Exploring the Shadows of
America’s Security State
Or How I Learned Not to Love Big
Brother
By
Alfred W. McCoy
[This
piece has been adapted and expanded from
the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s
new book,
In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global
Power.]
August
25, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- In
the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks,
Washington pursued its elusive enemies across
the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in
part to a massive expansion of its intelligence
infrastructure, particularly of the emerging
technologies for digital surveillance, agile
drones, and biometric identification. In 2010,
almost a decade into this secret war with its
voracious appetite for information, the
Washington Post
reported that
the national security state had swelled into a
“fourth branch” of the federal government --
with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security
organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence
units, issuing 50,000 special reports every
year.
Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed
the visible surface of what had become history’s
largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus.
According to classified documents that Edward
Snowden
leaked in 2013,
the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had
107,035 employees and a combined “black budget”
of $52.6 billion, the
equivalent of
10% percent of the vast defense budget.
By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide
web’s undersea cables, the National Security
Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the
confidential communications of just about
any leader on
the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up
billions of
ordinary messages. For its classified missions,
the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special
Operations Command, with
69,000 elite troops
(Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile
arsenal. In addition to this formidable
paramilitary capacity, the CIA
operated 30
Predator and Reaper drones
responsible for
more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.
While Americans practiced a collective form of
duck and cover as the Department of Homeland
Security’s
colored alerts
pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused
to ask the hard question: Was all this security
really directed solely at enemies beyond our
borders? After half a century of domestic
security abuses -- from the “red scare” of the
1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of
antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s --
could we really be confident that there wasn’t a
hidden cost to all these secret measures right
here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this
security wasn’t really so benign when it came to
us.
From my
own personal experience over the past
half-century, and my family’s history over three
generations, I’ve found out in the most personal
way possible that there’s a real cost to
entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion
of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of
my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been
forced to keep learning and relearning this
uncomfortable lesson the hard way.
On the
Heroin Trail
After
finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided
to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was
pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School
admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy
League in those days was no ivory tower. During
my first year at Yale, the Justice Department
indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a
local murder and the May Day protests that
filled the New Haven green also shut the campus
for a week. Almost simultaneously, President
Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and
student protests closed hundreds of campuses
across America for the rest of the semester.
In the
midst of all this tumult, the focus of my
studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia,
and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes,
that war. So what did I do about the draft?
During my first semester at Yale, on December 1,
1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut
up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100
birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but
any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My
birthday, June 8th, was the very last date
drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap
year) -- the only lottery I have ever won,
except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a
high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral
calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my
draft exemption, although acquired by sheer
luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all
else, to thinking about, writing about, and
working to end the Vietnam War.
During
those campus protests over Cambodia in the
spring of 1970, our small group of graduate
students in Southeast Asian history at Yale
realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in
Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos
to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South
Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept
campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the
library, preparing for the next invasion by
editing a book of essays on Laos for the
publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that
book appeared, one of the company’s junior
editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an
account we had included about that country’s
opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I
could research and write a “quickie” paperback
about the history behind the heroin epidemic
then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.
I
promptly started the research at my student
carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s
Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports
about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended
suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got
interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I
stepped outside the library to do a few
interviews and soon found myself following an
investigative trail that circled the globe.
First, I traveled across America for meetings
with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the
Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates,
courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad.
Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital
of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin
traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into
the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances
with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias
that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from
Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired
French intelligence officers about their opium
trafficking during the first Indochina War of
the 1950s.
The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the
U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I
discovered, exclusively the work of criminals.
Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos,
the traffic required official complicity at
every level. The helicopters of Air America, the
airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out
of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The
commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close
American collaborator, operated the world’s
largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the
implications of the traffic that he opened his
opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of
Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the
drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971,
this web of collusion ensured that heroin,
according to a later
White House survey
of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used”
by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.
None of
this had been covered in my college history
seminars. I had no models for researching an
uncharted netherworld of crime and covert
operations. After stepping off the plane in
Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I
found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four
million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles
and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts
or a clue about how to probe these secrets.
Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with
new challenges -- where to look, what to look
for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.
Reading
all that history had, however, taught me
something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of
confronting my sources with questions about
sensitive current events, I started with the
French colonial past when the opium trade was
still legal, gradually uncovering the
underlying, unchanging logistics of drug
production. As I followed this historical trail
into the present, when the traffic became
illegal and dangerously controversial, I began
to use pieces from this past to assemble the
present puzzle, until the names of contemporary
dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted
a historical method that would prove, over the
next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful
in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy
controversies -- CIA alliances with drug lords,
the agency’s propagation of psychological
torture, and our spreading state surveillance.
The CIA
Makes Its Entrance in My Life
Those
months on the road, meeting gangsters and
warlords in isolated places, offered only one
bit of real danger. While hiking in the
mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers
about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters,
I was descending a steep slope when a burst of
bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had
walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.
