8

The Reality That Must Be Effaced: Iran and Nicaragua

While the damage control project requires that we shake our heads in dismay over the foolishness and incompetence of those who have strayed from the American Way in their passion for democracy, the real world suggests a rather different picture. Here we find that the policies of the planners for whom Reagan serves as a figurehead are simply adaptations of traditional practice and principles to current conditions, and they have been anything but stupid. It should be recalled that as the Reaganites took command, there appeared to be real possibilities for democracy and social reform in Central America, with meaningful participation on the part of normally suppressed segments of the population. But these dangers were successfully overcome. Honduras was converted into a U.S. military base and the power of the domestic military and the oligarchy was further entrenched, while in El Salvador and Guatemala, state terror succeeded in protecting the rule of similar elements from any popular challenge. There were also substantial achievements in deterring significant reform and economic progress in Nicaragua and punishing it for its departure from “the Central American mode” of subordination to U.S. power, though the further goal of “restoring democracy” in the approved sense remains elusive. Furthermore, the bloodshed and torture were largely removed from American eyes—a remarkable accomplishment, given its scale and character—and the costs at home were limited. All in all, not an unimpressive chapter in the annals of international terrorism.

More generally, the application of the Reagan Doctrine reveals considerable sophistication, and a global vision that is impressive, in formulating and executing projects that are broadly supported by the elite consensus. The conclusion holds of both of the components of the operations partially exposed in late 1986: (1) the attack against Nicaragua, and more generally, the international terror network constructed to carry out this and other covert actions; and (2) the dealings with Iran, linked to these terrorist operations, but conducted for quite different purposes. Let us turn to these topics, now departing from the historical amnesia that is a condition of respectable discourse. With even a cursory look at recent history, essential details of what has been revealed—most of which, in fact, was long known, apart from details— fall into place within the normal spectrum of planning and execution.

Both Nicaragua and Iran were ruled until 1979 by U.S. clients—brutal, barbarous, corrupt murderers and torturers—who had been placed in power by U.S. violence (the Shah, by a CIA coup in 1953; the Somoza dynasty, by the Marine intervention of the late 1920s) and kept in power by the U.S., in the last years, with the aid of Israel in both cases. Furthermore, Nicaragua and Iran each played a leading role in U.S. strategic planning, so that the loss of these client states in 1979 was a serious matter.

Nicaragua under the Somozas had been the major base for U.S. subversion and terror in the region. Iran was part of a tripartite alliance (Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia) constructed by the United States in the 1970s (with earlier roots) as a component of the Nixon Doctrine, which recognized that the U.S. no longer had the capacity to carry out military intervention everywhere and must therefore rely on surrogate states. As explained by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, “America will no longer play policeman to the world. Instead we will expect other nations to provide more cops on the beat in their own neighborhood”—though police headquarters, it is understood, remains in Washington. In Henry Kissinger’s rhetoric, other states must pursue their “regional interests” within the “overall framework of order” managed by the United States. In the Middle East, Israel and Iran were the “cops,” protecting Saudi Arabia and its oil-rich neighbors from the usual enemy, the indigenous population, who may be affected by strange and unacceptable ideas about control over our resources in their lands; the conventional code phrase for these concerns is “defense against the Soviet Union.” As explained by the Senate’s leading specialist on the region, Senator Henry Jackson, an alliance developed between Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia (meaning: the tiny elite that dominates Saudi Arabia and that is closely linked to the U.S.), in furtherance of these objectives.1 It comes as no surprise, then, that there should be efforts to reconstruct this system of power with the cooperation of Israel and Saudi Arabia, as revealed in the late 1986 scandals—Israel having “become just another federal agency, one that’s convenient to use when you want something done quietly,” in the words of one Israeli analyst,2 a status to which the Saudi elite no doubt aspire as well.

In both cases, these subsystems of U.S. global power fit squarely into the more general framework of U.S. geopolitics. Loss of control over Iran is a particularly serious matter. Since World War II, the U.S. has been committed to dominating the Gulf and the world’s major energy reserves nearby. The fundamentalist regime in Teheran might, if successful in its aims, enflame Islamic nationalist efforts to take control of the critical resources of the region, a prospect that is particularly dangerous because of the large Shiite population in the oil-producing areas that might be particularly responsive to Khomeinist appeals. The problem is further exacerbated by the rise of fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world, in part a reaction to the failures of secular nationalism. From the U.S. perspective, the Khomeini regime poses threats to U.S. hegemony that are reminiscent of the “radical nationalism” of Egypt’s Nasser, also intolerable to the United States. For these reasons alone, the U.S. and Iran are on a collision course, as matters now stand, and it is readily understandable that the U.S. should seek to reincorporate Iran as an obedient participant within its global system; or failing this, to maintain physical control of the Gulf with naval forces and bases nearby, if they can be obtained from the reluctant neighboring states.

