14
BUILDING BLOWBACK
The Pentagon and the Navy actually needed several years to convince Congress to provide funding for a new base on Diego Garcia. As the 1960s ended and U.S. involvement in the wars in Southeast Asia reached high points in terms of troops deployed, there was considerable opposition in Congress to expanding military commitments and spending. An unprecedented Senate investigation reflected the concern at the time. “Once an American overseas base is established, it takes on a life of its own,” concluded the investigation’s final 1971 report. “Original missions may become outdated, but new missions are developed, not only with the intent of keeping the facility going, but often to actually enlarge it.”1
In 2012 I visited one of the authors of the investigation at the Washington Post, where he worked. Walter Pincus left his position as a staffer for the Subcommittee on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and columnist writing about military, intelligence, and foreign policy issues. Brooklyn-born Pincus walked out of the Post building looking like a Hollywood vision of an old-school reporter. Pincus wore gray flannel pants, a tie, and a slightly frayed white-striped shirt, its collar splayed open past the lapels of a blue blazer. His hair was stark white, his eyebrows bushy. Only a fedora with a “Press” card in the hatband was missing.
Over coffee Pincus told me that his Senate research took him to twenty-five countries hosting U.S. troops in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The subcommittee represented the first major investigation of the expansion of U.S. military bases and commitments around the globe since World War II. The final report totaled 2,442 pages. “We took away that we had bases all over the place,” he said. After some overseas base closures following the end of combat in Korea, the number of U.S. bases had grown again by 20 percent, as U.S. combat in Vietnam and Southeast Asia deepened.2 Despite the war context, Pincus’s subcommittee found that many bases abroad had little purpose and remained open mainly due to bureaucratic inertia.
The result was that the military, backed by the State Department, was maintaining and even expanding a large number of decades-old bases thanks to a series of rotating rationales and vague or dubious justifications for their continued existence. “Arguments can always be raised to justify keeping almost any facility open,” the subcommittee concluded, in language Pincus helped draft. “To the military, a contingency use can always be found. To the diplomat, a base closing or reduction can always be at the wrong time in terms of relations with the host country and other nations.” The report noted that in the Pentagon and State Department there was “little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities.” Some of the explanation lay in the tendency of bureaucracies to want to perpetuate themselves: “It is only to be expected that those in embassies abroad, and also at overseas military facilities, would seek to justify continued operations in their particular areas,” explained the subcommittee. “Otherwise, they recommend a reduction in their own position.”3
Some of the patterns of inertia and expansion were the result of making “commitments,” official guarantees, to ruling governments to ensure base access. Especially in authoritarian states, Pincus told me, establishing bases meant “we will also defend the regime that got us in there,” because the regime’s removal would threaten a base’s existence. In the case of Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain, Pincus said, “I kept asking, ‘Why do we keep Morón [Air Base]?’ ” The answer, military representatives told him, was that it was a “key base” for exercises.
Map 20. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1979–1989.
Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. By 1989, near the end of the “Cold War,” bases abroad totaled around 1,600. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: Base Structure Report for Fiscal Year 1989 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 1988); Blaker, United States Overseas Basing; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2018 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018); David Vine, “Lists of U.S. Military Bases Abroad, 1776–2020,” American University Digital Research Archive, April 27, 2020, https://doi.org/10.17606/bbxc-4368.
“So what the hell are we exercising with Spain?” he asked. The yearly exercises practiced saving the dictatorial government from any forces that might seek to unseat Franco, Pincus was told. The justification for bases at times became circular: we need to protect the regime to protect the base; we need the base to protect the regime. Pincus realized, too, that the exercises were, not coincidentally, timed to end around the start of one of Spain’s biggest festivals, the Feria de Sevilla. The good weather in southern Spain also helped explain why the military was still in Spain. What Pincus called the “perk side” of overseas bases was another reason bases tended to take on a life of their own. Even the military’s post exchange—the “PX” commissary store where military and State Department personnel buy cheap, tax-free goods on base—played a role in dulling the critical faculties of State Department embassy officials who came to enjoy this perk of overseas duty.
“The Pentagon also takes care of Congress,” Pincus added, when it should be playing an oversight role for bases abroad. When members visit overseas bases, he explained, the military tends to orchestrate everything, including a light schedule of three meetings a day plus “dinner and shopping and all that shit.” These are the people who “are supposed to be doing oversight,” he said. “And it’s infectious.”
