Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] Specialists in coups and killing
-----
View original article here:
http://socialistworker.org/2008/01/18/specialists-in-coups-and-killing
National
======== SPECIALISTS IN COUPS AND KILLING ====================================
FOLLOWING THE death of rebel agent Philip Agee, Todd Chretien describes the
bloody history of the CIA.
January 18, 2008 | Issue 658
PHILIP AGEE, the former CIA agent who rebelled against the U.S. spy agency,
died in Cuba at the age of 72 last week.
Agee resigned in 1968 after working for the CIA for more than a
decade--during which time he ran the CIA operation in Mexico during the 1968
Olympic Games, when hundreds of students were massacred by the Mexican Army
at Tlatelolco.
He went on to write /Inside the Company: CIA Diary/ in 1975, which not only
recounted the long list of atrocities committed by the CIA, but also named
250 CIA agents around the world. Agee's U.S. passport was revoked in 1979,
and in 1982, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,
making it a crime to expose CIA operatives.
This law was intended to silence Agee and others who worked to expose the
CIA's ongoing crimes. However, last year, it was used to convict former Bush
administration official Lewis "Scooter" Libby on perjury charges for
conspiring to expose CIA operative Valerie Plame as punishment for her
husband Joseph Wilson's public contention that Iraq didn't have the
components to make nuclear weapons.
Wilson was proved correct, and the Bush administration's drive to war on Iraq
was exposed as having been based on a series of lies.
The occupation of Iraq has been such a disaster that sections of the
permanent military and intelligence bureaucracy now oppose some of the Bush's
tactics. Most recently, the CIA's assessment that Iran didn't have a nuclear
weapons program was released to the media, creating a major stumbling block
for any White House hopes for military action.
These disputes within the establishment have led some liberals to identify
Bush's critics within the CIA (or the Pentagon) as the "good guys."
So, for example, although Valerie Plame was working on behalf of the Bush
administration trying to prove that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Jon
Stewart promoted her on his TV show in October 2007 to an enthusiastic
response from his audience.
Worse, in March 2007, while Plame was testifying before Congress, Rep. Dennis
Kucinich defended the CIA's right to protect its agents from public exposure,
saying, "Exposing an agent is destructive for the agency and for the
taxpayers' investment in the agency."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HISTORIAN WILLIAM Blum has painstakingly documented the bloody history of the
CIA since its inception after the Second World War under President Harry
Truman. It is worth recalling a few of the CIA's many victims in light of
these present controversies:
-- In 1953, the CIA engineered the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister
Mohammed Mossadeq after he threatened to nationalize foreign oil companies.
In his place, the Shah of Iran took power and was showered with billions of
dollars of military hardware, which he used to build a terrifying police
state based on torture. Iran, along with Israel, remained the main U.S.
military ally in the Middle East until the 1979 Iranian Revolution toppled
the Shah.
-- In 1954, the CIA organized the overthrow of the democratically elected
president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, paving the way for decades of military
rule. Hundreds of thousands of leftists, union organizers and especially
indigenous people have since been massacred.
-- In 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Congo
after it won independence from colonial rule, was deposed in a CIA-engineered
coup, setting the stage for decades of bloody rule by Mobutu Sese Seko.
-- During the Vietnam War, the CIA ran Operation Phoenix, under which tens of
thousands of Vietnamese people were tortured in the name of gathering
"actionable intelligence."
-- In 1968, the CIA helped organized the military coup in Iraq that brought
Saddam Hussein to power. With U.S. support, Hussein led a devastating war
against Iran from 1980 to 1988, with a death toll of more than 1 million on
both sides.
-- In 1973, the CIA sponsored Gen. Augusto Pinochet's coup against the
democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile. Tens of
thousands of Chilean leftists and union activists were murdered, tortured and
exiled.
-- From 1979, the CIA sponsored many sections of the Afghan resistance to the
invasion of the USSR. Covertly pumping in billions of dollars in Operation
Cyclone, the U.S. worked with Pakistan's secret service to arm, train and
fund the militias that today comprise Afghanistan's warlords and the Taliban.
With Saudi Arabia's help, the CIA laid the basis for al-Qaeda to arise.
-- In the 1980s, the CIA directed the covert U.S. war against the Nicaraguan
Revolution that toppled American-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Some
80,000 Nicaraguans were killed and the country's economy devastated. The
operation included mining Nicaraguan harbors and the formation of the
counter-revolutionary contra army--whose operations were funded through
Agency sales of banned arms to Iran and cocaine imports into the U.S. that
the CIA facilitated.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SINCE THE end of the Cold War with the USSR, there has been a relative
decline in the number of major CIA operations. Why?
