CIA watch (a few samples from website)
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_ThirdWorld.html
CIA death squads
operating in Iraq
CIA Death Squad
Timeline - Ralph McGehee
FBI and CIA Documents
CIA Diary by Phil Agee
Operation Gladio
Operation Chaos Books on the topic
http://www.subliminal.org/mugbook/index.html
by Allan Nairn
from the Nation magazine, April
17, 1995
The U.S.
government
has systematic links to Guatemalan Army death squad operations that
go far beyond the disclosures that have recently shaken official
Washington. The news that the C.I.A. employed a Guatemalan colonel who
reportedly ordered two murders has been greeted with professions of
shock and outrage. But in fact the story goes much deeper, as U.S.
officials well know.
North American C.l.A.
operatives work inside a Guatemalan Army unit
that maintains a network of torture centers and has killed thousands of
Guatemalan civilians. The G-2, headquartered on the fourth floor
of the
Guatemalan National Palace, has, since at least the 1960s, been
advised, trained, armed
and equipped by U.S.
undercover agents. Working out of the U.S.
Embassy and living in safehouses and hotels, these agents work through
an elite group of Guatemalan officers who are secretly paid by the
C.I.A. and who have been implicated personally in numerous political
crimes and assassinations.
This secret G-2 / C.I.A.
collaboration has been described by Guatemalan
and U.S. operatives and confirmed, in various aspects, by three former
Guatemalan heads of state. These accounts also mesh with that given in
a March 28 interview by Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, the C.I.A.- paid
Guatemalan G-2 officer who has been implicated in the murders of
Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez and a U.S. citizen,
Michael DeVine.
One of the American agents
who works with the G-2, a thin blond man in
his 40s who goes by the name of Randy Capister, has been involved in
similar operations with the army
of neighboring El Salvador. Another, a
weapons expert known as Joe Jacarino, has operated throughout the
Caribbean, and has accompanied G-2 units on missions into rural zones.
Jacarino's presence in the
embassy was confirmed by David Wright, a
former embassy intelligence employee who called Jacarino a "military
liaison." Col. George Hooker, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
chief in Guatemala from 1985 to 1989, says he also knew Jacarino,
though he says Jacarino was not with the D.l.A. When asked whether
Jacarino was with the C.I.A. he replied, "I'm not at liberty to say."
Celerino
Castillo,
a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who dealt with
the G-2 and the C.I.A. in Guatemala, says he worked with Capister as
well as with Jacarino. He showed photographs of himself and Capister at
embassy events and in the field. Guatemalan sources say Capister meets
regularly with Guatemalan Army chiefs. He has been seen in meetings in
Guatemala City as recently as the spring of 1994.
When I reached Colonel
Alpirez at the La Aurora base in Guatemala, he
denied all involvement in the deaths of Bamaca and DeVine and said he
was never paid by the C.I.A. But he
discussed at length how the agency
advises and helps run the G-2. He praised the C.I.A. for
"professionalism" and close rapport with Guatemalan officers. He
said
that agency operatives often come to Guatemala on temporary duty,
during which they train G-2 men and provide "advice and technical
assistance." He described attending C.I.A. sessions at G-2 bases on
"contra-subversion" tactics and "how to manage the factors of power" to
"fortify
democracy."
He said the C.I.A. men were on call to respond to G-2 questions, and
that the G-2 often consulted the
agency on how to deal with "political
problems." Alpirez said he was not authorized to give specifics
on the
technical assistance, nor would he name the North Americans the G-2
worked with, though he said they were "very good friends."
Other officials, though, say
that at least during the mid 1980s G-2
officers were paid by Jack McCavitt, then C.I.A. station chief, and
that the "technical assistance"
includes communications gear, computers
and special firearms, as well as collaborative use of C.I.A.-owned
helicopters that are flown out of the Piper hangar at the La
Aurora
civilian air port and from a separate U.S. air facility. Through what
Amnesty International has called "a
government program of
political
murder." the
Guatemalan
Army has, since 1978, killed more than
110,000 civilians. The
G-2 and
a smaller, affiliated unit called the Archivo have long been openly
known in Guatemala as the brain of
the terror state. With
a
contingent of more than 2,000 agents and with sub-units in the local
army bases. the G-2-under orders of the army high command-coordinates
the torture.
assassination and
disappearance of dissidents.
"If the G-2 wants to kill
you, they kill you," former army Chief of
staff Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia once said. "They send one of their
trucks with a hit squad and that's it." Current and former G-2
agents
describe a program
of surveillance backed by a web of torture centers
and clandestine body dumps. In 1986, then-army Chief of Staff
Gen.
Hector Gramajo Morales, a U.S. protege, said that the G-2 maintains
files on and watches "anyone who is an opponent of the Guatemalan state
in any realm." A former G-2 agent says that the base he worked at in
Huehuetenango maintained
its own crematorium and "processed" abductees
by chopping off limbs, singeing flesh and administering electric
shocks.
At least three of the recent G-2
chiefs have been paid by the C.I.A.,
according to U.S. and
Guatemalan intelligence sources. One of them, Gen. Edgar Godoy Gaitan,
a former army Chief of Staff, has been accused in court by the victim's
family of being one of the prime "intellectual authors" of the 1990
murder of the noted Guatemalan
anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang. Another, Col. Otto Perez
Molina, who now runs the Presidential General Staff and oversees the
Archivo, was in charge in 1994, when, according to the Archbishop's
human rights office, there was evidence of General Staff involvement in
the assassination of Judge
Edgar Ramiro Elias
Ogaldez. The third, Gen.
Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who now works
in Washington as general staff director at the Pentagon-backed
Inter-American Defense Board, was G-2 chief in the late 1980s during a
series of assassinations of students,
peasants and human rights
activists. Reached at his home in Florida, Jack
McCavitt said he
does not talk
to journalists. When asked
whether Ortega
Menaldo was on
the C.I.A.
payroll, he shouted
"Enough!" and slammed down the phone.
These
crimes
are merely
examples of a vast, systemic pattern;
likewise, these men are only cogs
in a large U.S. government apparatus. Colonel Hooker, the former
D.I.A. chief for Guatemala, says, "It
would be an
embarrassing
situation if you ever had a roll call of everybody in the Guatemalan
Army who ever collected a C.I.A. paycheck." Hooker says the
agency payroll is so large that
it encompasses most of the army's top
decision-makers. When I told him that his friend, Gen. Mario
Enriquez
Morales, the current Defense Minister, had reacted to the Alpirez
scandal by saying publicly that it was "disloyal" and "shameful" for
officers to take C.I.A. money, Hooker burst out laughing and exclaimed:
"Good! Good answer, Mario! I'd
hate to think how many guys were on that
payroll. It's a perfectly normal thing."