Bases’ tendencies toward inertia and expansion were on full display with Diego Garcia. In 1972, before the base was even operational, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt was asking others in the Navy about expansion plans: “What do we do in [fiscal years] 74, 75, and 76 for Diego Garcia?”4 By Christmas Day Bob Hope and Red Foxx were cracking jokes for the troops on Diego Garcia as part of a USO show, like those performed at bases worldwide.5 Shortly before the final deportations of Chagossians in 1973, a Navy Seabee construction battalion completed an eight-thousand-foot runway. Within months the Navy was using the base to support Israel in its 1973 war with Arab countries.
As top Navy officials and others in the U.S. government had hoped, what they sold to Congress as an “austere communications facility” served as the nucleus for a rapidly expanding base. In 1973 the Navy submitted a request to the Pentagon for an almost $32 million expansion between 1974 and 1976. The “communications facility” would now include ship support and air surveillance capabilities. Just days after the Navy’s submission, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer, sent a recommendation to Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to expand the base further. Moorer wanted a runway extension to accommodate huge B-52 bombers.6 Diego Garcia soon proved to be the leading edge of a far larger base presence throughout the Greater Middle East and a decades-long strategy to use military force to control Middle Eastern oil and natural gas supplies.
Attempts to create a significant U.S. military presence in the Greater Middle East started decades earlier; however, decolonization, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the wars in Southeast Asia had rolled back these efforts significantly. Continuing to build a base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, after it was no longer needed to fight World War II was an early sign of the strategy. After the war, U.S. officials used arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as other countries, to ensure basing access rights. Planners negotiated with British officials for access to their bases and encouraged Britain to maintain a powerful presence in the region. They made an agreement for air facilities in newly independent Libya and struck a secret deal with France for vast basing rights in North Africa. U.S. officials created a small naval force in Bahrain in 1949 and tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to fund a U.S. basing presence alongside the British between Cairo and the Suez Canal.7
Maintaining bases in Turkey became particularly important in the eyes of U.S. officials. The country was near Middle East oil fields and along the Soviet Union’s southern border, straddling Europe and Asia. Although U.S. planners understood that any immediate Soviet threat to the United States and its allies was exaggerated, they believed bases in Turkey were important to guarding against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe or the Middle East and, in the event of war, to attacking Soviet oil assets.8 To secure access to bases in Turkey, U.S. officials included Turkey in the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and provided additional economic and military aid under the Truman Doctrine.
When “Cold War” tensions with the Soviet Union deepened, U.S. leaders saw the Middle East as even more important to war plans. U.S. officials, writes Melvyn Leffler, aimed to bring nations in the region “into a U.S.-led orbit in order to insure that they would cooperate strategically in wartime and allow Western corporations to develop and control their petroleum resources in peacetime.”9 Many U.S. leaders were so concerned about Middle East basing access that they favored backing Arab countries in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ultimately, growing U.S. support for Israel resulted in the Saudi Arabian government evicting the United States from Dhahran. The Middle East buildup was rolled back further as the commitment of U.S. troops and funds skyrocketed in Southeast Asia. U.S. officials, particularly after the enunciation of the Nixon Doctrine, moved to maintain U.S. influence in the Middle East through proxies rather than through a direct U.S. military presence. This meant backing and arming regional powers, beginning with the authoritarian states of Saudi Arabia and Iran under the shah, as well as, increasingly over time, Israel. This relatively hands-off approach ended within months of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s 1979 revolution overthrowing the shah—which resulted in the eviction of the U.S. military from Iran.
