Tuesday 8th of October 2024

post iocos res multo obscurior: ambitiones imperiales...

The CIA’s destructive role in world politics since the end of World War II as a secret rogue spy agency controlled by unelected intelligence officers has become so ubiquitous that it can be joked about. But behind the jokes lies a far darker reality: the agency’s imperial ambitions have fueled a legacy of death and destruction in the name of expanding American power. Hugh Wilford, author and professor of history at California State University Long Beach, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to delve into the specifics of CIA operations and their impact on geopolitics from its inception to the present day.

Wilford’s book, “The CIA: An Imperial History,” emphasizes how the CIA is an unprecedented force in the world, advancing the goals of a global empire with a facade of spreading democracy. Although it makes for good Hollywood stories, the subversiveness of the agency alongside its brutal methods made it such an effective power that Scheer describes as capable of “destroying the right of people to make their own history.” The two mention the coup in Iran in 1953, choreographed by the CIA, and operations in Vietnam in the ‘60s and most odious examples.

The CIA’s bloody worldwide campaigns would leave populations dazed and confused, all under the pretense of acting in their best interest, while the rest of the world remained similarly in the dark. Wilford explains, “It’s not just that America is trying to hide its imperial role from world audiences, from people in the post-colonial world in the Global South, it’s also somewhat trying to hide what it’s doing from U.S. citizens.”

These imperial ambitions, Wilford warns, inevitably have a way of backfiring, and the CIA’s history is proof of that. The CIA’s consistent meddling in the Middle East in the 20th century resulted, for instance, in the occupation of the Palestinian people, which has translated to the genocide today. “The growth of this massive secret state to carry out this globalist foreign policy has had baleful consequences, disastrous consequences, not just for people living overseas, but for people within the United States as well,” Wilford explains.

CreditsHost:

Robert Scheer

Producer:

Joshua Scheer

Introduction:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer 

Hi. This is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where, I hasten to say, our guest, Hugh Wilford, is the source of this intelligence. His book is called “The CIA: An Imperial History”, and the word “imperial” is critical here. I’m going to let him take it over. But in many ways, it’s the most interesting book that I’ve read about the CIA in my long time writing about CIA, in fact, I’m mentioned in the book, because of some of the articles I wrote, but I’m going to turn it over to Professor Hugh Wilfred, Professor at Cal State, Long Beach. He wrote a very important book called “The Mighty Wurlitzer”, about the CIA’s operation, infiltration of domestic organizations and so forth, the classic. So take it, Professor Wilford, why this book? Why now? And how are your colleagues responding to it, because you’re breaking new ground with this?

Hugh Wilford  

Hey, thank you, Bob for that introduction, and thank you for having me on. It’s very exciting to be here, as you say, you feature in the book. And a lot of what I’ve written and what other people have written on this subject sort of builds on reporting that you did about various CIA operations. So our colleagues here are interested and supportive, and they’re a little bit I think, as the guy who writes about the CIA occasionally, that makes my image around here a little weird. But by and large, people are very nice to me, and I appreciate that. As to why I wrote the book, I guess I felt that there’s a lot of books, as you know, about the CIA, none, though, had quite answered the question for me of just why this supposedly secret government agency just became such a sort of famous, infamous name, set of initials right around the world and in and in the United States and it seems to me that the reason why the US kept reaching for the CIA to sort of carry out some of its main objectives in the years after World War II, the CIA was only created in 1947 was that the US was basically assuming an imperial role  in world affairs at this time. But it was a time when, unlike previous Western empires, the US couldn’t sort of really own up to that fact. It had to sort of hide it, because of the fact that imperialism was, so to speak, unfashionable in this period. Right? It’s that, you know, British and French, the European empires are collapsing and new post colonial nations are emerging. And, you know, a major power cannot afford to look like an empire. It has to hide the fact, which is why it keeps resorting to the CIA. There’s something here about the British Empire, actually, in its final years, especially in the Middle East, when it too tried to hide the fact. A Stanford historian called Priya Satya coined the term “covert empire” to describe what was going on with the British in the Middle East in the early 1900s and it seemed to me, there was a lot of the covert Empire about the US in the Cold War and beyond. It’s not just that America is trying to hide its imperial role from world audiences, from people in the post colonial world, in the Global South. It’s also somewhat trying to hide what it’s doing as well from US citizens, right? There’s a long historic tradition of that going back to the founding fathers of anti imperialism in the US. So the CIA, I think, is partly about concealing what’s going on from domestic as well as foreign audiences. And finally, of course,  the fact that the CIA is featured so large in US as well as world history, is to do with this phenomenon that European and post colonial writers have explored, which is this notion of the imperial boomerang.  What empires do overseas doesn’t just sort of stay overseas. It comes home. And I think some of the CIA’s domestic boot print is a reflection, as a consequence of that phenomenon going on, the Imperial boomerang effect.

Robert Scheer  

And it’s a complex phenomena. And you’re a historian, I’m merely a journalist, but it seems to me what you said about the founders, in a way, they did it, well, a version of it, they were settler colonialists. They totally ignored the native culture in this country, and its complexity and variety and its ability to adapt to the environment and not exploit it, etc, etc. Nonetheless, they were fearful of imperialism. They just didn’t regard the native population or the slaves they were importing, or had been imported, as full human beings. But they were aware of the collapse of Rome. They read books about it. They were aware of the contradictions, obviously, of the British Empire, because they made a revolution against it. And so there’s this wonderful contradiction, in a way, and the civilian, George Washington’s Farewell Address, where he warns about the imposters of pretended patriotism. He said, ‘Let’s engage with the world, but only by gentle means, by trade and so forth.’ Well, the CIA is the rejection of that, yet that is its cover, because it’s American exceptionalism. We’re not imperialists. We’re in fact, bringing freedom and supporting freedom around the world. We have to do it because we have evil enemies, you know, and that justifies doing it, and this virtue washing as if we are always on this side of the good guys. On the other hand, reading your book, and I want to get into the details of this book. You go chapter after chapter, and basically the CIA messes up the world, basically destroying the right of people to make their own history. You do it with the coup in Iran. You do it with Nasser in Egypt, and where the whole response to the six day war comes in, what we’re experiencing now with Gaza and Israel. You do it everywhere. It’s sort of a modern Graham Greene, who I think is the greatest writer about the American Empire until you came along now. So why don’t you give us that big picture? Because it’s really very current to right now. We have a revolt of the global south. We have a revolt of the very countries. It’s amazing. We even seem to be bringing India and China closer together. It used to be we celebrated India as the Democratic alternative. China, ince the revolution happened as the evil communists. We’re bringing Communist China and anti communist Russia under Putin. After all, he defeated the communists in an election. And so there’s this weird thing where the world seems to be clearly uniting around objecting to American hegemony. And the CIA is the poet, priest of American hegemony. And in your book, you describe the cultural origins of that, and something we never talk about, but is the wealthy or ruling class in America with the private schools, the Wasp elite that rose to the occasion. They loved Kipling. They loved the whole image of British imperialism, particularly, and that informed the CIA from the beginning in a massive way. 

