Empires Apart (69 page)

In some ways more surprising than such episodes is that both sides managed to hide so much from each other. In 1995 President Clinton
ordered the release of thousands of documents relating to the cold war, including a CIA assessment dated 12 October 1950 that concluded Chinese intervention in the Korean War was ‘not probable in 1950'. Just two weeks later 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. (Clinton's action caused immense dismay inside the CIA; despite the reports having been freely available for six years, the Bush administration had them reclassified and removed from the public archives in a deliberate attempt to rewrite history.) The KGB was no more successful in understanding the enemy. Just two weeks before America's final ignominious exodus from Vietnam the KGB leader Yuri Andropov warned that the US might win the war by launching an Inchon-style assault deep into North Vietnam.

The main reason for such intelligence failures was that both the CIA and KGB devoted most of their attention not to spying across the iron curtain but to policing their own empires. Much of their intelligence came from brutal secret police forces like the AVH in Hungary or SAVAK in Iran, who inevitably focused primarily on domestic dissent. Rhetoric might fly between the empires but action was centred within them. The CIA was more concerned with Central America than Central Europe.

On the night of 16 April 1961 two men having a quiet cigarette on an island beach were gunned down. It is possible they never saw their killers or heard the order to fire given by the group's leader, CIA agent Grayson Lynch. They had become the first casualties to fall at the Bay of Pigs.

One of the foundation stones of American imperialism was the Monroe doctrine under which the United States gave itself the right to intervene in the affairs of other nations in the western hemisphere. Since the age of the filibusters before the civil war the US had regarded Central America and the Caribbean as part of its informal empire. US troops occupied or intervened openly in Cuba (1899 and 1961), the Dominican Republic (1916 and 1965), Grenada (1983), Guatemala (1954), Haiti (1915), Honduras (1912), Nicaragua (1927 and 1980s) and Panama (1989). As so often the US has imposed economic sanctions, and
with the globalisation of the world economy such sanctions can have far-reaching effects: for example, the United States was recently able to stop Spain and Brazil selling military equipment to Venezuela as it contained US-made components.

The most famous case of military intervention in the region was, like Custer's last stand at the Little Bighorn eighty-five years earlier, an ignominious failure. In 1952 Fulgencio Batista staged a coup in Cuba that ended any chance of democratic government on the island. When six years later Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and eighty Cuban exiles landed to overthrow Batista their cause looked helpless; within days half of them had been captured or killed. But the people rose up against one of the most vicious and corrupt dictatorships in the region, and in January 1959 Castro marched triumphantly into Havana. Like the Hungarians the previous year the Cuban rebels were clearer on what they were fighting against than what they were fighting for. Castro himself was castigated as an ‘adventurist' by the communists and set off for the US to garner support, but his revolution had disturbed too many powerful commercial interest groups (among them organised crime, which had controlled Cuba's lucrative casinos) for him to have any realistic prospect of success there. In a bipolar world Castro was clearly not a friend of America's corporatist empire.

The US response was to sponsor an invasion of the island, which started three days before the Bay of Pigs landing when American B-26 bombers attacked Cuban airfields. The population did not rise up as expected to welcome the invaders, mostly Cuban émigrés, and President Kennedy refused the CIA's pleas to commit overt US military forces. The invasion collapsed; most of the invaders were killed or captured. Castro turned to Moscow in earnest, eventually proclaiming himself a Marxist-Leninist, and becoming a Tony Blair to Russia's George Bush – providing rhetoric and troops to support imperial adventures around the world.