With regard to Central America, a prime concern is to “protect our resources” in the words of State Department doves, who explain that this commitment often requires reliance on police states since more liberal elements cannot be trusted to crush dissidence.3 Secret documents explain further that Latin American legal systems pose problems, because they require evidence of crimes, thus impeding steps to suppress “anti-U.S. subversion”; and worse still, they do not impose the kinds of barriers to travel that protect the Land of the Free from unwanted ideas, as when a member of CoMadres—the Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Political Prisoners, Disappeared and Assassinated of El Salvador—who had recently been released from imprisonment and torture by the Duarte government is refused entry to the United States to attend meetings at small towns organized by NOW chapters to celebrate International Women’s Day, facts too insignificant to be reported in the quality press.4 This willingness of the excessively liberal Latin American culture to tolerate “anti-U.S. subversion”—what George Shultz, following the usual practice, calls “alien ideologies”5—has always been a severe annoyance to enlightened American opinion.

The Toronto Globe & Mail, commenting on Shultz’s phrase, observes that “it would be hard to call the ideology of the elected Nicaraguan government ‘alien’ to Nicaragua. The idea seems to be that Nicaraguans should be free to choose any government they wish, as long as it is one the US government can live with.” Note that the Canadian journal falls into the same error as the mainstream British press cited earlier (chapter 3), referring to the elected Nicaraguan government as “elected”; one would be hard put to find a similar deviation in their US counterparts.

It has, in fact, long been US policy, expressed in the secret as well as the public record, that the US government has the right to demand conformity to its dictates in the hemisphere, a minor footnote to the posturing about how “We believe in freedom” (Krauthammer). In contrast, the Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968 insisting on ideological conformity in the East European satellites—through which the Soviet Union was attacked and almost destroyed a generation ago—is regarded as the ultimate demonstration of Communist depravity.

This demand for obedience to US wishes is regularly accompanied by hysteria about the colossal consequences of any deviation from conformity. Thus UN Ambassador Vernon Walters, speaking to “democrats” of the Nicaraguan American Bankers Association, described Soviet influence in Nicaragua, a “cancer from outside the Americas,” as “the greatest threat to the integrity of the Americas since we became free” (exactly who in the Americas became free, he does not say). Nicaragua could be the “landing beach” for “destabilizing Mexico,” and Texas is just beyond, as Reagan warned.6 Similarly, the US has the right to ensure that there is no hostile military presence anywhere near its borders,7 while the USSR must be ringed with powerful military forces at its borders with US bases and missiles on alert aimed at its heartland—what is called “containment.”

The premises of discourse in the United States merit close examination; they reflect imperial pretensions with few counterparts in history.

The secret documents on Latin America explain further that we must oppose “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to “increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and that are thus concerned “to increase production and to diversify their economies.” These regimes respond to the wrong national interest—that of the domestic society, not the “national interest” represented by U.S. corporations. We must foster export-oriented production, protect U.S. investment, and prevent “anti-U.S. subversion” in the hemisphere. This requires that the U.S. gain “predominant influence” over the Latin American military and ensure their “understanding of, and orientation toward, U.S. objectives.” The primary role of the Latin American military is “internal security”; specifically, as the Kennedy liberals explained, “in the Latin American cultural environment,” the role of the military is to “remove governmental leaders from office whenever, in the judgment of the military, the conduct of these leaders is injurious to the welfare of the nation”—that is, the welfare of Big Brother, once the military have come to understand and accept “U.S. objectives.” U.S. planners perceive that “the contemporary ferment in Latin America is giving rise to a revolutionary struggle for power among major groups which constitute the present class structure.” Naturally, the U.S. and its local clients must position themselves properly to determine the outcome of this class struggle, the internal security forces being the essential element, since they are “probably the least anti-American of any political group [sic] in Latin America.” All of this follows from the fact that the primary root of U.S. interest in Latin America is “the economic root,” including investment and trade.8

It is noteworthy that such perceptions of the world within the framework of a rather vulgar form of Marxism are not uncommon in the documentary record of state planning and in the business literature (see, e.g., chapter 2, above).

The objectives of U.S. planners are clearly articulated in internal documents, as is their awareness that these objectives require reliance on force and organization of indigenous elements that can apply it properly. Such thinking explains the systematic features of U.S. foreign policy exhibited in practice, not only with regard to Latin America. The gap between the documentary record and standard incantations being vast, the former must be rigorously ignored.