Hugh Wilford  

It did. Yes, I think the CIA, when it emerged in 1947 is to a great extent the creation of an elite group whose values have been very much formed by the example of the British Empire. There’s this very good book by historian called Robert Dean, called the “Imperial Brotherhood”, which sort of describes this phenomenon,  it’s sort of Teddy Roosevelt’s class, right? It’s Wasp, East Coast Blue Bloods. Many of them have been to the same prep schools, and the same universities. An extraordinary number of first generation CIA officers were graduates of this small New England prep school, Groton, including some of the characters I write about in detail in my book, like Hermit Kim Roosevelt and these institutions, very much, were designed to sort of inculcate the values of service and patriotism but also an assumption that what you do is the right thing. That you basically have the right to sort of decide the nation’s affairs and also the world’s affairs. So combined with a sense of a strong urge to go off in search of adventure, I think that’s a big part of this class as well, which is why, you mentioned Kipling, that Kipling is sort of the bard for this generation. He’s described as the bard of empire in Britain. But I think it’s very much true of the role he performs for this distinct group of men in the US as well. So that in particular, his novel, “Kim” really about this boy spy carrying out these wonderful adventures in India, the during the British colonial period, the Raj and so many, I kept, I sort of run out of, I stopped counting references to Kim in memoirs by the CIA officers and Kermit Roosevelt. Even the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, even acquires this nickname of Kim in his childhood, which stays with him into adult life, and not to mention, also, of course, the British Soviet agent, Kim Philby as well, who’s known to a great many members of this generation. Yeah, so I think it’s there right from the beginning. I should say that it’s not, I don’t think it’s the only impulse within this, that the CIA this sort of hunt for imperial adventure. There’s also, and I think this is something that hasn’t featured, perhaps enough in previous accounts. There is this missionaries also, I think, are a big influence on the early CIA. That’s another sort of place where young CIA officers are sort of recruited from. Is the ranks of missionaries, you know, descendants of 19th century American missionaries had gone to places like Beirut, and actually, in the process, often developed, there’s a big irony here, and a sort of tragic irony developed a lot of sympathy for the nationalist struggles of foreign peoples living under European imperialism. And that sort of idealistic sympathy for third world, as they would have said then, third world nationalism, that is also there in the early CIA. But it sort of it gets, it keeps getting trumped, I think, by the hold of this kind of Imperial culture that that is very much in the sort of the management, the leadership of the CIA, and also the role, this kind of covert empire, role that the CIA is expected to perform overseas. I think there’s a lot of drama there. I think a lot of human drama, you know, in so that these young CIA officers, they often work incredibly  hard to the point they make themselves sick. They believe they’re doing good things. They’re serving their nation. They think they’re uplifting overseas peoples, yet  often, you know those adventures turn into terrible misadventures with appalling consequences for the foreign people’s concern, and often, actually they make the men concerned, they are main, mainly men, rather bitter, disappointed people in their later lives. That’s the sort of pattern that kept recurring I found.

Robert Scheer  

And what’s amazing, though, is they have the arrogance of that elite education, but actually their behavior is often idiotic and ignorant. I mean, for example, in your book, I mean, the whole drama was supposed to be defeating communism, there’s never a moment where they seem to really understand anything about this communist phenomena. Now, the analysts, as I understand it, as opposed to the covert people, because I’ve interviewed a number of them, say, ‘Oh, they knew all along there was no international communist conspiracy and a timetable for the takeover of the world.’ In fact, there were hardly two communist countries in the world that were even on good speaking terms. I mean, beginning with the rebellion of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, but the Sino Soviet dispute goes back, actually, before the Communists were even powered, there was already tension, and certainly China and Russia get along much better now that nly one of them is communist. So this idea of international communist unity was a denial of the main thing your book is really about, which is the suppression of nationalism. Who gets to make history? And you introduce us to these charming, well educated, basically presumptively well intentioned people who are making a mess of the world. So let’s just begin. You mentioned one, Iran is now the very much on the scene. How did Iran get to be such a center of radical opposition to the US and all that? And in one of the more powerful chapters, and I want to. I tell people, I’m only skimming this book. Each chapter is kind of, for my money, a classic view at whether it’s Egypt before the six day war, Egypt now, how Gaza came to be part of Israel. I mean, that whole thing, every chapter in there, you know, Vietnam War, certainly, you know, totally manufactured event. Most of these things, I think all of them, in retrospect, would look ridiculous. They had nothing to do with real security threats to the United States. And ironically, in the case of Vietnam, and you talk about Colonel Lanza, somebody I did interview at the time. You know, it’s ironic, Vietnam is still a communist country. China is still a communist country, and the United States is trying to now get manufacturing shifted from communist China to Communist Vietnam. Why? Because they’re both highly nationalistic movements in countries, right that have their own 1000 years of tension. So I want to get to the question of whether the Central Intelligence Agency was ever intelligent because and really to not be aware of the splits in communist movements that nationalism trumped. And so I want to take you back to Iran, the first daring, new successful that created the model when I interviewed Kermit Roosevelt for the LA Times. And I’m only bringing those up because I reminded myself getting the clip. The article ran March 29 1979 that’s almost a half century ago, and when I got him. He was in a hospital, this guy who had taken great risks and been a Kipling character, or influence by Kipling, but nonetheless, he was very angry. He had a book that was going to come out, revealing for the first time that the US had actually really done this, officially overthrown the last secular leader, really, of Iran, and set the whole way for the ayatollahs and the madness we have now. But his book was being held up, and he used me in that interview to sort of build a story which I ran, you know, but he was very bitter, because he said they took it, and he says this in his book, they took my success in Iran and they made it a model to go everywhere in the world. And it was stupid, same thing that Colonel, then General Lansdale told me about Vietnam. He said, Yeah, I did something successfully in the Philippines. Then they did it in Vietnam to great disaster. This was early on when he told me this, and they tried so they stupidly followed a poorly informed model of what the world needed or what the world was, and it basically was a denial of the right and need for other people to make their history. And I think that is the big message that comes out of your book, whether it was intended or not. It’s basically a denial of the right of self determination of anyone in the world except Americans.

Hugh Wilford  

Yeah, I think you’re right about I mean, I try to distinguish between the sort of the analytical divisions and the CIA’s analytical mission and then the covert action mission that it acquired within a few years after it was founded. I think there were analysts who got things right the sino Soviet split. You know, there were analysts who detected that in the late 50s. Leading up to the Iran Coup of 1953, there were analysts who said, No, this is a mistake, he is not a puppet of the Soviet Union, etc, but unfortunately, other people prevailed. Alan Dulles was very much, Kermit Roosevelt was very much of the view that most of their needed to go and you’re right. It’s because of this  perception that nationalism in the global south must be a puppet of some imperial power elsewhere. These people aren’t capable, right? This must be the result of interference in their society. And of course, that’s one of the things I point out, is that this is, to some extent, a legacy of earlier empire, right? The British had a very similar view of peoples in their colonies, that they were also, you know, quiz things of the Russians. Some historians have said it’s a kind of state you might describe as paranoia, that there’s this concept of imperial paranoia that often, you know, you’re this power trying to control millions of people in these far flung territories. And it  warps your judgment. You start to see threats where there aren’t any. You fail to see nationalist uprisings coming when, when they are coming, like the Indian rebellion of  1857 so again, I think this is something that, although there are sympathies with third world nationalism, even amongst covert operatives in the young CIA, although there are analysts who were actually kind of reporting some good intelligence, this kind of the the shadow of empire just constantly eclipses or obscures those impulses, plus, of course, the fact that that successive administrations, why even presidents, even who didn’t like the CIA, in fact that there were more who disliked it than liked it. You know, Richard Nixon is obvious example. He hated them. Thought they’re a bunch of, you know, Ivy League snobs and eggheads. But you know, he was happy to reach for the covert powers of the CIA to achieve his foreign policy objectives in the global south when it suited him.

Robert Scheer  

But you know, it’s a confirmation of the founders warning about the follies of empire, that you cannot be a representative Republic governance, even though you’re excluding at the beginning to white males of some property. The fact that matter is, they knew, if you got into an empire, there went the truth, there went any accountability, and so forth, and that has been ignored consistently. And I just want to get the flavor of this book, because you really go into the texture of their internal conversations, a lot of which has now been finally revealed in various documents that have been released, memoirs and so forth. And there almost is not a single situation that they got right. And even when they got things right, then they wouldn’t listen to it or somebody. I mean, for example,  the reason there’s a war going on now in Israel is because Egypt controlled Gaza, Jordan controlled the West Bank, Syria, control the Golan Heights. And all of that was a result of what was basically a preemptive war that Israel engaged in against Egypt. And the result is, you know, shifting. We didn’t bring any democracy to the Arab countries or anything, and certainly not to the Persian kingdom of Iran, but the victims of it are these Palestinians who had nothing to do with it. And one of the strengths of the CIA at the beginning is there were people who respected Arab culture, even bothered to learn the language. Were Arabs and Kim Roosevelt, you know, the grandson of the President Roosevelt. When I talked to him, he was very concerned, and he was not alone in a senior book, in a very strong way that we were blowing it with the whole Arab world. 

