The Global Purpose of CIA Covert Operations

Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st Century
(4th Edition, 2005)by J.W. Smith, The Institute for Economic Democracy

Suppressing the World's break for Economic Freedom
In this chapter:

America as an Empire predates the Cold War
Iran Breaks Free
Containing Iraq
Economic Freedom for Indonesia was a Big Threat
Nigeria tried but did not break Free
Vietnam Gained Political but not Economic Freedom
Guatemala Broke Free Briefly
Chile Broke Free Very Briefly
El Salvador did not gain even its Political Freedom
Nicaragua never attained Economic Freedom
Southern Africa’s Frontline States
The Libyan Threat
Cuba: almost Free and may yet Succeed
Orchestration of Death Squads and Writing History
Future Leaders of Nations Picked and Trained
Erasing the Records is Writing History to Maintain a “Framework of Orientation”
The Battle for Trade Supremacy Continues

Beginning of Chapter Contents
The public has, through strategies-of-tension, been conditioned to believe that they were battling communism all over the world but, of the governments overthrown, only Afghanistan and Chile were originally communist. During the seven years William Casey was CIA director (1981 to 1987), 50 major CIA covert operations were initiated throughout the world and thousands of minor ones.1 Those major destabilizations caused massive deaths and destruction while the minor operations controlled the media on both the periphery and in the imperial center and destabilized small democratic groups before they could gain a following. As Casey was director for only seven of the CIA’s 55 years, one starts to get a sense of the massive covert destabilizations it took to suppress these breaks for freedom.

1) America as an Empire predates the Cold War
That America won the Spanish-American War in 1898 is recognized by all, but even some encyclopedias do not inform the reader that “Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines” to the United States for $20-million. Similarly, but not totally, ignored, is that the Philippine patriots’ struggle for freedom from America was violently suppressed from 1899 through 1903 in a manner very similar in tactics and level of violence of the Vietnam War. In that break for freedom, an estimated 600,000 Filipinos died from combat and starvation.

Control through a puppet government was substituted for outright colonial control as authorized by the ceding of these lands by Spain. As the rest of the colonial world was breaking free after WWII, the Filipinos again fought for their freedom. Tens of thousands of Filipinos were killed, primarily by private death squads (orchestrated by the CIA’s General Edward G. Landsdale), as the elite fought to retain control of the government and the land, and that suppression of true independence through covert American support is still ongoing.2

History, as General Smedley Butler knew it while he was helping create it, does not get into high school, or even university, history books:

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the US Marine Corps…. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1913. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.3

The highly competent historians Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett researched the "conquest of the Amazon" and wrote Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Their research soon showed that corporate powers, working in part through missionary groups first to gain control of indigenous societies and then to gain control of their land, had been behind these destabilizations and genocides throughout the 20th-Century. Since WWII the CIA had been deeply involved in the same process for the same purpose. Equally of interest is that key cloak and dagger figures involved in guiding the destiny of the natives to their impoverishment and destruction were assigned positions of power in the American government developing Latin America policy.4

As we outline examples of a few of the major destabilizations of post-WWII democratic governments that were breaking out from under the control of the imperial centers, remember that these destabilizations were done by good people just like you and I who believed fully in what they were doing. Quality people throughout the world were firmly locked within a social-control paradigm carried by a political, academic, and media system from which many conscientious scholars had been either purged or silenced. Those carrying out the orders of managers-of-state had never heard anything other than that they were battling the world’s worst elements that were attempting to take away our democratic freedoms.

2) Iran Breaks Free
When Iranians gained their freedom after WWII under the leadership of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, they were America’s friend and wished to emulate both its democratic government and its economic success. Operation Ajax (with Kermit Roosevelt, future Vice President of Gulf Oil, in charge of reinstalling the Shah and training SAVAK, the Iranian Secret Service) was the CIA's covert operation to stem that burst of democracy. Under the reinstalled Shah, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Texaco, and Socony-Mobil gained a 40% share of Iranian oil rights (Britain, the original planner of this regime change, claimed the remaining rights). Thousands of Iranians were tortured by SAVAK and a few thousand were killed.5

The Iranians were as angry as any American would be if a powerful nation overthrew their government and put Britain back in power. But government press releases (most news can be traced to press releases of governments or corporate-funded think-tanks) and planted articles (traceable to the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer) building the image of a dangerous enemy denied all knowledge of this suppression of democracy to the masses in Western nations. That enemy is, of course, then not hard to prove. The overthrow of its government to control its oil and its destiny made Iran that enemy.

On November 4, 1979, activist Muslims overthrew America’s puppet dictator, overran the American Embassy, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.6 This was the greatest peacetime tweak of America’s nose in its history.
Considering the imperial nations were actively fomenting intrigues, overthrowing budding democracies with immense loss of life, and installing and supporting puppet dictators and “imperial democracies” all over the world to control resources and markets, to think that America would peacefully take that nose tweaking as well as the loss of control of Iranian oil would be an exercise in extreme denial.

To our knowledge the true history has not been uncovered yet, and may never be, but by accident we do have a hint. The Iran-Iraq War started four months before those hostages were released. Through the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer, the American people were being told the Soviet Union was backing Iraq. The truth came out when the Iraqis gassed their own Kurdish population. (A CIA study concluded it was really Iran. Run an Internet search.) A U.S. senator angrily fumed on national news, “We have $800-million of arms in the pipeline to Iraq and we should cancel it all.”

With the surfacing of that piece of hidden history, simple common sense tells us that any imperial nation would pursue every option to damage a nation that was holding their citizens hostage and Iraq was likely coached into that invasion with the promise of backing for their claim of title to the oil fields right across its borders. With the strongest nation in the world behind it and Iran in turmoil, Iraq would have felt assured of success.

3) Containing Iraq
Before the early 20th-Century subdivision of the Middle East, Kuwait was a province of Iraq. Badly bruised from the Iran/Iraq war, upset about Kuwait’s horizontal, cross-border, drilling stealing oil from Iraq, and feeling America was now their friend after their immense support, Iraq moved to bring her lost province back into the fold.a This led to the 1991 Gulf War which cost Iraq 200,000 killed, destruction of her industry and infrastructure, a 12-year embargo in which another million Iraqis died for lack of food and medicine, and the destruction of a 2nd Gulf War in 2003, and the on-going occupation of Iraq with daily loss of many Iraq and American lives.

The price of oil rising to over $50 a barrel threatens the economies of the imperial-centers-of-capital. Powerbrokers feel that oil priced under $30 a barrel will give the world economy a boost.7 There are deeper reasons. According to Neil Mackay of The Sunday Herald in Scotland, a meeting of President George W. Bush’s advisors was held within days after his election in 2000 in which the decision to depose Saddam Hussein was made. U.S. Intelligence would have known that Iraq, Venezuela and Iran were considering switching to euros as their reserve currency which, if other oil-producing nations followed that lead, could crash the American economy.8

As soon as the war was over the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA,) met and concluded that the 1st Gulf War cost them $600 billion and anticipated this 2nd Gulf war will cost them $1 trillion. All the destabilizations and overthrows of governments we are addressing were because of potentials for success if those countries gained or retained their freedom. There is no reason to doubt that the same reason applies to this 2nd and latest Iraq war (search for ESCWA, $600 million, 1,000 billion).

The war is on to install an “imperial democracy” in Iraq. But we must remember that democratic, as used by imperialists, means a government subservient to them. Puppet governments are as old as history but a “democratic” Muslim government suppressing Muslim interests and supporting Western interests is a contradiction in terms. What we are witnessing in Iraq is, as the threat of the world breaking free gets more and more imminent, America is doing openly, under a cover story, what they had been doing covertly for 50 years. (Run a Google/Nexus-Lexus search to learn about the U.S. supporting Saddam Hussein’s rise to power and later supported attempted overthrows leading to those mass graves. Read Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth behind September 11.)

