JFK (46 page)

THE YEAR WAS 1964. Pres. John F. Kennedy had been shot dead months before by bursts of “automatic gunfire”
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in Dallas by “mechanics,” that is, skilled gunmen, hired by a power cabal determined to exert control over the United States government. Lyndon B. Johnson, JFK’s successor, had been only a few feet under the bullets fired at Kennedy as he rode two cars back in that fatal procession.
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By 1964 Johnson was becoming mired in the swamp of the Indochina conflict. Kennedy, who had vowed to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” was dead. LBJ, who heard those fatal bullets zing past his ears, had learned the ultimate lesson; and for good measure, Richard Nixon was in Dallas on that fatal day, so that he, too, had the fact of this ever-present danger imprinted on his memory for future use by his masters.

During those fateful years, other events revealed the ubiquitous hand of the rogue elephant that is the CIA. Within a year of President Kennedy’s death, the CIA was on the move again. Following an abrupt coup d’état engineered by the CIA, Victor Paz Estenssoro, the president of Bolivia, fled from La Paz to Lima, Peru.

This coup established Gen. René Barrientos Ortuño as the new president. The man Barrientos replaced is the same Paz Estenssoro who again served as president of Bolivia in 1986 and who was much disturbed when U.S. antidrug campaign troops showed up in his country with armed helicopter gunships and automatic weapons.

From long experience, Paz knew what it meant to have weapons in the hands of outsiders who might at any moment permit them to be used by his enemies to threaten the government. It had happened to him before, more than once. Paz was an old hand in the game of international intrigue and power politics; his experience predated World War II. Before the outbreak of that war, the German Nazi machine had built a vast underground spy network throughout Latin America structured around the German airline Lufthansa and its affiliated companies. It was operated in much the same manner as the CIA’s huge proprietary corporation, Air America, was decades later, and it acted in support of a Nazi spy network.

In 1941, Paz, who already had a political record as the Bolivian minister of finance, sided with the Nazis and was arrested for promising to deliver the oil fields of his country into the hands of the Germans. He had been the leader of the pro-Nazi National Revolutionary Movement and was connected with four Bolivian newspapers that operated under the domination of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

On that day in November 1964 when Paz fled Bolivia to seek refuge in the elite San Antonio district of Lima, three men met in the dimly lit barroom of the old, regal Hotel Bolívar, adjacent to the Plaza St. Martin. I had just walked across that sunlit plaza and entered the same barroom through its street-level doorway. I heard those men speaking English and immediately recognized them, even though my eyes had not adjusted enough to the dim lighting to see them.

In our silent profession we learn never to approach anyone in strange surroundings until we are certain the coast is clear. I went to the bar, where I stood in brighter light and ordered the Peruvian national drink, a Pisco Sour. One of the three men came to the bar beside me, ordered drinks, took out a cigarette, and prepared to light it. “Do you have a light?” he asked. The bartender, hearing me say no, lit the cigarette. A normal conversation had opened. All was clear.

I returned with the man to his table and joined the others. The three had just finished an assignment in Bolivia and were on their way back to Washington. They had engineered the coup d’état against Paz and installed General Barrientos as president. It had been that easy.

During the 1964 political upheaval in Bolivia, it had been decided by the U.S. National Security Council that Paz must go and a new man placed in his shoes. The man chosen for this role, Barrientos Ortuño, was a popular young air force general. He was to be given the “Robin Hood” treatment by the CIA to increase his popularity, just as the CIA had done for Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines, for Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and for a host of others around the world.
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Control of a small Third World country is always tenuous at best. Paz was an old hand and knew the business. The man at the top must constantly be ready for an attack. He must maintain absolute control over all weapons, and particularly over all ammunition, in his country. In Bolivia at that time, Paz had put control of all weapons in the hands of relatives and reliable friends who commanded the civilian militia as an elite palace guard.

They maintained an edge over the armed forces by controlling all ammunition—absolutely. Soldiers of the Bolivian army and air force had weapons and were trained with live ammunition; after a day on the firing range or other maneuvers, their unit leaders had to turn in a shell case for every round fired. There was strict accountability not only for every weapon but for every single bullet.

The task for the CIA—to overthrow Paz and replace him with Barrientos—was clear, and it was simple. All that had to be done was to put more ammunition into the hands of Barrientos’s regular troops than Paz could get into the hands of his own civilian militia, and to do it quickly and by surprise.

This was done under the cover of an openly declared joint exercise involving United States and Bolivian army and air force units, scheduled to take place in outlying regions of Bolivia. This exercise, in 1964, was designed much as the antidrug campaign in Bolivia would be in 1986. The military maneuvers served to raise the political stature of Barrientos and to cover the secret delivery of tons of ammunition to his troops.

All of the U.S. Air Force aircraft employed in support of this exercise were “clean”—they had taken no part in the delivery of ammunition. The CIA used a contract Super Constellation aircraft from Air America to fly the ammunition to a remote landing ground in Peru. From there it was flown across the border in CIA-controlled light aircraft to several smaller magazines scattered throughout Bolivia.

