Empires Apart (66 page)

American military installations sprang up throughout the country. Electronic listening posts were set up on the Russian border; American spy planes used Iranian bases; espionage agents were smuggled across the frontier.
Because the new regime had limited popular support the CIA had to help set up SAVAK, the Shah's notorious secret police. Twenty years later SAVAK's fearsome reputation would lead Amnesty International to claim that Iran had the world's worst human rights record.

The shah and the Iranian military realised that they owed their power to the United States, and Iran became a classic vassal state. The parallels with Stalin's vassal states in eastern Europe were inescapable.

The Iranian coup not only showed a new facet of American imperial strategy but demonstrated that global imperial power had passed definitively from Britain to America. Not only was Britain unable to protect its oil interests without US assistance, but once Mosaddeq had been removed American oil companies like Gulf Oil swiftly moved into the country, usurping what had once been a virtual British monopoly. In another sign of the times Kermit Roosevelt did not follow his grandfather Theodore and cousin Franklin into politics; when he left the CIA a few years later he joined Gulf Oil. The close relationship between American corporations and US covert operations that this exemplified was even more evident on the other side of the world, where events remarkably similar to those in Iran were unfolding with a cast of characters far more familiar to students of American history. America's next target was the government of Guatemala.

The coup in Iran could be presented as a legitimate move in the cold war between America and Russia. Soviet troops had not long before occupied parts of the country and still sat just over the border. Guatemala was nowhere near the Russian empire and had long been firmly entrenched in America's camp. The robber baron Minor Cooper Keith had died nearly a quarter of a century before but his creation, the United Fruit Company, still exercised quasi-feudal control over the country. It was this control that was threatened when, in the same month that Mohammed Mosaddeq became prime minister of Iran, Guatemala held its first ever democratic presidential elections.

Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, landowner, soldier and convinced capitalist, swept to power and announced plans for agrarian reform that were
strikingly similar to those of the 1862 Homestead Act in the United States. Uncultivated land was to be compulsorily purchased and sold to smallholders. As the largest holder of such land was the United Fruit Company, this was bound to lead to conflict with the United States. Arbenz offered the company $3 an acre for its land, the value the company itself had declared when paying its property taxes, but United Fruit now declared the land to be worth $75 an acre. The scene was set for another imperial adventure, as United Fruit had far more powerful allies than the president of what one CIA document labelled a ‘Banana Republic'.

CIA director Allen Dulles, his brother, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and the undersecretary of state Walter Bedell Smith were United Fruit shareholders. The Dulles's former law firm had long represented United Fruit, and Allen Dulles had served on the corporation's board of trustees. The company's top public relations officer (who produced an anti-Arbenz film called
Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas
) was the husband of President Eisenhower's private secretary. The corporation paid for American journalists to travel to Guatemala, where they were fed bloodcurdling stories of supposed communist infamy, and in February 1954 the CIA launched Operation Washtub, a scheme to ‘discover' phoney Soviet arms caches in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.

The campaign succeeded, and the CIA moved on to orchestrate a coup codenamed Operation PBSUCCESS. The agency set up a clandestine radio station to broadcast propaganda, jammed all Guatemalan stations and hired American pilots to bomb strategic points in Guatemala City. In this way the CIA's invasion force of just 150 men was able to convince the Guatemalan public and President Arbenz that a major invasion was underway. Guatemala's brief flirtation with democracy was snuffed out. Arbenz and his cabinet were allowed to flee the country, but hundreds of his supporters were rounded up and killed. Over the next forty years successive US-backed military regimes are said to have killed over 100,000 civilians as the repression that was necessary to maintain regime change continued. Arbenz himself spent the rest of his life in exile. In 1971 he was found dead in his bath in Mexico, prompting the same sort
of rumours that had surrounded the death of a man whose fate he shared: Jan Masaryk in Prague.

While the CIA was spreading pro-corporatist subversion around the globe the KGB was spreading pro-communist subversion. Soviet records that have become available, such as those known as the Mitrokhin archives, show that the KGB operated in much the same way as the CIA. It too launched ‘initiatives', especially in the third world, quite independent of the formal diplomatic policy-makers, confident, like the CIA, that its political contacts at the highest levels would protect it. It too had a vision of a bipolar world, which was a mirror image of the CIA's. Not only was the KGB convinced that American imperialism was constantly seeking Russia's destruction, but it retained an ideological vision every bit as strong as its opponent's. Readers of the Mitrokhin archives, knowing that communism was destined to collapse, may well find it bizarre that the bungling, brutality and bureaucracy of the KGB was not accompanied by unremitting cynicism but was leavened with an apparently genuine Marxist-Leninist world view: many of its leaders really believed that they were helping to act out the dramas Marx and Lenin had claimed to be historically inevitable, and that by encouraging anti-colonialist national liberation movements they would so weaken western capitalism that – as their ideology predicted – communism's onward march to world domination would become unstoppable.

The covert imperial adventures of both America and Russia after the Second World War were long shrouded in mystery. There still remains controversy about an aborted CIA project to depose the Iraqi president in 1959, a project now remembered mainly for the planned participation of a twenty-year-old CIA ‘asset' named Saddam Hussein. With the end of the cold war Soviet archives began to be opened up, prompting America to do the same. In May 1997 the CIA released hundreds of documents relating to its 1954 coup in Guatemala, which demonstrated dramatically the moral equivalence of the two imperial powers. For example, the CIA documents included a list of fifty-eight people to be assassinated (although with the names of all fifty-eight carefully blanked out).

