This article provides a general overview of the nature, history and operations of the CIA and is followed by more

detailed accounts of the Agency's activities in various countries (Chile, Nicaragua, Europe, Indonesia, Guatemala, Australia, etc.)

"And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." - Inscription at CIA headquarters in Langley "Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply.... long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered.... we must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us." - From a CIA operations document

"It has been said that among the dangers faced by a democratic society in fighting totalitarian systems is that the government runs the risk of imitating its enemies' methods and thereby destroying the very democracy that it is seeking to defend. I cannot help wondering if my government is more concerned with defending our democratic system or more intent upon imitating the methods of totalitarian regimes in order to maintain its already inordinate power over the American people." - VICTOR MARCHETTI, ex-CIA agent

The Central Intelligence Agency is the world's largest secret police force. Its official function is to conduct foreign intelligence operations and intelligence-gathering abroad. It has no authority to operate domestically in the United States and no power of arrest. The Agency, as advertised to the public and to Congress, is supposed to function primarily as a producer of intelligence for the U.S. Government. However, its actual mission is that of clandestine operations, particularly covert action - the secret intervention in the internal affairs of other nations. The purpose of this is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. Government, to attack its avowed enemy - Communism - and to foster a world order in which America reigns supreme, financially and politically. Furthering these goals in one country may mean the active maintenance of the status quo; in another, a determined effort to overthrow a government. The CIA engages in espionage and counter-espionage; in propaganda and guiding the editorial policies of newspapers; disinformation (the deliberate circulation of false information); psychological warfare; political manipulation; conspiracy; bribery; corruption; paramilitary activities; military coups; assassinations and other dirty tricks. It penetrates and manipulates private institutions; it recruits agents and mercenaries; it bribes and blackmails foreign officials; it tortures, terrorises and murders; it uses whatever means it can to achieve its goals, without any consideration of the ethics involved or of the moral consequences of its actions. The CIA encourages professional amorality amongst its employees - the belief that righteous goals can be achieved through the use of unprincipled and normally unacceptable means. The Agency has carried

out covert action usually with the express approval of the White House, almost always without the consent of Congress and virtually never with the knowledge of the American public. The Eisenhower administration lied to the American people about the CIA's involvement in the Guatemala coup d'etat in 1954. The Kennedy administration publicly lied about the CIA's role in the abortive invasion of Cuba in 1961. The Johnson administration lied about the CIA's activities in Vietnam and Laos. The Nixon administration lied about the CIA's attempts to fix the Chilean election in 1970. The Reagan administration lied to Congress and to the public about the Agency's role in destabilising the Nicaraguan government, and the Bush and Clinton administrations lied about the CIA's involvement in the international drugs trade and in the Lockerbie plane bombing.

Bill Gates was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence during Washington's war against the Nicaraguan government. At Gates' confirmation hearing as CIA chief, one of his own staff testified: "Mr Gates' role was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence."

"In my ten years with the Agency, I only recall one case of many hundreds where a man who had joined the Agency felt some scruples about the activities he was asked to carry on." - ALLEN DULLES, ex-CIA chief

CIA clandestine operators assigned overseas are called case officers; their tours of duty are normally two to three years and most serve with false titles in American embassies. Some live under "deep cover" in foreign countries, posing as businessmen, students, newsmen, union workers, missionaries or other "innocent" visitors. The case officer's role is to find agents willing to work with or for the CIA. His aim is to penetrate the host government, learn its inner workings and manipulate it for the Agency's purposes. A network of agents - often hundreds - is built up in that country's government, military forces, press, labour unions and other important groups. It is not just the party of government that is infiltrated by the Agency, but usually every possible political party, group or organisation, so that each can be steered in the desired direction, ready to serve the CIA as and when the need arises. In his talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, ex-CIA chief Richard Bissell listed eight types of covert action that the CIA uses to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. political advice and counsel subsidies to an individual financial support and "technical assistance" to political parties support of private organisations, including business firms labour unions, industrial groups, etc. covert propaganda "private" training of individuals and exchange of persons economic operations paramilitary or political operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime

"It takes relatively few people and little support to disrupt the internal peace and economic stability of a small country." WILLIAM CASEY, Director of Central Intelligence 1981 - 1987

William Casey arriving on Capitol Hill, December 5th 1984, to testify about the CIA-produced manual which advised Nicaraguan contra forces on the "selective use of violence" to "neutralise" Nicaraguan officials .

At "The Farm", the CIA's West Point, near Williamsburg in Virginia, young recruits are trained in such paramilitary activities as infiltration, heavy weapons and demolitions. One former officer who was trained in special operations wrote: "Some of the training was conventional. But then we moved up to the CIA's demolition training HQ. And it was here that we received training in tactics which hardly conformed to the Geneva Convention. The array of outlawed weaponry with which we were familiarised included bullets that explode on impact, silencer-equipped machine guns, home-made explosives and self-made napalm for stickier and hotter Molotov cocktails.. And there was a diabolical invention that might be called a minicannon. It was constructed of a concave piece of steel fitted into the top of a can filled with a plastic explosive. When it was detonated, the tremendous heat of friction of the steel turning inside out made the steel piece a white-hot projectile. There were a number of uses for it, one of which was demonstrated to us using an old army school bus. It was fastened to the gasoline tank in such a fashion that the incendiary projectile would rupture the tank and fling flaming gasoline the length of the bus interior, incinerating anyone inside. It was my lot to show the rest of the class how easily it could be done. It worked, my God how it worked. I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess, the moment of truth. What did a busload of burning people have to do with freedom? What right had I, in the name of democracy and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die? The intellectual game was over. I had to leave."

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

The CIA officially has authorised manpower of 20,000 and an authorised budget of $800 million; however these figures do not tell the whole picture. Tens of thousands of additional people serve under contract the CIA's membership extends far beyond government circles and reaches into the power centres of industry, commerce, finance and labour. The agency's proprietary (cover) enterprises such as the airlines Air America and Air Asia conduct as much private business as possible and re-invest the profits; tens of millions of dollars each year are generated by these companies. Hundreds of millions of additional dollars are contributed by the Pentagon to fund major espionage and clandestine programmes. $50 to 100 million is on call for unanticipated costs in a special account called the Director's Contingency Fund. The CIA is not merely a multi-million dollar agency but a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. The Agency regularly deals with black marketeers to purchase "laundered" currency to be used for illegal ("black") covert operations that cannot be funded by official or legal channels. This involves the Agency in an intimate relationship with the Mafia and other criminal organisations, particularly with the international drugs trade, which is the most well-organised means of dealing with large amounts of untraceable black market currency. Arms and military hardware are readily exchanged for narcotics, which are in turn peddled for money that is used to finance further black operations. The Agency has frequently employed members of the Mafia and other criminals to carry out its more sensitive covert operations, as will be seen. Working on the CIA staff are sociologists, psychologists, historians and media specialists - all skilled at selecting "reachable" targets such as the youth or intellectuals of a particular country and getting a message through to them. In 1967, after embarrassing press revelations about the CIA's role on American campuses, CIA director Richard Helms asked his staff to find out how many university personnel were under secret contract to the CIA; a report was handed in listing hundreds of professors and administrators at over a hundred campuses. The Watergate scandal - the bugging of Democrat offices by CIA agents and the Agency's attempted cover-up - revealed some of the CIA's covert activities within the United States (which are in breach of its own charter). Since its founding, the Agency has spent over a billion dollars on propaganda activities, mainly foreign but also domestic. For instance, the publishing firm of Praeger of New York admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request.

Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence, 1966-1973

William Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, 1973-1976

Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, 1977 - 1981

"For adherents to the cult of intelligence, hypocrisy and deception, like secrecy, have become standard techniques for preventing public awareness of the CIA's clandestine operations and governmental accountability for them. And these men, who ask that they be regarded as honourable men, true patriots, will, when caught in their own webs of deceit, even assert that the government has an inherent right to lie to its people." VICTOR MARCHETTI, ex-CIA officer

The CIA began in 1947 when President Truman proposed the creation of a secret intelligence agency. In 1951, the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) were merged into the Central Intelligence Agency. Its originators saw the Agency as the instrument by which Washington could achieve its foreign policy goals that were not attainable through diplomacy, i.e. by covert action. Allen Dulles was appointed the first Chief of Clandestine Services. From less than 5,000 employees, the CIA grew to about 15,000 by 1955. During these years it spent well over a billion dollars to strengthen non-communist governments in Western Europe, to subsidise political parties around the world, to found Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for propaganda broadcasts to Eastern Europe, to make guerrilla raids into China, to create the Asia Foundation and to overthrow leftish Governments in Guatemala and Iran. The CIA financed political parties, individual leaders, Labour unions and other groups in West Germany, France and Italy. It also supported East European migr groups in the West as part of a programme to organise resistance in the communist countries. By the end of the 1950's, pro-American governments had become firmly established in West Europe, and the CIA turned its attention towards the Third World and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. From 1959 onwards, the CIA spent a major part of its resources to arrest the influence of the Cuban Revolution, which had an enormous impact throughout Latin America. It also sought to "divide, weaken and destroy our local enemies" - every group from left social democrats to legal Communist parties to armed revolutionaries. The ostensible plan was for the military dictatorships of the Latin American governments, backed by the U.S., to enact reform programmes such as redistribution of land and income, which would ease the extreme imbalances of wealth and opportunity that existed between rich and poor. This would supposedly improve life for everyone and at the same time diminish the appeal of the Cuban Revolution. In practice, as ex-CIA agent Philip Agee was to write: "The more successful we were in our operations to repress the left, the further away any possibilities for reform moved& . The result? The same old oligarchies, the large land-owners and commercial interests our "best friends" - continued enjoyment of their power, prestige and privilege as they always had& . For years in our propaganda operations we peddled the tired slogan "Evolution not revolution" and the only thing that evolved were bigger bank accounts for our friends. I wondered why we were so afraid of governments that put priorities on helping peasants and other poor people."

Fidel Castro, President of Cuba.

A force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala made an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April 1961. They were met by a stronger Cuban defence than had been anticipated. Four Americans flying CIA planes and nearly 300 Cuban exiles died during the fighting. The invasion was a complete failure and within 72 hours had been roundly defeated. It was one of the greatest humiliations of newly-appointed John F. Kennedy's presidency. After the affair, Richard Dulles was forced out of the Agency and Richard Helms took over as Clandestine Services Chief in 1962.

Richard Bissell, CIA Deputy Director for Plans, responsible for overseeing the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, receives the National Security Medal from President Kennedy exactly one year later.

A campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately. Throughout the 1960s there were countless sea and air commando raids by exiles, often accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon Cuban oil refineries, chemical plants, bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and warehouses. Spies, saboteurs and assassins were infiltrated; and there were pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships - anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection or make the revolution look bad. The Agency also commenced a remarkable campaign of chemical warfare against the Cuban people. Thousands of tons of sugar in Cuban warehouses were contaminated by chemical and biological agents. In 1962 a Canadian agricultural technician working as

an adviser to the Cuban government was paid $5,000 by the CIA to infect Cuban turkeys with a virus which would produce the fatal Newcastle Disease. 8,000 turkeys subsequently died. During 1969 and 1970, the CIA used futuristic weather modification technology to ravage Cuba's sugar crop. Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains and killer flash floods over non-agricultural areas and left the cane fields arid. In 1971 the CIA supplied Cuban exiles with a virus that causes African swine fever. Six weeks later, an outbreak of the disease in Cuba forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nation-wide animal epidemic. Ten years later, the targets may well have been human beings, as an epidemic of dengue fever swept Cuba in 1981. Transmitted by blood-eating insects, usually mosquitoes, the disease produces severe flu symptoms and incapacitating bone pain. Over 300,000 cases were reported in Cuba, with 158 fatalities, including 101 children under 15. Declassified CIA documents later revealed that in 1956 and 1958 the US Army had loosed swarms of specially bred mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida to study their use as weapons in a biological war. (The mosquitoes bred for the tests were of the Aedes Aegypti type, the precise carrier of dengue fever). In 1967 it was revealed that at the US government centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland, dengue fever and other diseases "are the objects of considerable research and appear to be regarded as potential BW [biological warfare] agents." (In 1977, newly-released CIA documents disclosed that the Agency maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program that was "targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries throughout the world."). The sabotage and commando raids against Cuba were accompanied by a total US trade and credit embargo (which continues to this day, and which has severely hurt the Cuban economy and damaged the people's standard of living). The US even denied export licenses for medical supplies and clothing for hurricane relief aid on the grounds that such shipments "are contrary to the national interest." Goods from other countries destined for Cuba were also sabotaged by the CIA: machinery was damaged and chemicals were added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid wear on diesel engines. A manufacturer in West Germany was paid to produce ball bearings off-centre and another paid to do the same with balanced wheel gears. A CIA officer involved in the sabotage campaign stated: "You're talking about big money when you ask a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to reset his whole mould. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more." When the British Leyland Company defied the US embargo to sell a number of buses to Cuba in 1964, the cargo ship carrying the buses collided in thick fog with a Japanese vessel in the Thames; the ship was breached on its side and the buses were "written off". A decade was to pass before the CIA and National Security Agency confirmed that the collision had been arranged by the CIA with the co-operation of British intelligence. The Agency enlisted the help of Mafia figures to attempt the murder of Cuban leader Fidel Castro in early 1961, and there were dozens of plots to assassinate or humiliate him. They ranged from poisoning his cigars and food to a chemical designed to make

his hair and beard fall off (thereby reducing his appearance of "manliness" to the Cuban public) and even a plan to administer LSD just before a public speech. In another plot, a CIA agent code-named AM/LASH was given a ball-point pen rigged with a hypodermic needle so that Castro would not notice its insertion. The CIA case officer had recommended the use of Blackleaf-40, a commercially available high-grade poison. The delivery of the assassination device took place on November 22nd, 1963, as a CIA Inspector General's Report of 1967 noted almost offhandedly "it is likely at the very moment President Kennedy was shot." There were also more traditional methods of disposing of Castro, one being an attempt to drop bombs on a baseball stadium while Castro was speaking; the B-26 bomber was driven away by anti-aircraft fire before it could reach the stadium. Under the guidance of William Colby, head of the CIA's Far East Division, the 1960's saw the Agency's programmes in South East Asia rapidly expand. The CIA's "secret" war in Laos was launched; guerrilla raids and bombing operations by the CIA's proprietary company Air America killed tens of thousands of Laotians. And in Vietnam, the notorious Phoenix "counter terror" programme was begun. Wayne Cooper, a Foreign Service Officer, reported: "CIA representatives recruited, organised, supplied and directly paid teams whose function was to use techniques of terror - assassination, kidnappings and intimidation against the Viet Cong leadership." William Colby also supervised the establishment of a network of Provincial Interrogation Centres in each of south Vietnam's 44 provinces, mainly for the use of torture tactics against suspected Vietcong.
"If you want good information, you'd better get good results." WILLIAM COLBY A former US military intelligence officer in Vietnam, Barry Osborn, reported: "By late 1968, the Phoenix programme was not serving any legitimate function that I know of, but rather had gone so wrong that it was the vehicle by which we were getting into a bad genocide programme." Osborn testified before a House Committee that suspects caught by Phoenix were interrogated in helicopters and sometimes pushed out. He also spoke of the use of electric shock torture. Jeff Stein, a senior CIA agent, stated: "I learned of the insertion of a six-inch dowel into the circular canal of one of my detainee's ears and the tapping through to the brain until the person died; the starving to death of a Vietnamese woman suspected of being part of the local education cabinet& . Atrocities are normal; atrocities are taught to us as being normal." Stein also stated: "I would send in a report which would say, one person who was suspected of being VC, unconfirmed, uncorroborated, should be at this point, co-ordinate, at this time on this day, and I would find out later that a B-52 strike had hit that spot at that time and wiped out the whole village."

The Bombed Ruins of Hongai, Vietnam 1975

Child Burned by U.S. Napalm, Vietnam 1966

Frank Snepp, another senior CIA agent, reported: "I would put together a list and I would turn it over to Mr Colby's people. He would feed this list out to the strike teams and they would go to work& . The hit teams became impatient and they decided to take the law as such into their own hands. And instead of bringing the sources in, they began killing them piece-meal. I looked at a list of the Phoenix programme's latest casualty count and I discovered it ran about 20,000 killed. And that is how you became a collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programmes, in the most atrocious excesses of the U.S. government." US Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was reported to have said that while he was in Vietnam, the CIA told him that the Agency disguised people as Vietcong to commit atrocities, including murder and rape, so as to discredit the Communists. In 1975 a Senate committee investigating the CIA's secret operations in Vietnam reported: "Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying towards Saigon. The first refused to answer all questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he too was thrown out& . Other techniques usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk involved cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner." According to William Colby's own testimony before a congressional committee in 1971, 20,587 suspected Viet Cong were killed under the Phoenix programme in its first twoand-a-half years. The South Vietnamese government credited Phoenix with 40,994 deaths. Colby, the architect of the murder programme, said: "I was not able to say that no-one had been wrongly killed& . But the purpose and the effect of the Phoenix programme was to bring decency and intelligence to our side of the battle." Two years later, Colby became Director of the CIA.

Howard Hunt, a security consultant at the White House, on trial for burglary at the democratic Party National Committee Headquarters in Watergate. Questioned about his forgery of a State department cable directly linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Hunt told the federal prosecutor "I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing . Floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing."

During later congressional hearings into the activities of the CIA, William Colby meticulously detailed decades of assassinations, destabilisation campaigns and domestic surveillance in the U.S. itself, going so far as to bring along dart guns, vials of snake poison and other Company hardware as exhibits. George Bush replaced Colby as CIA Director in early 1976 and the year-long House investigation of the CIA under Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church was wound down. In terms of reform or control of the CIA's covert operations, those investigations produced little more than the establishment of intelligence oversight committees in both chambers and recommendations for future legislation. However, a couple of weeks after the House of representatives voted to allow the White House to censor the Pike Committee's report, it was leaked to the Village Voice. It was sensational, with details of CIA intervention in foreign elections, paramilitary operations and black propaganda. Stung by these exposures, President Ford established by Executive Order new charters and duties, hyping it all as "reform" of the CIA, when in fact he made legal many activities considered to be abuses in the past. The only restriction on covert operations in other countries was a prohibition of political assassinations. For nearly every other apparent restriction, exceptions were provided. The only legislation that Ford asked Congress for, was for laws making it a crime to reveal classified information on intelligence activities.

George Bush's Swearing-in as Director of Central Intelligence, 1976 In 1979, following the deposal of the Shah of Iran's brutal regime, a Dutch television crew discovered a secret torture centre in Tehran, used by the Shah's SAVAK secret police. It was a basement with steel beds that had horizontal wire mesh at different levels. Coal fires were started under the beds and prisoners were strapped to the mesh, then gradually lowered until they were barbecued. The reporters found two severed, charred human hands that the torturers had left behind. The CIA had backed the Shah for decades; the Agency had set up the SAVAK and trained its officers in such practices. That film was never shown in the United States.

