by
John Laughland
Sefton Delmer was both a practician and theoretician of such "black propaganda." Delmer created a bogus radio station which broadcasted from Britain to Germany during the Second World War, and which created the myth that there were "good" patriotic Germans who opposed Hitler. The fiction was sustained that the station was actually an underground German one, and was put on frequencies close to those of official stations. Such black propaganda has now become part of the US government’s armoury of ‘spin’: the New York Times revealed that the US government makes news reports favourable to its policies which are then carried on normal channels and presented as if they were the broadcast company’s own reports.
In recent years, a number of "revolutions" have broken out all over the world.
Georgia
In November 2003, the president of Georgia Edward Shevardnadze was
overthrown following demonstrations, marches and allegations that the
parliamentary elections had been rigged.
Ukraine
In November 2004, the "Orange Revolution" of demonstrations started
in Ukraine as the same allegations were made, that elections had been
rigged.
The result was that country was ripped away from its previous
geopolitical role as a bridge between East and West, and put it on the
path to becoming a fully-fledged member of NATO and the EU. Considering
that Kievan Rus
is the first Russian state, and that Ukraine has now been turned
against Russia, this is a historic achievement. But then, as George Bush
said, "You are either with us or against us." Although Ukraine had sent
troops to Iraq, it was evidently considered too friendly to Moscow.
Lebanon
Shortly after the US and the UN declared that Syrian troops had to be
removed from Lebanon, and following the assassination of Rafik Hariri,
demonstrations in Beirut were presented as "the Cedar Revolution." An
enormous counter-demonstration by Hezbollah, which is the largest
political party in Lebanon, was effectively ignored while the TV
replayed endlessly the image of the anti-Syrian crowd. In one
particularly egregious case of Orwellian double-think, the BBC
explained to its viewers that "Hezbollah, the biggest political party in
Lebanon, is so far the only dissenting voice which wants the Syrians to
stay." How can the majority be "a dissenting voice"?
Kyrgyzstan
After the "revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine, many predicted that
the same wave of "revolutions" would extend to the former Soviet states
of Central Asia. So it was to be. Commentators seemed divided on what
colour to label the uprising in Bishkek – was it a "lemon" revolution or
a "tulip" revolution? They could not make up their minds. But on one
thing, everyone was in agreement: revolutions are cool, even when they
are violent. The Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, was overthrown on 24th
March 2005 and protesters stormed and ransacked the presidential palace.
Uzbekistan
When armed rebels seized government buildings, sprung prisoners from
gaol and took hostages on the night of 12th–13th May in the Uzbek city
of Andijan (located in the Ferghana Valley, where the unrest had also
started in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan) the police and army surrounded the
rebels and a long standoff ensued. Negotiations were undertaken with the
rebels, who kept increasing their demands. When government forces
started to move on the rebels, the resulting fighting killed some 160
people including over 30 members of the police and army. Yet the Western
media immediately misrepresented this violent confrontation, claiming
that government forces had opened fire on unarmed protesters – "the
people."
This constantly repeated myth of popular rebellion against a
dictatorial government is popular on both the Left and the Right of the
political spectrum. Previously, the myth of revolution was obviously the
preserve of the Left. But when the violent putsch occurred in
Kygyrzstan, The Times enthused about how the scenes in Bishkek reminded him of Eisenstein films about the Bolshevik revolution, The Daily Telegraph extolled the "power to the people," and the Financial Times used a well-known Maoist metaphor when it praised Kyrgyzstan’s "long march to freedom."
One of the key elements behind this myth is obviously that "the
people" are behind the events, and that they are spontaneous. In fact,
of course, they are often very highly organised operations, often
deliberately staged for the media, and usually funded and controlled by
transnational networks of so-called non-governmental organisations which
are in turn instruments of Western power.
The literature on coups d’état
The survival of the myth of spontaneous popular revolution is
depressing in view of the ample literature on the coup d’état, and on
the main factors and tactics by which to bring one about.
It was, of course, Lenin who developed the organisational structure
for overthrowing a regime which we now know as a political party. He
differed from Marx in that he did not think that historical change was
the result of ineluctable anonymous forces, but that it had to be worked
for.
But it was probably Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of a Coup d’état
which first gave very famous expression to these ideas. Published in
1931, this book presents regime change as just that – a technique.
Malaparte explicitly took issue with those who thought that regime
change happened on its own. In fact, he starts the book by recounting a
discussion between diplomats in Warsaw in the summer of 1920: Poland had
been invaded by Trostky’s Red Army (Poland having itself invaded the
Soviet Union, capturing Kiev in April 1920) and the Bolsheviks were at
the gates of Warsaw. The debate was between the British minister in
Warsaw, Sir Horace Rumbold, and the Papal nuncio, Monsignor Ambrogio
Damiano Achille Ratti – the man who was elected Pope as Pius XI two
years later. The Englishman said that the internal political situation
in Poland was so chaotic that a revolution was inevitable, and that the
diplomatic corps therefore should flee the capital and go to Posen
(Poznán). The Papal Nuncio disagreed, insisting that a revolution was
just as possible in a civilised country like England, Holland or
Switzerland as in a country in a state of anarchy. Naturally the
Englishman was outraged at the idea that a revolution could ever break
out in England. "Oh never!" he exclaimed – and was proved wrong because
no revolution did break out in Poland, according to Malaparte because
the revolutionary forces were simply not well organised enough.
