The secret gears that drive our foreign policy | by Jerry Meldon | The Tufts Daily, 19 May 1996

 

Shortly after its birth as the Cold War heated up, the Central Intelligence Agency found its calling propping up dictators like Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-Shek and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem (before arranging the coup during which he was assassinated), and subverting legitimate governments like those of Chile’s Salvador Allende and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

            Such covert actions have invariably clashed with both the ethics and priorities of most Americans – who have seen America’s good name lost in the translation from anti-communist doctrine into anti-democratic policy. Then how has the Agency survived a seemingly endless succession of scandals? Part of the answer recently stared us in the face.

            In March, the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community – appointed by Congress and President Clinton when the Aldrich Ames scandal knocked the C.I.A. against the ropes – issued its report and recommended little more than cosmetic changes at the Agency.

            Appointing a commission had once again meant spin control. It had taken the C.I.A. years to realize that Ames, a senior Agency official, had paid cash for his Jaguar and sprawling home … that he’d gotten the money from Moscow in return for a Who’s Who in U.S. spying … and that even years after realizing it had been penetrated like Swiss cheese, the Agency fed Washington lies served up by Soviet agents.

            You might have expected a self-respecting Commission to shut down the C.I.A. or at least order a house-cleaning. Then again … “If you want to make foreign policy, there’s no better fraternity to belong to than the Council on Foreign Relations, C.F.R..” So wrote Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas. “The influential but private C.F.R. … has long been the C.I.A.’s principal ‘constituency’ in the American public.” So wrote former C.I.A. agent Vincent Marchetti.

            True to form, the C.F.R. helped bail out the Agency.

            Of the Commission’s 17 members, the chair, former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, vice chair, former Republican senator Warren B. Rudman, and five others belong to the New York-based Council. Likewise, five of the eight members of the 1975 Rockefeller Commission that investigated illegal C.I.A. domestic spying on opponents of the war in Vietnam were members of the C.F.R.

            Formed following World War I “for the study and discussion of international affairs,” the C.F.R. today has 3,000 individual members – primarily from the U.S., but also from Europe and Japan – plus 200 corporate affiliates that pay over $1 million in combined annual dues. Its members include politicians like Bill Clinton, academics, foundation directors and reporters, plus every living former – and the present – director of the C.I.A. Though women were long excluded, the C.F.R. now includes not only women, but progressive women like children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman.

            But the big wheels have always been business magnates like David Rockefeller, statesmen like Rockefeller’s protege Henry Kissinger, and Wall Street lawyer/bankers like John J. McCloy – who became chair of the Council, the Ford Foundation and the Chase Bank, all in one year.

            No less influential members were Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his brother, longtime C.I.A. director Allen W. Dulles.

            During World War II – as early as 1942, according to Christopher Simpson’s “The Splendid Blond Beast” – the Dulles’ lobbied for a peace settlement with German behind Stalin’s back. Allen – a C.F.R. director from 1927 to 1969 – ran the Switzerland-based operations of the C.I.A.’s wartime predecessor, the O.S.S.. Pushing for a separate peace in 1944, he engineered the liberation of SS General Karl Wolff from anti-fascist Italian partisans.

            Under the same Dulles, the C.I.A. executed its first major coup in Iran in 1953, its second in Guatemala in ’54. Each responded to a move to nationalize foreign holdings: of British and American oil companies in Iran, of the Boston-based United Fruit Company – to which both Dulles’ were connected – in Guatemala.

            There followed decades of repression: by the dictatorship of the Shah of Iran – which beat the 1979 Islamic revolution and taking of American hostages; and by military-dominated governments in Guatemala – where the C.I.A. is currently under fire for covering up the murder of a U.S. citizen by a Guatemalan army officer on Agency payroll.

            Indeed, apart from Indochina, where the CFR issued a stream of reports urging Washington to defend US business interests – ultimately with tragic consequences – Guatemala has borne the heaviest burden of CIA intervention.

            Are the C.I.A. and C.F.R. – or U.N. and C.F.R., as fantasized by those of the militia mentality – part of (dare I say it?) a conspiracy? No more than lobbyists and Congress are, for protecting corporations from personal injury lawsuits.

