Premium Episode 137: Hidden Cold War History feat Vincent Bevins (Sample)
The anti-communist crusade that defined the post-world-war-II period. We explore how the CIA and the US government worked to crush left-wing political progress in so-called Third World countries by forming an international coalition of anti-communists carrying out a program of mass-murder that spanned the globe. We speak to Vincent Bevins, journalist and author of 'The Jakarta Method', a book using thorough historic research and journalism to explore the cold war in a new light.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 137 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Hidden Cold War History episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Ager, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're going to be talking about the anti-communist crusade that defined the post-World War II period and, in my opinion, is still highly relevant when we think of contemporary conspiracy theories.
We'll explore how the CIA and the US government worked to crush left-wing political progress in so-called third-world countries during this era, and how their actions evolved into an international coalition of anti-communists carrying out a program of mass murder that spanned the globe.
Interventions took the form of economic and diplomatic pressure, covert and psychological operations, as well as outright military intervention.
Our guest is Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method, a thoroughly researched book on the topic, and I really do recommend picking it up.
It's full of very personal stories that obviously we're not going to get into many of those, and it also does just a great job at demystifying this part of history.
This episode is largely based on Bevins' work.
He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, was the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Time, and he's written for a dozen of other big papers.
But before we speak to him, we're gonna get our hands dirty with a little bit of history.
In the post-World War II period, President Harry Truman put in place what came to be
known as the Truman Doctrine, stating, "I believe that it must be the policy of the
United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures."
This was coded language referring to a decision to wage war on supposed communists outside
of the United States.
Truman was following the advice of Arthur Vandenberg, the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee at the time, who had told him to "scare the hell out of the American
people" about communism.
Here's from Bevin's book.
In 1947, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been hugely influential in creating and disseminating the anti-communist consensus, addressed HUAC and gave voice to some of the fundamental assumptions of that ethos.
He said that communists planned to organize a military revolt in the country which would culminate in the extermination of the police forces and the seizure of all communications.
He said, One thing is certain, the American progress which all good citizens seek, such as old age security, houses for veterans, child assistance, and a host of others, is being deployed as window dressing by the communists to conceal their true aims and entrap gullible followers.
The numerical strength of the party's enrolled membership is insignificant.
For every party member, there are 10 others ready, willing, and able to do the party's work.
There is no doubt as to where our real communist loyalty rests.
Their allegiance is to Russia.
Hoover had presented a logical death trap.
If anyone accuses you of being communist or communist-adjacent, no defense is possible.
If you are simply promoting mild social reform, well, that is exactly what a communist would do in order to conceal their true motives.
If your numbers are insignificant, that is only further proof of your deviousness, as your comrades are all lurking in the shadows.
And if there are a lot of you, or you're openly, proudly communist, that's just as bad.
It's hard to overstate how big a role Edgar Hoover played in shaping American politics and policy over the course of his life.
He oversaw the FBI from 1919 until 1972, when he had a heart attack and died on the job.
He had been appointed during the first Red Scare, and then brought us a second one, in the form of McCarthyism.
Even in his old age, Hoover was so feared by Nixon that the president was recorded in 1971 explaining that he chose not to remove the 76-year-old FBI director for fear that he might, quote, bring down the temple.
Edgar Hoover is perhaps the prototypical American deep state actor, unelected yet wielding immense power while president cycled in and out of the White House.
In the post-WWII period, the FBI had already shown how effective an intelligence agency could be at shaping domestic politics.
But now the United States needed foreign operatives for the clandestine side of their war on communists.
So the Temporary Wartime Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, was developed into the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, by 1951.
Running the clandestine operations for the CIA was a man called Frank Wiesner, who was so extreme in his hatred of communism that one of his ex-OSS colleagues in Germany is quoted as saying, I myself was no great admirer of the Soviet Union, and I certainly had no expectations of harmonious relations after the war, but Frank was a little excessive, even for me.
Above him was the newly minted CIA director, Alan Dulles, who had held Wisner's position before him and knew the value of covert operations firsthand.
Bevins explained their mentality in his book.
Paul Nitze, the man who wrote the so-called blueprint of the Cold War, Describe the upper-class imperial values that children soaked up at the Groton School, a private institution which was modeled on elite English schools and gave the CIA many of its key early members.
Quote, in history, every religion has greatly honored those members who destroyed the enemy.
The Quran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament, Groton boys were taught that, said Nitze.
Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do.
Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means.
If you go back to the Greek culture and read Thucydides, there are limits to what you can do to other Greeks who are part of your culture.
But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian.
He's a barbarian.
The communists, he concluded, were barbarians.
Early operations by these self-dubbed CIA boys were mostly a bust.
The Soviets repeatedly anticipated their incursions into their territory, and it later came to light that Weisner's entourage at the time included British-Soviet double agent Kim Philby, who was acting as a mole for the USSR.
That would be like a funny show to make.
Just like the CIA trying to do plans and just continually getting screwed over by the Soviets.
The Ukrainian and Albanian death squads the CIA trained and then parachuted into Soviet territory were systematically killed before they could foment revolt locally.
These setbacks caused Weisner and the CIA to modify their strategy.
Here's from Bevin's book.
Slowly but surely, they realized that actual Soviet territory was mostly rock solid.
They were certainly failing to penetrate it.
If they wanted to fight communism, and they did, very badly, they had to look elsewhere.
The third world offered that opportunity.
The problem these men overlooked, according to a mostly sympathetic history written by journalist Evan Thomas, was, quote, the fact that they knew almost nothing about the so-called developing world.
In the early 1950s, the CIA ran a set of operations out of South Korea, where they used UN-US troops to fight North Korea.
The region had been liberated from Japanese imperial rule by Korean communists under Kim Il-sung.
