A History of (Violent) Incompetence
“Covert action is like a damn good drug. It works, but if you take too much of it, it will kill you.”
Richard Helms (director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973)
It’s already been seven months since the 500-page sneak peak into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s CIA torture report was triumphantly released, and… well, nothing seems to have really come out of it. Whether or not the CIA did mislead the Bush administration (which seems improbable, considering Dick Cheney’s notorious distrust of the agency), one thing remains beyond reasonable doubt: The whole affair is quite in keeping with the organization’s history; namely, these grim escapades neatly follow the past four decades of CIA operations, where the agency routinely proved itself to be the executive branch’s most sinister and incompetent pet. Don’t believe me? Lucky for you I’ve laid out three examples below. A joyous read, obviously.
1970: Chile
In September 1970, despite the CIA spending close to half a million dollars in anti-socialist propaganda, Salvador Allende of the left-wing Popular Unity party was democratically elected to be Chile’s 29th president. By then, the country had acquired a reputation as the most successful democratic regime in South America, and Mr. Allende had arrived in power after its 38th year of existence. Nonetheless, the Nixon administration — with in its ranks proverbial boogeyman Henry Kissinger — took it upon themselves not to allow any country to go Marxist simply because “its people are irresponsible”, as the secretary of state himself said at the time. It was agreed that provoking the arrival in power of a more likeable person was something of a necessity.
Unfortunately for them, Chile had back then a rather exemplary tradition of keeping its military out of politics. In particular, the chief of Chilean General Staff, René Schneider, was firmly against the army’s interference in electoral processes. So, less than two months after the elections, the CIA hired a group of far-right nationalists to kidnap the general and scare the South American country’s parliament into denying Mr. Allende as president. The first attempt, on October 19th, failed miserably. The second, the following evening, went much the same way. On the 22nd, however, local agents (under great pressure from the home office), along with hired guns, made a third and final attempt, murdering Mr. Schneider in his car on the streets of Santiago.
This incident, in effect, started the Nixon administration’s policy of pressure and destabilization of the Allende regime, a policy that lasted until he was finally deposed (and killed) in 1973. His successor, the renowned Augusto Pinochet, was a man who words can only best describe as a murderous tyrant, and who until 1978 was aided in his suppression campaigns by none other than the CIA. Most famously, Operation Condor, the international repression and assassination operations conducted together by South American juntas against their dissidents, was shown to have been directly aided by our most favored intelligence agency. Talk about precedent.
1984: Iran-Contra
1984: times are hard for the Reagan administration. After winning somewhat fair elections (according to independent foreign sources), the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua is officially legitimized. They had taken power 5 years before from a long-ruling family dictatorship, and were opposed by the Contras, an alliance of various rebel groups directly funded and supported by the U.S. government. Yet these elections prove a turning point for American public opinion, and thus congress, who now surprisingly sees the promotion of civil war against a foreign democratically-elected regime as untenable. Funding for Contra programs is cut by the legislative branch, and the administration suddenly has no way of furthering its Central American aims.
But wait! The head of the CIA devises a brilliant plan to go around these unfortunate limitations — the key being that Iran is in the midst of a war with Iraq, and thus looking for weapons. Through the agency (as well as a few others), the U.S. could bypass its own arms embargo against Iran and sell them weapons to raise funds, part of which would go to the Contras.
Everything goes according to plan for a while, but by a stroke of bad luck a cargo plane carrying weapons to Nicaraguan rebels is shot down in October 1986 by government forces, and the lone survivor implicates the CIA. The whole operation is then revealed the following November in a Lebanese newspaper, and soon confirmed by the Iranians. Half the administration ends up in a heap of trouble, but the president remains untouched (despite the impeachable seriousness of the offense).
1991: Haiti
In 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected president of Haiti with 67% of the votes in what is widely regarded as the first ever ‘honest’ election in the caribbean country’s history. Considered at the time to be far too much to the left for any American government to accept, the succeeding Reagan and Bush administrations use the CIA to create and arm a far-right opposition group named, in a rather unbecoming way, FRAPH. They moreover find it wise to send funds to Haiti’s notoriously corrupt military, just to be on the safe side (not that the generals would ever be caught dead siding with democratically-elected presidents anyway).
These efforts quickly proved worthy, as less than 8 months after he was elected, Mr. Aristide was deposed in a coup led by the Haitian army. The new man in power, Raoul Cédras, has since been found to have been on the CIA’s payroll at least until around that time. It is also worth noting that for the next three years this regime was to be accused of slaughtering thousands of civilians in a rampant repression worthy of the greatest South American juntas (see above).
Eventually, a number of persuasive claims — some of them in connection with what’s mentioned above, others with the lowest approval ratings ever at the start of any presidency (since polling began, presumably) — manifested themselves to the Clinton administration, changing their mind to the point of further intervention: and in 1994 a large US military force invaded the country to put Aristide back in power.
Worthy Reads
In guise of concluding remarks, I may add that the remarkable aspect of these successive controversies (and all those others not mentioned), perhaps doesn’t have as much to do with the fact that these were CIA operations, but rather that the agency was always caught. It may well be a testament to American democracy (as well as CIA incompetence) that these events are now well known. I cannot think of any other country where that would ever happen without prior political motivation, while it is a truism to add that a lot of other intelligence agencies have probably done equivalent, if not worse, deeds of their own.
For those of you still thirsting for more information and unsatisfied by their comprehensive Wikipedia entries, I suggest the following:
- Christopher Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger: an obvious necessity.
- Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 by Bob Woodward. While I wouldn’t quite go as far as recommending it (Woodward nearly acquiesces himself that he was led on by at least one person), it is a decent read nonetheless. Just don’t forget: access journalism involves playing favorites, almost by definition.
- Likewise, Woodward’s Obama’s Wars offers a nice insight into how our current president got his CIA addiction.
- And finally, this wonderful little piece by Paul Farmer on the Haitian case.
