Harry Targ : The CIA's Iranian Coup and 60 Years of 'Blowback'

Supporters of Mohammed Mossadegh demonstrate in Tehran, July 1953. Placard depicts an Iranian fighting off Uncle Sam and John Bull. Image from The Spectator.

The overthrow of Mossadegh:
Sixty years of Iranian 'blowback'

The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes.

By Harry Targ /The Rag Blog / August 21, 2013

Chalmers Johnson wrote in The Nation in October 2001, that "blowback"

is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the U.S. government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded... This misguided "covert operation" of the U.S. government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.

The CIA-initiated overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh 60 years ago on August 19, 1953, was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East and the fourth largest in the world and was geographically close to the former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the covert CIA war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.

The immediate background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian government received only 10 percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951.

Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil. Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.

Ironically, Mossadegh assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy. But in Washington the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”

After the nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a military intervention but the Truman administration feared such an action would work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party.

The boycott led to economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition, Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

As a result of the plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department official put it:

When the crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis... The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program... Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be in power. (Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, 1972)

The Shah, who had fled Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free” world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).

In August 1954, a new oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of 40 percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million, which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was accorded 50 percent of profits from future oil sales.

President Eisenhower declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of “economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an independent country in “the family of free nations.”

In brief, the United States overthrew a popularly-elected and overwhelmingly-endorsed regime in Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s, 70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary overthrow of his military state.

As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United States' role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Can Obama 'Rein In' His Presidency?

Obama: Who's making the call? Image from TomHayden.com.

Competing forces at play:
Can Obama ‘rein in’ his presidency?

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2013

President Barack Obama’s important speech at the National Defense University on deescalating his drone war should be seen as a window into the state of play among competing forces in the national security state.

Obama is trying, in his own words, to “rein in” the vast executive power directing the secret operations of the Long War, which was originally unleashed by George Bush after 9/11. Obama ended the Iraq phase of American combat and has promised the same by 2014 in Afghanistan while sharply escalating the drone war and special operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and beyond.

So far he has avoided direct intervention in Syria, which would require ground troops, and Iran, which would ignite an unpredictable storm.

In the process, Obama has grown a cancer on his presidency in the form of tens of thousands of disgruntled and difficult-to-control Special Forces, CIA personnel, a legion of spies and mercenaries, mainly in the Middle East and South Asia, but including also a steel defensive ring along the U.S. border with Mexico and Central America.

The apparatus of this Long War is well described by Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, and his previous work, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Their numbers are classified but, according to Nick Turse, the Special Ops are 60,000 or more, with their personnel deployed abroad quadrupled since 9/11; their budget jumping from $2.3 billion after 9/11 to $6.3 billion today, not including funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Additionally there are 7,000 armed border patrol agents and thousands more in the DEA.

These forces constitute the cancer, and they may not be willing to follow a presidential command to wind it down. They might fight back to the end. According to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, the generals tried to manipulate Obama into escalating Afghanistan into a “forever war.” The same forces undoubtedly have their objections to much of Obama’s recent speech as well.


Pentagon objections

The purposes of the Obama speech, as parsed by The New York Times on May 28, were to scale back the use of drones, target only those who actually threaten the U.S., remove the CIA from drone and targeting killing, and end the paradigm of the Global War on Terrorism.

The speech and its policies were “two years in the making,” reflecting the depth of unresolved tensions surrounding the administration. Obama, himself, first spoke of “reining in” the national security state in a Jon Stewart interview in October 2012.

There is no doubt that criticisms by Obama supporters, civil liberties lawyers, and many mainstream journalists helped the administration change its calculations. But greater pressures were exerted behind the scenes by the advocates of drones and counterterrorism.

• Obama kept secret until the day before the speech that he was lifting the moratorium on repatriating Guantanamo detainees, many of them on hunger strike, to Yemen, and appointing a new lead person to implement the transfers. Similarly, in 2009, when Obama announced his 33,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan, he slipped in a paragraph at the last minute pledging to begin his withdrawals in 18 months. The military objected.


• Against CIA objections, Obama decided to declassify the fact that U.S. drone strikes had killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other Americans who “were not intentionally targeted.”


• The CIA and Pentagon “balked” at tighter restrictions on drones, and the CIA’s counterterrorism center resisted the president’s proposal “to take its drones away.”


• A fierce debate broke out over whether “signature strikes” would continue, the drone war version of racial profiling. The new Obama policy remains murky as a result of internal compromise, and the CIA reportedly succeeded in keeping control of the drone war in Pakistan through 2014.


• The criterion for drone strikes was modified from targets that are “significant threats to U.S. interests” to targets representing “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” No sooner was the tighter standard announced than the CIA killed a Pakistan Taliban leader in apparent revenge for his organizing a suicide bombing which killed seven CIA operatives. Ignored in the militarized targeting criteria was the fact that the same figure was considered a “moderate” Taliban leader favoring a peaceful settlement of Pakistan’s internal bloodshed.


• Obama was unable to use his own speech to endorse a mechanism to carry forward an independent review of how and when drone attacks would occur. He could achieve no consensus in the administration.

Enlisting public opinion

Many will see these compromises and deferrals as evidence of Obama indecisiveness. But this is a leader who campaigned like a man of steel in 2008 and 2012, so the problem more likely lies in the nature of the state itself and the permanent forces contesting for power. If that is so, the Obama speech was designed to enlist public opinion in the internal arguments to come.

Obama often follows a confusing pattern of leaning toward the military’s preference while planning in his private chambers to later change course. Obama escalated in Afghanistan, then deescalated. He escalated the drone attacks, then sharply reduced them this past year.

He escalated deportations, then sued Sheriff Joe Arpaio and legalized the status of 1 million Dreamers by executive order. He dispatched DEA and even CIA agents in Mexico’s bloody drug war, then called for a new “conversation” about shifting to a harm-reduction approach.

In this zigzagging course Obama has sent thousands of largely clandestine troops and police into battles they could not win, causing enormous potential resentment and pushback. When the union representative of 7,000 border patrol agents testifies in defiance against Obama’s relaxed enforcement policies, you can assume that many in the national security state are considering forms of refusal to obey their commander-in-chief. Many will not deescalate quietly or loyally.

There is a disturbing analogy here with the 1960-63 John F. Kennedy era. JFK campaigned on a Cold War pledge to fight a long twilight struggle against communism. Like Obama, JFK became enthralled with special forces as a secret counterforce against radical insurgencies in Latin America.

The counterterrorism policies unleashed by JFK would lead eventually to the CIA’s tracking down Che Guevera, whose assassination was witnessed by a CIA agent in 1967, a parallel with Obama’s raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Kennedy gradually evolved toward a greater wisdom in the three years of his presidency; antagonizing many in what Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. At first, Kennedy went along with the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, conceived by the CIA under Eisenhower. But Kennedy refused to be drawn into sending American ground troops, which doomed the invasion of Cuba and provoked a violent right-wing Cuban backlash in Miami. Those Cuban exiles remained a virulent force in American politics down through the present time.

Then, after the near-apocalypse of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy moved steadily toward ending the nuclear arms race with the Russians, and turned instead to supporting the domestic goals of the 1963 March on Washington. JFK sent advisers to South Vietnam but showed a strong reluctance to dispatch American ground troops. In November 50 years ago, he was dead, to the unforgettable cheers of the John Birchers and the Cuban exiles, and to the more muted satisfaction of elements in the CIA and military-industrial complex.

