[Peace-discuss] FW: The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

[David Johnson]

Very interesting article about the documented history of the CIA’s
involvement in the drug trade and manipulation of the media.

 

 


https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/25/the-cia-and-me-how-i-learned-not-to-
love-big-brother/ 

	

 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/25/the-cia-and-me-how-i-learned-not-to
-love-big-brother/> The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

www.counterpunch.org

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,



 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/25/the-cia-and-me-how-i-learned-not-to
-love-big-brother/> The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother


by  <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/alfred-w-mccoy/> ALFRED W. MCCOY

*	 

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
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/> 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
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary
-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb
78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html> leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16
intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black
budget” of $52.6 billion, the
<http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013
_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf> 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
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leader
s-calls> any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-globa
l-datamining> billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions,
the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with
<https://static.dvidshub.net/media/pubs/pdf_23684.pdf> 69,000 elite
troops(Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition
to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-shifts-focus-to-
killing-targets/2011/08/30/gIQA7MZGvJ_story.html> operated 30 Predator and
Reaper drones
<https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graph
s/> 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
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/us/25colors.html> 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
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1608467732/counterpunchmaga>
Description: Image removed by sender.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
<http://prhome.defense.gov/Portals/52/Documents/RFM/Readiness/DDRP/docs/35%2
0Final%20Report.%20The%20Vietnam%20drug%20user%20returns.pdf> 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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Everingham> 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
<https://www.amazon.com/Crusade-Undercover-Against-Mafia-KGB/dp/0028810198/r
ef=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502898398&sr=1-1&keywords=Tom+Tripodi> 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,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556524838/counterpunchmaga> 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
<https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/156584596X/ref=sr
_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502898503&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=Frances+Ston
or+Saunders%2C+The+Cultural+Cold+War%3A+The+CIA+and+the+World+of+Arts+and+Le
tters+%28New+York%3A+New+Press%2C+1999%29> 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
<https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/156584596X/ref=sr
_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502898503&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=Frances+Ston
or+Saunders%2C+The+Cultural+Cold+War%3A+The+CIA+and+the+World+of+Arts+and+Le
tters+%28New+York%3A+New+Press%2C+1999%29> same history, “constituted the
greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities
of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “
<http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php> 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
<https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19760223&id=3dFQAAAAIBAJ&sji
d=gF8DAAAAIBAJ&pg=3895,4938048&hl=en> secret visits to the White House. When
she was found
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/44-years-later-a-washington-dc-death-
unresolved-93263961> 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
<https://www.amazon.com/Marys-Mosaic-Conspiracy-Kennedy-Pinchot/dp/151070892
8> 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
<https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Cold-War-World-Letters/dp/1565846648/ref=sr
_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502899216&sr=1-2&keywords=Saunders%2C+cultural+col
d+war> 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
<http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/22/archives/cia-aides-assail-asia-drug-charg
e-agency-fights-reports-that-it.html> 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
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/09/21/a-correspondence-with-the-cia/>
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
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/03/15/key-cia-figure-cord-
meyer-dies/fc90ef11-4137-4582-9f01-c7c13461e1bf/> 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
<http://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/03/archives/the-politics-of-heroin-in-southe
ast-asia-by-alfred-w-mccoy-with.html> 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
<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Dahm> 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
<https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_I.pdf> 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
<https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/cocaine2/contents.html> 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
<http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/18/world/afghan-rebel-s-victory-garden-opium
.html?pagewanted=all> opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the
Soviet occupation and, with the
<https://books.google.com/books?id=aTT94zkoWlcC&pg=PA132&lpg=PA132&dq=charle
s+cogan+drug+fallout&source=bl&ots=q28F60jMHu&sig=s0fP945lJk3TQ47Z16JZD25d3K
0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEqZasmNzVAhWi7YMKHSDpCkYQ6AEITzAL#v=onepage&q=charl
es%20cogan%20drug%20fallout&f=false> 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
<http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/30/world/pakistani-afghan-area-leads-as-supp
lier-of-heroin-to-us.html?pagewanted=all> 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,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1608467732/counterpunchmaga> 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.

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
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/05/23/berkeley-what-we-didnt-know/>
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  <http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175154/> 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.

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W.
McCoy’s new book,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1608467732/counterpunchmaga> In the
Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.
It originally appeared in  <http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176321/>
TomDispatch.

 

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