4) Economic Freedom for Indonesia was a Big Threat
Indonesia was gaining its economic freedom and taking control of its destiny. Besides having massive resources coveted by the imperial nations, Indonesia was establishing an honest democracy. Twenty-five percent of the nation’s citizens were following the Communist Party so they were to be entitled to 25% representation in the government. This could not be permitted. On the second try, the CIA overthrew Sukarno and installed Suharto. The managers of the American state were still not secure enough: their newly installed puppet was not actively suppressing that 25% of the voters who were such a threat. If they were left intact, Indonesians may have successfully taken control of their destiny.

How Indonesians were coached into slaughtering their own innocent civilians provides a textbook example of how strategies-of-tensions work. Arms were beached on the islands, papers were counterfeited to make it appear a revolution was imminent, and a list of over 4,000 political leaders and activists targeted for assassination was passed to the Indonesian military. The tension of Indonesian leaders rose rapidly and, by the lowest estimate, 500,000 Indonesians were slaughtered; by the highest, 1,000,000; and by the CIA's own estimate 800,000. As they tried to change their image in the riots in the year 2000 against the holdovers of Suharto’s regime, Indonesia’s Special Forces Command, Kopassus, the military forces responsible, did not even deny these atrocities.9

These innocents were not slaughtered because they were going to overthrow anybody, as the citizens of the Western world were told. They were overthrown because with their enormous resources a truly democratic Indonesian government had a high potential for both political and economic success and that success would catch the attention of other nations who would then insist on their freedom. That suppression of freedom was handled by such fine control of the news that it was almost unknown to the citizens in the Western world and what little was in the news seldom mentioned the immense slaughter and America’s connection was totally ignored.

5) Nigeria tried but did not break Free
In Nigeria, 1966 to 1971, it was oil again and possibly 2-million Biafrans, mostly children, starved as, during that nation’s destabilization, relief was prevented from reaching the starving Ibo people. Dan Jacobs, a United Nations relief worker trying to help avert that tragedy, who later researched its causes, was aghast to discover that British managers-of-state, with the passive support of American managers-of-state, were behind that disaster: “I went to a National Security Council staff man and said: ‘The British did this.’ ‘Oh, of course,’ he responded. ‘The British orchestrated the whole thing.’” Newsreels were constantly showing footage of starving Nigerians but not a hint did one see that—to prevent a nation with huge natural resources and oil from gaining control of its own destiny—this civil war was externally orchestrated by Britain with the passive diplomatic support of the United States.10

6) Vietnam Gained Political but not Economic Freedom
During WWII, while working directly with American agents to rescue downed U.S. pilots, Ho Chi Minh sent six letters to the U.S. government asking for support and stating that the Vietnamese wished to pattern their constitution after America’s. Only after America refused to recognize and support their freedom, and instead supported the French suppression of their freedom, were the Vietnamese forced to turn to China and the Soviet Union.11 It is said that America lost in Vietnam but 3-million people were slaughtered (4-million if one included the previous 15 years of French suppression), millions of acres of forest poisoned with herbicides were destroyed and, after winning its freedom, Vietnam was further decimated by embargoes.12 We want to remember the revolution only gained America its political independence and it required the war of 1812 to gain its economic independence. Vietnam gained only its political independence, not its economic independence. Vietnamese resources are now available to imperial-centers-of-capital. This makes that war a success. After all, control of resources to feed the industries of imperial centers is what these wars are all about.

With the struggle against France essentially won, a treaty was signed in Paris in 1954 for the future of that nation to be decided by free elections. The South Vietnamese puppet government and their new backers (America) knew well that over 80% of the votes would be for rejoining with North Vietnam. So the treaty was ignored and that tiny country and its theoretically neutral neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, were pummeled with more firepower than was expended in WWII (15.5-million tons). The 6.3-million tons of bombs dropped were 50% more than dropped in WWII and created over 5,000 square miles of craters. At the officially acknowledged cost of $800-billion (1990 dollars) to conduct that war and another $800-billion for the cost and damage incurred by the Vietnamese, for a total of $1.6-trillion, America could have given every man, woman, and child in Vietnam (62-million people) $13,000 or about $90,000 per family.13

7) Guatemala Broke Free Briefly
In 1951, the Communist Party was one of the smallest of four parties which supported the election of Jacobo Arbenz as president of Guatemala. Knowing that foreign-owned land titles had been obtained under far from free market conditions, President Arbenz started the legal process of reclaiming several hundred thousand acres of idle land from America’s United Fruit Company. For the first block of 178,000 acres, United Fruit was offered a 24-year bond valued at $525,000, its valuation on United Fruit's tax records.

But United Fruit had close connections to the old-boy network of the National Security Council and in the CIA: The brothers John Foster Dulles (appointed Secretary of State one year before the overthrow of Arbenz), Allen Dulles (appointed director of the CIA also one year before that overthrow), General Walter Bedell Smith (director of the CIA when Arbenz was elected), and John J. McCloy (World Bank president who refused loans to Guatemala during its destabilizations). In a replay of a future Vice President of Gulf Oil, Kermit Roosevelt, overseeing the overthrow of Iran, all four of these powerful men in American intelligence and the World Bank either had a longstanding connection to United Fruit before Arbenz's overthrow, or became directors of that company shortly afterwards.14

An earlier coup attempt with the CIA backing the remnant colonial elite with money and arms failed, so the CIA prepared more thoroughly for Arbenz's overthrow in 1954. A propaganda campaign was launched throughout Latin America claiming that Arbenz was a Communist. Russian-made arms were parachuted into Guatemala to be found and support the claim of a Communist takeover. The CIA and the United States Information Service (USIA, an integral part of the Mighty Wurlitzer) cooperated in a media blitz. The USIA created over 200 propaganda articles on Guatemala and provided them to Latin American newspapers for anonymous use. Over 100,000 pamphlets titled "Chronology of Communism in Guatemala" and 27,000 copies of anticommunist cartoons and posters were distributed. The USIA produced three propaganda movies on Guatemala. Seven weeks before the successful coup the CIA launched a clandestine radio misinformation campaign.15

When all was ready, powerful transmitters broadcasting messages of confusion overrode Guatemala's national radio while fighter aircraft bombed oil and ammunition dumps, strafed Guatemala City, and dropped smoke bombs to make it appear the attack was even larger. Although the CIA army of expatriate Guatemalans never numbered over 400 and were staying close to the Honduran border so they could escape if the Guatemalan army was activated, the bluff worked. Arbenz was overthrown.16

Undestroyed documents eventually forced out of the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act showed that 58 of Guatemala's freely elected officials were targeted for assassination. A comparable number of elected officials and intellectuals targeted for death so as to control the American government would be 2,300. Only the CIA knows how many of those original 58 leaders were assassinated, but with 200,000 killed and unaccounted for during the 35 years Guatemalans attempted to wrest back their government, and with Guatemala's U.S.-supported military and CIA-orchestrated death squads being responsible for a documented 93% of the slaughters, it is highly likely that most were.17

8) Chile Broke Free Very Briefly
Thinking there were no serious problems in Chile and spending only a modest amount of money to influence its 1972 election, Cold War managers-of-state went into shock when Salvadore Allende was freely elected president on a platform of control of Chilean resources for Chileans.