While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the
local village headman had prudently provided
laid down a covering fire, my Australian
photographer
John Everingham
and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass
and crawled through the mud to safety. Without
those armed escorts, my research would have been
at an end and so would I. After that ambush
failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me
to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to
murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my
research. After winning assurances from the U.S.
embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed,
I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.
Six
months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New
Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with
drug lords had taught me more than I could have
imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global
power. Settling into my attic apartment for an
academic year of writing, I was confident that I
knew more than enough for a book on this
unconventional topic. But my education, it
turned out, was just beginning.
Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a
suit interrupted my scholarly isolation. He
appeared at my front door and identified himself
as
Tom Tripodi,
senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which
later became the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second
visit, was worried about my writing and he had
been sent to investigate. He needed something to
tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could
trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my
book. He disappeared into the living room for a
while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff.
You got your ducks in a row.” But there were
some things, he added, that weren’t quite right,
some things he could help me fix.
Tom was
my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole
chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair,
shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his
shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling
corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous
stories -- like the time Jersey Mafia boss
“Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand
rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel
Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came
home for a vacation and had to be escorted
everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a
supermarket aisle.
Best of all, there was the one about how the
Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence
protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling
heroin into New York City. Some of his stories,
usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book,
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.
These conversations with an undercover
operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the
CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia
heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were
akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in
covert operations.
In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I
went to Washington to testify before Congress.
As I was making the rounds of congressional
offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang
unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a
meeting with the president and vice president of
Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into
a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires
of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those
executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the
CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had
called on their company’s president emeritus,
Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident,
for Canfield, according to an
authoritative history,
“enjoyed prolific links to the world of
intelligence, both as a former psychological
warfare officer and as a close personal friend
of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer
denounced my book as a threat to national
security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend,
to quietly suppress it.
I
was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a
senior CIA official but he also had impeccable
social connections and covert assets in every
corner of American intellectual life. After
graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the
marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war
dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly.
He later worked with the U.S. delegation
drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited
by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA
in 1951 and was soon running its International
Organizations Division, which, in the words of
that
same history,
“constituted the greatest single concentration
of covert political and propaganda activities of
the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation
Mockingbird”
that planted disinformation in major U.S.
newspapers meant to aid agency operations.
Informed sources told me that the CIA still had
assets inside every major New York publisher and
it already had every page of my manuscript.
As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord
Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and
marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford
Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service
and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot
was a breathtaking beauty who later became
President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of
secret visits
to the White House. When she was found
shot dead along
the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the
head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus
Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her
home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her
diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband,
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later
found the diary and gave it to Angleton for
destruction by the agency. To this day, her
unsolved murder remains a
subject of
mystery and controversy.
Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register
of New York’s fine families along with my
publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of
social cachet to the pressure to suppress my
book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s
office in that summer of 1972, two decades of
CIA service had
changed Meyer
(according to that same authoritative history)
from a liberal idealist into “a relentless,
implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven
by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t
agree with him” and a manner that was
“histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished
26-year-old graduate student versus the master
of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair
fight. I began to fear my book would never
appear.
To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request
to suppress the book. But he did allow the
agency a chance to review the manuscript prior
to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for
the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh,
then an investigative reporter for the New
York Times. The same day the CIA courier
arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript,
Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like
a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives
with incessant, unsettling questions. The next
day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at
censorship appeared on the paper’s
front page.
Other national media organizations followed his
lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage,
the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of
unconvincing denials.
The book was published unaltered.
My Life as
an Open Book for the Agency
I
had learned another important lesson: the
Constitution’s protection of press freedom could
check even the world’s most powerful espionage
agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same
lesson. According to his
obituary in the
Washington Post, “It was assumed that
Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA
covert operations, “but the public disclosure
about the book deal... apparently dampened his
prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and
eased into early retirement.
Meyer
and his colleagues were not, however, used to
losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA
retreated to the shadows and retaliated by
tugging at every thread in the threadbare life
of a graduate student. Over the next few months,
federal officials from the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to
investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal
Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income.
The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something
I learned years later from a class-action
lawsuit).
In
August 1972, at the height of the controversy
over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s
director that they had “conducted [an]
investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the
files they had compiled on me for the past two
years and interviewing numerous “sources whose
identities are concealed [who] have furnished
reliable information in the past” -- thereby
producing an 11-page report detailing my birth,
education, and campus antiwar activities.
A
college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years,
who served in military intelligence, magically
appeared at my side in the book section of the
Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our
relationship. The same week that a
laudatory review
of my book appeared on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review, an
extraordinary achievement for any historian,
Yale’s History Department placed me on academic
probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s
worth of overdue work in a single semester, I
faced dismissal.
In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale
were wide and deep. The campus residential
colleges screened students, including future CIA
Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in
espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James
Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I
not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany,
the distinguished scholar
Bernhard Dahm
who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that
probation would likely have become expulsion,
ending my academic career and destroying my
credibility.
