Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  In the bipolar world of US foreign policy, however, consorting with Fidel Castro proved that Bishop was a crypto-communist. The US government refused to accept the credentials of the Grenadan ambassador in Washington, the US navy conducted an exercise, Operation Amber, designed to prepare itself for an invasion, and in July 1981 the CIA presented the Senate Intelligence Committee with plans for the island’s economic destabilisation. At the same time Grenadan radicals were incensed by Bishop’s attempts to mend fences with the US, and in 1983 seized control. Bishop was arrested, released after popular demonstrations on his behalf, and then rearrested and murdered along with many of his supporters.

  The United States, whose policy of destabilising the Bishop regime had helped create the conditions for the latest coup, now sensed an opportunity. On the other side of the world the US marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, causing heavy loss of life, and President Reagan needed to be seen to act decisively somewhere. Two days after the Beirut bombing 1,200 US troops invaded Grenada. The outnumbered Grenadans defended themselves and the invasion force eventually grew to 7,000, but the fighting was all over in three days. As one US soldier said, ‘With the equipment we have, it’s like Star Wars fighting cavemen.’ The US lost eighteen men (only four of these killed by the enemy) and there are conflicting accounts of Grenadan military casualties, but it is known that twenty-four civilians were killed, including twenty-one patients in a psychiatric hospital accidentally bombed by US planes.

  Just as with the Russian interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the US showed a total disregard for international opinion and international law: not only was the invasion condemned by the UN, but Mrs Thatcher was outraged at the invasion of a country whose head of state was still the British queen without Britain even being forewarned. It had, however, become politic to assert some element of international support. When Russian tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 they did so alone; when they crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 they rolled as part of a Warsaw Pact mission that provided a fig leaf of legitimacy. Similarly the US enrolled small eastern Caribbean states in what was a pre-planned US operation.

  The White House also successfully exercised a Soviet-style control of the media. No American media correspondents were allowed on the island until the fighting was over, and when they arrived they were shown the happy smiling faces of ‘liberated’ islanders. US authorities emphasised that independent polls conducted showed broad popular support for the invasion – without mentioning that polls also showed broad popular support for the Bishop government that they had conspired to bring down.

  One bizarre aspect of the invasion was the reason the US gave for intervention: that the presence of up to 1,600 Cuban soldiers on the island created a threat to the United States. Leaving aside the fact that there proved to be only forty-three Cuban soldiers on the island, this justification was quite literally ‘far fetched’ – given that Cuban soldiers were further away from the US in Grenada than they would have been if they had stayed at home. But in offering this justification the US was merely continuing a tradition going back to the early settlers’ attacks on poorly armed natives and Adams II’s justification of the conquest of Florida on the grounds of protecting American ‘security’. Similarly on May Day 1985 President Reagan issued ‘Executive Order 12513 Prohibiting Trade and Certain Other Transactions Involving Nicaragua’ in response to what he said was ‘the threat to the security of the United States’ posed by the tiny Central American republic. American history contains repeated examples of imperial actions being described as responses to fictional ‘threats’, the most recent being the toppling of Saddam Hussein. With good reason Russians often have an overwhelming fear of foreign attack and see enemies behind every boulder, but less understandably Americans have similar fears: one poll on the Iraq invasion showed that 60 per cent of Americans believed that the Iraqi dictator had been personally implicated in the 9/11 attack, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

  One of the most infamous examples of US instigated regime change was the removal of the elected left-wing President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and his replacement by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. After CIA funding of his opponents failed to stop Allende’s election, President Nixon vowed to make Chile’s economy ‘scream’. With the help of ITT (the American-owned International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) the CIA devised a plan to destabilise the economy and eventually produce the Pinochet coup. Allende died in the ruins of the presidential palace, possibly by his own hand, and became another martyred hero. Although Pinochet had acted in the name of anticommunism, the leader of the Chilean Communist party was spared and, in an American brokered deal, exchanged with a Russian dissident. The two empires looked after their own.

  The truth about Allende is more complex than his supporters sometimes admit. In previous elections he had failed dismally, and was finally elected by the narrowest of margins when his two opponents split the right-wing vote. The decisive factor may well have been that, as KGB files have since made clear, the Russians heavily outspent their American rivals. Although a socialist, not a communist, Allende was dependent on Communist party support and received direct Russian financing himself. Russia had successfully copied America’s post-war Italian strategy, but the United States then demonstrated that it had as little respect for elections as Stalin and proceeded to overturn an election that had produced the ‘wrong’ result. As a consequence the US government helped install and maintain a regime that brought one of Latin America’s most civilised nations, with a 160 year democratic history, to the edge of barbarism.