The CIA immediately financed 10 economists, primarily from the Chicago School of Economics, to put together an alternative economic program for Chile to assure stability once that errant nation was brought back within the fold. To assure its return, the managers-of-state embargoed Chile and the CIA and America's military, primarily the Navy, coordinated plans for Allende's overthrow. This included picking Chilean military personnel for training at the School of the Americas (then in Panama, later in Fort Benning, Georgia, then renamed to the Center for Inter-American Security Cooperation, but properly nicknamed The School of Assassins or School of Coups). Among those hand-picked recruits would be dependable supporters for a coup when the time was ripe.

Guns used to assassinate President Allende were proven to have been given to the assassins by the CIA which then must abide by the rules of plausible denial and disclaim any responsibility.18 Among those killed the first year of Pinochet's regime were citizens of the United States, Spain, and a few other countries. The Chilean government's official figure of 3,197 killed by its security forces in the suppression is almost certainly many times too low.19

Pinochet was under house arrest in Britain for over a year in response to a petition to be extradited to Spain to stand trial for killing 300 Spanish citizens.b Although he escaped that attempt to put him on trial, he, eight Chilean generals, and 80 military and intelligence officials were later indicted in Chile and virtually everyone agrees that Pinochet will be recorded in history as being in charge of the torture and slaughter of many thousand innocent Chileans.20 Argentineans have similarly been able to correct the history of the suppression of democratic voice in their country but most such suppressions get falsely recorded as civil wars and uprisings.

Since the overthrow of Allende Chile is trumpeted as a great success story of Adam Smith free trade. But when all wealth is accounted for, it is a testimonial to Chilean resources and wealth going to the imperial-centers-of-capital and their wealthy puppets now running Chile. In statistics, where you start and where you quit is everything. After Allende's overthrow, national output dropped 15%, the unemployment rate rose to 20%, wage reductions averaged 15%, and that low level provides the base for most statistics.

But a proper statistical base would start from Chile's production level under Allende. Chile's GDP 16 years after Allende (1986) had only regained that 1970 level, real wages were still below that year’s level, per-capita consumption was 15% lower (some calculate 23% lower). In the next five years (1985 to 1990) the income of the top 10% of Chileans rose 90% while the share of Chile's wealth for Chile's poorest 25% fell from 11% to 7%.21

The percentage share of national income going to labor dropped from 47.7% in 1970 to 19% 20 years later. Likewise, Argentina’s labor share dropped from 40.9% to 24.9%, Ecuador’s from 34.4% to 15.8%, Mexico’s from 37.5% to 27.3%, and Peru’s from 40% to 16.8%.22 The real story of Chile and other emerging nations is that the earnings of laborers have declined significantly, their rights have declined precipitously, the earnings of the already wealthy have climbed astronomically, and the natural wealth of Chile and the rest of Latin America is being rapidly mined, harvested, and shipped to the imperial-centers-of-capital, a classic example of a successful neo-mercantilist policy.

9) El Salvador did not gain even its Political Freedom
With the exception that a free election was never permitted, the 1980 through 1992 suppression of El Salvador’s break for freedom paralleled that of Guatemala as described above. When tortured bodies with their thumbs wired behind their backs (a death squad marker) show up outside the El Salvadoran capital almost daily, and since there was no serious effort by the officials to get to the bottom of those tortures, one can safely assume these are government assassinations of the political opposition.

This was the conclusion of the United Nations El Salvador Truth Commission. Its 1993 report placed responsibility for 85% of the 70,000-plus deaths on security forces trained, armed, and advised by the American military and another 10% upon the El Salvadoran elite’s private death squads which, of course, could only function with the silent approval of the both the El Salvadoran and American governments. The suppression was successful and El Salvador remains as a provider of cheap resources and labor.23 It is now “the 8th-largest exporter worldwide of apparel to the United States. This year it will send the U.S. 268-million garments.” A Google/Nexus-Lexus search for Truth Commissions will be an education.

10) Nicaragua never attained Economic Freedom
Nicaragua gained its freedom July 19, 1979, when the Sandinista liberation forces overthrew President Somoza. Under the guidelines of NSC-68, American managers-of-state immediately made plans to reverse that revolution. The CIA armed, trained, and oversaw the sabotage and assassinations within Nicaragua by Nicaraguan defectors called Contras. While tens of thousands of people were killed under the oppressive—U.S. sponsored-Somoza dictatorship, only a few thousand died, all at the hands of the Contras, as Nicaragua fought for its freedom. The Nicaraguan government was protecting its citizens as opposed to being the primary source of murderous assault upon its own people as in Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador and in Nicaragua under Somoza. The immediate improvement in education, health, and living standards under the Sandinistas was reversed by the destabilization process.

The beleaguered Sandinistas eventually agreed to a free election, massive U.S. funds illegally financed the opposition, the people knew the war of attrition would continue if Ortega and the Sandinistas still governed, and the American-backed Violeta Chammoro became president of Nicaragua in February 1990.24 Though the Chammoro government was not the thief and oppressor the old guard Somoza government had been, that suffering nation, once rapidly progressing under the Sandinistas, is one of the poorest nations of Latin America as their resources again feed the industries and populations of the imperial-centers-of-capital. One-in-nine Nicaraguan children face serious malnutrition (BBC news used the word starving), and Nicaragua is again a country going nowhere.

11) Southern Africa’s Frontline States
As the Vietnam War wound down in 1976, the CIA, under the instructions of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was getting deeper into Angola and other regions of the world. John Stockwell, former CIA officer in Langley, Virginia, overseeing the destabilization of Angola, emphatically points out that America was supporting the National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) while the vast majority of Angolans supported the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Moreover, it was well recognized that the MPLA was “best-qualified to run Angola; nor was it hostile to the United States,” while the leader of UNITA, Jonas Savimbi, had taken training in the Soviet Union and was distinctly more ideologically tuned to that federation than MPLA. Obviously the political and economic shattering of Angola was the purpose of supporting Savimbi, not the establishment of a functional friendly government.25

Facing the greatest threat from black Africans gaining their freedom, South Africa’s white minority government orchestrated Renamo’s terror campaign in Mozambique and, in conjunction with the remnant colonial power-structures, ran similar covert destabilization campaigns in Zambia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana.26

The CIA, with support from Belgium, destabilized the Congo and assassinated the charismatic and popular Patrice Lumumba (run a Google/Nexus-Lexus search) before he could be legitimized as their leader through elections. Control still could not be assured, so Zaire was created to remove those rich copper deposits from the uncontrollable Congolese and Joseph Mobutu was installed as the Belgian/American puppet. That it was business interests that were being protected in the Congo is just as obvious as in General Smedley Butler’s overseas incursions by U.S. marines addressed above.27

As they were breaking free after WWII, many countries of Africa were looking forward to federating as a United States of Africa, building their infrastructure, educating their citizens, building modern industry, and joining the world of developed nations. The suppressions of those breaks for freedom on the southern cone of Africa cost many millions of innocent lives. (Crucial, powerful documentary: Wind of Change, order at Films for Humanity & Sciences 800.257.5126, item # BVL30750.)

12) The Libyan Threat
After Libya declared its freedom, Britain tried several times to covertly overthrow Libya’s leader who responded by supporting violent anti-Western political movements. After direct bomber attacks, which killed President Muammar Khadaffi’s adopted daughter, such support was abandoned. Though Libya’s human losses have been small, there have been some killed and, through embargoes, their economy has been successfully contained.

Libyan, Iranian, and Iraqi economic freedom meant they, along with other newly developing oil-rich nations which would follow their lead, would build their own refineries and take over a significant share of the world's oil industry. With their cheap oil and massive reserves (pennies per barrel as both raw material and fuel for their refineries and factories against $30 to $55 a barrel for others to import), they would also control all the thousands of derivative products of oil (medicines, plastics, synthetic fibers, et al.) as well as other fuel-intensive production processes.

