excerpts from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Odonian Press
The CIA’s Greatest Hits
The explosive book that blows the lid off the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s Greatest Hits details how the CIA:
• hired top Nazi war criminals, shielded them from justice and learned—and used—their techniques
• has been involved in assassinations, bombings, massacres, wars, death squads, drug trafficking, and rigged elections all over the world
• tortures children as young as 13 and adults as old as 89, resulting in forced "confessions" to all sorts of imaginary crimes (an innocent Kuwaiti was tortured for months to make him keep repeating his initial lies, and a supposed al-Qaeda leader was waterboarded 187 times in a single month without producing a speck of useful information)
• orchestrates the media—which one CIA deputy director liked to call "the mighty Wurlitzer"—and places its agents inside newspapers, magazines and book publishers
• and much more.
The CIA’s crimes continue unabated, and unpunished. The day before General David Petraeus took over as the twentieth CIA director, federal prosecutors announced that they were dropping 99 investigations into the deaths of people in CIA custody, leaving just two active cases they’re willing to pursue.
In order to survive, nations need strong intelligence services. But the idea that the CIA is primarily an intelligence-gathering operation is itself one of the agency's greatest propaganda triumphs.Despite its name, the Central Intelligence Agency's main purpose is, and has always been, carrying out covert operations involving economic warfare, rigged elections, assassinations and even genocide.
The CIA is also expert at distorting intelligence to justify its own goals, and this "disinformation" leads to dangerous illusions among our policymakers. But covert operations are its life's blood.
The litany of illegal, murderous CIA activity is enough to chill the bones of anyone who cares about liberty and justice.
As long as the CIA exists, our government can break any law it chooses in the name of national security.
Anyone for whom democracy is more than just a word should be working to abolish the CIA. For some ideas on how to do that, send a SASE to Odonian Press at Box 32375, Tucson AZ 85751.
Mark Zepezauer
The Gehlen Org
-- Philip Agee, CIA Diary
"... Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention ... will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs."
-- Philip Agee, CIA Diary
"But what counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the capitalists back in America, their property and their privileges. US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people."
-- Philip Agee, CIA Diary
"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor.
Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty."
-- Philip Agee, CIA Diary
"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force.
Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other."
-- Philip Agee, CIA Diary
The Gehlen Org
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
One of the most important of all CIA operations began before the agency was even born. Many Nazi leaders realized they were going to lose World War II and started negotiating with the US behind Hitler's back about a possible future war against the USSR. In 1943, future CIA Director Allen Dulles moved to Bern, Switzerland to begin back-channel talks with these influential Nazis.
Officially, Dulles was an agent of the OSS (the Overseas Secret Service, the CIA's predecessor) but he wasn't above pursuing his own agenda with the Nazis, many of whom he had worked with before the war. Indeed, as a prominent Wall Street lawyer, Dulles had a number of clients- Standard Oil, for one-who continued doing business with the Nazis during the war.
So it's not surprising that when Hitler's intelligence chief for the Eastern front, General Reinhard Gehlen (GAY-len), surrendered to the US, he expected a warm reception-especially since he had buried his extensive files in a secret spot and planned to use them as a negotiating chip
General Gehlen was whisked to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where he soon succeeded in convincing his captors that the Soviet Union was about to attack the West. The US Army and Gehlen arrived at a "gentlemen's agreement.
According to the secret treaty, his spy organization-which came to be called the Gehlen Org- would work for, and be funded by, the US until a new German government came to power. In the meantime, should Gehlen find a conflict between the interests of Germany and the US, he was free to consider German interests first.
Gehlen even made sure he got approval for this arrangement from Hitler's appointed successor, Admiral Doenitz, who was in a cushy prisoner-of-war camp for Nazi VIPs in Wiesbaden, Germany.
For almost ten years, the Gehlen Org was virtually the CIA's only source of intelligence on Eastern Europe. Then, in 1955, it evolved into the BND (the German equivalent of the CIA) which, of course, continued to cooperate with the CIA.
Gehlen was far from the only Nazi war criminal employed by the CIA. Others included Klaus Barbie ("the Butcher of Lyon"), Otto von Bolschwing (the Holocaust mastermind who worked closely with Eichmann) and, SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (a great favorite of Hitler's). There's even evidence that Martin Bormann, Hitler's second-in-command at the end of the war, faked his own death and escaped to Latin America, where he worked with CIA-linked groups.
[Correction: The OSS was the Office of Strategic Services - not the Overseas Secret Service.]
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Operation Gladio
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947. The ink was barely dry on it before an army of spooks began marching through the law's major loophole: the CIA could "perform such other functions and duties...as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This deliberately vague clause opened the door to a half-century of criminal activity in the name of "national security."
One of the first duties the NSC deemed necessary was the subversion of Italian democracy...in the name of democracy, of course. Italy seemed likely to elect a leftist government in the 1948 election. To make sure Italians voted instead for the candidates Washington favored-leftover brownshirt thugs from Mussolini's party and other Nazi collaborators-millions of dollars were spent on propaganda and payoffs. It was also intimated that food aid would be cut off if the election results were inconsistent with US desires.
The US got its way in 1948 without having to resort to violence but-as was discovered in 1990- the CIA had organized a secret paramilitary army in postwar Italy, with hidden stockpiles of weapons and explosives dotting the map. Called Operation Gladio (gladius is Latin for sword), the ostensible excuse for it was laughable-the threat of a Soviet invasion. But the real purpose wasn't so funny-Operation Gladio's 15,000 troops were trained to overthrow the Italian government should it stray from the straight and narrow.
Similar secret armies were formed in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and West Germany- often directed, quite naturally, by former SS officers. They didn't just wait around for the Russians to come marching in; they assembled huge arms caches (many of which remain unaccounted for), compiled blacklists of leftists and, in France, participated in plots to assassinate President DeGaulle.
Many members of Operation Gladio were also in a shadowy organization known as P-2; it too was financed by the CIA. P-2 had connections with the Vatican and the Mafia, and eventually with an international fascist umbrella organization called the World Anti-Communist League.
One of P-2's specialties was the art of provocation. Leftist organizations like the Red Brigades were infiltrated, financed and / or created, and the resulting acts of terrorism, like the assassination of Italy's premier in 1978 and the bombing of the railway station in Bologna in 1980, were blamed on the left. The goal of this "strategy of tension" was to convince Italian voters that the left was violent and dangerous-by helping make it so.
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MK-ULTRA
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The CIA says its mind-control experiments were a strictly defensive response to Chinese 'brainwashing" of US POWs during the Korean War (captured US pilots were making public statements denouncing US germ warfare against civilians). Actually, US brainwashing experiments predate the CIA itself.
CIA mind control activities (also called behavior control) did accelerate in 1953, under a program that was exempt from the usual oversight procedures. Code-named MK-ULTRA, many of its files were destroyed by CIA Director Richard Helms (who was with it from the start) when he left office in 1973, but the surviving history is nasty enough..
MK-ULTRA spooks and shrinks tested radiation, electric shocks, electrode implants, microwaves, ultrasound and a wide range of drugs on unwitting subjects, including hundreds of prisoners at California's infamous Vacaville State Prison.
The CIA saw mind control as a way to create torture-proof couriers (by implanting memories that can only be retrieved with a prearranged signal) and programmed assassins, as in The Manchurian Candidate. There's evidence Sirhan was treated by a CIA-linked shrink before killing RFK.