Other top commanders paid by
the C.I.A. include Gen. Roberto Matta
Galvez, former army Chief of Staff, head of the Presidential General
Staff and commander of massacres in the El Quiche department; and
General Gramajo, Defense Minister during the armed forces' abduction,
rape and
torture of
Dianna Ortiz, an American nun.
Gramajo also managed the early
1980s highland massacres. Colonel Hooker says he once brought Gramajo
on a ten-day tour of the United States to speak at U.S. military bases
and confer with the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.
Three recent Guatemalan
heads of state confirm that the C.I.A. works
closely with the G-2. Last year, when I asked Gen. Oscar Humberto Meiia
Victores (military dictator from 1983 to 1986) how the country's death
squads had originated, he said they had been started
"in the 1960s by
the C.I.A."
Gen. Efram Rios Montt (dictator from 1982 to 1983 and the current
Congress President), who ordered the main
highland massacres (662
villages destroyed, by the army's own count), said the C.I.A.
did have agents
inside the G-2.
When I asked Rios Montt -a firm believer in the death penalty- if he
thought he should be executed for his role in the
slaughter, he leapt
to his feet and shouted "Yes!
Try me! Put me against the wall!" but he said he should be tried
only
if Americans were tried too. Specifically, he cited President
Reagan,
who, in the
midst of the massacres, embraced Rios Montt and said he was getting "a
bum rap" on
human rights.
Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, civilian President from 1986 to 1991 (under
whom the rate of killing actually increased), said "the
C.I.A. often
contracts with our
military and G-2 people," and
that from what he knew they "very
probably" had people inside "who have participated with our G-2 in
technical assistance and advice. "
These C.I.A. operations are,
of course, part of the larger
U.S. policy.
The Bush and Clinton State Departments,
for example, in the midst of a
much-touted "cutoff" of military aid to Guatemala after 1990,
authorized-according to classified State Department records-more than
114 separate sales of U.S. pistols and rifles.
The killing
of
defenseless people has been state policy in Guatemala for thirty years.
The question is
not whether the U.S. government has known - it is
obviously aware of its own actions. It is why, with overt and
covert
aid, it has helped commit the army's murders.
"COINTELPRO" was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular
upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name
stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy
spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition
inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant
harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the
growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and
secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally- protected
political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance,
and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the
CIA has become infamous throughout the world.
|
excerpts from the book
CIA
Diary - Inside the Company
by Philip Agee - Penguin Books, 1975
p37
... what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President
and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes
decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of
the President.
... the question of Congressional monitoring of intelligence
activities and of the Agency in particular. The problem resides in the
National Security Act of 1947 and also in its amendment, the Central
Intelligence Agency Act of 1949. These laws charged the DCI [Director
of Central Intelligence] with protecting the 'sources and methods' of
the US intelligence effort and also exempted the DCI and the Bureau of
the Budget from reporting to Congress on the organization, function,
personnel and expenditures of the CIA - whose budget is hidden in the
budgets of other executive agencies. The DCI, in fact, can secretly
spend whatever portion of the CIA budget he determines necessary, with
no other accounting than his own signature. Such expenditures, free
from review by Congress or the General Accounting Office or, in theory,
by anyone outside the executive-branch, are called 'unvouchered funds'.
By passage of these laws Congress has sealed itself off from
CIA activities, although four small sub-committees are informed
periodically on important matters by the DCI. These are the Senate and
House sub-committees of the Armed Services and Appropriations
Committees, and the speeches of their principal spokesman, Senator
Richard Russell, are required reading for the JOT'S.
There have been several times when ClA autonomy was
threatened. The Hoover Commission Task Force on Intelligence Activities
headed by General Mark Clark recommended in 1955 that a Congressional
Watchdog Committee be established to oversee the CIA much as the Joint
Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy watches over the AEC. The
Clark Committee, in fact, did not believe the sub-committees of the
Armed Services and Appropriations Committees were able to exercise
effectively the Congressional monitoring function. However, the problem
was corrected, according to the Agency position, when President
Eisenhower, early in 1956, established his own appointative committee
to oversee the Agency. This is the President's Board of Consultants on
Foreign Intelligence Activities, whose chairman is James R. Killian,
President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can provide the
kind of 'private citizen' monitoring of the Agency that Congress didn't
want. Moreover ... the more Congress gets into the act the greater the
danger of accidental revelation of secrets by indiscreet politicians.
Established relationships with intelligence services of other
countries, like Great Britain, might be complicated. The Congress was
quite right at the beginning in giving up control - so much for them,
their job is to appropriate the money.
p49
In addition to discovering ordinary state secrets, the CS is
responsible for obtaining the most complete and accurate information
possible on the global manifestations of Soviet imperialism, that is,
on local communist parties and related political groups. The exceptions
to the world-wide operating charter of the CS is the agreement among
the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand whereby
each has formally promised to abstain from secret operations of any
kind within the territory of the others except with prior approval of
the host government. The governments of all other nations, their
internal political groups and their scientific, military and economic
secrets are fair game.
p53
The most important liaison operation of the CIA is with MI-6, whose
cryptonym is SMOTH. It has been almost ten years since Burgess and
Maclean disappeared, and SMOTH has apparently tightened its loose, 'old
boy', clubby security practices. The inner club also includes the
services of Canada, Australia and New Zealand although the CIA receives
relatively little from these. Liaison with the Dutch is considered
excellent because they facilitate support operations against targets of
mutual interest, as do the Italians who tap telephones and intercept
correspondence for the CIA station in Rome. The West German services
are considered to be thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets while liaison
with the French has become difficult and sensitive since the return of
de Gaulle.
p69
Psychological
and
paramilitary, known as PP or KUCAGE, operations differ from those of PI
or CI because they are action rather than collection activities.
Collection operations should be invisible so that the target will be
unaware of them. Action operations, on the other hand, always produce a
visible effect. This, however, should never be attributable to the CIA
or to the US government, but rather to some other person or
organization. These operations, which received their Congressional
charter in the National Security Act of 1947 under 'additional services
of common concern', are in some ways more sensitive than collection
operations.
They are usually approved by the PP staff of the DDP, but
when very large amounts of money are required or especially sensitive
methods are used approval may be required of the OCB (Undersecretary
level), the NSC or the President himself.
PP operations are, of course, risky because they nearly
always mean intervention in the affairs of another country with whom
the US enjoys normal diplomatic relations. If their true sponsorship
were found out the diplomatic consequences could be serious. This is in
contrast to collection operations, for if these are discovered foreign
politicians are often prepared to turn a blind eye - they are a
traditional part of every nation's intelligence activity.
Thus the cardinal rule in planning all PP operations is
'plausible denial', only possible if care has been taken in the first
place to ensure that someone other than the US government can be made
to take the blame.
