Mr Wilson’s resignation came as a shock … He secretly called two BBC journalists and gave them a scoop, what he called the British Watergate. He said that as prime minister he had been unable to run the country; instead, powerful sections of the establishment had been working so hard to get rid of him we had come within an inch of our very own military coup. The Plot Against Harold Wilson, BBC 2006
‘Democracy as we know it is in great danger … Dirty tricks have been going on’ … ibid.
What dark forces had driven the former prime minister into the arms of our journalist? ibid.
He criticised the stranglehold on power exercised by the British establishment. ibid.
The establishment really felt Wilson hitting them below the belt. ibid.
Wilson had been a frequent flier to the Soviet block. ibid.
Wilson was right: he was being bugged and someone was looking for something. ibid.
The coup was aborted, partly because the Conservatives were confident they could beat Wilson at the ballot box. ibid.
Former military officers like General Walter Walker and Major Alexander Greenwood began to form private armies, thousands strong to protect queen and country. ibid.
The plotters never got their coup. ibid.
[James] Angleton claimed he had given proof of Wilson’s treachery to the head of MI5, Roger Hollis. ibid.
How in the nineteenth century a British government coup in India created the British Raj. And was heralded by the Victorians as the civilising triumph of the empire. British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley III, BBC 2017
In 1953 in fact the CIA secretly sponsored its first full-scale coup in Iran, and as a result the USA kept control of one of the largest oil producers in the world. Secrets of the CIA
In 1951 Prime Minister Mosaddegh became Iran’s first democratically elected leader. His first act in power was to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, and his second was to begin talks with Iran’s Soviet neighbour. ibid.
In February 1979 the Iranian people staged the first ever Islamic revolution, which not only changed the face of Iran but changed the face of the entire Middle East. And the CIA had no idea that any of this was going to happen. ibid.
The CIA’s actions in Cuba were designed to spark a popular revolution against Fidel who had come to power via a revolution himself – a revolution against American power in Cuba. ibid.
By 1970 the CIA had perfected the art of overthrowing democratically elected leaders: Iran, Congo and Indonesia had already fallen victim to CIA plots to depose and replace their prime ministers. ibid.
Indonesia was strategically important. It had a huge population. And the CIA believed their prime minister, Sukarno, was going to open up the country to communism. The CIA made a bizarre decision. They tried to blacken prime-minister Sukarno’s name by making the world’s first celebrity porn film. They hired a Sukarno lookalike and filmed him enjoying the company of a young lady who wasn’t his wife. But the CIA failed to realise that Sukarno was already a famed womaniser, and this movie had no impact at all on his popularity. So when this amusing attempt to get rid of him failed, the CIA turned to something a lot less funny – black operations. ibid.
Sukarno was driven from power. After the coup the CIA worked together with the generals to ensure every single communist in Indonesia was killed. ibid.
In 1980 Ronald Reagan sent the CIA into Afghanistan. Their secret mission was to fund, train and arm the Mujahideen, a band of Islamic Afghani fighters. They were at war with the Soviet-backed People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. The CIA was told to crush the Soviet force by any means possible. ibid.
Laos had enormous strategic importance in the fight for Vietnam. The Vietnamese communists from the north had been using a secret trail which ran through Laos to direct troops, weapons and supplies to fight the US troops in the south of Vietnam. The Americans couldn’t invade Laos, so the CIA was called in and ordered to take care of the problem. ibid.
