For two decades the US government claimed that its decision
to work for the overthrow of Afghanistan's government in the final days of the
1970s was a response to the invasion of Soviet troops. But in January 1998, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser at the time, finally
admitted the truth: covert US intervention began months before the USSR sent in
troops.
"That secret operation was an excellent idea," he
bragged. "The effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
During an interview with the French publication, Le Nouvel
Observateur, which somehow never made it into US media, Brzezinski was
grilled about the role he played in aiding the Mujahadeen. Former CIA Director
Robert Gates had recently claimed in his memoir, From the Shadows, that US
intelligence operations began six months before the Soviet intervention.
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid
to the Mujahadeen began during 1980," Brzezinski noted, "that is to
say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality,
secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3,
1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the
opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note
to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was
going to induce a Soviet military intervention."
Seizing this opening, the interviewer suggested that perhaps
Brzezinski intended to provoke the Soviets into war. "It isn't quite
that," the former National Security Advisor replied cagily. "We
didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the
probability that they would." Nevertheless, when the Soviets tried to
justify their invasion with the claim that they were responding to a secret war
bankrolled by the US, few people believed them.
Did he regret anything? "Regret what?" Brzezinski
shot back. "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect
of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The
day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President
Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.
Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the
government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the
breakup of the Soviet Empire."
But what about arming Islamic fundamentalists who might
become future terrorists? Brzezinski's reply to that was brazen. "What is
most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the
Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and
the end of the cold war?" The jury is out on such questions.
Brzezinski's strategy did net some obvious results. The
1980s conflict in Afghanistan, provoked by US leaders as a geopolitical move in
the Great Game, led to almost two million deaths and sparked the Taliban’s rise.
Afghanistan became open territory for drug traffickers and energy companies
eager to build oil and gas pipelines. Meanwhile, millions of Afghanis, including
many who once worked with the CIA, paid a price. Eventually, the country served
as a base for Osama bin Laden's crusade against the US, Israel, and Arab
regimes in the Middle East.
Disaster in the Congo
Another prime example of covert manipulation going
drastically wrong is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as Zaire
during the 37-year reign of Mobutu Sese Seko, and before that the Belgian
Congo. In 1960, despite Belgian predictions that European rule would continue
for another century, the Congo declared its independence, and out of a largely
peaceful revolution emerged a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba, who became
the nation's first Prime Minister. But US policy-makers considered Lumumba,
actually militant nationalist, a communist sympathizer, and therefore a threat
to vital interests.
Located in Africa's heartland, the Congo was vital for its
vast mineral resources; one of the world's largest copper and industrial
diamond producers, it also had gold, manganese, zinc, cobalt, and silver. To be
blunt, it was a key source of raw materials for the emerging
military-industrial complex. Its uranium, one of the only known sources during
World War II, was used in the first atomic bombs.
Even today, it isn't completely clear what sealed Lumumba's
fate; some say it was his attempt to have UN troops step in to deal with the
violence breaking out between tribes and political parties. In the richest
province, Katanga, Moise Tshombe had declared himself ruler, attempted to
secede, and recruited Belgian, French and South African mercenaries to fight
the new government. However it was decided, Lumumba became a target for removal
in the CIA's "golden age" of destabilization campaigns. After less
than a year in office, he was deposed in a coup led by Mobuto, an
Israeli-trained paratrooper who had Belgian and US backing. Mobuto, then called
Colonel, turned Lumumba over the Tshombe, his archenemy.
Some details of Lumumba's assassination remain mysterious to
this day. But in 2000 evidence surfaced that President Dwight Eisenhower may
have directly ordered the CIA to "eliminate" him. The evidence came
from Robert Johnson, who took notes at an August 18, 1960, White House meeting
between Eisenhower and his national security advisers on the Congo crisis.
Johnson recalled the president turning to CIA Director Allen Dulles, "in
the full hearing of all those in attendance, and saying something to the effect
that Lumumba should be eliminated." Eisenhower had strict rules for
reports filed on National Security Council meetings: no direct quotations. With Johnson's
revelation, the reason became only too clear.
