Fw: [R-G] The USA and International Terrorism - Philip Agee

http://www.counterpunch.org/agee1.html

CounterPunch

The USA and International Terrorism

     The Cold War never really ended. It did so along the east-west axis.
But
     the Cold War always had a north-south dimension-- the war against
forces
     of liberation in Third World countries. That never ended, and it
continues
     today.. [Through my studies] I gradually came to the conclusion that
what
     my CIA colleagues and I had been doing during the 1950s and '60s was
     nothing more than a continuation of nearly five hundred years of
     exploitation and political repression.

     By Philip Agee

I would like to begin by citing a well-known observation of A. J. Liebling,
a U.S. journalist and media critic who was active during the mid-1900s:
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," he said.

In a sense, this has always been true. News media in general, except for
state-funded organizations, are part of the private sector. I know that,
here in Sweden as in Britain, you have state television and state radio. But
generally speaking, and certainly in the United States, the press has always
been in the private sector.

The Power of the Word

The United States - that is, the political class of the United States - has
known about the power of the word for a very, very long time. A personal
experience may serve to illustrate how powerful the written word can be.

For legal reasons, I stayed away from the United States for about seventeen
years-- from the time I started work on my first book, in the early 1970s,
until my autobiography was ready for publication in 1987. The publisher of
the latter was very eager for me to return to the States for the promotion
of the book, but my lawyers all warned me not to take a chance. They
suspected that there could be secret criminal indictment, as there could
have been all those years, and argued that the risk was not worth it.

My wife and I decided that we would take that risk. We went back, and they
didn't touch me. I did the promotion of the book, and that began ten years
of frequent travel to the U.S. for lectures at universities and speeches at
political rallies, civic centres, churches, even out in the street.
Altogether, and must have spoken at more than 500 events in the United
States.

One of my trips, around 1989 or 1990, was to the University of California at
Santa Cruz. When the organizers told me that the event was scheduled to take
place at a civic centre with room for about 3000 people, my reaction was:
"Oh,my god! We are going to look like we're all alone in there. We will
never attract more than a couple of hundred people." But they said, "Don't
worry. You'll see."

Sure enough, on the night of the meeting the arena was packed. During the
discussion period after my talk, which was about the war in Central America
still going on at the time, a man stood up way in the back. He was a very
large person, with a lot of long hair, a bushy beard, and a plaid lumberjack
shirt. He paused for a moment, and then said my name in an enormous, booming
voice: "Philip Agee!" He said, "Philip Agee, I want to thank you for saving
my life!"

With that, the place became as quiet as you could imagine. You could have
heard the proverbial pin drop. He went on to tell the story of how he was
seriously wounded in Vietnam, and had to spend several years in a veterans'
hospital in the United States. While in hospital, he became despondent: He
thought there was no hope, and decided to commit suicide. But then someone
gave him a copy of my first book.

He said: "When I read that book, it changed my life." He said that he
decided then not to end his life, but to spend the rest of it helping
Vietnam War veterans who had problems like his own. From that point in the
mid-1970s until the time of this meeting some fifteen years later, he had
made a career of social work among Vietnam War veterans suffering from
mental problems because of the things that they had done and seen in
Vietnam.

This is merely one personal story, but it indicates the strength of the
written word. Possibly, one life was saved-- possibly.

Covert Action

The CIA, as you probably know, was founded in the years following World War
II-- supposedly, to prevent another Pearl Harbor, the Japanese surprise
attack which brought the United States into that war. In that sense, the
events of September 11th represent a terrible failure on the part of the CIA
and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment.

There are at least twelve or thirteen different intelligence agencies in the
United States, and they are spending on the order of thirty billion dollars
per year-- the CIA being simply the foremost among them. Of course, the CIA
was not only established to collect information and to anticipate attacks.
>From the beginning of the CIA's existence, it was also used to intervene
secretly in the internal affairs of other countries. Virtually no country on
earth was exempt.

This secret intervention-- as opposed to the collection of information-- was
called covert action, and it was used in a variety of ways to influence the
institutions of other countries. Interventions in elections were very
frequent. Every CIA station, that is the undercover CIA office inside a U.S.
embassy, included agents who were involved in covert action. In addition to
intervention to ensure the election of favoured candidates and the defeat of
disfavoured candidates, the CIA also infiltrated the institutions of power
in countries all over the world. I am sure that Sweden is no exception, and
was not an exception during all the years of the Cold War.