CIA agent Philip Agee, who, disillusioned by his years with the Agency, embarked on a campaign to alert the public to the dangers of CIA covert operations world-wide. Agee told a London press conference: "The CIA's promotion of fascism in Chile is no isolated case. It has intervened to destabilise the forces of change and to support traditional ruling elites in other countries where fascism has developed: in Brazil, Indonesia, Uruguay, Greece, South Korea, the Philippines, Iran and Portugal ."

In 1981 William Casey became Director of Central Intelligence. That same year at a press conference, secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of "training, funding and equipping international terrorists." Ronald Spiers, head of the State Department's intelligence branch, told Haig privately that there was no evidence for this; he was referred to a book, The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, an American correspondent in Italy. In it, Sterling had written: "There is massive proof that the Soviet Union . has provided the weapons, training and sanctuary for a world-wide terror network aimed at the destabilisation of western democratic society." Casey ordered his intelligence experts to corroborate this view; when they could find no evidence to support it, he waved Sterling's book at them and barked: "I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." Lincoln Gordon, a senior member of a CIA review panel, later found that Sterling's information was based on part of an old CIA covert propaganda operation. In other words, the CIA's own black lies were now fuelling its present policies. Gordon's report was classified secret. So far as the American public was concerned, the Soviets still stood publicly branded by the Secretary of State as active supporters of terrorism. The record was never corrected.

Ronald Reagan and William Casey; Casey was Reagan's campaign manager during the 1980 presidential campaign.

In June 1982 U.S. Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act into law, criminalising the publication of the names of CIA undercover employees. From then on, any publication or journalist who identified a "covert agent" would suffer criminal penalties, including imprisonment and substantial fines. The offender would be guilty even if the information was unclassified and lawfully obtained and even if the person exposed was engaged in criminal activities. The law covered exposure not only of CIA officers but also of everyone who was working with the Agency. As one paper put it: "This means thousands of CIA-bribed politicians and trade union officials; this encompasses the security police of dozens of countries; this includes kings, sheikhs, presidents, party leaders, dictators and juntas from one end of the third world to the other." The law even made it a crime for a US religious organisation, university or political group to expose a CIA or FBI agent infiltrated for information, manipulation or disruption. In early 1985, William Casey met Saudi Ambassador Prince Bander to set up CIA hit teams to attack terrorists "pre-emptively". Their first target was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fudlallah. The Saudis contributed $3 million to the plan and on March 8th 1985 a car packed with explosives was driven into a Beirut suburb about 50 yards from Fudlallah's high-rise residence. The car exploded, killing 80 people and wounding 200, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who happened to be in the immediate neighbourhood was hurt or killed but Fudlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge "MADE IN USA" banner in front of a blown-out building.

"That guy may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT of the first Somozan dictator in El Salvador "Now that's the kind of anti-Communist we like to see down there." PRESIDENT NIXON on the second Somozan, a person who delighted in such activities as dropping his political opponents from helicopters into the Masayan volcano.

VEIL was the top secret code word for covert operations undertaken during the Reagan administration to influence events abroad. Casey wanted a comprehensive plan of action for Central America. On March 4th 1980, the President signed a top-secret finding calling for propaganda and political and financial support for military officers in El Salvador, the smallest country of the Central American republics. Despite horrendous repression by the US-supported ruling junta, the left-wing opposition rebellion by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was gaining strength. Paramilitary death squads were developed by the CIA to combat the left; over 30,000 people were murdered by these death squads since 1979, including an archbishop and four American church women. CIA surveillance programmes routinely supplied the security agencies with information on, and the whereabouts of, suspects who ended up as death squad victims. Colonel Nicholas Carranza, head of the Treasury Police, who were most responsible for human rights abuses, was for several years a paid CIA employee, receiving about $90,000 a year for five or six years from the CIA.

Victims Shot in the Head by Death Squads, El Salvador

Entire villages were massacred by the Salvadoran death squads. In December 1982, 700 to 1,000 people were killed in the village of El Mozote, mostly the elderly, women and children. People were hacked to death by machetes and many beheaded; a child was thrown in the air and caught on a bayonet; and there was an orgy of rapes of very young girls before they were killed. An officer barked to a reluctant soldier: "If we don't kill the children now, they'll just grow up to be guerrillas." One month later, President Reagan certified to Congress that the El Salvador government was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognised human rights." But the killings went on. For instance, in February 1989, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion - which was believed to have a US trainer assigned to it at all times - attacked a guerrilla field hospital, killing ten people, including five patients, a doctor and a nurse, and raping at least two of the female victims before shooting them. At the notorious School of Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia, (an institution known throughout South and Central America as "Escola des Culpas", the "School of Coups"), senior officers from Latin American countries were taught by the CIA to equate social unrest with communist subversion, and to murder at will. CIA advisers at the School of Americas introduced "scientific methods of torture" to Latin American security forces and also advocated psychological torture to "create despair among groups of potential

or actual activists". They taught how to insert wires into a prisoner's rectum, nipples, ears or genitals, then how to connect them to USAID electrical generators or field telephones and crank them with high voltage. They taught "the permissible levels the human body could withstand" and an instruction manual issued by the Agency taught interrogators how to keep electric shock victims alive and responsive during torture. The School has produced some of the most brutal human rights abusers and dictators in the world. Of the 57,000 who have been trained there, notable graduates include Haitian police chief Joseph-Michel Francois, Panama's Manuel Noriega, Argentina's General Galtieri and Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. The UN Truth Commission Report on El Salvador released in 1993 found that of the 27 officers involved in the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, 19 were graduates of SOA training programmes. Roberto D'Aubuisson once told three European reporters: "You Germans are very intelligent. You realised that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them." A former member of the Salvadoran National Guard later testified: "I belonged to a squad of twelve. We devoted ourselves to torture, and to finding people whom we were told were guerrillas. I was trained in Panama for nine months by the United states for antiguerrilla warfare. Part of the time we were instructed about torture."

A 1994 protest at Washington, demanding that the multi-million dollar budget School of Americas be shut down.

"I have been to that country and I know about the morticians who travel the streets each morning to collect the bodies of those summarily dispatched the night before by Salvadoran security forces - gangland style - the victim of bended knee, thumbs wired behind the back, a bullet through the brain. We recoil at such an image for our association with criminals." - SENATOR CHRISTOPHER DODD, in a speech to Congress "So obsessed is the Reagan administration that it has not hesitated to twist through redefinition the meaning of human rights in order to downgrade the most basic right of all - the right of life. Its acquiescence in patterns of torture, murder and other forms of state terrorism comes

close to condoning the kind of crimes against humanity condemned at the Nuremberg war crimes trial." CHARLES MAECHLING

The list of CIA activities and agents around the world is virtually endless. In 1977 it was publicly disclosed that King Hussein of Jordan had been a paid CIA agent for 20 years. President Hissen Habre of Chad came to power after receiving covert CIA paramilitary assistance. Other CIA agents include Philippine President Marcos, Sudan President Nimeri, Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Pakistani President Mohammed Zia and President Duarte of El Salvador. In Cambodia, Reagan authorised $5 million in aid to the non-communist alliance; this group was dominated by the Khmer Rouge who killed three million Cambodians during its four year rule of genocidal terror from 1975 to 1979. Another $12 million was donated to them by Washington the following year. And the list goes on. Facts cleared by a CIA review panel in the late 1980s stated the following: "The 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations in the CIA's history has helped bring about some six million deaths world-wide. The CIA has overthrown functioning constitutional democracies in over 20 countries and has manipulated elections in dozens of other countries." Washington is prepared to support any group that declares itself anti-Communist and will support them in the use of terror, repression and mass murder. Embedded in the CIA's clandestine mentality is the belief that human ethics and social laws have no bearing on them, that because of their "national security" goals they are free from all moral restrictions and can act wholly independently of public accountability. The feeling is strong among the top officials in the CIA and elsewhere that America is somehow responsible for what happens in other countries and that it has an inherent right (a sort of modern Manifest Destiny) to intervene in other countries' internal affairs. In short, the CIA - and the people that guide it - is the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the world. "The CIA is nothing more than the secret police of American capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of US companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip off. The interests of the privileged minorities in poor countries lead back to, and are identified with, the interests of the rich and powerful who control the US& . US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people - certainly not the security of the poor, except by way of reinforcing poverty. It is from the class interests in the US that our counter-insurgency programmes flow, together with that more fundamental of American foreign policy principles; that any government, no matter how bad, is better than a communist one - than a government of workers, peasants and ordinary people. Our government's support for corruption and injustice in Latin America flows directly from the determination of the rich and powerful in the US to retain and expand

these riches and power& . Reforms of the FBI and CIA, even removal of the President from office cannot remove the problem. American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. The argument is with capitalism and it is capitalism that must be opposed, with its CIA, FBI and other security agencies understood as logical, necessary manifestations of a ruling class' determination to retain power and privilege. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as in the international order. It's harder now not to realise that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognise that, like it or not, we contribute day in and day out to the one side or the other." PHILP AGEE, ex-CIA agent
As the following links show, the "democracies" of America's supposed allies, such as Europe and Australia, are just as vulnerable to infiltration, manipulation and subversion by the Agency as any Central American or Eastern Bloc country. These activities show that not only has the CIA consistently broken the rules of its own charter, it has also dragged the entire United States into transgressions against the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Genocidal Convention and the Nuremberg Tribunal Principles - all international agreements signed by the United States. Not for nothing did ex-CIA agent John Stockwell state: "The CIA poses the ultimate threat to democracy and should be dismantled for the good of the United States and the world."

The Nazi holocaust may be permanently etched in the conscience of the West with numerous museums, histories, remembrance ceremonies, memorial sculptures, documentaries, novels, movies and television series. But the holocausts created by the CIA - which have killed many more millions of people throughout the world - remain largely veiled from the world's consciousness and from public debate. In the words of American journalist William Blum, "Who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant?. What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank?" We should all be aware that we cannot understand history, we cannot understand the world and our current place in it, without knowing how the CIA has controlled, manipulated and affected virtually every single country throughout the second half of this century. And it is crucial that we understand the Agency's methods if we are to prevent further manipulation and atrocities.
"All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." Article Two, Paragraph Four, of the United Nations Charter

"We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation." State Department official GEORGE KENNAN "It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach. Many of the programmes which were conducted as covert operations can now be conducted quite openly, and consequently without controversy." WILLIAM COLBY, ex-CIA Director

"I don't see why we should have to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people." - HENRY KISSINGER, US Secretary of State, on Chile, 1970

When the socialist Salvador Allende came within 3% of winning the Chilean presidency in 1958, the United States decided to take action to prevent Allende winning the next election in 1964. Allende had run on a broad leftish programme calling for a more equitable distribution of Chile's wealth to help tackle the widespread poverty in the country. He planned to nationalise the copper mines and institute a programme of reforms to improve conditions for the country's workers and peasants. This was seen as a dangerous threat to American multinational interests. From the outset of the Kennedy administration in 1961, committees were set up in Washington and Santiago, composed of top-level officials and CIA people determined to undermine the Chilean elections. One intelligence officer strategically placed at the time commented: "US government intervention in Chile in 1964 was blatant and almost obscene. We were shipping people off right and left, mainly State Dept. but also CIA, with all sorts of covers." As many as 100 American operatives were assigned to the operation. A Senate investigating committee disclosed that the CIA's campaign began "by establishing operational relationships with key political parties and by creating propaganda and organisational mechanisms capable of influencing key sectors of the population." Projects were undertaken "to help train and organise 'anti-Communists' among peasants, slum dwellers, organised labor, students, the media, etc." The CIA channelled tens of millions of dollars to fund several non-leftist parties before settling on the Christian Democratic Party led by Eduardo Frei, as the party most likely to block Allende's rise to power. The Agency funded more than half of Frei's total campaign costs, an estimated $20 million (much more per voter than that spent by the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns combined in the same year in the United States). The CIA mounted a massive anti-Communist propaganda campaign making extensive use of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, direct mailings, paper streamers and wall paintings. The Agency founded and/or subsidised entire magazines, right-wing weekly newspapers and wire services. The scare campaign focused heavily on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the anti-Communist pastoral letter of Pope Pius XI were distributed. Disinformation and black propaganda (purporting to originate from the communists) were used as well. During a single week of the campaign, one CIA-funded propaganda group produced twenty radio spots per day in Santiago and on 44 provincial stations, twelve-minute news broadcasts five times a day on three Santiago stations and 24 provincial outlets, and 3,000 posters were distributed daily, together with thousands of cartoons and a great deal of paid press advertising. One radio spot featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman's cry: "They have killed my child - the Communists." The announcer then added: "Communism offers only blood and pain. For this not to happen in Chile, we must elect Eduardo Frei president." The operation worked beyond the CIA's expectations. Frei received 56% of the vote to Allende's 39%. The Agency regarded its anti-Communist scare campaign in Chile as "the most effective activity undertaken." When the 1970 Chilean elections approached, Nixon made it clear that a Chilean government formed by Allende's coalition of Popular Unity would be unacceptable to America and a similar propaganda campaign was launched by the CIA. The Agency prepared a series of propaganda articles to sow discontent about Allende. An anti-Allende newsletter was mailed to 2,000 Chilean journalists warning of catastrophes to come should he win. The Agency financed the hiring of sign-painting teams that covered some 2,000 walls depicting firing squads if Allende got into office. CIA-dictated editorials and news reports in many Chilean newspapers all regularly assailed Allende. A Senate report later stated that in the course of a six week period, "726 articles, broadcasts, editorials and similar items in the Cuban media resulted from CIA activity." Black propaganda was employed to sow dissent between the Communist

Party and the Socialist Party (the main members of the coalition). Nonetheless, on September 4th, Allende won a plurality of the votes. On 24th October, the Chilean Congress would meet to choose between Allende and the runner-up, Jorge Alessandri of the conservative National Party. By tradition, Allende was certain to become president. The United States had seven weeks to prevent him from taking office. A furious President Nixon met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon ordered Helms to "make the economy scream" and said that he would authorise "$10 million, more if necessary", to pay for whatever was needed to smash Allende. Helms' hand-written notes of the meeting have become famous: "One in ten chance perhaps, but save Chile!" and "Not concerned with risks involved." Nixon and Kissinger even made it clear to the CIA that an assassination of Allende would not be unwelcome and one White House options-paper discussed various ways this could be carried out. Funds were authorised to bribe Chilean congressmen to vote for Alessandri, but this was soon abandoned as unfeasible. American efforts were then concentrated on inducing the Chilean military to stage a coup and then cancel the congressional vote altogether. The CIA undertaking, first known as Track l and then Track II, included everything from the murder of generals and civilians to sabotage of the economy. A fresh propaganda campaign was launched to impress upon the Chilean military, amongst others, the catastrophe that would befall the country should Allende take office. Horror stories were planted that everything down to small shops would be nationalised, and that there would be economic collapse. In private, the CIA warned Chilean military officers that American military aid would come to a halt if Allende were seated. The CIA was in active consultation with Chilean military officers who were receptive to the idea of a coup, and assured them that the United States would give them full support short of direct military involvement. The immediate obstacle was the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Rene Schneider, who insisted that the constitutional process be followed. He had to be removed. In the early hours of October 22nd, the CIA passed machine guns, ammunition and tear gas to the conspirators. That same day, Schneider was mortally wounded in an attempted kidnap. However, the assassination only served to rally the army around the flag of constitutionalism and two days later, Salvador Allende was confirmed by the Chilean Congress. On November 3rd, he took office as president. Shortly before Allende's confirmation, American Ambassador Edward Korry warned: "Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende." The U.S. vetoed bank loans and credits for foreign debts, and blocked the import of food-stuffs and spare parts for machinery and transport equipment. Buses were put out of commission and a third of Chile's transport system was paralysed. Export-Import Bank credits, which had totalled $234 million in 1967 fell to zero in 1971. A major financial panic ensued. Heavily dependent on trade with the United States, the effects on the Chilean economy were devastating. The boycott led to serious difficulties in Chile's copper, steel, electricity and petroleum industries due to a lack of replacement parts. American suppliers refused to sell needed parts, despite Chile's offer to pay cash in advance. There were shortages of foodstuffs, toilet paper, soap and many other essential items. CIA agents organised a strike of private truck owners aimed at disrupting the flow of food and other important commodities. The Agency's propaganda merchants had a field day with newspaper headlines proclaiming "Economic chaos! Chile on brink of doom!" and exacerbating the food shortages by encouraging panic buying. CIA-supported newspapers alleged communist plots to disband or destroy the armed services, and told of Soviet and North Korean plans to establish bases in Chile. Textile mills were set ablaze, industrial plants bombed and mining machinery sabotaged. In May 1972 the Chilean embassy in Washington was burgled by some of the same men who the following month staged the Watergate break-in. William Broe, chief of the Western Division of the CIA's Clandestine Services, met several times with officials of ITT (the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) and other U.S. corporations with substantial financial interests in Chile. Broe proposed to them a four-part plan of economic disruption to weaken the Chilean government to the point where the Chilean military would move to take over the government. A 1970 ITT memorandum stated: "A more realistic hope among those who want to block Allende is that a swiftly-deteriorating economy will touch off a wave of violence leading to a military coup." Three years after Allende's election, this was indeed what happened. Allende's government was ousted in

a bloody coup d'etat by the CIA-backed forces in the army and replaced by a military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. Under the new junta, thousands of Allende's supporters and leftish suspects were rounded up in the national football stadium at Santiago and tortured; bodies piled up in the streets and floated in the river, and the country was beset by disappearances, executions and vicious political repression.

"We find ourselves faced with forces which operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, posted in the various places of influence... From the very day of our electoral triumph on September 4th 1970, we have felt the effects of a large scale external pressure against us which tried to prevent the inauguration of a government freely elected by the people, and has attempted to bring it down ever since, an action that has tried to cut us off from the world, to strangle our economy and paralyse trade in our principle export, copper, and to deprive us of access to sources of international financing . We are the victims of virtually imperceptible activities, usually disguised with words and statements that extol the sovereignty and dignity of my country. We know in our own hearts however the distance that separates these words from the specific activities that we have to face." - PRESIDENT ALLENDE, addressing the United Nations, December 4th 1972. Allende was murdered on September 11th 1973 by American-backed forces. All CIA stations in Latin America have a common programme, the so-called Subversive Control Watch List, a file on the CIA's most important political enemies, with details about their lives and movements so that they could be found and arrested quickly. The Agency gave this information to the Chilean military at the time of the coup, and this was responsible for many of the immediate arrests, tortures and summary executions. Altogether, hundreds of thousands of suspected opponents of the military regime were jailed and tortured, and an estimated 35,000 people "disappeared".