During
those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden
Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign
Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he
was sending staff investigators to Laos to look
into the opium situation. Amid this controversy,
a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I
had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong
headman who had helped my research to an agency
airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it
clear that he had better deny what he had said
to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told
my photographer, that “they will send a
helicopter to arrest me, or... soldiers to shoot
me,” the Hmong headman did just that.
At a
personal level, I was discovering just how deep
the country’s intelligence agencies could reach,
even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life
untouched: my publisher, my university, my
sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my
friends.
Although I had won the first battle of this war
with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the
longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my
sources and denying any culpability, its
officials convinced Congress that it was
innocent of any direct complicity in the
Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings
into CIA assassinations by the famed
Church Committee
three years later, Congress accepted the
agency’s assurance that none of its operatives
had been directly involved in heroin trafficking
(an allegation I had never actually made). The
committee’s report did confirm the core of my
critique, however, finding that “the CIA is
particularly vulnerable to criticism” over
indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable
importance to the Agency,” including “people who
either were known to be, or were suspected of
being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But
the senators did not press the CIA for any
resolution or reform of what its own inspector
general had called the “particular dilemma”
posed by those alliances with drug lords -- the
key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the
traffic.
During
the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the
United States slowed and the number of addicts
declined, the heroin problem receded into the
inner cities and the media moved on to new
sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had
forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and
correct its way of waging covert wars. In less
than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical
alliances with drug traffickers to support its
far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.
During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic
swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own
Inspector General later
reported,
allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in
the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship
arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in
Nicaragua and protecting him from any
prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on
the other side of the planet in Afghanistan,
mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an
opium tax on
farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet
occupation and, with the
CIA’s tacit consent,
operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border
to supply international markets. By the
mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown
10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for
America’s addicts and as much as
90% in New York
City.
Almost by accident, I had launched my academic
career by doing something a bit different.
Embedded within that study of drug trafficking
was an analytical approach that would take me,
almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of
U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations,
including diplomatic alliances, CIA
interventions, developing military technology,
recourse to torture, and global surveillance.
Step by step, topic by topic, decade after
decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient
understanding of the parts to try to assemble
the whole. In writing my new book,
In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,
I drew on this research to assess the overall
character of U.S. global power and the forces
that might contribute to its perpetuation or
decline.
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In the process, I slowly came to see a striking
continuity and coherence in Washington’s
century-long rise to global dominion. CIA
torture techniques emerged at the start of the
Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic
robotic aerospace technology had its first trial
in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all,
Washington’s reliance on surveillance first
appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900
and soon became an essential though essentially
illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of
domestic dissent that continued through the
1970s.
Surveillance Today
In the
wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off
that historical method, and used it to explore
the origins and character of domestic
surveillance inside the United States.
After
occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S.
Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign
in a restive land, discovered the power of
systematic surveillance to crush the resistance
of the country’s political elite. Then, during
World War I, the Army’s “father of military
intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman,
who had learned his trade in the Philippines,
drew upon his years pacifying those islands to
mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000
citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance
program against suspected enemy spies among
German-Americans, including my own grandfather.
In studying Military Intelligence files at the
National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters
purloined from my grandfather’s army locker. In
fact, his mother had been writing him in her
native German about such subversive subjects as
knitting him socks for guard duty.
In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped
thousands of phones without warrants and kept
suspected subversives under close surveillance,
including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an
anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of
Scientific American magazine. During the
Vietnam War, the bureau
expanded its activities
with an amazing array of spiteful, often
illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the
antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of
the sort seen in my own FBI file.
Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance
programs was largely washed away after the
Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that
required judicial warrants for all government
wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001,
however, gave the National Security Agency the
leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a
previously unimaginable scale. Writing for
TomDispatch in 2009, I
observed that
coercive methods first tested in the Middle East
were being repatriated and might lay the
groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.”
Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques
forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq
had made a “digital surveillance state a
reality” and so were fundamentally changing the
character of American democracy.
Four
years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA
documents revealed that, after a century-long
gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance
state had finally arrived. In the age of the
Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions
of private lives worldwide, including American
ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into
the global grid of fiber-optic cables.
And
then, as if to remind me in the most personal
way possible of our new reality, four years ago,
I found myself the target yet again of an IRS
audit, of TSA body searches at national
airports, and -- as I discovered when the line
went dead -- a tap on my office telephone at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it
was my current writing on sensitive topics like
CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my
name popped up from some old database of
suspected subversives left over from the 1970s.
Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable
reminder that, if my own family’s experience
across three generations is in any way
representative, state surveillance has been an
integral part of American political life far
longer than we might imagine.
At the
cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide
web of surveillance has now become a weapon of
exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global
hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century.
Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later
what we do overseas always seems to come home to
haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted
me this last half-century. When we learn to
love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not
less, dangerous place.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch regular,
is the Harrington professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the
author of the now-classic book The Politics
of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade, which probed the conjuncture of
illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50
years, and the forthcoming
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise
and Decline of U.S. Global Power
(Dispatch Books, September) from which this
piece is adapted.
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Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Alfred W. McCoy