Not the Preferred Way to Commit
Suicide
excerpted from the book
Overthrow
America's Century of Regime Change
from Haiti to Iraq
by Stephen Kinzer
Times Books, 2006, paper
p150
Early in 1954, French and Vietminh negotiators met in Geneva.
Negotiators from China, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United
States were also there. Secretary of State Dulles headed the American
delegation.
... France ended its rule over Vietnam
with a suitably muted ceremony. On October 9, 1954, under a rainy
sky, a small group of soldiers assembled around a flagpole at
Mangin Athletic Stadium in Hanoi and lowered the Tricolor. A bugler
played plaintive notes. There were no songs or speeches. In its
misbegotten eight-year war, France lost a staggering 44,967 dead
and another 79,560 wounded.
Few people in Hanoi noticed the ceremony.
They were too busy preparing to welcome their triumphant Vietminh.
The day after the French withdrew, thirty thousand guerrilla fighters
marched into the city. Their victory was not yet complete, because
Vietnam had been divided, but the division was to last only two
years. Ho Chi Minh had inflicted a stunning defeat on a far richer
and seemingly more powerful enemy. He was the country's most popular
figure. Many Vietnamese assumed that in the 1956 election, he
would be chosen to lead their country.
Dulles had done everything he could to
keep the French at their posts in Vietnam, but they were determined
to leave. That did not mean, however, that he had to sit idly
by while Vietnamese voters elected a Communist to lead their reunified
country. He never considered the possibility of seeking an accommodation
with Ho. Instead he set out to undermine the Geneva agreement
by making the country's division permanent.
p153
Vietnam was supposed to be divided for two years only. That changed
after Diem and Dulles decided not to hold the scheduled 1956 election.
With no election, there could be no reunification. Instead, two
new nations emerged: North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
At the end of 1955, after a referendum
that he won with a reported 98.2 percent of the vote, Diem deposed
Bao Dal and made himself chief of state. He used his new power
to impose a constitution that gave him sweeping authority. While
Ho ruled North Vietnam in traditional Communist fashion, through
a politburo made up of trusted comrades, , Diem shaped a politburo
of his own, made up of close relatives. They ruled the country
as a family.
Diem's eldest brother, Ngo Dinh Can, held
no official post but ruled central Vietnam like a feudal warlord.
Another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Catholic archbishop and
also an avaricious investor who had made a fortune in rubber,
timber, and real estate. A third, Ngo Dinh Luyen, became ambassador
to Britain. Most important and visible of all were the president's
fourth brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu's flamboyant wife. Nhu,
an avid admirer of Machiavelli who was sometimes called the "Vietnamese
Rasputin," was President Diem's closest adviser and alter
ego. Madame Nhu, a sharp-tongued defender of the regime, liked
to say she did not fear death because "I love power, and
in the next life I have a chance to be even more powerful than
I am."
America's determination to defend an independent
South Vietnam led Ho and his comrades to launch their third anticolonial
war. In 1960 they proclaimed a military campaign aimed at "the
elimination of the U.S. imperialists and the Ngo Dinh Diem clique."
A few months later, leaders of a dozen dissident political and
religious groups in the South announced the formation of a new
coalition, the National Liberation Front, that would confront
Diem politically while guerrillas, now called Vietcong, waged
war on the battlefield.
... Secretary of State Dulles fell ill,
retired, and died in 1958.
p156
The monk who burned himself to death on the morning of June 11
was named Thich Quang Duc. He was sixty-seven years old, had been
a monk for nearly half a century, and was revered as a bodhisattva,
a being on the path to enlightenment who chooses to forgo it in
order to help others become enlightened. In a statement that his
comrades distributed after his death, he made a "respectful"
plea to Diem to show "charity and compassion" to all
religions. The ruling family's most outspoken member, Madame Nhu,
replied by ridiculing the spectacle of what she called a "barbecue."
"Let them burn," she said. "We
shall clap our hands."
We're Going to Smash Him
p170
... when Allende won the presidential election there on September
4, 1970, he set off panic in the corridors of American power.
He was a lifelong anti-imperialist and admirer of Fidel Castro
who had vowed to nationalize the American-owned companies that
dominated his country's economy.
Because Allende did not win a majority
of votes cast in the presidential election-36.3 percent in a three-way
race-his victory had to be confirmed by the Chilean Congress.
In past cases like this, Congress had chosen the first-place finisher,
and it seemed certain to do so again. AgustIn Edwards, one of
Chile's richest men and owner of its largest newspaper, El Mecurio,
could not abide that possibility. He went to the American embassy
in Santiago, the Chilean capital, and put a blunt question to
Ambassador Edward Korry.
"Will the U.S. do anything militarily,
directly or indirectly?" he asked.
"No," Korry told him simply.
p171
On September 9 ... directors of the International Telephone &
Telegraph Corporation held their monthly meeting in New York.