The agency also wondered if it could disorient its adversaries with mind-altering substances like LSD. It was so fascinated with LSD that, in 1953, it tried to buy up the entire world supply. For many years, the agency was the principal source of LSD in the US, both legal and otherwise (one ClA-connected dealer produced tens of millions of doses).
Before ultimately dismissing LSD as unpredictable, the CIA tested it on countless people-including its own-without their consent, provoking several suicides. One CIA germ warfare expert hurled himself out of a tenth-story window after a "surprise" dose. It was 22 years before his family found out the real reason for his death.
The agency also rented a series of apartments, staffed them with prostitutes and watched through one way mirrors to see the effects of various substances the prostitutes slipped to the unlucky johns. When CIA auditors found out about this (in 1963), MK-ULTRA was supposedly shut down. In fact, it was simply renamed MKSEARCH, and some of it s more exotic projects were trimmed.
The CIA says all its behavior control operations ended when Helms left in 1973. If you believe that, maybe they did learn some useful techniques from all those brainwashing experiments.
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Operation CHAOS
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
In theory, the CIA's charter prohibits it from engaging in domestic operations. In practice, that's taken about as seriously as Frank Sinatra's periodic announcements that he's retiring from show biz.
The CIA explains its massive presence on US campuses by saying that so many foreign students attend US universities, it would be a shame not to try to recruit them. The Domestic Contacts Division is needed to glean information from US tourists and businessmen returning from abroad. Then there's the Domestic Operations Division, which handles foreign interventions on US soil, like breaking into foreign embassies.
In order to do all that, the CIA has had to set up the same sort of network of phony businesses and front organizations it uses overseas. But other than that, it claims it never operates domestically.
Unfortunately, that's not true. From 1959 to at least 1974, the CIA used its domestic organizations to spy on thousands of US citizens whose only crime was disagreeing with their government's policies.
This picked up speed when J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson that nobody would be protesting his Vietnam war policies unless they were being directed to do so by some foreign power. Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate.
In response, the CIA vastly expanded its campus surveillance program and stepped up its liaisons with local police departments. It trained special intelligence units in major cities to carry out "black bag" jobs (break-ins, wiretaps, etc.) against US "radicals."
In 1968, the CIA's various domestic programs were consolidated and expanded under the name Operation CHAOS. When Richard Nixon became president the following year, his administration drafted the Huston Plan, which called for even greater operations against "subversives," including wiretapping, break-ins, mail-opening, no-knock searches and "selective assassinations." Bureaucratic infighting tabled the plan, but much of it was implemented in other forms, not only by the CIA but also by the FBI and the Secret Service.
With the revelation of CIA and White House complicity in the Watergate break-in, light began to shine on Operation CHAOS. After a period of "reform," much of CHAOS's work was privatized, and right-wing groups and "former" CIA agents now provide the bulk of the CIA's domestic intelligence.
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Crooked Banks
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Since British bank examiners first shut down its London branch in 1991, BCCI (the Bank of Credit and Commerce International) has become known as "the world's crookedest bank"-or, as CIA Director Robert Gates called it, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. He, of all people, should know.
Throughout its entire history, the CIA has set up an elaborate shell game of "proprietaries" (front companies), money-laundering operations and off-the-books projects so complex that no outsider- and few insiders-could ever keep track of them. BCCI was neither the first nor the last of these.
An important predecessor was the Nugan Hand Bank, which helped the CIA topple a pesky government in its host country, Australia. Capitalized with booty from drug and weapons deals in the last years of the Vietnam War, it helped finance agency operations in Angola and the Middle East
Nugan Hand's board was loaded with spooks, including former CIA Director William Colby. When Australian bank examiners closed in on the bank in 1977, Nugan killed himself and Hand disappeared with billions in depositors' funds.
The CIA flirted with a similar operation in Hawaii, but eventually chose the Pakistan-based BCCI. It welcomed anyone with large amounts of cash to launder, from narcotics traffickers to arms merchants, terrorists to gangster governments.
Naturally, the CIA felt right at home. In fact, one former BCCI official claims to have been told that the CIA, and Director Richard Helms in particular, actually started the bank, and that it "wasn't a Pakistani bank at all."
Before collapsing, BCCI managed to facilitate a host of CIA covert operations, notably George Bush's efforts to pump weapons to Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Edwin Wilson's "unauthorized" arming of Libya.
Efforts to unravel all of BCCI's mysteries will never succeed. Its directors had the good sense to feather the nests of enough prominent US politicians, of both parties, to ensure that any investigation will be half-hearted at best.
Not surprisingly, CIA-connected lobbyists have worked to undermine any probe. Roughly $20 billion of BCCI's assets remain unaccounted for.
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Drug Trafficking
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Even before the CIA was officially founded, it was intertwined with major drug-trafficking organizations-its parent organization, the OSS, cooperated with the Mafia during World War II. After the war, one of the first covert operations of the new CIA was to break the strength of left-wing labor unions in southern France. To do this, the CIA cemented an ongoing tie to the Corsican Mafia, then the biggest heroin traffickers in the world.
By the early 1960s, much of the world's heroin production had shifted to Southeast Asia, due to another major CIA operation. The agency had trained Nationalist Chinese forces to invade Communist China; when that operation failed, they settled in northeastern Burma and became the world's largest opium producers (mainly by terrorizing the local villagers into growing it for them). This area, known as the Golden Triangle, continues to lead the world in opium production.
Meanwhile, as the US moved into Indochina, the existing opium trade there gradually became integrated into other US operations. While President Nixon, full of law-and-order rhetoric, made a great show of busting the famous "French connection," his allies in the Florida Mafia moved into Vietnam. By 1970, the US was flooded with pure Asian heroin, some of it smuggled home inside the corpses of US soldiers.
In Laos, the CIA was running a 40,000-man mercenary army. It included many Hmong tribespeople, who were longtime opium farmers. The CIA airline, Air America, ran weapons to the army and brought the Hmong's crop back out to market. Some of the massive profits from the operations were laundered by CIA agent Michael Hand through an Australian bank he founded and were used to finance other CIA operations behind Congress' back
Many veterans of CIA drug operations in Asia went on to star in the agency's secret wars in Central America in the 1980s, where the above pattern was repeated. The Nicaraguan contras were partially funded by cocaine operations, smuggled to and from the US on customs-free supply flights. CIA assets in Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama helped facilitate the trade.
In the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan, the Afghan rebels and their Pakistani hosts also partly financed themselves with heroin profits. Much of their product ended up, once again, in the veins of US addicts.
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The Mighty Wurlitzer
(the CIA's propaganda machine)from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Deputy Director Frank Wisner proudly referred to the CIA's worldwide propaganda machine as "the mighty Wurlitzer." And indeed, the agency's skill at murdering people is matched only by its ability to murder the truth.
The CIA has published literally hundreds of books that spread its party line on the Cold War. It was particularly proud of The Penikovsky Papers, supposedly the memoirs of a KGB defector but actually completely ghostwritten by CIA scribes. A bit more embarrassing was Claire Sterling's book which advanced the now-discredited theory that the Russians were behind the 1981 attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II. Even the popular Fodor's Travel Guides started as a CIA front.
The CIA also owns dozens of newspapers and magazines the world over. These not only provide cover for their agents but allow them to plant misinformation that regularly makes it back to the US through the wire services. The CIA has even placed agents on guard at the wire services, to prevent inconvenient facts from being disseminated.
