The CIA: A history of torture

On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. The terrorist organisation responsible for this attack was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).(1)

An overwhelming case can be made that the CIA has been the most dangerous terrorist organisation at work in the world since the Second World War. It has over-thrown governments, sponsored wars, carried out assassinations and terrorist attacks, organised and financed death squads, kidnapped and tortured, trafficked in drugs and weapons, bribed and blackmailed, and even worked with the Mafia.(2) Despite this it remains a ‘respectable’ organisation, listened to by Western governments, maintaining stations throughout the world (including in London) and is treated by the mainstream media as a credible intelligence-gathering organisation. In Britain, its agents were not, as one might expect from a hard-line, law and order Home Secretary such as John Reid, arrested and expelled from the country, but are instead welcome guests, mixing freely with both New Labour and Conservative politicians as well as maintaining an intimate relationship with Britain’s own security services.(3)

The CIA’s role in the overthrow of governments is well-known, beginning with the 1953 coup in Iran and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Since then the organisation has been involved in coups in South Vietnam in 1963, in Brazil in 1964, in Indonesia in 1965, in Greece in 1967, in Chile in 1973 (‘the other 9/11’) and elsewhere. All of these involved the establishment of right-wing dictatorships that kept themselves in power by torture and execution, banned trade unions and the Left, and redistributed wealth on a massive scale to the rich. How dangerous the Agency is and the fact that American politicians are aware of what it is capable of is shown by one telling episode. When President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, his brother, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, ‘asked the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McCone, point-blank, if the CIA had been responsible for the murder.’ The fact that he expected a straight answer shows how distraught he was.(4)

One point worth considering here is why it is that the United States maintains such a large covert capability and indeed makes such regular use of it. This has not been a feature of earlier empires is a response to the informal nature of the American empire. Whereas the European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been in the main a matter of ‘direct rule’ with colonial civil services, police forces and armies controlling and administering the occupied territories, the American empire has primarily been an affair of client governments, formally independent, but in relationships of varying degrees of dependency and subordination. Client governments have been required to maintain a profitable environment for American business and to play their part in sustaining American global domination. Rather than invade, occupy and rule directly those countries that do not fulfil their obligations, the CIA has been used to help put in power more amenable governments. This is not an exceptional or an occasional event, but a matter of routine, the way things were done. Since its establishment in 1947, the CIA has played a vital part in the maintenance of the American Empire.

Torture

Of particular interest today is the CIA’s involvement in torture. While this is often portrayed as a post 9/11 development, the Agency’s involvement in torture dates back to its foundation. Given this history, the CIA’s involvement in torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the ‘war on terror’ more generally should not come as a surprise to anyone. It would have been astonishing were it not involved in torture.

In his recent book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy argues that from 1950 into the 1960s the CIA managed to perfect ‘psychological torture……a major scientific turning-point, albeit unnoticed and unheralded in the world beyond its safe houses.’ He writes of

a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness .… a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock and sensory deprivation, this work then produced a new approach to torture that was psychological, not physical, best described as “no-touch torture”. The Agency’s dicovery was a counter-intuitive break-through – indeed, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.’

There are, however, some problems with this notion of a revolution in the science of pain. First McCoy tends to conflate the CIA’s mind control programme with the development of new methods of interrogation. The mind control programme failed and, at best, the sensory deprivation methods of interrogation were a ‘spin-off’ from it. Second, the new methods have not supplanted old-fashioned torture, especially when it is being outsourced to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The old and new methods continue to be used alongside each other. And third, the sensory deprivation methods he describes were used by the British in the 1960s and beyond, most notoriously in Northern Ireland in August 1971.(6)

The CIA’s mind control programme was part of the 1950s’ concern with brainwashing that was fuelled by the Korean War. The best known component of the programme is MKUltra, but this was surrounded by extraordinary secrecy even for the CIA. An Agency document warned that ‘precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.’ This was an understatement. When the Senate’s Church Committee, investigating the CIA, attempted to enquire into MKUltra, it was told that all the documentation had been destroyed.(7)

MKUltra received $25 million in CIA funding up until 1963, during which time it ‘supervised 149 projects and 33 more subprojects all focused in diverse ways on the control of human consciousness.’ Human experiments were conducted by ‘185 nongovernmental researchers at eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals.’ Initially the focus of research was on LSD with the Agency adopting testing methods marked by cruelty, illegality and, with surprising frequency, failure. Seeking unwitting subjects, the CIA injected not only North Korean prisoners, but also spiked drinks at a New York City party house, paid prostitutes to slip LSD to their customers for Agency concerns at a San Francisco safe house, pumped hallucinogens into children at summer camp, attempted behaviour modification on inmates at California’s Vacaville prison and collected powerful toxins from Amazon tribes. Terminal experiments were carried out on Communist defectors who were suspected of being double agents.

