SENTIENT TIMES February/March 2005

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

How the US Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

Interview with John Perkins by Ant Goodman

John Perkins, who worked from 1971 to 1981 for the international consulting firm of Charles T. Main, has written a book entitled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. A former respected member of the international banking community, Perkins describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the US cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. Perkins, who started writing the book twenty years ago, writes, “The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits—Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We economic hit men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.”

John Perkins goes on to write: “I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the US invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop.”

Amy Goodman: It is a remarkable story that you tell. Why don’t you start at the beginning, about how you came to be recruited first by the National Security Agency—far larger than the CIA—and then this international consulting firm of Charles T. Main.

John Perkins: It was in 1968. I was a student at business school and was recruited by the National Security Agency. They ran me through a series of tests—personality tests, lie detector tests—very sensitive testing. And during that process, they discovered that I would be a great candidate for an economic hit man. And also they discovered a number of weaknesses in my character. I think I have weaknesses that are pretty typical of our culture, the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. And they discovered these weaknesses in me. Then they encouraged me to go into the Peace Corps. I lived in Ecuador for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer with indigenous people there, who today are at war with the oil companies. We were starting that process then, so I got some very good on-the-job training, so to speak. While I was still in Ecuador in the Peace Corps, a vice president from this private consulting firm in Boston that worked closely with the National Security Agency and the other intelligence communities came to Ecuador and continued my recruitment. When I got out of the Peace Corps, he recruited me. I went to work for his company in Boston, Charles T. Main, and went through an extensive training program there with a remarkable woman who was extremely intelligent, extremely sharp, extremely seductive, and she hooked me. She knew exactly how to hook me. She benefited from all the tests that I’d gone through, knew my weaknesses. She first of all hooked me into becoming an economic hit man and at the same time, warned me that this is a very dirty business and you must be completely committed to it or you shouldn’t take your first assignment.

Explain what you mean by an “economic hit man.”

Over the past 30 to 40 years we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. There are many ways to do this, but a typical one is that we identify a third-world country that has resources, which we covet. And often these days that’s oil, or it might be the canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let’s say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we’ve all heard of recently, like Bechtel, Halliburton. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks—big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries.

The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don’t benefit from these loans, they don’t benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. What also happens is that this third-world country is then saddled with a huge debt that it can’t possibly repay. For example, today Ecuador’s foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can’t repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That’s what we’re doing today around the world. It began shortly after the end of World War II and it has been building up over time until today where it’s really reached mammoth proportions, where we control most of the resources of the world.

Talk about your experience in Panama. You had the opportunity to meet the Head of Panama before he was killed, Omar Torrijos. How did you end up there?

Panama was one of these pivotal countries at the time and Omar Torrijos, who was the President of Panama, followed a long line of oligarchy dictators that basically were puppets of the US government that we had installed 50 years prior when we took over the country. Omar Torrijos was the first one to break that cycle, and he was a very, very popular president. He was popular throughout much of the world. Many people believed he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize and might have had he not died or been killed. He protected the downtrodden everywhere. At the time President Carter was negotiating a new Canal treaty with Torrijos and ultimately that Canal treaty went through. But it caused a tremendous amount of turmoil in our own country. In fact, it was passed in Congress by only one vote.

So, we economic hit men were really looking beyond that process, at how we could win Panama over regardless of what happened to the Canal Treaty. I was there before the treaty was signed in 1972 and I was trying to bring Torrijos around. I was trying to catch him. I was trying to get him. I was trying to hook him the way we hooked everybody else. He arranged for me to meet with him in this private bungalow one day, and what he said to me is, Look, I know the game you guys are playing. I know what you’re trying to do here. You’re trying to saddle us with huge debts. You’re trying to make us totally dependent upon you, and you’re trying to corrupt me. I know what this game is and I’m not playing. I don’t need the money. I’m not looking to get personally wealthy out of this. I want to help my poor people. I want you to build the projects that you’re supposed to build, that you build in other countries, but I want you to build them for our poor people, not for our rich people.

And he said, if you do that, I’ll see to it that you and your company get a lot more work in this country. Good work that will help our people. Well, I was really conflicted at this because, as an economic hit man, I was supposed to get him under our control. I was supposed to hook him. But as a partner in this company and as the chief economist for this firm, I also wanted to get the work for the firm, and in this case it was very obvious that the economic hit men weren’t going to get through to Torrijos, so I went along with him. But at the time, I was deeply concerned because I knew that this system is built on the assumption that leaders like Torrijos are corruptible and they are all over the world for the most part. When one stands up to the system as Torrijos was doing, it’s not only a threat in his country, like Panama, that we’re not going to get our way there, but it also may be seen as setting a very bad example for the rest of the world once one leader stands up—and at that time there was another leader standing up, too, who was the President of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos. They were both standing up to the US government, to the oil companies and the economic hit men, and it was a very big concern to me. I knew in my heart that if this continued, something was going to give. Of course, it did. Both of these men were assassinated by what we call the jackals, CIA-sanctioned assassins.

