Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2024

How the CIA eventually got Patrice Lumumba assassinated

Filed under: Africa, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The CIA decided early on that the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was being controlled by their Soviet opponents and needed to be killed:

Patrice Émery Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 27 December 1960.
Unknown photographer

I’m still making my way through David Talbot’s 2015 book The Devil’s Chessboard, a history that explores the life of CIA Director Allen Dulles and the sordid history of the agency.

There are too many grisly anecdotes to recount showing how the CIA was involved in unlawful and unethical acts all over the world, but one that sticks out was the book’s treatment of Patrice Lumumba, an African nationalist who served as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo before he was killed in 1961 — with a shove from the CIA.

Lumumba was a thorn in the side of the agency, and his left-leaning politics led CIA officials to believe he was a stooge for the USSR (he wasn’t, as the CIA later admitted). So it was determined that Lumumba had to go—one way or the other.

First, a coup was arranged to have the democratically-elected Lumumba, who was demanding full independence for the Congolese people, removed from office and placed under arrest. To this end, the CIA tapped a young military colonel named Joseph Mobutu, who was friendly with Belgian intelligence (the Congo had long been under Belgian colonial rule) and would go on to rule for decades until he was ousted himself in a 1997 rebellion.

Then the CIA began exploring options to eliminate the popular Lumumba. Being the CIA, a single method was not chosen. Instead, various methods were explored to take out the Congolese leader and multiple people were tapped, including a pair of hitmen the agency had hired from Europe’s criminal underworld.

Talbot explains how the CIA equipped one of these cutthroats with a tube of poisoned toothpaste. Why toothpaste? Because one Dr. Ewen Cameron, at the behest of the CIA, had analyzed Lumumba and noted his immaculate white teeth. This led him to suggest a simple way to eliminate the troublesome leader: poison his dental products.

“In the end, the CIA did not go through with the toothpaste plot,” writes Talbot, “apparently deciding that poisoning a popular leader while he was under UN protective custody in his own house would be too flagrant a deed—one that, if traced back to the agency, would lead to unpleasant international repercussions.”

Instead, days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the CIA arranged to have Lumumba chartered off on a plane to Katanga, a province that had broken from the Congo and was ruled by factions hostile to Lumumba.

This all but sealed Lumumba’s fate, CIA officials later testified.

“I think there was a general assumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that his goose was cooked,” CIA station chief James Devlin, who helped orchestrate Lumumba’s fall, quipped to the Church Committee years later.

Devlin was right. During his flight to Katanga, Lumumba was beaten to a pulp. Then he was driven by jeep to a farm and beaten by members of rival political factions. The men, Talbot makes clear, had clear ties to US and Belgian intelligence.

“Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” said CIA agent John Stockwell, who was sent to the Congo in the aftermath of the assassination.

The Soviets managed a propaganda win out of the CIA’s clumsy wet work, renaming the Peoples’ Friendship University of the USSR (primarily used for training non-Soviet citizens from “fraternal socialist” and “unaligned” nations in Marxist-Leninist views) to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University.

May 22, 2024

The new queen of the AWFLs

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the rise of new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher:

Banner for Christopher Rufo’s article on Katherine Maher at City Journal.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/katherine-mahers-color-revolution

The polite world was fascinated last month when long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner confessed to the Stalinist suicide pact the public broadcaster, like all public broadcasters, seems to be on. Formerly it was a place of differing views, he claimed, but now it has sold as truth some genuine falsehoods like, for instance, the Russia hoax, after which it covered up the Hunter Biden laptop. And let’s not forget our censor-like behaviour regarding Covid and the vaccine. NPR bleated that they were still diverse in political opinion, but researchers found that all 87 reporters at NPR were Democrats. Berliner was immediately put on leave and a few days later resigned, no doubt under pressure.

Even more interesting was the reveal of the genesis of NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, a 41-year-old with a distinctly odd CV. Maher had put in stints at a CIA cutout, the National Democratic Institute, and trotted onto the World Bank, UNICEF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Digital Public Library of America, and finally the famous disinfo site Wikipedia. That same week, Tunisia accused her of working for the CIA during the so-called Arab Spring. And, of course, she is a WEF young global leader.