It is by no means inevitable or even likely that Obama will meet JFK’s fate, although even the Homeland Security Agency has reported rising assassination threats due to the election of a black president and economic depression for many in the white working class. What is most important is to realize that change can evolve unexpectedly, due first to the experiences of a president while in office -- JFK regarding Cuba and nuclear weapons -- and the persistent pressure of activists demanding change -- the Freedom Riders, SNCC, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the same time, the reaction against the “threat” of change is relentless and explosive -- the Goldwater movement, the Reagan presidency.

In the Republicans' seemingly crazed opposition to everything Obama represents, and their well-organized “fixes” to their electoral deficit -- Citizens United, voter suppression, a partisan Supreme Court, reapportionment to gain Electoral College advantage, etc. -- there is a pattern of resistance that Obama himself may have underestimated.

The Republican intransigence is at least, on the surface, something that can be seen and confronted. But it is also connected to the cancerous tumors of the security state, which citizens hardly encounter and cannot easily access.

The question at hand is what force can be strong enough to offset the power of those wishing to trap Obama in the legacy of an Imperial Executive he does not want to pass to an unpredictable successor. And if there is not a civic power strong enough to put the cancer in remission, what does that say about the state of American democracy?

This article was also published at TomHayden.com.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Benghazi is the Perfect 'Scandal'

Political cartoon by Daryl Cagle / Cagle Cartoons.

Benghazi:
The perfect 'scandal'

The real 'scandal' is the cover-up of what the U.S. was doing in Libya.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2013

On the night of September 11, 2012, an armed group attacked a diplomatic post in the city of Benghazi in eastern Libya. The next morning a CIA annex was attacked. Out of these two attacks four United States citizens were killed including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

According to a November 2012 Wall Street Journal article (quoted by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, May 13, 2013):

The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said.

On March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1973 authorizing humanitarian intervention in Libya. It endorsed “Member States, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in the country, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory...” Five Security Council members abstained from support of this resolution: Brazil, China, Germany, India, and Russia.

Passage of the resolution was followed by a NATO-led air war on targets in that country. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 as a military alliance to defend Europe from any possible aggression initiated by the Soviet Union. If words mattered, NATO should have dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The United States, so concerned for the human rights of people in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, including in Libya, was virtually silent as nonviolent revolutions overthrew dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and Egypt earlier in 2011.

The United States continued to support regimes in Bahrain and Yemen in the face of popular protest and violent response and remained the primary rock-solid supporter of the state of Israel as it continued to expand settlements in the West Bank and blockaded the transfer of goods to Palestinians in Gaza.

And, of course, in the face of growing ferment in the Middle East and Persian Gulf for democratization not a word was said by way of criticism of the monarchical system in Saudi Arabia.

So as the Gaddafi regime in Libya fought its last battles, leading ultimately to the capture and assassination of the Libyan dictator, the NATO alliance and the United States praised themselves for their support of movements for democratization in Libya.

What seemed obvious to observers except most journalists was the fact that the overthrow of the Libyan regime, for better or worse, could not have occurred without the massive bombing campaign against military and civilian targets throughout Libya carried out by NATO forces.

From the vantage point of the Benghazi crisis of September 11, 2012, humanitarian intervention, which in Benghazi included 23 (of some 30) U.S. representatives who were CIA operatives, suggests that the attacks on U.S. targets might have had something to do with the history of U.S interventionism in the country. Great powers, such as the United States, continue to interfere in the political life of small and poor countries. And, the mainstream media continues to provide a humanitarian narrative of imperialism at work.

The post-9/11 Benghazi story is one of Republicans irresponsibly focusing on inter-agency squabbles and so-called contradictory Obama “talking points” after the killings of the four U.S. representatives in Benghazi. They chose not to address the real issue of the United States pattern of interference in the internal affairs of Libya.

And the Obama Administration defends itself by denying its incompetence in the matter, desperately trying to avoid disclosing the real facts in the Benghazi story which might show that the CIA and the Ambassador’s staff were embedded in Benghazi to interfere in the political struggles going on between factions among the Libyan people.

As Alexander Cockburn put it well in reference to the war on Libya in The Nation in June 2011:

America’s clients in Bahrain and Riyadh can watch the undignified pantomime with a tranquil heart, welcoming this splendid demonstration that they have nothing to fear from Obama’s fine speeches or Clinton’s references to democratic aspirations, well aware that NATO’s warplanes and helicopters are operating under the usual double standard -- with the Western press furnishing all appropriate services.

If Cockburn were alive today he would have added that the Libyan operation was about U.S. covert interventionism, anger on the part of sectors of the Benghazi citizenship, and not about the United States encouraging “democratic aspirations” of the Libyan people.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to have a conversation about U.S. interventionism but prefer to debate about a “scandal.” The real “scandal” is the cover-up of what the U.S. was doing in Libya.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Iran and the Coup of Coups

Abrahamian's 'The Coup':
Shah of Shahs on the Peacock Throne

As Abrahamian tells the reader, in the eyes of London and DC, there was no room for genuine negotiations in their dealings with the Mossadegh government. The struggle was about control of Iran’s resources and regional geopolitical power.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 20, 2013

[The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations by Ervand Abrahamian (2013: The New Press); Hardcover; 304 pp; $26.95.]

If there is one nation whose political situation has been omnipresent and important to the history of the past 75 years, it would be Iran. Much to the dismay of those imperial powers that have tried to subdue and manipulate them, Iran’s people have refused to go along.

Islamic revolutionaries or leftist revolutionaries, military men and civilians, it doesn’t matter. The imposition of foreign restrictions and regimes have consistently failed to withstand the desire of the Iranians to be free of foreign domination. Britain, Russia, and the United States; all have tried and all have failed to make Iran do their bidding for more than a generation. None have tried harder than the United States, which took over from Great Britain after World War II.

What ranks as the most flagrant attempt to impose Washington’s will on the people of Iran has to be the 1953 coup engineered by Kermit Roosevelt and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This coup, which overthrew the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, continues to define the relationship between Washington and Tehran. Furthermore, it ranks as one of the twentieth century’s top examples of colonialist arrogance underpinned by dismissive racism and outright contempt for the subject people and their will.

Until recently the story of that chapter of history was told in the West by those who traditionally frame history -- the victors. In other words, the history of the 1953 U.S. coup in Iran was told by the CIA and its media supplicants. Like with most other tales told by these elements, the overthrown government was characterized as dictatorial, unpopular, communistic, and even fanatic. Therefore, goes the narrative, the CIA did the Iranian people a favor, just like they did in Guatemala around the same time.

In the year 2000, The New York Times published a series of articles based on classified documents detailing the workings of that coup. After receiving heavily redacted files which were written as a summary of the coup by a CIA operator, the Times re-summarized the material.

Even though a good deal of information was missing, and the Times itself had cheered the coup when it occurred, this series began to provide Western readers with a glimpse at exactly how intimately involved Washington was in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government. Furthermore, the Times report indicated that a primary reason for the coup was control of Iran’s fossil fuels, not any threat of communism (as had been previously reported) and not because Mossadegh was a fanatic dictator.

Still, there were several aspects of the story that were missing. Some of these were filled in with the publication of Kermit Roosevelt’s self-glorifying history of the coup titled Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran. Most however, were not, largely because Roosevelt remained convinced that the coup he engineered was the right thing to do for Iran and the world at large. Therefore, he ignored remarks and findings that claimed something else.

A new book changes all that. Titled The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations, the book is authored by the Iranian scholar Ervand Abrahamian. A learned historian, his 2008 book A History of Modern Iran provides a reappraisal of modern Iranian history unfamiliar to most U.S. readers. The Coup does that and more.

Indeed, it takes the familiar history -- a history that is primarily lies -- and debunks almost every bit of it. Mossadegh was not a communist; the Tudeh (Iranian Communist party) did not control the government and did not intend to overthrow Mossadegh; the Islamists under Imam Khatani did get bought off by the CIA; and the coup was not only cheered, but supported by a comprador class of Iranians concerned primarily with their wealth and not with the nation or the Iranian people.