What really threatens the imperial center is the potential of success of Libya’s and other resource-wealthy nations’ development plans and the loss not only of control of that oil and other resources but of the current monopolization of other industries through those nations’ use of the immense profits to take over industries and markets.

13) Cuba: almost Free and may yet Succeed
In 1959 the American-backed Cuban dictator, General Batista, fled as Fidel Castro’s forces freed Cuba. The new Cuban government was not Communist and attempted to maintain friendly relations with America. But the redistribution of the wealth-producing-processes in Cuba from foreign ownership to Cuban ownership and their regaining control of their destiny was the very thing that threatened American managers-of-state the most. Embargoes were put into effect to force a rescinding of those policies. Cuba promptly turned to the Soviet Union for technological and economic support and embraced the Communist ideology. The Cuban economy developed rapidly. Measured by averages, Cuban students now lead the world in education, their health care equals America’s, and infant mortality is lower.c No Cubans were hungry, housing was being rapidly built, and a sign outside Havana read: “Millions of children in the world sleep in the street and not one is Cuban.”

All this was accomplished even as Cuba was totally embargoed by the West. No ship trading with America dared dock in a Cuban port; if they did they could not dock in the United States. No corporation dared trade with Cuba; to do so would result in fines or withdrawal of trading rights in the United States. Such rapid development of a nation breaking free was the great fear of managers-of-state. Saboteurs—trained, armed, financed, and managed by the CIA—counterfeited Cuban money and ration books, burned cane fields and infected them with fungus, infected tobacco fields with mildew, and infected potato fields with the potato-ravaging insect Thrips palmi. African swine fever, never before seen in the Western hemisphere, ravaged Cuba twice and 500,000 pigs had to be destroyed. Over 300,000 Cubans were infected with dengue fever, 158 died of which 101 were children under 15 years old. Enough operatives have acknowledged their part in this biological warfare that serious researchers accept the accuracy of these allegations. Newly released CIA documents alerted researchers that crop warfare was practiced against a number of impoverished countries.28

This author watched a news broadcast where one operative boasted of over 50 forays into Cuba creating such havoc, including blowing up a Cuban railroad trestle and “watching the train go into the ravine just like in the movies.” The reader should note that, until the 9/11/2001, terrorist attack on America, no one was blowing up American or European trains and refineries, no one was burning American or European grain fields, no one was poisoning the West’s dairy cattle (7,000 East German dairy cattle were poisoned by the CIA) and no one was practicing germ and crop warfare against the West. In short, the truth is exactly apposite of what the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer has propagandized the world to believe. No countries were attempting to overthrow Western nations. It is the rest of the world which was under assault by the West for the purpose of controlling their governments, their resources, and the wealth-producing-process.

After the 9/11 terrorist attack Americans are very justly waging a war on terror. Yet five Cuban agents infiltrating the Cuban-American community so Cuba could be forewarned of U.S. coached terrorist attacks against them were sentenced to 15-years-to-life as spies. A serious analysis would conclude that charging those Cuban heroes with spying is an admission that America was behind the same covert attacks against Cuba as they fear others are now waging against Americans. The imperial center is retaining the right to interfere covertly, overtly, and violently with any nation on the periphery and simultaneously denying these besieged people even the right of self-defense.

Note how successful these strategies-of-tension are for controlling the mindset of a population. American people remained blissfully unaware that Cubans had attained a level of education and health care equal to America and had eliminated hunger while the rest of Latin America remained in poverty. Talk to any American on the street, most will know nothing of Cuba’s successes and, even though it is Cuba being terrorized by America and Cuba is not terrorizing anyone, they believe Cuba is a terrorist state in poverty.

Many times this author would test his peers by bringing up the subject of Cuba. Their immediate angry response casting Castro as a dictator and killer testify to the effectiveness of the American propaganda machine. Rather than being an autocratic dictator, any leaders that led a country to freedom and made such great progress in eliminating poverty and hunger would gain the very loyalty and respect the Cuban people give their government. Far fewer people died in the Cuban revolution than most and those who were killed were Cubans cooperating with the American government in the attempted suppression of Cuban freedom.
That Cuba was ever a military threat is totally silly. No serious diplomat of state thought the Soviets, China, or anyone else was going to invade any country in the powerful Western bloc. It was Cuba’s rapid, exemplary successes in bettering the living standards of her people, which, if allowed to succeed, would have made it impossible to control the governments and resources of other impoverished nations that was the threat.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the conditions for financial help was that it withdraw its support of Cuba. This effectively isolated their economy. Building cranes went silent for lack of building materials, machinery was idled for lack of spare parts, and the once prosperous Cuban economy rapidly regressed. Their economy has turned back up as a trade alliance of Venezuela Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and China are bringing them into their trade agreements. As these countries now understand how they have been destabilized in the past and denied their right for economic development it is highly unlikely their alliance (and potential federation that imperialists fear) and economic development can be prevented a second time around.

In short, all the death and destruction throughout the world which appeared to have successfully suppressed the impoverished world’s breaks for freedom may be coming undone. The truth of that bloody history is becoming known so it will be very difficult to covertly run another round of suppressions. This leaves the option of open suppression under cover stories as was done in breaking up Yugoslavia and is being done now (2003-05) to control Iraq’s resources. As the entire rest of the world will understand very well what is happening, it is highly likely the truth will suddenly implode upon the American consciousness. It is only through enemies created for them that a citizenry accept such violence upon others by their governments. People are good, when this reality hits the world will then gain their freedom.

Meantime Cuban doctors are going to the poorest regions of the world’s poorest countries to provide medical care. Cuba is now providing free medical scholarships to students from poor nations and has provided 50 free scholarships to poor American students with the understanding that they will practice in the poorer parts of the U.S. which have a shortage of good doctors.29

While in Cuba we were mesmerized watching 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, and 60-year-olds give passionate speeches to the Cuban legislative body. As we mentioned in the Introduction, Cuba, like the former Soviet federation we are taught was a dictatorship, has participatory democracy and the country had been shut down for three days to debate a change in their constitution. In this country we are taught is a violent and abusive dictatorship, its citizens debate, and vote on, their laws. These well educated passionate people would have been uneducated, impoverished and shoeless under any typical Western puppet government. Today they are, except for America’s embargo trying to strangle their economy, fully free and equal and trying to build a peaceful and productive society. So much for Cuban terrorists.

14) Orchestration of Death Squads and Writing History
Those who control history control the future. It is understandable that the United States is using its immense power to prevent the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) with authority to judge the planners and perpetrators of these atrocities. If such a court were ever established and given the investigative authority and funds, true history might be recorded. The powerful, currently protected because their acts are unrecorded in history and thus unknown, would be immediately weakened as their illegal acts were put on record, and the power of the suppressed masses would be simultaneously strengthened.

When U.S.-trained covert operatives are caught in criminal acts that are extensions of these operations, typically they are not charged in U.S. courts. To do so would require opening those CIA records so—since every operation is the total antithesis of law, justice, honesty, and right—these charges are dismissed or never brought in the first place. We saw this scene played out with seven Cuban defectors set for trial in Puerto Rico for plotting to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. Threatening to expose the fact that their assassination project was only an extension of the spreading of exotic livestock diseases and exotic human diseases in Cuba, burning Cuban cane fields, blowing an airliner with a champion Cuban fencing team (and other innocent people) out of the sky, and many other covert operations they were trained to do by the CIA, including the now well-known 30-year CIA effort to assassinate Castro. Naturally they were acquitted.

