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.
On February 24th 1994 Aldrich Ames a CIA Soviet expert who’d worked at the CIA for nearly thirty years, was arrested with a suitcase stuffed full with cash and a plane ticket to Russia in his pocket. 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.
The CIA failed to gather any intelligence about the World Trade Centre attack before it occurred. Incredibly this wasn’t the first time allies of Osama bin Laden had tried to blow up the Twin Towers. Back in 1993 Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Centre killing six people and injuring a thousand more. 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.
A huge quantity of the heroin produced by the tribesmen was delivered straight into the hands of the American GIs stationed in Vietnam. ibid.
It was time to bring back some of the dirty tricks the OSS had developed in World War II. Secrets of War s1e37: Cold War: Inside the CIA
1954: Project Ajax: A secret CIA plot to overthrow leftist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh codenamed The Old Bugger. The Shah would be maintained on the throne. Secrets of War s1e56: Cold War: Eisenhower’s Operatives
Dwight Eisenhower orchestrated some of the most devious covert operations the world has ever known. ibid.
Soon CIA aeroplanes were buzzing Guatemala dropping small bombs. ibid.
On March 17th 1960 Eisenhower authorised $4,400,000 to fund a cover operation to train a cadre of Cuban exiles. ibid.
In late April 1961 … Kennedy wondered aloud, How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed? He was referring to the US Central Intelligence Agency which had just humiliated itself, the new president and the nation by completely bungling its secret invasion of Cuba. Secrets of War s1e57: Cold War: The Kennedy Years
The CIA’s deputy director of plans Richard Bissell claimed that there was significant internal support in Cuba to overthrow Castro. ibid.
One plan to kill Castro involved the use of poisonous cigars. ibid.
But for America missiles just ninety miles away was a new and terrifying experience. ibid.
The CIA sent bombers painted with Cuban markings to destroy Castro’s Air Force planes. Secrets of War s1e61: Cold War: Cuba’s Communist Revolution
Following humiliating defeat in the Bay of Pigs John F Kennedy’s brother and attorney general Robert Kennedy vowed vengeance. ibid.
March 13th 1962: Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepares a document for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara named Operation Northwoods. The document proposed staging terrorist operations in and around Guantanamo Bay to provide a pretext for military intervention in Cuba. The plans included starting rumours about Cuba using clandestine radio, landing friendly Cubans inside the base to stage attacks, starting riots at the main gate, blowing up ammunition inside the base, starting fires, sabotaging aircraft and ships on the base, bombing the base with mortar shells, sinking a ship outside the entrance, staging funerals for mock victims, staging a terror campaign in Miami Florida and Washington DC, and finally, destroying a drone aircraft over Cuban waters. Project Illuminati
Throughout the 1960s, the Caribbean island was subjected to countless sea and air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical plants and railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar warehouses; infiltrating spies, saboteurs and assassins … anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection, or make the revolution look bad … taking the lives of Cuban militia members and others in the process … pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships, bombardments of Soviet vessels docked in Cuba, an assault upon a Soviet army camp with 12 Russian soldiers reported wounded … a hotel and a theatre shelled from offshore because Russians and East Europeans were supposed to be present there. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War I ch 30: Cuba 1959 to 1980s: The Unforgivable Revolution
These actions were not always carried out on the direct order of the CIA or with its foreknowledge, but the Agency could hardly plead ‘rogue elephant’. It had created an operations headquarters in Miami that was truly a state within a city — over, above, and outside the laws of the United States, not to mention international law, with a staff of several hundred Americans directing many more Cuban agents in just such types of actions, with a budget in excess of $50 million a year, and an arrangement with the local press to keep operations in Florida secret except when the CIA wanted something publicized. ibid.
Title 18 of the US Code declares it to be a crime to launch a ‘military or naval expedition or enterprise’ from the United States against a country with which the United States is not (officially) at war. ibid.
The commando raids were combined with a total US trade and credit embargo, which continues to this day, and which genuinely hurt the Cuban economy and chipped away at the society’s standard of living. ibid.
Moreover, pressure was brought to bear upon other countries to conform to the embargo, and goods destined for Cuba were sabotaged: machinery damaged, chemicals added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid wear on diesel engines, a manufacturer in West Germany paid to produce ball-bearings off-center, another to do the same with balanced wheel gears — ‘You’re talking about big money,’ said a CIA officer involved in the sabotage efforts, ‘when you ask a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to reset his whole mold. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more.’ ibid.
What undoubtedly was an even more sensitive venture was the use of chemical and biological weapons against Cuba by the United States … The full extent of American chemical and biological warfare against Cuba will never be known. Over the years, the Castro government has in fact blamed the United States for a number of other plagues which afflicted various animals and crops. And in 1977 newly released CIA documents disclosed that the Agency ‘maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries …’ ibid.
Cuba had become what Washington had always feared from the Third World – a good example. Parallel to the military and economic belligerence, the United States has long maintained a relentless propaganda offensive against Cuba. A number of examples of this occurring in other countries can be found in other chapters of this book. In addition to its vast overseas journalistic empire, the CIA has maintained anti-Castro news-article factories in the United States for decades. ibid.
In the early 1960s the federal government needed an excuse, a pretext, to invade Cuba. Seldom do we see examples as sterling as the Northwoods document where the federal government put the plan to paper ... The federal government proposed blowing up airliners full of Americans ... President Kennedy was not amused. Alex Jones, 9/11 The Road to Tyranny, 2002
US Military Drafted Plans to Terrorise US Cities to Provoke War With Cuba. ABC News 1st May 2001
The intention was to create such war hysteria that a legitimisation and justification for intervention in Cuba would emerge out of it. Kennedy refused that back then. He did not carry it out. But nevertheless all his chiefs of staff from Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy were in total agreement that it should be done. Andreas von Bulow, former German minister of research & education
The duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft ... The drone aircraft meanwhile will ... fly the filed flight plan. Operation Northwoods document 13th March 1962
1959-1997: The US carried out 5,780 covert actions in Cuba including several bombings. Abby Martin, Breaking the Set: Cuba I, RT 25-27.02.15, author’s estimate
Government attempts to hold down wages led to violent strikes. To Sterling it seemed that the country he had fought to keep great was now collapsing from inside. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set I: Who Pays Wins ***** BBC 1999
David Stirling returned to his traditional recruiting ground, the clubs of Mayfair. He formed an organisation called Great Britain 75. It was a group of military men, many of them ex-SAS. They planned to take over the running of Britain if the strikes led to the collapse of civil order. Stirling also formed a secret organisation within the trades unions itself; its job was to fight and undermine the leftwing union leaders. Much of the money to fund Stirling’s operations came from his friend at the Clermont Club – James Goldsmith. Like Sterling, Goldsmith believed that politicians no longer had the power to control Britain. ibid.
Government attempts to hold down wages led to violent strikes. To Sterling it seemed that the country he had fought to keep great was now collapsing from inside. ibid.