In this context, it is not surprising that Carter’s Human Rights Administration should have strongly supported both Somoza and the Shah. Congressional legislation, reflecting popular dissidence from the late 1960s, placed constraints on direct aid to Somoza, so the Carter administration was compelled to rely on Israel to provide arms and advisers while Somoza’s National Guard killed some 40-50,000 people in its final paroxysm of violence.9

When it became impossible to save Somoza, Carter attempted to ensure the rule of the National Guard and to exclude the Sandinistas from power, since they were clearly “nationalists” who responded to the wrong “national interest” and “class interest.” When this proved impossible, elements of the National Guard were rescued and reconstructed as a terrorist force to attack Nicaragua from Honduran bases, at first through the medium of what are openly called “proxy” states10: El Salvador, Taiwan, Argentina (then under the rule of the neo-Nazi generals, hence an acceptable “proxy”), and Israel. The Reagan administration even flew its friend General Leopoldo Galtieri, an Argentine criminal “who seems to have had no compunction about ordering the arrest and torture of suspects during the Dirty War,”11 to Washington in November 1981 “to devise a secret agreement under which Argentine military officers trained Nicaraguan rebels, according to an administration official familiar with the agreement.” These operations still being too limited, the U.S. soon took them over directly.12

In the case of the Shah, who was regularly cited by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations as one of the worst human rights violators of his day, President Carter praised his “progressive administration” and “move toward democracy” on October 31, 1978, shortly after his U.S-trained troops had murdered thousands of demonstrators in the streets. Earlier, Carter had explained that “there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship” than the Shah. Carter was particularly impressed by the “stability” in Iran “under the great leadership of the Shah”: “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty,” he declared, “and to your leadership, and to the respect, admiration and love which your people give to you.” Meanwhile U.S. arms flowed in abundance while the CIA instructed the Shah’s secret police in torture techniques devised by the Nazis, with the help of Israeli specialists.13

Unaware of the love they felt for the Shah, the Iranian people overthrew his regime. General Robert Huyser was dispatched to Iran in an effort to organize the Iranian military to carry out a military coup if the U.S.-backed government could not maintain itself. As he demonstrates in his personal record of these events, General Huyser approached the Iranian generals with exactly the assumptions on the role of local military forces and their U.S. supervisors that are outlined in the high level secret documents just discussed—not only “in the Latin American cultural environment.” When Prime Minister Bakhtiar seemed unwilling to “face the prospect of a military takeover,” General Huyser “came back hard and insisted that as military people, that was just the type of action we should expect to be called on to take.” When the Iranian chief of staff seemed to him “not the man to head [a military takeover],” Huyser realized that “if the bottom line was reached, we were anyway going to have to put somebody else in charge.” With “prudent planning,” he felt, the military could “seize control” and “the masses could not hope to dislodge them.” The opposition held that they were “controlling [the economy] for the people, and could cut it off at any moment, and they were absolutely right. The only way to change that fact was to introduce military control, and make it work.” The military would have to take over “should the people get out of control.” But against “the elemental power of this popular movement, we had made little headway.” The military leadership proved unsuited for the task, though Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski remains convinced that “procrastination and bureaucratic sabotage prevented the U.S.-sponsored military coup” that he advocated and “that might have saved Iran from Khomeini”—and “the masses.”14

Since shortly after the failure of these efforts to instigate a military takeover, the U.S. has—at least tacitly—authorized arms sales to Iran through its Israeli client, a natural choice in the light of the very close alliance between Israel and Iran under the Shah.15 This is not a discovery of late 1986. In July 1981, a plane carrying military supplies from Israel to Iran crashed in the Soviet Union near the Turkish border; the incident revealed Israeli arrangements to supply Iran with arms, including U.S.-made spare parts and ammunition, involving many flights and supply operations from 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski reported in his 1983 memoirs that the Carter administration had learned in 1980 of secret Israeli shipments of U.S. armaments to Iran.16 In 1982, a front-page story by current New York Times editor Leslie Gelb reported that half of the arms to Iran were “being supplied or arranged by Israel”—surely with U.S. knowledge and authorization, given the relations between the U.S. and its mercenary state—“and the rest by free-lance arms merchants, some of whom may also have connections with Israeli intelligence,” while the CIA was carrying out covert actions against the Khomeini regime from its bases in eastern Turkey. A lengthy chronology from the public record in Israel’s leading journal is appropriately headlined: “the most open secret.”17 It is hard to take very seriously the show of surprise on these matters after the Fall 1986 scandals erupted, or such “scoops” as Times columnist Flora Lewis’s revelation in August 1987 that “the C.I.A. knew about the shipments” of arms from Israel to Iran, as she was informed by CIA deputy director Bobby Ray Inman in mid-1982, according to her recollection, but in any event well after they had been publicly discussed in the New York Times and elsewhere.18