ITT was one of the world's largest conglomerates. It had large
holdings in Chile and faced the same threat that hung over Edwards's
business empire. Its prized asset, the Chilean telephone system,
was high on Allende's list for nationalization.
During that ITT board meeting, Harold
Geneen, the company's chief operating officer and one of the best-known
businessmen in the world, took one of the board members aside
to make an audacious proposition. "What he told me,"
the board member later testified, "was that he was prepared
to put as much as a million dollars in support of any plan that
was adopted by the government for the purpose of bringing about
a coalition of the opposition to Allende."
That board member was none other than
john McCone, the former CIA director. McCone had joined ITT less
than a year after leaving the CIA but remained a consultant to
the agency, meaning that he was simultaneously on both payrolls.
This unique arrangement made him the ideal link between ITT and
the top levels of the United States government.
McCone was able to see Kissinger, the
president's national security adviser, immediately to convey Geneen's
million-dollar offer. Although Kissinger did not accept it, he
was impressed with how seriously lTT was taking the Chile problem.
Later McCone also presented his case to his successor and former
deputy at the CIA, Richard Helms.
A covert campaign in Chile could not be
launched without an order from the president. Edwards undertook
to secure that order. As his intermediary, he chose his old friend
and business partner Donald Kendall, chairman of the board and
chief executive officer of Pepsi-Cola.
He stayed at Kendall's house in Connecticut
and told him that Chile was about to fall under Communist rule.
Pepsi-Cola lubricated these relationships.
p173
Two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, Chile was
well on its way to modernity, with a high literacy rate, a relatively
large middle class, and a strong civil society. The democratic
approach to life and politics was as deeply woven into the national
psyche as anywhere in Latin America.
Most countries whose governments Americans
have overthrown possess a valuable resource. Chile is no exception.
It is the world's leading producer of copper, which for thousands
of years has been one of the world's most prized commodities Copper
shaped the development the human race, and with the dawn of the
electrical age, it became
p174
... change was sweeping across Latin America. Cuban guerrillas
overthrew the Batista dictatorship and imposed a radical social
and political program. Other dictators fell in Peru, Colombia,
Venezuela, and Argentina. A restive young generation cast about
for new political ideas.
In 1961, seeking to respond to this challenge,
President Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress, a hemispheric
organization committed to "comprehensive" social and
political change. He asked his aides to look for a country that
could be the first Alliance for Progress showcase. It had to be
one where a basic political and physical infrastructure was already
in place and where people had demonstrated a desire for peaceful
change. Chile, with its strong private sector and democratic tradition,
was the obvious choice. Kennedy hoped that there, he could show
the world that the capitalist model of third-world development
worked better than the Marxist one.
... Beginning in 1964 ... the CIA set
out on a decade-long campaign of intervention and destabilization
that ultimately tore Chile away from its democratic roots.
The CIA began sending money and other
forms of support to Chilean newspapers, student groups, trade
unions, and political parties in the early 1960s. It concentrated
its support on the center-left Christian Democratic Party, whose
leader, Eduardo Frei, was an ebullient reformer in exactly the
right mold to fit Washington's fancy. His good looks and media-conscious
style even led reporters and columnists to call him the "Chilean
Kennedy." When he ran for president in 1964, his American
friends rallied to his side. They did so not just because they
liked him but also because they fervently wished to block the
Socialist candidate, Allende, who was becoming a nightmare figure
for some in Washington.
Allende was the classic bourgeois revolutionary.
Although born into privilege, he was a passionate advocate of
radical social change. His militancy grew from a combination of
Marxist gospel and the realities of life he saw around him. Despite
Chile's relatively prosperous position among South American nations,
millions of its people lived in desperate poverty, and this genuinely
moved Allende. Equally outrageous to him was the fact that foreign
companies controlled his country's all-important copper industry.
p176
United States policy toward Chile, and indeed toward all of Latin
America, changed dramatically after Richard Nixon assumed the
presidency in January 1969. Nixon disdained the Alliance for Progress,
partly because of its association with Kennedy and partly because
he considered it a dangerous triumph of idealism over reality.
He feared that by promoting reform, especially land redistribution,
it would undermine right-wing governments that were friendly to
the United States. Rather than encourage Latin America's "democratic
left," as Kennedy and Johnson had tried to do, he would support
its business elite and military.
"I will never agree with the policy
of downgrading the military in Latin America," Nixon told
one meeting of the National Security Council. "They are power
centers subject to our influence. The others, the intellectuals,
are not subject to our influence."
In 1970, Allende ran for president not
as the candidate of his own Socialist Party, which was too weak
to win on its own, but at the head of a leftist coalition called
Popular Unity. The challenge of keeping him out of power came
to obsess the American embassy in Santiago.
p177
Kissinger would be more directly responsible for what happened
in Chile than any other American, with the possible exception
of Nixon himself. For three years, during which he dealt with
a host of crises around the world, he never lost interest in Chile.