As Abrahamian tells the reader, in the eyes of London and DC, there was no room for genuine negotiations in their dealings with the Mossadegh government. The struggle was about control of Iran’s resources and regional geopolitical power. Reading this argument, I was reminded of the lack of compromise from Washington and London prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If one recalls, no matter what they said publicly, Bush and Blair were not interested in making a deal with Iraq; their governments wanted complete control.

Abrahamian also dispels the myth that the crisis and eventual coup were the fault of the Iranians, a premise put forth by observers as venerated as Daniel Yergin, the author of the classic work on oil politics of the mid-twentieth century, The Prize. Instead, through his reading of recently discovered documents and his own insights, Abrhamian makes it clear the crisis was engineered and brought to its fruition by Washington, DC.

While reading the last section of this book describing the procedure leading up to the actual coup, the reader might well be struck by how little has really changed when it comes to the West’s dealings with Iran. In fact, when reading about the British-backed and enforced oil embargo against Iran after the Iranians nationalized the industry, one cannot help but compare that historic attempt to destroy Iran’s economy to the current embargo led by Washington.

Abrahamian describes sanctions, ultimatums presented as negotiations, lies about the Iranian leadership, and CIA subterfuge. It is almost like reading today's New York Times and its coverage of U.S.-led operations against the current Iranian government. Not only is this book important because of its presentation of history. It is also important because it might be predicting the future.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Margarita Alarcón : All Roads Lead to Posada

Luis Posada Carriles. Photo by Delio Requeral / Cubaencuentro.
Life as a diplomat's daughter:
All roads lead to Posada

By Margarita Alarcón / The Rag Blog / January 27, 2010

The thing that made my life growing up in the U.S. quite different from that of others in my same situation was not so much that I was the daughter of an ambassador but rather that my life was subjected to slightly different constraints than those of my peers.

When most kids my age were going to school on the bus with their parents, I was being driven daily by an armed guard. As we grew older and kids became semi-adolescents allowed to take the bus and thus acquire the famous bus passes used those days in New York, I still had to be driven to school and back by a driver. No color-coded bus pass for me.

It may sound like whining now, but I can guarantee that not being able to hang out with the crowd after hours was really a drag, and for those of you who remember that far back, most of the cute guys would regularly take the bus, so I was missing out on a major part of the flirting going on.

Granted, my buddies loved the driver-driven car when we'd have sleepovers; they couldn’t get enough of not having to deal with the smelly subways and buses. But not me. In silence I wished to ride like the normal kids my age but, alas, I never got the chance.

Years later, back in Havana one night over drinks at a film festival I met the ying to my yang. She, like me, had grown up in the U.S. and her life experiences growing up were much like mine. The only difference was that I was the daughter of a Cuban diplomat and she was a Cuban who had fled the island to the U.S. with her parents. And while I was being driven around by someone, she was driving on her own -- but always checking under her car before she turned on the ignition.

We were living in the same country but in two totally different cities -- she in Miami, I in New York City -- and we were both instructed by our parents to follow the same basic security drill: check your rearview mirror for any car following you for more than 10 blocks; don’t repeat the same route to the same destination; NEVER open the mailbox; always sit with your back to the wall, facing the entrance and away from the windows. The list is endless.

We weren’t being brought up by wannabe members of the Corleones or Sopranos; we were simply being taught to protect ourselves from the possibility of a terrorist attack. These precautions had become second nature since early on.

As far back as the age of six I can remember being alone at home with my grandmother on York Avenue in Manhattan when the doorman buzzed with a package. The package contained a huge hideous dark green glass duck. As it was being set on the end table behind the couch, the phone rang. It was my father calling to warn not to accept anything and to take me to the other end of the apartment and shut the door behind us and wait for him and my mom to get home.

No, it wasn't because my father was an animal rights activist, though he does defend them; he was simply reacting to a call he had just received. Someone from the organization Alpha 66 had called to let him know that he'd do well to up his security at home because their organization had just breached every single possible security barrier we had, despite the fact we lived 10 blocks from one of the safest and ritziest neighborhoods in Manhattan.

During school rides home the driver often asked me to open the glove compartment and take out a pen and pad and jot down license plate numbers, and not to get out of the car until he’d opened the door. Other times we’d have to go a couple of blocks out of our way until there were others entering our building; the logic being that if I was going to be shot, at least let it happen in front of witnesses.

Meanwhile, my friend in Miami was checking under the hood of her car in heels, and was told to keep her drapes closed at all times. While she was learning of her dad’s place of work getting bombed every now and again, I was becoming quite an expert in the art of dodging bullets and tracking fiends.

A trip to East Hampton was abruptly interrupted when my father’s driver realized something was wrong with the brakes. We stopped at a gas station on the way and sure enough, they had been slashed. The face on the poor gas station attendant was a sight I’ll always remember. Cubans in a big black car, tall buff guys with them, a lefty good-natured “gringa,” and a hippie kid -- in a car with the breaks slashed -- is not something you encountered regularly on the Long Island Expressway.

I guess the one time I will always remember was in late September 1976. I had just gotten home and I stormed into the study where my mom was, and demanded that I be allowed to take the bus home like everyone else. My mom lifted her head from her desk and looked at me with bloodshot eyes and simply said, “You realize they murdered Orlando Letelier today? Please don’t do this to me now.” Less than a month later, on October 6, 1976, Cubana Airlines Flight 455 fell from the skies after two explosions on board the aircraft.

A car bomb took Letelier´s life in Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC. Santiago Mari Pesquera and Carlos Muñíz Varela were both shot dead in Puerto Rico, Felix Garcia was shot under the overhead pass on Queens Boulevard on a Sunday. The Cubana flight went down killing 73 passengers over the waters of the Caribbean.

Organizations like Alpha 66, Omega 7, CORU, and operation Condor were born -- all Cuban-American, all U.S.-based. They were responsible for intimidation, attacks, and the loss of countless lives through acts of terror. And all of these crimes have an unfortunate common denominator: when speaking of Cuba and acts of terror, all roads lead to Posada.

Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent, trained by the agency in terrorism and paramilitary activities, has operated and organized plots against almost every single nation in Latin America. He prides himself on having been one of the masterminds and executors of numerous assassination attempts against Latin American dignitaries and leaders.

He is responsible for the deaths of individuals through acts of torture in Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador. As recently as January 2011 he was caught on tape saying, “We have won, but we haven’t cashed in.” He was referring to his acts against the Cuban nation. To this day Posada is still suspected of training and influencing protégés in the dirty deeds trade.

How do I know all of this? It is all over the news in Miami, because he is at large; he is currently free as a bird. Well, I exaggerate; technically he is free but under indictment. Not for terrorism though. Luis Posada Carriles is currently in the state of Texas pending trial on one count of illegal entry into the United States of America. A confessed terrorist and assassin tried on an immigration technicality: he lied on his immigration form.

Is it me, or is that utterly insane?

How much information must a man such as Posada have under his sleeve for the U.S. to allow him to run free after knowing full well that this man is dangerous and a criminal? Are the lives of Cubans and others in Latin America so worthless? Are the lives of U.S. citizens whose only crime is to be forthcoming regarding Cuba so expendable? Does it really make sense that Cuba finds itself on the list of state sponsors of terrorism of the State Department? If Cuba had such a list, I wonder who would be at the top of it?

Julian Assange may be tried because he published the truth about things that some would rather have kept in the dark; Posada Carriles will stand trial for being a liar. What is wrong with this picture?