  The events of 9/11 1973 and 9/11 2001 warrant comparison: 3,000 people were murdered in 2001 and 3,200 in 1973, but in Chile a further 80,000 were imprisoned and perhaps 200,000 fled into exile. The most striking similarity is the ideological fanaticism behind the two events. Coups have been commonplace in much of Latin America, Chile excluded, but what was unusual this time was the orgy of political cleansing that followed. The bloodletting in Chile resembled the ethnic cleansing of the Mystic Massacre in its bestiality, but was driven by an ideology derived not from religious texts but from the texts of Chicago University economists. The messianic language of the coup leaders cast themselves as God’s warriors battling the devil of international communism in order to lead their people to a promised land where all markets were free and all property was private. In the period before the Pinochet coup missionaries had arrived from Chicago preaching an extreme form of corporatist capitalism in which the state would be almost entirely dismantled and its roles, other than military, would be given to private corporations. Followers of these doctrines allied themselves with military leaders to plot the coup, and were installed in key government positions within twenty-four hours. Almost immediately they started handing over public assets to private corporations and dismantling the safeguards that had been erected to protect Chilean industry from foreign competitors.

  The critical role of ITT in orchestrating the Chilean coup has led some to conclude that American imperial policy has been driven by and for the benefit of US corporations. The CIA and US marines, it is argued, act as a private army for the corporate oligarchs who pull the strings in Washington. This is to ignore the genuine ideological fervour of American leaders, who believe themselves to be engaged in a universal war of good against evil. President after president has worked with corporate leaders not out of selfish national interest but because they share the same values of corporatist democracy. Their aim was not to promote US commercial interests per se (although that of course was the result) but to defend the ‘free world’. In 1960 the CIA happily worked with the Belgian corporation Union Minière to overthrow and assassinate the populist African leader Patrice Lumumba: in a bipolar world ideology was all important.

  On achieving independence for the Congo, Lumumba had travelled to Washington seeking assistance, but was rebuffed. Like Fidel Castro a year earlier he then made the mistake of turning to Russia which,
as KGB officials have since frankly admitted, regarded Africa as a hunting ground ripe for exploitation. As the Congo was America’s only source of essential cobalt, President Eisenhower authorised Lumumba’s assassination. The CIA station chief at the time, Larry Devlin, has described how he was sent poisoned toothpaste that he was supposed to smuggle into President Lumumba’s bathroom. Devlin worked with the head of the Congolese army to mount a coup, which installed one of the most vicious and venal (and also long-lasting) dictatorships in the whole of Africa. Lumumba was murdered. American access to cobalt was maintained.

  There is a view that the cold war was really a hot war fought by America and Russia using third world proxies. More people have died in conflicts since 1945 than during the Second World War itself. In most cases the two superpowers egged on the combatants, providing the money, weapons, training and moral support needed to make the conflicts as bloody as they have been. To depict these wars as primarily local manifestations of a global imperial struggle is, however, very wide of the mark. There were all sorts of factors driving people to war – historic, economic, ethnic, religious – which needed no outside encouragement. The guerrilla wars and tribal conflicts that erupted around the world from Cambodia to Nicaragua, from Kashmir to Nigeria, were not masterminded by imperial strategists in Moscow and Washington. The superpowers merely chose sides. What is surprising to many is the sides they chose. In the vast majority of cases the conflicts were between the poor and the powerful, between a ruling elite and those they ruled, and in the vast majority of cases the natural autocrats in Moscow sided with the underclass and the natural democrats in Washington sided with the oligarchs.

  It is easy to see why Russia acted as it did. However imperial its practice in eastern Europe, its theory remained stuck in nineteenth-century Marxist dogma. The occupants of the Kremlin believed that the peasants and proletarians of the world were destined to throw off their chains. But why was America so keen to stop them? What had happened to the spirit of 1776? Why was a country created in revolution throwing its might into blocking the revolutions of others? Why was the world’s greatest democracy committed to defending some of the most viciously anti-democratic regimes of the twentieth century?

  Those who argue that the pursuit of corporate greed and national self-interest led to a cynical disregard for democracy point to the role of ITT in the bloody suppression of democracy in Chile or United Fruit in Central America. They emphasise the strategic value of the oil reserves conspicuously present in war zones from Angola to Iraq. But the US did not intervene in foreign conflicts just to grab oil or because corporate interests were at stake, or even because Russia was backing the other side. Support for dictators around the world was not confined to a few corporate oligarchs or state department apparatchiks. Polls showed that Americans believed overwhelmingly that their country was a power for good in the world and had convinced themselves that men like the Shah of Iran – whose despotic regime depended on a fearsome apparatus of torture and repression – were somehow defenders of ‘western values’. Dictators from Vietnam to Venezuela were held up as standard bearers of a common ideology, the ideology of democracy.

  To the Founding Fathers the idea that a Persian emperor could somehow symbolise the cause for which they had fought would have been incomprehensible, but their vision of democracy no longer survived; it had been replaced by the corporatist vision in which freedom and free markets had become synonymous. There developed a chain of logic as follows: Americans champion democracy, democracy includes free markets, free markets are those in which American corporations are free to operate, American corporations are encouraged by the regime in Country X (Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, for example), therefore in supporting that regime the United States is fostering democracy.