That was because Nixon pressed him relentlessly, and also because
the anti-Allende project fit perfectly with his view of the world
and of America's place in it.
From his background as a refugee from
Nazi Germany, Kissinger took the lesson that a statesman's transcendent
goal must always be to establish and maintain stability among
nations. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Prince Metternich,
the nineteenth-century Austrian diplomat who was one of the modern
world's master practitioners of big-power diplomacy. Once in office,
he applied some of Metternich's ideas. He projected American power
through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned
a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted
with abandon. One of his longtime associates, Lawrence Eagleburger,
concluded that he was guided by principles that "are antithetical
to the American experience."
"Americans tend to want to pursue
a set of moral principles," Eagleburger asserted. "Henry
does not have an intrinsic feel for the American political system,
and he does not start with the same values and assumptions."
During his long career, Kissinger, like
many statesmen of his generation, had paid almost no attention
to Latin America. In the spring of 1969, he visited the Chilean
embassy in Washington and bluntly told the ambassador, "I
am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern
portion of the world from the Pyrenees on down.
p178
On March 25, 1970, the "40 Committee" approved the "spoiling"
campaign against Allende with a budget of $135,000, later increased
to $390,000. It was a smaller-scale version of the multimillion-dollar
effort the CIA had launched to prevent Allende from winning in
1964. Agents dusted off many of the same tactics, from planting
propaganda in the press to supporting anti-Communist "civic
action" groups. Some printed and distributed posters showing
Soviet tanks on the streets of Prague. Others opened tendentious
news agencies, sowed discord within Popular Unity, and produced
anti-Allende books, pamphlets, and leaflets.
As the presidential campaign intensified
in Chile, Harold Geneen, the ITT chairman, decided to try to influence
its outcome. He asked McCone to arrange for him to meet William
Broe, the CIA's chief of covert operations in the Western Hemisphere.
They met in the ITT suite at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel in Washington
on July 16. Geneen said his company wanted to use the CIA as a
conduit to pass money to the campaign of Jorge Alessandri, the
rightist presidential candidate. Broe suggested that the company
make its contribution directly, and with help from CIA officers
in Santiago, it did. ITT covertly donated $350,000 to the Alessandri
campaign and arranged for other American businesses to donate
another $350,000.
Although the CIA's "spoiling"
campaign and the large contributions that American companies made
to Alessandri may have had some effect, it was not enough. On
September 4, 1970, Chilean voters went to the polls and gave Allende
his victory by plurality.
p178
Nixon ordered the CIA to produce an anti-Allende plan within forty-eight
hours, so Helms had no time to waste. Early the next morning,
September 16, 1970, he met with his covert action specialists.
He told them, according to one participant, "that President
Nixon had decided that an Allende regime in Chile was unacceptable
to the United States"; that Nixon had "asked the Agency
to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him";
and that, in a break from normal practice, "the Agency is
to carry out this mission without coordination from the Department
of State or Defense."
p180
Henry Kissinger
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country
go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."
p181
Agents in Santiago understood this me "perfectly well. "You
have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile," [Henry] Hecksher
[chief of the CIA station in Santiago] cabled back to headquarters.
"We provide you with formula for chaos, which is unlikely
to be bloodless."
p181
Over the next several weeks the political climate in Chile became
increasingly tense. Newspapers and radio stations, including several
that the CIA was subsidizing, denounced Allende and warned graphically
of the horrors his government would surely bring. A fascist-oriented
group, Fatherland and Liberty, which had received $38,500 from
the CIA, staged a rally in Santiago. CIA agents quietly contacted
nearly two dozen Chilean military officers, and those who seemed
open to the idea of staging a coup, according to a later report
of the United States Congress, "were given assurances of
strong support at the highest levels of the U.S. government both
before and after the coup."
A centerpiece of this operation, which
bore the CIA cryptonym FUBELT, apparently a reference to the tightening
of a belt around Chile, was the disruption of Chile's economy.
Helms wrote in a memo to Kissinger that since "a suddenly
disastrous economic situation would be the most logical pretext
for a military move," the United States should work to create
"at least a mini-crisis." It had many ways to do so.
In cables to Washington, Ambassador Korry suggested that American
banks be pressured to stop granting short-term credits to Chilean
businesses; that agents spread rumors of impending food rationing,
bank collapses, and nonexistent plans by Allende to seize private
homes and forbid technicians from leaving the country; and that
American companies in Chile "foot-drag to the maximum extent
possible" in filling orders for spare parts.
"Not a nut or a bolt will be allowed
to reach Chile under Allende," Korry warned Minister of Defense
Sergio Ossa in a meeting shortly after the election. "We
shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and he Chilean
people to utmost deprivation and poverty."
