Library:Washington Bullets

Washington Bullets
Author	Vijay Prashad
Written in	2020
Type	Book
ISBN	978-81-945925-2-5
Source	Anna's Archive

Preface

This is a book about bullets, says the author. Bullets that assassinated democratic processes, that assassinated revolutions, and that assassinated hope.

The courageous Indian historian and journalist Vijay Prashad has put his all into explaining and providing a digestible and comprehensive way of understanding the sinister interest with which imperialism intervenes in countries that attempt to build their own destiny.

In the pages of this book, Prashad documents the participation of the United States in the assassination of social leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in the massacres of the people, who have refused to subsidize the delirious business dealings of multinational corporations with their poverty.

Prashad says that these Washington Bullets have a price: ‘The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor.’

Prashad provides a thorough account of how the CIA participated in the 1954 coup d’état against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Árbenz had the intolerable audacity of opposing the interests of the United Fruit Company.

In Chile, Prashad shows us how the US government spent $8 million to finance strikes and protests against Allende.

What happened in Brazil when the parliamentary coup removed president Dilma Rousseff from office in August 2016 is an example of the perverse practice of ‘lawfare’, or the ‘use of law as a weapon of war’. The same method was used against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who suffered in prison for 580 days as a result of a trial in which the prosecutors did not provide concrete evidence – just ‘firm beliefs’.

Times have changed, and business is no longer carried out in the same way, but the underlying methods and responses of imperialism have remained largely unaltered.

Bolivians know this perverse politics well. Long before our fourteen years at the head of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, we have had to confront the operations, threats, and retaliation of the United States.

In 2008, I had to expel Philip Goldberg, the ambassador of the United States, who was conspiring with separatist leaders, giving them instructions and resources to divide Bolivia. In that moment, the US Department of State said that my claims were unfounded. I don’t know what they would say now, when the participation of the US embassy in the coup that overthrew us at the end of 2019 is so clear. What will future researchers say who take up the work of reading the CIA documents that are classified today?

The Monroe Doctrine and the National Security Doctrine attempt to convert Latin America into the United States’s backyard and criminalize any type of organization that opposes its interest and that attempts to build an alternative political, economic, and social model.

Over the decades, the US has invented a series of pretexts and has built a narrative to attempt to justify its criminal political and military interventions. First, there was the justification of the fight against communism, followed by the fight against drug trafficking, and, now, the fight against terrorism.

This book brings to mind the infinite instances in which Washington Bullets have shattered hope. Colonialism has always used the idea of progress in accordance with its own parameters and its own reality. This same colonialism – which puts our planet in a state of crisis today, devours natural resources, and concentrates wealth that is generated from devastation – says that our laws of vivir bien [‘living well’] are utopian. But if our dreams of equilibrium with Pachamama [‘Mother Earth’], of freedom, and of social justice are not yet a reality, or if they have been cut short, it is primarily because imperialism has set out to interfere in our political, cultural, and economic revolutions, which promote sovereignty, dignity, peace, and fraternity among all people.

If the salvation of humanity is far away, it is because Washington insists on using its bullets against the world’s people.

We write and read these lines and this text in a moment that is extremely tense for our planet. A virus is quarantining the global economy, and capitalism – with its voracious habits and its need to concentrate wealth – is showing its limits.

It is likely that the world that will emerge from the convulsions of 2020 will not be the one that the one that we used to know. Every day, we are reminded of the duty to continue our struggle against imperialism, against capitalism, and against colonialism. We must work together towards a world in which greater respect for the people and for Mother Earth is possible. In order to do this, it is essential for states to intervene so that the needs of the masses and the oppressed are put first. We have the conviction that we are the masses. And that the masses, over time, will win.

Evo Morales Ayma, Former President of Bolivia

Buenos Aires, April 2020

Files

"I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed – far surpassed, it is true – by the barbarism of the United States." – Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955

Books and documents that detail the tragedies afflicted upon the people of the world surround me. There is a section of my library that is on the United States government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its coups – from Iran in 1953 onward, every few years, every few countries. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports make up an entire bookshelf; these tell me about the roadblocks placed before countries that try to find a way out of their poverty and inequality. I have files and files of government documents that had investigated old wars and new wars, bloodshed that destabilized countries in the service of the powerful and the rich. There are memoirs of diabolical leaders and advisors – the complete works of Henry Kissinger – and there are the writings and speeches of the people’s leaders. These words create a world. They explain why there is so much suffering around us and why that suffering leads not to struggle, but to resignation and hatred.

I reach above me and pull down a file on Guatemala. It is on the CIA coup of 1954. Why did the US destroy that small country? Because the landless movement and the Left fought to elect a democratic politician – Jacobo Árbenz – who decided to push through a moderate land reform agenda. Such a project threatened to undercut the land holding of the United Fruit Company, a US conglomerate that strangled Guatemala. The CIA got to work. It contacted retired Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, it paid off brigade commanders, created sabotage events, and then seized Árbenz in the presidential palace and sent him to exile. Castillo Armas then put Guatemala through a reign of terror. ‘If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it,’ he said later, ‘I will not hesitate to do so.’ The CIA gave him lists of Communists, people who were eager to lift their country out of poverty. They were arrested, many executed. The CIA offered Castillo Armas its benediction to kill; A Study of Assassination, the CIA’s killing manual, was handed over to his butchers. The light of hope went out in this small and vibrant country.

What other day-lit secrets of the past are sitting in my files and books? What do these stories tell us?

That when the people and their representatives tried to forge a just road forward, they were thwarted by their dominant classes, egged on by the Western forces. That what was left was a landscape of desolation. Humiliation of the older colonial past was now refracted into the modern era. At no time were the people of the Third World allowed to live in the same time as their contemporaries in the West – they were forced into an earlier time, a time with less opportunity and with less social dignity. Tall leaders of the Third World felt the cold steel of execution – Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (1961), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara in Bolivia (1967), Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987), and so many others, before, after, and in between. Entire countries – from Vietnam to Venezuela – faced obliteration through asymmetrical and hybrid wars.

This book is based on a vast amount of reading of US government documents, and documents from its allied governments and multilateral organizations, as well as the rich secondary literature written by scholars around the world. It is a book about the shadows; but it relies upon the literature of the light.

‘Bring Down More US Aircraft’

Estados Unidos: el país donde La libertad es una estatua.

United States: the country where Liberty is a statue. – Nicanor Parra, Artefactos, 1972

What is the price of an assassin’s bullet? Some dollars here and there. The cost of the bullet. The cost of a taxi ride, a hotel, an airplane, the money paid to hire the assassin, his silence purchased through a payment into a Swiss bank, the cost to him psychologically for having taken the life of one, two, three, or four. But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. A peasant leader, a trade-union leader, a leader of the poor. The assassinations become massacres, as people who are in motion are cut down. Their confidence begins to falter. Those who came from them, organized them, spoke from them, either now dead or, if not dead, too scared to stand up, too isolated, too rattled, their sense of strength, their sense of dignity, compromised by this bullet or that. In Indonesia, the price of the bullet was in the millions; in Guatemala, the tens of thousands. The death of Lumumba damaged the social dynamic of the Congo, muzzling its history. What did it cost to kill Chokri Belaïd (Tunisian, 1964– 2013) and Ruth First (South African, 1925–1982), what did it take to kill Amílcar Cabral (Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean, 1924–1973) and Berta Cáceres (Honduran, 1971–2016)? What did it mean to suffocate history so as to preserve the order of the rich? Each bullet red struck down a Revolution and gave birth to our present barbarity. This is a book about bullets.

Many of these bullets are red by people who have their own parochial interests, their petty rivalries and their small-minded gains. But more often than not, these have been Washington’s bullets. These are bullets that have been shined by the bureaucrats of the world order who wanted to contain the tidal wave that swept from the October Revolution of 1917 and the many waves that whipped around the world to form the anti-colonial movement. The first wave crested in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in Eastern Europe, and it was this wave that provoked the Cold War and the East–West conflict; the other wave went from Vietnam and China to Cuba, from Indonesia to Chile, and this wave engendered the far more deadly North–South or West– South conflict. It was clear to the United States, as the leader of the West, that no muscular conflict would be possible along the East–West axis, that once the USSR (1949) and China (1964) tested their nuclear weapons no direct war would be possible. The battlefield moved from along the Urals and the Caucasus into Central and South America, into Africa, and into Asia – into, in other words, the South. Here, in the South where raw materials are in abundance, decolonization had become the main framework by the 1940s. Washington’s bullets that pointed towards the USSR remained unused, but its bullets were red into the heart of the South. It was in the battlefields of the South that Washington pushed against Soviet influence and against the national liberation projects, against hope and for profit. Liberty was not to be the watchword of the new nations that broke away from formal colonialism; liberty is the name of a statue in New York harbour.

Imperialism is powerful: it attempts to subordinate people to maximize the theft of resources, labour, and wealth. Anyone who denies the absolute obscenity of imperialism needs to find another answer to the fact that the richest 22 men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa, or that the richest one per cent have more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people. You would have to have an answer for the reason why we continue to suffer from hunger, illiteracy, sickness, and indignities of various kinds. You could not simply say that there are no resources to solve these problems, given that tax havens hold at least $32 trillion – more than the total value of gold that has been brought to the surface. It is easy to bomb a country; harder yet to solve the pressing problems of its peoples. Imperialism’s only solution to these problems is to intimidate people and to create dissension amongst people.

But liberty cannot be so easily contained. That is why, despite the odds, people continue to aspire for alternatives, continue to organize themselves, continue to attempt to win a new world – all this despite the possibility of failure. If you do not risk failure, you cannot taste the fruit of victory.

On 2 September 1945, Hồ Chí Minh appeared before a massive crowd in Hanoi. He had never before been to the capital, but he was known by everyone there. ‘Countrymen,’ he asked, ‘can you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?’ A few weeks before, in Tân Trào, the National Congress of People’s Representatives laid out the agenda for the new Vietnam. At that meeting, Hồ Chí Minh said, ‘The aim of the National Liberation Committee and all the delegates is to win independence for our country – whatever the cost – so that our children would have enough to eat, would have enough to wear, and could go to school. That’s the primary goal of our revolution.’ The people in Hanoi, and across Vietnam, knew exactly what Hồ Chí Minh was saying; they could hear him, and they could understand him. His slogan was food, clothes, and education.

To feed, clothe, and educate one’s population requires resources. Vietnam’s revolution meant that it would no longer allow its own social wealth to drain away to France and to the West. The Vietnamese government, led by Hồ Chí Minh, wanted to use that wealth to address the centuries-old deprivations of the Vietnamese peasantry. But this is precisely what imperialism could not tolerate. Vietnamese labour was not for its own advancement; it was to provide surplus value for Western capitalists, in particular for the French bourgeoisie. Vietnam’s own development could not be the priority of the Vietnamese; it was Vietnam’s priority to see to the aggrandizement of France and the rest of the imperialist states. That is why the French – in cahoots with the Vietnamese monarchy and its underlings – went to war against the Vietnamese people. This French war against Vietnam would run from 1946 to 1954, and then the mantle of war-making would be taken up by the United States of America till its defeat in 1975. During the worst of the US bombing of the northern part of Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh went on a tour of air defences. He was already in his late 70s. His comrades asked after his health. ‘Bring down more US aircraft,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be in the best of health.’

Washington’s bullets are sleek and dangerous. They intimidate and they create loyalties out of fear. Their antidote is hope, the kind of hope that came to us in 1964 as the Colombian civil war opened a new phase, and the poet Jotamario Arbeláez (translated by Nicolás Suescún) sang of another future –

a day

after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

I will hold you in my arms

a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war I have arms

and I will make love to you with love

a day after the war

if there is a war

if after the war there is a day

if after the war there is love

and if there is what it takes to make love.

Part 1

Divine Right

Divine right is an old, established principle. It means that Kings have the right – ordained by God – to act in any way that they wish. Human-made laws are of no consequence beside the awesome power of God, and God’s representative, namely the monarch.

In Delhi, towards the end of the 16th century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar began to have doubts about the idea of divine right. He established a translation bureau (maktab khana), where he asked intellectuals to read deeply into all religious traditions. ‘the pillars of blind following were demolished,’ wrote Akbar’s biographer Abu’l Fazl. ‘A new era of research and enquiry to religious matters commenced.’ Part of the emergence of a nonreligious idea of sovereignty was the sense that the Emperor had to rule for the people, not based on his own God-given right. ‘Tyranny is unlawful in everyone, especially in a sovereign who is the guardian of the world,’ wrote Abu’l Fazl in Ain-i-Akbari (1590).

Nine years later, the Spanish historian Juan de Mariana wrote De rege et regis institutione (1598), which made the case that the people – he meant mainly the nobles – ‘are able to call a king to account’.

Abu’l Fazl and de Mariana had sniffed the mood. Peasant rebellions had their impact. Their pitchforks were sharp; their anger a tidal wave.

Sovereignty gradually went from God and King to People.

A generation later, Louis XIV of France said – L’État c’est moi, the State is Me. His descendants would be guillotined.

Preponderant Power

On 6 August 1945, the United States military dropped a bomb that contained 64 kg of uranium-235 over the city of Hiroshima (Japan). The bomb took just over 44 seconds to fall from 9,400 metres and detonated 580 metres above the Shima Surgical Clinic. Over 80,000 people died instantly. This was the first use of the nuclear bomb.

Four days later, Satsuo Nakata brought the Domei New Agency’s Leica camera to the city. He took 32 photographs of the devastation; each of these pictures – archived in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – is iconic. The force of the bomb flattened the city, even though less than two per cent of the uranium detonated. Nakata took a picture of the office of the newspaper Chugoku Shimbun and of the Odamasa kimono store. The store’s metal twisted into a whirlwind. It is a sign of the power of this weapon. As Sankichi Toge, a hibakusha (survivor of the atom bomb) and poet, wrote of that power and its impact, as the fires burnt down from the bomb’s power in a city of 350,000: ‘the only sound – the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins’.

Between 1944 and 1946, Paul Nitze had been the director and then Vice Chairman of the US government’s Strategic Bombing Survey. He began this work in Europe, but then went to Japan shortly after the war ended. Nitze later said that he had believed that the war would have been won ‘even without the atomic bomb’. This is the thesis he hoped to prove during his time in Japan. The destruction he saw was breathtaking; it resembled the European cities that had faced conventional bombardment. As his biographer Strobe Talbott wrote, Nitze ‘believed that the measurements of the Survey at Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the effects to be roughly the equivalent of an incendiary bombing raid’. The Japanese generals and businessmen he interviewed told him that they would eventually have surrendered but that the atom bomb certainly made further war impossible. In November 1945, Nitze met Baron Hiranuma Kiichiro, the president of the Privy Council. On 26 July 1945, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China issued the Potsdam Declaration that called on Japan to surrender or else it would face ‘prompt and utter destruction’. Kiichiro said he was moved by this threat to urge his fellow members of the Privy Council to surrender. He failed to carry the day. A week later, on 6 and 9 August, the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito surrendered on 15 August. Kiichiro told Nitze that the ‘biggest factor’ for the Japanese surrender was ‘the atomic bomb’. The country, he said, ‘was faced with terrible destructive powers and Japan’s ability to wage war was really at an end’.

The immense authority of the atomic bomb had an impact on the Washington bureaucrats, even those who might have felt uneasy about its use. Nitze was one of them. He would have preferred that the atomic bomb not be used; but once used, saw its utility. It is why he would urge the US government to expand its massive arsenal. The point would not be to actually attack the USSR, but to ensure that the USSR was – as the US diplomat George F. Kennan said – contained, and then eventually rolled back. Nitze, more than Kennan, would shape US foreign policy for decades. With his team at the US State Department in 1952, Nitze formulated the clear objective of US power after the Second World War. The liberals in the US government, he said, tend to ‘underestimate US capabilities’; he did not, since he had seen it as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey. He introduced a word – preponderant – that would become part of the formula of US policy planners. ‘To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat,’ Nitze’s staff wrote in 1952. ‘Preponderant power must be the objective of US policy.’

The word ‘preponderant’ comes from Latin. It means to weigh more. The King is always worth his weight in gold. Now the United States claims the scale, its weight bolstered by the payloads dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Trusteeship

Old colonial masters liked to think that they were directed by God to bring peace and civilization to the world. That idea of the colonizer as the peacemaker and the lawgiver shuffled into the grand discourses of modern international law. Natives were fractious, unable to be governed by reason; they needed their masters to help them, to be their trustees. The League of Nations Covenant (1919) assembled the lands of the natives into ‘trusteeships’, so that their masters could believe that their domination was sanctified by law. It was in Article 16 of the Covenant that the ‘peace loving nations’ – namely the imperialists – said that they had the ‘obligation’ to maintain peace and security.

European hypocrisy over terms like ‘peace’ was by then clear to the colonized world. The League of Nations Covenant was signed on 28 June 1919. A few months earlier, on 13 April 1919, British troops conducted a massacre in Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar, India), where a mass meeting was being held in opposition to the authoritarian Defence of India Act of 1915. As many as a thousand people were killed on that one day. They were holding a peaceful meeting. The ‘peace loving nations’ murdered them. This was despite the fact that ‘India’ was a member of the League. Well, as the Indian papers – such as Rajkaran (November 1919) – understood immediately, ‘England secured a vote for India on the League of Nations in order to be able to command a larger number of votes.’ There was no benefit for India ‘in any way’.

The United States signed the Covenant. So did Nicaragua and Haiti. In 1909, the US had intervened in Nicaragua to overthrow President José Santos Zelaya who had ambitions of creating a Federal Republic of Central America. Such a project of regional unity was unacceptable to the US, which wanted to carve out a canal through Nicaragua to unite the two oceans (when the US turned its attention to Panama, Zelaya asked the Germans if they would be interested in a canal; this was a fatal error for him). The departure of Zelaya opened up space in Nicaragua for nationalists, including in the military. When they rose up in the Mena Rebellion in 1912, the US marines returned – and remained until 1933.