The Junta Storm La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, Santiago.

The military dictatorship takes over: General Pinochet (seated, left) with other members of the junta in Santiago

Cathedral soon after the coup. CIA director William Colby later admitted in secret testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the CIA had "penetrated" all of Chile's major political parties, that it had secretly furnished "some assistance" to certain Chilean groups and that the executions carried out by the junta after the coup had "done some good". In 1972 at a University lecture, ex-CIA director Helms was asked by a student if the Agency had intervened in the 1970 Chilean election. He replied, "Why should you, care? Your side won". State Department officials testifying before Congress explained that it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism in general.

Santiago National Stadium, Where Thousands of Pro-Allende Suspects were Tortured and Executed.

Aping the Nazis, Junta Soldiers Began "Purifying" Chilean Culture Through Book-Burning Sprees.

The United Nation's General Assembly, with substantial majorities, consistently denounced the military junta in Chile for it's "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of its people", for its violations of human rights, its torture practices and the unexplained deaths of political prisoners. The U.S. consistently voted against these condemnations - the only major power to do so. A year after the coup, President Gerald Ford declared that what the United States had done in Chile "was in the best interest of the people in Chile and certainly in our own best interest." In July 1981 the U.S. voted for a $161 million loan package to Pinochet's dictatorship; in a two year period the International Monetary Fund and the Inter American Development Fund lent Chile over a billion dollars. The U.S. also sent gifts to Pinochet and received Mrs Pinochet for tea at the White House, while banning Hortensia Allende (widow of the last democratically elected President of Chile) from visiting the United States to give a speech on human rights abuses in her country.

Some 35,000 people "Disappeared" in the First Few Years of the Coup.

Q: "Mr President, have you approved of covert activity to destabilise the present government of Nicaragua?" A: "Well no, we're supporting them, the - oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I'm sorry, I was thinking of El Salvador because of the previous, when you said Nicaragua. Here again, this is something upon which the national security interests, I just - I will not comment." President Reagan's press conference, Washington, February 13th 1983 In 1936 the dictator Anastasio Somoza took over the presidency of Nicaragua, and with the help of his brutal National Guards, he established a family dynasty that ruled over the country like a fiefdom for the next 43 years. The National Guards, consistently maintained by the United States, were responsible for rape, torture, murder of Somoza's political opponents, the massacre of thousands of peasants, robbery, extortion, and drug smuggling, while the Somozan clan helped themselves to Nicaragua's land and businesses.. However on July 19th 1979, a popular uprising by the revolutionary Sandinista Party (FSLN) overthrew Somoza, who fled into exile. Somoza left behind a country with widespread poverty and illiteracy. Two-thirds of the country's population earned less than $300 a year., while Somoza's personal wealth was placed by a U.S. intelligence report at $900 million.

After weeks of bloody civil war, FSLN forces march triumphantly into the Nicaraguan capital Managua.

During the conflict, deposed dictator Somoza's National Guard had been responsible for many atrocities such as the machine-gunning of this couple's two teenage sons.

Another victim of Somoza's death squads.

The Sandinistas set about reversing Somoza's devastation of the country and began a programme of land reform, social justice, and redistribution of wealth and income. Just as in Chile however, this was seen as totally unacceptable by the United States. President Carter signed a top secret finding authorising the CIA to provide political support to opponents of the Sandinistas. The CIA ran antigovernment propaganda in the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, while pirate radio stations operating from Honduras and Costa Rica attacked the Sandinistas as "Marxist" and "atheists" bent on suppressing religion in the overwhelmingly Catholic country.

FSLN Commandante Jaime Wheelock distributing land titles as part of the agrarian reform programme's distribution of land to poor peasants.

Paramilitary bands, aided by the CIA front organisation American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), began armed attacks in the north, singling out volunteers in the health and literacy programmes to murder. In January 1981 Ronald Reagan took office under a Republican platform which asserted that "it deplores the Marxist Sandinista take-over of Nicaragua" and he greatly expanded the CIA's guerrilla warfare and sabotage campaigns. In November 1981 Reagan authorised a covert plan for $19 million to help the Argentina dictatorship train a guerrilla force operating from camps in Honduras to attack Nicaragua. Former members of Somoza's National Guards (who had fled to Honduras when the Somozan regime was toppled) and other war criminals formed the basis of this force, which became known as the contras. By the autumn of 1983, 12,000 to 16,000 contra troops of the so-called FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) were operating along the Honduran border. Smaller contra forces operated from bases in Costa Rica. They staged hit and run raids against rural towns and co-operatives in Nicaragua, before returning to their bases across the border. The CIA had no illusions about the contras' ability to overthrow the FSLN; in two years of operations, they failed to take and hold even a small village. The aim of the contras was to use terrorist tactics to stop Nicaraguan development projects in all areas: economic, education, health services and political organisations.

The contras blew up bridges, civilian power plants and schools, they burned fields of crops and attacked hospitals. Their tactics included rape, kidnappings of peasants and civilians, ambushes and massacres against small rural communities, farms, cooperatives, schools and health clinics. Contra raids caused extensive damage to crop fields, grain silos, irrigation projects, farm houses and machinery. Numerous state farms and co-operatives were incapacitated; other farms still intact were abandoned because of the danger. Witness For Peace, an American Protestant watchdog body, collected a list of contra atrocities in one year, which included murder, the rape of two girls in their homes, torture of men, maiming of children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, amputating the genitals of people of both sexes, gouging out eyes, scraping the skin off the face, pouring acid on the face, breaking the toes and fingers of an 18 year old boy, and summary executions. These were the people Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our founding fathers." One survivor of a contra raid in Jinotega province, which borders Honduras, reported: "Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off and their eyes poked out. They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit." The human rights organisation Americas watch, concluded that "the contras systematically engage in violent abuses. so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war." There was also a CIA plan to split Nicaragua in half, east and west, with the contras taking the east side and the Sandinistas left with the capital Managua and the west side. Horrified at this picture of outright war, the Senate Committee introduced the Boland Amendment, prohibiting the use of tactics "for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua." However, in defiance of this, the CIA's contra operations continued. By 1983 the Agency's support for the contras had risen to $24 million.

School and Lorries Destroyed by Contra Bombing Raids. The Reagan administration imposed a total trade embargo on Nicaragua, together with additional economic sanctions. This was designed to force the Sandinistas to divert resources from development projects to defence, and to disrupt their economy to such an extent that the government could not deliver its promises of a better life for the poor, and thus be discredited. Washington hoped that the people would

eventually tire of the war and turn against the FSLN. Nicaragua was excluded from US programmes which promoted American investment and trade, sugar imports from Nicaragua were slashed by 90% and Washington pressured the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Common Market to withhold loans to Nicaragua. Another strategy of Reagan's was to force the FSLN to take action against the increasingly antiSandinistan sentiments of Agency-backed right-wing papers such as La Prensa, CIA-sponsored trade unions and right-wing sectors of the Catholic Church; each restriction would then be used in the international propaganda campaign to "prove" that the Nicaraguan government was becoming every more "totalitarian". Cardinal Miguel Obando and the Catholic Church in Nicaragua received hundreds of thousands of dollars in covert aid from the CIA until 1985 (and then, after official U.S. aid was stopped by Congressional oversight committees, from Oliver North's covert money laundering operations). One use that Obando put the money was "religious instruction to thwart the Marxist-Leninist policies of the Sandinistas."

Demonstration in support of leftwing clergy in the revolutionary government of Nicaragua, after the Pope had called on these clergy to either give up their political posts or the priesthood.

In September 1983 a contra bombing raid on a civilian airport narrowly missed killing two U.S. Senators on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua. The contents of a briefcase recovered from the wreckage were recognised by the senators as an authentic CIA contract for the operation. The pilot had the name and phone number of a CIA operator from the U S. embassy in Costa Rica in his pocket. On October 11th 1983, CIA-trained speedboat teams conducted a pre-dawn raid against the Nicaraguan fuel storage depots at the port of Corinto; five storage tanks were blown up. Three days later, another major Nicaraguan offshore petroleum unloading facility, Puerto Sandino, was struck. A pipeline inside Nicaragua was sabotaged and U.S. corporations such as Exxon informed the Nicaraguan government that they would no longer supply tankers for crude oil transportation to Nicaragua from Mexico, the country's leading supplier; at this point, Nicaragua had a ten-day supply of oil. Press reports revealed that the sabotage teams, known in the CIA as UCLAs (Unilaterally Controlled Latin Assets) operated under direct CIA-supervision, carrying out operations for which the FDN contras would later claim credit. The next stage was the mining of Nicaragua's harbours in 1984. The CIA directly carried out the placing of underwater 300 lb. mines of C4 explosive in three harbours; several ships were hit (including British and French vessels) and seamen and fishermen were wounded and killed. Nicaragua's fishing industry was devastated by mines and attacks, as well as from lack of fuel for its boats and spare parts due to the U.S. blockade. The country lost millions of dollars from reduced shrimp exports.

The vital oil facilities at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto were attacked by covert CIA squads, leading to a fuel shortage.

In April 1984 the CIA's role in the mining of Nicaragua's harbours was publicly disclosed and Congress refused to authorise another $21 million for the contras. The World Court declared the American mining illegal but the U.S. government chose to flout the law and continued the mining. The government of Saudi Arabia secretly arranged with the CIA to fund the contras at the rate of $1 million a month. This money was laundered via a bank account in the Cayman Islands (under the name of Lt. Colonel Oliver North) to a Swiss Bank account, and thence to the contras. Israel, South Korea and Taiwan also supplied money via the CIA to the contras, as well as right wing private organisations and individuals such as My Ling Sun Moon, Korean leader of the Unification Church. By the mid-1980s, Reagan's dirty war against Nicaragua had caused 14,000 casualties. Apart from soldiers and civilian militia defending the government, those injured by the contra attacks included teachers, health workers, local government officials, technicians, school-children, church workers, peasants and other innocent civilians. The number of children and adolescents killed exceeded 3,000 and more than 6,000 children had been turned into war orphans. The Nicaraguan government announced in November 1984 that since 1981 the contras had assassinated 910 state officials. In just over four years, the CIA-backed mercenaries had attacked nearly 100 civilian communities and caused the displacement of over 150,000 people from their homes and farms. Bridges, port facilities, granaries, water and oil deposits, electrical power stations, telephone lines, saw mills, health centres, schools and dams were all destroyed or damaged. In October 1984 the Associated Press disclosed a 90 page guerrilla-warfare training manual called "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare", which was authenticated by the House Intelligence Committee as a CIA-produced manual for the contras. The manual gave advice on political assassinations, blackmailing, mob violence, kidnappings and blowing up public buildings. It advised the use of "shock troops" in anti-government demonstrations "armed with clubs, iron rods and placards, and if possible, small firearms, which they shall carry hidden", together with "knives, razors, chains, clubs and bludgeons". Under the heading "Selective Use of Violence", the manual advised the contras to "neutralise carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police or state security officials, etc." The manual also urged the contras to "kidnap all officials or agents of the Sandinista government." The manual called for "implicit terror" and stated: "If possible, professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective jobs". In Congress, the question was raised to Reagan, "Is this not, in effect, our own state-sponsored terrorism?" CIA chief William Casey wrote a personal letter to each member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, stating that the manual was intended to moderate behaviour. Meanwhile, it was confirmed to congressional intelligence committees by the CIA and other witnesses that the contras indeed "raped, tortured and killed unarmed civilians, including children" and that "groups of civilians,

including women and children, were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded". After Congress again cut funding of the contras, the Saudis doubled their secret contributions to $2 million a month. Oliver North informed Casey that American hostages held in Beirut "can be bribed free for $1 million apiece"; a down-payment of $200,000 was made to North's contacts in Iran, followed by two shipments of U.S. TOW missiles to Iran. North wrote that $12 million of the $15 million expected to be paid by Iran for the arms could be "set aside for the contras". When news of the arms-for-hostages scandal became public, Reagan went on TV to announce: "We did not - repeat did not - trade weapons or anything else for hostages. Nor will we." But the war against Nicaragua continued. Reagan circumvented the ban on military aid to the contras by authorising "intelligence advice" of $13 million and "humanitarian aid" of $27 million to them, and in October 1986 Congress authorised another $100 million of aid for the contras. The United States's devastation of the frail Nicaraguan economy eventually resulted in the Sandinistas narrowly losing the country's second election. Exhausted and impoverished by ten long years of the war, people wanted the U.S. blockade lifted and Washington off their backs. Many queued to receive their $40 each for voting for the U.S.-favoured candidate Violetta Chamorra - an irresistible bribe if you have an annual income of less than $200. President George Bush called the result "a victory for democracy." U.S. State department official Elliott Abrams declared: "When history is written, the contras will be folk heroes." Today the United States stands condemned by the World Court of Justice at The Hague for the "unlawful use of force" against another, sovereign, state, Nicaragua. The World Court ruled that "the United States of America, by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted... in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another state." Afterwards, critics of the United States' policy in Nicaragua called it a "blueprint" for successful U.S. intervention in the Third World. A Pentagon analyst agreed: "It's going right into the textbooks." More information on the contras' covert funding by the CIA and their drug-running activities can be found in: DEALING IN DEATH: The CIA and the Drugs Trade

"They are trained, for example, to confront disorders and student demonstrations, to prepare dossiers, to make the best possible use of bank data and tax returns of individual citizens, etc. In other words, to watch over the population of their country with the means offered by technology. This is what I call techno-fascism." - Ex-CIA officer VICTOR MARCHETTI on the training provided by the Agency to the Italian security services, 1974.

While most people can accept the fact that the CIA has intervened covertly in the domestic affairs of Third World, Soviet and Central American states, many may not realise the extent of the Agency's same tactics of infiltration, sabotage and terrorism against its supposed allies in the West. In fact Western Europe has been the theatre of CIA undertakings of major proportions, designed to create the false idea of a "Soviet threat", to win the hearts and minds of liberals, social democrats and assorted socialists and steer them in an anti-Communist direction, and to manipulate the political path of every European country. THE PROPAGANDA WAR
"We "had" at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time." - a CIA admission in 1977, referring to European papers owned outright or infiltrated sufficiently by the Agency to print stories which were useful to the CIA or to suppress those it considered detrimental.

During World War II, many European labour leaders had been rescued from the Nazis with the aid of funds raised by American trade unions. This brought them closely in touch with American military intelligence, in particular the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), whose chief in Switzerland and Germany was Allen Dulles, later to become the first head of the CIA. The principal union leader in these secret operations was Jay Lovestone, who had switched from being the leader of the American Communist Party to secretly working for U.S. intelligence.

As the Allied armies advanced across Europe, Lovestone's men followed as political commissars, trying to make sure that the liberated workers were provided with trade union and political leaders acceptable to Washington. In France, Germany, Italy and Austria, the commissars provided lavish financial and material support for moderate socialists who would draw the sting from left-wing political movements, and the beneficiaries of this assistance survive in European politics to this day. The CIA set up dozens of American foundations, charitable trusts and the like as conduits for payments to all manner of organisations, which in turn funded other groups, all working covertly for an anti-Communist propaganda campaign. So numerous were the organisations involved, and so many were their interconnections and overlaps, that it is unlikely that the full picture of their activities will be revealed. The principal front organisation set up by the CIA in this period was the Congress For Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose purpose was to "defend freedom and democracy against the new tyranny sweeping the world." Given massive CIA funding, the CCF was

soon launching political seminars, conferences , newspapers and periodicals, news services, student exchanges and a wide range of political and cultural activities throughout Western Europe, as well as India, Australia, Japan, Africa, and elsewhere. The CCF set up Forum World Features, a news agency based in London, which sold weekly packets of features stories to newspapers all over the world. At its peak, Forum supplied over 250 newspapers world-wide, including The Guardian and The Sunday Times in Britain. The CIA used it as a conduit for U.S. propaganda and also as a cover to send undercover agents almost anywhere as "journalists." According to one of Forum's leading writers, by 1967 it had become "the principal CIA media effort in the world" - quite an achievement considering that in its heyday the CIA was devoting a reported 29% of its budget to media and propaganda. Another important beneficiary of CIA funding was the West German press baron Axel Springer, who was secretly channelled about $7 million in the early 1950s to help build up his vast media empire. Until he died in 1985, Springer was the head of the largest publishing conglomerate in Western Europe, spreading pro-Western and anti-Communist propaganda to an unprecedented degree. His relationship with the CIA reportedly continued until at least the early 1970s. The magazines and journals produced by Forum World Features appealed to the nonMarxist left throughout Europe. They promoted the concepts of a strong, well-armed and united Western Europe, allied to the United States as a bulwark against the insidious threat of the Soviet bloc; support for the Common Market and NATO; and scepticism of disarmament and pacifism. The head of the CIA's International Organisations Division, Tom Braden, later wrote that it was a policy of the Forum magazines to protect their credibility by "not supporting every aspect of official American policy." They generally eschewed the class struggle and excessive nationalisation of industry, and advocated the idea of a reformed capitalism, a capitalism with a human face. (This is the ideology espoused today by European social democratic leaders such as Tony Blair and Helmut Kohl). In 1960, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other elements of the British Labour Party's left wing succeeded in passing a resolution at the party's conference supporting a policy of complete, unilateral, disarmament. Although the Labour Party was not in power at the time, the turn of events was viewed with some anxiety by Washington. The right wing of the Labour Party, which had intimate connections to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with CIA-funded magazines such as Encounter and New Leader and other Agency fronts, undertook a campaign to reverse Labour's commitment to disarmament. Over the following year, the CIA provided funds for a permanent office, a full-time paid chairman and paid staff, field workers, travelling expenses, tons of literature sent to a large mailing list within the Labour movement and a regular free bulletin. Their opponents could not come close to matching this propaganda blitz. At the 1961 conference, the unilateralist decision was decisively overturned and the Labour Party returned to the NATO fold, where it has remained ever since. The CIA had similar working/financial relationships with leading members of the West German Social Democratic Party, two parties in Austria, the Christian Democrats of Italy, the Liberal

Party (in addition to the Labour Party) in Britain, and probably at least one party in every other Western European country. THE PARAMILITARY WAR Soon after the end of World war II, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, worked out a plan to build secret anti-Communist guerrilla forces across Europe. Dulles, Sir Stewart Menzies (boss of Britain's Secret Intelligence Services, SIS - later known as MI6) and the Belgian Premier Paul-Henri Spaak, secretly formed Operation "Stay Behind" under the umbrella of the Clandestine Co-ordinating Committee at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which became NATO in 1949. The supposed purpose of Operation Stay Behind was to defend against a Soviet invasion; however the real purpose was "to destabilise any left-leaning government, even a social democratic one" and to prevent the left from coming to power anywhere in Europe The most willing and experienced people they found to aid in this endeavour were ex-Nazis, fascists and collaborators. Highly trained and fervent anti-Communists, these were the cadres of Stay Behind. During the 1950s and 60s in Italy, the CIA gave millions of dollars to support many activities promoted by the Catholic Church, such as orphanages and missions. The thinking was that if such institutions were adequately supported, many young people would be able to live well there and so would not one day take up Communist ideology. The money went to a great number of bishops and monsignors. One in particular, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was heavily involved in a joint operation between the CIA and the Vatican to smuggle Nazis to freedom after World War II. Montini had a long history of association with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. In 1963 he became Pope Paul VI.

