John Lister reviews The CIA'S Greatest Hits, by Mark Zepezauer, Odonian Press With US foreign policy, and Bush's hypocritical claims to be the best promoter of "democracy" never far from the headlines, this republished anthology exploring five decades of CIA skulduggery is a useful memory jogger for activists and campaigners.
Recent reminders of the CIA's role in transporting US-held "suspects" around the world for torture by brutal regimes hark back to the seemingly endless series of unsavoury deals and corrupt regimes cultivated by the "company" under a sucNOW cession of directors, famously including of course, Dubya's daddy, George H Bush.
The CIA's Greatest Hits traces the process back to 1943 with the moves to enlist an entire staff of unreconstructed Nazis from Hitler's intelligence network, and 1945, with the earliest Agency involvement in Vietnam, employing merceside the French colonial army, backed up by logistical support from the CIA's own Air America (then the world's largest "private" airline) in seeking recapture the country from Ho Chi Minh's Communists. Another 40 examples bring together the US agency's complicity in political coups, assassinations, massacres, drug trafficking, sabotage, misinformation, money-laundering, corruption, psychological experiments and brainwashing.
Many of today's anti-capitallsts and anti-war acuivists may not have heard of the US often-repeated role in toppling progressive nationalist long-term and bloody dictatorships, including Iran and Guatemala (1953), Indonesia (1965).
The Greatest Hus clearly sums up each of these quite complicated situations in not more than two small format pages, with helpful and lighthearted cartoons to relieve the gloom.
First published in 1994, it retains a punch a decade later.
Indeed the slightly dated list also reminds us that while a number of the USinstalled tyrants it exposes have been ousted or died in subsequent years, few if any of the countries concerned have yet established any serous form of democratic rights for working people: so much for the US as the bringers of democracy!
page 24 of the scan
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