An attempt was made to assassinate Chou En Lai of China, second in power only to Mao Ze-dong. The plane was successfully sabotaged when it landed to refuel outside of China and all aboard were killed. However, Chou En Lai had taken another plane. This was a precursor to sabotaging the plane with the Cuban champion fencing team, and these were far from the only such Western state-sponsored assassinations of fundamentally nonviolent and peaceful leaders and potential leaders. 30 In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man John Perkins alerts us that Panama’s President Omar Torrijos and Ecuador’s President Jamie Roldos were assassinated by the CIA because they refused to be corrupted. Those death squads were killing teachers, professors, labor leaders, cooperative leaders, and church leaders. Those killed were not the terrorists and killers that we are told. They were the budding Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, Gandhis, and Martin Luther Kings of those countries who could lead their countries to freedom and thus had to be eliminated.

It is possible that U.S.-sponsored state terrorism was greater than all other world terrorism combined, state and private, and it is a certainty that all Western nations together supported and guided several times more terrorism than the entire rest of the world.d And remember, much, if not most, private world terrorism is in reaction to these assaults (overt, covert, financial, and economic) that subvert the governments and economies of defenseless societies.

Imperial nations fear a true International Criminal Court31 but they have no fear of the current International War Crimes Tribunal indicting and trying war criminals. Since the U.S. and NATO established and financed this court and provided the researchers and judges, there is no danger of it seriously looking into terrorist acts of their own such as we are addressing.

On May 10th, 2000 at a speech in Berkeley, California, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (one of the primary designers of trying Yugoslavs for war crimes) admitted what all diplomats knew: the U.S. “raised the bar” high enough during the Rambouillet negotiations so that “Milosevic could not jump over it” because “Yugoslavia needed a little bombing.” The U.S. dictated at Rambouillet that Yugoslavia accepts the total occupation of Yugoslavia by NATO or be bombed. As all diplomats agree that no nation could sign such an agreement, Rambouillet was a declaration of war, not a negotiation, and this means that all who planned that war and the massive destruction of Yugoslavia’s civilian infrastructure are war criminals.

Though a few officers of the puppet forces in the Yugoslav destabilization will necessarily have to be sacrificed, the focus will be on indicting and convicting Serbian leaders and military officers while the primary planners and enforcers of this externally planned destabilization of Yugoslavia will be untouched. This court will feign balance by investigating the Rwandan slaughter of 500,000 but the terrorist acts of imperial-centers-of-capital will not go on this court’s calendar. Quite simply, those court records are the writing of history and these court decisions are designed to create a protective “framework of orientation” through destroying the reputation of targeted societies and leaving the imperial nations unblemished.e

15) Future Leaders of Nations Picked and Trained
The CIA picks candidates in the developing world for an all-expense-paid education at Milton Friedman's Chicago School of [neo-liberal] Economics and other conservative institutions and these students go back to teach and run governments. To regain control of Chile, the CIA handpicked several hundred Chilean students for training at the Chicago School. These graduates returned to Chile, and are—along with the graduates of the School of the Americas (School of Coups/School of Assassins) addressed above—professors and political leaders in Chile today.

So it goes with military officers and students from all over the world. Money is always available for the "right students” to take the "right classes” under the "right professors” in America, others must fend for themselves 32 This is a continuation of William Pitt's imposition of Adam Smith free trade philosophy (as interpreted by neo-mercantilists) upon the defeated world to maintain its dependency. History is then written through the lens of that ‘framework of orientation.”

16) Erasing the Records is Writing History to Maintain a “Framework of Orientation”
Strategies-of-Tension would fail if exposed. CIA agents are trained on how to write the historical record to protect themselves and purging the records of damaging information is standard practice. In the Iran Contra hearings, Americans watched on their nightly news as Colonel Oliver North testified that he had shredded all records of that covert operation. When Congress was questioning the covert actions in Angola, John Stockwell, in charge of that destabilization, explained that the CIA director, HW Bush, sent a young lawyer to his office to purge his files of any such records. Bush then testified to Congress, “that no files in the Agency corroborated any of the Congressional allegations.” The CIA and other intelligence agencies are going even further. They are finishing their writing of this history by destroying their covert action records, which, of course, then leaves only these tens of thousands of fraudulent articles and books, and no record of their dishonest creation or the orchestration of those destabilizations by powerful imperial-centers-of-capital.33

Argentina has also destroyed their records on assassinating 30,000 essentially peaceful people (among them nuns and teenagers, about 500 of them pregnant women who, after giving birth, went straight to the plane which dropped these drugged people into the Atlantic Ocean34), and it is a safe bet that other allied imperial nations and their puppet governments have destroyed their incriminating records.

Due to the perseverance of mothers, the violence that Argentina imposed on its own people is being recorded (30 years late). But the ironclad rule of all imperial nations is “plausible denial.” These government-sponsored terrorist acts against other people, or their own people, are not to be traceable to those governments and thus unrecorded in history.

Only what is acknowledged or proven can be recorded in history. When someone does bring this government-imposed violence to light, the very people planning or carrying out this violence testify in front of Congress that it is not happening, the government denies to the people and the world that it is involved, and most of those records of covert terrorism are erased before the 30 to 100 years the secrets legally run out. So even if recorders of history (the media) are somehow informed that their government is responsible for extreme violence against innocent people, it does not get recorded in the papers and magazines of record and thus does not get recorded in history. We owe defecting CIA agents and good researchers an enormous debt for bringing enough to light before those records were destroyed so the story can be told.

South Africa’s policy of amnesty for all who fully tell the story of their involvement in that country’s state terrorism has exposed these practices. But the South African government’s poisonings, tortures, and assassinations pale into insignificance alongside those carried out under Western destabilization policies.
We must remember the title of George Seldes’s book, Even the Gods Can’t Change History, and his many examples of totally falsified events recorded as fact that simply cannot get changed in the history books. Quite simply, the winners of wars write history, claims of a free press and free thought notwithstanding. Those old history books become the source for new history books and the same falsifications of history are repeated.

When listening to someone on a podium mouthing the politically correct statements of dictators and killers in Cuba or any other country that has been demonized as wanting to rule the world, you as an individual can break through that propaganda blockade. When recognized to ask questions from the floor, here are some questions that will alert an audience that much in world history and world politics that they took for granted was far from true:

(1) “How come our media and our political leaders did not inform us that Cuba—once as impoverished as other Latin American nations—attained the education and health care level of America?

(2) How come Cuba eliminated hunger while the rest of Latin America did not?

(3) How come tens of millions of children in the world sleep in the street and not one is Cuban?

(4) How did they do this even as they were under almost total embargo by the West and American covert assaults burned their cane fields, spread exotic diseases to their livestock and within the human population killing over 150 Cuban children and forcing the slaughter of thousands of livestock, blew up railroad trestles dumping trains into the ravine, and blew a Cuban airliner out of the sky with Cuba’s champion fencing team aboard?

(5) Why were we not informed of the 730 American airmen who were shot down over the Soviet Union who were either killed in the crash or finished out their lives in Soviet prisons while their family were told any of dozens of cover stories of how they died?

(6) It is undemocratic and illegal in America and any other country for another country to be involved in their elections. How come America heavily financed and guided elections in almost every country of the world including those in Western Europe after WWII?

(7) By what right did America orchestrate the assassination by death squads of thousands of budding Washingtons, Jeffersons, Martin Luther Kings, and Gandhis when they were losing control of elections in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and dozens of other tiny countries?

(8) By what right did America destabilize governments that, in spite of the above named covert U.S. efforts, were democratically elected (Chile, Guatemala, Ecuador, Panama, Iran, Indonesia, and Nicaragua is an incomplete list)?

