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THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
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[This essay is in two parts. Part One is the essay proper. Notes and an extensive bibliography form Part Two.] Some Interesting QuotationsFuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good . . . American president Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Greek ambassador in Washington, explaining America's take on a crisis in Cyprus If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job. United States national security official "who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists," Toronto Star, December 26, 2002, p. A27 look out kid, they keep it all hid Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" IntroductionAll governments, to the extent that they can, attempt to influence foreign events to the benefit of the ruling group of their own country. Thus throughout history nations have had intelligence operatives (spies). They act in co-ordination with nations' militaries to bring about results desired by the ruling group. # # # The United States is no different. It professes high human principles in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and its human rights record is even exemplary in many respects. But beginning in the 19th century, the United States attempted to influence the policies of other nations, especially in its Latin American neighbourhood. Sometimes it used dishonest aggressive force. # # # It issued its first major warning to other nations in the Monroe Doctrine. This declaration warned the nations of Europe that had previously created colonies in the Americas that the United States forbade them to create any new colonies there. In effect, as we can see in retrospect, the Monroe Doctrine also warned these nations that the United States had exclusive interests in the Americas that it intended to protect. # # # In the later 19th century, as the United States became more powerful and created a powerful navy and marine corps, it went beyond the Monroe Doctrine. It directly exerted military pressure on states in the Americas by invading them repeatedly. It invaded Haiti, for example, dozens of times to enforce its interests. It aggressively invaded Mexico in 1846-47, seizing about a third of that country and incorporating it into the United States. It truculently asserted American dominance and control over territory in the Americas it considered to be in its backyard. The peak of this activity was American president McKinley's Spanish-American War in 1898. The United States responded to the accidental blowup of its ship, Maine, in Havana harbour by accusing Spain of an act of war. It went to war with Spain and stripped it of its colonies, notably, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. These were then made protectorates or colonies of the United States in what was proudly referred to by some at the time as "imperialism". In order to get the Panama Canal built, which would aid American commerce, American president Theodore Roosevelt supported Panamanian rebels against their state, Colombia. Then American diplomats made a deal in a New York hotel with the grateful (and obligated) new founders of the state of Panama to build and control the canal. Most of the American activities of this sort in the Caribbean were primarily military and diplomatic. They involved the U.S. Marines and diplomats in local embassies and consulates. But occasionally spies were used. # # # The United States did not limit its sphere of interest to the Caribbean or the Americas. Toward the latter end of the 19th century it began to exert its increasing power in Asia as well, taking positions in Asian controversies and attempting to secure equal or superior shares of influence and trade in Asian countries. For instance, it demanded the opening of Japan to its influence and goods in 1870, and concessions in China about the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The United States became concerned about increasing its sphere of influence and the rivalry of European powers. It became worried about having sufficient coaling stations around the world for its fleet. The influential book by its Admiral Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power in History (1909?), with its advocacy of sea power, strengthened the desire of influential Americans to expand American hegemony. # # # At the end of World War I, however, the United States essentially closed down most of its spying. "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," said the aristocratic leader of America's intelligence activities at the time. He was undoubtedly correct. Real gentlemen do not. But gentlemen, since they tend to be rich, often have compelling financial and other interests. One of the interests the United States has had throughout its history is affecting world events for the benefit of its powerful and influential groups -- its "gentlemen." In theory, this is not supposed to happen. The public and overt form of the government of the United States is that of a true representative democracy. It is not obvious from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States that these documents could lead to an actual ruling group (or groups) separate from and in control of the American citizenry's being in power. And yet, this has often seemed to be the case. As a democracy, the United States is commonly supposed to have as its sole ruling group the body of ordinary people -- that is, the ordinary citizens. In fact -- like all other democracies and states -- the United States has a minority of citizens who have far more power and influence than the rest. Powerful people tend to have disproportionate influence over the course of the American government and therefore of the United States. These people are closer to the seats of power -- partly because of their greater interest in power and legislation -- and, often through campaign contributions, control of the media or their own narrow watching over their interests, exert unusual, extensive influence -- even occasional dominating sway -- over those in government. In other words, for that particular administration, they are the effective ruling group. Their power is not unlimited -- it is somewhat checked by rival groups -- but they have the largest share of real power. New Elections Mean New Ruling GroupsAfter each election, of course, with new people in an altered government, the ruling group may change. People may lose or gain influence. Admission to the ruling group that temporarily holds sway is open to wealth and powerful desire. But with each administration we can gradually identify who has unusual influence and power over policy, though not officially part of the government. We can gradually identify who is the ruling group influencing that particular administration. For example, in American administrations between the Civil War and the 1930s, it is plain to see that the ruling group was to be found within the highest, most concentrated circles of American business. The ruling group included the banks, the Wall Street manipulators and the great trusts. As American Marine general Smedley Darlington Butler pointed out, the invasions of Caribbean countries he had conducted were fought for the benefit, not of ordinary citizens, but of big New York banks and financial institutions. These institutions, in fact, controlled America's Caribbean policy. Whole nations were invaded to secure the loans of these banks. But enough of this. Let us see how the closing down of part of the American intelligence community after World War I affected America's policies. Origins of the Central Intelligence AgencyBefore World War II, despite the closing down of some of its intelligence community, the United States of America still retained several intelligence agencies. Both the Army and the Navy, for example, kept intelligence branches. Before World War II, using a primitive computer called Magic, American Naval Intelligence cracked Purple, the Japanese diplomatic code. It also cracked numerous Japanese military codes by December 1940, "specifically part of the Kaigun Ango, the twenty-nine separate naval codes which gave us a good idea of what their fleet was up to during the entire year before Pearl Harbor,"1 the Japanese surprise attack on America's Pacific fleet on December 6, 1941, that took 3000 lives. American Naval Intelligence knew that something major was about to happen; they passed messages to this effect on to the White House and the Pentagon. But, though this is still controversial,2 it is doubtful that United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) or his army chief of staff General George Catlett Marshall (1880-1959) knew definitely of the impending Pearl Harbor attack. Why? The messages came through on a Sunday, and had to be translated. By the time they were passed to the President's desk, the Pearl Harbor attack was already history. In June 1942, however, the United States set up an organization called the Office of Strategic Services to coordinate and pool all the intelligence gathered by American intelligence groups during the war. The O.S.S. was under the command of General