The London Observer reports that documents it has obtained show that Israeli arms dealer Yaakov Nimrodi, with close Israeli government and Mossad connections and intimate ties to the Iranian military from earlier years, “has been supplying Iran with the latest US military hardware” since 1981, including Lance missiles and “the latest laser-guided Copperhead anti-tank shells, which only went into production the previous year.” The documents include a July 1981 contract between Nimrodi’s company and the Iranian Ministry of National Defense. The order was so substantial in scale that “military and diplomatic sources in London, Washington and Jerusalem confirmed” that the deal “could only have been made with official sanction. The order for Copperhead alone was larger than the US Army order for 1981.” The operations proceeded with the knowledge of the British government, and, surely, the US government as well.19

By November 1984—long before the first consideration of arms shipments to Iran according to the Tower Commission and the congressional hearings—Col. North approached British arms dealers to arrange shipments of missiles to Iran, the London Observer reports on the basis of documents it obtained. The deal involved CIA director William Casey, ex-CIA operative Theodore Shackley, the Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar who figured prominently in the later arrangements, US Embassy officials in London, and “a former mercenary with close links to US intelligence,” flown by the US Air Force to Frankfurt to meet Casey and given a letter to the Iranian Ambassador in Bonn, dated December 6, 1984, “which confirmed the deal.” All of this is confirmed by “US intelligence sources” and is flatly inconsistent with North’s sworn testimony that his involvement began after Israeli initiatives in June 1985. The West German press has reported that North himself met with the Iranian ambassador to West Germany in Hamburg in 1984 to arrange the purchase of 20,000 US-made TOW anti-tank missiles, a deal that fell through when an Iranian contact disappeared with a letter of credit. In October 1985, the State Department blocked a US Customs Service investigation of the delivery of US TOW missiles by Israel to Iran, advising Customs personnel to “forget the whole incident,” according to a Customs memorandum; Secretary of State George Shultz claims to have known nothing about all of these arms shipments until December 1985.20

The available record suggests that arms shipments flowed to Iran from US allies, with US government authorization or initiative, from shortly after the fall of the Shah.

Public reports of Israeli shipments of arms to Iran, including US-supplied arms, continued prior to the November 1986 “disclosure” of the scandals, though they were suppressible, much as in the case of the extensive supply operations for the contras in violation of congressional directives. Israeli senior Foreign Ministry spokesman Avi Pazner confirmed in an April 1986 interview that in 1982 Israel had sent Iran military supplies with the approval of the US, including spare parts for US-made jet fighters.21 In May, Patrick Seale reported that “Israeli and European arms dealers are rushing war supplies to Iran,” as Israel now dispenses with “the usual roundabout arms routes”; “for example, a ship now at sea, carrying more than 25,000 tonnes of Israeli artillery, ammunition, gun barrels, aircraft parts and other war supplies” was ordered to proceed directly to Iran instead of transshipping through Zaire.22

One major purpose of these arms supply operations was to locate what are called “moderates.” Thus the Los Angeles Times reports that Israeli arms shipments to Iran apparently began in 1979, hence shortly after General Huyser’s failure to instigate a military coup, to “help keep channels open to moderate or pragmatic elements in Iran, particularly in the military, who would one day overthrow or at least inherit the power.”23 The terminology (“moderate,” “pragmatic”) is standard Newspeak, but this report is unusually honest in recognizing the reasons. The concept of “moderate” is explained by Un Lubrani of the Labor Party, former de facto Israeli Ambassador to Iran under the Shah, now in charge of Israeli operations (terrorism, to be honest) in southern Lebanon. Outlining the motivation for the Israeli arms sales over BBC in February 1982, Lubrani said:

I very strongly believe that Tehran can be taken over by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill ten thousand people.

In short, these men would be “moderates,” in the technical Orwellian sense, who could carry out a coup that would, it was hoped, restore the Israel-Iran-Saudi Arabia alliance. In October 1982, the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Moshe Arens, informed the press that Israel was providing arms to Iran “in coordination with the US government . . . at almost the highest of levels” in the hope of establishing relations with Iranian officers who could carry out a military coup, or who “might be in a position of power in Iran” during the post-Khomeini succession. The same analysis was presented publicly in 1982—though kept from a US audience—by other high-ranking Israeli officials, including David Kimche and Yaakov Nimrodi, who are now identified as the earliest intermediaries in the 1985 operation of secret arms supply to Iran, perhaps its initiators.24

