Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences (A. B. Abrams)

Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences
Author	A. B. Abrams
Written in	2023
ISBN	978-1-949762-70-9
Source	IA
PDF	pdf

Introduction

It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

– HENRY KISSINGER

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

– JOSEPH GOEBBELS

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities, has the power to make you commit injustices.

– VOLTAIRE

Atrocity fabrication – the reporting of an atrocity committed by an adversary without knowledge that it ever occurred – has a centuries-long history at the heart of propaganda and power politics in the Western world with profound influences on its political culture. Portraying an adversary as committing particularly egregious crimes, especially when one intends to initiate military action or other hostile measures against that adversary, has consistently provided an effective means of moving public and international opinion and justifying one’s actions. Applied effectively, atrocity fabrication can transform in the public eye a war of unprovoked aggression into a war of liberation of the oppressed, or turn a blockade to starve enemy civilians into a humane effort to pressure an abusive government. Claims of atrocities can also serve to delegitimise criticisms of one’s actions against an adversary, portraying such opposition as siding with injustice and facilitating egregious crimes. An assessment of how and to what ends atrocity fabrication has been used provides context vital to understanding international politics both historically and in the 21st century.

Significant consistencies in how atrocity fabrication has been used in the Western world can be observed throughout much of modern history. A notable example from the early 20th century was the British government’s response to the German occupation of Belgium in the initial months of the First World War by sponsoring a distinguished panel of lawyers and historians, the Bryce Committee, to document German atrocities. The committee sensationally described German public rapes and mutilation of Belgian women and girls and the bayonetting of a two-year-old child by eight German soldiers, among other crimes, allowing it to conclude that “murder, lust, and pillage prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries.” Such conduct, while far from uncommon in European colonial wars from Australia to the Americas, was abnormal and considered unacceptable for an inter-European conflict where very different standards applied.

The Bryce Committee’s claims strongly influenced public opinion, and having been chaired by former British ambassador to the United States Viscount James Bryce it was found to have had an “overwhelming effect on the American mind and heart” which helped erode public opposition to entering the war on Britain’s side. Despite its persuasiveness, the report’s findings had little evidence to substantiate them, with a Belgian commission of inquiry formed in 1922 conducting investigations at the scenes of the alleged atrocities and failing to confirm even a single report of German excesses. Professor Phillip Knightly, a leading authority on journalism and war who lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Australian Senate, and Australia’s National Press Club, observed regarding the allegations made: “The committee had not personally interviewed a single witness. The report was based on 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees, taken by 22 barristers in Britain. None of the witnesses were placed on oath, their names were omitted, and hearsay evidence was accepted at full value.” This was far from an isolated case, and reflected broader trends in reporting on German military conduct. The Times, for example, quoted a source who claimed to have witnessed “with his own eyes German soldiery chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” The French Propaganda Bureau subsequently provided a picture of a baby without hands, and French papers went on to depict German soldiers eating babies’ hands, although post-war investigations failed to find evidence of any cases of comparable conduct.

As was generally the case for atrocity fabrication efforts it mattered little how German personnel actually conducted themselves or whether allegations against them had any grounding in reality – only that the alleged atrocities would shape public opinion both domestically and overseas to align with British state interests. As Phillip Knightly concluded: “By the time the atrocity story was discredited it had served its role. It had not only rallied opinion on the home front and strengthened the resolution of Britain and France to prosecute the war to the finish, but had also achieved the important task of lowering resistance to the war in the United States.” The barbarism portrayed made almost any policy pursued to counter German power appear justified.

Thirty years after the Bryce Committee’s work the beginning of the Cold War united the Western world against the first peer level challenger to its power in centuries, the Soviet Union, and similarly saw organisations and networks established to dominate the information space and fabricate stories vilifying the adversary. To fight a new kind of conflict where winning hearts and minds was often more decisive than firepower, Western intelligence agencies led by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a particularly potent global information network to control political narratives. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was one of the more prominent related operations and saw American journalists recruited to publish articles dictated by the agency – articles which very often vilified the USSR and its allies with totally fabricated information. The agency also funded student and cultural organisations and magazines for similar purposes, and through its networks of editors and journalists it went to significant lengths to discredit sources of information that contradicted its narratives down to and including targeting individual columnists in the Philippines.

An investigation by the U.S. Congress in the early 1970s revealed that CIA operations extended to influence reporting not only in America, but almost worldwide in dozens of languages. Its report concluded: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” It further noted that undercover CIA agents held key management positions across major American media organisations to ensure that published content aligned with the CIA’s agendas. Former CIA employee William Bader supported the report’s conclusions, illustrating the agency’s operations as follows: “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are agency people at the management level.”

The CIA’s operations to shape the global information space were described by the Washington Post as “a fascinatingly byzantine effort to turn the world to the American way of thinking,” and alongside hundreds of news outlets the agency funded and heavily influenced popular media including hundreds of films and “at least a thousand books” for publication and distribution globally. Peacetime vilification of adversaries through both news and popular media was generally far more subtle than depicting ongoing mass slaughter as the Bryce Committee had, but predisposed populations to more easily believe claims of enemy atrocities when they were occasionally made. The adversary did not need to constantly be portrayed as committing slaughter, but rather as being the ‘kind of country/actor’ which was highly capable of doing so based on its portrayed history and intrinsic nature.

The New York Times noted in its own more extensive report that “in its persistent efforts to shape world opinion, the CIA has been able to call upon a separate and far more extensive network of newspapers, news services, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasting stations and other entities over which it has at various times had some control.” The Times referred to the CIA’s “communications Empire” as having “embraced more than 500 news and public information organisations and individuals. According to one CIA official, they ranged in importance ‘from Radio Free Europe to a third-string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper’ … the network was known officially as the ‘Propaganda Assets Inventory.’” The Times also noted that the agency maintained extensive “financial ties to academic, cultural and publishing organisations” globally for much the same purpose. Millions of dollars in subsidies were paid to influence media in Cuba alone, with other large scale and long-term operations carried out worldwide from Kenya and India to Taiwan and South Vietnam.

The CIA was far from isolated in its extensive efforts to shape the global information space, with other American intelligence services as well as those of allied states creating parallel ‘communications empires’ of their own. A notable example was the British Information Research Department’s work specifically to foster anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese sentiments in the Muslim world, Africa and parts of Asia, which although long denied was confirmed by declassified documents in 2022. The decades long effort involved fabrications ranging from forging statements from Soviet institutions that would provoke anti-Soviet backlash, to creating media content from fictitious Islamic organisations portraying Moscow as an enemy of the Muslim world. Its publications often resorted to criticising and even calling for attacks on third parties, for example “the Jews,” to gain legitimacy among populations inclined towards such thinking and thus more effectively spread anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese messages. An example was the fabrication of claims by Islamic officials that only by turning against Moscow could the Arab nation gain victory over Israel – a theme which gained much traction in the Arab world while the department was operating.

The practice of government agencies establishing vast networks to influence various information spaces and promote fabricated stories was hardly relegated to the Cold War. A notable example was the formerly secret U.S. Defence Department Office of Strategic Influence which emerged in the early 2000s and was authorised to plant stories, including feeding false reports to journalists, to influence public opinion worldwide. Although the Pentagon was forced to disband the office after its existence became known, later comments by high level officials indicated that such operations continued under different bodies. This “black propaganda,” as it was referred to repeatedly by the BBC, provided a very potent means to shape international opinion towards American adversaries.

Providing details on Western intelligence agencies’ sustainment of extensive networks of journalists into the 21st century for the purpose of propagating favoured narratives, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte reported in 2016 regarding his own role in such networks:

I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service [Bundesnachrichtendienst – BND]…. One day the BND came to my office at the Frankfurter Allgemeine in Frankfurt. They wanted me to write an article about Libya and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi…. They gave me all this secret information and they just wanted me to sign the article with my name. That article was how Gaddafi tried to secretly build a poison gas factory. It was a story that was printed worldwide two days later.

Ulfkotte further detailed how intelligence agencies contacted journalists and used them to plant stories, the perks that came with working with them, and the risks of non-compliance. His example, the story about a Libyan poison gas factory, was one of many that contributed to influencing public opinion to perceive the targeted country as a malign and dangerous actor. False reports published in considerable quantities over several decades made Western economic sanctions on Libya, and eventually an intensive bombing campaign and the assassination of its leadership, much easier to justify publicly.

By the time of Ulfkotte’s work the information networks operated by Western intelligence agencies had expanded to incorporate large numbers of online assets, including both bots and human personnel, which operated to influence discourse and support Western-favoured narratives globally. This was vital as the internet and social media in particular played an increasingly central role in the global information space. These kinds of operations were revealed on multiple occasions, ranging from a network of bots spreading fabricated information that vilified Russia discovered in an Adelaide University study in September 2022, to a Stanford-Graphika joint study a month prior unveiling a network of false social media accounts created by U.S. and British agents to propagate vilifying disinformation about China, Russia and Iran across several Muslim-majority countries. Alongside intelligence agencies, the Pentagon also invested heavily in software to create vast networks of false social media accounts and influence foreign audiences in their own languages with a relatively small number of personnel, a notable example being Operation Earnest Voice in the 2010s, which was mirrored by parallel efforts by the British Armed Forces.

Often key to the success of atrocity fabrication has been the ability to construct portrayals of an adversary as part of a greater vilifying metanarrative – an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives additional meaning to their experiences. Particularly for countries or actors with which consumers of media content have less firsthand contact, enough sources repeating similar narratives of atrocities and other misconduct can strongly influence ‘what kind of country/actor’ the target is considered to be. All future encounters with the target will then be interpreted through the context of this overarching narrative. A powerful metanarrative affects not only the public but also analysts, journalists and even policymakers who will be strongly inclined to interpret new information related to the country or actor in the context of the narrative.

An exploration of the formation of metanarratives in U.S. media published in the Yale Review of International Studies observed:

Journalists often fail to acknowledge the lens through which they perceive and interpret reality. The existence of overarching themes that define political press coverage, what the Pew Research Centre deems ‘metanarratives,’ is made possible by the enduring tradition of pack journalism…. Washington insiders and journalists tweet and re-tweet each other’s content, rapidly formulate an interpretive lens through which to understand major new developments. The resulting echo chamber, one populated by the elite pundits and reporters that convey political information to the rest of the country, builds consensus rather than dialogue. This ‘groupthink’ is how metanarratives form.

A metanarrative tends to be simple but totalising, colouring news coverage so that every new piece of information is interpreted against its backdrop. This is why crude characterisations of presidential candidates (ex. ‘Biden is a plagiariser’ and ‘Clinton is untrustworthy’) are difficult to dispel once they have been established. Reporters interpret news involving any given subject through the lens of the agreed-upon metanarrative, even if such interpretations result in factual distortions or blatant double standards. For example, the press framed Obama’s position change on same-sex marriage ahead of the 2012 election as an ‘evolution,’ whereas Romney’s changes in position were seen as ‘flip-flops,’ which fit more neatly into the dominant character narrative of Romney as an inauthentic politician.

Metanarratives built around fabricated atrocities have often profoundly influenced the fates of targeted countries, a notable example being the Gulf War where proponents of military action against Iraq in late 1990 fabricated a claim that Iraqi soldiers were slaughtering Kuwaiti premature babies in their incubators (as covered in detail in Chapter 4). This and a wide range of other fabricated Iraqi atrocities contributed to very quickly creating an overarching way of viewing the country that structured almost all interpretations and coverage. Claims of Iraqi atrocities provided a key example of “the self-reinforcing nature of the metanarrative,” with the press having “cultivated a social and political environment wherein the incubator story could appear plausible, even reasonable.”

Despite the incubator babies story being proven entirely false in 1992, the metanarrative of Iraq as a country capable of such acts retained a powerful influence. The Yale Review observed accordingly: “This dynamic continued to colour press coverage of [Iraqi President Saddam] Hussein after the Gulf War and before 9/11. In those years, the U.S. media no longer needed prompting by the government to propagate the ‘Fuhrer Saddam’ mythology, and the U.S. public no longer needed prompting to accept it.” Impressions of ‘what kind of country’ Iraq was had been formed largely on the basis of multiple fabricated Iraqi atrocities, which predisposed Americans in particular to suspect Baghdad’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks and to believe Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction to attack them. This in turn was key to facilitating another war against Iraq in 2003.

The slaughter of incubator babies was just one of many widely accepted but totally fabricated stories that vilified Iraq, while Iraq itself was far from an isolated example of a country that had its fate radically transformed by atrocity fabrication. The global reach of Western information networks ensured that even beyond the Western world perceptions of the West’s adversaries were very often shaped in much the same way, which facilitated and created public support for hostile policies ranging from economic sanctions to invasion and war. Furthermore, as with Iraq, once a metanarrative shaped opinion of ‘what kind of country’ the target was, it was extremely difficult to dispel no matter how thoroughly the accounts on which it was based were disproven or retracted.

Understanding atrocity fabrication not in terms of the debunking of a single incident or set of incidents, but rather as part of a much broader phenomenon, is vital to comprehending how challengers to Western power have and will continue to be assailed. This book explores eleven leading cases of targeted countries, and the strong consistencies in how and to what ends they were. Also covered are the consequences of atrocity fabrication and how, by providing pretext for actual aggression, it paves the way for very real atrocities against the populations of the falsely accused states, which often far exceed the depravity described in the fabricated narratives.

A Note on Humanitarian Military Intervention: Atrocity Fabrication’s Most Dangerous End

The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.

– ALBERT CAMUS

For centuries the history, incentives for, and consequences of atrocity fabrication have been closely entwined with the concept of humanitarian military intervention – an idea deeply entrenched in Western political thought contending that offensive wars can be framed as altruistic if done to prevent abuses overseas. The idea that military action can be just and even noble when done to end enemy atrocities has historically provided one of the strongest motives to fabricate atrocities as a means to legitimise offensive actions.

The history of humanitarian military intervention as a central influence in Western political thought dates back to 16th century Europe and the Reformation, when the schism between the Protestant and Catholic faiths led states to frequently allege oppression of their co-religionists abroad as pretexts for offensive wars. Later historians would largely concur that European states’ entries into the religious wars of the period were motivated largely if not overwhelmingly by realpolitik, with concerns for religious minorities or appeasing deities being secondary factors if they were considered at all. Premised on protecting fellow believers abroad, successful military campaigns overseas consistently strengthened the positions of the aggressors while gaining widespread domestic support due to the altruistic causes cited for war. The military intervention of England in the religious wars of France during the 1560s, ’70s and ’80s, and in the Netherlands from 1585 to 1604, were notable examples of wars justified by humanitarian rationales, with offensives in France by the Holy Roman Empire and various German principalities relying on similar justifications. Spain, meanwhile, which had seen the English humanitarian-premised intervention in the Netherlands undermine its interests, claimed “the brutal and cruel yoke” of persecution imposed on the English Catholic minority as a pretext to attempt multiple invasions in the 1580s and 90s. This trend towards using humanitarian pretexts for military interventionism continued to profoundly shape European politics in the following centuries.

Early humanitarian intervention relied heavily on states portraying themselves as protectors of overseas minorities with whom they held something in common – usually co-religionists – with Catholic states claiming the oppression of Catholic minorities to attack Protestant states and vice versa. As European conquest came to be directed increasingly far afield, however, against countries which lacked minorities with whom an aggressor could claim any common religious or ethnic background, humanitarian intervention evolved and was increasingly applied universally. Western states portrayed themselves as acting in the interests of a common humanity, which meant that even if no one of their race or religion lived within the borders of the targeted state or nation, they could still legitimise military action on the basis that the population, or a segment of it, was suffering injustice.

Notable early examples of wars premised on protecting universal humanitarian values were the Spanish and Portuguese 16th century conquests of South and Central America, which were widely justified on the basis that the indigenous populations would be freed by European rule and cultural Europeanisation from their supposedly backward and savage cultural practices. The Native American way of life was portrayed as an atrocity in and of itself so ghastly and inferior that a European invasion would be a benevolent act – a narrative which relied heavily on emphasising, exaggerating, and at times outright fabricating aspects of native culture which were seen as distasteful to Europeans. The leading Spanish philosopher and scholar of international law at the time, Francisco Vitoria, was one of many to justify the campaigns on this basis. The resulting humanitarian-premised conquest of an entire continent quickly turned into one of the most depraved genocides in world history. Invasions which led to the particularly brutal genocides of the populations of three continents and their resettlement by ethnic Europeans – namely the Americas and Oceania – were notably all justified by allusions to altruistic humanitarian missions to free and uplift the targeted populations by westernising them. Since Australia and most of the Americas lacked centralised governance, aggressors resorted to portraying an oppressive culture rather than an oppressive government as the ill to which invasion and Europeanisation could be presented as the remedy.

Similar trends were observable across the European assaults on non-Western tribes and nations worldwide from the 16th century. The Netherlands’ most renowned legal scholar and philosopher Hugo Grotius, for example, strongly advocated for the conquest of the Dutch East Indies, which included perpetration of genocide, on the basis that it was a humanitarian mission to benefit the native population. As British historian of political thought Richard Tuck commented regarding Grotius’ position: “The idea that foreign rulers can punish tyrants, cannibals, pirates, those who kill settlers [which appears in the 1625 edition of Grotius’ work] … neatly legitimised a great deal of European action against native peoples around the world.”

The First Opium War against China in the mid-19th century was another notable early example. The British press reported at the time: “Thus it has been the destiny of England to break down a government fabric … to uncover to its own subjects its hollowness and its evils.” Other reports stated that the Chinese government’s “mysterious and exclusive barbarism” could only be dismantled, for the good of its own people, by “the force of active and intrusive Western Civilisation.” This purportedly humanitarian war to free the Chinese people was fought to ensure that the British Empire would maintain the rights to sell highly addictive narcotics to China, and the century that followed the British victories was the very darkest in China’s millennia-long history.

A further significant example of military intervention under a claimed universal humanitarian jurisdiction was the United States’ invasion of Cuba in 1898–99. As a European settler state the U.S. inherited many aspects of Europe’s political culture, and in its rapid imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere it became a leading perpetrator of aggression using humanitarian pretexts. U.S. President William McKinley portrayed aggression against Spain as a project to liberate the Cuban people and thereby advance both “civilisation” and “the interest of humanity” – framing the attack as a “war for humanity.” The conflict saw the U.S. annex the Philippines and Puerto Rico, committing severe atrocities in the former and forcing the bulk of the population into concentration camps with death rates as high as 20 percent. In November 1901 the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger wrote that the U.S. invasion force “killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog.” Some islands were purged entirely with “not one living native” left, killing an estimated 1.4 million Filipinos overall although some estimates were much higher. McKinley framed the invasion, a campaign considered by several historians to have been genocidal, as a humanitarian effort to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilise.”

Prominent British expert on the history of warfare Professor David Trim was among many to observe that particularly from the 19th century Western populations increasingly believed that their countries had the right to launch military offensives abroad for moral causes. He stated the following concerning what he referred to as the “humanitarian public”: “Keenly interested in the fate of oppressed people groups, albeit admittedly especially if they were Christian or Jewish, or ‘primitive’ peoples who could be converted to Christianity, it both consumed and helped to produce numerous printed reports, in books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, of atrocities, mass murder, and brutality. The humanitarian public could be manipulated by propaganda and polemic.” With a strong interest in humanitarian wars which furthered their nation or religion’s interest, Western publics could be led to view offensive wars as altruistic or humanitarian. This allowed both governments and non-state actors with influence over information spaces to raise calls for military action by creating public moral outrage often through atrocity fabrication.

It was only with the end of the colonial era that a new post-1945 international order enshrined in the United Nations Charter gave UN member states equal rights and provided each country, including unprecedentedly those outside the Western world, with the right to non-interference in their internal affairs. This effectively illegalised Western humanitarian military interventions as crimes of aggression, with only a resolution by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council able to legitimise such action. Since two non-Western states, China and the Soviet Union, held permanent council seats with veto powers, there was no longer a legal means for the West to unilaterally launch unprovoked military assaults on non-Western countries. Following the end of the Cold War, however, as states outside the Western sphere of influence became a smaller minority in the world and were increasingly targeted, calls grew in the West to legitimise humanitarian intervention and move beyond a world order where the sovereignty guaranteed under the UN Charter was considered inviolable. NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, for one, stated in 1999 when the alliance launched an illegal humanitarian-premised military campaign against Yugoslavia: “I think that we are moving into a system of international relations in which human rights, rights of minorities are much, much more important … more important even than sovereignty.” In his first month in office in January 2017 UN Secretary General of Portuguese origin Antonio Guterres criticised existing concepts of sovereignty and advocated a “whole new approach” to international relations under which international bodies could override it. This followed on from Guterres’ predecessor, Kofi Annan, who called for a new vision of sovereignty in the context of revising restrictions on humanitarian military intervention when UN Security Council authorisation was absent.

Another notable advocate was the president of the United States’ most influential policy think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Hass, who wrote in Foreign Affairs to much the same effect in a January 2017 article titled ‘World Order 2.0’: “The rules, policies and institutions that have guided the world since World War II, have run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order.” Regarding the changes Hass was calling for, he stated: “A good start, though, would be to amend the concept of self-determination away from its inherent unilateralism on the part of the entity seeking a state of its own and replace it with the notion that statehood is something to be granted rather that asserted.” Under World Order 2.0, Hass advocated, states accused of humanitarian abuses could have their rights to see their borders and peace respected stripped from them and foreign military intervention legitimised. Indicating the kind of countries held in mind, the article was captioned by a picture of the North Korean leadership just months after an attack on the East Asian country had been seriously considered by the Obama administration. Hass stated:

Necessity may also lead to reducing or even eliminating sovereignty when a government, whether from a lack of capacity or conscious policy, is unable to provide for the basic needs of its citizens…. Our notion of sovereignty must therefore be conditional, even contractual, rather than absolute. If a state fails to live up to its side of the bargain … then it forfeits the normal benefits of sovereignty and opens itself up to attack, removal or occupation. The diplomatic challenge for this era is to gain widespread support for principles of state conduct and a procedure for determining remedies when these principles are violated.

An understanding of how fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses or atrocities abroad have furthered Western geopolitical interests is vital to comprehending the nature of ‘World Order 2.0’ referred to by Hass. The list of countries most often portrayed in the West as committing the most serious humanitarian abuses and atrocities matches almost perfectly with those which most strongly oppose Western hegemonic interests on the international stage. The worst alleged abusers are near synonymous with the small minority of countries which do not have Western military presences on their soil. A world where any state labelled a humanitarian abuser or perpetrator of atrocities could be open to unilateral attack by the Western world would thus represent an important step to quashing challenges or resistance to Western-led order, and effectively revert the world to the colonial era order when Western powers could freely use military force worldwide.

The idea that a Western public’s indignation at a state of affairs abroad grants their country the right to kill peoples, overthrow governments and occupy lands overseas has historically had calamitous consequences for populations across the non-Western world, with examples explored throughout this work. This aspect of the West’s political culture and worldview has consistently provided aggressors with a strong incentive to fabricate stories of serious humanitarian abuses by their targets, with this work’s assessment of the history of such practices highlighting the extreme dangers of humanitarian intervention.

Chapter One Cuba and Vietnam in the Early Cold War

Engineering Pretexts to Invade Cuba: From Exploding Space Rockets to Attacking Jamaica

After waging a long guerrilla war against the Western-aligned government in Havana, insurgents led by Fidel Castro and supported by mass protests seized power in Cuba in January 1959. This marked the beginning of decades of conflict with the Western world, with U.S. intelligence agencies going to considerable lengths to undermine the new Cuban government and seeking to reverse what some American analysts referred to as the “unforgivable revolution.” As Havana responded to Washington’s perceived hostility by forming defence ties with the Soviet Union, the American assault on Cuba came to involve any and all measures short of open war and focused heavily on targeting the economy and placing downward pressure on living standards. The new developmentalist government in Havana, which quickly improved the country’s development indicators ranging from life expectancy to literacy rates, was seen to threaten Washington’s interests through its potential to provide an example for other Latin American states of an alternative ideology and system of government. Overthrowing the state, and until then stifling its economy, were thus seen as vital to prevent a ‘Cuba model’ of political and economic development from potentially gaining wider traction.

U.S. combat aircraft began a bombing and firebombing campaign against Cuba from October 1959, and possibly earlier, aimed primarily at targets such as crop fields and sugar mills. At least three American pilots were lost and a further two captured during these offensives. Sea and air commando raids launched from the U.S. mainland, most often by exiles of Cuban origin and frequently with CIA supervisors, targeted oil refineries, chemical plants, bridges, crops, mills, warehouses, fishing boats, and merchant ships. After Havana responded by calling for Soviet military support, an assault on a Soviet camp wounded 12 Soviet soldiers and a hotel and theatre were shelled from sea to target Warsaw Pact personnel there. A total U.S. trade and credit embargo was paired with sabotage operations targeting both Cuban sugar exports, which were at times contaminated by the CIA at sea, as well as its imports. Damage done to foreign goods before delivery to Cuba ranged from adding chemicals to lubricating fluids to wear out diesel engines, to instructing a manufacturer in West Germany, to produce ball-bearings off-centre and another to do the same with balanced wheel gears. British busses sold to Cuba in 1964 were sabotaged by U.S. and British intelligence before arriving. The bulk of these operations were carried out under Operation Mongoose, and were approved by the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House staff, the Attorney General’s office and the Pentagon.

The next stage of escalation involved biological warfare. A Canadian agricultural technician reported in 1962 that while working as an advisor to the Cuban government he was paid $5000 by “an American military intelligence agent” to infect Cuban turkeys with a lethal virus which produced the Newcastle disease. 8000 turkeys died as a result. The Washington Post reported of the incident: “According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Cubans – and some Americans – believe the turkeys died as the result of espionage.” In 1971 the CIA gave Cuban exiles a virus which caused African swine fever for deployment against the country. Six weeks later the disease broke out in Cuba and forced the country to slaughter 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide epidemic. It was called the “most alarming event” of the year by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. The U.S., Canada and Britain had previously invested heavily in developing such weapons to target livestock. In 1984 a Cuban exile on trial in New York testified that in late 1980 a ship travelled from Florida to Cuba with the purpose of introducing new germs as part of a biological warfare campaign. In a 2002 study of American biological weapons development, New York Times journalists Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broada reported that the CIA had prepared to use biological agents to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, as well as Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, although these plans were not put into motion.

In April 1961 the CIA attempted to deploy Cuban exiles residing in the U.S., many of them associated with the pre-revolutionary U.S.-aligned government, to launch an invasion. Despite CIA pilots flying extensive support missions, the Bay of Pigs invasion resulted in a total failure with four CIA pilots and 100 of the agency’s proxies on the ground killed and a further 1200 taken prisoner. Having exhausted the most obvious methods for attack the focus of the U.S. campaign against Cuba shifted to attempting to fabricate international crimes by the Cuban government – namely getting various U.S. government agencies to commit them and placing the blame on Havana – in order to provide pretext for further escalation in the form of a larger invasion.

In 1962 the U.S. Department of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) proposed an operation to turn public and world opinion against Cuba. This was intended to justify the further escalation of hostilities against the state, and eventually an American invasion to reinstall a Western-aligned government in power. The necessity of the operation was based on JCS assessments that Havana would not of its own accord undertake any provocations which could warrant U.S. intervention. Under the operation the CIA was tasked with staging terrorist attacks against American military and civilian targets. Proposed attacks included hijacking or shooting down airliners, orchestrating major terror attacks against U.S. cities, starting wars between Cuba and its neighbours, assassinating Cuban dissidents on American soil, and blaming possible failures in the U.S. space program on non-existent Cuban electronic attacks.

The proposal for Operation Northwoods was drafted and authorised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by its chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and had the written approval of every member. It also had considerable support from the Pentagon and the CIA. Long-hidden secret JCS documents unearthed decades later emphasised: “World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favourably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” The proposal recommended: “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” The operation recommended developing a “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which involved the bombing of civilian targets. This was to be blamed on the “irresponsible” Cuban government and on Fidel Castro to mislead both world opinion and the American public.

Support for the idea of creating a pretext to move on Cuba was hardly relegated to the military and intelligence establishments, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower having previously told Lemnitzer and his other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would take action if only the Cuban government gave him pretext to do so. With scandal surrounding the May 1960 U-2 spy plane incident fresh in the minds of the world, which after multiple denials by Washington decisively confirmed longstanding Soviet allegations of U.S. surveillance flights deep into its airspace, Eisenhower for much of the rest of the year pushed hard for an invasion of Cuba. He then floated the idea on January 3, 1961, that if Cuba failed to provide “a really good excuse” for an American attack, the U.S. “could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable” as a pretext for an invasion. Eisenhower’s successor John F. Kennedy would prove far less supportive, however, and quickly became an obstacle to such plans.

Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, who was referred to by the New York Times as “the nation’s premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency,” observed regarding operations:

The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property. Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro.

Bamford stressed that plans to engineer attacks on the U.S. which could be falsely blamed on Cuba as a pretext for an invasion “had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favour of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.” Bamford observed that “Operation Northwoods had called for nothing less than the launch of a secret campaign of terrorism within the United States in order to blame Castro and provoke a war with Cuba.” Regarding the U.S. military leadership, he stressed that “in the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.” The plan, in his words:

called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

One proposal for a fabricated attack which could be blamed on Cuba involved the American space program at the height of the space race. On February 20, 1962, the first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn, lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida in a flight touted as carrying the banner of American truth, freedom, and democracy into space. Speaking to Lieutenant Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, who subsequently launched CIA clandestine operations against Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed that should there be any problem with the rocket which resulted in Glenn’s death, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that … the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba.” This could be achieved, according to Lemnitzer, “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”

Had any problem with the launch occurred, Cuba was to be blamed to help strengthen the argument for an invasion. Unlike kinetic attacks, cyber or electronic attacks could be blamed on almost any party or even fabricated entirely – a fact not lost in subsequent decades as U.S. and Western planners sought to find new pretexts to attribute blame, vilify and enact various hostile policies against their targets (see Chapter 7). When John Glenn became the fifth man to go to space following an uneventful launch, the JCS quickly drafted new plans for false flag operations against Cuba which could be enacted “within the time frame of the next few months.”

Subsequent plans to frame Cuba for various atrocities grew more extreme. One stipulated “a series of well-coordinated incidents to take place in and around” the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which included dressing “friendly” Cubans in military uniforms and having them “start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations.” This attack by America’s own assets on a U.S. naval facility at the command of the JCS would present Havana as an aggressor, and be used as a pretext for a military campaign to take over the country. Another JCS proposal similarly suggested: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” highlighting that “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

Other JCS plans stipulated: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington…. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States…. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en-route to Florida (real or simulated)…. We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicised.”

Other operations planned included:

• “Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”
• “Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. ‘Cuban’ B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane-burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with ‘Cuban’ messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation.”
• “Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba.”
• “Create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en-route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.”

The U.S. had notably managed to acquire modern Soviet-built fighter jets from across the third world, some of which were of the same classes that Cuba itself was thought to field. Another plan which could potentially capitalise on these assets would “make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.”

Elaborating on a separate plan to engineer an airline hijacking which could be blamed on Havana, the JCS reported:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB [Air Force Base, in western Florida] would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organisation in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to ‘sell’ the incident.

On March 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy ruled out the operations after meeting with Lemnitzer. This was one of several more radical operations the president would veto before his assassination, although any of the other occupants of the Oval Office during the Cold War may well have been more inclined to approved it. Lemnitzer’s term as JCS chairman ended on September 30, 1962, and he subsequently went on to serve as NATO’s as Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Kennedy’s death and a change in chairmanship did little to change the position of the JCS, however, with new plans made to start a war between Cuba and a neighbouring country either by engineering provocations against Havana by a U.S.-aligned third country in the region or through another false flag Cuban attack. Such a war would give the U.S. a pretext to launch a military intervention on the request of its ally, which in turn would facilitate the invasion of Cuba. The documents stated: “A contrived ‘Cuban’ attack on an OAS [Organization of American States] member could be set up, and the attacked state could be urged to take measures of self-defence and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain the necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba.” Manufacturing a crisis would thereby provide a pretext for invasion. Another ambitious plan stipulated a U.S. attack against either Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, which were members of the British Commonwealth. The attack would be launched in such a way that it could be blamed on Havana, which would draw Britain into a war against Cuba.

In May 1963 Assistant Secretary of Defence Paul H. Nitze sent a proposal to the White House for “a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime.” The U.S. would continue to violate Cuban airspace with high flying U-2 spy planes, and if one were shot down then the Pentagon would send in further manned surveillance aircraft on very low-level reconnaissance missions which would make them far more vulnerable to taking further losses. Much as flying a U-2 over the USSR had resulted in escalated tensions when one was shot down in May the previous year, the new plan stipulated that “the U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident.” JCS plans involved sending fighters across the island on “harassing reconnaissance” and “show-off” missions “flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action.” “Thus, depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance.” Havana failed to take the bait, however, and responded to subsequent low-level flights only by launching formal protests.

A further plan stipulated bribing senior officers in Cuba’s armed forces to attack the United States Military: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo.” Although paying foreign nationals to attack an American military facility was highly treasonous, normal rules of conduct were generally discarded when conducting false flag operations. Even major U.S. casualties, both military and civilian, were seen as acceptable to advance the country’s geopolitical interests and forcefully bring a strategically important territory back into Washington’s sphere of influence.

The major detriment to America’s image which exposure of Operation Northwoods risked causing, as well as the illegality of several parts of the plan, resulted in high levels of secrecy with all details remaining hidden for over forty years. Like many operations of its nature, several of the relevant documents were destroyed with further details remaining unknown. Chairman Lemnitzer, for example, had ordered the JCS’ chief of the Cuba project, Brigadier General David W. Gray, to destroy all notes concerning the period of the Bay of Pigs following its failure. The U.S. ultimately never attempted a further invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, due to a combination of factors including signs of considerable popular support for the government in Havana, Soviet protection, and conflict between the JCS and the presidency. Plans to fabricate a Cuban provocation or even pin the blame for a U.S.-organised attack on Cuba, however, were highly indicative of the lengths to which the superpower could go to vilify and provide pretext for hostile action against its adversaries.

Finding Justification for an Assault on Vietnam

Following the defeat of the Japanese Empire in 1945 Vietnam quicky emerged as one of multiple key theatres of conflict in East Asia where Western empires seeking to impose their hegemony were pitted against local nationalists striving for independence. The League for the Independence of Vietnam nationalist movement, better known as the Viet Minh, fought for 30 years against Western imperial designs first to resist a French colonial war effort and subsequently against a large U.S.-led coalition seeking to maintain Western influence in the south of the country. Having colonised Vietnam in “an orgy of killing and looting” in the late 19th century, France had intended to impose its rule indefinitely and “exclude any idea of self-government, any possibility of development outside the French Empire” for the country. Alongside cultural Europeanisation and fierce promotion of Roman Catholicism, the policy of colonial underdevelopment was central to Paris’ designs and saw Vietnamese literacy rates and living standards plummet. Access to even a basic primary education became restricted to well under 10 percent of children, among the very lowest in the region, and Vietnamese land was confiscated en masse – much of it granted to the Catholic Church making it the largest landowner in the country.

When France faced staunch resistance reoccupying Vietnam it responded by deploying 400,000 personnel, half of them French and half local auxiliaries. One of the first French offensives was an attack on Haiphong, the main port city of northern Vietnam, from 23–28 November 1946. It caused 6000 deaths at a very conservative estimate, levelling most of the city as aircraft strafed fleeing refugees, and was intended to “teach a severe lesson” to the Vietnamese. A declared policy of collective punishment against areas suspected of supporting the Viet Minh saw French forces widely pillage and rape, with conduct highly consistent with that in prior decades. “They raped women, sometimes until they died,” survivors would recall years later. Villages near sites of Viet Minh operations were systematically burned down, with civilians blown up in their houses by grenades while public displays of severed Vietnamese heads and public torture of suspected insurgents were intended to terrorise the population into submission. Beheadings had long been a common practice in French colonial wars, with some skulls sent back to Paris for display as trophies. In politically suspect villages French forces singled out pregnant Vietnamese women for rape, often resulting in death. The bayoneting of politically suspect pregnant women by colonial forces was also widely reported. Writing in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, scholar Helle Rydstrom noted after widely interviewing survivors that pregnant women were “the embodied symbol of an enemy capable of projecting strength into the future by producing children,” which was the French motive for targeting them to send “waves of shock through the community.”

The U.S. showed a growing inclination to support the French colonial war from 1949, after the Western-aligned Republic of China was decisively defeated in the Chinese Civil War (see Chapter 3), as preserving what remained of Western influence in the region appeared increasingly critical. This support increased significantly from mid-1950 as U.S. and allied Western forces in Korea faced wholly unexpected losses and were forced into a months’ long retreat by North Korea’s scantly armed and outnumbered army. Although the use of military force by the U.S. to support French goals in Vietnam was not authorised, and remained unconfirmed for over 50 years, CIA airline CAT flew support missions for French forces from 1950 and was involved in airlifting paratroopers, artillery, ammunition and other military materials. French forces in Vietnam were also provided with much-needed warships and combat aircraft, and in May 1954 U.S. President Eisenhower seriously considered launching nuclear strikes against Viet Minh forces to support a besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. Washington dispatched two aircraft carriers armed with nuclear weapons into the Gulf of Tonkin at the time, although French commanders pointed out that the proximity in which their own units and the Viet Minh were fighting meant that nuclear strikes were not feasible. American support continued to escalate over the next four years, and by 1954 Washington was financing 78 percent of France’s colonial war effort.

The battle at Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954 was a major turning point in the colonial war and resulted in France’s withdrawal that year after having lost over 20,000 personnel and 55,000 local auxiliary fighters. The resultant signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords stipulated that colonial forces be removed and Vietnam be partitioned into northern and southern states with unifying elections scheduled for July 1956. The Viet Minh under the leadership of the leftist nationalist Ho Chi Minh controlled the north based in Hanoi, while the south was placed under the rule of the Francophone elite of the colonial era based in Saigon. With the Cold War escalating, however, what had been one country’s struggle for independence became a central part of a major regionwide U.S.-led effort to cement the Western sphere of influence and push back against challengers to Western power. With the pro-Western leadership in southern Vietnam expected to overwhelmingly lose unifying elections, the threat an independent Vietnam under the Viet Minh posed to the West’s already faltering regional hegemony led Washington to support cancellation of the elections in 1955. As U.S. President Eisenhower concluded based on the intelligence available: “had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.” The CIA had predicted in their own report: “if scheduled national elections are held in July 1956 … the Viet Minh will almost certainly win.”

Under a Francophone elite headed overwhelmingly by members of the Catholic minority, the South Vietnamese government discriminated harshly against the Buddhist majority, strongly promoted the Catholic faith, and was vehemently pro-Western in its orientation mirroring the policies of the French colonial era. With the government having little support in either the north or the south, CIA psychological warfare experts led by Colonel Edward Lansdale were deployed to engineer a program to reshape public opinion. This targeted the Catholic minority in particular and proved even more successful than Lansdale’s stunning prior psyops successes in the Philippines. As CIA case officer Ralph McGehee, who deployed to Southeast Asia from the late 1950s into the 1970s, reported:

Lansdale’s men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy…. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing [President Ngo Dinh] Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.

Lansdale’s team was far from isolated, another notable example being the atrocity fabrication efforts of Lieutenant Tom Dooley who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong. Dooley invented stories of the Viet Minh disembowelling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing Christian scripture. His ties to the CIA were uncovered in 1979. Once largely alienated from the population Catholics would be relied on to run the Western client government in the south. As McGehee observed: “The CIA had completed the imposition of a Catholic premier and the importation of a Catholic encoded army and police to rule a nation that was primarily Buddhist.”

Despite these successes, the southern client government remained overwhelmingly unpopular. As Ralph McGehee noted, U.S. intelligence appeared to be deluding itself that its adversaries did not have mass popular support. “U.S. policymakers had to sell the idea that the war in the South was being fought by a small minority of Communists opposed to the majority-supported democratic government…. The situation, however, was the opposite, as I was to understand later,” he stated. Washington was supporting a “tiny oligarchy against a population largely organised, committed, and dedicated to a communist victory.” The Viet Minh in South Vietnam became more active as an insurgency, and from the early summer of 1959 operated as the Viet Cong against the Western-aligned government and its foreign sponsors. The U.S. for its part, and President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) in particular who assumed leadership from November 1963, showed growing signs of an eagerness to intervene to preserve South Vietnam as a separate Western client state.

Johnson had been a critic of American reluctance to intervene more in Vietnam during the French colonial war, and in 1954 he condemned the Eisenhower administration’s failure to preserve French rule. As president he exhorted his aides during 1964 to do more to defeat the insurgency within South Vietnam, and according to Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara he “felt more certain than President Kennedy that the loss of South Vietnam had a higher cost than would the direct application of U.S. military force.” Support for drastic escalation was widespread among much of the military and civilian leadership, an example being Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Claude Ricketts, who in February 1964 called for airstrikes on military and industrial targets across North Vietnam. The purpose was to impose unacceptable costs on Hanoi for its continued support for the Viet Cong insurgents in the south. Offensives by Hanoi-aligned Pathet Lao insurgents in neighbouring Laos from mid-May, 1964, only deepened the sense of urgency for more heavy-handed American military involvement as the possibility grew of Vietnam’s neighbour moving out of the Western sphere of influence. As the positions of American clients fast deteriorated, plans for escalated U.S. military intervention began to be laid awaiting a suitable incident to serve as pretext.

The Johnson administration gained the pretext it needed to escalate the war effort in Vietnam in the first week of August 1964. On August 2 the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Maddox was approached by three North Vietnamese patrol (PT) boats off the country’s coast and fired the first shots, with accounts varying on whether these were intended to kill or as warnings. The Vietnamese ships reportedly responded by firing torpedoes which missed their targets, but the ensuing exchange of fire saw two patrol boats seriously damaged while the destroyer was lightly damaged by machine gun fire. The Maddox subsequently withdrew. Its operations were described as “routine,” which as the New York Times noted left “no ready explanation why the PT boats would in effect attack the powerful Seventh Fleet” when “unprovoked.”

A little over 48 hours later on August 4 the Maddox returned to the North Vietnamese coast on personal orders from President Johnson and was accompanied by a second destroyer the USS Turner Joy. The two reportedly opened fire on Vietnamese patrol boats after allegedly detecting torpedo fire against them. They suffered no damage. The president took this as a pretext for an immediate escalation of the war effort, and within half an hour of the incident’s end he overruled the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet to order major airstrikes on North Vietnam. The strike targeted naval bases and an oil storage facility using fighters based on nearby aircraft carriers, with the haste with which it was ordered reportedly intended to ensure that Johnson could announce it on television that night. This was despite his staff having yet to determine whether a Vietnamese attack had indeed occurred. Johnson framed the alleged attack on the American ships as “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America,” and as a result the Tonkin Resolution was hastily passed in the Senate and the House of Representatives on August 7. This empowered the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Reports of the two incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin were not duly investigated in what was widely interpreted as an attempt to force Congress into signing the resolution. The president’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy described the push for a rushed congressional resolution as an attempt to “go for it on the basis of some snap event and a surge of feeling around the snap event” – something he advised against.

Classified transcripts released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2010 showed that serious questions had quickly emerged regarding whether Congress had been misled to approve escalation of the war effort. As committee member Senator Frank Church stated in 1968, reflecting a widespread sentiment at the time: “In a democracy you cannot expect the people, whose sons are being killed and who will be killed, to exercise their judgment if the truth is concealed from them.” Regarding the case at hand, he stressed: “we have a case that will discredit the military in the United States, and discredit and quite possibly destroy the president.” National Security Agency (NSA) historian Robert J. Hanyok noted regarding the committee’s discussions: “there were doubts, but nobody wanted to follow up on the doubts,” perhaps because “they felt they’d gone too far down the road.” He concluded that NSA officers had deliberately falsified intercepted communications in the incident to make it appear that the alleged August 4 North Vietnamese attack had occurred.

As a study by Robert J. Hanyok, published by the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, observed in 2017 on the basis of evidence declassified 50 years after the incident and a comprehensive analysis of signals intelligence records from the night of the attacks:

Two startling findings emerged from the new research. First, it is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. Through a compound of analytic errors and an unwillingness to consider contrary evidence, American SIGINT [signals intelligence] elements in the region and at NSA HQs reported Hanoi’s plans to attack the two ships of the Desoto patrol. Further analytic errors and an obscuring of other information led to publication of more ‘evidence.’ In truth, Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August…. In order to substantiate that claim, all of the relevant SIGINT could not be provided to the White House and the Defence and intelligence officials. The conclusion that would be drawn from a review of all SIGINT evidence would have been that the North Vietnamese not only did not attack, but were uncertain as to the location of the ships … the overwhelming portion of the SIGINT relevant to 4 August was kept out of the post-attack summary reports and the final report written in October 1964. The withheld information constituted nearly 90 percent of all available SIGINT. This information revealed the actual activities of the North Vietnamese on the night of 4 August that included salvage operations of the two torpedo boats damaged on 2 August, and coastal patrols by a small number of DRV [North Vietnamese] craft.

The command’s report stressed that “the overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred.” It stressed that NSA summary reports from the time which portrayed North Vietnamese aggression relied heavily on “fragments of legitimate intercept lifted out of its context and inserted into the summary reports to support the contention of a premeditated North Vietnamese attack on 4 August. The sources of these fragments were not even referenced in the summaries … SIGINT information was presented in such a manner as to preclude responsible decision makers in the Johnson Administration from having the complete and objective narrative of events of 04 August 1964.” A U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) paper noted to similar effect in 2008, citing “the release of the nearly 200 documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and transcripts from the Johnson Library evidence recently made available,” that “these new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defence McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.”

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution served as a blanket endorsement of several rounds of escalation and the rapid expansion of the war effort, including the largest bombing campaign in world history targeting North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and supply lines in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The resolution was vital to legitimizing such action under U.S. law – referred to by President Johnson as “like Grandma’s nightshirt. It covers everything.” Within one month of the Gulf of Tonkin incident 93 U.S. warplanes had been dispatched to South Vietnam and Thailand, and within a year 200,000 American personnel were in South Vietnam. This figure quickly grew to over 500,000, with the resolution justifying open-ended U.S. military operations across Southeast Asia. Despite the magnitude of the response White House tapes released in 2002 showed that even President Johnson, although benefitting from the pretext for escalation, was highly sceptical of claims that North Vietnam had launched an attack. The tapes, as well as evidence from the preceding 38 years, left little question that an attack had not occurred. North Vietnam’s innocence was “well established,” according to USNI’s Acting Director of Naval History and Senior Historian of the Navy Dr. Edward J. Marolda.

Following the August 4th incident President Johnson had given an address at midnight in which he made multiple tenuous claims including that the North Vietnamese had launched two days of attacks, that its actions were unprovoked, and that the administration did not intend to go to war in Vietnam. As former White House chief speechwriter Robert Lehrman, writing for The Hill, observed:

Was any of LBJ’s speech that night, true? To historians the verdict is clear. No. ‘Seek no wider war?’ That is exactly what he sought with a resolution written six months earlier, waiting for an event to justify it [Vietnamese aggression] ‘On the open seas,’ with its implication that the attack was unprovoked? The Maddox, cruising off the Vietnamese coast, was part of a covert and illegal intelligence-gathering mission, designed to provoke exactly the response it got. Two days of attacks? Even Johnson didn’t believe the second one occurred. Aggression? The Maddox fired first. More important, the North Vietnamese were off their own coast. They were home. U.S. sailors were about 8,000 miles from home. If anything, the aggressors were us. Moreover, LBJ didn’t limit himself to deceiving the public. He deceived the Senate.

While the USS Maddox’s operations were described as routine, further details of its activities off the North Vietnamese coast indicate that this was far from the case. The destroyer was tasked with simulating attacks on the North Vietnamese coast as part of the effort to “locate and identify all coastal radar transmitters,” and had been equipped with extensive signals intelligence equipment and embarked 17 associated specialists in Taiwan in July for this purpose. Such missions were vital to pave the way for an expanded military campaign to neutralize such equipment – which in August was seen as a considerable possibility. The growing weight of proposals that the U.S. should bomb North Vietnam, of which Hanoi was far from unaware, made such offensive operations by American warships particularly sensitive. The U.S. already had approximately 16,500 personnel in South Vietnam whom it claimed were military advisors, but who were already widely involved in military operations, and by June it had deployed air units to strike insurgents as well as communist-held areas of neighbouring Laos. CIA operations from 1961, which were transferred to the Pentagon from January 1964, saw commando teams inserted into North Vietnam for reconnaissance and sabotage operations. This campaign was described by the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry D. Felt, as targeting “power plants, railroads, bridges, VIP residences, and the like,” although these efforts were met with a string of failures and saw the attackers consistently take heavy losses to North Vietnamese defences.

Another major factor which made the Maddox’s mission particularly provocative, and led many to speculate that by sailing as it did and firing the first shots it was seeking to provoke a response, was that it coincided with major South Vietnamese escalations at sea. In July the commander of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Lieutenant General William C. Westmoreland, initiated an offensive campaign under Operational Plan 34A that focused on using South Vietnamese patrol boats to conduct shore bombardments using mortars, rockets and recoilless rifles. These offensives built on a previous campaign that focused more on commando raids to do damage to North Vietnam. On July 22 South Vietnamese Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky confirmed to reporters that his country had been sending sabotage missions to the north for three years; and from July 31 with American approval South Vietnamese naval forces had begun to attack northern coastal and island installations without provocation. The U.S. had been increasing its own special forces and air operations in Vietnam at the time among other steps to rapidly expand is involvement. It was at the same time pressing Saigon to escalate including by insertion of guerrilla warfare teams into North Vietnam. July 31 was also the day the USS Maddox began its patrol, in what looked very much like a coordinated hostile action. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk conceded in a classified cable regarding clashes between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese ships on August 2: “Maddox incident is directly related to [North Vietnam’s] efforts to resist these activities,” with the patrol boats likely to have been operating as they did in response to the ongoing attacks. The American destroyer had effectively been sailing with special electronic surveillance equipment through a battle zone and close to an enemy coast just after its ally had initiated offensives.

Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, when testifying before a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees two days after the incident on August 6, notably evaded questioning regarding whether North Vietnam may have been provoked into taking military action. He instead answered: “our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any.” He subsequently that day claimed at a Pentagon news conference that he had no knowledge of the South Vietnamese coastal attacks which provoked that – a statement which proved to be an outright lie. An audio tape from the Johnson Presidential Library declassified in December 2005 showed that on August 5, the morning after the attacks, McNamara admitted to the president:

On Friday night, as you probably know, we had four TP [sic] boats from [South] Vietnam, manned by [South] Vietnamese or other nationals, attack two islands, and we expended, oh, 1,000 rounds of ammunition of one kind or another against them. We probably shot up a radar station and a few other miscellaneous buildings. And following 24 hours after that with this destroyer in the same area undoubtedly led them to connect the two events.

Alongside a simultaneous U.S.-directed commando raid, South Vietnamese ships had launched a second round of larger assaults on August 3–4. The Maddox had been ordered to approach the North Vietnamese coast as part of a coordinated action with South Vietnamese attacks to draw the northern patrol boats away from the area where the attacks were being launched. The northern navy was thus acting defensively not only because the American destroyer approached its coast and fired first, but also because the ship was operating as part of an offensive operation which saw southern ships bombard northern targets without provocation. The fact that the Pentagon misinformed the Senate and the press about where clashes had occurred – more than doubling the distance away from the Vietnamese coast – further contributed to misrepresenting North Vietnamese actions as aggression. Much as had been done in Korea, where the Western aligned south was also responsible for the majority of offensives preceding the outbreak of the Korean War, relatively minor northern retaliation was portrayed out of context and in isolation to portray the non-westernized states as the aggressors and in turn provide pretext for hostile policies including large scale Western military interventions.

Not only was the framing of the clashes in the Tonkin Gulf as unprovoked northern aggression highly misleading, but the claim that North Vietnamese ships even fired torpedoes, or were involved in any capacity whatsoever, was itself highly questionable. A few hours before the second incident began USS Maddox’s sonar equipment and its Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) device broke down and were repaired. Numerous erroneous sonar reports of torpedoes were made by the Maddox that night mostly caused by the ship’s own violent movements, as the ship had been going unusually fast and zigzagging. The Maddox’s SPS-40 long-range air-search radar and the Turner Joy’s SPG-53 fire-control radar were both out of action, while thunderstorms and rain squalls significantly reduced visibility and created waves six feet high – factors which combined to significantly further reduce situational awareness.

On August 5 at 1:30am, around one hour after the second naval incident ended, the patrol commander Captain John Jerome Herrick reported to Pacific headquarters: “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects and over-eager sonarman may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.” At 8am he sent another message:

Maddox scored no known hits and never positively identified a boat as such…. Air support not successful in locating targets…. No known damage or personnel casualties to either ship…. Turner Joy claims sinking one boat and damaging another…. The first boat close to Maddox probably fired torpedo at Maddox which was heard but not seen. All subsequent Maddox torpedo reports were doubtful in that it is suppose that sonar man was nearing ship’s own propeller beat.”

Herrick later stated that he confirmed the firing of the first torpedo only because he assumed that the Maddox had been moving at a slower speed, since the sonar equipment only confused rudder noises with torpedoes when the ship moved at more over 25 knots. When shown that his notes and the ship’s log indicated that the Maddox had been traveling at 30 knots when it was allegedly attacked, Herrick conceded that it was probable that no torpedoes had been fired.

The Maddox’s own officers were suspicious of reports of how many torpedoes were being fired because North Vietnam’s entire navy was only thought to be able to fire 24 torpedoes from all its patrol boats. They began to suspect that no attack was actually in progress. As the ship’s physician Samuel E. Halpern recalled, upon realising that the attack was false: “Immediately after the attack, the officers came streaming into the wardroom and it was hysterical… just hysterical laughter. Everybody was laughing like mad, and then suddenly, I realized I was laughing too, the same way. And it was this tremendous release from pressure.” American fighters flying overhead notably also reported that they could not confirm the presence of any enemy ships, with one reporting seeing: “No boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes – nothing but black sea and American firepower.” Skipper of the Maddox, Commander Herbert L. Ogier, confirmed on the morning of August 5 from the ship’s command bridge that reports of an attack were wrong.

Award-winning journalist I. F. Stone suggested that the crisis involved “not just decision-making in a crisis, but … crisis-making to support a secretly pre-arranged decision,” indicating that the provocative actions of the American warships alongside South Vietnamese attacks were intended to draw fire and in turn provide pretext for expanding the war. This opinion was widely shared by analysts, with the wholly disproportionate nature of the U.S. response strongly indicating that very minor clashes at the Gulf of Tonkin, even if they had indeed occurred as Washington tenuously claimed, were blown very far out of proportion. The Tonkin incident thus served as a pretext for an already desired series of actions.

A preliminary congressional resolution had been drafted by the Johnson administration from February to June awaiting some kind of incident, no matter how small, which could trigger it to be tabled. Indeed, President Johnson informed Senator J. William Fulbright on July 26, a week before the first incident and nine days before the second, that he planned to go to Congress soon to request a resolution on Vietnam – meaning the incidents were optimally timed. As historian Andrew L. Johns, writing for the Journal of American-East Asian Relations, noted: “The outpouring of patriotism which ensured the overwhelming acceptance of the resolution provided Johnson with the best of all worlds – bipartisan support, domestic political protection (albeit temporary), and the means to augment the American involvement in Vietnam with congressional sanction.” “Clearly, the situation in Vietnam was growing progressively worse during the first half of 1964. Johnson and his advisers realized that the status quo on the ground in Vietnam would soon be hopeless without a major commitment of American troops – indeed, perhaps unwinnable in any case – and thus planning commenced for the eventual escalation of the conflict,” Johns observed, stressing that while plans to go to Congress with a Vietnam resolution had been long in the making, the Tonkin Gulf incident provided “the perfect pretext to submit a resolution to Congress and avoid divisive debate as a matter of patriotism and expediency.”

Leading British international relations expert Professor Adam Roberts observed regarding the seemingly excessive response to the Tonkin incident: “It is as if Tonkin Gulf had been mistaken for Pearl Harbour,” an opinion which he highlighted was shared by many of America’s allies. Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Alastair Buchan similarly referred to “President Johnson’s ludicrous over-reaction to an attack on two ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Not only was the escalation of the war grossly disproportionate to the incident in question, but whether the incident had ever occurred was in serious doubt even in the eyes of the president himself. As Under Secretary of State George Ball observed, President Johnson: “wasn’t convinced at all after the thing … but they had been waiting for a provocation for a hell of a long time…. I don’t think he was sure, I think he had grave doubts that this attack had occurred … but from the point of view of the President and those who were around him who were eager for a stronger American line to be taken, this served the purpose.”

As more information came to light over time, both on the events in the Gulf of Tonkin itself and on the more general conduct of the United States during that period, the Johnson administration’s narrative regarding the chain of events appeared increasingly tenuous. Former U.S. State Department analyst and historian William Blum noted in 1995: “Serious enough doubts were raised at the time about the reality of the attack, but over the years other information has come to light which has left the official story in tatters.” President Johnson himself told Secretary George Ball: “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” He later commented privately: “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.” Secretary McNamara also later expressed doubts that any attack had ever occurred.

