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CounterPunch

The USA and International Terrorism

     The Cold War never really ended. It did so along the
east-west axis. But the Cold War always had a north-south
dimension-- the war against forces of liberation in Third
World countries. That never ended, and it continues
today. [Through my studies] I gradually came to the
conclusion that what my CIA colleagues and I had been doing
during the 1950s and '60s was nothing more than a
continuation of nearly five hundred years of exploitation
and political repression.

     By Philip Agee

I would like to begin by citing a well-known observation of
A. J.  Liebling, a U.S. journalist and media critic who was
active during the mid-1900s: "Freedom of the press is
guaranteed only to those who own one," he said.

In a sense, this has always been true. News media in
general, except for state-funded organizations, are part of
the private sector. I know that, here in Sweden as in
Britain, you have state television and state radio.  But
generally speaking, and certainly in the United States, the
press has always been in the private sector.

The Power of the Word

The United States - that is, the political class of the
United States - has known about the power of the word for a
very, very long time. A personal experience may serve to
illustrate how powerful the written word can be.

For legal reasons, I stayed away from the United States for
about seventeen years-- from the time I started work on my
first book, in the early 1970s, until my autobiography was
ready for publication in 1987. The publisher of the latter
was very eager for me to return to the States for the
promotion of the book, but my lawyers all warned me not to
take a chance. They suspected that there could be secret
criminal indictment, as there could have been all those
years, and argued that the risk was not worth it.

My wife and I decided that we would take that risk. We went
back, and they didn't touch me. I did the promotion of the
book, and that began ten years of frequent travel to the
U.S. for lectures at universities and speeches at political
rallies, civic centres, churches, even out in the street.
Altogether, and must have spoken at more than 500 events in
the United States.

One of my trips, around 1989 or 1990, was to the University
of California at Santa Cruz. When the organizers told me
that the event was scheduled to take place at a civic centre
with room for about 3000 people, my reaction was: "Oh,my
god! We are going to look like we're all alone in there. We
will never attract more than a couple of hundred people."
But they said, "Don't worry. You'll see."

Sure enough, on the night of the meeting the arena was
packed. During the discussion period after my talk, which
was about the war in Central America still going on at the
time, a man stood up way in the back. He was a very large
person, with a lot of long hair, a bushy beard, and a plaid
lumberjack shirt. He paused for a moment, and then said my
name in an enormous, booming voice: "Philip Agee!" He said,
"Philip Agee, I want to thank you for saving my life!"

With that, the place became as quiet as you could
imagine. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. He
went on to tell the story of how he was seriously wounded in
Vietnam, and had to spend several years in a veterans'
hospital in the United States. While in hospital, he became
despondent: He thought there was no hope, and decided to
commit suicide. But then someone gave him a copy of my first
book.

He said: "When I read that book, it changed my life." He
said that he decided then not to end his life, but to spend
the rest of it helping Vietnam War veterans who had problems
like his own. From that point in the mid-1970s until the
time of this meeting some fifteen years later, he had made a
career of social work among Vietnam War veterans suffering
from mental problems because of the things that they had
done and seen in Vietnam.

This is merely one personal story, but it indicates the
strength of the written word. Possibly, one life was saved--
possibly.

Covert Action

The CIA, as you probably know, was founded in the years
following World War II-- supposedly, to prevent another
Pearl Harbor, the Japanese surprise attack which brought the
United States into that war. In that sense, the events of
September 11th represent a terrible failure on the part of
the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence establishment.

There are at least twelve or thirteen different intelligence
agencies in the United States, and they are spending on the
order of thirty billion dollars per year-- the CIA being
simply the foremost among them. Of course, the CIA was not
only established to collect information and to anticipate
attacks.

>From the beginning of the CIA's existence, it was also used
to intervene secretly in the internal affairs of other
countries. Virtually no country on earth was exempt.

This secret intervention-- as opposed to the collection of
information-- was called covert action, and it was used in a
variety of ways to influence the institutions of other
countries. Interventions in elections were very
frequent. Every CIA station, that is the undercover CIA
office inside a U.S. embassy, included agents who were
involved in covert action. In addition to intervention to
ensure the election of favoured candidates and the defeat of
disfavoured candidates, the CIA also infiltrated the
institutions of power in countries all over the world. I am
sure that Sweden is no exception, and was not an exception
during all the years of the Cold War.

There was electoral intervention, propaganda via the media,
and also the penetration and manipulation of women's
organizations, religious organizations, youth and student
organizations, the trade-union movement-- very important--
but also the military and security services and, of course,
political parties. All of these institutions were free game
for penetration and manipulation by the CIA.