PP programmes are to be found in almost every CIA station and
emphasis on the kinds of PP operations will depend very much on local
conditions. Psychological warfare includes propaganda (also known
simply as 'media'), work in youth and student organizations, work in
labour organizations (trade unions, etc.), work in professional and
cultural groups and in political parties. Paramilitary operations
include infiltration into denied areas, sabotage, economic warfare,
personal harassment, air and maritime support, weaponry, training and
support for small armies.
Media Operations
The CTA'S role in the US propaganda programme is determined
by the official division of propaganda into three general categories:
white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly
acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US
Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to
people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the
source of their material and who produce the material as if it were
their own, black
propaganda is unattributed material, or it is
attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed
to a real source. The CTA is the only US government agency authorized
to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the
responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USTA.
However, according to the 'Grey Law' of the National Security Council
contained in one of the NSCID'S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA
approval before engaging in grey propaganda.
The vehicles
for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of
their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that
it can
be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know
what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true
sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others
may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who
their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so,
in agency terminology, there is a distinction between 'witting' and
'unwitting' agents.
In propaganda operations, as in all other PP activities,
standard agency security procedure forbids payment for services
rendered to be made by a CIA officer working under official cover (one
posing as an official of the Department of State, for instance). This
is in order to maintain 'plausible denial' and
to minimize the danger
of embarrassment to the local embassy if anything is discovered by the
local government. However, payment is made by CTA officers under
non-official cover, e.g. posing as businessmen,
students or as retired
people; such officers are said to be working under non-official
cover.
Officers working under non-official cover may also handle
most of the contacts with the recruited agents in order to keep the
officer under official cover as protected as possible. Equally,
meetings between the two kinds of officer will be as secret as may be.
The object of all this is to protect the embassy and sometimes to make
the propaganda agents believe that they are being paid by private
businesses.
Headquarters' propaganda experts have visited us in ISOLATION
and have displayed the mass of paper they issue as material for the
guidance of propaganda throughout the world. Some of it is concerned
only with local issues, the rest often has world-wide application. The
result of the talks was to persuade most of us that propaganda is not
for us - there is simply too much paperwork. But despite that, the most
interesting part of propaganda was obviously the business of
orchestrating the treatment of events of importance among several
countries. Thus problems of communist influence in one country
can be
made to appear of international concern in others under the rubric of
'a threat to one is a threat to all'. For example, the CIA station in
Caracas can cable information on a secret communist plot in Venezuela
to the Bogota station which can 'surface' through a local propaganda
agent with attribution to an unidentified Venezuelan government
official. The information can then be picked up from the Colombian
press and relayed to CTA stations in Quito, Lima, La Paz, Santiago and,
perhaps, Brazil. A few days later editorials begin to appear in the
newspapers of these places and pressure mounts on the Venezuelan
government to take repressive action against its communists.
There are
obviously
hosts of other uses to which propaganda, both black and grey, can be
put, using books, magazines, radio, television, wall-painting,
handbills, decals, religious sermons and political speeches as well as
the daily press. In countries where handbills or wall-painting
are important media, stations are expected to maintain clandestine
printing and distribution facilities as well as teams of agents who
paint slogans on
walls. Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty are the best
known grey propaganda operations conducted by the CIA against the
Soviet bloc.
Youth and Student Operations
At the close of World War II, the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union began a major propaganda and agitation programme through
the formation of the International Union of Students (IUS) and the World Federation of
Democratic Youth
(WFDY), both of which brought together national affiliates
within their respective fields in as many countries as possible. These
organizations promoted CPSU objectives and policy under the guise of
unified campaigns (anti-colonialism, anti-nuclear weapons, propeace
groups, etc.), in which they enlisted the support of their local
affiliates in capitalist countries as well as within the communist
bloc. During the late 1940s the US government, using the Agency for its
purpose, began to brand these fronts as stooges of the CPSU with the
object of discouraging non-communist participation. In addition to this
the Agency engaged in operations in many places designed to stop local
groups affiliating with the international bodies. By recruiting leaders
of the local groups and by infiltrating agents, the Agency tried to
gain control of as many of them as possible, so that even if such a
group had already affiliated itself to either the IUS or the WFDY, it
could be persuaded or compelled to withdraw.
The
Agency also began
to form alternative youth and student organizations at local and
international level. The two international bodies constructed to
rival those sponsored by the Soviet Union were the Coordinating
Secretariat of National Unions of Students(COSEC) with headquarters in
Leyden, and the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) situated in Brussels.
Headquarters' planning, guidance and operational functions in the CTA
youth and student operations are centralized in the International
Organizations Division of the DDP.
Both
COSEC and WAY,
like the TUS and WFDY, promote travel, cultural activities and welfare,
but both also work as propaganda agencies for the CTA - particularly in
underdeveloped countries. They also have consultative status as
non-governmental institutions with United Nations agencies such as
UNESCO and they participate in the UN special agencies' programmes.
One very important function of the CTA youth and student
operations is the spotting, assessing and recruiting of student and
youth leaders as long-term agents, both in the PI and PP fields. The
organizations sponsored or affected by the Agency are obvious
recruiting grounds for these and, indeed, for other CTA operations. It
is particularly the case in the underdeveloped world that both COSEC
and WAY programmes lead to the recruitment of young agents who can be
relied on to continue CTA policies and remain under CTA control long
after they have moved up their political or professional ladders.
Apart from working through COSEC and WAY the Agency is also
able to mount specific operations through Catholic national and
international student and youth bodies (Pax Romana and the
International Catholic Youth Federation) and through the Christian
Democrat and non-communist socialist organizations as well. In some
countries, particularly those in which there are groups with strong
communist or radical leaderships, the Catholic or Christian Democratic
student and youth organization are the main forces guided by the Agency.
Agents controlled through youth and student operations by a
station in any given country, including those in the US National
Students Association (NSA) international programme run by headquarters,
can also be used to influence decisions at the international level,
while agents at the international level can be used for promoting other
agents or policies within a national affiliate. Control, then, is like
an alternating current between the national and international levels.
Largely as a result of Agency operations, the WFDY
headquarters was expelled from France in 1951, moving to Budapest. The
TUS headquarters, on the other hand, was never allowed to move to the
free world after its founding at Prague in 1946. Moreover, the WFDY and
TUS have been clearly identified with the communist bloc, and their
efforts to conduct conferences and seminars outside the bloc have been
attacked and weakened by WAY and COSEC. The WFDY, for example,
has been able
to hold only one World Youth Festival outside the bloc, in Vienna in
1959, and then it was effectively disrupted by CIA-controlled youth and
student organizations. The TUS has never held a congress in the
free world. More important still, both WAY and COSEC have developed
overwhelming leads in affiliate members outside the communist bloc.
p79
Political-Action Operations
Communist expansion brought forth still another type of PP
operation: political action. Operations designed to promote the
adoption by a foreign government of a particular policy vis-a-vis
communism are termed political-action operations. While the context of
these operations is the assessment of the danger of communist or other
leftist influence in a given country, the operations undertaken to
suppress the danger arc pegged to specific circumstances. These
operations often involve promotion through funding and guidance of the
careers of foreign politicians through whom desired government policy
and action can be obtained. Conversely, these operations often include
actions designed to neutralize the politicians who promote undesirable
local government policy regarding communism.