Mind control proved a fantasy, but academic research on sensory deprivation opened the possibility of a revolution in methods of torture. The work of Donald Hebbs and Ewen Cameron was particularly important. Cameron carried out CIA-financed experiments on his unsuspecting mentally ill patients at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada. He developed what he called ‘psychic driving’ a three stage programme for assaulting the human mind: ‘first, drug-induced coma for up to eighty-six days; next electroshock treatment three times daily for thirty days; and finally a football helmet clamped to the head for up to twenty-one days with a looped tape repeating up to half a million times, messages like “my mother hates me”.’ Where Hebbs had only kept his subjects in total sensory deprivation for six days maximum (and these were volunteers), Cameron kept one patient in total sensory deprivation for thirty-five days. Another recipient of CIA funds, according to Alfred McCoy, was Stanley Milgram, whose research showed a grateful Agency ‘that almost any individual is capable of torture.’ His laboratory results were later confirmed by ‘the CIA’s field experience.’

Phoenix

The Vietnam War provided an opportunity for ‘research’ without any ethical restraints under the cover of the Phoenix Program. This was an attempt at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure throughout South Vietnam. It involved the widespread use of murder squads, eliminating Communist suspects and their families and the establishment of an extensive network of some 300 interrogation centres where torture was routine. Richard Helms, CIA Director at the time, described ‘the Phoenix blueprint’ as ‘a textbook plan for a counter-insurgency program.’(9) The blueprint has been used in every US counterinsurgency since Vietnam up to and including Iraq. The Agency itself admitted that over 20,000 Vietcong suspects were killed as part of the Program, but this is an understatement. The South Vietnamese government gave a figure of over 40,000.

One particular operation gives the flavour of the whole enterprise: on 25 February 1969 a US Navy SEAL team of seven men, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Kerrey, went into the village of Thanh Phong to ‘arrest’ a Vietcong suspect. They did not find their suspect, but nevertheless killed everyone they met. By the time the operation was over there were twenty-seven villagers dead, none of whom had offered any resistance to the Americans. The slaughtered villagers were recorded as enemy dead and Kerrey received the Silver Star for the massacre. He went on to become governor of Nebraska, a US senator and a university president in New York.(10)There were hundreds of such raids and everyone killed was claimed as Vietcong. The large number of women killed were listed as Vietcong nurses which, as Thomas Powers has sarcastically observed, showed the Vietcong to be a unique army, having ‘more nurses than soldiers’.(11) Phoenix operatives at one time had quotas for the number of ‘neutralizations’ they were to achieve (fifty a month);(12) and it is freely admitted that the Program descended into an occasion for blackmail, extortion and the settling of grudges. Wholly innocent people were fingered as Communists for refusing to pay protection or for crossing the authorities. In Da Nang, the holder of the Coca Cola franchise eliminated the opposition by having the Pepsi man placed on ‘the Phoenix hit list’.(13)The Program, in the words of one historian, degenerated into ‘a counterproductive bloodbath.’

Torture was a routine feature of the Phoenix Program. K. Barton Osborn told a House of Representatives Subcommittee that during his time in Vietnam he had seen a prisoner killed by means of a six inch dowel hammered into his ear and a woman prisoner starved to death. He could not recall a single prisoner surviving interrogation.(15) It was in these bloody circumstances that the Agency decided to conduct some controlled experiments in torture, presumably assuming that with so much going on no-one would notice. In mid-1966 two CIA psychiatrists flew into the country and carried out electroshock experiments on prisoners at the Bien Hoa mental hospital outside Saigon. The prisoners were tortured to death. Even more horrific, in July 1968 another CIA team, accompanied by a neurosurgeon, flew in to carry out experiments implanting electrodes in the brains of three prisoners in an attempt to control their behaviour. The experiments failed and the victims were killed and their bodies destroyed.(16)