On the day before the coup, CIA agents moved a sizable (in Bolivian terms) military force to the outskirts of La Paz. During the night its members were issued live ammunition, and at daybreak they infiltrated the city. The troops of the civilian militia were caught by surprise, with their weapons in hand but with no ammunition. Paz, yielding to good sense, quickly accepted the offer of a flight to Peru. The battle that never took place was over—except for one detail.

During the night, my friends, the three CIA operatives, had been hosts, that is, captors, of General Barrientos at a secret safe house. The dinner was bounteous, and the drinks flowed freely. When it was time to take the general to La Paz, they loaded him onto an old Bolivian Air Force C-47 (DC-3) for the final leg of his journey to power.

When the plane landed in a leaderless city, these CIA agents realized that El Presidente was far from being sober enough to assume his new duties. Cups of black coffee and a long, cold shower later, Barrientos was driven, in proper glory, down the main street to the cheers of his subjects, while the CIA men explained to him what had happened, his new duties and responsibilities, and some of the hazards of his new job.

Needless to say, my old friends were anxious when I spoke to them to get out of the city that now harbored Paz. Less than an hour later they were at the Lima airport and on their way to Panama. The CIA headquarters in Panama was, at that time, responsible for all clandestine activities in Latin America. The Bolivian coup was over. It had been a success, and the three CIA agents were ready for other assignments.

This is a picture of the CIA in action. This formula for the transition of leadership in less developed countries (LDCs)
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has been used over and over again. In such countries the politics are very simple. It is always “Us” or “Them.” The people of those countries have little, if anything, to say about it. The record of this type of activity goes back to World War II, and off the record it goes back much farther than that. The conflict in Indochina is the prime example in our time.

As the progression of events in Central America has demonstrated, the tactics of Vietnam have become the method of dealing with the problems of less-developed countries in the bipolar world. The big enemy has been said to be “communism,” and the presumed threat the dire effects of the domino theory: Lose Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia would fall to communism; lose Nicaragua and there would be Communists right on the other side of the Rio Grande, if not in the streets of Houston.

Despite the changes in what was the Soviet Union, this kind of warfare isn’t over yet. In Vietnam the United States won precisely nothing, but that costly war served the primary purposes of the world’s power elite. For one thing, they benefited splendidly from the hundreds of billions of dollars that came their way. For example, more than ten million men were flown from the United States to Saigon by contract commercial airline flights, representing more than $800 million in windfall business for those airlines. And this is only the beginning. With each takeover, the victors gain access to the natural resources and human, low-cost, assets of the country.

As
Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace
found: “War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained—and improved in effectiveness.”

According to Lewin, the “Special Study Group” that produced this amazing report voted to keep it under wraps, because the members of the group felt that:

Before we put the CIA-instigated Bolivian coup d’état behind us, we should note that the operational role stops with the completion of the overthrow of the government. Once that “dirty work” has been achieved and the operatives are out of town, a new band of intelligence experts takes their place.

One of the least-known divisions of the CIA is that headed by the deputy director of economics. This division moves into a country to work with a new regime and to begin the task of selecting and setting up new franchise holders for as many goods as possible to assure that they are imported from American companies and that those from other sources, formerly the Soviet sphere in particular, are excluded.

These new franchise holders are usually closely associated with the new President. They are members of his cabinet and other top government officials. The CIA screens and selects these new “millionaires” and arranges for them to meet with the various companies they will front for under the new regime. It might be said that this cleansing of the economic system is the real reason for most coups d’état, and that political ideology has very little to do with it. The ins (the men in the foreign government) are called “friends of the West” and “anti-Communist,” but that is just for public consumption. On the other side of the coin, the outs are well aware of the system—having been the ins and beneficiaries of the same, or similar, largess under the prior administration.

But it happens that over a period of time an administration begins to believe that it is truly in power and that it actually runs the government. This leads its officials to make franchise arrangements with an ever-increasing number of sources. Some of the more daring, in an attempt to escape the severe financial and profit-making controls placed upon them and their government by U. S. manufacturers and by the canopy of international banks that is spread over all imports and exports to their country, attempt to make deals with other countries. They believe that they may be able to buy essential goods cheaper that way and to sell their resources and labor at better rates. To oversimplify, this is what Ferdinand Marcos was doing in the Philippines before he was ousted.

As such actions increase, the national leadership will be increasingly attacked by the United States on the grounds that it is turning toward communism and becoming a base for the infiltration of the Communist ideology and military system into the hemisphere. In other cases there are more or less “legitimate” coups d’état as internal opposition rises against an oppressive dictatorship. There could have been no more “anti-Communist” dictators than Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and then was assassinated with American aid, or Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. All of these men, to cite a few, had been in power so long that they believed they could throw their weight around and extend their franchise selections to other countries. In such cases (Trujillo is the exception) the United States does not so much aid the insurgents as it just sits on its hands and lets the aged dictator be eliminated by others who want his job and the largess that goes with it.

Sometimes the United States gives the old leader a firm and friendly cue, as when Director of Central Intelligence William Casey visited the Philippines in 1985 and suggested to Marcos that he ought to “hold an election.” As we have seen, such a suggestion is the kiss of death. It remained for President Corazon Aquino to heed the hints that poured out from the Office of the Deputy Director of Economics and other “friends” as she faced the task of rebuilding the franchise networks. This means big money to the country involved and to the United States and to the bankers who manage the finances in both directions.