The U.S. tried to change other countries’ governments 72 times during the Cold War. The CIA has also a long history of helping to kill leaders around the world. During the Cold War, for instance, 26 of the United States’ covert operations successfully brought a U.S.-backed government to power; the remaining 40 failed. Washington sought to influence foreign elections by covertly funding, advising and spreading propaganda for its preferred candidates, often doing so beyond a single election cycle. Of these, the U.S.-backed parties won their elections 75 percent of the time.
Of course, it is impossible to say whether the U.S.-supported candidates would have won their elections without the covert assistance; many were leading in the polls before the U.S. intervention. However, as the CIA’s head of the Directorate of Intelligence, Ray S. Cline once put it, the key to a successful covert regime change is “supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time.”
Once in power, the new leaders find that acting at their foreign backers’ behest brings significant domestic opposition. They therefore tend to moderate their policies or turn against the foreign backer completely.
But after a nation’s government was toppled, it was less democratic and more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing. At the very least, citizens lost faith in their governments.
The United States has been involved in and assisted in the overthrow of foreign governments (more recently termed “regime change”) without the overt use of U.S. military force. Often, such operations are tasked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The supplying of billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan mujahideen militants was one of the CIA’s longest and most expensive covert operations
One day before the military coup of 12 September 1980 some 3,000 American troops of the RDF started a maneuver Anvil Express on Turkish soil.[91] At the end of 1981 a Turkish-American Defense Council (Turkish language: Türk-Amerikan Savunma Konseyi) was founded. Defense Minister Ümit Haluk and Richard Perle, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense international security policy of the new Reagan administration, and the deputy Chief of Staff Necdet Öztorun participated in its first meeting on 27 April 1982. U.S. support of the coup was acknowledged by the CIA’s Ankara station chief, Paul Henze. After the government was overthrown, Henze cabled Washington, saying, “our boys [in Ankara] did it.”[92][93] This has created the impression that the U.S. stood behind the coup. Henze denied this during a June 2003 interview on CNN Türk’s Manşet, but two days later Birand presented an interview with Henze recorded in 1997 in which he basically confirmed Mehmet Ali Birand’s story.[94][95] The U.S. State Department announced the coup during the night between 11 and 12 September: the military had phoned the U.S. embassy in Ankara to alert them of the coup an hour in advance.[96]
The United States played a significant role in pressuring President Ferdinand Marcos to step down and in the peaceful transition to democracy in the Philippines, notwithstanding decades of past American support for his regime.[
In 2002, Washington is claimed to have approved and supported a coup against the Venezuelan government.
US intelligence agency has since 1945 succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders,
But although the CIA attempts proved fruitless in the case of Castro, the US intelligence agency has since 1945 succeeded in deposing or killing a string of leaders elsewhere around the world – either directly or, more often, using sympathetic local military, locally hired criminals or pliant dissidents.
Fidel Castro died at age 90, at the end of a decade of dealing with illness.
Castro’s longevity may even seem like the final act of defiance against the United States, which become his adversary since he first took power in Cuba in the late 1950s. The botched US-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion meant to topple Castro could’ve ended in his death, but most other attempts involved more subterfuge and spycraft.
Fabian Escalante, a former head of the Cuban secret service who was charged with protecting Castro from would-be assassins, has claimed that Castro faced 634 attempts on his life, from the CIA, Cuban exiles, and others. Escalante’s count is quite possibly high (he counts 21 attempts under Bill Clinton, whose administration wouldn’t have had much motive after the end of the Cold War), but many American attempts have been verified by independent historians, government investigators, and journalists, especially as crucial documents have been declassified.
The poisoned cigar
Probably the most famous attempt on Castro’s life, the cigar plot, originated in 1960, toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, according to the Church Committee.
“A notation in the records of the Operations Division, CIA’s Office of Medical Services, indicates that on August 16, 1960, an official was given a box of Castro’s favorite cigars with instructions to treat them with lethal poison,” the Committee’s report recounts. “The cigars were contaminated with a botulinum toxin so potent that a person would die after putting one in his mouth. The official reports that the cigars were ready on October 7, 1960; TSD [Technical Services Division, the CIA’s science/gadgets arm] notes indicate that they were delivered to an unidentified person on February 13, 1961. The record does not disclose whether an attempt was made to pass the cigars to Castro.”
The Mafia ice cream plot
In mid-March, 1961, Mafia contacts of the CIA came the closest of anyone to carrying out an assassination, according to Tim Weiner’s history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes. “They gave poison pills and thousands of dollars to one of the CIA’s most prominent Cubans, Tony Varona,” Weiner writes. “Varona managed to hand off the vial of poison to a restaurant worker in Havana, who was to slip it into Castro’s ice cream cone. Cuban intelligence officers later found the vial in an icebox, frozen to the coils.” (Castro famously loved ice cream.)