This anecdote allows Malaparte to discuss the differences between
Lenin and Trotsky, two practitioners of the coup d’état/revolution.
Malaparte shows that the future Pope was right and that it was wrong to
say that pre-conditions were necessary for a revolution to occur. For
Malaparte, as for Trotsky, regime change could be promoted in any
country, including the stable democracies of Western Europe, providing
that there was a sufficiently determined body of men determined to
achieve it.
Manufacturing consent
This brings us onto a second body of literature, concerning the
manipulation of the media. Malaparte himself does not discuss this
aspect but it is (a) of huge importance and (b) clearly a subset of the
technique of a coup d’état in the way regime change is practised today.
So important, indeed, is the control of the media during regime change
that one of the main characteristics of these revolutions is the
creation of a virtual reality. Control of this reality is itself an
instrument of power, which is why in classic coups in a banana republic
the first thing that the revolutionaries seize is the radio station.
People experience a strong psychological reluctance to accept that
political events today are deliberately manipulated. This reluctance is
itself a product of the ideology of the information age, which flatters
people’s vanity and encourages them to believe that they have access to
huge amounts of information. In fact, the apparent multifarious nature
of modern media information hides an extreme paucity of original
sources, rather as a street of restaurants on a Greek waterfront can
hide the reality of a single kitchen at the back. News reports of major
events very often come from a single source, usually a wire agency, and
even authoritative news outlets like the BBC simply recycle information which they have received from these agencies, presenting it as their own. BBC
correspondents are often sitting in their hotel rooms when they send
despatches, very often simply reading back to the studio in London
information they have been given by their colleagues back home off the
wire. A second factor which explains the reluctance to believe in media
manipulation is connected with the feeling of omniscience which the mass
media age likes to flatter: to rubbish news reports as manipulated is
to tell people that they are gullible, and this is not a pleasant
message to receive.
There are many elements to media manipulation. One of the most
important is political iconography. This is a very important instrument
for promoting the legitimacy of regimes which have seized power through
revolution. One only need think of such iconic events as the storming of
the Bastille on 14th July 1789, the storming of the Winter Palace
during the October revolution in 1917, or Mussolini’s March on Rome in
1922, to see that events can be elevated into almost eternal sources of
legitimacy.
However, the importance of political imagery goes far beyond the
invention of a simple emblem for each revolution. It involves a far
deeper control of the media, and generally this control needs to be
exercised over a long period of time, not just at the moment of regime
change itself. It is essential indeed, for the official party line to be
repeated ad nauseam. A feature of today’s mass media culture
which many dissidents lazily and wrongly denounce as "totalitarian" is
precisely that dissenting views may be expressed and published, but this
is precisely because, being mere drops in the ocean, they are never a
threat to the tide of propaganda.
Willi Münzenberg
One of the modern masters of such media control was the German
Communist from whom Joseph Goebbels learned his trade, Willi Münzenberg.
Münzenberg was not only the inventor of spin, he was also the first
person who perfected the art of creating a network of opinion-forming
journalists who propagated views which were germane to the needs of the
Communist Party in Germany and to the Soviet Union. He also made a huge
fortune in the process, since he amassed a considerable media empire
from which he creamed off the profits.
Münzenberg was intimately involved with the Communist project from
the very beginning. He belonged to Lenin’s circle in Zurich, and in 1917
accompanied the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution to the Zurich
Hauptbahnhof, from whence Lenin was transported in a sealed train, and
with the help of the German imperial authorities, to the Finland Station
in St. Petersburg. Lenin then called on Münzenberg to combat the
appalling publicity generated in 1921 when 25 million peasants in the
Volga region started to suffer from the famine which swept across the
newly created Soviet state. Münzenberg, who had by then returned to
Berlin, where he was later elected to the Reichstag as a Communist
deputy, was charged with setting up a bogus workers’ charity, the
Foreign Committee for the Organisation of Worker Relief for the Hungry
in Soviet Russia, whose purpose was to pretend to the world that
humanitarian relief was coming from sources other than Herbert Hoover’s
American Relief Administration. Lenin feared not only that Hoover would
use his humanitarian aid project to send spies into the USSR (which he
did) but also, perhaps even more importantly, that the world’s first
Communist state would be fatally damaged by the negative publicity of
seeing capitalist America come to its aid within a few years of the
revolution.