Although political-action operations after World War II began
with electoral funding of anti-communist political parties in France
and Italy in the late 1940s, they are now prevalent in the underdeveloped countries
where
economic and social conditions create a favourable climate for
communist advance. The obvious human elements in
political-action operations are political parties, politicians and
military leaders, although agents in other PP operations including
labour, student and youth, and media are often brought to bear on
specific political-action targets.
In order to obtain political intelligence as well as to
develop relationships with potential political-action agents, most
stations have continuing programmes for cultivating local politicians
from opposition as well as from government parties. Making
acquaintances in local politics is not usually difficult because CTA
officers under diplomatic cover in embassies have natural access to
their targets through cocktail parties, receptions, clubs and other
mechanisms that bring them together with people of interest. Regular
State Department Foreign Service Officers and Ambassadors as well may
also facilitate the expansion of station political contacts through
arranging introductions. When a local political contact is assessed
favourably for station goals, security clearance and operational
approval is obtained from headquarters, and the station officer m
contact with the target begins to provide financial support for
political campaigns or for the promotion of the target's political
group or party. Hopefully,
almost surely, the target will use some of the money for personal
expenses thereby developing a dependency on the station as a source of
income. Eventually, if all goes well, the local politician will
report confidential information on his own party and on his government,
if he has a government post, and he will respond to reasonable station
direction regarding the communist question.
A station's liaison operations with local security services
are also a valuable source of political-action assets. Because of
frequent political instability in underdeveloped countries, the
politicians in charge of the civilian and military security forces are
in key positions for action as well as for information, and they are
often drawn into an operational relationship with the station when they
enter office merely by allowing ongoing liaison operations to continue.
They are subjected to constant assessment by the station for use in
political action and when deemed appropriate they may be called upon
for specific tasks. Financial support is also available for furthering
their political careers and for a continuing relationship once they
leave the ministry.
As final arbiters of political conflicts in so many
countries, military leaders are major targets for recruitment. They are
contacted by station officers in a variety of ways, sometimes simply
through straightforward introduction by US military attaches or the
personnel of US Military Assistance Missions. Sometimes the liaison
developed between the Agency and local intelligence services can be
used for making these contacts. Again CTA officers can make contact
with those military officers of other countries who come to the US for
training. As in the case of politicians, most Agency stations have a
continual programme for the development of local military leaders, both
for the collection of intelligence and for possible use in political
action.
The political actions actually undertaken by the Agency are
almost as varied as politics itself. High on the list of priorities is
the framing of Soviet officials in diplomatic or commercial missions in
order to provoke their expulsion. Politicians working for the Agency
are expected to take an active part in working for expulsion of
'undesirables'. Similarly, where the Soviet Union tries to extend its
diplomatic or commercial activities, our politicians are expected to
use their influence to oppose such moves. They are also expected to
take a hard line against their own nationals engaged in left-wing or
communist activities. In the last of these instances success means the
proscription of the parties, the arrest or exile of their leaders, the
closure of their offices, publications and bookstores, the prohibition
of their demonstrators, etc. Such large-scale programmes call for
action both by anticommunist movements and by national governments -
where possible the Agency likes to use the same political action agents
for both purposes.
But it is not just a matter of financing and guiding local
politicians. In
situations
regarded as dangerous to the US, the Agency will conduct national
election operations though the medium of an entire political party. It
will finance candidates who are both 'witting' and 'unwitting'. Such
multi-million-dollar operations may begin a year or more before an
election is due and will include massive propaganda and
public-relations campaigns, the building of numerous front
organizations and funding mechanisms (often resident US businessmen),
regular polls of voters, the formation of 'goon-squads' to intimidate
the opposition, and the staging of provocations and the circulation of
rumours designed to discredit undesirable candidates. Funds are also
available for buying votes and vote counters as well.
If a situation can be more effectively retrieved for US
interests by unconstitutional
methods or by coup
d'etat, that too may be attempted. Although the Agency usually
plays the anti-communist card in order to foster a coup, gold bars and sacks of
currency are
often equally effective. In some cases a timely bombing by
a station
agent, followed by mass demonstrations and finally by intervention by military
leaders in
the name of the restoration of order and national unity, is a
useful course. Agency political operations were largely responsible for
coups after
this pattern
in Iran in 1953 and in the Sudan in 1958.
Paramilitary Operations
At times the political situation in a given country cannot be
retrieved fast or effectively enough through other types of PP
operations such as political action. In these cases the Agency engages
in operations on a higher level of conflict which may include military
operations - although these should not be seen as US sponsored. These unconventional
warfare
operations are called paramilitary operations. The Agency has
the charter from the National Security Council for US government
unconventional warfare although the military services also sustain a
paramilitary capability in case of general war. These operations seem
to hold a special fascination, calling to mind OSS heroism, resistance,
guerrilla warfare, secret parachute jumps behind the lines. Camp Peary
is a major Agency training base for paramilitary operations.
The need for getting agents into denied areas like certain
parts of the Soviet Union, China and other communist countries, is
satisfied in part by illegal infiltration by land, sea or air. The
agents, usually natives of the denied area, are given proper clothing,
documentation and cover stories and, if infiltrating by land, may be
required to pass secretly through heavily guarded borders. Training in
border crossing is given in a restricted area of Camp Peary where a
mile or so of simulated communist borders is operated with fences,
watch-towers, dogs, alarms and patrols. Maritime infiltration involves
the use of a mother ship, usually a freighter operated by an Agency
cover shipping company which approaches to within a few miles of the
shore landing-site. An intermediate craft, often a souped-up outboard,
leaves the mother ship and approaches to perhaps a mile off the shore
where a rubber boat with a small silent outboard is inflated to carry
the infiltration team to the beach. The rubber boat and auxiliary
equipment is buried near the beach for use later in escape while the
intermediate craft returns to the mother ship. Infiltration by air
requires black overflights for which the Agency has unmarked long- and
short-range aircraft including the versatile Helio Courier that can be
used in infil-exfil operations with landings as well as parachute
drops. Restricted areas of Camp Peary along the York River are used for
maritime training and other parts of the base serve as landing-sites
and drop zones.