In the conversation you had with Omar Torrijos he talked about the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Arbenz in Guatemala by United Fruit and the CIA-backed coup there in 1954, about George Bush’s company Zapata Oil eventually taking over United Brands, which was United Fruit, and then he talked about giving your company the business, saying that he believed the Japanese would finance the canal that would be built, though turning to your company. He said “They provide the money, they will do the construction.” And you wrote, “It struck me, Bechtel will be out in the cold.” Bechtel’s President was George Schultz, Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury—Bechtel was loaded with Nixon, Ford, and Bush cronies. Torrijos had been told that the Bechtel family pulled the strings of the Republican Party.

Yes. Well, it got worse, of course. At that time, George Schultz was President of Bechtel. Casper Weinberger was their Chief Counsel, a senior officer in the corporation. They were opposed to Torrijos, not only on the US turning the Canal over to Panama, but even more importantly perhaps because Torrijos was actively negotiating with the Japanese to build a new sea level canal. As you know, the current canal is based on locks and the larger ships in the world can’t go through it. So, the idea was to build a sea level canal where every ship could go through, and the Japanese were offering to finance this. But if they financed it, it would be their construction companies, their engineering companies that would build it. Bechtel was incensed over this. They absolutely could not tolerate the idea of this happening. We knew this very strongly, we had to win Torrijos over.

And then Schultz became Secretary of State and Casper Weinberger became Secretary of Defense under Reagan. They were the heads of Bechtel Corporation.

Yes. Carter negotiated the treaty and then lost the election, partly because of this treaty, partly because of what happened in Iran, which is another story that I was involved in. And then when Reagan became President, Schultz went from President of Bechtel to Secretary of State and Weinberger went from Chief Counsel of Bechtel to Secretary of Defense. They went back to Panama and said, Okay, Omar, now let’s talk. We want the canal back, we want the military bases back in the canal zone and more than anything, we want you to stop talking to the Japanese. And Torrijos said, No, I’m a sovereign country. I am not opposing the United States. I’m not a socialist, I’m not a communist, I’m not siding with Cuba or Russia or China, I’m simply standing up for the rights of my people. We have the right to negotiate with whoever can build us the best canal. I have the right to negotiate with the Japanese.

He took a very strong stand and within a few months, his plane blew up and crashed into a mountain, and it was very strong evidence that it had been blown up by a tape recorder which was handed to him at the end that was full of explosives. There is no question in my mind and in the mind of much of the world that this was the jackals, the CIA-sanctioned assassins. I’ve seen them work in many places. Just a couple of months before that, they had done the same thing to Jaime Roldos, President of Ecuador, the first democratically elected president of Ecuador in decades, who had replaced a military junta, democratically elected, and who had stood up to the US oil companies. We economic hit men couldn’t get through to him and his helicopter blew up then and there.

Why was he standing up to US oil companies?

Because he ran in the first democratic elections in Ecuador in many decades on a platform of sovereignty for his country. If there is oil in Ecuador, he said, the Ecuadoreans should benefit from it. Once he became president, he began to introduce this. He set up a Hydrocarbons Act, he called it, which was basically a petroleum act that would ensure that if oil came out of Ecuador, the majority of the funds from that oil would go to his people. The oil companies would get a reasonable payment, but the majority would go to his people. He was setting a precedent that the oil companies couldn’t stand, because throughout the world, they were exploiting countries, as they still are. And Roldos said, I’m not going to let that happen to my country. The oil companies couldn’t bear to see that, not just because of Ecuador but, again, because of the precedent this would establish. And Roldos and Torrijos were really partners in a way. At the same time, they were supporting each other, and they both had to go. And they both went.

And what were your thoughts at the time? I mean, you continued doing this work.

It was a very pivotal point for me. Throughout my work, as I describe in the book, my conscience was torn. And to me this is one of most interesting parts of my own personal story. I think of myself as a pretty good person. I grew up a Yankee Calvinist in Vermont and New Hampshire. I come from a very patriotic background. I grew up in a very strictly Republican family, very conservative. I have very strong values. I’m very loyal to my country.