[Margarita Alarcón Perea was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in New York City. She studied at Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany and Havana, and is a graduate of Havana University in linguistics. She has taught English translation and North American Twentieth Century Literature, and worked in the Cuban music industry. She is currently a news analyst for Cubadebate in Havana and contributes to The Rag Blog and The Huffington Post. Margarita's father is Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban National Assembly.]

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FILM / Ed Felien : Big Brother With a Dash of 'Salt'

Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt: She takes it into her own hands.
Ignorance is Strength:
Perhaps we need a little 'Salt'!

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / September 3, 2010

How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. -- George Orwell

Tanya Tucker once sang, "Any kind of love without passion, ain't no kind of lovin' at all," and that's sort of what's wrong with Salt, the new movie starring Angelina Jolie as CIA agent Evelyn Salt.

There's certainly enough action -- probably enough action for three or four movies. In the first chase scene she jumps off a bridge onto a semi hauling a trailer, then onto a semi pulling a tanker, then onto a truck. Amazing stunts. Amazing athletic ability. But why should we care? We don't really know Evelyn Salt, so after a while it's a little like watching a gymnastics exhibition.

Well, if there's no depth of characterization and the plot is a string of melodramatic cliffhangers and chase scenes, then what's the pull of the movie?

Spoiler alert:

Evelyn Salt starts out the film as a tourist captured by North Koreans, being tortured and denying passionately that she is a spy. Then she is traded for a North Korean spy and in the exchange it is revealed she is in fact a CIA spy.

Then in an interrogation of a Russian defector it is revealed that she is a sleeper agent for the Soviets. Then she goes rogue from the CIA so she can totally eliminate the Soviet group. Finally, she's rogue in both camps but determined to save the world in spite of their intelligence agencies.

She's a comic book superhero, operating outside the law, hunted by both sides, following her own moral compass -- sort of like Batman and Spiderman. The difference for Evelyn Salt is that the bad guys are the intelligence agencies that have been given the power of life or death over everything and everyone, and they're out of control and Salt is the only one who can set them straight.

That's what makes the movie so appealing.

On July 19 the Washington Post published a two-year study of the U. S. intelligence community. They found there were 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies gathering intelligence on counterterrorism and homeland security, and 845,000 people holding top-secret security clearance. That seems like a lot of spies when you realize that the population of Washington, D. C. is only 600,000.

Most independent analysts agree, the intelligence community and the Pentagon are out of control. It's where the bulk of our tax dollars go, and Congress and the President are spending as fast as they can "to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic."

9/11 was manna from heaven for Halliburton and the military-industrial complex. It gave them a blank check in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's giving them even more money for intelligence gathering. Obama, who campaigned against the Patriot Act, now seems to like the idea of domestic spying:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time." (George Orwell, 1984)

Those people who hate big government have come to love Big Brother because they know he is protecting them from the evil-doers.They know that WAR IS PEACE because we have to fight them over there or else we would have to fight them over here.

At the Glenn Beck rally Saturday, August 28, Sarah Palin said, "Say what you want to say about me, but I raised a combat vet. You can't take that away from me." The Tea Party people want to end entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want nothing left but a military budget and 3,000 spy agencies.

They know that FREEDOM IS SLAVERY because to go forward into the unknown is to abandon the sacred institutions of church and traditional authority. Sarah Palin told the crowd: "We must not fundamentally transform America as some would want. We must restore America and restore her honor."

And they know that IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. The Original Sin was to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. At a warm-up rally to the Glenn Beck-a-thon, Minnesota's own Michelle Bachmann said, "It's our country; we own it. It doesn't belong to a cabal of a half-dozen radicals who are determined to reshape this country into an image that none of us would ever begin to recognize."

The buses that transported Tea Partiers from Bachmann's rally to Beck's were paid for by Americans for Prosperity, a lobbying group of the Koch Brothers, whose combined wealth is only surpassed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. They own Koch Refineries, and it's their funding that was responsible for many of the early Tea Party activities. They fund organizations that support Big Oil and the Military-Industrial Complex. They are the merchants of fear and death.

And how do they want to restore America and restore her honor? It can only be done through victory over our enemies. It can only come through a president flying a fighter jet onto an aircraft carrier with a banner saying, "Mission Accomplished" as a backdrop.

In the words of George Orwell, "Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

And that's the world our government is creating. That's the world the Tea Party worships.

And that's why you have to agree with the CIA man who releases Salt from her handcuffs and says, "Go get 'em." And Salt pushes loose the door of the helicopter, jumps into the Potomac, swims to shore and runs off through the woods to fight another day.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly.]

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Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan /11

U.S. Rep. Charles Wilson from Texas, on the white horse, visits Afghanistan in 1987. The Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, was based on his story. Photo from AP / Iconic Photos.
Part 11: 1981-1987
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 21, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The series so far can be found here.]

On March 29, 2010, the Associated Press reported that “a senior military official” in Washington “who was not authorized to speak publicly on the operation” said that “NATO forces in June will make a long-planned assault on the Taliban’s spiritual home in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar,” and that “military officials say they expect `several thousand’" of the 30,000 extra troops that Barack Obama recently ordered to Afghanistan “to be sent to Kandahar.”

But long before the Republican Bush II Administration ordered Pentagon ground troops to begin the endless war in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Republican Reagan Administration was involving the U.S. government even more deeply in the internal political affairs of Afghanistan .

The CIA’s SOVMAT program of arming anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas, for example, continued to operate after the Democratic Carter Administration was replaced by the Reagan Administration and William Casey (a former Capital Cities Communications media conglomerate board member who also then owned over $3 million worth of stock in companies like Exxon, DuPont, Standard Oil of Indiana, and Mobil-Superior Oil) became the new CIA director in 1981. As Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan : A Modern History observed:

Bill Casey’s CIA procurers scoured the globe in search of Soviet-style weapons. Egypt, which had large stockpiles of automatic weapons, land mines, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft missiles delivered by the Soviets was the first source... Other sources were Israel, which had a supply of Soviet-made weapons -- captured during the Six-Day War and from Syrian troops and Palestinians in London -- and China.

Using Pakistan ’s Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] as a go-between, the CIA contracted with the Chinese government to manufacture rocket launchers, AK47s and heavy machine guns in return for hard currency and new equipment. China became a major source of supply. As the requirements grew, the CIA arranged for copies of Soviet weapons to be manufactured in factories in Cairo and in the U.S., where one leading firm was given a classified contract to upgrade SAM-7-anti-aircraft missiles...

The CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s represented “the biggest single CIA covert operation anywhere in the world,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The money the U.S. government’s CIA secretly spent on giving weapons and military aid -- via its Pakistani ISI middlemen -- to the Afghan Mujahideen guerrillas grew from $30 million to $280 million-per-year between 1981 and 1985.

In addition, Reagan Administration CIA Director Casey also persuaded “Arab governments to contribute to a reserve fund that could be kept secret from Congress and the State Department” during the early 1980s, according to the same book. As a result, in late 1981 the repressive Saudi Arabian monarchical regime “began to match the CIA dollar for dollar in the financing of purchases of weapons for the Afghan resistance, ...funneled more than half a billion dollars to CIA accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands,” and made “substantial direct contributions of cash and weapons to its own favorites among the Mujahideen parties” in Afghanistan.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International [BCCI] in Geneva was the financial institution secretly used by the CIA and the Saudi government in the 1980s to manage the special “Afghan War” accounts -- from which the CIA and Saudi government payments were made to the various arms dealers who supplied the weapons needed for the CIA’s covert military intervention in Afghanistan.

