“Vijay Prashad’s new book Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, details how manufactured foreign threats have historically been used by the Agency to carry on a war against the Third World—in order to extend U.S. corporate dominance.”
“In a foreword, Evo Morales Ayma, the former president of Bolivia who was deposed in a 2019 U.S.-backed coup, writes that Prashad’s book is about “bullets that assassinated democratic processes, that assassinated revolutions, and that assassinated hope.””
Prashad’s book “includes personal revelations of ex-CIA agents such as the late Charles Cogan, chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (1979–1984), who told Prashad that in Afghanistan, the CIA had “funded the worst fellows right from the start, long before the Iranian revolution and long before the Soviet invasion.””
“Washington’s Bullets starts in Guatemala with the 1954 coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, whose moderate land reform program threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company.”
The CIA’s assassination manual “was later applied in operations directed against Third World nationalists such as Patrice Lumumba of Congo (1961), Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco (1965), Che Guevara (1967) and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso (1987).”
“Sankara was killed in a plot that was carried out through close coordination between a CIA operative at the U.S. embassy in Burkino Faso and French secret service, SDECE.”
“The pattern for the CIA’s behavior was established in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when it supported political factions in Europe which collaborated with the Nazis against the communists, who had led the resistance against Nazism.”
“In Japan, this meant creating a new party (Liberal Democratic Party—LDP) to defeat the socialists that absorbed old fascists (Ichiro Hatoyama and Nobusuke Kishi) and developed enduring ties with big business and organized crime (Yoshio Kodama).”
“In 1953, the CIA succeeded in toppling Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh who had moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.”
“From 1960-1965, the agency tried to assassinate Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro at least eight times by sending mafia gangsters with poison pills, poison pens, a poisoned cigar, a tuberculosis-laced scuba suit, with botulinum toxin, and other deadly bacterial powders. In total, 638 assassination attempts were made—all of them failed.”
“The CIA also orchestrated a coup in South Vietnam in 1963 against the Diem brothers when they sought rapprochement with the left-wing National Liberation Front (NLF).”
“A further coup was carried out against Indonesia’s socialist government of Achmed Sukarno, whose ouster in 1965 triggered an anticommunist bloodbath.”
“The 1965 Indonesian coup—like its Guatemalan and Iran predecessors and successor in Chile—followed a modus operandi involving 9 different steps”.
“Perfected and refined over the years, almost all these steps have been applied most recently in the Maidan coup of 2014 in Ukraine, and right-wing coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019.”
A CIA study supported the “campaign by the Nixon administration to “make Chile’s economy scream” after Chileans had the audacity to elect a socialist, Salvador Allende, who nationalized Chile’s copper industry (the industry has been controlled by two U.S. corporations, Kennecott and Anaconda who lobbied for a coup).”
“The CIA station chief at the time of the 1973 Chilean coup, which brought the Fascist General Augusto Pinochet to power, was Henry Hecksher.”
“After earning promotion, Hecksher went on to spearhead CIA subversion operations in Laos and Indonesia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before running a project against the Cuban revolution in Mexico.”
“Hecksher was a counterpart to sinister figures like Lincoln Gordon—a ruthless anticommunist who helped orchestrate the 1964 coup in Brazil—Marshall Green, who helped trigger the 1965 coup in Indonesia, and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt and State Department officer Loy Henderson, who helped advance the coup against Mossadegh.”
“In South America, the CIA-driven Operation Condor killed around 100,000 people and imprisoned about half a million.”
“The CIA allied with ex-Nazi torturers like Klaus Barbie, a senior intelligence asset for General Hugo Banzer, Bolivia’s president from 1971-1978, and a key figure running Condor.”
“The CIA helped to kill progress in Africa by supporting such acts as the 1971 coup in Sudan by Colonel Gafar Nimiery, which deposed the communist Major Hashem al-Atta and resulted in the execution of Sudan’s Communist Party founder Abdel Khaliq Mahjub.”
“In the Middle East, the CIA’s crusade against communism resulted in a preference for Islamic fundamentalist like the Saudi Royal family and Pakistani General Zi-al-Huq (1978-1988), who had his predecessor Zulfaqir Ali Bhutto hanged and armed violent jihadist fundamentalists in Afghanistan to carry on the holy war against the Soviet Union.”
“In the 21st century, Washington has brazenly used sanctions to try and undermine defiant governments. It has also helped manufacture corruption scandals, such as those that brought down leftists Lula and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, whose policies had lifted almost 30 million Brazilians out of poverty.”
2021-week21