You’re a descendant of Tom Paine and Ethan Allen?

They’re distant relatives. And my parents steeped me in American history and in the values of the founding fathers of our country. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, all over the world. I believed very strongly in this. And yet at the same time, I was very seduceable to money, power, sex. All these things came my way, and I was doing things that I was patted on the back for by the president of the World Bank, Robert MacNamara. And I was Chief Economist of a big consulting firm in Boston. I had 50 people working for me, PHDs, MBAs. I was doing work that macroeconomics in college had taught me was good work to do. It’s all a scam.

Why have very few people heard of this company, Main?

We were a very quiet company. We had about 2,000 professional employees, which is not small. We were a closely held company, that means we were owned like a partnership, about 5% of us owned the company so we didn’t have to disclose our books to the SEC or anybody. We were a very private, very quiet company and we were serving the interests of empire. The company no longer exists. In the early 1980s, the partners sold out to a larger engineering construction firm, and so the company essentially went out of existence at that point. I think it was getting a little too hot for us at this point. But it was intentional. We were very strictly forbidden from talking to the press. I broke that rule at one point. I wrote an op-ed piece on the Panama Canal for the Boston Globe and was severely chastised within the company. So, it was intentional that we were very quiet.

I want to ask you about Robert MacNamara. As you talk about the corporatocracy, certainly he embodied that, from becoming CEO of Ford to Secretary of Defense, and ultimately the President of the World Bank.

I think that what we have here is a world empire that’s controlled by a very few men, and these are the heads of the big corporations, big banks and government, and they tend to be the same person. They jump across the lines and MacNamara is a great example of that. He was president of Ford and then he became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then he became president of the World Bank. And in all three roles, his main job was to promote American business, to promote the corporatocracy, to bring the goodies home, to exploit the world. And he was in democratic regimes, Kennedy and Johnson. Today we’ve got Dick Cheney who’s basically in the same picture. We had George Schultz under the former President Bush. Condoleezza Rice under the current Bush administration. Government is filled with these people. But it is not just a Republican issue. It’s a bipartisan issue. It goes across all the lines, and MacNamara is a very good example of that. I think, at the same time, MacNamara was one of the most important people in terms of framing the new economics, what he called aggressive management, and it was aggressive about going out and basically taking the world and bringing it to us.

Today out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations. 47 are US corporations. They’re not countries, they’re corporations. Here we are 5% of the world’s population reaching out like a great octopus and sucking in 25% or more of the world’s resources. But it’s not really 5% of the world’s population, the American people. 1% of the American population owns more of the material wealth than 90% of our population. So, it’s that 1% that are the corporatocracy that are sucking all this in and the rest of us are supporting it through our taxes, through our purchases, through our silence, through going along with this system. Like me, as an economic hit man, I went along with the system. I did more than go along with the system, I promoted the system. But I did so legally, for the most part, and I did so while being patted on the back by all the people that I was taught to look up to.

You begin your book in Indonesia. Talk about your training there and what you were trying to accomplish.

I was in Indonesia in 1970, 1971. We know that at this point Vietnam is going to go. The people at the top knew we were going to lose, although they weren’t admitting it. The theory was if Indonesia went, the rest of Southeast Asia would go—like dominos one country at a time. And Indonesia was seen as the key to stopping that process. We didn’t want communism to go there. Also, Indonesia happened to have a lot of oil, which we needed or wanted, and it had the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. So, if we could win Indonesia over and basically get Indonesia as our slave in our clutches, we’d accomplish a lot. So I was sent there to make that happen, to arrange a huge loan to Indonesia for Indonesia to build a big electrical system or several large electrical systems that would serve the very wealthy people of Indonesia—didn’t help the poor much at all—and to make very inflated forecasts so that we would build a huge system, much bigger than anybody could possibly have imagined. Java is the most heavily populated piece of real estate in the world, but we were building this huge electrical system and it served industry, but it didn’t serve the people. At the same time, it put Indonesia in tremendous debt to us, a debt that it would have a hard time getting out of, and therefore, would cause it to become part of our empire.

Shoring up Suharto, the dictator there for so many years.

Right. An interesting aspect of that whole thing was at that time I was part of a team of 11, and the other 10 men on that team had no idea that we were doing the economic hit man thing. They were engineers. They were designing transmis-sion lines, fuel systems to bring the fuel into the power plants. They were designing the power plants, big power plants, distribution lines. I was the one that made the forecast. I was the one that said that the electrical demand was going to grow at 17% a year for 20 years, which is unheard of, but that was my job—to inflate these numbers as much as I possibly could. I mean, that’s a huge number when you compound it annually. And they were just going along. You know, for them it was great. They get to design this huge, amazing system, an engineer’s dream.

