When You Get Caught, Lie: It Worked for President Eisenhower

Lady Bracknell.  Oh, they count as Tories.  They dine with us.  Or come in the evening, at any rate.

It's a sign of how far out of touch with the general public Hillary Clinton is that she thought she could discredit Bernie Sanders by having one of her advisers complain that Sanders called for the abolition of the CIA forty-two years ago.

Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff who is now an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, told reporter Michael Crowley that Sanders’ comment “reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.” Bash explained: “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength.” Bash was chief of staff for Leon Panetta at both the CIA and Defense Department, and now runs a consulting firm called Beacon Global Strategies.

As Jon Schwarz showed in the article I just quoted, Sanders's position (which he no longer holds anyway) was not really that far-out.  A former CIA agent and now writer of best-selling thrillers acknowledged as much on Democracy Now! this morning.  The Clinton campaign's move was reminiscent of Clinton's defense of her relationship with War Criminal Emeritus Henry Kissinger.  As Alex Pareene wrote, Clinton's remark

was just a little brag that would have played well in a different room.

The sort of room it would have played well in, really, is the sort of room in which the worst people in the country congregate. The fact that Clinton lapsed into speaking as if she were in that room is more or less why she’s having trouble, once again, convincing the Democratic electorate to nominate her for the presidency.

I suppose that Clinton and her advisors and supporters don't realize this.  They don't understand that for many people in both parties the word "CIA," like the name "Henry Kissinger," is a red flag.  The same goes for Bash's criticism of Sanders: Very Serious People, those who really matter, those who really run this country, know that the CIA is a good thing, a necessary bulwark protecting America from its many enemies -- like George W. Bush, it keeps us safe.  Only a loony extremist like Harry S. Truman or John F. Kennedy would think otherwise. 

I doubt, myself, that the CIA can be abolished; even imposing more oversight would be extremely difficult to achieve -- and even if it were, it would quickly be replaced by new intelligence-gathering and covert-operations agencies.  Gathering information is not in itself an illegitimate government program, nor is "intervention" of various kinds aimed at influencing the affairs of other countries; even when the specific program is illegitimate, its lack of legitimacy is not a concern of our rulers. Where to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate intervention is a matter of judgment, so oversight and debate are vital.  The trouble is that we don't have enough of either.

As it happens, I had just finished reading a fascinating book, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia by Audrey R. and George McT. Kahin, published by The New Press in 1995, which was relevant to this question.  The book is about US meddling in Indonesian politics in the 1950s that basically blew up in the Eisenhower administration's face.  Instead of weakening then-President Sukarno, it strengthened him.  Instead of bringing about a "stable" (like "free world," a Newspeak euphemism for murderous right-wing dicatorships) government in Indonesia, it set off a civil war.  Instead of suppressing the Indonesian Communist party, it increased its prestige and influence.  Instead of pushing Indonesia away from its neutralist policy (which the US typically interpreted as pro-Soviet), it pushed it closer to the USSR until the US backed down.  Ultimately it led to the horrific massacres of 1965, in which at least half a million Indonesians (some Communist, others not) were butchered by the Indonesian army and paramilitary groups, to the delight of the US government and media.

I'll probably post more quotations from Subversion as Foreign Policy, but today I'll just include this bit.  The US had been covertly supporting mostly Islamist rebels in Sumatra against the central government in Java.  This support took the form of money, airdrops of arms, and training.  (Many higher military figures in Indonesia had been trained in the US; fancy that!)  Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese in Taiwan collaborated, as did Britain, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea.  This sort of thing is hard to keep totally quiet, of course; as the Kahins point out, secret US operations are generally secret from most Americans, but not from their targets.  But it was all going pretty well, despite successive defeats suffered by the rebels, until:

On May 18 [1958] a rebel B-26 bomber carried out apparently indiscriminate raids against the city of Ambon, a port on the eastern Indonesian island of Amboina.  After sinking an Indonesian naval vessel at its pier the plane bombed a church and the central market, resulting in heavy civilian casualties.  Before the plane left, however, antiaircraft fire brought it down, and its American pilot, Allen L. Pope, and his Indonesian radio operator were captured.

