheaval in China is a revolution which, if we analyze
it, we will see is prompted by the
same things that prompted the British, French and American
revolutions." {25} A cosmopolitan
and generous sentiment of Dean Rusk, then Assistant Secretary
for Far Eastern Affairs, later
Secretary of State. At precisely the same time as Mr. Rusk's
talk in 1950, others in his
government were actively plotting the downfall of the Chinese
revolutionary government.
This has been a common phenomenon. For many of the cases described
in the following pages,
one can find statements of high or middle-level Washington
officials which put into question the
policy of intervention; which expressed misgivings based either
on principle (sometimes the
better side of American liberalism) or concern that the intervention
would not serve any
worthwhile end, might even result in disaster. I have attached
little weight to such dissenting
statements as, indeed, in the final analysis, did Washington
decision-makers who, in
controversial world situations, could be relied upon to play
the anti-communist card. In presenting
the interventions in this manner, I am declaring that American
foreign policy is what American
foreign policy does.
Though I am clearly opposed to the American interventions
on both political and moral grounds, I
have striven to not let this color my selection of facts;
to not fall prey to that familiar failing:
choosing one's facts to fit one's thesis. Which is to say,
I have not knowingly omitted any facts
which contradict in any significant way the information I
have presented, or the implications of
that information. Further, I have chosen not to take into
account a number of intriguing
disclosures concerning American interventions where I felt
that the source could not be
sufficiently trusted and/or the information was not presented
or documented in a manner which
made it credible to me. In any event, it is not demanded of
the reader that he accept my biases,
but that he reflect upon his own{26}
INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION - NOTES
return to beginning return to mid-text
1. Washington Post, 24 October 1965, article by Stanley Karnow.
2. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. IV, The Hinge
of Fate (London, 1951), p. 428.
3. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London,
1929), p. 235.
4. D.F. Fleming, "The Western Intervention in the Soviet
Union, 1918-1920", New World Review
(New York), Fall 1967; see also Fleming, The Cold War and
its Origins, 1917-1960 (New York,
1961), pp. 16-35.
5. Los Angeles Times, 2 September 1991, p. 1.
6. Frederick L. Schuman, American Policy Toward Russia Since
1917 (New York, 1928), p. 125.
7. Ibid., p. 154.
8. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 October 1978, p. 4.
9. New Republic, 4 August 1920, a 42-page analysis by Walter
Lippmann and Charles Merz.
10. Life, 29 March 1943, p. 29.
11. New York Times, 24 June 1941; for an interesting account
of how US officials laid the
groundwork for the cold war during and immediately after World
War 2, see the first two chapters
of Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York,
1981), a study of previously
classified papers at the Eisenhower Library.
12. This has been well documented and would be "common
knowledge" if not for its shameful
implications. See, e.g., the British Cabinet papers for 1939,
summarized in the Washington Post,
2 January 1970 (reprinted from the Manchester Guardian); also
Fleming, The Cold War, pp.
48-97.
13. Los Angeles Times, 15 December 1987; the figure of 28%
disagreeing was obtained by the
author from the Times reporter. For a highly insightful and
readable description of the
anti-communist mentality in the United States, see Michael
Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse
(Random House, New York, 1969).
14. Related by former French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau
in a recorded interview for the
Dulles Oral History Project, Princeton University Library;
cited in Roger Morgan, The United
States and West Germany, 1945-1973: A Study in Alliance Politics
(Oxford University Press,
London, 1974), p. 54, my translation from the French.
15. Parenti, p. 35.
16. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York, 1978),
p. 101. The expressions "CIA officer"
or "case officer" are used throughout the present
book to denote regular, full-time, career
employees of the Agency, as opposed to "agent",
someone working for the CIA on an ad hoc
basis. Other sources which are quoted, it will be seen, tend
to use the word "agent" to cover both
categories.
17. Ibid., p. 238.
18. Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana (London, 1968), pp.
71-2.
19. The full quotation is from the New York Times, 11 January
1969, p. 1; the inside quotation is
that of the National Commission.
20. Mother Jones magazine (San Francisco), April 1981, p.
5.
21. San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 1982, p. 2.
22. Richard F. Grimmett, "Reported Foreign and Domestic
Covert Activities of the United States
Central Intelligence Agency: 1950-1974" (Library of Congress
report) 18 February 1975.
23. The Pentagon Papers (N.Y. Times edition, 1971), p. xiii.
24. Newsweek, 22 November 1971, p. 37.
25. Speech before the World Affairs Council at the University
of Pennsylvania, 13 January 1950,
cited in the Republican Congressional Committee Newsletter,
20 September 1965.
26. The last sentence is borrowed from Michael Parenti, op.
cit., p. 7.
Taken from Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II;
by William Blum
email:bblum6@aol.com
Killing
Hope