William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, an adviser of Roosevelt's. It did not only coordinate intelligence; it also ran many secret operations behind enemy lines, mostly in Europe. It seems to have been very effective. President Roosevelt died of natural causes in April, 1945, in the last days of the war in Europe. After World War II, his successor president Harry S. Truman disbanded the O.S.S. # # # However, in late 1945 Truman became aware of charges that North America was infiltrated with Soviet spies. He came under pressure to search for these spies and to oppose communism. The O.S.S. had proved to be useful. And America now had intelligence groups in every branch of its armed forces. As well, the Department of Justice had an intelligence and enforcement branch. This was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), set up decades before to deal with anarchists and communists in the Palmer raids of the early 1920s. In the 1930s under its aggressive, controversial and publicity-seeking director, J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. had made a great reputation for itself attacking individual gangsters. (Strangely, it never attacked organized crime, i.e., the Mafia. There is some thought that Hoover deliberately laid off organized crime, i.e., that he had been bought. Some contend that Hoover was a homosexual, and that this made him vulnerable to the Mob.) So in 1946 the United States set up a new intelligence group, the Central Intelligence Group, under Admiral Sidney Souers (later, under General Hoyt Vandenberg). Again, like the O.S.S., the purpose of the group was to gather and pool all intelligence from the proliferating American agencies. But General Vandenberg, once he had taken over, expanded the group to do research in depth. Congress passed enabling legislation, the National Security Act, on July 26, 1947. The Act not only created a new National Security Council of security advisers to the president (it would not become important until the Nixon presidency), but made the coordinating intelligence group, the Central Intelligence Group, a new organization of scope: the Central Intelligence Agency or C.I.A. (The C.I.A. seems to have begin with about 800 people, mostly culled from the old O.S.S.) The new Central Intelligence Agency naturally took its institutional culture from the old O.S.S. The C.I.A.'s leaders were, often, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the upper stratum of American society: lawyers, bankers, Wall Street CEOs, and so on. This was to gradually differentiate the C.I.A. from many Americans, and to cause a certain rigidity of culture and ineffectiveness in the C.I.A.'s operations. # # # American writer Gore Vidal (1922- ) believes that the National Security Act creating the C.I.A. marked the passage of the United States from a republic to what he calls a national security state. It may have done, but I see no great change. Before the creation of the C.I.A. the United States had acted sporadically regarding espionage and foreign covert actions; now it was to operate permanently in these areas. The United States had institutionalized its interest in "national security" and in projecting its foreign "interests" with a permanent non-military national security agency. The Powers of the New C.I.A.The new Central Intelligence Agency or C.I.A. was allowed run covert operations, but only outside U.S. borders. It seems clearly to have been intended to fight, not fascism like the O.S.S., but, among other things, international communism. Its mission under its chief, the Director of Central Intelligence (or D.C.I.), was to gather foreign intelligence, and to co-ordinate all intelligence from all American intelligence agencies for the briefing of the President. The C.I.A. contained a directorate, eventually called the Directorate of Operations, which was to conduct secret operations (i.e., covert assassinations, spying and subversion) outside the United States. It was forbidden to conduct such operations within the boundaries of the United States. Spying within the United States was reserved for the the F.B.I., which throughout the 1950s and 60s spied on communists and attempted to catch traitors and spies, i.e., counterintelligence operations. (In fact, the C.I.A. seems to have occasionally conducted inside the United States covert operations it was expressly forbidden by the National Security Act to perform; these acts, which really got underway in the 1960s, continued at least until the 1970s. Whether they still go on today is a matter for conjecture.) The C.I.A. Directorate of Operations has tried to assassinate people in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. However, Patrice Lumumba, president of the Congo in 1961, seems to have been murdered, not by the C.I.A., but by Belgian agents working with American forces.)3 When set up, the C.I.A. was made part of the Executive Office of the President; that is, part of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. It does the bidding of the president. Since it is a secret agency, probably no single person -- not even any president of the United States or C.I.A. director, let alone any senator or Congressman -- knows everything it has done. Much of its history, however, has leaked or been deliberately leaked over the years. A good deal of material on its operations has been published. I have looked over much of this material, and, after cross-checking it as best I can, found much of it plausible. In efforts to win public support for the Agency, some books of the C.I.A.'s official, censored "history" have been published. We know that some of the C.I.A.'s operatives have gone renegade (like Ed Wilson, serving prison time since the 1980s for smuggling weapons and lethal explosives to out-of-favour nations like Muammar Gaddafi's Libya). Some operatives have become crooks, like the principals of the Nugen Hand bank in Australia. Some agents have published revealing, unauthorized books about the C.I.A.'s activities (Marchetti, Agee). Occasionally, also, a foreign intelligence agent from a power that works in cooperation with the C.I.A. has published a book which casts light on the Agency. The Company (as, we are told, the C.I.A. has sometimes also been known) has also been investigated, at least superficially, by House of Representatives and Senate committees (notably the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Utah senator Frank Church, usually called the Church committee, in 1974 and 1975). The Church committee brought out specific details of, for example, the C.I.A.'s many attempts to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (1930- ) and its involvement in plans to assassinate Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo (which succeeded on 30 May 1961). These days the C.I.A.'s covert actions are all supposed to be revealed and approved in advance by a number of House and Senate oversight committees. With all this we can say, therefore, that quite a number of the C.I.A.'s history and activities are known definitely or at least in outline by the small group of politicians, journalists, observers and critics that pays attention. Most Americans do not. The C.I.A.'s Secret OperationsWe therefore can say with some certainty that the U.S. government, several presidents, and their agent the C.I.A. have shared responsibility in the death of many, many hundreds of thousands of people around the world. We can also say with certainty that the C.I.A., at the behest of several presidents, has caused to be overthrown a number of foreign governments. The C.I.A. has probably also overthrown or had a hand in overthrowing a number of additional governments that we do not yet know about. # # # The C.I.A. has also interfered with, controlled, or tried to interfere with, control and overthrow, a vast number more governments -- including those of a few Western democracies, e.g., Australia and Chile. The C.I.A. has also claimed the right to break the laws of all other countries. It claims the right to spy on all countries except Canada and the United Kingdom (but there is some evidence it has spied on Canada). From this all people in the world must take a measure of alarm. Clandestine American forces, amounting to secret governments, are interfering with nations around the world. To whom are they accountable? In recent years we can say that the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives appear to have achieved some oversight over the activities of the C.I.A. and related agencies (that is, the Defence Intelligence Agency, Air Force Intelligence, and so on; 15 agencies are acknowleged to exist in the American intelligence community, spending a supposed 40 billion dollars a year). For example, in recent years certain Congressional committees review the covert operations of the C.I.A. The C.I.A. appears nearly always to have been under the control of the sitting president of the United States, doing his will. Occasionally, however, the attitude of the American intelligence community seems to have been that civilians including the president must be protected from knowing what the intelligence community is doing, perhaps to preserve the government's ability to plausibly deny the agencies' activities. And some intelligence executives seem