After having cut his teeth on "selling" the death of millions of
people at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Münzenberg turned his attention
to more general propaganda activities. He amassed a large media empire,
known as "the Münzenberg trust," which owned two mass circulation
dailies in Germany, a mass circulation weekly, and which had interests
in scores of other publications around the world. His greatest coups
were to mobilise world opinion against America over the Sacco-Vanzetti
trial (that of two anarchist Italian immigrants who were sentenced to
death for murder in Massachusetts in 1921) and to counteract the Nazis’
claim in 1933 that the Reichstag fire was the result of a Communist
conspiracy. The Nazis, it will be remembered, used the fire to justify
mass arrests and executions against Communists, even though it now
appears that the fire genuinely was started on his own by the man
arrested in the building at the time, the lone arsonist Martinus van der
Lubbe. Münzenberg actually managed to convince large sections of public
opinion of the equal but opposite untruth to that peddled by the Nazis,
namely that the Nazis had started the fire themselves in order to have a
pretext for removing their main enemies.
The key relevance of Münzenberg for our own day is this: he
understood the key importance of influencing opinion-formers. He
targeted especially intellectuals, taking the view that intellectuals
were especially easy to influence because they were so vain. His
contacts included many of the great literary figures of the 1930s, a
large number of whom were encouraged by him to support the Republicans
in the Spanish civil war and to make that into a cause-célèbre of
Communist anti-fascism. Münzenberg’s tactics are of primary importance
to the manipulation of opinion in today’s New World Order. More then
ever before, so-called "experts" constantly pop up on our TV screens to
explain what is happening, and they are always vehicles for the official
party line. They are controlled in various ways, usually by money or by
flattery.
Psychology and the manipulation of opinion
There is a second body of literature, which makes a slightly
different point from the specific technique which Münzenberg perfected.
This concerns the way in which people can be made to react in certain
collective ways by psychological stimuli. Perhaps the first major
theoretician of this was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, whose
book Propaganda
in 1928 said that it was entirely natural and right for governments to
organise public opinion for political purposes. The opening chapter of
his book has the revealing title – "Organising chaos" – and Bernays
writes:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised opinions
and habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." [my italics]
The text continues: "We are governed, our minds are moulded, our
tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard
of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society
is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In
almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics
or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are
dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand
the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who
pull the wires which control the public mind."
Bernays says that, very often, the members of this invisible
government do not even know who the other members are. Propaganda, he
says, is the only way to prevent public opinion descending into
dissonant chaos. Bernays continued to work on this theme after the war,
editing Engineering consent in 1955, a title to which Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky alluded when they published their seminal Manufacturing Consent
in 1988. The connection with Freud is important because, as we shall
see later, psychology is an extremely important tool in influencing
public opinion. Two of the contributors to Engineering consent
make the point that every leader must play on basic human emotions in
order to manipulate public opinion. For instance, Doris E. Fleischmann
and Howard Walden Cutler write:
"Self-preservation, ambition, pride, hunger, love of family and
children, patriotism, imitativeness, the desire to be a leader, love of
play – these and other drives are the psychological raw materials which
every leader must take into account in his endeavour to win the public
to his point of view … To maintain their self-assurance, most people
need to feel certain that whatever they believe about anything is true."
This was what Willi Münzenberg understood – the basic human urge for
people to believe what they want to believe. Thomas Mann alluded to it
when he attributed the rise of Hitler to the collective desire of the
German people for "a fairy tale" over the ugly truths of reality.
Other books worth mentioning in this regard concern not so much
modern electronic propaganda but the more general psychology of crowds.
The classics in this regard are Gustave Le Bon’s work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) (1980); and Serge Tchakhotine’s Le viol des foules par la propagande politique
(1939). All these books draw heavily on psychology and anthropology.
There is also the magnificent oeuvre of one of my favourite writers, the
anthropologist René Girard, whose writings on the logic of imitation
(mimesis), and on collective acts of violence, are excellent tools for
understanding why it is that public opinion is so easily motivated to
support war and other forms of political violence.
The technique of opinion-forming
After the war, many of the techniques perfected by the Communist
Münzenberg were adopted by the Americans, as has been magnificently
documented by Frances Stonor Saunders’ excellent work, Who Paid the Piper?, published in America under the title The Cultural Cold War.
In minute detail, Stonor Saunders explains how, as the Cold War
started, the Americans and the British started up a massive covert
operation to fund anti-communist intellectuals.
The key point is that much of their attention and activity was directed
at left-wingers, in many cases Trotskyites who had abandoned their
support for the Soviet Union only in 1939, when Stalin signed his
non-aggression pact with Hitler, and in many cases people who had
previously worked for Münzenberg. Many of the figures who were at this
juncture between Communism and the CIA at the beginning of the cold war
were future neo-conservatives luminaries, especially Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling.
The left-wing and even Trotskyite origins of neo-conservatism are
well-known – even if I still continue to be astonished by new details I
discover, such as that Lionel and Diana Trilling were married by a rabbi
for whom Felix Dzherzhinsky – the founder of the Bolshevik secret
police, the Cheka (forerunner of the KGB), and the Communist equivalent
of Heinrich Himmler – represented a heroic paragon. These left-wing
origins are particularly relevant to the covert operations discussed by
Stonor Saunders, because the CIA’s goal was precisely to influence
left-wing opponents of Communism, i.e. Trotskyites. The CIA’s view was
simply that right-wing anti-communists did not need to be influenced,
much less paid. Stonor Saunders quotes Michael Warner when she writes:
"For the CIA, the strategy of promoting the Non-Communist Left was to
become ’the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations
against Communism over the next two decades’."