(9) What does dictating policy to the world do to our language when those assaulted countries with multiple political parties and some, such as the former Soviet Union’s and Cuba’s participatory democracy whose citizens’ representatives had direct instructions from the voters on how to vote on issues (similar to American ballot initiatives), are labeled dictatorships while the countries which did all I have just described, and which have effectively kept true democratic choice out of their political systems, are labeled as democracies?

17) The Battle for Trade Supremacy Continues
As a participant who helped write the training manuals and briefed presidents and pentagon chiefs on these covert operations, Colonel Prouty points out:
One of the least-known divisions of the CIA is that headed by the Deputy Director of Economics. This division moves into a country to work with a new regime and to begin the task of selecting and setting up new franchise holders for as many goods as possible to assure that they are imported from American companies and that those from other sources, formerly the Soviet sphere in particular, are excluded.... The CIA screens and selects these new “millionaires’ and arranges for them to meet with various companies they will front for under the new regime. It might be said that this cleansing of the economic system is the real reason for most of the coups d’état and that political ideology has very little to do with it.... Some of the more daring, in an attempt to escape the severe financial and profit-making controls placed upon them and their government by U.S. manufacturers and by the canopy of international banks that is spread over all imports and exports to their country, attempt to make deals with other countries. They believe they may be able to buy essential goods cheaper that way and to sell their labor and resources at better rates.... As such actions increase, the national leadership will be increasingly attacked by the United States on the grounds that it is turning toward communism and becoming a base for the infiltration of the communist ideology and military system into the hemisphere.35

Various countries have proven that America’s worldwide listening posts utilizing ECHELON software operated by the National Security Agency, have stolen proprietary corporate and government information and passed that information on to American corporations and trade negotiators. American corporations were then able to patent what was invented by others and American trade negotiators knowledge of other governments’ bottom lines gave them an unassailable advantage in negotiations.36

Throughout much of the Cold War the entire world was kept track of through Operation Statewatch. As addressed above, those breaking free via the ballot box or coups were targeted for destabilization. Countries alert enough to avoid covert takeovers of their economies faced open warfare. The cover stories justifying the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were in tatters so the final cover was America was bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Expanding upon this bold view, on August 5, 2004 the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization was established. Their mandate was to keep track of nations, just as Operation Statewatch had formerly done, and privatize the economies of up to three nations at a time. The legal structure of nations would be changed before the citizenry would realize what was happening.f Monopolizations, that we are told do not exist, are structured in law. Those changed legal structures end up as privately owned banks and industries competing in monopolized world markets and all subject to takeover by foreign capital.

First there was up-front colonialism, then there was covert colonialism hiding under the cover of Adam Smith free trade and covert destabilizations, and now a hyper-colonialism is planned under the cover story of reconstruction and the same unequal free trade rules. The bottom line is always the same, lock the world into monopoly capital’s legal structure, hold down the price of labor, control the price of commodities through overproduction (relative to needs [determined by purchasing power] of monopolized markets), through those low wages prevent the development of consumer markets on the periphery of empire, and thus siphon the wealth of the world to the imperial-centers-of-capital.

There we have it. All intelligence agencies have been, and are still in, the business of destabilizing undeveloped countries so as to maintain their dependency. It is the dependency of weak nations that maintains the flow of the world’s natural wealth to powerful nations’ industries at a low price and provides markets for those industrial products at a relatively high price. The military forces of today’s powerful nations are for the same purpose as those raiding parties from the city states 800 years ago as addressed in Chapter Two; control of the wealth-producing-process.

Footnotes
Most destabilizations were of progressive governments. Saddam Hussein’s wars against his neighbors and suppressions internally mark him as a leader easy to justify being deposed. Back to text

A part of those assassinations were carried out under Operation Condor, a joint operation set up by Chilean, Argentinean, Brazilian, Uruguayan, Paraguayan, Ecuadorian and Bolivian intelligence (see The Nation August 9, 1999 and the New York Times March 6, 2001) to assassinate expatriates whom they considered a danger to the security of their then fascist governments and who had fled their home country, including some in Spain, Italy, the United States, and other countries,.

The problem, of course, was that these people knew too much about the fascist suppressions in these countries. The assassination in Washington DC of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier was carried out under Operation Condor. American Ronni Moffit was riding in the car alongside Letelier and killed in that blast. An Internet search using keywords on these pages will come up with more citations. As this is written 86 nuns, priests, veterans, students, grandmothers, and grandfathers are being sentenced for protesting at the gates of the terrorist training center (school of the Americas addressed above) operating in America.

This is an annual event essentially unreported in the American media. As the imperial centers write history through placing defeated leaders on trial as mass murderers, the defendants were denied the right to use an international law defense but these courageous people would not be silenced and spoke forcefully on the atrocities committed worldwide by graduates of this terrorist training center. Back to text

It is this success that terrifies imperial nations not their failures. The fear is that such successes will expose that Western nations are not full democracies, that they do not provide their citizens full rights, and that they are not the most efficient economies. Back to text

Feisal Mansoor of Sri Lanka informed us that “idealistic youths were being murdered by the SL state in 1987-1992, the elite did not move until one of their own (Richard De Zoysa, journalist and doyen of Colombo society) was taken away from his home at night and found the next morning shot through the head on a beach South of Colombo.” Orchestrated death squads were operating in many countries we have not addressed. This is all being repeated in Iraq as I write, keywords “let a thousand militias bloom, A.K. Gupta” or “the Salvador Option” and watch for future such articles exposing these private militias as death squads. Back to text

As these subjects are not touched by Western media, we must depend upon www.emperors-clothes.com, and Google/Nexus-Lexus searches on the Internet using keywords off these pages, for this information so crucial to deciphering the true policies-of-state. Our statement barely scrapes the surface of evidence of Western war crimes and we encourage the reader to look at the in depth analysis on that website.

William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Super Power (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), especially pp. 73-77, addresses the subject well. Also, Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2001). Back to text

We do not have the space to tell the story so well laid out by Naomi Klein in “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, The Nation, (5/02/2005). There is a high possibility that theses latest plans for maintaining control of the world are, just as those who carried out covert destabilizations, true believers unaware they are suppressors of rights, not carriers of rights. But deep in the heart of the system has to be many who clearly understand what they are doing. Back to text