In his January 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter announced a profound transformation of U.S. policy. The new policy would become known as the Carter Doctrine. It has continued to shape—and destabilize—the Middle East and the United States to this day. In his speech Carter warned of the potential loss of a region “containing more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil” and “now threatened by Soviet troops” in Afghanistan. In a threat aimed at Soviet leaders, Carter warned that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.” He added pointedly, “Such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”10
If Carter’s words sound a bit like macho bluster, there’s a reason. During his reelection campaign, Carter was facing economic stagnation, Iranians holding U.S. hostages in Tehran, and the perception of being weak in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “To impress the US public in an election year that” he was “doing something,” Carter launched one of the greatest base-construction efforts in history.11 As an election strategy, it wasn’t enough to win in 1980, but Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, continued the expansion of bases in Diego Garcia, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region. Diego Garcia expanded faster than any other base since the war in Vietnam. By 1986 more than $500 million had been invested. Before long the total ran into the billions.12 What began in no small part as an election-year public relations campaign has become de facto U.S. policy in the Middle East to this day. The Middle East buildup is particularly ironic, given that it was publicly a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Carter’s “national security” adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later claimed to have lured the Soviet Union into the invasion by backing Islamic fundamentalist militants in Afghanistan, the mujahideen, to give the Soviets a taste of their own Vietnam.13
Carter’s and Reagan’s new Middle East bases soon hosted a Rapid Deployment Force, which was to stand permanent guard over Middle Eastern petroleum supplies. The Rapid Deployment Force would expand into the U.S. Central Command, the regional command that has led a long series of wars and invasions across the region in the decades since its creation.
In addition to the base buildup, U.S. officials continued to support a group of largely authoritarian Middle East allies with billions in military and financial aid and diplomatic support. Most prominent among them were Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. In Afghanistan the CIA continued to orchestrate shipments of weapons and other aid to mujahideen, seeking to end Soviet occupation and remove the Soviet-backed Afghan government from power. The Reagan administration also backed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during its 1980–88 war with the new revolutionary regime in Iran. In 1987 and 1988 the military became involved in the “tanker war” in the Persian Gulf between Iraq and Iran. U.S. Navy vessels protected Kuwaiti oil tankers carrying Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil. The tense standoff led to a U.S. Navy vessel accidentally shooting down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 passengers. An Iraqi jet accidentally struck a U.S. vessel with two missiles, killing 37 and wounding 21.
Reagan administration officials ultimately backed both sides. In the biggest presidential scandal since Watergate, reporters and Congress revealed that U.S. officials, with the help of Israel, had secretly sold overpriced weaponry to Iran. The administration used the proceeds of the weapons sales to secretly and illegally ship money and weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The scandal deepened when reporters uncovered evidence of the Contras’ involvement in drug trafficking. Congress’s Iran-Contra hearings showed that the Contras’ main benefactor, the CIA, had known since at least 1984 that the rebels were smuggling drugs.14 CIA, military, and diplomatic officials showed little concern for the drug trafficking and for the atrocious human rights record of the fighting force that was at the center of the decade’s other base buildup, in Central America.
Map 21. Enabling Wars in the Middle East.
Bases in the Greater Middle East helped launch U.S. wars and other combat actions in at least fifteen countries in the region between 1980 and 2020. Inspired by Andrew J. Bacevich, “Even If We Defeat the Islamic State, We’ll Still Lose the Bigger War,” Washington Post, October 3, 2014.
The Central American buildup focused on Honduras, strategically located on the borders of three terrible civil wars, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The creation of dozens of bases in the country earned Honduras the nickname the USS Honduras: for the Reagan administration, the entire country was like a static, unsinkable aircraft carrier.15 The Reagan administration used Honduras to support the Contras and to orchestrate support for brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. Shortly before Ronald Reagan took office, the leftist Sandinista Revolution had deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Despite the disaster of the U.S. war in Vietnam, many on the U.S. Right, among others, still believed in the “domino theory”: the idea that any leftist government coming to power risked spreading communism to neighboring countries and advancing communist desires for global domination. According to these domino-theory true believers, the U.S. government had to help remove any leftist government that came to power.
In the case of Nicaragua, the shadow of Vietnam made a U.S. military invasion politically impossible. Reagan administration officials saw a proxy army, in the form of the Contras, as a second-best option. The Reagan administration’s much-hyped 1983 invasion of Grenada, an island nation smaller than Portland, Oregon, was actually a sign of the constraints on U.S. military activity at the time. The brief war the U.S. military waged against Grenada’s tiny military and a contingent of one hundred or fewer Cuban military advisers reflected attempts by the Reagan administration to expand latitude for the use of military force in the post-Vietnam era.