Scuba diving was one of Castro’s favorite hobbies, so perhaps unsurprisingly the CIA looked into the possibility of building an exploding seashell to kill him on one of his expeditions.
In 1963, the Church Committee report recounts, “Desmond Fitzgerald, chief of the [anti-Castro CIA] Task Force, asked his assistant to determine whether an exotic seashell, rigged to explode, could be deposited in an area where Castro commonly went skin diving.”
But that’s not the only diving-related plan the CIA had: “A second plan involved having James Donovan (who was negotiating with Castro for the release of prisoners taken during the Bay of Pigs operation) present Castro with a contaminated diving suit.”
The paramour
Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s one-time lover, has said that she was recruited by CIA-funded anti-Castro groups in late 1959 and tasked with slipping him botulism-toxin pills. Her CIA contact, she claims, was E. Howard Hunt, a then-agent who would later go to jail for his role in the Watergate break-in.
As soon as her plane reached Havana, however, Lorenz was having doubts about killing Castro. Vanity Fair’s Ann Louise Bardach writes:
Even if she had had the will to go through with her mission, she had already botched it, having stashed the capsules in a jar of cold cream. When she looked for them, “they were all gunked up. I fished them out and flushed them down the bidet.” When Castro finally appeared, he was wary. “Why did you leave so suddenly?” was his first question, she says. “‘Are you running around with those counterrevolutionaries in Miami?’ I said yes. I tried to play it cool. The most nervous I have ever been was in that room, because I had agents on standby and I had to watch my timing. I had enough hours to stay with him, order a meal, kill him, and prevent him from making a speech that night, which was already pre-announced.
“He was very tired and wanted to sleep. … He was chewing a cigar, and he laid down on the bed and said, ‘Did you come here to kill me?’ Just like that. I was standing at the edge of the bed. I said, ‘Yes. I wanted to see you.’ And he said, ‘That’s good. That’s good.’”
Castro asked if she was working for the C.I.A. “I said, ‘Not really. I work for myself.’ Then he leaned over, pulled out his .45, and handed it to me. I flipped the chamber out and hit it back. He didn’t even flinch. And he said, ‘You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.’ And he kind of smiled and chewed on his cigar. … I felt deflated. He was so sure of me. He just grabbed me. We made love. I contemplated staying—to try talking to him later, after his speech, but it would be too late, because he rambles on for 8, 10, 12 hours. That was the hardest part. I wanted him to beg me to stay, but he got dressed and left. I just sat there by myself awhile. I left him a note. I told him that I would be back.”
The poison pen
In the early 1960s, the CIA made contact with a senior Cuban official known only as AM/LASH. “Each case officer testified that he did not ask AM/LASH to assassinate Castro,” the Church Committee report writes. “The record clearly reveals, however, that both officers were aware of his desire to take such action.”
AM/LASH asked for, and apparently received, a cache of high-powered rifles with scopes, which he intended to use for an assassination. But the CIA also offered him a ball-point pen rigged with a hypodermic needle “so fine that the victim would not notice its insertion.”
Character assassination through LSD-like drugs or debearding
These technically weren’t attempts to kill Castro so much as discredit him and undermine his rule. But they’re too strange to not include here.
“From March through August 1960, during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration, the CIA considered plans to undermine Castro’s charismatic appeal by sabotaging his speeches,” the Church Committee report writes. “According to the 1967 Report of the CIA’s Inspector General, an official in the Technical Services Division recalled discussing a scheme to spray Castro’s broadcasting studio with a chemical which produced effects similar to LSD, but the scheme was rejected by the chemical was unreliable.”
The TSD also experimented with dosing a box of cigars with a chemical producing temporary disorientation, which could lead to an embarrassing failed speech by Castro. The CIA inspector general also found a plan to dust Castro’s shoes with thallium salts, “a strong depilatory that would cause his beard to fall out.” It was supposed to be delivered to Castro when he was traveling abroad, and left his shoes outside his hotel room to be shined, but when Castro canceled the trip, the attempt was abandoned.
According to North Korea’s ministry of state security, the CIA has not abandoned its old ways. In a statement on Friday, it accused that the CIA and South Korea’s intelligence service of being behind an alleged recent an assassination attempt on its leader Kim Jong-un.
The attempt, according to the ministry, involved “the use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance” and the advantage of this was it “does not require access to the target (as) their lethal results will appear after six or 12 months”.
The person directly responsible was allegedly a North Korean working for the foreign intelligence agencies.