even to believe that it is none of the president or Congress's business what intelligence agents do, in their patriotic quest to protect to protect American interests. We can be very unsure whether the C.I.A.'s activities have, on the whole, benefited the American people and the world. In fact, due to the secrecy of the C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies, we must be very unsure who, exactly, their activities have benefited. DisclaimerSince the C.I.A. and its fellow American intelligence agencies -- among others, the much larger and perhaps more important National Security Agency (N.S.A., which studies communications intelligence), the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A., which works for the Pentagon), the F.B.I., the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and all the others -- are secret agencies, it is difficult to get accurate, respectable information about their history and activities. All accounts of the history of American intelligence agencies must be partial and doubtful. I may well have made several mistakes in this essay. But in the following I have tried to give a truthful account of what seems established, and to fit it within America's current domination of most of the world. I apologize in advance for any errors. Some of the History of the C.I.A.NOTE: The following is, I hope, accurate. I have been conscientious in referring to multiple sources, and weighing their respectability and accuracy. Notes and a bibliography form an appendix, Part Two, to this essay. . GreeceIn the late 1940s communists were numerous in Greece. Additional communists seem to have poured in from Albania, Yugoslavia and other newly communist countries. The communists fought a civil war against the government, which had ordered them to disarm, and the British garrison that backed the government. It seems that some of the communists turned in many of their weapons in 1945. From then on they were hunted down and killed by paramilitaries. So the communists reformed their army and fought for two and a half years. (I have met an old Greek man who insists 1,000,000 Greeks were killed in this war. So far I have found no evidence of this.) The British seem to have been unable to afford sufficient troops to win for the Greek government. So with American help from president Truman (the American military adviser was General Van Fleet, who later commanded U.N. forces in the Korean War), the communists were defeated. 160,000 people are reliably said to have been killed (I think this number refers to deaths on both sides). The C.I.A. was definitely active, and often takes credit for the defeat of communism in Greece at this time. It developed "assets" (as the saying goes) among the Greek military and supplied weapons to Greece from then on. The United States also, once the communists had been defeated, obtained bases in Greece. In 1967, the United States seems to have worked with its assets, a number of colonels in the Greek army, who took over the government in a coup and ran a dictatorship until 1974. (See entry on Cyprus below.) EgyptIn 1952 Canadian reporter Eric Downton was in Cairo on July 23, 1952, when Egyptian King Farouk was overthrown by officers of his army. They wished to carry out a social revolution and throw out the British; the British controlled the Suez Canal, as they had done since occupying the country militaily in 1882. The coup was led by Brigadier General Mohammed Naguib. Downton was told, however, that the real power was with Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who soon led his own coup toppling Naguib. In his book Wars Without End (Stoddart, Toronto, 1987, pp. 227-9) Downton hints that the C.I.A. gave help to Colonel Naguib. He names as C.I.A. agents involved Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt who was involved in the C.I.A.'s Iran caper the next year; and Miles Copeland. Downton says that Kermit Roosevelt had been in touch with the conspiring officers for months before the coup. He says Copeland became an unofficial adviser after the coup to the rebelling officers; this gave the United States for some years far superior influence in Egypt to that of the British. Finally, Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to build the Aswan High Dam, and the Egyptians turned to the Soviet Union for help. TibetIn 1950, nearly simultaneously with the Korean War, communist China invaded Tibet, a isolated realm that had been independent through most of its history. The spiritual leaders of Tibet, including the Dalai Lama, fled the country. The United States, almost certainly through the C.I.A., seems to have organized resistance and rebellion among Tibetans against the Chinese. Obviously the effort did not succeed. Tibet has been incorporated into China, and China has exported many Han settlers to Tibet until they number about half the present population. China has also tried to destroy the native Tibetan culture, destroying, for example, about 6000 Tibetan Buddhist temples. BrazilThe C.I.A. gave the go-ahead to the coup that overthrew Brazil's president Joao Goulart in 1964. The American government had not liked either Goulart or his predecessor Quadros. Each was trying to follow an independent and neutralist national policy; the United States wanted committed and obedient anti-communist governments that would go along with American policy (whatever it happened to be) and consistently oppose communism. The C.I.A. had funneled at least five million dollars to anti-Goulart candidates in elections in October, 1962. AID (the American Agency for International Development) had tried to tip money to the states of anti-Goulart government governors. The United States had also carefully prepared to assist the eventual military coup (on March 30, 1964). Interestingly, one of the ways they did this was through "labor operations." ("Labor operations" means having C.I.A.-financed American labor front-organizations like AIFLD -- the American Institute for Free Labor Development -- send U.S. labor organizers who are secret C.I.A. assets to a target country; there, the assets form tame company unions -- often in an American subsidiary -- cause unrest, and eventually march against the government and seize strategic buildings.) Goulart had been elected president in 1960 by "the largest margin in Brazilian history." (Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 349.) But Kwitny says Goulart was "a populist and a bit of a demagogue," so no doubt the U.S. government of Lyndon Johnson thought it was contributing to "stability" and anti-communism by arranging his overthrow. The brutal dictatorship that replaced Goulart was succeeded by another brutal dictatorship, und so weiter until the 1990s. Among those involved in putting pressure on the Quadros and Goulart governments were Adolph Berle Jr. and American ambassador John Moors Cabot. Both had advocated the 1953 American toppling of Guatemalan president Arbenz. Defense attache in Brazil Col. Vernon Walters, later to be Deputy Director of the C.I.A., was the liason between the coup conspirators and the United States. CyprusThe island of Cyprus was occupied about 80% by Greeks, about 18% by Turks. It became a republic in 1960. From the 1950s there were struggles between the Greek majority, many of whom wanted union (enosis) with Greece, and the Turkish minority, who wanted freedom for their language and religion, and equality. The United States under president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser and later secretary of state Henry Kissinger interfered in the situation to oppose Archbishop Makarios, a Greek leader. (Makarios had wanted in 1963 to reduce the power of the Turks to veto laws; he opposed enosis with Greece.) In July 1974 Makarios, who was detested by the Greek dictatorship then in power, was briefly deposed in a coup by the Cyprus national guard (assisted by the Greek colonels and the C.I.A.?). Turkey responded by invading Cyprus and drove most Greeks from the northern third of the island. Turkish forces killed Greeks and committed atrocities. About 3000 people disappeared. The Turks set up a Turkish state in the north. The Greek dictatorship of colonels reacted so haplessly to the Turkish invasion that they collapsed. Democracy returned to Greece. Archbishop Makarios returned from exile to rule the Greek south until he died in 1977. Since then Cyprus has remained divided. No country but Turkey recognizes the government of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In 2002 the Greek part of Cyprus is applying to join Europe. IranDuring World War II the British Empire began to unravel. Over 25 years or so, American interests gradually replaced or supplanted many British ones. This happened in the early 1950s in Iran. The chief interest, of course, was Iran's oil. When Iranian nationalists overthrew the Shah (king) of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, in 1953, and seized the foreign oil companies, the CIA sent Kermit Roosevelt,4 an agent supposedly working for the Northrop aircraft company, to Iran. Roosevelt worked with Iran's military and with street gangs. These he armed and sent into the streets of Tehran to fire their weapons and create chaos. Chaos in the streets filled ordinary people, and made them cry for order. The military launched a coup, overthrowing the nationalist government of Mohammed Mossadegh and putting the Shah back on his throne. America's oil interests in Iran were given back. The Shah remained a helpful client of the United States until 1970; the CIA allowed him to buy American arms and trained his military. The C.I.A. worked with and trained the Shah's secret police, the Savak.5 (The C.I.A. and other American agencies train armies, secret police and paramilitaries around the world at special schools in the United States.) The Shah saw that oil was pumped and that his internal enemies were put down. But Islamic resistance developed inside his country from Shiite leaders, the ayatollahs and imams of Iran. The Shah sent one of these, the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900?