Questions also surround the precise chain of events. But
according to Lugo de Witte, a Flemish expert on Africa, Belgian officers
probably implemented the plan. A document signed in 1960 by Harold Aspremont
Lynden, Belgium's minister for Africa, announced that "the main objective
to pursue, in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium, is clearly the
final elimination of Lumumba." After his arrest by Mobutu's forces on
January 17, 1961, on orders from Belgium's foreign minister, Lumumba was
transferred to Katanga, tortured in the presence of Belgian officials, and
executed under the supervision of a Belgian captain.
The new nation, whose artificial boundaries had been set in
negotiations between Belgium, Britain, France and Portugal, continued to hover
at the edge of civil war for several more years.
The US stuck with Mobutu until the bitter end, propping him
up as part of its Cold War strategy. As "president for life," he
stashed a huge fortune in Swiss banks. It didn’t matter, as long as he was an
anti-communist bulwark. His rapaciousness ultimately spread throughout the
country's bureaucracy, especially the army. Still, no discouraging words from
his overseers.
Much of his loot came from the US; he even pocketed CIA cash
provided to support "contras" at work in Angola. None of this made
any difference. Mobutu was a "friend," part of an elite club that
included Noriega in Panama, Marcos in the Philippines, Diem and Thieu in Vietnam,
Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua, Suharto in Indonesia, and the Shah in
Iran.
And what did this ally do to his country? According to the
World Bank, by the late 1990s the economy had shrunk to its 1958 level, despite
a tripling of the population. Public finances were a mess, the national
currency was worthless, and the State was insolvent. Upon its independence, the
Congo had the highest literacy rate in Africa; by the time Mobutu was forced
out in 1997, little more than half of all children were even attending schools.
When open at all, they didn't have textbooks and the students often had to sit
on the floor. Even the desks had been looted.
In the early 90s, Mobutu announced that he would end his one
party state. But the transition never began, promised elections were canceled,
and repression continued. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations looked the
other way, while mainstream media continued a policy of self-imposed ignorance.
Only after his departure did the news that Mobutu was a brutal tyrant begin to
reach the general public. By this time, one of the continent's most promising
nations was hobbled and deeply divided. A dictator had finally fallen, but the
culprits who put him there, some even expressing belated outrage, escaped with
impunity.
Iraq: Creating the next enemy
When pre-9/11 covert operations are discussed, officials and
pundits are quick to claim that, as bad as things sound, that’s "ancient
history." Things were different during the Cold War, when beating
communism excused some extreme, often unsavory tactics. But the logic is also reversed
to argue, things are different now, in order to excuse the same cynical
manipulation and disregard for human life.
An instructive example followed the fall of the Soviet Union,
when a credible new enemy was needed. US policy makers quickly turned their
eyes toward Iraq, fresh from victory after an eight-year war with Iran and
well-equipped with modern French and Soviet weapons. Saddam Hussein was at the
peak of his regional popularity.
Based on the theory that domination of the Gulf region by a
Hussein-led Iraq could jeopardize access to oil supplies, Colin Powell, then
chairing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on General H. Norman Schwarzkopf in
late 1989 to prepare a blueprint for combat. Schwartzkopf, who would lead
Operation Desert Storm a year later, had just taken charge of the US Central
Command (CENTCOM), an expanded version of the Rapid Deployment Force
established under President Carter.
In May 1990, the National Security Council released a white
paper that cited Iraq, and Hussein personally, as "the optimum contenders
to replace the Warsaw Pact," using that claim as a justification for
increased military spending. Meanwhile, at an emergency Arab summit held in
Baghdad, Hussein called for a united front against outside aggression, more
Arab coordination, and increased aid to the Jordan and the Palestinian
Intifada. In the foreign policy establishment, these were interpreted as
fighting words. Four months later Bush drew his line in the sand.