Once safely infiltrated to a denied area, a lone agent or a
team may be required to perform a variety of jobs. Frequently an
infiltration team's mission is the caching of weapons,
communications equipment or sabotage materials for later retrieval by a
different team which will use them. Or, an infiltration team may
perform sabotage through
the placing of incendiary
devices or explosives at a target-site timed to go off days,
weeks or even months later. Sabotage weapons include oil and gasoline
contaminates for stopping vehicles, contaminates for jamming
printing-presses, limpets for sinking ships, explosive and incendiary
compounds
that can be moulded and painted to look like bread, lamps, dolls or
stones. The sabotage instructors, or 'burn and blow boys',
have
staged impressive demonstrations of their capabilities, some of which
are ingeniously designed so as to leave little trace of a cause. Aside
from sabotage, an infiltration team may be assigned targets to
photograph or the loading or unloading of dead drops (concealed places
for hiding film, documents or small containers). Escape may be by the
same route as entry or by an entirely different method.
The Economic
Warfare Section of the PP staff is a sub-section under
Paramilitary Operations because its mission includes the sabotage of
key economic activities in a target country and the denial of critical
imports, e.g. petroleum. Contamination of an export agricultural
product or associated material (such as sacks destined for the export
of Cuban sugar), or fouling the bearings of tractors, trucks or buses
destined for a target country may be undertaken if other efforts to
impede undesired trade fail. As Economic Warfare is undertaken in order
to aggravate
economic
conditions in a target country, these operations include in
addition to sabotage, the use of propaganda, labour, youth, student and
other mass organizations under CIA control to restrict trade by a
friendly country of items needed in the target economy US companies can
also be called upon to restrict supply of selected products
voluntarily, but local station political-action assets are usually more
effective for this purpose.
Also coordinated in the paramilitary section of the PP staff
is the effort to maintain Agency supplies of weapons used in support of
irregular military forces. Although the Air and Maritime Support
section of the staff supervises standing Agency operations to supply
insurgents (Air America and Civil Air Transport in the Far East, for
example) additional resources such as aircraft can be obtained from the
Defense Department. These operations included the Guatemalan invasion
in 1954 (aptly given the cryptonyrn LCSUCCESS); Tibetan resistance
against the Chinese in 1958-9 and the rebellion against the Sukarno
government in Indonesia in 1957-8; current training and support of
irregular forces in South Vietnam and Laos; and increasing sabotage and
paramilitary operations against the Castro government in Cuba. Leaflet
drops as part of the propaganda aspect of paramilitary operations are
also arranged through the Air and Maritime Support section.
Closely related to paramilitary operations are the disruptive activities
known
as militant action.
Through organization and support of 'goon squads' sometimes
composed of
off-duty policemen, for example, or the militant sections of
friendly
political parties, stations attempt to intimidate communists and
other extreme leftists by breaking up their meetings and
demonstrations. The Technical Services staff of the DDP makes a variety
of weapons and devices for these purposes. Horrible smelling liquids in
small glass vials can be hurled into meeting halls. A fine clear powder
can be sprinkled in a meeting-place becoming invisible after settling
but having the effect of tear-gas when stirred up by the later movement
of people. An incendiary powder can be moulded around prepared tablets
and when ignited the combination produces ample quantities of smoke
that attacks the eyes and respiratory system much more strongly than
ordinary tear-gas. A tasteless substance can be introduced to food that
causes exaggerated body colour. And a few small drops of a clear liquid
stimulates the target to relaxed, uninhibited talk. Invisible itching
powder can be placed on steering wheels or toilet seats, and a slight
smear of invisible ointment causes a serious burn to skin on contact.
Chemically processed tobacco can be added to cigarettes and cigars to
produce respiratory ailments.
Our training in PP operations includes constant emphasis on
the desirability of obtaining reportable intelligence information from
agents engaged in what are essentially action (as opposed to
collection) operations. A well-run action operation, in fact, can
produce intelligence of extremely good quality whether the agents are
student, labour or political leaders. Justification for continuing PP
operations in Project Renewals includes references to the operation's
value in strictly collection activities as well as effectiveness in
achieving action goals. No action agent, therefore, can be allowed to
neglect the intelligence by-product of his operation, although the
action agent may have to be eased into the intelligence reporting
function because of the collaborative nature of his early relationship
with the Agency. Nevertheless with a little skill even leaders of some
rank can be manipulated into collecting information by letting them
know indirectly that financial support for them is based partly on
satisfaction of intelligence reporting requirements.
The funding of psychological and paramilitary projects is a
complex business. Project Outlines are prepared either in the station
or at headquarters, depending on which of these is proposing or running
the operation. Included in this, apart from those elements already
mentioned for F! projects, will be a statement on the need for
coordination with other US government agencies such as the State
Department or the Department of Defense. Where appropriate further
reports are attached giving greater detail on finances, personnel,
training, supply and cover mechanisms.
Operational progress reports are required each trimester in
the case of routine operations, but such reports may be more frequent
in special cases. Intelligence received as a result of PP operations is
processed in the same way as that which comes from PI operations.
Funding action operations, especially those involving labour,
student, youth or other organizations is a perpetual problem. Under
certain circumstances it can be done through foundations of one sort or
another which have been created as fronts for the Agency, but before
this, or any other, method can be employed there first has to be a
decision about the level at which the funds should be passed. If money
is to be put into an international organization like WAY, for example,
then it might be possible to do this through an American organization
affiliated to it. The money can then be disguised as a donation from
that organization. In other circumstances it might be possible to
supply the money through a 'cutout', that is, through a person who can
claim that the money is either a donation on his own account or from
his business. If this system is used the money is sometimes paid by the
'cutout' to a US organization affiliated to the international group for
whom the money is finally intended.
If it is paid direct then it is usual for the
secretary-general or the finance committee chairman of the organization
in question to be a 'witting' agent. The decision about the method to
be used is subject to several considerations. First the matter of
security and cover is considered; second comes the question of which
method would best ensure that the recipient or recipients will then do
what they have been paid for. Thus funds become a very effective method
of guiding an action agent. When cover foundations or companies are
used for funding they may be chartered in the US or in countries such
as
Lichtenstein, the Bahamas and Panama, where commercial secrecy is
protected and governmental controls are minimal.
p503
The question is not whether, but when, to resign. I wonder
what the reaction would be if I wrote out a resignation telling them
what I really think. Something like this:
Dear
Mr Helms,
I respectfully submit my
resignation from the Central
Intelligence Agency for the following reasons:
I joined the Agency because I
thought I would be protecting
the security of my country by fighting against communism and Soviet
expansion while at the same time helping other countries to preserve
their freedom. Six years in Latin America have taught me that the
injustices forced by small ruling minorities on the mass of the people
cannot be eased sufficiently by reform movements such as the Alliance
for Progress. The
ruling class
will never willingly give up its special privileges and comforts.
This is class warfare and is the reason why communism appeals to the
masses in the first place. We call this the 'free world'; but the only
freedom under these circumstances is the rich people's freedom to
exploit the poor.