To support the Contras and the governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, U.S. officials more than tripled military aid to Honduras between 1981 and 1982, from $8.9 million to $31.3 million. Aid more than doubled again to $77.4 million in 1984.16 The Reagan administration flooded Honduras with weapons and military equipment, U.S. military personnel, CIA operatives, and bases. In exchange for the increased aid, Honduras agreed “to loan its territory and provide essential sanctuary for the Contras.”17
The Contras and the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala received tens of millions more in military and economic aid, special forces training, weapons, and other military materiel. In El Salvador, for example, U.S. aid grew from $42.2 million in 1982 to $704.7 million in 1987. The Salvadoran military grew from twenty thousand to fifty-six thousand over the same period.18 The support for authoritarian regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala was part of a larger imperial strategy, spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, to fund and provide arms to repressive governments and other proxy armies combating political movements and insurgencies in any way linked to the political Left or the Communist Bloc.
The Contras never became powerful enough to hope to overthrow the Sandinistas. They were, in the words of former Foreign Service officer Todd Greentree, “a classic guerilla counterweight who could harass and bleed the Sandinistas and who[m] the Sandinistas could not defeat.” The Contras had no real political platform. They were almost exclusively a military force run by the CIA. President Reagan infamously described the group as the “moral equivalent of the founding fathers.” Greentree more accurately described them as a group led by “petty warlords” with “the reputation of being brigands and brutes who raped women, executed prisoners, and enjoyed murdering civilians.”19
The CIA set up six bases for the Contras in Honduras in the first year of support alone. CIA operatives, Argentine military advisers, Israelis, and Chileans started training the rebels. A C-130 cargo plane landed with the first twenty-five-ton delivery of CIA-supplied weapons. The CIA secretly provided other weaponry to the Contras with the help of the Honduran military: as the Honduran military got new U.S. weapons, it transferred its older weapons to the rebels.20 Soon the Contras had “virtually taken over [entire Honduran] provinces along the Nicaraguan border.”21
The centerpiece of the Central American buildup was the creation of a major U.S. military base in Palmerola, which the U.S. military calls Soto Cano. On the site of a tiny Honduran Air Force base, U.S. troops first built a runway and assembled some tents and other basic living facilities. Soon there was an airplane ramp, hangars, and more facilities. Next came a runway capable of accommodating F-16 fighter jets and C-5 cargo planes, along with offices and recreational facilities, twenty-two miles of roads, and extensive water, sewer, and electrical systems.22 U.S. and Honduran officials insisted the base was “temporary.” The base, which remains open today, would host as many as five thousand troops. It launched military operations involved in all three Central American civil wars. By decade’s end, analysts described Honduras as “little more than a vast US military base” and a “virtual US protectorate.”23
Beyond Soto Cano the Reagan administration engaged in a massive base-building campaign, constructing or expanding dozens of Contra, Honduran, and U.S. bases and other facilities to support the Contras and back the governments in El Salvador and Guatemala. Most were relatively spartan. The Contras alone eventually enjoyed at least thirty-two of their own bases in Honduras as well as in Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Florida, and Texas.24 On Honduras’s Tiger Island the CIA coordinated a mercenary contractor force, absurdly named Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets.25
In some cases the Pentagon asked for and Congress appropriated funds for the bases, as required by most military construction projects worldwide. When Congress began to limit and cut funding for the Contras, the Pentagon used military exercises as a cover for unauthorized base construction. “When Congress refused to fund the construction of new military bases in Honduras, the Pentagon built them anyway,” explains historian William LeoGrande. The exercises involved thousands of troops and implicitly threatened a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. At the end of the exercises, newly constructed buildings and other facilities and leftover supplies were simply given to the Hondurans and the Contras. Reagan administration officials thus avoided the challenges of seeking congressional approval.26 Elsewhere officials used Honduran military bases to supply the Contras and simply told Congress otherwise.27
In the background of the U.S.-backed wars, Honduras saw a decade of death squads, extrajudicial killings, and torture. U.S. advisers gave the Honduras military an Army counterinsurgency manual later dubbed by the Washington Post the “murder manual” for its advocacy of assassination and other violent tactics. Between 1980 and 1984 alone, there were 274 unsolved killings and disappearances of leftists and other dissidents in Honduras.28
Elsewhere the toll was far higher: 50,000 dead in Nicaragua, 75,000 dead in El Salvador, and 200,000 dead in Guatemala, in what’s widely considered a genocide. The majority in each case were civilians and poor peasants. They died, as a former Foreign Service officer put it, in “large and indiscriminate numbers, families, clans, entire villages, the victims of torture, of bombardment, of massacre, of crossfire.”29 Eric Haney, an original member of the Army’s elite Delta Force, who participated in combat operations with the Contras, commented, “Mr. Reagan’s secret wars in Central America were always merciless affairs.”30 Hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded to neighboring countries and, when they could, to the United States. The toll extended far beyond, to the injured and orphaned and entire nations of traumatized survivors.