Squadron Commander James Stockdale, a U.S. pilot who was flying overhead at low altitude for over 90 minutes during the August 4 incident, wrote in 1984 that he “had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets – there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.” He recalled that his superior officers instructed him to keep quiet on the matter. With officers on the USS Maddox also reportedly prevented from speaking out, Stockdale lamented: “I would never have guessed that commodores in charge on the scene of action are sometimes not allowed to blow the whistle on a screw-up or set records straight themselves.” As a result, he stressed, the Johnson administration had effectively moved “to launch a war under false pretences, in the face of the on-scene military commander’s advice to the contrary.” Naval officer John White was among many in the military who alleged that the pretext for war was far from honest, stating in 1967: “I maintain that President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave false information to Congress in their report about U.S. destroyers being attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Captain Herrick of the USS Maddox himself refuted reports of North Vietnamese provocation.

Foreign Policy magazine’s national security columnist, veteran journalist James Bamford, noted regarding the new perspective declassified documents on operations in Cuba gave the Gulf of Tonkin incident:

in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: ‘We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba … casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.’ One need only replace ‘Guantanamo Bay’ with ‘Tonkin Gulf,’ and ‘Cuba’ with ‘North Vietnam.’ The Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage- managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

As Rodney Carlisle’s Encyclopaedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence similarly noted:

In addition to formal propaganda, disinformation was informally promulgated to journalists and the public as well. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident is perhaps the prime example. At the time, most journalists and the public accepted at face value the claims of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The president, and other officials, characterised the August incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin … as examples of clear, unprovoked North Vietnamese aggression. The second attack almost surely did not occur, though some officials at the time believed it had. Yet the highly secret Plan 34A, involving covert attacks jointly managed by the CIA and the U.S. Navy against North Vietnam was not revealed. Nor was the fact that a U.S. naval patrol had been sent to gather electronic intelligence in the Gulf of Tonkin. The North Vietnamese ‘aggression,’ widely reported in the news media, paved the way for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, providing the basis for the U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam.

The U.S. war effort in Vietnam was broadly heavily reliant on fabrications both to justify escalation and to vilify and delegitimise resistance. Evidence of fabricated incidents engineered to justify U.S. intervention was considerable. Former CIA officer Philip Liechty stated in 1982 that in the early 1960s he saw written plans to load large quantities of Soviet-Bloc arms onto a Vietnamese boat, fake a battle in which the boat would be sunk in shallow water, and call in Western reporters to see the captured weapons as proof of aid by foreign communist powers to the Viet Cong. This occurred in 1965 exactly as Liechty had told it. A U.S. State Department white paper titled ‘Aggression From the North,’ which was published at the end of February 1965, reported that a “suspicious vessel” was “sunk in shallow water” off the coast of South Vietnam on 16 February 1965 and contained 100 tons of military supplies. These were “almost all of communist origin, largely from Communist China and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam.” The paper noted that “representatives of the free press visited the sunken North Vietnamese ship and viewed its cargo.” While records show that U.S. analysts were under no illusion that the Viet Minh were agents of an international communist conspiracy by Moscow and Beijing, and not the popular nationalists that they were, it was seen as vital to misrepresent them as such to both delegitimise them internationally and to justify U.S. military action against them.

Liechty had also seen documents involving an elaborate operation to print large numbers of multicolour postage stamps showing a Vietnamese downing of a U.S. Army helicopter. He stressed that the high professionalism required to produce such stamps was meant to indicate that they were produced by North Vietnam, as the Viet Cong would not have been able to do so. According to the former officer, letters in Vietnamese were then written and mailed all over the world with this stamp on them “and the CIA made sure journalists would get hold of them,” which created an impression of Hanoi being highly complicit in the war effort. Life magazine’s issue published on February 26, 1965, featured a full colour blow-up of the stamp on its cover which it referred to as a “North Vietnam stamp.” This was just two days before the State Department’s white paper appeared. Reporting Liechty’s statements, the Washington Post noted: “Publication of the white paper turned out to be a key event in documenting the support of North Vietnam and other communist countries in the fighting in the South and in preparing American public opinion for what was to follow very soon: the large-scale commitment of U.S. forces to the fighting.”

Ohio Senator Stephen Young was quoted as saying that while he was in Vietnam, he was told by the CIA that the agency disguised people as Viet Cong to commit atrocities such as murder and rape in order to discredit them in the eyes of the population. Although not verified, this kind of atrocity fabrication would have been far from unusual. In the Philippines the CIA had used very similar tactics to counter the Hukabulahap (Huk) insurgency which opposed U.S. hegemonic designs in the country. U.S.-aligned government forces disguised as Huks were allowed to pillage villages and wreak havoc in order to undermine the insurgents’ public image. L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, said this technique was “developed to a high art in the Philippines.” Soldiers were “set upon the unwary village in the grand manner of a Cecil B. DeMille production.” The head of the CIA clandestine paramilitary operations in the Philippines, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lansdale, who had pioneered many clandestine operation techniques there, used many of the same methods in Vietnam.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident paved the way for one of the most brutal wars in modern history, second since 1945 only to the much shorter but more intense Korean War that preceded it. As Robert Lehrman noted in The Hill to mark 50 years since the incident regarding its direct consequences: “Three million deaths in a [total Vietnamese] population of 30 million! That’s a Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 shot down each day, seven days a week – for 30 years. Sixty Memorial walls the size of our one – not counting the 500,000 to a million victims of Agent Orange.” Unexploded mines from the war, he stressed, caused over 100,000 Vietnamese casualties, most of them civilians since the conflict ended. Aside from mines, of the 15 million tons of explosive ordinance dropped on Vietnam from the air the Pentagon estimated that around 10 percent did not explode. The U.S. bombing campaign subsequently initiated against neighbouring Laos and Cambodia to prevent supplies from reaching Vietnam saw the air force target the population indiscriminately using all assets at its disposal – described as “anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Beyond explosives, the war effort premised on a response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident saw toxic chemicals widely sprayed across Vietnamese farmland and forests. Former U.S. Army medic in Vietnam Mike Hastie, who subsequently studied the effects of their employment, commented:

The spraying of 70 million litres of [the chemical defoliant] Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people by the United States Government, is one of the worst war crimes ever committed in modern warfare. It is the war crime that is born again with every new generation. Children die from cancer, they are born without arms and legs, they are born with twisted bodies, mental illness, or no eyes, to name a few birth defects. Their parents and society have an enormous burden to try and make their lives as meaningful as possible.

Cancer, diabetes, brain cell degeneration, muscular dystrophy and mental problems among the Vietnamese population were all consequences of the lasting legacy of American chemical attacks, and were passed on by the victims to their children. According to the Vietnamese Red Cross 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, with 3 million suffering illnesses as a result, as poisonous chemicals were found to have entered food chains and even the breast milk of Vietnamese women. American personnel accidentally exposed to Agent Orange suffered many of the same ailments – as did their families. According to scientists from the U.S. Air Force’s chemical weapons branch, the military was aware of the potential damage from dioxin contamination – and that dangers to human health were significantly greater from the cheaper mass-produced version used.

Extensive dehumanization of the local population was encouraged in the U.S. Military, the ‘Mere Gook Rule’ being the most notable example. This stipulated that mistreatment and killing of civilians was largely acceptable – they were the lives of “mere Gooks” which was a widely used derogatory term for East Asians. American soldiers were told when stationed in Vietnam: “The rule in Viet-Nam was the M.G.R – the ‘mere gook rule’: that it was no crime to kill or torture or rob or maim a Vietnamese because he was a mere gook.” Telford Taylor, a prominent American lawyer specializing in war crimes, commented on the prevailing American sentiments towards the Vietnamese which fuelled war crimes: “The trouble is no one sees the Vietnamese people. They’re not people. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.” Serviceman Scott Camil testified regarding the psychology of personnel committing rapes and massacres against Vietnamese civilians: “It wasn’t like they were human…. They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay.” Veteran Joe Bangert similarly testified that “in regards to the women in Vietnam, first of all, you get this feeling sometimes when you’re over there that you don’t even think of their sex. This is really disgusting. You don’t even think of them as human beings, they’re ‘gooks.’ And they’re objects; they’re not human, they’re objects.” He described watching another serviceman, not a new recruit but a veteran with 20 years of service, disembowel and skin a Vietnamese woman.

The U.S. Military also encouraged personnel to gain the highest body counts possible, largely due to a lack of tangible objectives in the campaign, which led both servicemen and commanders to pass off civilian dead as enemy combatants. As the BBC reported:

Unable to deal with an enemy that dictated the time and place of combat, U.S. forces took to destroying whatever they could manage. If the Americans could kill more enemies – known as Viet Cong or VC – than the Vietnamese could replace, the thinking went, they would naturally give up the fight. To motivate troops to aim for a high body count, competitions were held between units to see who could kill the most. Rewards for the highest tally, displayed on ‘kill boards’ included days off or an extra case of beer. Their commanders meanwhile stood to win rapid promotion. Very quickly the phrase – ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC’ – became a defining dictum of the war and civilian corpses were regularly tallied as slain enemies or Viet Cong. Civilians, including women and children, were killed for running from soldiers or helicopter gunships that had fired warning shots, or being in a village suspected of sheltering Viet Cong.”

The atrocities that resulted from both dehumanization and incentives to maximize kills were only worsened by the very widespread use of drugs among U.S. forces, with 28 percent of personnel in Vietnam being on hard drugs, namely heroin in 1971, and 70 percent using intoxicants by 1973. Amphetamines were among many stimulants given out ‘like candies’ by the military, and were blamed for the “unjustified violence against the civilian population.” A 1971 report by the U.S. House Select Committee revealed that from 1966 to 1969 the military had used 225 million tablets. Drugs were considered an effective means to help soldiers handle mounting pressure particularly when morale flagged after the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in 1968.

Personnel from the 23rd Infantry Division recalled that men raped Vietnamese women “on the average of once every third day,” while those from the 2nd Platoon said women would be raped whenever the company passed through a village. Infantryman Jamie Henry referred to rape as “SOP” – standard operating procedure. Vietnamese civilians widely recalled extremely frequent rapes by U.S. forces as well as the arbitrary rounding up of civilians for torture in areas suspected of supporting the Viet Cong. Officers and instructors widely condoned and at times promoted rape as a means of enhancing performance. As American researcher Elizabeth Anderson noted: “almost all of the men whose testimonies I have reviewed say that the leadership within their unit either directly encouraged sexual violence or passively allowed it to exist.” In part as a result “sexual violence was an indisputable part of the war, and undercurrents of gendered violence appear in almost every historical account of atrocities in Vietnam.” Some personnel reported that their commanders instructed units to kidnap women for ‘entertainment’ while on patrol, who would face hours of gang rape and then death. At times commanding officers saw that they had to outperform their subordinates in rapes to cement their positions of leadership.

Rape was considered a standard practice for U.S. personnel, many of whom recalled being told by instructors: “we could rape the women,” “spread them open” and “drive pointed sticks or bayonets into their vaginas.” As a squad leader in the 34d platoon attested: “That’s an everyday affair … you can nail just about everybody on that – at least once.” As well as recreationally, rape and threat of rape were also widely used strategically to enforce submission and obtain information from both prisoners and civilians. Elizabeth Anderson thus observed: “the unique breed of fear generated by the threat of sexual violence became a potent weapon against the civilian population and the North Vietnamese fighters thought to be hiding within it.” As one veteran testified regarding the use of rape to cow the population: “It makes a lasting impression on some guy – some ‘zip’ – that’s watching his daughter get worked over. So we have a better opportunity of keeping him in line.” Women were often raped using bottles and rifles.

Executions following rapes were highly common, with men who raped and then killed Vietnamese women widely referred to as “double veterans.” One veteran described such an incident as follows: “After we raped her, took her cherry [virginity] from her, after we shot her in the head … we literally start stomping her body. And everybody was laughing about it. It’s like seeing the lions around a just-killed zebra. You see them in these animal pictures, Wild Kingdom or something. The whole pride comes around and they start feasting on the body.” Another example was recalled by former GI John Ketwig who stated that when three young Vietnamese women were captured: “everybody circled around and they tortured these women with lit cigarettes … the one girl, they held her down and put the hose from the fire truck between her legs and turned on the water and exploded her. And the explosion of body fluids splashed across our faces.” He described it as a “revenge type of thing: hate against the Vietnamese, the ‘gooks’.”

Regarding life in the American client state, which was created and sustained by Washington largely using humanitarian pretexts, a World Health Organization study described South Vietnam as “a land of widespread malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, venereal disease and 300,000 prostitutes … one of the few places on earth where leprosy was spreading and bubonic plague was still taking lives.” The WHO reported there were half-million drug addicts, 80,000–160,000 leprosy cases and an estimated 5,000 cases of bubonic plague annually in South Vietnam alongside rampant epidemics of tuberculosis and venereal disease. North Vietnam, although its cities were far more intensely targeted by American bombings, was still far better off. This was aside from the state of terror intended to suppress dissent against Washington’s designs, a notable example being the Phoenix Program under which U.S. forces tracked and assassinated an estimated 100,000 dissidents in South Vietnam. It was common for civilian prisoners in South Vietnam to be slaughtered or tortured using fists, sticks, bats, water and electric shocks, with gang rapes of female political prisoners by U.S. personnel widely reported.

Deploying hundreds of thousands of personnel who were drugged, rapacious, incentivised to kill civilians, and taught to see the local population as sub-humans, inevitably led to disaster. The brief description above of the horrors suffered by the Vietnamese population as a result of U.S. military intervention in the county provides just a small indication of the depravity of the conflict. Other consequences ranged from emergence of a massive human trafficking industry in neighbouring Thailand to meet the sexual needs of American soldiers, to the systematic destruction of Vietnamese rural population centres under a policy of Forced Draft Urbanization leaving millions destitute and fuelling human trafficking The latter policy, as confirmed by the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, was designed to force the rural population into concentrations in U.S.-controlled cities to deny the Viet Cong its support base, at tremendous cost to the southern economy and at the expense of leaving millions destitute. These events were all made possible by the fabricated narrative of an unprovoked North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin which, had it not been believed, could have spared millions of lives.

False Atrocity Claims After a Lost War

Although atrocity fabrication played many important roles throughout the American campaign in Vietnam, it took on a renewed importance as it became increasingly apparent that the objective of sustaining a separate South Vietnamese state was untenable and steps towards drawing down U.S. military involvement began to be taken. As the war became increasingly unpopular not only on the home front, but among troops on the ground, proponents of continued military involvement very widely propagated false atrocity stories to strengthen their cases. Attributing false atrocities to the Viet Minh provided a key basis to claim that terrible consequences were inevitable if a sufficiently hard line was not taken. A withdrawal of U.S. forces, it was claimed, would “almost certainly” be followed by “a slaughter in the South of all those who have fought against the Communists,” thus leaving Washington with a moral obligation to persist in the war effort.

A notable example was expert Patrick Honey, personal friend and adviser of President Diem, former Reuters correspondent, former Foreign Editor of the Economist, and leading commentator on Vietnamese affairs, who confidently predicted regarding possible reunification under the Viet Minh: “Calculated on the basis of past Communist deeds, and given the size of South Vietnam’s population, the minimum number of those to be butchered will exceed one million and could rise to several times that figure.”

Even after the withdrawal of U.S. forces, atrocity propaganda was used extensively as a means to bolster South Vietnamese resistance. While Southern forces had more than double the numbers and triple the firepower of the North, an unwillingness to fight and lack of popular support for the U.S. client government was widely seen to be the cause of their effective collapse. Propagating reports of impending mass slaughter by the North Vietnamese was thought to potentially help remedy this.

CIA analyst Frank Snepp observed that in the final days of the North Vietnamese advance the U. S. embassy in Saigon organized “a noisy press campaign around recent reports that the Communists were torturing and mutilating recalcitrant civilians in newly captured areas.” While this could have generated international sympathy for the South and helped vindicate prior American efforts to preserve a separate southern state, it had the unexpected effect of sparking “panic and chaos” among “the South Vietnamese population itself.” Snepp also cited in his notes:

atrocity stories … now imaginatively embroidered by Saigon radio, the local press and the Embassy. At the Ambassador’s orders, [the political counsellor] Joe Bennett is still zealously churning out his share of them, playing on thirdhand reports relayed out of Ban Me Thuot by a Buddhist monk. “They’re tearing out women’s fingernails up there and chopping up the town council,” one of Bennett’s younger staffers advised me gleefully this afternoon. “That should turn some heads in Congress.”

Regarding one series of atrocity stories from the embassy, Snepp highlighted that the ambassador and CIA chief “apparently consider the latest crop too useful to risk putting them to any test of veracity,” stressing their effectiveness in spreading terror. Although U.S. embassy and CIA atrocity stories were usually accepted without scepticism being voiced publicly, this was not absolute. The Christian Science Monitor, for one, noted that its reporter, Daniel Southerland, had cabled from Saigon that:

so far he has been unable to verify reports of executions of officials and others in occupied areas. Mr. Southerland does report cables from the U.S. embassy in Saigon to Washington reporting alleged executions, but says one monk supposed to be an eyewitness is nowhere to be found. Another alleged eyewitness in Da Nang told Mr. Southerland he had seen no such thing. The embassy’s cables have the apparent aim of persuading Congress to vote more aid, Mr. Southerland reports.

Even after Vietnam’s reunification on April 30, 1975, atrocity propaganda played a key role in both justifying continued U.S. economic warfare efforts against the country and in retrospectively justifying the American war effort. With a very small fraction of the atrocities U.S. forces had committed in Vietnam gaining publicity internationally, which alone was damaging enough to their reputation, depicting the Viet Minh as more depraved still if not genocidal provided a means of presenting the Americans as having still been the lesser evil in the war.

American scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, who wrote extensively on U.S. relations with post-war Vietnam, observed that a key goal which the U.S. sought to attain largely through atrocity fabrication was “to reconstruct recent history so as to present their past role in a better light … to teach the lesson that exit from the Free World in the interest of national autonomy is the worst fate that a subject people can endure, and to provide a post hoc justification for U.S. intervention by showing the awful consequences of its defeat.” They referred to an “extensive effort to dispel what the Wall Street Journal calls the ‘simple-minded myth’ that Indochina’s suffering is somehow related to U.S. actions over the past thirty years,” which would be achieved by claiming that Vietnam under the Viet Minh was worse off than it would have been as a U.S. client state.

Aside from atrocity fabrication, another means by which this was pursued was misrepresenting the poor conditions in Vietnam, which were caused primarily by the devastating American air campaign and subsequent post-war sanctions, as instead being a result of the Viet Minh’s governance. Chomsky and Herman observed that “death and suffering from malnutrition and disease in societies brought to ruin by U.S. intervention are displayed as proof of the evil nature of Communism.”

The two scholars emphasized following their study of Western coverage of Vietnam, and Indochina more broadly, that it was “remarkable to see how susceptible intellectuals have been, over the years, to the machinations of the atrocity fabrication industry.” They highlighted regarding one notable technique used to vilify Vietnam and other adversaries:

As intelligence services have become more sophisticated – or at least, better funded – they have learned to play upon the willingness of the more thoughtful members of the community to believe the worst about official enemies of the state to which they are devoted. One technique is to arrange for ‘scholarly studies,’ such as the book by [prominent defector] Hoang Van Chi which had such remarkable success in establishing the mythology concerning the bloodbaths during the North Vietnamese land reform.

A favourite source cited in the American press to claim mass abuses after April 1975 was Andre Gelinas, a Canadian Jesuit who, among other often similarly absurd claims, reported that “15,000 to 20,000 Vietnamese have committed suicide rather than live under Communism.” The Jesuit dispelled criticisms from Western and other foreign eyewitnesses by dismissing them as parrots for Vietnamese government narratives, although in his congressional testimony in June 1977 he notably did not repeat the story of mass suicides. Gelinas told the Montreal Star: “People in South Vietnam today are praying for war … the way people in France were praying for it in 1942. They want to be invaded.” His refusal to name sources and inability to name key locations in his narrative sparked widespread scepticism, particularly among those who interviewed and discussed the allegations with Gelinas. Richard Hughes, head of the Shoeshine Boy Foundation which sheltered homeless children in Vietnam, concluded after a “probing, three-hour conversation with Father Gelinas” that his charges illustrated how “second-hand information fed rumour, and bitterness bias,” and stressed how harmful they had been to post-war recovery of ties. The dissemination of Gelinas’s charges by major media outlets, which took them very much at face value, were seen to have influenced several congressmen towards supporting a harder line. His allegations and those of defecting South Vietnamese allowed Western sources to claim that events in Vietnam had vindicated President Johnson’s predictions of mass suffering should the U.S. not intervene, and thus justified the American war effort, and ruined the credibility of those who had opposed it.

Gelinas offered no evidence for his charges, which were very widely contradicted by more credible sources on the ground that did much more to substantiate their own claims. Earl Martin, a Mennonite social worker who had done relief work in South Vietnam’s concentration camps and spent considerable time in the country after unification, was thus among many to conclude that “Andre Gelinas has seriously eroded any basis he might have had for serving as a credible witness.” Chomsky and Herman observed regarding the American press’ widespread propagation of Gelinas’ claims despite their highly tenuous nature: “nevertheless, it is Gelinas’s story that has remained ‘the truth’ for the Free Press … since Gelinas’ account is very critical of an official enemy, its truthfulness is irrelevant and no further analysis is required.” They further observed regarding his popularity in the Western press: “Imagine a man of the cloth who was able to live for 13 years in Vietnam through the worst barbarism of the U.S. war, never raising a peep of protest so far as is known, then inventing mass suicides and North Vietnamese coups to order for an admiring international audience.” The scholars highlighted that U.S. media outlets widely publicised the Jesuit’s reports to imply that the American war effort was entirely justified and delegitimise those who had opposed it.

Another notable source used was the French correspondent R. P. Paringaux from Le Monde, who wrote of severe repression and a very high portion of the population forced into concentration camps. His claims were widely propagated on American radio, television and in the written press, although like those of Gelinas they had little supporting evidence and were strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers in Vietnam. John Fraser from the Toronto Globe and Mail, for example, who spent four weeks travelling through the country, concluded that the French journalist’s reports were vastly exaggerated. Although highly critical of the Vietnamese government, Fraser had been specifically interested in verifying the observations and conclusions of the French journalist and explained why through his extensive experience, including many discussions with Vietnamese critical of the government, Paringaux’s narrative appeared far removed from reality. Paringaux notably frequently cited a figure of 800,000 prisoners, which had been repeatedly stated by defectors from former South Vietnam residing in the West, although this number was reached by counting 750,000 city residents who returned to the countryside after the war as prisoners to falsely give the impression of mass repression.

Western portrayals of mass repression in post-war Vietnam were consistently strongly contradicted by the large majority of foreign observers on the ground. Indeed, while Western outlets such as the New York Times consistently widely claimed that Vietnam was totally off limits to Americans after the war, this was very far from true. It nevertheless provided valuable pretext for focusing on reports from defectors and activists rather than on anyone actually in the country. The Times had itself requested a report on a trip to Vietnam from the distinguished U.S. historian Gabriel Kolko, but refused to permit its printing as his findings strongly contradicted the prevailing Western narrative.

A Swedish delegation led by parliamentarians, which met with leading non-Communist opposition figures who strongly denied charges of widespread humanitarian abuses by the post-unification government, concluded that Washington had a “need to invent all kinds of stories to destroy trust.” An Italian missionary priest who had spent 15 months in post-unification Vietnam, where he lived in a small village in the suburbs of Saigon with other Christians, was highly critical of how increasingly extreme testimonies of defectors were propagated in the Western media to provide an impression of the country that was far out of touch with reality. He thus stressed that it was “terribly dishonest to make these refugees say, in the countries that have received them, those things that the welcoming countries strongly wish to hear.”

Another notable example was Wallace Collett, a businessman who headed a Quaker mission to Vietnam and specifically investigated Western allegations of repression. His delegation met well-known non-Communist political figures in the South who denied such reports, and concluded that the allegations were untrue. Ly Chanh Trung, who had been a leading spokesman for the non-Communist opposition, was among those to deny outright Western claims of humanitarian abuses, stating: “If a violation of human rights occurs, we ourselves will raise our voices. We will not wait for our friends from abroad to raise theirs.” He dismissed Western claims that re-education camps “have the purpose of revenging or killing [U.S. collaborators] gradually.” This was in reference to the widespread misportrayals of these facilities which was central to forming a narrative of mass repression. Regarding conditions in such camps Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee reported he “met several old friends who, because they were officers in the old [South Vietnamese] army, spent nine months in re-education camps. They made no mention of torture and mistreatment” but “rather talked about learning how to work with their hands” and said that they had learned “about the new economic and social system they were living under. One young doctor, after completing his reeducation course, was made director of a drug rehabilitation centre near Saigon.” In Western coverage, however, the camps would continue to be likened to milder successors to Auschwitz or Birkenau where, much like the camps American POWs had been held in in Korea, two decades prior, all kinds of atrocities were imagined to portray them as something entirely different to what they were.

Chapter Two The Korean War

Massacres in Korea: Blaming Allied Atrocities on the Enemy

Waged for three years from June 1950, the Korean War in many respects remains the most consequential military confrontation since 1945, and pitted a U.S.-led United Nations coalition made up almost entirely of Western and South Korean forces against the East Asian Communist states of China and North Korea. The war left both a long legacy, which remains at the centre of tensions on the Korean Peninsula today, as well as several controversies ranging from whether the conduct of coalition forces towards Korean civilians was a genocide, to which parties bore what share of responsibility for its outbreak. Although atrocity fabrication was not a significant factor in starting the war, it profoundly shaped both the course of the conflict in its final 18 months as well as public perceptions of China and North Korea in much of the world.

Five years before the outbreak of the Korean War the United States had from September 1945 placed the southern half of the Korean Peninsula under American military rule, and in the process forcibly dismantled the fledgling local government the People’s Republic of Korea. The U.S.-installed replacement was headed by Syngman Rhee, who was personally selected by the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Military’s Far East Command, General Douglas MacArthur, and flown in from Washington where he had resided for two decades. Having been impeached by the prior Provisional Government of Korea for misuse of power, Rhee had little standing in the country itself although his vision for its future closely aligned with Western interests.

Rhee’s security apparatus responded to considerable public opposition with a campaign of massacres across southern Korea, with American historian Bruce Cumings describing the conduct of its paramilitary youth groups in population centres suspected of improper loyalties as follows: “In Hagui village, for example, right-wing youths captured a pregnant twenty-one-year-old woman named Mun, whose husband was allegedly an insurgent, dragged her from her home, and stabbed her thirteen times with spears, causing her to abort. She was left to die with her baby half-delivered. Other women were serially raped, often in front of villagers, and then blown up with a grenade in the vagina.” Donald Nichols, a commander in the American Counter Intelligence Corps, was among those in the corps to describe its close work alongside these paramilitaries and the atrocities they committed in gruesome detail, noting that there were some he would “never be able to erase” from his memory due to their severity.

By 1950 two percent of South Korea’s population had been killed in such campaigns at a conservative estimate, with official investigations years later placing the death toll in the first five years between 600,000 and 1.2 million. Those suspected of improper loyalties and their families were targeted indiscriminately, with particularly brutal methods reserved for suspected sympathisers of the Korean Workers’ Party that ruled northern Korea. Rhee had made his intentions very clear should he see through plans to place the north under his rule, stating: “I can handle the Communists. The Reds can bury their guns and burn their uniforms, but we know how to find them. With bulldozers we will dig huge excavations and trenches, and fill them with Communists. Then cover them over. And they will be really underground.” This was far from empty rhetoric, with his forces burying politically suspect segments of the population, including children, in the tens of thousands in mass graves across southern Korea exactly as he described. These killings escalated immediately after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. As an indication of their scale, Reuters quoted the chief of National South Korean police Kim Tai Sun stating shortly after the war began: “Twelve hundred Communists and suspected Communists have been executed by South Korean police since the outbreak of the hostilities.”.

The mass graves created by Rhee’s forces for the politically suspect and their families across the country were widely reported on by both government and American sources, with U.S. Army Private Donald Lloyd recalling of one such incident witnessed by the 3rd Engineers Company: “We heard the machine-gun fire and saw them [South Korean personnel] burying them in this big pit. There were women in that pit holding babies. I’d say one hundred people.” In his book, Colonel Donald Nichols recalled observing the systematic slaughter of political prisoners near Suwon in the first week of July 1950 by similar means, writing: “I stood by helplessly, witnessing the entire affair. Two big bulldozers worked constantly. One made the ditch-type grave. Trucks loaded with the condemned arrived. Their hands were already tied behind them. They were hastily pushed into a big line along the edge of the newly opened grave. They were quickly shot in the head and pushed into the grave.”

The scenes of mass killings on a tremendous scale and of women holding babies in mass graves were terrible – but also an excellent opportunity for propagandists intent on delegitimising and vilifying the North Korean government. The massacres were thus intentionally falsely attributed to North Korean forces, with American observers collecting and publicising extensive footage of the remains but mislabelling it as evidence of enemy war crimes. Prominent American actor Humphrey Bogart narrated the Pentagon-sponsored film The Crime of Korea which falsely presented sites of the U.S.-installed Southern government’s atrocities as the results of North Korean killings. Widely circulated in U.S. media, it lent considerable moral imperative to the war effort in the public eye. If the North Koreans were slaughtering women and babies and dumping them in their thousands in mass graves, it was difficult to criticise military intervention to liberate the Korean people. Use of different forms of media ensured that the message circulated as widely as possible, and there was even a comic book titled ‘Atrocity Story’ which highlighted the terror of the mass graves across South Korea and falsely attributed them to northern forces. After a long list of misattributed war crimes, the comic asked the reader to imagine if these were happening in Nevada, Atlantic City, New Jersey, or Inglewood, California – at once both fuelling empathy with the victims and implying a possible North Korean or other communist threat to America. It went on to describe, for comparison, the crimes of Nazi Germany, portraying the North Koreans as the ‘new Nazis’ and their conduct as from “the dark ages of barbarism and savagery.”

Time magazine published a column titled ‘Barbarity’ describing the Taejon Massacre of 5000 to 7500 prisoners, with the victims referred to as “anti-Communists – soldiers, officials, business and professional men.” The U.S. Army report described it as follows “for murderous barbarism, the Taejon massacre will be recorded in the annals of history along with the rape of Nanking, the Warsaw Ghetto and other similar mass exterminations…. Those responsible … must be brought to judgement before the tribunal of civilised peoples.” South Korean government investigations decades later proved without doubt that Rhee government forces were the perpetrators, and that the victims of their killings among the country’s civilian population numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the weeks following the outbreak of the war. It was the perpetrator of these massacres which the U.S. was fighting not only to preserve in power, but also to impose on the people of North Korea as well which would guarantee further similar atrocities. Such slaughter was widely seen from October 1950 when much of North Korea was briefly placed under the Rhee government’s rule following U.S.-led offensives.

The American war effort, launched in the name of liberating South Koreans and later North Koreans as well, and increasingly reliant on fabricated atrocities for justification, would itself pave the way to actual atrocities by coalition forces against both populations. Orders were given for U.S. personnel across the country to massacre South Korean civilians, which was confirmed by the accounts of war correspondents, Korean survivors, American perpetrators and years later by Pentagon archives.

Professor Kim Dong Choon a leading member of the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, a government body established in 1993 to investigate historical incidents, reported in 2004 that widespread atrocities committed by American personnel were a result of their “deep racial prejudices” towards the Korean people. Taking the massacre of the population of the village of No Gun Ri as an example he stated:

With total ignorance of Asia, young soldiers regarded Koreans and Chinese as ‘people without history.’ They usually called Koreans ‘gooks,’ a term used during World War II for Pacific Islanders. The fact that many Korean women in the villages were often raped in front of their husbands and parents has not been a secret among those who experienced the Korean War. It was known that several women were raped before being shot at No Gun Ri. Some eyewitnesses say that U.S. soldiers played with their lives like boys sadistically playing with flies.

Gil Insham from the U.S. Army 7th Infantry Division recalled his sergeant organised patrols into villages for the sole purpose of raping Korean women, and once watched him pistol-whip a village elder for not leading him to young women and then rape the old man’s wife in front of him. He recalled GIs tortured North Koreans in their power, poking the exposed brains of the wounded and laughing or tying them to trees and pulling them apart. “I don’t know why some of our people did things like that. Maybe they were just like that inside, sadistic,” he recalled. South Korean soldiers returned home to stories of their sisters and other family members being targeted for rapes by Western personnel, while Chinese soldiers recalled finding pictures of naked Korean rape victims in the helmets of dead American soldiers alongside pictures from home.

New York Times reporter George Barrett was among those to highlight the stark contrast between the Korean population’s perception of Chinese forces compared to those of Western nations as a result of their vast discrepancy in their conduct. He wrote that widespread rapes committed by U.S. and Canadian forces “have created a deep animosity among large sections of the Korean populace.” The Koreans stressed that Western soldiers committed crimes against civilians, including rapes and killings, with impunity and without reprimand by their superiors. By contrast, Barrett noted, the Chinese military “have impressed many Koreans with the discipline of their troops. Many residents of Seoul seem to go out of their way to tell about the good Chinese behaviour, and especially about executions of two rapists the Chinese are said to have held.”

The extent of American war crimes against the populations of both Koreas, which were carried out on a tremendous scale in a war fought under the pretext of liberating the peninsula, would require several volumes to fully elaborate (see: Abrams, A. B., Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years At War with American Power, Atlanta, Clarity Press, 2020.) On the basis of these crimes international observers present at the time, and several scholars from both South Korea and the West have since concluded that U.S. conduct towards Koreans both north and south was consistent with the definition of genocide based on the Genocide Convention of 1948. While American and allied atrocities would not become widely known for some decades, however, misattributing South Korean mass graves to North Korean forces provided an effective means of disguising a campaign to impose the rule of the perpetrators of such acts as a just war to protect civilians from mass slaughter.

Fabricating a Massacre of American Prisoners

The escalation of years of frequent hostilities into full scale war between the two Koreas in June 1950 was capitalised on by the United States to reverse highly unfavourable Cold War power trajectories, with the conflict reviving the struggling American economy and winning much of the world over to the view that a harder line against Communist states was needed. Furthermore, in the eyes of some hardliners, the war provided an opening to expand hostilities to include China or even the Soviet Union, while placing tremendous strain on the Chinese economy supplementing ongoing American offensives on its other borders (see Chapter 3). By contrast for the economies of China and North Korea the war imposed unsustainable costs. American advances after three months of fighting North Korean forces led its soldiers to approach China’s borders in late September 1950, just one year after China’s own long civil war had ended, to which Beijing responded after multiple unheeded warnings with a full-scale military intervention. The Chinese Civil War had itself had been immediately preceded by an eight-year war with Japan, and before that by decades of internal conflict between warring factions, leaving China’s ruined economy and negligible industry in a poor position in 1950 to support conflict with a coalition of major industrial powers.

America’s position in the Cold War benefitted considerably not only from fully scale miliary intervention in what was essentially an escalation of a Korean civil war, but also from prolonging the conflict when opportunities emerged to end it. From October 1950, after multiple major military victories, Beijing and Pyongyang pushed hard for ceasefire talks and an end to hostilities, with these efforts threatening to win over much of the United Nations as most member states had much less to lose than Washington should the fighting end. Thus just as talks were getting underway the U.S. on November 8 relaxed bombing restrictions and firebombed the city of Sinuiju on the Sino-Korean border with 85,000 incendiaries, which was immediately followed by an escalation of the bombing to target “every means of communication, every installation, factory, city and village” across North Korea. Ordered by the coalition’s Supreme Commander General MacArthur, who was a strong proponent of expanding the war to Chinese soil and overthrowing the government there, the escalated bombings were widely interpreted as an effort to ensure the conflict continued. The forthcoming Japanese peace conference in August 1951, during which the Korean War would serve as a vital pretext for maintaining the U.S. military presence in the country after direct American military rule ended, added further impetus to the need to sustain hostilities.

As the conflict dragged on through 1951, the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly in October was seen as a forum where world opinion could be turned against continuation of the war should the Chinese and North Koreans offer reasonable terms for concluding it. On October 4, speaking to a luncheon of the UN Correspondents Association in New York, the United States deputy representative on the UN Security Council Ernest A. Gross warned that a ceasefire in Korea would facilitate a “phony” peace offensive by the Soviet Union. The goal of Moscow’s supposedly malign peace plans would be to weaken “the sense of urgency that has developed in the free world as a result of Soviet actions.” This was based on the presumption that the Korean War was a Soviet conspiracy, despite U.S. military sources consistently concluding that North Koreans were not receiving Soviet material support. Such statements warning against sinister intentions behind every peace proposal, and by implication advocating the war’s continuation, were hardly unprecedented. Shortly before the war’s outbreak John Foster Dulles, author of the influential American containment policy analysis War and Peace and soon to be Secretary of State, dismissed what he termed Soviet “Peace Offensives” as “deceptive Cold War strategy” which seriously threatened the West. “As things are going now …we must develop better techniques…. They [the USSR] can win everything by the cold war they could win by a hot war,” Dulles warned, with the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean positions relative to the United States suffering from the war’s outbreak and continuation.

Before June 1950 global power trajectories including prestige and influence in the third world, economic growth and military modernisation, all favoured the USSR, with America’s formerly overwhelming advantages fast declining. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson noted regarding this in 1953, the Korean War “came along and saved us.” By mobilising the West for war the conflict had turned the tables, and there remained a strong incentive in 1951 to ensure that the fighting could be extended.

Representative Ernest A. Gross revealed in October 1951 that rather than ending the war Washington was considering expanding it, informing correspondents: “if the Korean talks fail … the Assembly would have to consider additional measures to employ against the foe there.” By the end of 1951, having previously penetrated deep into South Korea, Chinese and North Korean forces had been driven northward leaving battle lines little above the prewar inter-Korean dividing line the 38th parallel. It was expected that Beijing and Pyongyang would require a return to the parallel – status quo ante bellum – as a condition for armistice, which would provide the U.S. with an optimal opportunity to refuse. On this basis the U.S. Military’s Tokyo Headquarters, which oversaw the coalition war effort, was described at the time as “cheerfully pessimistic.” As it informed the New York Times on October 20 regarding the possibility of renewed peace talks: “Even if … full-dress sessions again began, few believed that an armistice would come much nearer.” Three days later the Times’ esteemed military editor Hanson Baldwin stressed that unless U.S.-led coalition forces were “willing to pull back to the 38th Parallel all along the front … there is not likely to be a cease-fire.”

It thus came as a shock to many in the U.S. when on October 26, the second day of truce talks, the Chinese and North Koreans expressed willingness to cease hostilities based on the current battle lines – a major concession that would make it far more difficult for hardliners in Washington and the military to provide a further pretext for continuing the war. As award winning journalist I. F. Stone observed, from the perspective of a U.S. leadership which sought to sustain hostilities:

Now the Reds were ready to yield on the 38th Parallel. It looked as if it would be difficult to keep peace from breaking out. By November 4 the Communists had ‘finally yielded to UN insistence that the armistice line should be generally based on the line of battle contact,’ had agreed on a neutral buffer strip one and a quarter miles wide, and were ‘largely in agreement’ on the location of the line itself. The situation looked desperate, but a stumbling block happily turned up.

U.S. negotiators responded by pushing for further concessions, namely by insisting on neither the status quo ante bellum nor on a ceasefire based on the current battle lines which advantaged Western forces. They instead required the Chinese and North Koreans to give up their territory south of the 38th parallel, namely the city of Kaesong, while the U.S.-led coalition would give up nothing. These highly unusual terms succeeded in preventing what appeared to have been an imminent breakthrough in the peace process and were widely interpreted as a move to prevent a swift end to hostilities. The New York Times reported on November 11 regarding this development: “In Washington – especially in diplomatic quarters – there was some mystification why Kaesong had taken on such importance when both sides had agreed on the principle that the battlefront should be the basis for the armistice line. It was pointed out that the battered town lay in a plain dominated by hills and hence had little military value.” According to the Times there was “a belief that after the Communists had made the big concession on the line,” and that the U.S. was “sticking at straws.” British press indicated that such conduct gave Beijing and Pyongyang grounds “to claim that the Allies [U.S.-led coalition] did not really want a truce.”

Rumours spread among American personnel in the field that their leaders were avoiding a peace settlement despite major enemy concessions, with the New York Times highlighting: “in many places along the Korean front the muttering guns fell silent. Ground fighting was almost at a standstill though air battles went on. The foxhole-to-foxhole grapevine on the UN lines was active with rumours. The GIs had hopes that an end to this fighting might not be far off – hopes which had been raised before and dashed before.” On November 11 China’s Radio Peking broadcast the statement that “if the Americans give up their demand for Kaesong a settlement can be reached in a matter of hours.”

The Chinese proposal for an immediate ceasefire was particularly concerning for those favouring continued hostilities. General James Van Fleet, Commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, addressed the troops to clarify that the war would be “business as usual” until “the Communist aggressors terminate their violation of human liberty.” Considering Western interpretations of how their East Asian adversaries “violated human liberty,” this purposefully vague objective meant that the war could continue indefinitely as long as the Chinese and North Korean states existed. A November 14 report from Tokyo Headquarters slammed the East Asian states’ calls for an immediate ceasefire, emphasising that “The Reds openly repudiated their long-standing agreement that hostilities would go on until a full armistice was signed.” As I. F. Stone noted ironically regarding such criticisms, “the blackguards were trying to bring the war to an end” – they were being vilified for attempting to end hostilities sooner.

American personnel on the frontlines appeared far from supportive of the positions taken by the military leadership. A New York Times dispatch on the central front in Korea published on November 12 emphasised that the same question was being raised by men across the front: “why don’t we have a cease-fire now?” Regarding “the troops who have to fight the war … the unadorned way that an apparently increasing number of them see the situation right now is that the Communists have made important concessions, while the United Nations Command, as they view it, continues to make more and more demands.” The Times’ frontline correspondent George Barrett emphasised: “the United Nations truce team has created the impression that it switches its stand whenever the Communists indicate they might go along with it,” while recent developments “have convinced some troops that their own commanders, for reasons unknown to the troops, are throwing up blocks against an agreement.”

I. F. Stone described the U.S. Military’s response to the issue at hand, facing decline in both faith in the leadership and in soldiers’ will to fight when peace was clearly being offered, as “atrocities to the rescue.” He observed:

Something had to be done and done quickly. Something was…. On November 14 in Pusan, Colonel James M. Hanley, Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army, called in the local Korean ‘stringers’ who covered that out-of-the-way place for the big news agencies and gave out one of the biggest sensations of the war. ‘U.S. REVEALS REDS KILLED 5500 G.I. CAPTIVES IN KOREA,’ said the headlines next day. And on November 16, when the estimate was raised to 6270, the Associated Press sent out a gory compilation, ‘REDS BUTCHERED MORE AMERICANS THAN FELL IN ’76.’ … Troop dissatisfaction over the delay in the truce talks was to be countered with an injection of hate. The alleged atrocities also were used to explain the delay in arranging a cease-fire.

The explanations which followed this perfectly timed news of atrocities against American prisoners gave a strong indication of its purpose. The Associated Press reported that on November 16 Colonel James M. Hanley, the Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army responsible for compiling and investigating all war crimes, said he “divulged the Reds’ ‘wanton murder’ of American prisoners because he thought American soldiers at the front ought to know what they are up against.” From the following day the Armed Forces Radio “broadcast the atrocity story … and repeated it at intervals.” It further reported: “A highly placed Allied officer said today the announcement that the Communists in Korea have murdered thousands of American prisoners has stripped the mystery from what has been holding up Korean armistice talks.” The officer stated: “The Communists don’t want to have to answer questions about what happened to their prisoners.” For the significant benefit this narrative provided, Supreme Commander General Matthew Ridgway likened the sudden report of atrocities and the way it quickly changed prevailing attitudes to a divine intervention, stating on November 17:

It may perhaps be well to note with deep reverence, that in his inscrutable way God chose to bring home to our people and to the conscience of the world the moral principles of the leaders of the forces against which we fight in Korea…. It may well be that in no other way could all lingering doubts be dispelled from the minds of our people as to the methods which the leaders of communism are willing to use, and actually do use, in their efforts to destroy free peoples and the principles for which they stand.

Reports that the Chinese and North Koreans had slaughtered prisoners in their custody built on multiple fabricated atrocities since the war began that characterised the adversary in a way that made such slaughter appear more believable, with the aforementioned misattribution of mass graves to North Korean massacres being but one example. British reports, however, indicated that Colonel Hanley’s claim of a mass slaughter of prisoners “seemed evidence of bungling propaganda or a deliberate effort to sabotage the negotiations.” The New York Times correspondent in London added that “a suspicion exists that the United States, for some inexplicable reason, wants to prolong the fighting.” New York Times diplomatic correspondent James Reston reported from Washington on November 15 that the circumstances appeared highly peculiar, stating:

Several days ago it appeared that a compromise finally had been arranged on the cease-fire line, at which time Secretary of State Dean Acheson, speaking in the United Nations meetings in Paris, attacked the Chinese Communists for conduct below the level of ‘barbarians.’ When this attack was followed during the critical moment of the armistice negotiations by the publication of Colonel Hanley’s atrocities report, even officials here conceded that it might look to the world as if the United States was purposely trying to avoid a cease-fire in Korea.

Successful atrocity fabrication quickly realigned popular opinion behind efforts to continue the war and punish the Chinese and North Koreans for what was portrayed as a wanton disregard for humanitarian norms. This allowed the U.S. to continue to stall negotiations while raising the possibility of escalation to a full-scale war with China. Atrocity fabrication was thus essential to more than doubling the war’s duration, extending it by 20 months, which exerted a far greater toll on the East Asian adversaries than it did on the Western powers since the former side had from the outset been in a much weaker position to sustain a war effort.

U.S. media outlets and politicians only further exaggerated claims of atrocities, with the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Korean War Atrocities later stressing that the East Asian adversaries were guilty of “beast-like acts committed against civilised humanity.” As an example of the kinds of misconduct seen, he claimed: “a Red Chinese nurse cuts off the toes of a GI with a pair of garden shears, without benefit of anaesthesia, and wraps the wounds in a newspaper.” Other alleged atrocities included GIs “lined up in a ditch and shot in cold blood, with their hands wired behind their backs,” and others “put into small iron cages and starved to death like animals, with maggots coming out of their eye sockets.”

Claims of enemy brutalisation or massacre of Western prisoners were highly inconsistent not only with the testimonies of the prisoners themselves, which emerged once they were released, but also with one another. On November 14 Colonel Hanley claimed 5500 American and 290 other coalition prisoners of war had been slaughtered in their camps by the Chinese and North Koreans. Two days later he announced that the figures for prisoners killed actually stood at 6270 Americans, 7000 South Koreans, and 130 other coalition personnel – a total of 13,400. Ridgway’s formal statement the following day on November 17 confirmed Hanley’s claims but did not provide figures. Three days later on November 20 Ridgway said it was “possible” that 6000 American soldiers listed as missing in action may have been killed as prisoners, but that there was proof of only 365 such murders. He gave no indication of the status of prisoners from other coalition members.

Two days later on November 22 documents sent by air courier to the UN New York headquarters contained the text of Ridgway’s fortnightly report dated November 12 which covered the two weeks from August 16–31. The report alleged that 8000 American prisoners of war had been killed. Thus the claims for numbers of American prisoners killed included: Ridgway (November 12) 8000, Hanley (November 14) 5500, Hanley (November 16) 6270, and Ridgway (November 20) “possibly” 6000, “definitely known” 365. Addressing these discrepancies on November 29, Ridgway said the figures were subject to “constant re-evaluation,” but the 6000 figure “was the most up-to-date” and included all coalition personnel except for South Koreans. The 8000 figure, he said, was an earlier estimate. Thus between November 20 and November 29, Ridgway had amended his estimate from a “possible” 6000 American prisoners killed, to the 6000 figure including other coalition forces. Furthermore, on November 20 Ridgway did not cover up or account for his own 8000 figure of November 12 by saying that it was “possible” that 8000 were killed.

Regarding what he referred to as these “weird statistics” I. F. Stone observed:

It does not help prisoners in the hands of the enemy to make charges of mistreatment if these charges are false, nor does it help their families…. To excuse oneself later by saying that atrocity reports were subject to ‘constant re-evaluation’ and that the 6000 was the more ‘up-to-date’ figure was to admit that these reports and estimates were so unreliable that in one week this process of ‘constant re-evaluation’ cut Ridgway’s estimates by 25 percent, while Hanley’s figures rose by 14 percent. This is sheer statistical slapstick, understandable enough if the purpose was merely to stir up hate and upset peace talks, utterly inexcusable if intended as a serious accounting on the murder of American men by the enemy.

Stone noted that Hanley’s accounts sounded much more like “wartime rumour picked up from the local population which [Ridgway’s predecessor] MacArthur himself did not think reliable enough to include in any of his reports.” He highlighted a sharp contrast in the reports on treatment of prisoners before the need arose to fabricate atrocities, and afterwards. Editors across the American press nevertheless took the story of prisoners being massacred at face value, with headlines ranging from that of the editorial of the New York Herald Tribune which referred to “The Communist Brutes,” to that of the New York Times which referred to the enemy as having “butchered prisoners in cold blood.” The New York Post, while critical of Hanley, stressed: “Let no one minimise the gravity of Hanley’s charges. The Communists are ruthless enemies whose disregard for human life is notorious.” An exception was the Washington Times-Herald, which inserted an editor’s note in the middle of a Tokyo dispatch on the front page on November 17 citing a “top Pentagon authority” who “said flatly Army headquarters has no conclusive evidence of atrocities or other barbaric acts committed by Chinese Reds in the Korean War.”

Claims that Americans had been slaughtered or tortured in Chinese and Korean prison camps were ultimately disproven once prisoners started to be released in significant numbers. Coalition prisoners had a harsh experience in the war’s initial months as battle lines were constantly changing, supply lines were strained or non-existent and no prison camps could be established. Prisoners could only be kept with troops at the moving frontlines and food was scarce for both captives and soldiers, resulting in an estimated 90 percent of U.S. prisoner deaths occurring in the first year of the war. Many died alongside their captors in bombing raids and, as noted by British military historian Max Hastings, “the plight of the prisoners was often no worse than that of the northern soldiers and people.” An order by North Korea’s advanced headquarters strictly forbade “the unnecessary killing of enemy personnel when they could be taken prisoners of war…. Those who surrender will be taken as prisoners of war.” Prisoners were nevertheless often assailed by the local population or shot by men on the frontlines who could not afford the burden of taking them along in this semi-guerrilla stage of the war. The nature of the war changed considerably after the entry of Chinese forces in October 1950, with fighting soon localised around the 38th parallel and secure prison camps quickly established behind the frontlines. Conditions for American and coalition prisoners quickly improved, and their camps were opened to the press including Western reporters. By the time allegations of mass slaughter were made in the U.S. the harsh conditions of the war’s early stages had long since passed.

Reports of “communist atrocities” against prisoners strongly contradicted the press’ findings and the pictures of decently fed smiling prisoners who were allowed exercise – prisoners who had allegedly seen many of their number slaughtered. Britain’s former chief of defence staff, Field Marshal Lord Richard Carver, observed regarding conditions in camps: “The UN prisoners in Chinese hands, though subject to ‘re-education processes’ … were better off in every way than any held by the Americans.” Re-education involved lessons on the ‘evils of capitalism’ and the history of Western imperialism. Evidence of Chinese and Korean forces slaughtering prisoners at this time was non-existent, and reports from prisoners who returned painted a very different picture to the claims from the military regarding their treatment. American prisoners reported Chinese guards inviting them to their quarters “for drinking and talking” and playing music with them in joint “jam sessions.” One American prisoner of war, Shelton Foss, recalled regarding his treatment that he, alongside his North Korean captors, “played chess, sang American songs … and talked generally about the U.S. and Korea.”

As one U.S. prisoner recounted upon being freed, conditions in Chinese camps were as follows:

Prisoners rose at 7 a.m. and either took a short walk or performed light calisthenics. They washed their faces and hands, and at 8 a.m. representatives from each squad drew the appropriate number of rations from the kitchen. Food was cooked by the Chinese and the diet was essentially the same as that provided the Communist soldiers consisting of singular items such as sorghum seed, bean curd, soya bean flour, or cracked corn and on certain special occasions such as Christmas or Lunar New Year, the prisoners received small portions of rice, boiled fatty pork, candy and peanuts.

Others recalled being given access to an English language library of “more than a thousand books,” with those less literate Americans being given tuition to improve their literacy skills.

American prisoner Howard Adams reported not only the far better treatment of prisoners in Chinese and Korean custody relative to those held by Western forces, but also of the mishandling of peace talks and extensive coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners by U.S. forces. He recalled in an interview: “the [American] prisoners’ hopes soared when the peace talks began. We thought we’d be free soon. The Chinese thought so too at one point and gave us a feast, but the talks dragged on and on as the U.S. side made ridiculous demands regarding prisoners and other issues.”

The Associated Press reported on April 12, 1953, as U.S. prisoners were first being released, that “American soldiers returning from communist prison camps told a story today of generally good treatment.” One former prisoner, Kenyon Wagner, had much praise for his medical treatment, saying he had been given “the whole works.” Another, Corporal Theodore Jackson, similarly praised the quality of the medical treatment he and his fellow prisoners had received. “To my idea” he said, “they did fair, about the best they could do with the medicines they had.” Former British prisoner Arthur Hunt said that there was a daily sick call and prisoners’ health was well taken care of, with inoculations given against various diseases. Albert Hawkins, another former British prisoner, said that he had reported his feet were feeling slightly numb and was carefully attended to and fed vitamin pills as a result. Former prisoner Private William R. Brock Jr. stated that conditions in prison camps were agreeable and he had never seen a prisoner ill-treated. He said that there was no barbed wire around the camps and that each man was issued with a quilt and blanket and their houses had floor heating. Upon examination when returning home, the U.S. Military was surprised by the excellent physical health and low number of fatalities among the prisoners – although it was concerned by what was termed the “Oriental brainwashing” of the servicemen. Statements from American prisoners indicated that interrogation rooms in Chinese and Korean camps were devoid of torture.

Marines interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post recalled that in six months of captivity the Chinese “never struck, beat, or in any way physically maltreated a prisoner,” and even protected them from mobs of North Korean civilians who tried to strike them while they were being marched to their camp. At camp they were told to regard themselves as “newly liberated friends.” The worst that happened to them was the obligation to sit through interminable Communist speeches and propaganda indoctrination sessions – hardly the kind of prison camp where one could expect thousands to be executed.

The return of significant numbers of American servicemen who made public statements contradicting prevailing portrayals of the Korean and Chinese adversaries, often strongly criticising the conduct of the U.S.-led coalition and alleging that serous war crimes were committed by their own side, itself required a creative propaganda approach to remedy. A narrative was thus constructed which stripped the servicemen of their agency and credibility, and portrayed any criticisms of U.S. conduct or policy as being involuntary as a result of some mysterious form of Asiatic mind control. The creation of the myth of “brainwashing,” a term first coined by the CIA for this purpose during the Korean War, was intended to delegitimise these American servicemen and their testimonies. Although seemingly ridiculous, racial sentiments against East Asians and widespread perceptions of an impending ‘yellow peril,’ combined with the narrative’s endorsement by respected figures in media and the intelligence community, led to its widespread acceptance. As New York University professor of history and prominent Korea expert Monica Kim noted: “‘Brainwashing’ became the perfect trope with which to render these American POW’s [prisoner of war’s] ‘desires’ – or politics, to be more exact – into a more familiar racialised narrative of the unwitting, innocent American being seduced by the mysterious ‘Oriental’.” ‘Brainwashing’ allowed the Western world to rest assured in the righteousness of their cause. It neutralised as contradictions to this narrative not only the statements of former servicemen, but also the actions of those who defected to or collaborated with the West’s adversaries, and even the Chinese and North Korean POWs who refused to defect to the ‘free world’ and chose to return home.

Professor Kim described a “process of fashioning the Korean Communist POW into an ideological figure – or more specifically, a ‘fanatic’ – a phrase used extensively by U.S. military personnel to describe the Communist POWs in both their statements for the case file and administrative memos passed from higher command to the camps.” These individuals, Western and allied populations were assured, were not acting of their own free will, and fantastical stories of communist Asiatic mind control were widely propagated to explain their actions. Thus those whose firsthand experience of the war led them to dispute the narrative of a Western good against an Asian communist evil were stripped of their voices – it was the Asian communist propagandists speaking through them, not the people themselves, be they freed American soldiers or East Asian prisoners.

The narrative of a massacre of prisoners did not need to be remotely true to be effective, and ultimately served not only to gain support for an extension of the war through abnormal demands at the armistice talks, but also to reinforce the metanarrative in the West vilifying countries at the forefront of opposing Western power and empire as malign and barbaric actors.

In sharp contrast to the treatment of Western prisoners in Chinese and Korean camps, sources consistently pointed to extreme brutalisation of East Asian prisoners held by U.S.-led coalition forces. Propaganda from Beijing and Pyongyang had no need to fabricate atrocities when covering the hardships their men endured, as the reality was already too extreme and gruesome for most media to fully cover. Journalists repeatedly found that American officers they interviewed admitted knowledge of or participation in massacres of Chinese and Korean prisoners. Robert William Burr of the U.S. Army second infantry division recalled one such incident in which his platoon sergeant shot a dozen prisoners personally. He stated regarding the prevailing attitude towards killing East Asian soldiers: “At the time I would have felt worse if I had run over someone’s dog with my car.” The ease with which East Asians could be slaughtered was similarly observed five years prior in the Pacific War, where surrendering Japanese soldiers frequently met with the same fate. Killing them was also frequently compared to killing animals in a way that killing ethnically European soldiers never could be. Multiple studies highlighted the considerable discrepancy in American treatment of surrendering ethnically European adversaries compared to East Asians as a result of the extent to which the latter were dehumanised.