Pope's capture provided Jakarta with incontrovertible evidence of direct American involvement in support of the rebels.  The administration persisted in its contention that he was an independent "soldier of fortune" for whom the United States was not responsible.  But the fact that he carried not merely a diary containing detailed accounts of recent bombing missions but also U.S. military identification papers, a copy of recently dated orders from a U.S. army base, and a current post exchange card for Clark Air Force Base made it difficult for this argument to be given much credence ...

[U.S.] Ambassador Jones credited the Jakarta government with "great maturity" in its efforts to avoid "making use of the bombings of the church and market place for purposes of propaganda -- domestic or international."  When discussing the matter with one of the authors only seven months after the bombing, this normally calm and composed ambassador was still seething with anger over what his sources had indicated to have been "several hundred civilians killed."  (In the book he wrote twelve years after the bombing, he stated that the civilian casualties were reported to be "in the vicinity of 700," but while pursuing his official duties he abided by the Jakarta government's "official" casualty figures of six civilians and seventeen members of the armed forces) [179-80].

Allen W. Pope was tried in Indonesia, "convicted and sentenced to death on April 29, 1960 -- nearly two years after his capture and well after public interest in his actions had died down ... The sentence was never carried out and he continued to live in comfort until quietly freed after U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy spoke with Sukarno in Jakarta during a 'good will visit' to Indonesia in February 1962..." (181-2).  The Kahins note "how gently Pope was treated and how many obvious questions were not pursued" (ibid.) at his trial, whose record

provides a sketchy account of his twelve bombing and strafing missions against against government naval and merchant shipping, airfields, and port cities -- with accounts of ships sunk and airplanes destroyed at airports.  This record shows that the attack on Ambon in which he was shot down was the fifth he had made on this city and its environs.  But potentially most embarassing to the United States was not only that Pope's immediate employer was the CIA -- through its wholly owned subsidiary CAT (Civil Air Transport, based on Taiwan) -- but also that he had been released to CAT on April 21 on 120 days temporary duty while assigned to the headquarters of the U.S. Army command at Camp Brucknerin the Ryukyu Islands [181].

The Eisenhower administration lied reflexively and professionally when Pope was shot down: he was a "soldier of fortune," not a US agent.  They had already begun to withdraw support from the Indonesian rebels, though aid continued to come in for awhile through Taiwan and the Philippines.  Luckily for them, the Indonesian government didn't make as much fuss as they could have over US support of terrorist attacks (what else can you call it, honestly?) on their people.  The entire project went down the Memory Hole for many years, and in 1995, when Subversion as Foreign Policy was published, many documents were still classified.

But hey, this is all ancient history, isn't it?  We should look to the future, not dwell on the dead past, etc.  What first led me to read Subversion of Foreign Policy, aside from the authors' name -- George Kahin had co-written an important 1967 book on the US invasion of Vietnam that taught me a lot, not only about Vietnam but about the larger geopolitics of the period -- was annoyance at the beatification of Dwight Eisenhower by many liberals today.  Supposedly Eisenhower was different from today's Republicans in his foreign policy; but he mainly took intervention and subversion of regimes he disliked under cover. The important thing to most Americans today is that no Americans were killed by his activities; that many thousands of dusky foreigners suffered and died is of no great interest to either liberals or conservatives.  The Kahins cite Iran and Guatemala among Eisenhower's "successes," but that's only by contrast with the debacle in Indonesia.

But much that I read in Subversion as Foreign Policy impressed me by how timely it still is, from the US support of Islamists to undermine governments our rulers disliked to the cover stories when our agents got caught.  Even at the time, the capture of Allen Pope echoed the capture by the Soviets of US spy-plane pilot Gary Powers.  Later, in 1986, a CIA agent named Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua while bringing weapons to President Reagan's terrorist Contras.  "President Reagan and other U.S. officials have denied that the plane or its crew had ties to the U.S. government. In Washington, Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams said Hasenfus was not telling the truth because of Sandinista threats and intimidation," as the Chicago Tribune reported at the time.  As with the capture of Pope, the capture of Hasenfus was not merely embarrassing, it was inconveniently timed: "For the last two years, the CIA has been prohibited by law from helping provide the rebels with military supplies. If the CIA was involved in the operation despite denials from the Reagan administration, it could renew the debate over aid to the contra rebels just as Congress was about to release $100 million for them."