-1989), into exile in the 1970s. Khomeini used the technology of audio cassette tapes to spread his fiery anti-shah sermons within Iran. Disaffection with the Shah's one-party dictatorship began to increase. In 1979 the Shah was overthrown by the army. He and his family fled into exile, where he died a year later in Egypt of cancer. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran where he instituted an Islamic fundamentalist Shiite government hostile to the United States. Diplomatic relations were broken off with the U.S. when Iranian radicals, apparently fearing that Iranian-American difficulties might be resolved, broke into the U.S. embassy and took about 50 American prisoners. They held them for a year, to the embarrassment of the United States. This incident, and a failed attempt to rescue them by the U.S. Army that cost several deaths, contributed to the defeat of Democratic president Jimmy Carter and the election of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980. (The American prisoners, incidentally, were released simultaneously with Ronald Reagan's inauguration, giving a happy boost to the beginning of his term of office. Much speculation hovers about the possibility that former American secretary of state and realpolitik shadow-master Henry Kissinger secretly negotiated with the holders of the prisoners for the timing of their release -- i.e., to help Reagan's chances of election. [In 2004 it appears probable that these secret negotiations were indeed held -- in Spain.--GS] The Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. Iran's government remains ultimately controlled by Shiite religious leaders. The government of Iran is led by a prime minister, Khatami, who seems to want better relations with the United States. Iran has moved slightly closer to restoring relations; however, George W. Bush named Iran one of the countries forming an "axis of evil" in a memorable speech in early 2002. GuatemalaThe C.I.A.'s actions in Guatemala in the early 1950s are among its best-known and best-understood. Numerous detailed and consistent accounts have emerged.6 Like several Central American republics, the government of Guatemala was and mostly remains a banana republic. That is, American interests, including the United Fruit Company,7 had bought up large areas of the country for banana plantations. These interests were deeply involved in the economy of the country and allied with a small aristocracy of government-connected landowners who owned major portions of the country's land. When a nationalist and populist revolt occurred in 1950, the C.I.A. set up an air force to attack Guatemala. The Arbenz nationalist government was overthrown. A military dictatorship took over friendly to the United States. For decades the United States has assisted the succeeding dictatorship to preserve the status quo. As it has with other Latin American countries, the United States has probably trained Guatemalan military and secret police officers at its School of the Americas (located from the 1940s to 1984 at Fort Benning, Georgia, and more recently renamed something else; I forget whether it is now in the Miami area or in Panama). Tens of thousands (50,000?) of Guatemalan Indians were killed by the Guatemalan dictatorships in the 1980s. Torture and assassination are common, though there appears to have been some recent timid movement toward real democracy. CubaThe Caribbean island of Cuba had been a colony of Spain since the 1500s. About 1898 the United States entered an imperialist phase. When an American vessel called the Maine blew up in the harbour of Havana, the capital of Cuba, the United States at once declared war on Spain. In a very brief patriotic war, the United States totally defeated Spain around the world. In the Philippines, a Spanish colony whose rebels were on the point of liberating themselves, the United States blew up the local Spanish fleet in a 90-minute battle. It then temporized with the rebels until they realized that the United States intended to take over the Philippines. War broke out; the rebels finally lost after tens of thousands ( I understand that some say, hundreds of thousands) of Filipinos had been killed. The Philippines became a territory of the United States (the United States tended never to call its possessions colonies) until the end of World War II. In Cuba at the same time, the United States invaded and quickly defeated the Spanish. It made treaties (some would say, unfair treaties) with the new Cuban government which gave it trade rights and a permanent base on Guantanamo Bay. From then on the United States interfered with Cuban affairs. Cuba endured a series of dictatorships until 1959. In December 1959, the forces of Fidel Castro, a Cuban lawyer who had turned guerrilla and been fighting the Batista dictatorship of Cuba since 1956, fought their way into Havana. Batista fled into exile. Castro, according to the American Public Broadcasting System show Frontline, had modeled himself on Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Unknown to the U.S. government, he was a Marxist. (I know, I know: How do Mussolini and Marxism go together? Don't ask me; perhaps Castro's real goal was simply power?) As soon as Castro's forces had taken over the government, he began nationalizing American (and Cuban) property without compensation. Some of this property was hotels, sugar mills (Cuba's chief industry was cane-sugar production) and American Mafia-owned gambling casinos. So the United States fell into opposition to Castro. (After all, the United States at this time and for decades later was in a very pronounced anti-communist phase. Has it ended?) Using the C.I.A., the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations began preparing an invasion of Cuba. It was thought that this could be done roughly on the model of the 1953 Guatemala affair. A proxy army of a few hundred anti-Castro Cubans would invade with C.I.A. and U.S. Navy support. Air cover from the United States Air Force (or a proxy group of repainted airplanes and pilots supplied by the U.S. or anti-Castroites) would cover the invading forces on the beach. At the last moment U.S. president John Kennedy cancelled the air cover. On April 17, 1961 several hundred Cubans landed at a beach whose name translates as the Bay of Pigs. There they were trapped and mowed down by efficient Castro army forces until they were forced to surrender. After this embarrassing black eye, the United States continued to attempt to get rid of Castro. It began Operation Mongoose and various other operations to harass and hamper the Cuban government. It was eventually revealed during Watergate-scandal investigations in the 1970s that the United States, through the C.I.A., had worked with the United States Mafia to try to poison and kill Castro. Many plots, some fairly silly, had been launched to "remove" him. All failed. VietnamThe French had taken over Vietnam as a colony in the 19th century. They had plantations there. In World War II the Japanese invaded and took over. A local movement under Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese, was formed, inspired by the American Revolution. The Japanese were defeated. The French came back. Ho Chi Minh's movement fought the French for the independence of Vietnam. Ho tried to get the help of the Americans. They would not see him. They would not help Ho end the colonialism of America's ally, France. Ho's forces catastrophically defeated the French at the months-long siege and battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The French lost 4,000 dead in the battle, and another 4,000 prisoners of war died in a 500-mile death march to a prison camp. The French were forced to withdraw, abandoning their colony. They had lost, in all, about 90,000 dead. A Geneva conference was called. The major powers except the United States made an armistice agreement on July 21, 1954, with Ho's Vietnamese. The armistice divided the country into two temporary zones at the 17th parallel. The agreement provided for elections in 1956. The Eisenhower administration in the United States refused to abide by the terms agreed to at Geneva. The C.I.A. began encouraging Roman Catholics in the north of Vietnam to flee south. The C.I.A. spent $100,000,000 to encourage them to move, and flew them in American general Claire Chennault's Taiwan airline, Civil Air Transport. The C.I.A. then set up a government in the south under a Roman Catholic Vietnamese they found in Tokyo and installed, the relatively unknown Ngo Dinh Diem. They set up a South Vietnamese dictatorship under Diem largely controlled by Roman Catholics. Roman Catholics were 5% of the population, Buddhists were 95%. Ho put pressure on Diem through the 1950s. The United States feared that Ho was a communist (he was) and that if South Vietnam was lost to communism other countries would fall. (This is known as the "domino theory" after a popular American game where one playing piece often topples another in a chain. President Eisenhower named the domino theory and explained it in a press conference in 1954.) Diem made tens of thousands of his political opponents political prisoners in tiger cages (don't ask). His repression of his opponents caused street protests, notably by non-violent Buddhist monks. Some burned themselves to death in protests conspicuous on American television in the early 1960s. Diem's egregious relatives -- a rather corrupt, nasty lot -- had high positions in his government. His brother was the police chief. Not having more than a few thousand troops in Vietnam, America tried to control the Indochinese situation with the C.I.A.; "paramilitary expert" Air Force general Gordon Lansdale was its point man. