Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky Read online

  But note how they did it: they had to sneak it in around the back. In fact, there was more funding of Guatemala under Carter than there was under Reagan, though it’s not very well known. See, the Carter administration was compelled to stop sending military aid to Guatemala by Congressional legislation in 1977, and officially they did—but if you look at the Pentagon records, funding continued until around 1980 or ’81 at just about the normal level, by various forms of trickery: you know, “things were in the pipeline,” that kind of business. This was never talked about in the press, but if you look at the records, you’ll see the funding was still going through until that time. 9 The Reagan administration had to stop sending it altogether—and in fact, what they did was turn to mercenary states.

  See, one of the interesting features of the 1980s is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military groups that unite the Western Hemisphere, Saudi Arabia to fund it, Panama—Noriega was right in the center of the thing. We caught a glimpse of it in things like the Oliver North trial and the Iran-contra hearings [Oliver North was tried in 1989 for his role in “Iran-contra,” the U.S. government’s illegal scheme to fund the Nicaraguan “contra” militias in their war against Nicaragua’s left-wing government by covertly selling weapons to Iran]—they’re international terrorist networks of mercenary states. It’s a new phenomenon in world history, way beyond what anybody has ever dreamt of. Other countries hire terrorists, we hire terrorist states, we’re a big, powerful country.

  Actually, one significant thing came up in the North trial, to my surprise—I didn’t think anything was going to come up. One interesting thing was put on the record, this famous 42-page document that they referred to; I don’t know if any of you saw that. 10 See, the government would not allow secret documents to appear, but they did permit a summary to appear, which the judge presented to the jury saying, “You can take this to be fact, we don’t question it anymore because it’s authorized by the government.” That doesn’t mean it’s not disinformation, incidentally; it means that this is what the government was willing to say is the truth, whether it’s true or not is another question. But this 42-page document is kind of interesting. It outlines a massive international terrorist network run by the United States. It lists the countries that were involved, the ways we got them involved. All of it is focused on one thing in this case, the war in Nicaragua. But there were plenty of other operations going on, and if you expanded it to look at, say, Angola, and Afghanistan, and others, you’d bring in more pieces. One of the main players is Israel: they’ve helped the United States penetrate black Africa, they’ve helped support the genocide in Guatemala; when the United States couldn’t directly involve itself with the military dictatorships of the southern cone in South America, Israel did it for us. 11 It’s very valuable to have a mercenary state like that around which is militarily advanced and technologically competent.

  But the point is, what was the need to develop this huge international terrorist network involving mercenary states? It’s that the U.S. government couldn’t intervene directly whenever it wanted to anymore, so it had to do it in what amounted to quite inefficient ways. It’s a lot more efficient to do what Kennedy did, and what Johnson did—just send in the Marines. That’s efficient, it’s an efficient killing-machine, it’s not going to be exposed and put a crimp in the works, you don’t have to do it around the corners. So you’re right: the Reagan administration did support Guatemala—but indirectly. They had to get Israeli advisers in there, and Taiwanese counter-insurgency agents and so on.

  Just to take one example of this, the Chief of Intelligence for the F.D.N., the main contra force in Nicaragua, defected about six months ago, a guy named Horacio Arce; he’s the most important defector yet. This was of course never reported in the United States, but he was very widely interviewed in Mexico. 12 And he had a lot of things to say, including details of his own training. He had been brought illegally to Eglin Air Force base in Florida, and he described in detail what the training was like there and then in San Salvador where he was sent for paratroop practice. The trainers were from all over the place: they had Spanish trainers, plenty of Israeli trainers, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Taiwanese, Dominicans, separate Japanese trainers for the Misquito Indian recruits—they’ve got a huge operation running. And it’s all clandestine, and all obviously illegal.

  And it’s lethal alright, I mean, in Guatemala alone maybe a hundred thousand people were killed during the 1980s, and the popular movements were decimated. 13 But lethal as it is, it would have been a lot worse without the restrictions that have been imposed by U.S. domestic dissidence in the last twenty-five years. I think that’s the important point. If you want to measure the achievement of the popular movements here, you have to ask, what would things have been like if they hadn’t been around? And things would have been like South Vietnam in the Sixties—when the country was wiped out, and may never recover. And remember, Central America’s a much more significant concern for the United States than Vietnam: there’s a historical commitment to controlling it, it’s our own backyard, and American business wants it as the equivalent of what East Asia is to Japan, a cheap labor area for exploitation. Yet the Reagan administration was unable to intervene there at the level that Kennedy did in an area of marginal American concern, Vietnam. That’s a big change, and I think it’s primarily attributable to the domestic dissidence.