Hussein may well have been tricked into war by repeated
assurances that the US felt no obligation to come to Kuwait's defense. It may
sound like just one more conspiracy theory. However, this time there is a
transcript to support the idea. On July 25, 1990, eight days before the
outbreak of fighting between Iraq and Kuwait, US Ambassador April Glaspie held
a taped meeting with Hussein, who apparently hoped to make sure the US would
stay neutral and not intervene. Obviously, he understood that Saudi Arabia was
Washington's key Arab ally, and hosted a significant US military presence in
the Gulf. No credible evidence that Iraq planned to attack the Saudis has surfaced.
During their talk, Glaspie clearly suggested to Hussein that
the Bush administration understood Iraq's point of view and did not want to
meddle in an Arab dispute. At one point, she said, "We have no opinion on
the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait...we see the
Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the
final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq."
A week later, that proved to be very bad advice.
Protecting the cover story
One covert operation that sparked some outrage at the time
was the US training of Indonesian commandos accused of torturing and killing
civilians. Despite a congressional ban in the 1990s, the Pentagon exploited
a legal loophole that allowed "human rights training" to provide
instruction in demolition, sniper techniques, psychological operations, and
"military operations in urban terrain." The targets included
workers who had lost their jobs during Indonesia’s economic crisis, students
opposing President Suharto's military-dominated regime, and East Timorese who
wanted independence.
Until support for Suharto became completely untenable, the
Clinton Administration defended this as "engagement with an
important country" that served US national interests.
Less publicized but equally deadly was US involvement in low-intensity war in Mexico. Under the guise of anti-drug operations, the US provided hundreds of million to Mexico for arms and training beginning around 1995. This
included the US training of the Air-Mobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), created
in direct response to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. After courses at Fort
Bragg, GAFE units went on to kidnap, torture, and kill government opponents.
Wearing hoods, they would enter homes in the middle of the night to surprise
their targets, and raid hotels and restaurants without presenting search
warrants.
Although responsibility for a massacre of 45 civilians in
Acteal in December, 1997 couldn't be traced directly to GAFE, the incident
clearly reflected counter-insurgency lessons learned at the School of the
Americas (SOA) in Georgia and other US training centers. Roy Bourgeois, a
Maryknoll priest who spent more than two decades trying to close the SOA, repeatedly pointed out that the insurgents under attack were usually reformers, human
rights workers, and peasants who opposed repressive governments. Despite
platitudes about human rights, the US continued to use the same tactics that had marked
earlier interventions in Latin America and Southeast Asia.
What we hear about such "humanitarian"
intervention is usually just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, 24-hour
news and social media promote the illusion that there are few secrets left.
Reality is another matter. Assisting the CIA, front groups like the National
Endowment for Democracy have funneled funds to countless so-called insurgencies for years.
Since declaring Islamic fundamentalism the post-communist global menace, the
Agency is known to have run covert operations in most Middle-East states, from Libya
and Iran to the Sudan.
Not so safe or secret anymore
While visiting London to promote his memoirs, Henry
Kissinger once stormed out of a widely heard radio interview when the
questioning turned to his complicity in war crimes. Jeremy Paxman, host of a
Radio 4 program, asked the former secretary of state whether he felt like a
fraud for getting a Nobel Peace Prize after plotting a coup in Chile and
orchestrating slaughter in Cambodia. Kissinger fumed and denied everything, of
course, charging that his host was woefully misinformed. But later the same
day, he declined to show up for a BBC roundtable discussion.
Kissinger isn't the only former leader who sometimes gets nervous
about accountability. Back when former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was
fighting extradition to Spain, other potential defendants fretted about the
precedent it might set. And the Clinton administration did not help. Instead, it
released documents on Chile that not only confirmed what many suspected -- the
US actively promoted the coup against Allende and sanctioned the subsequent
repression -- but also sparked a hailstorm of related revelations.
The administration's motives were not exactly pure. Bowing
to pressure from a Spanish judge, human rights groups, and the families of
victims, Clinton had opted to "declassify what we can, so that we can say
we did our share." That’s how a White House aide explained it. But the
potential to embarrass political opponents didn't escape notice. With Texas
Governor George W. Bush emerging as the Republican presidential front-runner,
the thought was that his father's connection to Pinochet's crimes could become
a factor, or at least a useful attack point, during the 2000 election.
It didn’t turn out that way.