It is a tribute to the Chilean political
system that despite all the CIA's efforts, FUBELT failed. Neither
President Frei nor members of Congress from anti-Allende parties
could be persuaded that the threat Allende posed was great enough
to require a break with Chile's democratic tradition. As for the
idea of promoting a military coup, only a few officers w e sympathetic,
and they had no realistic hope of success because General René
Schneider, the army commander, was fiercely opposed to ,.military
interference in politics. For a coup to succeed, Ambassador Korry
cabled his superiors in Washington, "General Schneider would
have to be neutralized, by displacement if necessary."
p182
On October 13, with less than two weeks remaining before the Chilean
Congress was scheduled to install Allende, President Nixon summoned
his national security team to the White House and demanded action.
According to one participant in the meeting, Nixon "went
out of his way to impress all of those there with his conviction
that it was absolutely essential that the election of Mr. Allende
to the presidency be thwarted." He was frustrated that Korry
seemed unable to arrange this, and summoned the ambassador to
the White House on October 15.
"That son of a bitch, that son of
a bitch!" Nixon was saying to himself, pounding one of his
fists into a palm, as Korry entered the Oval Office. When he looked
up and saw Korry's startled expression, he composed himself.
"Not you, Mr. Ambassador," he
said. "It's that son of a bitch Allende. We're going to smash
him."
p183
The plot reached its climax two days later. At two o'clock in
the morning, on a dead-silent street, Colonel Paul Wimert, the
United States military attaché in Santiago, delivered the
weapons to Chilean conspirators aligned with Viaux. Six hours
later, while General Schneider was on his way to work, a jeep
struck his chauffeur-driven car. Five men surrounded it. One smashed
the rear window with a sledgehammer. Accounts differ on whether
or not Schneider drew his pistol to defend himself, but his assailants
opened fire, using weapons of their own rather than those the
CIA had supplied. They hit Schneider with three shots. He died
at a hospital soon afterward.
p184
"We know as much about U.S. policy making toward Chile for
the period from September to November 1970 as we do about policy
making in any period in recent American history," the political
scientist Paul Sigmund has written. "It is a controversial
period and one that does not do credit to American ideals, since
it includes an effort to prevent a freely elected president from
taking office by fomenting a military coup; the assassination
of a Chilean general, for which the United States was indirectly
responsible; authorization, though not execution, of efforts to
bribe the Chilean Congress; subsidization of a quasi-fascist extreme
rightist group; and improperly close relationships between the
U.S. government and a major corporation."
p184
At nine-forty on the morning of November 6, 1970, just two days
after Allende donned the presidential sash in Santiago, President
Nixon convened the National Security Council to discuss ways of
deposing him. No one questioned the assumption that this was a
wise and necessary thing to do. In fact, there was remarkable
unanimity.
"We want to do it right, and bring
him down," Secretary of State William Rogers began. "We
can put an economic squeeze on him."
"I agree with Bill Rogers,"
said Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. "We have to do everything
we can to hurt him and bring him down."
After listening to his aides agree with
him, Nixon delivered a trenchant monologue explaining why he considered
Allende such a threat. It hardly tells the whole story of why
he was so intent on carrying out this coup but offers clear insight
into his thinking. It is as close as Nixon ever came to explaining
why he did it, and an impressive example of the classic realpolitik
that was one of his diplomatic hallmarks.
The main concern in Chile is that [Allende]
can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world
will be his success .... If we let the potential leaders in South
America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways,
we will be in trouble ...
... No impression should be permitted
in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it's safe
to go this way.
p186
Between 1970 and 1973, the CIA carried out a wide-ranging series
of covert operations in Chile. The historian and archivist Peter
Kornbluh has catalogued them.
More than $3.5 million was funneled into
opposition parties and allied organizations .... Station operatives
conducted a $2 million propaganda campaign, concentrating on Chile's
largest newspaper, El Mercurio. More than $1.5 million was passed
to business, labor, civic and paramilitary organizations organizing
protests, demonstrations and violent actions against Allende's
administration.
Soon after Allende's inauguration, most
of the leading American companies active in Chile, including ITT,
Kennecott, Anaconda, Firestone Tire & Rubber, Bethlehem Steel,
Charles Pfizer, W. R. Grace, Bank of America, Ralston Purina,
and Dow Chemical, joined to form a Chile Ad Hoc Committee. It
was dedicated, according to a memorandum prepared after its first
meeting, to working with officials in Washington who were "handling
the Chile problem." Over the next few months, its members
set out on a quiet destabilization campaign of their own that
included office closings, delayed payments, slow deliveries, and
credit denial. It was so effective that within two years, one-third
of Chile's buses and 20 percent of its taxis were out of service
due to lack of spare parts.
On July 11, 1971, the Chilean Congress,
meeting in joint session, unanimously approved a constitutional
amendment authorizing the nationalization of Kennecott, Anaconda,
and the smaller Cerro Mining Corporation. Allende proclaimed that
the date would henceforth be "National Dignity Day,"
and to celebrate the first one, he came to El Teniente. In a triumphant
speech to a throng of cheering miners, he accused Kennecott and
Anaconda of having made immorally high profits in Chile while
masses of Chileans lived in poverty. He did not encourage the
companies to hope for much in the way of compensation.
