In the Company of Philip Agee and John Perkins
Press Action
Thursday, February 09, 2006
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/perkins02092006/
Review of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (Plume, 2006, 303 pp.)
Philip Agee faced the punitive firepower of the U.S. government when his book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was published in 1975. The book, along with his work for Covert Action Information Bulletin, made him a marked man. After a 12-year career as a CIA operations officer, primarily in Latin America, Agee decided to call it quits in 1969 because he could no longer stomach how the CIA shored up dictatorships, destabilized democratic governments and carried out assassinations.
Agee paid a huge personal price for daring to offer an insider’s view of how the CIA operated. In contrast, John Perkins got to name his price during his long and lucrative career as an international consultant.
Perkins, 10 years younger than Agee, explains in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that he could no longer tolerate working as a tool of the U.S. “corporatocracy” (the ruling elite of corporations, banks and government officials “who had made up their minds to attempt to rule the planet”) when in 1981 he decided to quit his job with international consulting firm Chas. T. Main. In his role as a chief economist, Perkins helped to destabilize countries by making them economically dependent on global financial institutions dominated by the United States.
While Agee began work on his book soon after he quit the CIA and then fought a fierce battle to get it published, Perkins waited more than 20 years before deciding it was safe to write a book. During the intervening years, Perkins made a bundle of cash owning and operating an independent power company and serving as a handsomely paid adviser to Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation.
Only after striking it rich, using primarily the connections he had established while serving as an economic hit man, did Perkins finally feel comfortable enough to write a tell-all book about his life as an agent for the U.S. empire. Perkins’ Confessions, released in January in paperback by Plume, serves as both a memoir and a catalog of the tactics he employed during each of his foreign assignments.
Agee wrote Inside the Company because he felt obligated to reveal how the CIA manipulated governments to keep them sympathetic to U.S. interests. He did not use Inside the Company to explain his motivations for going public about his work for the CIA. Instead, Agee waited until he wrote On the Run to tell the story of his life, mainly his time trying to evade detection and capture by the U.S. government.
Perkins uses catchy terms, like economic hit man and jackal, to keep the reader interested in the various facets of his life as a corporate consultant. Agee doesn’t need to apply extra color to an already remarkable life on the run from the U.S. government. Agee’s Inside the Company and On the Run take the reader on journeys deep inside the workings of the CIA. Perkins’ Confessions offers glimpses of how the private sector helps to sustain U.S. global dominance. Agee and Perkins provide valuable information about their former employers, although in varying degrees.
The writings of the two authors reveal the many layers of bureaucracy in both the public and private sectors that service the worldwide activities of the U.S. government. The most notorious instrument of U.S. hegemony is its military, which generates the greatest attention because there is nothing subtle about a “shock and awe” incursion into Iraq or a 78-day aerial bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
But there are other categories of people who play important roles in ensuring U.S. dominance. The State Department employs legions of workers, career foreign service members and political appointees, who perform duties as the diplomatic face of the nation.
Often working under State Department cover are CIA officers, like Agee, whose roles range from intelligence gathering to facilitating violent campaigns in far-away lands. The private sector works closely with the U.S. government to keep the empire humming. From building U.S. military bases to supplying private armies to the Pentagon to granting the National Security Agency access to its key telecommunications facilities and databases, U.S. corporations work hand-in-hand with the U.S. government to ensure the American state maintains a comfortable level of control over its own people and the world as a whole.
Confessions represents Perkins’ attempt to elevate consultants into the upper echelons of the empire’s operations directorate, on par with or even outranking CIA officers. Perkins describes how he got to know Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos in the early 1970s while analyzing investment opportunities in Panama’s electric utility system. He also tells the story of how he ran into Graham Greene in a Panama City hotel in 1977. Perkins chatted with Greene for about 90 minutes about the novelist’s concerns for the safety of Torrijos. Both Greene and Perkins acknowledged that the Panamanian leader was not exhibiting the proper deference to Washington.
Perkins recounts theories about how Torrijos was assassinated in 1981, probably by U.S. interests who planted a bomb aboard his aircraft. And Greene later wrote the book, Getting to Know the General, published in 1983, which chronicled Greene’s trip to Panama and friendship with Torrijos.
Perkins’ trumpets his involvement in initiating a “huge EHM success” in Saudi Arabia where the royal family agreed to invest billions of dollars of oil income in U.S. securities and to allow the U.S. Department of Treasury to use the interest from those investments to hire U.S. firms to build power and water systems, highways, ports and cities. In exchange, Perkins explains, the U.S. government guaranteed that the royal family would continue to rule. This is an arrangement that has remained in effect for the past 30 years.
In the paperback edition’s epilogue, Perkins explains nothing in the book is seditious. “I wrote this book because I believe we are a great nation and that we can do much better than to continue building an empire that is hated by millions.”
Perkins said he doesn’t fear reprisal by the jackals, those CIA-sanctioned individuals who would take over when economic hit men failed to do their jobs. Perkins says he hopes jackals are smart enough to know that the book is already out and that “killing me would sell millions more copies.”
Agee has faced real hazards since he left his job in service of the U.S. empire but has found solidarity in the “thousands of people” who have helped him during his journey. Agee says he wrote Inside the Company “because I wanted to show that a CIA employee, or former employee, can reconsider, take a stand, and survive.” -Review by Mark Hand