The occasional oblique references to these facts in the media generally suppress the reasons explicitly presented by the high Israeli officials involved. Thus the Times reports that Israeli arms shipments to Iran “since 1979” were part of a “broad strategy,” namely, to protect Jews in Iran and to prolong the Iran-Iraq war. The still “broader strategy” undertaken in coordination with the US government is unmentioned.25

Israel’s leading journal, Ha’aretz, reports that “the truth, according to reliable [Israeli] sources,” is that the 1985 US-Israel-Iran connections were advocated by David Kimche in order to overcome the negative effects of the Jonathan Pollard spy affair on Israeli-US relations. Robert McFarlane testified in the Senate that David Kimche had initiated the idea of supplying Kimche and Nimrodi arms.26 Both Kimche and Nimrodi have recently expressed publicly the deep humanitarian commitments that impelled them to become involved in the efforts from 1985 to “rescue American hostages.” They have not been asked to explain when their conversion to humanitarian concerns took place, and why they abandoned the motives that they had expressed a few years earlier while pursuing the same policies.

The efforts to inspire a military coup in Iran were publicly endorsed in February 1982—with some skepticism as to the prospects—by US commentators, including Richard Helms (former CIA chief and Ambassador to Iran), Robert Komer (high Pentagon official under the Carter administration and “pacification” chief in Vietnam, and one of the architects of Carter’s Rapid Deployment Force, which, he observed, could be used to support a military coup in Iran), and others. Again, all of this was out of earshot of the American public, except for publications that are easily ignored in the United States.

There is no reason to believe that the plans have ever been shelved, despite problems that have arisen in carrying them out. Israeli officials report that their Iranian contacts were caught and executed in “the mid-1980’s” and that contacts were renewed “in early 1985.”27 The US supply of arms to Iran through Israel with Saudi Arabian funding since 1985 is, very likely, a renewal of these earlier efforts, combining with earlier US initiatives, already under way.

These programs may well be continuing, despite the disruption caused by the partial exposures of Fall 1986. The Labor Party press in Israel reports from Copenhagen that “Israeli arms continue to flow to Iran,” citing reports from the Danish Seaman’s Union, which publishes a record of shipments under the Danish flag. In its records from September 1986 to March 1987, “Israel captures first place”; ten out of 24 shipments left from Israel, followed by West Germany, Spain, Chile, South Africa and Portugal. Earlier reports from this source were generally ignored by the press, then cited briefly after the 1986 scandals broke. The same Israeli journal reports that Israel provides training in logistics and weapons handling to Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran)—while Ha’aretz reports in January 1987 that Israeli instructors are training contras in Honduras, possibly paid by the U.S. government, according to Israeli military sources.28

Again, it is plain that such Israeli programs proceed with US authorization, at least tacit. The Israeli press describes Israel as “the Godfather’s messenger,” undertaking the “dirty work” for the Godfather, who “always tries to appear to be the owner of some large respectable business,”29 an apt analogy.

The Tower Commission cites a memorandum that they attribute to Oliver North, which was apparently the basis for information provided to Secretary of State Shultz by national security adviser John Poindexter outlining US interests in the “transaction” with Iran. The first of these interests is “a more moderate Iranian government,” which “is essential to stability in the Persian Gulf and MidEast. Such a change of government in Iran is most likely to come about as a consequence of a credible military establishment,” based on the professional Iranian army (that is, a military coup). With a proper interpretation of the terms “moderate” and “stability.” this is a plausible formulation of the primary and persistent US objective. Further interests are: blocking the spread of “Shia fundamentalist terrorism” and “the return of the American hostages [which] will relieve a major domestic and international liability—in addition to its obvious humanitarian aspect.”30

There is little doubt that the Reagan administration very much wanted to secure the release of CIA operative William Buckley, who they assumed would be tortured to obtain information, and release of other hostages would undoubtedly have been a political plus. Retired House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O’Neil may have been the first to state openly what has surely crossed the mind of every observer: that the Iran arms deal was “inspired by the White House’s desire to get the hostages back before the 1986 elections to hold onto Republican control of the Senate,” with wonderful photo opportunities on the White House lawn properly timed before the vote.31 Nevertheless, the fact that essentially the same policies were pursued before there were any hostages suggests that the ranking of aims given in the North-to-Poindexter-to-Shultz memo is realistic, putting aside the humanitarian passion that is emphasized in public discussion of Reagan’s zeal to rescue the hostages, a quality that has been so dramatically revealed under the Reagan Doctrine.32

Furthermore, the pattern of the “transaction” is a classical one; hostility to some government is regularly accompanied by efforts to strengthen connections with the military, for quite obvious reasons—essentially those explained in the 1965 Pentagon memorandum cited earlier and by Carter’s emissary General Huyser: it is the role of the military to take power when necessary, overthrowing unacceptable civilian governments in accordance with their “understanding of, and orientation toward, US objectives,” firmly implanted through their association with the Godfather.