As resistance to Western occupation in Korea involved all parts of society, it was not unheard of to see three generations of the same family held in the same prisoner of war camps with many children also imprisoned. The fatality rate among prisoners was high with many not adequately fed and dying due to malnutrition and more intentionally killed by soldiers after their capture. Prisoners were shot by soldiers for insulting their guards, hunger striking, and even for singing. An example of one such incident saw around fifty women gathered in the common area of their compound begin to sing folk and political songs, which quickly spread to other compounds. They were met with gunfire by the guards causing 29 casualties. A more extreme case saw protesting prisoners, who had not even a rifle among them, suppressed by American paratroopers, battle tanks and flamethrowers. Brigadier General Haydon Boatner recalled regarding the killing: “What a gruesome sight it was! … A battlefield in every respect. Entrenchments, wounded, dead, burning buildings and tests [tents] with a few human hands, legs or feet here and there.”

After being repeatedly interrogated, severely beaten, half-starved, and kept in solitary confinement, North Koran officer Pak Sang Hyong was kept in a six-by-three-foot cage with only strands of barbed wire for walls. He was given one blanket and no shoes and left outdoors for three winter months. He recalled after his release: “I lived like an animal.” Korean female prisoners were particularly singled out for abuse, with Pulitzer Prize–winning American historian John Toland, the war’s contemporary, describing one example as follows:

One girl, Kim Kyung Suk, told how they had forced a group of women prisoners into a large room. Here they were stripped. Then nude male North Korean prisoners were shoved in. ‘We heard you Communists like to dance,’ an American shouted. ‘Go on! Dance!’ They pointed bayonets and revolvers at the prisoners, who began to dance, while drunken, cigar smoking, guffawing American officers stubbed out cigars on the girls’ breasts and committed indecencies.

With conduct strongly influenced by racial prejudice, a British officer noted that U.S. forces treated prisoners “as cattle.” Chinese and Korean prisoners were provided with extremely poor sanitary conditions, lacking access to clean water or toilets, and in a period of just 10 months from October 1950 over 4,000 prisoners in one camp died mostly due to dysentery. Prisoners were also used for medical experiments, in violation of Articles 13 and 19 of the Geneva Conventions, with the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reporting that the primary concern towards sick prisoners was often experimentation rather that treatment. In one epidemic at a prison camp on Koje Island treatments varied greatly, and some 1,600 cases of the same disease followed 18 different treatment and dosage schedules. The Journal noted: “the Korean outbreak demonstrated again that an epidemic situation provides the opportunity to accumulate valuable scientific data very rapidly,” which was prioritised over the wellbeing of the POWs. The epidemic resulted in 19,320 hospitalisations and a very high 9 percent fatality rate – 1,729 deaths. It was referred to as “150 epidemics in one.”

British and Australian journalists Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett documented a number of accounts of experimentation on prisoners after interviewing North Korean doctors who were held in the camps. Their 68 examples included providing prisoners with experimental doses of sulfadiazine tablets, ranging from eight to 48, “to test the effects of very high sulfa intake and many patients died of sulfa poisoning.” POWs at the U.S. 14th Field Hospital near the Pusan prison camp and the U.S. 64th Field Hospital at Koje were at times operated on either to give young surgeons practice or for experimentation. Prominent journalist and Harvard graduate Hugh Deane noted regarding experimentation: “The American doctors, if they had qualms, could always remind themselves that the purpose was to add to medical knowledge, making possible saving of more lives, and that the victims were inferior beings, gooks to many, near animals to others.”

Excessive amputations were also widely reported, with limbs stiff from lack of exercise or from having just been released from plaster casts being cut off. Prisoners were housed in compounds at four times the legal density of U.S. federal prisons, itself far from a high standard at the time, in conditions “considered appropriate to Asian peasants.” Max Hastings noted that “Western treatment of the Koreans and the Chinese was dictated by a deeply rooted conviction that these were not people like themselves, but near-animals.” Prisoners held on Koje Island by U.S. forces described the state of their captivity in a letter they signed in 1952: “Koje Island is a living hell. The shores of this island are no longer washed by sea water, but by our tears and blood. There is no breath of fresh air here, the pungent stench of blood fills our nostrils in every corner of the island.”

Observing the prisoners’ eventual return Winnington and Burchett emphasised the stark contrast to the well treated Western prisoners coming out of Chinese and Korean camps, describing prisoners released from Western camps as follows:

Haggard, with faces dank and moist like corpses, bearing the hideous mutilations of experimental surgery, some vacant eyed, girls driven mad by attempted rapes…. Half of the prisoners in many ambulances were lacking legs, often both legs. Even men missing two legs and without artificial ones were not treated by the Americans as stretcher cases, so plentiful were amputees. In a single hour it was possible to see six people delivered who lacked all four limbs – hacked back to mere torsos.

If Chinese or North Korean media had had anything near the influence of that of the West, it is likely that treatment of their prisoners in the custody of the U.S. and its allies would have been recorded in history as one of the great atrocities of the 20th century. As it was the two East Asian states were too isolated and vilified and lacked the media clout needed to propagate their narratives or make their grievances known. While the U.S. had a much more formidable media establishment, however, its own claims of atrocities against its prisoners were seriously undermined by a lack of evidence and by the accounts of the prisoners themselves after their release – leaving them deeply discredited after the war ended.

The ‘Free World’ and its War Prisoners

In parallel to the battles on land and in the air the contest for world opinion was a major arena of conflict in the Korean War, with the U.S. and its allies seeking to delegitimise their adversaries and portray themselves not only as representing their own countries’ national interests, but also as representing universal values and the interests of all humanity. As it became increasingly clear from the spring of 1952 that a decisive routing of Chinese and North Korean forces was unachievable, the United States began to focus on leveraging one of its major assets, the large numbers of prisoners of war it was holding, to construct a narrative of a moral and psychological victory. This centred around claiming that Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to return to their homelands outside the Western sphere of influence, and that when given free choice would defect en-masse to live in Western-aligned Taiwan and South Korea. Washington sought to have the world believe that the conditions the Beijing and Pyongyang governments created for their populations were an atrocity in and of itself, and engineering prisoner defections thus quickly gained a central place in furthering American and allied strategic interests.

American negotiators first mentioned the entirely unheard-of concept of voluntary repatriation in January 1952, which if implemented would mean that prisoners of war choosing to remain elsewhere would not be returned to their home countries. This directly contradicted the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which stipulated the mandatory return of all prisoners, and was described by the U.S. delegate to the armistice talks Admiral Ruthven Libby with phrases such as “principle of freedom of choice” and “the right of individual self-determination,” and “a bill of rights” for the prisoner of war. While British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was among those to concede that “our legal grounds were so poor” for pursuing such action, the coalition’s policy was effectively settled in Washington by February 27 on an insistence on voluntary repatriation. The wholly unexpected and illegal terms served to delay an armistice agreement by over a year.

Beyond providing a propaganda victory, engineering mass defections was vital to facilitating Western powers’ efforts to recast themselves as altruistic rather than imperial powers. As rhetoric from the Western world increasingly placed a new emphasis on claims of moral universalism to frame the rationale for its interventionism abroad in a new light, such defections would be particularly valuable. While a world order based on the dominance of Western military might ever-present across the globe remained as it had in the colonial era, the pretext for this order and for Western interventionism changed. The West’s wars were now “humanity’s wars” fought on behalf of mankind, and those such as the Chinese and North Koreans who resisted were accordingly portrayed as acting not only against Western interests – but against the interests of humanity, the international community and even their own people. The will of the “free world” and the “international community” and Western geopolitical designs were to be indistinguishable. Intended to justify the sustainment of Western-dominated global order and the quashing by Western armies of those that resisted it, the first major use of this rhetoric came in Korea.

Portraying the order it presided over as one with universal appeal to all peoples was key to the Western Bloc’s claim to represent the interests of humanity, legitimising its military interventions and delegitimising opposition to its hegemony. With China and North Korea both being decolonising states at the forefront of the conflict against the Western-led order at the time, engineering defections from them provided an extremely valuable and vital contribution to these designs. Monica Kim observed to this effect:

The choice of the Korean War POW would be further evidence of the fundamental appeal of U.S. mandated projects of democracy on the global stage…. The notion of defending humanity came to the fore as the moral impetus for war. Sovereign recognition, decolonising imperatives, or state interests – including those of the United States – none of these elements were placed on the table regarding how the American public should imagine the U.S. military intervention abroad.

She concluded: “Desire on the part of the decolonised Korean POW and the Chinese POW would enable the critical disavowal of imperial ambitions on which the United States insisted – if others demonstrated their wish to belong to the U.S.-defined liberal order, then the United States was not imposing an imperial design on the globe. Desire, however, was not a predictable variable in the interrogation room.” Ensuring that prisoners from the East Asian countries which resisted Western dominance would act in a way the Western narrative and ‘free world’ ideology would presuppose was thus essential.

Rather than fabricating an atrocity, the U.S. and its allies would create the image of both a universal appeal of the West and universal unattractiveness of life in decolonising and non-westernised East Asian states, which was achieved by employing extreme methods of coercion on the prisoners in their power. The effects of this were highly complementary to atrocity fabrication efforts, which similarly portrayed those countries outside the Western sphere of influence as lacking in basic humanity and thus showed the Western-led order as representing a more humane and benevolent future for the world.

Playing a central role in the manipulation of the prisoner of war issue, the U.S. Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) established in 1951 recognised that the figure of the POW could be emblematic of a new way of fighting for world opinion – one in which President Harry Truman took a strong personal interest and which would persist long after the cessation of hostilities in Korea. While undermining the image of unchallenged Western military might through their successes on the battlefield had provided the Chinese and North Koreans with considerable prestige, the PSB’s work had the potential to bolster the Western Bloc’s standing considerably in the eyes of the world while reversing its adversaries’ gains.

The PSB was responsible for efforts to shape international public perceptions of the war effort as one fought in the name of universal values rather than Western interests, which effectively placed the world in a total struggle between the Western-led order and those such as North Korea and China which remained outside it. Examples included recommendations that the language of “containment” of enemy states be abandoned in favour of references to the “liberation” of their populations, and replacing “made in America” labels in aid programs with tags stating: “Peace Partnership of Free Humanity.” Prominent political theorist and former jurist Carl Schmitt observed regarding the construction of this universal moralism at the time that it “would bring into existence – in fact allow only the existence of – wars on behalf of humanity, wars in which enemies would enjoy no protection, wars that would necessarily be total.” Where in the early 1950s, the prisoner repatriation issue lay at the crux of these efforts, the legacy of what PSB started in Korea would remain prominent in Western rhetoric into the 21st century particularly regarding how military interventions were justified.

When in early April 1952 American negotiators had offered to return 70,000 prisoners, which was a 40 percent reduction from a prior offer of approximately 116,000, Chinese and North Korean negotiators were stunned as the Americans had predicted. Hugh Deane reported on the U.S. strategy which necessitated a high number of enemy defections:

Reduced estimates reflected the results of savage coercion in the compounds. President Truman and an increasing number of others in the leadership had come to envisage a substitute for the victory the U.S. had failed to win on the battlefield – a propaganda triumph in line with the rollback doctrine that was prevailing over mere containment. An impressive number of prisoners were to refuse adamantly and publicly to go home to the communist evils awaiting them. To do the brunt of the dirty work in selected compounds (there were 32 of them on Koje, all overcrowded) the U.S. secured some 75 persuaders from Taiwan, mostly from [President] Chiang Kaishek’s equivalent of the Gestapo, and a larger number of members of terrorist youth groups sent in by the Syngman Rhee government. Some wore neat American uniforms, others were posing as prisoners…. Their continuing task was to locate prisoners who wished repatriation and to do whatever was necessary to dissuade them. Control of the food supplies was a powerful means, and that, threats, beatings, slashings and the killing of the most stubborn, led to a gratifying number who muttered ‘Taiwan, Taiwan, Taiwan’ when asked the key question…. Thus many Chinese who didn’t want to go to Taiwan found themselves there. Of the Chinese prisoners 6,670 were repatriated to China, 14,235 were sent to Taiwan.

The Anti-Communist Youth League, a far-right South Korean militia which had played a key role in quashing dissent against U.S. military rule there, maintained a strong presence in the prison camps. They were often given jurisdiction over meal distributions, disciplinary beatings, surveillance and interrogations, and reserved the right to execute or otherwise punish prisoners. Comparisons of prison camps where Chinese and North Koreans were held to Nazi concentration camps were common in internal U.S. reports. U.S. Ambassador to the South Korea John Muccio alleged that the Taiwanese representatives involved in repatriation were “members of Chiang Kai-shek’s Gestapo.” He passed on reports that Chinese prisoners were being forced under severe threats to sign petitions in blood and undergo tattooing to prove they were anti-communists and wanted to go to Taiwan. One report from a prisoner stated, regarding the enforcement of this policy:

In early 1952, the brigade leader, Li Da’an, wanted to tattoo every prisoner in Compound 72 with an anti-Communist slogan…. He ordered the prison guards to beat those who refused the tattoo in front of the five thousand prisoners. Some of those who couldn’t stand the beatings gave up and agreed to the tattoo. One prisoner, however, Lin Xuepu, continued to refuse the tattoo. Li Da’an finally dragged Lin up to the stage, and in a loud voice asked Lin: ‘Do you want it or not?’ Bleeding and barely able to stand up, Lin, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, replied with a loud ‘No!’ Li Da’an responded by cutting off one of Lin’s arms with his big dagger. Lin screamed but still shook his head when Li repeated the question. Humiliated and angry, Li followed by stabbing Lin with his dagger…. Li yelled to all the prisoners in the field: ‘whoever dares to refuse the tattoo will be like him.’

The true meaning of ‘voluntary repatriation’ and defection to the ‘free world’ were well known to the State Department, with Ambassador Muccio reporting to State Secretary Acheson as early as May 1952 that Taiwanese overseers in the compounds “dominated proceedings through violent systematic terrorism and physical punishment of those choosing against going to Taiwan throughout both orientation and screening phases. Severe beatings, torture, some killings.” He had reported four months prior in January to Secretary Acheson’s aide, Ural Alexis Johnson, that “beatings, torture and threats of punishment are frequently utilised to intimidate the majority of Chinese POWs” as part of “an attempt at forced coerced removal to Formosa [Taiwan] in direct contradiction of the UNC [United Nations Commission] stand at Panmunjom on voluntary repatriation of internees.” He later again emphasised in a report to Secretary Acheson the use of “physical terror including organised murders, beatings, threats, before and even during the polling process” to ensure an outcome on the repatriation issue favourable to Western interests. His findings were confirmed by others in the State Department. Muccio later referred to news on the treatment and coercion of Chinese and Korean prisoners as “very disturbing reports of horrors being perpetuated in the prisoners’ camps,” for which he said the United States was responsible.

A report from the Department Office of Intelligence research similarly observed that the U.S., with Taipei’s support, had created “a police-state type of rule over the main Chinese POW compounds, which provided the foundation and means for powerfully influencing the screening against repatriation.” This included “enforced tattooing of the POWs” and “violent and terroristic coercion of the POWs by the KMT [Taiwanese] trusties during the screening.” The report concluded that this seriously inflated the numbers of prisoners who ‘chose’ to defect.

U.S. State Department officers A. Sabin Chase and Philip Mansard were sent to Korea to ascertain why large numbers of prisoners defected, and concluded in their report that the main reason was “violent tactics of the PW [POW] trustees before and during the screening process.” They reported a “police state type of rule” over the prisoner compounds and that prisoners were not only subjected to an “information blockade,” but also that physical terror with organised threats, beatings and murders before and during the polling process were all widespread. While the investigators found substantial evidence of coercion, they did not find any significant lack of support for the Chinese government or the military among Chinese prisoners. North Korean doctor Rhee Tok Ki, who was held in prison camps, concurrently reported that ill patients were harassed to the detriment of their recovery to ensure that they would refuse repatriation. He stated: “TB patients especially need rest, but they were hounded day and night as a sort of specially refined torture to get them to renounce repatriation.”

Internal U.S. reports were corroborated by the Red Cross which reported finding “some very grave incidents” regarding the treatment of Chinese and North Korean prisoners particularly relating to coercion over the repatriation issue. Although reporters were not allowed near prison camps, one from the Toronto Star managed to enter with a British delegation. His report affirmed that the prisoners chose not to be repatriated due to “physical threats, often carried out.” In some cases prisoners were instead given the option either to remain imprisoned indefinitely or to go to Taiwan, and so elected to go to Taiwan based on false information. The final report by the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission reached the same conclusion, emphasising that “any prisoner who desired repatriation had to do so clandestinely and in fear for his life.”

With reports being almost unanimous that use of violence and intimidation tremendously inflated the number of ‘defections,’ American officers reported to chief negotiator Admiral Charles Turner Joy that the screening process was not indicative of real choice by the prisoners. The admiral himself wrote of the Taiwanese controlled compounds that “the results of the screening were by no means indicative of the POWs’ real choice,” and that, should Taiwanese overseers be removed the numbers wishing to be repatriated would rise “from 15% to 85%.” He further noted reports that “a mock screening which had taken place in compound 92 prior to the regular screening. The [Taiwanese] leaders had asked those who wished to return to step forward. Those doing so were either beaten black & blue or killed.” Regarding his Army interpreters who witnessed the repatriation process, Joy reported they had “said their experience watching Chinese POWs at the polls convinced them that the majority of the POWs were too terrified to frankly express their real choice. All they could say in answer to the questions was ‘Taiwan’ repeated over & over again.” Thus although referred to in most Western histories of the Korean War as a key affirmation of the superiority of Western values and the Western-led order, the prisoner repatriation issue instead revealed highly depraved conduct by the U.S.-led alliance that put its claims to represent a ‘free world’ to serious question.

What the U.S. and its partners had fabricated was not an atrocity, but rather a reinforcement of the metanarrative which portrayed the alternative to Western hegemony – life in those countries outside the Western sphere of influence – as terrible enough that even their own soldiers would abandon their homes and families to defect to Western-aligned states. The construction of this narrative relied heavily on vilifying Western adversaries using fabricated atrocity propaganda. CIA Director Allen Dulles was not overstating the importance of the issue when he referred to alleged mass defections as “one of the greatest psychological victories so far achieved by the free world against communism” – with the communist world at the time representing the primary challenger to Western-led order.

The Korean War saw atrocity fabrication to vilify Western adversaries, as well as the fabricated narrative of prisoner defections, both play very major roles in furthering Western Bloc objectives. As a result economically developed Western countries which brutalised and killed their prisoners were successfully portrayed as humanitarians standing for universal values, while their East Asian adversaries which treated prisoners as well as they did their own soldiers were cast as brutalising both the POWs under their power as well as their own people – the latter whom the Western narrative claimed were defecting in droves as a result. Although perpetuated highly successfully through Western media, the narratives created in Korea appeared to those from both sides familiar with the state of affairs of the ground to be entirely at odds with reality.

Chapter Three Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square

Background: Subversion and the Sino-U.S. Cold War

The coming to power of the Communist Party of China and declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 marked the beginning of new phase in Sino-U.S. relations, with the new state almost immediately labelled a leading adversary to Western interests alongside the Soviet Union and targeted accordingly. Washington’s hostility towards China’s communist movement had long predated 1949, and the United States had actively intervened in China’s civil war in the preceding four years against communist forces and on the side of the staunchly pro-Western Guomindang government. From August 1945 American air and naval assets were used to facilitate a massive and rapid redeployment of 400,000–500,000 Guomindang personnel and of U.S. Marines to prevent the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from taking key positions across the country. Among their targets were Beijing, Shanghai, and important railway lines, coal mines, ports and bridges. By 1946 100,000 American military personnel, including 50,000 Marines, were deployed to China, with PLA reports indicating that they actively took to the offensive against communist-held areas. Regular reconnaissance flights by U.S. aircraft provided vital intelligence to the Guomindang, with multiple reports indicating that American aircraft strafed and bombed PLA positions and massacred the populations of communist-held towns. As communist forces enjoyed widespread support particularly from rural communities, entire population centres were often perceived as adversaries and targeted indiscriminately. One U.S. Marine recalled to this effect that his unit had “unmercifully” blasted a Chinese village without knowing “how many innocent people were slaughtered.”

To fight alongside Guomindang forces and their own Marine Corps the U.S. had before the end of 1945 already begun rearming surrendered Imperial Japanese personnel in China – what President Truman referred to as “using the Japanese to hold off the communists.” From 1947 the CIA’s first ever air unit the Flying Tigers deployed to China to help counter communist forces, and by 1949 the U.S. had provided almost $2 billion in funds and a further $1 billion worth of military hardware as aid to the Guomindang and trained a full 39 of its divisions. The lengths to which the U.S. went to defeat China’s communist movement reflected the importance it attached to ensuring the country remained in the Western sphere of influence, and ensured that America and the new People’s Republic were effectively at war from the moment the latter came into existence when the Guomindang lost the civil war.

Regarding the reasons for the defeat of the Guomindang and their leader Chiang Kaishek former State Department employee William Blum observed that the key lay in “the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his [Chiang’s] tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system.” The head of the U.S. Military Mission in China General David Barr assessed that the Guomindang were under “the world’s worst leadership,” highlighting “widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces.” There was a broad consensus among U.S. analysts at the time supporting Barr’s views, but while the nature of Guomindang leadership was well known the U.S. still went to great lengths to impose it on China. In contrast reports on the communists by a U.S. Army delegation sent in 1944 were immensely positive, with the delegation’s leader John Service observing: “[party chairman] Mao and the other leaders are universally spoken of with respect … these men are approachable and subservience toward them is completely lacking…. To the casual eye there are no police in [the communist capital of] Yenan…. Morale is very high … there is no defeatism but rather confidence.” He contrasted this sharply with the Guomindang’s low morale, high corruption and militarist police state.

Following the communist victory British journalist and China scholar Felix Greene noted: “Americans simply could not bring themselves to believe that the Chinese, however rotten their leadership, could have preferred a communist government.” Largely as a result Washington’s position towards China was unremittingly hostile, with a very wide range of measures pursued to isolate and destabilise it with the goal of restoring a Western client government to power. Although Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai made repeated overtures to Washington seeking improved relations after 1949, these were flatly rejected and the U.S. instead made several attempts to assassinate him.

Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, as the American military leadership continued to pledge to ‘roll back’ Chinese communism, U.S. forces came within firing distance of Chinese territory and its vital border infrastructure and attacked Chinese forces which had been deployed to form a buffer inside Korea. Reports of the Chinese deployment, which were known to have begun over a week before hostilities broke out, were notably censored from American media so that when U.S. forces engaged them on October 25, 1950, it was made to appear that the Chinese had initiated hostilities. The result was an overwhelming defeat for U.S. and allied forces. Further assaults on Chinese positions led Beijing to eventually commit to a full scale military intervention in December, with China and the U.S. fighting a limited war confined to the Korean Peninsula. Many in the U.S. military leadership proposed expanding the war effort to the Chinese mainland with strategic firebombing or even nuclear strikes, a blockade and mining of Chinese ports, and eventually a full scale invasion supported by Guomindang remnants which had fled to Taiwan. The presence of Soviet forces in China, and risk of war with the USSR, were the primary deterrents to such action.

The U.S. waged war on China on multiple fronts, and beyond the battlefields of Korea it pursued extensive economic warfare measures, pressed for Beijing’s isolation internationally, provided protection and offensive weapons to Guomindang remnants, and supported Guomindang assaults on the mainland from Taiwan. The CIA further provided arms, training, logistical support, and its own advisors and engineers to Guomindang remnants in Myanmar, which repeatedly launched incursions into Chinese territory sabotaging infrastructure and forcing Beijing to divert resources towards defence on a third front. Although they were consistently defeated and several CIA advisors were killed, these operations continued until the PLA and Myanmar’s own armed forces launched a joint operation to expel the CIA presence and its militias. CIA use of Taiwan as a base for operations to destabilise the mainland included airdropping paramilitary units for “promoting domestic anti-government guerrilla operations. This was to be accomplished by small teams of Chinese agents, generally inserted through airdrops, who were to link up with local guerrilla forces, collect intelligence and possibly engage in sabotage and psychological warfare, and report back by radio” – according to the agency’s reports. While Washington repeatedly claimed that Beijing was paranoid and dismissed all charges when confronted over these actions, declassified documents later proved Chinese claims entirely correct – as did the shooting down and capture of CIA pilots.

A fourth front for destabilisation of China was opened by the CIA in the southwestern province of Tibet. Although Washington had refused requests from Tibetan separatist groups for assistance in obtaining independence under Guomindang rule, and made clear that it recognised Chinese sovereignty over the territory, this quickly changed after the foundation of the PRC in October 1949, after which separatist groups were leveraged as assets for destabilisation. On November 1 President Truman called for “modern weapons and sufficient advisors” to be sent to separatist forces, and in June 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated that London and Washington were jointly exploring means to “encourage Tibetan resistance to Commie control.” Efforts escalated from the mid-1950s, and a four-day conference between U.S. intelligence and the Tibetan separatist leadership in 1955 saw a ten-year joint plan laid out to balkanise China and establish Tibet as a separate state aligned with Western interests. The CIA invested heavily in training and arming separatist guerrillas from 1956, which were tasked with sabotaging infrastructure, mining roads, cutting communications lines and ambushing PLA forces.

Both the Chinese state and its Tibetan minority suffered as a result of U.S. intervention, with the fourteenth Dalai Lama being among those to highlight that separatist cooperation with the CIA to undermine China “only resulted in more suffering for the people of Tibet.” According to him, Western support was provided “not because they cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide efforts to destabilise all communist governments.” With the Korean War having ruled out prospects for an invasion of China, U.S. policy for the next quarter century was effectively summarised by Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Walter Robinson as follows: “our hope of solving the problem of the mainland of China was not through attack on the mainland but rather by actions which would promote disintegration from within.”

The U.S. was moved to pursue détente and normalisation of diplomatic relations with China in the mid-1970s, largely due to setbacks in the Vietnam War, economic stagnation at home, and a perceived rise in Soviet power. With Beijing itself perceiving the USSR as an imminent threat to its security following the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, China’s rapprochement with the U.S. ended its political isolation and facilitated an expansion of economic ties with the Western world. This compensated for the decline in ties with the Soviet Bloc which had previously been key to bolstering its war-ravaged economy. Détente would be short lived, however, and just a decade later the end of the Cold War, a relative decline in Soviet power, and improving Sino-Soviet ties meant China was no longer seen in the U.S. as a vital asset to Western goals of containing Moscow. The result was a resumption of efforts to target China for destabilisation, which first materialised in the summer of 1989.

Unrest in June 1989: The West Claims Mass Slaughter in Beijing

By 1989 China’s position to withstand subversion from abroad was in many ways much weaker than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Economic reforms pursued under the administration of Deng Xiaoping had fuelled economic growth, but also inequality and increasingly conspicuous at times obscene signs of corruption. This contrasted sharply with both the communist ideals with which two generations had by then been raised, and the Mao-era zero tolerance towards corrupt practices. The result was growing dissatisfaction particularly among the urban youth who felt that their parents’ sacrifices to build a new China were being exploited by a new class of corrupt officials leading the country astray.

The recent relaxation of price controls had greatly improved the wellbeing of China’s rural population and increased crop yields and productivity, but this came at a cost to the urban population who faced rising prices for staple foods. Inflation shocks throughout the 1980s worsened the situation, with rates averaging almost 19 percent in 1988 and 1989. Former Chinese Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Zhao Ziyang was seen as a symbol of the new corruption in government and had proposed reforms which directly fuelled inflation. Zhao was the initial target of the public’s ire, with handbills passed out in 1989 asking: “How much does Zhao Ziyang pay to play golf?” Hailed in the West as a ‘Chinese Gorbachev,’ Zhao was alluded to in the following decade as ‘China’s Yeltsin’ after the Russian president of the time both for his strongly pro-Western inclinations and his commitment to a westernisation of China’s political and economic systems. In May 1988 Zhao pushed hard for accelerated price reforms leading to widespread complaints and calls for a return to greater centralisation of economic controls. This precipitated a debate that lasted well into 1989.

In April 1989 Chinese university students flooded the capital’s main square, Tiananmen, for a sit-in protest against government corruption and deviation from the ideals of the 1949 revolution. A former student protestor from Beijing interviewed by the writer in 2019, who worked as a teacher at the time, recalled regarding the movement (writer’s translation):

From the Deng Xiaoping era we all saw that China was becoming very different from the country our parents had aspired to build. Under Chairman Mao even slight corruption was never tolerated, everyone lived more or less equally, and we built the country together. But Deng Xiaoping’s era saw a new class of parasites, those who didn’t necessarily follow the rules and who weren’t particularly honest or hard working, take most of the benefits from the country’s growth which the people had worked to build. As a result we went to protest – to tell the government we were not satisfied. All the later talk in Western press about how we were asking for Western democracy is absurd, we were loyal to the revolution of 1949 and were protesting against moves towards the Western capitalist system – not asking for more of it. But China’s enemies misrepresented the peaceful protests to portray us as counterrevolutionaries calling for a reversal of the revolution. It is really sad, really absurd, that this is what people in the West think of us [former student protesters].

Hijacking any form of public discontent to portray it as a call for political westernisation was a common practice in the West particularly after the Cold War. Whether Egyptian protestors calling for “bread, freedom and administrative correctness” in 2011 or those in neighbouring Sudan in 2019 demonstrating against the rise in prices, protests over living conditions or government misconduct were very consistently spun to be portrayed as calling for Western-style liberal democracy. Western-trained professional activists would often then move in to seize leadership positions and divert public discontent in this direction – presenting political and economic westernisation as both a solution and a historical inevitability. Such portrayals were consistent with the post-Cold War Western worldview of an ‘end of history,’ which presented the West’s systems of governance as an ultimate truth and the inevitable outcome of political development across the world. The Western narrative of a Chinese protest which “drew upon Western-inspired ideals” and was led by “pro-democracy dissidents” had little real grounding in reality, however, and while there were minority elements in Tiananmen Square in 1989 who did aspire for westernisation, they did not reflect the purpose of the movement. The deeply rooted Western perceptions of its own political and economic systems as ones universally aspired to, however, made it very easy for Western populations to believe that any discontent was a result of lack of westernising ‘pro-democracy’ reforms. Award winning Hong Kong journalist of Sri-Lankan origin Nury Vittachi was one of many to observe regarding how student protests were presented in the West:

Don’t say that the student demonstrations were a call for freedom. You see that written everywhere, but scholars agree that the students were complaining about the widespread corruption that they saw as preventing the achievement of what they wanted: a fair and just communist society. The students were fiercely patriotic and proud of China and its socialist stance…. Don’t say that the protests were a call for democracy. In truth, they were calling for reform within communism. It was only when students noticed that international reporters would race to photograph placards with English words such as ‘liberty’ that democracy was elevated to a major theme.

Although a leading critic of Beijing, the London-based Guardian conceded that events at Tiananmen more generally “have been distorted – continually and wildly – by the Western human rights lobby,” slamming “the selective remembering of influential reporters and human rights activists…. They have abused the memory of June 1989, turning it into a weapon to be used as part of their human rights agenda for China.”

Following the clearing out of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, a Western narrative quickly emerged portraying authorities as having responded to the sit-in by dispatching soldiers to open fire into crowds and massacre peacefully protesting students without provocation. This was presented as a reflection of the party and military’s lack of respect for the lives of their people, and quickly became the overarching theme in Western portrayals of both the event and of China more broadly that would influence the meta-narrative surrounding the country for decades. NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert was one of many who referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square. CBS correspondent Richard Roth’s story of being arrested and removed from the scene referred to “powerful bursts of automatic weapons, raging gunfire for a minute and a half that lasts as long as a nightmare.” Australian journalist Adrian Brown, who later became Al Jazeera’s most senior China correspondent, described: “A tank treading on two flattened bodies, a burned-out army personnel carrier and the charred corpse of a soldier inside.” He claimed decades later that the continued presence of police on China’s streets was meant to deter and intimidate its people with the threat of a similar outcome. The Wall Street Journal referred to “violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in China’s Tiananmen Square – an event that shocked TV audiences around the world, [and] made global pariahs of the country’s top leaders.” As Vittachi summarised the Western version of events: “your government gunned down all these poor students who were in Tiananmen Square pleading for freedom and democracy; the young people were so brave, one guy stood in front of a tank, but tens of thousands were massacred.” Essentially, the West pushed a narrative of good against evil – the former being the Chinese youth calling for westernisation of their country’s political system who were suppressed by the ‘brutal’ and ‘totalitarian’ government holding China back. While this narrative is the most spectacular and memorable for a Western public relations effort, available evidence very strongly contradicts it.

What Happened in Beijing in June 1989

While protests in Beijing reflected real concerns with the direction of Chinese politics, such unrest presented external adversaries with multiple valuable opportunities to further their interests at the expense of the Chinese state and its people. The fabricated narrative of a mass slaughter played a vital role in vilifying China as part of an at the time fast-shrinking minority of states outside the Western sphere of influence, while misrepresenting protesters’ dissatisfaction served to strengthen the narrative of a global desire for political westernisation. The unrest also provided an opportunity to pursue China’s destabilisation, with Western intelligence agencies deeply involved in shaping the protest movement and supporting elements that were amenable to Western interests. As the Vancouver Sun was among the publications to report in 1992, citing officials, for several months preceding the clearing of Tiananmen Square on June 4: “the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.” The involvement of Western intelligence agencies had been widely suspected, with the speed at which they were able to later locate and extract key pro-Western protest leaders further indicating that contacts had been established for some time.

Despite the complete absence of footage indicating protestors may have been killed in Tiananmen Square, as Western sources nearly unanimously claimed they had been, the incident came to be symbolised in Western reporting by images of a column of PLA tanks halting as a single civilian stood in its path. Considered “the most famous, enduring image of the massacre,” this was widely portrayed in the West as a symbol of the ‘pro-democracy westernisation’ movement standing in the way of ‘repressive authoritarianism.’ Like many aspects of the Western portrayals of the events of that day, this proved to be far from well founded. Although only a short extract was shown by Western sources, the full footage revealed that the armoured column was leaving Tiananmen Square on June 5. It showed that the man not only moved to prevent the tanks from driving around him, but was even allowed to climb onto one of them. This was hardly an image Western interests would benefit from conveying, and as a result a small cut of the footage was consistently shown out of context.

Cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing published by Wikileaks in 2016 provided some of the most valuable insights into the events in Tiananmen Square. Written for government officials as a report of the events that happened, the cables contrasted sharply with the sensationalised reports in Western media written for public consumption. According to the embassy a Chilean diplomat and his wife were present when Chinese soldiers moved into Tiananmen Square to disperse protestors. They were able to enter and leave many times, and faced no harassment. Citing the diplomat, the embassy reported: “He watched the military enter the square and did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear – truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers.” Crucially, and entirely contrary to Western claims, the diplomat witnessed “no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument.” The students then agreed to leave the square, and there were no incidences of lethal force being used by authorities. “Once [an] agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner,” it concluded, adding in reference to prevailing Western portrayals at the time that “there was no such slaughter.” Chile was politically closely aligned with the U.S. at the time, and its diplomats’ accounts were considered reliable.

Former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, similarly conceded in 1998 that: “all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” He referred to the ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’ as a myth, stressing that it was “hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression.” Regarding the questionable reliability of the sources used to claim a massacre had occurred, Mathews recalled:

The resilient tale of an early morning Tiananmen massacre stems from several false eyewitness accounts…. Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. The New York Times gave this version prominent display on June 12, just a week after the event, but no evidence was ever found to confirm the account or verify the existence of the alleged witness…. Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred…. A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the centre of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel.

“As far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square,” Mathews concluded, with his statement highlighting the prevailing tendency for figures such as Kaixi and the BBC reporter to fabricate claims of a massacre and falsely pass themselves off as eyewitnesses.

New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who was in Beijing at that time, observed that claims of a massacre were questionable on several “major points.” He effectively debunked and highlighted major inconsistencies in the sensational article attributed to the anonymous Qinghua student that was circulated in Hong Kong press and widely cited by British sources, which was the source most key to promoting the narrative of a massacre. “State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered,” Kristof stressed in conclusion.

As sources claiming a massacre were over time discredited, a growing number of eyewitnesses attested to the fact that no massacre had ever taken place. One of the most notable was the Taiwan-born writer Hou Dejian, who had been on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to show solidarity with the students. He recalled: “Some people said that 200 died in the Square and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say that I did not see any of that. I myself was in the Square until 6:30 in the morning.”

Reuters correspondent Graham Earnshaw, who spent the night of June 3–4 at the centre of Tiananmen Square and interviewed many students, watched the military arrive in the early dawn and “saw the clearing of the square from the square itself.” Earnshaw confirmed that most of the students had already left peacefully by this time, and that the remaining few hundred were persuaded to do the same. There was no violence, let alone a massacre.

Even the BBC’s Beijing correspondent at the time, James Miles, who had for years criticised Chinese government actions and accounts of the incident, conceded 20 years later: “I was one of the foreign journalists who witnessed the events that night…. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.” Western reporting had “conveyed the wrong impression,” and “protestors who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations,” he concluded.

Spanish ambassador in Beijing at the time, Eugenio Bregolat, noted in his own book which covered the subject that Spain’s TVE state media outlet had a television crew in the Tiananmen Square on June 4, and that if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to record it. He stressed that most of the reports claiming a massacre were made by Western journalists in the Beijing Hotel some distance from the square and out of sight.

With the narrative of a massacre having originated in the British colony of Hong Kong, and gaining particularly strong support from British media, former Australian diplomat and Tokyo bureau chief for The Australian Gregory Clark was one of many to attribute the narrative to a British black information operation. He observed in the title of a prominent article for the International Business Times on the incident’s 25th anniversary: “Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We’re ‘Remembering’ are British Lies,” referring to it as

one of the more spectacular UK black information operations – almost on a par with the mythical Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time – among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night. Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed.

While available evidence strongly points to there having been no ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre,’ despite how potent such a narrative quickly became as a symbol of ‘authoritarian Chinese government evil’ against ‘pro-democracy pro-Western good,’ unrest elsewhere in Beijing in June 1989 did result in lives being lost. Contrasting to Western claims of tens of thousands of innocent students killed in Tiananmen, street battles far from the square between soldiers and anti-government insurgents saw hundreds killed. Unlike the fabricated massacre of students which had no photographic evidence to support it, footage fully confirmed reports of attacks by unknown militants on PLA personnel and that many were burned alive and tortured in the streets. Coverage and publication of related images were conspicuous by their almost total absence from Western reporting, however.

Gregory Clark alleged that soldiers were victims of attacks by petrol bombs, and that many were trapped in busses, strung up and burned. He questioned the suspicious circumstances under which radical anti-government elements had managed to gain access to such weapons and learned to use them. By contrast the PLA personnel in Beijing, according to U.S. State Department reports, had carried no firearms when facing civilians up to June 3 which limited their ability to respond to armed attacks. Regarding the photographic evidence of the mutilated and burned bodies of soldiers, Clark wrote: “Let’s go back to those photos of the burning buses. The popular view is that they were torched by angry protesters after the shooting began. In fact they were torched before. The evidence? Reports of charred corpses being strung up beneath overpasses (one photographed by Reuters remains unpublished), and photos of badly burned soldiers seeking shelter in nearby houses.” These details were almost totally absent from Western coverage and would have undermined Western sources’ black and white portrayals of anti-government elements as purely moderate and peaceful.

Scholar and freelance writer Philip J. Cunningham witnessed the emergence of violent youth groups who were well organised, armed and very distinct in both conduct and appearance from the students in Tiananmen Square. He stated:

The [peaceful] May Fourth spirit was gone, replaced by something murky and malevolent. There was a new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, young punks decidedly less than student-like in appearance. In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins they wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under our lights, their eyes gleaming with mischief, they brazenly revealed hidden Molotov cocktails…. Who were these punks in shorts and sandals, carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline is tightly rationed, so they could not have come up with these things spontaneously. Who taught them to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?

Another account detailed how soldiers were massacred on June 3 by several armed and seemingly radical militants who were calling for blood. The burning of a military personnel carrier and targeting of a soldier trapped inside was recounted by Cunningham as follows: “After throwing rocks at the armored vehicle, rioters stopped it…. Why did so many people choose to pursue the APC once it had safely passed? … The camouflaged vehicle was attacked on all sides … someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement.” Accompanying Cunningham was a student from the Central Academy of Drama, a former hunger striking peaceful protestor named Meng, who was himself shocked at the extreme violence of the rioters. Cunningham recalled Meng shouted:

“Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help him get out!” The agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, blood-curdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the mother f*cker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.” “Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, bloody enthusiasm now whipped up to a high pitch. “Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded, leaving me behind as he tried to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop, he is just a soldier!” “He is not human, kill him, kill him!” said a voice…. At least one surrendering soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but the ambulance itself was attacked, the back door almost ripped off…. The blood thirst made me nauseous.

Cunningham stressed the difference between the minority militants and the majority of peaceful protestors, with the former “deliberately instigating violence, putting them at odds with conscientious demonstrators who had no intention of hurting anyone.” The goal of the violent minority appeared to be to provoke a military response against both themselves, but also against the peaceful majority, which in turn would provide grounds to vilify the government and swell the ranks of radical anti-government factions. Militants mingling among peaceful protestors and launching attacks from within their ranks, as alluded to by Cunningham and other observers, may have been what Deng Xiaoping referred to when he lamented on June 9: “because bad people mingled with the good, which made it difficult to take the drastic measures we should take.”

Pictures of dead, burned and mutilated Chinese soldiers provide important evidence of the actions of the armed militants. A photograph of one was published in Granta, but never appeared elsewhere in the British press and made few appearances elsewhere in the West. “Perhaps because it challenges the myth of a peaceful student protest inside Tiananmen Square,” one analyst speculated regarding why these images of actual killings were scarcely shown or even known of, while misrepresentations of the ‘tank man’ image were propagated widely. Gregory Clark, for one, noted as an example of what he claimed was an intentional effort led by Britain to distort public perceptions of the events: “Reuters, the British new agency, refused to publish a photo of a charred [soldier’s] corpse strung up under an overpass – a photo that would have done much to explain what had happened.”

The Washington Post was a notable exception, and did provide some coverage of these attacks, stating in a June 12 article that “on one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armoured vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers.” The Wall Street Journal also briefly referred to the presence of “radicalised protesters, some now armed with guns and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military.” “As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen many troops were set on by angry mobs…. [D]ozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square,” it observed on June 5. These reports were notably published very early on before a narrative surrounding the unrest had fully been established. The violence by rioters was conspicuous for its almost total absence in subsequent Western coverage of the incident over the following three decades. The Guardian would belatedly mention the attacks in 2008, but notably referred to the lynching of soldiers in radical terms as a “people’s execution” of “oppressors,” and as “understandable, even admirable.” It noted that “in one suburb, two soldiers were hanged from a burnt-out bus.”

In light of the U.S.’ long aforementioned history of infiltrating guerilla fighters and saboteurs into China for attacks on both military personnel and civilian infrastructure, it was speculated that these well-prepared insurgents, who appeared to come out of nowhere and attack soldiers without provocation, may have been infiltrated from Taiwan or elsewhere. This would explain their evident hatred for the PLA and their familiarity with producing makeshift weapons. Had these plain clothed but armed provocateurs succeeded in inciting soldiers to attack civilian protestors, it could have seriously undermined the prestige and legitimacy of both the military and the government. Ideally, as far as Western interests were concerned, this would eventually lead to the Chinese state’s collapse, and perhaps its balkanisation, as pro-Western elements were restored to power much as was being achieved across the Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself at the time.

While some soldiers did respond to attacks with live fire, this occurred far from Tiananmen Square and was defensive. As the U.S. embassy cables themselves noted regarding the reason why soldiers used firearms: “some of the soldiers were forced into firing for self-defence or to protect the lives of their fellow soldiers.” Gregory Clark addressed this in the Japan Times as follows:

[w]e do not have to look much beyond those widely publicised photos of military buses in rows being set on fire by those protesting crowds. To date the world seems to have assumed that those buses were fired by the crowds AFTER the soldiers had started shooting. In fact it was the reverse – the crowds attacked the buses as they entered Beijing, incinerating dozens of soldiers inside, and only then did the shooting begin. Here too we do need not go far to find the evidence – in the not publicised photos of soldiers with horrible burns seeking shelter in nearby houses, and reports of charred corpses being strung from overpasses.

Considering the nature of the attacks on and killings of the soldiers, their responses and those of their commanders were far more proportional and restrained than one would expect of most militaries. This could be attributed to the PLA’s emphasis on political education, and perhaps to commanders’ awareness that the biggest danger militants could pose would be to provoke a disproportionate response. Indeed, the ‘tank man’ video showing a single protestor being allowed to block a tank column could easily have been interpreted as a sign of this restraint. By contrast police and military vehicles in other countries – including on many occasions in the West – were known to drive at high speed into protestors who attempted to block their passage. Clark himself compared the more restrained responses of PLA personnel to attacks with the responses of U.S. forces in Fallujah, Iraq, where despite fewer American personnel being killed the population was forced to endure extremely brutal reprisals.

Regarding the intention to provoke soldiers to target civilian protestors, the most extreme of the protest leaders the 23-year-old Chai Ling, who considered herself the “chief commander” of the radical wing, stated six years later in 1995: “what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?” She referred to those who opposed provoking the government into carrying out such a massacre as “selfish.” The fact that the Chinese population had failed to respond to political events as she had hoped led her to lament: “you, the Chinese, you are not worth my struggle. You are not worth my sacrifice.” Ling attested to the fact that there was a harsh competition for leadership of the protest movement, with the majority calling for better workers’ rights and reduced corruption while a militant minority led by herself called for the government’s overthrow. She was particularly critical of the moderate Beijing Students’ Autonomous Union which represented the more mainstream aspirations of the protest movement.

Ling and other leaders of the protests’ radical wing reportedly worked very closely with Gene Sharp, who was considered America’s leading expert on the exploiting of internal dissent in countries outside the Western sphere of influence to achieve their destabilisation. Sharp arrived in Beijing in May 1989, and the tactics of protestors notably closely mirrored those recommended in his own writings on the subject. This was documented in detail by French scholar Dr. Bertrand M. Roehner, who authored the book Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena. Multiple sources, including several foreign governments, indicated that Sharp worked very closely with the CIA and the CIA-linked and U.S. government funded National Endowment for Democracy, and played an important role in similar destabilisation efforts in the Warsaw Pact and European regions of the Soviet Union at the time. He subsequently played important roles in similar efforts targeting Soviet successor states, the Arab world from 2011, and Myanmar and Venezuela later that decade.

Leaders of the protests’ radical wing consistently expressed strongly Western-supremacist sentiments and the strong belief that westernisation was the only way for China to progress. The most notable was Liu Xiaobo, who was much lauded in the West and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. He praised “100 years of colonialism” in Hong Kong for allegedly improving the territory, and claimed that China needed at least 300 years of Western colonialism imposed on it to be able to advance. His strongly Western supremacist position was hardly new, and as early as 1988 he had stated: “To choose Westernisation is to choose to be human,” while China’s own supposedly inferior culture left the population “wimpy, spineless, and f**ked up.” Liu similarly expressed strong belief in the idea of a Western ‘civilising and democratising mission,’ for example stating regarding the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq:

my support for the invasion of Iraq will not waver. Just as, from the beginning, I believed that the military intervention of Britain and the United States would be victorious, I am still full of belief in the final victory of the Freedom Alliance and the democratic future of Iraq, and even if the armed forces of Britain and the United States should encounter some obstacles such as those that they are currently facing, this belief of mine will not change … a free, democratic and peaceful Iraq will emerge.

The Western war efforts in Korea and Vietnam, the former which was described as genocide against the Korean population by several Western and South Korean scholars, were both strongly praised by Liu. Liu’s stances later won him both substantial funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as considerable support from across the Western world. His statements were hardly isolated, with many of the leadership of the protest’s radical wing expressing similar sentiments. The ideal outcome of the Tiananmen incident, as far as Western interests were concerned, would have been to place China under a new leadership ascribing to such a Western supremacist school of thought. For his statements and his pro-Western activism Liu was widely hailed in the Western world as the “Chinese Nelson Mandela,” ironic as it was since Mandela fought for decades against Western supremacist ideas and systems while Liu was strongly guided by them and advocated for their imposition.

Western involvement in the unrest in China in 1989 extended to information warfare operations targeting the government, the military and the general public. Voice of America (VOA) targeted the People’s Liberation Army by broadcasting to its satellites, and falsely reported several times that military units were turning on each other and the country was collapsing into civil war. The goal appeared to be to sow confusion and panic in the military and government. Shortly after attacks on soldiers began in Beijing, VOA reported that Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and Deng Xiaoping was nearing death. It increased Chinese language broadcasts to 11 hours daily. VOA’s focus on events in Tiananmen Square were extreme, growing from 20 percent of airtime between May 4 and May 15 to over 80 percent after June 4. Such tactics were hardly unique to operations against China. Two years later during Operation Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. accessed Iraqi military communications to transmit contradictory orders and excessively ludicrous propaganda statements pretending to be the Iraqi leadership in order to disrupt and demoralise the country’s armed forces. Later that year when the USSR disintegrated the U.S. was able to access Soviet military communications to ensure that any attempt to stop pro-Western elements from seizing power could be pre-empted.

Western intelligence operations in China continued after protests disbanded on June 4, the most notable being Operation Yellowbird which was carried out by the CIA and by British agencies. The operation sought to extract the Western assets who had led the radical wing of the protests from China. The close connections many of these figures already had to Western intelligence played an important role in facilitating their extraction, with 15 of the 21 most important assets successfully retrieved and taken to the British colony of Hong Kong.

Yellowbird saw Western intelligence agencies work closely with criminal gangs, the support of which was key to its success, most notably the Sun Yee On triad, which was involved in human trafficking, prostitution, smuggling, extortion, counterfeiting, gambling and narcotics. The criminal organisation was provided with sophisticated equipment and weapons for the operation by the CIA. Known gang members in Hong Kong were also heavily involved in financing Operation Yellowbird. Such organisations across East Asia had long partnered with Western interests as far back as the Opium Wars, and did so increasingly during the Cold War, in part due to fears that communist rule and a much harder line on crime and trafficking would bring an end to their ability to operate.

Extraction teams were sent into the Chinese mainland, reportedly from Hong Kong, equipped night-vision goggles, infrared signallers, encryption devices and makeup to help disguise the assets. Once out of China, the protest leaders were quickly relocated to the West primarily to the U.S. and France. Newsweek described them as the “media darlings of Tiananmen Square,” and their continued operations against the Chinese government from the cities of the countries that had first supported their operations represented a significant Western propaganda coup.

Hailed in the West as ‘Chinese Joan of Arc’ Chai Ling, who had stated her intention to provoke a government massacre of protestors, was among those extracted. For her activities and her prestige as a fighter for westernisation she received two Nobel Peace Prize nominations and an invitation to attend Princeton University, where she studied international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Ling became a fundamentalist Christian, which was publicised in 2009, and she subsequently hosted fundraisers for far-right politicians in the U.S. while her American husband Robert Maginn served as the Chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party from 2011 to 2013. She testified eight times at the U.S. Congress against the Chinese state. Regarding her vision for a politically westernised China and an end to party rule, Ling stated: “China will definitely have democracy in the future but it will be better than democracy, it will be like heaven. All our tears will be dried. There will be no death or unhappiness.” Her work, she said, was “at all times was motivated and guided by the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

China and the West After Tiananmen Square

With PLA units launching only modest reprisals in response to the militants attacking them from among the protestors, and the military avoiding a fall into disorder, Western intervention to destabilise China fell far short of success. As a result, the country would continue its path towards economic growth, and the ruling party would eventually crack down harder on corruption while raising living standards considerably. China emerged as the world’s largest economy in 2014, and by the end of 2020 had a GDP one sixth larger than that of the United States. Its industries by then were poised to gain dominance in many key areas of high tech ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G. In contrast the Soviet Union, which in 1989 had been several decades ahead of China in its high tech and economic development, was successfully destabilised two years later leading to its balkanisation, a 45 percent contraction in the post-Soviet Russian economy, the loss of much its industrial base, a crash in life expectancy and skyrocketing poverty rates. The result was millions of deaths and the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of women into slavery in Western Europe and the U.S. during the 1990s. In the Cold War’s immediate aftermath, the possibility of a balkanisation of China into smaller states was being openly discussed in the West as such a process was underway in the Soviet Union. In the USSR’s case this led to Soviet successor states devoting much of their energies over the next three decades to fighting one another after having formerly been united as a single superpower, which left Western hegemony unchallenged.

The unrest of 1989 thus marked a decisive turning point in China’s history in which the country avoided a very dark fate, and resulted in the deposition of Zhao Ziyang who was accused of having openly sided with pro-Western elements in the protest movement. Some analysts, such as international relations scholar Hal Brands, interpreted June 1989 as the beginning of a new phase in China’s relations with the West – a Cold War which would intensify with time as Western rhetoric towards Beijing changed drastically. Brands claimed in 2019 that 1989 highlighted “fundamental political differences at the heart of today’s U.S.-China competition,” and served as an “early notice” that China was not going to westernise its political system as Soviet Bloc communist states had. Indeed, three decades later when China had comfortably surpassed the U.S. in GDP, in spending on military acquisitions, and in scientific publications, among several other key metrics, hardliners in Washington such as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo lamented Western complacency in 1989. Using the fabricated Tiananmen massacre as a pretext, many contended the West should have taken much more aggressive actions to snuff China out as a challenger to Western power when it was much weaker.

The Tiananmen incident closely coincided with multiple Western interventions across the communist world targeting states in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia, which in most cases relied not on military action but rather on new information warfare capabilities and on cultivation and support for pro-Western paramilitary units. When China remained stable, however, the West managed to salvage a public relations victory by referring to a purported one-sided massacre of student protestors which never happened to vilify Beijing – an atrocity fabrication for propaganda purposes. The alleged massacre would continue to be used as a pretext to pursue limited hostile policies against China including economic sanctions, arms embargoes, the suspension of World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, and cancellation of many investment projects. Beijing was nevertheless able to leverage Western private sector interests, which in contrast to Western nations’ geopolitical interests were leading major firms to push for a normalisation of ties, to quickly resume trade and have most sanctions lifted. The ludicrous potential of access to Chinese markets and to its workforce provided this leverage. Canada, which took the hardest line on the issue, maintained sanctions for four years but was eventually forced to relax them as it remained an outlier even among Western countries. Chinese sources also perceived that Britain used claims of a massacre in Tiananmen Square as a pretext to renege on bilateral understandings relating to the return of the colony of Hong Kong to Beijing.

Memorial services were held across the Western world commemorating those who had supposedly been slaughtered fighting for westernisation in Tiananmen Square – a self-congratulatory narrative which both vilified the East Asian enemy and placed Western values and the Western political system on a pedestal. Much like the forced defections of Korean War prisoners to Western-aligned states (see Chapter 2), this was repeatedly reemphasised in the West to convey the narrative of a Chinese government at odds with the best interests of its population – and a Western world which stood with the Chinese people and represented their future hopes and aspirations. Regular references to the clashes of June 1989 cast an aura of notoriety on the most central location in Beijing, subtly reminding the world ‘what kind of country’ China was with the incident widely referred to in Western media on June 4 every year. Propagation of the myth of a massacre was key to shaping Western and global public perceptions of the post-Cold War world order and casting China, and those others which failed to westernise their political systems, firmly as the villains. The alleged Tiananmen Square massacre thus formed the core of a new metanarrative surrounding China for a new era of post-Cold War relations.

For well over a decade the alleged Tiananmen massacre provided a key reference point for discussions surrounding China whenever the country made headlines. Before and during U.S. President Bill Clinton’s trip to Beijing in 1998, for example, the New York Post referred to the square as “the site of the student slaughter.” USA Today and the Wall Street Journal referred to Tiananmen the following day as the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down,” and to the “Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops killed “hundreds or more.” A Baltimore Sun front page headline referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” During the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, when international media was in China’s capital, Tiananmen Square was referred to by Western reporters as China’s “blackened heart” – supposedly a symbol of Chinese malice which Western voices widely claimed overshadowed an almost perfectly executed Olympic games.

As observed in the Japan Times in July 2008:

With the Beijing Olympics looming we see more attempts to remind the world about the alleged June 4, 1989, massacre of democracy-seeking students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The New York Times, which did so much to spread the original story of troops shooting student protesters there with abandon, has recently published several more articles condemning the alleged massacre, including one suggesting there should be an Olympic walkout. Other media, including Britain’s usually impartial Guardian and Independent, and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, have chimed in. None are interested in publishing rebuttals. This effort is impressive, especially considering the overwhelming evidence that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre…. Damage from the Tiananmen myth continues.

Such efforts by Western news outlets to keep the story alive and evoke it to shape perceptions of China would only increase in the 2010s as the Barak Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia initiative fuelled greater tensions with Beijing and made countering China a primary foreign policy priority. Time, for example, framed the incident on its 40th anniversary in 2019 as: “Beijing’s bloody showdown with democracy” – directly contradicting information declassified since by stating “the massacre at Tiananmen killed hundreds, possibly thousands.” This was highly representative of the predominant trend in Western coverage. By the early 2020s, as Sino-U.S. relations reached lows not seen since the 1960s, art commemorating Tiananmen Square became increasingly common in the West. Examples from New York City alone ranged from the gay romance Tiananmen Requiem which opened in March 2022 to Broadway’s Tiananmen: A New Musical which premiered the following year.

