The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

by John Perkins

  Delving into my feelings of guilt helped me see the ease with which I had deceived myself in those years. It opened my mind to understanding that millions of people are in positions similar to mine. They are no longer taught to fear communism, but they still fear Russia, China, and North Korea, in addition to al-Qaeda and other terrorists.1 They may not travel to foreign lands and confront, face-to-face, the consequences of what their companies do. They may not personally stand beside oil spills in the Amazon or see the hovels where sweatshop workers sleep. Instead, they anesthetize themselves with TV. They succumb to assurances by their schools, banks, human relations experts, and government officials that they are contributing to progress. But in their hearts they know otherwise. Deep down, they — we — realize that the stories misrepresent. And now it is time to admit to our complicity.

  On a trip to Boston, not long after my operation, I reconnected with my former Boston University professor and the author of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn. Now in his eighties, he was still actively campaigning to reform a system he saw as an experiment that hadn’t worked. When I shared with him the guilt that so often threatened to overwhelm me, he urged me to keep opening to it.

  “Don’t be afraid of it,” he said. “You are guilty. We’re all guilty. We have to admit that although the big corporations own the propaganda machine, we allow ourselves to be duped. You can set an example. Show people that the way out, redemption, comes from changing it.”

  I told him that I often thought of middle-class Americans as being like the medieval bourgeoisie — the majority of the people, who lived in the bourgs outside the castle walls. “We pay our taxes so soldiers and jackals will defend us from the knights in the neighboring castles.”

  “Exactly,” he said, with that smile of his that had enchanted and inspired so many students. “We will do anything to maintain a system that has failed us.”

  I came to understand, during those days following my operation and in discussions with Howard, that my most important lesson since the publication of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was similar to the one I had learned as a Peace Corps volunteer working with Andean brick makers: the only reason the EHM system works is because the rest of us give it permission to work. At best, we look the other way; at worst, we actively support it. One of the things that most bothered me was having to admit to myself that I not only had looked the other way but also had convinced many people to actively support that system. I made a commitment to myself that I’d be more diligent; I’d watch more closely what was going on in my own community, my country, and the world.

  Although I was determined to follow Howard’s advice, I also found myself envying another man, who did not struggle with his conscience — a friend who became an immense support during my physical recuperation in Florida and who seemed to have no problem justifying his own violent actions. He was a jackal, taking a short leave of absence from the Middle East.

  CHAPTER 35

  A Jackal Speaks: The Seychelles Conspiracy

  I have been a martial artist for much of my adult life and, by 1999, had studied for about fifteen years under a Korean master, Chung Young Lee, near my home in South Florida. One day, just before the afternoon class, a stranger walked into our dojang. He was about six feet tall and moved with athletic agility. He smiled in a friendly sort of way, yet there was a certain air about him that seemed threatening. He said his name was Jack.1 He was a black belt and would like to consider signing up with our school. Master Lee invited him to put on his uniform and join the class.

  As the senior black belt, I was responsible for sizing up this stranger by sparring with him at the end of class. While he was suiting up, Master Lee approached me. “Be careful.” He patted my shoulder. “Defense.”

  As soon as we began the standard drills, it was obvious that Jack was fast and skilled. When the time came for us to spar, we lined up opposite each other and bowed. Master Lee gave the signal. Jack immediately came at me with a roundhouse kick. I blocked it and responded with a back kick. He sidestepped and sent me sprawling to the floor with a front kick to my chest.

  My intuition — and Master Lee’s — had been accurate. I’d learned my lesson. Jack was not an adversary I wanted to aggravate.

  After the class ended, the three of us chatted. Jack mentioned countries where he had served as a “security consultant” — all of them political hot spots. He was short on details, but Master Lee and I kept exchanging glances. He signed up to join the dojang.

  Over the next months, I made a point of getting to know Jack. We sometimes met for lunch or a beer. There was little doubt in my mind that he was a jackal waiting for his next assignment. The prospect of learning more about his life excited me. We circled each other in a sort of verbal sparring. Then, one day he mentioned that he had paid a short visit to Seychelles, back in the 1970s. I could hardly believe it.

  In the late 1970s, Chuck Noble, a MAIN senior vice president and retired US army general, told me to prepare to go to Seychelles. This island nation in the Indian Ocean is located close to Diego Garcia, home to one of the Pentagon’s most strategic military bases. Seychelles’ president, France-Albert René, was threatening to expose facts about Diego Garcia that Washington wanted to keep secret, facts that could have forced the United States to close down a facility that was essential to its operations in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. My job would be to bribe and threaten René into changing his mind. Very quickly, however, things happened that altered the situation.

  An undercover agent who had gotten close to René concluded that, like Roldós and Torrijos, the president would not be corrupted. I was called off the job, and in 1981, a team of jackals was sent to assassinate René. They were discovered when their chartered plane landed in Seychelles. A firefight broke out. The jackals — surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned — hijacked an Air India 707. Six of them, who believed the plane would be shot down as soon as it took off, opted to remain behind and try to escape by blending in with the local people. The rest forced the 707 crew to fly them to South Africa.