This strategy was outlined in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center
(1949), a book which represents one of the cornerstones of what was
later to become the neo-conservative movement. Stonor Saunders writes:
"The purpose of supporting leftist groups was not to destroy or even
dominate, but rather to maintain a discreet proximity to and monitor the
thinking of such groups; to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they
could blow off steam; and, in extremis, to exercise a final veto over
their actions, if they ever got too ’radical’."
Many and varied were the ways in which this left-wing influence was
felt. The USA was determined to fashion for itself a progressive image,
in contrast to the "reactionary" Soviet Union. In other words, it wanted
to do precisely what the Soviets were doing. In music, for instance,
Nicholas Nabokov (the cousin of the author of Lolita)
was one of the Congress’ main agents. In 1954, the CIA funded a music
festival in Rome in which Stalin’s "authoritarian" love of composers
like Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky was "countered" by unorthodox
modern music inspired by Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system.
For Nabokov, there was a clear political message to be imparted by
promoting music which announced itself as doing away with natural
hierarchies …
Support for other progressives came when Jackson Pollock, himself a
former Communist, was also promoted by the CIA. His daubs were supposed
to represent the American ideology of "freedom" over the
authoritarianism of socialist realist painting. (This alliance with
Communists pre-dates the Cold War: the Mexican Communist muralist, Diego
Rivera, was supported by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, but their
collaboration ended abruptly when Rivera refused to remove a portrait of
Lenin from a crowd scene painted on the walls of the Rockefeller Center
in 1933.)
This cross-over between culture and politics was explicitly promoted
by a CIA body which went under an Orwellian name, the Psychological
Strategy Board. In 1956, it covertly promoted a European tour by the
Metropolitan Opera, the political purpose of which was to encourage
multiculturalism. Junkie Fleischmann, the organiser, said:
"We, in the United States, are a melting-pot and, by being so, we
have demonstrated that peoples can get along together irrespective of
race, colour or creed. Using the "melting-pot" or some such catch phrase
for a theme we might be able to use the Met as an example of how
Europeans can get along together in the United States and that,
therefore, some sort of European Federation is entirely practicable."
This, by the way, is exactly the same argument employed by, among other people, Ben Wattenberg, whose book The First Universal Nation
argues that America has a special right to world hegemony because she
embodies all the nations and races of the planet. The same view has also
been expressed by Newt Gingrich and other neo-cons.
Other themes promoted include some which are at the forefront of
neo-conservative thinking today. First among these is the eminently
liberal belief in moral and political universalism. Today, this is at
the very heart of George W. Bush’s own foreign policy philosophy: he has
stated on numerous occasions that political values are the same all
over the world, and he has used this assumption to justify US military
intervention in favour of "democracy." Back in the early 1950s, the
director of the PSB (the Psychological Strategy Board was quickly
referred to only by its initials, no doubt in order to hide its real
name), Raymond Allen, had already arrived at this conclusion.
The principles and ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution are for export and … are the heritage of men
everywhere. We should appeal to the fundamental urges of all men which I
believe are the same for the farmer in Kansas as for the farmer in
Punjab.
To be sure, it would be wrong to attribute the spread of ideas only
to covert manipulation. They have their force in large-scale cultural
currents, whose causes are multiple. But there is no doubt that the
dominance of such ideas can be substantially facilitated by covert
operations, especially since people in mass-information societies are
curiously suggestible. Not only do they believe what they have read in
the papers, they also think they have arrived at these conclusions
themselves. The trick of manipulating public opinion, therefore, lies
precisely in that which Bernays theorised, Münzenberg initiated, and
which the CIA raised to a high art. According to CIA agent Donald
Jameson:
"As far as the attitudes that the Agency wanted to inspire through
these activities are concerned, clearly what they would like to have
been able to produce were people who, of their own reasoning and
conviction, were persuaded that everything the United States government
did was right."
To put it another way, what the CIA and other US agencies were doing
during this period was to adopt the strategy which we associate with the
Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who argued that "cultural hegemony"
was essential for socialist revolution.
Disinformation
Finally, there is a huge body of literature on the technique of
disinformation. I have already referred to the important fact,
originally formulated by Tchakotine (Chakotin), that the role of
journalists and the media is key in ensuring that propaganda is
constant: "Propaganda cannot take time off," he writes, thereby
formulating one of the key rules of modern disinformation, which is that
the required message must be repeated very frequently indeed if it is
to pass. Above all, Tchakotine (Chakotin) says that propaganda campaigns
must be centrally directed and highly organised, something which has
become the norm in the age of modern political "spin": British Labour
Members of Parliament, for instance, are not allowed to speak to the
media without first asking permission from the Director of
Communications in 10, Downing Street.
Sefton Delmer was both a practician and theoretician of such "black propaganda." Delmer created a bogus radio station which broadcasted from Britain to Germany during the Second World War, and which created the myth that there were "good" patriotic Germans who opposed Hitler. The fiction was sustained that the station was actually an underground German one, and was put on frequencies close to those of official stations. Such black propaganda has now become part of the US government’s armoury of ‘spin’: the New York Times revealed that the US government makes news reports favourable to its policies which are then carried on normal channels and presented as if they were the broadcast company’s own reports.