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent military advisers to help ARVN (Arvin), the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (i.e., South Viet Nam). But nothing worked. In November 1963, with tacit support from the United States, Diem was overthrown and killed by ARVN. A revolving door of generals ran the country for a while. In summer 1965 the United States landed Marines on the beach of South Vietnam, then told the South's government they were coming. (This is what American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky refers to as America's invasion of Viet Nam.) America poured in billions of dollars of aid to the South Vietnam government and hundreds of thousands of troops. They bombed North Vietnam (and Viet communist villages in South Vietnam) with more bombs than had been used in all of World War II. To no avail. Over 57,000 American soldiers died in the war. Over 1,000,000 Vietnamese died in, I think, the American-controlled period (it is said 3,000,000 Vietnamese died in the combined anti-French, anti-American period). The result? The American people, then Congress, grew tired of the war. Protest mounted in the United States. 1968 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon announced he had a secret plan for ending the war. If there was such a plan, it seems to have been to turn the fighting over to ARVN, bomb the hell out of North Vietnam, and get a treaty which would allow America to get out "with honor." The treaty was signed in Paris by American secretary of state Henry Kissinger in January 1973. (He and the North Vietnamese negotiator subsequently won Nobel Peace prizes for their efforts.) American troops gradually went home. In the spring of 1975 the American Congress finally stopped funding South Vietnam. In May and June 1975 the North Vietnamese defeated and rolled over ARVN. Remaining Americans escaped from Saigon, scrambling to climb into helicopters landed on the roof of the Saigon embassy. The South's government fell. Vietnam was united again under the communists. LaosThe C.I.A. ran a secret war here for years against the Pathet Lao, local communists run by a relative of the king. In 1975, about the time that South Vietnam collapsed, the Pathet Lao took over in Laos. It nows seems established, but it has never been officially acknowledged by the C.I.A., that throughout the Laotian war the C.I.A. made deals with local druglords in the so-called Golden Triangle border region of Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. That is, in return for help in its war with North Vietnam, the C.I.A. helped fly drugs to South Vietnam and the United States for the druglords. This seems to have happened in C.I.A. planes, perhaps those of one of its airlines, Air America. A film was made called Air America starring Australian actor Mel Gibson, but I do not know if it refers to these events. (These drugs addicted many American servicemen in Vietnam, as well as many Americans at home.) See my bibliography for several books about the C.I.A.'s illegal drug smuggling which I have not yet read. IndonesiaIndonesia was divided between various groups of indigenous ethnic Indonesians and the Chinese business class. American governments found Sukarno (1901-1970), the Indonesian leader, too leftist. Sukarno seems to have launched a bloody revolution in September 1965 to consolidate his power. He had a number of important generals killed. So Suharto (1921- ), an Indonesian general who was a C.I.A. "asset," fought back. Suharto suddenly used the Indonesian army to swoop down on and kill hundreds of thousands (Encylopedia Britannica 1998 says 300,000 or more), perhaps 1,000,000 or so. Many of these were Chinese. (At the time the ethnic basis of this slaughter was disguised in America by saying (for example, in Henry Luce's Time magazine) that they were "communists.") Suharto gradually took over Indonesia and sidelined Sukarno. By 1966 Suharto was president. Incidentally, Ralph McGehee, a retired C.I.A. agent, says flatly that the United States caused the 1975 Suharto coup. Suharto then set up a deeply corrupt family dictatorship under American auspices that lasted until about 2000. Somewhere I have read a description of a meeting in which the newly-installed Suharto regime essentially divided things up with American and British bankers, weapons suppliers, etc. Oy. One of the more unfortunate things about this horrible regime is the way in which the forests of Sumatra and Borneo were (and are) essentially clearcut, the timber sold to Japan, the environment destroyed, and local peoples dispossessed. ChileThe C.I.A.'s activities in Chile, in the 1960s probably the most democratic country in Latin America, are among the best known of that agency. There is general agreement about what happened. Throughout the 1950s the United States used the C.I.A. to prevent Salvador Allende from being elected president of Chile. They acted clandestinely and financially against him in elections in 1958 and 1964, secretly financing opposition, and were successful. Allende was not elected. But in 1970 Allende succeeded. He is said to have been, and there is some evidence he was, a democratic, moderate Marxist, leading a coalition of leftist parties (yes, apparently such people can exist, despite commentators in the Wall Street Journal, who give a somewhat different account of things). The C.I.A. was ordered by president Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to destabilize the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. This they did, getting deeply involved to help the interests of American corporations like the conglomerate International Telephone and Telegraph (known as ITT) and Anaconda Copper. The C.I.A. used its Chilean assets. A moderate general refused to topple Allende; the general wished to preserve Chilean democracy. According to Christopher Hitchens1, Henry Kissinger and the C.I.A. assisted the assassins of General Schroder by providing them with weapons (and, I think, money). Schroder was assassinated. None of this prevented Allende from taking office, however. So the C.I.A. then gave money to various trucking organizations to go on strike, and to newspapers to oppose the government and call for a coup. The coup came in 1973. Army general Augusto Pinochet, who was not the leader of the coup, joined in. Photos later revealed show Allende being taken from his palace. (Officially, he died in his palace, sitting in a chair with a rifle in his hands.) Allende either acted like a Roman and committed suicide with an automatic rifle or was assassinated (you make the call). Pinochet consolidated his power over time, taking over from the junta's other generals and admirals. People were rounded up, taken to the national stadium, tortured, killed, and left scattered about the streets of the capital Santiago. Even a few Americans were killed by the junta. (See the book Missing and the 1982 Costa-Gavras film made from it of the same name, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.) About 4,000 Chileans were killed without due process of law by the armed forces dictatorship. One of them may have been the famous leftist poet Pablo Neruda. (I believe Neruda was a former ambassador. He was probably a communist. At one point he was in exile in Italy, as romantically depicted in the excellent Italian movie Il Postino.) The dictatorship clung to power for years. It eventually made Pinochet a senator for life, and struck a deal for immunity from prosecution for itself with the civilian government it eventually allowed to succeed it in the 1990s. LebanonLebanon was artificially created a French colony (excuse me, League of Nations "mandate") in 1920. Like Iraq, it was made out of pieces of the Ottoman Empire thrust together willy nilly. It consisted of sixteen ethnic groups who hated each other. The French withdrew in 1946 and the modern "state" of Lebanon was created. Under its constitution power was to be shared between Maronite Christians and Arabs. The Maronites elected a