Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. Thus began a key component of American exceptionalism: the idea that America’s duty to the world was to liberate foreign peoples. What Truman had meant was that this liberation would come only to those who imitated the American way of life. The catalyst for most of the foreign policy of the postwar era, the foundation of the new world order, the place that enshrined a moral rhetoric and self-belief in all Americans, was Greece, a country whose history few of us cared to learn. This was part of the “American intervention” I kept hearing about: the Truman Doctrine.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE FIRST VICTIMS of the Cold War era was the American journalist George Polk, who was murdered one evening in Thessaloniki. Polk was handsome, flirtatious, outspoken, ambitious, and skeptical of the American project in Greece. “We have to stand for decency and for freedom,” he said. “We’re no better than the Russians otherwise.” He stood among several prominent reporters of the time—William Shirer, Edward Murrow—who saw dark clouds in Truman’s vision. In Greece, they observed the beginnings of America’s imperial reflex; a satellite country only had to cry “communism,” and more funds and weapons would follow. Polk repeatedly questioned the wisdom of Truman’s policy and exposed Greek political corruption. His reporting undermined American aid to Greece and threatened America’s collaboration with the Greek government against the Communists. When his body washed up in a Thessaloniki bay, the authorities pinned the murder on the reds.

  Some fifty years later it emerged that the American journalist was most likely killed by Greek thugs hired by the Greek regime, which was covered up with the assistance of American embassy staff, high-ranking CIA officials, and even American journalists. Every year, awards in George Polk’s name are given to American journalists—I had friends who had been recipients—but never had I heard anyone mention that one of the most prestigious American journalism awards was in the name of an American journalist who had been silenced with the collusion of his own country.

  In the late forties, the United States was giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Greece in economic and military aid. The USS Missouri paid a visit to Athens, as it had to Turkey. Greece soon experienced the circus-troupe invasion of Pax Americana: advisors, soldiers, teachers, spies, businessmen, diplomats, and agronomists. “Americans are now so numerous here that practically every large café in Athens prints its bill of fare in both Greek and English,” said Polk, according to his biographer Kati Marton. Americans worked in Greek government ministries. They set up shop at the embassy near the royal residence; many of the Americans lived in the same building off Constitution Square. According to the bilateral agreements signed around the administration of economic aid, the historian John O. Iatrides writes, “American officials were given authority to supervise virtually every function of the Greek state.”

  The rest of the American money went to the military, with which the Greek government began a series of emergency measures to purge Communists and disloyal citizens from society. On some of the thousands of islands strewn across the Aegean Sea, the Greeks constructed internment camps, where citizens were “reeducated” and forced to renounce communism. The government tortured them with truncheon beatings, and gave them electric shocks, and bound their skin with wire. So-called and supposed Communists—or anyone who criticized the regime—were regularly executed, cities locked down under curfews. The streets of Athens were festooned with American military regalia.

  But unlike the stream of images we see today from war-torn places, in Greece, as Marton writes, there were “no cameras to expose the ravaged faces of hunger, the broken bodies of those held captive on barren islands merely on suspicion of Communist activity.” Many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Henry Luce’s Time, instead reinforced the Americans’ and Greek royalists’ propaganda. It was these policies, the American policies, that drove more Greeks to join the dreaded Communist resistance.

  In the countryside, the Greek military launched offensives against the villages of these rebels, with the help of U.S. intelligence agents and napalm bombs. What the Americans did not know, the Greeks never forgot; a Communist Party member told me in 2010 that the Americans “first tested” napalm on the Greeks (it was after they used it on the Japanese during World War II). Those years also saw the first counterinsurgency operation in America’s history led by the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency, which in turn trained Greek intelligence agents in counterinsurgency and interrogation “techniques.” James Becket, a lawyer who later lived and worked in Greece as a representative of Amnesty International, wrote that all of this energy, money, and lives were expended for a myth, because in Greece “an omnipotent Communist Party taking orders from the communist monolith in Moscow does not exist.”

  But at the time, it was dissenters within the American apparatus, like George Polk, who were labeled “not objective.” “In the Cold War lexicon,” Marton writes, “the word ‘objective’ had thus assumed a new meaning.” I wasn’t sure that legacy wasn’t still with us. Long ago, I had accepted that the foreign Communists of that period had been our true enemies—that Communists existed, in fact, wherever the Americans said they did. I never questioned their guilt; I certainly never thought that perhaps “enemy” might simply mean someone who believes in a different political system. The outlandishly brutal actions of America abroad in the 1950s required compensatory rationalizing language, a language equally violent in its distortion. It was a discourse that defined “objectivity”—indeed, “reality”—according to the requirements of American power, and that, as much as in Greece, was created in Latin America.

  * * *

  THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR in Athens during that era was a man named John Peurifoy, and he became one of the primary executors of postwar American policy. Peurifoy was known to participate in Greek security meetings, even intervene in discussions at Parliament. When the Greeks were debating which electoral system they preferred—proportional representation, which most politicians favored, or a majority system, which the prime minister wanted—Peurifoy warned in so many words that if the Greeks chose the proportional system, he would cut off American aid. Today, a Greek friend told me, Greeks still use the word “Peurifoy” to refer to the bullying manner in which a foreigner condescends to Greeks.