We will pay it if it is just," he
promised. "We will not pay what is no just." Allende
later announced that he considered an annual profit of 12 percent
per year to be "rightful," and anything higher to be
"excessive." By that standard, Cerro, which had been
mining in Chile for barely a year and had yet to turn a profit,
was guiltless; Chile's comptroller awarded it compensation of
$14 million. For Kennecott and Anaconda, though, the situation
was quite different. According to Allende's formula, they had
made $774 million in excess profit over the past fifteen years.
He asked the comptroller to deduct that sum from their due compensation.
The comptroller agreed, and since $774 million was more than the
book value of their mines, Kennecott and Anaconda were not awarded
a cent.
"We used to be the fucker,"
one of Anaconda's lawyers lamented. "Now we're the fuckee."
Soon after taking this momentous step,
the Allende government took another one, assuming management control
of the ITT-owned Compania de Teléfonos de Chile. Two days
later, ITT's vice president for Washington relations, William
Merriam, sent the White House an eighteen-point list of steps
it could take to ensure that Allende would not "get through
the crucial next six months." Merriam confidently predicted
that if these measures were adopted, they would push Chile to
"economic chaos."
p188
The anti-Allende project had been under way for more than a year
when the secrecy surrounding it was spectacularly breached. A
muckraking Washington newspaper columnist, jack Anderson, obtained
twenty-four internal ITT memos that graphically detailed what
Anderson called the company's "bizarre plot to stop the 1970
election of leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende."
They told of ITT's offer of $1 million to help the CIA prevent
Allende from coming to power; its regular contacts with the CIA,
the National Security Council, and the State Department; and its
many efforts to "exert pressure on Allende," push Chile
to "economic collapse," and bring about "an internal
crisis requiring military intervention."
"No one can dream that we are going
to pay even half a cent to this multi-national company that was
on the verge of plunging Chile into civil war," President
Allende declared after the memos were published. Many Americans
were equally outraged. "How could it be so-if it is so-that
in 1970 an American President could consider the possibility of
acting to prevent a democratically elected president of a supposedly
friendly country from taking office?" the Washington Post
asked in an editorial.
p188
By the end of 1972 ... the American destabilization campaign had
combined to throw Chile into grave crisis. Street disturbances
became so regular that Allende was forced to replace his police
chief and his interior minister. Shopkeepers and truckers staged
crippling strikes. Food became scarce. Several cities were put
under temporary states of emergency. Against this backdrop, Allende
arrived in New York to address the United Nations.
Twenty-one years earlier, Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran had come to the United Nations to present
his case against a foreign corporation that controlled his country's
basic resource. Allende was in a similar position. His country
was a victim of the resource curse, just as Iran had been. The
riches that lay beneath their soil came under the control of foreign
corporations, and when they tried to reclaim those riches, great
powers came down upon them.
At eleven o'clock on the morning of December
4, 1972, after a brief meeting with George H. W. Bush, the American
ambassador to the United Nations, Allende strode to the General
Assembly podium. His speech eerily echoed Mossadegh's, showing
how little the relationships between large corporations and small
countries had changed over the course of two decades. Both leaders
had come to the UN to fire a volley in what Allende called "the
battle in defense of natural resources."
Our economy could no longer tolerate
the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of
its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies
that have always put their interests ahead of those of the countries
where they make their profits ....
These same firms exploited Chilean copper
for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit
in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments
were less than thirty million .... My country, Chile, would have
been totally transformed by that four billion dollars...
We find ourselves opposed by forces that
operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons,
from positions of great influence. We are potentially rich countries,
yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits
and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic
paradox of the capitalist economic system.
p190
When Nixon was sworn in for a second term as president, on January
20, 1973, his campaign against Allende was reaching its crescendo.
Chilean military commanders prepared to step in and strike the
final blow. At every step, their CIA friends urged them on.
"We should attempt [to] induce as
much of the military as possible, if not all, to take over and
displace the Allende government," CIA plotters in Langley
directed the Santiago station. "The creation of a renewed
atmosphere of political unrest and controlled crisis must be achieved
in order to stimulate serious consideration for intervention on
part of the military."
On April 10, the CIA directed its Santiago
station to begin "accelerated efforts against the military
target." Three weeks later, the chief of the agency's Western
Hemisphere division, Theodore Shackley, told the station to "bring
our influence to bear on key military commanders so that they
might play a decisive role on the side of the coup forces."
p193
... Allende took a telephone call from one of the rebel commanders.
Thy had decided to offer him free passage out of the country if
he would resign. Allende refused. He probably could not have escaped
in any case, since according to tape recordings that surfaced
years later, Pinochet was planning to shoot his plane down before
it left Chilean airspace. At around nine o'clock he stepped onto
the balcony for a final, forlorn look over Constitution Square.