Hugh Wilford  

Kermit Kim Roosevelt, given what he did in Iran, which was lead this coup against the nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, can sort of strengthen the repressive rule of the Shah. It’s a kind of irony. It’s a tragic irony that actually, he was pretty pro Arab nationalism. He served in the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services in Cairo during World War II, and he traveled widely in the Arab world in the late 40s. And as he did so, he sort of absorbed this kind of missionary sympathy for Arab nationalism, which was very, very much present in certain quarters. And he actually carried out operations that reflected this. There was a domestic front group called the American friends of the Middle East, which was anti Zionist, pro Arab, pro NASA. And he kind of secretly bankrolled that using CIA funds, and he also he advocated for and led an operation to to strengthen the Nationalist government of Gamal Nasser in Cairo after the Egyptian revolution against, you know, British quasi colonial rule in 1952 but ultimately, you know this, this policy was overturned by the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Davis, Ike, Secretary of State, couldn’t, couldn’t abide the fact that NASA was, was trying to achieve some independence of American control and turned against him, and that kind of obviously blew a big hole in Kermit Roosevelt’s plans for Nassar, and it kind of sunk the American friends of the Middle East, but at least as an advocacy group around the same time. So this is in the sort of mid to late 1950s so you know, Roosevelt isn’t remembered for that. What he’s remembered for is Iran, where the sort of the other side, I think, to his personality, this love of Imperial adventure that he inherited from his grandfather and his father, who effectively he was, kind of almost that his father, also Kermit, was like a, sort of like a figure out of a John Buchan novel, right? It’s sort of he Richard Hanna, you know, he was a sort of gentleman adventurer. And Kermit Roosevelt  Junior, very much inherited this. And I think Iran, for him, was a place for because he wasn’t, he was pro Arab, but he wasn’t really pro Iranian, if anything, I think he sort of inherited British Orientalist views about the Persians, right and and I think he saw Iran as a kind of a playing field for him to indulge his love of kiplingesque Imperial adventure and CIA documents declassified pretty recently. There’s a tranche of them are, after a lot of sort of lobbying by various groups and individuals, eventually, a lot of CIA records relating to the coup were declassified in 2017 and and for me, that they really sort of confirmed  this image that often in the face of the advice that CIA analysts were giving the covert action chief Allen Dulles seemed to become a director under Eisenhower and his sort of his Middle East lieutenant, Kermit Roosevelt, really were influential voices pushing for this action against Mosaddegh, and then when he’s in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt carrying out this coup operation. It all goes wrong. This is August 1953 and the coup plot is detected and Washington issues orders to the CIA team to evacuate, basically, to give up and return. And Kermit Roosevelt more just says, No, this, this can still work. So he kind of goes completely off script, you know? And this is documented, and the coup then does work on August the 19th. It’s a complicated event. It’s not all just down to Roosevelt, but I think without him, it wouldn’t have happened without him and his, kind of his, his appetite for sort of Imperial oriental adventure. So, yeah, I think, you know, subsequent US, Iranian relations and the disaster, they become a very much traceable to this moment, the Imperial impulse sort of won out over the missionary influenced and pro nationalist politics that were also present in the CIA early days. In the early days,

Robert Scheer  

And basically respect for any other people’s right to make their own history. And the irony here is that we talk about the Imperial venture. It was originally done at the request of the British who, because Mossadegh wanted to at least get more money from the oil, nationalization was going to happen. He started with the Italian oil interest, and then he was moving over the Anglo Iranian oil company, which became British Petroleum. And so the CIA first said it was doing this as a favor to the English to restore their imperial control. Same thing with Nasser. Nasser wanted to have control over the Suez Canal. That was the issue. It wasn’t his battle with Israel, and yet we were wavering about that. But I want to read you something that Roosevelt said when I interviewed him, when he was the hospital. Roosevelt said that, and this is interesting, because there was a Hollywood movie about Project Ajax, and it celebrated basically this Daring Do activity, which was a great failure, because if Iran is a danger to anybody in the world, it’s all starts back then, preventing Iran from developing any kind of rational secular government. But this is what Roosevelt told me when I talked to him in the hospital. Roosevelt said that the success of the operation in Iran called Project Ajax by the CA so inspired then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that Dulles wanted to duplicate it in the Congo Guatemala, Indonesia and Egypt, where he wanted to overthrow President Gamal of Nasser. Now he told me this back in March of 1979 and reading your book. I mean, I don’t want to say I told you so, or he told you so, but he said he resisted those efforts for the reasons you’ve outlined, and finally resigned from the CIA because of them. And you know, it’s really quite amazing that the folly aspect of it, and now I’m not minimizing the danger. We haven’t even gotten to Landsdale. Hope we do. Can we extend this another 10 minutes or so? It’s in a really important book. But, you know, people get killed. Not only, first of all, did we mess up the Mideast. So we didn’t get any kind of democracy or enlightenment. You know, we have totalitarian regimes and madness and everything else, and you know, possibility of nuclear war even there. But the irony is that they just went on from one adventure to another and so Vietnam, you know, because Lansdale, let’s introduce him. Would been an advertising guy, and he got a hold of some crazy ideas that, you know, a third way and better ways, even though he’s not the model, supposedly, for Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” he could have been. I think he was, but I don’t know why Grant Greene wouldn’t admit it, but the fact that matters, and again, I interviewed him in real time then, he was already disillusioned with the Vietnam thing, and yet the whole assumption was that somehow, okay, mistakes were made. Well, the mistakes, According to Robert McNamara, our Secretary of French, three and a half million people died when that movie Fargo War interviewed him over this folly actually probably closer to 5 million people. It messed up the lives, you know, including 59,000 American soldiers. And you know, it just enormous waste of resource and destruction of life, the distortion of world politics, you know, to this day, where the hope of a United Nations, of countries treating each other respect are trashed and everything. So this is not some minor folly of Daring Do and Kipling gone crazy. These are people who did as much damage to the world as any dictator that we’ve had since Hitler will give you Hitler better but, but it certainly has not been a good journey, and it’s hurt a hell of a lot of people around the world. 

Hugh Wilford 

And Graham Greene in “The Quiet American,” sees this coming, doesn’t he, because Aldyn Pyle is the sort of young CIA officer, anti hero of the book. He’s equipped with the best of intentions when he comes to Vietnam in the early 1950s , yet, ultimately, his meddling is proven to be disastrous. And clearly, even if he wasn’t modeled directly on Lansdale, sort of Lansdale has kind of bled into the reputation of that book, hasn’t it? And then, ironically, Lansdale was clearly somewhat involved with the shooting of the first movie adaptation. Joseph Mankiewicz’s “Quiet American” later in the 50s, which kind of flipped Greene’s message on its head and made it into a sort of pro American, anti communist story. And so Lansdale cleverly there, you know, reflecting his background in advertising. And in fact, he thought he was a smart fellow, you know, ingeniously, kind of inverting the message of the book there, but Lansdale is very young.

Robert Scheer  

Let me just stop you for a minute, because that’s a crime against art, right? That I knew Mankiewicz. I’m not dropping names. I just lived a long time, and I’ve been a journalist a long time. He was a well intentioned fellow, very quite liberal and decent in every respect, but it was a vicious work of propaganda. And by the way, he was part of the whole Kennedy administration and people like that, and the fact that matters, they didn’t learn the lessons of Graham Greene. And Graham Greene, as you point out your book, was a Foreign Service Officer of considerable experience as well as literary talent, and he nailed it in book after book, the power and the glory about Mexico, our man and Havana. I mean, just one after another, using his experience.

Hugh Wilford 

He had this ability to see the future pretty much, Havana, just predicts exactly what’s coming in Cuba.