She was marched out for a talk at the Carnegie Endowment where she was prayerfully interviewed and spouted mediatized language so anodyne, so meaningless, yet so filled with nods to her base the AWFULS (affluent white female urban liberals) one was amazed that she was able to get away with it. There was no acknowledgement that the criticism by this award-winning reporter/editor/producer, who had spent his life at NPR had any merit whatsoever, and in fact that he was wrong on every count. That this was a flagrant lie didn’t even ruffle her artfully disarranged short blonde hair.

Christopher Rufo did an intensive investigation of her career in City Journal. It is an instructive read and illustrative of a lot of peculiar yet stellar careers of American women. Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value. I strongly suggest reading Rufo’s piece linked here. It’s a riot of spooky confluences.

Intelligence has been embedded in media forever and a day. During my time at Time Magazine in London, the bureau chief, deputy bureau chief and no doubt the “war and diplomacy” correspondent all filed to Langley and each of them cruised social London ceaselessly for information. Tucker Carlson asserted on his interview with Aaron Rogers this week that intelligence operatives were laced through DC media and in fact, Mr. Watergate, Bob Woodward himself, had been naval intelligence a scant year before he cropped up at the Washington Post as “an intrepid fighter for the truth and freedom no matter where it led”. Watergate, of course, was yet another operation to bring down another inconvenient President; at this juncture, unless you are being puppeted by the CIA, you don’t get to stay in power. Refuse and bang bang or end up in court on insultingly stupid charges. As Carlson pointed out, all congressmen and senators are terrified by the security state, even and especially the ones on the intelligence committee who are supposed to be controlling them. They can install child porn on your laptop and you don’t even know it’s there until you are raided, said Carlson. The security state is that unethical, that power mad.

Now, it’s global. And feminine. Where is Norman Mailer when you need him?

April 11, 2024

The CIA would “brief the press on matters of national importance … when ‘we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue'”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore outlines the fascinating revelations from 1983 about how the CIA directly manipulated American journalists to propagandize certain issues in the way the Agency desired:

One of Snepp’s many jobs at the Agency was to brief the press on matters of national importance. Or in Snepp’s words, when “we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue”.

Snepp made this statement in a 1983 interview (see above) that I’d encourage readers to watch. In the video, the former CIA analyst discusses how the CIA manipulates journalists with lies and half-truths in pursuit of its own agendas.

    For instance, if we wanted to get across to the American public that the North Vietnamese were building up there force structure in South Vietnam, I would go to a journalist and advise him that in the past 6 month X number of North Vietnamese forces had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail system through southern Laos. There is no way a journalist can check that information, so either he goes with that information or he doesn’t. Usually the journalist goes with it, because it looks like some kind of exclusive.

What Snepp was describing was one of the most simple tactics the CIA has used for decades to control information. He said the success rate of planting these stories in the media was 70-80 percent.

“The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon,” Snepp said.

Snepp even offered the names of the journalists he successfully targeted: Bud Merrick of US News and World Report; Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker; Malcom Brown of the New York Times; and others.

Snepp worked his way into these journalists’ trust exactly as one would expect.

“I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, to slowly but surely gain their confidence,” Snepp said.

All of this sounds sleazy, but it gets worse.

February 19, 2024

The CIA’s covert operations … as inspired by Vladimir Lenin

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Along with most people who’ve been paying attention to history since the start of the Cold War, I hold the CIA in dubious regard. They seem to have been involved in so many underhanded escapades in countries around the world — certainly by reputation, if not in reality — that they stand almost in direct opposition to how most Americans liked to think of their country. Jon Miltimore thinks that among their inspirations was the founder of the Soviet Union himself:

I bring all of this up because I recently came across an old document of some significance that I’d never heard of before titled, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare“.

It was authored by George Kennan, the State Department Policy Planning Director who’d go on to be a successful US diplomat, for the National Security Council (which governed the CIA), and the document explained how the US government had to mobilize national resources “for covert political warfare” to combat the Soviet Union.

Kennan was not, in my opinion, a bad man. He had good instincts and sound motives, at least compared to others in the US intelligence apparatus. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and later was one of the first diplomatic leaders to warn against the US policy of expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep, something he predicted would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”.

That said, it’s clear that Kennan was not appalled by the Soviet Union’s use of covert political warfare. He was impressed by it.

“Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history,” Kennan wrote in the document.

    We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations — the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war].


The document is fascinating because it appears to mark the genesis of the US government’s first formal steps into the world of political warfare — a well-documented history that includes toppling governments, assassinating world leaders, tipping elections, and torturing enemies.

All of these efforts, of course, initially targeted external parties and countries to serve “the national interest”.

This is no longer the case. The CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies no longer restrict their covert political warfare to foreign states, and I’m not talking about just Operation Mockingbird and other domestic propaganda efforts.

The CIA is clearly putting its thumb on the scales of US elections in ways that should terrify all Americans.

October 14, 2023

Why Did the Vietnam War Break Out?

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 10 Oct 2023

In 1965, US troops officially landed in Vietnam, but American involvement in the ongoing conflict between the Communist North and the anti-Communist South had started more than a decade earlier. So, why did the US-Vietnam War break out in the first place?
(more…)

August 27, 2023

6 Strange Facts About the Cold War

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, History, Russia, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Decades
Published 27 Jul 2022

Welcome to our history channel, run by those with a real passion for history & that’s about it. In today’s video, we will be exploring 6 odd Cold War facts.
(more…)

August 26, 2023

OSS “Bigot” 1911 dart-firing pistol

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Apr 2012

The “Bigot” was a modification of an M1911 .45 caliber pistol developed by the Office of Strategic Services during WW2. The OSS was a clandestine operations service, the predecessor of the CIA. The Bigot was intended as a way for commandos to quietly eliminate sentries — although we are not sure what advantage it might have had over a silenced pistol. Questionable utility doesn’t prevent it from being a pretty interesting piece of equipment, though, and we had the opportunity to take a look at one up close recently.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com/oss-b… ‎

November 5, 2022

Psyops in theory and practice

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theophilus Chilton on the development of psyops and some examples of their use in US civilian contexts in recent years:

I trust that most readers are familiar with the concept of a “psyop”, a psychological operation designed to sway its targets in certain desired directions. Many of the mechanics of psyops were pioneered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies during the Cold War but have now been turned against civilian populations in the USA and elsewhere in an effort by the Regime to maintain control and minimise opposition to its various agendas. However, I’d like to make the point that psyops qualitatively differ from standard, run-of-the-mill propaganda such as governments have used for millennia.

The difference is primarily that of the time preferences involved. Whether it’s designed to whip up a population against an enemy or to try to obfuscate the truth about some particular event that has occurred, propaganda tends to operate on a shorter timescale and with more limited and simple policy goals in mind. It’s not surprising that modern propaganda techniques share a lot in common with commercial advertising designed to induce an “impulse buy” response in potential customers. Propaganda generally operates the same way — create a monodirectional response to a particular stimulus.

Psyops, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex and generally involve the building of a narrative memeplex over the course of months, years, or even decades. Psyops are, of course, also fake but theirs is a fakeness that builds upon constant, repetitious narrative-building that lays out a foundational lens through which any individual incident or act can be systematically interpreted, adding them to the overall saga being told.

With conventional propaganda, the aim is to communicate Regime diktat to the average citizen. However, it does not necessarily expect the recipients to believe the propaganda, but merely comply with the goals. The Powers That Be in such cases don’t care why Havel’s greengrocer puts the sign up in his window, but merely that he does so. The primary purpose of psyops, on the other hand, is to ensure compliance by convincing the target to self-comply, rather than it having to be done by outside force or persuasion. It’s always touch and go when you’re making someone outwardly comply but inwardly they’re dissident. When the mark can be convinced to willingly self-police, this makes the government’s job easier since they don’t have to worry about this closet dissidence. The true believer is the best believer.

In essence, propaganda aims for immediate reactive persuasion while psyops seek long-term groundlaying that gives more all-inclusive means of maintaining overarching narrative control.

Now, a lot of people out there like to think they’re immune to psyops because “hurr durr I don’t beleeb da media!!” But they’re not. Indeed, a lot of these boomercon types are just as susceptible to psyops as anyone else when the right buttons are pushed. This is because they’ve been primed for it by the systematic, society-wide preparation of the psychological battle space without their ever realising it. In many cases, the foundations for a psyop are so culturally systematic that people don’t even realise what is happening.