The alleged slaughter in Tiananmen Square has for decades been characterised in the West as a manifestation of the nature of the Chinese government, and as showing an almost unique level of depravity in the country. This characterisation bore a very strong contrast to the way clashes between authorities and protestors or rioters were covered when they occurred in countries more closely aligned with Western interests. A notable example was the deployment of the U.S. Military during the 1960s to suppress peaceful student protesters, at times killing them. American students had not lynched soldiers, thrown firebombs at military vehicles or torched public property, and no soldiers were killed or harmed – the violence was totally one-sided. While the alleged massacre in Tiananmen Square was consistently closely associated with the intrinsic nature of the Chinese state, no remotely similar associations were made with the very real student killings in America.

Another notable example was the South Korean government’s well documented military action to suppress the Gwangju student uprising in May 1980, in which the U.S. Military was heavily complicit and which saw a death toll estimated at between 1000 and 2000. While there had been no serious attacks on police or security forces to provoke the use of deadly force, Western media and political leaders largely turned a blind eye. In Venezuela nine days of protests beginning on February 27, 1989, saw hundreds and by some estimates several thousand protestors killed, although with a Western-aligned government having been responsible the incident was scarcely mentioned in Western press. In India the police’s mishandling of riots in Bihar in 1989 caused an estimated 1000 deaths, which also received little coverage in the West. This trend towards Western sources strongly downplaying massacres in friendly states went back decades, a notable example being in 1961 when French police fired on and killed an estimated 300 peaceful protestors without provocation in Paris. The Paris police chief who ordered it was subsequently promoted and awarded the Légion d’Honneur, while police archives were sealed to anyone looking to investigate until the 1990s. In sharp contrast to Tiananmen, Western media outlets such as Time and the Washington Post strongly downplayed the massacre as it was perpetrated by a Western country.

Had there been unrest in Beijing just five years prior when China was a valued partner against the Soviet Union, Western actors would have been far less likely to capitalise on it to promote destabilisation and vilify the Chinese state. Even a massacre, had one occurred just a few years earlier, would have likely received minimal coverage much like clashes in Gwangju, Paris or Caracas. It was only due to the Cold War’s end that destabilising China and fabricating narratives that vilified the country again aligned with Western interests.

Chapter Four The Gulf War

Iraq as the New Adversary

On August 2, 1990, the Ba’athist Republic of Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of its southern neighbour the State of Kuwait in what proved to be one of the most consequential military actions in modern Middle Eastern history. Multiple factors influenced Baghdad’s decision, with the country under the presidency of Saddam Hussein from 1979 having spent eight of the past eleven years at war with its neighbour to the east, the Islamic Republic of Iran, after invading in 1980. The war had exhausted Iraq’s substantial foreign reserves of almost $100 billion, and by 1990 its economy was in dire straits with a combination of crashing oil prices and Iranian strikes on its infrastructure having lowered annual oil revenues from $26 billion to just $10 billon. Thus when Kuwait repeatedly far exceeded OPEC oil production quotas despite repeated Iraqi warnings and requests, with the effect of driving prices down, the resulting Iraqi losses seriously impeded post-war recovery and were annually equivalent to the entire budget deficit of Iraq’s oil-reliant economy. While Baghdad repeatedly alleged this was part of a Kuwaiti-American economic conspiracy against it, it also accused Kuwait of horizontal drilling to steal its oil, and of blocking access to the sea by holding Iraqi-claimed islands. Kuwait’s inflexibility over its oil policies and territorial disputes, despite repeated warnings, was seen by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia among other regional leaders to have brought the invasion on itself, with Riyadh having urged its neighbour to be more accommodating.

Kuwait had the Middle East’s fourth largest oil reserves at an estimated 94 billion barrels, and Iraq initially planned to use its invasion to install a friendly client government in power much as the U.S. had done recently in Grenada in 1983 and in Panama just eight months prior in December 1989. With the invasions of Kuwait, Grenada and Panama being almost identical in the kind of international crimes they represented, it was argued by some analysts that by its illegal and unprovoked actions the U.S. had diminished the post-Second World War taboo against crimes of aggression against one’s smaller neighbours and set an international precedent on which Iraq then acted. Much as installing a U.S. client state in Panama was seen in Washington to be necessary to ensure favourable access to the strategically vital Panama Canal, Iraq planned to install a client government in Kuwait which would presumably reduce oil production to within OPEC quotas and invest more of its revenues in Iraq. Kuwait was also expected to agree to a resolution of territorial disputes over the strategically located Bubiyan and Warba islands that was favourable to Baghdad.

With Soviet influence in the Middle East having been in decline for over a decade Iraq remained the only major power in the region outside the Western sphere of influence. Its close security ties with the USSR and China, highly tense relations with Western-aligned Israel, and unpredictable leadership, led it to be seen as a potential challenger to Western interests. With the Cold War over and Iran successfully contained, crushing Iraq’s military and economy would mark a key turning point in regional order, returning it to the pre-Cold War status quo of near unchallenged Western hegemony. Following the USSR’s effective withdrawal from its prior role of containing Western power, demonstrating America and its allies’ ability to project force on a tremendous scale into the territories of countries across the world would also send a message of unchallenged strength with the potential to transform global order.

According to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael J. Dugan, President George H. W. Bush intended to go to war with Iraq almost as soon as he heard Kuwait had been invaded, and quickly announced plans for an air campaign which would concentrate on targeting Iraqi population centres. Dugan was dismissed from his post a few days after his revelations. Thus while Iraq initially announced plans on August 5 that it had begun its withdrawal from Kuwait, the announcement on August 8 that the U.S. was deploying its own forces near Iraq’s borders, including unprecedentedly to neighbouring Saudi Arabia, led Baghdad to reverse its plans. Kuwait was instead formally annexed into Iraq on August 28, with the territory expected to be used as leverage to gain Western security guarantees, or to otherwise serve as a buffer zone between Iraq and the Western military contingent in the Gulf in the face of possible attacks.

Opportunities for a mediated settlement over Kuwait were notably consistently rejected by Washington on the basis that they would legitimise the Iraqi government, despite Baghdad repeatedly indicating a willingness withdraw and restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. Iraq’s key condition for withdrawing was that it would be guaranteed that it would not come under Western attack afterwards. As President Hussein informed former British Prime Minister Edward Heath when asked to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait: “But what guarantee will you give me that if I pull out of Kuwait, the Americans and the British won’t come in with forces and be in a better position to bomb me and my country than they are at the moment; to attack us from Kuwait instead of Saudi Arabia?”

An offer on August 7 proposed that in return for security guarantees Iraq would fully withdraw, reinstate the Kuwaiti monarchy, reach an agreement with Washington for all matters pertaining to oil, and later even to sign a non-aggression pact with Kuwait. Washington’s response indicated it saw there was little to discuss. In part as a result it was widely assessed that the U.S. sought to have Iraq remain in Kuwait so as to provide a pretext for military action. As noted in a publication by the U.S. National Security Archive regarding efforts by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to mediate a peace deal: “the United States saw Gorbachev’s efforts to work out a peaceful solution as a problem and a nuisance. At that moment Washington was concerned that Saddam might actually comply with U.N. resolutions, which would undermine the grounds for [the military operation] Desert Storm.” A peaceful resolution was not seen to be in Washington’s interest. The U.S. instead quickly took an uncompromising position and called for the removal of Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president and the disbanding of the Iraqi Military as preconditions for a peaceful settlement. Baghdad expressed a strong willingness to enter negotiations with the assistance of the Arab League, the USSR and even America’s ally France, but having alienated its neighbours over the previous decade it was isolated on the international stage. The Cold War’s end and Soviet Union’s effective capitulation to the West enabled the U.S. and its allies to take an unprecedentedly hard line, guaranteeing much greater freedom to launch military strikes in the Middle East than at any time since the colonial era.

While Baghdad persisted that it needed security guarantees if it was to withdraw from Kuwait, the U.S. was expected to press for Iraq’s full disarmament of strategic military assets even if Iraqi forces withdrew. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who played a key role in lobbying Washington to take military action, insisted that it was vital to destroy Iraq’s military and likely all of its industrial potential. “No one should interfere with that objective,” she declared to Soviet KGB Director Yevgeni Primakov. When asked: “so you see no other option but war?,” she replied with a definite “no.” Former State Secretary Henry Kissinger informed the Senate Armed Services Committee on November 28 that “any solution to the crisis must provide for a reduction of Iraq‘s offensive capability…. Without addressing this fundamental imbalance, a solution will only postpone, and probably exacerbate, and eventual resolution of Gulf instability.” His views were seen as a guide to American thinking, although they were less hardline and those of President Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker. President Bush similarly alluded to ensuring the Iraqi leader could not “keep his military power” as a key objective, as neutralising the country increasingly became a goal in and of itself regardless of the status of Kuwait.

There was little doubt anywhere in the world that Iraq’s invasion and annexation of another UN member state was illegal, and that Kuwait’s population was worse off under occupation than it had been beforehand. This was far from sufficient, however, to gain support globally or even among Western populations for a military campaign against Iraq – particularly considering that Baghdad was offering to withdraw its forces with very limited conditions. A country invading its neighbour halfway across the world was hardly enough to sufficiently vilify it in the U.S. – particularly considering that America had launched full scale invasions of its own neighbours twice in the past decade including one just months before.

Media in the West had for decades focused on vilification of Communism, of Soviet peoples as an ‘Asiatic Menace’ and ‘Red Terror,’ and at times on Chinese, Vietnamese and North Koreans as an ‘Asiatic Horde’ that threatened the Western world. Preceding this Japan had been the target for demonisation – ranging from papers in leading scientific journals examining alleged Japanese ethnic inferiority to posters depicting its population as insects and rats, in the context of portrayals of the war as a racial and civilisational clash between East and West. The Arab world, by contrast, had seen little attention in Western media as an ‘enemy’ figure. Arab jihadists employing terrorist tactics were largely aligned with Western interests and received considerable Western support in their campaign against the Soviet-aligned Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, and subsequently against the Soviet Union. By the 1980s a large majority of Arab governments were aligned with Western interests, with Libya being the only state to receive significant negative coverage in Western media. Few in the U.S. had heard of Iraq before 1990, and those who had knew of it politically mainly as on the ‘good side’ working with the ‘free world’ to contain the ‘evil’ Iranian revolutionary government. Indeed, under Saddam Hussein’s leadership which began in 1979 Iraq’s relations with the West had improved significantly as Baghdad distanced itself the USSR and Soviet-backed Syria.

For war against Iraq efforts were made not only to portray the country as a significant threat, but also to vilify both the Iraqi government and the general population by presenting Iraqi forces as committing a wave of extreme atrocities. Western efforts to cast Iraq as both an imminent threat and a uniquely depraved actor relied very heavily on fabricated claims that had little basis in the reality of the situation on the ground. The Bush administration and its partners made the case that if Kuwait was allowed to fall permanently, Iraq would subsequently launch invasions across the Middle East. Resembling a key argument for the Vietnam War, this was essentially a Middle Eastern iteration of the ‘domino theory.’ As noted in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, a key part of the first Bush administration’s case “was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.” Nothing less than a quarter of a million Iraqi troops, battle hardened from an invasion of Iran and with heavy armour supporting them, amassed on the border of the world’s largest oil exporter, appeared very menacing. Like many aspects of the propaganda campaign, however, it turned out to have no basis in reality.

Claims of Iraqi forces massed on Saudi Arabia’s borders provided the pretext for the first major deployments of U.S. ground units to the Gulf region – which in turn influenced Baghdad to keep its forces in Kuwait where it had previously stated that it would withdraw after a new pro-Iraqi client government was installed. Reporter Jean Heller from the Florida-based St. Petersburg Times obtained commercial satellite images of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border at the exact same time and location that Washington claimed American intelligence had found the large Iraqi force. The images showed nothing but empty desert, which substantiated Saddam Hussein’s personal claim that Iraqi forces were all deployed far from the Saudi border to prevent any misunderstandings and as a guarantee of the kingdom’s security. Heller contacted the office of Defence Secretary Dick Cheney “for evidence refuting the Times’ photos or analysis offering to hold the story if proven wrong,” but received none. As noted in the Christian Science Monitor, the Iraqi build-up on Saudi Arabia’s borders “was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.” The Saudi leadership was itself sceptical of U.S. claims, with its armed forces detecting no Iraqi presence near its border.

It mattered not where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi personnel really were, but where Washington and major Western media outlets said they were, with this seemingly imminent threat providing sufficient pretext to quickly involve the U.S. and a growing coalition of its security partners in the Gulf. Iraqi control of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil, it was said, would allow it to deny the West the supplies it needed and would place Baghdad in a position to sway global oil prices. Thus much as Imperial Japan 50 years prior had seen a Western oil embargo as a reason to go to war, the United States now portrayed itself as being at risk of a similar crisis if it did not act quickly. According to President Bush, guarding the safe supply of oil was a major cause for the initial U.S. deployments to the Gulf, with Trade Representative Carla Hills subsequently stating that the following campaign to restore the Kuwaiti monarchy was necessary “to guarantee the right to import oil.” The claim of a threat to oil supplies, however, was itself based on the lie that Iraqi deployments reflected an intent to invade Saudi Arabia.

Complementing the portrayal of an Iraqi threat, and playing a much more significant role in swaying Western and global opinion, an intensive months-long propaganda campaign by Western media outlets, officials and various non-government organisations made allegations of gruesome Iraqi atrocities. The Washington Post, for example, reported that Iraqi soldiers were “attacking Kuwaiti civilians with axes, raping women and hanging mutilated body parts of slain victims in the streets of Kuwait City.” Only after the war’s end did it become apparent that these kinds of reports, lacking corroboration and often citing sources with obvious incentives to exaggerate or outright fabricate claims, were far removed from reality. Such reports nevertheless successfully recast Iraq’s overseas image within a very short period. Western coverage and discourse in many ways resembled that of 1942 against Japan, that of 1950 against North Korea and China, and that of the early 1980s against Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The most prominent atrocities circulated by Western media and verified by Western officials, which served to foster significant anti-Iraqi sentiments, turned out to be fabrications.

From British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Clairborne Pell, Saddam Hussein was very widely likened to a new Adolf Hitler in the West. President Bush claimed he was “even worse than Hitler.” U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. This almost cliché description for any serious Western adversary continued to be used from the 1950s well into the 21st century, from Egypt’s President Nasser and Iran’s Supreme Leaders Khomeini and Khamenei to North Korean President Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping among over a dozen other examples. Invading Kuwait alone, however, was far from sufficient to vilify Hussein to the ‘Hitler level’ in the eyes of Western publics, which would require several months of concerted reports portraying mass atrocities against the Kuwaiti population. Pressing such a narrative to demonise the country had very significant implications for the Iraqi population. Every Iraqi soldier became a “Saddam Hussein soldier,” Iraqi industries became “Saddam’s factories,” and the Iraqi Army became “Saddam’s Army.” This served not only to dehumanise Iraqis, but also to facilitate much harsher measures against their country, with such extreme personification of a country in the figure of a vilified leader becoming increasingly common in Western propaganda in the decades following the Gulf War.

The Story of Slaughtered Incubator Babies Paves the Way to War

Among the multiple narratives vilifying Iraq, the one which had the strongest impact and gained especially strong endorsement from prominent political figures was the claim that Iraqi military personnel had taken babies out of incubators at Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floors. The claim was most famously made as part of a highly emotional testimony before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who identified only as Nayirah. Her family name was not revealed on the basis that it could invite reprisals against relatives still in Kuwait. Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud al-Sabah, as the Senators who sponsored her hearings well knew, and she had not been in Kuwait since the Iraqi invasion. The entire story, it emerged after the Gulf War was over, was false.

Nayirah’s allegations were backed and strongly endorsed by Western media outlets, human rights organisations and political figures. The story was described as President Bush’s “favoured symbol of Iraqi vileness” which he referred to repeatedly both leading up to and during war – a reminder for both Western publics and the wider world of who the ‘good side’ and ‘bad side’ were and why extreme measures against Iraq were justified. The testimony, echoed in multiple reports across Western media and in strong rhetoric from key political figures, played a particularly central role in building consensus both in the Western world and globally for decisive military action against Iraq.

The Nayirah testimony was far from isolated, with Western news outlets citing a wide range of sources which made the very same claims long before the Kuwaiti girl spoke on Capitol Hill. On September 5, 35 days before the testimony was given, the London-based Daily Telegraph reported citing Kuwaiti sources: “babies in the premature unit of one hospital had been removed from their incubators so that these, too, could be carried off” – taken to Iraq as war loot. On September 7 the same story from Reuters, which was also based in London, was re-reported by the Los Angeles Times, which marked the first time it reached the U.S. It cited Americans who had escaped stating that Iraqis were: “taking hospital equipment, babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off…. They are even removing traffic lights … the Iraqis are beating Kuwaitis, torturing them, knifing them, beating them, cutting their ears off if they are caught resisting or are with the [Kuwaiti] army or police.” They described people stranded in Kuwait as “begging” for U.S. forces to launch a military intervention to save them. The fact that Reuters and the Times allowed sources to remain anonymous and give testimony with a total lack of evidence was seen by some as highly suspicious, and was described by one analyst as “a serious breach of one of the few ironclad rules of journalism.” While the origin of the incubator babies atrocity fabrication appeared to be Britain, it was subsequently expanded on considerably in the U.S. to form the heart of the public understanding of what kind of country Iraq was.

Reports by a number of news outlets were themselves far from enough to sufficiently reshape perceptions of Iraq, and it was thus necessary as part of the next stage in escalation of the narrative that Nayirah spoke at Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The caucus provided the ideal setting, and since it was not officially a committee of the U.S. Congress the legal accoutrements that would usually deter a witness from knowingly providing false testimony were not in place. While lying under oath was a very serious crime in front of a congressional committee, in front of the less formal human rights caucus the testifying party could not be held accountable.

The leading orchestrator of the Nayirah testimony was the Washington D.C. based public relations committee the Citizens for a Free Kuwait (CFK), which was heavily funded by the exiled Kuwaiti government. CFK worked closely with the public relations firm Hill+Knowlton to influence world opinion against Iraq, and more specifically to gain support for U.S. military action against the country. Public relations efforts included producing propaganda videos depicting life under Iraqi occupation, organising a ‘Kuwait Information Day’ on college campuses, having churches observe a national day of prayer for Kuwait, and even having September 24th declared ‘Free Kuwait Day’ in thirteen American states.

Hill+Knowlton was the largest and widely considered the most influential public relations firm in Washington at the time, and conducted a $1 million study with the goal of ascertaining how best to shape public opinion in favour of supporting action against Iraq. The study was based on focus groups and was conducted by Withington Groups – a leading provider of such services. It found that a strong emphasis on atrocities in particular would be most effective, giving specific details on the kind of story which would have the most powerful impact on public opinion. The public relations campaign conducted by Hill+Knowlton was later found to have cost approximately $12 million – over $24 million if valued in 2022 dollars. The firm coached Nayirah on how to give her testimony and wrote the script which she recited in the address to the Human Rights Caucus.

The testimony given two months after the Iraqi invasion read as follows:

Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah and I just came out of Kuwait. My mother and I were in Kuwait on August 2nd for a peaceful summer holiday. My older sister had a baby on July 29th and we wanted to spend some time in Kuwait with her.

I only pray that none of my 10th grade classmates had a summer vacation like I did. I may have wished sometimes that I can be an adult, that I could grow up quickly. What I saw happening to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever, has changed the life of all Kuwaitis, young and old, mere children or more.

My sister with my five-day-old nephew travelled across the desert to safety. There is no milk available for the baby in Kuwait. They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert sand and help came from Saudi Arabia.

I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country. The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al Dar Hospital with 12 other women who wanted to help as well. I was the youngest volunteer. The ‘other’ women were from 20 to 30 years old.

While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. I could not help but think of my nephew who was born premature and might have died that day as well. After I left the hospital, some of my friends and I distributed flyers condemning the Iraqi invasion until we were warned we might be killed if the Iraqis saw us.

The Iraqis have destroyed everything in Kuwait. They stripped the supermarkets of food, the pharmacies of medicine, the factories of medical supplies, ransacked their houses and tortured neighbours and friends.

I saw and talked to a friend of mine after his torture and release by the Iraqis. He is 22 but he looked as though he could have been an old man. The Iraqis dunked his head into a swimming pool until he almost drowned. They pulled out his fingernails and then played electric shocks to sensitive private parts of his body. He was lucky to survive.

If an Iraqi soldier is found dead in the neighbourhood, they burn to the ground all the houses in the general vicinity and would not let firefighters come until the only ash and rubble was left.

The Iraqis were making fun of President Bush and verbally and physically abusing my family and me on our way out of Kuwait. We only did so because life in Kuwait became unbearable. They have forced us to hide, burn or destroy everything identifying our country and our government.

I want to emphasise that Kuwait is our mother and the Emir our father. We repeated this on the roofs of our houses in Kuwait until the Iraqis began shooting at us, and we shall repeat it again. I am glad I am 15, old enough to remember Kuwait before Saddam Hussein destroyed it and young enough to rebuild it

Thank you.

Hill+Knowlton was highly effective in ensuring that the hearing received maximum coverage. The firm sent its own crew to film the testimony and sent out a video news release to MediaLink which served 700 television stations across the U.S., with portions of the testimony on ABC News alone reaching an estimated 35–53 million Americans that night. The Congressional Panel to which it was given notably did not demand any kind of proof, with the emotional account widely accepted both in the United States and overseas. Nayirah’s testimony proved to have a pivotal effect on public opinion, with co-chairman of the Human Rights Caucus Representative John Porter stating that in his eight years of service on the Caucus he had never heard of such “brutality and inhumanity and sadism” as that which the Iraqis were allegedly committing.

Complementing atrocity fabrication efforts Hill+Knowlton also made considerable efforts to present the Kuwaiti political system to members of Congress as one with commonalities with those of the West, and thereby invoke ideological support for its deposed semi-constitutional monarchy and for a war to restore it to power. Congressmen Tom Lantos and John E. Porter notably had close ties to Hill+Knowlton and received $50,000 from CFK as donations to the private group, the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, which they had themselves founded, as well as free office space at Hill+Knowlton’s Washington headquarters. Such donations in exchange for political favours were hardly an unheard of practice, with multiple political figures receiving generous contributions to various charitable or human rights foundations associated with them in exchange for actions that advantaged the donors. These practices became more widely known two decades later under the Barack Obama administration due to the relationship between State Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

The New York Times would note in 1992 regarding how special interest groups could influence specific parts of the U.S. Congress, citing the Nayirah case with Congressmen Lantos and Porter as an example:

dubious financial dealings of the House caucus system. Unlike Congressional committees, which act on legislation, the caucuses bring together like-minded members to highlight issues like human rights abuses, the environment and minority concerns. Current rules prohibit the caucuses from accepting private donations or government grants. But the caucuses often have close ties to companion nonprofit ‘foundations’ or ‘institutes’ that attract funds from special interests. Caucus leaders often play a central role in these foundations.

The Times further drew attention to some of the material benefits which senators could gain from accepting the funds being offered by various interest groups which were seeking favours in return. Other officials were similarly targeted, with a separate case seeing officials including former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain, Sam H. Zakhem, found to have taken $7.7 million in Kuwaiti money to help build public support in America for military action against Iraq. Zakhem and others ran front businesses from August 1990 to influence public opinion, although further details on how they did so were not given.

Congressmen Lantos and Porter not only helped to conceal the identity of Nayirah when she testified, but also sponsored the congressional hearings on Iraqi atrocities. These in turn formed the heart of a public relations campaign against Iraq under the guise of concern over human rights abuses. Had these hearings not been sponsored, or had the nature of Nayirah’s testimony not been concealed from the outset, public and world opinion toward Iraq would have almost certainly been very different. Manipulation of public opinion in such a way, in turn, was key to facilitating moves to sanction and later to make war on Iraq. As award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine John R. MacArthur observed: “it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein, at least in the public consciousness, into Adolf Hitler. And the feeling was that they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this. In other words, they had to cheat to win … if he’s a baby killer then, reasonable people can disagree about how to enforce international law, how to prevent countries from invading other countries, but we have to draw the line at baby killing.”

Executive director of Middle East Watch Andrew Whitley, who participated in an investigation in post-war Kuwait that visited multiple hospitals, stated regarding the effect that the narrative of Iraqis slaughtering incubator babies had:

I think the impact was enormous. I think it was a story which had been treated as one [in] which Iraq was capable of any depravity. Most of the incubators which had apparently been stolen had been stored away. When we went to the maternity hospital we saw that there was an entire wing which had been stripped and they had been put away into a storeroom … it was a major lie. I don’t believe there was any truth in fact as to Iraqis having deliberately systematically removed babies from incubators in order to steal them. And I think it made a major impact on public opinion in this country.

The centrality of the incubator story, as one of many alleged Iraqi atrocities which were being continually reported and re-reported by Western media sources, NGOs and political figures, was attested to on 60 Minutes as follows: “There was plenty of evidence of Iraqi brutality, but the incubator story became almost a rallying cry. It has Presidential confirmation and the confirmation of Amnesty International, which published a report after Nayirah testified, quoting her and claiming 312 babies were killed when Iraqi troops pulled them from their incubators.” This extreme claim was reportedly more than the actual number of incubators in all of Kuwait City’s hospitals. Prominent American scholar Tom Regan, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, recalled regarding the powerful effects Nayirah’s testimony had on public opinion:

More than 10 years later, I can still recall my brother Sean’s face. It was bright red. Furious. Not one given to fits of temper, Sean was in an uproar. He was a father, and he had just heard that Iraqi soldiers had taken scores of babies out of incubators in Kuwait City and left them to die. The Iraqis had shipped the incubators back to Baghdad. A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day. ‘We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein. Now,’ he said passionately. I completely understood his feelings. Although I had no family of my own then, who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident.

The next stage in strengthening the narrative involved Western human rights organisations, which from 1990 would increasingly emerge as a key tool in atrocity fabrication efforts. The perceived credibility of these organisations, which presented themselves as having no connection to any government or political agenda and working impartially for the interests of humanity, was a major asset to efforts to lend weight to both media reports and Nayirah’s testimony. The most prominent Western human rights organisation at the time, London-based NGO Amnesty International, publicised multiple independent reports which claimed Iraqi personnel had indeed carried out such killings.

Amnesty was the first in the world to produce publications which claimed to independently verify what Nayirah had said. Amnesty published a report on December 19 which played a vital role in further escalating the demonisation of Iraq, stating that Iraqi troops “left 300 premature babies to die after stealing their incubators.” It claimed to have talked to several doctors and nurses who “gave details of the deaths of 300 babies removed from incubators in hospitals by Iraqi troops and left to die on cold floors.” The NGO further declared that it had “substantial information on the extent of the killings.” The report was said to have given the story “the ring of authority because it carried Amnesty’s imprimatur,” thereby giving the claim of Iraqi soldiers slaughtering babies “a quantum leap in public relations terms.” Amnesty’s U.S. executive director, John Healy, gave testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 8 confirming the story.

Amnesty further claimed that Iraqi forces were committing castration, rape, mass executions and mass torture. The British source, held in high regard as a global champion of human rights, gave much credibility to the growing narrative against Iraq and, through false portrayals extreme Iraqi barbarism, greatly contributed to building widespread public and political support for military action. Amnesty International had worked closely with British and U.S. intelligence agencies in the past, and published multiple reports in the lead up to the war to similar effect citing a range of sources. The British NGO worked to form an impression that its claims had left little room for doubt and were fully verified.

The Nayirah testimony was widely cited by senators in speeches urging public support for the war. President Bush repeated the story at least ten times in his public statements over the following weeks, which was itself a testament to the importance of the alleged Iraqi atrocities as the cornerstone in the case for war against the country. He used particularly emphatic language such as “babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.” On January 10, 1991, as the U.S. Senate voted to authorise military action against Iraq, seven senators cited Nayirah’s testimony in speeches backing the use of force, with some quoting Amnesty’s report on incubator babies word-for-word. The authorisation notably passed by just five votes, 57:42, leading many to conclude after stories of Iraqi atrocities were later debunked that they had proven decisive and provided the Bush administration with the bare majority it needed. As the New York Times noted, the Nayirah testimony “created a furore that helped convince several Senators to vote in favour of authorising military action against Iraq.”

Allegations of mass infanticide were part of a far larger media campaign in the Western world demonising Iraq and were placed at the centre of efforts to build a consensus for war using human rights precisely because focus groups found they were expected to move public opinion the most. There were numerous other examples of alleged atrocities, and Western media outlets very often uncritically reproduced stories sourced from Hill+Knowlton which complemented the Nayirah story and made it appear part of a wider trend of Iraqi barbarism. President Bush, for one, spoke on Thanksgiving Day 1990 of other stories including “mass hangings” and “kids shot for failing to display the photos of Saddam Hussein,” comparing Iraqi conduct to “the days of the slave trade.” He further warned of a potential Iraqi nuclear menace and compared a policy of non-intervention against Baghdad to appeasing Nazi Germany.

Aziz Abu-Hamad from Middle East Watch stated on January 6 regarding the coverage of the conflict in both the U.S. and in U.S.-aligned Arab states:

In August, while I was in Saudi Arabia, I reported to MEW [Middle East Watch] how the leading Saudi daily, Al-Riyadh, published on its front page photographs of four children who had died of thirst while trying to cross the border from Kuwait. It turned out that the story was bogus and so were the photographs, as the newspaper had to admit a week later. Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Egyptian newspapers are full of similar stories. So are U.S. papers. Many prominent Kuwaitis had been reported dead before I left for Saudi Arabia in mid-October, but I was surprised to find them alive and well in the Kuwaiti Popular Conference. For example the L.A. Times reported [on October] that Dr. Abdul al-Sumait, a senior official of the Red Crescent, had been killed and his mutilated body was thrown in front of his house. Dr. al-Sumait is also alive and well. When he is not on public relations tours for the Kuwaiti cause, he shares offices with the Kuwait government-in-exile. He is also the source of much of AI’s [Amnesty International’s] information on incubators.

Regarding the importance of the Kuwaiti incubator story in particular, among multiple accounts of Iraqi atrocities, John MacArthur noted: “The significance of the baby incubator story in the larger propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein and for the war option cannot be underestimated. Without it, the comparison of Hussein with Hitler loses its lustre; to make the case effectively, one had to prove Hussein’s utter depravity.” MacArthur notably recalled a later meeting with the American-educated head of Citizens for a Free Kuwait, Hassan al-Ebraheem, who alongside U.S. public relations firms put out stories alleging gruesome Iraqi atrocities. Although they were thinly evidenced or even totally unevidenced, they had a major impact on public opinion in America. MacArthur emphasised that although by that time the Gulf War was over, al-Ebraheem

was still unable to relax and stop selling his story. Iraqi ‘atrocities’ in Kuwait were still very much on his mind, and he said he wanted to show me some shocking photographs. The pictures, at first glance were horrifying. Some were amateurish out-of-focus shots of human figures covered with bloody gashes. A couple of figures had metal shafts driven through their chests, and some were trussed with straps. Another picture showed ‘torture’ instruments. For a few minutes my scepticism about Dr.al-Ebraheem was checked, but on closer examination I realised the human figures were actually mannequins. Someone had reconstructed the alleged results of the Iraqi occupation for public relations purposes.

This was highly symbolic regarding the entire campaign of atrocity propaganda. The Kuwaiti propaganda agency could do whatever it pleased to the mannequins and claim whatever atrocities it liked had taken place, and with Washington’s blessing this would be widely re-reported by NGOs and media outlets. As MacArthur observed: “The significance of this little pantomime cannot be underestimated; vaguely documented photographs and testimony from unidentified Kuwaitis provided some of the staples of the Hill and Knowlton campaign throughout the late summer and fall.”

A Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by Atrocity Fabrication

The Gulf War was optimally timed to further U.S. interests, with its military at peak strength in 1990 after a decade of high spending initiated under the Reagan administration, in contrast to its much weaker position in 1980 when Iraq had invaded Iran. Had the war taken place five years later, post-Cold War decommissioning of much of the U.S. arsenal, demobilising of its assets and deep spending cuts would have made it considerably harder to fight. With the Soviets and then Russia beginning to offer a new generation of very capable heavyweight fighter and interceptor aircraft and long-range air defence systems for export, and Iraq having begun to seriously invest in fleet modernisation from 1988, Iraqi airspace would have been significantly more difficult to penetrate by 1995. As the American campaign was very heavily centred on air power, this could have caused serious complications. Iraq’s ballistic missile arsenal, which already proved a challenge to tackle despite using 1960s Scud technologies, was also expected to be brought several decades forwards technologically with the purchase of new high precision solid fuelled designs in the early 1990s which would have placed U.S. assets at much greater risk.

Had the Kuwait crisis occurred five or ten years earlier, the Soviet Union would likely have intervened to protect Iraq as it had throughout the Cold War against Western targets across Asia and the Arab world. Moscow would have, at the very least, ensured a peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi forces while guaranteeing Iraq’s security against any post-withdrawal Western attacks. In 1990, however, Iraq faced an adversary at the height of its power both militarily and economically in one of the most unipolar moments in world history, and at a time when Baghdad was more isolated than ever.

On November 27, two days before the United Nations was scheduled to vote on whether to support military action, the walls of the Security Council chamber were “covered with oversize colour photographs of Kuwaitis of all ages who reportedly had been killed or tortured by Iraqis.” Chairing the Council, the U.S. gave an audio visual presentation alleging widespread Iraqi atrocities. John R. MacArthur, reported that the presentation

was loaded with anonymous charges of Iraqi thuggery, mayhem and murder. One videotaped ‘witness’ was clearly scripted to sound the ‘Saddam-is-Hitler’ theme that proved so useful to the White House…. It seemed that Saddam was everywhere, personally meting out punishment, torturing Kuwaitis, and bayoneting and raping women. The videotapes were interspersed with live witnesses, one of whom reiterated the baby incubator story. A Kuwaiti claiming to be a surgeon, and identified in the U.N.’s provisional transcript as ‘Dr. Issah Ibrahim,’ or Witness No. 3, explained that after the Iraqis took over ‘the hardest thing was burying the babies. Under my supervision, 120 newborn babies were buried the second week of the invasion. I myself buried 40 newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators by soldiers.’ The next day, the major media failed to mention Hill and Knowlton’s involvement with the hearings, and their news reports converted the claims of ‘witnesses’ into ‘testimony.’ Evidently no one thought to point out that the Kuwaiti spokesmen were not under oath…. Had they made inquiries, the U.N. reporters might have discovered that five of the seven witnesses at the U.N. that day – coached by the Hill and Knowlton team led by Lauri Fitz-Pegado – had used false names without saying they were doing so.

Rather than common observers, MacArthur found that the witnesses giving fake names had various ties to the Kuwaiti government and Citizens for a Free Kuwait, and that Issah Ibrahim was a dentist rather than a surgeon. He later admitted his story had been false.

The lies put to the Security Council reflected the broader metanarrative which had encompassed Western discourse on the Iraq-Kuwait issue. That day the Toronto Star published a quote from a surgeon name Mohammed, who said that he had supervised the burying of 120 new born babies in Kuwait and that he himself had buried 40 “new born babies that had been taken from their incubators by the soldiers.” Mohammed was later found not to be a doctor and to have no knowledge of the issue. Shortly beforehand on November 11, Kuwaiti physician Dr. Ali al-Hawil denounced doubts of the baby incubator story and claimed to have personally buried 50 babies alongside his colleagues. This was among several further alleged eyewitness accounts widely cited in the West that proved to be totally fabricated.

On November 29 Washington gained support from the United Nations Security Council through Resolution 678 to use all necessary means to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Having recently capitulated in the Cold War, the USSR was increasingly dependent on Western aid and voted in favour. With China seeking to avoid confrontation with the West at a time of instability, and thus abstaining, the Western world gained UNSC legitimisation for its attack. As was demonstrated twice in the past decade, and would be again in later years, when the Western Bloc countries failed to obtain UNSC authorisation to launch attacks on other target states, they were perfectly willing to carry out offensive overseas military action without such authorisation and in direct violation of international law. Panama and Grenada, and subsequently Yugoslavia and the second war against Iraq (2003) were among the many examples.

For 118 days leading up to the UNSC’s vote the United States had been redeploying over half a million personnel to the Gulf region alongside vast quantities of equipment, from battle tanks with depleted uranium shells and carrier battle groups to new F-117 stealth fighters. With such a large force built up, the momentum towards war was so great by this stage that authorisation from Congress and from the UNSC almost appeared to be afterthoughts. The U.S. refused Soviet offers for a joint command, ensuring that the campaign would be waged overwhelmingly by the Western powers. The United States initiated hostilities with an intensive aerial bombardment under Operation Desert Storm, which from January 17, 1991 saw U.S. and allied aircraft fly over 100,000 sorties and drop 88,500 tons of munitions across a range of Iraqi targets.

On February 15, in a speech at the Fort Hood base in Texas, Vice President Dan Quayle emphasised the virtue of the U.S.-led war effort by stressing the atrocities allegedly committed by Iraq. “There are pictures Saddam doesn’t want us to see. Pictures of premature babes in Kuwait that were tossed out of their incubators and left to die.” The same claim was still being widely repeated throughout Western media. The following day, for example, in a column dedicated to maligning the “egregious” and irresponsible critics of the war, popular historian and journalist Paul Johnson wrote in Britain’s Spectator stressing Saddam Hussein’s “slaughter of 7,000 Kuwaitis – including babies torn from life-support machines which were then stolen – and his systematic stripping of this small country of all its valuables, public and private, are well authenticated.” Discourse regarding the highly dubious nature of these claims was only allowed to begin once the war was over.

On February 24, after 38 days of aerial bombardment, U.S.-led ground forces crossed into Kuwait. Facing heavily fortified Iraqi positions including an estimated 70 miles of defensive trenches, large ploughs were used to bury the defenders alive. Thus, when war correspondent Leon Daniel subsequently asked the commander of the U.S. Army First Infantry Division “where are the bodies,” he replied “what bodies?” They were all buried under several tons of sand. As U.S. Army Colonel Anthony Moreno recalled: “What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with people’s arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands.” While this action was criticised in the limited coverage it did receive, there was a case to be made that it was a military necessity and much ‘cleaner’ than going into the trenches with flamethrowers and bayonets. Had the Iraqis perpetrated any similar act when entering Kuwait, however, it would have been ensured that this shaped the country’s public image and forever became associated with ‘what kind of country’ Ba’athist Iraq was. The American mass burial of live Iraq troops was quickly forgotten, and for the overwhelming majority of people it would not be permanently associated with the images of the U.S. Military or the Gulf War.

Iraqi soldiers in trenches widely reported having been bombarded heavily with napalm, a weapon previously employed extensively in Vietnam and Korea which stuck to their skin and burned them alive. They described such attacks as “unimaginable … like a living hell.” When it emerged that napalm was being employed U.S. officials denied it was being used against enemy personnel, although this claim appeared increasingly tenuous as the body of evidence grew that it was being doused across Iraqi troop concentrations. Although horrific, napalm’s use in the Gulf was far less extreme than its uses in prior conflicts in East Asia where it was dropped in tremendous quantities by American aircraft to douse civilian population centers from end-to-end. These American attacks, which many considered to be inhuman atrocities in their own right, were only made possible by the vilification of Iraq using fabricated atrocities in the lead up to the war.

Another notable tragedy that resulted directly from the fabrication of Iraqi atrocities was the fallout from the use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces in the theatre. During Operation Desert Storm an estimated 340–350 metric tons of depleted uranium was fired in battle releasing millions of grams of airborne radioactive particles with half-lives of over four billion years – meaning contamination would be effectively indefinite. Depleted uranium rounds were made from low-level radioactive waste left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel or warheads, and although not designed for the purpose of contamination this was a very significant side effect of their employment. As one of the densest elements on the planet – 84 percent as dense as the world’s densest element osmium – depleted uranium had applications both in tank armour and in various anti-armour and anti-bunker weapons. According to the U.S. Army, depleted uranium rounds fired by an American M1A1 Abrams tank provided “the force of a race car striking a brick wall at two hundred miles per hour, but with all of its energy compressed into an area smaller than a golf ball.” These weapons later saw extensive use by U.S. forces in Yugoslavia and Syria, as well as within Iraq’s own borders for years after the 2003 invasion.

Upon impacting its target a depleted uranium round oxidises into an easily inhalable dust which can travel for at least 42 kilometres from the site of impact. Effects of exposure to depleted uranium contamination include an extreme rise in cancer rates, genetic abnormalities and severe deformities in children at birth. The element’s particularly long half-life makes contamination from it much more dangerous than that from neutron and thermonuclear bombs. This affected both Iraqis and Western personnel. As British Royal Navy Commander Robert Green stated in a paper in the New Zealand International Review, citing a range of scientific sources:

Since the 1991 Gulf War, there has been a surge of unexplained illnesses, cancers and children born with genetic deformities among the Iraqi people, especially in the south near the battlefields. At the same time, both American and British veterans have reported similar health and reproductive problems, collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome. Many of their problems, particularly cancers and birth defects, seem consistent with radiation exposure. The official U.S. casualty total in 1991 was less than 300 dead and another 300 wounded or ill. Now over 8000 are dead, and over 200,000 of those same troops are claiming disability benefits. In Britain, more than 600 veterans have died and 9000 are seriously sick with multiple ailments. This amounts to around 30 per cent of American and 17 percent of British troops who went to the Gulf.

Green’s conclusions were widely supported by a range of sources, which as time passed increasingly represented a majority consensus on the issue. A confidential UN report leaked in May 1999 notably stated regarding depleted uranium: “this type of ammunition is nuclear waste, and its use is very dangerous and harmful.” The Gulf War would hardly be the last time that atrocity fabrication facilitated American military offensives abroad in which depleted uranium was then very widely used.

While the results of extensive use of depleted uranium rounds by U.S. forces would become clearer only with time, as is the case with all forms of nuclear contamination, the most devastating immediately visible impact of the war was the Western air campaign and in particular its targeting of Iraqi population centres. While shortages of precision guided weapons limited U.S. capabilities against tactical targets, attacks focused primarily on key civilian infrastructure targets such as water and sewage processors. The British military intelligence company Jane’s Information Group concluded that coalition operations had worked to “bring Iraqi’s infrastructure virtually back to where it was at the country’s birth” – back to 1921 setting back 70 years of sustained development. U.S. forces launched 109,390 of the 126,581 coalition air sorties, or 86 percent, with Saudi Arabia and Britain between them making up most of the reminder with over 12,000 between them. According to a report by the Washington Post in 1991, the purpose of the U.S. bombardment was to drive down Iraqi living standards by destroying key infrastructure such as oil refineries, electrical plants and transportation networks. Examples included the destruction of 80 percent of Iraq’s power generation capabilities and the crippling of its sewage treatment system.

The U.S. air campaign targeted eight dams, destroying not only a major supply of hydroelectric power but also municipal water supplies and flood control. Other consequences included the emergence of widespread malnutrition and associated illnesses, and an inability to store vaccines which ended the vaccinations of children. Farm herds were devastated and food storage facilities were destroyed. Among the targets the U.S.-led air campaign destroyed were 676 schools, 16 chemical and petrochemical plants, seven textile factories and five engineering plants. As a result the population was forced to subsist on a starvation-level calorie intake at half the calories per person of the minimum standard for healthy living, with malnutrition rising steeply across the country. From an upper-middle income country, Iraqi living standards quickly plummeted with a subsequent 12 years of economic sanctions further deepening the population’s impoverishment. Living standards never recovered to pre-war levels and over 1 million of its population died as a result. Sanctions proved highly effective in preventing post-war recovery, and according to statistics from U.S. sources they had caused the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by 1996.

Pulitzer Prize-winning CNN war correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported from Baghdad during the war, recalled having a very tense relationship with the U.S. Military because they did not approve of his coverage of the air campaign. Relations deteriorated, he said, “as the bombing campaign developed and I was revealing every day more excesses of bombing. There were villages [where] 20, 30, 40 houses had been destroyed. Only about 6 percent of the bombs used in the Iraq war were guided missiles, and they were mainly in Baghdad – the most high-profile target. Elsewhere in the country they were using these dumb bombs and they were devastating many localities we were visiting.”

When Arnett’s team filmed a bombed out Iraqi baby milk factory, U.S. intelligence claimed that it was a biological weapons facility. Arnett ridiculed the claim, stating:

if this was a biological testing centre, they would not have let us walk all over the premises. Accompany us around the premises. Let us touch everything. Pick up samples such as this bag [of powdered baby milk]. We used it for coffee – that’s how confident I was. The U.S. government is perfectly capable of lying to achieve its aims in a time of national crisis – and they did. It was very effective because in the years that followed the Gulf War, that was the most frequently asked question: ‘what about the baby milk plant.’ And the question was always: ‘you weren’t duped, were you?’ That was the single most effective piece of military black propaganda that I’ve seen in my whole career. And I’ve been in this business for 35 years.

Arnett was chastised as a “dupe of Saddam Hussein,” which was particularly reputationally harmful as Hussein had by then been built into a “worse than Hitler” figure primarily on the basis of fabricated atrocities attributed to him. The metanarrative surrounding Iraq meant that civilian targets could easily be portrayed as parts of menacing weapons programs to legitimise their destruction. U.S. and allied justification of attacks on civilian targets on the false premise that they were part of weapons programs became increasingly common in the following years. These ranged from a cruise missile strike on one of East Africa’s largest medicine factories in Sudan in 1998, under the false pretext that it was a chemical weapons facility, to an Israeli attack on Syria in 2007 under the dubious claim that the target was part of a Syrian-Korean nuclear weapons program. By fabricating claims of enemy weapons facilities the U.S. gave itself a free hand to attack civilian targets at will – much as fabricating claims of Iraqi atrocities had allowed it to go to war. The U.S. was further able to cover up its involvement in a major disaster by blaming Baghdad, with an oil spill resulting in a 30-mile-long oil slick at sea and footage of a bird struggling in the black water used to claim that Iraq had “declared war on nature itself” by intentionally causing it. The Daily Mirror referred to it as “Saddam’s Black Sea” on its front page. William Arken, a former military intelligence officer with access to Pentagon records, stated regarding the fabrication of Iraqi environmental terrorism:

I think that one of the biggest coverups of the Gulf War is the fact that the U.S. Navy and allied air forces attacked Iraq oil installations and oil tankers and didn’t want to acknowledge that there was a tremendous amount of controversy over that very point. And so they hid behind claims of Iraqi environmental terror to avoid a debate over whether those are legitimate targets in warfare…. They attacked those two oil platforms at Mina Al Bakur and also at Al Kabar, and also at the same time they attacked oil related ships. On the 18th of January, on the second day of the war, French aircraft attacked an Iraqi tanker that was at Mina Al Ahmadi on the Kuwaiti coast. And those were the very tankers that a few days later they stated were expelling their oil into the sea.

When asked if there was a coverup, Arken replied: “Oh absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. Of course they lied about it. Have you ever read in any report that the U.S. Navy or the French Air Force attacked Iraqi oil tankers and were responsible for much of the oil that flowed into the gulf. No. Is that a coverup, is that a lie? Of course it is.” The strict regulation of reporters during the war meant that many potentially scandalous incidents were not made known to the public.

Arguably the most important military discrepancy between Iraq and the U.S.-led coalition was in intelligence gathering capabilities, an advantage the Americans exploited to the fullest and translated into massive battlefield gains. Without the support of the USSR, which at the time had far more satellites in space than any other country and would have previously been expected to at the very least provide updates on American positions and movements, Iraq’s armed forces could be described as going into battle blind and deaf relative to their adversaries. While its air force’s sole squadron equipped with high performance MiG-25 interceptors from the 1970s put up a strong fight and took down as many American fighters as it lost, it was overwhelmingly outnumbered by America’s own heavyweights, lacked supporting assets such as airborne early warning aircraft, and saw airfields quickly destroyed. Control of the skies allowed American air power to devastate not only Iraqi population centres, but also its ground forces which suffered from deficiencies in organisation, equipment and, following sustained bombardment, also morale. The Kuwait campaign was unique in the history of conventional wars fought by the U.S. Army, as while neutralising enemy ground units was traditionally primarily an Army task in this case the Air Force laid down the bulk of the firepower used against them. With Iraqi ground units deployed on Kuwait’s flat lands, often with little-to-no cover, American air units perpetrated a massacre causing well over 100,000 Iraqi military casualties in just 44 days. The BBC claimed up to 200,000, alongside thousands more civilians killed.

Large numbers of Iraqi personnel seeking to leave Kuwait on the six-lane Highway 80 were killed from the air by U.S., French, British and Canadian units after a large vehicle column was trapped using cluster bombs. It came to be known as the ‘Highway of Death.’ The concerted attacks on retreating soldiers were highly controversial and came to be widely considered a serious war crime. Reports from U.S. journalists also showed disarmed and surrendering Iraqi personnel being fired on by American heavy weapons. American Photojournalist Peter Turnley reported U.S. personnel digging mass graves for the victims, seeing bodies scattered across the road, and a stretch of destroyed vehicles over a mile long. He stressed that Western media outlets avoided publishing the extensive footage they had of the incident. The Atlantic similarly referred to “the war photo no one would publish” – specifically an image which humanised an Iraqi soldier trying to pull himself over the dashboard of his truck but was incinerated in his place. It observed:

The colours and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes…. The image, and its anonymous subject, might have come to symbolise the Gulf War. Instead, it went unpublished in the United States, not because of military obstruction but because of editorial choices … the hypnotising and awful photograph ran against the popular myth of the Gulf War as a ‘video-game war’ – a conflict made humane through precision bombing and night-vision equipment. By deciding not to publish it, Time magazine and the Associated Press denied the public the opportunity to confront this unknown enemy and consider his excruciating final moments.

In sharp contrast to the emotive depictions Kuwaiti babies who were never slaughtered, or of tortured mannequins which CFK presented as supposed evidence of Kuwaiti suffering, the very real and often brutal deaths of Iraqis was sanitised with strict censorship and with “bloodless language” such as “surgical strikes” and “kinetic warfare.” These were far removed from the often gruesome reality on the ground.

The commander of U.S.-led coalition forces General Norman Schwarzkopf notably justified the mass killing of retreating soldiers by citing the atrocities they had allegedly committed, stating: “This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.” The New York Times similarly stressed that most of those who observed the incident “thought the Iraqis were getting only what they deserved.” Even after the war’s outcome was decided, the fact that fabricated atrocities vilifying the enemy had become central to the metanarrative surrounding it made almost any measure against Iraq, including the slaughter of thousands of retreating soldiers, seem acceptable.

The ‘Highway of Death’ came at the close of the war and was one of the few parts of the conflict which the press had relatively free access to. As professor and award-winning journalist Ben H. Bagdikian reported: “the military learned its own lesson from Vietnam: keep wars short and keep the news media completely controlled in the opening days of the engagement. By maintaining total control of the initial image in a military action, the government can create the framework into which the public theatre fits subsequent information.” Censorship was described as “unprecedented” and “draconian,” even compared to the extreme precedent set by the Korean War. Bagdikian further elaborated: “In the opening days of the Gulf War, American news people were sequestered and forced to transmit totally controlled military versions of what was happening. After the shooting war was over and reconstruction of the realities known, once again, the major news media failed to collect all the facts and present them in a coherent way that would effectively correct the misleading and inadequate information the public had been given earlier.” Press seen to be overstepping their bounds were in some cases physically assaulted and arrested by the U.S. Military. The few parts of the war the press did gain free access to, however, they found truly horrific, and it can only be speculated how many more atrocities were committed in the preceding 40 days leading up to the Highway of Death.

U.S. military intervention against Iraq in 1991 paved the way for over a decade of economic sanctions followed by full scale invasion of the country in 2003. This had further consequences not only for Iraq, whose population would endure several more massacres by Western hands, but also for the wider Middle East. Decades of Western warfare on Iraqi soil, both economic and kinetic, were made possible by successful atrocity fabrication from August 1990 to January 1991, with Western forces having never left Iraqi territory ever since. Only once the Gulf War was over was the content of Nayrah’s testimony confirmed to have been completely false – as was the case with many other alleged Iraqi atrocities which had been reported as total certainties but lacked verifiable sources. By this stage, with Iraq lying in ruins not to recover for well over three decades and with the country’s image cemented as ‘evil’ in the Western world and beyond, the facts disproving the anti-Iraqi narratives were only an afterthought.

As NBC News’ John Chancellor wrote shortly after the war ended: “The conflict brought with it a baggage train of myth and misconception, exaggeration and hyperbole…. Accounts of Iraqi atrocities were accepted without question. There was the tale of premature babies thrown out of incubators in a Kuwait hospital and left to die. It never happened…. There were facts misperceived, truth bent out of shape and a fog of myth and misconception.” In Kuwait City John Martin from ABC News interviewed the director of Kuwait’s primary healthcare system, Dr. Mohammed Matar, and his wife the chief of obstetrics at the maternity hospital on March 15 1991. Matar firmly denied that Iraqis had taken babies from incubators. Martin, apparently very surprised, then asked again: “But, I mean, this is very specific. Iraqi soldiers took them out of the incubators and put them on the floor to die.” “I think this is something just for propaganda,” replied Dr. Matar.

Martin subsequently questioned the surgeon who had testified under a false name at the UN Security Council, who was in fact the dentist Ibrahim Behbehani and served as the acting director the Kuwait’s Red Crescent Society. Asking him about the incubator atrocity, Behbehani conceded: “I can’t tell you if they were taken from incubators … didn’t see it.” He backed off from his previous claim of supervising burials of 120 babies – although with the war premised on his lie now over this counted for very little. The narrative nevertheless persisted. An example was the wife of U.S. Senator John McCain, a leading advocate for military action, who as late as June 1991 insisted under questioning that allegations were true. She later acknowledged that she had been relying on hearsay. While the story was disproven, the metanarrative it created, and the way it shifted public discourse and perceptions of Ba’athist Iraq would stain that state’s image indefinitely.

The incubator baby killings were far from isolated among Western allegations in proving to be entirely fabricated. Another was the report that Iraq had forcibly relocated 40,000 Kuwaitis to its own territory, although the actual figure was 1500–2000. Another came from Amnesty International, which had claimed in its December 19 report that “the number of extrajudicial killings runs into the hundreds and may be over 1,000.” According to senior Kuwaiti officials, the figure was “a little bit over 300.” Stories of Iraqi soldiers raping and looting at will were also seriously questioned. Paris Match, for example, had received a picture allegedly depicting Iraqis shooting blindfolded Kuwaiti resistance in Kuwait City. It later emerged that the picture was of Iraqi soldiers who had looted the city being executed by their own military as a disciplinary action – indicating zero tolerance for such conduct. Although this was discovered before U.S.-led military operations had begun, the French source notably withheld this evidence until after the war to avoid improving Baghdad’s image and undermining the West’s prevailing narrative. The editors later described their motive as follows: “it was our obligation to renounce publication so as not, in the name of the scoop, to aid the image of Saddam Hussein.”

In contrast to Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, where premature babies in their incubators were relatively safe, many prematures were killed in Iraq by the U.S. and its allies. In July 1991 Patrick Tyler from the New York Times interviewed the director of Baghdad’s Saddam Paediatric Hospital, Dr. Qasm Ismail, who recalled that on the first night of the Western air campaign the targeting of civilian infrastructure caused major losses. The hospital lost electricity, and as a result: “mothers grabbed their children out of incubators, took intravenous tubes out of their arms…. Others were removed from oxygen tents, and they ran to the basement, where there was no heat. I lost more than 40 prematures in the first 12 hours of bombing.” Iraqis did take babies out of incubators during the war, but they were not Iraqi soldiers at hospitals in Kuwait – rather they were Iraqi parents trying to save their children from Western attacks in Baghdad.

While the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was seen to have concluded the conflict, the U.S., Britain and France pressed the offensive further and created two ‘no fly zones’ that prevented Iraq from operating aircraft in its own airspace. These zones had no authorisation from the United Nations Security Council and covered over 60 percent of Iraqi airspace. Their imposition was widely seen by experts to be a violation of international law – one which was only made possible and acceptable by the vilification of Iraq from 1990. Iraq would remain under tight Western and UN economic sanctions which seriously impeded post-war reconstruction, and alongside a UN arms embargo which remained in place long after the Gulf War ended this effectively eliminated the country as an independent pole in the Middle East and as a major power outside the Western sphere of influence. This remained the status quo for 12 years until a much-weakened Iraq faced a full-scale U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The U.S.-led assault in 1991, facilitated by fabricated claims of humanitarian abuses, led to a decades-long humanitarian catastrophe from which Iraq is unlikely to fully recover for at least half a century. The result was over 700,000 Iraqi deaths at a conservative estimate between 1991 and 2003, and over 1 million deaths between 2003 and 2008 in a second war made possible by Desert Storm. This did not account for the deaths and extreme deformities in children caused by depleted uranium, stunted growth of an entire generation, or the sharp decline in the quality of life seen after 1991.

Iraq faced multiple further rounds of Western attacks throughout the 1990s which similarly relied heavily on fabricated narratives and false claims for justification. A notable example in December 1998 saw Washington and London claim that Baghdad had expelled weapons inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission, which Western-drafted resolutions at the United Nations Security Council required to be deployed to disarm the country. Th lleged expulsion was used as a pretext to launch Operation Desert Fox, which added to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed over the past seven years by Western attacks with a further 2,000 Iraqi lives taken. The pretext for the attacks proved to be fabricated, with head weapons inspector Richard Butler revealing years later that it was the U.S. ambassador Peter Burleigh, acting on orders from Washington, who suggested inspectors be pulled out of Iraq to protect them from planned U.S. and British airstrikes. The withdrawal of inspectors was done in order to pave the way for attacks, and was then used to justify those same attacks which the withdrawal had been carried out to facilitate in the first place. In 2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated multiple times that Iraq had forced inspectors to withdraw, which he claimed proved Baghdad held malign intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction and justified the illegal U.S. invasion then being planned. The nature of the withdrawal was only later made public.