Haiti, which, like Nicaragua, was in the League of Nations, saw its people rise up against the pro-US dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, whose death in the streets of Port-au-Prince gave the US the excuse to send in the marines; they remained in Haiti till 1934. Fifteen thousand to thirty thousand Haitians died in the repression, though this did not stop a peasant rebellion in 1919–20 and a series of strikes in 1929. The leader of part of this unrest – Charlemagne Masséna Péralte (1886–1919) – and his band of cacos fought to defend the Haitian people’s rights. He was shot in the heart by a US marine. Péralte was Haiti’s Sandino, the Nicaraguan revolutionary who met a similar fate in 1934. Every institution in Haiti was hollowed out, their functions subordinated to the United States.

A ‘peace loving nation’ invaded two other members of the League in the name of peace. But these exceptions were already baked into the Covenant. It said quite clearly, ‘Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements, such as . . . regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine, for securing the maintenance of peace.’ The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which the US understood as its right to the hemisphere, was quite legal since it allowed the imperialists a right to its dominions.

Japan’s representative to the League of Nations meeting was Baron Makino Nobuaki. His speech at the Versailles conference – tinged with naiveté – put forward a ‘proposal to abolish racial discrimination’. Nobuaki’s brief was narrow, as made clear by Foreign Minister Viscount Uchida Yasuya; this proposal would only apply to the members of the League of Nations, and not to the colonized territories. But even this principle was too much. Australia had officially adopted a White Australia Policy in 1901. Its Prime Minister William Morris Hughes would not tolerate such a proposal at the League. Both Britain and the United States of America agreed. The Japanese proposal fell by the wayside. Baron Nobuaki returned home furious; he was a patron of the ultra-nationalist groups whose role drove Japan towards its wars of aggression in Asia.

‘International Law Has to Treat Natives as Uncivilized’

In the days of colonialism, there was no need for any justication. If a colonial power wanted to invade a territory, it could do so at will. Other colonial powers could object – and sometimes did – but this objection did not come on behalf of those who were being overrun; it came out of the competitive feeling between colonial powers. In 1884–85, the imperialist powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa. European powers and the United States vied for ‘effective occupation’ and ‘spheres of inuence’, phrases that disguised the brute and cruel seizure of lands and the suppression of people’s aspirations. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States carved out the landscape. A decade later, only Ethiopia, Morocco, and the Sultanates of Majeerteen and Hobyo remained relatively independent. Within decades France and Spain would seize Morocco, and the two Sultanates would be taken by Italy, which would later ght a severe war against Ethiopia to seize it in 1936. All this was done through a legal framework which disenfranchised an entire continent to serve the needs of Europe and the United States.

John Westlake, the Cambridge University professor who pioneered international law and would later be a Liberal Member of Parliament, wrote in his 1894 textbook International Law,

[I]nternational law has to treat natives as uncivilised. It regulates, for the mutual benefit of civilised states, the claims which they make to sovereignty over the region and leaves the treatment of natives to the conscience of the state to which the sovereignty is awarded, rather than sanction their interest being made an excuse the more for war between civilised claimants, devastating the region and the cause of suffering to the natives themselves.

To protect the natives, in other words, they must give up their land and resources to the colonizers, who must themselves come to an understanding through international law so that they do not go to war with each other; it is to the benefit of the natives that they surrender and watch the imperialists divide up the loot. That’s the highest point of imperialist international law, which burrows itself into the conceptual framework of present-day international laws.

Legal fictions hovered over conquest, but there was no such disquiet over the massacres of entire peoples and cultures.

The First Geneva Convention (1864) emerged out of a sense of outrage at the large numbers of Europeans killed in battles in Europe. Two particular engagements disgusted the European public: the conflict in Crimea between 1853 and 1856, which claimed over 300,000 lives, and the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which claimed 40,000 lives in a single day. Out of these two wars came the First Geneva Convention and the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded (later the International Committee of the Red Cross). This law and this institution set the moral framework for warfare.

It would all fall apart during the First World War, when the technology of war eclipsed any moral framework. Chemical weapons and aerial bombardment removed the ‘honour’ in warfare, making combat a matter of technological superiority rather than bravery. The impact of aerial bombardment was the most significant, since it meant that the divide between combatant and civilians began to dissolve in front of the technological ability to bomb civilian areas far behind the front lines of the battlefield. Further Geneva Conventions (1929, 1949) would follow, each trying to ameliorate the harshness of the new technologies of death. The Nazis had no qualms about civilian deaths, the prelude being the bombing of Guernica (Spain) in 1937. But the Allies were no less harsh. In 1942, the British government acknowledged that its bombing was to damage ‘the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, the industrial workers’. The 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden (Germany) is practice to the 1942 theory. The US novelist Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden as a Prisoner of War. Later, he wrote a devastating book about the bombing called Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The dead littered the city. ‘There were too many corpses to bury,’ Vonnegut wrote. ‘So instead the Nazis sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians’ remains were burned to ashes.’

The new technology of warfare – and the Holocaust – demanded that the West create the United Nations, and the UN Charter (1945). Europe had widened the jaws of hell for itself. Hell, on the other hand, had always been the condition in the colonies and for the colonized.

Thirteen hundred West African soldiers from Benin to Togo who had fought in the French army, been captured by the Nazis and held in a concentration camp, been freed and brought back to another concentration camp at Thiaroye outside Dakar, mutinied in November 1944 against the way they were being treated. They had seen the bombings and the brutality; they had thought they were on their way home to collect their war pensions. Instead, the French betrayed them, as colonialism always does. Their revolt was a cry into the dark. French soldiers opened fire and killed hundreds of them. In 1988, the brilliant Senegalese filmmaker Sembène Ousmane made a film – Camp de Thairoye – about this massacre. One of the key characters in the film is Pays, who suffers from the traumas of war, what used to be called shell shock; he cannot speak but can only grunt and scream. He is on guard duty. He watches the tanks circle the camp and tries to tell his fellow soldiers that the Nazis are back to kill them. His comrades say that he is crazy. The French tanks open fire. The Africans are all slaughtered.

‘Savage Tribes Do Not Conform to the Codes of Civilized Warfare’

Young Winston Churchill went off to fight in ‘a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples’. In the Swat Valley, in today’s Pakistan, Churchill and his troops mowed down local resistance with extreme violence. When he reflected on that murderous war, he wrote that his troops had to be bloody because the people of Swat had a ‘strong aboriginal propensity to kill’. The French borrowed a distinctly American word, gook, first used in the Philippines, for their war in Algeria, sending in their troops on gook hunts. It is the native who is the savage. The colonizer is civilized, even in his brutality. The colonizer can never be the terrorist. It is always the savage who is the terrorist.

Discussions around the First Geneva Convention in 1864 made no mention of the colonial wars. There was nothing about the terrible repression against the Indian uprising of 1857, nothing about the savagery in the crackdown against uprisings of enslaved people in the Americas, silence about the genocidal killings of indigenous peoples in Australia and the Americas – silence.

The silence would run through the Geneva Conventions, from 1864 through 1929 and into 1949. ere is nothing to cite here to show that there is this silence – only that there are no references to any colonial wars in these laws of war. It was only in 1977 – as Additional Protocol I – that the Geneva process acknowledged that wars of national liberation were to be considered as armed conflicts under the framework of the Conventions, and therefore to be subjected to international law. But that was only because the formerly colonized, newly independent states in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – formed in 1961 – fought to bring in this addition.

Till this happened, in the colonies, all interventions were legal, all attacks and massacres were legal. If the natives misbehaved, the colonizer could do what they wanted. The term ‘gunboat diplomacy’ exemplifies the nature of the lawlessness. Sometimes the liberal conscience had to confront its own brutality. Then, justifications had to be conjured up. In 1923, British officials in London worried about the harshness of their operations in Afghanistan. But after a brief discussion, they concurred that international law – the Geneva Conventions – was not applicable ‘against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare’. This was Westlake’s 1894 textbook in a war bureaucrat’s 1923 notes.

King Leopold II of Belgium and his genocidal regime in the Congo – which killed at least ten million people in a decade – was an embarrassment to the European project. He had to relinquish control of the Congo in 1908. But that is because he was too extreme. The principle that European colonizers could be lawless in the colonies was not challenged – the quality of lawless colonialism remained, only the quantity of dead became the scandal.

Later, when technology produced the ability to kill from the skies, anxiety remained for a brief instant and then was quickly shunted; the colonizers saw aerial bombardment as a way to bring civilization to the natives. The Italians were the first to bomb human beings from the air, when they bombed Libya in October 1911, just a few years after Leopold was removed from the Congo. Some newspapers complained. The Daily Chronicle described the scene vividly: ‘Non-combatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.’ The use of the legal word ‘non-combatants’ is significant. The editor of the paper – Robert Donald – tolerated war, but not slaughter. The Italian air force, which saw the value of the bombing, wrote in its communiqué from the field that the bombs ‘had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs’, namely that the Arabs were terrified of the colonizers. Robert Donald’s British air force would mirror the Italians in the campaigns against the Iraqis in 1924. British jurist J.M. Spaight wrote in Air Power and War Rights (1924) that aerial bombardment has ‘almost limitless possibilities’. ‘It can turn the old, crude, hideous, blood-letting business into an almost bloodless surgery of forcible international adjustment.’ The swift and deadly bombing runs shift the balance of forces so that ‘international adjustment’, or surrender of the native, could be hastened. That is what passed for the laws of war when these related to the colonized people.

That brutality would run long past the creation of the United Nations, long past the slogan of ‘never again’ that came out of disgust at the Holocaust. During Britain’s genocidal war in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, the colonial police chief Ian Henderson led the most brutal pseudo-gangster operation. Henderson’s book – published to great acclaim in 1958 – was called Man Hunt in Kenya; he was after terrorists and savages, and his attitude was fully in the saddle as he prosecuted one of the ugliest colonial wars of the 20th century. In 1976, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo dramatized the trial of Dedan Kimathi – the leader of the Mau Mau rebellion, who Henderson had captured. They meet in the cell – the national liberation leader Kimathi and the colonial policeman Henderson. ‘Look, between the two of us,’ Henderson says, ‘we don’t need to pretend. Nations live by strength and self-interest. You challenged our interests. We had to defend them. It is to our mutual interest and for our good that we must end this ugly war.’ Kimathi responds, ‘Do you take me for a fool?’

‘I am a Kenyan revolutionary,’ Kimathi said – a human being who stands against the lawless colonial wars. Before Kimathi was executed, he told his wife Mukami, ‘[M]y blood will water the tree of independence.’

Natives and the Universal

Gradually, and with intensity, the movements for national liberation grew across the colonized world. These movements did not merely demand political freedom against colonial regimes. We are part of the human race, they said, and therefore we are part of universal ideas of freedom and humanity. I am a Kenyan revolutionary, said Kimathi, but what he meant was also that I am a human being. No such ideas as that of ‘the savage’ could be used to remove those who had been colonized from universal principles. This was the essence of the resolutions that emerged from the League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels in 1927–28. The political resolution amplified this demand with its anger at the ‘reign of terror’ and ‘brutal measures of repression’ used against the national liberation movements from Nicaragua to India. Nothing, it was felt, can stand in the way of the demands of humanity to walk freely onto the stage of history.

Over the decades that followed, the national liberation movements grew in strength, endured the vicious attacks by the imperialists, and developed their own understanding of the essential unity of humanity. The racism of colonialism was not to be mirrored in the national liberation movements, which fought for universality and not for their own particular advancement.

The 1941 Atlantic Charter, pushed by US President F.D. Roosevelt, came with all the high-minded principles of universality that mirrored the demands of the national liberation movements. But, like US President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points (1918), Roosevelt’s Charter was more bombast than reality. Anxiousness about anti-colonialism impacted the highest reaches of the imperialists – Wilson worried about the 1911 revolutions in China, Iran, and Mexico, as well as the 1917 Russian Revolution; Roosevelt saw history in the face, and it revealed that anti-colonialism would prevail after the Second World War ended. British Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee went before a group of West African students – electric with their hope for freedom from colonialism – in 1941 to say, ‘The Atlantic Charter: it means dark races as well. Coloured people as well as white will share the benefits of the Churchill–Roosevelt Atlantic Charter.’ His Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not share this view. In 1942, he announced as the Allies landed in North Africa, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Imperialists had to acknowledge the rising power of national liberation, but they were not going to give in without a brutal fight.

Just as Hồ Chí Minh announced freedom for Indochina in 1945, French troops returned to re-take the region, as they did in Algeria. The British would fight brutally to hold on to Malaya and Kenya but would accept the partition of India as long as their airbases in northern Pakistan remained untouched. Flag freedom was permitted, but the newly freed countries were under economic and political pressure to hastily join up to the imperialist military alliances. In 1965, after he had been overthrown in a coup, Ghana’s first leader Kwame Nkrumah wrote a book called Neo-colonialism; that was the mood of the new period. The principle contradiction in the years after 1945 was not along the axis of West–East – the Cold War – but North–South – the imperialist war against de-colonization.

Roosevelt saw that the structural basis of the North–South divide, or more properly the West–South divide, was war. When he visited Gambia, then a British colony, in 1943 after the Casablanca Conference with Churchill, Roosevelt noted, ‘The thing is, the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements – all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.’ This was not all high moral principle, but an acknowledgement of reality. Roosevelt had seen this pressure from Latin America, which moved him to the Good Neighbor Policy of 1933 that pledged nonintervention in the hemisphere in exchange for drawing resources towards the war effort. Pressure from the national liberation movements and the resistance to intervention (in Nicaragua and Haiti) forced the imperialists to come to terms with the changing balance of forces. Even Gambia, which is not often considered a major front line of the anti-colonial movement, was home to the Bathurst Trade Union, which – with some assistance from the League Against Imperialism – led a general strike in 1929–30. This strike startled London, where the officials hastily tried to control the situation by recognizing the rights of trade unions and trying to buy off union leaders (through the Passfield Memorandum of 1930). But, as the Communist leader George Padmore wrote in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), these strikes – including in Gambia – were ‘taking on more and more of an anti-imperialist character’.

The native said it was part of the universal. That had to be recognized.

UN Charter

In 1945, the United Nations came into existence. At the founding meeting in San Francisco, a Charter was drafted which articulated the highest principles of statecraft and international relations. The UN Charter drew from the failed efforts of the League of Nations, whose own documents struggled to come to terms with the complexities of universal jurisdiction and the reality of a colonized world.

On the ashes of Dresden and Hiroshima, the Allies fashioned the United Nations. Power was to be held by the five permanent members of the Security Council – China, France, the USSR, United Kingdom, and the United States. The UN Charter adopted the League of Nations’s concern with how the ‘great powers’ must be responsible for international security. In Article 39 of the Charter, the powers agreed that it would be the UN Security Council which would ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression’ in the world. In the Council, the five permanent members would have a veto over the overall decision-making; it was a Council of the five rather than of the 51 founding members of the UN. In Article 41, the Charter goes on that it is the Security Council that ‘may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions’. The UN said that these measures could include ‘complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of air, rail, sea, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations’. This is the long form of the legal justification for the sanctions policy that would become harshest in our time.

If these did not work, Article 42 under Chapter VII allowed the ‘member states’ to use armed force against sovereign nations. Some ‘member states’ had more power than the others. One sought preponderant power. That was the United States.

It is important to recognize that the UN Charter provided the legal framework for lawless interventionism. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and not the almost two hundred states in the UN General Assembly, have the power to decide when and how to intervene against sovereign states.

From 1945 to 1989, the USSR operated as an umbrella against the fully lawless usage of these UN loopholes, these mechanisms to offer the old colonial states a back door to continue their colonial wars in a modern form. The importance of this shield was evident within the first decade of the UN’s operations. The USSR boycotted the Security Council because the UN did not replace the Nationalist Chinese delegate with the delegate from the People’s Republic of China; during this period, the West weaponized the UN to authorize its intervention into South Korea against the Communist forces in the north. The USSR reversed its boycott as a consequence of this inability to veto the UN’s action. It returned to the UN. The first 56 vetoes in the UN Security Council were made by the USSR. The importance of the shield comes mainly on the anti-colonial, national liberation question. It was the USSR that used its veto to defend the process of national liberation, from the struggles of the Palestinians to the struggles in South Rhodesia, from the South African freedom struggle to the liberation war in Vietnam.

In 1953, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. went to the United Nations as the United States ambassador. He was horrified by the way in which the new nations that came out of colonialism had a positive attitude towards the USSR. Lodge created a Psychological Strategy Board to advise him in how to make the Soviets appear like the imperialists. Arthur M. Cox, who would later head the Brookings Institute, wrote negatively of Lodge’s plans. ‘I think we have made a great mistake as a nation of assuming that because Soviet power and subversion is the greatest problem facing us today,’ he wrote in a memorandum in 1953, ‘it is therefore the greatest problem facing everybody else.’ Cox was a liberal who respected reality. ‘No amount of horror stories demonstrating the crimes of the Kremlin will convince millions of people in the free world that Soviet-inspired Communism is their main problem because they know,’ he said sharply, ‘that it is not.’ Lodge was deaf to this. He understood that if the United States battered the USSR by using its vast cultural apparatus – from the media to the films – it could succeed. Paint the Soviets as the imperialists, went the final programme of the Psychological Strategy Board, call them the ‘new colonialists’. ‘While the Soviet Union preaches its concern for the liberation of dependent peoples,’ the US officials wrote, ‘it has ruthlessly converted every territory over which it has acquired domination into a vassal of the Soviet state.’ This was written in August 1953, while the CIA overthrew the democratic leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

‘I am for America’

The term used at the US State Department in its early years is ‘hub and spokes’. The United States is the hub, and its allies are the spokes. In the first decade after the Second World War, France and Britain – the two old imperial powers – thought they could regain their place of primacy. This was not to be. Both France and Britain prosecuted debilitating colonial wars, from Malaya to Algeria, from Vietnam to Guiana. Key here was the rise of Arab nationalism, which threatened old colonial power; Nasser’s Egypt gave support to the Algerian revolutionary struggles against the French, and to the Iraqi rumbles against the old king. These forces of national liberation had to be cut down if the old colonial countries were to maintain their power. The gambit by France and the United Kingdom to assert power over the Suez Canal and to dent the role of Arab national liberation – with the assistance of Israel – failed them in 1956; it was the last gasp of Europe leading the way. The United States was furious. It punished the old world and took advantage of the situation to assert its authority. Both Britain and France took their places as spokes around the US hub.