By 1989, around $13 billion had been spent by the U.S. and Saudi governments for subsidizing the CIA and ISI’s Mujahideen militias in Afghanistan, and around 50 percent of U.S. government-supplied weapons had been distributed to Hekmatyar’s extremely anti-feminist Hizb-I Islami guerrilla group.

Ironically, one of the strongest proponents in for the escalation of the Reagan Administration’s escalation of Casey’s covert war in Afghanistan in the early 1980s was a Democrat: a now-deceased Democratic Congressman from Texas named Charles Wilson. As John Coole recalled in his Unholy Wars:

The single U.S. Congressman who emerged as CIA Director William Casey’s champion Congressional ally, especially for appropriating money was Democratic Representative Charles Wilson of Texas, one of the most colorful figures of the Afghan jihad... Always ready to promote the interests of the Texas defense contractors who supported him, he got seats on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee...

Wilson made 14 separate trips to South Asia... In 1982, he began intensive work in secret hearings of the Senate Appropriations Committee to inject more and more money into the Afghan enterprise. On one trip in 1983 he crossed into Afghanistan with a group of Mujahideen...

Wilson’s best ally for money decisions below Casey’s level in the CIA was John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director since June 1982...

McMahon did support Wilson’s efforts for more money for the jihad, after setting up, during Stanfield Turner’s watch as CIA Director [during the Democratic Carter Administration], many of the original financing and supply arrangements for the Mujahideen...

In late 1984, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, the U.S. Congress, “in a rare show of bi-partisanship, and prompted by friends of the Afghan resistance such as Charles Wilson, Gordon Humphrey, Orin Hatch and Bill Bradley, also took the lead in voting more money for the Mujahideen than the Reagan administration requested, sometimes by diverting funds from the defense budget to the CIA.” And CIA Director Casey personally visited three secret training camps in October 1984 to watch some of the Mujahideen guerrillas being trained in Pakistan to wage war in Afghanistan.

The CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986-1989 who was apparently responsible for arming the Mujahideen was Milton Bearden, according to James Lucas, in an article entitled “America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan." In Bearden’s view, “the U.S. was fighting the Soviets to the last Afghan,” during the 1980s. And around 1.5 million to 2 million Afghans would be killed during the CIA-sponsored Afghan war, before all Soviet troops were eventually withdrawn by the Gorbachev regime in the late 1980s.

Thousands of Afghan civilians were apparently killed, for example, as a result of the Soviet military’s bombing of apparently 12,000 rural villages in Afghanistan (as part of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA] government’s “counterinsurgency” campaign) during the 1980s.

As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “all pretenses that the United States was not directly involved in the Afghan war were dissipated at a stroke late 1984,” when Republican President Reagan then publicly authorized “the delivery of Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the Mujahideen.” The delivery of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the Mujahideen by the CIA “would begin to turn the tide of the” Afghan “war in 1985” against the Soviet military forces and Afghan armed forces that supported the PDPA regime in Afghanistan, according to Unholy Wars. As James Lucas noted in his “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article:

“Between 1986 and 1989, the U.S. provided the Mujahideen with more than 1,000 of these state-of-the-art, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launchers which by some accounts prevented a Soviet victory. Stinger missiles were able to destroy low-flying Soviet planes which forced them to fly at higher altitudes, thereby curtailing the damage they could cause.”

By 1987, the U.S. government was giving the anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas nearly $700 million in military assistance per year; and were it not for the involvement of the CIA and the Pakistani government’s ISI in the 1980s war in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen might not have eventually succeeded in violently overthrowing the PDPA regime by the early 1990s. As Afghanistan: A Modern History noted,

...the greatest advantage that the Mujahideen as a guerrilla force had were the safe havens in Pakistan to which they could withdraw from time to time to rest and refit, gather the supplies that they needed, receive training in the use of the increasingly sophisticated weapons that the United States was delivering, and be briefed on the superior intelligence... that the CIA was providing through the ISI.

The same book revealed some details of how the CIA and ISI organized their military units of Afghan refugees to attack Afghanistan —in violation of international law—during the late 1970s and 1980s:

Within the ISI, the Afghan Bureau was the command post for the war in Afghanistan and operated in the greatest secrecy, with its military staff wearing civilian clothes. Its head reported to [then-ISI Director General] Akhtar [Abdur Rahman], who also devoted some 50 percent of his time to the affairs of the Bureau and reported directly to [Pakistani President] Zia.

The respective roles of the CIA and the ISI’s Afghan Bureau are best summed up by the army officer personally selected by Akhtar in October 1983 to head the Bureau, Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf:

“To sum up: The CIA’s tasks in Afghanistan were to purchase arms and equipment and their transportation to Pakistan; provide funds for the purpose of vehicles and transportation inside Pakistan and Afghanistan; train Pakistani instructors on new weapons or equipment; provide photographs and maps for our operational planning; provide radio equipment and training, and advise on technical matters when requested. The entire planning of the war, all types of training for the Mujahideen, and the allocation and distribution of arms and supplies were the…responsibility of the ISI, and my office in particular."

Around 80,000 Mujahideen Afghan guerrillas were trained, for example, in camps in Pakistan between 1984 and 1987. At the ISI Afghan Bureau’s 70 to 80 acre Ojhri Camp in Rawalpindi -- not too far from Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad -- were barracks, training areas, mess halls, and a warehouse from which 70 percent of the weapons used by the Afghan Mujahadeen were distributed, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. The anti-feminist Afghan combatants were mostly recruited by the ISI and CIA from the over 3.2 million Afghan refugees who settled in Pakistan and the over 2.9 million Afghan refugees who settled in Iran between 1980 and 1990.

Yet despite the opposition of the anti-feminist Mujahideen, the PDPA government refused to scrap its program for female equality and female emancipation in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Gilles Dorronsoro wrote in his 2005 book Revolution Unending: Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present:

The regime maintained the proportion of women members of the party at around 15 percent... In addition, there were women members of the party militias, especially in Kabul and in some of the northern towns. The most marked changes were in public education... In Kabul half of the holders of the public teaching posts were women, as were the majority of the staff of the Ministries of Education and Health. Similarly, 55 percent of the students were girls... Dress codes showed the beginnings of a break with traditional practices, although these innovations were mostly restricted to the modern areas of the capital and to a lesser extent of Jalalabad and Mazar-I Sharif…

In the Afghan countryside, however, “the Mujahideen imposed an order that was much more conservative or even fundamentalist,” the “prohibition of women’s participation in public activities became stricter,” and “opposition from fundamentalists... restricted the educational opportunities for girls,” according to the same book.

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan—12: 1987-1992"

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• Previous installments of "A People's History of Afghanistan" by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog can be found here.

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Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan / 9

This photo allegedly shows President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski with Tim Osman (later known as Osama bin Laden), during training with the Pakistan Army, 1981. Brzenzinski and President Carter worked covertly for regime change within Afghanistan. Photo from Sygma / Corbis.
Part 9: 1978-1979
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 8, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The series so far can be found here.]

As The New York Times (4/26/10) recently observed, “small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity for several weeks in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders... in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say.”

So if you’re a Rag Blog reader who’s also a U.S. anti-war activist,this might be a good time for you to revisit the post-1978 history of the people in Afghanistan.

Following the April 27, 1978, “Saur [April] Revolution” in Afghanistan, a Revolutionary Council of the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan [PDRA] was established on May 1, 1978, with People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan [PDPA]-Khalq faction leader Noor Mohammad Taraki as its president and premier, PDPA-Parcham faction leader Babrak Karmal as vice president, 30 PDPA civilians as members and five pro-PDPA military officers as members; and on May 6, 1978, Taraki announced that Afghanistan was now a non-aligned and independent country.

Soon afterwards, however, control of the post-April 1978 revolutionary government of Afghanistan was shifted to the PDPA’s Politburo.

