Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Kinzer Stephen

Author:Kinzer, Stephen [Kinzer, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2007-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

9

A Graveyard Smell

A CIA officer who called himself Abe was one of the first people David Atlee Phillips met after he reported for duty at Langley, Virginia, in the autumn of 1970. Phillips, a veteran covert operative, had been chosen to help run the CIA’s subversive campaign against President-elect Salvador Allende of Chile. Abe briefed him on the plan, which was to sow chaos for a few weeks in the hope of setting off a revolution or military coup. Phillips, who had edited a newspaper in Chile and knew the country well, said he doubted the wisdom of trying to block Allende’s rise to power and, besides that, didn’t think it could be done. To his surprise, Abe agreed with him.

“I don’t understand,” Phillips said. “Why should we be doing this, especially when we believe it won’t work?”

“Understand?” Abe mused in reply, taking off his bifocals and polishing them. “Some time ago, I returned with Dick Helms from a meeting downtown. On the way back the car was tied up in traffic almost half an hour, and Helms and I talked about the assignment he had just been given. I ended by saying to Helms, ‘I don’t understand.’ Well, you know what Helms said? He looked at me and said, ’Abe, there’s something I’ve had to learn to understand. I’ve had to learn to understand presidents.’ So I guess you don’t really need to understand, as long as you understand what the President ordered.”

The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all “what the President ordered.” They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created the CIA and assigned it “duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States.

“The finger should have been pointed at presidents, and not the intelligence group,” Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona complained after the CIA was vilified for fomenting these coups.

Their second common feature is that in all four cases, the United States played the decisive role in a regime’s fall. It did not simply give insurgents tacit encouragement or discreet advice. American agents engaged in complex, well-financed campaigns to bring down the governments of Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile. None would have fallen—certainly not in the same way or at the same time—if Washington had not acted as it did.

Each of these four coups was launched against a government that was reasonably democratic (with the arguable exception of South Vietnam), and each ultimately led to the installation of a repressive dictatorship. They could be seen as at least temporary Cold War victories for the United States, which at the time seemed quite significant. Beyond that, however, it is hard to see them as successful. Part of the reason is that after the Americans won their victories, they proved unable or unwilling to control the regimes they helped install.

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