In 1977, famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein revealed that over 400 US journalists had been employed by the CIA. These ranged from freelancers who were paid for regular debriefings, to actual CIA officers who worked under deep cover. Nearly every major US news organization has had spooks on the payroll, usually with the cooperation of top management.
The three most valuable media assets the CIA could count on were William Paley's CBS, Arthur Sulzberger's New York Times and Henry Luce's Time/Life empire. All three bent over backwards promoting the picture of Oswald as a lone nut in the JFK assassination.
Among prominent journalists who've worked knowingly with the CIA are National Review founder William F. Buckley, PBS interviewer Bill Moyers, the late columnist Stewart Alsop, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem.
Bernstein's landmark article on the CIA and the media told of the agency's frantic efforts to limit Congressional inquiry into the matter, with claims that "some of the biggest names in journalism could get smeared." And while the CIA director at the time, George Bush, made a not-too-convincing show of discontinuing the agency's manipulation of the media, it's clear that the CIA regards the space between your ears as one of its most important battlefields.
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Iran
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The history of the CIA in Iran shows that it isn't the failures of the agency we need to worry about, numerous though they are. Its successes-and Iran is one of the biggest-are far more dangerous.
The CIA did exactly what was asked of it in Iran, deposing a mildly nationalist regime that was a minor irritant to US policymakers. As a direct result, a fiercely nationalist regime came to power 26 years later, and it's proved to be a major irritant to the US ever since.
In 1951, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, "the most popular politician in the country," was elected Prime Minister of Iran. His major election plank was the nationalization of the only oil company operating in Iran at that time-British Petroleum. The nationalization bill was passed unanimously by the Iranian Parliament.
Though Mossadegh offered BP considerable compensation, his days were numbered from that point on. The British coordinated an international economic embargo of Iran, throwing its economy into chaos. And the CIA, at the request of the British, began spending millions of dollars on ways to get rid of Mossadegh.
The CIA's plans hinged on the young Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, a timid and inexperienced figurehead. (He was a mere shadow of his father, who had led a pro Nazi regime during World War n. ) In 1953, with CIA backing, the Shah ordered Mossadegh out of office and appointed a Nazi collaborator as his successor. Demonstrators filled the streets in support of Mossadegh, and the Shah fled to Rome.
Undaunted, the CIA paid for pro-Shah street demonstrators, who seized a radio station and announced that the Shah was on his way back and that Mossadegh had been deposed. In reality, it took a nine-hour tank battle in the streets of Tehran, killing hundreds, to remove Mossadegh.
Compared to the bloodshed to follow, however, that was just a drop in the bucket. In 1976, Amnesty International concluded that the Shah's CIA-trained security force, SAVAK, had the worst human rights record on the planet, and that the number and variety of torture techniques the CIA had taught SAVAK were "beyond belief."
Inevitably, in 1979, the Iranian people overthrew the bloodstained Shah, with great bitterness and hatred toward the US for installing him and backing him all those years. The radical fundamentalist regime that rules Iran today could never have found popular support without the CIA's 1953 coup and the repression that followed.
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Guatemala
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
If you ever need a reminder that the CIA was founded and run by lawyers, you won't need to look any further than the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy. The Dulles brothers were partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell; time permitting, they also worked for the US government. With John Foster Dulles heading the State Department and Allen Dulles heading the CIA, they were the czars of Eisenhower's foreign policy, and they made sure that the interests of Sullivan & Cromwell clients weren't ignored.
In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala by a landslide in a free and fair election. He hoped to transform Guatemala "from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy to a modern capitalist state." The CIA, however, weighed in heavily on the side of feudalism.
When Arbenz appropriated some unused land controlled by the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company (for which United Fruit was duly compensated), the company undertook an extensive PR campaign in the US, designed to paint Arbenz as a tool of the "international Communist conspiracy." John Foster Dulles, ever alert for opportunities to roll back the red menace-and to help out a valued client-convinced Ike that Arbenz must go.
Brother Allen's CIA was only too happy to take the job, which ended up costing only about $20 million. The agency sponsored a propaganda offensive and hired about 300 mercenaries who sporadically sabotaged trains and oil supplies.
Finally, in June of 1954, unmarked CIA planes staged a series of air raids on the Guatemalan capital and dropped leaflets demanding Arbenz's resignation. At the same time, CIA-run radio stations warned of the impending invasion of an occupying rebel army (actually the agency's 300 hired thugs). Considering discretion the better part of valor, Arbenz fled, leaving Guatemala in the hands of the CIA's hand-picked stooge, General Castillo Armas.
The CIA has always been particularly proud of the Guatemalan operation, which inaugurated a series of bloodthirsty regimes that murdered more than 100,000 Guatemalans over the next 40 years. In retrospect, however, some CIA veterans concluded that it may have come off too easily, leading to a certain overconfidence. As one CIA officer put it, "We thought we could knock off these little brown people on the cheap."
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Zaire
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
When the Congo (as Zaire was then known) won its independence from Belgium in 1960, Patrice Lumumba became its first prime minister. He was a charismatic leader who enjoyed strong support in the parliament, but he was able to hold office for only two months.
A leftist, Lumumba attempted to steer a neutral course between the US and the USSR-no easy task. As Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana pointed out, it was perfectly all right for Britain and France to maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviets, but any African leader who dared to do this became an enemy of the US.
Such was the fate of Lumumba. Though the CIA "regularly bought and sold Congolese politicians," it feared that Lumumba's oratorical talents would make him a thorn in their side even if he were maneuvered out of power. So they decided it made more sense to kill him.
CIA Director Allen Dulles ordered Lumumba's assassination. (A 1975 Congressional inquiry decided that "a reasonable inference" could be drawn that this was done with Eisenhower's assent.) The agency dispatched a lethal virus to Africa, but before it could be used on Lumumba, he was deposed by Zaire's president (who had CIA backing) and fled for his life.
With the ClA's help, Lumumba was captured in December 1960 by the troops of General Joseph Mobutu, who'd assumed control of the government. Lumumba was held prisoner for over a month, interrogated, tortured, then finally shot in the head. His body was dissolved in hydrochloric acid.
Mobutu has run Zaire ever since, and the lure of the country's vast mineral resources led the CIA into a marriage of convenience with him. (The CIA station in Zaire is the largest in Africa.)
Mobutu is worth billions. Almost 40% of Zaire's national revenues accrue to him and his cronies, while the average Zairian makes $190 a year.
He hands out life sentences to student protesters for "insulting the president," tosses opposition politicians into mental hospitals, suppresses religion and the press. He's so hated by his countrymen that he once had to live in a barge in the middle of the river.
Mobutu's brutality eventually alarmed even the CIA, who backed a 1977 uprising against him. When it failed, however, the CIA and Mobutu kissed and made up. In 1992, another rebellion began and continues to vie with Mobutu for power.
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The Bay of Pigs
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
When Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro overthrew the US-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, he closed down the casinos and brothels and nationalized all businesses. This deprived the Mafia-and other US-based multinationals-of a very profitable cash cow.
Vice President Nixon, who had longstanding ties with the Mob (through his best friend, Bebe Rebozo, among others), began plotting with the CIA to eliminate Castro. They did this largely behind Eisenhower's back, fully expecting that Nixon would be the next president. When JFK was elected instead, he inherited an operation-an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs-about which he had serious misgivings.
While JFK was eager to get rid of Castro, he didn't want to use US forces to do it, just Cuban exiles. The CIA hoped they could provoke an incident that would force JFK to use the US military. When he held his ground and refused, the whole invasion failed (in April 1961).
