What was invented in the Yemen was a new private form of foreign policy for Britain, paid for by other countries’ money. But then at the very moment when Stirling’s team seemed to be on the brink of success, an economic crisis hit Britain which threatened his whole concept: in 1964 a new Labour government was elected; almost immediately there was a run on the pound. ibid.
To save the pound Labour decided on wide-ranging spending cuts, and one of the main targets was defence. Denis Healey had been made minister of defence, and in 1965 he began a series of enormous cutbacks; he closed the overseas’ bases and brought the troops who had once protected the empire back home. ibid.
[Denis] Healey believed that instead British defence industries should make money for the country. The Americans were selling weapons throughout the world and Healey wanted Britain to compete with them and earn precious foreign currency. But Britain was not very good at selling weapons until David Stirling decided to get involved. ibid.
He [Khashoggi] told Lockheed that the only way to win the [arms] deal was to bribe the Saudi government. Ten years later in a Senate investigation Lockheed’s chairman admitted what had happened. Stirling told the British government they would have to do the same as the Americas: pay commission to their agents in King Faisal’s entourage. If they didn’t, Britain would lose the deal. In December 1965 the Saudis announced they would buy the British planes: the bribes had worked. It was the biggest export deal in Britain’s history. And King Faisal came on a state visit to celebrate it. It was also the beginning of the modern arms trade with the Middle East which has grown to dominate Britain’s economy. And from it also came a much wider commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia. ibid.
By the late ’60s many of Britain’s former colonies were being torn apart by civil war. In Nigeria the federal government were fighting a vicious campaign to stop Biafra from seceding. The British government were secretly supplying the federal side with weapons. Their aim was to protect Britain’s oil interests in Nigeria. ibid.
The federal government won helped by the British arms. But the resulting scandal clearly showed the limits of openly using arms sales as a tool of foreign policy. As coups and civil wars spread throughout the Third World, Stirling was determined to find a subtler way to maintain Britain’s influence in the world. He set up a secret organisation called WatchGuard: its job was to provide Africa and Middle-Eastern leaders with a private army of British mercenaries. They would prevent the rulers that Stirling approved of from being overthrown. WatchGuard was a great success. Stirling organised protection for leaders in Africa and the Middle East. ibid.
In Oman many of the Sultan’s advisers were ex-SAS men. They ran the Sultan’s guerrilla war against Marxist rebels. The rebels made a propaganda film attacking the Sultan and his British mercenaries. But the British won. ibid.
By the early ’70s [David] Stirling had become a successful businessman. He arranged enormous arms deals, and his mercenaries kept many third-world leaders in power. Almost single-handedly Stirling had created the foundations of Britain’s modern privatised foreign policy. It is a hidden world of vicious guerrilla wars fought by British mercenaries, a world that occasionally surfaces in scandals like the Sandfire affair. It all began with Stirling selling Britain’s military power to countries he approved of. ibid.
The price of oil had been massively increased as a result of the Arab/Israeli war. The oil-producing states led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia were furious at American support for Israel. Their action had catastrophic effects for Western economies. 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.
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.
Through the summer of 1976 Arab oil money continued to leave London. The heads of Arab banks now became powerful figures ... Denis Healey began a series of savage cuts in public expenditure. It was the only way he believed for Britain to get a loan from the IMF and avoid bankruptcy. But it was clear to many in his party that he had given away control of the economy to the markets. ibid.
Stirling’s mercenaries returned home after twenty years of trying to keep Britain powerful. The country they came back to was very different from the one they had left. ibid.
