Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

by John Perkins

  I told him that it was my understanding that the whole idea behind the project came from his people. He responded with a cynical laugh, saying that the idea was planted in the shah’s mind by my own United States government, and that the shah was just a puppet of that government.

  “A true Persian would never permit such a thing,” Yamin said. Then he launched into a long dissertation about the relationship between his people—the Bedouins—and the desert. He emphasized the fact that many urbanized Iranians take their vacations in the desert. They set up tents large enough for the entire family and spend a week or more living in them.

  “We—my people—are part of the desert. The people the shah claims to rule with that iron hand of his are not just of the desert. We are the desert.”

  After that, he told me stories about his personal experiences in the desert. When the evening was over, he escorted me back to the tiny door in the large wall. My taxi was waiting in the street outside. Yamin shook my hand and expressed his appreciation for the time I had spent with him. He again mentioned my young age and my openness, and the fact that my occupying such a position gave him hope for the future.

  “I am so glad to have had this time with a man like you.” He continued to hold my hand in his. “I would request of you only one more favor. I do not ask this lightly. I do it only because, after our time together tonight, I know it will be meaningful to you. You’ll gain a great deal from it.”

  “What is it I can do for you?”

  “I would like to introduce you to a dear friend of mine, a man who can tell you a great deal about our King of Kings. He may shock you, but I assure you that meeting him will be well worth your time.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Confessions of a Tortured Man

  Several days later, Yamin drove me out of Tehran, through a dusty and impoverished shantytown, along an old camel trail, and out to the edge of the desert. With the sun setting behind the city, he stopped his car at a cluster of tiny mud shacks surrounded by palm trees.

  “A very old oasis,” he explained, “dating back centuries before Marco Polo.” He preceded me to one of the shacks. “The man inside has a PhD from one of your most prestigious universities. For reasons that will soon be clear, he must remain nameless. You can call him Doc.”

  He knocked on the wooden door, and there was a muffled response. Yamin pushed the door open and led me inside. The tiny room was windowless and lit only by an oil lamp on a low table in one corner. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the dirt floor was covered with Persian carpets. Then the shadowy outline of a man began to emerge. He was seated in front of the lamp in a way that kept his features hidden. I could tell only that he was bundled in blankets and was wearing something around his head. He sat in a wheelchair, and other than the table, this was the only piece of furniture in the room. Yamin motioned for me to sit on a carpet. He went up and gently embraced the man, speaking a few words in his ear, then returned and sat at my side.

  “I’ve told you about Mr. Perkins,” he said. “We’re both honored to have this opportunity to visit with you, sir.”

  “Mr. Perkins. You are welcome.” The voice, with barely any detectable accent, was low and hoarse. I found myself leaning forward into the small space between us as he said, “You see before you a broken man. I have not always been so. Once I was strong like you. I was a close and trusted adviser to the shah.” There was a long pause. “The Shah of Shahs, King of Kings.” His tone of voice sounded, I thought, more sad than angry.

  “I personally knew many of the world’s leaders. Eisenhower, Nixon, de Gaulle. They trusted me to help lead this country into the capitalist camp. The shah trusted me, and,” he made a sound that could have been a cough, but which I took for a laugh, “I trusted the shah. I believed his rhetoric. I was convinced that Iran would lead the Muslim world into a new epoch, that Persia would fulfill its promise. It seemed our destiny—the shah’s, mine, all of ours who carried out the mission we thought we had been born to fulfill.”

  The lump of blankets moved; the wheelchair made a wheezing noise and turned slightly. I could see the outline of the man’s face in profile, his shaggy beard, and—then it grabbed me—the flatness. He had no nose! I shuddered and stifled a gasp.

  “Not a pretty sight, would you say, ah, Mr. Perkins? Too bad you can’t see it in full light. It is truly grotesque.” Again there was the sound of choking laughter. “But as I’m sure you can appreciate, I must remain anonymous. Certainly, you could learn my identity if you tried, although you might find that I am dead. Officially, I no longer exist. Yet I trust you won’t try. You and your family are better off not knowing who I am. The arm of the shah and SAVAK reaches far.”