Of all the major industrial powers, the United States had been least damaged by the depredations of the Second World War. None of its cities had been hit by bombs, and none of its considerable productive base had been destroyed; its scientists and engineers advanced their skills to increase productivity in US manufacturing and to develop swiftly the technological capacity to sweep ahead of the rest of the world. The total US casualties in the Second World War stood at just over 400,000. Without question, the US – with its massive industrial and technological advantages, and its military power – emerged after the Second World War as the pre-eminent power; it was not a stretch for Nitze to call for ‘preponderant power’, eternal power over the planet.

Meanwhile, just in the Battle of Stalingrad, 1.2 million Soviet citizens were killed. Soviet manufacturing was hit hard, as the Nazis bombed the industrial base of the USSR. Close to 32,000 industrial enterprises were put out of production during the Second World War; this was over 80 per cent of the manufacturing base located in the key areas of Belorussia and Ukraine. What manufacturing was hastily shifted into western Siberia was mainly for war production. Capital stock fell by 30 per cent. By 1942, two-thirds of Soviet national income was allocated to the war effort, with household consumption falling from 74 per cent of national income in 1940 to 66 per cent of a much-lowered national income by 1945. At the end of the war, the average Soviet citizen lost 25 years of earnings due to the cost of war. When offered a very small amount of the Marshall Plan – less than what was given to Germany, the key belligerent of the war – the USSR declined the money and relied upon its own population to generate resources. The USSR was in no position to exert its power across the world, except through the prestige gained by the Soviet people for their stubborn resistance to the Nazi blitzkrieg and through the global impact of Communists in the anti-fascist resistance.

Not only was Europe destroyed and the USSR weakened, but so too were vast stretches of North Africa and Asia. As the war began to end, it became clear that the United States would emerge as the most powerful country: its industrial heartland was robust, its currency was strong, and its cultural industries had not suffered from the trauma of warfare.

A year before the World War ended, in 1944, the United States welcomed government officials from around the world to Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) for a conference on the new world order. It was clear that this was not a conference of equals, but it was a meeting to dictate terms of surrender. The future of Europe had to be settled first before the US could tackle the rest of the world. Europe was not only bankrupt, but its various currencies had no value (many of them had been yoked to the Nazi Reichsmark); the United States pegged European currencies to the Dollar, which was then pegged to the price of gold (at the rate of $35 per ounce). Out of this conference came the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their purpose was to rebuild a destroyed world and to stabilize capitalist turbulence.

At Bretton Woods, the US delegation came to undermine European power. Already in Article VII of the Lend-Lease Agreement in February 1942, the United States had made it clear to the British that their ‘imperial preferences’ system, whereby Britain dominated the economic lives of its colonies to the detriment of other colonial powers, had to end. Britain, in debt and despair, would have to take its place just behind the United States, not ahead of it. Senator Robert Wagner, who was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, told the US Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau and his associate Harry Dexter White at Bretton Woods that the European quotas in the Bank and Fund must not be increased because they still have colonies. White said, ‘I think the Queen of the Netherlands would be very disturbed if you did anything [with regard to the Dutch East Indies].’ Wagner answered, ‘The Queen? She is a Queen, but she is not my Queen. I am for America.’ In February 1947, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said, ‘There are only two powers left. The British are finished.’ He might as well have said all the old colonial powers are slowly dying off; with the Soviets in grave trouble, it was more accurate to say that the United States had emerged out of the war as first amongst unequals.

In 1947, George C. Marshall, the US Secretary of State, gave a lecture at Harvard University about what would be called the Marshall Plan. The United States would pledge $12 billion to the Europeans to redevelop their continent. Meanwhile, the US urged the European states to form some kind of political unity, ‘some agreement among the countries of Europe’, Marshall said. Pressure from the US led to the creation of the Committee for European Economic Co-operation, which – in 1948 – would become the Organization of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), one of the first major pan-Western European bodies. ‘Europe’ was born at Harvard.

Little doubt that by the time Nitze wrote his memorandum in 1952, the United States had exercised ‘preponderant power’ over Western Europe. In 1949, at the initiative of the United States, Western European powers joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); NATO was the military aspect of European unification under the US umbrella, a move – as Acheson said – ‘completely outside our history’.

There was no partnership here. The US dictated the terms. It had the money, and it had the industrial capacity.

Lord John Maynard Keynes went to both Bretton Woods and then to Savannah (Georgia) to sign the terms of the surrender. He asked if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank could at least be situated in New York, so that they would not be under the full influence of the US Treasury Department. US Treasury Secretary Fred Vinson said that they would have to be in Washington, DC; ‘this was a final decision the merits of which they were not prepared to discuss’. Lord Keynes, distraught, went back home to London and died.

Western Europe was now one of the spokes for the projection of US power.

Solidarity with the United States against Communism

Treaty organizations were the mechanism for the creation of the spokes. The pioneer was the Organization of American States (OAS), set up in 1948 inside what the United States had long considered its ‘backyard’. The first meeting of the OAS was held in Bogotá (Colombia); it left no doubt as to who was in charge when its headquarters were established in Washington, DC, at the old Pan-American Union building. On 1 November 1947, a CIA memorandum worried about ‘Soviet objectives in Latin America’. This worry defined the formation of the OAS. US Secretary of State Marshall did not come to Colombia with only a cheque book; he came with the full arsenal of anti-communism that had swept Washington, DC.

As Marshall sat with leaders of some of the hemispheric states, on 9 April 1948 a gunman shot to death Jorge Gaitán, a presidential candidate who was the champion of Colombia’s poor; not far away, a World Bank mission led by its president John J. McCloy was in town to provide the intellectual cover not for a Marshall Plan but for the entrapment of Colombia’s economy into the web of US transnational corporations and of the bank accounts of the Colombian oligarchy. People took to the streets of Bogotá, angered by the assassination of Gaitán; their unrest is known as the Bogotazo. Marshall, inside the OAS meeting, said that these protests were ‘the first important communist attempt in the Western hemisphere’. He was wrong about that. It was another gasp of a country that faced from 1948 a terrible phase of violence known – precisely – as La Violencia; the Colombian oligarchy simply would not permit the masses to enter history, and so they used the full arsenal of state power to execute hope from their country. In the name of anti-Communism, the Colombian oligarchy subordinated itself to Washington, DC.

The Conference centre was ‘completely gutted’, Marshall noted. ‘Conference records and equipment destroyed.’ The city, he told the delegates who met in the residence of the Honduran delegate, is in ‘shambles and fires still burning’. While he spoke, the Colombian ruling class united to form a Conservative-Liberal government and arrested the Communists, who were later released for lack of evidence. Nonetheless, a 1949 US Council on Foreign Relations study pressed the case saying, ‘[I]t was clear that the Communists took advantage of the outbreak if they did not actually start it. They did their best to disrupt and discredit the conference.’ The US played its hand effectively. ‘Many Latin American governments were genuinely concerned over the threat of communism to the existing order. Practically all of them saw that they could lose nothing and might gain something by declaring their solidarity with the United States against communism.’ The Final Act of the Ninth International Conference of American States, Bogotá, signed by the ruling classes of Latin America, pledged to ‘prevent agents at the service of international communism or any totalitarian doctrine from seeking to distort the true and the free will of the peoples of this continent’, namely to be governed by a caste of the oligarchy. Then, at the end of the Final Act, comes the language of epidemics – the oligarchies of Latin America will ‘proceed with a full exchange of information’ about Communists and take ‘measures necessary to eradicate and prevent activities’ of the Communists. To eradicate is a word that takes on especial meaning given the pogroms against the Left in the hemisphere.

A few days before Gaitán’s assassination, two young Cubans were arrested in Bogotá for distributing leaflets that wanted to revive hope in their region. Their leaflets called for four objectives: the overthrow of the vicious dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the independence of Puerto Rico, the return of the Malvinas islands from Britain to Argentina, and an end to US control of the Panama Canal. These were basic demands of the era of anti-colonialism. The two students were Fidel Castro and Rafael del Pino Siero. They had come to Bogotá to help organize a Latin American student meeting. When they were released, they heard that Gaitán had been killed. Fidel, wielding an iron bar, joined the protest. ‘These experiences,’ he later told Katiuska Blanco Castiñeira, ‘taught me about the mass struggle.’

The OAS, the Latin American oligarchs, and the US government (through multilateral agencies like the World Bank) set the terms for the hemisphere and for its spokes. These came swiftly around the world. The US initiated the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 (the Manila Pact), and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955 (the Baghdad Pact). These ‘treaty organizations’ were created to yoke in the post-colonial states into a close embrace with the United States, and to encircle the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Korea. In February 1950, the USSR and the PRC signed a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This is what had to be undermined.

‘No Communist in Gov. or Else’

Spokes had to be fashioned. This was class warfare. The classes that favoured imperialism were frequently the old aristocracies, the landed oligarchy, and the emerging capitalists; they were joined by forces of tradition – such as hierarchical religious orders – that understood clearly that they would be pushed aside by socialism and communism. The factory owner, the baron, the landlord, and the priest rushed to assist and be assisted by the CIA and its friends. It is these groups that colluded with the imperialist forces to overcome their class adversaries. It was class against class in the immediate years after the Second World War, with the CIA helping the ruling elites to maintain their property and privilege against democracy. The spokes were made in this class war.

If the parties of the workers and peasants came near power, or if they took power, and if they defied the rule of the imperialists, they would have to be prevented or ejected from office. The most common instruments used by the United States – without any mandate from the UN or by international law – were interference in elections and the coup d’état.

Those that appeared to be obvious allies had to be brought into line. It was too bad for imperialism that their natural allies in Europe had collaborated with the Nazis, while their decisive enemies – the Communists – had played heroic roles in the fight against Nazism. The Communists – from France to Yugoslavia – had the highest level of popularity. In this class war, the Communists had to be destroyed and the old social elites – even the Nazis – had to be reinstated to power. In West Germany, the CIA was quite happy working with a Nazi intelligence officer – Reinhard Gehlen – who formed the anti-Communist Gehlen Organization, which then was essentially absorbed into the West German Federal Intelligence Service, which Gehlen ran. There was no embarrassment to have a Nazi as the CIA’s main asset in West Germany, and none at all that this was the man who then founded and ran West German intelligence a mere decade after the Holocaust.

A CIA memorandum from 1949 admitted that the Albanian Communists in the National Liberation Front partisan brigades ‘did fight effectively’. In nearby Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito’s partisans beat back the Nazis with little outside support. The same could be said of Greece, where the Communist Party formed the bulk of the partisans. In the 1945 legislative elections in Albania, the Communists – as the Democratic Front – won all the seats. Observers from the United States and Britain grudgingly conceded that this was a fair election. Their favoured Albanians had cooperated with the fascists; no one wanted to vote for them. Their ears rang with the partisan song – ‘Hakmarrje Rini’ – in which the voice of a young partisan asks for vengeance; there would be no class collaboration with those Albanians who had danced with the Nazis. This attitude ran through the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which was not in any mood to create a government of national unity that included collaborators. They went into the hills as the Democratic Army of Greece and fought a civil war from 1946 to 1949. Konstantinos Tsaldaris’s right-wing government was bathed in monarchism and gangsterism (with its maa-like parakatos on the streets), but it was also energized by money and support from Washington, DC. Dollars brought back to life the cadaver of Europe’s reactionary political bloc. It had permission to use maximum force against the Communists. Washington would manage the world media on behalf of this doddery fascistic government.

Much the same sort of political equation was necessary in far-off Japan. There, the elites had all been compromised by their role in the brutal war in Asia and then in the Second World War. The United States guided the early elections in 1946, 1947, 1949, and 1952. The US occupation forces struggled to bring the far-right (Liberal Party) and the liberals (Democratic Party) into coalition against the socialists. In the 1947 general elections, the Socialist Party won and its leader Tetsu Katayama served as the prime minister for a year. A month after his shocking victory, the Democrats and the Liberals formed the Democratic Liberal Party, whose formation was egged on by the US State Department and whose creation was well-funded by the CIA. The Democratic Liberal Party absorbed old fascists (Ichiro Hatoyama and Nobusuke Kishi) and developed enduring ties with big business and organized crime (Yoshio Kodama), going on to rule Japan for 38 years (the Democratic Liberal Party would become the Liberal Party in 1950 and then the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955). Whatever esteem lay with the Japanese Socialists and the Communists had to be undermined. Japan became a key spoke of the US hub.

It would appear that the most obvious candidates to become subordinates of the United States and of transnational corporations would be France, Italy, and Germany – the three most important Western allies for the decades to come. But this was not the case. In France and Italy, the Communists emerged as the most powerful political forces – largely because of their leadership in the antifascist resistance. US Secretary of State Marshall told the Prime Ministers of both France (Paul Ramadier) and Italy (Alcide De Gasperi) that he would not write a cheque to the countries if they retained Communists in their ministries. In Italy, the Communist leader Fausto Gullo – as the minister of agriculture – had begun deep reforms in the countryside, including basic land reforms that had been blocked by an old alliance between the landlords and the mafia. Even the conservative De Gasperi could not rein in Gullo. In France, the Communists commanded a full quarter of the votes, and played a key role in Ramadier’s socialist government. ‘I told Ramadier,’ Marshall wrote in his diary, ‘no Communists in gov. or else.’ It was a direct threat. A wave of strikes in France and a mafia attack on Communist militants in Italy provided the two Prime Ministers their excuse. The Communists were removed from government. Washington blessed the Prime Ministers, and then paid them off. The money did not come only from the US Treasury. It also came from the transnational corporations. Exxon Corporation contributed almost $50 million to the Christian Democrats in Italy from 1963 to 1972. This was a soft coup against the Communists.

It was expensive tool-and-die work; at its end, the spokes were ready, and they – because of their class interests – remained loyal for decades to come.

‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’

In May 1943, the USSR disbanded the Communist International. The Soviet Union – in the midst of the Nazi invasion – wanted to mollify the United States and Great Britain; the USSR wanted the Allies to open another front in Europe to relieve the pressure of the Nazi onslaught. In September 1943, the Allies finally landed in Italy. After the war, the USSR created a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to draw together its allies along the eastern edge of Europe (but including the French and the Italians). No Communist parties from the colonized world were members of the Cominform. Instead, they would become part of people-to-people communist organizations such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the World Peace Council, and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. These mass fronts provided the main contacts for Communists and their allies in the immediate period after the war; but there was nothing like the Communist International to use the resources of the USSR to spread revolution in the world. The revolutions that did take place, such as in Vietnam (1945), had their own dynamic with minimal assistance from the Soviets.

The main contradiction in the period after the Second World War was not between the capitalist powers – led by the United States – and the USSR, what became known as the Cold War. US President Harry S. Truman, who had authorized the use of the nuclear bombs on Japan, formulated a doctrine in 1947 to use any and every means to defeat – or at least contain – the spread of Soviet influence and of Communism. It was this Truman Doctrine that authorized the use of US assets to interfere in the elections in Greece, France, and Italy, and it would be the Truman Doctrine that justified the US use of asymmetrical wars and hybrid wars against the process of decolonization. The main contradiction of this new period was between the forces of decolonization (which included the USSR when it allied with anti-colonial national liberation movements) and imperialism. This contradiction – between North and South – rather than the Cold War – between East and West – shaped the character of US-led imperialism.

In 1953, the US National Security Council produced a report that candidly spoke of US interests in the world. The United States, the NSC notes, must make sure that ‘nothing can be allowed to interfere substantially with the availability of oil from those sources to the free world’. It referred to the Gulf region, which had already become a key producer of oil for fossil fuelled capitalism. The United States must make ‘every effort to ensure that these resources will be available and will be used to strengthen the Free World’.

That term was key to Truman – the Free World. The term emerged during the Second World War to refer to the countries that fought against fascism, although many of those countries – such as Britain and France – held colonies where they maintained authoritarian regimes. The United States government of Truman weaponized the term through a massive campaign of psychological warfare, which included Truman’s Campaign of Truth of 1950 and the celebrated publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which made the case for the identity of fascism and communism. These were totalitarian and unfree ideologies, while Western liberalism was identical to freedom. The ‘Free World’ was the world led by the United States. What the US champions is freedom; its adversaries are the forces of unfreedom.

So, in this prison house of psychological warfare it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to claim resources from the colonized world, which should be forced to surrender its wealth for the sake of someone else’s freedom.

In 1950, Truman wrote to the Saudi monarch King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud about the renewal of US rights to the Dhahran Air Base – a military project that would secure Saudi Arabia’s loyalty to the US. Underneath all this was the oil. Truman praised the King for his ‘enlightened leadership’ and for Saudi Arabia’s role as a ‘bulwark to peace in the Near Eastern world’. This ‘enlightened’ leader faced severe labour struggles in the oil region of Saudi Arabia from June 1945, which deepened in 1953. Communists played a key role in these mobilizations, which threatened the Saudi-US oil company, ARAMCO. Enlightened leadership, if it meant the swift dispatch of oil to the West, was allowed to use any means against the workers, particularly against the Communists. The Saudi monarchy was threatened by its own workers and its own Communists; but it used the Cold War to tighten its links with the United States. Dhahran Air Base is located in the oil region, and so the deal to have US troops based there was insurance against any Communist-led rebellion. That same year, the Saudis agreed to a 50-50 split on oil profits within ARAMCO between the United States and the Saudis. This was the price that the Saudis were willing to pay; they would rather leech their resources to the United States to maintain their power rather than share the benefits of resources with the oil workers. The Saudi monarchy bound the United States to itself through the 1951 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement. The defence of the Saudi monarchy – and its oil fields – was the charge of the United States government.

Nothing can be allowed, said the NSC document of 1953 – not labour unrest in Qatif, nor Communist organizations; not even the basic elements of the ‘free world’, such as a free press and the right to free association. A June 1956 strike by oil workers was crushed with the full force of the Saudi apparatus; whatever newspapers had emerged were closed down, and labour leaders and Communist activists were imprisoned on long terms. The oil had to flow. It was freedom of the oil that mattered, not the freedom of the people. Their freedom could not be allowed.