president; the Arabs elected a prime minister. But the Arabs grew in numbers faster than the Maronites. In the 1950s they demanded a larger share of power. The United States helped rig an election in 1957 so that the Christians would dominate Lebanon's government. This caused, about a year later, turmoil. The Christian president invited the United States to come in and restore order. President Eisenhower sent in marines in 1958, who stayed some months. "Stability" was restored. The Marines withdrew. According to Kwitny7, this was the ultimate cause of the civil war that broke out in Lebanon in April 1975. Neighbours killed neighbours; factions shelled and dispossessed each other; Beirut was divided by militias and levelled. Over 50,000 died; about 30,000 or so in the first year. About 200 temporary truces were made and broken between the factions. Things were not particularly helped when Israel invaded in 1982 to root out Palestinian guerrillas. General Sharon, the Israeli defence minister, went right up to Beirut and shelled West Beirut, home of the Palestinian leadership. He assured his weapons suppliers, the Americans, that he would not invade Beirut. But after the Palestinian leadership had left Beirut under a truce, he did invade West Beirut. Israeli soldiers stood by as their allies, the Lebanese Forces (a militia of the Maronite Christians) entered two Palestinian refugee camps (Shatila was one) and, within sight and hearing of the Israelis, killed perhaps a thousand men, women, children and babies. This was only one of a number of colourful massacres that had been going on in Lebanon since 1975, but for some reason it caught the attention of the world. Under president Ronald Wilson Reagan, American marines were sent into Lebanon in 1982 to help the Christian side. (At least, I think that's what they were trying to do.) He also sent two battleships to shell Muslim militias in the hills with shells described as being "the size of Volkswagens." Over 260 U.S. Marines were killed one night in their barracks in the fall of 1983 by one Muslim suicide bomber who drove his truck into their barracks. (At the same time another truck bomb killed 46 French soldiers accompanying the Americans, in a nearby camp.) Some months later, president Reagan withdrew the American troops, reluctantly assenting to the will of Congress. William Joseph Casey, the CIA's director, presumably with Reagan's knowledge, and with the help of British intelligence, caused a car bomb to explode in Beirut in the early 1980s. The bomb was set outside a mosque, to explode when worshippers were leaving after their service. (Does this sound like a terrorist action to you?) This was an attempt to assassinate a specific Muslim religious figure. The bomb killed about 60 civilians and injured 240, but failed to kill the person intended. Casey died of a brain tumor in 1987. Supposedly he gave a deathbed interview to Robert Woodward, the journalist (formerly of the Washington Post) who helped reveal the Watergate conspiracy in the early 1970s. The Lebanese eventually settled their civil war themselves, made a new political deal between the Muslims and Maronite Christians, and are trying to rebuild their country. IraqThe Shiite-dominated regime of Iran had taken over from America's client, the Shah, in 1979. Since the new, brutal theocratic Iranian regime under Ayatollah Khomeini was an enemy of the United States, the United States secretly armed its rival Iraq, a particularly brutal classic dictatorship under its leader, Saddam Hussein. Hussein obliged the United States by attacking Iran in 1980 (I think). The two countries fought a long war that lasted until about 1989. This war cost about 1,000,000 lives before the two sides essentially returned to their starting positions. (It has been revealed that the United States, under president Ronald Reagan, also helped Iraq during the war with satellite intelligence.) The United States continued arming Iraq. Iraq then threatened Kuwait (which had, about 1920, been part of Iraq before being separated by the British) in 1990. Iraqi officials sounded out an American ambassador about possibly invading America's ally, Kuwait. She gave them an ambiguous reply. A couple of days later, in July 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The United States president George Herbert Walker Bush announced that the invasion "would not stand." He put together a coalition to overturn Iraq's conquest of Kuwait. In January 1991 the coalition attacked and pulverized Iraq's army, largely based on battle tanks. President Bush stopped the war without taking the capital of Iraq, Bagdad. The UN was sent in to inspect and cause the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. CIA agents infiltrated the weapons inspectors, thereby destroying the international credibility of the inspections. In 2002 it appears that the United States intends to resume the war in a few months. This time the purpose is to remove Saddam Hussein, thereby causing a "regime change." The official reason is that Saddam is continuing to pursue the building of weapons of mass destruction, is helping the terrorist group al-Quaeda, and therefore poses an imminent threat to the United States. Israel/PalestineIn 2002 the C.I.A. was said by American newsmagazines to be working in the West Bank, helping its ally Israel and contemplating rebuilding the infrastructure of the Palestine Authority which Israel had destroyed in the spring. President Arafat appears, at least on the surface, to be more moderate than the bomb-developing groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and so on that continue to attack Israel with suicide bombers. AustraliaIn the early 1970s, the United States did not like the Labour government of Gough Whitlam. As usual, it was too nationalistic, independent and mildly leftist. According to Blum, the United States used its influence to get the governor general of Australia, Kerr, to remove Whitlam from power and call a general election. It also gave money to both of the opposition parties, the Liberal Party and the National Country Party. According to Zepezauer, the C.I.A. interfered with an Australian election. I assume this refers to the 1975 election that followed Whitlam's dismissal. Whitlam lost. Simultaneously a bank was operating, the Nugen Hand Bank, which "helped finance agency operations in Angola and the Middle East." Two men, American Michael Hand and a man named Nugen (Hand, at least, seems to have been an ex-member of the C.I.A.) were in charge of this bank. "When Australian bank examiners closed in on the bank in 1977, Nugen killed himself and Hand disappeared with billions in depositors' funds." ["Billions" seems to be an error. 50 million dollars was missing.--GS] AfghanistanThe Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan at the end of 1979 and installed a friendlier government. The United States, acting through C.I.A. agents, armed the Afghan opposition to the Soviet Union, the the so-called mujahadeen, in their war with the Soviet Union from 1979-1990. This involved the expense of several billion dollars and included equipping the mujahadeen with weapons, including Stinger surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles. After the Soviet Union abandoned Afghanistan in 1990, the groups the United States had armed fought each other for control of the Afghanistan government. The eventual winner became known as the Taliban ("seminary students"). The Taliban developed extremely close links of marriage and ideology with Osama bin Laden and his al-Quaeda terrorist network. After the events of September 11, 2001, the United States first demanded that the Taliban turn over Osama bin Laden and his Afghanistan-based operatives, then bombed the Taliban. In this war in late 2001 and early 2002, C.I.A. operatives were everywhere in Afghanistan, liasing with friendly groups. One C.I.A. operative was killed at a prison in northern Afghanistan. AlbaniaThe United States acting through the C.I.A. attempted to foment rebellions against the regime of Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxha (1908-1985) throughout the 1950s, to no avail. It is possible that the "assets" in country were betrayed by British traitor and Soviet spy Kim Philby. CongoWhen Belgium gave up its colony, the Belgian Congo, in 1960, copper-rich Katanga province rose up to secede from the country. Its leader, Joseph Kasavubu, was eventually defeated by Joseph Mobutu, leader of the Congolese army. In 1960 Mobutu, then secretary to Soviet-educated leftish Patrice Lumumba, president of the Congo, arrested Lumumba. Lumumba was executed in January 1961, apparently by Belgian operatives with a little participation by the C.I.A. Moise Tshombe, eventually became leader of the entire country. Mobutu Sese Seko (1930-1997) became dictator in 1965 and corruptly ran the country for his own benefit until displaced by rebels in 1997. While he was looting the country and sending several billions to his Swiss bank account, Mobutu was funded and supported solidly by his ally the United States of America, which often put down rebellions against him. AngolaAfter the death of its dictator, Salazar, in 1975, Portugal quickly gave up its colonies of East Timor, Mozambique and Angola. The central