There was electoral intervention, propaganda via the media, and also the
penetration and manipulation of women's organizations, religious
organizations, youth and student organizations, the trade-union movement--
very important-- but also the military and security services and, of course,
political parties. All of these institutions were free game for penetration
and manipulation by the CIA.

In short, the CIA influenced the civic life of countries all around the
world. It did this due to a lack of faith in democracy in other countries.
There was a desire for control. The secret U.S. policy was to not leave
things to "chance", that is to the will of the people in whatever country it
might be. They had to be tutored, they had to be "guided" in such a way that
they would be safe for U.S. control. Control was the key word. None of this
was done for altruistic or idealistic reasons.

Three key factors

Where the media are concerned, there are three important factors involved:
sources, selection and the slant. With regard to sources, it is my
understanding that Swedish news media have very few of their own people
working abroad. That means that they are dependent on what they get from
other sources, for example the Associated Press, Reuters, BBC or CNN. Those
huge organizations which have people all over the world are, of course,
selling their products here.

So you receive those products here, and an editor takes uses them in any way
he chooses. What seems to be happening with globalization is that the
treatment of news is becoming more and more homogeneous. Sweden, of course,
is a unique society with a unique history, culture and language. You would
surely have a unique way of viewing and interpreting world events-- a vision
of the world that is Swedish, in contrast to that of the U.S., Germany or
any other nationality.

But how do you maintain this cultural identity with regard to international
news, if the media here are dependent on foreign sources? These sources are,
of course, becoming fewer and fewer, as the process of monopolization
continues. Consider the mergers that have occurred just during the past ten
years or so-- for example, Time merging with Warner, then taking over CNN
and now merging with AOL. Or General Electric, another giant corporation,
taking control of NBC. This is a process that has been going on for a long
time, resulting in fewer and fewer independent sources.

Selection may be the most important factor of the three, because what is
most important in the news is what is left out. It is a form of censorship.
There is a lot of news out there; but editors determine what is news and
what is not. Whatever is overlooked, not reported, says a lot about the
media.

Invisible background

This has been very well illustrated during the past two weeks. I imagine
that we have all seen the same reports over and over again, on what happened
in New York and Washington, along with the demonization of Osama bin Ladin.
There has been some reporting, but not very much, about the fact that bin
Ladin is a product of the United States. He is a creature of the CIA, having
gone to work for it in Afghanistan. It was the largest operation ever
carried out by the CIA, and its purpose was to bleed the Soviet Union.

Bin Ladin was one of thousands who volunteered to fight with the mujihadin
against the Soviets. As I recall, there were seven different groups. All
seven were basically fundamentalist Islamic forces, who felt that the Soviet
invasion defiled an Islamic country. Bin Ladin was among those who did not
stop fighting after the Soviets were expelled. In fact, he started laying
plans for the future while the war against the Soviet Union was still going
on. He was able to develop a world-wide network which today is operating in
sixty countries or more.

Very little of this background on bin Ladin as a creation of the United
States has been brought to public attention during the past two weeks. Most
of what we have seen and heard is related to the "solution", which is war.
How much have we read or heard about those voices calling for alternative
solutions to the problem of international terrorism? How much reporting have
we seen on analyses of what has driven these people to such desperation that
they carried out those attacks on September 11th?

I have not seen very much of that. This may be due to the fact that I am
living in Cuba at present. But I do read the New York Times on the Internet
every morning, for example, and have access to quite a lot of other news.
When it comes to alternative solutions to the problem, such as a
re-examination of U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly with respect
to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I don't think I have seen anything. The
only thing we get is Bush saying "this is war, we are at war, this is the
first war of the 21st century, this is a question of good versus evil,
whoever is not with us is against us", and so on.

That is pretty much the attitude we had in the CIA during the 1950s. When we
analysed the operational climate and all the political forces in any given
country, we had our friends and we had our enemies. There was no one in
between. The friends were centre and right-wing social democrats,
conservatives, liberals, in some cases all the way over to neo-fascists. The
enemies were left-wing social democrats, socialists, communists, all the way
to those advocating armed struggle.

This is the way we saw the world. It was a strictly dualistic view of the
political climate in any given country where we were operating. It was very
much like what we are hearing today from Washington.

The Uses of Journalists

The third important factor affecting the news is, of course, the slant or
bias. It reflects the moral, social and political values of the person doing
the writing, or at least the editor. This is where the CIA played a very
fundamental role in years past, and I cannot imagine that it suddenly
stopped when the Cold War came to an end.

In fact, like many others, I believe that the Cold War never really ended.
It did so along the east-west axis. But the Cold War always had a
north-south dimension-- the war against forces of liberation in Third World
countries. That never ended, and it continues today.

