Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  Gary C. Schroen, CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1996 to 1999, has provided secret details about the way the agency paid off Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance warlords in the autumn of 2001 to reopen the civil war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and on the bungling of U.S. Special Forces in the subsequent campaign.26 Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA clandestine services officer fluent in Arabic, denounced former director George Tenet for his “total denial of failure” after September 11, 2001.27 Although not an American whistle-blower, the late British foreign secretary Robin Cook also deserves mention as the only cabinet-rank statesman in any country to resign over the war in Iraq—he stepped down as leader of the House of Commons in 2003 to protest the invasion—and then to denounce official lies that were being told about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “Instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy,” he charged, “we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled.”28

  After George Tenet resigned as George Bush’s DCI in July 2004 and went on the lecture circuit at $35,000 an appearance—he had earned well over a half million dollars by November 2004—Bush appointed Porter Goss to stanch the leaks at Langley.29 The Senate confirmed him by a vote of 77 to 17 (six senators did not vote), suggesting the increasing worthlessness of Senate oversight of the executive branch. The new head of the CIA quickly got rid of as many messengers like Scheuer as he could identify. Goss had clearly been ordered to make it appear that the agency misled the president (rather than the other way around, as was actually the case). He was then supposed to shake up what he called a “dysfunctional” organization.

  Before representing the Fourteenth District of Florida in the House for some sixteen years, Goss worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO). During that time he was stationed primarily in Latin America, and rumors persist that he left the agency under a cloud. In 1995, he was appointed to the House Intelligence Committee and, in 1997, the ex-agent became its chairman. There is no evidence that he ever did anything useful in this position, like investigating the intelligence lapses that preceded 9/11 or the failure of the CIA to place a single spy anywhere in Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the 2004 election campaign he actually gave speeches attacking candidate John Kerry for “slashing intelligence funding” without mentioning that, in 1995, he himself had cosponsored a measure calling for the firing of 20 percent of all CIA personnel over five years.

  Goss brought with him to the agency a group of Republican activist staff members from the House Intelligence Committee and set them up in prominent executive positions. They helped unleash a witch hunt against any and all intelligence officers who sought to put accuracy and integrity ahead of service to George W. Bush. Goss began his shake-up of the CIA by forcing out the director and deputy director of operations, even though this is not the primary place where the failures of the CIA in recent years have occurred. (This, in turn, led to speculation that it was a way to keep his own service record in the DO under wraps.) Shortly thereafter, Goss fired Jami A. Miscik, deputy director for intelligence, who had worked in the agency since 1983 and was a close associate of George Tenet. She had led the Directorate of Intelligence since May 2002, a period in which much of the false reporting on Iraq occurred. It might have seemed logical that Miscik would be held responsible for the politicized intelligence produced on her watch; but under the circumstances it seems clear that she was actually a scapegoat for President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who ordered up the false intelligence in the first place.30 As Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic has written, “If Goss thought the CIA was dysfunctional before, he has guaranteed that it is now.”31

  At the same time, President Bush ordered that the number of clandestine service officers within the agency be doubled, placing a much greater emphasis on covert operations.32 The CIA remains the main executive-branch department in charge of overthrowing foreign governments, promoting regimes of state terrorism, kidnapping people of interest to the administration and sending them to friendly foreign countries to be tortured and/or killed, assassination and the torture of prisoners in violation of international and domestic law, and numerous other “wet” exercises that both the president and the country in which they are executed want to be able to deny.

  CIA covert operations are distinguished from military assaults carried out by the Department of Defense (which is also rapidly expanding its covert operations) chiefly by the requirement that the president must be able plausibly to deny that he ordered them or that he even knew about them. Covert operations are therefore protected by the most rigorous secrecy. As Loch Johnson observes, this sort of secrecy also destroys the last shreds of agency accountability. “Under a system of plausible denial it often becomes uncertain who really does know about, and has approved of, any given covert action. The lines of accountability wash away like markings in the sand.”33

  From the creation of the CIA in 1947 down to the Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 (formally entitled Section 602(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974), there were virtually no officials of government who actually supervised or gave approval for covert acts or knew in detail about them or what they were supposed to accomplish. “The foreign policy establishment in Washington trusted the CIA,” Thomas Powers wrote in 1979, “and still trusts it, for that matter, but beyond governing circles the political foundation of the CIA rested on nothing more substantial than a popular fascination with espionage and a conviction that we are the good guys.”34 The Church Committee estimated that the National Security Council itself knew about and approved of no more than about 14 percent of all covert actions from 1961 to 1975.35

  For example, when it came to investigating the CIAs several attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro of Cuba (and a few other heads of state), the Church Committee had to throw in the towel. Numerous cabinet officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, testified under oath that it was unthinkable that either Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had authorized such a mission. As Powers writes, “The committee was forced to confess in the end that while it had no evidence that the CIA had been a rogue elephant rampaging out of control, it also had no evidence that Eisenhower or Kennedy or anyone speaking in one of their names had ordered the CIA to kill Castro. The only indisputable fact was that the CIA did, in fact, try to do so.”36 Plausible denial, extreme secrecy, the power of the presidency, and a culture of loyalty to the agency rather than to the Constitution cause this kind of endemic confusion—exceedingly useful to those in power—about who is responsible for what the CIA does, a problem that still haunts the government today.