  After all, what are the Iran-contra hearings about? What they’re about is the fact that the government was driven underground. Well, why was the government driven underground, why didn’t they just come out and do everything up front? They couldn’t. They couldn’t because they were afraid of their own population. And that’s significant, you know. It’s very rare that a government has had to go this deep underground in order to carry out its terrorist activities. It’s an unusual situation; I don’t even think there’s a historical precedent.

  Overthrowing Third World Governments

  WOMAN: The Allende coup in Chile—that wasn’t above ground. [Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup engineered by the C.I.A. in 1973.]

  The Allende thing was underground, that’s true—but that was a one-shot affair. And even there, notice that it was done in a different style: it was done in the classic style, it was like the Iran side of the Iran-contra affair. See, there’s a classic technique when you want to overthrow a government: you arm its military. That’s the standard thing, for obvious reasons. You want to overthrow a government, who’s going to overthrow it for you? Well, the military, they’re the guys who overthrow governments. In fact, that’s the main reason for giving military aid and training all around the world in the first place, to keep contacts with our guys in the place that counts, the army.

  If you read American secret documents, this is all stated very openly, actually. For example, there’s a now-declassified Robert McNamara [Secretary of Defense]-to-McGeorge Bundy [Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs] intercommunication from 1965 with a detailed discussion of Latin America, in which they talk about how the role of the military in Latin American societies is to overthrow civilian governments if, in the judgment of the military, the governments are not pursuing the “welfare of the nation,” which turns out to be the welfare of American multinational corporations. 14

  So if you want to overthrow a government, you arm its military, and of course you make it hard for the civilian government to function. And that’s what was done in the Chile case: we armed the military, we tried to cause economic chaos, and the military took over. 15 Okay, that’s sort of classic. In fact, that’s almost certainly what the Iran part of the Iran-contra affair was about. The arms shipments to the Iranian military didn’t have any
thing to do with a secret deal to release American hostages [held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon beginning in 1985], and they didn’t have anything to do with “October Surprises” either, in my view [theory that the Reagan electoral campaign secretly promised arms to Iran if Iran delayed the release of earlier U.S. hostages until after the 1980 Presidential election]. What they had to do with was the classic device of arming the military so they would carry out a coup and restore the old arrangement that existed under the Shah. There’s very good evidence for this; I can talk about it if you like. 16

  But Chile was a straight, classic operation—clandestine in a sense, but not all that clandestine. For instance, arming the Chilean military was completely public: it was in public records, it was never secret. 17 It’s just that nobody in the United States ever looks, because the media and the intellectual class are too disciplined, and ordinary people out there don’t have the time to go and read Pentagon records and figure out what happened. So it was clandestine in the sense that nobody knew about it, but the information was all available in public records, there was nothing hidden about it. In fact, Chile was kind of a normal C.I.A. operation, it was like overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia [in a 1965 U.S.-backed coup]. 18 There were some clandestine parts to it—and there are parts that still haven’t come out yet—but it was not really deep covert action. And it was nothing like the Central American activities of the 1980s, they’re just radically different in scale.

  I mean, there have been clandestine operations—I don’t want to suggest that it’s novel. Like, overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953 was clandestine. 19 Overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954 was clandestine—and it was kept secret for twenty years. 20 Operation MONGOOSE, which so far wins the prize as the world’s leading single international terrorist operation, started by the Kennedy administration right after the Bay of Pigs, that was secret.

  MAN: Which one was that?

  Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge—I think it had a $50 million-a-year budget (that’s known); it had about twenty-five hundred employees, about five hundred of them American, about two thousand what they call “assets,” you know, Cuban exiles or one thing or another. It was launched from Florida—and it was totally illegal. I mean, international law we can’t even talk about, but even by domestic law it was illegal, because it was a C.I.A. operation taking place on American territory, which is illegal. 21 And it was serious: it involved blowing up hotels, sinking fishing boats, blowing up industrial installations, bombing airplanes. This was a very serious terrorist operation. The part of it that became well known was the assassination attempts—there were eight known assassination attempts on Castro. 22 A lot of this stuff came out in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975, and other parts were uncovered through some good investigative reporting. It may still be going on today (we usually find out about these things a few years later), but it certainly went on through the 1970s. 23

  Actually, let me just tell you one piece of it that was revealed about a year ago. It turns out that Operation MONGOOSE practically blew up the world. I don’t know how many of you have been following the new material that’s been released on the Cuban Missile Crisis [1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown over Soviet missiles in Cuba], but it’s very interesting. There have been meetings with the Russians, now there are some with the Cubans, and a lot of material has come out under the Freedom of Information Act here. And there’s a very different picture of the Cuban Missile Crisis emerging.