Questions persist about what the first President Bush knew
and did while serving as CIA chief in the mid-1970s, a period during which
Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his US co-worker Ronni Moffitt
were assassinated in Washington. At the time suspicions pointed to Chile's intelligence
arm, DINA, a sponsor of international terror.
According to declassified documents, however, we also know
that Kissinger, Nixon, and CIA Director Richard Helms ordered a coup even
before Allende assumed office. Kissinger and Alexander Haig worked out the
details, described in an October 15, 1970, memo. "It is the firm and
consistent policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," wrote CIA Deputy
Director of Plans Thomas Karamessines, who coordinated the operation. "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 and American hand be well
hidden."
Two years later, their goal was achieved. In a victory report,
Naval attache Patrick Ryan called September 11, 1972, "our D-day,"
noting that the coup "was close to perfect." In subsequent years, the
State Department received detailed reports on the escalating death toll under
Pinochet. Yet, in another memo Kissinger tells the general that the US is
"sympathetic with what you are trying to do here."
Years later, as Pinochet faced charges for murder, torture,
disappearances, rape, and genocide, the question naturally arose: Why not
Kissinger and those responsible for mass mayhem elsewhere? If more documents
were declassified, the list of possible defendants would undoubtedly grow.
The accountability chase
Even though he ultimately escaped punishment, the Chilean
dictator's case did help peel away the facade of deniability, exposing high
officials who provided weapons, training, financial support, and direct
guidance for some of the worst modern violations of political and civil rights.
Given that, is it any surprise the US backed out of an International Criminal
Court (ICC), which was established in part to prosecute powerful individuals
when domestic courts fail to act?
The treaty establishing the ICC was adopted in 1998, and
subsequently ratified by many countries. At the time, human rights groups
considered it the most important advance for the cause of international justice
since the creation of the UN. But the US refused to sign at first, joining such
notable naysayers as Russia, China, Israel, Iraq, and much of the Middle East.
Officially, the US objection was that, as the world's
pre-eminent (and most resented) power, it might be subjected to
"frivolous" prosecutions. There were also suspicions about the
UN itself. By delaying, US officials hoped to obtain a guarantee that no US
citizen accused of war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity could ever
be brought before the court. In a letter to European Union foreign ministers,
Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Clinton, implied that if her
country did not get its way, it might withdraw from international peace-keeping
and humanitarian missions. Pentagon officials went further, threatening to pull
forces out of Europe.
In December 2000, the US finally signed, leaving Libya as
the only country officially antagonistic the ICC's creation. But shortly after
taking office, Bush II revived the old objections, suggesting that the court
could expose US soldiers and officials abroad to politically motivated war
crimes prosecutions. After 9/11 and the military response in Afghanistan, that
looked more like a possibility. Thus, plans proceeded to reshape US relations
with the UN. In May 2002, the administration informed the world body that it
was nullifying its treaty signature. It was an unprecedented step; no other
nation had ever before voided a signature on a binding international treaty.
For many countries, the decision was a clear early sign of resurgent US
unilateralism.
On the bright side, Kissinger did squirm a bit. Even Bush I
sensed that he might not be immune. Predictably, the ex-president called the
case against Pinochet "a travesty of justice." Former Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher also became edgy, making discreet inquiries to Britain's
Interior Ministry on the likelihood of being arrested while traveling abroad. As
an old friend of Pinochet, the Iron Lady was worried about being charged as a
war criminal for her actions in Northern Ireland and the Falklands.
The exposure of war crimes by former high officials like
Kissinger, although it usually comes decades late and rarely leads to
prosecution, does suggest that it may one day be possible to get at the truth
about covert schemes and schemers. For Bill Clinton, meddling in Mexico and the
Sudan, not to mention in Iraq and Kosovo, could prove damning if more of
those stories were revealed.
In May 2002, eight months after 9/11, Bush II almost faced
that same problem: premature exposure, in this case of what he actually knew and did before the
attacks, could have led to embarrassing revelations about how and why the
"war on terror" was launched. But no such luck. It still takes at
least a generation, plus political convenience, to get far beyond the veil of
disinformation.
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