U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps Document Detailing Plans to Recruit Members of the SS. Britain took responsibility for Operation Stay Behind in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, and Norway. America took responsibility for Sweden, Finland and the rest of Europe. The operation varied from country to country. In Italy and France, which both had very strong Communist parties, the objective was to disrupt them from within and "cause acts of terror which would increase popular demands for restrictive

measures and benefit right wing conservative parties." In 1949 in Italy, British intelligence assisted U.S. intelligence in setting up a 12,000 strong secret military unit code-named Gladio (Italian for "sword"). Similar secret armies in other countries were created by the CIA and European intelligence services as part of Operation Gladio. Far from being a defence force against possible Soviet invasion, Gladio was used exclusively to inflict damage upon domestic leftist movements throughout Europe. In Italy in the 1960s, there was a marked increase in social and economic dissatisfaction and the left were growing in popularity. Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA, revealed that in the 1950s and 60s the Agency spent some $10 to $30 million a year to finance its covert programmes in Italy. The CIA itself admitted that between 1948 and 1968 it paid a total of $65 million to anti-Communist political parties, labour groups and a wide variety of other organisations in Italy. It also spent an undisclosed amount on propaganda, magazine and book publishers and other means of news and opinion manipulation, such as planting news items in non-American media around the world which cast unfavourable light on Communism, then arranged for these stories to be reprinted in friendly Italian publications. In 1963 the ruling Christian Democratic Party led by Aldo Moro entered into a coalition with the Socialist Party (PSI) to form a government. Washington was worried about where such a coalition would lead. In a posthumous memoir published in 2000, the Italian wartime resistance hero Count Edgardo Sogno described his visit to the CIA station chief in Rome in July 1974 to inform him of his plans for an anticommunist coup. "I asked him what the attitude of the American government would be. He answered what I already knew: the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government."

General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of SID, the Italian military counter-intelligence service, revealed to a Milan court in March 2001 that US intelligence services had instigated and abetted rightwing terrorism in Italy during the 1970s. For instance, General Maletti's men had discovered that a right wing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany with the help of US intelligence. Maletti told the court, "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and for this purpose, it made use of rightwing terrorism. I believe this is what happened in other countries as well." Maletti gave evidence of the CIA's involvement in the bombing of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana, an atrocity that inaugurated the "strategy of tension", a series of bombings intended to shift the country's political centre of gravity to the right. In 1973, four members of the public were killed and 45 injured when an anarchist, Gianfranco Bertoli, hurled a grenade into a crowd outside police headquarters in Milan. It was later revealed that Bertoli was really a right-winger and a long-standing SID informant codenamed Negro. General Maletti's men were warned in advance of the attack but took no action to prevent it and failed to pass on their information about Bertoli, even after the killings.

"The Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence." - GENERAL GIANADELIO MALETTI, head of Italian counter-intelligence 1971-1975
Under the guise of "left wing insurgency", Operation Gladio embarked on a reign of terrorist bombings across the country that left at least 300 dead. The bombings were blamed on the extreme left as part of a strategy to mould public opinion to the idea of an alternative government taking power by force. The Gladio personnel created a parallel government called P2 (Propaganda Duo), a neo-fascist Masonic Lodge composed of most of the country's top military officers, political leaders, industrialists, bankers, and diplomats. P2 had close connections with the CIA and carried out drug smuggling missions and assassinations for them. They infiltrated the Red Brigades and carried out the murder of Aldo Moro in 1978. Colonel Oswald Le Winter of the CIA, who served as U.S. liaison officer with Gladio, has stated that the planning staff of the Red Brigades was made up of CIA intelligence agents. Gladio also carried out the bomb attack on Bologna Railway station in 1980 in which 85 people were killed and hundreds injured. The outcry over this led to the exposure of much of the conspiracy and the CIA arranged for P2's Grandmaster, fascist Lucio Gelli to escape to Argentina.

The Aftermath of the Bologna Terrorist Bombing It is not known if the CIA ever ended its practice of funding anti-Communist groups in Italy. Internal CIA

documents revealed contributions of tens of millions of dollars to political parties and individuals in each of the parliamentary elections in the 1970s and 80s to prevent the Communists from achieving electoral gains. In May 1981, it was the CIA-run Milan newspaper Il Giornale Nuovo, which set in motion the particular piece of international disinformation known as "The KGB Plot to Kill the Pope." In Germany the U.S. Office of Policy Co-ordination, which fronted for the CIA, incorporated the entire espionage outfit run by Hitler's spy chief, Reinhard Gehlen. Upon West Germany's entry into NATO in May 1955, West German leader Konrad Adenauer signed a secret protocol with the U.S. agreeing that the West German authorities would not take legal action against known right wing extremists. Operation Stay Behind in Germany drew its main personnel from former SS and Waffen SS men, who were trained by officers of the British SIS. Later, the operation was taken over by a secret wing of the Federal German Intelligence Service, the BND. Documentary evidence in the hands of the British All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes group shows that Nazi Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie himself ("The Butcher of Lyon") kept in close contact with American secret services and functioned as a recruiter of ex-Nazis for operation Stay Behind. Later, the U.S Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) helped Barbie to escape to Argentina in 1951. From the late 1940's until the mid 50's, the CIA organised sabotage and propaganda operations against every country of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. They tried to ferment rebellion and to hinder those countries' efforts to rebuild their economies from the devastation of World War II. In 1955, anti-Communist Eastern Europeans trained with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, learning guerrilla warfare tactics to be used in their native lands. By the following year, hundreds of Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles and others were being trained by CIA paramilitary specialists at a secret installation in West Germany. The Agency laid plans for uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland and Rumania. The CIA's propaganda stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty assured Eastern European people of American backing for their liberations. At the same time, CIA paramilitary groups were being infiltrated into those countries' capitals to provoke anti-Communist uprisings.

Ukrainian volunteers for the Nazi SS 'Galicia' Division, on parade during the war. Many had committed war crimes while serving in auxiliary police units; they were blessed by Archbishop Szepticky at the Vatican and recruited by British intelligence after the war as part of the fascist Stay Behind network across Europe, engaged in sabotage and subversion against the Communists.

In particular, East Germany was an easy target before the Berlin Wall went up. The CIA's forces damaged power stations, shipyards, a dam, canals, docks, public buildings, petrol stations, shops, a radio station, public transportation; they derailed freight trains (seriously injuring workers), blew up road and railway bridges, used special acid to damage vital factory machinery, promoted work slow-downs in factories, stole blueprints and samples of new technical developments, killed 7,000 cows of a cooperative dairy by poisoning the wire used to bale the cow's corn fodder, added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools, raided and wrecked left-wing offices in East and West Berlin, stole membership lists, assaulted and kidnapped leftists and, on occasion, murdered them, forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment and much more. The murder of one man, for being nothing more than "an East-West bridge builder" led to the exposure of the entire operation. When arrested by the East German authorities, one of the CIA forces were in possession of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin, with which they planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans. In Belgium the Stay Behind group SDRA-8 was linked with terror tactics and coup attempts. In 1983, in

order to convince the Belgian public that a security crisis existed, Gladio operatives and police officers staged a series of seemingly random shootings in supermarkets. The following year, a group of U.S. marines parachuted into Belgium and attacked a police station. A civilian died in the operation, which was intended to give the impression that the country was on the brink of Red revolution. Guns used in the operation were later planted in a Brussels house used by a Communist splinter group. In Sweden, ex-SS officers were recruited into a Stay Behind organisation called Sveaborg and the CIA arranged for P2 to assassinate Swedish Premier Olaf Palme. In the April 1967 national elections in Greece, the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou seemed certain to be re-elected as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. A joint campaign by the Greek military and the CIA to unseat him began immediately. Former General Nikos Kouris revealed that a Greek Gladio force was formed with CIA help "to intervene in case of Communist threat, whether external or internal. There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism." The Gladio "Sheepskin" group was involved in a campaign of terrorist bombings, which were blamed on the left, and two days before the election campaign was to begin, a military coup brought to power a junta led by George Papadopoulos, a member of the Greek intelligence service KYP. The CIA had created the KYP and Papadopoulos was on the payroll of the Agency for some 15 years. Along with hundreds of other KYP officers, he had received training in anti-subversive techniques in the United States. Papadopoulos was "a great believer in Hitler's new order"; declaring that the coup had taken place to save the nation from a "Communist take-over", he plunged Greece for the next seven years into a nightmare of martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture and murders. 8,000 were killed in the first month alone. Before the end of the year, Amnesty International reported that "torture as a deliberate practice is carried out by the Security Police and the Military Police." The Greek junta contributed $549,000 to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign in the United States. A Senate investigation to discover if this was CIA money finding its way back home, was abruptly cancelled at the direct request of Henry Kissinger. The Greek junta allowed the U.S. to install dozens of military installations, from nuclear missile bases to major communications sites. In turn, the United States provided the regime with ample military hardware, despite an official congressional embargo. Much of the junta's torture equipment came as U.S. military aid, including such items as a special "thick white double cable" whip and a headscrew known as an "iron wreath", which was progressively tightened around the head or ears. In 1969, the European Commission of Human Rights found Greece guilty of torture, murder and other violations, and rejected the junta's claim that their country had been in danger of a Communist take-over. Philip Deane, a Greek UN official, was told by leading politicians that "for the sake of preserving good relations with the U.S., the evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup will not be made fully public." As far as can be determined, the CIA's paramilitary group in Greece was never disbanded. In the eyes of senior CIA officials, it is seen as a longterm "insurance" for U.S. interests in Greece, to be used to assist or to direct the possible overthrow of an "unsympathetic" Greek government. In Britain, MI6 was involved in recruiting Latvian police and ex-SS men from Germany into the Gladio network. They were trained in the UK and at British bases in West Germany and returned home to carry out contra-style sabotage raids aimed at disrupting the post-war economy of the Baltic states. SS Major Emil Hoffman was used to recruit former Gestapo and SS agents. The Special Air Services (SAS) functioned with MI6 to train Italian Stay Behind units in Britain for the purpose of guerrilla warfare and sabotage well into the 1980's. Amongst those involved in running secret armed cells within Britain were George K. Young, ex-director of MI6, and Tory MP Airey Neave, one of Margaret Thatcher's closest advisors, later murdered by the IRA. Young formed the group Tory Action which was at the centre of a smear campaign to discredit the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The CIA and MI6 collaborated to spread disinformation about the Labour Party and portray Wilson as a KGB agent. Former MI6 officer Leigh Tracey revealed that Neave plotted to organise a paramilitary army

of resistance in case Labour won the general election of 1979. Young, General Sir Walter Walker (former NATO commander) and Ross McWhirter set up a secret paramilitary army called "UNISON" and a covert group called "Resistance and Psychological Operations Committee" (RPOC) was formed, hidden inside the government-funded Reserve Forces Association (RFA) which took control of Stay Behind in 1971 and was given access to Ministry of Defence departments such as the Joint Warfare Establishment near Salisbury. The existence of Operation Stay Behind has been officially admitted in France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Luxembourg, Turkey and Italy, where the investigation into the murder of Aldo Moro caused a massive political scandal. The CIA spent over $100 million on the operation and there were arms dumps all over Europe. As late as 1990, large stockpiles of weapons and explosives for Operation Gladio could still be found in some countries, and Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti disclosed that more than 600 people still remained on the Gladio payroll in Italy. As many as 900 arms dumps across Europe remain intact today. As the veneer of Western democracy fades, it should be clear that the current governments of the West have come to power not by the free will of the people but with the aid of subterfuge, manipulation and (where necessary) armed aggression - created and controlled by the CIA. It is evident that the Agency has not hesitated to use the same tactics it has applied throughout the rest of the world to the supposed democracies of Western Europe. It is crucial that we understand the extent and methodology of the CIA's tactics if we are to help prevent the subversion of democracy in the future. How far have the intelligence services infiltrated our national press, TV and radio? If any European government tried to implement radical left wing policies, what measures would the CIA resort to, in order to prevent it? These and many more questions need to be answered while the secret services of the U.S., Britain and other Western governments still have much to hide.... For more details of the CIA's interference in British politics, see: THE PSYOPS WAR: British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front and How the CIA Took The Teeth Out of British Socialism

"It was one of the ghastliest and most concentrated bloodlettings of current times." - from the CIA's own study on its Indonesian operation. The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of this century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which murdered them in a bloodbath that claimed more than half a million lives.

Indonesian soldiers parade their anti-riot equipment past a portrait of President Suharto. The dictator was brought to power with the aid of the CIA. His army has been the dominant political force in the country ever since.

In the early 1950s, the PKI or Communist Party of Indonesia became the largest political movement in the country, with three million members. The U.S. National Security Council responded with a series of policy documents calling for "appropriate action, in collaboration with other friendly countries, to prevent permanent PKI control of Indonesia." The CIA's primary efforts were directed towards funding and aiding extreme right-wing political parties (described by NSC 171 as "moderates on the right') with tens of millions of dollars annually, together with arms and personnel. U.S. academics in CIAsubsidised "think-tanks" pressured their contacts in the Indonesian military to "seize power and liquidate the Communist opposition." A CIA memorandum dated June 18th 1962, concerning a meeting between President Kennedy and British Prime Minister Macmillan, stated that the two leaders agreed to attempt to isolate Indonesian President Sukarno in Asia and Africa. Further, "They

agreed to liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities." The most prominent of the CIA's operatives in Indonesia was Guy Pauker, who taught at the University of California at Berkeley and served as a consultant at the RAND Corporation, where he maintained frequent contacts with leaders of the Indonesian military. In a RAND Corporation book published by the Princeton University Press, Pauker urged his Indonesian military contacts to "assume full responsibility" for their nation's leadership" and "to fulfil a mission... to strike, sweep their house clean." Pauker's closest friend in the Indonesian army was the U.S.-trained General Suwarto, who played an important part in the creation of the army's counterinsurgency wing. Suwarto built the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School in Bandung (SESKOAD) into a training-ground for the take-over of political power. SESKOAD became a focal point of aid from the Pentagon, the CIA, RAND and the Ford Foundation. As well as military and counterinsurgency training, SESKOAD trained army officers in economics and administration, and thereby taught them to virtually operate as a para-state, independent of the government. U.S. officials confirmed that the training programme was "contingency planning to prevent a PKI take-over." Military aid included a secret contract to deliver 200 Aero Commanders to the Indonesian army. These were light aircraft suitable for use in "civic action" or counter-insurgency operations by the Army Flying Corps, whose senior officers were virtually all trained in the United States. A Senate investigation nine years later was to reveal that U.S. military suppliers with CIA connections (principally Lockheed) negotiated equipment sales with payoffs to middlemen in such a way as to generate payments to neither Nasution nor Yani (the titular leaders of the Indonesian armed forces) but instead to the hitherto little-known leader of a third faction in the army, the right-wing Major-General Suharto. Secret funds administered by the U.S. Air Force on behalf of the CIA were laundered as "commissions" on sales of Lockheed equipment and services, in order to make political payoffs to those military personnel - Suharto's faction - favoured by the CIA. The most significant focus of U.S. training and aid was to the Territorial Organisation's connections with "the civilian administration, religious and cultural organisations, youth groups, veterans, trade unions, peasant organisations, political parties and groups at regional and local levels." These political liaisons with civilian groups provided the structure for the ruthless suppression of the PKI that was to come. Roger Hilsman, whose career spanned the CIA and the State Department, noted that by 1963, as a result of the training programme, "the American and Indonesian military had come to know each other rather well. Bonds of personal respect and even affection existed." The House Committee on Foreign affairs confirmed that at the time of the coup, more than 1,200 Indonesian officers, including senior military figures, had been trained in the United States.

In 1965, a group of young military officers, encouraged by the CIA, attempted a coup against President Sukarno and killed six top military officers. The CIA seized this opportunity to replace the increasingly unpopular Sukarno with Major-General Suharto. The Agency established a massive propaganda campaign to blame the deaths of the six generals on the PKI. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the PKI. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals - badly decomposed - were featured in all the newspapers and on television. CIA-planted stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women armed with razor blades. The Agency also planted rumours in the press that mainland China was smuggling arms to the PKI for an imminent revolt. During this time, an elite group of Indonesian military and economic leaders, who had been trained by the CIA at the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and who would later be christened the "Berkeley Mafia", returned to Indonesia and became the impetus behind a military coup on 1st October 1965. The CIA brought in troops from East, West and Central Java to Jakarta to aid the coup. Systematic killings of the leftists by the Indonesian army swept across the country. Civilians involved in the massacre were either recruited and trained by the army on the spot, or were drawn from groups such as the CIA-sponsored SOKSI trade unions (Central Organisation of Indonesian Socialist Employees) and allied student organisations that had collaborated for years with the Army on political matters. British, Japanese, German and Australian intelligence played a supporting role in the operation. Anti-Communist organisations and individuals, particularly Muslims, were encouraged to join in the slaying of anyone suspected of being a PKI sympathiser. A former CIA deputy station chief and an American diplomat admitted in May 1990 that U.S. officials supplied both arms and the names of thousands of PKI members to the Indonesian army and CIA-funded Muslim student death squads, who hunted the leftists down and murdered them. The first order by military officers to Muslim students in early October was the word sikat, meaning "clean out", "wipe out" or "massacre." U.S. officials were well aware that the people named on the lists "were destined for extrajudicial firing squads." CIA officers "later checked off the names of those who had been killed." Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA operation run from half a million to over one million people. Former CIA Director William Colby compared the Indonesian operation to the CIA's Phoenix Programme in the Vietnam War (whose goal was to "neutralise 3,000 people a month" and which murdered between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese). Colby admitted: "The people getting killed in Indonesia were not soldiers. They were not even the "enemy" in an on-going war. They were members of a popular, grassroots political party. Or they were in the way." State Department consultant and former member of the U.S. Embassy's Indonesian political section Robert Marten commented: "They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."

Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, stated: "No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it." According to Australian journalists who were in Indonesia at the time, the massacre was hideous. Victims of firing squads were made up not just of Communists, but their families and ethnic Chinese who were targeted as potential Communists. Northern Sumatra and Eastern Java reeked with the smell of decaying flesh. Boats were immobilised on rivers choked with human corpses. In a public report, the CIA described the indiscriminate killing as "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century," then turned around in a covert study and recommended the operation as "a model for future operations." The CIA concocted a false account of what happened, later published by the Agency as a book, Indonesia 1965: The Coup That Backfired. U.S. officials, journalists and scholars with CIA connections created the myth that the bloodbath was a "spontaneous, popular revulsion to PKI terrorism." Over one million people were detained for alleged involvement with the PKI during the military coup. At least 100,000 were held without charge for up to 14 years. The trials of those charged with involvement with the PKI were grossly unfair. The virulent antiCommunism which followed the coup meant that few witnesses dared testify on behalf of suspects. Defence lawyers were accused of Communist sympathies, threatened and harassed. The evidence of many witnesses was extracted under torture. In the military courts, many PKI prisoners were denied the right to appeal. Those allowed to do so often waited 10 or 20 years to learn that their appeals had been rejected. Many prisoners detained at that time remain in jail today - some of them on death row. The New Order Government under President Suharto has remained the dominant political force in Indonesia for the past three decades, with the explicit approval of Washington. The country has suffered persistent patterns of human rights violations. Women and young children have been tortured and raped in custody; men in their seventies have been hauled before the firing squad after 20 years in jail on political charges; elderly women have been shot for protesting against eviction from their land. Students, trade unionists, farmers, community leaders, journalists and human rights workers have all suffered. Hundreds of thousands have been arbitrarily killed. Between 1983 and 1985, government death squads summarily executed some 5,000 alleged criminals. President Suharto said in his memoirs that the killings were deliberate government policy, "shock therapy to bring crime under control."

Indonesian troops attack peaceful protestors in Jakarta.

Trade unions and the right to organise and strike are heavily restricted in Indonesia. Over 35,000 were forbidden to vote in the 1992 "elections." Security forces routinely open fire on peaceful demonstrations. In May 1994, 21 students were each sentenced to six month's imprisonment for taking part in a demonstration calling for President Suharto to take responsibility for past human rights violations. One month later, the High Court increased the sentences by between 8 and 14 months, on the grounds that the students had used their trials for "political propaganda." Indonesia's subversion law carries the death penalty and allows people to be detained for a year without being charged. The death penalty is mainly passed on political opponents. Suharto and the military exert total control over the nation's political, social and economic affairs. Since 1968, Suharto has stood unopposed in five successive elections. Only two political parties apart from his are allowed to exist, and neither has any chance of gaining power. Only Suharto's ruling party Golkar, can campaign in rural areas, where 65% of the population lives. Before national elections, all candidates must be vetted by military intelligence and approved by the President. The most relentless violations of human rights have taken place in East Timor, the former Portuguese colony that Indonesia has illegally occupied since 1975, and in Aceh and Irian Jaya, where the government faces armed independence movements. East Timor has great economic and strategic importance, lying close to rich oil and natural gas reserves in the Timor Sea. When the popular Fretiuin Party took control of the country in September 1975, advocating an independent East Timor, the U.S. decided to take action. A secret cable leaked in Australia revealed that the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta was under instructions from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger not to involve itself in the forthcoming Indonesian invasion, and that events should be allowed to "take their course." The same cable revealed Australia's position. The then Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Richard Woolcott, advised the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra that the situation in East Timor was going to be messy for some time. He therefore advised that Australia distance itself as far as possible from Indonesia's intervention, while privately reassuring the Indonesians that Australia supported their position. The Prime Minister of Australia in 1974, Gough Whitlam, met the Indonesians for informal talks in Central Java, where he told President Suharto that he thought the best solution would be for East Timor to join Indonesia.

On December 7th 1975, just nine days after Fretihin proclaimed the Democratic Republic of East Timor, Indonesia invaded the island, annexed it and instigated a mass slaughter. More than 200,000 East Timorese - one third of the population - were massacred. No one was spared from the systematic "disappearance," torture, rape, political imprisonment, arbitrary arrest, intimidation and harassment, no matter how old, how young or how vulnerable. Washington did nothing to condemn Suharto after the invasion took place. Kissinger even told the Jakarta press: "The U.S. understands Indonesia's position on the Timor question." A peaceful procession to the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili in November 1991 resulted in the cold-blooded murder by the security forces of 270 people and the "disappearance" of some 200 others. Without warning, squads of Indonesian soldiers opened fire on the unarmed crowd, shooting indiscriminately. Many were shot in the back as they ran from the gunfire. Those wounded but not killed were stabbed with bayonets by the soldiers. The Indonesian armed forces commander (now Vice President) General Try Sutrisno, attempted to justify the killings on the grounds that the people in the procession had "spread chaos" and "shouted unacceptable things." He said: "In the end, they had to be shot. These ill-bred people have to be shot... and we will shoot them." Eyewitnesses testified that a number of the wounded, who were taken to the military hospital in Dili, were hit with large rocks or crushed by military vehicles as they lay on the ground, and that others were given lethal injections.
Massacre in East Timor: demonstrators and bystanders flee in panic as Indonesian army troops open fire on the unarmed crowd at the Santa Cruz cemetery. Some of the wounded sheltering in a chapel during the Santa Cruz massacre. Many of the dead and "disappeared" have still not been accounted for.

Today, the CIA provides training for Indonesia's brutal military and intelligence services, both at the notorious School of Americas (see Dealing in Death: The CIA and the Drugs Trade) and elsewhere in the United States. Other western governments have also provided military training to Indonesian troops known to be implicated in serious human rights abuses. The international community has shown little concern over the systematic slaughter taking place in the fourth largest population in the world. Sitting astride critical sea-lanes which link the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Indonesia is of considerable strategic and economic importance to the west, which embraced Suharto's regime as a friend and ally against Communism at the height of the Cold War. The response of the U.S. and other western governments to Indonesia's appalling human rights record has been to provide Suharto with abundant economic, military and political support while turning a blind eye to clear evidence of Indonesia's systematic human rights abuses. In a statement made to the United Nations Special Committee in July 1994, Amnesty International broke with tradition by not just condemning the government of Indonesia but laid the blame also on "The member states of the UN, who in our view share responsibility - both directly and indirectly - for the long-standing human rights problem in East Timor." Both British Conservative and New Labour governments have been major suppliers of arms and military goods to Suharto, providing the regime with everything from Alvis light tanks and British Aerospace Hawk ground attack aircraft to army helmets and riot control equipment. Transnational corporations such as Shell, Petroz and BHP Petroleum were among those granted exploration agreements of the Timor Sea in a treaty signed between Australia and Indonesia in February 1991. In mid-1993, the Australian military conducted joint exercises with Indonesia's counterinsurgency unit Kopassus, which has been heavily involved in massacres and torture over many years. (The Kopassus Red Berets, then known as RPKAD, played a key role in the bloodbath that brought Suharto to power; General Prabowo, who trained in the US at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, headed the elite Kopassus Red Beret command which was chiefly responsible for human rights violations in East Timor). In March 1998, the US Congress learned that, despite its express prohibition in 1992, the Pentagon had continued to supply training to Kopassus. The tactics that US Green Berets taught Kopassus included 'Advanced Sniper Techniques', 'Military Operations in Urban Terrain', 'Psychological operations' and 'Close Combat'. "They are asking for more freedom... This is a warning for us to beware of the PKI. The name is different but it is the same movement. We have to stay alert." - PRESIDENT SUHARTO on the pro-democracy movement, December 1993 U.S. Ambassador Green reported of an interview with Nixon in 1967: "The Indonesian experience had been one of particular interest to Nixon because things had gone well in Indonesia. I think he was very interested in that whole experience as pointing to the way

we should handle our relationships on a wider basis in Southeast Asia generally, and maybe in the world." Thus, the role of the CIA in Indonesia may be seen as the blueprint for the Agency's actions in overthrowing Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia in 1970 (which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge), the overthrow of President Allende in Chile in 1973 and the U.S. sponsorship of the death squad regimes in Central America. Indonesia also serves as a prime example of Washington's hypocrisy in condemning, for example, Iraq's invasion of Iran (the excuse for all-out war) while turning a blind eye to the naked aggression of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. Five days after the invasion, the United Nations voted to condemn Indonesia's attack as an act of international aggression. The United States abstained; thereafter, the U.S. has consistently manoeuvred behind the scenes to resist UN moves aimed at forcing Indonesia to give up its conquest. Once again, America's economic interests supersede all considerations of human rights.

"We have no scorched earth policy. We have a scorched Communist policy." Guatemalan President RIOS MONTT "The military guys who do this are like serial killers. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by now." - CLYDE SNOW, forensic anthropologist

Compared to the struggles against state tyranny in other Central American countries, very little is heard of Guatemala in the Western media. This is because the level of repression is extremely high; Guatemala has suffered the worst record of human rights abuses in Latin America. During three decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been massacred during their struggle against a government that has been armed and trained by the U.S. After years of interference in Guatemalan politics, the level of American involvement increased dramatically in 1954 with a coup (organised by the CIA) against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose agrarian reform policies threatened the interests of both the wealthy elite in Guatemala and U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company. The coup restored these groups' stranglehold on the economy with the installation of a military dictatorship led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Hand-picked by the CIA for his malleability, Armas flew into the capital on July 3rd 1954, aboard the private aircraft of the U.S. ambassador John Peurifoy. Peurifoy immediately furnished lists of radical opponents to be eliminated, as he had done on his previous posting to Greece. A massive bloodletting began, with strong racial as well as ideological overtones (around half the population of Guatemala is indigenous). Land reform activists were repressed and in the battles that followed, indigenous communities were savagely attacked. The successive regime of President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes permitted the CIA to use the country for its training camps for Cuban exiles during the 1960s. When a rebellion broke out in November 1960, the CIA came to the aid of Fuentes, sending in B-26 bombers against the rebels; the insurgency was crushed and Fuentes remained in power. Despite evidence of widespread human rights abuses by the dictatorship, the U.S. continued to pour money, training and equipment into the Guatemalan military. However, Ydigoras planned to step down from power in 1964, leaving the door open to an election. This alarmed the U.S., who believed that a free election in Guatemala would reinstate a left wing government bent upon land reform and an independent foreign policy. Thus, in 1963 after a secret meeting, President Kennedy backed an army coup, which further consolidated the power of military control over the country. The tone of the new government, headed by Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, was set with one his first acts - the murder of eight political and trade union leaders by driving over them with rock-laden trucks.

When Peralta wanted to deal with a left wing rebellion in late 1965, he declared, "If I have to turn the country into a graveyard to pacify it, I will do so." Peralta was assisted in this by CIA counter insurgency specialists such as John Logan, who instructed the Guatemalan military, police and secret service in developing an "anti-terrorist" plan of action. Firstly, a clandestine cell within the presidential palace was set up to co-ordinate all anti-Communist activity. This became known as the Casa Negra, the dreaded "black room". Secondly, raids were launched all over Guatemala City to "force the Communists out of their hiding places". Thirdly, areas of the country were "frozen" - taken over and controlled by the military. Peralta secretly offered John Logan cash rewards for any Communist leader arrested or killed; Logan immediately requested other U.S. agents to be sent to the country to "influence police operations" and secret mass killings began. In March 1966, the head of CIA operations in Guatemala reported to Agency headquartersin Langley, Virginia: "The following Communists and terrorists were secretly executed by the Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6: [a list of names]. The executions will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they ever took place." Among those murdered was the figurehead of popular resistance, Victor Gutierez Garbin, leader of the Popular Socialist Party. A few days after his death, the CIA chief in Guatemala described Gutierez as "a cultured man, honest and brave, which made him one of the most influential leaders among the workers" - attributes that were not held up for praise but as justification for his assassination. By 1967 the Casa Negra was orchestrating a full-scale reign of terror. In the period from October 1966 to March 1968, an estimated 3,000 to 8,000 Guatemalans were killed by the police, the military and "death squads" (who were often the police or military in civilian clothes, carrying out atrocities too bloody for the government to claim credit for.) By 1972 the number of their victims was estimated at 13,000 and four years later the count exceeded 20,000. The head of intelligence at the State Department wrote: "At the heart of the secret anti-Communist force is a special unit of the army which kidnaps, kills in the street, plants bombs and executes real or supposed Communists. It occasionally acts against ill-defined 'enemies of the government'". Rather than voicing disquiet about the abuses of human rights, the report noted a concern that "the Communists could benefit politically" from the indiscriminate terror. Anyone attempting to organise a union or simply suspected of being in support of the resistance was a target. Armed men broke into their homes and dragged them away. The abducted were tortured, mutilated or burned; their bodies were found buried in mass graves or floating in plastic bags in lakes or rivers, or lying beside the road. Bodies were dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gualan area, it was said, no one fished any more because too many corpses were caught in the nets. In Guatemala City, right wing terrorists machine-gunned people and houses in daylight. Journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, trade unionists, members of opposition parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel cause, anyone with a vaguely leftist political association or a moderate criticism of government policy and relatives of the victims were all targets for attack.

"It is hard to find the words to express the state of putrefaction that exists in Guatemala, and the permanent terror in which the inhabitants live. Every day bodies are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets and partially eaten by fish. Every day men are kidnapped right in the street by unidentified people in cars, armed to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols." - from the notebook of MICHELE KIRK, a young French woman who shot herself in Guatemala City as the police came to her room to make "inquiries."

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) contributed to a programme to greatly expand the size of Guatemala's national police force and to develop it into a professional body skilled at counteracting urban disorder. Additionally, the police force was completely supplied with radio patrol cars and a radio communications network and funds to build a national police academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons and equipment. Senior police officers and technicians were sent for training at the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama (replaced in 1964 by the International Police Academy in Washington) and at a Federal School in Los Fresnos, Texas (where they were taught how to construct and use a variety of explosive devices). Their instructors were often CIA officers operating under AID cover.

John Gilligan, Director of AID during the Carter administration, disclosed, "At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas - government, volunteer, religious, every kind."
CIA officers and Green Berets accompanied the Guatemalan soldiers into battle areas and taught their trainees various methods of interrogation, including electric shock techniques. One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim. The slogan of the New Anticommunist Organisation was "See a Communist, kill a Communist. Another of the death squads, Mano Blanca (White Hand) distributed leaflets in residential areas suggesting that doors of left-wingers be marked with a black cross." Bodies were found decapitated or castrated, or with pins stuck in the eyes. Men were found dead with their eyes gouged out, their testicles in their mouths, without hands or tongues and women with their breasts cut off. Entire villages where there were people suspected of supporting the guerrillas were rounded up and massacred and the village bulldozed over to cover the traces. At the same time as these atrocities were taking place, the American ambassador, John Gordon Mein, presented the Guatemalan military with new armoured vehicles, grenade launchers, training and radio equipment and several HU-1B jet-powered attack helicopters. Mein publicly stated: "Liberty must be defended and that liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala." As public concern began to grow worldwide about the violence, the Guatemalan president appointed a new defence minister and sent a few officers abroad, to minimise bad publicity. However, the massacres continued, with the full knowledge and consent of Washington. One CIA report written in 1971 stated: "The army and police are secretly eliminating a great number of terrorists."

Following the discovery of large deposits of petroleum and minerals such as copper and nickel in the 1970s, large landowners and foreign corporations began expropriating communal lands. There were mass expulsions of indigenous peasants from their homes. However, despite the constant danger, indigenous groups continued to campaign for land reform. When President Lucas Garcia began his reign of terror in 1978, he set out to eliminate all the new popular leaders. Death squads roamed the land and murdered at will, and moves to obtain land were brutally crushed. Between March and September 1982, more than 4,000 people were killed and thousands more were tortured; the reform movement withered.
International concern over the Guatemalan government's excesses led to a Congressional curtailment of U.S. military aid to the dictatorship under the Jimmy Carter administration in 1977. However, the Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan then began a courtship of the Guatemalan far right. In December 1979 a delegation from the American Security Council (an ultra-right military lobby) visited Guatemala on behalf of Reagan. One of the ASC consultants was John C.Trotter, the manager of Guatemala City's Coca-Cola bottling plant franchise. Trotter was implicated in the death squad murders of a number of workers and union leaders at the bottling plant and was removed from management by Coca-Cola headquarters after an international union and church-led protest and boycott of Coke. During the 1980s, Guatemalan speculator and right-wing activist Roberto Alejos Arzu (who had made his plantation available as a training site for participants in the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961) sponsored a series of trips to his country by many of the most prominent leaders of the American New Right. Several high-level Reagan advisers visited Guatemala to give support to death squad organisers, including Roger Fontaine, National Security Council assistant for Latin American affairs and Lt. General Daniel Graham, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who also visited El Salvador for Reagan. In 1980 Reagan met with Guatemalan hotel magnate Eduardo Carette, a leading figure in Amigos del Pais, an extremist right-wing pressure group comprised of Guatemalan businessmen and landowners. Reagan told ambassador-to-be Carette, "Hang in 'til we get there. We'll get in and then we'll give you help. Don't give up. Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in." Reagan's associates duly put pressure on Congress to "lend a sympathetic ear" to the lobbying campaign by Amigos del Pais to restore U.S. aid and training for the Guatemalan military.

At the Republican Convention before his election as President, Ronald Reagan offered a "salute" to the new Guatemalan President Romero Lucas Garcia and informed him, "things are going to be changing." Two of Reagan's closest associates - retired General John K. Singlaub (former commander of U.S. forces in South Korea) and retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, headed American delegations to Guatemala, where they assured President Garcia that Reagan would provide for the resumption of military training and aid as soon as he was installed in office. High-level Guatemalan officials stated at the time that Reagan's assurances may have led to an increase in the number of death squad assassinations, while a senior leader of Guatemala's moderate Christian Democratic Party (already decimated by more than 34 assassinations of its leadership in the last year) was in fear of his life.

Death squad founder Mario Sandoval Alarcon with friends.

The brutal regime of General Efrain Rios Montt was brought to power in a CIA-backed coup in March 1982. Montt boasted openly of his policy of genocide against the indigenous populations, stating on Guatemalan television that he had "declared a state of siege so that we could kill legally." In his first six months of power, Montt massacred 2,600 Indians and peasants, while during his 17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off the map. Rios Montt had been trained by the CIA in the Panama Canal Zone and in counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where his regime was taught how to implement its Model Village programme. This was based on the strategic hamlet programme used by the U.S. in the Vietnam War. It was intended to convey to the world that the government wished to re-establish the democratic life of the country but in reality, the "villages" were concentration camps in which the government imposed its own social and political systems to undermine indigenous community structures. In addition to American support, Israel, Argentina and Chile provided military aid and training to Montt's dictatorship.

Backed by the CIA, the Guatemalan military under Rios Montt was among the world's worst human rights violators.