  After Greece, the State Department sent Peurifoy to Guatemala. “I have come to Guatemala to use the big stick,” he announced upon arrival. Guatemala’s popular new president, Jacobo Arbenz, had been implementing agrarian reforms, which to Americans seemed similar to those in Communist China. Guatemala, the Americans reasoned, threatened to go Communist as well. “Public opinion in the U.S. might force us to take some measures to prevent Guatemala from falling into the lap of international Communism,” Peurifoy told Time magazine. Overthrowing Arbenz was the CIA’s top priority, and in preparation they distributed violent how-to manuals to their Guatemalan conscripts, and began training them for war. On the day of the Guatemalan “revolution,” Guatemalans, organized by Peurifoy and the CIA, invaded Guatemala to overthrow Arbenz and liberate Guatemala from “communism.” If Greece was one of the Americans’ first occupied satellite states after World War II, Guatemala would count as one of its first military coups.

  The coup in Guatemala, according to the British historian Alex von Tunzelmann, spurred “a shock wave of anti-American feeling” across Latin America. Pedro Mir, a Dominican poet, said at the time of Americans: “You do not want Walt Whitman, the Democrat, but another Whitman, atomic and savage.” If there is one region about which Americans know their imperial history, it’s likely Latin America: the United Fruit Company; Coca-Cola and Del Monte working with Latin American death squads; David Rockefeller’s Business Group for Latin America conspiring with the CIA to bring about coups; the School of the Americas, an American military college in Fort Benning, Georgia, which trained seemingly every Latin American dictator in, among other thin
gs, torture techniques. There is no place of such thoroughgoing capitalist-imperialist horror as Latin America. But there is a tendency among Americans, even those marginally well-read, to rely on a number of assumptions about their history—for example, that the Soviets did pose a genuine threat to the United States—which serves to diminish the emotional impact of such imperial actions. How else could we still think of the 1950s as a period of innocence? In fact, it was during this decade, and largely in Latin America, that the American government began to find rhetorical ways to deliberately obscure its intentions. When President Eisenhower observed that the word “capitalism” had become associated with imperialism, he was disturbed. From then on, according to von Tunzelmann, he decreed that capitalism would be replaced with words such as “free enterprise,” “the free world,” or, most simple, “freedom.”

  As in Greece, there wasn’t as great a Communist threat throughout most of Latin America as the Americans believed. Most Latin Americans were religious, unlikely to be swayed by godless communism; and Stalin himself had little interest in a region he saw as “the obedient army of the United States.” But the right-wing dictators throughout Latin America seized on the United States’ irrational fear of communism, and conjured a Communist menace whenever necessary for their own power and survival. The Americans supported monsters like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, as well as military regimes throughout South America, political eras from which those countries still have not recovered. “Do nothing to offend the dictators,” said the American secretary of state John Foster Dulles. “They are the only people we can depend on.” Years later, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would admit that the Kennedy administration simply did not understand the many shades of leftist and progressive politics in Latin America, or anywhere.

  In Latin America, the Americans would eventually stage or support six more military coups: Argentina in 1962, Guatemala again in 1963, Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1964, Uruguay and Chile in 1973. What might have been a last resort had become an easy habit—yet one that did not quench American desire for global power. Despite destructive influence in the Western hemisphere, the Americans’ failure to fully wrest control over the region would inspire them to look elsewhere for self-renewal. President Kennedy, so embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs invasion, needed to show that U.S. power was credible. And so from Greece to Latin America and across Asia, the Americans searched for the vulnerable country where they could forever prove their authority. Kennedy’s adviser, the modernization theorist Walt Rostow, told the president: “Vietnam is the place.”

  Those decades of interventions, coups, and invasions had been justified by Truman’s benign words and intentions. My perception of the Truman Doctrine had been mostly all benevolence and protection. It is one of our origin stories. Even after the invasion of Iraq, there are few things that happen militarily, politically, or economically—the IMF hammering Greece, the many American-sponsored dictatorships whose brutality inspired the revolts of the Arab Spring—that do not recall this very illusion of largesse, this language of virtue and progress, and this iron core of cold, imperial self-interest. In an essay called “The CIA in Latin America,” Gabriel García Márquez quoted from a book called Inside the Company, written by a whistleblower and former CIA officer stationed in Latin America. The officer, Philip Agee, wrote: “The key question is to pass beyond the facts of CIA’s operations to the reasons they were established—which inexorably will lead to economic questions: preservation of property relations and other institutions on which rest the interests of our own wealthy and privileged minority [italics mine]. This, not the CIA, is the critical issue.”