In short, the CIA influenced the civic life of countries all
around the world. It did this due to a lack of faith in
democracy in other countries.

There was a desire for control. The secret U.S. policy was
to not leave things to "chance", that is to the will of the
people in whatever country it might be. They had to be
tutored, they had to be "guided" in such a way that they
would be safe for U.S. control. Control was the key
word. None of this was done for altruistic or idealistic
reasons.

Three key factors

Where the media are concerned, there are three important
factors involved: sources, selection and the slant. With
regard to sources, it is my understanding that Swedish news
media have very few of their own people working abroad. That
means that they are dependent on what they get from other
sources, for example the Associated Press, Reuters, BBC or
CNN.

Those huge organizations which have people all over the
world are, of course, selling their products here.

So you receive those products here, and an editor takes uses
them in any way he chooses. What seems to be happening with
globalization is that the treatment of news is becoming more
and more homogeneous. Sweden, of course, is a unique society
with a unique history, culture and language. You would
surely have a unique way of viewing and interpreting world
events-- a vision of the world that is Swedish, in contrast
to that of the U.S., Germany or any other nationality.

But how do you maintain this cultural identity with regard
to international news, if the media here are dependent on
foreign sources? These sources are, of course, becoming
fewer and fewer, as the process of monopolization
continues. Consider the mergers that have occurred just
during the past ten years or so-- for example, Time merging
with Warner, then taking over CNN and now merging with
AOL. Or General Electric, another giant corporation, taking
control of NBC. This is a process that has been going on for
a long time, resulting in fewer and fewer independent
sources.

Selection may be the most important factor of the three,
because what is most important in the news is what is left
out. It is a form of censorship.

There is a lot of news out there; but editors determine what
is news and what is not. Whatever is overlooked, not
reported, says a lot about the media.

Invisible background

This has been very well illustrated during the past two
weeks. I imagine that we have all seen the same reports over
and over again, on what happened in New York and Washington,
along with the demonization of Osama bin Ladin.

There has been some reporting, but not very much, about the
fact that bin Ladin is a product of the United States. He is
a creature of the CIA, having gone to work for it in
Afghanistan. It was the largest operation ever carried out
by the CIA, and its purpose was to bleed the Soviet Union.

Bin Ladin was one of thousands who volunteered to fight with
the mujihadin against the Soviets. As I recall, there were
seven different groups. All seven were basically
fundamentalist Islamic forces, who felt that the Soviet
invasion defiled an Islamic country. Bin Ladin was among
those who did not stop fighting after the Soviets were
expelled. In fact, he started laying plans for the future
while the war against the Soviet Union was still going
on. He was able to develop a world-wide network which today
is operating in sixty countries or more.

Very little of this background on bin Ladin as a creation of
the United States has been brought to public attention
during the past two weeks.  Most of what we have seen and
heard is related to the "solution", which is war.

How much have we read or heard about those voices calling
for alternative solutions to the problem of international
terrorism? How much reporting have we seen on analyses of
what has driven these people to such desperation that they
carried out those attacks on September 11th?

I have not seen very much of that. This may be due to the
fact that I am living in Cuba at present. But I do read the
New York Times on the Internet every morning, for example,
and have access to quite a lot of other news.

When it comes to alternative solutions to the problem, such
as a re-examination of U.S. policy in the Middle East,
particularly with respect to the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, I don't think I have seen anything.  The only
thing we get is Bush saying "this is war, we are at war,
this is the first war of the 21st century, this is a
question of good versus evil, whoever is not with us is
against us", and so on.

That is pretty much the attitude we had in the CIA during
the 1950s.  When we analysed the operational climate and all
the political forces in any given country, we had our
friends and we had our enemies. There was no one in
between. The friends were centre and right-wing social
democrats, conservatives, liberals, in some cases all the
way over to neo-fascists.

The enemies were left-wing social democrats, socialists,
communists, all the way to those advocating armed struggle.

This is the way we saw the world. It was a strictly
dualistic view of the political climate in any given country
where we were operating. It was very much like what we are
hearing today from Washington.

The Uses of Journalists

The third important factor affecting the news is, of course,
the slant or bias. It reflects the moral, social and
political values of the person doing the writing, or at
least the editor. This is where the CIA played a very
fundamental role in years past, and I cannot imagine that it
suddenly stopped when the Cold War came to an end.

In fact, like many others, I believe that the Cold War never
really ended.

It did so along the east-west axis. But the Cold War always
had a north-south dimension-- the war against forces of
liberation in Third World countries. That never ended, and
it continues today.