There are many other such authors, some of whom I have discussed in
my column, "All News is Lies". But perhaps the most relevant to today’s
discussion is Roger Mucchielli’s book, Subversion,
published in French in 1971, which shows how disinformation had moved
from being an auxiliary tactic in war to a principal one. The strategy
had developed so far, he said, that the goal was now to conquer a state
without even attacking physically, especially through the use of agents
of influence inside it. This is essentially what Robert Kaplan proposed
and discussed in his essay for The Atlantic Monthly in July/August 2003, "Supremacy by Stealth."
One of the most sinister theoreticians of the New World Order and the
American empire, Robert Kaplan, explicitly advocates the use of immoral
and illegal power to promote US control of the whole world. His essay
deals with the use of covert operations, military power, dirty tricks,
black propaganda, hidden influence and control, opinion-forming and
other things like political assassination, all subject to his overall
call for "a pagan ethic," as the means to ensuring American domination.
The other key point about Mucchielli is that he was one of the first
theoreticians of the use of bogus non-governmental organisations – or
"front organisations" as they used to be known – for effecting internal
political change in another state. Like Malaparte and Trotsky,
Mucchielli also understood that it was not "objective" circumstances
which determined the success or failure of a revolution, but instead the
perception created of those circumstances by disinformation. He also
understood that historical revolutions, which invariably presented
themselves as the product of mass movements, were in fact the work of a
tiny number of highly organised conspirators. In fact, again like
Trotsky, Mucchielli emphasised that the silent majority must be
rigorously excluded from the mechanics of political change, precisely
because coups d’état are the work of the few and not the many.
Public opinion was the "forum" in which subversion was practised, and
Mucchielli showed the different ways in which the mass media could be
used to create a collective psychosis. Psychological factors were
extremely important in this regard, he said, especially in the pursuit
of important strategies such as the demoralisation of a society. The
enemy must be made to lose confidence in the rightness of his own cause,
while all effort must be made to convince him that his adversary is
invincible.
The role of the military
One final historical point before we move onto a discussion of the
present: the role of the military in conducting covert operations and
influencing political change. This is something which some contemporary
analysts are happy to admit is deployed today: Robert Kaplan writes
approvingly of how the American military is and should be used to
"promote democracy." Kaplan says deliciously that a phone call from a US
general is often a better way of promoting political change in a third
country than a phone call from the local US ambassador. And he
approvingly quotes an Army Special Operations officer saying, "Whoever
the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special
forces and the President’s bodyguards. We’ve trained them. That
translates into diplomatic leverage."
The historical background to this has recently been discussed by a Swiss academic, Daniele Ganser, in his book, Nato’s Secret Army.
His account begins with the admission made on 3rd August 1990 by Giulio
Andreotti, the then Italian Prime Minister, that a secret army had
existed in his country since the end of the Second World War, known as
"Gladio"; that it had been created by the CIA and MI6; and that it was
coordinated by the unorthodox warfare section of NATO.
He thereby confirmed one of the most long-running rumours in post-war
Italy. Many people, including investigating magistrates, had long
suspected that Gladio was not only party of a network of secret armies
created by the Americans across Western Europe to fight in the
resistance to a putative Soviet occupation, but also that these networks
had become involved in influencing the outcome of elections, even to
the extent of forming sinister alliances with terrorist organisations.
Italy was a particular target because the Communist Party was so strong
there.
Originally, this secret army was constructed with the aim of
providing for the eventuality of an invasion. But it seems that they
soon moved to covert operations aimed at influencing the political
process itself, in the absence of an invasion. There is ample evidence
that the Americans did indeed interfere massively, especially in Italian
elections, in order to prevent the PCI from ever winning power. Tens of
billions of dollars were funded to the Italian Christian Democrats by
the US for this very reason.
Ganser even argues that there is evidence that Gladio cells carried
out terrorist attacks in order to blame Communists, and to frighten the
population into demanding extra state powers to "protect" them from
terrorism. Ganser quotes the man convicted of planting one of these
bombs, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who duly explained the nature of the
network of which he was a foot soldier. He said that it was part of a
strategy "to destabilise in order to stabilise."
"You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent
people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason
was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian
public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the
political logic which remains behind all the massacres and the bombings
which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or
declare itself responsible for what happened."
There is an obvious relevance to the conspiracy theories swirling
around 9/11. Ganser presents a host of good evidence that this is indeed
what Gladio did, and his arguments shed light on the intriguing
possibility that there might also have been an alliance with extreme
left-wing groups like the Red Brigades. After all, when Aldo Moro was
kidnapped, shortly after which he was assassinated, he was physically on
the way to the Italian parliament to present a programme for a
coalition government between the Socialists and the Communists –
precisely the thing the Americans were determined to prevent.
Today’s revolutionary tacticians
These historical works help us to understand what is going on today.
My colleagues and I from the British Helsinki Human Rights Group have
personally witnessed how the same techniques are used today.