When word got out we were interested in the genocide, the army would no longer let the survivors participate in the movie. And so they suggested we film with the perpetrators. The Act of Killing, director’s introduction, Sky Atlantic 2016
In 1965 the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist: union members, landless farmers, intellectuals and the ethnic Chinese. In less than a year and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million ‘communists’ were murdered. ibid. caption
When Arbenz became President in Guatemala, the country was very much under the control of the United Fruit Company and big international corporations. And Arbenz ran on this ticket that says we want to give the land back to the people, and when he was in power he began to implement policies that would do just that, give land rights back to the people. The United Fruit company didn’t like that very much, so they hired a public relations firm and launched a huge campaign in the United States to convince people ... that Arbenz was a Soviet puppet, and if we allowed him to stay in power, the Soviets would have a foothold in this hemisphere ... Out of this public relations campaign came a commitment on the part of the CIA and the Military to take this man out. And in fact we did. We sent in planes. We sent in soldiers. We sent in jackals. We sent everything in to take him out, and did take him out. And as soon as he was removed from office, the new guy that took over after him basically reinstated everything to the big international corporations, including the United Fruit. John Perkins, author Confessions of an Economic Hitman, economist for Chas T Main Inc
Doctor Mohammad Mosaddegh, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 – 1953: he was elected in Iran. He was considered to be the best hope for democracy in the Middle-East and around the world; he was Time magazine’s man of the year. But one of the things that he ran on and began to implement was the idea that foreign oil companies needed to pay more to the Iranian people a lot more for their oil, for the oil they were taking out of the ground. The Iranian people should benefit from their own oil. A strange policy. We didn’t like that of course. But we were afraid of sending in the troops, instead we sent in one CIA agent, Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s relative. He went in with a few million dollars and was every effective and efficient. He managed to get Mosaddegh overthrown and he brought in the Shah of Iran to replace him, and he who was more sympathetic to oil. John Perkins
Iraq [2003] actually is a perfect example of the way the whole system works. So we economic hit-men are the first line of defense. We go in and try to corrupt governments, and get them to accept these huge loans which we then use as leverage to basically own them. If we fail, as I failed ... with men who refuse to be corrupted, then the second line of defense is we send in the jackals. And the jackals either overthrow governments or they assassinate. And once that happens, when the new government comes in, boy, it’s going to tow the line because the new president knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t. And in the case of Iraq, both of those things failed. The economic hit-men were not able to get through to Saddam Hussein; we tried very hard, we tried to get him to accept a deal very similar to what the House of Saud had accepted in Saudi Arabia, but he wouldn’t accept it. And so the jackals went in to take him out. They couldn’t do it. His security was very good. After all, he had one time worked for the CIA; he’d been hired to assassinate a former president of Iraq, and failed. But he knew the system. So in ’91 we send in the troops. And we take out the Iraqi military. So we assume at that point that Saddam Hussein is going to come around. We could have taken him out, of course, at that time, but we didn’t want to, he’s a kind of strong man we like; he controls his people; we thought he could control the Kurds, and keep the Iranians in their border, and keep pumping oil for us, and that once we took out his military, now he’s going to come around. So the economic hit-men go back in in the ’90s without success. If they’d had success, he’d still be running the country. We’d be selling him all the fighter jets he wants and everything else he wants, but they couldn’t. They didn’t have success. The jackals couldn’t take him out again. So we sent the military in once again, and this time we did the complete job – we took him out, and in the process created for ourselves some very very lucrative construction deals and to reconstruct a country that we’d essentially destroyed, which is a pretty good deal if you own construction companies [Halliburton], big ones. So Iraq shows the three stages – the economic hit-men failed there, the jackals failed there and as a final measure the military goes in. And in that way we really created an empire; but we’ve done it very very subtly; it’s clandestine. All the empires of the past were built by the military. And everyone knew they were building them ... The majority of the people in the United States had no idea that we’re living off the benefits of a clandestine empire. Today there’s more slavery in the world than ever before. Then you have to ask yourself, well, if it’s an empire, then who is the emperor? ... The Corporatocracy. John Perkins, author Confessions of an Economic Hitman, economist Chas T Main Inc
In 1952 the Shah’s supremacy was challenged by the popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh … Mosaddegh was finally toppled by a British-American backed coup. Decadence and Downfall: The Shah of Iran’s Ultimate Party, caption, BBC 2016
The first President Bush urges Iraqis to stage a coup against Saddam. Charles Ferguson, No End in Sight, 2007
From the outset, Gaddafi’s Libya was in a state of constant revolution. The bloodless coup in 1969 that ten years after independence brought him to power was seen as a popular revolution sweeping away the corrupt pro-Western monarchy of King Idris. Gaddafi: The Endgame: State of Denial, Al Jazeera 2011
The dream was not to be. On February 1st 1999 the Clinton administration released its new federal budget: it contained a tiny 3% increase on social programs, meanwhile, $112 billion in new funds were allocated to the military, while the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies rose by $29 billion. The Power Principle, 2011
The US now spends as much on war as the rest of the world combined. ibid.
NSC68: ‘A policy which the United States would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet Union’. ibid.
Guatemala didn’t even have diplomatic relations with Russia … Bernays was offered huge sums of money to develop a propaganda campaign against Arbenz and the people of Guatemala. ibid.