  The chair wheezed and returned to its original position. I felt a sense of relief, as though not seeing the profile somehow obliterated the violence that had been done. At the time, I did not know of this custom among some Islamic cultures. Individuals deemed to have brought dishonor or disgrace upon society or its leaders are punished by having their noses cut off. In this way, they are marked for life—as this man’s face clearly demonstrated.

  “I’m sure, Mr. Perkins, you’re wondering why we invited you here.” Without waiting for my response, the man in the wheelchair continued, “You see, this man who calls himself the King of Kings is in reality satanic. His father was deposed by your CIA with—I hate to say it—my help, because he was said to be a Nazi collaborator. And then there was the Mossadegh calamity. Today, our shah is on the route to surpassing Hitler in the realms of evil. He does this with the full knowledge and support of your government.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Quite simple. He is your only real ally in the Middle East, and the industrial world rotates on the axle of oil that is the Middle East. Oh, you have Israel, of course, but that’s actually a liability to you, not an asset. And no oil there. Your politicians must placate the Jewish vote, must get their money to finance campaigns. So you’re stuck with Israel, I’m afraid. However, Iran is the key. Your oil companies—which carry even more power than the Jews—need us. You need our shah—or you think you do, just as you thought you needed South Vietnam’s corrupt leaders.”

  “Are you suggesting otherwise? Is Iran the equivalent to Vietnam?”

  “Potentially much worse. You see, this shah won’t last much longer. The Muslim world hates him. Not just the Arabs, but Muslims everywhere—Indonesia, the United States, but mostly right here, his own Persian people.” There was a thumping sound and I realized that he had struck the side of his chair. “He is evil! We Persians hate him.” Then silence. I could hear only his heavy breathing, as though the exertion had exhausted him.

  “Doc is very close to the mullahs,” Yamin said to me, his voice low and calm. “There is a huge undercurrent among the religious factions here and it pervades most of our country, except for a handful of people in the commercial classes who benefit from the shah’s capitalism.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” I said. “But I must say that during four visits here, I’ve seen nothing of it. Everyone I talk with seems to love the shah, to appreciate the economic upsurge.”

  “You don’t speak Farsi,” Yamin observed. “You hear only what is told to you by those men who benefit the most. The ones who have been educated in the States or in England end up working for the shah. Doc here is an exception—now.”

  He paused, seeming to ponder his next words. “It’s the same with your press. They only talk with the few who are his kin, his circle. Of course, for the most part, your press is also controlled by oil. So they hear what they want to hear and write what their advertisers want to read.”

  “Why are we telling you all this, Mr. Perkins?” Doc’s voice was even more hoarse than before, as if the effort of speaking and the emotions were draining what little energy the man had mustered for this meeting. “Because we’d like to convince you to get out and to persuade your company to stay away from our country. We want to warn you that although you may think y
ou’ll make a great deal of money here, it’s an illusion. This government will not last.” Again, I heard the sound of his hand thudding against the chair. “And when it goes, the one that replaces it will have no sympathy for you and your kind.”

  “You’re saying we won’t be paid?”

  Doc broke down in a fit of coughing. Yamin went to him and rubbed his back. When the coughing ended, he spoke to Doc in Farsi and then came back to his seat.

  “We must end this conversation,” Yamin said to me. “In answer to your question: yes, you will not be paid. You’ll do all that work, and when it comes time to collect your fees, the shah will be gone.”

  During the drive back, I asked Yamin why he and Doc wanted to spare MAIN the financial disaster he had predicted.

  “We’d be happy to see your company go bankrupt. However, we’d rather see you leave Iran. Just one company like yours, walking away, could start a trend. That’s what we’re hoping. You see, we don’t want a bloodbath here, but the shah must go, and we’ll try anything that will make that easier. So we pray to Allah that you’ll convince your Mr. Zambotti to get out while there is still time.”