  The six who remained were caught and imprisoned. Four were sentenced to death; the other two drew long prison terms. As soon as the 707 landed, it was surrounded by South African security forces. The jackals were arrested and imprisoned.2

  I stared at Jack, wondering . . .

  “I almost went there in the late seventies,” I said. “To work with the president.”

  His eyes held mine. “Albert René?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I tried to kill him.” He gave me a disarming grin. “But it’s not something I want to talk about.”

  I understood his reticence. It was enough to know that he had in fact been a member of the jackal team. Later that day I went back to my files. His name was there; as one of the 707 hijackers, he had made the newspapers during the trials in South Africa.

  I never asked Jack about Seychelles. I knew that prying would merely earn his mistrust. Instead, we talked about his more distant past. He had grown up amid the violence of Beirut, the son of a corporate executive. He was a US citizen, yet his life had been far removed from that of the teenagers hanging out on the streets of US cities during the love-in years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of watching flower children dancing through fountains, Jack watched as a mother was raped in front of her son and AK-47s spewed death across city streets. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, Jack was kidnapped by the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused of spying for Israel, tortured, and threatened with execution. Eventually they released him; nevertheless, it was an experience that changed his life.

  “Those bastards didn’t scare me,” he explained. “They pissed me off, showed me that I was meant to be a fighter.”

  He headed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Its army was notorious for its effectiveness and brutality, and for being the number one training ground for mercenaries. Jack excelled and was selected to join the elite South A
frican Special Forces Brigade. Popularly known as the “Recces” (reconnaissance commandos), its fighters were considered to be the most lethal in the world. By the time he graduated from the Recces, Jack had gained a reputation that appealed to the CIA.

  Jack would disappear from our dojang for extended periods. He was an avid surfer, and he brought back surfing photographs. Still, Master Lee and I commented to each other that violent things happened in countries where he went surfing — a bombing in Indonesia, riots in Lebanon, an assassination in South Africa.

  Then came 9/11, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jack accepted an assignment to go to the Middle East. All he would say about it was “It’s my type of job. And it’ll be a reunion of old friends, like the guys who went to the Seychelles with me.”

  I did not see him again until after my operation, in 2005, when he was back in the States for a month of vacation. He visited me just about every day and forced me to take longer and longer walks. “Got to get you back to kicking ass at Master Lee’s,” he would say.

  He did not talk much about his job. Instead, he shared photographs he’d taken: artful ones of the Iraqi people working in their fields, children riding on camels, and beautiful sunsets; and ones that told the story of bombed-out buildings, wrecked military vehicles, and men running from exploding cars.

  I gave him a copy of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Twenty-four hours later, he had read it all. “You’ve told the real story,” he said. “I hope you’ll write more, go deeper.” When I expressed surprise at his desire for transparency, he responded, “We got nothing to hide.”

  At that point, I broached the subject I’d avoided for so long. “What did you guys intend to do after you assassinated René?”

  He paused, but only for a moment. “Get the hell out of there fast, turn into ghosts — spooks.” He laughed at that last word. He went on to explain that the Kenyan army had an aircraft loaded with paratroopers standing by in Nairobi. After the jackals had killed René, the Kenyans would immediately arrive to accept credit for the coup. Jack and his team would take commercial airliners to other countries.

  “So,” I asked, “no one was supposed to know that a bunch of white mercenaries had staged this coup?”

  He nodded.

  “You’d simply vanish into thin air, and the world would be told that an army of Africans had swept in from the continent, killed René, destroyed his government, and reinstated the former president?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “The CIA, South Africa, Diego Garcia. They would all be left out of the news.” I whistled softly. “What a scam!”

  “Clever, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t bother to mention that it was a direct assault on the foundations of the American political system, that democracy is a farce when voters are intentionally deceived. “Except — you got caught.”

  “Yes.” He looked off wistfully, then brightened. “But you know what? It all worked out in the end. The South African security forces and the government were our buddies. After the Air India plane landed, we were tried and found guilty — and then a couple months later quietly released.” He gave me a knowing grin. “And our so-called failure turned out to be a success. The South African government paid René a $3 million bribe to free our six guys imprisoned there. No one was executed. No one stayed jailed for long. After that, René cooperated, never exposed the Diego Garcia secrets, and became a friend to the US.”

  I mentioned that the undercover agent who’d concluded that René was not corruptible — the reason I’d been pulled off the job — had been wrong.

  “Or perhaps,” Jack said, “René saw the light. Remember, he’d come this close to death.” He held his hands up and moved them together. “Our attempted assassination convinced him the CIA was serious.”

  I considered his words for a moment and thought about Roldós and Torrijos. “The CIA had killed the presidents of Ecuador and Panama only a few months before you went in, because they wouldn’t play our game.”