Most American interventions were more successful. As time went by the geographical limits of the Monroe Doctrine were swept away, and US actions in the Caribbean basin could be seen as exemplars of
the imperial mindset that would later lead to military interventions in Asia and the Middle East. Nowhere was too small to be subject to US control when there was any deviation from the ‘American Way'. The original Monroe Doctrine explicitly excepted existing European interests in the region, but in 1983 this caveat was ignored in the case of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

Grenada's first post-Independence prime minister, Eric Gairy, was somewhat odd: he declared 1978 to be the Year of the UFO, and called for a UN Agency for Psychic Research into Unidentified Flying Objects and the Bermuda Triangle. More seriously, there were allegations of rigged elections and the Grenadan army and police received training in ‘security' from the Chilean military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The opposition headed by Maurice Bishop seized power in a bloodless coup. For four years Bishop tried to find a middle way between competing ideologies – accepting aid from Cuba, increasing state spending in areas like health provision and allowing free rein to American corporations. The result was a reduction in unemployment, a significant improvement in per capita GDP and plaudits from the World Bank for his sound fiscal policies.

In the bipolar world of US foreign policy, however, consorting with Fidel Castro proved that Bishop was a crypto-communist. The US government refused to accept the credentials of the Grenadan ambassador in Washington, the US navy conducted an exercise, Operation Amber, designed to prepare itself for an invasion, and in July 1981 the CIA presented the Senate Intelligence Committee with plans for the island's economic destabilisation. At the same time Grenadan radicals were incensed by Bishop's attempts to mend fences with the US, and in 1983 seized control. Bishop was arrested, released after popular demonstrations on his behalf, and then rearrested and murdered along with many of his supporters.

The United States, whose policy of destabilising the Bishop regime had helped create the conditions for the latest coup, now sensed an opportunity. On the other side of the world the US marine barracks in Beirut was bombed, causing heavy loss of life, and President Reagan needed to be seen to act decisively somewhere. Two days after the
Beirut bombing 1,200 US troops invaded Grenada. The outnumbered Grenadans defended themselves and the invasion force eventually grew to 7,000, but the fighting was all over in three days. As one US soldier said, ‘With the equipment we have, it's like Star Wars fighting cavemen.' The US lost eighteen men (only four of these killed by the enemy) and there are conflicting accounts of Grenadan military casualties, but it is known that twenty-four civilians were killed, including twenty-one patients in a psychiatric hospital accidentally bombed by US planes.

Just as with the Russian interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the US showed a total disregard for international opinion and international law: not only was the invasion condemned by the UN, but Mrs Thatcher was outraged at the invasion of a country whose head of state was still the British queen without Britain even being forewarned. It had, however, become politic to assert some element of international support. When Russian tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 they did so alone; when they crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 they rolled as part of a Warsaw Pact mission that provided a fig leaf of legitimacy. Similarly the US enrolled small eastern Caribbean states in what was a pre-planned US operation.

The White House also successfully exercised a Soviet-style control of the media. No American media correspondents were allowed on the island until the fighting was over, and when they arrived they were shown the happy smiling faces of ‘liberated' islanders. US authorities emphasised that independent polls conducted showed broad popular support for the invasion – without mentioning that polls also showed broad popular support for the Bishop government that they had conspired to bring down.

One bizarre aspect of the invasion was the reason the US gave for intervention: that the presence of up to 1,600 Cuban soldiers on the island created a threat to the United States. Leaving aside the fact that there proved to be only forty-three Cuban soldiers on the island, this justification was quite literally ‘far fetched' – given that Cuban soldiers were further away from the US in Grenada than they would have been if they had stayed at home. But in offering this justification the US was merely continuing a
tradition going back to the early settlers' attacks on poorly armed natives and Adams II's justification of the conquest of Florida on the grounds of protecting American ‘security'. Similarly on May Day 1985 President Reagan issued ‘Executive Order 12513 Prohibiting Trade and Certain Other Transactions Involving Nicaragua' in response to what he said was ‘the threat to the security of the United States' posed by the tiny Central American republic. American history contains repeated examples of imperial actions being described as responses to fictional ‘threats', the most recent being the toppling of Saddam Hussein. With good reason Russians often have an overwhelming fear of foreign attack and see enemies behind every boulder, but less understandably Americans have similar fears: one poll on the Iraq invasion showed that 60 per cent of Americans believed that the Iraqi dictator had been personally implicated in the 9/11 attack, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One of the most infamous examples of US instigated regime change was the removal of the elected left-wing President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and his replacement by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. After CIA funding of his opponents failed to stop Allende's election, President Nixon vowed to make Chile's economy ‘scream'. With the help of ITT (the American-owned International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) the CIA devised a plan to destabilise the economy and eventually produce the Pinochet coup. Allende died in the ruins of the presidential palace, possibly by his own hand, and became another martyred hero. Although Pinochet had acted in the name of anticommunism, the leader of the Chilean Communist party was spared and, in an American brokered deal, exchanged with a Russian dissident. The two empires looked after their own.