The military and economic power of the Soviet Union meant that Washington had
to sometimes resort to backdoor means to pursue Corporate America's
interests. The end of the Cold War in the 1990s that followed the collapse of
the USSR meant that the U.S., under the Clinton administration, was able to
impose its will economically on weaker countries.
Plus, after the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. could bomb or invade countries
without fear of any military competitor. Thus, Bush Sr. invaded Iraq in 1991,
Clinton invaded or bombed Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and
Sudan during his terms, and Bush Jr. has obviously continued down the same
path.
However, this isn't to say that the CIA was left aside in the massive
military spending spree since September 11. The agency has expanded its
operations dramatically, setting up secret torture sites around the world and
building up its "extraordinary rendition" apparatus. And the CIA is very
active within the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying out Phoenix-type
operations.
Still, in recent years--for example, regarding Iran--the CIA's analysts
almost seem like restrained academics compared to the Bush neo-cons. In the
past, it was often argued that the CIA was a "rogue agency" in the same way
that people today think of Bush and Cheney as a "rogue administration."
Of course, there are tactical policy disagreements and bureaucratic turf wars
between government agencies and the two ruling political parties in the U.S.
However, with rare exceptions, the CIA has acted under the orders of
presidents of both parties, and in close cooperation with the Senate and
House Intelligence Committees.
Sometimes, it is convenient to leave the grubbier aspects of the agency's
work unsaid in order to provide the politicians with plausible deniability.
But the CIA budget is voted on by Congress, and all the elected officials
agree to keep it a secret. Leaders of both parties are briefed on a regular
basis.
In the same way, the vast majority of what the Bush administration has done
was with the support of Democrats in Congress. For instance, last year,
torture by waterboarding became a huge scandal. But just as some Democrats
started to make an issue of it, it emerged that, starting in 2002, the CIA
had given Congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, briefings about
waterboarding.
The history of the CIA's crimes is certainly depressing. But it is important
to keep in mind that the spies can be beaten.
In 1961, John F. Kennedy authorized the CIA-organized invasion of Cuba at the
Bay of Pigs. But within days, the invasion force of thousands of right-wing
Cubans was wiped out by local militias fighting to defend the land they had
recently received from radical land reform.
And the CIA's brutality could not defeat the mass movement for independence
in Vietnam. These massive social struggles in turn helped to radicalize the
U.S. population in the 1960s and created the climate for someone like Philip
Agee to turn against his bosses.
More recently, millions of working-class Venezuelans took to the streets to
defeat a CIA-orchestrated coup in 2002 against democratically elected
president Hugo Chávez.
These struggles, and not a misplaced faith in the Valerie Plames and Joe
Wilsons of the world, hold the keys to closing the book on the CIA's bloody
history.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What else to read
Philip Agee's /Inside the Company: CIA Diary [1]/ caused a sensation when it
was published by exposing agency operations and naming agents. It is out of
print today, but can still be found in used bookstores.
For a meticulously documented history of the CIA's crimes, see /Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II [2]/, by William Blum.
Blum is also the author of the out of print /Rogue State: A Guide to the
World's Only Superpower [3]/.
The CIA's role in the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz is exposed in /Bitter Fruit:
The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala [4]/, by Stephen Schlesinger and
Stephen Kinzer.
For a comprehensive history of U.S. imperialism from before the CIA was
formed through the Vietnam era, get Sidney Lens' /The Forging of the American
Empire [5]/.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Published by the International Socialist Organization. Material on this Web
site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd
3.0) license, except for articles that are republished with permission.
Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for
non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and
SocialistWorker.org.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FInside-Company-Diary-Philip-Agee%2Fdp%2F055322977X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1200330732%26sr%3D8-1&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FKilling-Hope-Military-Interventions-Since%2Fdp%2F1567512526%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1200330970%26sr%3D1-1&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FRogue-State-Guide-Worlds-Superpower%2Fdp%2F1567511945%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1200330970%26sr%3D1-5&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBitter-Fruit-American-Guatemala-Rockefeller%2Fdp%2F067401930X%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1200331213%26sr%3D1-1&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[5] http://www.haymarketbooks.org/product_info.php?cPath=41&products_id=1638