I also believe that the CIA's media operations have
continued. They involve the recruitment and payment of
editors and reporters who take the CIA's material and
publish it as if it were their own. Taken all together-- the
sources and selection of material, and the point of view or
slant-- the result is essentially what is known as
propaganda, but which passes for "unbiased news".

Journalists are also very important to the CIA for
non-journalistic activities. They serve as very convenient
agents of access for the Agency.

Particularly since they come from a country with a neutral
tradition, Swedes in general have always been of great
interest to the CIA. This is because they do not carry a lot
of political baggage, as do people from most other
countries. I am aware of the ongoing debate here concerning
just how neutral Sweden has or has not been. But in the rest
of the world, the neutrality of Sweden has created a special
attraction for U.S. intelligence agencies, because Swedes
have readier access to certain target individuals than, say,
an American or a German would.

The fact is that journalists are used for non-journalistic
purposes-- as collection agents for intelligence, and for
making contacts, because a journalist can approach
practically anyone and ask for an interview or develop some
type of relationship. Of the hundreds of journalists who
have come to me over the years, I have no idea how many have
been sent by the CIA. I get some idea when I read what they
write. But I learned to be cautious, early on.

Education in Injustice

The covert action operations to which I referred earlier
were carried out all over the world, and certainly in Latin
America where I was posted. I spent three years in Ecuador,
then three more in Uruguay. In both cases, my cover was as a
political attaché in the U.S. embassy.

I then returned to Washington, pretty disillusioned with the
work. I was a product of the U.S. education system of the
1950s, which provided me with a very good liberal education,
but no political education at all. I was simply brought up
to believe that whatever the government did was good, and
that it was doing these good things in the name of us all.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to
get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went
down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced
me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and
the injustices that could not be ignored.

The two most fundamental, interrelated problems were the
grossly unequal distribution of land and the unequal
distribution of wealth. In the early years of the Kennedy
administration-- I had gone down to Latin American toward
the end of the Eisenhower period-- there was much talk about
land reform as a way of dealing with those problems.

But with the success of the Cuban revolution, and its
success in surviving U.S. attempts at invasion and other
hostilities, land reform in the rest of Latin America was
put aside. "Stability" was the order of the day. The view in
Washington was that, if reform programmes were pushed, it
could lead to instability and create openings for liberation
forces all over Latin America that were inspired by the
Cuban revolution.

So, the aim of our programmes was to support the status quo,
to support the oligarchies of Latin America. These are the
power structures that date back centuries, based on
ownership of the land, of the financial resources, of the
export-import system, and excluding the vast majority of the
population.

With all of our programmes, we were supporting these
traditional power structures. What first caused me to turn
against these people were the corruption and the greed that
they exhibited in all areas of society. My ideas and
attitudes began to change, and eventually I decided to
resign from the CIA.

It is widely believed that, once you have joined the CIA, it
is likely being in the mafia, that you can never leave. But
that is actually not the case.

The CIA does not want people working within the organization who are not
happy and do not want to be there. They are security risks, for one
thing.

So, people are coming and going all the time in that large
organization of some 18,000 employees.

Maddening Diary

I decided to start a new career in teaching, and enrolled as
a Ph.D.  student in a programme of Latin American studies at
the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In the course
of those studies-- of the Spanish Conquest, the colonial
period, and all the horrors that have occurred over the
centuries in Latin America -- I gradually came to the
conclusion that what my CIA colleagues and I had been doing
during the 1950s and '60s was nothing more than a
continuation of nearly five hundred years of exploitation
and political repression.

It was then that an idea entered my mind which had
previously been unthinkable -- to write a book that would
show how all this works. The research required me to spend a
year in Paris, and then another year in London where the
British Library's newspaper archive proved to be
invaluable. There, I was able to read all the news reports
relating to the places that I had worked in Latin America,
in many cases dating back to the 19th century.

When the book finally came out-- the title was Inside the
Company: CIA Diary-- it was reviewed in the CIA's classified
in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence. I managed to get
a copy of the review, which speculated that I had kept
copies of all the stuff I had worked on while I was in the
CIA, because they could not believe that I was able to
reconstruct all those thousands and thousands of details
from memory. It drove them absolutely crazy. But, in fact,
most of the maddening details were gleaned from the
newspaper archive of the British Museum.

The book had a tremendous effect on the Agency's
effectiveness, its ability to continue its standard
operations. The most gratifying result was that many Latin
Americans told me how important the book was for defending
themselves and their organizations from destruction by the
CIA. In the broadest sense, the purpose of the Agency's
various activities was to prop up those forces that were
considered to be friendly to U.S. interests, while
penetrating, dividing, weakening and destroying those forces
that were regarded as unfriendly to U.S. interests-- the
forces of the political left that I mentioned earlier.