Endnotes
Covert Action Information Bulletin (Summer 1987): p. 28; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Bernard Grun, Timetables of American History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), pp. 33-36; W. Bello, U.S. Sponsored Low Intensity Conflict in the Philippines ( San Francisco: Institute for Food & Development Policy December, 1987); S. Karnow, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines (New York: Random House, 1989); Fred Poole, and Max Vanzi, Revolution in the Philippines: The United States in A Hall of Cracked Mirrors (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987); William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed Books, 1986); C.B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988); R. Constantino and L.R. Constantino, The Philippines: The Continuing Past (Quezon City, Philippines: The Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1978); G. Porter, "The politics of counterinsurgency in the Philippines: Military and Political Options," Philippine Studies Occasional Paper No. 9 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, Center for Philippine Studies, 1987); R. Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (New York: Times Books 1987); J. Prados, The Presidents' Secret Wars (New York: William Morrow, 1986) and The President’s Secret Wars, rev. Warwick: Elephant Paperbacks, 1996; K. Nair, Devil and His Dart: How the CIA is Plotting in the Third World (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986); Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Boulder, CO, many issues; E. G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); D.S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance 1950 to Present (New York: The Free Press, 1977); E. Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); J. Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986); Michael T. Klare and P. Kornbluh, Low Intensity Warfare (NY: Pantheon Books, 1988); see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Frederic F. Clairmont, Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism (Goa, India: The Other India Press, 1996), p. 223. Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003) Back to text
Gerald Colby, Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). Conversation with the authors shortly after their book was published. Back to text
Amir Taheri, Nest of Spies: America's Journey to Disaster in Iran (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Said K. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Iran (New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), p. 44; Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), 330-34; Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill 1979): C. Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), pp. 203-05; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Taheri, Nest of Spies, pp. 122-126. Back to text
Larry Everest, Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Common Courage Press, Monroe, 2004); Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003); Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); Christopher Scheer, Robert Scheer, and Lakshmi Chaudhry, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told us About Iraq (Seven Stories Press, 2003); Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 (Ontario: Global Outlook, 2002); Neil Mackay, “Bush Planned Iraq ‘Regime Change’ Before Coming President,” The Sunday Herald (Scotland), September 15, 2002; Dan Morgan and David B Ottaway, “In Iraqi Oil Scenario, Oil is Key Issue: U.S. Drillers Eye Huge Petroleum Pool,” Washington Post, September 14, 2002; Scott Peterson, “In War, Some Facts Less Factual,” The Christian Science Monitor September 6, 2002; Milan, Rai, Regime Unchanged (Sterling: Pluto Press, 2003); Solomon, Norman, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell you (New York: Context Books, 2003); Ali, Tariq, Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq (New York: Verso, 2003); Hiro, Dilip, Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom and After, A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East (New York: Nation Books, 2004); Ali, Tariq, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (New York: Verso, 2002); Briody, Dan, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group (Hoboken, Wiley and Sons, 2003); Ivins, Molly, and Lou Dubose, Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush’s America (New York: Random House, 2003); Chossudovsky, Michel, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11(Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2002); Chomsky, Noam, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Zinn, Howard, Terrorism and War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002); Parenti, Michael, The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002); Bill Powell, “Iraq We Win, Then What, Fortune November 5, 2002, pp. 61-72; Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq (London: Verso Press, 2002); William Rivers Pitt, Scott Ritter, War on Iraq (New York: Context Books, 2002). Back to text
Mackay, “Bush Planned Iraq ‘Regime Change’”; W. Clark, “The Real Reason for the upcoming War with Iraq, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html Back to text
Dan Murphy, “Indonesia Confronts Unruly Past” ( The Christian Science Monitor , November 20, 2000), pp. 1, 10; Blum, Rogue State , Chapter 17; Philip Agee, Inside the Company (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), p. 9; .Steve Weissman, The Trojan Horse (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1975); McT Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995); Wendell Minnick, Spies and Provocateurs: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Persons Conducting Espionage and Covert Action, 1946-1991 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1992), especially pp. 183-84; S.E. Ambrose, Ike's Spies (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981), p. 251; M. Caldwell, Editor, Ten Years Military Terror Indonesia (Nottingham: Spokesmen Books, no date); Blum, The CIA , especially p. 221; search databases for articles or books by Kathy Kadane, reporter for States News Service; see Chapter 6, endnote 6.. Back to text
Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), especially p. 5. Back to text
Stockwell, Praetorian Guard, p. 78. Back to text
John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1995); G.M. Kahin and J.W. Lewis, United States in Vietnam (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969); M. Gettleman, J. Franklin, M. Young, and B. Franklin, Vietnam and America: The Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War (New York: Grove Press, 1995); Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision Making on Vietnam, Senator Gravel, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); L. Ackland, Credibility Gap: A Digest of the Pentagon Papers (Philadelphia, PA: The National Literature Service. 1972); O. DeForest and D. Chanoff, Slow Burn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); N. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House, 1988); Currey, Edward Lansdale; Prouty, JFK; Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, The Indochina Story: A Fully Documented Account (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970); Frank Snepp, Decent Interval (New York: Random House, 1977); M. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990); D. Kaplan, Fires of the Dragon: Politics, Murder and the Kuomintang (NY: Atheneum, 1992); K. Conboy and J. Morrison, Shadow War: The CIA's Secret War in Laos (Bolder, CO: Paladin Press, 1995); Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
The Costs of War,” The Nation, December 24, 1990: p. 793; Matthew Cooper, “Give Trade a Chance,” U.S. News & World Report, February 14, 1994, p. 20; C. Robbins, The Ravens: The Men Who Flew in America's Secret War (New York: Crown Publishers, 1987), p. 332; Prouty, JFK, p. 55; V. Levant, Quiet Complicity: Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War (Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines, 1986), p.46. Back to text
B. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 228-29; see also L. Shoup, W. Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Hersh, Old Boys; Robin Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: Quill, 1987); see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984); Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy : The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Back to text
N. Miller, Spying for America (New York: Paragon House, 1989); P. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States 1944-1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); H.J. Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1974). Back to text
United Nations Guatemalan Truth Commission Report carried on AP wires February 25, 1999; Beatriz Manz Refugees of A Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala (New York: State University of New York, 1988); Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Susanne Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991); Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985); B. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower ; Thomas, Very Best Men ; D.A, Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum 1977); T. McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit (New York: Crown Publishers, 1976); Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only ; Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala: Occupied Country (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); J. Heidenry, Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and Dewitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp. 594-97; CovertAction Quarterly; Counterspy ; run library database searches for anything written by Allen Nairn; Blum, The CIA ; Blum, Rogue State , Chapters 3-10 and Chapter 17; and his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Me: Common Courage Press, 1995); see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Lucy Komisar, “Documented Complicity: Newly Released Files set the Record Straight on U.S. Support for Pinochet,” The Progressive , September, 1999, pp. 24-27; Blum, Rogue State , Chapter 17; Samuel Chavkin, The Murder of Chile (New York: Everest House, 1982); John Dinges, Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Blum, Forgotten History , pp. 232-43; Blum, Killing Hope ; R.L. Borosage and J. Marks, ed., The CIA File (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976); Church Committee Report (1975-1976); William Colby, Honorable Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), pp. 302-06; M. Copeland, Beyond Cloak and Dagger (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1975), Note 221 ; Counterspy , Spring/Summer 1975, pp. 43-47; Louis Wolf, review of The American Federation of Teachers and the CIA , by George Schmidt, CovertAction Quarterly 2 (October 1978); Fred Landis, “ CIA Media Operations in Chile , Jamaica, and Nicaragua,” CovertAction Quarterly 16 (March 1982), pp. 42-43; Fred Landis, “Opus Dei: