A History of Incompetence
While recent news might have overshadowed it, last December’s triumphant release of a 500-page sneak peak on the Senate intelligence committee’s CIA torture report still deserves interest – reminding of a few of the agency’s past glories. Whether or not the CIA did in this case mislead the Bush administration (which seems inprobable, considering Dick Cheney’s notorious distrust of the agency), I am sure a look at the following three grim cases will put this latest episode into perspective – namely, that it neatly follows three decades of CIA history as the executive branch’s most sinister and incompetent pet. A joyous read, undoubtedly.
1970: Chile
In September 1970, despite the CIA’s spending close to half a million dollars in anti-socialist propaganda, Salvador Allende of the left-wing Popular Unity party was democratically elected to be Chile’s 29th president. By then, the country itself had acquired a reputation as the most successful democratic regime in South America, and Mr. Allende had arrived in power after its 38th year of existence. Nonetheless, the Nixon administration – with proverbial boogeyman Henry Kissinger – took it upon themselves not to allow any country to go Marxist simply because “its people [were] irresponsible”, as the secretary of state himself said at the time. It was agreed that provoking the arrival in power of a more likeable person was something of a necessity.
Salvador Allende and the tactical turtleneck
Unfortunately for them, Chile had back then a rather exemplary tradition of keeping its military out of politics. In particular, the chief of Chilean General Staff, Rene Schneider, was firmly against the army’s interference in electoral processes. So, less than two months after the elections, the CIA hired a group of far-right nationalists to kidnap the general and scare the South American country’s parliament into denying Mr. Allende as president. The first attempt, on October 19th, failed miserably. The second the following evening went much the same way. On the 22nd ,however, local agents – under pressure from home – and hired guns made a third and final attempt, murdering Mr. Schneider in his car on the streets of Santiago.
This incident, in effect, started the Nixon administration’s policy of pressure and destabilization of the Allende regime, a policy that lasted until he was finally deposed (and killed) in 1973. His successor, the renowned Augusto Pinochet, was a man who words can only best describe as murderous tyrant, and who until 1978 was aided in his suppression campaigns by none other than the CIA. Most famously, Operation Condor, the international repression and assassination operations conducted together by South American juntas against their dissidents, was shown to have been directly aided by our most favored intelligence agency. Talk about precedent.
1984: Nicaragua-Iran
1984: times are hard for the Reagan administration. After winning somewhat fair (according to independent, foreign sources) elections, the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua is finally officially legitimized. They had taken power 5 years before from a long-ruling family dictatorship, and were opposed by the Contras, an alliance of various rebel groups directly funded and supported by the U.S. government. Yet these elections prove a turning point for American public opinion, and thus congress, who now surprisingly sees the promotion of civil war against a foreign democratically-elected regime as untenable. Funding for Contra programs is cut by the legislative branch, and the administration suddenly has no way of furthering its Central American aims.
But wait! A brilliant plan is devised by the head of the CIA in order to go around these unfortunate limitations, the key being that Iran is in the midst of a war with Iraq, and looking for weapons. Through the agency (as well as a few others), the U.S. could bypass its own arms embargo against Iran and sell them weapons to raise funds, part of which would go to the Contras.
“Thank God for Alzheimer’s”
Everything goes according to plan for a while, but by a stroke of bad luck a cargo plane carrying weapons to Nicaraguan rebels is shot down in October 1986 by government forces, and the lone survivor implicates the CIA. The whole operation is then revealed the following November in a Lebanese newspaper, and soon confirmed by the Iranians. Half the administration ends up in a heap of trouble, but the president remains untouched (despite the impeachable seriousness of his offense).
1991: Haiti
In 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected president of Haiti with 67% of the votes in what was widely regarded as the first ever ‘honest’ election in the caribbean country’s history. Considered at the time to be far too much on the Left for any American government to accept, the succeeding Reagan and Bush administrations use the CIA to create and arm a far-right opposition group named, in a rather unbecoming way, FRAPH. They moreover find it wise to send funds to Haiti’s notoriously corrupt military, just to be on the safe side (not that the generals would ever be caught dead siding with democratically-elected presidents anyway).
Raoul Cédras: Man of Mystery
These efforts quickly proved worthy, as less than 8 months after he was elected Mr. Aristide was deposed in a coup led by the Haitian army. The new man in power, Raoul Cédras, has since been found to have been on the CIA’s payroll at least until around that time. It is also worth noting that for the next three years this regime was to be accused of slaughtering thousands of civilians in a rampant repression worthy of the greatest of South American juntas.
Eventually, a number of persuasive claims – all of them in connection with what’s mentioned above – manifested themselves to the Clinton administration, changing their mind to the point of further intervention: and in 1994 a large US military force invaded the country to put Aristide back in power.
Worthy Reads
In guise of concluding comments, I may add that the remarkable aspect of these successive controversies (and all those others not mentioned), perhaps doesn’t have to do as much with the fact that these were CIA actions, but rather that the agency was always caught. It may well be a testament to American democracy (as well as CIA incompetence) that most of their perpetrators were prosecuted. I cannot think of any other country where that would ever happen without prior political motivation, while it would be almost truistic to add that a lot of other intelligence agencies have probably done equivalent, if not worse, deeds of their own.
For those of you thirsting for more information and still unsatisfied by their comprehensive Wikipedia entries, I suggest the following:
Christopher Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger: an obvious necessity.
Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 by Bob Woodward. While I wouldn’t quite go as far as recommending it (Woodward nearly acquiesces himself that he was led on by at least one person), it is a decent read nonetheless. Just don’t forget: access journalism involves playing favorites almost by definition.
And finally, this wonderful little piece on the Haitian case.