  One thing that’s been discovered is that the Russians and the Cubans had separate agendas during the course of the Crisis. See, the standard view is that the Cubans were just Russian puppets. Well, that’s not true, nothing like that is ever true—it may be convenient to believe, but it’s never true. And in fact, the Cubans had their own concerns: they were worried about an American invasion. And now it turns out that those concerns were very valid—the United States had invasion plans for October 1962; the Missile Crisis was in October 1962. In fact, American naval and military units were already being deployed for an invasion before the beginning of the Missile Crisis; that’s just been revealed in Freedom of Information Act materials. 24 Of course, it’s always been denied here, like if you read McGeorge Bundy’s book on the military system, he denies it, but it’s true, and now the documents are around to prove it. 25 And the Cubans doubtless knew it, so that was probably what was motivating them. The Russians, on the other hand, were worried about the enormous missile gap—which was in fact in the U.S.’s favor, not in their favor as Kennedy claimed. 26

  So what happened is, there was that famous interchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev, in which an agreement to end the crisis was reached. Then shortly after that, the Russians tried to take control of their missiles in Cuba, in order to carry through the deal they had made with the United States, See, at that point the Russians didn’t actually control the missiles, the missiles were in the hands of Cubans—and the Cubans didn’t want to give them up, because they were still worried, plausibly, that there would be an American invasion. So there was a stand-off between them early in November—which even included an actual confrontation between Russian and Cuban forces about who was going to have physical control of the missiles. It was a very tense moment, and you didn’t know what was going to happen. Then right in the middle of it, one of the Operation MONGOOSE activities took place. Right at one of the tensest moments of the Missile Crisis, the C.I.A. blew up a factory in Cuba, with about four hundred people killed according to the Cubans. Well, fortunately the Cubans didn’t react—but if something like that had happened to us at the time, Kennedy certainly would have reacted, and we would have had a nuclear war. It came very close.

  Alright, there’s a terrorist operation which might have set off a nuclear war. That wasn’t even reported in the United States when the information was released about a year ago, it was considered so insignificant. The only two places where you can find it reported are in a footnote, on another topic actually, in one of these national security journals, International Security, and also in a pretty interesting book by one of the top State Department intelligence specialists, Raymond Garthoff, who’s a sensible guy. He has a book called Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he brings in some of this material. 27

  Actually, other things have been revealed about the Crisis which are absolutely startling. For instance, it turns out that the head of the U.S. Air Force at the time, General Thomas Power, without consultation with the government—in fact, without even informing the government—raised the level of American national security alert to the second highest level [on October 24, 1962]. See, there’s a series of levels of alert for U.S. military forces: it’s called “Defense Condition” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Usually you’re at “5”; nothing’s going on. Then the President can say, “You can move up to ‘3,’ ” which means, get the Strategic Air Command bombers in the air, or “Go up to ‘2,’ ” which means you’re ready to shoot, then you’re at “1,” and you send them off. Well, this guy just raised the level of alert unilaterally.

  Now, when you raise the level of alert, the point is to inform the Russians and to inform the other major powers what you’re doing, because they know something’s happening—they can see what you’re doing, they can see the S.A.C. bombers going up and the ships getting deployed: this stuff is all meant to be seen. So one of the top U.S. generals openly raised the level of security alert to just before nuclear war right in the middle of the Missile Crisis, and didn’t inform Washington—the Secretary of Defense didn’t even know about it. The Russian Secretary of Defense knew it, because his intelligence was picking it up, but Washington didn’t know. And this general did it just out of, you know, snubbing his nose at the Russians. The fact that this happened was just released about a year ago. 28

  MAN: At that point, did the Russians go up to the next level too?


  No, they didn’t react. See, we would have seen if they’d reacted, and Kennedy probably would have shot off the missiles. But Khrushchev didn’t react. In fact, throughout this whole period the Russians were very passive, they never reacted much—because they were scared. The fact is, the United States had an enormous preponderance of military force. I mean, the U.S. military thought there was no real problem: they wanted a war, because they figured we’d just wipe the Russians out. 29

  WOMAN: But are you saying that the U.S. intentionally created the Cuban Missile Crisis?

  Well, I’m not quite saying that. These are things that happened in the course of the Crisis—how we got to it is a little different. It came about when the Russians put missiles on Cuba and the United States observed that missiles were going in and didn’t want to allow them there. But of course, there’s a background, as there always is to everything, and part of the background is that the United States was planning to invade Cuba at the time, and the Russians knew it, and the Cubans knew it. The Americans didn’t know it—I mean, the American people didn’t know it. In fact, even a lot of the American government didn’t know it; it was only at a very top level that it was known.

  Government Secrecy

  There’s a point here to be made about government secrecy, actually: government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on. I mean, a lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there’s virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern. I don’t know if Stephen Zunes [a professor in the audience], who’s just done a dissertation on a lot of this stuff, would agree, but my impression from reading the secret record over a wide range of areas is that you virtually never find anything in there that had any connection to security whatsoever. The main purpose of secrecy is just to make sure that the general population here doesn’t know what’s going on.