Examples are numerous, several of them similar to the Iranian episode. Thus, relations between the US and Indonesia became bitterly hostile in the 1950s, so much so that the CIA sponsored an invasion and coup attempt in Indonesia in 1958. After the failure of this attempt to overthrow the Sukarno regime, the US continued to provide it with arms. In late 1965, the pro-American General Suharto carried out a military coup, leading to the slaughter of several hundred thousand people, mostly landless peasants, and the destruction of the only mass-based political organization in Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party. Indonesia was thus restored to the Free World, opened to robbery and exploitation by US, Canadian, European and Japanese corporations, impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling generals, who imposed a corrupt and violent dictatorship. These developments were warmly welcomed by enlightened opinion in the West, and regarded by American liberals as a vindication of US aggression against South Vietnam, which provided a “shield” that encouraged the generals to carry out the necessary purge of their society. In Senate testimony after the slaughter, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was asked to explain the supply of arms to Indonesia during the period of intense hostility between the two countries. He was asked whether this arms supply had “paid dividends” and agreed that it had—some 700,000 dividends at that point, according to his Indonesian friends. A congressional report held that training and continued communication with military officers paid “enormous dividends” in overthrowing Sukarno.33

And sure enough, Suharto’s accomplishments qualify him as a “moderate”: “Many in the West were keen to cultivate Jakarta’s new moderate leader, Suharto,” the press comments accurately, using the term “moderate” in its approved Orwellian sense. The London Economist goes so far as to describe this extraordinary mass murderer and torturer as “at heart benign” in a lengthy ode to Indonesia under his rule—presumably on the basis of his kindness to international corporations, which is not in doubt. The same issue of the Economist continues the regular berating of “the Sandinists,” who have quite the wrong priorities.34 An accompanying chart lists “political killings” in Central America since 1979, including 15,000 in Guatemala and 70,000, the record, in Nicaragua, which the reader is presumably to attribute to “the Sandinists.” The hysteria they arouse in business circles is wondrous to behold.

To take another example from Southeast Asia, after many years of corrupt and brutal military rule backed enthusiastically by the United States, Thailand began to move towards a democratic government in 1973, arousing concerns in Washington over the threat to its major base for aggression and subversion in the region; Thailand was to be the “focal point” for covert operations to undermine the Geneva accords on Indochina in 1954, as the National Security Council determined in its secret reaction to the perceived “disaster” of the political settlement, and later a source of mercenaries and base for bombers for the U.S. wars in Laos and Vietnam. The U.S. offered no support, even verbal, for incipient Thai democracy but instead reduced badly needed economic aid while sharply increasing military aid to strengthen the security forces it had established, which duly carried out a bloody coup in 1976, allaying concerns.35

Turning to Latin America, according to Pentagon sources, “United States military influence on local commanders was widely considered as an element in the coup d’état that deposed Brazil’s leftist President João Goulart in 1964,”36 to the enthusiastic acclaim of Kennedy liberals, installing a National Security State complete with torture, repression, and profits for the foreign investor. The story was re-enacted in Chile a few years later. During the Allende regime, the U.S. continued to supply arms while doing its best to bring down the regime, and was rewarded with the Pinochet coup, which again it welcomed.

The Iranian operations conform to a familiar pattern of policy planning, which is quite understandable and sometimes realistic. “The US may have wanted its hostages back,” ABC Middle East correspondent Charles Glass writes—in Europe—“but it also wanted to find an Iranian Pinochet.”37

These achievements in Southeast Asia and Latin America were no small matter, and it would be most surprising if U.S. planners were unaware of the lessons. The 1965 Pentagon memo cited earlier, explaining the role of the military in overthrowing civilian governments (under U.S. influence and control), was transmitted shortly after the bloody military coup in Brazil and was followed a few months later by the far more murderous coup in Indonesia, which dramatically reaffirmed the doctrine. The coup in Brazil, furthermore, had a significant domino effect in Latin America. In the major study of human rights and U.S. policy in Latin America, Lars Shoultz points out that the new forms of “military authoritarianism” that swept over the continent beginning with the U.S.-backed military coup in Brazil were novel in that they aimed “to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority, principally the working or (to use a broader, more accurate term) popular classes.” These National Security States developed in response to “increased popular political participation,” he observes.38 This phenomenon is unacceptable to the United States, inconsistent with the traditional and well-motivated antidemocratic thrust of U.S. policy, as events in Central America during the 1980s demonstrate once again.