More sophisticated was the attempt, chronicled by Frank Snepp, to break a North Vietnamese prisoner, Nguyen Van Tai, one of the organisers of the Tet attack on the US Embassy in Saigon. As Snepp recalled, ‘he had not been treated kindly’ when first captured, but was now placed in solitary confinement in a totally white cell where he was kept hungry, cold and disorientated for four years. In all this time, Tai never even ‘admitted who he was’. With the collapse of South Vietnam in April 1975 it was decided to dispose of Tai by placing him on a plane and throwing him out over the South China Sea. Most accounts actually record this as having taken place, but in all the confusion of the final US debacle, Tai survived to later write his own memoirs.(17)Snepp was to later confess to having been ‘a collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programs, in the most atrocious excesses of the US government.’

One last point here is that even the CIA was not exempt from opposition to the war. The anti-war movement in the United States, a movement arguably only ever surpassed by the anti-war movement in Tsarist Russia in 1917, even had sympathisers in the Agency. After the American invasion of Cambodia in April-May 1970, ‘a few hundred CIA employees……signed a petition objecting to American policies in Indochina.’

Condor

Defeat in Vietnam did not put an end to the Agency’s terrorist activities. Instead, their centre of gravity shifted to South America. The CIA had already been involved in covert attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba(20) and the 1970s saw the CIA sponsoring Operation Condor, a terrorist network of torturers and assassins operating in South America and beyond that was jointly organized by the secret police forces of the Argentinean, Brazilian, Bolivian, Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Chilean dictatorships. Pinochet’s regime was the prime instigator. Refugees from all those regimes were hunted down, kidnapped, tortured and killed. Indeed, the enterprise got out of control with the killers presuming to operate in the United States itself. On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Foreign Minister under Salvadore Allende, was killed by car bomb in Washington DC.(21) The Condor network even targeted a US Congressman, Ed Koch, a vocal opponent of the South American dictatorships, for assassination, something that caused ‘a small, secret earthquake inside the US government.’ Assassinating Letelier was bad enough, but a US Congressman was way out of line. The then CIA Director, George Bush senior, personally warned Koch of the danger he was in.(22)

Throughout these years, the CIA collaborated closely with all the South American dictatorships, a collaboration that included instruction in the most up-to-date torture techniques. The US Agency for International Development’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), established by President Kennedy in 1962, provided the front for this collaboration. One particular OPS advisor, Dan Mitrione, had instructed the Brazilian military in torture before being transferred to Uruguay where he helped transform one of the least militarised police forces in South America into a force of torturers and killers. Mitrione was kidnapped in July 1970 by the Tupamaros guerrillas and killed the following month. At the time of his death, both Uruguayan policemen and their victims testified to his role as a torturer. Another CIA agent, the Cuban Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, was later to reveal that Mitrione had once tortured four homeless men to death as a demonstration for his Uruguayan students. Mitrione considered a premature death under interrogation as ‘failure by the technician.’ His motto was: ‘The right pain in the right place at the right time.’ When his body was flown back to the United States, he was celebrated as a hero and Frank Sinatra, no less performed at a benefit in his honour.(23)

The trial run for Iraq, Afghanistan and the War on Terror was, however, provided in Central America in the 1980s and early 1990s. There the United States (with the full support of the Thatcher government) engaged in two of the most brutal counter-insurgency campaigns of modern times in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as waging an illegal covert war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Instead of committing ground troops, the Americans waged war through proxies, turning loose CIA-sponsored death squads to torture and kill in all these countries. In El Salvador, the death squads murdered the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero on 24 March 1980 and then attacked mourners at his funeral, killing another forty people. Later that same year, in December, four American nuns, believed to be sympathetic to the rebels, were kidnapped, raped and killed by a death squad. Even though such episodes were a considerable embarrassment to the US government, all the while its covert arm, the CIA, kept those responsible on its payroll. According to one American official: ‘The CIA didn’t mind what was going on so long as they were killing Communists.’(24)One senior American advisor in El Salvador, Colonel James Steele, has since been dispatched to Iraq where he is playing a similar role. Death squads play a central if unspoken role in American counterinsurgency operations.

