The current alarm and proposed legislation over “fake news from Russia” (McClatchy Washington Bureau Dec. 15) is evidence of just how confused the suspicions have become. Hacking needs to be distinguished from fake news. Russian or not, the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails exposed genuine, if private, information. Not fake news. CIA allegations of Russian hacking are a way of shooting the messenger and drawing attention away from emails showing how the DNC boosted Clinton, marginalized Bernie Sanders.
The CIA should be adept at investigating foreign interference in the U.S. presidential election, since it has a long practice of interference in other countries’ elections. The CIA’s current (and illegal) aid to the rebels (including terrorists) in Syria’s civil war has brought it full circle from 1949 when it undermined Syria’s democratic government. Syria was the first Arab country to free itself from colonial rule and the first to suffer U.S.-led regime change. Under a democratically elected parliament and prime minister, Syria balked at a pipeline desired by big oil. The CIA invited Syrian military figure, Col. Husni Zaim to seize control of the government. A number of military coups followed, culminating in the takeover by Hafez Assad. His son, Bashir Assad, is the first president of Syria since 1949 to hold that office without the benefit of a coup.
Some of the world’s attempted or successful regime changes involving the CIA probably remain undisclosed; even so, William Blum, who has written extensively on the matter, lists over fifty instances where the U.S. was involved in foreign regime change efforts. The Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen as respective secretary of state and head of the CIA solidified an illegal (and immoral) foreign policy that calls for undermining governments they opposed. Iran and Guatemala provide instructive models that illustrate how the CIA has been used to overthrow democratic governments that dared to challenge U.S. political or corporate interests.
Three years after the Zaim coup in Syria, the CIA turned on Iran and its democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-dominated Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. U.S. media cooperated with the CIA in demonizing Mossadegh’s rule as an “iron dictatorship” based on “terrorism” (these days repeated in the regular vilification of Syria’s elected President Bashir Assad as a “brutal dictator”). The CIA organized violent demonstrations and staged attacks on religious figures, making it appear as if the troublemakers were Mossadegh supporters. With violence bringing on chaos, the CIA trotted out a general it had picked to lead a coup, install the Shah, and replace democracy with a dictatorship.
Dulles appointed his old law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, to divide the spoils from the newly privatized Iranian oil fields, with American companies granted a 40 percent cut of the oil. The CIA’s use of street demonstrations is a staple in preparing for regime change, as it has in recent years in Ukraine and less successfully in Syria.
The following year, the CIA used a similar program to engineer the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratic government when its president, Jacobo Arbenz, nationalized uncultivated land owned by the United Fruit Company. United Fruit was also represented by John Foster Dulles’ old law firm. Dulles enlisted his brother and the CIA, starting with a public relations campaign to demonize Arbenz and his government and to encourage newspapers like the New York Times to report a “growth of Communist influence.” Such stories, followed by CIA planes bombing and strafing of Guatemala City for several days paved the way for the CIA to remove Arbenz and satisfy United Fruit by installing Col. Castillo Armas as its hand-picked dictator.
Each of the CIA efforts — successful or otherwise — has been illegal. Some of the leaders put in power by the CIA have been cruel dictators, who replaced decent, elected leaders. As the most powerful country in the world, the U.S. has been immune from prosecution, though it may invite terrorism in response.
American attacks on foreign countries in this century have destroyed so much that the victim counties will need decades and fortunes to recover. Some countries — Libya and Iraq — are nearly failed states as a result of U.S. military violence. The U.S. has been far too slow to revise a policy of engagement solidified during the Cold War.
The Dulles brothers are long gone but their policy lingers on.
Democratic government depends on information; suppressed news is as bad and sometimes worse than fake news. Given the history of CIA depredations, it becomes difficult to see anything but hypocrisy in the CIA’s allegations of a supposed Russian attempt to influence the U.S. presidential election. Whoever hacked information about the Democratic National Committee’s manipulation of the media and the presidential primary contest revealed information that the American public had a right to know.
Jerome Donnelly is a retired university professor who has spent parts of over the last 20 years living in New Salem.