Economic growth in Latin
America might broaden the benefits
in some countries but in most places the structural contradictions and
population growth preclude meaningful increased income for most of the
people. Worse still, the value of private investment and loans and
everything else sent by the US into Latin America is far exceeded year
after year by what is taken out - profits, interest,
royalties, loan
repayments - all sent back to the US. The income left over in
Latin America is sucked up by the ruling minority who are determined to
live by our standards of wealth.
Agency operations cannot be
separated from these conditions.
Our training and support for police and military forces, particularly
the intelligence services, combined with other US support through
military assistance missions and Public Safety programmes, give the
ruling minorities ever stronger tools to keep themselves in power and
to retain their disproportionate share of the national income. Our
operations to penetrate and suppress the extreme left also serve to strengthen the ruling
minorities by
eliminating the main danger to their power.
American business and
government are bound up with the ruling
minorities in Latin America - with the rural and industrial property
holders. Our interests and their interests - stability, return on
investment - are the same. Meanwhile the masses of the people keep on suffering because they
lack even
minimal educational facilities, healthcare, housing, and diet.
They could have these benefits of national income were not so unevenly
distributed.
To me what is important is to
see that what little there is
to go around goes around fairly. A communist hospital can cure just
like a capitalist hospital and of communism is the likely alternative
to what I've seen in Latin America, then it's up to the Latin Americans
to decide. Our only alternatives are to continue supporting injustice
or to withdraw and let the cards fall by themselves.
And the Soviets? Does
KGB terror come packaged of necessity with socialism and communism? Perhaps
so, perhaps not, but for most of the people in Latin America the
situation couldn't
be much
worse - they've got more pressing matters than the opportunity
to read dissident writers. For them it's a question of day-by-day survival.
No, I can't answer the dilemma
of Soviet expansion, their
pledge to 'bury' us, and socialism in Latin America. Uruguay, however,
is proof enough that conventional reform does not work, and to me it is
clear that the only real solutions are those advocated by the
communists and others of the extreme left. The trouble is that they're
on the Soviet side, or the Chinese side or the Cuban side - all our
enemies.
I could go on with this letter but it's no use. The only real
alternative to injustice in Latin America is socialism and no matter
which shade of red a revolutionary wears, he's allied with forces that
want to destroy the United States. What I have to do is to look out for
myself first and put questions of principle to rest. I'll finish the
resume and find another job before saying what I really think.
p558
One has to take the realistic view in order to fulfill
responsibilities you have to compromise with the system knowing full
well that the system doesn't work for everybody. This means everybody
has to get what he can within decency's limits - which can be stretched
when needed to assure a little more security. What I have to do now is
get mine, inside the system, and forget I ever worked for the CIA. No,
there's no use trying to change the system. What happened at the Plaza
of the Three Cultures is happening all over the world to peopIe trying
to change the system. Life is too short r and has too many delights
that might be missed. At thirty-three I've got half a lifetime to enjoy
them.
p561
... Secret
CIA
operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust,
unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt
military intervention (as in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic) will
not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more
remote overt intervention becomes - and the more remote become reforms.
Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs.
A book on the CIA could also illustrate how the interests of
the privileged minorities in poor countries lead back to, and are
identified with, the interests of the rich and powerful who control the
US. Counter-insurgency doctrine tries to blur these international class
lines by appeals
to
nationalism and patriotism and by falsely relating movements
against the capitalist minorities to Soviet expansionism. But what
counter-insurgency really comes down to is the protection of the
capitalists back
in America, their property and their privileges. US national
security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the
capitalist class in
the US, not the security of the rest of the people - certainly
not the security of the poor except by way of reinforcing poverty. It
is from the class interests in the US that our counter-insurgency
programmes flow, together with that most fundamental of American
foreign policy principles: that any government, no matter how bad, is
better than a communist one - than a government of workers, peasants
and ordinary people. Our
government's support for corruption and injustice in Latin America
flows directly from the determination of the rich and powerful in the
US, the capitalists, to retain and expand these riches and power...
... The killings at Kent
State and Jackson State show clearly enough that sooner or
later our counter-insurgency
methods
would be applied
at home.
p564
The key to adopting increasingly radical views has been my
fuller comprehension of the class divisions of capitalist society based
on property or the lack of it. The divisions were always there, of
course, for me to see, but until recently I simply failed to grasp
their meaning and consequences: adversary relationships, exploitation,
labour as a market-place commodity, etc. But by getting behind the
liberal concept of society, that concept that attempts to paint out the
irreconcilable class conflicts, I think I have grasped an understanding
of why liberal
reform programmes in Latin America have failed. At the same time
I have seen more clearly the identity of interests of the classes in
Latin America (and other underdeveloped areas) with the corresponding
classes in the US (and other developed areas).
The result of this class conception, of seeing that class
identity comes before nationality, leads to rejection of liberal reform
as the continuous renovating process leading step by step to the better
society. Reform may
indeed represent improvement, but it is fundamentally a manoeuvre by
the ruling class in capitalist society, the capitalists, to allow
exploitation to continue, to give a little in order to avoid losing
everything. The Alliance for Progress was just this kind of fraud
- although it was heralded as a Marshall Plan for Latin America that
would permit, indeed encourage, a Latin American New Deal to sweep
through the region behind the leadership of liberals like Betancourt,
Haya de la Torre, Kubichek and Munoz Marin.
But the Alliance for Progress failed as a social reform
programme, and it failed also to stimulate sufficient per capita
economic growth, partly because of high population growth and partly
because of slow growth in the value of the region's exports. These two
factors, combined with rising consumption by upper and middle classes,
provided less for the investments on which growth must be founded.
Result? The division in Latin American society widened
between the modern core, dependent largely on the external sector, and
the marginalized majority. By 1969 over half the people in the labour
market were unemployed or underemployed. Where progress occurred in
education, health care and housing it accrued mostly to the core
societies in cities. Flight to cities by rural unemployed continued
with the cities unable to absorb them productively. The vicious circle
of small internal markets and lack of internal growth momentum also
continued.
Particularly in countries like Brazil, where economies have
grown rapidly, wealth and income have tended to even greater
concentration. Latest figures of the UN Economic Commission for Latin
America (ECLA) show that the poorest 20 per cent of the Latin American
population now receive only 3-1 per cent of total income and that the
entire lower 50 per cent receives only 13.4 per cent of total income.
The upper 5 per cent income bracket, on the other hand, receives 33.4
per cent of total income. The contrast between the high 5 per cent and
the lower 50 per cent of the population according to ECLA rests on the
dominance of the entrepreneurial class - the capitalists - in the upper
5 per cent whose extraordinary income results largely from distribution
of profits which could be reinvested instead of being consumed. In
Mexico, for example, 60 per cent of the income of the top 5 per cent is
dividends, in El Salvador 80 per cent, in Argentina 85 per cent. Most
important, income of the high 5 per cent is growing more rapidly than
the middle- and lower-income levels - thus aggravating income imbalance
still more. The assumption, therefore, that economic growth under the
Alliance for Progress would result in higher standards of living for
the poorer half of the population is now demonstrated to have been
false.