The truth about Allende is more complex than his supporters sometimes admit. In previous elections he had failed dismally, and was finally elected by the narrowest of margins when his two opponents split the right-wing vote. The decisive factor may well have been that, as KGB files have since made clear, the Russians heavily outspent their American rivals. Although a socialist, not a communist, Allende was dependent on
Communist party support and received direct Russian financing himself. Russia had successfully copied America's post-war Italian strategy, but the United States then demonstrated that it had as little respect for elections as Stalin and proceeded to overturn an election that had produced the ‘wrong' result. As a consequence the US government helped install and maintain a regime that brought one of Latin America's most civilised nations, with a 160 year democratic history, to the edge of barbarism.

The events of 9/11 1973 and 9/11 2001 warrant comparison: 3,000 people were murdered in 2001 and 3,200 in 1973, but in Chile a further 80,000 were imprisoned and perhaps 200,000 fled into exile. The most striking similarity is the ideological fanaticism behind the two events. Coups have been commonplace in much of Latin America, Chile excluded, but what was unusual this time was the orgy of political cleansing that followed. The bloodletting in Chile resembled the ethnic cleansing of the Mystic Massacre in its bestiality, but was driven by an ideology derived not from religious texts but from the texts of Chicago University economists. The messianic language of the coup leaders cast themselves as God's warriors battling the devil of international communism in order to lead their people to a promised land where all markets were free and all property was private. In the period before the Pinochet coup missionaries had arrived from Chicago preaching an extreme form of corporatist capitalism in which the state would be almost entirely dismantled and its roles, other than military, would be given to private corporations. Followers of these doctrines allied themselves with military leaders to plot the coup, and were installed in key government positions within twenty-four hours. Almost immediately they started handing over public assets to private corporations and dismantling the safeguards that had been erected to protect Chilean industry from foreign competitors.

The critical role of ITT in orchestrating the Chilean coup has led some to conclude that American imperial policy has been driven by and for the benefit of US corporations. The CIA and US marines, it is argued, act as a private army for the corporate oligarchs who pull the strings in Washington. This is to ignore the genuine ideological
fervour of American leaders, who believe themselves to be engaged in a universal war of good against evil. President after president has worked with corporate leaders not out of selfish national interest but because they share the same values of corporatist democracy. Their aim was not to promote US commercial interests
per se
(although that of course was the result) but to defend the ‘free world'. In 1960 the CIA happily worked with the Belgian corporation Union Minière to overthrow and assassinate the populist African leader Patrice Lumumba: in a bipolar world ideology was all important.

On achieving independence for the Congo, Lumumba had travelled to Washington seeking assistance, but was rebuffed. Like Fidel Castro a year earlier he then made the mistake of turning to Russia which, as KGB officials have since frankly admitted, regarded Africa as a hunting ground ripe for exploitation. As the Congo was America's only source of essential cobalt, President Eisenhower authorised Lumumba's assassination. The CIA station chief at the time, Larry Devlin, has described how he was sent poisoned toothpaste that he was supposed to smuggle into President Lumumba's bathroom. Devlin worked with the head of the Congolese army to mount a coup, which installed one of the most vicious and venal (and also long-lasting) dictatorships in the whole of Africa. Lumumba was murdered. American access to cobalt was maintained.