The end of the “Cold War” effectively ended the wars in Central America, as it did U.S.-Soviet competition in the Middle East. With U.S. funding for the Contras withdrawn, a Government Accounting Office report declared, “The original reasons for the establishment of U.S. presence at Soto Cano no longer exist.” Many U.S. military and diplomatic officials agreed that there was “not reason enough to maintain the presence” of the “expensive, semi-permanent logistics base.”31 Officials saw that any counternarcotics or disaster relief operations in the region could be conducted just as effectively from domestic bases.
Likewise in the Middle East, the end of the “Cold War” and the Soviet Union itself removed any possibility of a supposed Soviet threat to oil supplies—a threat that was always exaggerated. The reason for the Carter Doctrine’s Middle East base buildup had disappeared. With peace in both Central America and the Middle East, the U.S. military could have packed up and gone home. Some bases in Europe and Asia did close with the end of the “Cold War.” Many, like Soto Cano in Honduras and Diego Garcia, did not.
U.S. government support for repressive forces in Central America and for dictators in the Middle East and its continued basing of troops in both regions would become telling examples of what the CIA calls “blowback.”32 Popularized by former CIA analyst–turned-scholar Chalmers Johnson, blowback describes the unintended consequences of covert operations whose causes the public cannot understand because the precipitating operations were covert. Put simply, the United States reaps what it secretly sows.33
In the case of the U.S. taxpayer–funded dirty wars in Central America, many of the refugees from these conflicts ended up in poor neighborhoods of cities like Los Angeles. Once there many impoverished boys and young men (and, to a lesser extent, girls and young women) found themselves joining U.S. gangs. In addition to terrorizing U.S. neighborhoods, these refugee–gang members were often arrested and deported to their home countries. In El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, they soon established new branches of their U.S.-based gangs.34 The gangs became central players in the growth of drug trafficking in Central America—which the CIA-backed Contras helped kick-start. Drug traffickers took advantage of the region’s poverty and the glut of weapons and men with military training from the wars to create a new transshipment hub between South American producers and North American points of sale.35 In recent years an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine shipped from Colombia and Venezuela to the United States has gone through Central America. More than one-third of that total has gone through Honduras.36
The drug trade’s violence and the proliferation of gangs have been mutually reinforcing amid the violence of life in three of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. There should be little wonder that the murder rates in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala have consistently ranked among the world’s highest. In 2013, for example, Honduras had the world’s highest murder rate—higher than those in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than four times that of Mexico, roughly twenty times the U.S. rate, and ninety times greater than Western Europe’s.37 Deteriorating and increasingly desperate conditions in the three countries have pushed thousands of Central American migrants to flee for safety in the United States. Like the Central American refugees who arrived at U.S. borders fleeing violence in the 1980s, these new refugees are in part blowback from decades of overt and covert support for repressive governments and rebel groups in the region.
The United States was not responsible for all the problems in Central America in the 1980s, and it is not today. But the violence and insecurity today are directly linked to the violence and insecurity produced by more than a century of continuous U.S. domination and the transformation of Honduras into a base for U.S. military, paramilitary, and intelligence-gathering operations in the 1980s.
Covert CIA support for the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan would similarly produce blowback that’s still being felt today: CIA backing helped fuel the rise of Islamist rebels pledging allegiance to the son of a Saudi construction magnate with Yemeni roots. That Saudi magnate, ironically enough, helped build the U.S. base in Dhahran at the end of World War II; his construction equipment later helped build some of the mujahideen’s fortified cave complexes in Afghanistan.38 The irony deepens: the name of the construction firm is Bin Laden. The name of the son is Osama. The name of his soon-to-be global rebel group, al-Qaeda—the base.