For example, there are a ton of people out there who would pride themselves on being independent thinkers who nevertheless believed everything that was peddled during the covid and vaccine psyops. The reason for this is because they want to think of themselves as smart, knowledgeable about science, etc. Smart People believe the Right Things, after all. That, in turn, is the result of decades of psyops that have ensconced “science” as the arbiter of morality and truth in post-Christian America. So even when the science is fake or wrong, it is still accorded a moral authority that it does not deserve.

May 3, 2022

Is all of social media just a “giant domestic surveillance operation”?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian posted this last week, but I’m only just getting caught up now:

I was wrong about Musk buying Twitter. Lot of that going around — the Z Man got a whole podcast on “avoiding error” from his misread of the situation. It’s well worth a listen. I, too, had a “hot take” on Musk’s offer — not that it was particularly hot, as most folks on this side were saying it, but I too thought it was a stunt. After all, Musk, like Bezos and all the other “new commerce” billionaires, don’t exist without massive government support. I figured his “offer” was stoyak — he’s got something in the works in the Imperial Capital and needed to play hardball with somebody.

But I was also working off my longstanding assumption that Twitter, Faceborg, and all the rest are essentially CIA / NSA fronts. When I first heard about Facebook, my first thought was “Wait, don’t we already have Friendster? What does this bring to the table?” My second thought was the first one I’d had about Friendster: “That’s clever, I guess, but how on earth is this going to make money? Even if they saturate it with ads, to the point where it’s unusable — which will happen in about two weeks — they can’t monetize your personal data any farther. People are pretty set in their habits — once the algorithm figures out you’re the kind of guy who likes anime and New Wave music, any further data is useless.”

Being a much more naive, trusting sort back then, I figured it was just stupidity. You know, Pets.com level stupidity. The VC boys were trying to get another dotcom bubble inflated, because if the first one proved anything, it’s that people are dumb and will keep falling for the same obvious scam over and over. I could hear them in the board rooms: “This time, instead of sticking ‘cyber’ in front of everything, we’ll call it ‘Web 2.0.’ Cha-ching!”

Obviously that didn’t happen. So I went with the common explanation that was floating around in those days, that “social media” sites made their money by selling your data to advertisers. But that doesn’t pass the smell test either. For one thing, as I said above, your habits don’t change very much. For another, as anyone who has any experience with them knows, those algorithms really suck. The other day, for instance, I was listening to some old music one of the streaming music sites. And I mean really old. Nothing I’d played the whole morning had been composed after the 17th century, but the service’s algorithm was convinced that what I’d really like to listen to next was some rapper.

Indeed, the whole point of the ads on Pandora, Spotify, whatever seems to be: To annoy you to the point where you pay for their premium service. Pandora, for instance, either really really really believes I want a Surface Pro 8 and some Taco Bell, or they’re just playing those ads every two songs to annoy me into buying the premium service (which is every ad that isn’t Surface Pro or Taco Bell). Which is just bizarre, because I haven’t had Taco Bell since college — which was 30 years ago, and I paid cash — and this essay right here is the first time I have ever even typed the words “Surface Pro 8”, much less looked at the product.

I really wouldn’t be surprised that the “algorithm” is reading itself. Hey, this guy sure has seen a lot of ads for Taco Bell and Surface Pro! He must really want some!

But the algorithm for companies whose entire business model is e-commerce is no better. Amazon seems to have gone to a “push” model — they must be selling their suppliers on the idea that they can push you stuff, which is why they always pimp the same four or five items in the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendations, no matter what you’re searching for. And these again are laughably wrong — the only things I get off Amazon are used history and philosophy books, and stuff for my dog. Based on this, they have concluded that what I’m really looking for are chick lit and beach gear.

Given all that, I came to the conclusion that “social media” (and Amazon too, probably) really only have one customer, who really does have a use for your data, and that customer’s initials are CIA. It’s a giant domestic surveillance operation.

And why wouldn’t it be? The Regime has had a legitimacy problem for a long time, and a “feedback loop” problem for longer than that. Even if we assume no ulterior motives whatsoever — fat chance, but let’s stipulate — the fact remains that public opinion polling, however you want to define it, has a similar problem as psychological studies. Since the vast majority of study participants are college undergrads, what you get is WEIRD — that’s Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, and also in a very narrow age range. Psych studies that purport to be universal are, at their very best, snapshots inside the head of the BCG.