A CIA spokesman refused to comment on the allegations. Although then president Gerald Ford signed in 1976 an executive order stating: “No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire in, political assassination.”
In spite of this, the US never totally abandoned the strategy, simply changing the terminology from assassination to targeted killings, from aerial bombing of presidents to drone attacks on alleged terrorist leaders. Aerial bomb attempts on leaders included Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Earlier well-documented episodes include Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, judged by the US to be too close to close to Russia. In 1960, the CIA sent a scientist to kill him with a lethal virus, though this became unnecessary when he was removed from office in 1960 by other means. Other leaders targeted for assassination in the 1960s included the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, president Sukarno of Indonesia and president Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
In 1973, the CIA helped organise the overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, deemed to be too left wing: he died on the day of the coup. A leaked document obtained by WikiLeaks and released earlier this year showed the CIA in October 2014 looking at hacking into car control systems. That ability could potentially allow an agent to stage a car crash.
Achmad Sukarno of Indonesia In 1975 the US Senate Church committee, investigating the activities of the CIA, noted that it had “received some evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno.” An agent had been identified who it was believed might be recruited for the job.
As a leader of the nationalist non-aligned movement, Sukarno was seen by the US as a dangerous irritant. He was overthrown in a bloody coup in 1965 and died under house arrest five years later.
Patrice Lumumba of Congo President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of the country’s first prime minister in 1960. CIA chief Allen Dulles sent a CIA scientist to Congo with a lethal virus. But before the plan could be activated, Lumumba was deposed. He was later captured with CIA help and killed by rebel forces.
Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic The administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy, through the CIA, plotted the assassination of the dictator for several years before a group of dissidents shot him to death in 1961.
Salvador Allende of Chile President Nixon made it clear in 1970 that a CIA assassination of the new left-wing president would not be unwelcome. Allende was killed in a 1973 coup.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia He claimed that the CIA set up several plots to kill him in the early 1960s. He was deposed in a 1970 coup.
Muammar Gadafy of Libya. US jets tried to kill Gadafy in bombings which included a strike at his personal compound. It killed his infant adopted daughter.
Ever since the end of World War 2 and emergence of the US as a superpower, Washington has impudently indulged in state terrorism around the world, imposing sanctions and wars on independent states, and using its notorious spy network, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to plot coups and kill leaders around the world. Iran was the prime victim of American adventurism when in 1953 the CIA along with Britain staged the August 1953 coup to topple the elected government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq and restore the fugitive Pahlavi Shah to power.
In his article Ewen MacAskill may have left out many other instances of CIA mischief around the world, including the toppling of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953, but there are many other instances of US state terrorism through its intelligence agency, such as complicity with the illegal Zionist entity in the murders of Palestinian leaders.
Another case is the killing of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 because of his defence of many issues of the Third World including the chronic question of the Israeli usurped land of Palestine, which the US didn’t like.
Earlier on 6 September 1966 South Africa’s Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated in Parliament minutes before he was to announce a Canadian-style Confederation, which all the ethnic groups, especially the black African majority were in favour of, but which did not suit the major industrialists and the big western powers, including the US and Britain.
The CIA hand was also evident in the supposed plane crash in what is now Zambia in Africa in 1961 that killed UN Secretary-General Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjold, who was on his way to finalize ceasefire in Congo, which the US and major European powers did not like. According to evidence the aircraft was shot down, and no inquiry or investigation was ever carried out.
There is also copious evidence the CIA was behind the overthrow of the Australian government of Gough Whitlam in 1975. It is routinely ignored in Australia but a little investigation into the background of Governor John Kerr, who unceremoniously dismissed him, reveals numerous CIA ties.
Osama bin Laden After 9/11 President Bush issued an authority to kill Bin Laden and two dozen top aides if they could not be captured alive. Last November six suspected followers, including one of the principal strategists, Salim Sinan al-Harethi, were killed in their car by an unmanned CIA Predator plane in Yem
While President Ford publicly expressed outrage over the alleged C.I.A. assassination plots and called for thorough investigations, the views he expressed to Congress were seemingly different.
Subsequent presidents have affirmed President Ford’s ban on assassination.
In January 1978, President Carter expanded the ban to prohibit assassinations conducted by individuals working for the United States. “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” 44 In December 1981, President Reagan adopted the same language used by President Carter.45 President George Bush has seemingly affirmed Reagan’s prohibition by allowing Executive Order 12,333 to remain in effect. Congress has repeatedly failed to enact a ban on assassinations.. Despite the calls for heightened judicial scrutiny of executive orders,8 4 the Supreme Court has shown broad deference to the President by actively seeking congressional authorization. Besides the challenge posed by judicial scrutiny, executive orders
are vulnerable to two other direct attacks. First, Congress may invalidate or repeal executive orders when it believes that the executive branch incorrectly interpreted its statutes.’ 0 1 Second, the President may alter the order by issuing a new one.