The standard procedures are in process elsewhere as well. In Haiti, for example, the Reagan administration turned against the Duvalier dictatorship only when it was clear that it was unraveling and that the U.S.-linked elites were turning against the regime, as in the Philippines at the same time.39 What lies behind the enthusiasm for “democracy” that was aroused when the dictatorship could no longer be sustained is revealed in a Times report headlined “Haitian Democracy Imperiled By a Rising Tide of Violence.” It warns that “Haiti is caught up in such a tide of violence that it is doubtful whether elections can be held”—namely, as we find when we look behind the useful passive voice, violence by the security forces and by mobs organized by landowners and other right-wing elements. The conclusion? “The United States, which argues that elections are the best hope for restoring order to the country, has given Haiti more than $400,000 worth of riot control gear” and has trained the security forces “in riot-control techniques,”40 measures likely to strengthen the most anti-democratic elements and to facilitate continuing effective military control, whether elections are formally held or not.

To restore the convenient arrangements of earlier years with Iran is plainly in the interest of the U.S., Israel, and their Saudi allies. It should come as no surprise that Saudi Arabia, through the medium of the billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, was cooperating with its tacit Israeli ally under the coordination of the U.S. in supplying armaments to Iran—not enough to terminate the useful Iran-Iraq mutual slaughter on Iranian terms, but enough, it was hoped, to locate those Iranian “moderates” in the military who would be able to serve the function of Suharto, the Thai and Brazilian generals, and Pinochet.

The idea of linking these efforts to the attack against Nicaragua—and possibly Angola as well, among other cases yet to be investigated41— was by no means foolish, apart from the possibility of exposure. On the contrary, all of these plans reflect a considerable degree of sophistication and geopolitical insight, applied within the limits imposed by a largely dissident population, which must not be aroused from its passivity.

The Reagan policies were well within the normal framework of U.S. planning and geopolitics. True, the Reagan planners worked through “secret teams,” as did their predecessors, and established an international terrorist network on a hitherto unprecedented scale. But the policies remain those laid out in the secret record in liberal as well as conservative administrations, and implemented in practice for many years. The resort to clandestine means, covert operations, and ad hoc executive structures is natural and to be expected when the normal means of excluding the public from any influence on policy lose their efficacy. Functioning democracy can be tolerated at home no more than it can in Central America or elsewhere, for reasons that are solidly grounded in the socioeconomic institutions of capitalist democracy, particularly in the variety that has evolved in the United States with its special features. The historical record can be readily understood, if we approach it without illusion and dogma.

The Reagan planners have, however, faced certain unavoidable contradictions in their efforts. One problem has to do with the program of driving Nicaragua to dependence on the USSR while at the same time depriving it of the means of survival. It has surely occurred to Reagan planners that a program of Kissinger-style “linkage” might engage the USSR in the enterprise of strangling Nicaragua in tacit association with the extensive network already constructed to that end, possibly in exchange for an arms agreement of the sort that the U.S. had been seeking to avoid during the Reagan years. Reagan made the point explicit in a radio address announcing that such an agreement was “close,” but warning that that this would be a “particularly good time” for the Kremlin to renounce military adventurism throughout the world. Specifically, President Reagan said: “They can stop helping the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua subvert their neighbors”—to decode from presidential Newspeak, they can stop providing Nicaragua with means to defend itself from U.S. attack. “If the world is to know true peace,” Reagan continued, “the Soviets must give up these military adventures.”42 There are signs that such initiatives may have been undertaken, e.g., the Soviet decision to cut back desperately needed petroleum supplies. But such moves fly in the face of the necessity to ensure Nicaraguan dependence on the Soviet Union so as to market the attack against Nicaragua at home in terms of self-defense in an East-West confrontation. This would be a difficult problem to resolve even for the most sophisticated planners.

Other problems have arisen in dealing with another major enemy: the population of the United States. As discussed earlier, the major programs of the Reaganites have always been opposed by the general public, in particular, the right-wing Keynesian program of forcing the public to subsidize high technology industry through the military system. There is a classic method for obtaining the acquiescence of the public to policies it strongly opposes: induce fear. If the populace can be led to believe that their lives and welfare are threatened by a terrible enemy, then they may accept programs to which they are opposed, as an unfortunate necessity. To induce fear, the propaganda system must be put to work to conjure up whoever happens to be the current Great Satan. Other powers have their own favorites; at various moments of U.S. history the enemy invoked to justify aggression, subversion and the resort to terror has been Britain, Spain or the Huns, but since 1917 the Bolshevik threat has been the device most readily at hand. Hence the renewed appeal under Reagan to the threat of the Evil Empire, advancing to destroy us.