I also believe that the CIA's media operations have continued. They involve
the recruitment and payment of editors and reporters who take the CIA's
material and publish it as if it were their own. Taken all together-- the
sources and selection of material, and the point of view or slant-- the
result is essentially what is known as propaganda, but which passes for
"unbiased news".

Journalists are also very important to the CIA for non-journalistic
activities. They serve as very convenient agents of access for the Agency.
Particularly since they come from a country with a neutral tradition, Swedes
in general have always been of great interest to the CIA. This is because
they do not carry a lot of political baggage, as do people from most other
countries. I am aware of the ongoing debate here concerning just how neutral
Sweden has or has not been. But in the rest of the world, the neutrality of
Sweden has created a special attraction for U.S. intelligence agencies,
because Swedes have readier access to certain target individuals than, say,
an American or a German would.

The fact is that journalists are used for non-journalistic purposes-- as
collection agents for intelligence, and for making contacts, because a
journalist can approach practically anyone and ask for an interview or
develop some type of relationship. Of the hundreds of journalists who have
come to me over the years, I have no idea how many have been sent by the
CIA. I get some idea when I read what they write. But I learned to be
cautious, early on.

Education in Injustice

The covert action operations to which I referred earlier were carried out
all over the world, and certainly in Latin America where I was posted. I
spent three years in Ecuador, then three more in Uruguay. In both cases, my
cover was as a political attaché in the U.S. embassy.

I then returned to Washington, pretty disillusioned with the work. I was a
product of the U.S. education system of the 1950s, which provided me with a
very good liberal education, but no political education at all. I was simply
brought up to believe that whatever the government did was good, and that it
was doing these good things in the name of us all.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political
education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me
every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social
conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

The two most fundamental, interrelated problems were the grossly unequal
distribution of land and the unequal distribution of wealth. In the early
years of the Kennedy administration-- I had gone down to Latin American
toward the end of the Eisenhower period-- there was much talk about land
reform as a way of dealing with those problems.

But with the success of the Cuban revolution, and its success in surviving
U.S. attempts at invasion and other hostilities, land reform in the rest of
Latin America was put aside. "Stability" was the order of the day. The view
in Washington was that, if reform programmes were pushed, it could lead to
instability and create openings for liberation forces all over Latin America
that were inspired by the Cuban revolution.

So, the aim of our programmes was to support the status quo, to support the
oligarchies of Latin America. These are the power structures that date back
centuries, based on ownership of the land, of the financial resources, of
the export-import system, and excluding the vast majority of the population.
With all of our programmes, we were supporting these traditional power
structures. What first caused me to turn against these people were the
corruption and the greed that they exhibited in all areas of society. My
ideas and attitudes began to change, and eventually I decided to resign from
the CIA.

It is widely believed that, once you have joined the CIA, it is likely being
in the mafia, that you can never leave. But that is actually not the case.
The CIA does not want people working within the organization who are not
happy and do not want to be there. They are security risks, for one thing.
So, people are coming and going all the time in that large organization of
some 18,000 employees.

Maddening Diary

I decided to start a new career in teaching, and enrolled as a Ph.D. student
in a programme of Latin American studies at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico. In the course of those studies-- of the Spanish
Conquest, the colonial period, and all the horrors that have occurred over
the centuries in Latin America -- I gradually came to the conclusion that
what my CIA colleagues and I had been doing during the 1950s and '60s was
nothing more than a continuation of nearly five hundred years of
exploitation and political repression.

It was then that an idea entered my mind which had previously been
unthinkable -- to write a book that would show how all this works. The
research required me to spend a year in Paris, and then another year in
London where the British Library's newspaper archive proved to be
invaluable. There, I was able to read all the news reports relating to the
places that I had worked in Latin America, in many cases dating back to the
19th century.

When the book finally came out-- the title was Inside the Company: CIA
Diary-- it was reviewed in the CIA's classified in-house journal, Studies in
Intelligence. I managed to get a copy of the review, which speculated that I
had kept copies of all the stuff I had worked on while I was in the CIA,
because they could not believe that I was able to reconstruct all those
thousands and thousands of details from memory. It drove them absolutely
crazy. But, in fact, most of the maddening details were gleaned from the
newspaper archive of the British Museum.

The book had a tremendous effect on the Agency's effectiveness, its ability
to continue its standard operations. The most gratifying result was that
many Latin Americans told me how important the book was for defending
themselves and their organizations from destruction by the CIA. In the
broadest sense, the purpose of the Agency's various activities was to prop
up those forces that were considered to be friendly to U.S. interests, while
penetrating, dividing, weakening and destroying those forces that were
regarded as unfriendly to U.S. interests-- the forces of the political left
that I mentioned earlier.