A particularly notable aspect of the use of atrocity fabrication in the Gulf War was the role of Amnesty International and other Western human rights NGOs in providing legitimacy to false claims of atrocities, as this marked the starting point of a predominant trend in future Western atrocity fabrication efforts. This saw Western NGOs, under the pretext of supporting human rights, publish vilifying and very often poorly evidenced content to target a particular Western adversary whenever there was a need to turn opinion against them. While weaponisation of human rights was far from unprecedented before 1990, the use of major NGOs for this purpose, with Amnesty joined by several more over the next three decades, became common only from 1990.

Western human rights NGOs followed a very consistent pattern of targeting those states whose policies undermined the interests of the Western world, and particularly those whose governments the West was seeking to overthrow, with criticisms generally being proportional to how hostile the target state’s relations were with the West. This had the impact not only of building public consensus in support of hostile policies, be it military action or economic sanctions, but also of delegitimising opposition to such policies by portraying those who failed to sufficiently oppose the targeted state as uncaring for human rights and ‘regime apologists.’ Such reactions to those who opposed military action against Iraq were widespread and often emotionally charged by Nayirah’s testimony and the other similar fabricated reports. The Gulf War saw Western atrocity fabrication efforts achieve a new level of sophistication, and very similar trends could be observed in multiple subsequent conflicts where similar fabrications consistently played central roles in shaping perceptions of Western adversaries.

Chapter Five The Yugoslav Wars

Target: Yugoslavia

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and the communist government of Albania, Yugoslavia by 1992 remained the only communist state in Europe and one of the few major industrial powers in the world outside the Western sphere of influence. The country had emerged in 1918 as a union of the Croat, Serb and Slovene Slavic peoples who had formerly been ruled under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the belief that historical divisions needed to be overcome and unity pursued to safeguard all four from external imperial interests. Albanians and Macedonians also represented significant minority groups in the union, which had a 5 percent Muslim minority as a legacy of Ottoman imperial rule. Following four years of Nazi German occupation from 1941, communist resistance fighters led by Josip Broz Tito formed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in November 1945.

Yugoslavia quickly established itself as an independent pole in the Cold War and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement alongside Indonesia, Egypt, India and Ghana. Like the other four founders, the country would come under Western attack in an attempt to forcefully bring it into the Western sphere of influence, with a lack of tolerance for non-aligned states being a consistent part of the Western Bloc’s Cold War foreign policy. Attacks on non-aligned states included extensive support for coups by the CIA (Ghana, Indonesia) , direct Western military assaults (Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia), and assassination attempts against their leaders (India in 1955, Indonesia in the 1950s and 1962, Egypt in 1957). As the closest to the USSR geographically, meaning it was for decades shielded from the West by the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was the last to come under attack with the campaign against it only gaining momentum from the early 1990s.

After the Cold War’s end and the declaration of an ‘end of history,’ under which global economic and political westernisation were portrayed as inevitabilities, Yugoslavia remained an outlier in an otherwise politically unified Europe. Despite stagnation in the 1980s, its industries remained competitive internationally and living standards by metrics from education to life expectancy and employment rates were high. Furthermore, unlike most of the former Warsaw Pact, the country appeared highly unlikely to be absorbed into the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and was by far the most formidable European military outside it. An independent pole in the world with a relatively advanced industrial economy, Yugoslav industries ranging from automobiles and pharmaceuticals to household appliances and agriculture were competing with Western brands internationally – competition which would disappear if the state were destabilized, dismantled and set back developmentally. With leading industries all widely dispersed, and different regions responsible for providing different primary and secondary inputs, a divided country would lack the industrial potential of the union state. Yugoslav petroleum, mining and in particular the substantial mineral wealth in Kosovo, were also major prizes which could strengthen Western power if the country’s territory could be placed under Western client governments to provide access on favourable terms.

Germany and the United States played leading roles in realizing Yugoslavia’s partitioning, and framed separation as a solution to economic stagnation while generously supporting ethno-nationalist factions. The West’s allies within various Yugoslav regions were accordingly encouraged to pursue separatist goals. As American political scientist and Yale PhD Michael Parenti noted: “the Western powers were deeply involved in inciting civil war and secession in the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] before that time [1991–95]. One of the earliest and most active sponsors of secession was West Germany, which first openly championed Yugoslavia’s dismemberment in 1991, but was giving Slovenia and Croatia every encouragement long before then.” Western powers subsequently increasingly involved themselves in “financing the secessionist organisations and creating the politico-economic crisis that ignited the political strife,” according to Parenti, who highlighted regarding the process: “once the blood-letting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own. In order to hasten the discombobulation of Yugoslavia, the Western powers provided the most retrograde, violent, separatist elements with every advantage in money, organisation, propaganda, arms, hired thugs, and the full might of the U.S. national security state at their backs. Once more the Balkans were to be balkanised.”

After building ties with and generously supporting separatist factions in Yugoslavia’s republics, threats were made to cut off aid unless the country held unscheduled elections in 1990. Washington further stipulated that these elections were to be conducted within each republic and not at the federal level. The U.S. in particular had a very long history of manipulating foreign elections to ensure that candidates favourable to Western interests prevailed, or else cancelling or preventing them when victories for pro-Western candidates could not be engineered. In Yugoslavia the National Endowment for Democracy and various CIA front organisations funnelled vast funds to support the election campaigns of separatist political groups favourable to Western interests. These parties, openly described in U.S. media as “pro-West” and as the “democratic opposition,” also received considerable campaign support from Western advisors, and after overwhelmingly outspending their local opponents on campaign they won elections in every republic other than Serbia and Montenegro.

Slovenia was the first region to leave the union, and in 1991 closed its borders and banned any protests against its moves towards secession. Croatia soon followed suit and both quickly began to receive Western military advisors and sizeable arms shipments from Western countries and particularly from Germany. German instructors further engaged in combat with the Yugoslav military when fighting alongside separatist militias. The European Community then moved to call for Yugoslavia’s separation into “sovereign and independent republics,” while the U.S. passed the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which offered aid to individual republics but not to the Yugoslav central government – thereby further weakening federal ties. When Croatia and Slovenia subsequently declared their full independence as separate states within one day of one another in June 1991, Germany and the Vatican were the very first to recognise them as nation-states.

Unlike Slovenian, Croat or Muslim minority groups, which quickly became dominated by separatist factions that fell in line with Western designs for a partitioning of Yugoslavia, the Serb ethnic minority was far from compliant. Serbs were the only group to have given up an independent nation-state in order to enter into a unified state when Yugoslavia was formed, and Serbia and Montenegro remained the most strongly supportive of the federation. Serbs were not only the largest and most influential ethnic group, but also had a proportionately higher percentage of membership in the ruling communist party than any other. In the 1989 elections Serbs and Montenegrins supported the former communists in their respective republics, with Serb workers having also led opposition to an austerity program imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to service Yugoslav debt. Serbia accordingly refused IMF-prescribed privatisation of state assets. The entrenched historical religious animosity between the Western world and the Orthodox Christian world to which the Serbs belonged was also seen by some analysts to have been a further factor leading the Serbs to be singled out for targeting.

As the union increasingly fell apart Serb-majority regions in separatist provinces, such as Croatia’s Krajina district, sought to secede from the newly seceded countries and re-join Yugoslavia. In the case of Krajina, Croatia responded with a military operation by separatist militias which now formed the post-independence armed forces and with Western support, including airstrikes, caused thousands of casualties among Serb civilians and sent 225,000 more into flight as refugees. Many of those who fled were subsequently strafed from the air, with the operations described years later in 1999 as “the largest ethnic cleansing” of the Yugoslav civil war.” The Independent reported in August 1995: “The rearming and training of Croatian forces in preparation for the present offensive are part of a classic CIA operation: probably the most ambitious operation of its kind since the end of the Vietnam war.” Similar support was provided on an even greater scale to separatist forces from the Muslim and Croat ethnic groups in the self-declared Bosnian republic, and by 1997 the CIA station in Bosnia was reputed to have become one of the largest in Eastern Europe.

Hired to represent the interests of Croat, Bosnian Muslim and later Kosovar Albanian separatist groups, the public relations firm Ruder & Finn played a central role in the campaign to turn world opinion against the Yugoslav state and the Serbs. The firm’s director James Harff highlighted how disseminating sensationalist reports caused a drastic increase in public support for U.S. military intervention in Bosnia. He told French journalist Jacques Merlino in April 1993 that he was proud of having manipulated overseas Jewish opinion, which was otherwise set to oppose the Islamic and Croat state projects due to the former’s close ties with radical Islam and the latter’s historical collaboration with Nazi Germany and extermination of Jews in the 1940s. Regarding Jewish opinion towards Western-aligned far-right separatist forces, he said: “our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully,” with a campaign focused on portraying Serbs as the new Nazis and capitalising on Roy Gutman’s reports of death camps (see below). The ideological predecessors of the Croat separatist leadership had provided the most manpower to the Nazi German-led war effort in the 1940s, committing atrocities against Jews and Serbs too extreme even for the Nazis themselves. Harff highlighted how this past and the similarly extremist position of the Muslim Bosnian leadership posed difficulties to public relations efforts:

To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous [when] looked at from that angle. President [of Croatia Franjo] Tudjman was very careless in his book, Wastelands of Historical Reality. Reading his writings one could accuse him of anti-Semitism. In Bosnia the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in his book The Islamic Declaration. Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by real and cruel anti-Semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps, so there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organisations to be hostile towards the Croats and the Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse the attitude and we succeeded masterfully…. When the Jewish organisations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated. By a single move we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself…. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘concentration camps,’ which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being accused of revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full.

When Merlino highlighted: “When you did this, you had no proof that what you said was true. All you had were two Newsday articles,” Harff replied: “Our work is not to verify information…. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favourable to us…. We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to moralise.” The receptivity of Western media to almost any anti-Serb story was key to facilitating Ruder & Finn’s success.

Deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the U.S. State Department George Kenney gave a sharper comment regarding the fabricated nature of Western claims, stating: “The U.S. government doesn’t have proof of any genocide and anyone reading the press critically can see the paucity of evidence, despite interminably repeated claims and bloodcurdling speculation.” Michael Parenti similarly stated: “The charge of genocide was reiterated so relentlessly in regard to Bosnia that evidence became irrelevant,” stressing that an objective analysis would indicate that portrayals in the West which developed into a broad consensus on the issue were very far removed from reality.

Former deputy commander of the U.S. Military’s European Command Charles Boyd noted the following in Foreign Affairs regarding the way Serb minority was vilified in the West during clashes with Western backed Croat and Muslim separatist forces in Croatia and Bosnia: “The popular image of this war is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia – what the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs. In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.” Boyd highlighted that it was U.S. policy to covertly approve offensives by Muslim militant groups that destroyed the ceasefire Washington claimed to support, and thereby “encouraged a deepening of the war.” Mass expulsions by the Croatian government of its Serb minority on ethnic grounds also received Western encouragement and support. As a result Stephen Harper, among other analysts who were generally supportive of the Western position, conceded that “the commonplace Western media position that [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic was more inclined to ultranationalism than the presidents of Bosnia or Croatia rests on political demonology [demonisation] rather than sober historical analysis.”

The Serb minority’s land holdings in Bosnia were reduced from 65 to 43 percent as a result of the Western-backed campaign, with Belgrade forced under considerable pressure to agree to a ceasefire on highly unfavourable terms under the Western-brokered Dayton Accords. This finalised the breakup of Yugoslavia and succession of Croatia and Bosnia, leaving Serb minorities in these new states in highly precarious positions. The remainder of Yugoslavia – a federation of Serbia and Montenegro – was placed under harsh Western economic sanctions which fuelled hyperinflation and malnourishment, collapsed the country’s healthcare system and blocked access to raw materials vital for the production of medicines. As Foreign Affairs noted in May 1999, economic sanctions could be considered the world’s leading weapon of mass destruction due to the simultaneous destruction wrought on Yugoslavia and on Iraq, and could have “contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all the weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”

Western Atrocity Fabrication Targets the Serb Minority

As the Western powers sought to more strongly and openly align themselves against the now predominantly Serb Yugoslav government, as well as the interests of the Serb minorities in the seceded territories of Croatia and Bosnia, vilification using fabricated atrocities became increasingly essential. Slobodan Milosevic, who became president of Yugoslavia from July 1997, was among those to highlight that Western powers focused heavily on media and information warfare to control political narratives both globally and within Yugoslavia itself. He stated in April 1999, at a time when Western warplanes were opening fire on media outlets and television infrastructure across the country:

Your government is running two wars against Yugoslavia. Against our people. One is military war and the other is media war or if you like it better, propaganda war. Propaganda war started long before military war, and its goal is to satanize [demonise] this country, our people, leadership of this country, individuals, and whatever was needed to create, artificially of course, public opinion in United States which will be supportive to aggression they committed later.

Vilification through atrocity fabrication served to justify a range of hostile measures ranging from support for further partitioning of Yugoslavia and arming and training separatist militias, to bombing media sites in Belgrade and dropping cluster bombs across Serb areas. The most notable fabricated Serb atrocities were allegations of mass rape of civilians from other minorities – a narrative that would strongly shape perceptions of the Yugoslav state and Serb people internationally throughout the war and for decades to come. From 1991 Serbs were portrayed as pursuing an officially sanctioned policy of mass rape, with the Serb minority in Bosnia said to have raped between 20,000 and 100,000 women from the Muslim majority. With Bosnian Serb forces having numbered only around 30,000 personnel or less, many of whom were engaged in high intensity combat, these claims appeared highly dubious. They were nevertheless widely re-reported and given considerable airtime in Western media. The New York Times belatedly ran a small retraction that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved,” but inevitably far more people read the original striking headlines than the one retraction.

Although claims that Serb forces had raped 20,000–100,000 Muslims were widely circulated, hearings held by the European Community’s Committee on Women’s Rights in February 1993 rejected them due to a lack of evidence. Representatives from the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees concluded at the hearings there was insufficient evidence to sustain charges of a Serbian mass-rape campaign – although this did not stop such claims from shaping public opinion across much of the world towards the Yugoslav situation.

One widely reported story depicted a Bosnian Serb commander instructing his forces to “go forth and rape” – although the source of the quote could never be traced and the commander’s name was never produced. Western media outlets repeatedly referred to ‘rape camps’ allegedly set up as part of an ‘ethnic breeding’ campaign in which thousands of captive Muslim women were allegedly impregnated and forced to give birth to half Serb children. After hostilities ceased and UN forces occupied all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, evidence of the existence of the mass rape camps never materialised. The waves of pregnant or recently pregnant victims supposedly treated at Bosnian hospitals, and the associated medical records, were non-existent, with rape-produced births being very small in number. Agence France Presse reported that in Sarajevo “Bosnian investigators have learned of just one case of a woman who gave birth to a child after being raped,” while Amnesty International reported it “has never succeeded in speaking with any of the pregnant women.”

Although it was suggested that there appeared to be very few rape victims because they were stigmatised by local culture, which left women unwilling to come forward, international aid agencies notably rendered confidential assistance and never asked victims to go public – but only to be interviewed anonymously and receive medical care. Considering this, the discrepancy with the claim of 20,000 or more rape victims was particularly stark. If tens of thousands of women were keeping their treatment a secret so well – this raised the question of how Western journalists and Western-aligned Bosnian and Croatian government officials could have known about them or estimated such a figure in the first place. Substantial evidence of mass rapes involving tens of thousands of women was never produced. Although some rapes were committed by all sides, available evidence indicates that the victims numbered in the dozens rather than the tens of thousands and were not part of an organised or systematic policy of genocide or ‘ethnic breeding’ by any party.

Perpetrators of rape were notably not restricted to local factions, and after the war American military personnel in former Yugoslavia were found to have taken girls “not a day over twelve [years old]” as sex slaves – in the words of an American who had bought such a girl and kept her at home while working there. As Army veteran Ben Johnson, who worked as a military contractor in Yugoslavia, recalled regarding the trafficking of sex slaves: “you could get basically any girl you wanted. Lot of people said you can buy a woman and how good it is to have a sex slave at home.” Rapes and child rapes committed by Western-aligned forces, and particularly by Western personnel themselves, inevitably received negligible coverage.

A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that reports of mass rapes originated with the Croatian and Bosnian governments and had no credible support. Chief correspondent of the London Observer, Nora Beloff, claimed she elicited “an admission from a senior German official that there is no direct evidence to support the wild figures of rape victims.” The official in charge of the Bosnian desk in the German Foreign Affairs Ministry admitted that all such reports came either from Bosnian government sources or from the Catholic charity Caritas, which relied entirely on Bosnian Muslim and Croat sources without independent corroboration.

As stories of Serb atrocities were increasingly widely accepted by Western populations, European media outlets outdid themselves in the gruesome nature of their allegations. Even among the Western media, however, it was the British press which fabricated the most extreme claims. The BBC, for one, informed its millions of listeners that Serb snipers were under orders to single out children for targeting, and were paid 2,700 French Francs for every child killed. The London Daily Mirror took this even further, and alongside Germany’s Bud am Sonntag and Italy’s La Repubblica reported that a Bosnian woman was “forced to give birth to a dog” – a bizarre and biologically incredible story supported by lurid fabricated accounts of fiendish Serbian gynaecologists implanting canine foetuses into her womb. German parliamentary deputy Stefan Schwarz told stories in the Bundestag of Serbian “successors to Mengele” who forcibly implanted dog embryos in women, claiming that a videotape would corroborate his claim. A year later he admitted that no such tape existed – but again the retraction gained much less attention than the original claim. Schwarz had gained instant fame by telling stories of Serbs roasting children in ovens, carrying out burnings and castrations and using poison gas among many other atrocities. None were supported by evidence. For his extreme claims of enemy misconduct, which made for shocking headlines and could quickly turn public opinion, Schwarz became a very popular source with the Western press.

Complementing stories of rape camps, dog births, poison gas and almost any kind of other imaginable horror, equally unsubstantiated Western allegations of Serbian ‘death camps’ were widespread. Evoking the memory of Nazi Germany and its allies’ Holocaust in the 1940s, American reporter Roy Gutman led efforts to portray the Serbs as the ‘new Nazis.’ A notable example came on the front page of Newsday in August 1992, which bore the large headline ‘Bosnian Death Camps’ and opened with: “The Serbian conquerors of northern Bosnia founded two concentration camps where more than a thousand civilians have been killed or died of hunger, and thousands are being kept until death follows…. In one of the camps, over a thousand men are locked up in metal cages.” As was far from uncommon for fabricated accounts, Gutman relied on anonymous sources – in this case an ex-prisoner who said: “I saw ten young men lying in a trench. Their throats were slit, their noses cut off and their genitals torn.”

Those allegedly exterminated in the death camps were, according to the narrative, burned in cremation furnaces and turned into animal feed. British newspapers were quick to follow Gutman’s lead in publishing similar stories, followed by claims that Bosnian Serbs had executed more than 17,000 Muslim and Croatian prisoners. The Sun columnist Richard Littlejohn described the Serbs as “the Nazis of the 1990s,” while the Daily Mail referred to the alleged death camps as “Serbia’s Nazi-style attempts at ‘ethnic purification’.” Leading British leftist politician Ken Livingstone made one of the most dramatic and misleading descriptions, stating: “As the Serbs slaughter their way across Bosnia, Europe is seeing the first real attempt at genocide since Hitler murdered six million Jews.” The Independent later similarly compared the Serbs to the Nazis to describe them as “a challenge to the collective security of the whole continent.” The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, while maxing extensive use of highly misleading barbed wire pictures taken by ITN (see below). The narrative of equating Serbia with Nazi Germany was promogulated across Western media and by multiple Western officials, with any reluctance to bomb Yugoslavia equated with allowing Nazi death camps to continue operating.

Roy Gutman’s extreme horror stories played a central role in influencing public opinion in the West and beyond, with his particularly gruesome and debased stories being among the most effective. When UN forces gained access to all of BosniaHerzegovina, however, they failed to unearth any evidence to support the existence of death camps with metal cages, cremation furnaces, mass graves or the starved mutilated corpses – the existence of which Western reporting had presented as a certainty. Gutman would later play a major role in a very similar campaign to vilify the government of Syria, which by the early 2010s had succeeded Yugoslavia and the Serbs as a primary target for Western fabrication of wartime atrocity stories. He was accused by a number of journalists and scholars of whitewashing the crimes of NATO-backed insurgent groups and allowing a very strong opinion bias to influence his work.

The importance of Gutman’s publications was largely a result of its popularity with Western media outlets, which consistently very actively promoted them. This led British journalist Joan Phillips to retrace Gutman’s steps on the ground, which represented one of very few cases of members of the Western press making serious efforts to verify allegations against the Serbs. Phillips discovered that Gutman had visited Serbian camps only after publishing articles describing them as death camps. A visit to the Trnopolje camp, a death camp akin to Birkenau according to Gutman, was not even entirely a detention camp, with many of its inmates having entered willingly to find safety from the fighting in nearby villages. Omarska camp, meanwhile, was run by civil authorities as a temporary holding centre, with Gutman’s story about it resting solely on the testimony of one man who himself admitted that he had not witnessed any killings. Phillips also determined that Gutman’s article on the Brcko camp, where 1,350 people were supposedly slaughtered, also relied on the testimony of just one individual who claimed he had been imprisoned there. A notoriously unreliable Bosnian government source was the only confirmation. Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović would later concede that the stories of Serb death camps had been fabricated with the aim of bringing about a NATO assault to support separatist groups from the air.

Investigating further, Phillips found that while Gutman did journey to the Manjaca detention site, which was another facility in the hands of the supposedly genocidal Serbs, he had toured it and interviewed prisoners who, although complaining about the food, gave no indication that torture or executions were taking place. Indeed, Serb forces seemed to be respecting the Geneva Conventions, with Phillips reporting that the International Red Cross had consistently had access to Manjaca from the time it opened while many of those held were prisoners of war being kept for future prisoner exchanges. Similar camps with similar conditions were seen in Muslim and Croat areas, and while at times crowded there was never any substantial evidence of unusual conduct. Nonetheless, Western coverage portrayed standard Serb prison camps as the new Auschwitz while giving little indication that the almost identical camps of Western-aligned forces even existed.

In 1992 photographs were widely published by Western media outlets allegedly showing mistreated Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Serb camps. They subsequently proved to be staged. At the Trnopolje refugee camp, for example, Western journalists and photographers deliberately placed themselves in a small barbed-wired enclosure which fenced in a utility shed, while the Muslim men were photographed standing outside. The pictures cleverly gave the impression the men were behind barbed wire. Furthering the imagery evoking the liberation of the Nazi death camps, Western media outlets singled out a small number of emaciated men from among the well fed and healthy majority and photographed them individually behind barbed wire. One such image was prominently displayed on the cover of Time among several other Western publications. Another such prisoner, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek, was identified as a Serb, Slobodan Konjevic, who had been arrested by Serb forces for looting – although his criminal and ethnic backgrounds were left out in order to portray his clearly poor health as a result of ethnic cleansing and Auschwitz-like conditions. His skinny frame was the result of over ten years of tuberculosis.

First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia in 1992–1993, Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar, himself stated regarding Western allegations of genocide: “with 28,000 forces under me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media.” While Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and Albanians all accused their territorial rivals of genocide, supporting and magnifying allegations against Serbs proved effective in aligning public opinion behind the Western world’s geopolitical interests.

As inter-ethnic conflict escalated within Croatia and Bosnia, Serb militias committed a number of war crimes and massacres, but these were portrayed as being totally unprovoked where they were often reprisals for similarly and often more brutal Croat and Bosnian militias’ massacres of Serb civilians. The Chair of a Holocaust survivors organisation John Ranz, for one, took an interest in the Yugoslav conflict and questioned the serious double standards determining which war crimes were given attention and which were conveniently ignored. He thus questioned why secret indictments were made against the entire government of Serbian Krajina, and war crimes charges openly levelled against its leader Milan Martic, while Croatian war crimes on a much greater scale through the same region were never mentioned. Similarly, when Muslim militias slaughtered hundreds of Serbs near Srebrenica, it was vital for the Western narrative not to mention this and only to discuss Serb atrocities. This was not atrocity fabrication, but rather gross misrepresentation of events by portraying them in isolation and concealing the crimes of Western-aligned parties. The vast numbers of Serb refugees and racially motivated attacks on their population centres were consistently ignored in the West throughout the war to provide a one-sided account favouring Western-aligned Bosnian and Croat parties which themselves had a great deal of blood on their hands.

Former White House press secretary and director of the Council on Foreign Relations Bill Moyers produced a special documentary on alleged Serb war crimes which aired on PBS in 1999 and again the following year. He made many very notable claims, including that in the city of Tuzia Serb forces had stored “more than a thousand bodies in a mine” after perpetrating a genocidal mass killing. No evidence was provided to substantiate this despite the area being highly accessible since the fighting had ended. Moyers stated multiple times that 7,414 Bosnian Muslims were executed by Serb forces in Srebrenica area, claiming that thousands of Bosnian men and boys were separated from their female family members and shot. How such a precise figure was arrived at was highly uncertain, but Moyers conceded that only seventy bodies had been identified. To explain the vast discrepancy between the two body counts, one which was 100 times greater than the other and indicative of ethnic cleansing rather than an ordinary toll from warfare, Moyers claimed that Serbs reburied bodies in secondary graves to conceal them. He offered no details as to how Serbs could have buried and then located, dug up and reburied the other 7,344 bodies during a difficult and often chaotic military campaign without leaving a trace – or when or where this happened. Nor did he explain why the initial grave sites could not be found, or why secondary mass graves were also impossible to locate. As American political scientist Michael Parenti asked rhetorically regarding Moyers’ somewhat unrealistic claim of a well-hidden second group of graves: “When it came to hiding bodies, what did the Serbs know the second time that they kept forgetting to do the first time?”

Several individuals familiar with the situation on the ground in the Srebrenica commune, where the most widely publicised massacre of the war did take place and after which Bill Moyers named his documentary, highlighted the highly misleading nature of Western coverage. The massacre occurred in July 1995, five months before the signing of the Dayton Agreement which largely concluded hostilities in Bosnia and Croatia. The most notable omission from the Western narrative was that the siege and massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb militias was preceded by a large-scale attack by Muslim militants which razed fifty Serb villages in Srebrenica and Bratunac, and massacred more than 1,200 Serb women, children and elderly people while leaving more than 3,000 wounded. The Chief of Staff of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia, Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie, was among those critical of prevailing Western portrayals of the war. He observed: “As the Bosnian Muslim fighters became better equipped and trained, they started to venture outside Srebrenica, burning Serb villages and killing their occupants before quickly withdrawing to the security provided by the UN’s safe haven. These attacks reached a crescendo in 1994 and carried on into early 1995.” MacKenzie stressed that the Serb move on Srebrenica was provoked by the need to end attacks by Western-aligned Muslim militias, that these attacks on Serb villages had killed at least as many Serbs as the Muslims who were killed in the reprisals, and that by sparing women and children the Serbs could not be considered guilty of genocide despite Western claims to the contrary. Indeed, with Srebrenica’s location making it vital to the formation of a separate Bosnian Muslim state, and with just 25 percent of its population belonging to the Serb minority while 73 percent were Muslims, it was far more plausible that proponents of a purely Islamic state would seek to ethnically cleanse the Orthodox Christian Serb minority than that the minority would attempt genocide against a population three times their number.

The presence of foreign jihadist militias among the ranks of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of which had been set up with Western support to fight the Afghan government the previous decade, made reports of their genocidal conduct more credible considering the extreme atrocities they had committed in Afghanistan. America’s chief Balkans peace negotiator Richard Holbrooke himself testified that deployment of Arab jihadists from Afghanistan was key to ensuring the survival of Western-aligned Muslim militias in that conflict. Britain’s Spectator observed that after the fall of the Afghan government in 1992:

many Arabs, in the words of the journalist James Buchan, were left stranded in Afghanistan ‘with a taste for fighting but no cause.’ It was not long before some were provided with a new cause. From 1992 to 1995 the Pentagon assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other Islamic elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadist mission. In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East into Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men to fighting alongside the West’s favoured side in the clash of the Balkans. If Western intervention in Afghanistan created the mujahedin, Western intervention in Bosnia appears to have globalised it…. The Pentagon’s secret alliance with Islamic elements allowed mujahedin fighters to be ‘flown in,’ though they were initially reserved as shock troops for particularly hazardous operations against Serb forces.

Vilifying the State and Whitewashing Extremists: Western Coverage of Yugoslav Separatists

As the separation of Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia was achieved the focus of the campaign against Yugoslavia shifted to within the Serbian republic itself – namely the southern Kosovo region. Forming the heart of a new insurgency against continued Yugoslav and Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) separatist group received very considerable support from U.S. and its allies, most notably Germany and Turkey from the mid-late 1990s. Much like Bosnian Islamic groups, the Liberation Army was also bolstered by large numbers of foreign jihadists many of them trained in Al Qaeda terror camps in Afghanistan. The group made its debut by bombing camps housing Serbian refugees from wars in Croatia and Bosnia in February 1996. It was described by Jane’s at the time as acting indiscriminately and as a force that “does not take into consideration the political or economic importance of its victims, nor does it seem at all capable of seriously hurting its enemy, the Serbian police and army. Instead, the group has attacked Serbian police and civilians arbitrarily at their weakest points.” In contrast to the Yugoslav republic which had its origins in the anti-Nazi guerrilla movement of the 1940s, the KLA was a direct successor to Italian-backed fascist militias during the Second World War.

Western efforts to divide Kosovo from what remained of Yugoslavia, and from Serbia which it was an integral region of, centred on forcing the Yugoslav armed forces to withdraw from the territory while simultaneously strengthening the KLA. As noted by director of the British-American Security Information Council Dan Plesch, Yugoslavia’s neighbour Albania had already become “a military colony, with a status in relation to the United States similar to that of some South American countries or the Philippines in the past” after its communist government was overthrown, with much the same fate expected for Albanian-majority Kosovo should it be partitioned. Indeed, by the mid-late 1990s other Yugoslav successor states had already begun to host tens of thousands of NATO personnel including 60,000 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and 16,500–20,000 in Macedonia. It was predicted that the result of Western efforts to separate Kosovo from Serbia could be a ‘Greater Albania’ firmly under U.S. and NATO influence.

The KLA sought to establish an ethnically pure Albanian state, with Serbs and other minorities singled out for targeting. A notable example was that 90,000 people of the Roma minority were forced to flee from Kosovo under attacks from the Western-backed militants. Western support for the KLA thus mirrored the approach in Croatia and Bosnia, with a 1999 paper in the International Journal observing that “the main result of Western intervention in Bosnia was the creation of a minority-free client state in Croatia and the establishment of a NATO-run protectorate comprising ‘ethnically cleansed’ statelets in Bosnia.” KLA members and affiliates featured very prominently in delegations sent for talks on the territory’s future, and despite the organisation’s record the U.S. State Department noted in 1999 regarding its intentions to help the KLA come to power in Kosovo: “the United States is moving quickly to help transform the Kosovo Liberation Army from a rag-tag band of guerrilla fighters into a political force…. Washington clearly sees it as a main hope for the troubled province’s future.” Indeed, under the U.S.-backed Rambouillet Agreement of 1999 the KLA had been set to form the backbone of Kosovo’s police force.

Although portrayed as freedom fighters until after the Western military campaign against Yugoslavia ended in 1999, the KLA’s war crimes were well documented by both Western and international sources. Aside from ties to Islamist terror groups, this included widespread organised rapes of Serb, Roma and pro-government Albanian women, attacks on Serbian cultural sites including centuries old churches, at times using mortar bombs, racially motivated massacres and disappearances of Serbs, and the use of child soldiers. Ambassador and chief prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia Carla Del Ponte, who formerly served as the Swiss attorney general, reported that the KLA relied on organ trafficking to earn revenues. Citing evidence obtained by Hague Tribunal investigators, she reported that this included the targeting of Serb prisoners for forced organ harvesting. Member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and Swiss state prosecutor Dick Marty cited a figure of 300 Serb prisoners victimised in this way, and tied former KLA political leader Hashim Thaçi, who by that time had become Kosovan prime minister, to the harvesting.

NATO did not initially demand outright independence for Kosovo, but rather the creation of a transitionally autonomous protectorate with the establishment of a separate state structure safeguarded by Western militaries – a state of affairs which would pave the way for the KLA to then declare independence. Former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer George Kenney observed in 1998 regarding the expected nature of the KLA-run protectorate which the West was working to create: “It will have a pan-Albanian and Islamist orientation, overlaying a culture steeped in the tradition of extended patriarchal families, blood vengeance, and an incomprehension of women’s rights.” The ethnically Albanian ethno-nationalists NATO empowered ensured that Kosovo was cleansed of its non-Albanian populations, with Serbs in particular slaughtered, forced to flee, or worse. 164,000 Serbs and Roma fled Kosovo by mid-1999 with the KLA’s killings and abductions seen by foreign observers as intended to terrorise them into leaving to create an ethnically pure Albanian state. This was a goal which the KLA’s predecessors, the Nazi collaborators of the 1940s, had also sought to achieve.

The KLA relied heavily on funds from the narcotics trade and trafficking in human slaves to fund its operations against Yugoslav forces, although Western media outlets only began to give meaningful coverage to this after the war was over. Police records in other European states, as well as multiple independent investigations, consistently provided strong evidence for this connection. With one fifth of all sex slaves in the world passing through the Balkans and 80 percent of all Europe’s heroin being imported by Kosovar Albanian groups, the revenues of KLA-associated organised crime were substantial. These groups benefitted considerably from Western support to realise Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and Yugoslavia, which allowed them to continue their illicit activities unchecked as they formed the leadership of the new independent Kosovo. As Mother Jones observed in early 2000 regarding Kosovo’s drug trade in particular: “With [Yugoslav leader Solobodan] Milosevic gone, and no one in control, the former freedom fighters are now transforming the province into a major conduit for global drug trafficking … in the six months since Washington enthroned the Kosovo Liberation Army in that Yugoslav province, KLA-associated drug traffickers have cemented their influence…. In Kosovo, it’s hard to separate a legal organisational structure from an illegal one.” Militiamen from allied drug cartels notably fought as part of the KLA against the Yugoslav government. Among those attesting to the KLA’s role as one of the world’s leading drug traffickers were France’s Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency, Europol, Jane’s Intelligence Review and even the U.S. Chief Negotiator and architect of the Rambouillet Agreement Christopher Hill.

Regarding prevailing attitudes in the American leadership towards the KLA and its activities, a Congressional expert who monitored the drug trade stated a few months after hostiles ended: “There is no doubt that the KLA is a major trafficking organisation. But we have a relationship with the KLA, and the administration doesn’t want to damage [its] reputation. We are partners. The attitude is: The drugs are not coming here, so let others deal with it.” The KLA’s nature was increasingly acknowledged in the West after 1999 once the war effort to bring it to power was over and Yugoslavia had suffered its final defeat. British Member of Parliament and member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, Alan Clark, for one, compared the KLA to the “the Contras … and other groups who were armed by the CIA” to stress that they were “exactly the sort of people British service men should never fight alongside” due to their extreme abuses. British Special Air Service (SAS) units on the ground nevertheless provided training and operated alongside the KLA.

As early as February 1998 President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA on the basis of its conduct in Kosovo as “without any questions, a terrorist group.” “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists,” he stated on a separate occasion. Expediently overlooking this reality, the drug traffickers, slave traders and jihadist terrorists which made up the KLA were not only whitewashed, but lionised, which helped to justify massive Western material support and close military cooperation for the war against the deeply vilified Yugoslav state.

A confidential report by NATO’s North Atlantic Council stated that the KLA was “the main initiator of violence” in Kosovo and “launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation” which led to the outbreak of hostilities with Yugoslav government forces. These hostilities in turn paved the way for NATO military intervention. Other Western assessments of KLA activities consistently came to similar conclusions. James Bissett, who served as Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia for much of the 1990s, noted that the CIA and the British SAS trained the KLA “to foment an armed rebellion in Kosovo.” He stressed regarding the goal of supporting the KLA and the way they operated: “The KLA terrorists were sent back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and do everything possible to incite murder and chaos. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene.” Germany, too, had as early as 1996 begun training the militants who later became the KLA.

In 1998–99 the KLA escalated attacks to kill or ‘disappear’ as prisoners all manner of targets associated with the Yugoslav state or the Serb ethnic group, ranging from police and postal employees to Serb farmers. Approximately half of their victims were ethnic Albanians loyal to the Yugoslav state, many of whom had their villages burned by the KLA. Yugoslav counterinsurgency efforts responding to these attacks by well-armed and highly trained militants, in which hundreds of soldiers were killed, were portrayed in the West not only as repression, but even as a Serb genocide against the ethnic Albanian population. Such claims had little grounding in reality but were valuable for Western efforts to gain a pretext for military intervention to more directly support the KLA.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, perhaps the leading proponent for Western military action against Yugoslavia, referred to the Serbs as “set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two,” with the Western war effort described as part of “a great moral crusade.” “It is no exaggeration to say that what is happening is racial genocide, something we had hoped we would never again experience in Europe. Thousands have been murdered, 100,000 men are missing, and hundreds forced to flee their homes and the country,” he claimed in May 1999. The U.S. State Department echoed these claims, stating that Yugoslav forces were “conducting a campaign of forced population movement not seen in Europe since WW2.” The department and the U.S. Information Agency similarly claimed that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population had been massacred by government forces. Once genocide had been alleged and such claims widely re-reported across Western media, the proponents of war could on the basis of these claims frame a NATO assault as Blair did: “There are no half measures to Milosevic’s brutality. There can be no half measures about how we deal with it. He is determined to wipe a people from the face of his country. NATO is determined to stop him. And we will. We are united in our determination to right this wrong and reverse ethnic cleansing.”

Much like allegations made to vilify the West’s adversaries across other Yugoslav regions, those against government forces in Kosovo had little substance to them. As observed by American political analyst and author of multiple assessments of the Yugoslav wars, Professor Noam Chomsky: “the term genocide, as applied to Kosovo is an insult to the victims of Hitler. In fact, it’s revisionist to an extreme. If this is genocide, then there is genocide going on all over the world. And Bill Clinton is decisively implementing a lot of it. If this is genocide, then what do you call what is happening in the southeast of Turkey? The number of refugees there is huge.”

Alleged Yugoslav government genocide was not the only fabrication which served to provide pretext for a Western military campaign, with Western portrayals of the Rambouillet peace talks in February-Mach 1999 also serving to frame a Western attack as unavoidable. The talks were portrayed as having failed due Belgrade’s unwillingness to grant Kosovo greater autonomy which, although it infringed greatly on Yugoslavia and Serbia’s sovereignty and right to self-govern, was central to Western demands. British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Robin Cook claimed that “the reason they [the Yugoslav state] refused to agree to the peace process was that they were not willing to agree to the autonomy of Kosovo, or for that autonomy to be guaranteed by an international military presence at all.” This portrayal was highly misleading for several reasons. By February 1999 Serbia had already agreed to most of the autonomy proposals, and even to allow UN peacekeeping forces to deploy to Kosovo.

The Yugoslav government had not been expected to comply with these somewhat intrusive terms, but such a peace settlement did have the potential to stabilise the situation, undermine the power of Western-aligned separatist factions in Kosovo, and ultimately leave the territory as part of what remained of the Yugoslav state. With engineering military intervention in Kosovo widely seen to have been a key foreign policy objective of the Bill Clinton administration for months before the talks even started, it was imperative for Western designs to have the Rambouillet talks fail and thus be able to portray Belgrade as rejecting peace – thereby providing the pretext for Western military action against it. U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright and her British counterpart Secretary Cook thus moved to insert new terms into the Rambouillet accord which were so provocative and unacceptable that they would ensure Belgrade would reject them. As a result, Appendix B in the seventh chapter of the document insisted on an occupation of Kosovo by NATO forces, rather than neutral UN forces which Belgrade had accepted. It took this further by also insisting that NATO military aircraft and ground forces would have “unrestricted access” to all of Yugoslavia – terms few countries would accept. As France’s Le Monde Diplomatique observed 20 years later in 2019: “inflexibility was not always on the side you would expect: the Serbs agreed to an autonomous government, free elections, and the release of all political prisoners. But the West also wanted to impose NATO troops.” The full text of the Rambouillet document was kept secret from the public, meaning that world opinion could be shaped to see the Yugoslav government, rather than NATO states, as opposing peace and having unreasonable demands. The extreme nature of the Western terms was only exposed weeks after the military campaign had begun, by which time Yugoslavia already lay in ruins.

NATO’s Bombing of Yugoslavia: War Crimes to Achieve Humanitarian Ends

Under the pretext of preventing an alleged but non-existent genocide, and on the basis that all peace terms had been rejected by Belgrade, NATO commenced an intensive 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999. Lacking authorisation from the United Nations or from the Yugoslav government for these attacks, or any argument that it was acting in self-defence, the Western assault was a crime of aggression against a sovereign state – considered the supreme international crime. The Western alliance had launched limited strikes on Yugoslavia previously, the first in 1995 to support attacks by U.S.-trained Croat forces, but the new air assault was far larger in scale and was far more focused on non-military targets. 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped in 40,000 sorties, with the munitions used being approximately equivalent to the payload of one of the nuclear warheads dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yugoslavia was one of four countries the U.S. had attacked from the air in the span of just a few months, with Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq also being targeted at the time.

Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, Harold Koh, met with the leaders of several U.S. human rights groups to explain how the Pentagon and President Clinton believed human rights concerns should be the driving force behind the Western bombings. He expressed hopes that human rights groups would support the mission and promised that State Secretary Albright could meet with them in person in the near future if they agreed to do so. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others subsequently provided very considerable support to indirectly endorse and legitimise the campaign through their reporting, much as they had eight years prior against Iraq.

A significant number of analysts decried the West’s “selective humanitarian concern” in claiming that alleged abuses against the Albanian minority in Kosovo warranted a military campaign, as while Yugoslavia appeared to be singled out for challenging Western hegemony, minorities in Western-aligned countries were faced far more desperate situations without intervention. From the ongoing civil war in Sri Lanka taking 100,000 lives, to internal conflict in Congo deemed the world’s “deadliest since World War 2,” and Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Kurdish villages, it appeared to many that humanitarian military intervention was only conducted when such campaigns could further Western geo-political interests.

Highlighting the absurdity of the precedent set by the Western assault and the fact that it could never be applied consistently, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon highlighted that if his country’s Arab minority in the Galilee region declared autonomy, as KLA-affiliated separatists did in Kosovo, would NATO not then need to attack Israel? Despite the target being a socialist state, figures on the American right similarly pointed out that the pretext to attack was so absurd that there was nothing to stop similar strikes on Israel over its Arab minority or the U.S. over its own minority issues if the principle was applied equally. Indeed, after the bombings of 1999, Yugoslav citizens frequently argued to illustrate their sense of injustice that just as NATO had intervened to separate Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Yugoslavia needed to intervene protect the Mexican minority in Texas which they claimed suffered more serious cultural discrimination and economic adversity than Albanians in Kosovo ever had. If the rationale NATO had used for its assault were applied consistently, they claimed, then foreign military action was urgently needed to make Texas an independent country as a safe haven for Mexican Americans. While the argument for ‘liberating’ Mexican Americans was ludicrous, it served to highlight how nonsensical the Western pretext for war appeared to many observers.

NATO conducted multiple serious war crimes in its humanitarian-premised military campaign, the most notable being its massive attacks against civilian targets. The headquarters of Belgrade TV, which had been a persistent thorn in the side of Western efforts to control narratives regarding the conflict and had given extensive coverage to the crimes of Western-aligned parties, had long been expected to be a priority target for NATO attacks once the air campaign began. Shortly before the bombing commenced, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea gave a written assurance that the TV building would not be attacked, although this counted for little when it was destroyed in a NATO airstrike and its staff killed on April 23. Many of its staff, in the middle of their workdays, were left buried under rubble for days, with survivors describing the experience as “like a nightmare.” The attack caused 32 casualties, half of them deaths.

Rather than denying that the attack was intentional as it did when striking other civilian targets, NATO justified bombing the media station on the basis that it was “making an important contribution to the propaganda war.” The Pentagon justified the attack by claiming that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is.” U.S. envoy to Yugoslavia Richard Holbrooke described the attack in a speech at the Overseas Press Club’s anniversary dinner a few minutes after it was carried out as “an enormously important and, I think, positive development” – a sentiment widely echoed across in Western media and by political figures. Critics of the attack, however, would years later compare it to the radical Islamist killings of French press figures at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in 2015, highlighting the double standards between Western outrage at the targeted killings of press figures in France and the broad support when Western militaries did the same in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Foreign Ministry described the attack as an “attempt to dig out our eyes and cut off our ears so that you will be exposed only to one side, to the factory of lies.”

Western justifications for the attack were based on the presumption that if a media outlet’s political narratives were opposed by the West, it was justifiable to attack that outlet and kill its staff. The Yugoslavs, and its Serb ethnic group in particular, had been sufficiently vilified with fabricated atrocities so as to make such Western attacks appear widely acceptable. The attack was one of several serious war crimes committed, although the only one ever charged was the general manager of the TV HQ, Dragoljub Milanović, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building when ordered to do so by NATO. Milanović was under no obligation to follow NATO’s orders, and the fact that he was the only one charged provided an important insight into the nature of the Western understanding of human rights at the time.

The airstrike on the Belgrade TV HQ was far from an isolated incident, with NATO attacks singling out transmitters throughout Serbia for targeting and cutting off television reception in Kosovo and the northern province of Vojvodina. An example was an attack on TV facilities in the city of Novi Sad which interrupted broadcasts to all its 400,000 residents, with the destruction of means whereby political narratives contrary to those of the West were promogulated appearing to be an important priority for attack. NATO notably attempted to use the threat of bombing to force Yugoslav media outlets to disseminate pro-Western content, with spokesman Air Commodore David Wilby in one case on April 8th warning the Serbian national broadcaster RTS that it would be met with fire from Western aircraft unless it drastically altered its schedule and coverage to play Western programs for six hours a day in prime time. The message was clear – those who did not become tools to promote Western political narratives would see NATO aircraft deploy lethal force against them. As evidence that Yugoslav media was supposedly purely misinformation and propaganda, Western sources cited claims of large numbers of NATO aircraft being shot down which was vehemently denied in the West. A trickle of information over the following decades, however, revealed that over 50 aircraft, mostly drones but including two of America’s supposedly near-invulnerable stealth fighters, had been neutralised by Yugoslav air defences despite the serious erosion of the country’s military and its lack of modern hardware. Yugoslav claims that its own fighters shot down American F-15s in air-to-air combat, however, were never verified. Although in many cases verified, Yugoslav media’s reports were considered unacceptable because their portrayal of the war was at odds with Western interests.

On April 23 alone, the day of the strike on the TV HQ, NATO planes attacked at least three transmitters as well as key civilian infrastructure including bridges and electrical plants. The New York Times conceded that these attacks were being carried out “even though the electrical power largely goes to civilians, who are also the main users of the country’s bridges.” Indeed, even journalists highly critical of the Yugoslav government and its media outlets referred to NATO as having “lost the distinction between military and civilian targets and aims.” Beyond the dangers of being hit by NATO bombs directly, civilians were seriously endangered by the secondary effects of the Western air campaign including food and fuel shortages, loss of access to medicines, destruction of water, sewage and sanitation systems, and breakdowns in healthcare and the functioning of hospitals.

A further example of a serious NATO war crime during the humanitarian-premised military assault was the widespread use of cluster munitions to scatter delayed explosives in civilian areas. The most famous incident was the Royal Netherlands Air Force’s attacks on a crowded marketplace, a hospital, a university and several shops, in the Serbian city of Nis from May 7–12. The positions attacked were far from any military targets, with residents describing NATO strikes on the market as “showering it with bombs randomly.” NATO denied knowledge of the attack and subsequently claimed it was an accident, although the incident was hardly isolated. The extent of the use of cluster munitions by Western forces resulted in large quantities of un-exploded ordinance littering the Serbian countryside and threatening civilians into the 2020s – despite clean-up efforts by the post-war government. In 2009, ten years after NATO concluded its air campaign, an independent Norwegian survey estimated that 160,000 people in Serbia were still in danger from cluster weapons, with many areas left indefinitely off limits due to their use. Belgrade emerged as a world leader in calls to globally ban cluster munitions largely as a result of its population’s experience on the receiving end of their use. Deputy chief of the Yugoslav desk at the U.S. State Department George Kenney himself conceded regarding the nature of NATO’s employment of cluster munitions against Yugoslav targets: “Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn’t result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing.”

Western war crimes were notably not confined to Yugoslav targets, with the U.S. launching an unprovoked precision strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7 that demolished the office of the military attaché and caused 27 casualties. A $2 billion B-2 Spirit bomber, one of the latest additions to the American arsenal, launched the attack from a base on the U.S. mainland using a highly precise JDAM satellite guided bomb which had an unrivalled degree of accuracy. Although the CIA, U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office all claimed the strike was accidental, this was not widely believed even within the Western world. Claims that the embassy was not clearly marked or that NATO was using obsolete maps were widely deemed by experts and officials to be far from credible. As the National Interest noted: “it’s difficult to imagine that the vast U.S. military and intelligence apparatus could mistake an embassy with a traditional Chinese green tiled roof for a military logistical hub.” The Chinese government referred to American explanations of the incident as “anything but convincing.” At NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre in Vincenza, Italy, an American colonel was widely cited by Western media outlets near the end of the year admitting to the intentional strike, stating: “That was great targeting … we put two JDAMs down into the attaché’s office and took out the exact room we wanted … they [the Chinese] won’t be using that place for rebro [re-broadcasting radio transmissions] any more, and it will have given that bastard [Serbian paramilitary commander] Arkan a headache.” Other reported motives for the attack included sending a strong signal to the Yugoslav leadership that the international community, including China as the world’s leading non-Western power, could not save it from the Western assault, and that Chinese intelligence was using the embassy to monitor NATO cruise missile strikes under combat conditions in order to develop countermeasures.

The Guardian noted regarding the attack: “non-U.S. staff were suspicious. On 8 May they tapped into the NATO target computer and checked out the satellite co-ordinates for the Chinese Embassy. The co-ordinates were in the computer, and they were correct. While the world was being told the CIA had used out-of-date maps, NATO’s officers were looking at evidence that the CIA was bang on target.” As the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency noted, the Pentagon’s “wrong map” story was “a damned lie.” The Observer, citing a range of sources including multiple serving officers from NATO colonels to intelligence officers and a general, showed that the Chinese Embassy was deliberately attacked. As one intelligence officer told the paper: “if it was the wrong building, why did they [U.S.] use the most precise weapons on Earth to hit the right end of that ‘wrong building’?” CIA director George Tenet later confirmed regarding the special nature of the mission that it was not only carried out outside of NATO, but that it was the only airstrike of the campaign organised and directed by his agency rather than by the military.

After the public consensus shifted to more firmly support the narrative of an intentional attack, Western sources attempted to justify the war crime by claiming that because the embassy was allegedly being used to rebroadcast signals for commander Arkan, who according to the Western narrative was perpetrating a genocide, the strike was legitimate. Again, once Western media, political leaders and NGOs could construct a narrative which sufficiently demonised an adversary with atrocity fabrication, any measure including bombing an embassy could be justified by claiming that it was part of a humanitarian effort to prevent evil deeds from being perpetrated by Western adversaries.

A number of other aspects of NATO’s air campaign were notable, including the use of up to 15 tons of highly toxic depleted uranium in its munitions which caused serious health issues for the local civilian population for decades afterwards. President Milosevic’s house was also singled out for targeting, another notable war crime, in what appeared to be an attempt either to take his life or to terrorise the leadership into submission. Another notable target for Western bombings in the same week was a 23-story Belgrade high-rise building housing the headquarters of the Socialist Party of Serbia and the Yugoslav United Left party. Multiple civilian factories were also bombed as part what NATO called an effort to destroy “national assets” of Yugoslavia, with targets ranging from car plants and tobacco concerns to petroleum refineries in what appeared to be an effort to wipe out key sectors of the nation’s economy. These strikes, too, were justified on the basis that the country was committing genocide. Such attacks, the Western narrative claimed, were to be considered altruistic and done out of humanitarian concern for ethnic groups at risk of being wiped out by the Yugoslav government.

Covering the air campaign in a way seldom seen in Western press, the Chicago Tribune noted regarding the list of targets for the Western bombing campaign, which it described as a “a war against all of the Serbs” with the goal of taking out “the mainstays of the Serbian economy”:

NATO expanded its list to include facilities whose destruction will do the most harm to civilians…. Rail lines have been severed, industrial plants flattened and bridges demolished. Often, bystanders have found themselves classified, posthumously, as ‘collateral damage.’ Travel is hazardous, and just getting to work can be nearly impossible … it’s hard to justify a policy whose chief achievement – and possibly its main purpose – is to make life miserable, frightening and dangerous for people who have no control over what is going on in Kosovo…. Torturing or killing innocents in order to further a political goal is normally regarded as terrorism. But deliberately and needlessly inflicting pain on the people of Serbia, while creating conditions that promise to spawn disease and death, is seen by NATO as a perfectly legitimate strategy.

Writing on the Western air campaign award winning Australian journalist John Pilger referred to civilians being “blown up in crowded passenger trains and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old people’s homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF’s [British Royal Air Force’s] thousands of ‘unaccounted for’ cluster bombs which fragment into shrapnel.” The extent of the slaughter perpetrated by the Western powers on the basis of fabricated atrocities widely and uncritically reported in Western press, he said, “require[s] an apology from the propagandists; because, as NATO’s planners never tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalists ‘on board,’ they could never have pulled it off.”

In sharp contrast to the Iraqi Army eight years prior, the capabilities of Yugoslav ground forces were not significantly eroded by NATO’s air campaign. Effective use of cover and innovative kinds of decoys had ensured that Yugoslav units were difficult to locate and target despite NATO’s massive surveillance capabilities and extensive use of cluster bombs and precision guided weapons. This led Western powers to increasingly focused on non-military strategic targets such as factories and media outlets. Former senior National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration, Charles Kupchen, claimed that NATO was “increasingly frustrated, and they want to up the ante by going after more lucrative targets in Belgrade.” Difficulties in the campaign would reduce the possibility of sending in Western ground forces as had been initially planned, according to Kupchen. Although a ground invasion was ruled out, NATO was able to press Belgrade to yield by imposing massive costs on its population, with the threat of further strategic bombing being the only major card it had to play. The government in Belgrade, however, agreed to yield under threat of further attacks, in a move several historians and scholars would later criticise as falling for NATO’s bluff.

Regarding the price NATO was promising to exact for continued defiance of Western demands, the chairman of NATO’s military committee German General Klaus Naumann said Yugoslavia had been set back economically by 10 years, and that the air campaign could turn the clock back half a century if continued. President Milosevic, he warned, “may end up being the ruler of rubble” after the Western alliance was done with his country. As the Chicago Tribune noted: “NATO, in short, plans to reduce a country that is home to 10 million people to a huge pile of worthless debris.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman stated that the message of the air campaign to Belgrade to the Yugoslav population was as follows: “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation, and the stakes have to be very clear. Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1398? We can do 1398, too.” This mirrored Vietnam War proposals to ‘bomb them back to the Stone Age,’ as had been done during the Korean War, but which the U.S. had been deterred from fully seeing through against Hanoi due to the threat of Soviet or Chinese intervention. Belgrade, however, had no such protector to curb Western ambitions, and beyond public opinion in the West itself there was nothing to stop Western attacks from escalating and continuing indefinitely in the new post-Cold War world – all under humanitarian pretexts.

A Washington Post article titled ‘NATO’s Latest Target: Yugoslavia’s Economy,’ detailed some of the impacts of the bombings in a way that was rare for Western publications, and cited figures showing that the first month of attacks alone had caused over $100 billion in material damage. The attacks, it noted:

set Yugoslavia back one or even two decades … have devastated targets ranging from the country’s two biggest oil refineries, in Pancevo and Novi Sad, to the Zastava factory at Kragujevac, which produced the Yugo car and employed some 15,000 workers. The bombing has cut all but one of the bridges across the Danube River…. Other targets have included chemical, drug, cigarette, shoe and light aircraft factories, as well as TV transmitters, railway stations and airports.

Taking the city of Krusevac as an example, the Post noted:

Today, Krusevac is in a sorry state. With the destruction of its largest factories by NATO bombs, unemployment is escalating and prospects for economic reconstruction seem bleak. On April 12, NATO warplanes attacked a heating plant on the edge of the town, reducing it to a smoldering heap of rubble and twisted metal. They went on to hit the region’s biggest factory, the October 14 plant, which produced bulldozers, excavators and other heavy machinery. What was left standing was destroyed in a second raid three days later. ‘This was the biggest heavy machinery plant in the Balkans,’ said Nebojsa Toskovic, the factory’s deputy general manager, as he took reporters on a guided tour of the ruins. ‘Without machinery from this factory, the country will be unable to reconstruct all the bridges and everything else that has been destroyed by NATO.’

Quoted by the Post, the director of the coal-fired heating plant which supplied heat to 50,000 people, Radoslav Savic, observed regarding the attack: “Nobody can understand why our plant was hit. We were not a military target. There was not a single gram of oil inside the plant. The only purpose is to make our people suffer.”