Targeted killings have been conducted by the U.S. government for a decade, and drones have played a large part in the continuation and frequency of such activities. Armed Predators and Reapers have become the weapons of choice for killing individual terrorist leaders in foreign lands. The success of weapon-carrying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) created a demand within every branch of the military and the CIA for as many of them as their corporate inventor, California-based General Atomics, could produce. It also spawned a development and production frenzy within the niche community of manufacturers experimenting with other types of unmanned aircraft, and with the many larger defense contractors whose technology is used to move a drone’s surveillance pictures and targeting information around the world — from the battlefield to the sanctuary — in a matter of seconds.
The number of drones in the U.S. arsenal has increased from sixty to more than six thousand since 9/11. Funding for drone-related projects and activities was about $350 million in 2001, when the first CIA Predator was being flown from a trailer once used as a daycare center in the parking lot of the agency’s headquarters. In ten years, spending on drones has ballooned to over $4.1 billion, and there are over twenty different types of UAVs in the government’s inventory. Most of them are used for surveillance. Some of the experimental ones are as small as a dragonfly, and disguised as one, too.
Until July 2009, the military’s lethal drones targeted individuals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now most of the kills take place in Afghanistan; the CIA’s drones, on the other hand, killed people in countries where U.S. forces were not conducting military operations, including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
In Somalia, where there was no effective government, once the White House approved the overall mission, all that was needed were multiple CIA or JSOC confirmations of the target’s location — so the wrong person wouldn’t be killed. In Yemen, where the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh had agreed to allow the CIA and JSOC to operate, authority was delegated to commanders in the region. In Pakistan, however, in August 2010, after a number of civilians had died in drone attacks and the public there began to grow more vocal in its opposition to them, CIA director Leon Panetta announced that he would personally approve every drone strike.
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The duty to approve or reject putting an individual on the kill list was granted to this small group at the CIA by President Bush, and the responsibility was extended by President Obama. The agency’s approval process was orderly, vetted by legions of lawyers in the White House, the National Security Council, and the CIA, and then affirmed without much discussion or controversy by eight members of Congress, known as the Gang of Eight. They included the House and Senate Democratic and Republican leaders and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The CIA did not seek Congress’s approval for the program or to kill a particular individual on the list. But once the covert drone program began, the agency kept Congress informed of those who had been killed.
In Pakistan, where the United States used drones beginning in mid-2008 to go after al-Qaeda and Taliban members who had fled over the Afghan border, there was an elaborate Kabuki dance between Islamabad and Washington. The Pakistani government had given the CIA approval for such strikes as long as they were kept secret — which they never were because Pakistanis and local journalists sooner or later discovered the ruins, and the wrong people, civilians, were often killed. For internal political reasons, the Pakistani government usually publicly condemned the very strikes they had approved each time one became known. Sometimes there would be a temporary halt until the tensions subsided.
Obama’s unprecedented use of drones began shortly after he took office, when he ordered an increase in lethal drone strikes in Pakistan. In all, from July 2008 to June 1, 2011, the CIA launched 220 strikes inside Pakistan, according to a senior CIA official. The agency said that some 1,400 suspected militants were killed, along with about thirty civilians.
What is a regime change? It is the forcible replacement of one government with another, which may replace all or part of the state’s leadership system, administration or bureaucracy. This can be achieved by democratic processes, revolutions, coups, or reconstruction of a state after civil war. It can also be imposed by foreign actors through invasions, intervention or coercive diplomacy. Regime change often leads to new institutions, restores old ones, or the promotion of new ideas such as secular democracy.
In Pakistanh opposition waved a sigh of relief when the military spokesperson stated there was no mention of a foreign conspiracy, but acknowledged foreign intervention in internal politics. This has raised a crucial question on the difference between conspiracy and intervention. It is a known fact that foreign-imposed regime change is used by states as a foreign tool and superpowers have frequently intervened in states.
The United States has interfered directly and overtly in the replacement of several foreign governments. Many of the documents proving US intervention have now been declassified and are examined in Western universities, unveiling the extent of US interference.
For this reason, William Blum has labelled democracy as America’s deadliest export. Whether there was a conspiracy to oust Imran Khan through a regime change will be known in years to come, the history of the United States is replete with countless examples of how it has brought down nations for dominance and foreign policy influence.
References:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/inside-the-cias-kill-list/
The CIA & The Cult of Secrecy: David Shamus McCarthy Auburn, New York
M.A., The College of William and Mary, May 2003
A.B., Dartmouth College, June 1999
Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown
Inside the CIA’s “Kill List”