  “Why me?”

  “I knew during our dinner together, when we spoke of the Flowering Desert project, that you were open to the truth. I knew that our information about you was correct—you are a man between two worlds, a man in the middle.”

  It made me wonder just how much he did know about me.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Fall of a King

  One evening in 1978, while I was sitting alone at the luxurious bar off the lobby of the Hotel InterContinental in Tehran, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a heavyset Iranian in a business suit.

  “John Perkins! You don’t remember me?”

  The former soccer player had gained a lot of weight, but the voice was unmistakable. It was my old Middlebury friend Farhad, whom I had not seen in more than a decade. We embraced and sat down together. It quickly became obvious that he knew all about me and about my work. It was equally obvious that he did not intend to share much about his own work.

  “Let’s get right to the point,” he said as we ordered our second beers. “I’m flying to Rome tomorrow. My parents live there. I have a ticket for you on my flight. Things are falling apart here. You’ve got to get out.” He handed me an airline ticket. I did not doubt him for a moment.

  In Rome, we dined with Farhad’s parents. His father, the retired Iranian general who once stepped in front of a would-be assassin’s bullet to save the shah’s life, expressed disillusionment with his former boss. He said that during the past few years the shah had showed his true colors, his arrogance and greed. The general blamed U.S. policy—particularly its backing of Israel, of corrupt leaders, and of despotic governments—for the hatred sweeping the Middle East, and he predicted that the shah would be gone within months.

  “You know,” he said, “you sowed the seeds of this rebellion in the early fifties, when you overthrew Mossadegh. You thought it very clever back then—as did I. But now it returns to haunt you—us.”1

  I was astounded by his pronouncements. I had heard something similar from Yamin and Doc, but coming from this man it took on new significance. By this time, everyone knew of the existence of a fundamentalist Islamic underground, but we had convinced ourselves that the shah was immensely popular among the majority of his people and was therefore politically invincible. The general, however, was adamant.

  “Mark my words,” he said solemnly, “the shah’s fall will be only the beginning. It’s a preview of where the Muslim world is headed. Our rage has smoldered beneath the sands too long. Soon it will erupt.”

  Over dinner, I heard a great deal about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Farhad and his father made it clear that they did not support his fanatical Shiism, but they were obviously impressed by the inroads he had made against the shah. They told me that this cleric, whose given name translates to “inspired of God,” was born into a family of dedicated Shiite scholars in a village near Tehran, in 1902.

  Khomeini had made it a point not to become involved in the Mossadegh-shah struggles of the early 1950s, but he actively opposed the shah in the 1960s, criticizing the ruler so adamantly that he was banished to Turkey, then to the Shiite holy city of An Najaf in Iraq, where he became the acknowledged leader of the opposition. He sent out letters, articles, and tape-recorded messages urging Iranians to rise up, overthrow the shah, and create a clerical state.

  Two days after that dinner with Farhad and his parents, news came out of Iran of bombings and riots. Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs had begun the offensive that would soon give them control. After that, things happened fast. The rage Farhad’s father had described exploded in a violent Islamic uprising. The shah fled his country for Egypt in January 1979, and then, diagnosed with cancer, headed for a New York Hospital.

  Followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded his return. In November 1979, a militant Islamic mob seized the United States Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American hostages for the next 444 days.2 President Carter attempted to negotiate the release of the hostages. When this failed, he authorized a military rescue mission, launched in April 1980. It was a disaster, and it turned out to be the hammer that would drive the final nail into Carter’s presidential coffin.

  Tremendous pressure, exerted by U.S. commercial and political groups, forced the cancer-ridden shah to leave the United States. From the day he fled Tehran he had a difficult time finding sanctuary; all his former friends shunned him. However, General Torrijos exhibited his customary compassion and offered the shah asylum in Panama, despite a personal dislike of the shah’s politics. The shah arrived and received sanctuary at the very same resort where the new Panama Canal Treaty had so recently been negotiated.