  “Exactly.” He smiled. “Don’t think for a moment those deaths didn’t make a big impression on Mr. René.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “René? He just retired as president. Two decades later! And Diego Garcia’s been the launching pad for US forays into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia all these years.”

  The story of the jackals in Seychelles says so much. On the surface, it seemed like a failure, but in fact it ended up accomplishing everything Washington could possibly have wanted. Better than actually killing a president, it had scared and bribed him into cooperating. He became a docile servant of empire. Key operatives had been caught — but they were soon back in business. And anyone who happened to read or hear about the raid on the Seychelles airport or the hijacking of an Air India 707 believed it was the work of terrorists — Communists — out to overthrow a legitimate government. The public had no idea that it was a CIA plot gone sour.3

  CHAPTER 36

  Ecuador Rebels

  I kept thinking about the possibility that I’d been poisoned, as I recuperated from that operation.

  I didn’t want to believe that the NSA or CIA had tried to kill me — the implications were just too terrifying. I tried to convince myself, instead, that the government was smart enough to assume that my untimely death would sell lots of books — the last thing they wanted. If I’d been poisoned, I told myself, the “journalist” who took me to lunch had done it as a personal vendetta; he felt similarly to the people who wrote e-mails accusing me of being a traitor. In any case, I knew from the e-mails that I’d done things that made people hate me. How could I live with myself?

  My mounting sense of guilt took me back to an experience I’d had while living in the Ecuadorian Amazon with the Shuar.

  I had become terribly sick. I couldn’t eat and had lost a great deal of weight in a short period of time. The nearest road was a two-day hike through dense jungle (for a healthy person), and then it was a two-day ride in rickety buses to a medical doctor — an impossible task, given that I could barely stand. I was resigned to dying. Then, a traditional Shuar healer, a shaman named Tunduam, cured me.

  On an all-night shamanic journey, I saw that I’d been brought up on bland New Hampshire foods. Now I was living with people whose diet was very different. Among other things, because the rivers were filled with organic matter, they always mixed drinking water with a type of beer fermented with the aid of human saliva.

  Faced with no alternatives, I ate their foods and drank their beer. That night, I saw that each time I did so, I heard a voice telling me it would kill me. I also saw that the Shuar were incredibly strong and healthy. As the night progressed, it became clear to me that it wasn’t the food and drink that were killing me; it was my mind-set. The next morning I was totally healthy.

  A few days later, Tunduam told me that I owed him for the healing. I needed to become his apprentice. It was the last thing I wanted. I’d been to business school; I could see no future in shamanism. But he’d saved my life and I owed him.

  Spending time with Tunduam, learning about the power of mind-sets, taught me the truth of that old adage “If you can dream it, you can make it happen.”

  I had taken on a mind-set of paranoia and guilt. I needed to change it.

  One day, shortly after my operation, I walked into the woods near my home, sat with my back against a large oak tree, and closed my eyes. I conjured an image of Tunduam and felt my connection to the natural world. The Shuar, like many indigenous cultures, believe that the key to changing one’s mind-set is found in the heart. I placed my hands on my heart.

  I sat there in silence for a few moments, until it came to me: my salvation had to include dedicating myself to doing everything possible to create a better world. I’d fallen into the trap of believing that writing the book, confessing, was enough. Now I understood that redemption required an absolute commitment to continuing to act. I had been mistaken to think I should cut back on my work after having
so much of my large intestine removed. Howard Zinn had been right. I now saw that I needed to reinvigorate myself as a writer and speaker. I needed to be an activist. It came to me that the best way to do this was to get more involved with the nonprofit organizations I’d founded or cofounded.

  Dream Change had accomplished a great deal over the fifteen years of its existence. We had taken people on trips to live with and learn from indigenous shamans in the Amazon, the Andes, the Asian Steppe, Africa, and Central America; had organized workshops in the United States and Europe; and had partnered with the Omega Institute to present annual shamanic gatherings that connected indigenous teachers from around the world with hundreds of participants in the United States. However, after my operation, Dream Change director Llyn Roberts and I decided to cut back. Llyn was busy writing books that would be published as Shamanic Reiki and Shapeshifting into Higher Consciousness. I was absorbed with all the activities generated by Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

  The Pachamama Alliance, on the other hand, was extremely active. Its history and mine were interwoven.

  In 1994, my Ecuadorian friend Daniel Koupermann had insisted that I meet with Achuar leaders deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Achuar, like Tunduam and the Shuar, believe that the world is as you dream it, and they’d had a communal dream. They asked me to help them form a partnership with people from the countries whose oil and other corporations threatened to destroy Achuar lands and culture — and, they said, the entire human presence on this planet.

  I had delivered that message to a person I’d recently met, who impressed me as a powerful activist, Lynne Twist. In 1995, she, her husband, Bill, and I took a small group of people into the jungle, to the Achuar. At the end of that trip, those people donated more than $100,000 to start the nonprofit that became the Pachamama Alliance.