Robert Scheer  34:37  

I think, with all due respect to your book, I can’t think of any writer I would recommend to a student if you want to understand the post World War II world from in terms of what we did. That’s Graham Greene. You go to his books. He even predicts the rise of the multinational corporations and their Mackinac. And so forth, but getting back, let’s take the last five minutes of this, is a little longer. Talk about Lansdale in Vietnam, and I mean the incredible arrogance. And I want to tell let people know your book is a joy to read, and not just because you got a lot of sex in there, but because you can see that I’m half joking, but, I mean, you can see that these are human beings that they did, like adventure. They were wild, and they exploited the natives and particularly women, in ways that, you know, belie whether they really cared about these people. I mean, you know, they turned, beginning with the French and after their intelligence, they turned Vietnam into a, you know, a brothel. For many people, it was just a terrible destruction of a culture. One of the reasons why you have some of this religious pushback from Muslims in the Middle East and embracing the Sunni hardliners is because of the corruptions of Empire and the exploitation of people sexually and otherwise. But this so they weren’t just these Merry Pranksters or daring new or so forth. They were exploitive, deeply exploitive, and destructive of local culture, and nowhere more than Vietnam. I mean, the idea that you had the right to, first of all, back the French when they wanted to return the old colonialism, everybody forgets that. You know you’re going to return the French there, even though Ho Chi Minh out in the jungle had given you some airplane signals and helped you and everything but in the name of communism and fighting communism, you justify bringing the French back. They paid for 80% of something of the cost of the French returning. They get defeated at Dien BIM Phu, and then we’re not going to allow the Geneva elections to take place and let Vietnam be unified two years later. No, we’re going to go into this madness of finding this guy in a seminary in New Jersey or New York and make him the George Washington of Vietnam. And they did this in the most arrogant, extreme, contemptuous way. And what you were saying before, the ability to just deny history, to reinvent it through their access to mass media. They were influenced the major newspapers, major television coverage, until it all went south, you know, fell apart, and Walter Cronkite could do his famous statement. But basically, the mass media in America embraced all this is the third way, there’s something wonderful, that’s the takeaway, I think.  

Hugh Wilford  

Yes. I think Lansdale and the others, right? They thought, again, you know, they very much, thought they were doing something different from the previous Western colonials, they and it’s there in, again, as so many things are in Greene’s “Quiet American,” Aldyn Pyle, right? He takes a Vietnamese mistress away from this older British man, right? Because he thinks he’s saving her from this kind of colonial exploitation. Yet, in fact, it is another form of colonialism and another form of exploitation. And indeed, you know, as there was a sex industry in Saigon under the French, and it’s kind of reinvented during the American period as in so many ways, even in their most intimate relations, right? These young Americans are basically reprising the European colonial past and dansdale again, you know, he kind of demonstrates, he personifies  this kind of this missionary notion that when he talks about this, he talks about loving Asians and brotherhood with Asians. You know, that’s how he thinks he’s going to win over countries like Vietnam to the American side in the Cold War. But, you know, back back of an awful lot of what he was doing is this deeper colonial history, going back to the French in the late 1800s I was struck by because he’s seen as this kind of counterinsurgency genius, Lansdale, you know, the kind of founder of coin doctrine in the US. But actually, and this notion that you can sort of win hearts and minds with, you know, with friendship and development and so on, which is, you know, all well and good. It’s just that when that didn’t work, because it so often doesn’t, because often these counterinsurgency efforts are supporting governments that are seen as basically imperialist interventions by the people that living under them. There is resistance against these, even the sort of these best intentioned of efforts led by people like Lansdale and personified by Lansdale. And then there is a resort to violence in the language of counterinsurgency doctrine. It’s a shift from population centric tactics to enemy centric ones. And you saw this with the French in the late 1800s in particular, the sort of that imperial general who’s the sort of figure who I’m sure Lansdale would have appalled. He really disliked the French personally. But actually, you know, an awful lot of what he did in Vietnam basically reprised and the Philippines earlier as well. He played a very important role in the Philippines in the late 40s and early 50s, basically reprised French colonial counterinsurgency doctrine. So again, you know, it’s this dynamic of trying to do something different, but because, basically of what the US government is getting the CIA to do, these Imperial inventions, but interventions, but hiding them, and because of this, this, this colonial past, which they suddenly find themselves inserted to. So that, you know, in Saigon, on the one hand, Lansdale is saying that he’s anti French, and he’s doing things differently from the French. But he’s living in sort of, you know, Colonial Era housing. He’s speaking French. Are not particularly good French, apparently, according to his Vietnamese friends, he’s even he and his team is CIA team, the Saigon military mission, but even end up dressed like French colonial officials, a Saigon tailor creates this uniform for them. And it’s not clear if there was a sort of, you know, this. This Taylor was intending a sort of subtle criticism, a sort of joking criticism by making this uniform look like the French colonial one. Lansdale and the others can’t get out from under it, with the result that the mission fails, the CIA mission to, you know, shore up the rate that the anti communist, pro American regime of ngo dinh Diem and and that is the backdrop to the escalation of the war in in the 60s. And Lansdale, personal fall from favor, personal fall from grace. You know, there is an element again, of of some these idiocies kind of returning to haunt these men in their later lives.

Robert Scheer  

I want to wrap this up, but show the book, the video, “The CIA: An Imperial History”. It’s basic books. I don’t know if I’m showing this right. It’s indispensable reading if you want to know why the world is so confusing and dangerous right now. Because as I see it, and I don’t want to, I’m not saying this is the only interpretation of your book, but you know, one of the things I made a commitment to myself, I’m actually going to read the books that I interview people about. And even though I thought I knew quite a bit about some of these ventures here, I wrote about them, interviewed people. Your book is really the clearest overall view. Uh, I could quibble with certain things before we taped, I even quibble with you said I when I was on Cuba and was, you know, etc, you know, friendly with Castro. No, I said no more than I was with Nixon or Reagan or anybody else that I interviewed and didn’t break bread or anything, was escorted by two people with some machine guns to go interview him and, you know, a little bit scary, but certainly did a good interviews. But, you know, sign from, and I’m sure anybody can, people can differ about lots of little things, but what you capture, and I’ll get to the title, “The CIA: An Imperial History”. Because otherwise you think, well, these Boy Scouts, and they kind of screw up here and there, and they really didn’t save the drowning person, but they wanted to and so forth. But I see something much more fundamental, and again, the betrayal of really the great hope, if not only the hype of America, of the American experiment, which was a renunciation of imperial control over others, as I said, those contradictions developed right from the beginning, but that, you know, you cannot read Jefferson, or you know the limited part we have with Washington and others without getting a sort of Tom Paine image of that the folly of trying to manage things, because, after all, the English thought they could manage the colonies just fine. And so they had this sympathy, as you describe in your book, for the other they saw themselves a little bit in the other. Or the guys in the CIA, but I want to capture here the economics of the Imperial part, because, again, it’d be a mistake to think of the Iran coup being divorced from oil. It was really about oil to begin with, and it’s about oil right now. And you know, I don’t want to simplify history. But right now you have a situation where, amazingly enough, we have a scarier Cold War going with Russia now than we did under Stalin and under Khrushchev and so forth. I mean, we really, you know, deny any, and this is a regime now in running what remains of Russia, Putin, who, yes, he was in the TJB, but he came with the St Petersburg, and he defeated the remnants of the communist and election, right? He’s the guy that we like to replace Yeltsin, because Yeltsin was too drunk, and Putin was sober. And then you have China, which we celebrated as long as it was our factory floor, even though they are communists. But now we attack them at every turn. They’re making chips, and it’s all for war and so forth. So we have, and the irony is, we have a realignment, you know, we have BRIC, the BRIC coalition. Who would have ever thought you’d have China, India and South Africa, you know, and Brazil and Russia and all these people and Saudi Arabia, even having deals with Russia and you know and support, and OPEC plus, and you have the shifting of the sands of the plates, really, of foreign policy. And I think your book, and whether you agree with or not, I’ll let you have the last take as much time as you want, but I reading your book, I realized this is that how to understand the chaos of the moment, that it really comes from a contempt and indifference to the concerns and thoughts of other others, whether they’re Islamic fundamentalists, whether the remnants of communist ideology, whatever they are, the people that the CIA basically empowered, almost with few exceptions and mostly on the covert side, were people that thought they had a God given gift to reorder the world, And they knew what civilization meant. They knew what decency meant, and they had that Kipling, this arrogance to do it. And then, what was that famous thing? There’s a spot of blood on your pinafore, but that just shows you’ve been out there. You know, somebody else’s blood is on it, though.