The main tactics were perfected in Latin America during the 1970s and
1980s. Indeed, many of the operatives of regime change under Ronald
Reagan and George Bush Sr. have happily plied their trade in the former
Soviet bloc under Bill Clinton and George Bush Jr. For instance, General
Manuel Noriega reports in his memoirs that the two CIA-State Department
operatives who were sent to negotiate and then engineer his downfall
from power in Panama in 1989 were called William Walker and Michael
Kozak: William Walker resurfaced in Kosovo in January 1999 when, as head
of the Kosovo Verification Mission, he oversaw the artificial creation
of a bogus atrocity which proved to be the casus belli for the Kosovo
war, while Michael Kozak became US ambassador to Belarus, where in 2001
he mounted "Operation White Stork" designed to overthrow the incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko. During an exchange of letters to The Guardian in 2001, Kozak brazenly admitted that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua and Panama, namely "promoting democracy."
There are essentially three branches to the modern technique of a
coup d’état. They are non-governmental organisations, control of the
media, and covert operatives. Their activities are effectively
interchangeable so I will not deal with them separately.
Serbia 2000
The overthrow of Slobodan Miloševic was obviously not the first time
the West used covert influence to effect regime change. The overthrow of
Sali Berisha in Albania in 1997 and of Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia in
1998 were heavily influenced by the West and, in the case of Berisha, an
extremely violent uprising was presented as a spontaneous and welcome
example of people power. I personally observed how the international
community, and especially the Organisation for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE), fiddled its election observation results in order to
ensure political change. However, the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševic in
Belgrade on 5th October 2000 is important because he is such a
well-known figure, and because the "revolution" which unseated him
involved a very ostentatious use of "people power."
The background to the putsch against Miloševic has been brilliantly described by Tim Marshall, a reporter for Sky TV.
His account is valuable because he writes approvingly of the events he
describes; it is also interesting because this journalist boasts of his
extensive contacts with the secret services, especially those of Britain
and America.
At every turn, Marshall seems to know who the main intelligence
players are. His account is thick with references to "an MI6 officer in
Priština," "sources in Yugoslav military intelligence," "a CIA man who
was helping to put together the coup," an "officer in US naval
intelligence," and so on. He quotes secret surveillance reports from the
Serbian secret police; he knows who the Ministry of Defence desk
officer is in London who draws up the strategy for getting rid of
Miloševic; he knows that the British Foreign Secretary’s telephone
conversations are being listened to; he knows who are the Russian
intelligence officers who accompany Yevgeni Primakov, the Russian prime
minister, to Belgrade during the Nato bombing; he knows which rooms are
bugged in the British embassy, and where the Yugoslav spies are who
listen in to the diplomats’ conversations; he knows that a staffer on
the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee is, in
fact, an officer in US naval intelligence; he seems to know that secret
service decisions are often taken with the very minimal ministerial
approval; he describes how the CIA physically escorted the KLA
delegation from Kosovo to Paris for the pre-war talks at Rambouillet,
where Nato issued Yugoslavia with an ultimatum it knew it could only
reject; and he refers to "a British journalist" acting as a go-between
between London and Belgrade for hugely important high-level secret
negotiations, as people sought to betray one another as Miloševic’s
power collapsed. (My suspicion is that he may be talking about himself
at this point.)
One of the themes which inadvertently runs through his book is that
there is a thin dividing line between journalists and spooks. Early on
in the book, Marshall refers casually to "the inevitable connections
between officers, journalists and politicians," saying that people in
all three categories "work in the same area." He then goes on jokingly
to say that "a combination of ‘spooks’, ‘journo’s’ and ‘politicos’,
added to ‘the people’" were what had caused the overthrow of Slobodan
Miloševic. Marshall clings to the myth that "the people" were involved,
but the rest of his book shows that in fact the overthrow of the
Yugoslav president occurred only because of political strategies
deliberately conceived in London and Washington to get rid of him.
Above all, Marshall makes it clear that, in 1998, the US State
Department and intelligence agencies decided to use the Kosovo
Liberation Army to get rid of Slobodan Miloševic. He quotes one source
saying, "The US agenda was clear. When the time was right they were
going to use the KLA to provide the solution to the political problem" –
the "problem" being, as Marshall explains earlier, Miloševic’s
continued political survival. This meant supporting the KLA’s terrorist
secessionism, and later fighting a war against Yugoslavia on its side.
Marshall quotes Mark Kirk, a US naval intelligence officer, saying that,
"Eventually we opened up a huge operation against Miloševic, both
secret and open." The secret part of the operation involved not only
things like stuffing the various observer missions which were sent into
Kosovo with officers from the British and American intelligence
services, but also – crucially – giving military, technical, financial,
logistical and political support to the KLA, which, as Marshall himself
admits, "smuggled drugs, ran prostitution rackets and murdered
civilians."