Third World Project

The US-instigated coups against Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) took place when the Third World bloc was not fully established; the Bandung conference of the post-colonial states of Africa and Asia took place only in 1955. The Soviets made their objections in the UN, but the Sino-Soviet dispute was already on, and it would severely weaken the ‘red zone’ in its ability to stand fast against these kinds of manoeuvres. After Bandung, the Third World bloc was stronger, and it was able to draw the Soviets in as a more reliable shield.

In December 1960, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on decolonization. ‘The process of liberation,’ agreed the nations of the world, ‘is irresistible and irreversible.’ This resolution was the summary of major fights from Cuba to Vietnam, from Indonesia to Egypt. Over the course of the 1960s, a broad understanding emerged in the former colonial world about the necessity of freedom from colonialism and from imperialism. The temperament of the various national liberation struggles differed based on the class alignment of their leading organizations. It is this difference that fractured the new nations in the anti-colonial world. There were rightward leaning states and leftward leaning states, but each of them – from Saudi Arabia to Tanzania – would remain within the Non-Aligned Movement, created in 1961. By 1973, even the rightward states would acknowledge the radical agenda set by NAM in its New International Economic Order (NIEO). Indeed, even countries like Saudi Arabia and Brazil – steeped in monarchies and military dictatorships – found merit in the argument that the global economic and political order needed to be reformed.

New states that won their independence after the Second World War gathered at Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. There they laid out the outlines of what would be considered a ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy. These were states led by political movements that had a range of class alignments and therefore of domestic policies. There was, however, broad agreement against the dangers of warfare (particularly nuclear warfare) and for the creation of the context for a national development agenda. It was these states – notably Egypt, India and Yugoslavia – that led the way for the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 and, that same year, the Committee of 24 or the Decolonization Committee in the United Nations. This inter-state movement had a cognate in the United Nations through the Group of 77 (G77), formed in 1964 at the UN Conference of Trade and Development. It was out of their agenda that the guts of the NIEO were crafted: subsidies and tariffs to grow national economies, cartels to protect prices of exported raw minerals, preferential financing to go around the prohibitive rates set by banks, and so on.

By the mid-1960s, NAM was challenged on its right and left flanks. From the right came NAM states that had formed close associations with imperialism, whether by joining the Manila or Baghdad ‘security’ pacts or by the formation in 1969 of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (led by Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Pakistan). These formations took a position against Third World-style socialism and communism. From the left came the Tricontinental, a group established by Cuba of state and national liberation movements that believed in a fuller freedom – often to be attained by armed struggle. The Tricontinental would not only gather heads of states, but leaders of national liberation movements from Cape Verde to Vietnam. At the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba’s President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, who had been present at the NAM’s founding in Belgrade, was crisp in his denunciation of the mood and strategy of conciliation to imperialism – ‘The problem of underdevelopment, even of independent nations, cannot be solved with palliatives, with institutions and technical instruments that emerge out of international conferences. The cause of underdevelopment is none other than the subsistence of imperialist domination, and thus it can be overcome only through a struggle against and by total victory against imperialism.’ These were strong words. By the 1970 NAM meeting in Zambia and the 1973 NAM meeting in Algiers, the ethos of the Tricontinental would be centre stage.

Cuba’s revolution of 1959 could not be contained. Everything that the new revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro did was rational and logical, from land reform to control of electricity and housing prices. Each time the government moved one of these reasonable policies, it was met by resistance from the local landowners, from the Cuban property owners, and from the US transnational firms. It was this resistance that proved the Marxist analysis of capitalism, that the social development of the people was constrained by the hideous prejudice of private property. It was not that Castro came to Havana as a Communist, but it was that the wretched resistance of the owners – whether in Cuba or in the United States – made him into a Communist. Castro challenged the transnational oil and electricity companies, and they fought back; but the new Cuban revolution was stubborn, so it took what it wanted. The US embargo and the turn to Communism was a consequence of the impossibility of the United States to tolerate a free country in the Caribbean. Haiti had suffered that fate after its revolution in 1791. Che Guevara was in Guatemala when Árbenz was overthrown; he knew not to trust the United States and he knew that the revolution had to arm the people and defend itself. Indio Naborí, a Communist poet, took the line from Louis XIV and gave it to the Cuban worker, The state, now it is me (‘el estado, ahoro soy yo’); Castro quoted this line in a speech at a graduation ceremony in 1961, when three thousand children of peasants lined up to take their degrees – and claim the state as their own.

In 1966, Castro would welcome the national liberation movements to Havana. Between 1960 and 1965, the CIA had tried to assassinate Castro at least eight times (Castro told Senator George McGovern in 1975 that the actual number by then was 24). Even the CIA acknowledged to the Church Committee in 1975, that it had at least twice sent maa gangsters with poison pills, poison pens, and deadly bacterial powders to kill Castro in those years; the mobsters failed. In 1961, the CIA attempted an invasion of Cuba at Bay of Pigs. This failed because Castro armed the people. And then he turned to the world of national liberation as well as the socialist bloc to provide a shield.

In 1966, Che Guevara was on a secret mission in Tanzania to assist the resistance movement in the Congo. Che was disappointed. ‘The human element failed,’ he wrote in his Congo Diary. ‘There is no will to fight. The leaders are corrupt. In a word, there was nothing to do.’ He would draft two books on economics and philosophy before moving on to his tragic mission in Bolivia. All this was supported by the Cuban government. The export of the revolution, the Cuban leadership felt, was the essence of their revolution. At the Tricontinental conference in 1966, Castro announced that this new body would ‘coordinate support for revolutionary wars of liberation throughout the colonized world’. Cuba would provide logistical support and people to all liberation movements ‘within its means, wherever they occur’.

The imperative of armed struggle at the Tricontinental came fully developed from Amílcar Cabral of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), who argued that ‘we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight’. Cabral picked up the gun not out of choice, but out of necessity. The PAIGC began its independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1956. Three years later, the Portuguese authorities conducted a massacre at Pijiguiti, killing 50 unarmed dockworkers. It was this colonial violence that pushed the PAIGC into the armed struggle that ran from 1961 to 1974. It was imperialism’s harsh face that moved the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s into the armed phase. It was the viciousness of imperialism which denied the national aspirations of the people of places like Vietnam and the Congo that pushed them to move to the gun. An inventory of that colonial violence would include the Malayan Emergency (1948– 60), the Kenyan Emergency (1952–60), the French war on Algeria (1954–62), the French war on Vietnam (1946–54), the US war on Vietnam (1954–75), the failed 1961 US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the 1961 assassination of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, the US invasion of Guatemala (1954) and the Dominican Republic (1965), and the massacre of the Communists in Indonesia (1965). In the lead-up to the Tricontinental, in October 1965 French intelligence and Moroccan intelligence assassinated Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the planners of the Tricontinental. What different kind of futures might have been available to the Congo and to Morocco had the Congolese National Movement and the National Union of Popular Forces in Morocco been able to triumph? Such different futures buried with the corpses of those who had been assassinated. It was this colonial violence that set the tactical terms for the armies of national liberation that came to Havana in 1966. They did not want violence; violence was imposed upon them.

The violence of the armies of national liberation was, as Amílcar Cabral put it, ‘to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism. Nobody can doubt that, whatever its local characteristics, imperialist domination implies a state of permanent violence against the nationalist forces’. Violence is the essence of imperialism and it is the instinct of a cornered imperialist bloc. It was this violence that was on display in the Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai in March 1968. One soldier described his mission with brutal honesty – ‘Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood.’ Four years later, in 1972, Portuguese colonial troops went into the village of Wiriyamu in Mozambique and massacred between 150 and 300 villagers. Before they killed them, the Portuguese colonial troops made the villagers clap their hands and say goodbye.

By 1975, the Vietnamese had defeated the US, and Portugal was defeated by its African colonies. Cuba remained afloat, despite every attempt to overthrow that government. No question that the Carnation Revolution of Portugal would not have taken place to overthrow the Estado Novo in 1974 without the wars of national liberation in Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. No question that two decades later the apartheid regime of South Africa would not have fallen without the victory of the Angolan liberation forces, with the Cubans against the South African regime in the 1987–88 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Democracy in Portugal and in South Africa was taken by the gun. It was not given by liberalism. This narrative is now submerged. It has to be revived. Not just the sounds of the battlefield, but also the stories of the doctors and the technicians, of the revolutionary educational programmes in Mozambique and Cape Verde, the attempt to build a new society out of the detritus of the colonial order. This was the revolutionary energy that is now forgotten.

It was not forgotten due to the passage of time. A condition of amnesia was produced by the corporate media and the profession of history-writing, both of whom became stenographers of power. There was concerted effort by the West to undermine the entire dynamic of decolonization, from coups against the Ghanaian people (1966) to coups against the Chilean people (1973). Violence of the colonizer was slowly justified in humanitarian terms, with the West re-establishing itself as the architect of humanity who would now need to manage the violence of the native. The great decolonization process – whose highpoint was in the 1960s and 1970s – became the prelude to poverty and war that now racks the former Third World. Beneath the paving stones in these colonized lands there is no beach. Beneath the paving stones, the corpses of freedom fighters.

Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’

The anti-colonial movement had, by the late 1950s, delegitimized the idea of colonialism. National liberation leaders – even when they had different political orientations – fought to build united platforms on the world stage to oppose both colonialism and imperialism. The most important institution for them was the United Nations, which they saw as an instrument for the decolonization struggle. In 1960, these states pushed for that important resolution at the UN that summarized their views: ‘the process of liberation is irresistible’. Even if the French tried to hold on to Algeria and the British tried to hold on to Rhodesia, the process of liberation could not be stopped.

The United States has always hesitated before admitting its own colonial history. There is a great myth of the American Revolution of 1776 as an anti-colonial revolution. It is worth asking if 1776 was a revolution at all. There was no class struggle of any importance, no movement from below of the workers that defined the revolutionary process, no social unity of the various peoples (Europeans, Africans, Native Americans) in this struggle. Instead, there was a genocidal attitude towards the Native peoples, and a great fear of a revolt of the enslaved Africans. The war against the English was premised against a desire by the European settlers to break out of the Thirteen Colonies and conquer the entire continent; this was a war for colonization, not a war against colonialism. When the break with England did happen, no real change took place in the order of property, with the contradiction between Southern plantation capitalists and Northern industrial capitalists put off for a few generations till the Civil War broke out in 1861.

From its early years, the new country looked outwards to conquer, with one Kentucky man saying in 1810 that ‘his countrymen were full of enterprise’ and ‘although not poor, are greedy after plunder as ever the old Romans were. Mexico glitters in our eyes – the word is all we wait for’. They did not have to wait long. President James Polk sent the US troops south to claim Mexico. The New York Herald on 8 October 1847 cheered the soldiers on:

It is a gorgeous prospect, this annexation of all Mexico. It was more desirable that she should come to us voluntarily; but as we shall have no peace until she is annexed, let it come, even though force be necessary at first to bring her. Like the Sabine virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravishers.

Mexico lost one-third of its territory, including what would become the US states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. Earlier, the United States had gone into the 1812 war against the British to seize Canada; some hoped to go to war against the Spanish for Cuba and Florida; yet others called for the genocide of the Native Americans so that the settlers could have the entire continent for themselves (‘you are a subdued people’, the US government told Native chiefs as early as 1784). US imperialism was born not in the harbours of Havana and Manila in 1898, but on the vast territory that would eventually stretch from New York to San Francisco. But this ‘internal colonization’, with its full-scale genocide of the Native peoples, did not fully appear to be colonialism since it was muddied by conceptual blankets such as ‘territorial expansion’ and the ‘frontier of settlement’.

In 1823, James Monroe delivered an important speech which laid out the Monroe Doctrine. In his speech, Monroe made it abundantly clear that the United States of America was supreme in the hemisphere of the Americas. At the same time, Monroe told the Europeans both that they must not interfere politically and commercially in the hemisphere, and that the US is perfectly within its rights to interfere in Europe (the issue here was Greek independence). In 1893, just before the US went to war against Spain to expand its colonies, Frederick Jackson Turner in his celebrated speech on the frontier found the ‘germ of the Monroe doctrine’ in the colonial tendencies of the farmers of the Ohio Valley, whose wars against the Native Americans and whose drive to California and the purchase of Louisiana defines the beginning ‘of the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power’. Or, to be frank, of an imperialist state.

Even the US role in the ‘Spanish-American’ war is shrouded in the falsehood that the US sent its troops in 1898 into Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Samoa to help liberate these lands from the Spanish empire. In fact, the US absorbed these countries into its orbit, forcibly defeating the national liberation forces in each of these places. Cuba’s revolutionaries were denied a role at the peace talks in Paris, and US General William Shafter did not allow General Calixto García to attend the Spanish surrender in Cuba. This was symbolic of the usurpation of the gains of that war by the United States. None of these former Spanish colonies were allowed to become independent; they were hastily absorbed into the expanding archipelago of US power.

Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem White Man’s Burden (1899) to urge on the United States to take up its imperialist mantle. It is a silly poem. It misunderstood the US posture. It was not as if the US would not be an imperialist power, since it was already one in many of its aspects and would become one in the decades to come. What Kipling did not recognize was that the main political leaders in the United States masked their imperialism by various forms of anti-imperialism. Albert Beveridge, the US Senator for Indiana, wrote a tract with just this theme – For the Greater Republic, Not for Imperialism (1899). ‘Imperialism is not the word for our vast work,’ Beveridge wrote, because imperialism came with all the suggestions of domination and theft. What imperialism truly represents, he continued, is the ‘mighty movement and mission of our race’. What was that mission? Kipling wore that mask tighter than Beveridge. In his poem, he defined imperialism or the white man’s burden as ‘to seek another’s profit, to work another’s gain’. The imperialist did not act to aggrandize himself, to steal wealth; he worked to bring civilization to the barbarians. This was an old trick – the mission of civilization as the objective of imperialism, when it was clear from all evidence that the objective was to plunder wealth and subordinate sovereignty. Beveridge won his seat to the Senate with an impassioned speech that called for outright colonization of Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. ‘The trade of these islands,’ he said, ‘developed as we will develop it by developing their resources, monopolized as we will monopolize it, will set every reaper in this republic singing, every spindle whirling, every furnace sprouting the flames of industry.’ These were honest words – annexation to subordinate these islands so that they provided raw materials for US industry, and then bought the finished products from the United States.

Anxiety about being an imperialist power runs through the entire history of Washington’s expansion. Nitze, who framed the policy of preponderant power for the United States, wrote in 1955 that support for colonialism was ‘abhorrent to American sensibilities’. But this did not mean that Nitze supported the decolonization process that would include the meeting of the African and Asian states at Bandung that year. He understood, as the UN would say in 1961, that the process of decolonization was inevitable. But its timing could be slowed. There was a taste of Hegel in Nitze’s essay, the acknowledgment that the ‘historic development of world forces’ would lead to decolonization and that the US should throw ‘its weight behind the acceleration of self-determination for all peoples’. But then came the caveat. The US should throw its weight but only ‘under conditions which will see preserved these precious freedoms’. Here’s an important hesitation. Only if the new states would drive in the lanes drawn by the US – who would determine what are these ‘precious freedoms’ – could they be allowed eventually to flourish. The language of freedom and liberty would fly off the lips of US diplomats, but the meaning of these words would be unique.

In 1962, the administration of US President John F. Kennedy produced an Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. It is a clear statement of the class allegiance of the United States with the worst elements of countries in the Third World – despite the glamour of the Kennedy administration and its veneer of liberalism. This Policy document was being prepared by Kennedy’s team just as 6,500 US Marines landed in Thailand to ‘support that country during the threat of Communist pressure from outside’, and just as Kennedy – after his failed attempt to overthrow the government in Cuba – pledged to ‘go all the way’ against Vietnam’s Communist government. This 1962 document merely established in print what had already been written in blood: that the full force of the United States would be used to make sure that ‘developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment for international cooperation and the growth of free institutions’. All this is verbiage for a simple motto: the US government will make the world safe for the capitalist system whose major beneficiaries were transnational corporations (most of them based in the West). In fact, there is no need to annotate the Policy document. The US, the authors write, has an ‘economic interest in assuring that the resources and markets of the less developed world remain available to us and to other Free World countries’.

Those Marines arrived in Thailand in July 1962. They had come to bolster the anti-Communist militias and the Thai police – both trained by the CIA – in a war to weaken the communist Pathet Lao forces in nearby Laos and the Communist Party of Thailand, which began armed struggle in 1961. The US sent in its premier former CIA diplomat John Peurifoy, fresh from overthrowing a democratic government in Guatemala, to oversee operations in Thailand, and to ensure that the military – led by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat – came to power. Millions of dollars owed out of the Kennedy administration to train the Thai Army and the Royal Lao Army in a project known as Ekarad. Theirs was a policy – as the US embassy in Bangkok put it – of ‘covert harassment’. It is what created the conditions for a clash with the Pathet Lao, the triggering of the SEATO pact, and then the arrival of US troops – with the sound of US aircraft overhead, threatening the wrath of napalm. Garment workers from factories that ringed Bangkok and college students moved in a radical direction; they, along with the insurgency at the fringes of the country, threatened the monarchy, the military, and the bourgeoisie. It was to crush them that the US lent its full force, in return for which it got a subordinated ally and military bases – and it could ensure its economic interests remained alive and well.

The intervention of the US Marines – little known now as it was little discussed then – took place alongside the ‘covert harassment’ provided by droves of US advisors to the Thai and Laotian military forces. The US whispered into the ears of the militaries of these regions, who were quite pleased to suspend any talk of democracy in the interests of stability; stability is a synonym for anti-Communism. These militaries were not simply marionettes of US power; they represented classes in their own societies that wanted to suppress workers and peasants to maintain both local oligarchic rule – from which they benefited – and international imperialism – from which the US and its allies benefited.

What was impossible was for the United States to admit that it was an imperialist power. The times were against that. In January 1962, Kennedy asked the CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell to oversee the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency). It was this group that produced the Overseas Internal Defense Policy document. Bissell was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in the home that was built by Mark Twain, one of the leaders of the Anti-Imperialist League that was set up to protest the US war on the Philippines. Bissell went to Yale, and then the CIA; the men who joined him in this Group were also well-read men from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. They knew both their history and their current events. The countries of the Third World had just met in September 1961 in Belgrade (Yugoslavia) to set up the Non-Aligned Movement. That is why the Special Group emphasized covertness in its operations. US power must be used through military action (asymmetrical wars), but also through the use of measures such as economic inducements, sanctions, and information warfare as well as support for local police and military forces (hybrid wars).