Hugh Wilford  

I think they also said that, didn’t they? When one officer, CIA, officer, said that to another after they they gone after you and Ramparts, I think that appears in a book, that quotation that some of the dirty tricks that the CIA was contemplating in order to deter you and your colleagues on Ramparts Magazine from reporting on its front operations in 1966 and 1967 I think there’s a spot of blood on your collar that, yeah, that was said by one officer to another about those operations, and then we haven’t really had time to talk about that side of the book, which is how a lot of this boomerang tome in the shape of, you know, surveillance operations like MH chaos and the operation against ramparts, and also sort of domestic publicity efforts as well, via front groups to sort of whip up support us interventions overseas. 

Robert Scheer  

Just one little anecdote, because I got my own personal files and got some material and so forth. And it was interesting because you we haven’t even talked about James Jesus Angleton, who is central, I think, to a book, we have to do a little bit of that. This was sort of the, I don’t know what sinister, complex, wild character there and the whole drama, but at one point, Hoover and the FBI and Chris of ramparts, everything they’ve been I’ve been targeted and and so I guess some of the correspondence when there was freedom of information, and also some court hearings, where you could see the San Francisco Bureau decided that, in my case, Mario Savio and I forget so another person, a professor, that we really were not what, what they thought were just independent people out maybe to have a good time were cared about things but but Angleton was really pursuing it. And there’s actually an exchange in which Hoover tells Angleton to buzz off that there’s no so I like, wow, I was exonerated, What? You give it up. You know, it is comical, except you think, and we are in a situation now where there’s a renewed red baiting and a renewed look for foreign contacts. And you can even, oh, Trump must be a Putin agents, and he’s not. He’s going to then, and the other republics are going to say Kamala Harris is because her father was a graduate student at Berkeley or something. I mean, there’s all this, this, this character assassination, everything. And you can make fun of it. You could say it’s crazy and it’s goofy, but the fact the matter is, it really hurts. It really ends up killing millions and millions of people, destroying precious resources, endangering the very life of the planet. So we shouldn’t just take this a little bit more. I mean, that’s kind of, I don’t want to bury that. I mean, the book, yes, it’s an easy read, it’s great read. It’s got a lot of inside stories. I think it holds up incredibly well. And even when I thought you had some things wrong that I might have known about, then I thought, well, maybe he’s right, you know, maybe I got it wrong, because, after all, that’s, this is all contested stuff, so I really respect the work enormously, and defer to it. Really, from now to my mind, is the standard to understand these different certainly, chapters that I know about, I could have some quibbles, but, but really wanted to give the big takeaway is, this destroys democracy.

Hugh Wilford  

Yes, yeah. And that was something that the  anti imperialists said, right from the 18th century on down, is that these Imperial adventures overseas will come home and eventually destroy republican government at home. And I think that one has seen that in the years since World War II is the I mean, not just not the entire destruction, but the growth of this massive secret state to sort of carry out this globalist foreign policy has had baleful consequences, disastrous consequences, not not just for people living overseas, but for people within the United States as well, including the growth and I write a little bit about this in the book as well. I think it, you know, it contributes to the growth of the sorts of conspiracy theories that are rampant as well and will no doubt feature in the upcoming election. You know, I think that there was a pre history of conspiracy theories, and I’m not saying they’re all right by any means, but, you know, there is, there is something to the notion  that there are government agencies carrying out propaganda at home and surveilling people at home. And that’s perhaps, you know, something that irresponsible people, especially on the right, you know, on all both ends of the political spectrum, I think, are exploiting at the current moment. So I think, you know it’s another of the many evil consequences of this fist. And I appreciate all your kind words about the book and but I don’t by any means see it as the as regards historians versus journalists and reporters. I was just thinking as you were talking of the fact that, you know, I feature in footnotes, other people’s footnotes, but you’re actually in the text as a character for, for, for the in the accounts of Ramparts. So, there you go.

Robert Scheer 

And you did spell my name right. But let me finally, because James Jesus Angleton, I don’t know, just tell us, because you’re a great storyteller, and these people come alive. And by the way, I want to take my hat off to a plenty of former CIA agents out there, the Ray McGoverns, the Milgamers, a lot of them John Kiriakou, who who stepped forward and risk their pensions, risk their career and so forth, and and speak honestly and not all on the analytical side, John Kiriakou was, you know, involved in the capture of what was allegedly the highest ranking Al Qaeda member. It turned out not to be the case. But, you know, and so I know it’s you introduce us to an amazing collection of individuals down to its history. There’s nothing boring about these people. Fascinating. They’re literary. They have great stories to tell, and so forth and so. But James, we even make him seem multi dimensional. It’s your strength as a historian.  

Hugh Wilford  

You’re very, very too kind. Yeah, no. I mean, it’s difficult not to. In Angleton’s case, he’s just this fascinating personality, deeply weird person, right? Had this reputation as a counterintelligence genius. He sort of set up counterintelligence, you know, detecting spying within the CIA  in  in the 1950s after an earlier career as a sort of minor modernist poet and an editor, but then he becomes so obsessed with hunting for moles within the CIA that he becomes paranoid, and the whole thing spins out of control. Various people’s careers are ended, who you know, were leading perfectly blameless lives. In the end, he’s suspected of being the mole by some  colleagues, and he’s, you know, I’m not the first person to write about him, because he’s such a fascinating, complicated personality, but I what I tried to do again was subject was put, put him in in an imperial kind of context framework. I noticed the fact that I didn’t think previous biographers of him have made enough of this, the fact that he was educated in not just at one of these kind of faux British public schools, like Gotom, but he actually, he had actually attended a British public school himself, by which I mean, you know, a private fee paying school, Malden college. And he was in London through it during the World War II, for with the OSS, working with the British he knew Kim Philby very well. All of these kind of influences made him into, I think, a sort of, really an imperial figure, and, and, and very, you know, people that try to work out where his paranoia came from. Was it? Was he a clinical case? Was it because of the shock of discovering that his very good British friend. Kim Philby was a Soviet agent. I think to some extent, he’d spent so much time with the British in his early life that he was kind of channeling. He was reflecting this tendency towards Imperial paranoia that the British had exhibited, just, you know, thinking that, the thinking that the Russians right, the Tsar, the Russians, and then, then later, the Bolsheviks, the Soviets, were behind everything that was bad that was going on in the world. And I think to some extent that that was, that was where he was, he was getting it from. But as you say, Yeah, well, one of a number of really very interesting personalities called Maya, his kind of his protege within the agency. He’s a big character in the chapter about CIA, domestic publicity, work or propaganda, and he’s another just really fascinating, complicated, conflicted personality who meant well and actually often did things that proved disastrous.

Robert Scheer  

And would you say that power continues to this day?

Hugh Wilford  

Not on, not on quite the same scale, I don’t think. You know, there have been repeated attempts to sort of reign in the power of the CIA. And of course, you know it’s failure to predict 9/11 and then the weapons of mass destruction debarked in Iraq these, you know, these greatly embarrassed it and led to, you know, the effective demotion within the intelligence community, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the appearance of, you know, other other agencies and and players, especially the Pentagon. But it’s, no, it’s still there. You know, the CIA, you know, occasionally something comes to light and, you know, you see another New York Times story. It’s not quite the same. There aren’t as many as the word back in the 70s, but it’s power is still there, I think, both domestically and overseas especially. And you know this kind of new Cold Wars, starting with Russia and especially China. You know that the US is going to continue to want to resort to covert operations against these rivals. So the story of the CIA is not over yet. I don’t think so.