At this point, however, a new problem arises: confrontations with the Evil Empire might prove costly to us, and therefore must be avoided. The problem is to confront an enemy frightening enough to mobilize the domestic population, but weak enough so that the exercise carries no cost—for us, that is. The solution is obvious enough: we must confront not the Evil Empire itself, but rather its proxies, little Satans, states or groups sufficiently weak and defenseless so that we can attack them and torture and kill without fear that we might also suffer. Predictably, then, the Reagan administration came to office declaring that it would dedicate itself to eliminating the plague of international terrorism, as it prepared to launch programs of international terrorism on an unprecedented scale. Predictably, this was all accepted uncritically by the educated classes, abroad as well, and still is.43

The Reagan Public Relations system proceeded at once to construct a series of appropriate demons: Qaddafi, the PLO, the Sandinistas, and so on. They can be attacked by us or our allies without fear that we will suffer in the process, and can be designated as Soviet clients, or forced into that position. Libya was particularly well-suited to the role against the background of anti-Arab racism in the United States, and Reaganite Agitprop specialists have skillfully concocted a series of incidents and threats, timed in each case to domestic political needs, to which Reagan and Shultz have been able to respond with appropriate heroic posturing.44 The Sandinistas too are depicted as terrorists attempting to conquer the hemisphere as agents of Soviet aggression, so that liberal voices in the media and Congress call for “containing Nicaragua” and compelling Nicaragua to “rein in its revolutionary army.” The “terrorists” in El Salvador are also “aiming at the whole of Central and South America [and] I’m sure, eventually, North America” as well, Reagan explained in March 1981.45 It would be difficult to convince the American people that these monsters really threaten our existence, but if they are all tentacles of the Evil Empire, poised to encircle and destroy us—intending “to sweep over the United States and take what we have” as Lyndon Johnson wailed, referring to those beyond our borders who “outnumber [us] 15 to 1”—then the threat becomes more credible. And there is no doubt that the propaganda campaign has been effective.

One aspect of the brilliantly conceived propaganda campaign regarding (properly selected) acts of terrorism has been exalted rhetoric about the need to isolate these criminals and to refuse any contacts with them; the fact that such words can be pronounced by Reagan, Shultz and their associates without eliciting international ridicule is a measure of the cultural colonization of much of the world by U.S. power. In general, the device has worked magnificently. But it came to grief when the Iran operation was exposed, revealing that the U.S. itself was violating its lofty prescriptions about “dealing with international terrorists.”

If the media proceed to expose the probable U.S. government complicity in the international drug racket, that will engender similar problems, given the effort to exploit the drug problem as an additional device to mobilize the public and bring it to accept the strengthening of state power and the attack on civil liberties that is yet another plank of the “conservative” agenda.46

Through 1986, the media largely skirted the issue. To mention one interesting case, on March 16, 1986, the President gave an impassioned address denouncing the Sandinistas for every conceivable crime including involvement in the drug trade; this, he said with great emotion, would cause “every American parent . . . [to] be outraged.” His statements were reported without comment, but partial exposures of this and other fabrications did appear later.47 The reports on the President’s evening address, however, refrained from mentioning that the morning edition of the San Francisco Examiner on the same day had a lengthy story describing how “a major Bay Area cocaine ring helped to finance the contra rebels in Nicaragua according to federal court testimony and interviews with the convicted smugglers.”48 Furthermore, sealed court records obtained by the Examiner revealed that the Federal authorities returned to one convicted smuggler “$36,020 seized as drug money after he submitted letters from contra leaders saying it was really political money for ‘the reinstatement of democracy in Nicaragua’.” The money was returned at the initiative of a U.S. District Attorney. The report proceeds to discuss evidence distributed months earlier by AP, but not generally reported, of contra involvement in drug smuggling. Thus the media might have accompanied the report of the President’s charge with two facts that they knew: the charges against the Sandinistas had long been dismissed by his own Drug Enforcement Agency, but U.S. Federal authorities might well be guilty of the charge. Nothing of the sort happened, however.49

A more thorough news analysis might have noted that U.S. government involvement in drug trafficking can be traced to the earliest days of the CIA, when the CIA and the U.S. labor bureaucracy recruited goon squads and scabs from the underworld to break French labor unity and prevent interference with arms shipments for the French reconquest of Indochina, and continued through the Indochina wars. If U.S. officials have been involved in drug smuggling to obtain weapons for the contras, or have been looking the other way to permit it to proceed as recent testimony by drug smugglers indicates, this would simply be another chapter in a long history.50

Such are the problems that arise with complex and sophisticated global planning in the service of international terrorism, forced underground by popular dissidence.