According to an article by John Ryan, titled “Afghanistan: A Forgotten Chapter,” which appeared in the November/December 2001 issue of Canadian Dimensions, labor unions “were legalized, a minimum wage was established, a progressive income tax was introduced, men and women were given equal rights, and girls were encouraged to go to school,” by the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan.

All debts owned by Afghan’s peasants and small farmers were also abolished, and 200,000 rural families were scheduled to receive redistributed land in accordance with the PDPA government’s land reform program. In addition, the PDPA government elevated the Uzbek, Tucoman, Baluchi and Niristani minority languages to the status of national language in Afghanistan, deprived members of the Afghan royal family of their citizenship, and began building hundreds of schools and medical clinics in the Afghan countryside.

A female member of the PDPA/PDRA’s Revolutionary Council, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, also wrote, in a May 28, 1978 Kabul Times editorial, that “privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services, and free time to rear a healthy generation for building the future of the country,” and “educating and enlightening women is now the subject of close government attention.”

Once the PDPA had gained control over the Afghan government, however, internal party conflict between the leaders of its Parcham faction and its Khalq faction developed again, and at a June 27, 1978, PDPA Central Committee meeting, “Karmal and other leading Parchamis were shunted off to lives in glorified exile as ambassador” and “virtually ousted... from the government” by the Khalq faction, according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History.

A number of Parcham activists were then also imprisoned by the PDPA-Khalq faction’s regime. Besides Taraki, the PDPA-Khalq faction in late June 1978 was also now being led by Hafizullah Amin -- the Columbia University Teachers College graduate (who some Afghan leftists subsequently claimed may have been previously recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency when he studied in the United States -- during the Cold War period when the Afghan monarchical government was considered by the CIA to be too friendly with the Soviet Union.)

Karmal, who had been appointed Afghanistan’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, apparently then met with “Parchamis who were still in place, notably Defense Minister Qadir and the Army Chief of Staff, General Shahpur Ahmedzai,” and a PDPA-Parcham faction internal coup against the PDPA-Khalq faction’s Taraki-Amin regime was planned for September 4, 1978, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. But in August 1978 Amin learned of the planned coup, arrested Qadir and Ahmedzai, and “went on a witch-hunt for Parchamis, eliminating them and their sympathizers from key government and party posts and filling the jails with them,” according to the same book.

Meanwhile, right-wing Islamic opponents of the Taraki-Amin regime in rural Afghanistan, soon began to organize against the mixing of sexes in the classrooms of the post-Saur Revolution’s literacy campaign, and against its democratic reform of Afghan’s marriage laws -- which would now abolish forced marriages, insure freedom of choice of marriage partner, and make 16 years the minimum age for marriage.

But the anti-feminist rural Afghan religious leaders, rural village heads, and rural elders who opposed the literacy campaign and marriage law reforms -- along with their followers -- were also either repressed in large numbers by the PDPA-Khalq regime in 1978 or fled to Pakistan during the last six months of 1978. As James Lucas’s recalled in his recent article, “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan,"

Efforts to introduce changes involved a degree of coercion and violence directed mainly toward those living in areas outside of Kabul where the vast majority of the population lived in mountainous, rural and tribal areas where there was an exceptionally high rate of illiteracy. Steps to redistribute land were initiated but were met by objections from those who had monopoly ownership of land.

It was the revolutionary government’s granting of new rights to women that pushed orthodox Muslim men in the Pashtun villages of eastern Afghanistan to pick up their guns. Even though some of those changes had been made only on paper, some said that they were being made too quickly.

According to these opponents, the government said their women had to attend meetings and that their children had to go to school. Since they believed that these changes threatened their religion, they were convinced that they had to fight. So an opposition movement started at that point which became known as the Mujahideen, an alliance of conservative Islamic groups.

The anti-feminist Afghan alliance of Sunni Islamic party groups, also known as the “Peshawar Seven,” soon called for a jihad, or holy war, against the post-April 1978 revolutionary government in Afghanistan. And by the end of 1978, some 80,000 Afghans from the eastern half of Afghanistan had reached Pakistan,” and “eight training camps were established in the North West Frontier Province” by Pakistan’s right-wing military dictatorship “to turn simple Afghan refugees into guerrilla fighters,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

A report in the February 1979 issue of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung indicated that the CIA apparently initially provided Pakistan’s military dictatorship with the money needed to purchase weapons for the anti-feminist Afghan refugees that it began training in late 1978. According to John Cooley’s 2001 book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism, “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officers and a few key Afghan guerrilla leaders were first secretly schooled in the service training centers of the CIA and the U.S. Army and Navy Special Forces in the United States” and “main training took place under the watchful eyes of the Pakistanis and sometimes a very few CIA officers in Pakistan...”

In response, the Taraki-Amin regime signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the government of the neighboring Soviet Union on December 5, 1978, agreeing to provide more Soviet military advisors and Soviet military aid for the PDPA-Khalq government in Afghanistan.

Yet “in January 1979 a first contingent of some 500 [anti-feminist Afghan guerrillas] under the banner of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizbi-i-Islami” [group] entered Kunar province, attacked Asadabad, its principal town, and captured a strategically located government fort,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. Hekmatyar’s followers had initially “gained attention” in Afghanistan “by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil” according to journalist Tim Weiner.

In the western half of Afghanistan, Afghan Shiite Islamic party groups also had prepared for armed resistance to the post-April 1978 revolutionary government, and in February 1979 the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was taken hostage by an anti-government Shiite Islamic group that demanded the release by the PDPA-Khalq government of a political prisoner. The U.S. Ambassador was then killed during a shootout between Afghan police and his anti-government captors.

The following month, hundreds of Afghan government officials (who were in charge of introducing the women’s literacy program in the western city of Herat) and their Soviet advisors -- along with members of their families -- were apparently killed by rebellious local Afghans and a garrison of mutinous Afghan government soldiers in Herat on March 24, 1979. There followed major attacks in Jalalabad, in Pattia province, and in Gardez during April 1979, by "Mujahideen organized from Pakistan by Syyed Ahmd Gailani and Mujaddidi,” according to Afghanistan : A Modern History.

Even before Democratic President Carter secretly signed a July 3, 1979, directive to officially provide covert military aid to the anti-feminist Islamic guerrillas in Afghanistan (that Pakistan’s ISI agency had covertly trained to seek a regime change in Afghanistan), both the Tarkai-Amin regime and the government of the Soviet Union had accused Pakistan’s military dictatorship of illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, in violation of international law.

As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “both Kabul and Moscow were convinced, not without reason, that the spreading insurrections in Afghanistan were encouraged, armed and directed by Pakistan.”

Yet Pakistan’s military dictatorship apparently lied about its role in illegally intervening in the internal affairs of Afghanistan following the April 1978 Saur Revolution in Afghanistan . As Afghanistan : A Modern History recalled:

Whenever such charges were publicly leveled at Pakistan, they were flatly denied. Pakistan was able to maintain the fiction... The whole support program was a very covert operation from beginning to end, conducted in... secrecy by the ISI whose chief, General Akhtar, reported directly to [then-Pakistani Dictator] Zia... The fiction was maintained even when the level of support reached massive proportions after the United States became involved…

Prior to the introduction of large numbers of Soviet troops into Afghanistan by the Brezhnev regime in December 1979, the Carter Administration apparently also was not completely honest about the degree to which it was working for a regime change in Afghanistan by illegally intervening in Afghanistan’s internal affairs in early 1979. For example, as Steve Galster observed in “Afghanistan : The Making of U.S. Policy 1973-1990”:

According to a former Pakistani military official who was interviewed in 1988, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had asked Pakistani military officials in April 1979 to recommend a rebel organization that would make the best use of U.S. aid. The following month, the Pakistani source claimed, he personally introduced a CIA official to Hekmatyar who... headed what the Pakistani government considered the most militant and organized rebel group, the Hizbi-i Islami...