Robert Scheer  

It’s a good point on which to end, because we just have all this concern about the covert operations of other countries, particularly Russia and China now against our election and so forth. And, you know, reading your book, okay, no one likes these covert operations. But you know who invented this? For God’s sake. I mean, you know, you say 1947 but actually started earlier, but, I mean, there wasn’t an election in the world that they didn’t meddle in so, but that doesn’t mean you should meddle in elections. So I’ll let it go at that. I want to thank you for doing that. The book is “The CIA: An Imperial History:. I want to thank you for doing that, Professor Hugh Wilford, but Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW for posting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who really pushed this book heavily, and it took us a while to get it together, and I’m glad we did it. Diego Ramos, who writes the introductions, Max Jones, who does the video. I want to thank the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a great writer, independent personality, public citizen, for giving us some funds, along with the Integrity Media Foundation to help this thing get going. All right, see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/09/07/the-cia-the-worlds-first-secret-empire/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

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THE U.S. DID NOT DEFEAT FASCISM IN WWII, IT DISCRETELY INTERNATIONALIZED IT     BY GABRIEL ROCKHILL

 

Dangerous bureaucrats: C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles with C.I.A. Counter-insurgency expert Colonel Edward Lansdale, United States Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining, and C.I.A. Deputy Director Lieutenant General Charles P. Cabell at the Pentagon in 1955. By class proclivity, the Dulles brothers—both Wall Street creatures—hated and feared communism far more than the Nazis. Allen once said the US had fought the wrong enemy in WWII. In the postwar, the US imported Nazis wholesale, and the CIA has helped to maintain their fascist networks in Europe to this day. The Neonazi surge in Ukraine proves it.

 

“The U.S. has established itself as the mortal enemy of all people’s government, all scientific-socialist mobilization of consciousness everywhere on the globe, all anti-imperialist activity on earth.”

– George Jackson

One of the founding myths of the contemporary Western European and American world is that fascism was defeated in WWII by liberal democracies, and particularly by the United States. With the subsequent Nuremburg trials and the patient construction of a liberal world order, a bulwark was erected—in fits and starts, and with the constant threat of regression—against fascism and its evil twin in the East. American culture industries have rehearsed this narrative ad nauseum, brewing it into a saccharine ideological Kool-Aid and piping it into every household, shack and street corner with a TV or smartphone, tirelessly juxtaposing the supreme evil of Nazism to the freedom and prosperity of liberal democracy.

The material record suggests, however, that this narrative is actually based on a false antagonism, and that a paradigm shift is necessary in order to understand the history of actually existing liberalism and fascism. The latter, as we shall see, far from being eradicated at the end of WWII, was actually repurposed, or rather redeployed, to serve its primary historical function: to destroy godless communism and its threat to the capitalist civilizing mission. Since the colonial projects of Hitler and Mussolini had become so brazen and erratic, as they shifted from playing more or less by the liberal rules of the game to openly breaking them and then running amok, it was understood that the best way to construct the fascist international was to do so under liberal cover, meaning through clandestine operations that maintained a liberal façade. While this probably sounds like hyperbole to those whose understanding of history has been formatted by bourgeois social science, which focuses almost exclusively on visible government and the aforementioned liberal cover, the history of the invisible government of the national security apparatus suggests that fascism, far from being defeated in WWII, was successfully internationalized.

The Architects of the Fascist International

When the United States entered WWII, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, as he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism. After all, the U.S. had, only some 20 years prior, been part of a massive military intervention in the U.S.S.R., when fourteen capitalist countries sought—in the words of Winston Churchill—to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib.” Dulles understood, like many of his colleagues in the U.S. government, that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the old war, as Michael Parenti has convincingly argued: the one they had been fighting against communism since its inception.

Towards the end of WWII, General Karl Wolff, formerly Himmler’s right-hand man, went to see Allen Dulles in Zurich, where he was working for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor organization to the CIA. Wolff knew that the war was lost, and he wanted to avoid being brought to justice. Dulles, for his part, wanted the Nazis in Italy under Wolff’s command to lay down their arms against the allies and help the Americans in their fight against communism. Wolff, who was the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war, offered Dulles the promise of developing, with his Nazi team, an intelligence network against Stalin. It was agreed that the general who had played a central role in overseeing the Nazi’s genocidal machine, and who expressed his “special joy” when he secured freight trains to send 5,000 Jews a day to Treblinka, would be protected by the future director of the CIA, who helped him avoid the Nuremberg trials.

Wolff was very far from being the only senior Nazi official protected and rehabilitated by the OSS-CIA. The case of Reinhard Gehlen is particularly telling. This general in the Third Reich had been in charge of Fremde Heere Ost, the Nazi intelligence service directed against the Soviets. After the war, he was recruited by the OSS-CIA and met with all of the major architects of the postwar National Security State: Allen Dulles, William Donovan, Frank Wisner, President Truman. He was then appointed to head the first German intelligence service after the war, and he proceeded to employ many of his Nazi collaborators. The Gehlen Organization, as it was known, would become the nucleus of the German intelligence service. It is unclear how many war criminals this decorated Nazi hired, but Eric Lichtblau estimates that some four thousand Nazi agents were integrated into the network overseen by the American spy agency. With an annual funding of half a million dollars from the CIA in the early years after the war, Gehlen and his strong men were able to act with impunity. Yvonnick Denoël explained this turnaround with remarkable clarity: “It is hard to understand that, as early as 1945, the army and the US intelligence services recruited without qualms former Nazi criminals. The equation was, however, very simple at the time: the United States had just defeated the Nazis with the help of the Soviets. They henceforth planned to defeat the Soviets with the help of former Nazis.”

The situation was similar in Italy because Dulles’ agreement with Wolff was part of a larger undertaking, called Operation Sunrise, which mobilized Nazis and fascists to end the Second World War in Italy (and begin the Third World War across the globe). Dulles worked hand in hand with the Agency’s future chief counterintelligence officer, James Angleton, who was then stationed by the OSS in Italy. These two men, who would become two of the most powerful political actors of the twentieth century, showed what they were capable of in this close collaboration between the American intelligence services, the Nazis and the fascists. Angleton, on his end, recruited fascists to end the war in Italy so as to minimize the power of the communists. Valerio Borghese was one of his key contacts because this hardline fascist in Mussolini’s regime was ready to serve the Americans in the anti-communist struggle, and he became one of the international figureheads for postwar fascism. Angleton had directly saved him from the hands of the communists, and the man known as the Black Prince was given the opportunity to continue the war against the radical Left under a new boss: the CIA.

Once the war was over, Senior U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, Wisner and Carmel Offie, “worked to ensure that denazification only had a limited scope,” according to Frédéric Charpier: “Generals, senior officials, policemen, industrialists, lawyers, economists, diplomats, scholars and real war criminals were spared and put back in their positions.” The man in charge of the Marshall Plan in Germany, for instance, was a former adviser to Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe (air force). Dulles drafted a list of high functionaries of the Nazi state to be protected and passed off as opponents to Hitler. The OSS-CIA proceeded to rebuild the administrative states in Germany and Italy with their anti-communist allies.

Eric Lichtblau estimates that more than 10,000 Nazis were able to immigrate to the United States in the post-war period (at least 700 official members of the Nazi party had been allowed into the U.S. in the 1930s, while Jewish refugees were being turned away). In addition to a few hundred German spies and thousands of SS personnel, Operation Paperclip, which began in May 1945, brought at least 1,600 Nazi scientists to the U.S. with their families. This undertaking was aimed at recovering the great minds of the Nazi war machine and putting their research on rockets, aviation, biological and chemical weapons, and so forth, in the service of the American empire. The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was set up specifically to recruit Nazis and find them positions in research centers, the government, the army, the intelligence services or universities (at least 14 universities participated, including Cornell, Yale and MIT).