Thus, for Latin American revolutionaries to come to me and say how much they
appreciated the book, with all its details on how the CIA works to subvert
institutions in other countries, was extremely gratifying.

Suitable enemy

Since the events of two weeks ago, there has been much comment and
speculation about the new era we may now be entering. Looking back, there
was a long Cold War that had already begun during World War II. An important
turning point occurred in 1950, when it was decided to start an arms race
that would serve the dual purpose of forcing the Soviet Union into
bankruptcy while stimulating the U.S. economy. Since the Soviet Union was
still recovering from the devastation of World War II, it would never be
able to catch up; but it would be compelled to make the effort,
nevertheless. Meanwhile, military spending in the U.S. would keep going up
and up, which in turn would stimulate the U.S. economy through a sort of
"military Keynesianism". This continued through the Reagan administration of
the 1980s.

But in the decade since the end of the Cold War until September 11th, the
U.S. security establishment-- the political class, the CIA, the people who
fought the Cold War-- had no real enemy to focus on. True, they had Saddam
Hussein for awhile, and they might have had a minor enemy here, another one
there. But there was no real world-wide threat similar to that of the Cold
War. Well, now it seems that they have one again.

What this means is that the United States is going to be in this for quite
some time. I have feeling that it is going to go on for ten or fifteen
years, because they are not going to wipe out international terrorism or
something like bin Ladin's group overnight. During this period, they are
going to be doing the same things they did in the Cold War. We can already
here it in such expression as, "Whoever is not with us is against us." They
are going to be trying to use every bit of power they have to bring
countries in line behind the United States.

It also means important changes within the United States, because the war on
terrorism will serve as the justification for restraints on civil liberties.
They are building a huge crisis in the United States. They are building the
psychological climate for broad-based acceptance of an ongoing war, for
which there will be no quick resolution. There will be no great battles,
either.

Little Room for Alternatives

During this period, there will be very little room for alternative views and
alternative solutions in U.S. news media. What are the alternatives? Well,
one is obviously to address the question of why these people are doing these
things: What are the roots of international terrorism? How does U.S. foreign
policy create this type of reaction? How does U.S. support of everything
that Israel does, including the oppression of the Palestinian people,
influence fundamentalist Islamic groups?

In other words, a feasible alternative would be a reconsideration of U.S.
foreign policy, to see if it would not be possible to create a more just
situation in the Middle East. But the United States is stuck. It is stuck
with an authoritarian regime in Egypt, which is one of the really shaky
countries at the moment. Algeria has gone through a horrible period, and the
fundamentalist movement there has not died away at all. In Pakistan the
government could fall; fundamentalists there could take over, and they would
then have nuclear weapons in their hands. So, a lot of things can happen in
the months and years ahead.

Unfortunately, I suspect that there will be greater self-censorship by U.S.
media in order to line up behind the government, however its policy of war
may turn out. There is already talk of a personal identification system of
some kind for the entire country, together with large-scale surveillance of
the population-- especially immigrants, and Muslim immigrants in particular.
There will be some opposition to this; but historically, the courts have
usually gone along with the government, even though they are theoretically
supposed to be the guarantors of civil liberties. For example, the courts
went along with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
So, it will be possible to restrict, and even infringe upon, civil liberties
and human rights in the U.S.

It is early days to draw any conclusions about how all this is going to
develop, since it is still in the planning stage. But in my opinion, if they
carry out this military solution-- with an attack or a series of attacks, or
the establishment of military bases in Islamic countries-- they will be
doing exactly what bin Ladin wants them to do. It would turn more and more
people to fundamentalism and to his organization. They could kill him
tomorrow, but the organization that he has established will live on, and it
will be nearly impossible to penetrate.

My reading of the situation is that there have been a few defectors from bin
Ladin's organization who have provided valuable information. But the U.S.
has not been able to have anyone working in these clandestine groups around
the world and reporting from the inside. It has had to make do with whatever
it can learn from a few defectors. Certainly, the CIA and the other
components of the U.S. intelligence apparatus will be using all available
technical means to locate and attack these groups, wherever they may be.
They should certainly know where all the training bases are located, since
they were established by the CIA, itself. But that will not be nearly
enough. CP


Philip is a former CIA officer and author of Inside the Company. This is
article is adapted from the text of a speech Agee gave at ABF House, in
Stockholm on 24 September 2001




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