And according to John Cooley’s 2001 book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, during “the summer of 1979... National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski got Carter to sign a secret directive for covert aid to the Mujahideen resistance fighters.” As Brzezinski -- a former Columbia University Professor of Government and former policy advisor to Barack Obama -- confessed in a January 15, 1998 interview with the Paris newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

The Unholy Wars book also observed that “Charles Cogan, until 1984 one of the senior CIA officials running the aid program... agrees with Brzezinski... that the first covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance fighters was actually authorized fully six months before the Soviet invasion -- in July 1979...”

As a then-classified U.S. State Department Report of August 1979 stated, "the United States larger interests... would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan," according to James Lucas’ recent “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission In Afghanistan” article.

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan—10: 1979-1981"

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• Previous installments of "A People's History of Afghanistan" by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog can be found here.

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Follow the Poppies : Opium, Afghanistan, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Soldier among the poppies at opium field in Afghanistan. Image from Aftermath News.
Working with the warlords:
Afghanistan and the heroin trade

The U.S. used the international heroin network to serve its geopolitical aims in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / May 24, 2010

When George W. Bush and Tony Blair decided to first attack Afghanistan, one consideration was bringing enough stability to run a pipeline down through the country to Pakistan. One wonders if Blair and Bush gave any thought to the heroin trade when they decided to attack the Taliban.

Between 1991 and 2003, about 60 tons of heroin from Afghanistan went to wholesalers along the Volga and in the Urals Districts of Russia. Who knows how much went to the rest of Russia. Northern Afghanistan is the bridgehead for moving drugs into Russia. Far more Afghan heroin went to Europe, the largest single consumer of heroin.

Drugs and banks

In June, 2003, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan estimated that the international drug trade was worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year. The banks that launder this money have a strong incentive to see that the drug trade continues. The Independent reported on February 28, 2004, that, in cash terms, narcotics ranked third in world trade, following oil and arms. Drugs are particularly important because they constitute a form of currency vital to the underworld, international crime, and intelligence agencies.

Making this point could mislead readers into thinking that a high wall separates legitimate and illegitimate transactions. Today, business transactions have become so complex that many so-called legitimate businesses have found it necessary to deal with international criminal organizations and to use their currency of choice, drugs. All too often it is very hard to distinguish between government intelligence agencies and the criminal elements they must cooperate with, and the welfare of some politicians also depends upon the free flow of drugs. Heroin constitutes but one part of that trade.

By then between 80 and 90% of the world’s heroin was coming from Afghanistan. In 2007, the country produced 8,200 tons of opium poppies. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the Taliban earns from $90 to $400 million from drugs. Most experts place the figure at $125 billion and add that this includes taxes it imposes upon chemicals used to process opium.

The whole country’s annual drug take is somewhere between $2.8 and $3.4 billion. Much of that money goes to line the pockets of Afghan police and officials. A 2008 U.S. Senate report put the value of the transnational sales of all Afghan opiates at between $400 and 500 billion in street value. Some of that found its way to western chemical companies via doubtful routes. Of that amount, about $70 billion is heroin. Up to 10% of the heroin money moves through an informal banking system called hawala. The rest is laundered through Western banks.

Some financial analysts claim that the hundreds of billions in narco-dollars held by huge financial institutions provided the liquidity that made it possible to pull the world back from the potential wreckage of its financial system.

Antonio Maria Costa of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said, “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” Costa added, “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

Afghanistan’s poppies are enormously important in today’s world, but it is difficult to sort out how drugs have influenced U.S. policy there.


Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-i Islami, addressing a rally in Peshawar, Pakistan, November 1987. Photo by Mohammad Karim / Neiman Reports.

Fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan

In the 1980s, the C.I.A. helped drug lords become mujahidin leaders. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatya who dominated the local drug trade and became the world’s most important heroin trafficker. Of course, these leaders were encouraged to finance their insurgency through drug sales. With the blessing of the Americans, the drug lords ordered the peasants to raise many poppies. The drug barons were also encouraged to spread heroin to the Russian forces, and this effort was largely successful. Within two years, Afghanistan was the world’s main heroin producer.

Drugs moved from the drug lords to Soviet troops with the help of reputed Russian crime figures such as Vladimir Filin and Aleksei Likhvintsev. They were part of what Russians call “OPS,” an organized crime society. According to Indian observer Theruvath Raman, the C.I.A. controlled this flow.

Since then, massive quantities of heroin have made their way into Russia with the help of an international drug network and likely successor to the BCCI that includes the Russian mafia and Islamic extremists there. Drug addiction there is now as serious as the alcohol problem.

While attempting to combat Islamic extremists in the Middle East, the U.S. was probably working with elements of the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami in Russia. It is a “liberation army” intent upon creating an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia. More recently, it appears that elements in the Russian government and military are sharing business with the narco-barons and bringing some order to the trade by squeezing out the ethnic criminal/drug groups.

A worldwide drugs/arms network takes form

The Russian mafia soon became a major player in moving drugs and arms throughout the world. Many of the arms came from the arsenals of the collapsed Soviet Union that were not located on Russian territory. Some of the leaders in this criminal underground were former intelligence officers, and some of them are highly educated and even respected scholars.

These Russians are the most visible element in a worldwide network that seems to control the movement of drugs in most places, other than the route from Burma to South China. There is much speculation about the extent of U.S. cooperation with this network, and especially its Russian members.

In 1994, the U.S. began shipping arms into Angola through Victor Bout of the OPS, whom the U.S. later employed in Iraq, and is now seeking to arrest. The overthrow of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania and the fall of Shevardnadze in Georgia also involved cooperation with the network. It is possible that the “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan was another joint project. Far West, LLC, an arm of the Russian mob that supposedly specializes in intelligence consulting, moved into Kyrgyzstan after the fall of Askar Akayev, and heroin traffic through that land soon trebled.

Whatever U.S. and Western involvement there was in these nasty activities was masked by various cut-outs. As the Wall Street Journal reported in respect to Georgia, that was work of “a raft of non-government organizations... supported by American and other foundations.” One of the officers of Far West has said that an unnamed American firm had invested in it. Far West has done business with Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR Halliburton), and Diligence Iraq LLC, a private military firm considered a CIA. spin-off. It is tied to Diligence Middle East, which has links to New Bridge Strategies, which is linked to Neil Bush.

It is known that representatives of the drug network and people close to the CIA met in 1999 under the aegis of Adnan Khashoggi at Beaulieu, France. He has been a CIA asset since the 1960s when he was passing Lockheed money to Saudi officials. One topic at the meeting must have been affairs in the former Yugoslavia, where Kosovo was becoming a major drug entrepot.

Without the knowledge of their defense ministry, Russian paratroopers on June 11, 1999, seized the Slatina airport, giving Russia a base in Kosovo. This was an instance in which the U.S. and the Russian narco-barons were not on the same page. Wesley Clark ordered General Sir Mike Jackson to oust the Russians, but the Brit declined to “start World War Three for him.”

The Russians remained there until 2003, when they shifted their main platform for the export of drugs to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. That port and St. Petersburg are used to export cocaine brought in from Columbia.

Saudi millionare Adnan Khashoggi in his New York apartment in 1987. Photo by Ted Thai / Life.

The U.S. and the Caucuses

The Caspian area in 1999 was estimated to have a reserve of 200 billion barrels of black gold or oil. Two years later, it appeared that the reserve was about one tenth that amount.