Although the program officially excluded ardent Nazis, at least at the beginning, in actual fact it allowed for the immigration of chemists from IG Farben (which had supplied the deadly gases used in mass exterminations), scientists who had used slaves in concentration camps to make weapons, and doctors who had participated in hideous experiments on Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals and other prisoners of war. These scientists, who were described by an official in the State Department opposed to Paperclip as “Hitler’s angels of death,” were received with open arms in the land of the free. They were given comfortable accommodations, a laboratory with assistants and the promise of citizenship if their work bore fruit. They went on to conduct research that has been used in the manufacturing of ballistic missiles, sarin gas cluster bombs, and the weaponization of the bubonic plague.

[GLADIO is born]
The CIA also collaborated with MI6 to set up secret anti-communist armies in every country in Western Europe. On the pretext of a potential invasion by the Red Army, the idea was to train and equip networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Russians moved westward. They would thus be activated in the newly occupied territory and charged with missions of exfiltration, espionage, sabotage, propaganda, subversion and combat. The two agencies worked with NATO and the intelligence services of many Western European countries to build this vast sub-rosa organization, establish numerous weapons and ammunition caches, and equip their soldiers of the shadows with everything they needed. To do this, they recruited Nazis, fascists, collaborationists and other anti-communist members of the extreme Right. The numbers vary according to the country, but they are estimated between a few dozen and several hundred, or even a few thousand, per country. According to a report from the television program Retour aux sources, there were 50 stay-behind network units in Norway, 150 in Germany, more than 600 in Italy and 3,000 in France.

These trained militants would later be mobilized to commit or coordinate terrorist attacks against the civilian population, which were then blamed on the communists in order to justify ‘law and order’ crackdowns. According to the official numbers in Italy, where this strategy of tension was particularly intense, there were 14,591 politically motivated acts of violence between 1969 and 1987, which killed 491 people and injured 1,181. Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of the far-right group Ordine Nuovo and the perpetrator of the bombing near Peteano in 1972, explained that the fascist “Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo, were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-Communist strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the institutions of power, but from the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.” An Italian parliamentary commission that undertook an investigation of the stay-behind armies in Italy, reached the following conclusion in 2000: “Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”

 

Phony Klaus Barbie Bolivian identity police papers

The U.S. National Security State was also involved in overseeing ratlines that exfiltrated fascists from Europe and allowed them to resettle in safe havens around the world, in exchange for doing its dirty work. The case of Klaus Barbie is but one among thousands, but it speaks volumes regarding the internal functioning of this process. Known in France as ‘the butcher of Lyon,’ he was head of the Gestapo office there for two years, including the time when Himmler gave the order to deport at least 22,000 Jews from France. This specialist in ‘enhanced interrogation tactics,’ known for torturing to death the coordinator of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, organized the first roundup of the General Union of Jews in France in February 1943 and the massacre of 41 Jewish refugee children in Izieu in April 1944. Before arriving in Lyon, he had led savage death squads, which had killed more than a million people on the Eastern Front according to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. But after the war, the man whom these same authors describe as third on the most-wanted list of SS criminals was working for the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army. He was hired to help build the stay-behind armies by recruiting other Nazis, and to spy on French intelligence services in the French and American controlled regions in Germany.

When France learned what was happening and demanded Barbie’s extradition, John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany, refused by claiming that the allegations were based on hearsay. Nevertheless, it ultimately proved too expensive, symbolically, to keep a butcher like Barbie in Europe, so he was sent to Latin America in 1951, where he was able to continue his illustrious career. Settling in Bolivia, he worked for the security forces of the military dictatorship of General René Barrientos and for the Ministry of the Interior and the counter-insurgency wing of the Bolivian Army under the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer, before actively participating in the Cocaine Coup in 1980 and becoming the director of security forces under General Meza. Throughout his career, he maintained close relationships with his saviors in the U.S. National Security State, playing a central role in Operation Condor, the counter-insurgency project that brought together Latin American dictatorships, with the support of the United States, to violently crush any attempt at egalitarian uprisings from below. He also helped develop the drug empire in Bolivia, including organizing gangs of narco-mercenaries whom he named Los novios de la muerte, whose uniforms resembled those of the SS. He traveled freely in the 1960s and 1970s, visiting the U.S. at least seven times, and he most likely played a role in the manhunt organized by the Agency to kill Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

The same basic pattern of integrating fascists into the global war against communism is readily identifiable in Japan, whose system of government prior to and during the war has been described by Herbert P. Bix as “Emperor-system fascism.” Tessa Morris-Suzuki has convincingly demonstrated the continuity of intelligence services by detailing how the U.S. National Security State oversaw and managed the KATO organization. This private intelligence network, very much like the Gehlen organization, was stocked with former leading members of the military and intelligence services, including the Imperial Army’s Chief of Intelligence (Arisue Seizō), who shared with his American handler (Charles Willoughby) a deep admiration for Mussolini. The U.S. occupation forces also cultivated tight relationships with senior officials in Japan’s wartime civilian intelligence community (most notably Ogata Taketora). This remarkable continuity between prewar and postwar Japan has led Morris-Suzuki and other scholars to map Japanese history in terms of a transwar regime, meaning one that continued from before to after the war. This concept also allows us to make sense of what was happening above ground in the realm of the visible government. For the sake of concision, suffice it to cite the remarkable case of the man known as the “Devil of Shōwa” for his brutal rule of Manchukuo (the Japanese colony in Northeast China): Nobusuke Kishi. A great admirer of Nazi Germany, Kishi was appointed Minister of Munitions by Prime Minister Hideki Tojo in 1941, in order to prepare Japan for a total war against the U.S., and he was the one who signed the official declaration of war against America. After serving a brief prison term as a war criminal in the postwar era, he was rehabilitated by the CIA, along with his cell mate, the kingpin of organized crime Yoshio Kodama. Kishi, with the support and generous financial backing of his handlers, took over the Liberal Party, made it into a rightwing club of former leaders of imperial Japan, and rose to become Prime Minister. “The [CIA] money flowed for at least fifteen years, under four American presidents,” writes Tim Wiener, “and it helped consolidate one-party rule in Japan for the rest of the cold war.”

U.S. national security services have also established a global educational network to train pro-capitalist combatants—sometimes under the leadership of experienced Nazis and fascists—in the tried-and-true techniques of repression, torture and destabilization, as well as propaganda and psychological warfare. The famous School of the Americas was established in 1946 with the explicit goal of training a new generation of anti-communist warriors worldwide. According to some, this school has the distinction of having educated the greatest number of dictators in world history. Whatever the case may be, it is part of a much larger institutional network. It is worth mentioning, for example, the educational contributions of the Public Safety Program: “For about twenty-five years,” writes former CIA officer John Stockwell, “the CIA, […] trained and organized police and paramilitary officers from around the world in techniques of population control, repression, and torture. Schools were set up in the United States, Panama, and Asia, from which tens of thousands graduated. In some cases, former Nazi officers from Hitler’s Third Reich were used as instructors.”

Fascism Goes Global under Liberal Cover

The American imperium has thus played a central role in the construction of a fascist international by protecting right-wing militants and enlisting them in the Third World War against ‘communism,’ an elastic label extended to any political orientation that entered into conflict with the interests of the capitalist ruling class. This international expansion of fascist modes of governance has led to a proliferation of concentration camps, terrorist and torture campaigns, dirty wars, dictatorial regimes, vigilante groups and organized crime networks around the world. The examples could be enumerated ad nauseum, but I will curtail them in the interests of space and simply invoke the testimony of Victor Marchetti, who was a senior CIA official from 1955 to 1969: “We were supporting every half-assed dictator, military junta, oligarchy that existed in the Third World, as long as they promised to somehow maintain the status quo, which would of course be beneficial to U.S. geopolitical interests, military interests, big business interests, and other special interests.”

The record of U.S. foreign policy since WWII is probably the best measure of its unique contribution to the internationalization of fascism. Under the banner of democracy and freedom, the United States has, according to William Blum:

+ Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments.

+ Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

+ Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

+ Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

+ Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.