It probably wouldn't have succeeded in any case. Security for the operation was poor, as was the training given the 1500 man invasion force. A planned phony attack on the US base at Guantanamo never happened, nor did the agency's other ace in the hole-the assassination of Castro.
The CIA had hired the Mafia to kill Castro (something they both dearly desired); the hit was to occur at the same time as the invasion. Ironically, because the CIA's left hand didn't know what its right hand was doing, the Mob's hit man was almost assassinated himself. He was one of eight JFK-backed exile leaders chosen to head a post-Castro government, but Nixon had them detained during the invasion. If the invasion had succeeded, all eight would have been killed, so that Nixon-backed Cubans could take over.
To shift blame from themselves, and to embarrass JFK into more militant actions, the CIA mounted a propaganda campaign that attributed the whole Bay of Pigs failure to JFK's decision to cancel a crucial air strike. In fact, the decision had been made behind JFK's back-though he took full responsibility for it, as President Eisenhower did in a similar situation).
After JFK's death, the CIA's war against Castro continued. The agency has tried to kill Castro more than two dozen times, up until at least 1987. There have also been numerous cases of CIA sabotage in Cuba, including the use of germ warfare.
As for the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs, many have turned to organized crime and freelance terrorism. Others have continued to work for the CIA on covert operations. And many, of course, do both.
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Vietnam 1945 - 1963
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Long before the US military got involved there directly, Vietnam was the CIA's war. At first they waged it on behalf of the French, who struggled for nine years, from 1945 to 1954, to recapture their one-time colony (despite the war's unpopularity with the French public).
Even with CIA mercenaries fighting alongside the French, and air support from the CIA's Air America (at the time, the largest "private" airline in the world), the effort proved tobe in vain.
The 1954 Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam in preparation for elections in 1956. But the US wasn't interested in elections.
In the North, CIA "psywar" expert Ed Lansdale spread the rumor that the US was planning to nuke the area. This, along with other, similar tactics, created an exodus of over one million refugees, who were ferried to the south by CIA ships and planes.
In the South, the CIA wrote a constitution for "South Vietnam" (which had never been considered a separate country before), installed Ngo Dinh Diem and gave him the job of crushing anyone who had opposed the French.
US support for Diem was based on the belief that he was the one politician in Vietnam who would never negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. When, after nine more years of futile warfare, even Diem found such negotiations desirable, he was tossed aside as casually as he'd been put in place. In November 1963, he was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup, then assassinated.
In 1945, one US intelligence agent had described Ho Chi Minh as the "strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina, and...any suggested solution which excludes him is...of uncertain outcome." Unfortunately, such insights were ignored in Washington as the Cold War solidified.
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Dominican Republic
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Rafael Trujillo took power in the Dominican Republic in a 1930 coup d'etat and received enthusiastic backing from Washington for most of the next 30 years. His methods for suppressing dissent were sickeningly familiar-torture and mass murder. The US raised no objections, and Trujillo returned the favor by becoming a totally reliable supporter of US policies in the UN.
As often happens with such tyrants, however, he got too greedy. His personal business holdings grew until he controlled some three-fifths of the Dominican economy, which threatened the "favorable investment climate" that client states are set up for in the first place.
Also, when it started to look like Castro's revolutionary army would take over Cuba, the US began to worry that Trujillo's excesses might inspire a similar revolution. For whatever reasons, the CIA began plotting Trujillo's assassination in 1958.
Trujillo's life came to an abrupt end in May 1961, and while proper deniability was maintained in Washington, this is one of the best-documented CIA assassination plots (according to the 1975 Church Committee). The US attempted to maintain the corrupt essence of the Trujillo regime without Trujillo, but the 1962 elections brought a physician named Juan Bosch to power.
Bosch was anti-Communist and pro-business but, foolish man, he was dedicated to establishing a "decent democratic regime" through land reform, low-rent housing and public works projects. He was deposed by a CIA-backed coup after only seven months in office. When a popular countercoup tried to restore Bosch to power in 1965, the US invaded the island and installed a series of murderous regimes which have maintained a favorable investment climate ever since.
While he never lived long enough to see it enshrined as the "JFK Doctrine," President Kennedy once offered a fairly clear-cut rationale for US interventions abroad. Referring to the Dominican Republic, he said, "there are three possibilities...a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime [by which he meant Bosch]. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can't renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third."
In practice, we've hardly ever used the first option. Virtually all of our client states are similar to the Trujillo regime-and to the regimes we replaced him with.
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Indonesia
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Some people justify the CIA's crimes by saying that we faced a brutal and ruthless enemy in the Cold War, and winning was of paramount importance. The problem with that argument is that no one could have been more brutal and ruthless than the allies we embraced. There's no clearer illustration of this than Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation in the world.
From 1945 to 1965, Sukarno was president of Indonesia. A star among Third World leaders, active in the nonaligned, anti-imperialist movement, he'd long been a thorn in the side of the US. Worse yet, the Communist party was part of his governing coalition. The CIA had backed a failed uprising against him (in 1958), had tried to assassinate him and had even attempted to embarrass him by making a porno film starring a Sukarno look-alike!
In 1965, they finally scored. The Indonesian military, trained and backed by the US, provoked a leftist coup against its leader, General Suharto. When the coup failed, the military used it as an excuse to depose Sukarno and replace him with Suharto. (According to diplomatic documents, the coup was a setup to justify the military takeover. )
What followed (as depicted in the film The Year of Living Dangerously) is almost beyond belief. In just a few weeks, between five hundred thousand and a million Indonesians were put to death, many in a grisly fashion. (But don't worry-the Suharto regime assures us they were all Communists.) It was later learned that the death squads had been working from hit lists provided by the US State Department (the usual cover for CIA agents).
The 1965 massacre was only the beginning for Indonesia's new military regime. In 1975, its army invaded the tiny nation of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony which has the bad luck to own significant oil reserves.
Since then, between a quarter and a third of East Timor's inhabitants, from all ethnic and religious groups, have been slaughtered by the Indonesian military, with arms largely supplied and paid for by the US.
On a per-capita basis, East Timor is the greatest genocide since the Holocaust. Combined with the 1965 killings and other Indonesian atrocities, it puts Suharto in the first rank of twentieth century mass murderers, right up there with Hitler, Stalin, the Turks who massacred the Armenians in 1915 and the generals who run Guatemala.
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Greece
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
In April 1967, a Greek election campaign was about to begin. The candidate favored to win the election was George Papandreou, a staunch anticommunist. His son Andreas was a bit more left-wing, an admirer of subversives like Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson. Both the Papandreous, however, were a bit too independent for US policymakers.
Andreas Papandreou had mused publicly about steering a more neutral course for Greece in the Cold War. He also had some misgivings-correct ones, as it turned out-about the autocratic nature of certain elements in the Greek military.
George Papandreou had previously served as prime minister, but had been removed from power in 1965 by the king, with the assistance of the CIA. Like his son, he showed signs of less than complete subservience to US interests.
Two days before the election campaign was to begin, a group of colonels overthrew the government and established military rule. The leader of the coup had been on the CIA payroll for the previous fifteen years
For the next six years, martial law held sway in the birthplace of democracy. Widespread censorship, routine use of torture, brutal beatings and killings by the government became standard. Among the offenses deemed worthy of torture was possession of leaflets critical of the government. While being tortured, victims were taunted that they were beyond all help, since the colonels were supported by the power of the United States.