Yugoslavia Yields – But No Sign of Mass Graves

As multiple Western studies of the war concluded, the fact that the Yugoslav leadership “apparently believed that NATO had both the intent and the freedom of action to destroy their country’s entire infrastructure if need be” led them to yield to avoid unacceptable hardship for the civilian population. It was the “attacks and threat of additional attacks” on infrastructure which “generated the decisive pressure for war termination,” after having subjected the public to “cumulative stress caused by daily air raid alerts.” Conveying to Belgrade that this was the price of defying Western interests thus “greatly benefited NATO when it came to persuading Milosevic to accept its terms for war termination.” Indeed, some claimed that “more robust bombing of infrastructure targets in Belgrade at the outset of the conflict” could have brought about a Western victory more quickly. It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission.

Members of the Yugoslav leadership were subsequently sent for trial on NATO territory in the Netherlands, with several meeting with untimely and somewhat suspicious deaths shortly before their days in court. Milosevic himself complained of being denied medication or treatment for his heart condition, among other “active, wilful steps taken, to destroy my health” taken by his detainers while he was held in The Hague, before dying of a heart attack in March 2006. Yugoslav forces were withdrawn from Kosovo, and the much weakened Yugoslav state ceased to exist in 2003. Kosovo itself became a hub of operations for NATO forces in the region and beyond, with the U.S. military base Camp Bondsteel being its largest facility in Eastern Europe. Despite being recognised by the United Nations as a part of Serbia, Kosovo’s separation gained Western recognition, and increasingly recognition from much of the non-Western world, as a defacto independent state which aligned itself strongly with Western interests. Although Kosovo’s lack of UN member status prevented it from formally joining NATO, Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro did so in 2004, 2009 and 2017 respectively. Bosnia and Herzegovina joined a Membership Action Plan and was considered a NATO “aspirant country” – leaving only Serbia outside the Western military bloc.

After the bombing campaign came to an end and investigations into the alleged genocide in Kosovo began, the Western narrative increasingly began to fall apart under weight of evidence. The U.S. State Department first put out figures in April 1999 claiming 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing – apparently ‘disappeared’ by the ‘new Nazis’ the Yugoslavs and feared to be victims of genocide. Once NATO began its bombing campaign these inflated figures had served their purpose, and they were eventually revised to 200,000, then to 100,000, then to 8000. It later emerged, however, that no killings had occurred, with 1,400 bodies found by international investigators all belonging to victims killed after NATO’s bombing campaign had begun and long after the claims of genocide of tens or hundreds of thousands were made.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s war-crimes specialist Patrick Ball, who claimed Yugoslav forces were hiding the bodies of their victims very effectively and “were not going to leave any bodies lying around as evidence,” still extrapolated based on such assumptions a death toll of 9000 plus or minus 3000. This was not a body count, but an estimate based on the assumption that the Serbs were effective at hiding the bodies of their victims. British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon subsequently referred to claims of around 10,000 ethnically cleansed by Yugoslav forces “in more than 100 [separate] massacres,” a figure which American officials referred to as “conservative in the extreme.” The figure originated with the Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, many of the staff of which were KLA members, although the highly partial nature of the source was not made an issue as its claims aligned with Western interests. The U.S. State Department and multiple media outlets used this figure, which was impossible to verify because the KLA-linked council refused to share its list of missing persons. The New Statesman was among the minority of Western outlets which highlighted that these claims were “utterly unsubstantiated” – stressing how unreliable such claims really were by highlighting how the number had so quickly fallen from hundreds of thousands to just tens of thousands.

While the term genocide was used to provide NATO with a pretext to launch its military campaign, the findings of forensic teams on the ground showed that the Western narrative was very far removed from reality. The leader of a Spanish team sent to Kosovo, for one, complained angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one – not one – mass grave.” A United Nations court subsequently ruled in September 2001 that Yugoslavia had not carried out genocide in Kosovo – a verdict harshly criticised in the West and deemed highly controversial for contradicting the Western narrative. This was particularly remarkable considering the massive and near unchallenged Western influence over UN proceedings, especially in the post-Cold War years, and was only possible due to the overwhelming nature of available evidence contradicting Western allegations of genocide. The Guardian, a leading proponent of the war, conceded in an article nine years later in 2008: “The ‘genocide’ in Kosovo was a complete fabrication: but it helped Blair and Clinton spin their narrative of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, to cloak the real economic and strategic reasons for NATO’s military intervention.”

As France’s Le Monde Diplomatique observed 20 years later in 2019: “In order to justify their own use of force, Western forces denounced Serbian intransigence, and exaggerated the gravity of the situation on the ground, calling it a ‘genocide’, and putting forward fake news that was taken up by a host of media outlets.” Indeed, in the three months from June to August1999 alone the New York Times ran eighty articles, nearly one a day, that made some reference to mass graves in Kosovo. What mass killings did occur, however, appeared to have been done by the KLA rather than by the government as international investigations made clear. As the Wall Street Journal noted in December 1999 following its own investigation that “the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect … the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active.” It concluded that “NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields’” essentially to divert attention away from its own killings – in response to “a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO’s bombs.” Referring to a much hyped “mass-grave obsession,” the Journal stressed that this atrocity propaganda largely came from the KLA, the very party responsible for the majority of the killings, and that no genocide had in fact been perpetrated. Such admissions were rare in Western media, with the Wall Street Journal standing out for conceding these points.

A further very significant disclosure, which was confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in October after hostilities concluded, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines which were central to the Western narrative alleging genocide, contained no corpses, remains or even teeth. This contradicted repeated claims by NATO and American officials and by Western media outlets that over 1000 corpses of genocide victims had been hidden there, many disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, and that the mines were the site of a “mass dumping of executed corpses” and “Auschwitz-style furnaces.” The Daily Mirror predicted that the names of the victims at the mines would “live alongside those of Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka,” with Western media outlets widely setting a similar tone. As Michael Parenti noted regarding the investigation and the absence of mass graves which the Western narrative indicated certainly existed: “How the Serbs accomplished these mass-grave disappearing acts without being detected is not explained. Where was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock full of bodies? And why were they so impossible to detect? Questions of this sort were never posed.” The Western narrative, although later thoroughly disproven, was highly successful, and after over a decade of operations against Yugoslavia the West’s objectives in what remained of the state were fully attained in 1999 as a direct result of effective atrocity fabrication.

Chapter Six The Iraq War

9/11 as a Pretext for War: Inventing a Baghdad-Al Qaeda Connection

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the George W. Bush administration declared that the United States was at war. Quickly declaring Al Qaeda to be the perpetrator, and launching a war on October 7 against Afghanistan which had longstanding ties to the terror group, administration officials soon came to see the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity for military intervention against other state adversaries. Foremost among these were the three countries named as members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address – namely Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Of these Iraq, which was both the easiest to casually tie to 9/11 due to its Arab and Sunni Muslim population, and which also presented by far the softest military target, was reported to be the primary target on Washington’s list even before the first troops had moved into Afghanistan.

On September 12, as the National Security Council (NSC) met to formulate a policy response to 9/11, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld first raised the possibility of attacking Iraq. State Secretary Colin Powell, although not opposed to military action, stressed that as a priority, “the American people want us to do something about Al Qaeda” – which was based primarily in Afghanistan. Richard Clarke, who served as the administration’s counterterrorism chief and chaired the NSC meeting, was stunned when he found the discussion focused on Iraq. “Then I realised with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda,” he recalled. When Rumsfeld argued: “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq,” Clarke angrily responded that there were lots of targets everywhere, “but Iraq had nothing to do with it [9/11 attacks].” President Bush subsequently pulled Clarke into a room and asked: “See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.” Clarke reportedly again made clear that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, but the president persisted. After Clarke re-examined the data, he consulted with intelligence experts who signed off on a report to the president stating there was no evidence linking Baghdad to the 9/11 attacks. Clarke later noted: “It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer.’”

According to a senior administration official cited by the Washington Post, a September 17 top-secret document which outlined plans for a military campaign against Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning the invasion of Iraq. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an influential neoconservative member of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, stated at a September 19–20 meeting regarding the 9/11 attacks: “If we don’t use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.” The Pentagon notably authorised former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neoconservative member of the board, to fly to London on a government plane to find evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

On September 17 President Bush reportedly told his advisors: “I believe Iraq was involved” – an inclination he voiced on at least one other occasion. Having been shown no intelligence to this effect, whether this assertion was a hunch based on the prevailing American metanarrative on Iraq, or an early sign of the president’s intention to use 9/11 as a pretext for war, remains uncertain. By September 21 the CIA had informed the president that no Al Qaeda-Baghdad link existed, but Bush continued to press intelligence agencies to find a connection. Following the creation of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) by Secretary Rumsfeld the following year, this pressure on intelligence analysts to select raw data supporting the purported ties between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, as well as on Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), escalated further. As a Pentagon adviser acknowledged: “The goal of Special Plans [was] … to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see” – providing intelligence which suited Washington’s agenda but did not necessarily reflect the real state of affairs.

Iraq had been explicitly on Washington’s target list for the preceding three years, since the U.S. Congress and Senate had passed the Iraq Liberation Act by an overwhelming majority in 1998. The legislation stipulated that Washington should work “to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace it.” The U.S. subsequently more openly provided financial assistance to pro-Western Iraqi opposition groups and funded radio and television broadcasts into the country to propagate American-favoured political narratives. The consensus in Washington had shifted away from that of 1991, when leaving the Ba’athist government in power was seen to be in the American interest, with the new legislation of 1998 and extensive airstrikes launched by the Bill Clinton administration in its aftermath marking a turning point in the long campaign against Iraq.

The impetus for imposing a change in government on Iraq increased from 2001. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, one of the leading figures on the NSC, recalled that at the Bush administration’s first NSC meeting on January 30, 2001, the president’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice raised the agenda topic: “How Iraq is destabilising the region.” O’Neill later observed: “Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.” This was partly motivated by concerns that the UN sanctions regime on Baghdad was soon to expire, and with oil prices high and much of the world willing to do business the country had the potential to make a swift recovery from the crisis of the 1990s and re-emerge as a major power that could undermine Western hegemony in the Middle East. Indeed, even with sanctions in place, Iraq had already begun to show some signs of an economic recovery by 1997 – a few months before the Clinton administration had launched its own major attack. At his senate confirmation hearing that month Secretary of State Colin Powell pledged to the Senate that the new administration would reenergise the UN sanctions on Iraq, but although this was considered vital to U.S. interests Washington’s ability to do this unilaterally was limited. Leading figures in the Bush administration including Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy State Secretary Richard Armitage, and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, argued in a joint statement that the policy of simply containing Iraq had to be rejected on the basis that the U.S. “can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions.”

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Zoellick were all subscribers to the increasingly prominent neoconservative school of thought, which heavily influenced the Bush administration and called for the U.S. to take “an imperial role” in world affairs and establish a “benevolent global hegemony.” Eighteen leading neoconservatives had sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton on January 26, l998 urging him to work towards “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” Ten of them received positions in the new Bush administration. The neoconservatives were said to have “a focus on the Middle East and global Islam as pivotal to America’s national interests.” Their resulting foreign policy outlook was arguably highly detrimental to America’s hegemonic position since the most formidable challengers to its power such as China and North Korea were outside the Islamic world and were notably largely ignored in the Bush years.

Attacking Iraq was not only a time sensitive issue due to the expiry of UN sanctions, but it was also militarily one of the most vulnerable American adversaries for several reasons including the destruction of much of its forces in 1991 and the arms embargo imposed since which prevented its military’s replenishment or modernisation. Baghdad’s acceptance of highly intrusive UN inspections throughout much of the 1990s, meanwhile, had allowed the U.S. and its allies to ensure that it had been stripped of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons which could have otherwise enabled it to deter or retaliate against future Western attacks. By contrast North Korea, which had by far the largest and most sophisticated defence sector of the three axis members, had proliferated many of its technologies including medium range ballistic missiles to Iran. The fact that Iraq’s population was far less homogenous than those of the other two targets, with sizeable Shiite and Kurdish minorities which had shown a propensity for rebellion in the past, and which potentially had much to gain from seeing crippling Western sanctions end if the government in Baghdad was removed, also made the country a more attractive target.

In order to justify a full-scale invasion of Iraq Washington leveraged the preceding negative portrayals of the country and of President Hussein in particular to claim that the kind of government it represented was a threat to the world if allowed to continue to exist. Negative portrayals of the country had already made a strong imprint on the American and Western consciousness and formed a metanarrative which presented Baghdad as capable of almost any kind of evil act. A poll conducted by Time and CNN on September 13, 2001, found that 78 percent of Americans suspected Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. A Gallup poll conducted from September 21–22 found that over 68 percent of respondents in the U.S. supported removing Saddam Hussein from power. The administration had not yet tied Iraq to terror groups in any statements, but such perceptions were already predominant largely as a legacy of Gulf War propaganda efforts. Indeed, a Gallup poll conducted before the 9/11 attacks in February 2001 had found that 85 percent of Americans had an “unfavourable” opinion of Iraq – the worst of 26 countries the poll asked about.

An April 1991 Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of Americans felt hostilities with Iraq had ended too soon – with Washington’s decision not to invade that year and to allow the Ba’athist government to stay in power considered controversial. In mid-August l992 almost two-thirds of respondents polled supported a new military campaign to overthrow the Iraqi government by force. A poll after 9/11 in mid-December, 2001, found that 61 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power for the War on Terror to be successful – despite the administration having as yet made no indications to the public of a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda or terror attacks. The Bush administration’s thought, although sharply contradicting available intelligence, closely reflected the major public consensus which had itself been shaped by 13 years of propaganda – much of it based on total fabrications. Subsequent statements by Bush administration figures served to remind the public that Saddam Hussein was to be viewed as ‘another Hitler’ and a ‘madman,’ recalling the rhetoric of the Gulf War.

To provide further impetus to the need for military action, the argument for war centred around two new aspects of the ‘Iraq Threat’ which had not been significant parts of the narrative of the Gulf War. These were allegations of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the country’s alleged development of weapons of mass destruction. The former allowed the case for war to benefit from post-9/11 fervour and public calls for harsh retaliation against those responsible, while making the danger Iraq allegedly posed appear far more imminent. Although developing weapons of mass destruction was hardly an atrocity, nor did it violate international norms since several other states had done or were doing so, Iraq’s Ba’athist government had been portrayed as so terribly atrocious in nature that its possession of such weapons was considered totally unacceptable. Thus, the fabricated weapons program was made significant largely due to a metanarrative which had been built on fabricated atrocity stories such as the 1990 slaughter of incubator babies, in contrast to weapons programs in other countries which aroused far milder public responses.

In February 2002 chairman of the influential neoconservative Project for a New American Century think tank William Kristol testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when asked about the next step in the war on terrorism: “the short answer is that Iraq is next.” The first significant allusion of possible Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda had come on December 9, 2001, when Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, said an alleged meeting between Al Qaeda plotter Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague was “pretty well confirmed.” Secretary Rumsfeld subsequently alluded to the possibility of Iraq harbouring Al Qaeda terrorists in August 2002, claiming the following month that evidence for such ties was “bulletproof.” Administration officials increasingly raised the possibility of ties between Baghdad and the terror group. On September 9, Cheney claimed U.S. intelligence reports after September 11 had disclosed “a number of contacts over the years” that pointed to links between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks.

The president himself began to allude to the possibility of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda from September 2002, although not claiming it outright. As a Yale Review of International Studies paper on the image of Saddam Hussein highlighted, Bush “simply tarred both Hussein and Al-Qaeda with the same terroristic brush to imply a relationship. The persistence of such insinuation effectively allowed the Bush administration to claim that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda worked together, and that Hussein was involved in 9/11, without ever outright saying so.” Of the 13 speeches the president gave between that of September 12, 2002 at the United Nations General Assembly, and the conclusion of the invasion of Iraq in May 2003, twelve mentioned Iraq and terrorism in the same paragraph and ten placed them in the same sentence.

Other administration officials similarly implied a connection between Baghdad and Al Qaeda without stating it explicitly. In response to a New York Times story claiming a link between Iraq and terror groups, which was later proven to be entirely false, President Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: “I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilising.” Creating the image of such ties was heavily dependent on how American and Western perceptions had been shaped regarding ‘what kind of country’ Iraq was – leading the public to assume what officials would not state outright.

A possible connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda became increasingly central to Washington’s arguments for war, and was made more serious by claims that the weapons of mass destruction Iraq was allegedly developing could be proliferated to terror groups. As Vice President Cheney declared in March 2002, in reference to Iraqi WMD and its alleged ties with terror groups: “The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide.” President Bush elaborated in a speech at West Point in June: “Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons or missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.” The WMD argument alone may not have been sufficient to sway the American public, for which claims of ties to terror groups were much more important. Polls showed that 82 percent of Americans said they would support the war regardless of whether WMDs were found in Iraq, and 64 percent said “Saddam Hussein should be removed from power in Iraq, regardless of whether U.N. inspectors find evidence of weapons of mass destruction.” Indeed, from January 2002 to May 2003 President Bush referred to Iraq’s alleged ties to terror groups over five times as much in his speeches as he did to alleged WMDs (an average of 12.2 mentions per speech vs. 2.3 mentions). While the latter allegation held more sway internationally, particularly in Britain, the former had a stronger impact on the post-9/11 American public.

The importance of the Al Qaeda link was highlighted by the fact that poll respondents who considered Al Qaeda to be America’s greatest threat were more likely to favour invading Iraq than those who thought Iraq itself was America’s most important threat. Even if Iraq had WMD and became the world’s seventh non-Western nuclear weapons state, it had no reason to suddenly attack the U.S. with them much as it had refrained from using its chemical or biological weapons even at the height of the Gulf War. While Iraq on its own was not a threat, the image of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda axis added an unpredictable and undeterrable element to the enemy, and effectively framed Iraqi WMDs as a force multiplier to future 9/11-type attacks. This was key to conveying an imminent need for action against Baghdad.

June 2002 saw the initiation of preliminary military actions against Iraq to pave the way for an invasion, with American and British combat aircraft assigned to patrol no fly zones over Iraq since 1991 reassigned to carry out offensive sorties without provocation under the then-secret Operation Southern Focus. British MoD figures released three years later showed that, despite U.S. claims that renewed air attacks were a response to increased Iraqi provocations, Iraqi actions which could be construed as such had in fact been in decline before the operation was initiated. Multiple official sources, including U.S. Army General and CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks who in 2003 oversaw the invasion of Iraq, later conceded that Operation Southern Focus was falsely premised on a response to Iraqi resistance to the no fly zone, and was in fact an attempt to destroy Iraqi air defences to pave the way for invasion. Defending minorities within Iraq was also used as a pretext for the escalated air assault, although this was later conceded by Whitehall officials to have been false with the weakening of Iraqi air defences and communications systems being the actual goal. These attacks continued for nine months, with a large 100-aircraft strike three months into the operation ensuring that Iraq would be blind to special forces and other assets entering its territory through neighbouring Jordan.

In July 2002 the administration formed the White House Iraq Group to create a media strategy to promote war. Its campaign centred on the narrative that Iraq would provide terror groups with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and on the argument that the only sure defence was to forcefully dismantle the Iraqi government before it could arm its alleged terrorist accomplices. Even many of the most tenuous claims by administration officials regarding ties to Al Qaeda or WMD were almost never questioned in major media outlets, which to the contrary only amplified the government’s line. Leading journalist Bob Woodward, for example, when asked on CNN what would happen if America went to war and didn’t find any WMDs, answered: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.” Several media outlets would later apologise for their uncritical and one-sided coverage, but only once the war was over and the damage was done – before then going on to similarly support future unprovoked miliary assaults based on similarly tenuous pretexts.

Addressing the press alongside British Prime Minister Tony Blair on September 7, 2002, President Bush asserted the existence of a new report from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which stated that an Iraqi nuclear arsenal was imminently expected to materialise. “A report came out of the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need,” he stated. This was one of the most blatant examples of a fabricated claim by the administration, and the IAEA had notably never issued any report which even an imaginative interpretation could reach such a conclusion from. Award winning former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine John MacArthur described Bush’s claim as a “near total fabrication,” and “a completely uncorroborated case for pre-emptive war,” stressing that “for public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the press bothered to check out the president’s claim.” The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung notably quoted an IAEA spokesman saying that “the agency has issued no new report,” but she didn’t confront the White House with this information nor was it ever mentioned by the Post beyond her 20-second summary of the press conference. The right-leaning Washington Times was effectively alone in addressing the issue, and pointed out that there were no new reports from the IAEA as the president claimed, nor had the agency ever issued any report with a time frame for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. It also cited spokesman from the UN inspection teams Mark Gwozdecky, who reported on the actual state of the Iraqi nuclear industry and the possibility of developing nuclear weapons. He stated: “we had concluded that we had neutralised their nuclear weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.”

Aside from the Washington Times, U.S. and Western press, and the New York Times in particular, not only did not question the president’s claims, but played an important role in ensuring that they resonated with the public. The Times, in John MacArthur’s words, inflated what appeared to be a totally fabricated claim by President Bush “into something resembling a prediction of nuclear Armageddon” while repeatedly citing “anonymous administration sources” for increasingly ludicrous claims.

President Bush formally introduced plans for war on Iraq on September 11, 2002, in a national address from Ellis Island, New York City, which commemorated the 9/11 attacks. The occasion chosen did more to cement the idea in the minds of the public of a connection between the threat from Al Qaeda and the need for an attack on Iraq – which the president now stated explicitly. Bush alleged that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in bomb making and other key skills, provided medical treatment to its leadership, and maintained “high level contacts” with the terror group. This partnership was supposedly intended by Baghdad to “allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstructing its nuclear weapons program,” he further alleged, stressing the importance of military action to forestall the possibility of a nuclear armed Iraq – a possibility that allegedly could materialise within a year. The terrifying narrative Bush put forward was that Baghdad obtaining nuclear weapons could directly result in nuclear attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States – none of which would be traceable to Iraq.

The following day on September 12 President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly with a focus on portraying an imminent Iraqi threat, and much like American delegations had in 1990 he stirred emotions through graphic depictions of alleged humanitarian abuses by Baghdad. “Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents,” he claimed before the world. The U.S. subsequently used the UN as a forum to press its claims particularly surrounding Iraq’s alleged development of nuclear weapons – claims which leading international experts firmly refuted. UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters before meeting the Security Council: “We haven’t found any smoking guns.” IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed Al Baradei reported in late January: “We have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear program.” Baradei subsequently told the UN Security Council on March 7 that documents purportedly showing Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger, which were thought to have been supplied by Britain or the U.S. who were pushing this claim, were forgeries.

In response to the questions raised regarding Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer responded: “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.” Deputy Defence Secretary Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2003: “Iraq’s weapons of mass terror and the terror networks to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate themes – not two separate threats. They are part of the same threat.” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote a New York Times Op-Ed that same day titled “Why We Know Iraq Is Lying,” which described Iraq’s weapons disclosure to the United Nations as “a 12,200-page lie.”

To undermine Washington’s case for war and prove its own innocence, Baghdad had notified UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in late September that it would allow UN weapons inspectors to return “without conditions.” This was a major concession reflecting the seriousness of the situation, since U.S. and British intelligence had previously infiltrated UN inspection teams not only for espionage, but also to attempt unsuccessfully to engineer a coup in Iraq and assassinate Saddam Hussein. UN inspectors had otherwise passed on their findings and large quantities of seized Iraqi government documents to Washington before doing so to the United Nations itself, highlighting controversies regarding how impartial the inspection regime could have been and drawing strong criticisms from several quarters of the UN. Iraq’s prior reluctance to allow inspections was portrayed in the West either as paranoia, or more often as a sign that it was hiding something, with the U.S. and British operations that used the inspections as cover only later being revealed. It nevertheless appeared to be the correct move by Baghdad. As a U.S. government source who insisted on anonymity stated in 2002, the Bush administration “doesn’t want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.” “This administration is capable of any lie … in order to advance its war goal in Iraq,” the source concluded. Washington’s timetable for military action notably overrode, the timetable and processes set by the UN Security Council for inspections in Iraq, thus effectively terminating the possibility.

The UN was again used as a forum to make the case for war when on February 5, 2003, State Secretary Powell addressed the Security Council to advocate a U.S.-led invasion. Like all major figures in the administration Powell was a hardliner, and in the 1990s had indicated the possibility of a Desert Storm-like military campaign to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. Where he stood out was in his high approval ratings and credibility which made him the ideal figure to deliver such a presentation. Powell reportedly insisted that CIA Director George Tenet sit directly behind him during the speech to provide the impression that everything said had the full support of the intelligence community. It proved successful, with some studies pointing to a 30-point rise in the number of Americans who felt convinced of a Baghdad-Al Qaeda connection following Powell’s speech at the Security Council.

An assessment by scholars at Princeton University published by the American Political Science Association in 2005 concluded:

the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush’s speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president’s speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. The assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources…. In 2002 the terrorism frame was available, believable, and understandable to a country scarred by September 11, making the frame powerful and convincing.

They stressed that although “President Bush never publicly blamed Saddam Hussein or Iraq for the events of September 11, but by consistently linking Iraqi with terrorism and Al Qaeda he provided the context from which such a connection could be made…. The way language and transitions are shaped in his official speeches almost compelled listeners to infer a connection.” They elaborated on the technique and its success:

The administration juxtaposed allusions to Iraq with the terms terror, bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Furthermore, there was little elite opposition to this rhetoric, leaving the American public with a one-sided flow of information…. The connection between Iraq and 9/11 made the latter the most relevant consideration in the minds of the American people when they thought about the war in Iraq, which increased support for the war.

In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush made one of most the direct allusions to the possibility of Al Qaeda being equipped with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, evoking the painful memories of the 9/11 attacks and strongly implying links to Iraq. He stated: “Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans – this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” The distinction between “imagine the hijackers …” and “the hijackers could have been/could be in future.” was a significant one, but not one most viewers would notice. Fifty days later, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the majority of Americans believed President Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Truth or Fabrication?

In the lead up to the Iraq War, and increasingly so afterwards as more papers were declassified and more officials provided new testimonies, it became clear not only that the Bush administration had misled the public, but that the claims it used to justify the invasion were outright false and sharply contradicted the intelligence it was being given. In 2015 the CIA’s 93-page 2002 National Intelligence Assessment (NIE) was declassified, and showed that claims of ties between Al Qaeda and Baghdad were not supported by available intelligence. The NIE concluded that there were no operational ties between Iraq and the terror group, casting claims by administration officials in a new light. Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, had stated: “We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.” President Bush made multiple claims to the same effect, including after Baghdad was captured that “we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.” The CIA’s own documents indicated that these were all entirely false.

The only source for claims that Iraq was training Al Qaeda to use chemical and biological weapons came from detained jihadist Ibn al-Shaykh Al Libi, a Libyan who operated a training camp in Afghanistan. He later retracted his claims, stating that he was under torture and was only telling his captors what they wanted to hear. The case of Al Libi was an example of what former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served multiple foreign affairs and intelligence committees, described as follows: “the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.” David Kay, a former Iraq weapons inspector who also headed the Iraq Survey Group, stressed to similar effect in an interview in 2006 that assessments were trying to drive towards a policy conclusion while the information available simply didn’t support it. A 2014 RAND Corporation report on the case for war in Iraq similarly highlighted that many intelligence reports from the time were flawed and unreliable because they were “influenced by policymakers’ desires.” Al Libi’s statements extracted through torture were a case in point.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice had received a memo on September 18, 2001, summarising intelligence on the possible relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which concluded there was little evidence of any links. The administration’s narrative of an Iraqi threat, however, continued to be centred on claims that Baghdad was working with the terror group. Claims frequently cited by the vice president that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer were at the centre of the case presented for these ties, although by the time they began to be voiced the CIA and FBI had already reported their conclusion that such a meeting never took place.

The CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Assessment notably stressed that “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program,” and that there were no definitive signs of development of chemical or biological weapons. Thus, when President Bush stated in 2002 that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” this sharply contradicted the information his administration was actually receiving. The U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence itself eventually concluded that the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD program were “not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.”

In August 2002 when Vice President Cheney said: “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” there was nothing approaching confirmed intelligence to this effect. Indeed, General Anthony Zinni who had accessed the same intelligence later recalled regarding Cheney’s speech: “It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”

In October President Bush claimed that Iraq had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons, although CIA Director George Tenet highlighted that the CIA had informed policymakers there was “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” On December 31, in an effort to justify a policy focus on Iraq over North Korea which multiple reports indicated already had nuclear weapons, the president declared: “We do not know whether or not he [Saddam Hussein] has a nuclear weapon.” This was one of the most difficult comments to substantiate, although it did serve to portray Iraq as a more imminent threat. CIA Director Tenet later testified “We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.” Indeed, if there was any significant ambiguity on Iraq’s possession of any substantial chemical or biological weapons arsenals, let alone nuclear weapons which were much harder to produce, the invasion likely would not have been carried out in the way it was.

Regarding Iraq’s interest in the procurement of aluminium tubes, which was cited as proof that it was developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that their dimensions were “consistent with applications to rocket motors” which was a “more likely end use.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research also indicated that the tubes’ purpose was not for the development of nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice subsequently stated that the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs” – which she used to argue for military action on the basis that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” This had caused controversy at the time with the Institute for Science and International Security being one of many parties to have alleged in 2002 that the administration was exerting pressure on its own analysts for evidence that could be interpreted in a certain way – namely to support its narrative regarding Iraq’s WMDs and Al Qaeda ties. The institute stressed that evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program was underwhelming.

Although Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed 13 years later that his UN speech was a “great intelligence failure,” available evidence strongly indicated that he had knowledge of but intentionally contradicted what intelligence agencies were saying and was deliberately committing lies to the record to provide pretext for war. These included, among many other mistruths, lies regarding the designs of Iraq’s aluminium tubes, doctoring of UN evidence on Iraqi compliance with requests for disarmament to portray it as proof Iraq was hiding weapons, and lies by omission regarding Iraq’s VX nerve agent program. Among several dozen outright lies committed to the record, when quoting intercepts of the conversations of Iraqi officers, Powell went so far as to add sentences that were not in the original quotes to make it appear as though they were talking about hiding evidence of WMD. None of the incriminating parts of conversation could be found in the original transcripts.

An early indicator of how tenuous administration allegations against Iraq were came in February 2003, when Secretary Powell informed the UN Security Council that a “poison factory” in Northern Iraq was linked to Al Qaeda. No evidence was provided, and when Western reporters subsequently visited the compound, they found nothing of the kind. “There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere – only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking,” British reporter Luke Harding reported. A State Department official responded to the embarrassment by telling the New York Times: “a ‘poison factory’ is a term of art.” The claim marked part of what would become a growing trend of satellite images of buildings which could be put to almost any use being cited by the U.S. and its European partners as evidence of a site where some kind of malign activity was committed. Although there were Islamist fighters at the site, this was explained by its location in Iraq’s Kurdistan region over which the Iraqi government had exercised almost no control since 1991 after Kurdish separatist groups there were placed under Western protection. Even if there had been a poison factory there, Baghdad could hardly have been held responsible.

Secretary Powell subsequently announced a threat from a new Iraqi drone – which was portrayed as a major threat that was able to launch biological weapons attacks far and wide. Four months prior in October President Bush had alluded to the possibility that Iraqi drones could be used to launch attacks on the U.S. – meaning either that Iraq had the only drones in the world with intercontinental ranges or it had some kind of operating base in the Americas which were both ludicrous propositions. Washington’s concerns were soon echoed by London. The possibility of Iraqi drones flying down American streets launching WMDs was widely reported in U.S. media and contributed to portraying Iraq as an imminent threat. The drone referred to, it quickly emerged, was no better than a civilian hobby model and had a wooden propeller, engines smaller than those of a lawnmower and a range of no more than five miles.

The Iraq War was thus based on claims which the administration, in the best cases, was aware were highly tenuous, and in the worst cases knew were outright lies. The invasion’s far-reaching consequences were thus all direct results of fabricated information vilifying the government in Baghdad, associating it with the 9/11 atrocity, and falsely portraying it as an imminent threat with malign intentions.

False Claims of Iraqi Atrocities

The credibility of U.S. allegations against Iraq, in particular that of its development of weapons of mass destruction, was bolstered by corroborating claims from Britain which would be its primary coalition partner in launching the invasion. A 55-page dossier published in September 2002 by the British government, based on reports made by the Joint Intelligence Committee, alleged that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. This included claims that Baghdad sought “significant quantities of uranium from Africa” for such purposes, although the sources for large majority of the evidence were not reported supposedly to protect anonymity. Its findings, according to Prime Minister Tony Blair, left both London and the world no choice but to act.

British reports that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and Al Hussein Scud-derived ballistic missiles capable of carrying them, were presented by politicians and major media outlets as evidence of an imminent threat to the Western world. Britain’s most popular daily newspaper The Sun, for example, claimed “Brits 45mins from doom,” while the Daily Star reported “Mad Saddam ready to attack: 45 minutes from a chemical war,” and the Daily Mail published the headline “Just 45 minutes from attack.” Prime Minister Blair similarly alluded to the possibility that Iraq, again personified as Saddam Hussein, would not only expand its arsenal, but also “use the weapons he has” unless swift action was taken.

Even if Iraq did have the chemical and biological weapons it was alleged to, presenting the case that the country would use them unprovoked was somewhat ludicrous. The missiles Iraq allegedly had, even according to the dossier itself, had only a 650km range allowing them to reach only “Cyprus and NATO members Greece and Turkey as well as all Iraq’s neighbours.” The fact that Britain had a military base on Cyprus was used to spin this as a sign that Iraq not only could hit Britain, since the base was technically British soil, but that such an attack was going to be initiated without provocation. Iraq’s alleged capability was far from remarkable, not only compared to Western and Western-aligned states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, but even compared to other U.S. adversaries. Syria and Iran, for example, used North Korean missiles with ranges of 1000km and 1500km respectively and much more survivable and sophisticated terminal warheads, and the former likely fielded more chemical weapons that Iraq ever had. Blurring the very distinct lines between a deterrent, and a weapon which would be used as soon as the owner had the chance to, was later similarly used by advocates of war to portray North Korea as ready to launch nuclear attacks on the United States as soon as it developed a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching it. As it was, however, Iraq actually had neither.

Major General Michael Laurie, who had been involved in producing the dossier, wrote to a subsequent inquiry in 2011, later known as the Chilcot Inquiry, that “the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.” The claim that Iraqi missiles could reach British territory within 45 minutes was found not only to have been misleading, but to have been outright false, and had been inserted by the government’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, against the wishes of the intelligence agencies. British weapons expert David Kelly from the Defence Ministry, who had led ten UNSCOM missions to Iraq, spoke with journalists highlighting that the dossier, and in particular the ’45 minutes’ claim, were misleading. Kelly was subsequently reported to have committed suicide under circumstances for years seen as suspicious.

The invasion began on March 10, 2003, and was carried out without authorisation from the United Nations Security Council or the pretext of defence from an Iraqi attack, which made it a serious breach of the UN charter and an illegal act of aggression – the supreme international crime. This was one of several U.S. led crimes of aggression which violated international law, with preceding examples including the invasions of Grenada and Panama and the illegal air campaigns and no fly zones targeting Yugoslavia and post-Gulf War Iraq.

Following the invasion U.S. and allied allegations of Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction were revealed to have been totally fabricated. They had proven invaluable as a pretext for hostile policies towards Baghdad, however, particularly when paired with efforts to portray the Iraqi leadership as a potential supplier of such weapons to Al Qaeda, and otherwise as irrational or insane and therefore willing to use such weapons unprovoked. As Professor Robert Swansbrough, President Bush’s most prominent biographer, stressed: “The Bush administration’s call for a pre-emptive war against Iraq – replete with frightening warnings about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda and hints of the Iraqi’ dictator’s role in the 9/11 attacks on America – created a powerful juggernaut towards a ‘war of choice’ with Iraq.” He noted regarding the Bush administration’s decision to go to war “once the president had made that decision, groupthink shunted aside warnings, contrary data, and less optimistic assumptions that disputed the president’s preferred policy.”

The head of Britain’s MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove similarly concluded, as documented in the Downing Street Memorandum published in 2005: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” He recalled that many figures in the administration had been “playing fast and loose with the evidence” to provide a pretext for the policies they hoped to enact.

Many of the statements by U.S. officials were found to have been not only misleading, but outright false. An example was an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when Vice President Cheney unequivocally declared “we now know” that Iraq has resumed its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The CIA had not cleared the speech, which went well beyond the facts the intelligence community had established. Another was an address on October 7, 2002 during which President Bush stated: “We know Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts over a year.” House Speaker Dennis Hastert summarised five days later regarding this claim: “is there a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda? The president thinks so.” This unevidenced claim was seen as a highly dubious by experts considering, among other factors, the sharp animosity between the secular Ba’ath Party and the fundamentalist terror group and their starkly opposing backgrounds and ideologies. As a CATO Institute report noted: “as a secular leader of a country divided along religious lines, Saddam represented everything that the global jihadists and Islamic fundamentalists hate. Saddam was deterred from cooperating with terrorists because he feared the terrorists.” Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, was one of many who stated that available evidence showed the agendas of the state and the terror group were “incompatible,” leaving little room for cooperation. With a Catholic, Tariq Aziz, as one of his closest confidants, former foreign minister, and deputy prime minister, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had consistently had some of the very worst relations with Islamist groups of any country in the Arab world, and had abolished Sharia courts very early on. For those familiar with Iraq the allegations of ties to Al Qaeda appeared absurd.

The primary argument for war with Iraq was not that it was committing atrocities, but rather that there was an imminent need to pre-empt an atrocity by terrorists using Iraqi WMD – a narrative bolstered by a strongly implied connection between Baghdad and the mass killings of 9/11. The British narrative placed a lesser emphasis on possible Baghdad-Al Qaeda ties, but instead strongly implied that an Iraq with an expanded WMD capability would not use it as a deterrent, and could instead use it to attack the West without warning. Both narratives were perhaps best summarised by the statement of President Bush: “facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” The atrocity fabricated for Iraq by its Western adversaries, pertaining to its weapons program, was one yet to happen and which invading the country was presented as the only means to prevent.

J.D. Maddox, an intelligence officer for the Department of Energy assigned to the Iraq Survey Group – the American-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – recalled regarding his deployment to Iraq in June 2003 and growing disillusionment with Washington’s narrative:

I had privately questioned the motive for going into Iraq, suspicious of the way the administration had shifted its justification over time, but I still chose to go. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s now-notorious United Nations speech on Feb. 5, 2003 – when he argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime had developed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent threat – assuaged any reservations I might have had. ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,’ he said. ‘These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.’ There was no more trustworthy spokesman, I thought at the time…. After just a short time with the group, I had little belief that we would find any nuclear weapons. During late-night rants, my fellow intelligence officers debunked the stories that the Iraqi government had access to African uranium, had developed special centrifuges or was driving biological-warfare trailers around the country. But nobody said anything during work hours. That argument had already been made and lost in Washington…. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were no more than a bit of improvised sham, a con man’s counterfeit goods.

Maddox highlighted that those who believed WMD would be found were a minority by the time he arrived, as well as the tremendous disconnect between what the military saw on the ground, and what the media and government claimed at home. He recalled: “when I returned to Washington, some weeks later, it was clear to me that people who hadn’t served in Iraq knew little of what was really going on. A friend asked me how the search for weapons of mass destruction was going. I responded wryly, ‘Well, I’m back, aren’t I?’ I avoided explaining the enormity of it.” Regarding the findings of the group he had been working with, he noted: “When the Iraq Survey Group’s interim progress report was released, in October 2003, the truth became unavoidable. It offered a thinly veiled admission of failure to find any convincing evidence of recent W.M.D. activity.” After that, Maddox recalled: “It became impossible to square my American sense of free will – our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices – with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq. I had been taught throughout my childhood and my military training that America conducts wars based on just cause, but the reality emerging from Iraq was that we had been compelled by deception.”

U.S. government funded Iraqi National Congress (INC) made up of anti-government defectors, which were relied on heavily by the administration to accuse Baghdad of developing WMDs and maintaining ties to Al Qaeda, considered the invasion to be a major victory. After post-invasion investigations proved their claims to be entirely fabricated, the head of the congress Ahmed Chalabi proudly declared: “We are heroes in error…. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.” In aiding the Bush administration, the defectors had not only gained funding and a living in the U.S., but now had a chance to gain power and influence in Iraq itself. Their statements consistently contradicted available intelligence, but administration officials could choose to believe and cite these defector sources with whom they had a common agenda. Similar defector sources would continue to be cited and placed on a pedestal to profoundly shape Western narratives surrounding other adversaries – most notably North Korea and China (See Chapters 7 and 10).

Complementing claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat to Western security through WMD development and Al Qaeda ties, a secondary narrative portraying the invasion of the country as a humanitarian action also played a significant role in providing pretext for war. Like in 1990–91, when the Kuwaiti population were portrayed as the victims in fabricated atrocity stories, in the months preceding 2003 invasion new horror stories cast Iraq’s own population in the role of those a Western war effort was needed to save. Iraq’s government was far from the most humane in its treatment of dissent, as perhaps best demonstrated by its large-scale chemical attacks on Kurdish villages in the 1980s for which it had received full U.S. support. Its post-1980s practices, namely various forms of torture, were hardly sufficient to evoke an extreme enough reaction overseas, both because such practices were almost unanimous in the Arab world and extremely common in much of the third world, and because the U.S. and Britain themselves were known to be severely torturing suspected jihadists at the time. Indeed, several of America’s own victims were tortured to death at various ‘black sites’ across the world, and many including U.S. citizens were arrested and held indefinitely without trial. Iraq’s abuses thus had to be portrayed as out of the ordinary, and shown to be particularly grotesque.

The most prominent atrocity story was that of ‘Saddam’s human shredder.’ This was a plastic shredding machine into which the Iraqi president was reported by Western sources to feed his enemies into, feet first, as a particularly brutal form of execution, which was described in graphic detail. According to Western coverage, the remains of the victims were subsequently used as fish food. “See men shredded, then say you don’t back war,” the (London) Times headline read on March 18. The story itself originated in an address to the British House of Commons, with member of parliament Ann Clwyd writing a piece in the Times on the day of the Iraq debate in the House. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard addressed his country on March 20 to explain why Australian forces would support the U.S.-led coalition, he alluded to a humanitarian mission justified by “the use of a human shredding machine as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein.” “This is the man, this is the apparatus of terror, we are dealing with,” he concluded.

Citing the shredder story, the Daily Mail slammed activists and religious leaders who refused to endorse the war, stating: “bodies got chewed up from foot to head…. This is the evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops refuse to fight.” Fittingly headlined “This war IS about good versus evil,” the paper claimed that those protesting against the war were “committing nothing less than an act of treachery” for defending “a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler.” Those “fighting against a free democracy,” it added, could never be on the right side – an absolutist ideological argument. Other publications across much of the British media spectrum made claims to similar effect, with the Telegraph asserting that peace activists, by opposing the invasion, were effectively telling Iraq to “crank up the shredder.”

This alleged Iraqi atrocity, like so many others vilifying Western adversaries at times of high tensions, proved to be a baseless fabrication. As the Guardian observed in 2004: “The horror of one of Saddam’s execution methods made a powerful pro-war rallying cry – but the evidence suggests it never existed.” The Sun noted regarding the atrocity’s impact in providing support for an invasion: “Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.” It had a similarly strong impact in the United States. The human shredder story would likely have played a much larger role in shaping the narrative for the war if it had been published earlier, much like the story of Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators did in the Gulf War. As former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine, John MacArthur, noted in reference to consistencies in fabricated atrocity propaganda between the two wars: “These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago. They’ll make up just about anything … to get their way.”

Seeking to capitalise on growing claims of Iraqi atrocities and to broaden support for military action, President Bush’s rhetoric notably changed 15 days before the beginning of the war from February 23, 2003. The core message of subsequent statements was not the imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, but rather the need to promote the Western political model, Western-style liberal democracy, by imposing this system on Iraq. This ideological argument invoked the Western world’s age-old belief in the ‘civilising mission’ – which in its latest iteration had evolved into the ‘democratising mission’ – to spread its ideology, political models and way of life across the world. Portrayals of the supposed depravity of the Iraqi system affirmed the idea of Western supremacy, and the need for a ‘civilising mission’ to build a better Iraq that was influenced by Western ideology and political values.

Following the invasion, it became increasingly clear that Baghdad had no ties to Al Qaeda and no WMDs – with even its old chemical and biological programs having been abandoned in exchange for expected sanctions relief as international inspectors had verified in the 1990s. Indeed, many analysts noted that if Iraq really had WMDs, and the U.S. and its allies had not been able to get inspectors into the country to confirm they were gone, an invasion would have been unlikely due to the danger that such weapons would be used to retaliate against Western and allied targets.

While an illegal U.S. and British-led invasion in 2003 was based on the premise of halting Iraq’s WMD development, when this narrative had been fully debunked the invasion needed to be retrospectively justified with a new round of fabricated atrocities. These efforts benefitted from the metanarrative created from 1990, and amplified after 2001, which cast Baghdad as capable of practically any evil deed. In November and December 2003, as the war faced growing criticism for being unjust and conducted on false premises, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that “400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves [writer’s italics]” – victims of government massacres. In doing so, Blair attempted to vindicate the invasion by reframing it as humanitarian war. The claim was widely cited by prominent sources, including by members of parliament, and widely published including in the introduction to a USAID pamphlet dedicated exclusively to the issue titled “Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves.” Blair is quoted as having stated on November 20: “We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.” The pamphlet further elaborated “If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.”

Since Prime Minister Blair alleged that the larger number of bodies had been found, rather than asserting that they would be found, it appeared a very deliberate falsification to vilify Iraq and dissipate growing criticism of London and Washington’s actions. It was only in July the following year, after the story had circulated for over six months, that Downing Street admitted its claims had been false. Even a retracted atrocity fabrication, however, would continue to reinforce the metanarrative which had shaped public opinion to favour the war, and to view Western military action as justified against those countries outside the Western sphere of influence accused of humanitarian abuses. The saying in American politics that “voters, once deceived, tend to stay that way despite all evidence” summarised the value of alleging extreme atrocities even if these allegations were then quietly retracted. As noted by professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, Jean Bricmont in his book on the subject of atrocities and humanitarian military action regarding the Iraqi mass graves case specifically:

The lie remains in the public consciousness and has its effect if someone points out that the U.S. war has cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the immediate answer is: ‘Ah, yes, but they found 400,000 bodies in Saddam’s mass graves’…. What would be the reaction if the leader of a Third World country multiplied by a factor of 80 the number of dead at Sabra and Chatila (160,000), or during the Vietnam War (240 million) or in the invasion of Iraq (8 million)? How much credibility would he retain?

Iraq’s Fate After a Humanitarian Premised Invasion

Following the U.S.-led invasion Iraq would remain in a near constant state of instability with serious negative implications for its population. The conduct of U.S. and allied forces exacerbated the suffering, including not only the kinds of munitions used but also the comportment of servicemen conditioned for extreme violence. Representative Duncan D. Hunter, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, said his military unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians.” This statement was an attempt to justify Navy SEAL chief Edward Gallagher’s killing of an Iraqi prisoner, to which Hunter responded: “I frankly don’t care if he [the prisoner] was killed. I just don’t care. Even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think.” Claiming Gallagher was not guilty of any unique crime, and implying a prevailing norm among personnel in Iraq, Hunter stated: “Well, then, how do you judge me? So, I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians – if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians. Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged, too?” His statement ultimately pointed to the fact that only a small fraction of atrocities and war crimes committed were ever publicised, with the majority being overlooked. Gallagher’s target had notably been a teenage combatant who he killed with a knife before posing with his corpse for photos, which Hunter defended by saying he had also posed for pictures with dead combatants.

U.S. Marine sniper Rudy Reyes recalled being shown footage of targets having their heads blown off by sniper rifles in order to become desensitised to violence before being sent to Baghdad in 2003. Marines were “systematically programmed to kill,” he said. “In our boot camp, do you know how we say the word ‘yes’? It’s the word “kill”. It’s the only way you can say ‘yes’.” “We’re watching real world: head shots, footage of sniper kills. And then they’re slowing it down in slow motion, head expanding three times the size, then vacuum collapse, then brains and skull.” He initially questioned if he was capable of continuing, “because there was still some human in me,” but the extreme desensitisation to violence led his group of Marines to slaughter Iraqi civilians including children. More extreme methods of desensitising Western forces for war were known, a notable example being the junior Australian personnel in Afghanistan given civilians to kill by hand by their seniors – mental preparation for war in the country known as ‘blooding.’ British special forces had a similar practice.

U.S. Army Corporal Michael Prysner was one of many former servicemen who stressed that, much like in its wars in the Philippines Japan, Korea and Vietnam, racial dehumanisation of the population significantly influenced the conduct of American personnel. Although less well documented and arguably much less severe than in the wars in East Asia, the Iraqi population still suffered greatly for being perceived as less than human in the eyes of Western occupation forces. Another Marine recalled regarding how perceptions of the Iraqis fuelled misconduct: “If they looked like an insurgent, you did what you wanted for them…. The Marines took it upon themselves to shoot at, beat, rob, rape, kill whomever they wanted to. And that’s being proposed on the news as a few bad apples, an isolated incident.” Regarding how Marines’ training influenced their conduct, he stated “what’s inherent to that training? Well people in the Middle East are referred to as sand niggers, hajis, camel jockeys, towel heads, barbarians, terrorists. Women [as] bitches, c***s.” These prevailing attitudes which fuelled misconduct, according to him, were “all firmly entrenched in the training, all firmly entrenched in the ideology. All firmly entrenched in the linguistics and lexicon within the military.”

Speaking to Middle East Eye in 2019, British personnel recalled that rules of engagement in Iraq as well as Afghanistan allowed them to kill suspicious looking unarmed civilians – with one describing the result as a “killing spree.” In the Iraqi city of Basra anyone holding a phone or a shovel could be considered a combatant and shot on the spot. One serviceman recalled: “We were shooting old men, young men. This is what I witnessed. I have never seen such lawlessness.” They revealed instances in which, after young boys were killed, weapons were planted on them to make them look like combatants. “Our commanders, they would tell us: ‘We will protect you if any investigation comes. Just say you genuinely thought your life was at risk – those words will protect you,’” one of the former servicemen said. Some British activists alleged that because the military was “allowed to run their own criminal courts and prosecution service,” and was able to exert considerable pressure domestically, its personnel could not be held accountable for such conduct.

Although the overthrow of the Iraqi government in May 2003 left U.S.-led coalition forces fighting only insurgents with handheld weapons, meaning they faced no tanks, armour or bunkers, U.S. forces still made extensive use of depleted uranium weaponry (see Chapter 4) including in civilian areas. In 2014 reports emerged that showed that U.S. forces fired depleted uranium rounds in population centres such as Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah. From 2005 Iraqi doctors observed a staggering increase in rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by U.S. Marines the previous year, with these rates exceeding those among survivors of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As The Independent observed in 2011:

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between U.S. troops and insurgents. Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Similar effects were seen in parts of Yugoslavia and in southern Iraq after the Gulf War. Professor Chris Busby, one of the authors of a survey of 4,800 Fallujah residents, said regarding the cause of cancers and birth defects “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened.” What was striking, he noted, was not only the greater prevalence of cancer, but the speed at which it affected people. The fallout, he concluded, suggested that some kind of uranium weapon was used. The survey was carried out by 11 researchers in January and February, who visited 711 houses in Fallujah, and concluded that the effects on the population were “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout.”

Aside from their toxic effects, depleted uranium rounds were also incendiary and thus had a much greater threat of collateral damage than normal munitions. Fallujah had also been bombarded with white phosphorous which represented another serious war crime. The Independent reported: “U.S. commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties,” with officers who ordered such attacks not seeing them as significant enough to be worth reporting to superiors. A decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq after 2003, where it was already much lower than before 1991 due to 12 years of sanctions and the bombing of key infrastructure, only worsened the situation – as did the population’s fear of U.S. military checkpoints which prevented them from going to Baghdad for healthcare.

The treatment of Iraqis suspected of aiding the insurgency was similarly egregious, with many held without charge or legal access, killed in custody or subjected to severe torture. The Washington Post described “prisoners forced to retrieve their food from toilets” and produced 65 pages worth of sworn statements. It reported:

The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib [prison] during the holy month of Ramadan … pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers…. Many of them recalled the same event or pattern of events and procedures…. Most of the detainees said in the statements that they were stripped upon their arrival to Tier 1A, forced to wear women’s underwear, and repeatedly humiliated in front of one another and American soldiers. They also described beatings and threats of death and sexual assault if they did not cooperate with U.S. interrogators. Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee No. 151108, told investigators that when he first arrived at Abu Ghraib last year, he was forced to strip, put on a hood and wear rose-colored panties with flowers on them. ‘Most of the days I was wearing nothing else,’ he said in his statement.

During the rape of a boy between 15 and 18 years old, other prisoners heard his screams and watched the assault, with a female soldier taking pictures. “The kid was hurting very bad,” one prisoner said. He recalled prisoner being punished for asking for time to pray by being cuffed to the bars of a cell window and left for close to five hours – his feet dangling off the floor. The prisoner also watched a detainee being tied to his bed and sodomised by soldiers with a phosphoric light. Another recalled regarding that incident that the Iraqi victim: “was screaming for help…. There was also a white female soldier, short, she was taking pictures.”

Others recalled being beaten severely, having U.S. personnel step on their heads, and having the chemicals from phosphoric lights poured on them – which made their bodies glow for the soldiers’ amusement. “They were taking pictures of me during all these instances,” the victim recalled, and that he was subsequently sodomised with a nightstick.

Detainee No. 13077, Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, recalled: “They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn’t do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything.”

Detainee No. 151362, Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, recalled: “They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen…. They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and makes me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.”

Detainee No. 18170, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, recalled a soldier

brought a box of food and he made me stand on it with no clothing, except a blanket. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head…. ‘Do you pray to Allah?’ [one asked]. I said ‘yes.’ They said, ‘[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.’ One of them said, ‘You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped.’ And he said to me, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.’ One of them said, ‘But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.’

The soldiers told him that if he cooperated, they would release him in time for Ramadan. He said he did but was not released. One soldier continued to abuse him by hitting his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. “Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive.” After being handcuffed him to a bed, he was asked “Do you believe in anything?.” “I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ So he [soldier] said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’” Only a small portion of the evidence of abuses committed against Iraqi prisoners would ever become available to the public. Journalist Seymour Hersh, who gained special access to a greater quantity of the evidence, recalled regarding its contents:

Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib…. The women were passing messages out saying, ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has.

Rick Pearlstein recalled after hearing him speak, that Hersh “said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, ‘You haven’t begun to see evil …’ then trailed off. He said, ‘horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.’ He looked frightened.”

Iraqi businesswoman Huda Alazawi, who was suspected of ties to insurgent groups, recalled: “They handcuffed me and blindfolded me and put a piece of white cloth over my eyes. They bundled me into a Humvee and took me to a place inside the palace. I was dumped in a room with a single wooden chair. It was extremely cold.” After being joined by her crying sister and left there overnight, Alazawi was taken to a “torturing place” where: “The U.S. officer told us: ‘If you don’t confess, we will torture you. So you have to confess.’ My hands were handcuffed. They took off my boots and stood me in the mud with my face against the wall. I could hear women and men shouting and weeping. I recognised one of the cries as my brother Mu’taz. I wanted to see what was going on so I tried to move the cloth from my eyes. When I did, I fainted.”

Alazawi recalled being beaten by an American soldier, and her brother being sexually abused in custody. American guards then made her stand with her face against the wall for 12 hours, then returned her to her cell at midnight. “The cell had no ceiling. It was raining. At midnight they threw something at my sister’s feet. It was my brother Ayad. He was bleeding from his legs, knees and forehead. I told my sister: ‘Find out if he’s still breathing.’ She said: ‘No. Nothing.’ I started crying. The next day they took away his body.” Her brother had been tortured to death and his corpse thrown in with his sisters – perhaps as a threat to compel them to confess. His body had extensive bruising to the chest and arms, and a severe head wound above the left eye. Photos were shown to British journalists as evidence, although his death certificate from an American doctor claimed he died from “cardiac arrest of unknown etiology.”

After being put on a minibus with 18 other detainees, Alazawi recalled the U.S. personnel told them: “‘Nobody is going to sleep tonight.’ They played scary music continuously with loud voices. As soon as someone fell asleep, they started beating on the door. It was Christmas. They kept us there for three days. Many of the U.S. soldiers were drunk.” An American serviceman eventually broke her shoulder, and she was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison and kept in solitary confinement for 156 days in a two-metre-square cell, initially with no bed and a bucket for a toilet. Prisoners under punishment were thrown in one-metre-square cells and had cold water poured on them for hours. Dogs were used to torture inmates and allowed to bite them, and female detainees including children were on occasion raped. “The American interrogators were entirely ignorant and knew nothing about Iraqi people. The vast majority of people there were innocent,” Alazawi concluded.

Reports from U.S. military personnel, alongside photographic evidence, verified claims of abuse, including arranging male prisoners naked in a pile and jumping on them, forcing prisoners to rape one another and simulating electric torture. U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba, commenting on the photos American soldiers took as evidence of their own sexual abuse against Iraqis, said that they “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” Many of these pictures were not released, as it was believed that it would seriously tarnish the country’s image. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld commented: “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.” President Obama, upon taking office, also strongly opposed releasing the photos, stating that they would “inflame anti-American public opinion.” This decision was supported by General Taguba, and was vital to preserving the United States’ international image and to concealing some of the real consequences of Washington and its allies’ humanitarian-premised war. These very real and egregious humanitarian abuses against the Iraqi population were direct results of successful U.S. and allied fabrication of false allegations of Iraqi atrocities, WMD development and ties to terror groups, without which no invasion would have been possible.