Even more horrific than El Salvador was the war in Guatemala, a war that had been in progress since the coup of 1954, but which reached its greatest intensity in the 1980s. The Guatemalan military conducted themselves with a brutality that rivals that of the Nazis. The civilian population in those areas that supported the guerrillas was physically exterminated in the most cruel and sadistic fashion. By the end of the conflict in 1996 over 200,000 people had been killed, overwhelmingly by the military (the UN Truth Commission estimated that the military were responsible for 93 percent of the atrocities). Throughout all this horror the Americans worked hand-in-glove with the Guatemalan military. The American lawyer, Jennifer Harbury, whose Guatemalan husband was tortured to death, successfully established that the man who supervised his torture, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, was a well-paid CIA asset. He actually received $40,000 from the Agency while her husband was being tortured. Indeed, the CIA was complicit in what went on in Guatemala at every level. Harbury concluded that in Guatemala the CIA practiced torture by proxy. The CIA was operating an enormous network of paid informants, most of them well known for their involvement in torture and other war crimes. The CIA and related intelligence officials knew which prisoners had been kidnapped, where they were being held, and the fact that their torturers were the CIA’s own paid informants. Moreover, the Agency did its best to ensure that ‘the torturers were shielded from any legal or political consequences.’

Similarly, the covert war against Nicaragua involved a campaign of terror waged by CIA mercenaries that was nevertheless presented to the world as a liberation struggle. President Ronald Reagan celebrated ‘the contras’ as men in the same mould as the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States. This did not stop him trying to subvert the Constitution the Founding Fathers had drawn up in order to conduct his illegal war, something conveniently forgotten in the eulogies that accompanied his death. Moreover, as Greg Grandin writes of the contras:

‘They were the “strangest national liberation organization in the world”, remarked an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “just a bunch of killers”. One high-level Contra official who worked closely with the CIA said that brigades would “arrive at an undefended village, assemble all the residents in the town square and then proceed to kill – in full view of the others – all persons suspected of working” for the government. Other Contra leaders confessed to “damnable atrocities” and “hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes” of which “CIA superiors were well aware.(26)

All this was prescribed in the instruction manual that the CIA produced for the contras.(27) One section, ‘Selective Use of Violence for Propagandist Effects’ recommended the killing of ‘carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police and State Security officials, CDS Chiefs, etc.’ As Holly Sklar observed, ‘a hit list that starts with court judges and ends with etcetera is a mighty broad licence for murders.’(28)And, in practice, the etcetera included teachers, doctors, nurses, indeed anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Sandinistas.

Crucial as a base for the covert war against Nicaragua was neighbouring Honduras. Effectively ruled from the American Embassy, there were so many US military and CIA personnel in the country that it was jocularly known as ‘the USS Honduras’. Presiding over this was the US Ambassador, John Negroponte, later a key figure in the Iraq War. Negroponte had earlier served in the US Embassy in Saigon. Now he supervised both the contra operation and the brutal suppression of dissent in Honduras itself. The CIA, with the co-operation of the Honduras Army, established death squads that tortured and killed dozens of people. So close was the relationship that the head of the Army, Colonel Alvarez Martinez, was actually godfather to the daughter CIA station chief, Donald Winter. Reagan awarded Alvarez the Legion of Merit for his services to the American empire in 1983. An elite Honduran Army unit, Battalion 3-16, provided the personnel for the death squads, which were trained and financed by the CIA. According to one veteran of the unit, ‘US advisors taught “psychological methods” of coercive interrogation.’ In practice, they made use of both the new and the old methods of torture.(29)

What is clear from this dreadful history is that there is nothing new about what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the ‘war on terror’. The use of torture has always been a feature of the American empire. What is new is that under George W. Bush it has become a global phenomenon with the United States claiming the right to seize people anywhere in the world for interrogation and that an attempt has been made to legitimise, and even legalise, the use of torture. This has seriously backfired and the United States’ reputation has never been so low in the eyes of most of the world’s people.(30)

What is particularly shameful is the complicity of the New Labour government in the current American torture scandal, in the rendition of prisoners to the CIA’s secret interrogation centres and more particularly in the torture of British citizens at Guantanamo Bay.(31) It is not that ministers don’t know what is going on, it is that they don’t want to know. British complicity will continue for as long as the ‘war on terror’ lasts.