If you haven’t encountered the Basic College Girl, he provided a thumbnail sketch here.

December 11, 2021

Suppressed OSS M3 Grease Gun and Bushmaster Booby Trap Trigger

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 May 2017

Today, we have a chance to take a look at a suppressed M3 “Grease Gun”, as purchased and issued by the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS; predecessor to the CIA). Thanks to its readily removable barrel, the M3 (and M3A1) submachine gun was an easy gun to adapt to use with a suppressor (or as it was called at the time, a silencer). During World War 2, such a unit was developed for clandestine use by OSS and British SOE agents in occupied Europe, and they would see use for many decades in all manner of conflicts.

The suppressor itself is quite different than modern designs, being a two-part device using tight wire mesh instead of baffles. The barrel itself is heavily perforated, and extends only through the large diameter section of the suppressor. Around it is wrapped a large roll of wire mesh, which acts as an expansion chamber to slow down the exit of gas from the muzzle. The smaller front section of the unit is filled with small discs of the same wire mesh, similar to wipes but made of mesh.

Allegedly, the suppressor was effective enough to reduce the noise of the gunshots below the level of the action cycling, which is all that one can reasonable want from a suppressor. This particular example has an excellent provenance, having been provided by OSS to a European resistance fighter for a specific mission right at the end of WW2.

In addition, we also have a piece of the OSS sneaky tricks catalog to see. Specifically, a “Bushmaster” remote trigger mechanism to allow the M3 (silenced or otherwise) to be made into an autonomous booby trap in conjunction with a time delay, tripwire, or other triggering device.

Many thanks to the anonymous collector who let me take a look at this piece and bring you a video on it!

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November 24, 2021

The Marshall Plan

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cold War
Published 6 Jul 2019

Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on the Marshall Plan and how the USA was able to help in the rebuild of the post-War World and gained valuable allies while doing it

Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar

November 21, 2019

“Gosh I miss the good old days” … when the CIA and the FBI were the bad guys, according to all good progressives

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Severian on the amazing change in popularity of the bad old US cloak-and-dagger set among Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Progressives, and other well-intentioned folks:

For anyone who grew up during the Cold War, reading the news these days is like your first time getting stoned. Everything’s fine, nothing’s happening, and then … what the hell? Wait wait wait … the cloak-and-dagger goons are the good guys now?

For the benefit of younger readers: Back when the USSR was a going concern, the Left spent a great deal of time excusing Commies’ behavior Scooby Doo-style — they would’ve gotten away with it, were it not for those meddling kids! The Reds’ hearts were in the right place, of course, but gosh darn it, the CIA insisted on interfering with spontaneous sovereign people’s movements, and that’s why the Marxist guerrillas invariably had to massacre all those peasants. It was pretty much an entrance exam for NGOs back in the days — if you couldn’t find a way to blame the excesses of, say, Kim Il Sung’s torturers on Ronald Reagan, you couldn’t get a job at Amnesty International.

Naturally, then, all correct-thinking people hated the CIA and their domestic Mini-Me, the FBI. Those two organizations used to show up at college job fairs, and a good way to meet easy girls was to drop in on the inevitable protests. Slap on a Che t-shirt (available at the campus bookstore, natch), do a Ricardo Montalban impression while saying “Sandinista,” and let the magic happen. Don’t forget to stop by the Emma Goldman clinic for some free rubbers on your way back to her dorm room!

Gosh I miss the good old days, but whatever, the point is, watching groovy antiques like Nancy, Bernie, and Hillary telling me to trust the black helicopter guys is like watching Bruce Jenner in drag — you’re embarrassed for him, and scared of his enablers. Listening to them screech about Russia like the most paranoid Reaganaut is so weird, I can’t even come up with an analogy. Yo, guys, THIS was your idea, wasn’t it? Just like it was you guys calling the FBI the American Gestapo all those years? Hello? COINTELPRO? Remember that? Hello? Is this thing even on?

September 23, 2019

QotD: Harry Truman’s second thoughts about the CIA

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it got out of hand. The fella … the one that was in the White House after me never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. Why, they’ve got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I’ve told you, one Pentagon is one too many.

Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.