The official justification for the coup and the hideous repression that followed was that they were necessary to save the nation from a communist takeover. The Papandreous weren't communists, of course, but they were something much more dangerous committed, independent nationalists.
The US attitude toward that breed is made clear by the following quote: When the Greek ambassador objected to President Johnson's plan for settling a dispute concerning Cyprus, LBJ told him, "Fuck 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....If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitutions, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long."
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Chile
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
In 1973, the CIA destroyed the oldest functioning democracy in South America. Twenty years later, the agency is still trying to deny its involvement.
The CIA intervened massively in Chile's 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970, its fears were realized-the socialist candidate, a physician named Salvador Allende, was elected president.
Horrified, President Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent Allende's inauguration. The agency did its best to promote a military coup, but the Chilean military's long history of respect for the democratic process made this virtually impossible. One of the main impediments was the Chilean army's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, so the CIA plotted with fanatics in the military to assassinate him. The killing backfired, solidifying support for Allende, who took office as scheduled.
That approach having failed, the CIA was ordered to create a "coup climate." ("Make the economy scream," President Nixon told CIA Director Helms.) CIA-backed acts of sabotage and terror multiplied. The agency trained members of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad (PyL) in guerrilla warfare and bombing, and they were soon waging a campaign of arson.
The CIA also sponsored demonstrations and strikes, funded by ITT and other US corporations with Chilean holdings. CIA-linked media, including the country's largest newspaper, fanned the flames of crisis. The military's patriotism was gradually eroded by endless stories about Marxist "atrocities" like castration and cannibalism, and rumors that the military would be purged or "destroyed" and Soviet bases set up.
When the coup finally came, in September 1973, it was led by the most extreme fascist members of the military, and it was unrelenting in its ferocity. Allende was assassinated (some CIA apologists maintain he committed suicide-by shooting himself with a machine gun!). Several cabinet ministers were also assassinated, the universities were put under military control, opposition parties were banned and thousands of Chileans were tortured and killed, many fingered as "radicals" by lists provided by the CIA.
Under the military junta headed by General Pinochet, torture of dissidents became routine, particularly at a gruesome prison called Colonia Dignidad. It drew expatriate Nazis from all over South America, one of whom told a victim that the work of the Nazi death camps was being continued there.
No wonder the CIA tries to deny it was involved in the Chilean coup. It turned a democratic, peace loving nation into a slaughterhouse.
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Vietnam 1964 - 1975
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Following the deaths of JFK and Ngo Dinh Diem, it was only a matter of time before US combat troops became involved in Vietnam. Within days of the JFK assassination in November 1963, President Johnson had reversed JFK's plan to withdraw US personnel by the end of 1965. As LBJ told one impatient general, "Just get me elected; you can have your damn war."
In August 1964, the CIA and related military intelligence agencies helped fabricate a phony Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam. This supposed act of North Vietnamese aggression was used as the basis for escalating US involvement.
In March 1965, US troops began pouring into Vietnam. Nine years of backing the French, another nine years of backing Diem and two more years of CIA operations had failed. From this point on, the US Army took over the war effort.
Since the Vietnamese people overwhelmingly supported their own National Liberation Front (the NLF, or "Viet Cong" as we called it), the Army began destroying villages, herding people into internment camps, weeding out the leaders and turning the countryside into a "free-fire zone" (in other words, shoot anything that moves).
The CIA still had a role to play, however. Called Operation Phoenix, it was an assassination program plain and simple. The idea was to cripple the NLF by killing influential people like mayors, teachers, doctors, tax collectors-anyone who aided the functioning of the NLF's parallel government in the South.
Many of the "suspects" were tortured and some were tossed from helicopters during interrogation. William Colby, the CIA official in charge of Phoenix (he later became director of the CIA), insisted this was all part of "military necessity"- though he admitted to Congress that he really had no idea how many of the 20,000 killed were Viet Cong and how many were "loyal" Vietnamese.
Colby's confusion was understandable, since Phoenix was a joint operation between the US and the South Vietnamese, who used it as a means of extortion, a protection racket and a way to settle vendettas. Significantly, the South Vietnamese estimated the Operation Phoenix death toll at closer to 40,000. Whatever the exact number, there's no question the killings were necessary-after all, we were trying to prevent a blood bath.
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Laos
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Between 1957 and 1965, Laotian governments came and went at a frantic pace, with the CIA sponsoring at least one coup a year. The problem was a leftist group called the Pathet Lao which kept getting enough votes to be included in coalition governments.
If the Pathet Lao or other leftists were voted into office, there'd either be a right-wing coup or the legislature would be dissolved, with future elections canceled if possible. If there was an election, the CIA would stuff ballot boxes, run propaganda campaigns and bribe legislators to try to get their candidates elected.
But the CIA didn't rely primarily on such namby-pamby techniques. Starting in the late 1950s, they recruited a mercenary force of some 40,000 men to attack Pathet Lao forces. Known as the Armee Clandestine ("secret army"), about half its members were from Thailand; the rest came from Taiwan, South Korea and other US client states. Despite the size of the Armee Clandestine, the Pathet Lao had enough support in the countryside to withstand it.
By 1964, after another CIA coup succeeded in installing a right-wing puppet, the Pathet Lao was completely frozen out of the electoral process. They'd begun receiving aid from the neighboring North Vietnamese, who were concerned about ClA-backed sabotage and assassination teams operating from Laotian territory. When the Pathet Lao made significant advances, the US military got directly-although secretly-involved.
From 1965 to 1973, the US dropped over two million tons of bombs on Laos, far more than all sides dropped in World War II. The bombing was so ferocious that over a quarter of the population became refugees, with many people living in caves for years at a time.
Since this CIA-run war in Laos was "secret," it only received a fraction of the attention given to the war in Vietnam. The secrecy proved unfortunate for many of the US soldiers involved.
If killed, they were listed as casualties of the Vietnam war. But when the Pathet Lao finally took power in 1975, no prisoner exchange treaty was signed, because we couldn't admit we'd been running a secret war in Laos.
Many of the Americans known to have been captured alive in Laos were involved in drug trafficking with the Armee Clandestine. If any are still alive, the CIA would have a considerable interest in denying their existence.
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Cambodia
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
In 1955, when CIA intervention in Cambodia began, there was no communist threat to rationalize it. Sandwiched as he was between two US client states, Thailand and South Vietnam, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the popular sovereign of Cambodia, had one overriding goal-to keep his country from becoming involved in the Vietnam War. To that end, he stuck tenaciously to a policy of neutralism from 1955 to 1970, accepting aid from both communist and capitalist states but criticizing each on occasion.
Sihanouk dismissed as fraudulent CIA documents that predicted imminent Communist aggression against him, but the plots and coup attempts by US-backed factions were all too real. In his memoir, My War with the CIA, Sihanouk alleges at least two assassination plots against him. There were also numerous incursions by Thai, South Vietnamese and US troops, a 1958 CIA-backed coup attempt and countless "accidental" bombing runs into Cambodian territory. Sihanouk's unwillingness to join the crusade against Communism made him the CIA's enemy.
Perhaps the final straw was when Sihanouk denounced US military incursions into Cambodia at a major press conference (dutifully, the US media barely mentioned his charges). In March 1970, Sihanouk was deposed by a CIA puppet named Lon Nol, who immediately began committing Cambodian troops to the war in Vietnam.
With Sihanouk out of the way, war quickly engulfed Cambodia. US bombing intensified near the Vietnamese border, driving North Vietnamese and NLF troops deeper into Cambodia. From 1969 to 1975, US bombing killed 600,000 Cambodians and created a full-scale famine.