            The Council on Foreign Relations is merely the lodge of those with a vested interest in – and history of making – foreign policy. Its members don’t conspire. They simply fill strategic positions where foreign policy – and the survival of the agency that secretly carries it out – are decided.

 

 

 

 

Our phony drug war | by Jerry Meldon | Published in The Boston Globe, January 27, 1996

 

 US aid to Mexico has been used more to suppress grass-roots movements than to uproot drug networks and their allies. 

 

Cooperation between the United States and Mexico is again being applauded following the Jan. 14 capture of drug lord and FBI most wanted, Juan Garcia Abrego. But don’t expect the northbound drug avalanche to slow down.

            The bottom line is that US drug users generate a multibillion-dollar bounty. So when one capo goes, 10 others shoot it out. The same gold mine has thoroughly corrupted Mexican authorities, including the army. This produces scenes that make Fellini films seem bland:

·         In 1989, drug capo Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo is arrested. During the next three years, his operation expands as Felix Gallardo occupies an office equipped with cellular telephones and a fax machine, and his bodyguards perform clerical work.

·         In 1991, US Customs agents look on helplessly as Mexican soldiers shoot and kill seven drug agents waiting to ambush the crew of a cocaine-laden plane.

·         In April 1994, Tijuana police chief Jose Frederico Benitez Lopez is shot to death. Benitez had criticized federal investigation of the assassination early that year of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Many observers attributed the assassination to drug traffickers and their friends in high places.

·         In May 1994, federal authorities arrest state prosecutor Sergio Ortiz Lara on charges of protecting cocaine traffickers accused of the 1993 killing of a Roman Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara. Ortiz is later released.

·         In May 1995, the former attorney general for the state of Jalisco, who had investigated the cardinal’s murder, is gunned down in the same city.

 

It’s easy to blame Mexicans for succumbing to the narcodolar flood. But to do so ignores the broader context of US Mexican relations that exacerbates the problem.

For the past two decades, aid from Washington – under both Democratic and Republican administrations – has been used more to suppress grassroots movements, which threaten US investments and the availability of cheap labor, than to uproot drug networks and their political allies.

In the 1970s, the State Department’s international narcotics control program delivered more than $95 million worth of helicopters, airplanes, tear-gas projectiles and other arms and assistance into the hands of Mexican authorities.

In the Guerrero province, according to the 1991 book “Drug Wars” by journalist Jonathan Marshall, the army suppressed a local guerrilla movement, while the state judicial police chief for northern Guerrero, a reputed heroin dealer, was left untouched.

In 1978, Peter Bourne, director of the Carter White House’s Office of Drug Abuse Policy, told a Senate subcommittee that the ongoing drug control activities of the Mexican and American governments “rank among the most exemplary forms of international cooperation in the world today.” The reality was quite different.

That year, 7,000 Mexican soldiers, supported by advisers from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, waged a “special war” against marijuana growers. The US Catholic Conference reported that the real targets were Indian peasants. Aerial herbicide sprays poisoned their food crops and starved the Indians out.

The 1980s were no different, according to Marshall. The drug war remained “a convenient weapon against suspected subversives, human rights activists, journalists, opposition political leaders and entire communities of Indians.”

When DEA Agent Enrique Camarena was murdered in Guadalajara in 1985 – by Mexican drug traffickers, police and politicians – DEA Administrator Francis Mullen charged that “Mexico hasn’t arrested a major drug trafficker in eight years.” Drug lord Felix Gallardo – wanted in the Camarena case – reportedly bragged he had purchased a get-out-of-jail-free card with donations to the Reagan administration’s counter-revolutionary army, the Nicaraguan contras.

With the North American Free Trade Agreement tightening US-Mexican financial linkages in recent years, the narcotics skeleton has been shoved further into the closet.

According to a former Bush drug policy official quoted last summer by Tim Golden of The New York Times, “People desperately wanted drugs not to become a complicating factor for NAFTA. There was a degree of illicit activities that was just accepted.”

Likewise, the Clinton administration has soft-pedaled drugs and corruption to avoid further destabilizing Mexico, especially after it arranged a $40 billion bailout of the free-falling peso.

But if so-called “stability” remains Washington’s top priority, the drug war will remain hype. And it will be easy to understand why, in the words of Mexican novelist Paco Ignacio Talbo, “the worse guys are beating the bad guys.”