‘It is important,’ Bissell and his colleagues wrote, ‘for the US to remain in the background, and where possible, to limit its support to training, advice, and material, lest it prejudice the local government effort and expose the US unnecessarily to charges of intervention and colonialism.’

Part 2

Manual for Regime Change

Jacobo Árbenz came to power in 1951 in impoverished Guatemala with a democratic mission. He wanted to make sure that the peasantry held land and could use that land to free themselves. Árbenz came from a wealthy family, which encouraged him to join the military. It was as a military officer that Árbenz saw the US-backed dictator Jorge Ubico crush peasants and force them to work for the massive US-owned United Fruit Company, the largest single landowner in Guatemala. Árbenz was influenced by the Communist leader José Manuel Fortuny and by his feminist and socialist wife María Vilanova. When he won the election in 1950, he pledged to use the land to help the people. But there were only four Communists in the 61- member congress and none in Árbenz’s cabinet. Their influence on the process would be exaggerated.

The Agrarian Reform pushed by Árbenz was modest for such a grotesquely unequal society. In 1953, Árbenz’s government expropriated 200,000 acres of unused lands owned by United Fruit. The company, based in New Orleans (Louisiana), would not tolerate this action. Nor did the US government, whose members had intimate financial links to United Fruit. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s law firm – Sullivan & Cromwell – represented United Fruit. Dulles, his brother Allen (the CIA director), John Moors Cabot (Dulles’s Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs), and Thomas Dudley Cabot (Dulles’s Director of International Security Affairs) were some of the largest shareholders in United Fruit. The former CIA director Walter Bedell Smith became president of United Fruit after the removal of Árbenz. US President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary – Ann Whitman – was the wife of Edmund Whitman, the publicity director of United Fruit. Their action was not merely on behalf of US imperialism or of the capitalist class; it was also for themselves.

‘If the Guatemalans want to handle a Guatemalan company roughly,’ the First Secretary at the US embassy in Guatemala City wrote to Washington in 1951, ‘that is none of our business, but if they handle an American company roughly it is our business.’

The CIA developed a covert programme called PBFORTUNE to overthrow Árbenz. There was nastiness from the start. General James Doolittle wrote to his old army buddy US President Dwight Eisenhower that the CIA needed to operate viciously. ‘There are no rules in such a game,’ he wrote. ‘Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.’

Árbenz was overthrown in 1954. His ouster seemed to follow from a manual, which would then be used over and over again, from the removal of João Goulart of Brazil in 1964 and of Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, from the overthrow of Abd al-Karim Qasim of Iraq in 1963 to Sukarno of Indonesia in 1965, from the ouster of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1961 to Juan José Torres of Bolivia in 1971. There are echoes here of the method used to overthrow the government of Evo Morales of Bolivia in 2019 and the ongoing attempt to overthrow the Bolivarian process in Venezuela. Anyone who pushed an agenda that resembled economic nationalism, anything that threatened the market domination of transnational corporations and that offered an advantage to the Communists had to be removed. International law and public opinion could be massaged to the advantage of imperialism. The formula is clichéd. It is commonplace, a short plan to produce a coup climate, to create a world under the heel. Here are the nine chapters in this manual for regime change.

1. Lobby ‘public’ opinion

A coup has to be first prepared in public opinion.

Journalists who looked at what Árbenz was doing would have reasonably concluded that he was merely following through on the promises he had made in the campaign. They would have reported that Árbenz had not threatened to overthrow the United Fruit Company, only to take away some of its lands to enhance the conditions of the Guatemalan people. But such reasonableness was not possible.

United Fruit hired Edward Bernays, a leading public relations expert, to lobby the US Congress about a Communist conspiracy. ‘Whenever you read “United Fruit” in Communist propaganda,’ wrote the firm’s public relations director, ‘you may readily substitute “United States”.’ The point, for Bernays, was to ensure that United Fruit and United States were synonymous and that any attack on the company should be seen as an attack on the country. Bernays used United Fruit money to send journalists from the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, New York Times, and Time to report on Communists in Guatemala. The journalists complied. In an unsigned report in the New York Times on 14 July 1951, the journalist wrote, ‘We cannot expect a Maya, living in an ancestral village high in the hills, unable to read, cut off from the main world currents, to recognize communism by instinct as just another system of slavery.’ The journalist had talked to no one in the highlands, quoted no one – this was a press release from United Fruit.

United Fruit spent half a million dollars to lobby the US Congress, using these accounts of a Communist threat in Guatemala. ‘Public’ opinion, namely, the views of the capitalist media and the US Congress had been won over to the side of United Fruit.

The US government had stopped supplying arms to Guatemala, so Árbenz bought some Czech weapons. When these were delivered, Washington exaggerated their impact to the stenographers of the Western media houses. John Foster Dulles went to Caracas for the 10th Inter-American Conference to push for a resolution that condemned ‘communist infiltration’ with an emphasis on Guatemala. All the oligarchies lined up behind Dulles; only Guatemala voted against the resolution. The public relations campaign had succeeded in isolating Árbenz and the land reform agenda.

Red Rule in Guatemala, screamed an NBC television broadcast. No more needed to be said. The fate of Árbenz was sealed.

2. Appoint the right man on the ground

Much work needed to be done within Guatemala. The right man had to be in charge. The US State Department sent along John Peurifoy as Ambassador to Guatemala City, who came from Athens where he had played a key role in strengthening the new anti-Communist government. Washington had a stable of men like Peurifoy. In Brazil, the man on the ground was Lincoln Gordon – a liberal when it suited him, but a ruthless anti-Communist outside the United States. It was Gordon who called upon the US government to send a ‘clandestine delivery of arms’ to the Brazilian coup makers. For the coup against Allende in Chile it was Nathaniel Davis, for the coup against Sukarno in Indonesia it was Marshall Green. In Iran, it was Loy Henderson, who went and threatened Mossadegh with the withdrawal of US support and forced his resignation. These men helped stiffen the spine of the Western embassies, ensured that propaganda was ready to justify the coup, and provided sufficient US backing for the murders and mayhem that would follow. Green, for instance, met with the Western ambassadors after it became clear that the Indonesian generals wanted to move. The Army, he told Washington and his fellow ambassadors, ‘hoped for Western sympathy and economic help if Army decide to depose Sukarno’. The embassies were only too willing to help. They provided lists of Communists and Communist sympathizers who needed to be killed.

Peurifoy was good at his job. When the CIA plots failed, as they often do, and when the agents are discovered and arrested, as often happens, it is the US Ambassador who has to hold his nerve and continue to pressure the government. Peurifoy never lost his composure; he tried to bribe Árbenz with $2 million, then threatened him, then began to make links with his cabinet, and finally sat in the embassy on 18 June 1954 and watched as his plot worked to overthrow the government.

There is that old joke. Why is there never a coup in the United States? Because there is no US embassy there.

3. Make sure the Generals are ready

Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who worked as a furniture salesman in Honduras, was convinced by the US that he needed to return home as the liberator of his country. Castillo Armas was known to have been cultivated by United Fruit, which was said to have paid him $30,000 per month as a retainer. Colonel Roberto Barrios Peña, one of the key opposition military men, complained to the US on 8 October 1953 that Castillo Armas was unreliable and would not help unify the fragmented opposition. The CIA knew that Castillo Armas was useless; he had blocked a coup attempt in January 1952 and was not getting along with the other military officers who were eager to defend United Fruit against the Guatemalan people. But he was loyal. Castillo Armas was backed not only by United Fruit, but also by the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose intervention would be invaluable.

After Árbenz’s second expropriation of land on 12 August 1953, the CIA’s Operations Coordinating Board told the CIA to go ahead ‘on a basis of high priority’ against Árbenz. With $3 million in hand, the CIA went to work to train the mercenary force of Castillo Armas and to bring the entire military brass behind him. In December, US Ambassador Peurifoy wrote to John Cabot at the State Department (and a shareholder of United Fruit) that the US government ‘must accept the risks inherent in helping to bring about a change of government here’. He said that the problem facing the United States and United Fruit was the disorganized opposition. ‘The internal “anti-Communist” opposition,’ he wrote, ‘is badly divided and without a workable political program or an organization immediately available.’ That is the reason why Peurifoy recommended the ‘Guatemalan Armed Forces as the primary area in which any effort to stimulate anti-government action is most likely to be fruitful’. CIA asset Henry Hecksher, who worked undercover as a coffee buyer in Guatemala, approached Colonel Hernán Monzón Aguirre, who was not only in Árbenz’s cabinet but was also influential in the army. Hecksher offered Monzón a bribe to join the coup. Monzón would become the leader of the Junta that took over immediately after Árbenz was ejected; he would then pass the baton to the CIA’s favoured Castillo Armas. Hecksher, meanwhile, would be promoted to Chief of the CIA Station in Laos in 1958, then as part of the CIA operation in Indonesia from 1960 to 1963, before moving to Mexico City where he ran the project against the Cuban Revolution, before rounding out his career as the CIA Station Chief in Chile in 1973 to overthrow Salvador Allende.

Peurifoy’s 28 December 1953 cable to Washington makes two points that are worth reading in full:

"What I expect is that the program outlined in the telegram would (a) prepare hemispheric and Guatemalan opinion for a change and dull the charges of intervention which may be expected to be leveled at us, and (b) to [sic] create here a climate in which important segments of the population and especially the Armed Forces and propertied class felt their interests sufficiently threatened to be stirred from their present lethargy into a better disposition to take the risks necessary to cooperate actively in bringing a new government into power."

4. Make the economy scream

On 11 September 1953, the CIA produced a report on its hybrid war against Guatemala. Down the list of points, it noted that ‘economic pressure’ was essential; ‘Considering that Guatemalan government economy is susceptible to pressures, covert economic warfare methods targeted against oil supplies, shipping and vital exports and imports, where feasible, will be applied’. A working group was formed that comprised US businessmen with ‘experience in Latin American banking, shipping, publicity, general investments and oil’ and three men who ‘occupy high positions in Guatemalan business and industrial life’. The CIA wanted to shift attention from United Fruit and towards Guatemala’s coffee production. It produced a report on 31 July 1953 with the title ‘The Coffee Industry in Guatemala – Special Considerations Regarding Possible Economic Sanctions’. US firms – such as Folgers and J.A. Medina – were concerned about any problems in the coffee export business. The CIA would have to mollify them. In its September report, the CIA noted that it needed to either use real or ‘necessary fabricated evidence’ at the upcoming OAS conference for ‘multilateral economic action against Guatemala, particularly in respect to coffee’. The CIA had developed a study on ‘what phases of the coffee industry may be attacked which will damage the Árbenz government and its supporters without seriously affecting anti-Communist elements’.

Reading these CIA documents from 1953–54 brings to mind the US government’s preparations for the 1973 coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. On 15 September 1970, US President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger authorized the US government to do everything possible to undermine the incoming government of Allende. Nixon and Kissinger, according to the notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to ‘make the economy scream’ in Chile, and they were ‘not concerned [about the] risks involved’. War was acceptable to them as long as Allende’s government was removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with $10 million as a first instalment to begin the covert destabilization of the country. On 11 June 1971, US Treasury Secretary John Connally told Nixon, that ‘the only pry we have on them, the only lever we have on them, it seems to me, is at least if we could shut off their credit, or shut off the markets for the commodities they produce, or something. But we have to be in a position to impose some economic sanctions on them. Now, you can’t impose military sanctions, but we can impose financial or economic sanctions’. A month later, Allende nationalized the copper sector and told the main companies – Kennecott and Anaconda – that he would compensate them by forgiving the $774 million in excess profit taxes that they did not pay. Chileans celebrated this day as the Day of National Dignity (Día de la Dignidad Nacional). The companies went to the White House to complain. They were joined by the telecommunications giant ITT and the soft drink maker Pepsi Cola. On 5 October 1971, Connally told Nixon, ‘The only thing you can ever hope is to have him [Allende] overthrown, and, in the meantime, you will make your point to prove, by your actions against him, what you want, that you are looking after American interests.’

The retaliation was swift. The US Export–Import Bank had already refused to give Chile a loan to buy three Boeing aircraft. This was less a loan to Chile and more a subsidy to Boeing – as the deposed Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah wrote in 1965, ‘Aid, therefore, to a neo-colonial state is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial state and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.’ When Chile went to the Paris Club to negotiate the terms to reschedule its $1.862 billion in debt, the US delegate at the Club sniffed. The US owned $1.227 billion of this debt, so it raised the issue of both compensation to the copper transnational firms and Chile’s suspension of debt repayment. Pressure on Chile mounted, as international finance dried up. In the Inter-American Development Bank, the US holds 40 per cent of the votes and effectively runs a veto; its loans to Chile fell from $46 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1972. The World Bank, controlled by the US, made no new loans to Chile between 1970 and 1973. The Export– Import Bank reduced Chile’s ratings from B to D – the lowest level. Trade continued, but firms began to ask for cash upfront for the purchase of goods. All this occurred as the copper prices fell by 25 per cent; as global inflation increased imported food prices rose. Inflation escalated to over 1,000 per cent, and the Allende government began to print money and to ration goods in order to prevent a total decline in living standards.

A combination of Nixon’s ‘invisible blockade’, the panicked reaction to the sanctions by the government, and the adverse international conditions (low copper prices, high food prices), ‘created the conditions’, as Kissinger put it, for a coup. Nixon answered, ‘[T]hat is the way it is going to be played.’

5. Diplomatic isolation

The government that stands against imperialism and stands with its people has to be portrayed as out of touch and isolated long before the tanks leave the barracks. This isolation has to appear as a natural process. No longer is the government a government, but a regime; no longer is it a democratic government, but an autocratic regime.

No one disagreed that Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidential election in 1970 in a fair vote. That was beside the point. The Chilean oligarchy and the US government had tried to undermine the Chilean democracy after the socialists began to make gains in the 1960s. The CIA ran a programme to influence Chilean mass media, with the suggestion that it was the Soviets – who had no real purchase in Chile – who wanted to undermine Chilean democracy. They funded the parties of the far right in the Chilean Congressional elections of March 1969. When this failed, and when it appeared that the socialists would win the 1970 presidential elections, the CIA attempted to create dissension, to split the socialist vote, and to ensure the victory of the far right. Allende won the election on 4 September 1970.

As early as 9 September that year, a full three years before the actual coup, the CIA opened a conversation with the Chilean military about a military coup. General René Schneider was not keen on a coup because he believed that the Constitution of 1925 had to be respected. Retired Army General Roberto Viaux, who was eager for a coup and had been regularly meeting the CIA, kidnapped General Schneider and killed him. This shocked the army. It was the CIA, the right wing in the army, and the Chilean oligarchy that had tried to undermine democracy. They should have been the ones who were isolated. But that is not how the language of imperialism operates.

In 1962, the Organization of American States, under pressure from the US government, suspended Cuba from its ranks. Castro had called the OAS the ‘Yankee Ministry of Colonies’, which is – on balance – a fair portrayal. The OAS had been used by Washington to discipline the countries of the hemisphere, and so it had been used against Cuba right after Castro’s government began to assert the rights of the Cuban people to its own land and labour. It was not enough to remove Cuba from the OAS. The Kennedy administration fought to have the OAS impose sanctions on Cuba in 1964, and it demanded that all OAS members follow suit. Mexico was the only OAS member that refused Kennedy’s edict.

At its January 1962 meeting, the OAS said that ‘Marxism-Leninism is incompatible with the Inter-American system and the alignment of such a government with the communist bloc breaks the unity and solidarity of the hemisphere’. The expulsion of Cuba came on the lines that communism was alien to the Americas. Allende knew this. That is why he did not declare his government to be based on Marxist principles and why he was careful not to openly make a connection with the Soviet Union. He did open full relations with Cuba, however, and trade relations with North Korea. Four other states followed Chile’s lead regarding Cuba, breaking the OAS blockade; this is what the US wanted to forestall, and hence the CIA itched for a coup. ‘It is likely,’ the CIA noted in a long memorandum produced for Henry Kissinger on 4 December 1970 on the situation in Chile, that the ‘Chileans will be more sophisticated than the Cubans’, and so they will not provoke an OAS expulsion. The CIA drew up a plan to overcome the hesitancy of the OAS members to directly challenge Chile’s seat in the OAS. One way to force Chile’s hand would be for the US to organize ‘blanket and concerted opposition to Chilean positions and proposals, harassment and slow-down or suspension of IDB [Inter-American Development Bank] loans and OAS technical assistance’. Making Chile’s rightful use of the OAS machinery difficult might force Allende’s hand and then lead him into the trap set by the US – namely for expulsion from the OAS and diplomatic isolation.

When the OAS did not bow to US pressure, US Treasury Secretary John Connally proposed to US President Richard Nixon in 1971 that the US withdraw from the OAS and deal with each of the Latin American countries on a bilateral basis. In any bilateral conversation, the US would be the most powerful negotiator, and it could more easily isolate countries that did not submit to US pressure. If the US could negotiate with each country individually, Connally said, ‘then we can put the screws on Peru and Brazil’. The OAS, for the US, was merely an instrument of power, not a platform to create regional cooperation. It would be naïve to read the OAS Charter and take it seriously.

It was not easy to eject Chile from the OAS, although sanctions did hit the economy. Western intelligence services worked hard to damage Allende’s reputation on the world stage. What Allende was saying had resonance across the Third World. His speech at the UN in December 1972 depicted a world in struggle between the power of transnational corporations – backed by the United States and its allies – and sovereign states. This was the kind of language that resonated in the Non-Aligned Movement, whose principle objective in those years was for passage of the New International Economic Order, a complete overhaul of the trade and development system. Allende warned that the NIEO was not on the cards for the Western countries, and instead, ‘the entire political structure of the world is being undermined’. This was not hyperbole to him; this was a factual statement. When the NAM met in Algiers in September 1973, Allende was not there. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said in her opening remarks on 6 September, ‘We miss President Allende of Chile, who is fighting a battle which is common to us.’ A battle common to us. The isolation could not work as long as the Third World bloc and the Soviet bloc remained intact. Nonetheless, five days later, on 11 September, the coup would take place and Allende would be dead.