Not surprisingly, forces opposed to Lon Nol's regime grew rapidly. In 1975, one of them, the Communist Khmer Rouge, took power (before Lon Nol, they'd been a tiny, marginal group).
As depicted in the film The Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge carried out many atrocities, executing probably between 100,000 and 350,000 people. For propaganda purposes, Western reporters inflated the total by adding famine deaths to it.
The Khmer Rouge's hideous crimes didn't prevent the CIA from supporting it after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, and for many years thereafter. As the Arabs say, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
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Angola
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The Angolan intervention is a strong candidate for the most pointless CIA operation ever. Certainly the ratio of blood spilled to goals achieved-to the extent that those goals can even be determined- makes it one of the agency's biggest fiascoes.
In 1975, the collapse of the Portuguese empire left its African colony of Angola with three groups struggling for power. Each had at various times flirted with both capitalism and Marxism, and each had taken aid from both East and West. Zaire (a US ally) backed one faction, the Soviets backed another (the MPLA) and the CIA ended up backing the third, Jonas Savimbi's UNITA.
The main reason for the CIA's involvement in Angola was Henry Kissinger's determination to start another war as soon as possible after the fall of Saigon, to show the world how tough we were. We said we were worried about oil-even though there isn't much of it in Angola, and the MPLA, which has controlled the oil since 1975, has continued to sell it to the West throughout the war. Another absurd excuse: Angola is close to "shipping lanes" (just like every other coastal nation on earth).
No diplomatic option was ever pursued by Kissinger. Instead, the CIA put untold amounts of blood and treasure behind Savimbi-a brutal, bloodthirsty autocrat. Our apparent determination to turn Angola into a Cold War battlefield brought in South African troops, who supported Savimbi, and-in response-Cuban troops, who supported the MPLA with great success.
South Africa's involvement was part of its efforts to destabilize all of its neighbors, in order to delay the inevitable ascension of its black majority to power. Since they were supporting our faction, this caused considerable damage to US relations with black Africa.
After $40 million and thousands of dead, Congress-in a rare display of principle-cut off funds for the Angolan war in 1976, the first time it had ever voted to shut down a CIA operation. Unfortunately, the CIA managed to sustain the killing off-the-books until Reagan took office in 1981. Millions more dollars and thousands more lives were then wasted until, in 1990, the ongoing Angolan stalemate at last resulted in an election.
When Savimbi lost overwhelmingly to the MPLA, he cranked the war right back up again, initially with further CIA funding. Finally, in 1993, the US distanced itself from Savimbi and recognized the MPLA government, but the war still continues. So far, more than 300,000 Angolans have died, 80,000 are crippled, 50,000 orphaned, and the damage to property exceeds $50 billion.
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Orlando Letelier
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
"Are you the wife of Orlando Letelier?" asked the anonymous caller. "Yes," she answered. "No," the caller said, ~ you are his widow."
A week later, on September 21, 1976, the exiled Chilean diplomat and prominent critic of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime was torn to pieces by a car bomb on the streets of Washington DC. Also killed was Letelier's American aide, Ronni Moffit. Her husband, blown clear of the car, immediately began shouting that Chilean fascists were responsible for the atrocity.
He was right, but those fascists had powerful allies in Washington. An FBI informant knew of the plot to assassinate Letelier before the fact but the FBI did nothing to protect him. After the bombing, CIA Director George Bush told the FBI that there'd been no Chilean involvement whatever. The CIA was certain of this, he said, because it had many reliable sources inside the Chilean secret police, DINA.
Actually, the CIA had known that a DINA hit squad was in the US and headed for Washington. After the bombing, the agency purged its files of photos of the assassins. The CIA and DINA then began planting stories in the press suggesting that Letelier had been killed by leftists seeking to make a martyr of him.
The FBI figured out the identities of Letelier's assassins within weeks, but didn't charge them until the CIA's cover-up unraveled several years later. The unraveling began a month after the killing, when a Cuban airliner was bombed, killing 73 passengers. That bombing was done by a violent group of CIA-linked Cuban exiles who were connected with the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination and who went on to do similar things in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Investigators into the airliner bombing discovered that both it and the Letelier/Moffit killings were planned at the same meeting, which was organized by a man with longtime CIA connections and was attended by other FBI and CIA men.
Apologists argue that no one can prove that Letelier's convicted assassins, "former" CIA agent Michael Townley and two Cuban exiles, were acting under agency orders. But if they weren't, why did the CIA immediately begin covering up for them?
This case is so complex that, in 1991, the Chilean Supreme Court (post-Pinochet) asked George Bush if he'd mind submitting to questioning. You'd better believe he minded.
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Grenada
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
Here's what the US public was told: President Reagan woke up one day to discover that a horrible Marxist coup had taken over the Caribbean island of Grenada. Because there were Cuban troops on the island, the president had to send the US military to rescue US citizens trapped there and held as virtual hostages.
There was no way to get a more accurate picture, since the US military kept reporters from setting foot on Grenada during the invasion; a boatload of US journalists was turned away at gun point and all flights in and out were canceled. Much later, long after everyone had stopped paying attention to Grenada, it became clear that the official story was built on a mountain of lies.
The CIA began destabilizing Grenada in 1979, when a man named Maurice Bishop ousted the eccentric thug who ruled the island. Bishop set to work developing a better life for Grenada's citizens and earned much popular support for doing so. He ran afoul of the US fairly quickly, though, when he failed to join in the quarantine of Cuba.
Bishop's mildly socialist program (private enterprise left unmolested, but free health care, school lunches, etc.) was the final straw. Before long, a CIA propaganda campaign was portraying Grenada as a terrorist state allied to the Soviet Union, its 100,000 inhabitants armed to the teeth and poised to attack the pitifully vulnerable US.
The US invasion was planned at least two years before it happened, and CIA acts of sabotage proliferated. Money was given to opposition politicians and neighboring armies. Finally, in late 1983, Bishop was overthrown by extremists in his own party and executed, and the US invasion began. CIA agents among the "hostages" helped coordinate the three-day war over shortwave radio.
As for the Cuban troops we invaded to protect our citizens from, there were 43 of them; the other Cubans on Grenada were mostly middle-aged construction workers. The Cubans let it be known that they would not interfere with the US "rescue," but the US troops fired on them and they defended themselves. That night, the US assured Cuba that its citizens in Grenada were "not a target"; the next day, we attacked them with helicopter gunships. When it was all over, 81 Cubans, 296 Grenadines and 131 Americans had been killed or wounded.
Today Grenada is back where it was before Bishop, mired in poverty and hopelessness. But, hey, it's no longer a threat to our very survival.
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El Salvador
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The fourteen families who rule El Salvador have never been squeamish about taking the life of anyone who gets in their way. Among the many people who commonly get in their way are the Catholic clergy, due to the concern they often show for the poor. As a result, a popular slogan among Salvadoran rightists is, "be patriotic-kill a priest."
In 1980, El Salvador's archbishop, Oscar Romero, made the mistake of taking President Carter's human rights rhetoric seriously. He wrote Carter, begging him to stop military support for El Salvador's murderous rulers. Carter ignored Romero, but the people who ran El Salvador didn't. Shortly after he sent the letter, Romero was shot through the heart while saying mass.