The Association for Responsible Dissent, composed of 14 former CIA officers, calculated that their agency was responsible for killing a minimum of 6 million people in 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations between 1947 and 1987. These are direct murders, so the numbers do not account for premature deaths under the fascist-backed capitalist world system due to mass incarceration, torture, malnutrition, lack of drinkable water, exploitation, oppression, social degradation, ecological illness or curable disease (in 2017, according to the U.N., 6.3 million children and young adolescents died from avoidable causes linked to the socio-economic and ecological inequalities of the Capitalocene, which amounts to one child dying every 5 seconds).

To establish itself as the global military hegemon and international guard dog of capitalism, the U.S. government and National Security State have relied on the help of the significant number of Nazis and fascists it integrated into its global network of repression, including the 1,600 Nazis brought into the U.S. through Operation Paperclip, the 4,000 or so integrated into the Gehlen organization, the tens or even hundreds of thousands that were reintegrated into the ‘postwar’—or rather transwar—regimes in fascist countries, the large number who were given free passage to Empire’s backyard—Latin America—and elsewhere, as well as the thousands or tens of thousands integrated into NATO’s secret stay-behind armies. This global network of seasoned anti-communist assassins has also been used to train armies of terrorists around the world to participate in dirty wars, coups d’état, destabilization efforts, sabotage, and terror campaigns.

All of this has been done under the cover of a liberal democracy, and with the assistance of its powerful culture industries. The true legacy of WWII, far from being that of a liberal world order that had defeated fascism, is that of a veritable fascist international developed under liberal cover in order to try and destroy those who had actually fought and won the war against fascism: the communists.

 

Gabriel Rockhill is a Franco-American philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (2017), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public intellectual debate. Follow him on twitter: @GabrielRockhill

 

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2024/09/10/the-u-s-did-not-defeat-fascism-in-wwii-it-discretely-internationalized-it/

 

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CIA & terror....

 

Confirmed: New Evidence Shows CIA Worked Alongside Al Qaeda Sympathizers in Somalia    By CIAgate

 

Just over a year ago we reported on Chanda Creasy, a courageous yoga coach, who had previously managed to work with militants in Africa, making her way up to the position of special assistant to CIA director on global operations. Recently, we found new details of Chanda’s trip to Somalia in 2009, corroborating our assumptions about her role as a case officer who maintained arms/money supplies to local warlords. We strongly recommend that you read our previous articles: (1) CIA: Black Market of Arms Trade. Part 1, and (2) How an “Average” Yoga Coach Managed to Become a Head of CIA Division Responsible for Arms Transfers to Militants in Africa and Middle East.

First of all, it is worth saying that the CIA began its expansion in Somalia around the 1960s, using an extensive set of tools of political influence, such as kidnapping, operating black sites, promoting Somali politicians and funding warlords. Specifically, the last point was seen as a way to avoid re-sending American troops after the Black Hawk Down incident.

The CIA’s first attempts to form a combat-capable unit in Somalia were recorded back in the 2000s. The agency’s efforts led to the creation of the so-called Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism (ARPCT) in 2006 to fight Islamic militant groups. According to the International Crisis Group, the CIA funneled between $100,000 and $150,000 per month to the ARPCT leadership.

Despite decent funding and supplies, however, the ARPCT was crushed by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), another militant group in Somalia, whose leadership had previously been found to have ties to al-Qaeda. It also should be noted that, right after the defeat, most ARPCT warlords immediately swore allegiance to their opponent.

Given that the ICU’s goal to build a Sharia-law state resonated strongly with the local population, such a scenario was totally expected. But not for the CIA leadership, who apparently still believed that money alone could ensure victory on the battlefield: After it became clear that the ARPCT project was a complete failure, the CIA switched to financing another militant group in Somalia—Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a (ASWJ).

What is known about this paramilitary group?

A cursory study shows that ASWJ was formed in 1991 as an opposition to Salafists in Somalia, such as Al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda branch). The group opposed capital punishment, stoning, limb amputation, as well as banning music.

One might get the impression of these militants as moderate Muslims. However, if you read local media, which is almost non-existent there, the situation appears much different. For example, Somali Hiiraan claimed that ASWJ killed many young people under the pretext that they were Al-Shabaab sympathizers. The media also stated that ASWJ militants did not observe either the Islamic ethics of war or any other convention, such as the Geneva Conventions.

“I was shocked to see ASWJ’s fighters dragging many corpses of Al-Shabaab fighters in the dusty streets…These dead bodies were left at the city center to rot…ASWJ do not observe either the Islamic ethics of war or any other convention.”

In 2011, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General reported that there had been numerous cases of the use of child soldiers by ASWJ and the TFG in their fight against terrorists.

[Source: theinteldrop.org]

So, it appears that ASWJ militants were not inherently different from Al-Shabaab terrorists after all; both groups used Islam as a bargaining chip to expand their political influence in Somalia.

According to our source, it was also common for these two groups’ members to switch sides from time to time. There was also nothing wrong for ASWJ commanders to cooperate with the ICU. 

Having previously been recruited by the CIA, one of ASWJ’s leaders, Mohamed Dheere, worked closely and, according to Markus Virgil Hoehne of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, was on good terms with ICU leader Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. 

Later, Mohamed Dheere joined the ARPCT and waged war against his friend. However, after the defeat, the CIA sent his spy back to the ASWJ.

[Source: theinteldrop.org]

The agency also did not hesitate to waste money on ASWJ, completely forgetting the lesson learned from confronting the ICU. That is why an almost similar story happened with ASWJ: By June 2009 Al-Shabaab nearly captured the capital, and millions of dollars in ASWJ training and equipment seemed to vanish in the haze. In this regard, the CIA had requested emergency assistance from the Pentagon to equip ASWJ with U.S. guns.

But how could this be done, given that Congress would never have authorized arms shipments to such dubious militants as the ASWJ? It was necessary for the CIA to find a reasonable argument for such a step. And it was found.

On June 21, 2009, the TFG and ASWJ leaders signed an agreement on mutually beneficial cooperation, under which ASWJ would fight against Al-Shabaab if they were given certain ministerial posts in the cabinet and a number of MPs in the federal parliament.

Five days later, on June 26, 2009, Reuters reported that the Pentagon had delivered 40 tons of weapons and ammunition to the TFG army, the size of which was equal to two U.S. battalions.

Eventually, after three years of confrontation and with the support of the U.S. military, Al-Shabaab’s influence in the region was significantly diminished, finally allowing the CIA to install a “legitimate” federal government. The official ceremony included the Somali president’s visit to his patrons at the State Department, where he was warmly welcomed by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And now for the most interesting part: Chanda’s role in this whole story

We have obtained a DipTel from the CIA station in Kenya, dated July 17, 2009. The cable was a vetting request for specific ASWJ field commanders. According to the message, these warlords were supposed to “facilitate the Somali Transitional Federal Government possible future provision of U.S.-origin security assistance to ASWJ.”

The cable provided last name, first name, date of birth, and job title of field commanders. Among them we found Mohamed Dheere, CIA-backed ARPCT commander and close friend of ICU bosses. That time the agency put him to the second most important position in the entire ASWJ structure.

The funny thing is that the Post “has found no derogatory information” on these individuals.

True professionals indeed.

And who do you think was the contact person in Somalia, who oversaw the whole thing? It was already familiar to us Chanda Creasy, a yoga master from Washington, D.C. What a coincidence!

So, as you can see, the war on terrorism declared in 2000 is not always aimed at destroying these same terrorists. In many cases this is a simple and convenient pretext to invade a Third World country and install a puppet government there. And Somalia is the best example of this.

Nowadays, the CIA does not even hide the fact that the Somali government is completely under the CIA’s control as, a few months ago, CIA Director William Burns visited Somalia, where he discussed with the same president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud “regional issues of mutual interest and enhancing Somalia-U.S. strategic partnership in critical areas, including the fight against international terrorism.” [Emphasis added.]

Their joint photo clearly shows what they think of constant civilian casualties and millions of dollars wasted.

 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/09/11/confirmed-new-evidence-shows-cia-worked-alongside-al-qaeda-sympathizers-in-somalia/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.