Land-reform programmes have also failed. During the 1960s
virtually every country in Latin America began some programme to reform
restrictive, precarious and uneconomical tenure systems - long accepted
as the most serious structural cause of imbalance in wealth and income.
But with the exceptions of Cuba, Peru and Chile the impulse has been
lost and little progress made where the bulk of the potential
income-producing resources lies. Concentration continues: the upper 1.8
per cent of the rural income scale holds more than 50 per cent of the
farmland while the small landholders who number 25 per cent of the farm
population hold only 2.4 per cent of farmland.
During these past ten years, while Latin American countries
failed to establish more equitable distribution of land, wealth and
income, considerable success could be claimed in counterinsurgency -
including propaganda to attract people away from the Cuban solution as
well as repression. As part of the counterinsurgency campaign, the Alliance for Progress
in the
short run did indeed raise many hopes and capture many imaginations in
favour of the peaceful reform solutions that would not fundamentally
jeopardize the dominance of the ruling capitalist minorities and their
system. Since the 1960s however, as the psychological appeal of
peaceful reform diminished in the face of failure, compensatory
measures have been increasingly needed: repression and special
programmes, as in the field of organized labour, to divide the victims
and neutralize their leaders. These measures constitute the four most
important counter-insurgency programmes through which the US government
strengthens the ruling minorities in Latin America: CIA operations, military
assistance
and training missions, AID Public Safety programmes to help police, and
trade-union operations through ORIT,: the International Trade
Secretariats and the AlFED -all largely controlled by the CIA.
Taken together these are the crutches given by the capitalist rulers of
the US to their counterparts in Latin America in order to obtain
reciprocal support against threats to American capitalism. Never mind
all those marginals - what's good for capitalists in Latin America is
good for capitalists in the USA.
A liberal reform programme like the Alliance for Progress is
a
safety-valve for capitalist injustice and exploitation - as the
frontier served for release and escape from oppression in American
cities during the last century. Such a programme is only what the
ruling-class will allow by way of redistribution during a time of
danger to the system as a whole - something that runs against the
current and the inherent drive to concentrate wealth and political
power in ever fewer hands. Once the sense of urgency and danger fades,
so also the pressure on the safety-valve declines and the natural
forces for accumulation recuperate, soon wiping out the relative gains
that the exploited obtained through reform. Reforms are temporary
palliatives that
can never eliminate the exploitative relationship on which capitalism
is based.
Increasingly, as the oppressed in capitalist society
comprehend the myth of liberal reform, their ruling minorities have no
choice but to increase
repression in order to avert socialist revolution. Eliminate
CIA stations, US military missions, AID Public Safety missions and the
'free' trade-union programmes and those minorities would disappear,
faster perhaps, than they themselves would imagine.
p570
The functioning of the external sectors of Latin American
economies (excepting Venezuela as a special case) during these ten
years demonstrates how these economies
have supported the US standard of living to the detriment of the Latin
American people: Americans, in other words, can thank Latin
American workers for having contributed to our ease and comfort. It is
the external sector that counts because exports and foreign aid
determine how much machinery and technology can be imported for
economic growth, and during the past ten years the external sectors of
Latin American economies failed to generate adequate growth.
From 1961 to 1970 Latin America paid out to other regions,
mostly to the US, a little over 20 billion dollars, practically all m
financial services (royalties,
interest and repatriated profits to foreign capital). About 30
per cent of this potential deficit was offset by export surpluses,
while the remaining 70 per cent was paid through new indebtedness, new
private foreign investment and other capital movements. The new
indebtedness, representing as it does new costs for financial services,
raised still higher the proportion of export earnings required for
repatriation of royalties, interest and profits to foreigners, mostly
US, thus decreasing amounts available for investment.
During these ten years private foreign capital provided new investment of only
5~5 billion
dollars while taking
out 20 billion dollars. The lion's share went to US investors
whose investment, which averaged about 12 billion dollars in value,
returned about 13 billion dollars to the US. Without the loans and
grants from the US under the Alliance for Progress, Latin America would
have had to devote about 10 per cent more of its export earnings to the
services account so that 'fair return' on investment could be
satisfied. Otherwise a moratorium or some other extreme measure would
have been necessary - hardly conducive to new credit and investment.
The Alliance for Progress has been, in effect, a subsidy programme for US
exporters
and private investors - in many cases the same firms. For Latin
America this has meant a deficit in the external sector of about 6
billion dollars that limited the importation of equipment and
technology needed for faster economic growth - the deficit compensated
by new indebtedness. For the United States this has meant a return to
private investors of about five dollars for every dollar sent from the
US to Latin America during the period, plus a favourable trade balance,
plus billions of dollars in loans that are earning interest and will
some day be repaid. In other words Latin America through the Alliance
for Progress has contributed to the economic development of the United
States and has gone into debt to do it. No wonder we prop up these
governments and put down the revolutionaries.
In contrast to the myth of the Alliance for Progress, which ensures that the gap
between the US
and Latin American economies will grow, the interesting
alternative does not assume that economic growth is the determinant for
integration of the marginalized majority. Based on a distinction
between economic growth and social development, the revolutionary
solution begins with integration. The Cuban position paper for this
year's sessions of ECLA, entitled Latin America and the Second United
Nations Decade for Development, views social integration through
structural changes in institutions - revolutionary change rather than
reform - as the condition for development. Economic growth alone, with
benefits concentrated in the modern core minority, cannot be considered
as national development because the whole society doesn't participate.
Institutional change, social integration and economic growth is the
revolutionary order of priorities rather than economic growth, reform
and eventual extension of benefits to the marginals - little by little
so as not to affect the wealthy.
The institutional changes: first, the land tenure system must
be altered to break the injustices and low productivity resulting from
the latifundia-minifundia problem. Second, the foreign economic
enterprises must be nationalized so that the product of labour is used
for national development instead of being channelled to shareholders in
a highly-developed, capital-exporting country. Third, the most
important national economic activities must come under state control
and be subjected to overall development planning with new criteria for
marketing, expansion and general operations. Fourth, personal income
must be redistributed in order to give purchasing power to the
previously marginalized. Fifth, a real working union between government
and people must be nurtured so that the sacrifices ahead can be endured
and national unity strengthened.
During this early period of institutional change, attained
with few exceptions, in the Cuban view, through armed struggle, the
basic problems of priorities emerge: immediate development of social
overhead projects in health and education v. expansion of consumption
of the formerly marginalized v. investment in infrastructure. The
redistribution of income, new costs of social projects, and increased
internal consumption leave even less productive capacity for
re-investment than before. High demand causes inflationary pressures
and black markets, while rationing is necessary to assure equity in
distribution.