Romero's assassination was ordered by Roberto D'Aubuisson (daw-bwee-SAWN), nicknamed Blowtorch Bob for his favorite instrument of torture. A big admirer of Adolf Hitler, D'Aubuisson once said, "You Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible for the spread of Communism and you began to kill them." D'Aubuisson has passed on, but his ARENA party, supported by the US, still rules El Salvador.
D'Aubuisson was a big wheel in the World Anti-Communist League. Organized in 1961, WACL serves as a worldwide umbrella organization for extreme-right militants. Among its members are expatriate Nazis, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaners, Latin American death squad leaders and a number of US congressmen and "former" CIA agents.
Even aside from its participation in WACL, the CIA has done much to encourage bloodshed in El Salvador. With billions of dollars in US military aid at its disposal, it's flown air raids, waded into combat and trained the military units that formed the death squads.
The agency's spin doctors have also worked to improve the government's image. This often consisted of denying that atrocities like the 1982 massacre at El Mozote ever happened. Agency sycophants in the media parroted this line shamelessly until, in 1993, the UN Truth Commission investigated El Mozote and determined that 733 peasants had been murdered there. All in all, the Truth Commission concluded, 63,000 Salvadorans were killed between 1979 and 1992.
In 1982, after he was out of office, Jimmy Carter called El Salvador's government the "blood-thirstiest in the hemisphere." It's too bad he didn't come to that realization back when he-like his predecessors and successors-was funding it.
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Nicaragua
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
FDR once remarked of Nicaragua's dictator, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." So when a later Somoza (the son of our son of a bitch) was overthrown in 1979, we spared no effort until Nicaragua was ours again.
When President Carter saw that the younger Somoza's days were numbered, he tried to ease him out of power, unaware that retired CIA agents were providing him with further weaponry. Carter's plan was to keep Somoza's private army, the National Guard, in power, while Somoza escaped to enjoy his $900 million fortune.
Most Nicaraguans, having suffered 46 years of the Guard's unrelenting brutality, were not thrilled with that plan. When Somoza fell, so did his hated National Guard.
Many of the Guard were evacuated on US planes. We reassembled them, armed and supplied them, had them trained by Argentinean death squads and sent them back to harass the new regime. Because the Guard was so despised in Nicaragua, they were given a new name-the contras (an abbreviation of the Spanish word for counter-revolutionaries).
The resulting bloodshed was perhaps the least covert of all CIA covert operations. President Reagan was perfectly candid about the goals-the second-poorest nation in the hemisphere was to be "pressured" until "they say 'uncle'."
The methods became part of the public record too-though not intentionally-when the CIA's Freedom Fighters Manual was leaked to the press. It gave detailed instructions on assassination, sabotage, kidnapping, blackmail and the slaughter of civilians.
The US lavished military and financial aid on the contras, whom they used to terrorize rural Nicaragua. Since many peasants were delighted that the new government was providing them with teachers and doctors (for the first time ever), the contras particularly targeted those professionals.
The CIA mined harbors and blew up fuel tanks, then told the contras to claim credit. The agency flew supplies to the contras, attempted to assassinate the Nicaraguan leadership and pumped millions of dollars into opposition politicians. And, as in Chile, they made the economy "scream".
Finally, in 1989, after ten years of warfare- both economic and military-the Nicaraguans gave up and voted for the US-backed slate of candidates. If any of them wondered what would happen should they fail to do so, they only needed to look south to Panama, which had just been invaded by the US the month before.
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Afghanistan
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
During the Reagan years, the CIA ran nearly two dozen covert operations against various governments. Of these, Afghanistan was by far the biggest; it was, in fact, the biggest CIA operation of all time, both in terms of dollars spent ($5-$6 billion) and personnel involved. Yet it not only generated little controversy, but enjoyed strong bipartisan support. That's because its main purpose was to "bleed" the Soviet Union, just as we had been bled in Vietnam.
Prior to the 1979 Russian invasion, Afghanistan was ruled by a brutal dictator. Like the neighboring Shah of Iran, he allowed the CIA to set up radar installations in his country that were used to monitor the Soviets. In 1979, after several dozen Soviet advisors were massacred by Afghan tribesmen, the USSR sent in the Red Army.
The Soviets tried to install a pliable client regime, without taking local attitudes much into account. Many of the mullahs who controlled chunks of Afghan territory objected to Soviet efforts to educate women and to institute land reform. Others, outraged by the USSR's attempts to suppress the heroin trade, shifted their operations to Pakistan.
As for the CIA, its aim was simply to humiliate the Soviets by arming anyone who would fight against them. The agency funneled cash and weapons to over a dozen guerrilla groups, many of whom had been staging raids from Pakistan years before the Soviet invasion. Today, long after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan (and, in fact, has ceased to exist), most of these groups are still fighting each other for control of the country.
Besides tossing billions of dollars into the conflict, the CIA transferred sensitive weapons technology to fanatical Muslim extremists, with consequences that will haunt the US for years to come. One notable veteran of the Afghan operation is Sheik Abdel Rahman, famous for his role in the World Trade Center bombing.
The CIA succeeded in creating chaos, but never developed a plan for ending it. When the ten-year war was over, a million people were dead, and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the US market.
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South Pacific
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
In 1993, US citizens were shocked to learn that their government had performed nuclear experiments on innocent and unknowing test subjects. To the residents of US-administered "trust territories" in the South Pacific, this was an old story.
Ever since we nuked Japan in August 1945, the US had regarded the Pacific as an "American lake." For years, both the US and France tested nuclear weapons and lobbed missiles at various Pacific islands under their "trusteeship," hustling the natives out of the way.
Sometimes natives were returned prematurely to their irradiated homelands, which resulted in birth defects and cancers. Not surprisingly, this led to particularly strong anti-nuclear sentiments among the Pacific islanders. Also not surprisingly, the CIA has done everything in its power to counter them.
The US has occupied the tiny island of Belau since World War II and, despite native calls for self-determination, is unlikely to depart anytime soon. In 1979, the Belauans had the effrontery to pass the world's first anti-nuclear constitution.
Since then, the US has sponsored ten elections in an unsuccessful effort to revise the document. Because the Pentagon wants to keep a military base on Belau for the next 30 years or so, there have been endless beatings and assassinations of Belauan anti-nuclear activists.
The island nation of Kanaky (also known as New Caledonia) has been occupied by French troops since a bogus 1987 election that "ratified" French rule. Kanaky's exiled resistance movement receives support from the island nation of Vanuatu (formerly called New Hebrides), which has one of the most progressive governments in the Pacific. The CIA has been funnelling money into destabilizing Vanuatu, which it charges iS the victim of "Libyan subversion."
In Fiji, a pro-US government was replaced by a progressive coalition in a 1987 election; less than a month later, a ClA-backed coup deposed the elected government. ClA"-coup experts," including the head of the World Anti-Communist League, were on hand before, during and after the coup. The new ruling junta purchased US helicopters to use against any Fijians who have the gall to imagine they have the right to elect whomever they please.
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Panama
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
For most of his life, Manuel Noriega got along very well with the CIA. As far back as 1959, he was reporting on Panamanian leftists to the Americans; by 1966, he was on the CIA payroll. Despite-or maybe because of-Noriega's "perverse" treatment of prisoners, he was deemed worthy to be trained at the notorious School of the Americas (also known as the "School of Dictators" or the "School of Assassins" ), run by the US Army in Panama City (it's since moved to Ft. Benning, Georgia).
As early as 1972, reports of Noriega's drug trafficking irked the DEA, and the State Department complained of his dealings with other intelligence services, notably those of Israel and Cuba. Don't worry, said the CIA-he's our boy.