In reality Arbenz was a democratic socialist with no links to Moscow. Bernays set out to turn him into a communist threat to America. He organised a trip to Guatemala for influential American journalists. Few of them knew anything about the country or its politics … He also created a fake independent news agency in America – the Middle-American Information Bureau. It bombarded the American media with press releases saying that Moscow was planning to use Guatemala as a beach-head to attack America. All of this had the desired effect. But what Bernays was doing was not just trying to blacken the Arbenz regime, he was part of a secret plot. President Eisenhower had agreed that America should topple the Arbenz government. But secretly. The CIA were instructed to organise a coup. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self II: The Engineering of Consent, BBC 2002
On his return Qutb became politically active in Egypt; he joined a group called the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted Islam to play a major role in the governing of Egyptian society. And in 1952 the Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser that overthrew the last remnants of British rule. But Nasser very quickly made it clear that the new Egypt was going to be a secular society that emulated western models. Adam Curtis: The Power of Nightmares I: Baby It’s Cold Outside, BBC 2004
And then in 1979 the Iranian revolution showed dramatically America’s policy of backing dictators did not work. The Iranian people rose up and toppled the Shah of Iran. The Shah had one of the largest military forces in the world given to him by the Americans. But it proved helpless in the face of the new Islamist ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many in the West saw Khomeini as the resurgence of a dark almost medieval force. But this was wrong. The Iranian revolution was yet again driven by Western ideas of political freedom. Adam Curtis: The Trap III: We Will Force You to be Free, BBC 2007
The other part of Project Democracy was to use military force in secret operations to overthrow foreign regimes that stood in the way of freedom. The main target was the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power in 1979; but since then they had held elections and had been democratically elected. The Reagan administration dismissed this though as a sham. And an operation was set up to enforce the right kind of democracy by overthrowing the Sandinistas if necessary. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were beginning to believe that their ideal of freedom was an absolute. And that this then justified lying and exaggerating in order to enforce that vision. The end justified the means. Although they portrayed the Contras as freedom fighters, it was well known that they used murder, assassination and torture. And also were allegedly using CIA-supplied planes to smuggle cocaine back into the United States. And to finance the Contras, the Neo-Conservatives were even prepared to deal with America’s enemy – the leaders of the Iranian revolution. In 1985 those running the Nicaragua operation held a series of secret meetings with Iranian leaders in Europe. They arranged to sell the Iranians American weapons; in return the Iranians would release American hostages held in Lebanon. Then the money from these sales would be used by those running Project Democracy to fund the Contras. The only problem was that this was completely illegal. And the President knew it. ibid.
Their leader Pol Pot had also studied revolutionary theories in Paris. And he believed that the only way for Cambodian society to reach utopia was to destroy the whole of Bourgeois society and start again back to year zero. Within hours of arriving in the capital Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge set about slaughtering all the middle classes, some three million people in the end, because under Pol Pot’s logic they stood in the way of allowing the rest of the people to become truly free individuals. Adam Curtis, The Trap, BBC 2007
1968: The downfall of the most powerful newspaper owner in Britain, Cecil King, and it almost destroyed the Labour Party. And out of the ruins would rise a new mogul who would begin to construct a new frame – Rupert Murdoch. Cecil King ran the International Publishing Corporation which owned the Daily Mirror. It was the largest newspaper business in the world and it controlled 40% of the newspapers in Britain. At the time this film was shot in February 1968, King was planning to use his immense power to mount what in effect would be a coup and bring down the British government … He planned to create an emergency national government that would include businessmen, sympathetic politicians and above all himself. Adam Curtis, Every Day is Like Sunday, 2011
For 20 years the CIA had been planning assassinations and overthrowing leaders of foreign governments all around the world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything, BBCiplayer 2021
In Russia the democracy experiment had gone out of control. The president Boris Yeltsin had lost all power. It had been seized by a small group called the oligarchs who were using it to loot Russia. There was massive inflation. Millions of people were reduced to selling what they owned on the street. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid?
Yeltsin responding by dissolving parliament; he cut the phone lines and sealed the building off. But a group of protesters broke through and fighting began around the parliament and then spread to the television station. ibid.
Ever since the Second World War the American Government had been using the CIA to manipulate and overthrow the governments of many other countries … The CIA rigged elections, destabilised governments through fake information, and organised violence coups in Italy, Greece, Syria, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Indonesia and Chile. In all, the United States ran covert operations to overthrow 66 foreign governments. In 26 cases they succeeded. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones *****
The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953. ibid. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 28