International authority on Iraq and the Arab world, President Emeritus of the International Association of Middle East Studies and consultant to the State Department, the Department of Defence and USAID, Raymond Baker, observed in 2010 seven years after the invasion:

The consequences in human and cultural terms of the destruction of the Iraqi state have been enormous: notably, the deaths of over 1 million civilians; the degradation in social infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, and sewage systems; the targeted assassination of over 400 academics and professionals and the displacement of approximately 4 million refugees and internally displaced people. All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people. Rampant chaos and violence hamper efforts at reconstruction, leaving the foundations of the Iraqi state in ruin.

Foreign Affairs in 2012 described “the Iraq we left behind” as “the world’s next failed state.” In sharp contrast to the Ba’athist period, and relative prosperity preceding Western sanctions and bombings or the imposition of a Western-style political system, it noted:

The Iraqi state cannot provide basic services, including regular electricity in summer, clean water, and decent health care; meanwhile, unemployment among young men hovers close to 30 percent, making them easy recruits for criminal gangs and militant factions … the current pace of bombings and shootings is more than enough to leave most Iraqis on edge and deeply uncertain about their futures. They have lost any hope that the bloodshed will go away and simply live with their dread.

Human Rights Watch reported to similar effect: “The rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are violated with impunity, and those who would expose official malfeasance or abuses by armed groups do so at enormous risk. The 2003 invasion and its resulting chaos have exacted an enormous toll on Iraq’s citizens.” Taking women’s rights as an example, which contrasted very sharply with the Ba’athist era:

The deterioration of security has promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously-inflected political extremism, which have had a deleterious effect on women’s rights, both inside and outside the home. For Iraqi women, who enjoyed some of the highest levels of rights protection and social participation in the region before 1991, these have been heavy blows. Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to stay out of public life … Trafficking in women and girls in and out of the country for sexual exploitation is widespread.

The full consequences of the invasion are too great to cover in this volume, but one result would be over one million Iraqi deaths by September 2007, according to Britain’s Opinion Research Business polling group. Approximately 40 percent of the country’s middle class had fled within four years of the invasion, with 2 million refugees leaving the country and a further 1.7 million left internally displaced – figures which only increased in the following years.

The invasion ultimately saw Iraq transformed from a recovering and stable power with considerable economic potential into a weak and internally divided nation over which various foreign powers fought for control. The weak institutions of the post-Baathist government established under the U.S.-led occupation, and foreign sponsorship of various non-state groups including radical jihadist groups backed by Western-aligned Gulf States, to which State Department officials turned a blind eye, ensured a perpetuation of this situation. Indeed, President Barack Obama himself acknowledged that the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and later the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror group, were direct consequences of the U.S.-led invasion. There was no notable presence of jihadist terror groups on Iraqi soil before March 2003, but by the end of the year Iraq had become one of the leading hotspots for terrorist activities. The eventual rise of the Islamic State was thus also a direct consequence of Washington’s fabricated atrocities and other false narratives to vilify Baghdad, including not only those in 2001–03, but also in 1990–91, which had been essential to paving the way to two devastating assaults on the country. An investigative report released by the British government in 2016 strongly indicated that intelligence officials knew before March 2003 that the invasion would only fuel terrorism and lead to instability and societal collapse. Indeed, Britain’s Defence Intelligence Service (DIS) had predicted as early as March 2002 that an invasion would lead to “political disintegration and extremist violence in Iraq.”

Although Western forces formally withdrew from Iraq in 2011, Western military contractors would remain indefinitely. U.S. personnel, alongside those from allied states such as Britain and Norway, returned within three years and appeared set to stay indefinitely despite significant clashes with militia forces loosely aligned with the Iraqi government. On January 4, 2020, the CIA assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport after he had been invited to the country for peace talks and was scheduled to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister. Soleimani’s killing, likely many U.S. actions taken in the country over the preceding two decades, was considered by analysts to be illegal, if not a war crime, and as a serious breach of Iraqi sovereignty it demonstrated just how limited this sovereignty was. The Iraqi parliament passed a resolution the following day calling for the removal of U.S. and foreign forces from the country, but the U.S. State Department made clear the following week that the issue of a troop withdrawal would not be open for discussion with the Iraqis. Baghdad was left issuing somewhat feeble protests as the U.S. launched continuous airstrikes on various militia groups in the destabilised country, and ultimately had only limited sovereignty as Western forces were able to operate on its soil effectively at will.

Chapter Seven The U.S.–North Korean Conflict

Shaping Global Opinion of North Korea

North Korea in 2020 marked its 70th year in a state of war with the United States – the longest war between two industrial powers in world history – making it the oldest state adversary ever faced by Western empire. The conflict had taken on newfound importance for Washington after the Soviet Bloc’s disintegration, with immense Western pressure on much of the world to eschew ties with Pyongyang and intense Western economic sanctions between them leaving the country increasingly isolated. With Soviet protection and military aid lost military pressure simultaneously escalated, leading Washington to come close on multiple occasions to launching attacks. From the 1990s, and increasingly in the 20th century, a strong consensus emerged in the Western world that North Korea’s destruction was not only inevitable, in line with broader perceptions of an ‘end of history’ and inevitable global westernisation, but that this process had to be accelerated. In more extreme terms, as noted by the Centre for the National Interest’s Director of Korea Studies Harry J. Kazianis: “North Korea is a stain on human history that needs to be expunged” – a statement which broadly reflected Western thinking towards the country.

Western economic warfare efforts, although pursued over several decades, succeeded only in curbing North Korea’s potential growth but not in forcing it into crisis as was achieved in Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, Syria or other Western targets with more vulnerable economies. The East Asian state succeeded in sustaining economic growth, albeit at a slow rate, and in keeping both exchange rates and prices for most basic goods stable despite sanctions that were wholly unparalleled worldwide in their intensity. This was largely explained by the robustness of the state’s economy, which before the 1990s had been one of the most developed of all Western adversaries. Data from the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization showed that, in terms of registered industrial designs North Korea was second only to the Soviet Union among socialist countries by the mid-1980s, with sustained investment raising it to fourth place in the world in 1990 behind only Japan, South Korea and the United States. High levels of technical education among the workforce even in rural areas were repeatedly observed by foreign professionals, while domestic industrial works such as hydroelectric dams were, according to experts from companies such as the Swiss-Swedish ABB Group, considered nothing less than “engineering masterpieces.”

North Korea repeatedly proved resilient not only to Western economic pressure, but also to military threats, with its emphasis on military readiness, widespread political education and a sizeable defence industry limiting options for a Western assault. In the mid-2010s a conventional invasion was projected to lead to the loss of approximately 200,000 American military personnel, while other reports indicated that the Pentagon could expect a loss of up to 500,000 troops under its command within 90 days of the outbreak of war. These figures did not account for North Korean weapons of mass destruction or its ability to deliver them to U.S. territories such as Guam or Hawaii. The price of military action grew considerably further from 2017 after the ability to strike cities across the U.S. mainland with thermonuclear warheads was demonstrated in Korean weapons tests and confirmed by American intelligence. In a war with the country a victory for U.S. and allied forces was considered far from assured, and the eradication of cities across the American mainland was a significant possibility.

Facing limitations in their ability to impose military and economic pressure on North Korea, the U.S. and its partners capitalised on their tremendous advantages in controlling the global information space to launch complementary campaigns on a third front. These included not only efforts to spread Western-favoured political narratives among North Korea’s population through radio broadcasts among other means, but also to promote a negative image of the country overseas. Unlike Iraq in 1991 or Libya in 2011, where intense atrocity fabrication over a period of several months or even days was used to rapidly reshape international public opinion in preparation for war, in the Korean case atrocities and other misconduct were fabricated over decades to mould world opinion over time. The low likelihood of an imminent hot war, and very long span of cold conflict, created conditions for which this kind of information campaign was ideal.

Western efforts in the information space have served to seriously tarnish North Korea’s image, to portray its population as better off if their country were brought under Western influence, and to help cast any prospective Western assault as a justified humanitarian endeavour. As North Korea in many ways represents the epitome of rejection of westernisation, discrediting its policy direction as an alternative to submission to Western hegemony and preventing the emergence of any kind of North Korean soft power are other notable achievements of these efforts. The Western campaign in the information space has included not only the fabrication of Korean atrocities and other forms of misconduct by both in Western media outlets and by various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups, but also consistent framing of Pyongyang as the sole perpetrator in major international incidents based on questionable or non-existent evidence.

Atrocity Fabrication Through Defectors

Since the 1990s atrocity fabrication has played a central role in Western efforts to shape public opinion of North Korea both within Western countries and internationally, with North Korean defectors residing in the West or in Western-aligned states often being at the crux of these efforts. Defectors have consistently been able to derive significant financial benefits from denouncing their former homeland, with the more extreme stories gaining the most publicity, while some of the most prominent figures have gained celebrity status in the West. Although the accounts of a small number of defectors have served as the most essential source of extreme negative stories about the country, the most influential and best publicised testimonies alleging the most egregious abuses by the Korean state have consistently suffered from serious inconsistencies.

One such defector was Shin Dong Hyuk, whose allegations of severe human rights abuses were widely reported as fact by Western press, activists, political figures and NGOs despite a lack of evidence. Shin’s life story, Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Journey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, was written by former Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden based on Shin’s narration. The title was strongly indicative of the agenda it represented – the story of ‘Western good’ against ‘Asian communist evil’ – and it became a bestseller promoted in Western countries as a key reference for understanding North Korea. Translated into 27 languages and sold worldwide, Western human rights organisations heavily based several of their reports on the country on Shin’s testimony. This testimony, retold several times in movies and documentary films, was then used as a pretext for further Western economic sanctions and was said to have “shifted the global discourse about North Korea.” A Western-led United Nations commission in 2014 – Justice Michael Kirby’s Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the official name of North Korea) – based its report and positions almost exclusively on Shin’s testimony. A member of the commission referred to him as the world’s “single strongest voice” on Pyongyang’s alleged abuses. Shin was the first defector to have his testimony on human rights in North Korea heard by the United Nations.

Choe Sung Hun, the New York Times correspondent in Seoul, highlighted growing suspicions surrounding Shin’s testimony and later concluded: “Shin lied to me and so many others.” Professor Andrei Lankov, an expert on and outspoken critic of North Korea, acknowledged that Shin had been pressured by anti-Pyongyang groups to tell his story as he did, with the hype surrounding him for years preventing an objective analysis that would later expose him as a fake. Lankov emphasised that this was part of a widespread issue, with defectors facing considerable pressure to fabricate extreme stories. Other lower profile North Korean defectors notably referred to Shin’s testimony as “complete lies.”

It was only several years after Shin’s testimony was published that its writer, Blaine Harden, himself revealed that the defector had fabricated much of his story while the book was being drafted. Shin later admitted to much the same. Referring to him as an “unreliable narrator” Harden re-emphasised that “Shin was the only source of information about his early life” which allowed the defector to alter his account as he pleased in the knowledge that it would be accepted without corroboration or evidence. Harden added that he would not be surprised if Shin made further alternations to his testimony in future.

An assessment of North Korean defector testimonies in the International Journal of Communication Ethics highlighted that “the discrediting of Shin did little to dampen the enthusiasm for celebrity defectors and their stories,” with his testimony being far from the last to significantly influence both policy and world opinion before being proved false. Western sanctions on Pyongyang and UN reports made on the basis of Shin’s allegations were notably not reviewed, much less changed, which marked a notable success for the anti-Pyongyang groups which pressured him into fabricating North Korean atrocities and supported his work’s propagation. What the DPRK’s adversaries needed was not necessarily a verifiable story, but rather an emotional and horrifying one which could be used to vilify it before the world and serve as a pretext for further hostile actions. Shin’s testimony filled this role perfectly, and there was no need for it to be even remotely true to do so.

Shortly after the flaws in Shin’s testimony were exposed another defector, Park Yeonmi, rose to high prominence through similarly fierce promotion and strong endorsements in the West. At her debut speech at the One Young World Summit in Dublin in October 2014 she dressed in highly presentable pink traditional clothing and, much as Nayirah had, conspicuously wiped her eyes and held her hand to her mouth with long pauses which gave her words much added dramatic effect. Much as Colin Powell was described as having committed “lie after lie” to portray an Iraqi threat, from advanced drones to a poison factory to false claims regarding aluminium tubes, so too did Park Yeonmi commit falsehood after falsehood to the record. Much as Powell’s statements continued to be debunked, only for him to come out with more, so too were most of Yeonmi’s claims relatively easy to confirm as false – as was clear to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of North Korea. This did not stop her from making more claims which continued to be widely publicised by a Western press eager for such stories, and her fame quickly became unprecedented among celebrity defectors.

Park’s false claims to global audiences regarding life in North Korea are too numerous to list, but some examples are given below. In the first line of her opening One World Summit speech she stated: “North Korea is an unimaginable country. There is only one channel on tv. There is also no internet.” For anyone with a basic knowledge of the country, who has exchanged emails with friends in Pyongyang or flicked through multiple channels showing several foreign films, these claims are ludicrous – but perfectly believable for Western audiences. When addressing the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, Park claimed North Koreans had never heard of Africa – although almost every senior and middle school in the country has a world map with Africa clearly labelled. A look at a high school history textbook shows that African history receives more attention than it does in most Western countries or anywhere else in East Asia. This is not to mention the performing arts shows put on by the many African students in Pyongyang coming from across the continent – from Zimbabwe and Uganda to Nigeria and Senegal. When Park claimed anyone with a height over 4 foot ten was conscripted into the military, this appeared to have no basis in reality since the country had an all-volunteer force. Of hundreds of North Koreans the writer has met and the dozens to whom he has spoken about the military, none recalled ever being conscripted and all were over five foot. When Park claimed there was no word for ‘love’ in North Korea, one needed only listen to one of its many popular love songs to know that there were many, and that her claim was totally ludicrous. She also claimed that there was virtually no word for ‘I,’ and that North Koreans had to say ‘we’ for everything from school – again totally ludicrous for anyone who has watched television or any kind of North Korean popular media or heard people have daily conversations across the country. Her claims relied on her audiences’ total ignorance about the country, and to the prejudiced metanarrative which Western coverage had fostered for decades.

Before the end of 2014 a number of foreign journalists, many based in Seoul, had begun to question the truthfulness of Park’s story, with freelance journalist John Power publishing articles for The Diplomat and the Christian Science Monitor highlighting her serious inconsistencies. The result, he noted, was harsh attacks on him by the often radical anti-North Korean groups which supported her. “I got a lot of grief for the story I wrote about Yeonmi Park. I pissed off every right-winger…. I wrote the story raising the questions people had about her and it got me in a load of shit,” he noted. Such attacks may have been intended to deter others from highlighting the extremely tenuous nature of her claims. Dr. Andrei Lankov observed that there were “bigger forces of manipulation at play” with Park’s rise to fame, highlighting that it was part of a broader phenomenon under which parts of the typical defector story had to be fabricated for the story to sell. “The real story of the refugee does not sell. It’s easier to create some fake stories about obligatory torture in the camps every second Saturday then to tell the real story which is boring,” he concluded.

Award-winning documentary producer Mary Ann Jolley, having interviewed Park several times, observed in 2014: “Was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t … if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed.” Jolley was one of many to highlight that the facts Park presented consistently failed to stand to reason, for example: “In telling of her escape from North Korea, Park often says she crossed three or even four mountains during the night to get to the border and describes the pain she endured because her shoes had holes in them. However, Hyesan where Park was living is right on the river that divides the two countries and there are no mountains to cross.” Park similarly claimed to have crossed the Gobi Desert from China into Mongolia at temperatures of minus 40 degrees with her mother and five other people including a baby – none of whom had any winter clothing, gloves, scarves or any guide. She claimed they crossed the entire desert on foot in such extreme weather in a single day, and when asked how this feat, which was impossible for many reasons, was achieved, she said it was a miracle.

Another noteworthy claim which Park repeated several times was the following: “when I was nine years old, I saw my friend’s mother publicly executed. Her crime – watching a Hollywood movie.” This, too, was ridiculous, with even staunch critics of North Korea including professors in South Korea and other defectors highlighting that while the country did have the death penalty, it was reserved for crimes such as murder, human trafficking or smuggling.

Park described extreme hardship and having to “go to the mountain to get the grass to eat” and forage for food “like grass or sometimes dragonflies,” “eating grasshoppers, dragonflies, a lot of insects, tree bark, plants, flowers.” “To watch dead bodies was my routine life. That’s how many people were dying from [lack of] food, and starving,” she noted on a separate occasion. A 2021 iteration of the story was even more extreme, recalling “piles of human bodies” every spring from malnutrition, “and you see children, just rats eating human eyes, first, and then children catching these rats and they eat them and they somehow die from – I don’t know what it is. Then rats eat the children back. So this cycle of us eating rats and they eat us back is going to continue and continue.” Such horror stories were very far from atypical particularly in her later talks.

Earlier in her career preceding her major debut in 2014, however, when Park was interviewed alongside other defectors on the South Korean television show ‘Now On My Way to See You,’ her mother was asked: “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju [Park’s pseudonym at the time] says, ‘Oh that never happened….’ Why is that? Did Yeju never go through these experiences?” Park’s mother replied: “We were not to that extent. We were just never in a position where we were starving.” She claimed her daughter didn’t know about any serious hardship in North Korea until she left the country, stating: “Her father did his best to give his kids a better life, so … the kids didn’t know the truth about what was going on in North Korea,” highlighting that Yeonmi only learned about such stories after being featured on ‘Now On My Way to See You.’ The contradictions regarding Park’s personal experiences, including the kinds of abuses and hardships she claimed to have faced, were even more extreme, as well documented by another defector named Park Joo.

Park Yeonmi’s early perceptions of North Korea contrasted sharply with her much more extreme claims of later years. For example, her mother stated regarding a defector TV program she appeared on, where other defectors recounted various horror stories regarding their experiences: “She calls me before and after a show recording, asking me, ‘Am I really North Korean?’ She says she has no idea what the other girls on the show are talking about. She says she thinks everyone is lying on the show.”

Lee Je Son, another North Korean defector, noted that several facts about Park’s story were clearly false. Regarding some of Park’s claims she commented “no one would believe this unless they were an idiot.” South Korean professors Shi Eun Yu and Kim Hyun Ah, who worked at the country’s processing sector for North Korean defectors, strongly refuted several of Park’s statements. “It’s not possible” they stated outright. Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who had worked and travelled extensively in North Korea for seven years, strongly refuted Park’s claims as “obviously exaggerated or plain false,” noting multiple significant inconsistencies.

Park’s narrative was nevertheless highly prized in the West for the emotional deliveries she gave, for the way her extreme claims could grab headlines, and for affirming Western supremacy by presenting westernisation as the solution to and inevitable fate of her country. She was thus strongly endorsed and promoted by Western sources because, like Nayirah, her story suited the Western agenda against a key target. Following her debut, she embarked on an international promotional tour that included radio and television appearances around the world, and subsequently appeared on a panel at the U.S. State Department on Human Rights Day to present her claims. Several journalists, such as veteran DPRK analyst Michael Basset, continued to conclude that Park’s statements regarding North Korea were out of touch with the reality in the country, and that she was using outright lies to gain fame and, in the process, tarnish the country’s image. Park meanwhile reaped a small fortune from her sensationalized speeches, from which she earned over $12,500 per speech according to her agent.

Much as public relations firm Hill+Knowlton had helped to create Nayirah as a phenomenon, Park was similarly supported and trained by the Teach North Korean Refugees Global Education Center, which was founded by International Director of the Atlas Network NGO Casey Lartigue. Lartigue was the host of North Korea Today, and his NGO was funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Congress. It in turn directly funded defectors such as Park and defector groups to promote anti-North Korean narratives. When meeting with the writer in person, Lartigue emphasised that he and his associates had the goal of nothing less than the total destruction of North Korea’s political system, the remaking of its society and punishment of its leadership. “If you met [North Korean leader, Chairman] Kim Jong Un, what would you say to him?” he asked. Answering his own question, he said: “I would have nothing to say to him, there’s nothing one can say to these kinds of people, their only job is killing Koreans, and the only way to help North Koreans is to bring them down.” He showed the writer photos of himself alongside Park, whose work he expressed considerable pride in and to whom he said his organisation had provided tremendous support, alongside other defectors, to speak against the country. To one familiar with North Korea, Lartigue gave the impression of an extremist who firmly believed that that those who resisted Western power and rejected Western hegemony, values and ideology needed to be neutralised. The support of his organisation, which widely recruited and groomed defectors in South Korea, was central to facilitating Park Yeonmi’s rise to international fame.

At the time of this writing Park had gained 600,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel Voice of North Korea and was publishing new videos several times a week making consistently ludicrous claims and frequently predicting the country’s imminent collapse or its leadership’s imminent overthrow. Examples from the first half of 2021 alone include: Kim Jong Un’s sister and many North Korean children being frequent consumers of crystal meth; disabled people and AIDS patients being executed or experimented on with chemical weapons; women being sold by the government as sex slaves to China; Kim Jong Un being secretly gay; Kim Jong Un having several mistresses and female sex slaves; among hundreds of others. An entire volume would need to be written on the Park Yeonmi phenomenon in order to debunk the literally hundreds of total fabrications which she spread to her large audience.

Shin and Park were very far from isolated examples, with notable others including:

• Defector Lee Soon Ok, who gave testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2004 elaborating on claims that Christians were tortured and burned to death molten iron in North Korean political prisons. The head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul, Chang In Suk, claimed to know first-hand that Lee was never a political prisoner as claimed, with many other defectors agreeing that Lee’s accounts were very far from credible.
• Defector Kwon Hyuk, who told the U.S. Congress that he was an intelligence officer at North Korea’s embassy in Beijing and had witnessed the government conducting human experiments on political prisoners. His testimony was key to building support for passing the North Korea Human Rights Act in 2004 to place further sanctions on the country. His story was subsequently retold in a prominent BBC documentary which brought it to the public’s attention, but a more detailed analysis by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency subsequently largely discredited his claims.
• Defector Kim Hye Kyung testified before the Canadian parliament that she knew a woman who killed her baby and sold it as pork in a market in North Korea – which she portrayed as reflecting the general state of affairs in the country. Her testimony was widely questioned by Korean defectors and analysts.

These testimonies were highly valued in the West for the self-gratification they provided, appearing to affirm the idea of Western superiority over the world’s least westernised state, as well as providing pretexts for hostile policies against the East Asian adversary usually including further economic sanctions.

Writing for the International Journal of Communication Ethics, in a study of how defector testimonies shaped coverage of North Korea, journalism educator in South Korea Richard Murray noted that much Western reporting was “highly speculative or loosely fictional,” with uncritical use of defectors skewing the world’s understanding of the country. He observed:

There were issues in the reliability of all these sources with defectors and their testimony being particularly problematic. Issues in which defectors and how defector testimony was used reigned supreme. Defector testimony was used to support an isolationist premised narrative on North Korea under the guise of human rights…. Stereotyping, caricature and lazy analysis are all hallmarks of the use and treatment of North Korean refugees and their community as a whole in reporting [on] North Korea from South Korea … the marketplace for defector stories is crowded and that has led to defectors outdoing each other to sell their stories.

New York Times correspondent Choe Sung Hun similarly observed regarding defectors: “some of them have a habit when they meet a reporter, they begin imagining: ‘What kind of answer is he looking for?’ They will provide the answer they think you want … horrible made- up stories about NK.” Efforts by anti-North Korea and human rights organisations to use defectors to manipulate journalists were widespread, he observed, and there was a strong tendency to “exaggerate and make up stories,” recounting: “I see human rights activists doing this all the time.”

Media outlets also played important roles in interpreting and at times distorting defector accounts to fit into the narratives that were most favoured. As noted by lecturer at Leiden University and head of Korea work at the International Crisis Group Christopher Green, media outlets and scholars consistently dishonestly portrayed North Koreans as leaving their country only due to hardship and deprivation. He highlighted that the primary reasons for leaving ranged from wanting to be with loved ones abroad or wanting a better education for their children, and often had nothing to do with living conditions in North Korea itself – but that this kind of story would not be fit in with the narratives journalists or scholars sought to convey. The South Korean government’s National Human Rights Commission of Korea similarly observed “a tendency on the part of journalists … distorting defector accounts of life and escape from North Korea.”

The manipulation of defector testimonies by media outlets in countries hostile to North Korea, and the use of financial incentives as a means of extracting false testimony, was attested to by defector Kim Ryon Hui in a 2018 interview with Korean-American documentary producer David Yun. Having repeatedly criticised the campaign to vilify the country, she stated:

It is defectors who say that there really are human rights violations in the North, but we have to examine defectors very closely. There is a TV show called Now On My Way to See You in South Korea. It’s a show starring defectors and their stories…. When you watch this show and all its star defectors, you will watch with tears running down your face. ‘North Korea has to be destroyed.’ ‘We must liberate North Koreans and given them freedom.’ It will make you say things like that…. However, partition [of Korea] means that news from the other side is not told truthfully. Instead, the prolonged [Korean] war creates a need to distort truth and tell lies. The people who need war are creating this. Now On My Way to See You airs four times a month … two days of shooting makes four episodes for a month. The pay for two days of work is $2000. No worker, no matter who they are, if they had a job that pays $2000 for 2 days, what would they do? They would try their best to hold on to that job. But ‘the North lives in extreme poverty,’ ‘we starve and shiver’ – just these testimonies won’t keep you on the show. It’s more difficult than keeping a job at Samsung or those huge corporations. You’re going to need more of ‘I was so hungry I ate a human being,’ ‘I gave birth to a baby, but because he’s disabled the government buried him alive.’ Only these kinds of testimonies can get you a place on the show. I have a friend that got a call from Now On My Way to See You staff. This friend was caught three times while trying to live in China and was caught by Chinese authorities each time. And when the show found out they called and asked my friend if he could join the cast. ‘We heard you were caught three times. All you have to do is tell us the story,’ they said. So my friend replied ‘I have no idea what other defectors are talking about on your show. I was caught three times [and returned to North Korea], but I never have experienced what the defectors claim on your show. I don’t know what country they’re talking about.’ Then, the show staff member said: ‘Sir, you can’t say that kind of stuff.’ Then added: ‘Don’t worry we will give you a script. All you have to do is read it out loud’…. So the show has a pre-made script at the ready, and when the defector doesn’t know what to say the script is given to fill the space. So they take a kernel of truth like my friend who did get caught three times and when they take that and pile lies on top of it – it becomes the new reality. It becomes the new truth. I think this is very unfortunate.

A defector interviewed under the name Mr. Choi, who also lived in South Korea, similarly referred to North Koreans who made inflated claims about unfathomable human rights abuses and horrors in the north as “the defectors who just read aloud the NIS’ fictions” – the NIS (National Intelligence Service) being South Korea’s chief intelligence agency equivalent to the CIA. “These guys don’t work for money; they don’t work in factories or companies. They talk for money,” he concluded.

While the allure of fame and fortune motivated some defectors to seek celebrity status with extreme testimonies, the need to subsist in South Korea was also a significant motivator since northerners earned significantly less money than locals, faced discrimination in employment, education and healthcare access, and often struggled to adapt to life. The fact that defectors and their children residing in Seoul have been known in extreme cases to die of starvation was an important indicator of this. Statistics ranging from defectors’ unemployment rates to high school dropout rates among their children further demonstrated this, making sensationalist reporting an attractive avenue to escape poverty. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov, a leading fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for Far Eastern Studies Korean Studies Centre, was among those to observe to this effect: “The media has enough materials about how difficult they find it to adapt in the South and that they are considered second-class citizens there. One of the few ways to get more is to actively participate in propaganda against North Korea, telling the public not so much what is really going on, but what is desired to be heard. And as the competition is high, it is necessary to tell something particularly terrible and become the author of an ‘exclusive rumor.’”

Senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Melbourne Song Jiyoung similarly observed:

Cash payments in return for interviews with North Korean refugees have been standard practice in the field for years…. A government official from the South Korean Ministry of Unification told me the range of fees could vary wildly, from $50–500 per hour, depending on the quality of information. But this practice raises a difficulty: how does the payment change the relation between a researcher and an interviewee, and what effect will it have on the story itself? This practice also drives the demand for ‘saleable stories’: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee.

Song highlighted that defectors “have become well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. Whether speaking to the UN, U.S. Congress or western media, the questions are the same every time: why did you leave North Korea, and how terrible is it?” He added that “first-person testimonies have become the norm, and have increasingly come to involve younger victims with more tragic, dramatic, visual and emotional accounts.” With cross-examination and by consulting multiple sources being highly time-consuming, he noted, unverified information was often accepted at face value to satisfy the demand for extreme headlines.

In my 16 years studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, some intentional omission and occasionally, some lies … many refugees say they feel pressured for defector stories. Ahn Myung Chol, a former prison guard at Camp 22, said people liked shocking stories and these so-called ‘defector-activists’ were merely responding to this desire. Chong Kwang-il, a former prisoner at Camp 15, said the fame brought by media exposure trapped them, forcing them to reproduce a certain narrative.

Song noted that the accuracy of testimonies often mattered little to activists and those who were receiving them so long as they portrayed North Korea negatively. These false testimonies had very real consequences. U.S. legislation including the North Korea Human Rights Act, and subsequent much harsher measures passed under the Obama administration, were overwhelmingly reliant on the oral accounts of defectors to provide justification. The same was true for the 2013 UN Commission of Inquiry into human rights in North Korea which launched a report that overwhelmingly relied on defector testimony.

It was not only the claims defectors which were fabricated, but in many cases also the claims that any defection had occurred at all. The most prominent example was the extreme coercion used to force Korean prisoners of war to refuse repatriation during the Korean War (see Chapter 2). A more recent example was the case of 12 North Korean waitresses employed in China, who were reported to have sought asylum in South Korea in 2016. At a time of high tensions, this was widely hailed by Western media outlets as yet another sign of the disillusionment of North Korea’s population with their country and its leadership. While Pyongyang continued to insist that its waitresses had been kidnapped, publicising interviews with their bereaved families, these claims were inevitably dismissed in the West as propaganda. With the inauguration of a new administration in South Korea in 2017, however, it emerged the following year that the waitresses had indeed been kidnapped by South Korean intelligence, reportedly on personal orders of President Park Geun Hye, and that they wished to return home. The women had been denied access to the press or lawyers to prevent this from becoming known. Only after being reported in South Korean media was this later re-reported by a number of Western outlets, although seven years later the women remain in custody and unable to return. Many other supposed defectors claimed to have been similarly coerced or tricked into moving to South Korea from China and were prevented from returning, although this was very seldom reported as it contradicted the Western narrative of the North as near unliveable and as a country-sized prison.

For Western efforts to vilify Pyongyang it was an inconvenient truth that significant numbers of defectors sought to return to North Korea, with most prohibited from leaving South Korea although some succeeded. Indeed, the numbers seeking to return to their country after experiencing life in the South rose throughout the 2010s. As one North Korean living in Seoul, Kwon Chol Nam, said when interviewed in 2017: “even though North Korea is poorer, I felt more free there. Neighbours and people help each other and depend on each other. Life is simpler there and here they are just slaves to money.” Kwon was arrested by South Korean police for attempting to return home, and his case was far from exceptional. Indeed, on the very day that Kwon’s interview was published, a UN human rights hearing on North Korea held in Seoul was interrupted by a tearful defector, Kim Ryon Hui, who begged to be allowed to return home after having repeatedly attempted to leave the South for years. This reality undermined efforts to portray the North Korean state as one committing untold horrors within its borders, and was carefully omitted from Western reporting. Also omitted were the rewards offered by South Korea of up to $860,000 per person, depending on circumstances, for defections.

North Korea in the Western Press

Beyond defector testimonies, efforts to vilify North Korea have relied heavily on Western media outlets and various anti-Pyongyang human rights groups’ fabrication or misrepresentation of information. Several Western journalists have attested to the unreliability of major outlets’ reporting on the country, with Max Fisher from the Washington Post writing that when covering North Korea: “almost any story is treated as broadly credible, no matter how outlandish or thinly sourced.” Isaac Stone-Fish wrote in Foreign Policy that: “as an American journalist you can write almost anything you want about North Korea and people will just accept it.” He admitted to having done the same himself, detailing a severe North Korean drug epidemic without evidence which later proved to be entirely false. A study published in the International Journal of Communication Ethics by Richard Murray observed accordingly: “North Korea’s isolation has resulted in an ‘anything goes’ approach to reporting on the nation that would not be acceptable in covering any other country.” The Telegraph similarly noted: “when it comes to covering news about the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ it seems that sometimes the rule book is thrown out the window.” A report from Business Insider came to much the same conclusion – that almost any story depicting the country negatively was generally accepted in Western press.

Korean Studies professor at Colombia University and prominent expert on North Korea, Charles Armstrong, referred to the country’s post-Cold War isolation as having “served in the West as a blank screen on which many – often mutually contradictory – fears and fantasies have been projected.” One way this manifested was in common fabricated reports of executions carried out by the Korean state, with Western reports that high profile North Korean figures from leading pop singers to generals were ordered killed consistently followed by reappearances by the same supposedly dead figures on camera. An example was CNN’s report in May 2015, which it framed as revealing “the ugly truth about the regime,” alleging that Chairman Kim Jong Un had personally ordered his aunt Kim Kyong Hui to be poisoned and killed. The killing of an elderly family member by the leader of one of the West’s main adversaries was subsequently widely re-reported by Western news outlets, and as was often the case defectors were cited as the source. Mrs. Kim was very much alive, however, went on to make a public appearance in January 2020.

Another example was the report in 2013 that famous North Korean singer Hyon Song Wol not only had been arrested, but was secretly the former girlfriend of Chairman Kim who had then ordered her execution by firing squad along with 11 other entertainers. Widespread reports in Western media outlets surrounding the story included an extramarital affair by the Korean leader and the much older singer, Hyon and other singers trading in sex tapes, and several other claims which, although appearing ridiculous to those familiar with North Korea, were believable enough for public consumption. Hyon’s fame as a symbol of Korean performing arts, and her frequent singing of national songs at major events, meant she was a particularly attractive target for a fabricated story involving pornography and execution for those seeking to tarnish North Korea’s image. She reappeared on television several months after her supposed execution, however, and subsequently performed several times including on goodwill visits to South Korea in 2018 with no sign of any veracity to the allegations made.

Serbian volleyball coach Branislav Moro, who trained North Korea’s national team, noted as an example of the near complete detachment of Western reporting from reality that major Western media outlets had reported on the executions of North Korean athletes as punishment for their failure to win medals at international competitions. Moro stated: “for example, I sit right next to one of those ‘killed’ athletes and I’m too ashamed to tell him that he’s supposed to be dead. I even used my cell phone to check on the internet to confirm his identity. Basically, there is very little truthful information out there.” Moro stressed that this was indicative of a wider phenomenon under which Western press’ fabricated stories of misconduct by the Korean state served to harm its international image.

Another notable prior example was the reporting by a number of Western organisations, most prominently the Washington-based Human Rights Without Frontiers, regarding the fate Korean defector Yu Tae Jun. Yu had defected to South Korea and received southern citizenship, but later returned to find his wife. The rights group’s report stated:

In June of last year he is known to have been executed in South Hamyong Province in North Korea. It is known that the North Korean government executed many former North Koreans, however this is the first time that the victim has actually been identified. In addition, due to the fact that Mr. Yu was a South Korean citizen, the repercussions for this incident are expected to be large. Mr. Yu was publicly executed in front of a group of North Korean citizens. It is known that he was charged with going to South Korea and committing treason against the Pyongyang government.”

“By all accounts,” seconded prominent British rights expert Aidan Foster-Carter, “he’s now very dead – at just 33.” Western and South Korean media were quick to pick up on this execution, with prominent Seoul-based paper Chosun Ilbo reporting on it on ten separate occasions.

After reports of his public execution had circulated in Western press for some months, the “now very dead” Yu Tae Jun gave a press conference in North Korea on June 12, 2001. He subsequently returned to South Korea in 2002, having been fully pardoned for his defection by Pyongyang. Yu’s mother, Ahn Chong Suk, stated regarding the circumstances of his return: “I heard from my son that the North Korean leader directed my son’s pardon on April 30 last year by saying that a man who loves his wife also loves the fatherland.” She nevertheless cautioned her son to lie about the circumstances of his return because otherwise “it might make [North Korean leader Chairman] Kim Jong Il look good.” Yu’s case was far from an exceptional one in terms of the coverage it received from Western human rights groups and media outlets. False reports of executions went as far as the claim in 2019 by leading British papers, citing anonymous sources, that a North Korean general had been executed by being thrown in piranha tank built specifically for such killings. This fit in with reports in Western press over several years of a range of other execution methods, consistently based on anonymous sources, ranging from feeding to tigers and dogs to blasts with anti-aircraft artillery.

Perhaps the leading media source of extreme fabricated stories on North Korea was Radio Free Asia (RFA), a U.S. government-funded non-profit broadcasting corporation with the stated purpose of “advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy.” One of its most widely circulated and spectacular stories in the early years of Kim Jong Un’s leadership was that the new leader had “fed his uncle to dogs” – a story widely re-reported in Western news outlets which proved to be entirely false. RFA was a leading producer of fabricated stories either alleging severe North Korean government abuses of its population or claiming the state had instituted absurd new policies. Another notable example was a report shortly after Chairman Kim’s accession that all men in North Korea were required by law to copy his exact haircut – which was similarly re-reported as fact without evidence or corroboration. As was very often the case with RFA stories in particular, it turned out to be entirely false. Foreign businessmen and NGO workers in Pyongyang at the time all contradicted the story – in the words of the director of Singapore-based NGO Choson Exchange it was “just stupid.” In 2017 RFA reported that the Chinese Foreign Ministry had advised all its citizens to immediately evacuate North Korea for their safety, and while some who heard the broadcast did evacuate there was no record of such a warning ever being issued. The ministry subsequently had to release a statement denying the report which it referred to as Fake News.

RFA retained close ties to U.S. intelligence from its foundation, and was referred to by the New York Times as a “CIA broadcasting venture” established during the Cold War as part of a generously funded agency propaganda network alongside Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Free Cuba Radio and several others. By fabricating stories misrepresenting and demonising North Korea, the state-funded outlet advanced U.S. foreign policy goals by depicting America’s oldest state adversary as a pariah and exacerbating tensions around it.

Alongside outright fabrications, news from North Korea was often misrepresented in Western reporting with similar results. An example was a report in 2012 that Pyongyang had claimed to have discovered a “unicorn lair.” This was again widely re-reported by Western media outlets and was one of many fabricated stories to appear in the New York Times–endorsed bestselling guide to the country titled North Korea, Unmasking Three Generations of Madmen. The original Korean statement announced the discovery of an archaeological site associated with the ancient capital of King Dongmyeong of Gogurye, a poetic term for which is “kiringul” – a unicorn lair.

Complementing Western reporting vilifying the DPRK, positive imagery of the state was consistently depicted either as a façade or censored entirely. The blocking of North Korean-run or pro-North Korean media content by American social media platforms such as YouTube represented only part of the picture. A prominent article written for the German Institute of Global Area Studies by researchers David Shim and Dirk Nabers regarding portrayals of North Korea in the West concluded that positive images were tightly and effectively censored. “Images of North Korea showing its military ‘strength’ and internal ‘weakness’ are highlighted as idiosyncratic aspects to emphasise its Otherness. The use of images marks North Korea in particular ways, which separate ‘them’ from ‘us’… A good example of what is made almost invisible in Western representations of North Korea is smiling or joyful ordinary North Korean people,” they concluded.

One seemingly trivial but significant example of suppression of positive imagery of North Korea was the response to the popular apolitical video blog by British traveller Louis Cole, which focused on the quality of attractions such as its fun karaoke and water parks and the kind local people. When the videos’ popularity risked undermining predominant Western portrayals of North Korea, Cole was heavily criticised by organisations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch for failing to speak negatively about the country’s politics, and was even widely accused of being a paid agent of Pyongyang. Cole was instead expected to describe the country in line with the way its image had been constructed in the West – an invisible “true North Korea” never seen on camera but which Western sources insisted represented the reality of the country: one where seemingly happy and well fed people were supposedly secretly starving and miserable behind closed doors.

The extent to which positive aspects and achievements of North Korea were denied or dismissed, based on the supposition that the country must actually look different in secret, reflected the strength of the metanarrative the Western world had constructed which predisposed populations exposed to its media to dismiss positive stories and accept negative ones. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov observed to this effect:

the author sees one more aspect associated with the fundamental demonisation of the DPRK as the Land of Darkness. After all, from the standpoint of the demonising propagandists, such a state is fundamentally unable to create something positive, especially something aimed at improving the living standards of the population…. If something is noticed there which is along the lines of improving the living standards of the population, it is propaganda, and the actual situation does not work that way. If they invent something useful, that is not actually their own invention, they just stole it. If something is built there, then the building has been erected on the bones of countless prisoners, or it has something to do with the Potemkin village.

Even in supposedly apolitical content, North Korea could very seldom be mentioned in the West without harsh rebuke. Whether it be a travel guide, an art gallery or a collection of mountain scenery there was almost always additional commentary labelling it as something along the lines of the “most vicious, paranoid, murderous dictatorship” – as a British book on flag designs referred to it. This is not only indicative of the degree of animosity felt in the Western world towards its oldest adversary – but also an almost total inability to view it apolitically.

Sinking a South Korean Warship: An Attack That Never Happened

As tensions between Pyongyang and Washington increased in the 2010s North Korea was increasingly accused of launching attacks based on dubious evidence. This served to provide additional pretext both for U.S. involvement in East Asia, furthering the goals of the Obama administration’s Pivot to Asia initiative, and for placing additional pressure on Pyongyang.

On March 26, 2010, the South Korean Navy Pohang Class corvette ROKS Cheonan sank during anti-submarine warfare exercises killing 46 seamen onboard. The incident was initially widely blamed by families of the dead on the incompetence of the Navy, but some weeks later local media began to speculate that North Korea may have been to blame. Evidence at the time was highly questionable – namely citing an unnamed NGO representative who said he received a call from a North Korean officer of high rank boasting that he had orchestrated the entire operation to target the Cheonan. When it was pointed out that there were no traces of North Korean submarines in the area, as verified by its very close monitoring by specialised anti-submarine warfare assets, a number of media outlets then claimed that if it was not North Korea’s navy then its saboteur bombers must have been responsible. Some Japanese and Russian outlets meanwhile claimed the corvette was sunk by an American submarine, and that Seoul was concealing the truth by blaming the North. Such allegations were supported by notoriously high rates of friendly fire accidents in the U.S. Military, and it was confirmed that American submarines had been present. No evidence was presented, however, to prove the U.S. had been the perpetrator.

With a new administration in Seoul officially seeking to abandon the previous policy of rapprochement with Pyongyang, the spinning of the Cheonan incident as a North Korean plot not only shielded Seoul, the Navy and the U.S. from criticism, but also provided pretext for a policy shift. Experts nevertheless continued to support the conclusion that the sinking was caused by an accident rather than a North Korean attack, with South Korean Defence Minister Kim Tae Young suggesting that one of the many mines placed by South Korean forces in the 1970s was responsible. Citing interviews with surviving crew who had been operating the frigate’s sensors as evidence refuting the torpedo theory, he called reports of a northern torpedo attack “unfounded.” A commission of six nations, all but the ROK being Western states, itself concluded on May 7 that the corvette was most likely “destroyed by a torpedo made in Germany” – a weapon widely employed by South Korean submarines to which North Korea did not have access. The commission’s report led to speculation that friendly fire may have been to blame. This conclusion, too, was called into question, as the torpedo’s remains were corroded which led experts to believe they must have been submerged for several years.

The only evidence offered that the torpedo was North Korean was a “No. 1” inscribed in purple marker on one of the parts. This proved wholly insubstantial and led to widespread satirical responses in South Korea – the most prominent being the photo-shopping of iPhones with the same “No. 1” as supposed evidence that they too were North Korean. As University of Virginia professor Lee Seunghun observed: “You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea. The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press.”

Dr. Suh Jae Jung, a political analyst at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C., was among many experts who argued that the evidence cited in no way proved North Korea had attacked the Cheonan. The biggest inconsistency, he argued, was the white powder found on the warship which could not have resulted from such an explosion. Experiments replicating the chemical process showed that the powder was rust from water exposure over time. He claimed instead that the Cheonan was most likely sunk by an older South Korean mine – as the defence minister had originally stated. Dr. Konstantin Asmolov independently assessed in detail the circumstances of the Cheonan’s sinking which effectively ruled out a North Korean attack. Noting that the warship was “specifically designed to hunt enemy submarines,” he stated:

It is strange that in the close-combat conditions, and low (15–20m) depths in the area of the tragedy, its crew not only did not find an enemy ship, but also could not detect any torpedo firing. In such a case, the enemy boat as described above had to overtake the ASW [anti-submarine warfare] barrier deployed near the border, make its way unnoticed into the waters off the island of Baengnyeong teeming with enemy ships, submarines and aircraft, then discreetly attack the corvette, sink it with the very first torpedo, and then safely leave, avoiding other anti-submarine ships and helicopters…. The question of how it [the alleged North Korean submarine] managed to remain undetected during the exercise and sink a vessel intended for combatting enemy submarines remained open, but that no longer bothered anyone.

The likelihood of such a trajectory by a North Korean torpedo seemed highly implausible if not impossible. Asmolov called the chances of this happening “miraculous,” and was hardly alone in reaching this conclusion. As observed in the Japanese Asia-Pacific Journal:

The Cheonan was a patrol boat whose mission was to survey with radar and sonar the enemy’s submarines, torpedoes, and aircraft…. If North Korean submarines and torpedoes were approaching, the Cheonan should have been able to sense it quickly and take measures to counterattack or evade. Moreover, on the day the Cheonan sank, U.S. and ROK [Republic of Korea – the official name of South Korea] military exercises were under way, so it could be anticipated that North Korean submarines would move south to conduct surveillance. It is hard to imagine that the Cheonan sonar forces were not on alert.”

Prominent South Korean papers similarly stressed the low likelihood that a submarine could have operated undetected by the Cheonan and other surveillance assets deployed by both U.S. and South Korean forces in a state of high combat readiness. Director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Scott Snyder cited similar facts and voiced serious doubts regarding the narrative of a North Korean attack.

Further inconsistencies with the narrative of North Korean culpability were widely highlighted by South Korean official sources, from Defence Ministry Official Kim Chul Woo and investigative panel member Shin Sang Cheol to lawmaker Lee Jung Hee and former senior presidential secretary Park Seon Won, among others. Many were openly prosecuted by the state on the basis that they were spreading “groundless rumours,” which carried with it the serious charge of undermining national security and thus deterred others from voicing scepticism or carrying out their own independent assessments. Shin had noted regarding his own findings during the investigation: “I couldn’t find the slightest sign of an explosion. The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn’t even find dead fish in the sea.” He presented considerable evidence for his claim that the ship had run aground and collided with another vessel, concluding that what had occurred was nothing more than “a simple traffic accident at sea.” The Defence Ministry responded by asking the National Assembly to eject Shin from the panel for “creating public mistrust” in the investigation.

Lee Jung Hee was sued for defamation by the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff for pointing out, in a speech before the national assembly, that the feed from a thermal observation device showing the moment the warship’s stern and bow split apart, which would have indicated how the incident occurred, was being purposefully withheld. Former secretary Park, meanwhile, was charged with libel for simply requesting greater transparency and expressing doubts about the official narrative, stating regarding the resulting lawsuit: “I asked for the disclosure of information for a transparent and impartial investigation into the cause of the Cheonan sinking … the libel suit seeks to silence public suspicion over the incident.” As Dr. Asmolov observed: “it started to become clear to experts that what’s important is not who actually sank the ill-fated corvette, but who is named responsible for the tragedy.”

The Cheonan incident played well into the hands of the U.S. and the new Lee administration by reversing inter-Korean rapprochement, and was well timed with escalating sanctions to cut North Korea off from its valuable economic relationship with the South. Lee’s administration used the incident to end almost all trade and escalated pressure on Pyongyang on both the military and information fronts. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited South Korea soon afterwards and spoke of designs towards “changing the direction of North Korea” and “offering the opportunities for a better life for the people of the North,” which based on how such rhetoric was commonly used in the West was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled call for toppling the non-westernised government there. It was hoped that the Cheonan incident would allow the Obama administration to rally greater support from other regional actors and from the South Korean public for a hard line against Pyongyang.

While it remains uncertain how the Cheonan sank the narrative of North Korean culpability, which was later pressed by the Western-led investigation team and repeated to the exclusion of all others across Western media, remains highly implausible. This is particularly true when considering the changing nature of the claims and the nature of the evidence cited. While the Cheonan sinking would have represented one of the most successful North Korean military operations since the Korean War, and Pyongyang had historically never shied away from claiming credit for previous strikes, it denied any involvement from the outset with state media referring to the loss of “fellow countrymen” as a “regrettable accident.”

A Chemical Assassination in Malaysia

On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of Chairman Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The perpetrators, two women of Indonesian and Vietnamese origin, reportedly used a VX nerve agent, and within hours South Korean officials stated with certainty that Pyongyang was responsible – terming it a “naked example of Kim Jong Un’s reign of terror.” Western sources were quick to follow, despite no investigation having taken place, and the incident was used as a pretext to swiftly impose further economic sanctions against North Korea. The extent of Western speculation was overwhelming, and leading media outlets had the influence needed to turn this theory into an effective fact regardless of what investigators would conclude. Reports in Western media and subsequent accusations by Western experts and officials focused overwhelmingly on what Western and South Korean sources had to say while ignoring the Malaysian investigation.

In sharp contrast to the Western press, official Malaysian sources never accused North Korea of masterminding the assassination. The Malaysian side announced only that South Korea and the United States had accused Pyongyang of being behind the attack, without an investigation of their own or presentation of evidence, and that North Korea had denied this. South Korean media were quick to depict Ri Jong Chol, a North Korean residing in Malaysia, as the mastermind behind the attack. Ri was subsequently questioned by Malaysian police and quickly released due to a lack of evidence. Staff at the North Korean embassy in Malaysia were also cleared of all suspicion and, after questioning by police, were no longer mentioned in the investigation. The case was effectively closed in April 2019 with light sentences given to both the women on the basis that neither were aware of what they were doing, as both thought they had been carrying out a televised prank. The official result of the investigation did not state that North Korea was the perpetrator. Claims of North Korean culpability were later dismissed as pure speculation by the Malaysian Prime Minister.

While the lack of evidence implicating North Korea as the perpetrator did not rule out the possibility of its responsibility, it highlighted the extent to which its adversaries could shape narratives and manipulate global opinion based on totally unproven accusations. Multiple parties including hardline anti-DPRK elements in South Korea and the Western world had incentives to assassinate Kim Jong Nam – whether to end what appeared to be a soft line against North Korea by the new Donald Trump administration, to frame Pyongyang, or to dispose of Kim who had been working as a CIA informant. North Korea also had incentives to carry out the killing, including eliminating Kim as an CIA asset or staging a show of force to demonstrate the reach of its operatives and its expertise in deploying chemical agents abroad. Considering that the killing was done very publicly, however, when Kim Jong Nam had regularly stayed at the country’s embassy and could have been quietly disposed of there, and the fact that it occurred at a time of potential détente with the U.S. under a new administration, indicated that Pyongyang was less likely to be culpable.

The Death of an American Student

On January 2, 2016, American student Otto Warmbier was arrested in Pyongyang after entering as a tourist. He was accused of carrying out a “hostile act against the state” after breaking into a restricted government area of the Yanggakdo Hotel and stealing a poster. Two months later he was convicted under Article 60 of the country’s criminal code, with the prosecution citing his confession, CCTV footage, forensic evidence, and witness testimonies to sentence him to 15 years of hard labour. The sentence was near unanimously criticised by Western sources, although it was no harsher than that he could have received in the United States or several Western aligned states for similar acts.

On June 13, 2017, fifteen months after the sentencing, State Secretary Rex Tillerson announced that North Korea had released Warmbier to American custody. Media outlets subsequently reported that the State Department had been informed Warmbier had fallen into a coma and was seriously ill, and he was hospitalised as soon as he returned to the United States. Warmbier died six days later, although the cause of his illness was unclear. Damage to his brain tissues from suffocation and reports of hypoxia, alongside the total lack of trauma or injury on the rest of his body, was consistent with an attempted suicide by hanging which a number of analysts speculated was the likely cause. A blood clot, pneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and sleeping pills were also cited as potential causes, and could have caused him to stop breathing if he had botulism and was paralyzed from it.

The Director of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center’s Neurocritical Care Program, Dr. Daniel Kanter, stated regarding the student’s condition: “We have no certain or verifiable knowledge of the cause or circumstances of his neurological injury…. This pattern of injury, however, is usually seen as the result of cardiopulmonary arrest, where the blood supply to the brain is inadequate for a period of time, resulting in the death of brain tissue.” He further noted that there was no trauma to the head or skull. Warmbier reportedly had had a neurological injury “for 15 months or so” indicating he may already have been in poor health before entering North Korean custody. CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta speculated that medication given to Warmbier after his arrival in the U.S. could have directly caused his situation to deteriorate leading to his eventual death.

Shortly after his death Warmbier’s parents alleged that their son’s passing was the result of torture in North Korea, an account which fit in with prevailing Western preconceptions of the kind of country it was, but which was strongly contradicted by both the results of medical examinations and the experiences of previous American prisoners in the country. The Hamilton County Coroner’s Office carried out an external examination of Warmbier’s body which, according to reports from CNN and other outlets, strongly contradicted the account of his parents. For example, Warmbier’s father had made an emotionally charged statement that: “His bottom teeth look like they had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged them.” Directly contradicting this, the coroner’s report stated: “the teeth are natural and in good repair.” Addressing the claims by Warmbier’s parents of forced rearranging of his teeth, Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco stated: “I felt very comfortable that there wasn’t any evidence of trauma. We were surprised at the [parents’] statement.” She said her team, which included a forensic dentist, thoroughly evaluated and assessed various scans of his body.

Warmbier’s parents declined to comment on the coroner’s report and refused to allow an autopsy which could determine the cause of their son’s death. They instead continued to support a narrative accusing the North Korean government of torture, and subsequently sought through an American federal court to obtain half a billion dollars in compensation from the East Asian state. Forensic scientists were highly critical of the unusual and unexpected decision not to perform an autopsy, which Warmbier’s parents did not explain, and which ensured that the cause of death would remain unknown. This decision led to speculation that Warmbier’s parents sought to protect their narrative from expected contradiction by the autopsy, thus not only supporting the hardline positions of many in the U.S. government against and further vilifying North Korea, but also potentially winning them very significant financial rewards. Subsequent moves by the United States Navy to seize a North Korean cargo ship in 2018 and escort it to U.S. territory, where it was later sold at auction, were followed by a decision by the Marshals Service to provide Warmbier’s parents with part of the receipts from the sale – a major loss to the Korean merchant shipping fleet. The legality of the seizure remains disputed.

Hacking Sony

In 2015 North Korea was accused of hacking Sony Pictures and publishing company documents in response to its release of the film The Interview earlier that year. Pyongyang had requested that the production not be shown due to its crude and at times vulgar depictions of North Korea and the gory killing of its leader. The film was widely accused even by Pyongyang’s Western critics of having strong racist and bigoted depictions of East Asian peoples and particularly women. American author and journalist Tim Shorrock, a regular contributor to The Nation and The National Interest and expert on U.S.-Korea relations, observed: “The film used every racist image and trope that [director Seth] Rogen could dream up, from the sing-songy caricatures of Asian speech that were a film staple in the 1940s and ’50s, to the concept that Koreans are either robotic slaves (like Kim’s security guards) or sex-starved submissives who crave American men.”

The Sony hack, which had seen malware erase key computer infrastructure, revealed the extent of the firm’s close contacts with the Democratic Party and the U.S. defence establishment, which had requested production of The Interview and directly influenced its content. This came as part of a broader trend under the Obama administration towards a strong emphasis on the weaponization of information and close cooperation with media organisations. Director Seth Rogen himself attested to this, stating: “Throughout this process, we made relationships with certain people who work in the government as consultants, who I’m convinced are in the C.I.A.” Chief executive of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton remained in communication with the State Department during the film’s development, and was told that it could have a real impact on North Korea. Sony was further advised to keep Chairman Kim’s gory execution in the film, as it was something American defence analysts and Korea experts believed the DPRK’s population “needed to see” and that could inspire anti-government activities.

Executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute Professor Christine Hong observed regarding the production and its intentions:

if you actually look at what the Sony executives did, they consulted very closely with the State Department, which actually gave the executives a green light with regard to the death scene. And they also consulted with a RAND North Korea watcher, a man named Bruce Bennett, who basically has espoused the thesis that the way to bring down the North Korean government is to assassinate the leadership. And he actually stated, in consulting with Sony about this film, that this film, in terms of the South Korean market, as well as its infiltration by defector balloon-dropping organisations into North Korea, could possibly get the wheels of a kind of regime change plot into motion. So, in this instance, fiction and reality have a sort of mirroring relationship to each other.