government of Angola was taken over by a leftist (probably marxist) government. (This government nevertheless made a deal with American oil companies recovering oil off its coast, however; Mobil, or whoever it was, went on with its oil program regardless.) But a civil war broke out between the central government and two other factions. The war was probably about who got the oil revenue. Castro's Cuban government sent troops to Angola to help the leftist government against the other factions. So, presumably to oppose Castro and communism the United States through guess-what-organization helped the faction led by Jonas Savimbi (19 -2002), UNITA, against the central government for many years with checkered success. (In a 1980s presidential election a Republican convention hopeful, Lew Lehrman of New York State, a businessman, even went to Angola to talk to Savimbi, who was, incidentally, not a sterling character. Lehrman lost the convention and did not become the Republican candidate.) Savimbi and other rebel leaders eventually made truces with the central government for limited times, but then broke them. Eventually Savimbi died, unsuccessful in his struggle. I have lost sight of this situation and can say no more. Guatemala, Honduras, Costa RicaIn all three of these Central American countries the American-owned United Fruit Company created by Minor Keith in 1899 owned land, railroads, etc., and strongly affected the local economy. United Fruit worked with local dictators to protect its interests. The C.I.A. has long been involved in Costa Rica (a relatively progressive, peaceful and enlightened place by Central American standards) looking out for American interests. Honduras is essentially a quiescent, cooperative chattel. U.S. officials worked with successive Guatemalan dictators helping them to suppress local Indian populations. Tens of thousands of Indians were killed. NicaraguaNicaragua was another of the Central American banana republics in America's backyard. For decades the United States regularly interfered in Nicaragua. Four times in the 20th century the U.S. Marines invaded to make sure that American loans to Nicaragua were repaid. Nicaragua was occupied by the United States for years at a time. When the United States invaded the fourth time, in the 1930s, it left Anastasio Somoza dictator of the country. In the 1980s popular forces named after Sandino, a 1930s martyr who had fought Somoza, threw out Somoza's family. They took over. The United States under president Ronald Reagan opposed the Sandinistas. In Honduras they financed a guerrilla army of Somoza supporters, and helped these contras, as they were called, conduct raids against the new Sandinista government. The Sandinistas were indeed leftists, popular marxists who were friendly to Fidel Castro. The contras were, however, dictatorial feudal aristocrats. Their army burned many villages, killing many civilians and committing atrocities. (In one village they seem to have killed about 800 peasants, including many, many young children. (See Joan Didion's Political Fictions for one of many accounts.) The C.I.A. seems to have been active supplying and organizing the contras and attempting to raise support for them in Costa Rica, Panama and other places. The Reagan government, however, got in trouble with the World Court at the Hague when the Sandinista government of Nicaragua sued it for mining a harbour on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. The United States lost in court (apparently the Reagan administration had violated one of the rules of war). The United States refused to recognize the judgment of the court. Under George W. Bush the United States has tried to have itself exempted from judgments of the court relating to war crimes and atrocities committed by its previous office-holders (see articles in the New York Times). El SalvadorAnother typical Latin American republic in America's backyard, El Salvador has the usual ruling class of big landowners. In the 1980s, parallel to the Nicaraguan and Guatelaman situations, El Salvador had a civil war going on and a central government that regularly "disappeared" people. (In a display of local color, the bodies of civilians and labor leaders killed by the government and its military were often left mutilated on the slope of a local volcano.) The United States was of course active in El Salvador with "humanitarian aid," C.I.A. and other agents working to "stabilize" the government and "reform the electoral process" and so on. After many atrocities by both the government and the (no doubt) marxist-inspired revolutionaries in the hills, a number of assassinations of prominent figures including American nuns caused a general revulsion about the whole country in the North American media. Little has appeared in North American newspapers about El Salvador in years and I have lost sight of the situation. PanamaPresident Theodore Roosevelt created the nation of Panama to secure the right of the United States to build and maintain a Panama canal for 99 years. An author on security matters claims that then-vice president Nixon met in Honduras with American officials on January 1, 1955. The next day, the then-president of Panama was assassinated at the racetrack. The author suggested that the meeting planned the assassination. I am investigating. During the George H.W. Bush administration, the United States invaded Panama to secure its control over that country. The local dictator, General Noriega, had ceased to be an agreeable puppet and, it was thought, now had to be removed. This was surgically done, although at the cost of some thousands of Panamanians (the American press paid little attention to the number). Noriega was removed to the United States, tried and convicted for drug-trafficking. Panama returned to being the same "co-operative" regime it had been for most of its history. The United States continues overtly to control the Canal Zone. The Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union was the chief rival of the United States in the 20th century. For 45 years after World War II it was a well-armed ambitious superpower, which stole American atomic secrets, tried to subvert the United States, and built thousands of atomic and thermonuclear strategic weapons. It even built intercontinental ballistic missiles and tens of thousands of strategic and tactical warheads. Finally, it built a large navy of threatening proportions. It is not difficult to understand why the Soviet Union was considered a grave threat to the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency tried to infiltrate agents into the Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union considered vulnerable to subversion. Its agents tried to stir up rebellion against the Moscow authorities in the early 1950s. But all its efforts failed. Many of its agents seem to have been hunted down, cleaned out and killed. The probable cause was Kim Philby, the British double-agent the Soviets had in M.I. 6, the British counterintelligence agency corresponding to the C.I.A. ConclusionsThe United States of America is a business-dominated society, the most business-dominated society in history. In the United States the interests of major corporations and ordinary people contend for power. Sometimes the corporations are brought (somewhat) to bay, for example, by means of the new Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2003 -- which compels more honest, transparent accounting -- or by effective public regulators and prosecutors, like Eliot Spitzer of New York State. Other times, by lobbying, public argument or outright bribery, big business succeeds at establishing unfair, special laws -- such as tariffs or trade sanctions, or extended copyright protection -- or special interest actions, including invasions and wars. The C.I.A. is an important part of this. It is a vital part of the extensive intelligence, military and diplomatic apparatus by which the United States exercises its predominance (Marxist term, hegemony) in the world. It usually works in effective cooperation with the other agencies and branches of the American government and military. Together the American intelligence and military communities project American will and power overseas, and protect what is termed the "national security" and "national interests" of the United States. Together the communities enforce successive American administrations' concepts of desirable stable and progressive world order. What is this concept of a desirable stable and progressive world order? The American concept of stable and progressive world order is of a geopolitical situation wherein American citizens are safe and respected everywhere in the world, and large American and transnational corporations have secure access (preferred access, if possible) to foreign markets -- free from any interference at all from the governments of foreign nations. This stability depends on eliminating or squeezing to death at birth all possible rivals to American power. These rivals were, historically and in order, Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The current situation is that none of these powers or former powers are any longer a threat to the American dominance of the world. All, in fact, are allied (more or