  US corporations are at the centre of America’s informal empire, and the question of whether they aid or hinder development has been hotly debated. In terms of charting the history of the last century, however, the question is irrelevant. Foreign corporations, whatever their intent, are rich, powerful creatures who will almost inevitably be perceived as being aligned with the rich and powerful in any society. When conflict arises between the ruling elite and the masses (or those who claim to speak for the masses), American corporations will therefore automatically be viewed as part of the establishment and the US government will find itself on the side of the powerful against the powerless. In turn this pushed the United States down a track that Russia had followed since the Mongols: the path of terror.

  The Use of Force

  Terror had been a weapon in the American armoury since the Mystic Massacre, but one that until the cold war had become rusty with disuse. As the US moved to support assorted despots and dictators around the world it discovered what Russian autocrats from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin had instinctively understood: in order to survive, dictatorships need to be fortified by brute force.

  Mass murder has been a feature of twentieth-century history. Even after the passing of Hitler and Stalin millions have died in such killing fields as Indonesia, Cambodia, Rwanda and especially China under the murderous regime of Chairman Mao. These were usually crazed, often genocidal, rampages that may have been sparked by the two superpowers but usually more by accident than design. One exception was the murder of between 500,000 and a million ‘communists’ in Indonesia between 1965 and 1969, which American dissidents like Noam Chomsky claim to have linked directly to the CIA. Even today the full death toll remains unknown. In his memoirs Barack Obama, who lived in Indonesia shortly after the coup, talks about a ‘few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million’. Even the CIA, he says, lost count. In 1990 the Washington Post found confirmation that the CIA provided ‘shooting lists’ of three to four thousand ‘leftists’, who were then murdered by the Indonesian military. Journalist Kathy Kadane reported that one of the American Embassy officials who was involved admitted, ‘I probably have a lot of blood on my hands,’ before adding, ‘there’s a time when you have to strike hard at the decisive moment’. The spirit of the Mystic Massacre lived on.

  In addition to such large-scale pogroms the post-war world also witnessed the systematic use of terror aimed at changing or maintaining the political status quo. Russia established terror schools in East Germany, Bulgaria and other parts of its empire, and many of the world’s most infamous terrorists – men like Carlos the Jackal and assorted Middle Eastern murderers – were trained, equipped and to some extent managed by the KGB. Nevertheless it is now clear that statistically far more people were murdered or ‘disappeared’ at the hands of US-supported regimes than at those of Russia’s proxies. Death squads, many led by graduates of the counter-insurgency school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, operated in numerous countries with the full knowledge and sometimes active support of the CIA.

  The study of recent history is always fraught. In theory records should be more complete and analysis therefore more robust, but the prisms of ideology are ever more refractive. Nowhere is this clearer than in the study of terrorism in the cold war period. Russia had an explicit commitment to the use of terror as a tool of revolution. America had no such commitment; indeed its official ideology could not be further away. Nevertheless, without the use of secret police, death squads and widespread torture it was impossible for US-sponsored regimes from Iran to Chile to maintain themselves in power.

  American use of terror and torture peaked during the Vietnam War when, as openly disclosed much later, hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians were killed in terror-raids or targeted assassinations. Terror raids on villages usually killed more women than men, often categorised in official statistics as ‘Vietcong nurses’ – leading one wag to crack that the Vietcong appeared to be the only army in history to have had more nurses than soldiers. A House of Representatives subcommittee heard how the Phoenix Program routinely included barbaric and fatal tortures. The lessons learnt in Vietnam were passed on elsewhere. Phoenix veteran John Kirkpatrick produced a manual that the C
IA issued to the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua; one section, entitled ‘Selective use of Violence for Propagandist Effects’, explained the value of murdering ‘carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges’.

  One of America’s most notorious torturers was Dan Mitrione, a CIA official who taught torture techniques in Brazil and then Uruguay. Using the slogan ‘the right pain in the right place at the right time’, Mitrione referred to his students as ‘technicians’. A CIA colleague later recalled one lesson in which four homeless vagrants acted as subjects; all four were tortured to death. When Mitrione was eventually captured and executed by Uruguayan opposition forces, his body was flown back to the United States with great ceremony: Frank Sinatra performed at a benefit in his honour. Although Mitrione’s true role was well known to the media in Latin America, it was hardly mentioned in America.

  Having established the principle of conducting foreign policy interventions in secret in Italy, Iran and Guatemala, it was natural for America’s support for death squads to be hidden from public scrutiny. The CIA agent responsible for the capture in Bolivia of Che Guevara has since described how he gave orders for Guevara to be murdered by a submachine gun blast to the chest so that it would appear that he had been killed in combat. As a consequence of such secrecy most Americans react in horror and disbelief when their opponents describe the United States as a terrorist state. And indeed such a description is a gross oversimplification. In countries like El Salvador CIA officials in one part of the US Embassy were working closely with paramilitaries, while in another part of the same embassy officials of AID (the US Agency for International Development) were handing out money to people like the Christian human rights worker Dr Rosa Cisneros, who was destined to become one of the paramilitaries’ victims.