Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (3 page)

If you read American secret documents, this is all stated very openly, actually. For example, there’s a now-declassified Robert McNamara [Secretary of Defense]-to-McGeorge Bundy [Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs] intercommunication from 1965 with a detailed discussion of Latin America, in which they talk about how the role of the military in Latin American societies is to overthrow civilian governments if, in the judgment of the military, the governments are not pursuing the “welfare of the nation,” which turns out to be the welfare of American multinational corporations.
  ¹⁴

So if you want to overthrow a government, you arm its military, and of course you make it hard for the civilian government to function. And that’s what was done in the Chile case: we armed the military, we tried to cause economic chaos, and the military took over.
  ¹⁵
Okay, that’s sort of classic. In fact, that’s almost certainly what the Iran part of the Iran-contra affair was about. The arms shipments to the Iranian military didn’t have anything to do with a secret deal to release American hostages [held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon beginning in 1985], and they didn’t have anything to do with “October Surprises” either, in my view [theory that the Reagan electoral campaign secretly promised arms to Iran if Iran delayed the release of earlier U.S. hostages until after the 1980 Presidential election]. What they had to do with was the classic device of arming the military so they would carry out a coup and restore the old arrangement that existed under the Shah. There’s very good evidence for this; I can talk about it if you like.
  ¹⁶

But Chile was a straight, classic operation—clandestine in a sense, but not all that clandestine. For instance, arming the Chilean military was completely public: it was in public records, it was never secret.
  ¹⁷
It’s just that nobody in the United States ever looks, because the media and the intellectual class are too disciplined, and ordinary people out there don’t have the time to go and read Pentagon records and figure out what happened. So it was clandestine in the sense that nobody knew about it, but the information was all available in public records, there was nothing hidden about it. In fact, Chile was kind of a normal C.I.A. operation, it was like overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia [in a 1965 U.S.-backed coup].
  ¹⁸
There were some clandestine parts to it—and there are parts that still haven’t come out yet—but it was not really deep covert action. And it was nothing like the Central American activities of the 1980s, they’re just radically different in scale.

I mean, there
have
been clandestine operations—I don’t want to suggest that it’s novel. Like, overthrowing the government of Iran in 1953 was clandestine.
  ¹⁹
Overthrowing the government of Guatemala in 1954 was clandestine—and it was kept secret for twenty years.
  ²⁰
Operation MONGOOSE, which so far wins the prize as the world’s leading single international terrorist operation, started by the Kennedy administration right after the Bay of Pigs, that was secret.

M
AN
: Which one was that?

Operation MONGOOSE. Right after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed, Kennedy launched a major terrorist operation against Cuba [beginning November 30, 1961]. It was huge—I think it had a $50 million-a-year budget (that’s known); it had about twenty-five hundred employees, about five hundred of them American, about two thousand what they call “assets,” you know, Cuban exiles or one thing or another. It was launched from Florida—and it was totally illegal. I mean, international law we can’t even talk about, but even by domestic law it was illegal, because it was a C.I.A. operation taking place on American territory, which is illegal.
  ²¹
And it was serious: it involved blowing up hotels, sinking fishing boats, blowing up industrial installations, bombing airplanes. This was a very serious terrorist operation. The part of it that became well known was the assassination attempts—there were eight known assassination attempts on Castro.
  ²²
A lot of this stuff came out in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975, and other parts were uncovered through some good investigative reporting. It may still be going on today (we usually find out about these things a few years later), but it certainly went on through the 1970s.
  ²³

Actually, let me just tell you one piece of it that was revealed about a year ago. It turns out that Operation MONGOOSE practically blew up the world. I don’t know how many of you have been following the new material that’s been released on the Cuban Missile Crisis [1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown over Soviet missiles in Cuba], but it’s very interesting. There have been meetings with the Russians, now there are some with the Cubans, and a lot of material has come out under the Freedom of Information Act here. And there’s a very different picture of the Cuban Missile Crisis emerging.

One thing that’s been discovered is that the Russians and the Cubans had separate agendas during the course of the Crisis. See, the standard view is that the Cubans were just Russian puppets. Well, that’s not true, nothing like that is ever true—it may be convenient to believe, but it’s never true. And in fact, the Cubans had their own concerns: they were worried about an American invasion. And now it turns out that those concerns were very valid—the United States had invasion plans for October 1962; the Missile Crisis was in October 1962. In fact, American naval and military units were already being deployed for an invasion before the beginning of the Missile Crisis; that’s just been revealed in Freedom of Information Act materials.
  ²⁴
Of course, it’s always been denied here, like if you read McGeorge Bundy’s book on the military system, he denies it, but it’s true, and now the documents are around to prove it.
  ²⁵
And the Cubans doubtless knew it, so that was probably what was motivating them. The Russians, on the other hand, were worried about the enormous missile gap—which was in fact in the U.S.’s favor, not in their favor as Kennedy claimed.
  ²⁶

So what happened is, there was that famous interchange between Kennedy and Khrushchev, in which an agreement to end the crisis was reached. Then shortly after that, the Russians tried to take control of their missiles in Cuba, in order to carry through the deal they had made with the United States, See, at that point the Russians didn’t actually control the missiles, the missiles were in the hands of Cubans—and the Cubans didn’t want to give them up, because they were still worried, plausibly, that there would be an American invasion. So there was a stand-off between them early in November—which even included an actual confrontation between Russian and Cuban forces about who was going to have physical control of the missiles. It was a very tense moment, and you didn’t know what was going to happen. Then right in the middle of it, one of the Operation MONGOOSE activities took place. Right at one of the tensest moments of the Missile Crisis, the C.I.A. blew up a factory in Cuba, with about four hundred people killed according to the Cubans. Well, fortunately the Cubans didn’t react—but if something like that had happened to
us
at the time, Kennedy certainly would have reacted, and we would have had a nuclear war. It came very close.