less) with the United States. It has emerged as the sole remaining superpower, or hyperpower. But . . . a few much smaller regional powers remain a threat or conceivable threat to the American vision of things. These small powers are (or were) North Korea, Iraq and Iran (identified by president George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address as forming "an axis of evil"). In spring 2003 Iraq was therefore invaded by the United States. Under what we may call the George W. Bush Doctrine, the United States invaded Iraq to preempt a perceived (or imagined) threat from that country. Though the war was quickly won, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (a 1980s client of the United States) was displaced from power, guerrilla activity remains considerable there against the United States. In spring 2004 the World's Sole Superpower is already planning its exit, hoping to leave a compliant, "stable" and "democratic" government behind. The United States has in turn also threatened Iran and Syria with future invasion, but, since American forces are bogged down in Iraq (which has turned out to be a more difficult occupation than originally imagined), this is unlikely to happen for a few years. As for the third member of the "axis of evil," the United States dares not invade or attack North Korea for the moment, not only because American armed forces are fully extended in Iraq and over 130 countries around the world, but also (most importantly) because North Korea probably has two or three operational and launchable atomic weapons. If attacked, North Korea would probably attack American ally South Korea with nukes. So the George W. Bush administration works to isolate and, if possible, alter these regimes to transform the world and make it a safer, freer, more democratic and stable place. Well . . . more "stable," anyway. # # # Among those benefiting most from the existence of the C.I.A. are, historically:
Who loses from the existence of the C.I.A. and the Pax Americana? Losers include:
Whether the ordinary American citizen and taxpayer has benefited from the C.I.A. I am not prepared to say. It is a difficult evaluation. It is possible that the C.I.A. and the American strategy of intervention has improved the world (albeit at the cost of those mentioned above). Perhaps. It is more certain that many tens of billions of dollars have been paid, often to American-owned corporations and their rich shareholders with unknown real benefit to ordinary citizens. How did, for example, the coup in Guatemala help ordinary citizens? Is it all a shell game, to transfer wealth to the already affluent and dominant? You decide. Some More Interesting QuotationsIt is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government. James Jesus Angleton (19 -1987), C.I.A. head of counterintelligence for 20 years, testifying before the Church Committee of the United States Senate, 1975. He later made a partial apology We are a democracy, one with high ethical ideals. We should never turn over custody of these ideals to any group of individuals who divorce themselves from concern for the public attitude. The crimes against mankind perpetrated by zealots who did not need to answer to the citizens are too many. Admiral Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy Some Directors of Central IntelligenceWilliam J. Donovan, head of the wartime O.S.S., is said to have wanted to be the first Director of Central Intelligence, but was not picked. He had a debilitating stroke in 1957, and died in 1959. Walter Bedell Smith, 1950-1953Bedell Smith had been an Army general, Eisenhower's longtime assistant, confidant and dogsbody. Eisenhower used him for numerous purposes, one of which was as D.C.I. from October 7, 1950 to February 9, 1953. Alan J. Dulles, 1953-1961Dulles had been the O.S.S. station chief in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War II. His exploits there involved getting intelligence from Admiral Carnaris, the head of German intelligence. He was Deputy Director from 1951 to 1953; this seems to have been the reason he was promoted to D.C.I. (It didn't hurt that his elder brother, John Foster Dulles, was president Eisenhower's secretary of state.) Through the 1950s Dulles led the C.I.A.'s cloak and dagger black ops. He was fired because of the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion failure in early 1961, though not let go by Kennedy until August that year. A book published a few years ago, The War Against the Jews, charges the Dulleses with greed, prejudice against Jews, and hiding their connections with the Nazis. Admiral William F. Raborn, 19 -1965Although he knew nothing about intelligence, Admiral Raborn, the successful naval administrator who had brought in the Polaris missile project ahead of schedule, was picked to be D.C.I. He gamely struggled with the Company for about a year, but did not have the willing cooperation of Agency executives or operatives and was eased out. Richard M. Helms, 1965-1966Helms, an O.S.S. veteran and the C.I.A. deputy director, became head of the C.I.A. on April 25, 1965, during the Johnson years, and was fired on June 30, 1966. During his term the C.I.A. led many operations inside the United States, in violation of its founding law. In 1973 he misled Congress about C.I.A. activities, and was later under investigation for perjury. It has been argued that Congress at the time and previously did not really want to know the truth about the activities of the C.I.A. James R. Schlesinger, 1973Schlesinger was brought in in 1973 to clean house. He downsized the Company, but left after only six months to become Defense Secretary. In 2004 he seems connected with the 9/11 committee's investigations of the intelligence community's massive failures concerning 9/11 and Iraq. William E. Colby, 1973-1976Colby ran the C.I.A. from September 4, 1973 to January 30, 1976. He seems to have been disliked by many in the Agency. During his term as D.C.I. the Agency is said to have become demoralized due to the revelations that came out from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church committee). Nearly simultaneously with the Church committee's revelations, Colby fired James Jesus Angleton, the scholar in charge of C.I.A counterintelligence who was paranoically afraid of moles. (Angleton had held captive a 1964 Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko, in a special Virginia prison for 1277 days -- two and a half years -- while trying unsuccessfully to break him.) George Herbert Walker Bush, 1976-77The 41st president of the United States served as D.C.I. for less than a year at the tail end of the Ford administration, from January 30, 1976 to January 20, 1977. He was very disappointed not to be reappointed by the incoming Carter administration. So far Bush Senior is the only president to have been D.C.I. Admiral Stansfield Turner, 1977-1981Turner was a appointee of president Jimmy Carter. An apparently honorable man, he attempted to encourage the C.I.A. to take risks again after the 1975 Church Commission criticisms, but felt that the future of intelligence was in signals and electronics (so-called sigint and elint). Turner therefore reduced the number of human C.I.A. agents, and relied more heavily than previously on the National Security Agency's numerous spy satellites. His book is interesting for its accounts of his meetings with president Jimmy Carter and the C.I.A. establishment; one gets a sense of what was going on at the time. William J. Casey, 1981-1987Casey was president Reagan's choice to be D.C.I. He was an old O.S.S. and Wall Street type who ran a wide variety of careless and dirty secret ops. Under him the C.I.A. is thought to have seriously declined in quality. He became ill with a brain tumor, left off being D.C.I. January 29, 1987, and died in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. on May 6. William Webster, 1987-1991After Casey, Webster was appointed his successor, and served from May 26, 1987 to September 1, 1991. Before becoming D.C.I., Webster had been head of the F.B.I. A moral man, like Admiral Turner, Webster tried to improve the C.I.A.'s morality, and made several improvements in its bureaucratic structure. Robert M. Gates, 1991-199?Gates was deputy director of the C.I.A. from 1986 to 1989, and moved up to D.C.I. on November 12, 1991. James WoolseyWoolsey was fired because of the Aldrich Ames spy scandal. Ames, an F.B.I. man, spied for the Russians between April 1985 and February 1994. He was one of the most destructive double agents in the history of American intelligence. Because of the Ames debacle all authority over counterintelligence was stripped from the C.I.A. and given solely to the F.B.I. John M. Deutch, 1995-1996Deutch served as D.C.I. from May 10, 1995 to December 14, 1996 during the Clinton administration. Shortly after his official departure from his post, classified material was discovered on his government-owned computer in his Virginia home. The C.I.A. had an official investigation of how this had come to be; meanwhile, Deutch had moved on to be a consultant to the current D.C.I. and a member of the committee that combats the spread of weapons of mass destruction (the Proliferation Committee).
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