Notes

1. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (New York, 1987), pp. 396-397
2. The standard overview of CIA activities in William Blum’s Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, (London, 2003). See also Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York, 2006). CIA involvement with the Mafia is freely admitted in various CIA memoirs, see Richard M. Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior (New Haven, 1996). He writes that ‘the Mafia seemed a reasonable partner. Since the Mafia had controlled the gambling casinos that thrived in Cuba under Batista, (we) assumed that Sam Giancana and others would have a powerful motive for overthrowing Castro, as well as the contacts for carrying out such a plan…… I hoped the Mafia would achieve success’ (p. 157). Bissell was a deputy director of the CIA from 1959 until 1962.
3. As a former Communist, it is safe to assume that John Reid is familiar with something of the CIA’s history. Can we also assume that whereas he once regarded its atrocities as ‘bad’, he now regards them as ‘good’? He, along with the likes of Gordon Brown, Peter Hain, Hilary Benn and others, certainly cannot plead ignorance.
4. Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda (New York 2002) p. 189. Robert Kennedy had been charged by his brother with overseeing the attempt to assassinate Castro.
5. Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York 2006) pp. 7-8. See also John Marks, The Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York 1988).
6. See John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (London 1974)
7. Peter Grose, Gentlemen Spy: The Life and Times of Allen Dulles (Amherst 1994) p. 393.
8. McCoy, A Question of Torture, (see note 5) pp. 28, 29, 33, 44-45, 49. (On this see Terry Hanstock’s ‘Re:’ in this issue – ed. The CIA funding allegation is disputed.) Milgam’s famous experiments showing the willingness of his subjects to inflict pain on others is summarised at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment>.
9. Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: My Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York 2003) p. 337.
10. See Gregory L. Vistica, The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey (New York 2003), for the whole sorry tale. According to John Prados this operation was ‘a routine mission’. See his Lost Crusades: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (New York 2003) p. 213.
11. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York 1979), p. 230.
12. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (Lincoln 2000) p. 13.
13. Ibid, p. 359
14. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven 1998) p. 166.
15. McCoy, (see note 5) pp. 67-68.
16. Ibid, pp. 56-66.
17. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval (Lawrence [Kansas]) 2002, pp. 37-38.
18. Valentine, see note 12, pp. 306-307.
19. Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York 1975) p. 261.
20. For CIA operations against Cuba see Fabian Escalante, The Cuba project: CIA Covert Operations 1959-1962 (Melbourne 2004).
21. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and the Covert War in Latin America (Lanham 2005) pp. 152-157.
22. John Dinges, The Condor Years (New York 2005) pp. 214-219.
23. Blum (see note 2) pp. 202-203. See also Martha Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America, (London 1998) pp. 134-136. According to Huggins, the OPS used Gillo Pontecorvo’s anti-Imperialist classic, The Battle of Algiers as a training film.
24. Holly Sklar, Washington’s War on Nicaragua (Boston 1988) p. 52.
25. Jennifer Harbury, Truth, Torture and the American Way (Boston 2005), pp. 35, 56-65. For her account of her struggle to uncover her husband’s fate see her Searching For Everado (New York 1997).
26. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States ad the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York 2006) pp. 115-116. This was reviewed in Lobster 52 – ed.
27. The author of the manual was John Kirkpatrick, a veteran of the Phoenix Program.
28. Sklar (see note 24) p. 178.
29. McSherry (see note 21) pp. 214-223. McSherry describes the fate of Humberto Sanchez, a Honduran suspected of Sandanista sympathies. He was kidnapped by a Battalion 3-16 squad and subsequently ‘tortured with the capucha (a rubber mask or hood used to suffocate a victim), electric shock, being buried alive and other horrific methods.’ Eventually, together with his nine year old son, he was turned over to the contras who killed both of them.
30. See Karen J. Greenburg (ed.) The Torture Debate in America (New York 2006) and Mark Danner, Torture and Trade: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (London 2004). For the methods used to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects in the CIA’s secret prisons see James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York 2006), pp. 32-33.
31. For rendition see Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme (London 2006). See also Moazzam Begg and Victoria Brittain, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantanamo and Back (New York 2006) and Mark Woolf, ‘Why are there two British residents still in Guantanamo Bay?’, Independent on Sunday 7 January 2007.