Another familiar theme was the 'fixing' of intelligence to justify Eisenhower's Cold War paranoia about Communist influence in Indonesia.  American officials and agents who didn't tell the President and his fanatical CIA chief Allen Dulles what they wanted to hear were ignored at best, replaced and transferred out at worst.  Those who want to contrast Eisenhower with George W. Bush will find no comfort here.  That's not necessarily to single out Eisenhower; the desire not to hear what one doesn't want to hear is a normal human impulse (you could call it human nature).  All the more reason for people in high places, who are especially susceptible to the tendency, to be aware of it, and make efforts to overcome it.  If they can't, the rest of us must do it.

Nothing New Under the Sun

I'm reading Arundhati Roy's new book Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket, 2014), and as usual with Roy, it's fascinating, infuriating, and depressing.  Here are some choice tidbits.  Get the book and read it.

Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism, and the Vietnam War.  As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order.  Foundations and corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format.  The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel, and Monsanto.  The center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement.  Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that "work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others."  It cosponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lectures Series called "The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Nonviolent Social Change" [38-39].

This sort of thing is evidently pretty common.  "You will also find the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany" (44).

But it's not only posthumously that great legacies are squandered:

[Nelson] Mandela gave South Africa's highest civilian award -- the Order of Good Hope -- to his old friend and supporter General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia [40].

I must look into this some more.  Why would Suharto, who presided over the massacre of at least half a million of his own people in 1965 with US support and assistance (as well as another quarter million East Timorese from 1975 to 1999), have supported and befriended Mandela, of the leftist, communist-supported African National Congress?

One more bit, on the role of NGOs with respect to poverty: 

Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem.  As though the poor had not been created by injustice but are a lost tribe who just happen to exist, and can be rescued in the short term by a system of grievance redressal (adminstered by NGOs on an individual, person-to-person basis), and whose long-term resurrection will come from Good Governance.  Under the regime of Global Corporate Capitalism, it goes without saying.

Indian poverty, after a brief period in the wilderness while India "shone," has made a comeback as an exotic identity in the arts, led from the front by films like Slumdog Millionaire.  These stories about the poor, their amazing spirit and resilience, have no villains -- except the small ones who provide narrative tension and local color.  The authors of these works are the contemporary world's equivalent of the early anthropologists, lauded and honored for working "on the ground," for their grave journeys into the unknown.  You rarely see the rich being examined in these ways [37].

This fits with what I'd noticed about some liberal discourse on poverty myself.

There Goes the Sun King

Kim Jong Il is dead, as I'm sure everybody in a position to read this blog knows by now. (Judging from what I've been reading online all day, it might be helpful to some readers if I explain that East Asian names usually put the surname first. So Kim was the dictator's surname or family name, Jong Il his given name; Jong Il Kim in Western order.) I certainly don't mourn him, but it's hard to know what to say when so many willfully ignorant people, people who know only that Kim was an official Bad Guy, are jumping for joy at the news -- especially in the US, where many people and our corporate media have been doing the Happy Dance over the guys it's safe to hate in the past year.

There are plenty of people on the Korean peninsula who have reason to hate Kim Jong Il; here in the US, not so much. He hurt a lot of people, but few if any Americans; so why are Americans so excited about his decease? Well, aside from Fidel Castro, we have hardly any Commies left to hate anymore, and for many Americans, Commies have a special place in what we laughingly call our hearts. Second, he was insubordinate, refusing to recognize that we are in charge of the world -- and worse, he played us rather effectively. This was a special slap in the face to American pride, given that we'd always thought him a joke from the day he succeeded his father in 1994, and have continued to treat him as a joke while simultaneously inflating him into a world-class threat to peace, justice, and the American way. Those are the only genuine reasons I can think of, as opposed to pretenses.