Half an hour later, through a makeshift radio hookup, he addressed
his last words to his people.
I will not resign. I will not do it.
I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own
life .... Foreign capital-imperialism united with reaction-created
the climate for the army to break with their tradition. Long live
Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure
that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at
least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.
Soon after Allende delivered his impassioned
farewell, infantry units began advancing on the palace under cover
of artillery fire. Defenders fired back, and men on both sides
fell. Shortly before noon, two British-made Hawker Hunter fighters
roared out of the sky. They swooped down and fired at the palace
...
A Graveyard Smell
p195
The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all
"what the President ordered." They were not rogue operations.
Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and
CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created
the CIA and assigned it "duties related to intelligence affecting
the national security." The first thing all four of these
coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously,
willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws
of the United States.
"The finger should have been pointed at presidents, and not
the intelligence group," Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona
complained after the CIA was vilified for fomenting these coups.
Their second common feature is that in
all four cases, the United States played the decisive role in
a regime's fall. It did not simply give insurgents tacit encouragement
or discreet advice. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed
campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South
Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen - certainly not in
the same way or at the same time - if Washington had not acted
as it did.
Each of these four coups was launched
against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the
arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led
to the installation of a repressive dictatorship.
p196
Whatever else these operations may have been, they were not victories
for democracy. They led to the fall of leaders who embraced American
ideals, and the imposition of others who detested everything Americans
hold dear.
The reason was straightforward. When people
in countries like Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were
free to speak, many criticized the United States and supported
political movements that placed their own national interests ahead
of those of outside powers. Once these critical voices were forcibly
silenced, Americans were able to believe that anti-American feelings
had disappeared. The truth was quite different. Those feelings
festered and became steadily more intense.
p196
[[U.S.] Ambassador [to Guatemala] John Peurifoy
"Communism is directed by the Kremlin
all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn't
know what he is talking about."
p197
Presidents and others had no doubt the Soviets were manipulating
Mossadegh, Arbenz, and Allende. That turned out to have been wrong.
The three leaders had differing views of Marxism-Mossadegh detested
it, Arbenz sympathized with it, Allende embraced it-but they were
nationalists above all. Each was driven mainly by a desire to
recover control over natural resources, not to serve world Communism,
as Americans believed.
p198
Americans who think about and make foreign policy have traditionally
been Eurocentric. Most of what they understand about the world
comes from their knowledge of European history and diplomatic
tradition. They grasp the nature of alliances, big-power rivalries,
and wars of conquest. The passionate desire of people in poor
countries to assert control over their natural resources, however,
has never been an issue in Europe. This hugely powerful phenomenon,
which pushed developing countries into conflict with the United
States during the Cold War, lay completely outside the experience
of most American leaders. Henry Kissinger spoke for them, eloquently
as always, after Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés
accused him of knowing nothing about the Southern Hemisphere.
"No and I don't care," Kissinger
replied. "Nothing important can come from the South. History
has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts
in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes
to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance."
This attitude made it easy for powerful
Americans to misunderstand why nationalist movements arose in
Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. Behind these movements,
they saw only the hand of Moscow. That made intervention seem
almost a form of self-defense.
In 1954, President Eisenhower secretly
named James Doolittle, a celebrated air force general who had
retired and become a Shell Oil executive, to conduct "a comprehensive
study of covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency."
In his confidential report, Doolittle concluded that because the
Soviet threat was so profound, the United States must fight back
with no quarter.
It is now clear that we are facing an
implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by
whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such
a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.
If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts
of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop
effective espionage and counter-espionage services and must learn
to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more
sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against
us.
p199
John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and others who shaped United
States foreign policy during the Cold War were utterly uninterested
in the details of life in individual countries, and cared not
the slightest whether the regimes that ruled them were dictatorships,
democracies, or something in between. Their world was defined
by a single fact, the Cold War confrontation between Moscow and
Washington. Nations existed for them not as entities with unique
histories, cultures, and challenges but as battlegrounds in a
global life-or-death struggle. All that mattered was how vigorously
each country supported the United States and opposed the Soviet
Union.
p200
After the 1953 coup in Iran, the triumphant Shah ordered the execution
of several dozen military officers and student leaders who had
been closely associated with Mohammad Mossadegh, and also of Hussein
Fatemi, Mossadegh's foreign minister. Soon afterward, with help
from the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, the
shah created a secret police force called Savak, which became
infamous for its brutality. Among its most notorious directors
was General Nematollah Nassin, who as a colonel had played an
important role in Operation Ajax.
It would have been too risky for the shah
to order Mossadegh executed. Instead he arranged for the old man
to be tried for treason and found guilty. Mossadegh was sentenced
to three years in prison and the rest of his life under house
arrest in his home village of Ahmad Abad. He served his sentence
in full and died in 1967, at the age of eighty-five.