The strategy began in late 1998 when "a huge CIA mission (got)
underway in Kosovo." President Miloševic had allowed the Kosovo
Diplomatic Observer Mission to enter Kosovo to monitor the situation in
the province. This ad hoc group was immediately stuffed with British and
American intelligence agents and special forces – men from the CIA, US
naval intelligence, the British SAS and something called "14th
intelligence," a body within the British army which operates side by
side with the SAS "to provide what is known as ‘deep surveillance’." The
immediate purpose of this operation was "Intelligence Preparation of
Battlefield" – a modern version of what the Duke of Wellington used to
do, riding up and down the battlefield to get the lie of the land before
engaging the enemy. So as Marshall puts it, "Officially, the KDOM was
run by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe …
unofficially, the CIA ran (it) … The organisation was just packed with
them … It was a CIA front." Many of the officers in fact worked for
another CIA front, DynCorp, the Virginia-based company which employs
mainly "members of US military elite units, or the CIA," as Marshall
says. They used the KDOM, which later became the Kosovo Verification
Mission, for espionage. Instead of doing the monitoring tasks assigned
to them, officers would go off and use their global positioning devices
to locate and identify targets which would be later bombed by Nato.
Quite how the Yugoslavs could allow 2,000 highly trained secret service
agents to roam around their territory is difficult to understand,
especially since, as Marshall shows, they knew perfectly well what was
going on.
The head of the Kosovo Verification Mission was William Walker, the
man deputed to oust Manuel Noriega from power in Panama, and a former
ambassador to El Salvador whose US-supported government ran death
squads. Walker "discovered" the "massacre" at Racak in January 1999, the
event which was used as a pretext for starting the process which led to
the bombing which began on 24th March. There is much evidence to
suggest that Racak was staged, and that the bodies found were in fact
those of KLA fighters, not civilians as was alleged. What is certain is
that Walker’s role was so key that the country road in Kosovo which
leads to Racak has now been renamed after him. Marshall writes that the
date for the war – spring 1999 – was not only decided in late December
1998, but also that the date was communicated to the KLA at the time.
This means that when the "massacre" occurred and when Madeleine Albright
declared, "Spring has come early," she was behaving rather like Joseph
Goebbels who, on hearing the news of the Reichstag fire in 1933, is
supposed to have remarked, "What, already?"
At any rate, when the KVM was withdrawn on the eve of the Nato
bombing, Marshall says that the CIA officers in it gave all their
satellite phones and GPS equipment to the KLA. "The KLA were being
trained by the Americans, partially equipped by them, and virtually
given territory," Marshall writes – even though he, like all other
reporters, helped propagate the myth of systematic Serb atrocities
committed against a totally passive Albanian civilian population.
The war went ahead, of course, and Yugoslavia was ferociously bombed.
But Miloševic stayed in power. So London and Washington started what
Marshall happily calls "political warfare" to remove him. This involved
giving very large sums of money, as well as technical, logistical and
strategic support, and including arms, to various "democratic
opposition" groups and "non-governmental organisations" in Serbia. The
Americans were by then operating principally through the International
Republican Institute (a branch of the National Endowment for Democracy),
which had opened offices in neighbouring Hungary for the purpose of
getting rid of Slobodan Miloševic. "It was agreed" at one of their
meetings, Marshall explains, "that the ideological arguments of
pro-democracy, civil rights and a humanitarian approach would be far
more forceful if accompanied, if necessary, by large bags full of
money." These, and much else besides, were duly shipped into Serbia
through the diplomatic bags – in many cases of apparently neutral
countries like Sweden who, by not participating formally in the NATO
war, were able to maintain full embassies in Belgrade. As Marshall
helpfully adds, "Bags of money had been brought in for years." Indeed
they had. As he earlier explains, "independent" media outlets like the
Radio Station B92 (who is Marshall’s own publisher) were, in fact, very
largely funded by the USA. Organisations controlled by George Soros
also played a crucial role, as they were later to do, in 2003–4, in
Georgia. The so-called "democrats" were, in reality, nothing but foreign
agents – just as the Yugoslav government stolidly maintained at the
time.
Marshall also explains something which is now a matter of public
record that it was also the Americans who conceived the strategy of
pushing forward one candidate, Vojislav Koštunica, to unite the
opposition. Koštunica had the main advantage of being largely unknown by
the general public. Marshall then describes how the strategy also
involved a carefully planned coup d’état, which duly took place after
the first round of the presidential elections. He shows in minute detail
how the principal actors in what was presented on Western TV screens as
a spontaneous uprising of "the people" were, in fact, a bunch of
extremely violent and very heavily armed thugs under the command of the
Mayor of the town of Cacak, Velimir Ilic. It was Ilic’s 22
kilometre-long convoy carrying "weapons, paratroopers and a team of kick
boxers" to the federal parliament building in Belgrade. As Marshall
admits, the events of 5th October 2000 "looked more like a coup d’état"
than the people’s revolution of which the world’s media so naïvely
gushed at the time.
Georgia 2003
Many of the tactics perfected in Belgrade were used in Georgia in November 2003 to overthrow President Edward Shevardadze.