A CIA report detailed the instructions given by Montt to his secret service: "You are free to arrest, imprison, interrogate and eliminate any alleged guerrilla in whatever way you see fit." The air force base of Retalhuleu was turned into a vast torture centre. Prisoners were flung into deep pits filled with water, their bodies later thrown into mass graves and sealed with cement. The notorious death squads, with such names as "Secret Anti-Communist Army" and "Eye For An Eye," continued their ruthless use of torture, machine-gun executions and "disappearance". Some 70,000 people were murdered in the early 1980s, while U.S. military aid to Guatemala continued, peaking at $50 million in 1983. That year, the State department accused Amnesty International of conducting "a campaign of misinformation in favour of the Communists". Over 200,000 Guatemalans have been killed since the 1980s. There have been 50,000 "disappeared", over one million displaced and 250,000 children who have lost one or both parents. Evidence mounted in the late 1980s that private businessmen provided the payrolls for the death squads and often assisted in compiling the lists of "troublesome" labour activists, political leaders and other suggested victims.

Rosario Godoy de Cuevas was abducted and killed in Guatemala in 1985. She was one of the leaders of a campaign to locate the "disappeared." Her husband, a trade union activist, had "disappeared" the year before.

Elias Barahona, former press secretary to Interior Minister Alvarez Ruiz, fled the country in the late 1980s and at a Panama City press conference, he issued a 15-page statement detailing how President Lucas and his generals ran the death squads from the fourth floor of the National Palace Annex. He also listed the addresses of houses used by the government for detention and torture of its kidnap victims. Despite such evidence and the near-universal recognition that Guatemala was one of the worst human rights violators in the entire world, both Guatemalan president Col. Carlos Aranao Osorio (known as "The Butcher of Zacape") and former vice-president Mario Sandoval Alarcon (high commander of the death squads) were invited to the Reagan inauguration in the U.S. In fact American businessmen based in Guatemala who backed the death squads heavily funded Reagan's election campaign, including one payment of over $120,000 from Amigos del Pais. None of these payments were disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

"Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the Commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, I'd get some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too Why should we criticise them? The death squads - I'm for it Shit! There's no question, we can't wait 'til Reagan gets in We all feel that he is our saviour." - FRED SHERWOOD, CIA pilot who settled in Guatemala and became president of the American Chamber of Commerce
In 1989 Reagan struck a deal with Guatemalan businessmen and government officials involved with the death squads, which led to the restoration of the sale of U.S. weapons, ammunitions, crowd control and counterinsurgency gear; the resumption of CIA training of the Guatemalan military and police, particularly in surveillance, intelligence and interrogation techniques; curtailment of U.S. criticism of the regime's

massive human rights violations; and the promise of U.S. military intervention in the event of the Guatemalan government being threatened by a popular uprising. Although the government repression was meant to frighten the Guatemalan population into submission, it actually served to radicalise them. In various communities, indigenous peasants organised themselves in armed self-defence groups or joined the revolutionary movement URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity). In 1989 U.S. National Guard units from a number of states rotated through Guatemala, ostensibly providing medical and dental services in highly conflicted areas where the guerrilla movement was strongest. In reality, they carried out interrogations on behalf of the Guatemalan police and were in the area of El Aquacate when the army massacred 22 villagers. Sister Dianna Ortiz, a nun, related how, in 1989, she was kidnapped, burned with cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of corpses and rats. She said that a fair-skinned man who spoke with an American accent seemed to be in charge.

Indigenous Guatemalans march for their rights in Quetzaltenango, October 12th 1991.
The CIA was still actively involved in the death squads and other covert intelligence operations in Guatemala throughout the 1990s. In 1992, a resistance leader, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, disappeared. The government claimed that he had died in an armed clash with the police. But his wife, American lawyer Jennifer Harbury, refused to accept the official version and claimed that she had received reports that the authorities had tortured her husband. The State Department responded by branding Harbury's claims as "lies" and "manipulation". However, U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli generated front page headlines when he revealed in Congress that one of the Guatemalan officers involved in Velasquez' murder - Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez - had been a paid agent of the CIA. A recently released CIA report from the time reveals that Velasquez was arrested, tortured and executed "when there was nothing more to be got out of him". After the CIA's Alpirez was implicated in another murder, that of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine (DeVine was killed because he had uncovered some of the Guatemalan military's involvement in drug trafficking and other illegal activities), Alpirez received some $44,000 in "severance pay" from the CIA in 1990. Torricelli pushed for U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to make the Alpirez files public; to this date, the State Department has persistently refused.

CIA agent Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, involved in death squad murders.

Jennifer Harbury and Carol DeVine, the widows of Efrain Velasquez and Michael DeVine respectively, testify in Congress about the CIA's involvement in the murders of their husbands. The Bush administration, in a public show of anger at DeVine's murder, cut off military aid to Guatemala, but secretly allowed the CIA to provide millions of dollars to the government to make up for the loss. The annual payments of $5 to $7 million apparently continued into the Clinton administration. When further public outcry over Guatemala's human rights record led to a suspension of U.S. military aid, the "drug war" funding mechanism proved valuable as a conduit for covert U.S. aid to the dictatorship. Through the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Washington provided the Guatemalan army with millions of dollars, ostensibly as part of its drug eradication policy. The real aim of the programme however was counter-insurgency against the left.

The Guatemalan army and government have long been heavily involved in drug trafficking. Unlike South America, there are no independent drug cartels in Guatemala. Production and transportation of narcotics is directed by well-placed members of the military and G-2, Guatemala's powerful military intelligence unit. When airport immigration agent Carlos Minera was tried for cocaine smuggling in 1989, he testified that G-2 members were involved in the drug trade. G-2 officers assigned to drug control

were paid not by the DEA but by the CIA in order to increase the Agency's influence. This revealed the farcical concept of the U.S. government supplying money to an army to fight against itself.

After a Colombian plane with U.S. markings crashed, U.S. DEA agents and Guatemalan soldiers seized cocaine worth $50 million. Termed "another fierce blow to international narcotraffic" in the media, the bust turned out to be a boom to the domestic drug market when it went "missing" the next day. America's anti-drug programme had no significant impact on the country's drug production and trafficking but did have serious consequences for indigenous Guatemalans. The spraying of lethal insecticides by "anti-drug" helicopters and planes damaged the ecology of large tropical reserves and poisoned large numbers of people, animals, fish and plant life in the targeted areas. Fourteen people died in the Tacuna area of San Marcos after showing symptoms of poisoning. Although reports of nausea, respiratory problems, diarrhoea and death or illness of livestock were widely reported, the protests were routinely ignored. The New York Times reported in 1977 that "30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning . Death can come in hours, or a longer lasting liver malfunction the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala are the highest in the Western world". In an attack, guerrillas destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; they were quickly replaced with the help of Washington, together with as much pesticide they could carry, courtesy of Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis and Guatemala City. The spraying programme had a covert agenda: some of the 40,000 internal refugees from the violence had banded together in remote areas to form Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPRs). It was these which the government, under the guise of "anti-drug policy", bombed using US-supplied helicopter gunships and Super Turbo Thrush planes. The population in the CPRs consisted largely of indigenous civilians who fled their homes in the wake of government repression. Many were accused by the government of defending human rights or asking for better working conditions for their people, or simply of associating with or living near someone who had been accused of these "crimes".

"Today in the United States, we don't hear much talk anymore about armed intervention in Central America. Instead we hear about the free trade agreement and a "war against drugs." We know that these programmes are a substitute for the Cold War.... The war on drugs is a war. We know what populations they've been bombing; we know what crops they've been destroying when they bomb the countryside." - Guatemalan indigenous leader RIGOBERTA MENCHU, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner

In 1997 the Guatemalan government theoretically ended Latin America's longest armed struggle when it signed a peace treaty with the URNG. The elected civilian government of President Alvaro Arzu was committed under the peace plan to reforms which would conclude in the year 2000, costing an estimated 1.6 billion, of which little has so far been forthcoming from the international community. The country remains ravaged by decades of oppression, government corruption and massive economic and social discrimination. Such is the result of Washington's interference in the internal politics of a country that would otherwise no doubt be enjoying today a democratic society and far greater prosperity for the mass of its people. In particular, the support that the Reagan administration gave to the far right in Guatemala is an indictment of Washington's entire Central American foreign policy. No U.S. official has ever been brought to justice for complicity in the atrocities carried out in Guatemala.

Guatemalans march through the capital to mark the signing of a treaty ending four decades of civil war heavily promoted by the CIA.
As with the CIA's Indonesian operations, Guatemala was a training ground for the Agency's more infamous operations elsewhere in Central America. For instance, David Phillips was one of the CIA officers involved in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954. This apprenticeship served him well in Cuba during the Batista dictatorship and he later worked on the Bay of Pigs task force. Phillips went on to direct CIA operations in the Dominican Republic when the U.S. invaded that country, was CIA Chief of Station in Brazil under the military dictatorship there, and became chief of all Latin American operations in the period leading up to the military coup in Chile .

"The CIA's aim in Australia was to get rid of a government they did not like and that was not co-operative it's a Chile, but in a much more sophisticated and subtle form." - VICTOR MARCHETTI, ex-CIA officer, 1980 "There is profoundly increasing evidence that foreign espionage and intelligence activities are being practised in Australia on a wide scale I believe the evidence is so grave and so alarming in its implications that it demands the fullest explanation. The deception over the CIA and the activities of foreign installations on our soil are an onslaught on Australia's sovereignty." - GOUGH WHITLAM to the Australian Parliament, 1977
On December 2nd 1972, Australia's first Labor Government for twenty-three years was elected. The new Prime Minister, Edward Gough Whitlam, quickly set about a series of historic legislations: wages, pensions and unemployment benefits were increased; equal pay for women was introduced; a free national health service was established; spending on education was doubled; university and college fees were abolished; and legal aid became a universal right. The Federal Government assumed responsibility for Aboriginal health, education and welfare, and the first land rights legislation for Aborigines was drafted. Cultural initiatives for women, Aborigines and immigrants were set up. Imperial honours such as knighthoods and MBEs were scrapped. The "Commonwealth Government" was renamed the Australian Government and an Australian anthem replaced "God Save the Queen." Conscription was ended. Australian troops were withdrawn from the Vietnam War and men imprisoned for draft evasion were released. Australian ministers publicly condemned the American conduct of the Vietnam War. The U.S. bombing of Hanoi during Christmas 1972 was denounced as the work of "maniacs" and "mass murderers". Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Jim Cairns, called for public rallies to condemn the bombing and for boycotts on American goods. In response, Australian dockers refused to unload American ships. Whitlam himself warned the Nixon administration that he might draw Indonesia and Japan into protests against the bombing. The Australian Government also pressed for support for the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace, which was opposed by the US, and spoke up in the United Nations for Palestinian rights. The French were condemned for testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, and refugees fleeing the CIA-backed coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia (an irony in the light of Washington's retaliation against Whitlam).

"We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators." - FRANK SNEPP, CIA officer stationed in Saigon at the time of the Agency's covert activities against the Whitlam government.
The CIA's alarm over the Australian Government rose to a fury when, in the early hours of March 16th 1973, the Attorney General, Lionel Murphy, led a raid on the Melbourne offices of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Murphy and Whitlam were concerned about ASIO's involvement with local fascist Croatian groups that had carried out terrorist acts in Australia and against Yugoslav diplomats abroad. Set up under the auspices of the UKUSA Treaty in 1949, ASIO had distinguished itself by not uncovering

a single spy or traitor (this is still the case), yet it had become almost as powerful in Australia as the CIA itself. ASIO had a secret pact of loyalty to the CIA and helped to set up and maintain secret police organisations that kept files on all Australian Labor Party members, prominent politicians, government officials, union leaders, members of the Council of Civil Liberties and anyone considered the slightest leftof centre. Even prayer meetings for peace were watched and recorded. According to a top-secret report to a Royal Commission into Australia's secret services led by Mr Justice Hope, for decades members of ASIO handed over to the CIA slanderous information against Australian politicians and senior officials who they regarded unfavourably. This material ranged from accusations of subversive tendencies to concern about their personal lives, and allowed the CIA to work against these people in ways that ranged from blackmail to efforts to block their careers. ASIO is run as an internal organisation in Australia. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, operates abroad and is less well known. Code-named MO9, its existence was only acknowledged after the Labor Government came to power in 1972. ASIS played an important role in the CIA's covert activities against foreign governments in Southeast Asia. For example, after Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk broke off diplomatic relations with the United States in 1965, the CIA used ASIS to secretly carry out its work in the country for the next four years, despite official Australian policy being one of strict neutrality. After Sihanouk was overthrown in a CIA-inspired coup, American forces invaded Cambodia and the US carpetbombing of the country - a bombing so intense that during one six-month period in 1973, American B52s dropped the equivalent (in tons of bombs) of five Hiroshimas on the civilian population - served as a catalyst for the rise to power of Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge).

Extract from a top-secret ASIS document, describing the organisation's activities.

Whitlam also discovered that ASIS agents were working for the CIA in Chile, de-stabilising the government of Salvador Allende, who was supported by the Australian Labor Government. Whitlam promptly ordered the ASIS officers home. However, some remained in Chile under Australian Embassy cover and without Whitlam's knowledge; Allende was subsequently murdered during the CIA-orchestrated military coup led by the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The CIA's concern over the activities of the Whitlam government was due to the fact that Australia played a pivotal role in the United States' desire for covert influence over Indo-China. Some of the most

strategically important and top-secret American bases outside the United States are located in Australia. These include the U.S. Naval Communication Station, North West Cape, on the northern coast of Western Australia, which transmits battle orders for the nuclear missile-carrying Polaris submarines. The most secretive Australian intelligence organisation is the Melbourne-based Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) which is modelled on the American National Security Agency, NSA. The DSD spies for the U.S. in the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. There is also the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO), established in 1970 under the supervision of the CIA's analyst division, and the Office of National Assessments (ONA), whose job is to co-ordinate and analyse Australia's extensive spying networks in the region. Most important of all is Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, officially described as an American- Australian "Joint Defence Space Research Facility", but in actuality it is an entirely American spy-satellite base, run by the CIA and the NSA. Pine Gap can pick up communications from almost anywhere in the world; its primary function is the collection of data from CIA sources and transmitters, and the preparation for nuclear warfare. So secretive were Pine Gap and the other major U.S. base at Nurrungar in South Australia that no details of their plans were revealed to successive Australian Prime Ministers and their cabinets. Leaked Australian Defence Department documents disclosed that in 1972, high-frequency transmitters at North West Cape had helped the United States to mine Haiphong and other North Vietnamese harbours; and that satellites controlled from Pine Gap and Nurrungar were being used to pinpoint targets for the American bombing of Cambodia. These actions were taken entirely without the consent or knowledge of the Australian government. William Corson, a former senior U.S. intelligence officer, also revealed that the CIA ran between ten and fifteen "black airfields" at their secret Australian bases during the Vietnam War, flying "hot" CIA agents from Vietnam for debriefing. In 1975, as the North Vietnamese captured control of South Vietnam, massive supplies of drugs that had been stashed by the CIA in Vietnam were flown into the secret U.S. airfields in Australia. The drugs were redistributed to "regional drug banks", thus providing a "reserve currency" for the Agency's global criminal activities.

The top-secret American base at Nurrungar, South Australia.

In October 1973, during the Middle East War, President Nixon put U.S. forces on nuclear "Level Three" alert, through the base at North West Cape. Australia had become involved, without the knowledge of its government, in a war on the other side of the world. When Whitlam found out about this, he was furious and told Parliament that although the Australian government would honour agreements with America covering

existing spy stations, "there will not be extensions or proliferations." Whitlam's words were to have serious consequences for the fate of his government. A new American Ambassador was appointed to Australia - Marshall Green, widely known as "the coup-master". Green was a senior U.S. policy planner for Southeast Asia and had the distinction of being involved in several countries where the CIA had masterminded coups, such as Indonesia and Chile. Green visited the office of Clyde Cameron, a senior minister in the Whitlam government, and made the threat that if the Labor Government honoured one of its key election pledges to reclaim national ownership of oil refineries and other industries which had been mostly sold to American transnational interests, "we would move in." In early 1974, Green addressed the Australian Institute of Directors with a speech that amounted almost to an incitement to rise against the Australian Government. Green went on to say that Australian business leaders "could expect help from the United States, which would be similar to the help given to South America." (The CIA-sponsored coup in Chile had happened only a few months earlier). The CIA set about a programme of discrediting Jim Cairns, leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. ASIO timed the leak of a defamatory "Cairns file" to the Bulletin magazine to coincide with Cairns' election to Deputy Prime Minister in 1974. This file claimed that Cairns "echoed Communist views... and his activities could lead to the fascist cult of the personality... and to the destruction of the democratic system of government." A few weeks later, ASIO leaked a second file to journalist Peter Samuels, a regular publisher of CIA propaganda. Under the headline The Pathway to Terrorism, Samuels wrote that ASIO's prime concern about Cairns was the "terrorist" potential of his part in the anti-war movement. By the end of 1974, inflation and the money supply were rising at an alarming rate due to the dramatic rise in the cost of oil. Despite this, the Whitlam Government was determined to honour its election promise to hand control of U.S. multinational subsidiaries to the Australian people. In order to achieve this, Whitlam sent two of his ministers to scour the Middle East for a loan of $A4 billion. In November 1974 Rex Connor, the Minister for Minerals and Energy, met with Tirath Khemlani, a Pakistani "commodities merchant" who was working for the London brokers Dalamal & Sons. Unknown to Connor, Khemlani was a con-man who had been sent to sabotage the Australian Government by a Hong Kong arms firm closely associated with Commerce International, a Brussels-based armaments company with widespread links to the CIA. (Commerce International was set up as a front for Task Force 157, the highly secretive CIA "dirty tricks" organisation). In March 1975 Jim Cairns was introduced to Melbourne businessman George Harris,