It can't be because he was corrupt, as he undoubtedly was -- America gets along just fine with corrupt heads of state and their families. It can't be because he ran a viciously repressive state with hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, and a failed economy that periodically collapsed into famine -- America gets along just fine with the rulers of viciously repressive states etc. No, it can only be because he wouldn't take orders from us; why, he wouldn't even take orders from his Red masters in what the deranged wing of the American Right used to call "Peiping." (It was the pronunciation used by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists.)

My first thought when I heard the news and began to see Western reactions was Suharto, the dictator of Indonesia for over thirty years. Suharto took power in a spectacularly bloody 1965 coup, epitomized by the slaughter of uncountable ethnic Chinese designated as Communists. Estimates range from half a million to two or three million or even more. It seems certain that the US was involved (via) (though given our record, US involvement would be plausible even if we didn't have other good reasons to believe it), with the CIA giving Suharto the names of labor activists to butcher. At the time, FAIR has reported,

After the scale of the massacre began to be apparent, [New York Times writer Max] Frankel was even more enthusiastic. Under the headline "Elated U.S. Officials Looking to New Aid to Jakarta's Economy" (3/13/66), Frankel reported that "the Johnson administration found it difficult today to hide its delight with the news from Indonesia.... After a long period of patient diplomacy designed to help the army triumph over the Communists, and months of prudent silence...officials were elated to find their expectations being realized." Frankel went on to describe the leader of the massacre, Gen. Suharto, as "an efficient and effective military commander."

After having pacified the country,

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

A decade later, in 1975, Suharto invaded the neighboring country of East Timor, initiating a quarter-century-long reign of terror, again supported faithfully by the US, which killed a quarter-million Timorese.

When Suharto left power, he received the harsh judgment you'd expect such a person to suffer at the hands of the American media.

In the months of his exit, he was referred to as Indonesia's "soft-spoken, enigmatic president" (USA Today, 5/14/98), a "profoundly spiritual man" (New York Times, 5/17/98), a "reforming autocrat" (New York Times, 5/22/98). His motives were benign: "It was not simply personal ambition that led Mr. Suharto to clamp down so hard for so long; it was a fear, shared by many in this country of 210 million people, of chaos" (New York Times, 6/2/98); he "failed to comprehend the intensity of his people's discontent" (New York Times, 5/21/98), otherwise he undoubtedly would have stepped down earlier. He was sometimes described as "authoritarian," occasionally as a "dictator," but never as a mass murderer. Suharto's mass killings were referred to--if at all--in a brief and antiseptic paragraph.

I believe Kim Jong Il deserves nothing less than the same kind of pitiless scourging Suharto got.

By all accounts, North Korea is a dreary, regimented society, with no civil liberties and little material security. (A good place to begin reading if you want to know more would be Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country [The New Press, 2004].) At the same time, I keep getting the impression that much of what is depicted as grim regimentation is simply normal for communitarian societies, including South Korea. I remember reading a sketch of a North Korean extended family, comprising at least three generations, out for a night of karaoke, which from the description sounded just like its South Korean working-class counterpart. The massed rallies and organizing chanting also sound to me like South Korean society in the days of its dictatorship: GoGo 70, a recent South Korean film set around 1970, began with archival footage of marching soldiers, cheering crowds, and martial songs that at first I took for the North, but it turned out to the freedom-loving South. And the standard of living was higher in the North than in the South until the 1970s, partly because until then the South was run by corrupt American-backed dictatorships more interested in lining their pockets than in raising up their people. Not until Park Chung Hee's Five Year Plans (did he deliberately take that label from Stalin's USSR?) did the South Korean economy begin to take off, though as with all modernizing industrial economies, at great human cost.

But despite the occasional concern trolling -- oh worra worra, what will happen to North Korea now that Kim is dead? is his young heir-designate, Kim Jong Un, mature enough at twenty-something to take the reins of power? surely he should invite the US to step in and guide him with the same benign wisdom we've exhibited everywhere else -- I don't believe that many of the people celebrating Kim's death give a damn about the North Korean people, or about peace on the Korean peninsula, or about anything except venting the free-floating rage and hatred they don't dare express about anything that matters. The US government is no more interested in democracy in North Korea than it is in the South, which means (at best) hardly at all; and most Americans don't know enough about either Korea to have an opinion.