In 1976, Noriega paid a visit to CIA Director George Bush in Washington. Bush's successor was less comfortable with Noriega and took him off the CIA payroll, but when Bush became vice-president in 1980, Noriega went back on, with a six-figure annual salary.
In 1981, Panama's popular head of state, Omar Torrijos, was killed in a plane crash; by 1983, Noriega had consolidated his control. In 1987, a close Noriega aide corroborated what many suspected-Noriega had sabotaged Torrijos' plane. (The CIA has also been linked to the assassination, in 1955, of Panama's president, allegedly with the approval of then-Vice-President Nixon).
Nothing Noriega did seemed to upset the CIA. If he smuggled cocaine on contra supply planes ...well, he wasn't the only one. If he beheaded a political opponent who accused him of drug running...well, he was just being firm.
If he used violence and fraud to steal the 1984 Panamanian elections...well, we couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome.
By 1989, however, the love affair was over. Noriega had angered his handlers by waffling on his opposition to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and he was showing other disquieting signs of disobedience. In December 1989, US troops invaded Panama to "arrest" Noriega, slaughtering 2,000 - 4,000 innocent civilians in the process.
What changed after the invasion? Violence, fraud and drug trafficking continued unabated. But, unlike Noriega, Panama's new rulers knew how to follow orders, and agreed to reconsider the Torrijos treaties, under which all US military bases in Panama would be shut down by the year 2000. (In 1994, Torrijos' and Noriega's old party was voted back in-so look for more CIA sabotage.)
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Iraq
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The Gulf War of early 1991 didn't change much. Our old buddy, the despotic Emir of Kuwait, is back on his throne. Our former buddy, Saddam Hussein, while knocked down a peg or two, is still in power and as brutal as ever. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, hundreds of US veterans are suffering from a mysterious disease, and the Persian Gulf has been ravaged by the largest oil spill in history. The question naturally arises, could any of this have been avoided?
The whole dispute started because Kuwait was slant-drilling. Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's old company, Kuwait was pumping out some $14-billion worth of oil from underneath Iraqi territory. Even the territory they were drilling from had originally been Iraq's. Slant-drilling is enough to get you shot in Texas, and it's certainly enough to start a war in the Mideast.
Even so, this dispute could have been negotiated. But it's hard to avoid a war when what you're actually doing is trying to provoke a war.
The most famous example of that is the meeting between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, five days before Iraq invaded Kuwait. As CIA satellite photos showed an Iraqi invasion force massing on the Kuwaiti border, Glaspie told Hussein that "the US takes no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait.
A few days later, during last-minute negotiations, Kuwait's foreign minister said: "We are not going to respond to [Iraq]....If they don't like it, let them occupy our territory....We are going to bring in the Americans." The US reportedly encouraged Kuwait's attitude.
Pitting the two countries against each other was nothing new. Back in 1989, CIA Director William Webster advised Kuwait's security chief to "take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq to put pressure on Iraq.'' At the same time, a CIA-linked think tank was advising Saddam to put pressure on the Kuwaitis.
A month earlier, the Bush administration issued a secret directive that called for greater economic cooperation with Iraq. This ultimately resulted in billions of dollars of illegal arms sales to Saddam.
The Gulf War further destabilized the region and made Kuwait more dependent on us. US oil companies can now exert more control over oil prices (and thus boost their profits). The US military got an excuse to build more bases in the region (which Saudi Arabia, for one, didn't want) and the war also helped justify the "need" to continue exorbitant levels of military spending. Finally, it sent a message to Third World leaders about what they could expect if they dared to step out of line.
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Haiti
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
US troops invaded Haiti five times, once staying for almost twenty years (1915-35). At the end of that prolonged visit, during which we killed thousands of Haitians for daring to rebel, we left the country in the hands of the local National Guard, confident that they'd carry on our good work.
From this arrangement emerged the Duvalier family dynasty and their private terrorist force, the machete-wielding Tontons Macoutes. "Papa Doc" Duvalier (he was a medical doctor) also relied on voodoo incantations and, during a 1959 uprising, the timely assistance of the US military. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his 19-year-old son, called Baby Doc, became "president-for-life."
Throughout the blood-drenched rule of the Duvaliers (nearly 100,000 killed by the Tontons Macoutes alone), the US barely uttered a peep about human rights violations. In 1986, however, when it became apparent that Baby Doc's presidency could not in fact be sustained for his entire life (unless he died soon), the Reagan administration airlifted him to a retirement villa in France and started talking about the "democratic process."
Before that could begin, however, the Haitian military had to be further strengthened. CIA money began flowing to Haiti, which had already seen US aid double during the Reagan years. The CIA set up an anti-narcotics service called-appropriately-SIN ("national intelligence service"). As one CIA man admitted, SIN used its millions in CIA subsidies mainly to suppress popular movements by means of torture and assassination. Far from combating drugs, many SIN officers engage in the drug trade themselves.
In 1990, elections were finally allowed. Haitians stunned the US by rejecting the candidate we preferred in favor of a left-wing Catholic priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The Bush administration could scarcely conceal its joy when Haiti's US-trained military deposed Aristide eight months later.
When Bill Clinton took office, he offered lip service to the idea of returning Aristide to power. Even this hypocritical posturing was too much for the CIA, who leaked a"psychological profile" that painted the courageous, dedicated Aristide as a "psychopath."
Endless waves of refugees, and US embarrassment over more than 4,000 killings by Haitian security forces, have led to even more vigorous US lip service. But if history is any indication, the chances of a government coming to power that meets the needs of the Haitian people are slim to none.
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Yugoslavia
from the book
The CIAs Greatest Hits
By Mark Zepezauer
The bloodshed and chaos that have engulfed Yugoslavia since its breakup have been portrayed as the inevitable result of bottled-up ethnic tensions. But there's considerable evidence that both the breakup and the warfare were encouraged by Western intelligence services-including Germany's BND, the successor to the Gehlen Org.
Germany's interests in the region date to World War II, when the Bosnians and Croats allied with the Nazis against the Serbs, who the Nazis regarded as untermenschen (subhumans). After Germany reunified in 1989, it began to take a more expansionist attitude toward Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia in particular. In 1990, it urged the Bush administration to help it dismantle Yugoslavia.
Bush was happy to comply, since the US had longstanding plans to overthrow Yugoslavia's government. Yugoslavia had recently renounced the market-oriented "shock treatment" prescribed for it, which had been causing social unrest, so it was a prime candidate for further destabilization.
The Germans encouraged Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia, and Bosnia soon followed. Germany immediately recognized the new nations, forcing the hand of the European Community, which had wanted to take a more cautious approach. The new Croatian state adopted the flag and anthem of its WWII Nazi puppet regime-and, in some cases, the same personnel.
Virulently fascist Croats had long been active in the World Anti-Communist League and other exile groups nurtured by the CIA. Many Eastern European Nazis had gone on to work with the CIA, either in the US or in covert operations abroad. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, many of these aging chickens came home to roost. Neofascist movements are active in Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, as well as in much of Western Europe (notably Italy).
Despite an official arms embargo against Croatia and Bosnia, Western powers immediately began covertly arming them, which would have been impossible without the knowledge and acquiescence of the CIA and the BND. Mercenaries from Britain, Germany and the US are said to be serving alongside the Croat militias-a sure sign of an ongoing covert operation. In fact, in 1994, the CIA opened a new base in Albania to monitor troop movements and "potential targets."
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