When the shadow of the Third World and the Soviet bloc receded two decades later, it became much easier for the United States and its allies to use diplomatic isolation as a tool for regime change. It would become much easier for the Arab League to throw out Libya prior to the NATO war on that country in 2011; it would be infinitely easier to use the OAS as a weapon against Venezuela and Bolivia.

6. Organize mass protests

A coup is never a coup. To call it a coup would be to admit that the United States government had subverted the democratic processes of another country or at least to have interfered in another country. A coup had to come by another name. It had to be a popular uprising against an authoritarian government, which was saved by the intervention of the nationalist military. It could have been a ‘takeover’ or an ‘interim step’. That had to be how the coup was understood.

Thanks to the CIA control of the media, the news reports in the major Western papers would not call it a coup, nor would they call it a war. Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times had offered John Foster Dulles total cooperation in his coverage of the 1953 CIA coup in Iran; he would do the same for Guatemala. ‘The almost opéra-bouffe quality of the Guatemalan “war” ’, wrote Baldwin on 22 June 1954, after the army had begun the massacre of those who followed Árbenz and of the Communists. This was, for Baldwin, ‘a war that so far is primarily without battles but is punctuated by pronouncements and rumors’. The word ‘coup’ does not appear, and ‘war’ comes in scare quotes.

To be a popular uprising, masses of people are needed on the streets. But if the masses are behind the government – as was the case with both Mossadegh and Árbenz – then how to fabricate the popular character? Money helps, and Kermit Roosevelt spread a million dollars around in Tehran in 1953 to gather up a ‘rented’ crowd. Peurifoy, along with his CIA colleague Howard Hunt, did the same in Guatemala City; when Árbenz and his family were leaving the country, a well-dressed crowd, funded by the CIA, stood near at hand, yelling abuse at the family, and then watching as the military forced Árbenz to strip naked before he could board the plane to Mexico.

Philip Agee at the CIA’s Montevideo station wrote in his diary on 1 April 1964 about what he was hearing from the CIA’s Rio station’s chief Ned Holman about the coup against Goulart in Brazil. It was the CIA’s station in Rio and its other offshoots that ‘were financing the mass urban demonstrations against the Goulart government, proving the old themes of God, country, family, and liberty to be effective as well’. William Doherty of a CIA front said of the coup in Brazil, ‘It was planned – and planned months in advance. Many of the trade union leaders – some of whom were actually trained in our institute – were involved in the revolution, and in the overthrow of the Goulart regime.’ CIA Director William Colby authorized at least $8 million to ‘rent’ crowds in Chile and to subsidize strikes. In February 1973, US Colonel Gerald Sills asked Chilean General Augusto Pinochet when he would move to overthrow the socialist president Allende. ‘Not until our legs get wet,’ Pinochet replied. ‘The armed forces cannot move against Allende until the people get out into the streets and beg us to act.’ The CIA went into motion. The money was spent on ‘strikes’ and on ‘protests’, which obliged Pinochet to send his troops out of the barracks. Without the ‘demonstrations’, there was no legitimacy for the army to act.

In Guatemala, the rented crowds plastered the capital with anti-Communist slogans and with threats to the lives of both Árbenz and Fortuny. The Guatemalan military officers were told by US military advisors that if they did not overthrow the government, the US would invade. It was a threat that unsettled many otherwise loyal officers; they would either stand down when the coup happened or join the coup itself.

The hot breath of the coup that blew over Guatemala lingered over the Caribbean and then swept towards British Guiana. There, in 1953, the people elected as their chief minister Cheddi Jagan, the leader of the Sawmill and Forest Workers’ Union as well as of the People’s Progressive Party. Jagan was not a member of a Communist party, but he was a Marxist who came from Port Mourant – British Guiana’s ‘Little Moscow’. Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, which was the colonial master of British Guiana, wanted Jagan overthrown. Jagan’s new labour laws and his threat to move on a socialist agenda terrified Churchill. ‘We ought to get American support in doing all that we can to break the communist teeth in British Guiana,’ he wrote to Oliver Lyttelton, his Secretary of State for the Colonies. The US did not seem immediately interested; it was busy with Iran and Guatemala. Churchill sent in his troops to remove Jagan. It was a simple operation, and mass support was not necessary.

A decade later, Jagan was back in power, and this time the United States was interested in his removal. US President John F. Kennedy’s advisor wrote to him in August 1961 about the ‘possibility of finding a substitute for Jagan himself’, in other words, for regime change in Guyana. Jagan was very popular, and a simple military intervention seemed too difficult. This time the CIA decided to use the trade unions against Jagan. The CIA worked closely with the US trade-union movement – the AFL– CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the US) – to create a range of fronts, such as the Free Trade Union Institute and the American Institute for Free Labor Development. These fronts channelled US government money to trade unions across the world; their agents built up the right-wing unionists against the left. Their collaborators across the world were often people and organizations of the seediest interests – including people from the mafia and from fascistic groups. Anything was acceptable to undermine the class struggle, both inside Europe and in the national liberation states.

In 1947, during the strike wave in France, the right wing and the mafia went on a rampage against the workers. One of them – Vincent Voulant, a Communist militant – was killed by the Marseilles mafia, an early indication of the kind of alliances at work. Three of four workers in Marseilles went on strike during the day of his funeral. Dockworkers joined miners to shut down the city. They threatened a Communist insurrection in the southern region of France. The CIA’s Frank Wisner met with the Free Trade Union Committee’s Jay Lovestone (a former US Communist Party leader), who then began to courier cash to the anti-Communist trade union Force Ouvrière and to Le Milieu (the mafia), but more precisely the Corsican front. The deal was that the mafia would intimidate the union members and murder Communists, while in exchange the French and US authorities would allow them to bring heroin into Europe. This was known as the French Connection. Additionally, the CIA sent a psychological operations unit to undermine the reputation of the Communists. When a ship arrived with 60,000 sacks of flour and when the dockers refused to unload it, the CIA spread the story that the unions and the Communists were against the hungry.

It was these ‘free labour’ groups funded by the US that began to create mischief amongst the working class in British Guiana. They funded and disaggregated the trade-union movement. This is how the CIA brought the ‘masses’ to turn against the left governments. American Federation of Labor’s Serafino Romualdi was in Guiana in 1951, where he had begun to set the roots for what would come a decade later. In 1962, eight trade-union officials from Guiana came to a training course run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). They returned to Guiana charged up against Jagan’s government, which came to power in September 1961. In 1963, these men and their unions organized a general strike that lasted for three months and deeply damaged Jagan’s government. The unions could hold out because they received funds from two AFL–CIO unions. These were the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Retail Clerks International Union. These CIA funds came to the AFL–CIO from private foundations such as the Gotham Foundation (created by the CIA). The CIA had its fingers all over a series of labour fronts, such as the international department of the Public Services International Union (whose main person William Howard McCabe was a CIA agent) and the labour lawyer of the AFL–CIO Gerald O’Keefe (also reportedly a CIA agent). O’Keefe is said to have provided funds to Richard Ishmael, a labour leader who opposed Jagan, and to Forbes Burnham, Jagan’s main political opponent, to hire men to conduct acts of violence and sabotage against the government and its supporters. The intimacy of the CIA and the AFL–CIO was such that after this Operation Flypast, J.C. Stackpoole of the British Foreign Office began to call them the AFL– CIA.

Jagan’s government fell, and then – deeply damaged – lost the elections in 1964. Burnham, who won, would rule Guyana with US support till 1980, while his party stayed in office till 1992.

While they created confusion in Guyana, Romualdi and his AFL– CIA team brought their mischief to the Dominican Republic. Juan Bosch, a socialist, won the presidential election in 1962 and attempted to move a modest agrarian agenda. But what Bosch found soon enough was that all the main mass organizations in his country had been either fronts of the CIA or had been hollowed out by the AFL–CIA. One of his close advisors – Sacha Volman – was a CIA asset who hollowed out the main peasant organization (Federación Nacional de Hermandades Campesinas, FENHERCA), while the AFL–CIA had created and shaped the main trade union, Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores Libres (CONATRAL). Bosch’s bureaucrats and technicians had been trained by the International Institute for Labor Studies, which was funded by the Inter-American Center for Social Studies, which in turn received money from a CIA front known as the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Bosch stood on hollow ground. When Bosch had to go, the AFL–CIA tugged on the strings, the workers were sent on strike, and Bosch had to concede to what appeared to be mass unrest against his government.

7. Green light

There is always a green light. These documents come to us fifty years after the fact, a cunning statement of power once the world has been changed. It is one thing to wink and acknowledge a role in a coup from another generation; it is always to be hidden when the Manual for Regime Change is actively in use.

11 July 1953: ‘Through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mossadeq government, and to replace it with a pro-Western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its Prime Minister.’

26 August 1960: ‘In high quarters here it is the clear-cut conclusion that if Lumumba continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at least be chaos and at worst pave the way to communist takeover of the Congo. His removal must be an urgent and prime objective. This should be a high priority of our covert action.’

When the light flashed green, the CIA pilots got into their P-47 Thunderbolts and began to fly over Guatemala City. They fired their .50- calibre guns and dropped some five-pound fragmentation bombs; they made a racket.

No coup is as easy as it seems. Castillo Armas’s ill-armed battalions failed in their rush to the capital. Many suffered defeats at the hands of the border guards and the army. The CIA aircraft bombed an oil tank, which – one CIA agent wrote – left an impression of ‘incredible weakness, lack of decision, fainthearted effort’ amongst the coup makers. But the Army feared a US invasion. One of Árbenz’s men went to a base, where he found the officers hiding in their barracks. They think, he told Árbenz, ‘that the Americans are threatening Guatemala just because of you and your Communist friends. If you don’t resign, the Army will march on the capital and depose you’. The CIA did not know that the Army had turned. They authorized a massive bombing of the country, and a barrage of radio broadcasts. But the Army seized power, and turned its back on the CIA. ‘We have been betrayed,’ said US Ambassador Peurifoy. But Peurifoy knew his job. He barked at the Army and they conceded. In 11 days, five successive juntas took power, each more willing to subordinate itself to Washington than the previous one.

8. A Study of Assassination

Fortuny, the leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party, took refuge in the Mexican embassy. He was asked if the overthrow of Árbenz meant that the US would not allow a Communist government in the Americas. ‘Draw your own conclusions,’ he said. He died in Mexico City at the age of 89 in 2005.

The CIA had long believed that if it could assassinate key leaders, it would weaken the resolve of any national liberation state. One CIA official wrote, in the context of Guatemala, that ‘the elimination of those in high positions’ in the government ‘would bring about its collapse’. The CIA’s Directorate of Plans got its hands on a 1949 list of the left drawn up by the Guatemalan military. ‘Disposal lists’ of people to execute were circulated; peasant and worker leaders, Communists, Marxist intellectuals – all of them were on these lists. In January 1952, the CIA had its list of ‘topflight Communists whom the new government would desire to eliminate immediately in event of successful anti-Communist coups’. In a cable on 29 January 1952, the CIA asked for the following: ‘HQ desires list [of] communists and/or sympathizers whom new government would desire encarcerated [sic] immediately in event of successful anti-communist coup. Request you verify following list and recommend additions or deletions.’ When I read the word ‘encarcerated’, I read it as incinerated not incarcerated. Both words apply. Weapons were delivered to the hard-right Guatemalans, and sabotage operations began against the Árbenz government. As part of its psychological warfare, the CIA sent leading Communists ‘death notice’ cards each day for a month in 1953. The CIA created a new programme – PBSUCCESS – to ‘remove covertly, and without bloodshed if possible, the menace of the present Communist-controlled government in Guatemala’. Assassination teams – the K Group – and sabotage groups began their work.

In the CIA files on Guatemala is a chilling 19-page document with a simple title, A Study of Assassination (1953). ‘No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded,’ says this Study. Decisions must be made in the field and kept there. There is a list of tools that can be used in an assassination, from hammers to kitchen knives, ‘anything hard, heavy, and handy will suffice’. ‘Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region,’ which can be done by a knife. ‘Persons who are squeamish should not attempt it,’ says the Study. Such studies would continue to be produced for the military and paramilitaries associated with the long arm of US imperialism. In 1983, the Honduran military officers read the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, which was less explicit about murder but as clear about the use of force to get the desired results – namely to crush the class struggle. Battalion 316 of the Honduran military made it its business to pick up anyone from the left, torture them, and then murder those hundreds that it deemed too dangerous to release into society. The CIA teachers were excellent at their jobs. Dan Mitrione of the CIA went to Uruguay, where he taught the right-wing groups how to use torture. ‘The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect’ – that was his credo. His favourite torture was to electrocute the genitals. He was killed by the left-wing Tupamaros in 1970.

The most stunning account of politicide in terms of numbers is clearly the massacre of the left and left sympathizers in Indonesia that took place in a short span of time from October 1965. North of Indonesia, the Vietnamese people continued to defend themselves from the US bomb; their resilience was clear to the CIA, which noted in October, ‘Hanoi continues to assert its determination to press on with the war in South Vietnam despite the continuing attrition of the air war and the increase of US troops in the South.’ In March 1965, 3,500 US Marines landed in Vietnam; they were the first of hundreds of thousands of combat troops. The US had begun to escalate there, having frozen the war in Korea. That same month, a decade after the stalemate between the two Koreas, Kim Il Sung (leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) met with a Chinese delegation. He told them something which worried the CIA. ‘If war breaks out in Korea in the future, we would still need your help and would want to fight together. Comrade Mao Zedong once said that China’s Northeast is our rear area and that, furthermore, all of China is our rear area.’ China had just tested its nuclear bomb in 1964 and would eventually extend its nuclear shield over Korea. The US attitude had been made clear by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In a speech that year, he said to the Communists, ‘We must say in Southeast Asia as we did in Europe, in the words of the Bible: Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ The ‘no further’ applied not only to Southeast Asia, but to anywhere outside the USSR, China, the northern halves of Korea and Vietnam.

It certainly applied to Indonesia, which had the largest Communist Party outside China; the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had an important relationship with President Sukarno who had begun to edge closer and closer to the Communists. In 1965, one section of the Indonesian Army moved against Sukarno, and took over the institutions of the country. Then began what is generally understood to be one of the ghastliest political purges in modern times. The Indonesian Army and its allies – mainly fanatical anti-Communists, including religious groups – killed at least a million people in this pogrom. What is beyond doubt – even though the US refuses to release fully its documents on this period – is that the United States and the Australians provided the Indonesian armed forces with lists of Communists who were to be assassinated, that they egged on the Army to conduct these massacres, and that they covered up this absolute atrocity.

What cables have been released from the United States show that the US embassy in Jakarta knew full well what was going on. ‘A reliable Balinese source informed the Embassy,’ the Political Affairs Counsellor wrote on 21 December 1965, three months into the killings, ‘that PKI deaths on the island of Bali now total about 10,000 and include the parents and even distant relatives of crypto-Communist Governor Sutedja.’ The reference here is to Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, born into a royal family, who had participated in the anti-Japanese and anti-Dutch struggles and had been imprisoned by the Dutch from 1948 to 1949. After independence in 1949, Suteja was appointed to run the administration on the island of Bali. Not only did the Army kill his extended family, but he was also ‘disappeared’. CIA officer Edward Masters sent a cable in 1966, which read, ‘Many provinces appear to be successfully meeting this problem of executing their prisoners or killing them before they are captured.’ He referred to the Communist prisoners. The US had provided the Indonesian Army with a list of at least 5,000 Communist leaders. The Australians also had their list. In early October 1965, Australia’s Ambassador Keith Shann wrote to say that the massacre of the Communists is ‘now or never’ and that he ‘devotedly’ hoped that the Army would ‘act firmly’ against the Communists. He need not have worried. By 1966, Australia’s Prime Minister Harold Holt told a New York audience, ‘With 500,000 to one million Communist sympathizers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’

Whether in Guatemala or in Indonesia, or by the 1967 Phoenix Program (or Chiến dịch Phụng Hoàng) in South Vietnam, the US government and its allies egged on local oligarchs and their friends in the armed forces to completely decimate the Left. The Phoenix Program in South Vietnam ran from 1967 to 1971. A CIA memorandum from 1968 (‘Assessment of the Phoenix Program’) clearly says that one of the three goals is ‘to neutralize 12,000 VCI members’; VCI stands for the Viet Cong infrastructure. In this assessment, the CIA notes that they believe that there are roughly 82,000 cadre of the Vietnamese national liberation movement in the South; of these, in 1968, the US and its South Vietnamese allies were only able to kill 11,066 with 83.5 per cent of them ‘serving at village or hamlet level’. The US wanted to kill more advanced cadres, so ‘US officials developed a listing of VCI executive and significant cadre’ who were to be assassinated (or in the CIA language, neutralized).

In South America, the US government worked with the archipelago of military juntas from Argentina to Paraguay to abduct, torture, and murder Communists in the continent. This programme, which ran from 1975 to 1989, was called Operation Condor. It would kill around 100,000 people and imprison half a million. In a 1977 CIA document called ‘Counter-terrorism in the Southern Cone’, the official notes that Operation Condor consists of CIA oversight of the Chilean development of a computerized data bank (‘all members will contribute information of known or suspected terrorists’), and Brazilian provision of gear for ‘Condortel’ (the group’s communications network). The Condor assassination teams were primed against known Communists, opposition leaders, and human rights groups (including members of Amnesty International). Condor’s agents operated in Europe to kill Communists, and it killed former Chilean Ambassador to the US Orlando Letelier and his associate Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, DC in 1976. It has long been thought that the CIA was involved in this murder. The Argentinian armed forces, meanwhile, sent a hastily-written note of concern to the US government that the investigation into the murder of Letelier might lead to information about the 1974 assassination of the former Chilean Minister of Defence General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert; the Argentine cable makes it clear that General Prats, a close associate of Salvador Allende, had been killed as part of Condor (‘Measures must be taken to conceal any ultimate Argentine responsibility in the Prats case since’).

For just about four days in 1971, a Communist coup in Sudan led by Major Hashem al-Atta could have changed the balance of forces in Africa, but it was soon overrun by Colonel Gaafar Nimeiry, the deposed President, who used the counter-coup as an opportunity to arrest and assassinate the main leadership of the Sudan Communist Party – including the founder of the party Abdel Khaliq Mahjub – and of the trade unions.