In December, 1999, the United States again began to play a major role in Turcic, in Central Asia. It sent representatives to a meeting in Azerbaijan where arrangements were made to train mujahedeen from the Caucases and Central/South Asia and also Arabs to assist Chechen rebels. U.S. “private security companies” were used to evade the international embargo against helping the Chechen rebels.

The thinking was that higher levels of violence would dissuade Western investors from making oil deals with Russia. The U.S. was promoting the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Basin to the Mediterranean. James Baker III, Adnan Khashoggi, and Lord Mc Alpine had created a Caucasian Common Market to serve this effort. It is administering $3 billion in United States development funds for infrastructure projects in the area. The Bush administration spent $11 in Georgia to train a pipeline protection battalion.

The US intervenes in Afghanistan

The Taliban took over the Afghan drug trade in 1994, with the CIA’s consent, and they seized power in 1996. Relations between the Taliban and the U.S. soured, and in July, 2000, the Taliban moved to end poppy cultivation, calling it un-Islamic. Of course, they were probably doing this to put pressure on the West. The long-term consequences of this currency contraction could have dealt a serious blow to Western financial systems.

Drying up that crop deprived Western banks of billions in new deposits. At that time, Afghanistan produced two-thirds of the world’s heroin, and the absence of new narco-dollars could damage the finanCIAl system. Le Monde and the IMF estimated that about $300 billion in Afghan heroin money had been making its way to Wall Street. Narco-dollars provided needed liquidity to the American and Western financial markets.

The Taliban decision also hurt the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Ironically, the ban also made Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, major drug operators, far less valuable to the Pakistani spooks. About 60% of Pakistan’s GDP also came from drugs, and the Taliban’s move was a serious blow to its neighbor.

Of course, the Taliban also alienated the Afghan drug lords when they dried up 97% of the opium poppy crop. Banning the drug trade alienated Afghan drug lords, many of whom were in the Northern Alliance. In 2001, the United States began reestablishing close ties with Afghan drug lords, perhaps as preparation for making war in that country.

Drug trafficker Ahmad Shah Massoud became very important to American planners because his guerrilla attacks on the Taliban were often successful. Haji Zaman, “Mr. Ten Percent,” another drug lord, was another important American ally then. He fled to Dijon, France, when the Taliban seized Jalalabad, and the U.S. and British representatives persuaded him to return to Afghanistan.

War lords Hazrat Ali, left, and Haji Zaman. Image from Rawa News.
With the help of Afghan and Pakistani drug lords, Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal employee, gathered support in Pashtun areas. The U.S. seems to have turned a blind eye to the heroin reserves and refineries kept maintained by these people.

General Tommy Franks gave drug barons Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman the job of trapping and bringing in Osama bin Laden, who was known to be at Tora Bora. They moved very slowly, not attacking until the bombing had stopped four days before. There was plenty of time for Osama to escape and leave behind a rear guard.

The intelligence chief of Eastern Shura, Pir Baksh Bardiwal, had warned that it was a great mistake to use the two drug lords. They had no interest in seeing the power of Kabul extend to their operations Nangahar Province. U.S. journalist Philip Smucker heard that one of Hazrat Ali’s low level commanders, Ilyas Khel, provided an escort for Bin Laden and showed the Arabs how to escape.

Afghan war lords and poppies

The successful war restored to power brutal war lords whose rule was worse than that of the Taliban. The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was sharply diminished, and the Bush administration spent very little on nation-building and development. Afghan poppy growing mushroomed, and very little was done about it.

There was talk about eradicating the poppy crop, but some in Washington said that such a step would destabilize the regime in Pakistan. In 2002, a former Indian official offered another reason why the Americans could not move against the Afghan poppy crop:

...this marked lack of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda.

The country produces 8,250 metric tons of opium poppies every year, and and it is moved by trucks by refineries. If the trucks were stopped, the refineries would go out of business. There are reports that India supports some refineries which generate money for insurgents in Pakistan. The Israelis did the same for insurgents in Iran.

Authorities in neighboring Tajikistan complain that neither the U.S. nor NATO is moving against the Afghan drug lords. The Tajikistan Drug Control Agency’s Avaz Yuldashov noted: “Our intelligence shows there are 400 labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated along our border.” He added that drug money from Afghanistan pays for international terrorism. In addition there are many labs in Pakistan to process Afghan poppies. The drugs are then shipped out of Karachi. Most Afghan drugs end up in Turkey, a NATO member, from whence they are moved to Europe.

Some drug lords are allied with President Karzai, and his half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council, has been accused of being in the drug trade. It is said that he ships drugs to Iran. If so, he would have to pay some Taliban tolls to keep the product moving.

Those drugs could be used in Iran, but much of that cargo goes to Russia via Iran. Much has been written about warlords tied to Wali benefiting from a $2.16 billion U.S. contract for trucking services. Current and former intelligence officials tell reporters that Wali has been on the C.I.A. payroll for eight years.

Has the U.S. been dealing heroin?

It is difficult to establish whether the U.S is benefiting directly and financially from the Afghan drug trade. Political scientist Vladimir Filin, once head of Far West, told an interviewer that this is the case. He noted that, “They control Bagram airfield from where the Air Force transport planes fly to a U.S. base in Germany.” From there, heroin goes to “other U.S. bases and installations in Europe.” Much is shipped to Kosovo where the Kosovo Albanian mafia move it it “back to Germany and other EU countries.”

Afghan poppy fields. Photo from Douglas606 / Flickr.
In time, he predicted, U.S. drug centers will be shifted to Pozan, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria because those host countries tolerate high levels of corruption. He estimated that America was moving between 15 and 20 tons into Europe per year, That is not a huge share of the world drug trade. However, other Russian observers place the tonnage at a much higher level and offer many more details about how the heroin is taken out and where it goes . General Mahmut Gareev, who commanded Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said:

Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year -- which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.

General Khodaidad, the Afghan counternarcotics minister, also said the Americans and British are stockpiling the opium poppies in the provinces they control, and he added that NATO forces often tax the production. Former F.B.I. translator Sybel Edmonds told Congress that some military planes were used to move the heroin, but she was twice silenced by the Bush administration through the state secret privilege.

Dennis Dayle, a former DEA. agent said:

In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the C.I.A.

No one wants to believe that our government is deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Perhaps none of these sources can be believed. However, we do know that the U.S. was selling drugs to its troops in Vietnam and moving some drugs out of Southeast Asia then. At the very least, it was also protecting Nicaraguan Contras who moved drugs into the U.S. to pay for weapons. Maybe there is a pattern here. Conversely, there seems to be a long-standing pattern of mainstream media not looking into these matters.

Two problems

The U.S. used the international heroin network to serve its geopolitical aims in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Peter Dale Scott, upon whose solid work this piece is partially based, has suggested that the drug/arms network may have grown so powerful that it is no longer just a tool to be used by the U.S. government. It may have its own agenda and the ability to bend U.S. policy to serve its objectives.

The present situation is very different from the days when the U.S. relied on private firms run by retired U.S. officials and politicians to carry out illicit weapons transactions or help the Nicaraguan Contras move drugs.

A second problem is that American aims in Afghanistan may have conflicted with those of the local drug lords. The drug industry thrives where state power is weak, where nothing can be done about peasants growing poppies, and the state cannot move against refineries and stockpiles.

The United States claimed that it wanted to expand state power and to bring order and stability to Afghanistan. Order was also needed if headway was to be made on the TAPI pipeline that was critical to U.S.-owned electrical facilities in India. Possibly, American planners thought that these conflicting interests could be reconciled. Clearly, the drug barons thought otherwise. At this moment, it appears that the TAPI venture could be doomed.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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