who told Cairns that a $A4 billion loan was available from Commerce International with a once-only brokerage fee of 2.5%. Cairns considered the offer a fairy tale and rejected the deal. Harris then contacted Phillip Lynch, Deputy Leader of the opposition Liberal Party. When Lynch raised the question of the brokerage fee in Parliament, Cairns denied that any such agreement existed. Within days, a letter with Cairns' signature was published on the front pages of the national newspapers and Cairns was forced to resign for "misleading Parliament." Cairns steadfastly maintained that he never agreed to or put his name to such an outrageous and incriminating letter. A top-secret CIA briefing document for the U.S. President dated July 3rd 1975 later revealed that Cairns had been sacked "even though the evidence had been fabricated." The CIA was involved in further activities designed to undermine the Whitlam Government. In July 1975 the Australian media reported that the Mercantile Bank and Trust Company, based in the Bahamas, had issued a letter seeking $4,267,365,000 "for and on behalf of the Government of Australia." The bank did not claim to be acting with the approval of the Australian Government and cabinet ministers had never heard of it. But the implication was enough to fill the newspapers with another "scandal". Much later, an ASIO officer was to publicly state: "some of the documents which helped discredit the Labor Government in its last year in office were forgeries planted by the CIA." Mercantile Bank and Trust was set up and owned by the CIA's Colonel Paul Helliwell, who built up a network of banks, including the infamous Castle Bank, which collapsed after U.S. tax investigators found it was laundering drugs money for the CIA and the Mafia (see the Wake Up article Dealing in Death: The CIA and the Drugs Trade). As the loans affair reached its climax in the spring of 1975, a welter of supposedly incriminating documents forged by the CIA were given widespread coverage in the Australian media. Tirath Khemlani himself arrived in Australia with two bags bulging with more "incriminating" documents. Bodyguards provided by the opposition parties accompanied Khemlani and the CIA paid his expenses. Khemlani made outrageous claims in the media that Labor ministers had received commissions and "kickbacks" from the loans, that documents proving corruption were soon to be made public, and so on. In fact not one of these "documents" proved a thing; not one penny was paid by anyone to the government, nor did any minister profit from the affair. In 1981 a CIA contract employee, Joseph Flynn, revealed that he had forged some of the loans affair documents and had bugged a hotel room where Gough Whitlam was staying. He had been paid by Michael Hand, co-founder of the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank. Former Nugan Hand principal Karl Schuller provided evidence to Australian Corporate Affairs investigating officers that the CIA transferred a "slush fund" of $A2,400,000 to the main opposition parties in March 1973, four months after Whitlam's election. An investigation by a special New South Wales police task force concluded that "many links were found between individuals connected with Nugan Hand and individuals connected

in very significant ways with U.S. intelligence organisations, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Naval Intelligence [Task Force 157]... at times those links have the appearance of the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community itself." The Commission called for criminal charges for "drug, conspiracy, perjury and passport offences." (A year after Frank Nugan's death, the Deputy Director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, expressed deep concern that the investigations into Nugan Hand Bank would lead to disclosure of a range of CIA dirty tricks calculated to undermine the Whitlam Government). It was revealed in the press that the CIA had offered the Australian opposition Liberal Party (the Liberals were actually conservative) "unlimited funds" in their unsuccessful attempt to defeat the Labor party in the May 1974 parliamentary elections. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti confirmed that the CIA had funded both of the major opposition parties and that the Liberals had been receiving CIA funds since the late 1960s. According to the former Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, Dr Ray Cline, the CIA passed information to opposition politicians not only to discredit the Whitlam Government but also to put pressure on Australian civil servants who in turn would pressure the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr. When the Pine Gap Treaty, which would determine the future of the CIA's most valuable overseas base, was due for renewal on December 9th 1975, Whitlam's comments that he might not renew the treaty raised major alarms in the Agency. CIA Director William Colby later wrote that the "threat" posed by the Whitlam Government was one of the three "world crises" of his career, comparable with the Middle East war two years previously, when the United States considered using nuclear weapons. The CIA Station Chief in London, Dr John Proctor, contacted MI6 and asked for British help with "the Whitlam problem." William Colby directly approached his opposite number, head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to emphasise to British intelligence that Australia was "traditionally Britain's domain" and that if Pine Gap was closed down, "the Alliance would be blinded strategically." The CIA also sought assistance from MI6 and MI5 liaison officers based in Washington. British intelligence has long had a vested interest in Australian politics. MI6 operates its own base at Kowandi, south of Darwin, where its highly secret activities are concealed from the Australian government and people. They include widespread interception of communications and covert operations in Asia. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, also operates from this base and is highly integrated with British intelligence. At the same time as U.S. intelligence was targeting the Australian Labor Government, Peter Wright (of Spycatcher infamy) and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright conspired with his

close friend, James Jesus Angleton, the extreme right-wing head of CIA counterintelligence, to "target" the three Western leaders they regarded as "Communist agents": Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt in Germany and Gough Whitlam. After discovering that the British and American intelligence services based in Australia were secretly involved in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, Whitlam ordered the dismissal of the heads of ASIO and ASIS in the autumn of 1975, and then began to make moves against the CIA. Then, at the beginning of November, it was revealed in the press that a former CIA officer, Richard Stallings, had been channelling funds to J. Douglas Anthony, leader of the opposition National Country Party, and was a close friend and former tenant of Anthony's Canberra home. Whitlam accused the opposition of being "subsidised by the CIA." In Parliament, Doug Anthony admitted that Stallings was a friend but challenged Whitlam to provide evidence that Stallings worked for the CIA. (Stallings' name was not on the official list of "declared" CIA officers working in Australia, but on a "confidential" list held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange). Whitlam prepared a reply, which he intended to give when Parliament resumed the following week, on Tuesday November 11th. The CIA was frantic. The Australian Prime Minister was about to blow the cover of the agent who had set up Pine Gap and to reveal that the supposedly "joint" facility was a CIA charade. Furthermore, the future of the base itself was to be subject to parliamentary debate. The day before his speech was due, Whitlam was informed of a telex from the ASIO station in Washington, which stated that the Prime Minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The message had been virtually dictated by Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA's East Asia Division (and whose plethora of illegal covert activities have been outlined in other articles on this site). On Sunday November 9th, the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was briefed on the "security crisis", while the head of the Defence Department declared publicly: "This is the greatest risk to the nation's security there has ever been." The CIA was certain that Whitlam would announce the cancellation of the Pine Gap agreement on December 9th, and set into motion a plan to install in power a political party to "protect the sanctity of U.S. bases." Six weeks earlier, during a visit to Indonesia, opposition politician Andrew Peacock had briefed government officials there on the current state of the Australian political crisis. He described in detail a sequence of events that were about to take Australia by surprise. A record of his briefing was later read into Australian Hansard: "Whitlam will not agree to hold an election.... The Governor-General would be forced to ask Malcolm Fraser to form a Cabinet. But this Cabinet would not be able to get a

mandate to govern, because Parliament is controlled by the Labor Party.... Fraser is appointed PM, a minute later he asks the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament, following which a general election is to be held." And that was exactly what happened. On November 11th, the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament fully about the CIA and American bases in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr from Parliament House. Without warning, Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, dissolved both houses of Parliament and appointed Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal Party, to head an interim government until new elections could be held in December. An unelected official (whose position was traditionally only that of a figurehead representative of the Queen of England) had, in one arbitrary and unconstitutional act, overthrown a legitimate and democratically elected government. Back in the House of Representatives, Whitlam called for a vote of confidence in himself and his government. An overwhelming majority supported Whitlam. Indeed, six motions proposed that day, including a motion of no-confidence in Malcolm Fraser, were passed by absolute majorities. The Speaker of the House delivered Parliament's clear message of confidence in the Whitlam government personally to the Governor-General. Kerr refused to accept it. The no-confidence motion against Fraser legally obliged the Governor-General to dismiss Fraser, but Kerr chose to ignore this. Former CIA officers who were among the Agency's "top seven" in 1975, revealed ten years later that "Whitlam was set up. The action that Kerr took was so extreme that it would take far more than a constitutional crisis to cause him to do what he did...." A Deputy Director of the CIA said, "Kerr did what he was told to do." During the first week of the coup, the Australian army was recalled to barracks and there were reports that units were issued with live ammunition. There were demonstrations against the sacking of the Labor Government throughout Australia; the unions began to mobilise and prepare for a general strike. However, Bob Hawke, the President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), summoned the press and delivered a stirring speech in which he said that "working people must not be provoked... we have to show we are not going to allow this to snowball." Hawke's intervention was critical: Australia's organised labour was strangely quiet in response to the affair. In fact Marshall Green later said that he found Bob Hawke so amenable to the CIA's cause that "Bob gave me his private telephone number and said if anything ever comes up that desperately needs some action, this is the number to ring." An election was called for December 13th 1975. During the campaign, three letter bombs were posted to Kerr, Fraser and the ultra-right-wing Queensland Premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. Most of the press, led by Rupert Murdoch's papers, concluded that the bombs were sent by left-wing extremists within the Labor Party. There was not a shred of evidence to support this and no culprits were ever found, but the charge of "terrorism" was used to great effect against Labor.

Four days before the election, Bjelke-Petersen called a special session of the Queensland Parliament to hear "dramatic revelations". He claimed to be "in possession of material which made clear that two Ministers of the Whitlam Government were due to receive staggering sums of money as a consequence of secret commissions and kickbacks." Bjelke-Petersen then moved quickly to gag any debate and to prevent the Labor leader from arranging for parliamentary investigation of the "revelations". The undisclosed "revelations" made large headlines in the press. No material or evidence of any kind was ever produced, but the publicity achieved its goal. Whitlam lost the election. The new Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser renewed the Pine Gap treaty for another decade. He also offered Washington a naval base at Cockburn Sound, even though the Americans had not requested it. In his first budget, Fraser increased the size of ASIO and gave it more money, proportionately, than any other government body. Kerr was given an unequalled pay rise of 170% and was promoted to "Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George."
The Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr. Despite denying that he ever had any connections with the CIA or any other intelligence organisations, Kerr in fact had a long association with covert intelligence operations, firstly as a member of the top-secret Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs during the Second World War. He was then seconded to the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, the fore-runner of the CIA. Although he joined the Australian Labor Party early in his career, Kerr was always well to the right politically. He was chief legal adviser to the Industrial Groups, a body which sought to dominate trade unionism and was linked to the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), an extreme "anti-Communist" organisation whose split from the Labor Party and subsequent spoiler tactics kept Labor in opposition until the election of Gough Whitlam in 1977. Kerr was an active member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, which was exposed in Congress in 1967 as being "founded, funded and generally run by the CIA." In the 1960s Kerr travelled to the United States to arrange funding from the Asia Foundation; that too, was exposed in Congress as a CIA conduit for money and influence.

The trade union movement of Australia had long been infiltrated by U.S. intelligence. As John Grenville, assistant secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall, revealed, "it was generally accepted that the U.S. labour attach was the station agent for the CIA." Robert Walkinshaw was the labour attach from 1962 to 1964. During his time in

Melbourne, a trade-union publication, Spotlight, was set up, funded and run by the CIA. Walkinshaw's subsequent CIA posting was Indonesia, during the military coup in which over half a million alleged Communists were murdered. Walkinshaw was later posted as CIA adviser in Phuoc Tuy, Vietnam, where the Australian army and Australian CIA advisers were based. The CIA later admitted giving money to the General Secretary of the powerful Australian Worker's Union, Tom Dougherty, to "fight Communism in the AWU." Four years later the National Secretary of the Federation Ironworkers' Association, Laurie Short, began many visits to the United States, which were sponsored by the CIA. Short returned to Australia "determined to get rid of the Commies and their friends" from the Labor Party and the unions. He also delivered the clear message that "in America, the trade-union movement looked to Australian unionists to help counteract the spread of Communism in the Far East." The three Americans involved in supporting Bob Hawke's campaign for the Presidency of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) - Emil Lindahl, Gerry O'Keefe and Ed McHale - all worked for the CIA. Gerry O'Keefe was exposed as a major CIA operator in right-wing Chilean unions that helped to overthrow the Allende Government. Ed McHale was U.S. labour attach in the early 1970s and maintained a "close personal relationship" with Hawke when the ACTU President was one of the most powerful union bosses Australia had ever known. McHale was internationally known as a senior CIA officer, having long been Assistant Director of Radio Free Europe, which had been set up, financed and run by the CIA. In 1977 the American Christopher Boyce disclosed details of CIA activities in Australia, specifically the manipulation of unions. Boyce was employed by a Californian aerospace company, TRW Systems Inc., in a cryptographic communications centre which linked CIA headquarters in Virginia with the Agency's satellite surveillance system in Australia. Boyce revealed that the CIA had infiltrated Australian labour unions, had manipulated their leadership and suppressed strikes, particularly those involving railroads and airports. Boyce described one instance when TRW had material and personnel to ship out to the CIA spy base at Pine Gap. The Agency was concerned that strikes at Australian airports could wreck their schedule. However, a telex from CIA headquarters said, "CIA will continue to suppress the strikes. Continue shipment on schedule." In other words, the CIA had infiltrated the hierarchy of Australian trade unions. Boyce and his associate Andrew Daulton Lee were put on trial in 1977 for selling U.S. secrets to the Russians. Lee had flown to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico and sold details of the CIA's covert activities in Australia to the Soviets. Boyce maintained that he had never intended the information to go the Russians, that Lee had agreed to make it public through one of his father's influential friends, but that he had been blackmailed by Lee, a heroin addict and pusher.

Evidence emerged during the trial that most of TRW's communications came from Pine Gap and that although the United States had signed an Executive Agreement with Australia to share information from Pine Gap, the agreement was not being honoured and "certain information" was regularly concealed from the Australian government. Boyce described the CIA's campaigns to subvert Australian trade unions "particularly in the transport industry", and revealed that the Agency was using Pine Gap to eavesdrop on telephone and telex messages to and from Australia of a political character, and that the CIA had funded the Australian opposition political parties. Boyce also revealed that the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was referred to by Joe Harrison, the CIA chief at TWR, as "our man Kerr." Boyce's disclosures caused a sensation in the United States. The prosecuting lawyers made no attempt to refute his allegations but successfully objected to any further evidence about the CIA's activities in Australia. The judge complied with a direct CIA request and agreed that Boyce would not mention the "Australia information" at his trial if, in return, the government did not use it against him - such was the sensitivity of the matter. Boyce and Lee were both found guilty; Lee was given a life sentence, while Boyce was sent for "psychiatric observation" - an indication that he might be treated leniently in return for his silence. However, Boyce made it consistently clear that he was so outraged at the betrayal of an ally - Australia - that he intended to talk. He was subsequently given forty years in Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, where he is kept in solitary confinement. Whenever he leaves his cell, he is manacled, handcuffed and accompanied by two guards. It is said that his only hope of release rests on his continued silence about what happened in Australia.

The American Christopher Boyce described CIA covert operations in Australia aimed at bringing down the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam. Boyce was sentenced to 40 years solitary confinement for his refusal to stay silent on the matter.

Five years after the overthrow of Whitlam, in April 1981, senior executives of nineteen Australian corporations met at Melbourne's Noah's Hotel for a "forecasting round table" organised by Business International. Business International is a worldwide American organisation of "consultants" which represents the top multi-national companies in Australia. In December 1977, the New York Times exposed Business International's clandestine links with the CIA.

The nineteen had come to hear Business International's Alan Carroll express his concern about the resurgence of the Labor Party under Bill Hayden, who had held senior posts in the Whitlam Government and described himself as a republican and a democratic socialist. At that time, Bob Hawke had completed his term as ACTU President and was a newly elected Labor Party Member of Parliament. Carroll told the meeting that he knew Hawke "pretty well" and "basically, Hawke will be Labor Party leader by the middle of next year; and that's my business, and we won't go into that in any great depth. But he will be there. It's all under way. The game plan is totally under way and I forecast 3 to 5 on a Hawke Government in '83! We had a meeting with him about one month ago and we're meeting with him every six months from now. It's terribly important." A top-secret CIA briefing document for the U.S. President described Hawke as "the best qualified" to succeed Whitlam as Labor leader. The forecasts of the Agency and Alan Carroll came true in almost every detail. In February 1983, three weeks before an election was due, Hawke and others on the party's right wing mounted a successful putsch against Bill Hayden. With the slogan, "Bob Hawke, Bringing Australia Together", the CIA's chosen candidate became Australian Prime Minister. Hawke went on to cultivate many ties with anti-Communist groups and developed what U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz described as "a fine relationship" with Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Hawke's Government repeatedly refused to release some 1,200 documents on the Nugan Hand Bank, the front for international crime and illegal CIA operations in Australia. Hawke also refused to find out why the CIA barred the release, under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, of fourteen intelligence reports on Commerce International, the CIA-front company that played a central role in the destruction of the Whitlam Government. In 1989 a committee headed by a former Chief Justice of the High Court recommended rigorous Government secrecy in order to prevent disclosures about the activities of the CIA, MI5 and MI6 in the internal affairs of Australia. The CIA's illicit actions against the Australian Labor Party clearly indicate that the Agency will not hesitate to move against even supposed allies if it considers that they threaten U.S. interests; the full range of CIA dirty tricks can be expected to be applied against any Western nation with the same lack of impunity and regard for the law that the Agency has shown in its wars with its enemies in the East.

Good mates: U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Bob Hawke, 1987.

UNIVERSITY INFILTRATION AND CAMPUS SURVEILLANCE INFILTRATING THE MEDIA THE DOMESTIC OPERATIONS DIVISION OPERATION CHAOS THE TENTACLES WIDEN CONCLUSION "It is shameful for the American people to be so misled. There is no federal agency of our government whose activities receive less scrutiny and control than the CIA." - SENATOR STUART SYMINGTON, Member Joint Senate Committee for CIA Oversight, Nov 23rd 1971 The CIA's gross violations of international law and the Agency's interference in the internal politics of other countries are well-established facts. Less well known is the fact that for decades the CIA has conducted a massive campaign of illegal covert operations within the United States, in breach of the Agency's own charter (officially the CIA has no legal jurisdiction within the United States; the National Security Act of 1947 prohibits the Agency from engaging in any kind of "internal security functions."). UNIVERSITY INFILTRATION AND CAMPUS SURVEILLANCE
Professors and other operatives with academic cover have worked extensively for the CIA on campuses around the world. They have written books, articles and reports for U.S. consumption with secret CIA sponsorship and control; they have spied on foreign nationals at home and abroad; they have regularly recruited foreign and U.S. students and teachers for the Agency; they have hosted conferences with secret CIA backing under scholarly cover to promote disinformation; and they have collected extensive data, under the disguise of research, on Third World movements opposed to US interference.

Frank Wisner, who headed the CIA's first large scale effort to recruit at universities across the U.S.

"It is absolutely essential that the Agency have available to it the single greatest source of expertise: the American academic community." - F.W.M. Janney, CIA Personnel Director Since the 1940s, the CIA had hundreds of teachers and graduate students on more than 100 campuses who worked for the Agency secretly in recruiting, writing propaganda and running covert operations. For instance, Yale's crew coach "Skip" Walz was a spotter for the Agency throughout the 1940s and 50s. He received $10,000 to pass the names of athletic young men on to CIA recruiters. In one year, Skip introduced 25 such men to the CIA who went on to become paramilitary officers. In the 1950's, the CIA expanded its operations within educational institutions until some 5,000 academics at universities across the States were working for it by identifying and recruiting students, both from America and from the thousands of foreign students who came to the United States each year. These foreign students would then work as moles for the Agency when they returned to their own countries. The CIA, both overtly and covertly, established entire university institutes and research departments, and employed professors as recruiting agents and researchers. From 1952 to 1967, the Agency even funded the National Student Association, giving about $3.3 million to support its operations. The Agency was also involved in the creation of a number of academic foreign studies institutes. For instance, in co-operation with the American Metal Climax Corporation, a US-African mining company, the CIA established the African-American Institute in 1954 (now located in New York). The purpose of this was to generate interest in African studies that could subsequently be tapped by the CIA and other government agencies. Academic institutions also played an important role in promoting CIA interests in African affairs. The CIA funded the joint Harvard/ MIT Center for International Studies (MIT-CIS) and developed its African Research Programme through a network of academic agents. Max Milllikan, former director of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, was appointed director of MIT-CIS. He in turn appointed State Department official Arnold Rivkin to head the African programme. Together, the two supervised the centre's African studies for the CIA's use. For instance, Milllikan commenced Project Bushfire to study the political, psychological, economic and sociological factors leading to "peripheral wars." A 1958 CIA report stated that the Agency would need "a constant level of seventy people specializing in the African area; they particularly desire those who have training in economics, geography or political science." CIA-backed professors at MIT-CIS and Cornell launched projects to train an elite group of Indonesian military and economic leaders at the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California in Berkely. These trainees would later be christened "the Berkeley Mafia." They went back to Indonesia and became the impetus behind the coup that brought General Suharto to power, which resulted in the massacre of 500,000 to one million Indonesians during the CIA-backed coup.