... The main results of the 1953 coup
were the end of democracy in Iran and the emergence, in its place,
of a royal dictatorship that, a quarter of a century later, set
off a bitterly anti-American revolution.
... The shah did not tolerate dissent
and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade
unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian
dissidents could find a home was in mosques and religious schools,
many of which were controlled by obscurantist clerics. Through
their uncompromising resistance to the regime, these clerics won
the popular support that secular figures never achieved. That
made it all but inevitable that when revolution finally broke
out in Iran, clerics would lead it.
p201
John Kennedy had prodded the shah to change his ways, but the
shah outlasted him. Subsequent presidents were happy to take his
money and encourage his excesses. Richard Nixon, who with Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger developed a strategy of cooperating with
dictators who allowed their countries to be used as platforms
for the projection of American power, made him an ally. In 1975
Gerald Ford and Kissinger received him in the White House. Two
years later, Jimmy Carter did the same.
If ever there was a country which has
blossomed forth under enlightened leadership," Carter said
in his banquet toast to the shah, "it would be the ancient
empire of Persia."
Soon after that banquet, angry crowds
began surging through the streets of Tehran and other Iranian
cities crying "Death to the American shah. That amazed many
in the United States. Worse shocks lay ahead. The cleric who emerged
as the revolution's guiding figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
turned out to be bitterly anti-Western. His movement became so
powerful that at the beginning of 1979, it forced the shah to
flee into exile. A few months later, the new Khomeini regime sanctioned
the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran and the taking
of American diplomats as hostage.
The hostage crisis deeply humiliated the
United States, destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency, and turned
millions of Americans into Iran haters. Because most Americans
did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953,
few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they
called "the great Satan."
Years later, one of the Iranian militants
involved in the embassy takeover wrote an article explaining why
he and his comrades had carried it out. It was, he said, a delayed
reaction to Operation Ajax, when CIA agents working inside the
American embassy staged a coup that brought the shah back to power
after he had fled the country.
p203
Guatemala is a far smaller, weaker, and more isolated country
than Iran, but the leader the United States imposed after the
1954 coup, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, followed a repressive
course much like the shah's. During his first weeks in power,
he abolished the banana workers' federation, revoked the Agrarian
Reform Law, banned all political parties and peasant groups, and
ordered the arrest of thousands of suspected leftists. His secret
police chief, who had held the same office under the former dictator
Jorge Ubico, outlawed subversive literature, specifically including
all works by Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. With this burst of repression,
the foundation was laid for a police state that plunged Guatemala
into bloody tragedy over the following decades.
p204
The man who directed his [Arbenz] overthrow, John Foster Dulles,
was determined to convince the world that Arbenz had been a Communist
all along ...
... Dulles concluded that he had to destroy
the Arbenz government for two reasons: because it was molesting
United Fruit and because it seemed to be leading Guatemala out
of the American orbit and toward Communism.
... Many Guatemalans were naturally outraged
by the coup, and after it became clear that democracy would not
return to their country on its own, some turned to revolution.
p205
To combat this threat, the Guatemalan army used such brutal tactics
that all normal political life in the country ceased. Death squads
roamed with impunity, chasing down and murdering politicians,
union organizers, student activists, and peasant leaders. Thousands
of people were kidnapped by what newspapers called "unknown
men dressed in civilian clothes" and never seen again. Many
were tortured to death on military bases. In the countryside,
soldiers rampaged through villages, massacring Mayan Indians by
the hundreds. This repression raged for three decades, and during
that period, soldiers killed more civilians in Guatemala than
in the rest of the hemisphere combined.
Between 1960 and 1990, the United States
provided Guatemala with ! hundreds of millions of dollars in military
aid. Americans trained and armed the Guatemalan army and police,
sent Green Beret teams to accompany soldiers on antiguerrilla
missions, and dispatched planes from the Panama Canal Zone to
drop napalm on suspected guerrilla hideouts. In 1968, guerrillas
responded by killing two American military advisers and the United
States ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein.
This bloodiest of all modern Latin American
wars would not have broken out if not for Operation Success. During
the decade when Guatemalans lived under democratic rule, they
had legal and political ways to resolve national conflicts. After
dictatorship settled over the country, all space for political
debate was closed. Tensions that would have been manageable in
a democratic society exploded into civil war.
p207
In 1996, under the auspices of the United Nations, Guatemalan
military commanders and guerrilla leaders signed a peace treaty.
That did little to resolve the huge inequalities of life in Guatemala,
where two percent of the people still own half the arable land,
but it did end a long, horrific wave of government repression.
It also led to the establishment of a Commission on Historical
Clarification that was assigned to study the violence and its
causes. The commission's report put the number of dead at over
200,000, and said soldiers had killed 93 percent of them.
p210
After the coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, General Augusto
Pinochet and the other officers who seized power with him moved
quickly to consolidate their power. Pinochet soon became the ruling
junta's dominant figure. Several of his military rivals died unexpectedly,
most notably his minister of defense, General Oscar Bonilla, who
was killed in a helicopter crash in 1975. Others chose early retirement.