  The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, named after its authors, Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat from Iowa) and Representative Leo J. Ryan (Democrat from California), for the first time tried to enforce the CIAs accountability to the elected representatives of the people. It states that “No funds ... may be expended by or on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency for operations in foreign countries ... unless and until the President finds that each such operation is important to the national security of the United States.” The verb “finds” is the origin of the odd term “finding,” which is governmental argot for the document that the president now signs approving and setting into motion a covert operation. The law also stipulates that the president must give the appropriate committees of Congress “in a timely fashion” a description of each operation and its scope.

  This law has not worked well. In the middle of the Reagan administration, members of Congress first read in the newspapers that, on orders of the president’s national security adviser, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, CIA operatives were covertly and illegally selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and using the funds thus obtained to finance a congressionally forbidden insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua. This disaster led to much stronger demands for intelligence oversight, but the president and his secret army found numerous ways to get around such pre
ssures. For example, in lieu of a specific finding, “worldwide findings” have given the CIA blanket authority to conduct certain types of unspecified covert operations—say, those against terrorists. Operations have also been “privatized” by getting foreign governments and U.S. corporations to pay for them, or kept totally hidden via “off the books” personnel and funds. To illustrate what the CIA does best, let us look briefly at its record in Chile, in Afghanistan, and in carrying out so-called extraordinary renditions.

  CIA activities in Chile, ranging from the early 1960s to 1990, occurred in both the pre- and postaccountability eras. Before 1974, they were intended to overthrow the oldest and most stable democracy in Latin America, dating from the country’s independence in 1818, and replace it with “the vilest of Latin American dictators in recent history.”37 Having to report to Congress had little effect on CIA operations in Chile. If findings were ever signed and passed to Capitol Hill, we have no record of them. What we do have is a vast archive of thousands of highly classified reports and cables from the Oval Office, the CIA, the National Security Council, the State Department, the American embassy in Santiago, and the FBI that the U.S. government was forced to declassify because of the blowback that the operations themselves generated, including lawsuits by Chilean torture victims and demands for the arrest and trial of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.38

  Chile was certainly not the first instance in which the United States government used its clandestine services to manipulate, undermine, or overthrow a fellow democracy. It had done so in many other places, including Italy in 1947-48, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1957-58, Brazil from 1961 to 1964, Greece from 1964 to 1974, South Korea from 1961 to 1987, and the Philippines in every year since it gained its independence from the United States in 1946. But Chile provides us with the first written record of a U.S. president ordering the overthrow of a democratically elected government—namely, the handwritten notes of CIA director Richard Helms reflecting the orders given to him by President Richard Nixon in the White House on September 15, 1970.39 Even the heavily censored CIA documents released to the Church Committee in 1975 led Senator Church to produce his own definition of “covert action.” It is a “semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”40

  From the moment the Kennedy administration came to power in 1961 until the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the CIA spent some $12 million on a massive “black” propaganda campaign to support Allende’s primary political opponent, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, and to denigrate Allende as a stooge of the Soviet Union. In addition, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (which owned the Chilean telephone system) and other American-owned businesses in Chile gave the CIA an extra $1.5 million to help discredit Allende. ITT properties in Chile, including two Sheraton Hotels, were worth at least $153 million. In July 1970, two months before Allende was elected president, John McCone, director of central intelligence from 1961 to 1965 and in 1970 a member of the board of directors of ITT, set up an appointment with then DCI Richard Helms. He offered money and cooperation from ITT “for the purpose of assisting any [U.S.] government plan ... to stop Allende.” ITT presented a plan “aimed at inducing economic collapse” in Chile.41