Thus, for Latin American revolutionaries to come to me and
say how much they appreciated the book, with all its details
on how the CIA works to subvert institutions in other
countries, was extremely gratifying.

Suitable enemy

Since the events of two weeks ago, there has been much
comment and speculation about the new era we may now be
entering. Looking back, there was a long Cold War that had
already begun during World War II. An important turning
point occurred in 1950, when it was decided to start an arms
race that would serve the dual purpose of forcing the Soviet
Union into bankruptcy while stimulating the
U.S. economy. Since the Soviet Union was still recovering
from the devastation of World War II, it would never be able
to catch up; but it would be compelled to make the effort,
nevertheless. Meanwhile, military spending in the U.S. would
keep going up and up, which in turn would stimulate the
U.S. economy through a sort of "military Keynesianism". This
continued through the Reagan administration of the 1980s.

But in the decade since the end of the Cold War until
September 11th, the U.S. security establishment-- the
political class, the CIA, the people who fought the Cold
War-- had no real enemy to focus on. True, they had Saddam
Hussein for awhile, and they might have had a minor enemy
here, another one there. But there was no real world-wide
threat similar to that of the Cold War. Well, now it seems
that they have one again.

What this means is that the United States is going to be in
this for quite some time. I have feeling that it is going to
go on for ten or fifteen years, because they are not going
to wipe out international terrorism or something like bin
Ladin's group overnight. During this period, they are going
to be doing the same things they did in the Cold War. We can
already here it in such expression as, "Whoever is not with
us is against us."  They are going to be trying to use every
bit of power they have to bring countries in line behind the
United States.

It also means important changes within the United States,
because the war on terrorism will serve as the justification
for restraints on civil liberties.

They are building a huge crisis in the United States. They
are building the psychological climate for broad-based
acceptance of an ongoing war, for which there will be no
quick resolution. There will be no great battles, either.

Little Room for Alternatives

During this period, there will be very little room for
alternative views and alternative solutions in U.S. news
media. What are the alternatives?  Well, one is obviously to
address the question of why these people are doing these
things: What are the roots of international terrorism? How
does U.S.  foreign policy create this type of reaction? How
does U.S. support of everything that Israel does, including
the oppression of the Palestinian people, influence
fundamentalist Islamic groups?

In other words, a feasible alternative would be a
reconsideration of U.S. foreign policy, to see if it would
not be possible to create a more just situation in the
Middle East. But the United States is stuck. It is stuck
with an authoritarian regime in Egypt, which is one of the
really shaky countries at the moment. Algeria has gone
through a horrible period, and the fundamentalist movement
there has not died away at all. In Pakistan the government
could fall; fundamentalists there could take over, and they
would then have nuclear weapons in their hands. So, a lot of
things can happen in the months and years ahead.

Unfortunately, I suspect that there will be greater
self-censorship by U.S. media in order to line up behind the
government, however its policy of war may turn out. There is
already talk of a personal identification system of some
kind for the entire country, together with large-scale
surveillance of the population-- especially immigrants, and
Muslim immigrants in particular.

There will be some opposition to this; but historically, the
courts have usually gone along with the government, even
though they are theoretically supposed to be the guarantors
of civil liberties. For example, the courts went along with
the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

So, it will be possible to restrict, and even infringe upon,
civil liberties and human rights in the U.S.

It is early days to draw any conclusions about how all this
is going to develop, since it is still in the planning
stage. But in my opinion, if they carry out this military
solution-- with an attack or a series of attacks, or the
establishment of military bases in Islamic countries-- they
will be doing exactly what bin Ladin wants them to do. It
would turn more and more people to fundamentalism and to his
organization. They could kill him tomorrow, but the
organization that he has established will live on, and it
will be nearly impossible to penetrate.

My reading of the situation is that there have been a few
defectors from bin Ladin's organization who have provided
valuable information. But the U.S. has not been able to have
anyone working in these clandestine groups around the world
and reporting from the inside. It has had to make do with
whatever it can learn from a few defectors. Certainly, the
CIA and the other components of the U.S. intelligence
apparatus will be using all available technical means to
locate and attack these groups, wherever they may be.

They should certainly know where all the training bases are
located, since they were established by the CIA, itself. But
that will not be nearly enough.

CP Philip is a former CIA officer and author of Inside the
Company. This is article is adapted from the text of a
speech Agee gave at ABF House, in Stockholm on 24 September
2001