  The mullahs demanded the shah’s return in exchange for the hostages held in the U.S. Embassy. Those in Washington who had opposed the Canal Treaty accused Torrijos of corruption and collusion with the shah, and of endangering the lives of U.S. citizens. They too demanded that the shah be turned over to Ayatollah Khomeini. Ironically, until only a few weeks earlier, many of these same people had been the shah’s staunchest supporters. The once-proud King of Kings eventually returned to Egypt, where he died of cancer.

  Doc’s prediction came true. MAIN lost millions of dollars in Iran, as did many of our competitors. Carter lost his bid for reelection. The Reagan-Bush administration marched into Washington with promises to free the hostages, to bring down the mullahs, to return democracy to Iran, and to set straight the Panama Canal situation.

  For me, the lessons were irrefutable. Iran illustrated beyond any doubt that the United States was a nation laboring to deny the truth of our role in the world. It seemed incomprehensible that we could have been so misinformed about the shah and the tide of hatred that had surged against him. Even those of us in companies like MAIN, which had offices and personnel in the country, had not known. I felt certain that the NSA and the CIA must have seen what had been so obvious to Torrijos even as far back as my meeting with him in 1972, but that our own intelligence community had intentionally encouraged us all to close our eyes.

  CHAPTER 21

  Colombia: Keystone of Latin America

  While Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Panama offered fascinating and disturbing studies, they also stood out as exceptions to the rule. Due to vast oil deposits in the first two and the Canal in the third, they did not fit the norm. Colombia’s situation was more typical, and MAIN was the designer and lead engineering firm on a huge hydroelectric project there.

  A Colombian college professor writing a book on the history of Pan-American relations once told me that Teddy Roosevelt had appreciated the significance of his country. Pointing at a map, the U.S. president and former Rough Rider reportedly described Colombia as “the keystone to the arch of South America.” I have never verified that story; however, it is certainly true that on a map Colombia, poised at the top of the continent, appears to hold the r
est of the continent together. It connects all the southern countries to the Isthmus of Panama and therefore to both Central and North America.

  Whether Roosevelt actually described Colombia in those terms or not, he was only one of many presidents who understood its pivotal position. For nearly two centuries, the United States has viewed Colombia as a keystone—or perhaps more accurately, as a portal into the southern hemisphere for both business and politics.

  The country also is endowed with great natural beauty: spectacular palm-lined beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, majestic mountains, pampas that rival the Great Plains of the North American Midwest, and vast rain forests rich in biodiversity. The people, too, have a special quality, combining the physical, cultural, and artistic traits of diverse ethnic backgrounds ranging from the local Taironas to imports from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

  Historically, Colombia has played a crucial role in Latin American history and culture. During the colonial period, Colombia was the seat of the viceroy for all Spanish territories north of Peru and south of Costa Rica. The great fleets of gold galleons set sail from its coastal city of Cartagena to transport priceless treasures from as far south as Chile and Argentina to ports in Spain. Many of the critical actions in the wars for independence occurred in Colombia; for example, forces under Simón Bolívar were victorious over Spanish royalists at the pivotal Battle of Boyacá, in 1819.

  In modern times, Colombia has had a reputation for producing some of Latin America’s most brilliant writers, artists, philosophers, and other intellectuals, as well as fiscally responsible and relatively democratic governments. It became the model for President Kennedy’s nation-building programs throughout Latin America. Unlike Guatemala, its government was not tarnished with the reputation of being a CIA creation, and unlike Nicaragua, the government was an elected one, which presented an alternative to both right-wing dictators and Communists. Finally, unlike so many other countries, including powerful Brazil and Argentina, Colombia did not mistrust the United States. The image of Colombia as a reliable ally has continued, despite the blemish of its drug cartels.1