The success of covert operations in Italy, Iran and Guatemala have led many on the left to see the CIA as the sinister architect of America's global hegemony, just as their opponents have seen the KGB behind every American setback. Conspiracy theorists have found American spies under every rock. As secret archives are unlocked it has become obvious that the CIA has had amazingly long tentacles, which have encompassed enemies and allies alike. James Angleton, the CIA's director of counterintelligence (who had previously represented the agency in Rome and been responsible for the manipulation of Italian elections after the Second World War), had a particular hatred for British prime minister Harold Wilson, and spent money to combat what he regarded as Wilson's subservience to the Kremlin. Similarly the agency seems to have worked actively against Gough Whitlam's government in Australia. But just because the United States tried to influence the course of events does not mean it succeeded. There is a danger of using the same faulty logic that pro-American observers used after the Second World War: the United States fought to bring down Hitler, Hitler was brought down, therefore the US brought down Hitler. The CIA wanted to push Wilson and Whitlam out; they were pushed out; therefore the CIA pushed them out. This is far too simplistic a reading of history. The CIA, like the KGB, has been just one of thousands of vectors carrying the influence of American and Russian rulers around the globe. It provides fertile soil to be tilled by thriller-writers, film makers and journalists, but the main tools of the new imperialism have been US financial institutions and corporations supported by old-fashioned military force.

The role of military force in American foreign policy is sometimes regarded as a modern development. The classic text on post-war US foreign policy is Ambrose and Brinkley's
Rise to Globalism
, first published in 1971 and regularly updated ever since. The book's very first sentence describes the glaringly different conditions today from those that existed in 1939 when ‘no American troops were stationed in any foreign country'. Today, the argument goes, the United States has interests beyond its borders that were entirely absent before the Second World War. In fact
what this sentence illustrates is not a change in underlying policies but in perceptions, because of course there were American troops stationed in what most of the world would have described as foreign countries; there were significant military forces in the Philippines and Cuba, not to mention the island of Guam – where the commandant of the naval station also acted as the island's governor. These were remnants of the old-style imperialism in which foreign territories from Florida to Hawaii had been annexed to become part of the United States. In 1939 the sailors at Subic Bay in the Philippines or Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were technically not in foreign countries; they were all part of the American empire (as indeed Guam remains, as does Guantanamo Bay – when it suits).

The scale of American military intervention overseas dipped dramatically between the two world wars, but it then increased dramatically. One academic study quoted by Ferguson identified 168 separate instances of American armed intervention overseas between 1946 and 1965, one intervention every six weeks. The transition away from using force as a last resort started in the Middle East, with troops sent to Lebanon to protect the pro-American government in 1958 and additional air force units to Saudi Arabia a few years later to stop incursions from Yemen. Initially these were exceptions, with the United States relying on dollar diplomacy to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Whereas in 1939 there were a handful of military outposts in the colonies, by 1967 US troops were stationed in sixty-four countries – nineteen in Latin America, thirteen in Europe, eleven in Africa, eleven in the Middle East and surrounding area and ten in the far east. The collapse of the Russian Empire, far from reducing the desire for overseas bases, provided new opportunities for expansion. By 2006 there were 702 bases in 130 countries.

The primacy of commercial over cold war objectives in driving military operations was clearly outlined in an unlikely source: Noam Chomsky quotes the
Marine Corps Gazette
of May 1990. General A. M. Gray, after noting that ‘the majority of crises we have responded to since the end of the Second World War have not directly involved the Soviet Union', described the need for a ‘credible military power projection capability'
to ensure America's unimpeded access to overseas markets and to the resources needed by US industries. But for the first forty years after the Second World War America's objectives were usually expressed in terms not of selfish national interest but of the great ideological battle between the godly and the ungodly. American covert and overt interventions overseas were necessary for one reason only: to counter the evil ambitions of its former Soviet ally.

While America led a crusade to resist the Soviet devil, the driving force behind the startling post-war resurgence of Russian imperialism disappeared.

On 5 March 1953 Joseph Stalin died. One of history's most evil men, a man whose murderous reign had touched nearly every family in Russia, passed away and the nation collapsed into grief. It was said that flower shops across Russia sold out, and there were no flowers left for the funeral of the composer Prokofiev who died on the same day. The anguish that swept the country was spontaneous. At Stalin's funeral there was no need to bus in press-ganged factory workers for the carefully orchestrated demonstrations that had been such a feature of his reign. For millions of ordinary Russians Stalin was the man who had dragged their country into the twentieth century, and above all had saved them from barbarian invasion. He was the all-wise omnipotent autocrat in a nation that for centuries had been told to venerate its all-wise omnipotent tsar.

Stalin influenced every aspect of life in Russia and in its colonies. His secret police reached into every home, school, office, factory and field. More than any western president or prime minister of the twentieth century, more even than Churchill or De Gaulle, he stamped his mark on his country's character, history and even on its geography. He changed borders, relocated peoples, installed and replaced governments. He left an empire that stretched from the borders of Austria to the Pacific, an empire under his absolute personal control and an empire that – when that personal control was gone – would eventually collapse in on itself like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Stalin had carved himself a place in history – but what place? Despite all the evidence of Stalin's atrocities that has emerged since his death, the veneration that was so evident when he died has not gone away.

The rewriting of historical events starts before they occur and continues long after they end. At the very moment that they happen actions are being perceived through ideological prisms built up over the preceding centuries. The ideology of autocracy conditioned the way Stalin was perceived. Russians looked to the tsars as the fathers of their nation; they might be flawed, they might be badly advised but they had the interests of all Russia in their hearts; they provided the strength of leadership that would safeguard their wellbeing, protect them from invasion and advance their glory. Stalin assumed the mantle of autocracy, and his subjects perceived all his actions in that light.