This was the formula used in Argentina and in Chile, in Brazil and in Iraq, and in Ghana – a ruthlessness was let loose upon the earth, as the most toxic political ideologies were given full license to kill. And then, on their radio and television stations, in their newspapers and magazines, the United States and its allies would either suffocate the truth or else frame the story so that the Communists essentially killed themselves.

9. Deny

When Árbenz was ejected, and when the Communists were murdered, the US government denied any role. Privately, they were thrilled. CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote to the US Ambassador to Honduras Whiting Willauer about the coup, which he called a revolution. Later, Willauer described the telegram from Dulles, saying, ‘In effect the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did.’ The US government masked its activities, including denying requests by journalists through the 1966 Freedom of Information Act. No documents were released until the USSR collapsed. Denial of the documents came alongside ongoing encouragement, participation, and complicity by the US government in the massacres conducted by the Guatemalan army against any dissent. The US State Department’s Viron Vaky wrote in an internal memorandum in March 1968 that the violence sanctioned and conducted by the CIA in Guatemala presents ‘a serious problem for the US in terms of our image in Latin America and the credibility of what we say we stand for’.

What we say we stand for – the sourness of the hypocrisy in Vaky’s phrasing.

If the mechanics of the coup were to be released as it happened or just after it happened, it would not only be denied but the person who made the accusations would be branded as a conspiracy theorist.

In 1967, the CIA produced a dispatch (1035-960) called ‘Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report’. Four years previously, a commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren produced a report on the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. The CIA worried that interpretation of the largely inchoate Warren report was undermining the ‘whole reputation of the American government’. The CIA was eager to disparage those who asked serious questions about the activities of the US government. To discredit criticism, the CIA suggested that its agents contact liberal critics of the agency and ‘point out . . . that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation’.

The idea of the ‘conspiracy theory’ was developed by the anti-Communist philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper was against the view that war, unemployment, and poverty were the ‘result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups’. Theories of society – such as Marxism – which attempted to understand the social mechanisms of war and unemployment could be softly dismissed as merely conspiracy theories. Popper pointed out that conspiratorial groups were paranoid and – like Nazism – would lead to totalitarianism and genocidal policies. Popper’s liberals viewed any left-wing criticism of the US state and society as conspiratorial; the actual conspiracy theorists – such as Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society – were sniffed at, disparaged, but not taken seriously (after all, as Daniel Bell wrote, the Communists – unlike the John Birch Society – had a conspiracy that ‘was a threat to any democratic society’). This was not a principled objection to conspiracies, but a class attack on any criticism of capitalism and imperialism.

The idea of the conspiracy theory was used to delegitimize genuine investigation of covert behaviour by the government. Implicit faith in the goodness of US power generated the view that the US government would never use illegal means to secure its ends, and that if there was any suggestion that the US had fomented a coup – that suggestion was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Those who suggested that the US participated in a conspiracy against the Árbenz government would be roundly mocked as conspiracy theorists. Later, when the documents proved that the critics had been correct it was too late.

Production of Amnesia

The United States had to be discrete. But it was not enough to conduct its activities in secret. It had to both deny its role as the leader of the imperialist bloc, and it had to reveal this role so as to engender fear amongst its adversaries. Bissell and his colleagues in Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) said that the US must ‘remain in the background’; but, later US President Richard Nixon told his Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman that he favoured the ‘Madman Theory . . . I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war . . . he has his hand on the nuclear button’. Homeopathic doses of fear for US power had to come alongside allopathic doses of amnesia about US power.

Free. Freedom. It was a public relations coup for these words to be associated with the West, and to paint the USSR and its allies, as well as the newly independent post-colonial states, as dictatorial and authoritarian. The idea of the ‘free world’ was produced not by reality – namely, that the US and its allies were truly free or were committed to basic liberal principles – but it was produced by a massive project that involved money and talent, the construction of institutions and organizations as well as a cultural imagination. The West became associated with the idea of Freedom through propaganda.

The idea of the ‘free world’ was mobilized to produce implicit faith in the United States, and to delegitimize both the socialist world and the Third World project. Money poured into the media and into other culture industries to portray people like Stalin and Nasser as the equivalents of Hitler. These men were depicted as the essence of evil, and their projects as against freedom. What freedom meant was not the freedom to be fully alive – to have the resources to eat, to learn, to be healthy – but to have free elections and a free press; although even this entire definition had the ring of falsity, as the people of France, Greece, and Italy had experienced in the near aftermath of the Second World War, and as the people of the Third World found as the imperialist powers asserted their right to reclaim their lost colonies. The French, as an example, prosecuted their rights over Algeria and Vietnam in the name of democracy, against authoritarianism, just as the United States intervened regularly in the Americas on behalf of old encrusted oligarchies in the name of anti-communism and anti-totalitarianism. It did not seem relevant that French colonialism was itself totalitarian – as Hồ Chí Minh had been saying since the 1920s – and that US intervention in the Americas itself strengthened totalitarian rule, including military rule. These assaults against democracy were conducted in the name of freedom, a freedom for the oligarchs and imperialism against the people. If the United States or the French or the British intervened into countries of the Third World, this was for freedom; the Soviets and the Third World project were the essence of unfreedom: this was a remarkable feat of interpretation.

To assert such an interpretation, a peculiar version of history had to be secured. The past had to be smothered, amnesia produced, and room for discussion of the actual history had to be erased.

Smartly, the CIA and its various offshoots as well as private foundations (such as the Ford Foundation) did not feel the need to finance right-wing and oligarchic intellectuals and social movements. These were already committed to the rule of the oligarchy and imperialism, and they got sufficient funds from private sources. It was more important to strengthen the spine of the liberals and of the anti-Communist left. In 1950, the US government created the Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote anti-communist views among left-leaning intellectuals across the world; at the same time, US foundations such as the Ford Foundation flooded intellectual communities and social movements with large fellowships and grants. Their goal was to produce an anti-Marxist and anti-communist mentality, even at the cost of rationality. The CIA and the Ford Foundation had an intimate relationship; when it was revealed in 1967 that the CIA had funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the platform was given to the Ford Foundation which renamed it as the International Association for Cultural Freedom. The CIA–Ford money grew tentacles deep into the Third World intelligentsia through magazines such as Black Orpheus (Nigeria), Hiwar (Lebanon), Mundo Nuevo (Paris), Quest (India), and Transition (Uganda). These periodicals, well-funded conferences, book ventures, and films became the avenue to promote anti-Marxist and anti-national-liberation ideologies, including the promotion of the primacy of religion over reason.

The opportunistic use of religion as the bulwark against communism was a feature of both the CIA and the Ford Foundation. The CIA nudged Saudi Arabia to create the Muslim World League in 1962 as a way to organize people in the Third World on the basis of religion, and to suggest the dangerous foreignness of communism, left-wing nationalism, trade unionism and even anti-clericalism. ‘Everywhere the newly independent countries seem to be putting great emphasis on a revival of their religion as a means of strengthening their cultural independence and their national patriotism,’ noted Don Price of the Ford Foundation in January 1955 – months before the Bandung Conference. ‘The religious traditions in Asia,’ Price wrote to his boss, ‘may be a bulwark against Communism.’ Price acknowledged that religion must be ‘a handicap to the Asian nations’ own efforts to modernize themselves in technical and economic and administrative ways’, but this was a price worth paying. Backwardness was better than communism, and backwardness could be sold ideologically as authentic to the cultural world of Asia. It was communism that was foreign; backwardness was indigenous.

‘Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest’

On 5 March 1971, Nixon assembled his closest advisors to the Oval Office. They were talking about Latin America. Nixon pointed out that the single most important event in the past ten years was the ‘deterioration of the attitude of the Catholic Church’. ‘[T]hey’re about one-third Marxists, and the other third are in the center, and the other third are Catholics . . . In the old days,’ he said, ‘you could count on the Catholic Church for many things to play an effective role.’ Not anymore, not after the Second Vatican Council of 1962 and the emergence of liberation theology. Several key Catholic priests had come to the understanding that Jesus was a revolutionary, and so they should stand with the peasants and workers against the oligarchs and the armies. Since the Church had provided the ideological and cultural scaffolding to prevent the growth of radical ideas, the drift of some priests towards the left raised serious concerns not only amongst the oligarchies and the militaries, but also in the Vatican’s upper echelon and in the United States government.

The CIA had close ties with the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, whose members run across the Catholic fraternity and who have a strong hold on churches across the world. When the Nazi leadership fled Europe in 1945, the Vatican’s Bishop Alois Hudal worked closely with this Order to smuggle them to South America. Klaus Barbie went on this passage to Bolivia, where he became a senior intelligence asset for General Hugo Banzer. In 1948, the Order honoured Reinhard Gehlen, the CIA’s Nazi who later became the head of West German intelligence. The CIA funded Catholic Action, a lay group with ties to the Order but even more with the far-right fascistic elements who helped prevent the Communist election victory in Italy and who would provide intelligence against any left-leaning priest. The infrastructure for the weaponization of religion against the left was produced in the aftermath of the Second World War with an unsavoury group of far-right fascists, actual Nazis, CIA agents, oligarchs who wanted no change to their wealth, and sections of the Church.

In 1975, not long after Nixon’s ruminations about Catholicism, Bolivia’s Hugo Banzer, with advice from his Nazi security chief Klaus Barbie, urged his Interior Ministry to draw up a plan against liberation theology. Banzer’s Interior Ministry was stuffed with fascists from Bolivia’s Falange movement; for several years, before he attempted a coup against Banzer, the Ministry was run by the fascistic Colonel Andrés Selich Chop, whose unit executed Che Guevara in 1967. In 1975, the Ministry was run by Juan Pereda Asbún, who would follow Banzer onto the dictator’s chair. Pereda worked closely with the CIA to draw up what would be known as the ‘Banzer Plan’, which was a direct attack on liberation theology. Bolivian intelligence, joined by the CIA and by the intelligence services of ten other Latin American countries, began to compile dossiers on liberation theologists, to plant Communist literature in the churches to shut down any progressive Church publication, and to arrest and expel foreign priests and nuns who believed in liberation theology. On 16 July 1975, the Bolivian intelligence services arrested three Spanish nuns in the town of Oruro, accused them of conspiring with labour unions to hold a strike, and then deported them. Such arrests and deportation became commonplace; the Vatican did nothing to defend its priests and nuns. The CIA financed fascistic religious groups that would then bomb churches and assault priests and nuns affiliated with liberation theology.

The violence would escalate to murder. In El Salvador, where priests and nuns took up residence in the slums, the fascistic religious paramilitaries circulated a simple call – haz patria, mata un cura (‘be a patriot, kill a priest’). Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest, was murdered by the Salvadoran security forces in 1977 in a spate of murders which would culminate in the killing by a far-right death squad of the Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero in March 1980. In December of 1980, four nuns from the United States were abducted, raped, and murdered by members of El Salvador’s National Guard. It would not end there. In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were brutally killed by a Salvadoran army battalion that had been trained by the United States. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, as general secretary of the Latin American Episcopal Conference, would leave his church and go into the forests of Colombia with the paramilitaries; he was known to point out radical priests and nuns, who would be executed. López Trujillo would later head the Vatican’s campaign against homosexuality. In 1979, he organized a conference of Latin American Bishops, where Pope John Paul II said that the ‘idea of Christ as a political gure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechesis’.

Within a decade, Nixon’s worries about liberation theology morphed into two documents prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration; these documents by a group that called itself the Council for Inter-American Security are known as the Santa Fe Document 1 (1980) and 2 (1984). They suggested that war, not peace, is the norm in world affairs; they said that the main battlefields for the war against communism were to be in South America and Southeast Asia. The main point was that the United States must protect ‘the independent nations of Latin America from communist conquest’ and ‘preserve the Hispanic American culture from sterilized communist conquest’. The first document said that priests affiliated with liberation theology ‘use the church as a political arm against private property and productive capitalism’. The next document noted that the US government must make closer ties with the Catholic hierarchy to crush liberation theology. In 1983, Pope John Paul II went to Nicaragua, in the throes of its revolution, to attack priests and the flock for their attraction to liberation theology.

Not only had the Vatican been seized by the threat from liberation theology, but Catholics seemed to drift off towards evangelical churches – many of them financed by US evangelical projects, especially Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. The larger evangelical churches – especially many of the neo-Pentecostal churches – had been immune to the drift leftwards. They were as reliable as the Opus Dei and Catholic Action tendencies. General Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala despised Catholic priests who went into the slums and consorted with Communists. Protestant sects, particularly those with US roots, he felt, preached the Gospel of individual enterprise not social justice. That is why Ríos Montt left the Catholics and joined the Gospel Outreach Church of Eureka (California). When Ríos Montt came to power in a military coup in 1982, Pat Robertson dashed down to Guatemala City to interview him for The 700 Club; Robertson portrayed Ríos Montt to his more than three million viewers as having ‘a deep faith in Jesus Christ’. This is Ríos Montt, who not only let loose his army to conduct a genocide of his own people, but who said, ‘[I]f you are with us, we’ll feed you; if not, we’ll kill you.’ A decade before, leaders of 32 Pentecostal churches in Chile welcomed Pinochet’s coup. They said that the overthrow of Allende ‘was God’s answer to the prayers of all the believers who recognized that Marxism was the expression of a satanic power of darkness. We, the evangelicals, recognize as the higher authority of our country the military junta who in answer to our prayers freed us from Marxism’.

Religion, as Don Price of the Ford Foundation wrote from Burma, was the bulwark against Communism.

The Answer to Communism Lay in the Hope of Muslim Revival

In August 1951, a curious document arrived in Washington from Taipei with the title ‘Proposal to Unite Democratic Nations and Islamic World into an Anti-Communist Force’. The memorandum was forwarded to Washington by Colonel David Barrett, a career US soldier who was the military attaché to the Nationalist government in Taiwan. It was written by Haji Yousuf Chang, who would later become a scholar of Islam in China and would establish in 1976 the Islamic Education Cultural Foundation in Taiwan. Chang noted that there were three ideological frameworks that contended with each other in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War – Democracy, Communism, and Islamism. Democracy and Communism were currently in the midst of a dangerous war in Korea, not far from Barrett. Islamism, meanwhile, could be found from the Suez Canal to Sumatra. Islam, he thought, could either ally with the forces of democracy or of communism, which is why the United States had to hastily suborn Islam to its anti-Communist mission. In February 1951, John Playfair Price, a British diplomat who had most recently served as Consul-General for the British in Khorasan, Sistan, and Persian Baluchistan (in the outer rim of Iran), said,

The answer to Communism lay in the hope of Muslim revival in which Pakistan was well qualified to assume leadership. Persia may well prove to be the bridge for Muslim unity. The Muslim world is a reservoir of strength. Communism can be checked by a faith stronger than its own and that faith lies in the Middle Near East.

This statement impacted Chang. He proposed that the US government fund a three-point plan:

1. To set up an Islamic Cultural Society in the place chosen as the centre of the Muslim movement, a channel keeping close contact with the Muslims in the world, especially those in Middle East and China.

2. To publish periodical pamphlets in English, Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, and Malayan languages, with the purpose of linking up the Americans and Muslims together into one united front against Communism.

3. Both the cultural society and the office issuing the pamphlets should be headed by Muslims either from China or any other Muslim countries. It is of the utmost importance that it should not be made known to outsiders that such services are backed by the United States.

This was the essence of Chang’s memorandum. Barrett’s note affixed to the memorandum applauded Chang and suggested that he be hired to implement the policy.

Two years later, in Iran, the CIA operated alongside Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani against the growing influence and power of the communist Tudeh Party. Kashani was a complex character, who – in 1951 – had defended the Tudeh ‘as a loyal Muslim organization’ and fantasized about a new ‘anti-imperialist organization’; but after a trip to Mecca, he returned to Iran convinced that he should help overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi. When William Warne of the US Technical Cooperation Administration Mission went to visit Kashani in Tehran in August 1952, the cleric told him that what drove the people to communism was misery and desperation. Communism, he told Warne, ‘was the worst enemy of Iran and that to stop communism the present deplorable condition of the people should be improved. A hungry person will not go after moral values and religion’. More investment and infrastructural development by the United States were necessary, as was the removal of the Communists from the country. Later that year in November, US Ambassador to Iran Loy Henderson went to see Kashani, who told him that the ‘situation made it all the more important that Christian US cooperate with Moslem Iran to prevent spread of militant atheism’. During the day of the coup against Mossadegh, Kashani’s forces were out on the streets; they felt that their day of deliverance had come.

Kashani was eager to create a pan-Islamic movement, but he was not able to succeed in his mission. In 1949, King Abdullah of Jordan, the Shah of Iran, the King of Iraq, and the President of Turkey considered the establishment of a pan-Islamic movement. They shared an antipathy to the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and communism. A British Foreign Office official wrote in October 1949, ‘In so far as a modern Pan Islamic movement is designed to create a common front against Communism, it is evident that we should do everything in our power to assist it.’ No such divides of Shia and Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood and Sala held this movement back. That it did not happen was merely from lack of will.

A decade later, the Saudis took leadership to form such a movement. On 18 May 1962, King Saud inaugurated an Islamic conference in Mecca, which brought together clerics and scholars from Algeria to the Philippines. That afternoon, the delegates formed the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-Alam al-Islami). This platform, funded by Petro-dollars and encouraged by the CIA, posed as a philanthropic organization when in fact it was a network to preach the gospel of Islam over communism and to create cells to influence young people against both anti-colonial nationalism and communism across the Soviet lands and the Third World. David Long, a US official, said of this development, ‘Pan-Islam was not, to us, seen as a strategic threat. There were bad guys doing bad things to people on the Left, to Nasser. They were fighting the pinkos. So, we didn’t see pan-Islam as a threat.’ After King Saud abdicated on behalf of Crown Prince Faisal, the latter went off on a world tour to promote the pan-Islamic alliance. Since the Rabitat was a ‘civil society’ network, King Faisal invited governments to come to Jeddah in 1969 to create the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an inter-state body. Saudi Arabia financed Said Ramadan’s Islamic Centre of Geneva so as to bring the Muslim Brotherhood into this pan-Islamic alliance against the left. In place now was an inter-state organization (OIC), a civil society organization (Muslim World League), and an intellectual institution (Islamic Centre of Geneva). The money came from oil; the direction came from the CIA.