  * * *

  I WASN’T SURE what interests Agee was talking about, but I would learn about them from a young economist who was among the many Greeks protesting in the streets in 2010, whom I interviewed years after. His father had come to Greece from Cairo in the 1940s, at the beginning of the Greek Civil War. Upon his arrival, a policeman asked him to sign a paper denouncing communism, which he refused to do. He was not a Communist, but he reasoned: “Look, I am not a Buddhist, either, but I would never sign a denunciation of Buddhism or Islam or the Jewish faith.” The police “beat the shit out of him” and sent him to a concentration camp, where he became a member of the Communist Party. The economist himself had been a student activist and had belonged to the party PASOK, led then by the anti-American Andreas Papandreou. During the 1970s “junta” era, the economist explained, it was very hard to avoid being political.

  The economist’s name was Yanis Varoufakis. Over the years, he developed a theory about the worldwide financial crisis that showed how the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan years of the 1940s and ’50s had long ago set the calamity in motion.

  “The story is one in which the postwar period is characterized by two different phases, both of them featuring the United States as the protagonist,” he said. “The first phase is Bretton Woods—I call it the Global Plan, because it’s not just Bretton Woods, it’s bigger. Bretton Woods was the monetary system the Americans established—a system of fixed exchange rates and the IMF and all that.

  “But they did something else, too: the United States tried to augment the fixed exchange rate with something quite remarkable, which I call a surplus recycling mechanism. This was not the first time we had an exchange rate. We had the gold standard in the interwar period. Why did that collapse? Because you didn’t have a mechanism for recycling surpluses from the surplus countries to the deficit countries. When you don’t have that, the moment there is a recession, the deficit countries fall into a black hole and drag everyone down with them. The New Dealers who went through the Depression understood this very well, and it was the same New Dealers who designed the postwar world.”

  “They set out to design the postwar economic system?” I asked.

  “Yes. If you look at the Senate papers of the period between 1946 and 1947, you will find lots of statements by James Forrestal and Dean Acheson to this effect.”

  At the time of the Bretton Woods conference, a New York World-Telegram editorial put it this way: “The kid who owns the ball is usually captain and decides when and where the game will be played and who will be in the team.”

  “Look, it made perfect sense to them,” Varoufakis went on. “They understood why American capital collapsed in the Great Depression. They also understood that by 1945 the world economy was finished, and Europe was finished, and America had a historic duty to reset the scene and rebuild global capitalism. They felt that duty and they did have that duty.

  “What was the Marshall Plan? It wasn’t just a plan stemming the advances of the Soviet Union. The economic minds behind the Marshall Plan needed the Marshall Plan to create this surplus recycling mechanism. American factories were overproducing at that time. They needed the Europeans to buy their goods, but the Europeans had no money. So they put two and two together and said, Okay, we’ll give them money. That’s surplus recycling. And this worked brilliantly, until a very important linchpin fell off this global plan.”

  The Marshall Plan, in other words, had not been the act of charity so many Americans and foreigners celebrated. It was a global economic scheme. But then the exuberant postwar economy of the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s began slowing, while others abroad improved.

  “America suddenly stopped having surpluses. That started an economic disintegration—in the period between 1965 and 1971, from LBJ to Nixon. It was their idea to do the second phase of the global plan. It was also Paul Volcker’s idea. He was central.”

  “Paul Volcker? The financial crisis guy? Seriously?” I said. Paul Volcker assisted President Obama in regulating Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis.

  Varoufakis laughed. “Americans tend to have a memory that spans a maximum of ten years. Volcker said: What are we going to do now? How will we retain our hegemony if we don’t have surpluses to recycle? Then he said: If we can’t recycle our surpluses, we’ll recycle everyone else�
�s surpluses. And this is the second phase of the global plan.”

  I wanted him to say whether these economic decisions were good or bad; it was still difficult for me to interpret American history any other way.

  “I try not to make moralistic judgments,” he replied, looking at me worriedly. “At the time, America was losing control of the Europeans. The Europeans were incensed—especially French president Charles de Gaulle—that America was not doing austerity. The argument from the European side was, Look, if you don’t have surpluses, then you must do austerity. And LBJ and then Nixon said, We’ll be damned if we are going to shrink our economy for your benefit, damn you! They were not going to destroy the system they created for someone else’s benefit.”

  And these must have been at least some of the interests that Philip Agee, the CIA officer, had said the Americans would never let go. Varoufakis wrote in his book The Global Minotaur that Volcker would later give a speech in which he admitted that the Americans had unleashed “a controlled disintegration of the world economy.”

  “So the Americans unpegged the dollar from gold,” Varoufakis continued. “Then Volcker comes in in the late 1970s, and pushes interest rates up. Suddenly, there is a complete reversal of the old plan. Before the 1970s, you had America being the surplus country: exporting products to Europe and Japan, importing a surplus of capital, and then taking this money and loaning it back to them. When these surpluses ended, they engineered something else. American consumers were now buying products from Europe and Japan and later China. What was financing America’s deficits? German and Chinese profits. They were flying into Wall Street.”

  And then the whole thing collapsed.

  Varoufakis was speaking from an economic or scientific point of view, but all I could think of was an ordinary Greek’s emotional or psychological reaction to this history, the sense of helplessness when the European Union suggested that raising taxes or cutting pensions would somehow assuage a crisis sixty years old. The Greeks, like many other peoples around the world, had once been victims of a military coup, and thus would not necessarily assume such calamities could be entirely their own responsibility.