Alright, there’s a terrorist operation which might have set off a nuclear war. That wasn’t even reported in the United States when the information was released about a year ago, it was considered so insignificant. The only two places where you can find it reported are in a footnote, on another topic actually, in one of these national security journals,
International Security
, and also in a pretty interesting book by one of the top State Department intelligence specialists, Raymond Garthoff, who’s a sensible guy. He has a book called
Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis
, and he brings in some of this material.
  ²⁷

Actually, other things have been revealed about the Crisis which are absolutely startling. For instance, it turns out that the head of the U.S. Air Force at the time, General Thomas Power, without consultation with the government—in fact, without even
informing
the government—raised the level of American national security alert to the second highest level [on October 24, 1962]. See, there’s a series of levels of alert for U.S. military forces: it’s called “Defense Condition” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Usually you’re at “5”; nothing’s going on. Then the President can say, “You can move up to ‘3,’ ” which means, get the Strategic Air Command bombers in the air, or “Go up to ‘2,’ ” which means you’re ready to shoot, then you’re at “1,” and you send them off. Well, this guy just raised the level of alert unilaterally.

Now, when you raise the level of alert, the point is to inform the Russians and to inform the other major powers what you’re doing, because they know something’s happening—they can see what you’re doing, they can see the S.A.C. bombers going up and the ships getting deployed: this stuff is all
meant
to be seen. So one of the top U.S. generals openly raised the level of security alert to just before nuclear war right in the middle of the Missile Crisis, and didn’t inform Washington—the Secretary of Defense didn’t even know about it. The
Russian
Secretary of Defense knew it, because his intelligence was picking it up, but Washington didn’t know. And this general did it just out of, you know, snubbing his nose at the Russians. The fact that this happened was just released about a year ago.
  ²⁸

M
AN
: At that point, did the Russians go up to the next level too?

No, they didn’t react. See, we would have seen if they’d reacted, and Kennedy probably would have shot off the missiles. But Khrushchev didn’t react. In fact, throughout this whole period the Russians were very passive, they never reacted much—because they were scared. The fact is, the United States had an enormous preponderance of military force. I mean, the U.S. military thought there was no real problem: they
wanted
a war, because they figured we’d just wipe the Russians out.
  ²⁹

W
OMAN
: But are you saying that the U.S. intentionally created the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Well, I’m not quite saying that. These are things that happened in the course of the Crisis—how we got to it is a little different. It came about when the Russians put missiles on Cuba and the United States observed that missiles were going in and didn’t want to allow them there. But of course, there’s a background, as there always is to everything, and part of the background is that the United States was planning to invade Cuba at the time, and the Russians knew it, and the Cubans knew it. The Americans didn’t know it—I mean, the American
people
didn’t know it. In fact, even a lot of the American government didn’t know it; it was only at a very top level that it was known.

Government Secrecy

There’s a point here to be made about government secrecy, actually: government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on. I mean, a lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there’s virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern. I don’t know if Stephen Zunes [a professor in the audience], who’s just done a dissertation on a lot of this stuff, would agree, but my impression from reading the secret record over a wide range of areas is that you virtually never find anything in there that had any connection to security whatsoever. The main purpose of secrecy is just to make sure that the general population here doesn’t know what’s going on.

S
TEPHEN
Z
UNES
: I concur completely
.

Yeah, that’s your impression too? And you know, I’m at M.I.T., so I’m always talking to the scientists who work on missiles for the Pentagon and so on, and these guys also don’t see any reason for it. Like, Stark Draper, who runs the big missile lab at M.I.T. and who invented inertial guidance and so on, says publicly, and he’s told me privately, that he doesn’t see any purpose in security classifications—because he says the only effect is to prevent American scientists from communicating adequately. As far as he’s concerned, you can take the instruction book for building the most advanced missiles and just give it to China or Russia, he doesn’t care. First of all, he says they can’t do anything with it, because they don’t have the technological and industrial level that would enable them to do anything. And if they
did
have that level, they’d have invented it too, so you’re not telling them anything. All you’re doing is making it harder for American scientists to communicate.

As for the secret diplomatic record, it’s difficult to think of anything that has been released that was ever a secret which actually involved security—they involve marginalizing the population, that’s what government secrets are for.

W
OMAN
: You could apply that insight to the Rosenberg trial in the 1950s—they were supposed to have endangered the world by selling the Russians nuclear secrets. [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for treason by the U.S. government in 1953.]

Yeah—the Rosenberg execution had nothing to do with national security; it was part of trying to destroy the political movements of the Thirties. If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way—if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.