The alleged North Korean hack was used as a pretext for additional economic sanctions, and shortly after President Obama warned of a proportional response a large scale cyberattack on Korean internet servers was carried out and widely speculated to have been perpetrated by the U.S. Many experts raised serious questions regarding Pyongyang’s responsibility, and while there was evidence of considerable cyber espionage targeting South Korea there was none of significant cyber warfare efforts against the United States and, according to experts, much evidence to the contrary. As Kurt Stammburger, senior vice president at the leading American cybersecurity firm Norse Corp, informed law enforcement: “We can’t find any indication that North Korea either ordered, masterminded or even funded this attack…. Nobody has been able to find a credible connection to the North Korean government.” Data instead pointed to a former Sony employee with insider knowledge of the company. Shlomo Argamon, chief scientist at cybersecurity consulting firm Taia Global, similarly found a complete lack of any indication that North Korea was responsible, stating “there’s certainly reason to doubt the total attribution of this to North Korea.” A number of other experts, including hackers and security researchers, reached similar conclusions. Portraying Pyongyang as the culprit nevertheless did much to further cement the state’s image as a transnational threat and an easily provoked aggressor, both vilifying it and vindicating those who had long called for a harder policy line.

The Metanarrative’s Influence on Analysts and Policymakers

The metanarrative built up around North Korea proved effective not only in shaping global public opinion, but also in deeply influencing officials and policymakers. In his coverage of the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War, award winning American journalist, former Wall Street Journal reporter and president of Harper’s Magazine, John MacArthur, had observed: “the success of ‘Bush’s PR War’ … was largely dependent on a compliant media that uncritically repeated every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.” In the Korean case the reverse was largely true, with media’s phantastic depictions of what went on in the world’s least westernised country strongly influencing policymakers, while the tremendous quantities of false information on which predominant narratives were based often prevented officials at all levels from making sound assessments. As CIA analyst John Nixon observed, policymakers conditioned to see the country as “evil” could not analyse intelligence objectively and the CIA itself “seemed completely locked into its interpretations of Kim [Jong Il],” with information contradicting the prevailing narrative routinely ignored.

The impact of this cognitive dissonance was exemplified by the testimony former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who when visiting Pyongyang in 2000 recalled having been seriously misinformed by prejudiced intelligence officials. “I went having been briefed on what kind of a weirdo he [Kim Jong Il] was from our own people. He was portrayed as reclusive-like with many girlfriends and watching porno movies – basically a very weird kind of person,” she elaborated. Albright stressed that the Korean leader made the opposite impression in person, stating: “He was actually quite charming…. He was very, very well prepared, responded without notes, was not only respectful but also interested in what I had to say.” To her surprise the talks were a success. In an interview eighteen years later her impression remained unchanged, recalling:

I do think that what is interesting is how smart and informed Kim Jong Il was … he technically knew an awful lot of things. We were actually talking about missile limits at the time. He did not consult his experts. He really was able to talk about various aspects of the programs. And he spent a lot of time on it. It was very interesting. He also could be very gracious. I mean, it was all kinds of dinners and all kinds of things. But I think that he was determined to make some progress…. I was surprised by how technically adept and smart he was.

According to Albright, the success of future negotiations would rely heavily on whether American leaders recognised the North Korean leadership for what it was – in sharp contrast to what the prevailing narratives, up to and including those in her briefings, had led her to believe.

Chapter Eight The NATO-Libyan War

The West Makes War on Libya

The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya emerged from the mid-1970s as the leading opponent of Western hegemony on the African continent, and repeatedly came to blows with U.S., British and French forces during the Cold War. The country’s large oil reserves were not only located near major consumer bases in Europe, but were also easy to extract and had low refining costs, providing the wealth needed to raise living standards to the highest levels on the African continent. Libya’s wealth was also used to pursue foreign policy goals against the interests of Western hegemony, often aligned with pan-African causes, including providing training and material support for the ANC in South Africa and the Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army as well as building up its own armed forces with Soviet Bloc equipment.

By the mid-1980s Libya was a leading regional military power with the most impressive air force inventory in Africa or the Arab world and was a persistent thorn in the side of Western foreign policy designs both on the continent and beyond. Its activities included donating tanks and fighter jets to Syria at a time of conflict with the United States, equipping Iran with its first ever ballistic missiles and its most capable battle tanks to counter a Western-backed Iraqi invasion, arming and funding the Irish Republican Army against the British government, and supporting the Soviet arms industry as its best paying foreign client. For his contributions to the ANC’s struggle, the grandson of party leader Nelson Mandela was named after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, while Gaddafi’s daughter served pro-bono on the legal team representing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after he was captured by U.S. forces in 2003. Libya had also strongly supported Yugoslavia when it came under Western assault in the 1990s.

Fearing an Iraq-style Western assault in the 2000s, after the USSR’s disintegration had allowed the West to impose harsh sanctions and arms embargoes through the United Nations, Libya agreed to unilaterally disarm and accept intrusive Western inspections of its military facilities in exchange for Western security guarantees and sanctions relief. Despite the partial reproachment that followed, Tripoli nevertheless continued to seriously challenge Western hegemony over Africa in other ways. When the U.S. Department of Defence established the United States Africa Command as a unified combatant command in 2007, which was interpreted to signal the beginning of a renewed focus on the continent by the Pentagon, Libya proved a major barrier to Washington’s designs. When countries were offered payment to serve as hosts for the new command, Tripoli notably offered its own funds for them to reject it, and while this was not the only factor in the repeated rejections AFRICOM faced it was a significant one. The official news site of the United States Army referred to Libya as having “voiced the most radical opposition against AFRICOM” alongside Nigeria and South Africa, with all three being “early and vociferous critics.”

As the continent’s wealthiest country, and guided by a pan-African foreign policy outlook, Libya was well positioned to spearhead efforts to unify and increase cooperation between African states. The country by 2011 had one of the largest sovereign investment funds in the world, more than $150 billion dollars in overseas financial assets, and a much larger domestic reserve, which not only guaranteed prosperity domestically but also allowed it to support major pan-African projects. An example was the Libyan government’s position as by far the largest investor in Africa’s first satellite in 2007 under the Regional African Satellite Communication Organisation, which was hailed as saving countries on the continent collectively several hundreds of millions of dollars annually which were previously being paid to foreign operators. Libya had allocated $30 billion for the African Union’s three largest financial projects aimed at ending African dependence on external finance, and the African Investment Bank headquartered in the country was to provide low interest loans for development programs on the continent.

Libya’s most significant program for African economic integration was the creation of a gold backed currency – the African Gold Dinar – which was cited as a leading threat to the status quo of Western influence and the ability of Western parties to extract resources from the continent on favourable terms. The project was seen to particularly threaten French interests, undercutting Paris’ sphere of influence in resource rich Francophone West Africa where the CFA franc, a currency guaranteed by the French Treasury, was in use. With fourteen African countries bound to agreements providing Paris with special rights, including placing the majority of their foreign reserves in the French Central Bank, use of the Franc, and provision of first rights to major infrastructure contracts or resource extraction opportunities to French firms, the potential loss of these benefits could devastate France and the wider EU. Paris and many of its European partners were thus among the leading proponents for action against Libya and were the most threatened by its actions on the continent. As former French President François Mitterand highlighted regarding the importance of special ties to former colonies in Africa to France’s economic wellbeing: “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.” His successor, Jacques Chirac, similarly warned: “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third world power.” Former French foreign minister Jacques Godfrain stated to similar effect that while France was “a little country, with a small amount of strength, we can move a planet because [of our] relations with 15 or 20 African countries.”

When the Western powers made war on Libya in 2011 France was notably the first to strike, with leaked emails from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later revealing the prime motivation for Paris’ moves to both attack the country and to press its Western allies to join it in doing so. As Vice News reported, the French government not only had “a desire for Libyan oil,” but the fact that “Gaddafi secretly planned to use his vast supply of gold to displace France’s primacy in the region” reportedly “freaked out” President Nicholas Sarkozy. This was entirely consistent with the degree to which France depended on Africa, and West Africa in particular, for its economic wellbeing and status as a major power – an empire in all but name which was seen by African scholars to pose a continued burden on its former colonies. With Europe and France in particular having been heavily reliant since the colonial era on the economic benefits their hegemony over Africa brought, Libya’s pan-African policies, which rejected and threatened to deeply undermine this hegemony appeared particularly dangerous.

The U.S. had notably committed itself since the 1940s to helping its European partners retain their spheres of influence on the African continent, with the resulting access to its tremendous resources on very favourable terms having been a major boon to the Western Bloc’s collective strength in the Cold War. As head of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff George Kennan had observed at the outset of the Cold War, the economic wellbeing of Western Europe depended heavily on such access to Africa – a reality which had changed little since then. “The only way in which a European union, embracing Britain but excluding eastern Europe, could become economically healthy would be to develop the closest sort of trading relationships either with this hemisphere or with Africa,” according to the Policy Planning Staff. It advocated at the time

arrangements whereby a, union of Western European nations would undertake jointly the economic development and exploitation of the colonial and dependent areas of the African Continent … the idea itself has much to recommend it. The African Continent … lies easily accessible to the maritime nations of Western Europe, and politically they control or influence most of it. Its resources are still relatively undeveloped.

It was on this basis that John Perkins, the former chief economist at the Chas T. Main strategic consulting firm and lecturer at leading universities including Harvard, Oxford, referred to the campaign against Libya as “a war in defence of empire.” Its purpose, according to Perkins, was to neutralise the threat Libya’s gold backed currency would pose to the West’s ability to access African resources on privileged terms.

In mid-February 2011 the sudden outbreak of concerted attacks on Libyan armouries and security forces by unknown militants saw Libyan forces respond with water cannon and rubber bullets but refrain from using lethal force. The BBC acknowledged that internet footage uploaded and widely circulated at the time claiming to show security forces firing live ammunition was fake. In the country’s second largest city Benghazi insurgents used firearms, Molotov cocktails, bulldozers, and bomb-laden vehicles to assault and capture the army garrison on February 20, five days after the first signs of unrest. Similar assaults were reported across the country. On February 21 militants in Libya’s third largest city Misrata attacked police and army bases and seized arms. The UN reported: “Protests appeared to have escalated rapidly, however, with demonstrators attacking offices of the Revolutionary Committees, police stations and military barracks on February 21 and 22, 2011, and arming themselves with weapons found at these locations.” Libyan government forces responded by using live ammunition on the now well armed insurgents.

Libyan counterinsurgency operations quickly expelled militants from the cities of Zawiya, Misrata and Ajdabiya, before moving on to Benghazi. Civilian casualties were modest despite insurgents hiding in civilian areas, and by the end of February it appeared the conflict would end in a matter of days. The city of Misrata saw the most intense clashes between insurgents and government forces, but figures show that the Libyan Armed Forces conducted themselves well and avoided harming civilians. Human Rights Watch reported that 949 people in Misrata were wounded in the first seven weeks of fighting, of whom only 22 were women and 8 children. With over 97 percent of the wounded being males, this provided a strong indication that civilians were not being targeted. While Western media outlets and NGOs were quick to present Libyan counterinsurgency operations as an indiscriminate massacre of civilians, the female percentage would have been closer to 50, and certainly not under 3 percent, had this been the case. The fact that Misrata’s medical facilities documented only 257 people killed in a city of 400,000 after almost two months of fighting in the conflict’s most intense theatre, including both insurgents and government forces, meant at most 0.0006 percent of the population were killed. This was a very low figure for a counterinsurgency operation in the heart of a major city, and again showed that the Libyan Military was not applying indiscriminate force and was avoiding collateral damage to civilians. Similar trends were observed across Libya’s major cities. In Tripoli, for example, when insurgents targeted and burned down government buildings only one percent of those killed in the ensuing operations by security forces were female.

Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Alan J. Kuperman observed to this effect:

the regime was responding to the protesters’ escalation of violence … the image created by Western media of Qaddafi’s [Gaddafi’s] forces initiating violence by attacking purely peaceful protesters was false…. Although the government did respond forcefully to the rebels, it never targeted civilians or resorted to ‘indiscriminate’ force, as Western media reported. Indeed, early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten … the international press also reported incorrectly, starting on February 21, that Qaddafi’s air force was indiscriminately strafing and bombing civilians in Benghazi and Tripoli. Only after the war ended did a prominent article, by the International Crisis Group’s North Africa Project leader, reveal that ‘the story was untrue.’

A French doctor working in a Benghazi hospital reported that even after escalating to use live ammunition, Libyan forces were shooting to incapacitate insurgents rather than kill them and targeted the legs and abdomen. After later defecting, a high-level Libyan general similarly informed a UN inquiry that government forces only used live ammunition after insurgents began to themselves use firearms.

Throughout the conflict questions were repeatedly raised regarding who Libya’s insurgents were, how they had coordinated and trained for simultaneous attacks across the country, and why they had initiated a military campaign which it was clear from the outset could only succeed if Western militaries were to intervene in support. Some indications could be found in neighbouring Syria, which alongside Libya had long been one of the two staunchest opponents of Western hegemony in the Arab world and which was targeted simultaneously by a very similar form of attack, and by many of the same foreign actors. Both insurgencies saw very swift calls in the West for military intervention against the targeted governments, and gained considerable support not only from Western media outlets but also from major tech giants such as Google. French Foreign Minister Ronald Dumas noted that Britain had been training insurgents since at least 2009 to “invade” Syria, with multiple other reliable sources confirming that the insurgency had arms, training and support from Western powers and their partners including the deployment of Western and allied special forces alongside them. In Libya the confirmed presence of Western special forces on the ground within days of the insurgency’s outbreak indicated that it had been long in the planning much as was the case in Syria. Muammar Gaddafi, for his part, referred to the insurgents as “the traitors who are working for the United States and Britain, the colonialists.”

A report from the National Interest in 2014 highlighted, on the basis of a body of evidence that had grown considerably since 2011, that Libya’s insurgency was both separatist and jihadist in nature, stating:

The uprising in Libya began as a struggle for succession of the east – a struggle which had been ongoing…. A decisive factor in the campaign against Gaddafi was a large influx of mujahideen, many affiliated with Al Qaeda – many of whom hailed themselves from Eastern Libya, which had become a major source of transnational jihadists over the lifespan of the regime: Cyrenaica provided by far the most foreign fighters per capita to the insurgency in Iraq, just as the easterners had made a decisive contribution in the 1980s against the Russians in Afghanistan, with many ascending to pivotal roles in Al Qaeda’s central leadership over the successive decades.

This assessment was supported by the fact that a few months after the government’s defeat, militias in the east quickly moved to declare autonomy from Tripoli. A later report from the National Interest observed that the West had supported “a rebellion that was actually led by Al Qaeda militants, not by pro-Western liberals as reported at the time…. The conventional narrative improbably suggests that Libyan human rights lawyers, reacting spontaneously to regime violence, somehow acquired arms and conquered half the country in a week. The truth makes much more sense: the rebellion was led by Islamist veterans of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.” A hallmark of jihadist operations, suicide bomb vehicles played a prominent role from the outset of hostilities while Benghazi saw Al Qaeda’s flag widely waved in the streets and hoisted over the main courthouse after the city was placed under insurgent control. Citing multiple testimonies by jihadist leaders, many of whom went on to take major roles in the leadership of post-Jamahiriya Libya, the report stated regarding their initial operations:

evidence reveals that the Islamists planned the launch of the rebellion prior to any peaceful protests and then used snowball tactics, targeting a series of increasingly important security installations by obtaining weapons from each facility to use against the next larger one…. The militants initially attacked police stations with rocks and petrol bombs to get firearms, which they used against internal-security forces to acquire higher-calibre weapons. In turn, they utilised this materiel to attack an army barracks to acquire even heavier weapons and armoured vehicles, which they then deployed to capture eastern Libya’s main garrison and four air bases – all during the week of February 15–21, 2011.

Following the Jamahiriya’s eventual overthrow, these militants pressed hard not only for both greater autonomy for the eastern regions, but also for the writing into Libya’s constitution of conservative interpretations of Islamic law and a guarantee that this would serve as the foundation of law in the new Libya. Many went on to join eastern separatist movements when their conditions were not fully met. As noted in the National Interest: “At the time, Gaddafi was ridiculed for asserting that the rebellion was an Islamist plot, but in retrospect the evidence vindicates him.”

Leaked emails from State Secretary Hillary Clinton later provided evidence of war crimes perpetrated by insurgents, of Western special forces operating alongside them from the war’s outset, and that the insurgency was well known to have a significant Al Qaeda presence among its ranks. Militias with ties to Al Qaeda received training and support from abroad to join the fight against the Libyan government. This was far from unprecedented, a notable example being reports from French intelligence that Britain’s MI6 was heavily funding an Al Qaeda affiliate in Libya in the 1990s, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which fought against the government and attempted to assassinate Gaddafi. When insurgents proved incapable of capturing major targets such as the city of Benghazi, foreign special forces units and Qatari forces in particular were deployed to do the job for them.

Western governments and media outlets were quick to portray not only a grassroots revolution being fought in the name of Western political values – a serious misrepresentation of the jihadist insurgency – but claimed there was a looming threat of a massacre by government forces. French President Nicolas Sarkozy stressed that the Libyan population wanted to “liberate themselves from servitude,” and that France had a responsibility to prevent a “killing spree” by the state. France, he said, had “decided to assume its role before history.” “We have a duty to respond to their anguished call,” he claimed, and led Paris to become the first country to recognise insurgents instead of the UN-recognized government as the legitimate leadership of Libya. This fit in with the prevailing Western paradigm for portraying much of the non-Western world as tyrannical ‘dictatorships’ and ‘despots’ who stood between their people and westernisation, and a moral obligation for the West to overthrow such leaders and thus further the tide of history. Other similar statements from across the Western world were quickly forthcoming.

Dr. Nicola Pedde, Director for Middle East Research at the Italian Defence Ministry’s Centre for High Studies of Defence, and Director of the Institute for Global Studies think tank, highlighted regarding foreign involvement in the Libyan conflict’s first two months – covert at first but subsequently with open attacks by Western states:

From the beginning, the coordinated series of actions, the availability of a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, and the existence of a series of targets on the ground clearly demonstrated the presence of a plan, something which is incompatible with a simple riot. Another factor of fundamental importance has to do with the rapid reactions of certain European governments, particularly those of France and Great Britain, which almost immediately supported the anti-governmental positions…. Massive global media coverage started to disseminate a narrative of the Libyan crisis that was largely built on the idea of a violent government reaction to an attempt at a peaceful popular revolt. The primary source of this narrative was the Qatari news network Al Jazeera, which started broadcasting images of violence, destruction, rage and death on a systematic basis, convincing the European public that a massacre had been started by Gaddafi with the aim of ensuring the continuation of his power and privileges. Most of the news stories which were systematically communicated to western households described how Gaddafi’s air force was indiscriminately bombing urban areas, creating thousands of civilian casualties. Thus the message was that it was a massacre which had to be stopped at all costs, with the support of the international community.

The Western military assault on Libya was paired with harsh economic warfare efforts, to which the country had become increasingly vulnerable over the past decade as it relied more heavily on Europe for trade, with loss of access to key medicines being particularly damaging. After gaining support from the United Nations Security Council for military action France launched the first airstrikes on March 19. While Paris took the opportunity to showcase its new Rafale fighter jets, which had failed to gain any traction on export markets, the very poor state of Libya’s wholly neglected defences meant resistance was negligible – and any remotely modern fighter jet could have braved them to launch attacks. Although Libya did have the largest fleet of Mach 3+ combat aircraft in the world, a force which when acquired in the 1980s would have been more than sufficient to keep any European combined force at bay, they had flown little since the turn of the century and particularly after Tripoli’s rapprochement with the West in 2004. Lacking not only avionics or weapons upgrades, but even trained pilots or adequate maintenance, they were of no use. As Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, would lament several weeks later: “One of our big mistakes was that we delayed buying new weapons, especially from Russia, it was a big mistake. And we delayed building a strong army because we thought that we will not fight again, the Americans, the Europeans are our friends [since disarming under Western pressure to normalise relations from 2003.]” The country had been set to acquire modern air defences, which would have been operational within 2–3 years and were considered by Western experts to be sufficient to deter and if necessary seriously impede European or U.S. attacks. The timing of the Western assault was thus critical, and exploited delays in Libya’s military modernisation caused by Tripoli’s complacency.

The U.S. was quick to follow France in attacking and launched B-2 heavy bombers and F-16 and F-15 fighters for major airstrikes. The Navy fired 112 cruise missiles at targets across Libya on the first day, positioning three nuclear attack submarines, two amphibious assault ships and two guided-missile destroyers and four other warships in the Mediterranean to support operations. Britain, Italy, Canada and Qatar were the next to join, followed shortly by Spain and Denmark. More Western powers such as Sweden and Belgium joined the assault in the following weeks. Despite the almost total incapacity of Libyan defences, the campaign was cited as an example of the staggering inefficiencies and underwhelming capabilities of European NATO members – in spite of their very considerable collective military spending of approximately $200 billion and despite European states having led calls for an attack. This forced the United States to intervene heavily on their behalf to an extent it had not previously anticipated. Extremely low combat readiness rates in several countries such as Spain and Germany, understocked cruise missile arsenals such as those in Britain, or command and control problems affecting Europeans more generally, were among the many issues preventing most from contributing more than token forces. The air campaign was paired with provision of arms and training to insurgents and a full spectrum media campaign, with Qatar also setting up communications networks and deploying its special forces for combat on the ground to support Western efforts. Doha simultaneously led calls for the West to launch a similar air campaign against Syria, and was found to be supporting Al Qaeda insurgents in both countries. Western arms sent to Libya also ended up in Al Qaeda’s hands, with the terror group emerging as a particularly effective fighting force against the Libyan government.

Even before the first strikes were launched, it was clear from Western rhetoric, from prior similar military interventions, and from the clear motives behind the assault that the purpose of the campaign was not to protect civilians in Libya – who there was negligible evidence were ever in danger. The goal was instead to win the war for the insurgency, establish a pro-Western government, and eliminate the Libya Arab Jamahiriya which had been a major thorn in the side of Western hegemonic designs in Africa and beyond for decades. This became all the more clear once the first airstrikes began, as Libyan infrastructure and other targets across the country were bombarded from the air very often far from where any fighting was taking place. Strongholds of government support were singled out for particularly intense bombardment of civilian infrastructure.

Western journalists on the ground reported that Western air and missile strikes were causing extremely high civilian casualties, far greater than the Libyan government had even been accused of causing, with civilian targets across the capital Tripoli such as universities and hotels bombarded repeatedly and very heavily. European and American warplanes were described as “massacring anyone that moved” outside insurgent-held areas. British war correspondent Lizzie Phelan reported from Tripoli: “When NATO’s intensive bombing of Tripoli began on August 19th, I could hear those daily lives being robbed by the bombs and Apaches [attack helicopters] all around the hotel with the most brutal force one can imagine, while the world was being told that the Libyan people were being ‘liberated.’” Describing streets “lined with bodies” and hospitals “drowning with dead and injured bodies,” Phlean said her first-hand experience and sources on the ground all corroborated figures from the Libyan government of a severe civilian death toll – including in one instance 1,300 dead and 5000 wounded in Tripoli alone in just twelve hours of Western strikes. She documented and photographed multiple cases of civilian targets being purposefully struck which killed large numbers of innocents. Phelan’s observations were later supported by Pentagon documents released in 2021 showing that claims of NATO precision strikes and resulting low civilian casualties often had little substance to them and devastated the targeted populations.

The Western powers and the insurgents they were arming and training on the ground consistently eschewed opportunities for ceasefires. While the Libyan government accepted offers from multiple neutral third parties for mediated peace talks, the Islamist-led insurgent leadership was adamant that they “totally rejected the concept of talks.” Tripoli even offered a ceasefire deal which would see Gaddafi sidelined from power and a new constitutional government formed to include both sides, but this was also firmly rejected. The only outcome acceptable was the execution or expulsion of the Jamahiriya leadership and imposition of their own rule over the country. As Princeton University international law professor Richard A. Falk was one of many to observe: “NATO forces were obviously far less committed to their supposed protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces within Libya would be tipped in the direction of the insurrectionary challenge.”

A Massacre Imagined in the West

In a March 26 radio address U.S. President Barack Obama said Western attacks were necessary because the Libyan government imminently threatened “a bloodbath.” Two days later, he asserted “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte (N.C.) – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” While this narrative cast a Western attack on Libya as a moral endeavour to save civilian lives, assessments by scholars and analysts repeatedly concluded that claims of such an imminent atrocity were entirely fabricated and had almost no basis in reality.

Writing for Foreign Policy in April 2011, leading authority on international relations and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Steve Walt, stated: “the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Gaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny … his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured.” Although referring to Gaddafi as “a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities,” Walt stressed that the population was never in danger with threats made by the country’s leadership directed towards the insurgents and not the public. Describing the nature and motives for the Western military campaign, Walt clarified that Washington had “launched a new war against Libya. As in Iraq, the real purpose of our intervention is regime change at the point of a gun.”

Twenty-eight–year CIA veteran and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Security Studies of Georgetown University, Paul R. Pillar, similarly observed that “a warning by the former dictator to deal harshly with those who took up arms against his regime was falsely translated into a prediction of a genocidal bloodbath.” The result, he noted three years later, had been a “never endling Libya nightmare” due to Western intervention. Assistant professor at National Defence University Paul Miller, who served on the National Security Council under the Bush and Obama administrations, was another to raise serious questions regarding Western claims of an imminent massacre in Benghazi. The New York Times later reported regarding the veracity of insurgent allegations of government misconduct, which played an important role in providing pretext to a Western attack: “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda,” and made “vastly inflated claims.”

Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas Alan J. Kuperman stressed that evidence such as footage of any kind of massacre by government forces was conspicuous by its absence. “Despite ubiquitous cell-phone cameras, there are no images of genocidal violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda,” he concluded. Contrasting the European and U.S. narrative claiming an imminent mass slaughter in Benghazi to the actual conduct of Libya’s armed forces, Kuperman observed:

Gaddafi’s regime never threatened or perpetrated revenge killings against civilians…. From March 5 to March 15, Libyan government forces retook all but one of the major rebel-held cities, including Ajdabiya, Bani Walid, Brega, Ras Lanuf, Zawiya, and most of Misurata [Misrata]. In none of those cities did the regime target civilians in revenge, let alone commit a bloodbath. When the regime was poised in mid-March to recapture the last rebel-held city, Benghazi, it again threatened ruthless violence against rebels who stayed to fight, as reported.

Kuperman highlighted the discrepancy between the stated goal of the Western attacks – protecting civilians – and what appeared to be their actual objective, “bolstering anti-government forces by attacking the Libyan army, especially near Benghazi.” He emphasised that insurgents had known their only chance of prevailing was to gain Western military support, which was an objective shared by their foreign sponsors. Contrasting the situation in Libya to other Arab states, Kuperman stated: “Ironically, Obama has applied little pressure on Yemen and Bahrain, which slaughtered peaceful protesters, but he bombed Libya for responding to armed rebels. This sends precisely the wrong message to the Arab street: If you want U.S. support, resort to violence.” He strongly implied that the U.S. was “falsely claim[ing] ‘humanitarian’ grounds for intervention driven by other objectives,” as claims that the Western assault was motivated by the need to protect civilians did not stand up to scrutiny and “actually magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya.” Steve Chapman, from the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board stated to similar effect: “Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited ‘the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred.’ These are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words.” The case for war was “absent specific, reliable evidence,” he stressed. “Bush had a host of reasons (or pretexts) for invading Iraq. But Obama has only one good excuse for the attack on Libya – averting mass murder,” a narrative which was even more fragile than that of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Regarding the extreme paucity of evidence, Chapman highlighted:

Where Bush sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to make the case against Saddam Hussein, Obama has treated the evidence about Gadhafi as too obvious to dispute. I emailed the White House press office several times asking for concrete evidence of the danger, based on any information the administration may have. But a spokesman declined to comment. That’s a surprising omission, given that a looming holocaust was the centrepiece of the president’s case for war.

Highlighting the similarity between the proclaimed need of both administrations to launch attacks to avert humanitarian disasters which there was no evidence actually existed, Chapman stressed: “In 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off doubts about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, saying, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’ Right now, the Benghazi bloodbath looks like Obama’s mushroom cloud.” The Bush administration had provided false evidence based on questionable intelligence, and its successor had provided effectively none at all, in both cases to assault and destroy longstanding Western adversaries in the Arab world without provocation leaving failed states in their wake.

Citing Walt, associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies David Bosco wrote a separate column for Foreign Policy concurring with his assessment. He stressed that the humanitarian pretexts for the Western assault on Libya were false and had been based largely on speculation of what the Libyan Armed Forces would do. This speculation had little basis in reality and contrasted sharply with the military’s actual prior conduct. The ability to base claims of an imminent humanitarian crisis purely on presumption depended heavily on prevailing Western worldviews and portrayals of the world outside its own sphere of influence – namely a world of ‘murderous authoritarians’ content to ‘slaughter their own people.’ As shown throughout this work, a significant majority of cases where Western adversaries were accused of conducting genocidal killings within their borders proved to be entirely fabricated, but the weight of decades of fabrication, from the imagined but non-existent Iraqi mass graves to Tiananmen Square, built consensus towards viewing Libya, as a non-westernised state, as one of ‘those types.’ It was far from uncommon for the entire world of politically non-westernised countries to be painted in the West with the same brush. Fabricated atrocities had a cumulative effect, making future atrocities by the West’s enemies seem more believable. Only on this basis could the Western narrative of a Libyan massacre be believed despite a total lack of evidence, and considerable evidence to the contrary showing the good conduct of government forces.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had himself stated on March 17 regarding upcoming counterinsurgency operations in Benghazi: “We have left the way open to them. Escape. Let those who escape go forever … whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.” For “traitors” who continued to attack security forces, and who called for Western military intervention to provide air support, “we will have no mercy on them.” This last sentence was taken out of context, however, and was repeatedly replayed by news outlets across the Western world, and those in Western-aligned Arab states such as Qatar’s Al Jazeera, to claim that Gaddafi was somehow threatening the entire population of Benghazi with a mass slaughter. Some scholars such as Nicola Pedde claimed that Western public support for military intervention was built up “mostly because of the narrative broadcast by Al Jazeera which built on the fear of carnage and violence by Gaddafi.” This indicated a very central role for the Qatari channel in facilitating the initiation of the Western assault.

Among Arab states Qatar’s foreign policy was most closely aligned with Western interests, and Al Jazeera in turn was directed by the Qatari royal family. Among Al Jazeera’s controversies were its favourable coverage of terror attacks in Algeria, some of which were linked to Al Qaeda, and a strong general bias in favour of Islamist militant groups. Described by scholars as having “mobilised Arab support” for the NATO war efforts against Libya and Syria, leaked documents had shown that the U.S. State Department was able to directly exert an influence over its news coverage. This also aligned with Doha’s own goal of bringing Islamist parties to power in the Arab world and toppling secular governments. Leaked emails also highlighted its practice of coaching eyewitnesses to give false testimony and fabricate information.

Consequences of Atrocity Fabrication for Libyan Civilians

With NATO and Qatar waging a concerted air war on Libya and providing insurgents on the ground not only with generous funds, arms, equipment and training, but special forces to back them on the battlefield, the Libyan Armed Forces struggled to hold their own. Fighting for months without any cover from near constant air attacks, the fact that military could maintain a cohesive force and relatively high morale was itself a major achievement. As leading expert on the Libyan conflict and research fellow with the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts, Musa al-Gharbi, observed: “contrary to the Obama administration’s Reaganesque calculations, the relatively small national military did not defect or desert the Colonel [Gaddafi] until his final days.” As a result, he observed:

The rebels were able to repel Gaddafi’s forces and advance on the capital because of the NATO intervention – which began in March 2011 as a no-fly zone to protect the rebels but was quickly forced to expand far beyond its U.N. mandate because, despite small anti-government protests in Tripoli and other parts of the country, beyond Cyrenaica [an Islamist stronghold in eastern Libya] the people did not rise up en masse to overthrow the regime…. And so, the revolution had to be carried largely by the east and its foreign patrons, from the beginning to the bitter end.

Both NATO and the insurgents ensured that the war would be pursued until the country was in their hands, with offers for ceasefires or mediation from Tripoli and the African Union flatly rejected by both. South African President Jacob Zuma visited Libya twice during the conflict and made two desperate attempts to broker a ceasefire – efforts he slammed NATO for undermining. He accused the Western alliance of abusing UN resolutions to pursue “regime change, political assassinations and foreign military occupation.” These peace plans were also rejected, with insurgents expressing faith in the Western air campaign’s ability to deliver them a total victory. South Africa’s position represented part of a broader trend on the continent towards opposing the Western assault on Libya. In August after Libyan forces had held out for months longer than expected, the Obama administration sought to increase pressure on Tripoli by sending a delegation to tour key African states and press them to cease their efforts to mediate the conflict or otherwise support Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi himself, a man best known in the West before 2011 as the archenemy of Ronald Reagan when their two countries clashed during the 1980s, had for decades symbolised rejection of Western hegemony and was targeted accordingly for assassination by his European adversaries. Western powers had made several attempts on his life during his time in power, but with a full-scale war underway the opportunities to see this through had increased significantly. U.S. assassination attempts resulted in the death of his daughter in 1986, and his son and three grandsons in a U.S. airstrike on April 30, 2011. An American eyewitness who visited the site of the April strike claimed that the target had been a house owned by his wife, rather than a military compound as the U.S. claimed, and that it only missed him because he was 500 feet outside the residence.

After French intelligence tracked down Gaddafi’s location in October, French air units neutralised his convoy before insurgents were signalled to move in and finish him off. On October 20, after being captured, Gaddafi was beaten by militants and sodomized with a bayonet and with glass, then shot in the street. A leader who had lifted his population out of poverty and raised Libya to the status of a major regional power, his last words while being tortured by the militant youths were: “what did I do to you?” The Guardian referred to his death as “a spectacle of pain and humiliation.” Dozens of his supporters were also reported killed while in captivity that day, and Gaddafi’s body was then exhibited in a freezer by militants for several days as a trophy of their victory. According to Time, which justified his killing rather than capture, Gaddafi would have likely escaped from Sirte, the city where he died, had he not insisted on taking many of his wounded allies with him. He had also refused multiple offers of asylum abroad, pledging to fight and die in Libya. Gaddafi’s death was hailed as a positive step forward in statements from Western capitals almost without exception, from Ottawa, Canberra and Washington to Copenhagen, Paris and the Vatican. The response across Africa was precisely the opposite, with deep regrets for the Libyan leader’s brutal demise expressed across much of the continent.

Under the pretext of protecting Libyan civilians the Western assault on the country devastated infrastructure that had been built up over decades. The campaign “tore the country apart and destroyed much of its infrastructure,” according to Germany’s Deutsche Welle. As a result of the intensive Western air assault, and the political turmoil that followed and prevented an effective recovery, post-war Libya would for years lack reliable electricity with power cuts regularly lasting up to nine hours. Prices for essential goods and medical supplies increased exponentially, while sharp cuts to the Jamahiriya-era food subsidies left many in desperation. Britain’s Daily Mail interviewed a number of Libyans in 2016, by which time food costs had quintupled, government workers had often been unpaid for months, and water was increasingly scarce, to investigate the effects the humanitarian premised Western assault had had on the people it claimed to be protecting. One man stated: “Libya died with Gaddafi. We are not a nation anymore; we have become just warring groups of tribes.” Another, a former anti-government fighter, reflected on the way he had been misled to hate and oppose the government, stating: “I joined the revolution in the first days and fought against Gaddafi. Before 2011 I hated Gaddafi more than anyone. But now life is much, much harder, and I have become his biggest fan.” A third simply said: “Before Libya was much better.”

Another recalled: “There was always money and electricity and, although people did not have large salaries, everything was cheap, so life was simple.” All consistently believed that the country had been better under the republic that the West had torn down, including those who had previously taken up arms against it. A businessman from Tripoli who had harshly criticized the former leader also admitted: “It’s just that people’s lives are so difficult now compared to under Gaddafi.” A British woman who lived in Libya with her local husband stated regarding the rapid deterioration after Western intervention: “I used to walk home alone at midnight with no fear. But now I don’t like to go outside alone after dark. I don’t feel safe.” Residents from all walks of life and from all political affiliations were unanimous in their nostalgia for what had been before the West had used humanitarian pretexts to launch its assault to destroy the Jamahiriya.

A long-lasting consequence of both Western attacks and post-war neglect under the post-Jamahiriya regime was the damage to Libya’s water infrastructure. The country had been water scarce throughout its history, and it was only through extensive investment that fresh water had been made relatively abundant in the Jamahiriya era. The main factory providing pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes to the massive $27 billion Great Man-Made River (GMR) project, the world’s largest irrigation project which had provided 70 percent of Libya’s fresh water, was targeted in a U.S. airstrike on July 22. Key water ducts and a factory that produced spare parts for that factory were also levelled from the air. With these destroyed it was impossible to keep the GMR operational and repair leaks or breakages. The GMR project had been key to facilitating the modernisation of the Libyan economy and its industrialisation and urbanisation, and had made the country a world leader in hydrological engineering which was expected to export its knowhow and technologies across much of Africa. The Western strikes, like many attacks on Libyan infrastructure throughout the months-long assault, were serious war crimes, as were attacks by insurgents on water pipelines, confirmed by UNICEF, which Western sources had initially blamed on government forces. The UN agency reported that while water infrastructure came under attack, the Libyan government had worked closely with a UN technical team to “facilitate an assessment of water wells, review urgent response options and identify alternatives for water sources.”

By August, UNICEF reported that the conflict had “put the Great Manmade River Authority, the primary distributor of potable water in Libya, at risk of failing to meet the country’s water needs.” Christian Balslev-Olesen from UNICEF Libya’s head of office stressed that “the current situation is the absolute worst-case scenario, and a swift resumption of water supplies is critical.” Disruption caused by the attacks “could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic” if water supplies were not quickly restored. By September UNICEF reported that the attacks on water infrastructure had left four million Libyans without potable water, with issues persisting for several years and infrastructure having yet to fully recover a decade later. Much of Libya’s population was forced to rely on imported bottled water delivered as emergency aid by the UN agency.

In response to criticisms of Western attacks on infrastructure, research director for the U.S. intelligence contractor Stratfor, Kevin Stech, proposed that the Libyan population revert to relying on limited well water as they had in the pre-Jamahiriya era. “How often do Libyans bathe? You’d have drinking water for a month if you skipped a shower. Seriously. Cut the baths and the showers and your well water should suffice for drinking and less-than-optional hygiene,” he commented. His statement created a revealing contrast with that of a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority, Adam Kuwairi, who had stated when the project made fresh water available for the first time in Libya’s history: “The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering. The quality of life is better now, and it’s impacting on the whole country.” The impacts of Western intervention, under humanitarian pretexts allegedly to protect Libyan civilians from their government were the direct opposite of the effect the Jamahiriya era had had on living standards in the country – much as it was clear which party was genuinely protecting Libyan civilians and had their interests at heart.

These kinds of infrastructure attacks were hardly unprecedented, a notable example being the Western bombardments of Iraq in 1991 which had similarly specifically targeted water and sewage infrastructure. Combined with subsequent sanctions to prevent restoration, this provoked a major health crisis (see Chapter 4). NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslav infrastructure in 1999 had been similarly devastating (see Chapter 5). The Libyan government had warned on April 3 that any Western attack on the GMR would risk a “human and environmental disaster.” Engineer and project manager Abdelmajid Gahoud told foreign journalists in Tripoli at the time: “If one of the pipelines is hit, the others are affected as well, which could mean a humanitarian catastrophe. If part of the infrastructure is damaged, the whole thing is affected and the massive escape of water could cause a catastrophe,” which would leave 4.5 million Libyans without drinking water.

The water situation only continued to worsen with time, as did electricity shortages. As former foreign correspondent for the BBC and the Financial Times Kieran Cooke reported regarding the state of Libyan infrastructure in 2017:

chronic power shortages in most areas of the country are seriously impeding the operation of water-pumping stations and wells. More than 90 percent of people in Libya – the population has doubled since the early 1980s – live in cities and towns on the coast. Coastal aquifers have either been drained dry or are being tainted by seawater intrusion. Old desalination plants are in need of repair. Plans to build new ones are on hold as the fighting continues. Meanwhile power blackouts mean people in Libya’s two main cities – Tripoli and Benghazi – have to go without water for up to eight hours a day, sometimes longer. Other parts of the country, including farming regions dependent on the GMR for irrigating crops, are similarly affected.”

Political instability following the Western and insurgent victory left Libya in a near-constant state of conflict which further eroded living standards, prevented post-war recovery, and facilitated the penetration of the country by various foreign interests – which then increasingly made rival factions their proxies in a battle for influence. On June 1, 2013, Libya’s oil rich eastern Cyrenaica region declared autonomy and plans to form its own separate legislature. The region’s long history of strong separatist and radical Islamist tendencies had made it the centre of the insurgency, and after attempting to impose strict Islamic law on the whole country with its significant influence on the post-war central government it later sought separation. In September 2013 separatists in Libya’s southern Fezzan region declared autonomy, appointing a president and creating an independent military. While lacking easy access to seaports to export their oil they quickly set up blockades to prevent the central government from exporting its own. More parties quickly involved themselves in the battle over resources, often with the backing of various foreign countries, as a unified Libyan state and identity increasingly fractured. Conflict between tribes, as well as between ethnic groups including Arabs, Tebus, and Tuaregs, fractured the country. Libya became a country which foreign powers fought over, rather than a major power in its own right which it had become in the Jamahiriya era when it had projected influence across the African continent and beyond.

By 2014 a permanent partitioning of Libya was widely predicted, with the Islamic State terror group feared by the end of the year to potentially be able to take a third of the country. The closest thing Libya had to a government was itself seen to be “dominated by Islamist-leaning politicians” – a result of the jihadists’ role in spearheading the insurgency that brought them to power. Intelligence analyst at the geopolitical risk consulting firm Max Security Solutions, Jacob Steinblatt, highlighted that year that an “unstable security environment and governmental inability to enforce the rule of law in much of the country” had left Libya open for “tribal or other autonomous militias to disrupt operations at oil-producing facilities in an effort to settle disputes or address financial and political complaints.” Analysts writing for the National Interest observed in April 2014: “Since the overthrow of Gaddafi, the capital has long been consumed by fierce struggles between Islamists and the coalition aligned with former prime minister Ali Zeidan, largely perceived as Western proxies – each with their own parliamentary blocs and militias.”

Six years later the constant factional conflict had largely continued, solidifying more clearly into a proxy war in which both sides were dependant on NATO member states’ patronage. In the title of a prominent 2020 article, the National Interest referred to “Libya: A Country Up for Grabs?” and was among multiple sources to warn of the possibility that ongoing civil war would leave it permanently divided into two states.

More serious still were the widespread and often brutal reprisals the insurgents carried out once the U.S. and European air campaign brought them to power. The Western-backed and predominantly Islamist militants tortured, beat, arbitrarily detained, and massacred thousands of suspected Jamahiriya and Gaddafi supporters, terrorising the population against expressing nostalgia for the previous republic. A report by the UN Human Rights Council’s International Commission of Inquiry on Libya reflected the deterioration in law and order and the serious crimes committed by the militants. The Washington Post described the situation as follows: “[A]nti-Gaddafi militias carried out reprisal killings of suspected regime loyalists and mercenaries, as well as the wide-scale torture of detainees…. Serious abuses continue to be carried out by militias aligned with Libya’s new government.” A Human Rights Watch official characterized this behaviour as “a trend of killings, looting and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.”

A yet darker side to the new country the West’s humanitarian-premised war had created was perhaps the most serious case of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 21st century. It was perpetrated against black Africans who the Jamahiriya era government had protected but who jihadist insurgents targeted for mass slaughter and extermination, with the genocidal conduct of the militants the West had brought to power bearing a very sharp contrast to the Jamahiriya’s Pan-Africanism. Much as the Western military campaign had been facilitated by presumed but totally unevidenced atrocities, the massacre of Libya’s black population was fuelled by outright atrocity fabrication – the primary culprit being Qatar’s Al Jazeera news network.

Shortly after the outbreak of the insurgency Al Jazeera claimed that black African mercenaries were fighting alongside government forces in Libya and systematically raping Libyan women. The National Transitional Council in Benghazi which represented the insurgency, as well as British Defence Minister Liam Fox and NATO spokesperson Oana Longescu, echoed these claims, which were taken as evidence of the depravity of the ‘Gaddafi-regime.’ U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice supplemented these stories with claims that pro-government forces in Libya were being supplied with Viagra to commit mass rapes – an unfounded claim which originated with Hillary Clinton’s close confidant Sidney Blumenthal and was later discredited. As observed in the Foreign Policy Journal regarding Western coverage of such claims: “as long as it painted Gaddafi and his supporters as monsters, and so long as it served the cause of prolonged military action in Libya, it was deemed credible by network news.” The narrative built on longstanding stereotypes in both the West and the Arab world portraying black Africans as sexually potent and a threat to the chastity of European or white Arab women, as well as the Jamahiriya and Gaddafi’s close ties with sub-Saharan Africa which were looked on disapprovingly in both the Arab world and the West.

Regarding the perpetuation of this imagined atrocity Professor at Concordia University Maximilian Forte highlighted: “two of those responsible for giving credibility to falsehoods of African mercenaries landing in Libya were Mona El Tahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and a frequent guest on CNN and Al Jazeera, and Dima Khatib, Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera’s Latin America bureau chief.” He stressed that longstanding bigoted perceptions of black Africans in the Arab world, as well as among much of Libya’s population in spite of the government’s pan-African policies, provided fertile ground for this story. Forte stressed “the role of the mainstream media, led by Al Jazeera, as well as the seeding of social media, in creating the African mercenary myth,” which in turn fueled the “deadly, racist practice” of ethnic cleansing by Western and Qatari backed militias.

Amnesty International crisis researcher Donatella Rovera, who spent time in post-war Libya investigating the situation, stated in an interview with Austria’s The Standard regarding the purported myth of rapist African mercenaries: “We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence. The rebels spread these rumors everywhere, which had terrible consequences for African guest workers: there was a systematic hunt for migrants, some were lynched and many arrested. Since then, even the rebels have admitted there were no mercenaries.”

Western and Qatari backed Islamist militias adopted slogans such as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin,” according to a Human Rights Watch investigation. Irish journalist Mary Fitzgerald reported public hangings of black men in insurgent-held areas with accompanying graffiti describing them as ‘black slaves’ (abid) – a common derogatory term in Arabic for black Africans. A BBC News report cited a Turkish construction worker in Libya who recalled: “We had 70–80 people from Chad working for our company. They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: ‘You are providing troops for Gaddafi.’ The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves.” The militants who made up the new post-Jamahiriya regime did not differentiate between Libyan citizens with black African features, and sub-Saharan expatriate workers. The most notorious case was the fate of the town of Tawergha with a population of 35,000 demographically comprised overwhelmingly black Libyans, which vanished almost overnight after Jamahiriya forces retreated and it was captured by Western-backed Misratan brigades. Tawergha’s entire population were either killed or expelled, with their homes and shops burned and looted under the pretext that they had been ‘mercenaries’ and supported Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya. In nearby Misrata the black Libyan minority that inhabited its Ghoushi neighbourhood were similarly purged, with the Western-backed insurgents putting bounties on the heads of those few blacks who remained in hiding. Video footage clearly showed the insurgents in Benghazi carrying out public lynchings of blacks.

Bryan Chan from the Los Angeles Times was given access to an insurgent-run prison in Benghazi in March 2011 and was shown terrified black men being paraded before the cameras. The colour of their skin, and for foreign workers their West African passports, were regarded as all the proof needed that they were loyal to the government. Chan’s Libyan interpreter asked him: “So what do you think? Should we just go ahead and kill them?” Considering the fates of most blacks in the country who fell into the insurgents’ hands, this or sale into slavery were the most likely outcomes for the captives.

The New York Times reported regarding the consequences of the insurgency’s victory for black African expatriate workers across Libya: “For the more than one million African guest workers who came to oil-rich Libya seeking their fortunes, it has meant terror…. These innocent migrant laborers now find themselves singled out by ordinary Libyans and rebels who believe they are the enemy.” Although it strongly criticised the African Union for not siding with the insurgents and for its support for the Jamahiriya, the Guardian admitted that the result of NATO and the insurgency’s victory was an “ugly race war” which polarised relations between Libya and sub-Saharan Africa. It described “pogroms” against blacks reminiscent of Nazi Germany and concluded that as a result of NATO’s success: “Libya’s role as the ideological and financial engine of Africa has ended.”

Video footage of blacks being tortured by insurgents, including being kept in animal cages and forced to swallow the flag of the Jamahiriya, surfaced on the internet and provided a small indication of the kind of atrocities being perpetrated across the country by the militants the West had empowered. In sharp contrast to its pan-African past, the new Libya quickly saw the emergence of regular slave markets as blacks were kept in chains or cages, sold for free labour, and often given hot iron cattle brands on their faces to identify them. Black women and girls unfortunate enough to be captured by the Western-backed militants were subjected to mass rape, according to UN reports. Black men and those seen to be ‘pro-Gaddafi’ were also reportedly raped by insurgents as a means of humiliation and subjugation, and at times imprisoned and raped by militants frequently for serval years under the post-Jamahiriya regime. These practices continued to be reported into the latter half of the 2010s, with uniformed personnel from the new Libyan government responsible for frequent cases of rape against black children of West African origin.

In April 2012 six months after the Jamahiriya fell Human Rights Watch reported that the very severe mistreatment of blacks by the new authorities persisted and “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.” A report by the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry in May highlighted that war crimes were being committed against the black population. Reports of the atrocities only worsened with time. Racial divisions exacerbated by the African mercenary narrative effectively destroyed Libya’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa and thereby ended a serious threat to Western hegemony on the continent. A report by Ghanaian lawyer Bobby Banson claimed in 2017 that blacks imprisoned or enslaved were having their organs harvested and sold on a significant scale by the post-Jamahiriya regime. Other reports, such as that by former Nigerian minister Femi Fani-Kayode, made the same claims. Multiple sub-Saharan states protested and recalled their ambassadors from Libya over the abusees. The Guardian summarized the sharp shift away from Pan-Africanism overseen under the new Western-installed government as follows: “culturally, ideologically and financially, Libya has moved towards a greater identification with its north African, Middle Eastern and south Mediterranean neighbors. Libya is embracing its Arab heritage.”

The war against Libya was hailed across the Western world as an example of successful humanitarian intervention by West – one which could set a precedent for similar Western attacks on alleged humanitarian abusers in future. Strongly reflecting the consensus view in the West, U.S. Permanent Representative on the NATO Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis published an article in Foreign Affairs in March 2012 titled: ‘NATO’s Victory in Libya: The Right Way to Run an Intervention.’ “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention…. NATO’s involvement in Libya demonstrated that the alliance remains an essential source of stability…. By any measure, NATO succeeded in Libya…. It enabled the Libyan opposition to overthrow one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators,” they stated. By the time it was written, the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of blacks by the insurgents the West had supported, and the radical jihadist nature of these militants, were overwhelmingly evident. Nevertheless, it was difficult to dispute that the result of the war benefitted Western interests tremendously, destroying a longstanding obstacle to Western empire while protecting the privileged living standards of Europe at Africa’s expense and at an extreme but highly acceptable cost to Libyan and African civilians.

As observed by CATO Institute Research Fellow in Defence and Homeland Security Studies Benjamin H. Friedman, those “who championed Libya as a model intervention turned their attention elsewhere as it deteriorated.” The fallout from the campaign, not to mention the extreme lack of evidence for a humanitarian pretext to attack to begin with, were inconvenient truths for those who sought to establish Western humanitarian-premised military interventions as a new norm in the world. The new Libya after humanitarian intervention saw Western special forces continue to operate freely on its soil, occasional bombings by Western aircraft, and much of the country’s armories transferred to Al Qaeda-linked militants in Syria – where the Western powers and Qatar were seeking to apply a similar model to topple another longstanding adversary.

While the death toll from what would have been a short-lived insurgency was expected to reach approximately 1,100, the large majority of them militants and security forces, government massacres imagined in Western minds but far removed from reality were used as a pretext for a war which caused over 90,000 casualties in its initial months alone. The figure for total deaths resulting from the Western assault was considerably higher, with the town of Tawergha alone, which had a predominantly black population, found almost completely empty after Western-backed militants took it over and engaged in thorough ethnic cleansing of its population of 35,000. Indeed, the insurgents had long threatened to wipe the black city “off the map,” and its fate was hardly unexpected nor was the character of the militias the West was supporting at all a mystery. Even many years later close to the end of the decade, ongoing instability meant that almost a quarter of Libya’s population were internally displaced and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to reports from the UN High Commission for Refugees. The death toll grew significantly higher in the decade following the Jamahiriya’s fall, as Libya became a battle ground for Arab and NATO states to wage seemingly unending proxy wars by supporting various factions in the permanently fractured country against one another. In 2017, former U.S. Ambassador to the country, John Graham, called the new Libya “a completely failed state.”

The fallout from the Western victory in Libya notably went well beyond the country’s borders, and Gaddafi’s torturous death was seen by many as symbolizing the imposition of Western power over Africa. The Jamahiriya’s downfall considerably strengthened the Western position on the continent while seriously weakening the African Union, which was reflected in the sharply contrasting responses to his demise in the West and Africa. Former Namibian president Sam Nujoma notably predicted regarding the implications the Western military campaign had for all of Africa: “foreign-sponsored killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi must serve as a lesson to Africa that foreign aggressors are readying themselves to pounce on the continent.” This may well have been substantiated by the subsequent rapid expansion of AFRICOM and of the Western military presence across the continent which was now almost totally unimpeded. The decline in major pan-African projects for infrastructure and development which had brought much of the continent together were further direct consequences of the Western victory in Libya.

An example of a state which suffered was Sudan, which had formerly benefitted greatly from Libyan economic and political support, but endured isolation and gradual economic decline from 2011 under harsh Western economic sanctions. The loss of Libyan support contributed to facilitating an eventual Western-backed military coup in the country in 2019 and an even sharper economic decline in the aftermath. Other examples were Mali, Nigeria and Algeria, where Islamist insurgents received substantial quantities of heavy weapons and logistical support through post-Jamahiriya Libya, and in the former two went on to gain considerable ground from government forces. NATO’s humanitarian-premised intervention placed Libya’s large arsenals at the disposal of Islamist militias who in turn passed them on both for profit and out of ideological affinity. Nigeria’s Boko Haram was a major beneficiary, and as a direct result emerged as the world’s deadliest terrorist origination. Libya’s fall under Western assault had similar negative reverberations across the African continent, but particularly in West Africa where it directly empowered terrorist actors.

The Assault on Libya as a Model for Future Western Interventions

Despite its devastating consequences, three separate aspects of the war on Libya were cited in the West to characterise it as an ideal military campaign. Firstly, the campaign was and continues to be presented in the West has having liberated the Libyan people and prevented a humanitarian disaster. Although available evidence indicates that precisely the opposite is true, the supposed success of the humanitarian war led it to be widely cited as a precedent for the West to consider further similar attacks on states outside its sphere of influence using similar pretexts.

Secondly the Western campaign served as a model for an inexpensive war relying on special forces, air and naval assets, extensive use of media and particularly social media, and on organizing and supporting militants on the ground rather than sending in Western troops. This was frequently contrasted with the heavy handed ‘boots on the ground’ invasions of the George W. Bush era, and significantly furthered Western hegemony in the world at a much lower cost. As U.S. Permanent Representative on the NATO Council Ivo H. Daalder and U.S. Navy Admiral James G. Stavridis observed in March 2012 regarding the campaign’s major achievements: “it accomplished all of this without a single allied casualty and at a cost – $1.1 billion for the United States and several billion dollars overall – that was a fraction of that spent on previous interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.” They referred to it as “a teachable moment” which could be a model for future military interventions. As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stated, implying a contrast with the costly Iraq War: “NATO got it right. In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life. This is more the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has in the past.”

A very similar model was applied in Syria, and although less successful it still ensured that the damage done to the country far outweighed the costs to the Western powers which had initiated the campaign. Germany’s Deutsche Welle thus observed regarding the Libya model’s possible future applications against other Western adversaries: “The template of surgical airstrikes, supported by Special Forces on the ground and the covert training of indigenous, opposition forces seems tailor-made for missions where large-scale invasions would be counter-productive at best, and hugely inflammable at worst. U.S. planners … are thought to favour such an approach should the option of military action against Iran become a reality.” U.S. Senator John McCain, who would soon afterwards become Chairman of Senate Joint House Services Committee, stated that this new kind of warfare centred around building up and supporting insurgencies was “a virus that will attack Moscow and Beijing.” President of the Joseon Institute and founder of Liberty in North Korea and Pegasus Strategies Adrian Hong, who later led a violent attack on the North Korean embassy in Spain and worked in close cooperation with U.S. intelligence, stated in much the same vein following successful operations to destabilize Libya and Syria that the offensives were “a dress rehearsal for North Korea.”

Thirdly, the term ‘Libya Model’ was used to refer to the country’s unilateral disarmament in the early 2000s, including permitting deep Western inspections of its military facilities as part of the process. Upon Libya’s disarmament in 2003 U.S. President George W. Bush had pledged that the country would be “a model for other countries” in the consequences of their disarmament and reconciliation with the West. The war in 2011 and subsequent decade of disaster placed Tripoli’s decision to disarm in a new context – with the ‘Libya Model’ coming to refer to the potential fates of those states which placed their trust in Western security guarantees and abandoned efforts to deter Western military action themselves. This had significant consequences for North Korea in particular, where the Libyan precedent was repeatedly cited by a range of figures from Daniel R. Coats, the Trump Administration’s Director of National Intelligence, to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and Russian President Vladimir Putin as indicating why Pyongyang would never unilaterally disarm. Libya’s fate proved that once a Western adversary disarmed, the West could always exploit the opening presented by fabricating whatever atrocities were needed to justify an attack.