Thus strengthened, Pinochet declared himself president of the
junta and then president of the republic.
One of Pinochet's first acts after the
coup was to order a nationwide series of raids on leftists and
other supporters of the deposed regime. The harshness with which
this campaign was conducted, the tens of thousands of people who
were arrested, the conditions under which they were held, and
the fact that many were never seen again set the tone for what
would be years of repression. The regime ordered summary executions
for scores of leftist leaders. Many more died at the hands of
soldiers and rightist thugs who swept through pro-Allende slums,
called poblaciones, beating and killing as they rampaged. On October
8, Newsweek reported that city morgues in Santiago had received
a total of 2,796 corpses since the coup, most with either crushed
skulls or execution-style bullet wounds. Four days later, the
New York Times also placed the death toll in the thousands.
p211
In 1976, Henry Kissinger traveled to Santiago to deliver a speech
to the Organization of American States. The day before his public
appearance, he met privately with Pinochet to assure him that
although his speech would include a few perfunctory references
to human rights, it was "not aimed at Chile."
"My evaluation is that you are a
victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your
greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going
communist," Kissinger told Pinochet. "We welcomed the
overthrow of the communist-inclined government here. We are not
out to weaken your position."
p213
Thirty-one years after the coup [in Chile] a government-appointed
commission in Chile concluded that during the years of dictatorship,
"torture was a state policy, meant to repress and terrorize
the population." It identified 27,255 people who were tortured
during the years of military rule, and President Ricardo Lagos
announced that each of them would receive a lifetime pension.
Soon afterward, a judge ordered Pinochet, then eighty-nine years
old, placed under house arrest pending trial on charges of kidnapping
and murder. The commander of the Chilean army, General Juan Emillo
Cheyre, then made a historic admission.
"The Army of Chile has taken the
difficult but irreversible decision to assume the responsibility
for all punishable and morally unacceptable acts in the past that
fall on it as an institution," General Cheyre said. "Never
and for no one can there be any ethical justification for human
rights violations."
p214
Despite its remarkable success in reinventing its democracy, Chile
remains a shattered nation. The 1973 intervention and the long
period of dictatorship that followed have deeply scarred its collective
psyche. Many Chileans, like many Americans and others around the
world, ultimately came to believe that this was another in a line
of American coups that turned out badly for almost everyone involved.
p214
The coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile had much in common. All
three countries were blessed with rich natural resources, but
those resources fell under foreign control. When nationalist leaders
tried to take them back, the United States responded by turning
their countries into bloody battlegrounds. Iran, Guatemala, and
Chile were brought back into the American orbit, but at a staggering
human and social cost.
... The covert coups of the Cold War era
were carried out quite differently from the invasions and stage-managed
revolutions that the United States used in deposing regimes in
the period around 1900. Much of what motivated them, however,
was the same. Each country whose government the United States
overthrew had something Americans wanted-in most cases, either
a valuable natural resource, a large consumer market, or a strategic
location that would allow access to resources and markets elsewhere.
Powerful businesses played just as great a role in pushing the
United States to intervene abroad during the Cold War as they
did during the first burst of American imperialism.
Their influence alone, however, was never
enough. Americans overthrew governments only when economic interests
coincided with ideological ones. In Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico,
the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the American ideology
was that of Christian improvement and "manifest destiny."
Decades later, in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile, it
was anti-Communism. During both eras, Americans came to believe
it was their right, and even their historical obligation, to lead
the forces of good against those of iniquity.
"For us there are two sorts of people
in the world," John Foster Dulles once asserted. "There
are those who are Christians support free enterprise, and there
are the others."
p216
Some of those who directed Cold War interventions, like john Foster
I Dulles, devoted their lives to the service of American corporate
power. Others, like Henry Kissinger, had no real interest in business
and even regarded it with disdain. All of them, however, believed
that only malicious regimes would try to restrict or nationalize
foreign companies.
Directors of large corporations were the
first to wish Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador
Allende overthrown. They persuaded leaders in Washington, who
had somewhat different interests, to depose them. In each case,
government stepped in to lead a parade that had already formed
for other reasons. Ideology and economic interest combined to
drive the United States to intervention.
The Americans who conceived, authorized,
and carried out covert plots against the governments of Iran,
Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile considered them to have been
great victories. From the perspective of history, they do not
look that way. In all four countries, they led to increased repression
and reduced freedom. Beyond their borders, they also had profound
effects. They intensified and prolonged the Cold War by polarizing
the world and choking off possibilities for peaceful change. They
undermined Americans' faith in the CIA, thereby making the agency
less effective. Around the world, they led millions of people
to conclude that the United States was a hypocritical nation,
as cynical as any other, that acted brutally to replace incipient
democracies with cruel dictatorships.
Overthrow
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