  In the 1964 election, the CIA directly underwrote more than half of Frei’s campaign expenses. It spent more than $2.6 million in support of the election of the Christian Democratic candidate. More sinister was the agency’s disinformation campaign, which it later held up as a model of how to do it. The Church Committee reported, “Extensive use was made of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers, and wall painting. It was a ‘scare campaign,’ which relied heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads and was directed especially to women.”42 The CIA placed radio spots that featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman’s cry: “They have killed my child—the communists.” One poster, printed in the thousands, showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads. Juanita Castro, Fidel’s anticommunist sister, said on the radio, “If the Reds win in Chile, no type of religious activity will be possible.... Chilean mothers, I know you will not allow your children to be taken from you and sent to the Communist bloc, as in the case of Cuba.”43

  The CIA boasted that it produced and planted in various media around the world some 726 stories against an Allende presidency. Most of these appeared first in Latin American newspapers and were later reprinted in Chilean ones; some appeared in the CIA’s own secret outlets, which included Der Monat in Germany, Encounter in Britain, the Daily American of Rome, and the South Pacific Mail of Santiago. Some seeped into the New York Times and the Washington Post, including the idea that Allende was a paid agent of the USSR.44 In 1964, these “dirty tricks” produced the desired results. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent, an unprecedented and almost statistically impossible outcome, given Chile’s multiparty electoral system. The targeted scare tactics worked well. While Chilean men voted for Allende by a plurality of more than 67,000, women gave Frei 469,000 more votes than Allende.45 As a reward and an insurance policy, the U.S. government promptly began to pay off Frei. Under the U.S.’s Alliance for Progress, a scheme to prevent the spread of leftist views in Latin America, “Chile received more American aid per capita than just about any other country in the world—Vietnam excepted.”46

  The next presidential election was scheduled for September 4, 1970. Even though the CIA kept up its blistering disinformation campaign, Chilean voters had become warier of the increasingly preposterous American propaganda and its “false flag” agents who tried to convince Chilean business and military elites that “an Allende victory means violence and Stalinist repression.” As a matter of fact, there was no issue of potential Soviet influence in Chile. Allende was not a communist and, in any case, after he came to power in 1970 the Soviet Union wisely urged him to “put his relations with the United States in order.”47 In August 1970, Henry Kissinger had ordered a special national intelligence estimate to answer the question “What would happen in the event of an Allende victory?” It concluded: “An Allende election carried no military, strategic, or regional threat to U.S. interests in security and stability.”48

  In the September 4 election, Allende finally won a plurality, but not a majority, of the vote. However, he confidently expected that on October 24 the Chilean Congress would choose him to be president—normal parliamentary practice.

  In an attempt to prevent this, the Nixon White House and the CIA sprang into action. On October 16, 1970, CIA headquarters dispatched a secret “eyes only” cable to Henry Hecksher, the CIA Santiago station chief. The actual sender, presumably DCI Helms, is blacked out in the text. “It is firm and continuous policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October, but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [United States government] and American hand be well hidden.”49

  For months, the CIA had been sounding out senior Chilean military officers on the issue of a coup, promising extensive help to any who agreed to participate. The agency’s operatives soon discovered that the main obstacle was the commander in chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who represented what the CIA called “the apolitical, constitution-oriented inertia of the Chilean military.”50 Therefore, the CIA set out to find and arm dissident Chilean forces who would assassinate him. One group it approached asked for submachine guns, ammunition, and $50,000 to do the job, and the agency obliged, shipping the weapons from Washington to Santiago in the regular diplomatic pouch.51 Local CIA agents then delivered them to
the plotters at 2 a.m. on October 22, 1970; at 8 a.m. the assassins surrounded General Schneider’s chauffeur-driven car, knocked out the rear window, and fatally wounded him. He died in a hospital three days later.

  The CIA went to great lengths to cover its tracks, including paying hush money to the conspirators and driving to a general’s home to retrieve the guns they had given him. Colonel Paul Wimert, the military attaché in the U.S. embassy in Santiago, had to pistol-whip the general to force him to comply.52 The agency then dumped the machine guns in the ocean to ensure that they could not be traced back to the U.S. government.

  But Washington and the CIA had overplayed their hands. “Far from fostering a coup climate,” Peter Kornbluh, the chief Chilean specialist at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., writes, “the Schneider shooting produced an overwhelming public and political repudiation of violence and a clear reaffirmation of Chile’s civil, constitutional tradition.”53 The Chilean Congress voted 153 to 57 to ratify Allende as president, with all seventy-four senators and congressmen from the Christian Democratic Party voting with Allende’s own party. This result did not, however, even begin to slow down Washington’s venomous campaign. For the next three years, the Nixon administration tried in every way to undermine Allende by producing economic chaos in Chile, and the CIA worked tirelessly to find a suitable general to put in power. They finally identified a likely candidate in the summer of 1971—the cruel, ruthless, and corrupt General Augusto Pinochet.