The only source of relief to offset the investment deficit,
according to the Cubans, is foreign aid. Aggravating the development
problem is the exodus of managers and professionals who join the
overthrown landed gentry and upper middle classes in seeking to avoid
participation in national development by fleeing to 'free' countries.
Another drain on investment is the obvious need to maintain oversized
military forces to defeat domestic and foreign counter-revolutionary
forces.
The romantic stage of the revolution ends, then, as the
realities of the long struggle for national development take root.
Internally the revolution calls for ever-greater productivity,
particularly in exports, so that dependence on external financing can
be kept as low as possible. Nevertheless, years will pass before
economic growth will reach the point of decreasing reliance on foreign
aid. Sacrifice and greater effort are the order of the day, and neither
can possibly result if the producers - the workers, peasants and others
- fail to identify in the closest union with the revolutionary
government. Mistakes will be made, as every Cuban is quick to admit,
but there can be no doubt that national development here is well
underway and accelerating.
In Cuba the people have education, health care and adequate
diet, while long strides are being made in housing. When one considers
that over half the population of Latin America, over 150 million
people, are still deprived of participation in these minimal benefits
of modern culture and technology, it becomes clear that the only
country that has really attained the social goals of the | Alliance for
Progress is Cuba.
p584
Only a few more months and ten years will have passed since
that 31 March when the cables arrived in the Montevideo station
reporting Goulart's overthrow. Such joy and relief! Such a regime we
created. Not just through the CIA organization and training of the
military regime's intelligence services; not just through the military
assistance programmes - good for 165 million dollars in grants, credit
sales and surplus equipment since 1964 plus special training in the US
for thousands; not just through the AID police assistance programme
worth over 8 million dollars and training for more than 100,000
Brazilian policemen; not just the rest of the US economic assistance
programme - worth over 300 million dollars in 1972 alone and over 4
billion dollars in the last twenty-five years. Not just the
multi-lateral economic assistance programmes where US influence is
strong - worth over 2 5 billion dollars since 1946 and over 700 million
dollars in 1972. Most important, every one of the
hundreds of
millions of private US dollars invested in Brazil is a dollar in
support of fascism.
All this to support a regime in which the destitute, marginalized
half of the
population - some fifty million people - are getting still poorer while
the small ruling elite and their military puppets get an ever larger
share. All this to support a regime under which the income of
the high 5 per cent of the income scale now gets almost 40 per cent of
total income, while half the population has to struggle for survival on
15 per cent of total income. All this to create a facade of
'economic miracle'
where per capita income is still only about 450 dollars per
year - still
behind Nicaragua, Peru and nine other Latin American countries - and
where even the UN Economic Commission for Latin America reports that
the 'economic miracle' has been of no benefit to the vast majority of
the population. All this for a regime that has to clamour for export
markets because creation of an internal market would imply reforms such
as redistribution of income and a slackening of repression - possibly
even a weakening of the dictatorship. A11 this to support a regime
denounced the world over for the barbaric torture and
inhuman
treatment inflicted as a matter of routine on its thousands of
political prisoners - including priests,
nuns and many non-Marxists - many of whom fail to survive the
brutality or are murdered outright. Repression in Brazil even includes
cases of the torture
of
children, before their parents' eyes, in order to force the
parents to give information. This is what the CIA, police assistance,
military
training and economic aid programmes have brought to the
Brazilian people. And the Brazilian regime is spreading it around:
Bolivia in 1971, Uruguay in February of this year and now Chile.
p595
The gap between rich and poor grows in developed countries as
well as in poor countries and between the developed and underdeveloped
countries. A considerable proportion of the developed world's
prosperity rests on paying the lowest
possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on
exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries.
Continuation of this | kind of prosperity requires continuation of the
relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor.
Within the underdeveloped countries the ~t distorted, irrational growth
dependent on the demands and vagaries of foreign markets precludes
national integration, with increasing marginalization of the masses.
Even the increasing nationalism of countries like Peru, Venezuela and
Mexico only yield ambiguous programmes for liberating dependent
economies while allowing privileged minorities to persist.
Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that
. the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged
minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty. This
understanding is bringing even greater determination to take
revolutionary action and to renew the revolutionary movements where, as
in Chile, reverses have occurred. Increasingly, the underprivileged and
oppressed minorities in developed countries, particularly the US,
perceive the identity of their own struggle with that of the
marginalized masses in poor countries.
The US government's defeat in Vietnam and in Cuba, inspires
exploited peoples everywhere-to take action for their liberation. Not
the CIA, police training, military assistance, 'democratic' trade
unions, not even outright military intervention can forever postpone
the revolutionary structural changes that mean the end of capitalist
imperialism and the building of socialist
society. Perhaps this is the reason why policymakers in the US
and their puppets in Latin America are unable to launch reform
programmes. They realize that reform might lead even faster to
revolutionary awareness and action and their only alternative
is escalating
repression and increasing injustice. Their time, however, is
running out.
p596
... In
the CIA we
justified our penetration, disruption and sabotage of the left in Latin
America - around the world for that matter - because we felt
morality changed on crossing national frontiers. Little would we have
considered applying these methods inside our own country. Now, however,
we see that the FBI was employing these methods against the left in the
US in a planned, coordinated programme to disrupt, sabotage and repress
the political organizations to the left of Democratic and Republican
liberals. The murders at Kent and Jackson State, domestic activities of
US military intelligence, and now the President's own intelligence plan
and 'plumbers' unit - ample demonstration that CIA methods were really
brought home. Prior restraints on using these methods against the
'respectable' opposition were bound to crumble. In the early 1960s when
the CIA moved to its new headquarters in Virginia, Watergate methods
obtained final institutional status.
How fitting that over the rubble of the CIA's old temporary
buildings back in Washington, the new building that rose was called
'Watergate'.
When the Watergate trials end and the whole episode begins to
fade, there will be a movement for national renewal, for reform of
electoral practices, and perhaps even for reform of the FBI and the
CIA. But the return to our cozy self-righteous traditions should lure
no one into believing that the problem has been removed. Reforms attack symptoms
rather than
the disease, and no other proof is needed than the Vietnam War
and Watergate to demonstrate that the disease is our economic system
and its motivational patterns.
Reforms of the FBI and the CIA, even removal of the President
from office, cannot remove the problem. American capitalism,
based as it is
on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in
personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police
force.
The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be
opposed, with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as
logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class's determination to
retain power and privilege.
Now, more than ever, indifference to injustice at home and
abroad is impossible. Now, more clearly than ever, the extremes of
poverty and wealth demonstrate the irreconcilable class conflicts that
only socialist revolution can resolve. Now, more than ever, each of us
is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of
minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and
repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and
fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as
well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that
there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to
recognize that like it or not we contribute day in and day out either
to the one side or to the other.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_ThirdWorld.html
end of CIA Diary - Phil Agee
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