Saudi money flooded parts of the world where in societies with large numbers of Muslims communism or anti-colonial nationalism had taken hold and where heterodox forms of Islam were prevalent. Mosques were built, clerics influenced, aid to the poor provided, books and pamphlets distributed amongst the youth – a new kind of belligerent, orthodox Islam seeded what would later emerge in force against socialism and against the modern world. The ‘Muslim revival’ that Haji Yousuf Chang had written about in his 1951 memorandum was now being prepared by the monarchies of the Arab world and the CIA.

‘I Strongly Urge You to Make This a Turning Point’

If you were standing on the edge of a cliff on 31 December 1979 and looking backwards over the decade that was coming to a close, the situation in the world would have given you whiplash.

There were immense advances for the people of the world during the past ten years, with vast areas of the world liberated from colonial rule and from colonial wars. In 1974–75, the people under Portuguese colonialism were able to remove the claws of Europe’s oldest colonial power; Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique had fought against the Portuguese for decades, and now not only did they win their freedom – but through the Carnation Revolution – their parting gift to Portugal was the end of its fascist regime. The impact of freedom for Portugal’s colonies in Africa was immediately felt in Rhodesia, where the national liberation fighters were strengthened to overthrow the government of Ian Smith and proclaim a free Zimbabwe in 1980. In 1975, the Vietnamese people watched as US imperialists boarded their helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, and thereby surrendered to the Vietnamese revolution. The US bombardment of Vietnam with Agent Orange and Napalm left the country’s soil infused with toxic materials for generations to come; its loss of life demolished an easy transition to socialism. Vietnam won the war but was left a graveyard of possibilities.

Three rapid revolutions took place once more in poor countries, each one a result of deprivation of the most drastic sort and of the belief that the oligarchies would not be able to change the situation: Afghanistan (1978), Nicaragua (1979), and Grenada (1979). None of these revolutions would be allowed to stabilize and to put the various socialist agendas into place. Before the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan could even set a course out of the deep inequality and backwardness, particularly in the rural and mountainous areas, the United States went to work with its most diabolical allies to undermine an internally divided Communist movement. The US mined Managua harbour in Nicaragua and set in motion a series of dirty wars not only against the Sandinista government in that country but also against any progressive force that emerged in El Salvador and Guatemala. Finally, the US played upon the petty grievances inside the New Jewel movement in Grenada, watched as Maurice Bishop was executed by his former comrades, and then invaded the country to dismantle anything decent produced by the movement.

Part of what would be visible from the mountaintop were the coups – Bangladesh (1975), Chad (1975, 1978), Pakistan (1977), Iraq (1978), South Korea (1979), and Turkey (1980). Wrapped up in these coups is the story of a region, the entire arc of Asia that runs from Turkey to South Korea. These are coups with internal histories, so that the coup in Turkey is partly about the contest between the secular bourgeoisie of Istanbul and its Kemalist military against the Islamist petty bourgeoisie of Anatolia and its many religious orders; and so that the coup in South Korea, which first takes place in 1961, has to do with both the demands of the Cold War to retain South Korea as a US ally and the imperatives of the South Korean capitalist class which wanted to hold down labour so as to grow the economy at a rate that relied upon the extreme exploitation of the South Korean working class. Around the deeply local situation of the coups was a regional anxiety of the US imperialists about an increase in the influence of the USSR and China around not only Asia but also Eurasia. It is important to put in this context the new relationship between the US and China forged in 1972, to weaken fatally any attempt to create a united Communist front in the continent.

On 2 January 1980, US President Carter’s Assistant for National Security – Zbigniew Brzezinski – wrote a memorandum to the President about the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. The main argument of the memorandum was to ‘make the costs to the Soviets very high, preventing a successful Soviet consolidation of power there if possible’. To do this, the US would need to ‘build a security system in the Persian Gulf’. ‘I strongly urge you to make this a turning point,’ Brzezinski wrote to Carter. Control by the United States in the region had begun to falter after the Communist Saur Revolution in Afghanistan in April 1978. Even though that revolution was internally driven, with minimal Soviet participation, the US saw it as an extension of Soviet power. Brzezinski had already pushed for US intervention in Afghanistan through the provision of funds and weaponry to the far-right mujahideen through the military government in Pakistan (formed out of the coup of 1977, fully backed by Washington). But now he wanted more. There were four elements to the Brzezinski plan, each of them eventually adopted by the US:

1. A direct offer of large military assistance to Pakistan. When General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in September 1977, he called the US Ambassador Arthur Hummel to inform him about what he had done. The US already knew and backed Zia fully. When the Soviets entered Afghanistan, Zia took out his prayer mat and prayed; he knew that US funds would now flood his country, which would – like Honduras in the Dirty War of the 1980s – become effectively a military base for US policy in the region.

2. Speed up our acquisition of bases and a new unified military structure for the region. The US Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force had been created in reaction to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It was the military component of the Carter Doctrine (1980), which said that any threat to the Persian Gulf – mainly Saudi Arabia – would be seen as a threat to the United States; any attack on the Persian Gulf would be defended by this Task Force. In 1983, this Task Force became US Central Command.

3. Covert action in South Yemen and Eritrea as well as in Iran and Afghanistan. The CIA and US military intelligence began to operate against the People’s Democratic Republic of Southern Yemen, which was governed by the Marxist National Liberation Front from 1969, and had drastically improved the conditions of its people (including land reform and equal rights for women); this government had to be undermined. In 1970, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist group with mass support, emerged to take the upper hand in the fight for independence from Ethiopia; the US operated to beat back that dynamic and prevent the creation of a socialist republic in the Horn of Africa. US covert operations continued against Iran, and of course had begun against Afghanistan from the first hours of the Saur Revolution. People such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a fundamentalist who threw acid on the faces of female students at Kabul University, would become the main recipients of CIA funds through Operation Cyclone – a CIA programme to finance and arm the mujahideen, fighters for God, against the Afghan government. It was this programme that created the chaos that provoked the Afghan government to seek help from the Soviet Union. ‘We didn’t push the Russians to intervene,’ Brzezinski later said, ‘but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.’ Or, as the CIA Chief of the Directorate of Operations for the region Chuck Cogan told me years later in a restaurant near Harvard University, ‘We funded the worst fellows right from the start, long before the Iranian Revolution and long before the Soviet invasion.’

4. An aid package to Turkey (funded largely by Bonn and perhaps other European allies) in exchange for Turkish help in Iran and Pakistan. Powerful working-class movements swept across Turkey in the 1970s, with the threat looming of the possibility of the country joining the revolutionary wave that had swept Asia. The US wanted to do anything and everything to forestall the possibility of a revolution: its arms embargo – put in place when Turkey occupied Northern Cyprus – ended in 1979 and by March 1980, the US and Turkey signed an economic and defence treaty. Sixteen NATO bases inside Turkey and the half a million troops of the Turkish army were on the line; they had to be protected. IMF austerity exacerbated problems in the country, which is why the US government advised the World Bank and the Irving Trust Company to provide loans to the otherwise bankrupt Turkey. NATO commander General Bernard Rogers, a US Army General, visited Ankara four times in October 1980, while General David Jones, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, visited the country in November. Turkish Air Force General Ali Tahsin Şahinkaya went to Washington to – as they say – seek permission to move against the chaos in Turkey. A bright green light ashed from Washington for the Turkish military to seize power on 12 September 1980 (a CIA document was less clear, saying that the US military was ‘alerted in advance of the military takeover’). General Kenan Evren took power, putting in place Turgut Özal as Deputy Prime Minister to hold the IMF line, sending in tanks to crush working-class rebellion, and hastening a NATO– Turkish military exercise called Anvil Express to show NATO support for the coup. The Turkish intelligence services (MIT), the CIA, and the fascist MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) had already spent the time since 1978 killing Communists; this exacerbated in the months after the coup. Turkey was prepared to become a military agent for US imperialism against the spread of the revolutionary wave. ‘Turkey was not like Argentina,’ Brzezinski told Özal, since it was more fortunate with its military leadership. They could be relied upon to toe the US line fully.

In these four points, Brzezinski did not mention South Korea. But, in a visit to South Korea in November 1980, Brzezinski said that US–South Korean relations must be ‘viewed against the background of what has been happening in Europe and the Persian Gulf’. ‘Afghanistan and Iran are no longer buffer states in the Middle East,’ he told Kim Kyong Won, the South Korean Secretary General for the President. The military dictatorship of an increasingly ‘isolated’ Park Chung Hee that ran from 1961 to his assassination by his own intelligence chief in October 1979 could have led – thanks to already militant working-class and student unrest – into a broad revolution. This is what Kim told Brzezinski. The matter was settled with another military coup led by young officers, in particular General Chun Doo Hwan, who eventually became the coup’s president. Chun’s maniacal anticommunism, grounded in the anti-Communist National Security Act of 1948 and institutionalized in the police and internal security, led to the arrest and torture of hundreds of activists. It, said Kim, is what prevented South Korea from becoming ‘another Iran’.

What is important here is that Brzezinski was talking to Kim in November 1980. In May of that year, in the southern city of Gwangju, a popular uprising fought against the Chun dictatorship. Chun sent in the military on 18 May, who opened fire and killed hundreds – if not thousands – of people. Chun defended his action saying that he was preventing a Communist coup, instigated by North Korea. On 23 May, at the CIA headquarters, a discussion took place where Richard Lehman – head of the National Intelligence Council – affirmed that ‘there are no signs of anything untoward underway in North Korea’; he meant that North Korea was not behind the uprising. US Ambassador William Gleysteen wrote to Washington in May that the Gwangju uprising was an ‘internal threat’, with ‘at least’ 150,000 people involved. None of this impacted Washington, where – on 30 May – a meeting at the White House concluded that ‘the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later’. The US government had counselled moderation, ‘but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order’. In clearer terms, the US told Chun’s government that it was permitted to use force.

In 1997, President Chun was sentenced to death – later commuted – for his role in the Gwangju massacre; the United States was not part of the proceedings, although the US green light should very well have been investigated (only in 2018 was it revealed that South Korea used US provided helicopters – MD 500 Defender and UH-1 Iroquois – in the massacre; arms sales to South Korea continued undaunted after 1980). The US government had no real problem with the crackdown in South Korea. Far better to let the South Korean military use lethal force than tolerate ‘another Iran’; far better to maintain South Korea as a forward base for the ambitions of US imperialism.

‘The Sheet is Too Short’

The Third World Project, backed by the USSR, had placed on the table the idea of the New International Economic Order in 1973–74. The NIEO made the case for a total transformation of the trade and development order, drawing in the principles of economic nationalism onto the world stage. The United States and its allies understood the dangerous implications of the NIEO and found many ways to undermine its advancement – including the delegitimization of the United Nations General Assembly, which had endorsed the NIEO in 1974. The main argument against the NIEO was not intellectual, but political, with the Western bloc using the full force of its power to contain any Third World infection inside the multilateral organizations and to pressure states reliant upon external funding to reject the NIEO programme. It was in this period that the US and its allies put pressure on the International Monetary Fund, and on the various private and public lending agencies, to tie loans of all kinds – even for short-term liquidity challenges – to structural adjustment of their own internal economies.

If these three initials – CIA – had become associated with US imperialism in the period from its formation to the 1970s, three new initials – IMF – became associated with Washington from the 1970s onwards. The IMF’s manuals did not come with titles such as A Study of Assassination, but their policies had as harmful impacts – often via their own version of coups. For the IMF coup, the military did not need to leave the barracks; an IMF team would appear in the capital and subordinate the financial power of the state with few key demands about the price of currency and cuts in the budget. Two significant assaults – in the nature of financial coups – took place in Zaire (Congo) and Peru. In Zaire, IMF officials told the government through 1976 to 1978 to devalue the currency by 42 per cent, which led to a five-fold increase in consumer prices and a drop in real consumption expenditures by one-third. IMF officials essentially took command of the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank. In 1977, the IMF arrived in Lima with a proposal from a Citibank-led consortium to the dictatorial regime led by General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez Cerruti and his military junta; the consortium would offer to sell Peru’s natural resources and take care of Peru’s substantial debt. Billions would eventually flood out of the country. The word desgobierno – or ungovernment – would be coined to define the situation in Peru; it is a word that could be used for the other states that were members of the Non-Aligned Movement and faced the IMF coup. Mexico’s José López Portillo’s government of 1976–82 made the same sort of deal with the IMF, fell into ungovernment, called out the riot police, and then plunged into bankruptcy in 1982. Washington kept its power dry; the IMF had done the job.

If the IMF dithered, the CIA made sure to stiffen its spine. In an important note from 1985 entitled Major Debtors: Problems with the IMF, the CIA noted that its economists faced the ongoing financial crisis in Mexico with far too much leniency. President Miguel de la Madrid, who adopted the IMF suggestions to slice deeply into the Mexican budgets, nonetheless worried that his austerity programme was alienating the population. He was, the CIA noted, ‘resisting suggestions from within the government to make deep federal spending cuts and hold the line on wages’. Non-compliance by Mexico with IMF rules would pose ‘the most immediate problem for US interests’, the CIA wrote. The problem was not with Mexico alone, but with the region. If the IMF allowed Mexico latitude, then this would ‘make it more difficult to negotiate meaningful reform with Brazil and Argentina’.

Around the time that the CIA delivered its assessment on de la Madrid, it wrote up a memorandum on the incoming Peruvian government of the socialist leader Alan García. García, the CIA noted, had already made comments in favour of the Nicaraguan revolution, and was thought to be close to the Soviets and the Cubans. The anti-IMF rhetoric of García was necessary in a country where IMF policy led to harsh austerity. He had made strong speeches against the IMF and called upon Latin American leaders to come to Peru and sign a Lima Declaration asking the IMF for more favourable payment terms. It was this regional solidarity that was the problem. The US government put pressure on private financial lenders to cease their lines of credit to Peru. Hyper-inflation escalated, at unbelievable rates of 13,000 per cent per year. García lost his footing. He was booed when he left office; he was succeeded by Alberto Fujimori, whose own adherence to the IMF line – supported by the CIA and the rest of the Washington government – was called Fujishock. Fujimori adopted wholesale the prescription for the ‘Washington Consensus’ developed by the IMF’s John Williamson in 1989 – from fiscal policy discipline to tax reform to privatization to deregulation. This list – later called liberalization or the policy slate of neoliberalism – would become formulaic for the IMF coups to come.

In April 1983, in an important summary entitled IMF-led Austerity: Implications for Troubled Borrowers, the CIA pointed out that the IMF policies were necessary, but they would create ‘political instability’. ‘Widespread anger and frustration with austerity will almost certainly spark periodic strikes, worker demonstrations, and possibly food riots.’ Workers’ strikes from Bolivia to Zambia threatened to go out of control. ‘In our opinion,’ wrote the CIA analysts, ‘political resistance to austerity in debtor countries will build over time and become better organized. We believe strong political opposition will develop if the adjustment process is perceived as unfair or too harsh. Although at this time, we do not foresee a full-scale revolution or an outright repudiation of debt in the major debtor countries.’

Two years later, in 1985, the Cuban government tried to organize the discontent into this outright repudiation of debt. The Cubans hosted the Havana Debt Conference that year. The gathering took place in the shadow of the Guantanamo Naval Base that has been held by the United States since 1898. The novelist Gabriel García Márquez was at the conference, where he – like Castro – sat and took notes. A journalist asked him about his opinion of the IMF policy and Washington Consensus. García Márquez confessed that he is not an expert in financial matters, ‘but even I know that the sheet is too short, and if we pull the sheet up over our heads, our feet will stick out’.

The Debt of Blood

When Captain Thomas Sankara, a young military officer, took power in his native country, he changed its name from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso – the land of upright people. This was in 1983, in the midst of the IMF-exacerbated debt crisis. ‘The origins of debt go back to colonialism’s origins,’ Sankara said at the July 1987 Organization of African Unity summit; the point of the summit was to create a unified front of African states to repudiate their debts. ‘We cannot repay the debt because we are not responsible for this debt,’ Sankara said. ‘On the contrary, others owe us something that no money can pay for. That is to say, the debt of blood.’

In a time of hopelessness, when debt ravaged the states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Sankara came with hope and preached condence. Stand up, he would say, and look the world in the eye, for your dignity cannot be diminished. It was a powerful message. In 1985, Sankara laid out his theory of confidence:

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.

Imperialism would not allow this. The plots against him came fast and furiously.

The French have still not opened their archive on their activities, but rumours in Ouagadougou – Burkina Faso’s capital – remain alive to French and CIA intervention to undermine Sankara’s efforts. In 2009, Italian journalist Silvestro Montanaro interviewed Liberian Senator and warlord Prince Johnson, who told him – on tape – that ‘there was an international plot to get rid of this man’, meaning Sankara. Cyril Allen, a former head of Liberia’s national petroleum company told Montanaro that ‘Sankara was leaning too far left. The Americans were not happy with Sankara. He was talking of nationalizing his country’s resources to benefit his people. He was a socialist, so he had to go’. General Momo Jiba, an aide-de-camp of Charles Taylor, the Liberian warlord, approached Sankara to allow Taylor to use Burkina Faso to launch his regional war. Sankara told Momo that he was not interested. Taylor met with Sankara’s Defence Minister Blaise Compaoré in Mauritania along with a ‘white man from Paris’. They then held another meeting in Libya, where they decided to kill Sankara. Cyill Allen said, ‘The Americans and French sanctioned the plan. There was a CIA operative and the US embassy in Burkina Faso working closely with the secret service at the French embassy, and they made the crucial decisions.’ Momo and Johnson were part of the plot.

Before he was shot to death on 15 October 1987, Sankara had written, ‘Whatever the contradictions, whatever the oppositions, solutions will be found as long as confidence reigns.’ The assassination of Sankara ended a long cycle of national liberation, as confidence dithered, as the debt crisis swept away hope, and as the USSR began its own slow demise.

All the Cameras Have Left For the Next War

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall,

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for those

who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Wisława Szymborska, ‘The End and the Beginning’

(translated by Johanna Trzeciak)

Part 3