To many, the anecdote described below will sound far-fetched, and logical minds may suspect that the Vietnam vet in the story created the “incident” himself.
But as those who lived through that period may remember, representatives of the covert side of government did far worse — and often. Infiltration, intimidation, framing, and more were all part of the arsenal against the “disloyal.” No method was deemed too severe.
Today, we may find ourselves in a comparable period. Incidents covered by WhoWhatWhy such as the fiery death of journalist Michael Hastings and the open statements that Edward Snowden should be assassinated remind us to take nothing for granted. (To see our stories on these threats, please go here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
The essay below is by the father of “Deep Politics” analysis, Peter Dale Scott. It reminds us that, too often, it is not the wild-sounding that is the fiction — but the constant assurances that everything is a-ok, that our society operates on fundamental decency, and that we need to stay focused on the small things and leave the big problems to others.
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Below, Scott describes that phenomenon as “a great conspiracy/of organized denial.”
Seeking to reverse this organized denial, Scott, in the book introduction that follows, posits — based on his decades of research — powerful connections between militarism, vast illegal drug operations, and America’s intelligence agencies. Sound far-fetched? So does much of history itself.
Excerpt from American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), Introduction. Deep History and the Global Drug Connection:
Two Researchers Encounter a Deep Event
If by terrorism we mean “the use of violence to intimidate,” then in September 1971 the historian Alfred McCoy and I witnessed a minor California terrorist incident. A Vietnam veteran of Special Forces living in East Palo Alto who had seen opium loaded onto the CIA’s Air America airplanes in Asia agreed on my telephone to be interviewed by the two of us. But when we arrived at his house the next morning, he had changed his mind. Motioning to us not to speak, he led us back down his front-door steps to his sports car, an MG. Overnight someone had warned him not to talk to us by burning a large hole in its steel door, with what he said could only have been a sophisticated implosion device, of the sort used by his old unit.(1)
One might think that such a vivid and incongruous event could hardly be forgotten, especially since it had clearly been generated by knowledge of what had been spoken on my telephone. But in fact for more than a decade, I totally suppressed my memory of it, even through the first two years of a determined poetic search to recover just such suppressed memories.(2)
And so, as I rightly suspected, had Alfred McCoy. In the preface to the 2003 edition of his monumental classic, The Politics of Heroin, he writes in prose about his own bizarre suppression of the same facts:
I landed in San Francisco for a stay with poet and Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott. He put me in touch with an ex-Green Beret, just back from covert operations in Laos, who told me, over the phone, of seeing CIA aircraft loading opium.
He agreed to be interviewed on the record. The next morning, we knocked at his door in an East Palo Alto apartment complex. We never got inside. He was visibly upset, saying he “had gotten the message.” What happened? “Follow me,” he said, leading us across the parking lot to his MG sports car. He pointed at something on the passenger door and named a chemical explosive that could melt a hole in sheet metal. It was, he said, a signal to shut up. I looked but cannot recall seeing. [Ed. Apparently this refers to the “something on the passenger door.”] The next day, I flew to Los Angeles, visited my mother, and then flew on to Saigon, forgetting the incident.(3)
As I began to recall this episode in a different millennium, the incident itself seemed less surprising. The nation was then in turmoil, and even nonviolent antiwar protesters like myself were subject to ongoing surveillance.
Much worse things were happening. In San Diego, “Vigilantes led by an FBI informant wrecked [an antiwar] paper’s printing equipment, firebombed the car of one staffer, and nearly shot to death another.”(4)
In Chicago in the same period, “The army’s 113th Military Intelligence Group… provided money, tear-gas bombs, MACE, and electronic surveillance equipment to the Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.”(5)
The crimes I have just recalled, in Palo Alto, San Diego, and Chicago, are examples of what I first conceptualized as deep state violence and would now call deep force violence (violence from an unexplained or unauthorized source). There are many varieties of this deep non–state-sanctioned violence as so conceived.
In most cases illegal violence is an assignment handed off by an established agency to organized groups outside the law. There are also cases of proxy violence when the delegation of violence is not to nonstate actors but to agencies of other governments.
Finally, there are cases in which the violence reinforces the de facto power structure of the country without directly involving the CIA or other established official agencies at all. Such violence may be affirmatively sanctioned by members of the established power structure.
Or it may be passively sanctioned by failure to punish those responsible. Unprosecuted lynchings were the de facto enforcement of illegally segregated Jim Crow society in the American South.
Land grabs in the American West were achieved with press-encouraged violence against Native Americans, many of them nonviolent, who originally lived there.(6)
This cultural tolerance of violence and murder spilled over into other aspects of American life, notably union busting. In the 1914 “Ludlow massacre,” during a mineworkers strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, only one member of the strikebreakers was convicted, and he was given only a light reprimand.(7)