Although the Soviets didn't join the struggle, the North Koreans were eventually aided by the Chinese, who were still grateful for the help Kim Il-sung had given them against the Japanese in Manchuria.
The South, in turn, was ruled by Syngman Rhee, a Christian anti-communist who had lived in the U.S.
for decades prior.
He reliably targeted leftists and oversaw the massacre of tens of thousands of people on the island of Jeju, citing the threat of communism.
Here's from Bevan's book.
During the resulting three-year stalemate, the U.S.
dropped more than 600,000 tons of bombs on Korea, more than was used in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, and poured 30,000 tons of napalm over the landscape.
More than 80% of North Korea's buildings were destroyed, and the bombing campaign killed an estimated 1 million civilians.
In Korea, the CIA boys also tried out some of the same tools they had unleashed in Eastern Europe.
Thousands of recruited Korean and Chinese agents were dropped into the North during the war.
Once again, the infiltration was a total failure.
Later, classified CIA documents concluded that the operations, quote, were not only ineffective, but probably morally reprehensible in the number of lives lost.
The CIA only found out later that all the secret information the agency gathered during the war had been manufactured by North Korean and Chinese security services.
Iran In 1952, Wiesner turned his eyes to Iran.
Their British MI6 agents had been trying to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, elected by the Iranian parliament in 1951 and broadly considered a champion of secular democracy.
This was a relief for the population, which had suffered greatly under the British-appointed Shah, losing two million lives to famine.
But despite their supposed withdrawal as colonial rulers, the British were still using the Anglo-Iranian oil company to extract twice more oil wealth in the country than Iran was itself.
Mossadegh carried out a series of social reforms including land taxation, and the introduction of things like unemployment benefits, sick leave, and an end to forced labor.
He built public baths, rural housing, and pest control.
But he also made the mistake of nationalizing the oil industry.
This was a step too far for the British, who asked the Americans and the CIA for some help.
At first, the Yanks were reluctant to get involved with the British Empire.
But the Brits pointed out that the Tudeh Party, which was communist-led, was about to maybe take over the country if nothing was done to stop them.
This, despite the leader Mossadegh's open disgust for communism.
So the CIA set up Operation Ajax, greenlit by Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers, and assigned the operation to Kermit Roosevelt, The grandson of Theodore Roosevelt who worked for the CIA.
Bevins explains.
The CIA bribed every politician it could and looked for a general willing to take over and install the Shah as dictator.
Agents paid street thugs, strongmen, and circus performers to riot in the streets.
When CIA Station Chief Roger Goyron argued the U.S.
was making a historic mistake by aligning itself with British colonialism, Alan Dulles recalled him to Washington.
The CIA created pamphlets and posters Proclaiming that Mossadegh was a communist, an enemy of Islam.
They paid off journalists to write that he was a Jew.
The CIA hired gangsters to pretend to be Tudeh party members and attack a mosque.
Two of Roosevelt's Iranian agents, who were handling some of the hired muscle, tried to turn down further work at one point, saying the risk was becoming too great.
But Kermit Roosevelt convinced them by saying that if they refused, he'd kill them.
By 1953, the country had been weakened through economic sanctions and a British blockade, and the Shah was repeatedly teaming up with royalists and right-wing groups to stop, for example, Mossadegh from allowing illiterate Iranians to vote.
Despite this, Mossadegh still continued gathering votes and attempted to reform the country through democratic means.
Then the Shah finally acceded to British and American demands and agreed to remove Mossadegh.
Replacing him with Kermit Roosevelt's choice, General Fazlullah Zahedi.
The Shah had been told that the United States would proceed with or without his approval at this point.
Violent clashes left about 300 dead, and the military royalists joined the CIA-led uprising to place Zahedi in power.
One of the first things he did was to make a deal with foreign oil companies to form a consortium and quote, restore the flow of Iranian oil to world markets in substantial quantities.
In return, the British and Americans lent the Shah's government their full support.
As a result, the Iranian working class remained in poverty and the great majority of the colonial era oil holdings were restored.
The Philippines.
Also on the CIA radar at the time was the young nation of the Philippines.
Bevins writes, "In 1954, the CIA wrapped up another successful operation nearby in the Philippines.
The left-wing Huk rebellion that began under Japanese occupation
continued after both the Japanese left and the US officially
officially handed over power to Filipinos.
Anti-occupation Huk guerrillas were opposed to the new president, who had been an active collaborator with the Axis powers, and the ongoing oligarchical control of the economy by hugely powerful feudal landowners.
U.S.
military advisor Edward Lansdale wrote in his diary that the Huks, quote, believed in the rightness of what they were doing.
Even though some of the leaders are on the communist side, there is a bad situation needing reform.
I suppose armed complaint is a natural enough thing.
The U.S.
helped the Philippines devise and implement a counterinsurgency operation, and made considerable progress including the use of Mornepom.
In a bit of bizarre psychological warfare, Lansdale also collaborated closely with Desmond Fitzgerald, a Wisener recruit at the CIA, to create a vampire.
As part of a range of psychological operations alongside the war on the guerrillas, CIA agents spread the rumor that an Aswang, a blood-sucking ghoul of Filipino legend, was on the loose and destroying men with evil in their hearts.
They then took a Huk rebel they had killed, poked two holes in his neck, drained him of his blood, and left him lying on the road.
After years of conflict, the Huks gave up.
And the Philippines settled into right-leaning pro-American stability that would last decades.
With special privileges granted to U.S.
corporations, the woeful condition of the Filipino people remained entirely unchanged.
Because of this, now whenever I hear about a cryptid, I'm going to have to ask myself whether or not it's a CIA op.
So, another thing ruined.
Welcome to my life.
Yeah, wait a minute.
This dismantles my entire worldview.
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