That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it’s got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there’s got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don’t care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.

And when you can’t do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we’re on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn’t have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn’t prove that, I don’t know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA.

Harry S. Truman, quoted by Jeff Deist, “Truman Was Right About the CIA”, Mises Wire, 2017-03-08.

March 28, 2017

A long history of US involvement in “regime change”

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith goes over just the “high points” of American interference in the domestic affairs of other nations:

It makes me sick to keep hearing the mostly Democratic assertion that Donald J. Trump is a candidate foisted on us poor, gullible Americans by the Russian government. This is largely a matter of psychological projection by the left, and of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Previous American governments (mostly Democratic) have a long, shameful history of removing foreign leaders they dislike, for one reason or another, and replacing them with more agreeable figures.

It’s hard to know quite where to begin, and absolutely impossible to be exhaustive. General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881- 1940), twice winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, tells a long, bloody tale in his little book War Is A Racket, in which he demonstrates that the United States Marines were sent on gunboats to various places across our sad, scarred, and war-weary planet — notably to South and Central America — to protect the interests (with rifles and bayonets, if necessary) of corporations like the United Fruit Company. Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatamala have all suffered from this kind of interference. That’s why they’re called “banana republics”.

In 1953, the people of Iran had thrown the Shah off the throne and replaced him with an elected official by the name of Mosaddegh. British and American “intelligence” were alarmed. If the guy was a communist (he was not) he might cut off the supply of oil on which they had become dependent to enforce their will on the world, So they deposed him and set the Shah back on the throne, setting the scene for today’s unholy (and extremely dangerous) mess.

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina was the dictator of the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti) for many decades. He was thoroughly brutal and corrupt, but a time came when his government began to break up, threatening the “stability” of the Caribbean region. In 1961. he was assassinated spectacularly by riflemen in ambush. (Oddly, I recall his car body being blown off the frame by a bazooka.) Wikipedia teeters between blaming his dozens of political rivals and the CIA. At the time it happened, everybody I knew (I was growing up in the military — counter insurgency branch) took the latter theory for granted.

And in 1963, in the middle of the War in Vietnam, when a dictator named Diem failed to do America’s bidding, the kindly, humane, genteel, and oh-so-Democratic President John F. Kennedy had him assassinated and replaced.

May 17, 2016

Charles Stross updates a classic WW2 field guide – a dot-com sabotage manual

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Many people have noted that the sabotage techniques listed in a Second World War espionage manual seem to have somehow migrated into a lot of management texts in the last few decades. Here he imagines what an updated version of the manual might look like:

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the post-war CIA — was concerned with sabotage directed against enemies of the US military. Among their ephemera, declassified and published today by the CIA, is a fascinating document called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (PDF). It’s not just about blowing things up; a lot of its tips are concerned with how sympathizers with the allied cause can impair enemy material production and morale […]

So it occurred to me a week or two ago to ask (on twitter) the question, “what would a modern-day version of this manual look like if it was intended to sabotage a rival dot-com or high tech startup company”? And the obvious answer is “send your best bad managers over to join in admin roles and run their hapless enemy into the ground”. But what actual policies should they impose for best effect?

  1. Obviously, engineers and software developers (who require deep focus time) need to be kept in touch with the beating heart of the enterprise. So open-plan offices are mandatory for all.
  2. Teams are better than individuals and everyone has to be aware of the valuable contributions of employees in other roles. So let’s team every programmer with a sales person — preferably working the phones at the same desk — and stack-rank them on the basis of each pair’s combined quarterly contribution to the corporate bottom line.
  3. It is the job of Human Resources to ensure that nobody rocks the boat. Anyone attempting to blow whistles or complain of harassment is a boat-rocker. You know what needs to be done.
  4. Senior managers should all be “A” Players (per Jack Welch’s vitality model — see “stack ranking” above) so we should promote managers who are energetic, inspirational, and charismatic risk-takers.
  5. The company must have a strong sense of intense focus. So we must have a clean desk policy — any personal possessions left on the desk or cubicle walls at the end of the day go in the trash. In fact, we can go a step further and institute hot desking — we will establish an average developer’s workstation requirements and provide it for everyone at every desk.

This would explain some of the management policies at a few places I’ve worked at over the years…including the software company where I first met Charlie.

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