The same allegations were made, and repeated ad nauseam, that the
elections had been rigged. (In the Georgian case, they were
parliamentary elections, in the Yugoslav case presidential.) Western
media uncritically took up these allegations, which were made long
before the actual voting took place. A propaganda war was unleashed
against both presidents, in Shevardnadze’s case after a long period in
which he had been lionised as a great reformer and democrat. Both
"revolutions" occurred after a similar "storming of the parliament,"
broadcast live on TV. Both transfers of power were brokered by the
Russian minister, Igor Ivanov, who flew to Belgrade and Tbilisi to
engineer the exit from power of the incumbent president. Last but not
least, the US ambassador was the same man in both cases: Richard Miles.
The most visible similarity, however, came in the use of a student
movement known as Otpor (Resistance) in Serbia and Kmara (It’s enough!)
in Georgia. Both movements had the same symbol, a black-on-white stencil
of a clenched fist. Otpor trained people from Kmara, and both were supported by the US.
And both organisations were ostensibly structured along communist lines
– combining the appearance of a diffuse structure of autonomous cells
with the reality of highly centralised Leninist discipline.
As in Georgia, the role played by US money and covert operations has
been revealed – but only after the event. During the events, the
television was full of wall-to-wall propaganda about how "the people"
rose up against Shevardnadze. All images which counteracted the
optimistic view were suppressed, or glossed over, such as the fact that
the "march on Tbilisi" led by Mihkail Saakashvili started off in Gori,
Stalin’s birthplace, beneath a statue of the former Soviet tyrant who
remains a hero to many Georgians. The media was equally unconcerned when
the new president, Saakashvili, was confirmed in office by elections
which awarded him the Stalinist score of 96%.
Ukraine 2004
In the case of Ukraine,
we observe the same combination of work by Western-backed
non-governmental organisations, the media and the secret services. The
non-governmental organisations played a huge role in de-legitimising the
elections before they occurred. Allegations of widespread fraud were
constantly repeated. In other words, the street protests which broke out
after the second round, which Yanukovich won, were based on allegations
which had been flying around before the beginning of the first round.
The main NGO behind these allegations, the Committee of Ukrainian
Voters, receives not one penny from Ukrainian voters, being instead
fully funded by Western governments. Its office was decorated with
pictures of Madeleine Albright and indeed the National Democratic
Institute was one of its main affiliates. It pumped out constant
propaganda against Yanukovich.
During the events themselves, I was able to document some of the
propaganda abuses. They involved mainly the endless repetition of
electoral fraud practised by the government; the constant cover-up of
fraud practised by the opposition; the frenetic selling of Viktor
Yushchenko, one of the most boring men in the world, as a charismatic
politician; and the ridiculously unlikely story that he had been
deliberately poisoned by his enemies. (No prosecutions have been brought
to date on this.) The fullest account of the propaganda and fraud is
given by the British Helsinki Human Rights Group’s report, "Ukraine’ Clockwork Orange Revolution." An interesting explanation of the role played by the secret services was also given in The New York Times by C. J. Chivers
who explained that the Ukrainian KGB had been working for Yushchenko
all along – in collaboration with the Americans of course. Other
important articles on the same subject include Jonathan Mowat’s "The New Gladio in Action: Washington’s New World Order ‘Democratization’ Template,"
which details how military doctrine has been adapted to effect
political change, and how various instruments, from psychology to bogus
opinion polls, are used in it. Mowat is particularly interesting on the
theories of Dr. Peter Ackermann, the author of Strategic Non-Violent Conflict
(Praeger, 1994) and of a speech entitled "Between Hard and Soft Power:
the Rise of Civilian-Based Struggle and Democratic Change," delivered at
the State Department in June 2004. Mowat is also excellent on the
psychology of crowds and its use in these putsches: he draws attention
to the role of "swarming adolescents" and "rebellious hysteria" and
traces the origins of the use of this for political purposes to the
Tavistock Institute in the 1960s: that institute was created by the
British Army as its psychological warfare arm after World War I and its
illustrious alumni include Dr. David Owen, the former British Foreign
Secretary and Dr. Radovan Karadžic, the former President of the Bosnian
Serb Republic. Mowat recounts how the ideas formulated there by Fred
Emery were taken up by one Dr. Howard Perlmutter, a professor of "Social
Architecture’’ at the Wharton School, and a follower of Dr. Emery,
(who) stressed that "rock video in Katmandu," was an appropriate image
of how states with traditional cultures could be destabilized, thereby
creating the possibility of a "global civilization." There are two
requirements for such a transformation, he added, "building
internationally committed networks of international and locally
committed organizations,’’ and "creating global events" through "the
transformation of a local event into one having virtually instantaneous
international implications through mass-media.
Conclusion
None of this is conspiracy theory – it is conspiracy fact. The United
States considers as a matter of official policy that the promotion of
democracy is an important element of its overall national security
strategy. Large sections of the State Department, the CIA,
para-governmental agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy,
and government-funded NGOs like the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, which publishes several works on "democracy promotion." All
these operations have one thing in common: they involve the
interference, sometimes violent, of Western powers, especially the US,
in the political processes of other states, and that interference is
very often used to promote the quintessential revolutionary goal, regime
change.
Source: http://www.voltairenet.org/
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