Secret Order Vies for Power,” CovertAction Quarterly 18 (Winter 1983), pp. 14-15; Louis Wolf, “Inaccuracy in the Media: Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History,” CovertAction Quarterly 21 (Spring 1984), pp. 31-32; Fred Landis, “Moscow Rules Moss’s Mind,” CovertAction Quarterly 4 (Summer 1985), pp. 37-38; Stella Calloni, “The Horror Archives of Operation Condor,” CovertAction Quarterly 50 (Fall 1994), pp. 11, 13, 58-59; Darrin Wood, “Mexico Practices What School of America Teaches,” CovertAction Quarterly 59 (Winter 1996-97), pp. 38-53; Lisa Haugaard, “Textbook Repression: US Training Manuals Declassified,” CovertAction Quarterly 61 (Summer 1997), pp. 29-38; Michael Ratner, “The Pinochet Principle,” CovertAction Quarterly 66 (Winter 1999), pp. 46-48; H. Frazier, ed, Uncloaking the CIA (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 34-54, 60-63; Darrell Garwood, Under Cover (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 104, 127; F.S. Landis, “ Psychological Warfare and Media Operations in Chile 1970-1973 ” (Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1975): pp. 4, 14, 235, 254, 309-312; Victor Marchetti, J.D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), especially p. 17; Nair, Devil and His Dart ; Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars , 1996 ed., p. 319; Ranelagh, Agency , pp. 514-520; J. Richelson, American Espionage and the Soviet Target (New York: William Morrow, 1987), pp. 232-33; R.R. Sandford, The Murder of Allende , trans. A. Conrad (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); F.F. Sergeyev, Chile: CIA Big Business , trans. L. Bobrov, (Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1981), pp. 52-53, 93, 98, 108, 114, 163; Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), pp. 80-81, 113, 191; A. Uribe, The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975); Rayack, Not So Free to Choose: The Political Economy of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1986); Hersh, Old Boys ; Winks, Cloak & Gown ; Juan José Arévalo, Anti-Kommunism in Latin America (New York: Lyle Stewart, 1963); see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
P. Gunson, A. Thompson, G. Chamberlain, The Dictionary of Contemporary Politics of South America (NY: Routledge, 1989), p. 228; Rayack, Not so Free to Choose. See also note 18 above and Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Marc Cooper, Chile and the End of Pinochet,” The Nation (February 26, 2001), pp. 11-18. Back to text
Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has a much deeper analysis that is a must read for the serious researcher. Duncan Green, Silent Revolution (London: Cassel, 1995), pp. 101, 108; Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Verso, 1992), p. 231; Thomas Skidmore, Peter Smith, “The Pinochet Regime,” Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 137-38.; Rayack, Not so Free to Choose; Silvia Bortzutzky, "The Chicago Boys, Social Security and Welfare in Chile," The Radical Right and the Welfare State; Howard Glennerster, James Midgley, editors (Barnes and Noble import, 1991), pp. 88, 91, 96; See also above two notes. Back to text
Rayack, Not so Free to Choose; Bortzutzky, " Chicago Boys,” pp. 88, 91, 96; Walden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1999), pp. 42-45, 58-59. See also above three notes. Statistics on labor’s share of income is from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, “Latin America at the End of the Millennium,” Monthly review (July/Aug. 1999), p. 44. Back to text
United Nations Commission on the Truth in El Salvador, From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador (U.N. Security Council, 1993); Charles Kernaghan, “Sweatshop Blues,” Dollars and Sense (March/April, 1999); Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 17; Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London: Zed Books, 1985); Blum, The CIA, pp. 232-43; Blum, Killing Hope; Dennis Volman, "Salvador Death Squads, a CIA connection?" The Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 1984, p. 1; many issues of the CovertAction Quarterly and Counterspy; Klare & Kornbluh, Low Intensity Warfare; Edward S. Herman, F. Broadhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S. Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984) ; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 17; William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Peter Kornblush, Nicaragua, The Price of Intervention: Reagan’s War Against the Sandinistas (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1987); Reed Brody, Contra Terror in Nicaragua: Report of A Fact Finding Mission: September 1984-January 1985 (Boston: South End Press, 1985); The Rise and Fall of the Nicaraguan Revolution (New York: New International, 1994); Garvin, G., Everybody Has His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras (New York: Brassey's,1992); Peter Kornbluth and M. Byrne, The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York: A National Security Archive Documents Reader, The New Press, 1993); Twentieth Century Fund, The Need to Know: The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Covert Action and American Democracy (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1992); E. Chamorro, "Packaging the Contras: A Case of CIA Disinformation." Institute for Media Analysis, Inc. Monograph Series Number 2 (New York, Institute for Media Analysis, Inc, 1987); Minnick, Spies and Provocateurs; John Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Loch .K. Johnson, America's Secret Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); C,D. Ameringer, U.S. Foreign Intelligence (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990); H.B. Westerfield, ed., Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal 1955-1992 (New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 1995); J. Adams, Secret Armies (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press 1987); Tony Avirgan and M. Honey, eds., Lapenca: On Trial in Costa Rica (San Jose, CA: Editorial Porvenir, 1987); J. Marshall, P.D. Scott, and J. Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987); P.V. Parakal, Secret Wars of the CIA (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1984); Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); National Endowment for Democracy, Annual Report; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapters 3-10; John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), especially pp. 43, 63-64, 272; Stockwell, Praetorian Guard; Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); Clarridge, A Spy for all Seasons; H. Rositzke, The CIA's Secret Operations (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977); S. Gervasi and S. Wong, “The Reagan Doctrine and the Destabilization of Southern Africa” (Unpublished paper from McGehee's CIABASE, April 1990); B. Freemantle, CIA (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), p. 68. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 17; Gervasi and Wong, Reagan Doctrine, pp. 56-57; W. Minter, Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London, ZED Books, 1994). Back to text
Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, pp. 10, 105, 137, 169, 172, 236-37; Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 17; Sean Kelly, America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington DC: American University Press, 1993); D. Gibbs, The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991); R. L. Borosage, J. Marks, The CIA File (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976); Gervasi and Wong, Reagan Doctrine; Prados, Presidents Secret Wars; Kwitny, Endless Enemies; Blum, Killing Hope; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapters 3-10; Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); Minnick, Spies and Provocateurs, especially p. 262; R. Ridenour, Back Fire: The CIA's Biggest Burn (Havana, Cuba: Jose Marti Publishing House, 1991), especially pp. 73, 77-78, 145-49; Prados, Presidents Secret Wars, 1996 ed., pp. 333, 337, 349; Prados, Keepers of the Keys, especially pp. 142-44, 203-317; J.T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1985), especially p. 231; P.V. Parakal, Secret Wars of the CIA (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1984); R. S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), especially p. 195; Garwood, Under Cover, especially p. 92; P. Wyden, Bay of Pigs, the Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); D. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), especially pp. 151-53; Ranelagh, Agency, especially pp. 356-60; G. Treverton, Covert Action, The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1987); D. Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); L.F. Prouty, The Secret Team (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973); Borosage and Marks, CIA File; Hersh, Old Boys; Thomas, Very Best Men; Jeffreys-Jones, R., The CIA & American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1989; B. Watson, S. Watson, and G. Hopple, United States Intelligence: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990); Covert Action Information Bulletin; Counterspy; see Chapter 6, endnote 6. Back to text
Castro, Capitalism in Crisis, p. 138; Nadia Marsh, M.D., “U.S. Med Students Arrive in Cuba,” The Workers’ World, April 19, 2001. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapters 3-10; Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, 1996 ed., pp. 333, 337, 349; Garwood, Under Cover, pp. 60-64; Church Committee Report (1976), Congressional Record; Blum, The CIA, p. 108; check Chapter 6, endnote 6 for other successful and unsuccessful attempts to assassinate leaders and potential leaders of other countries. Back to text
Tuva Raanes, “A Divine Country All on Its Own,” World Press Review, October 2002, p. 17. Back to text
Prouty, JFK, pp. 244-45. Back to text
Stephen Schlesinger, "The CIA Censor's History," The Nation, July 14, 1997, pp. 20-22; Stockwell, Praetorian Guard, p. 21. Back to text
Epstein, Jack, “Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ Laundry May Get a Public Airing,” The Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1997,p. 7; Blum, Rogue State, Chapters 3, 5, 14, 17, and 18. Back to text
Prouty, JFK, pp. 236-37, 341. Back to text
Blum, Rogue State, Chapter 21. Back to text

“The first priority for any underdeveloped country, before it can begin the economic and social development most appropriate to the needs of its people, is the seizure of power by the masses and the total destruction of the control and influence of the foreign power and local exploiting elite. Without this, nothing is possible.” – Felix Green, British Author, 1970

“The HISTORY of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.” - Meridel Le Sueur, American writer, 1900-1996

Neocolonialism - The dominance of strong nations over weak nations, not by direct political control (as in traditional colonialism), but by economic and cultural influence.

"The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain" - Thomas Jefferson, 1809

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