Durwood Lockard, assistant deputy to the CIA's Near East Division, became assistant head of MIT-CIS's Middle Eastern Studies Department in 1957. From that period onwards, several officials and faculty members of the Harvard Business School founded and helped to administer front organisations for the CIA. They published a number of books in two versions: one classified for CIA reading and the other unclassified and released to the general public.

In 1956 the CIA established the Asia Foundation, providing it with $88 million in funding each year. The foundation sponsored research, supported conferences, ran academic exchange programmes, funded anti-Communist academics in various Asian countries and recruited foreign agents and new case officers. Large numbers of American academics participated in the program. From 1955 to 1959, Michigan State University was under a $25 million contract with the CIA to provide academic cover to five CIA agents stationed in South Vietnam. Their jobs included drafting the South Vietnamese government's Constitution and providing police training and weapons to the repressive Diem regime. The level of CIA surveillance on American campuses was best summed up by one student, recruited by the CIA at Iowa State University in 1965, who wrote: "My campus missions included monitoring selected students; obtaining printed materials from student protest groups, including membership and donor lists and programs of planned actions and protests; gathering information on the private sexual activities of selected students or faculty, and on the student visa status of selected foreign students; and learning the identities of visiting "travelling agitators" from other colleges and universities Ethnic and racial groups were watched as well as student radical movements. No guidelines were given that differentiated between what was legitimate protest and what constituted a perceived threat to national security. This allowed the CIA to expand its domestic surveillance to cover draft resistance organisations, military deserters, non-mainstream newspapers and publications, most black militant groups, and US citizens travelling abroad. Most domestic political activity was also covered." In 1968 the CIA used the Eagleton Institute for Research at Rutgers University in a plan to influence the outcome of the presidential election in Guyana. Through the Eagleton

Institute, the CIA helped amend the Guyanese constitution to allow Guyanese and relatives of Guyanese living abroad to vote by absentee ballot. Then, 16,000 votes were manufactured in New York City, giving the CIA's candidate, Forbes Burnham, a narrow margin over socialist Cheddi Jagan. The nature of the relationship between the CIA and academic community was perhaps best highlighted by a 1968 memo from Dr. Earl C. Bolton, who, while serving as Vice President of the University of California at Berkeley, was secretly consulting with the CIA. The memo was widely circulated among US universities and advised the use of "duplicity and deception to hide CIA connection to the campuses." It also advised lying about CIA involvement in university projects, stating, "The real initiative might be with the Agency but the apparent or recorded launching of the research should, wherever possible, emanate from the campus." Bolton's memo also recommended setting up programmes with CIA funds "to establish the study of intelligence as a legitimate and important field of inquiry for the academic scholar." Under Bolton's plan, the CIA was to fund one-year post-doctoral programmes for selected scholars. By the late 1970s, about 500 academics were working for the CIA, identifying and recruiting American students and providing full-time screening committees designed to select 200-300 future CIA operatives from among the 250,000 foreign students in the U.S. Around 60% of these professors, researchers and administrators were fully aware of and received direct payment from the CIA as contract employees, or from research grants. In 1976, one CIA official bragged about the level of recruitment of foreign students who would go on to become moles for the Agency in their own countries, stating that "by 1985, we'll own 80% of the Iranian government's second and third level of officials." By the late 1980s, the CIA had made recruitment of new personnel a key priority and initiated an "Officer in Residence" programme to increase the Agency's presence and prestige in the US academic community. According to CIA "Academic Coordinator Arthur Hulnick, "about ten" major universities across the country were hosting CIA Officers in Residence at the time.

James McInnis, the CIA's Officer in Residence at the University of Texas in Austin. Today, according to John P. Littlejohn, the CIA's deputy director of personnel, approximately 1,000 CIA employees are hired each year from campuses and two to three hundred of these become clandestine officers. The Agency's surveillance of U.S. citizens was not limited to academic institutions. Following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained forces in 1961, Cuban exiles were directed and paid by the Agency to compile secret files on and watch over other Cubans and Americans "who associated with individuals under surveillance." By the late 1960's such activities were being supported by the CIA in several key American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Miami and San Juan. It was estimated that 150 informants were on the payroll of a "Cuban counterintelligence" office located in Florida. INFILTRATING THE MEDIA
Since the 1950s, the CIA conducted extensive operations within newspaper, magazine and television organisations, maintaining liaison relationships with about 50 American joumalists and U.S. media organisations. An uncensored portion of the Senate's Church Committee investigation into the CIA stated: "They [the 50] are part of a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence foreign opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of foreign newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers and other foreign media outlets."

The Agency also established close links with book publishing houses and media organisations in the U.S. Between 1947 and 1967, the CIA produced, subsidised or sponsored well over 1,000 books, many of them published by cultural organisations backed by the Agency. In early 1964, President Johnson's national security advisors decided something was needed to overcome the American public's apathy towards U.S. involvement in Vietnam, so the CIA fabricated evidence to justify the war to its domestic audience. In 1965, just before the entry of American troops into Vietnam, the State Department issued two reports, one of which was entitled Aggression From the North: The Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam. Both papers relied on contrived CIA "intelligence" to support their arguments. The Agency conducted several covert operations to prove the papers' thesis. One involved an elaborate scheme to print large numbers of postage stamps showing the Viet Cong shooting down a U.S. helicopter. The highly professional production technique was meant to indicate that the stamp was produced in North Vietnam because the South had no such capability. The CIA printed sheets of these stamps, wrote letters in Vietnamese, mailed them all over the world and made copies available to U.S. journalists. A full colour blow-up of the stamp appeared on the cover of Life magazine on February 26th 1965.

Another covert operation entailed planting a weapons shipment and blaming it on the North Vietnamese. The CIA took tons of Communist-made weapons out of its warehouses, loaded them onto a Vietnamese ship, faked a firefight and then called in Western reporters and International Control Commission observers to "prove" that the North Vietnamese were aiding the Viet Cong rebels. A State Department White Paper featured details of this operation under the headline "Hanoi Supplies Weapons, Ammunition and Other War Material to its Forces in the South." Seven pages of the White Paper were devoted to the fake CIA "evidence". On March 6th 1965, just a week after publication of the White paper, President Johnson ordered two Marine Corps battalion-landing teams into Vietnam and the initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder, which consisted of the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War had begun. THE DOMESTIC OPERATIONS DIVISION
Also in 1964, President Johnson allowed CIA Director John McCone to create a new super-secret branch of the CIA's proprietary front organisations called the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), the very title of which mocked the supposed congressional prohibition of CIA operations inside the U.S.

In the classified document creating the DOD, the scope of its activities were "to exercise centralised responsibility for the direction, support and coordination of clandestine operational activities within the United States." One of those activities was burglarising foreign diplomatic sites at the request of the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA also expanded the role of its "quasi-legal" Domestic Contact Service (DCS), an operation designed to brief and debrief selected American citizens who had travelled abroad in sensitive areas of intelligence interest. The DCS also monitored the arrivals and departures of U.S. nationals and foreigners. Thus, a nationwide network was established, comprising the DOD, the DCS and the Agency's network of fronts, covers and phoney organisations, operating entirely without congressional oversight or public knowledge. As anti-war protests spread across American campuses during the late 60s, the CIA reacted by implementing two new domestic operations. The first, Project RESISTANCE, was designed to provide security to CIA recruiters on campuses. Under this programme, the CIA sought active cooperation from college administrators, campus security and local police to help identify anti-war activists, political dissidents and "radicals". Information on thousands of students and dozens of groups was fed to the DOD. The CIA also created Project MERRIMAC, to provide warnings about demonstrations being carried out against CIA facilities or personnel in the Washington area. Under both Projects, the Agency infiltrated agents into all sorts of domestic groups and embarked on a massive campaign of burglaries, explosives, criminal frame-ups and disinformation. The CIA worked closely with local police, purchasing sophisticated equipment for them, and in return was given access to arrest records, suspect lists and

intelligence reports. Many large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA, carried out illegal warrantless searches of private property, to provide intelligence for a report requested by President Johnson and later entitled "Restless Youth." By 1967, the CIA's illegal collection of domestic intelligence had become so large and widespread that CIA Director Richard Helms was forced to create a Special Operations Group (SOG), which provided data on the U.S. peace movement to the Office of Current Intelligence on a regular basis. SOG was directed by Richard Ober, a CIA officer with an established record of domestic intelligence operations. OPERATION CHAOS
In July 1968, CIA Director Helms decided to consolidate all CIA domestic intelligence operations under one programme and title; this was called Operation CHAOS. The Agency's domestic activities greatly expanded from then on, at the urging of both President Johnson and his main White house advisers Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow and Tom Charles Huston, who were staunch anti-Communists and wanted the Agency to establish the involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the anti-war movement in the U.S.

After Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, Operation CHAOS became one of the largest and most pervasive domestic surveillance programmes in the history of the United States. The CIA went to great lengths to conceal the operation's existence from the public, while Nixon, like Johnson, exploited CHAOS for his own political ends. Helms recommended that computer networks be used to "share information about American dissidents between the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and military intelligence units." Using a computer system called HYDRA, the CIA gathered information on individuals and groups from all of these intelligence organisations. The Agency also employed satellites to monitor anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Many of the CHAOS agents received several weeks of assignments and training overseas to establish their covers as radicals. Once they returned to the US and enrolled in colleges and universities, they had the proper "credentials." The CHAOS unit periodically drew up reports "on the foreign aspects of the anti-Vietnam War, youth and similar movements and their possible links to American counterparts" and collected files on over 300,000 individuals in the United States.

CIA Director Richard Helms, who developed CHAOS into a massive surveillance operation.

In 1970, Richard Helms joined with others in recommending to President Nixon "an integrated approach to the coverage of domestic unrest," which came to be known as the Huston Plan. The CIA "recruited or inserted about a dozen individuals into American dissident circles" In order to "establish their credentials for operations abroad." These agents "submitted reports on the activities of the American dissidents with whom they were in contact." This information was kept in CIA files and passed on to the FBI. In June 1970, Nixon met with Helms, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative Lt. General Donald V. Bennett, and told them that he wanted an even more concentrated and coordinated effort against domestic dissenters. To that end, Nixon created the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), chaired by Hoover. The first ICI report, in late June, recommended new efforts in "black bag operations", wiretapping and mailopening; within a month these recommendations had been accepted by the White House. In 1972, a report by the CIA's Inspector General expressed misgivings about Operation CHAOS: "we also encountered general concern over what appeared to be a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans not known to be or suspected of being involved in espionage Stations were asked to report on the whereabouts and activities of prominent persons whose comings and goings were not only in the public domain, but for whom allegations of subversion seemed sufficiently nebulous to raise renewed doubts as to the nature and legitimacy of the CHAOS program." By now, even Helms and Hoover began to have second thoughts about the expansion of CHAOS and its widespread use as a political tool by Nixon. Both men feared that the whole question of domestic operations was going to become public knowledge. Meanwhile, Helms continued to lie to Congress and to the public, denying that the CIA was involved in domestic operations, or using American institutions such as the Peace Corps, the business community or the media as covers for CIA operations. Yet just a few years later, the Washington Star revealed that over 35 American journalists, some full-time, some free-lance and some major media correspondents, were on the CIA payroll. And in 1974 the CIA was forced to admit that over 200 CIA agents were operating overseas posing as businessmen. When the Watergate scandal broke out in 1972 (in which two former CIA officers, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, were involved in a burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington), the Agency's web of lies, deception, misinformation and illegal domestic activities began to unravel with speed. In an effort at damage control, new CIA Executive Director William Colby decided that Operation CHAOS and Project RESISTANCE should be terminated. In 1975, largely as a result of Watergate and other exposures, the CIA underwent public investigation and scrutiny by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Committee. These investigations revealed considerable evidence showing that the CIA had carried

out criminal activities with total contempt for the law, both in the United States and abroad. Documents released in early 1979 by the Agency as the result of a lawsuit indicated that Operation CHAOS, contrary to earlier accounts in reports to government committees, had infiltrated political groups in the United States in order to collect purely domestic information. The documents also revealed a number of aspects of CHAOS and related programmes not reported by the Church Committee, including information that "the Agency had investigated domestic political groups as much as five years before the initiation of CHAOS, that CHAOS collected information on prominent Americans including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Ronald Dellums (Chair of the House of Representatives Black Caucus), that CHAOS information was preserved and continued to be used after the operation's supposed termination in 1974", and that "the programme was for several years assigned highest operational priority." During the life of Operation CHAOS, the CIA had compiled personality files on over 13,000 individuals, as well as files on over 1,000 domestic groups, and that the Agency had shared information on over 300,000 people with the FBI, DIA and other agencies.. THE TENTACLES WIDEN
The literature that exists of the CIA's illegal domestic operations is by no means complete, since it describes only those activities that have been uncovered, and most of those have only come to light years after the fact, because of unauthorised leaks or Freedom of Information Act requests. There is good reason to believe that the number of operations has escalated, rather than diminished. After taking office, President Bush greatly increased the CIA's secret budget for internal spying and the number of academics on the Agency's payroll expanded sharply.

In 1982, the CIA brazenly proposed that all scientific research papers written in the United States by U.S. academics be submitted to the Agency for "prior review." And in 1986, Robert Gates, the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence, told university professors at a public speaking engagement that the CIA would "continue to strengthen the kinds of programmes it ran in universities in the past", and "We need your help." One example of this was the case of Professor Richard Mansbach, head of the political science department at Rutgers, who assigned an undergraduate class to do dataintensive research on Western European political culture. The studies that the students carried out on Western Europe's disarmament, labour, women's and environmental movements were secretly passed on to the CIA. Professor Nadav Safran was forced to leave his director's position at Harvard's Centre for Middle Eastern Affairs in 1986, when it was revealed that he was on the CIA's payroll. He had received over $100,000 from the Agency to write a book on Saudi Arabia and $50,000 to organise a university conference on Islam. Just a year earlier, the director of Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, was also uncloaked as a CIA asset, having worked secretly with a CIA consultant and published documents that were funded by the Agency. It is safe to assume that only a small number of CIA academics are ever exposed, while the great majority remain secret. It is difficult to typecast the CIA scholar. Gustav Hilger,

a CIA academic who held posts at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, was a former member of the Nazi Foreign Office. But even liberal professors have been inducted into the CIA. James R. Hooker of Michigan State's African Studies Centre was regarded as left thinking; he spoke publicly against the Vietnam War and was friendly with leaders of liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean. However, as a CIA researcher, Hooker travelled to Africa to document the support of various political parties and eventually gave his support to UNITA and the FNLA in Angola. Evidence of the Agency's creation, support and training of the Salvadoran death squads in the U.S. was documented in 1984, when it was revealed that the head of Salvador's Treasury Police (key organisers of the death squads) had been a paid CIA informant since the late 1970s. The CIA, along with the State Department and US military, conceived and organised ORDEN, the rural paramilitary intelligence network that initiated the use of terrorism against government opponents. ORDEN became Mano Blanca (the "White Hand") and developed into a network of death squads whose members received direct training in the United States from U.S. officials. In the summer of 1986, Northwestern University's Traffic Institute, a policetraining facility, began participation in the "Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program", which involved the training of Salvadoran police force members who were connected with the death squads. Media coverage and protests from campus and community groups eventually forced the university to pull out of the programme but State Department spokesman Michael Kraft said that "schools in the New England area" had already completed their participation in the programme. In 1987, Harvard University agreed to take on a $1.2 million study in conjunction with the CIA to study problems in intelligence assessment and foreign policy, using the Philippines as a model. CONCLUSION
Just as the FBI's illegal actions against U.S. citizens did not stop with the supposed termination of its COINTELPRO programme, so the termination of the CIA's Operation CHAOS never ended the Agency's criminal activities against domestic dissidents. President Reagan extended the CIA's domestic operations dramatically and the following Bush administration and CIA head William Webster both announced the need to again target political enemies of the U.S. for assassination.

The CIA is not the only U.S.-based organisation with frightening domestic surveillance capacities. Using a computer system called HARVEST, the National Security Agency (NSA) can monitor thousands of phone conversations simultaneously, honing in on and recording specific conversations according to pre-programmed "trigger words" such as "Cuba," "CIA," or "protest." It was revealed in the Iran-Contra hearings that the U.S. government, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has detention camps in place and ready for use for dissenting Americans labelled as "subversives," who are to be detained by police and military units in an "emergency" situation.

FEMA developed a secret contingency plan, written as part of an Executive Order signed by President Reagan, for use in a "severe crisis." The plan calls for suspension of the Constitution, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and declaration of martial law. Such a "crisis" situation includes "domestic opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." Much of what was done outside the law under the COINTELPRO and CHAOS programmes has since been legalised by Executive Order No. 12333, signed by the President on December 4th 1981. This gives the CIA extended license to carry out domestic operations in the United States and limits the public's access to information about these operations. Also under Executive Order 12333, government infiltration "for the purpose of influencing the activity of domestic political organisations" has received official sanction. The CIA's methodology, applied so ruthlessly abroad, has now been given full legislation for use at home.... "In the CIA we justified our penetration, disruption and sabotage of the left around the world because we felt morality changed on crossing national frontiers. Now, however, we see that the FBI was employing these methods against the left in the U.S. in a planned, co-ordinated programme to disrupt, sabotage and repress the political organisations to the left of Democratic and Republican liberals. The murders at Kent and Jackson State, domestic activities of U.S. military intelligence and now the President's own 'plumbers unit are ample demonstration that CIA methods were really brought home. How fitting that over the rubble of the CIA's old temporary buildings back in Washington, the new building that rose was called Watergate." - PHILIP AGEE, ex-CIA agent "The lesson we learn from this history is that we cannot keep our liberty secure by relying alone on the good faith of men with great power." - WALTER MONDALE, future vice president, while taking part in the Senate probe of the CIA and FBI in 1975.