You replaced a man who had warned you not to make economic forecasts that you couldn’t support, that it was a con game, that it would destroy the country. But he was taken out.

Right. Howard Parker retired from the New England Electric System. He saw what was going on, but he was also a very bitter man, and nobody really got along very well with Howard. My job was to forecast the economy of the country. His job was then to forecast the electrical needs of the country. But the two are very highly correlated, so if I would come up with 17 or 18% economic growth in the economic sector, then his load forecast for the electricity would have to be roughly the same, and he told me I’m not going to go along with this. This is a scam. You are buying into the system. This is all based on greed and I’m not going along with it. And in a way that let me off the hook. I felt very relieved. At one point, I realized, my gosh, I can do what my handlers have trained me to do, what Claudine has told me I must do, and that is come up with these high electrical load forecasts, but my conscience is going to be clear, because Howard is not going to pay any attention to them anyway. He’s going to come up with much lower electric load forecasts so we’re really not going to scam the country. And then, of course, when I get back to Boston, I found that my boss had fired Howard, called me into the office, said Howard didn’t do his job. He has got these ridiculous low forecasts. We fired him. We’re going to give you his job as well as your own. We’re going to make you a department head. You’re going to get rich. But you have got to come up with the kind of forecast that we were looking for from him and we know you can do that because you do that for the economy.

What about Iran?

Iran is where economic hit men really got started because in the early 1950s, Iran democratically elected a man named Mossadeq as premier. He was Time magazine’s man of the year in 1951. And he was held out for the hope of the Middle East and, in fact, the whole world of democratically elected president. But as soon as he got into power, he went up against the oil companies. And fore-shadowing what Roldos and Torrijos would do later on, he really stood up for his people. And he said, particularly to British Petroleum, if you are going to be here, you are going to give your fair share to our people. The oil companies were very upset, so the United States made the decision to go in and do something about this. At the time, we were terrified of nuclear war—Russia was the enemy after World War II, and Iran is on the Russian border—so we didn’t dare send in troops to get rid of Mossadeq. Although he was a demo-cratically elected president, the US decided to get rid of him because he opposed the oil companies. Instead of sending in the troops, Kermit Roosevelt—a CIA agent who happened to be Teddy’s grandson—was sent in with a few million dollars, and he managed to create riots, protest, havoc, and he overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah back into power. One of the lessons learned, however, was that Kermit Roosevelt, as a CIA agent and government employee, would have gotten the government in trouble had he been found out. So, shortly after that, the decision was made that economic hit men needed to be hired by private firms. The NSA, the CIA could identify us, could run all the tests on us, could hook us, but in the end, we had to work for private companies so that if we were caught, it would be chocked up to corporate greed, rather than government policy.

Deniability. So Kermit Roosevelt goes from Iran to Guatemala a year later to help overthrow Arbenz by the Dulles brothers, and he refuses. But that happens. And the next coup the next year is the overthrow by United Fruit and the CIA of Arbenz in Guatemala, so the model got started.

The model got started and continued to grow tremendously. By the time I got to Iran, which was in the early 1970s, it was a pivotal country for us. Its location on the Russian border was very important, and it had all this oil which we wanted to control. We wanted desperately to control all the Middle Eastern oil. We saw the Shah as being the person who could make this happen for us. The plan was that the Shah would help take over the rest of the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq. From the very beginning, the idea was to become allies with the Shah. We did everything we could to shore him up. And at the same time, we realize that he had a lot of oil money and so our companies were benefiting tremendously. Once again, all those engineering firms that we’ve talked about, my own, Charles T. Main, and Bechtel and Halliburton, and everybody else who was in there building cities, building power plants, building highways, getting very, very, rich and making tremendous numbers of people—a lot of Muslims around the world and many others in the Middle East—very angry. Even to this day Osama bin Laden cites how we overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah in as one of the reasons for his anger.

Mossadeq went after Anglo American saying this is our oil and we should control it. Anglo American, the British govern-ment, did not allow for any Iranian ownership, but then forced Anglo Amer-ican eventually into becoming British Petroleum?

Yes, I believe the numbers were that 85 cents of every dollar of oil drilled in Iran went out of the country to Anglo American or BP. And, of course, Mossadeq was incensed by this, as he should have been. There’s no reason why the people who sit on the resources, whose land is being drilled to provide it, shouldn’t get the lion’s share of what comes out of it, and that’s what he was fighting for, as Torrijos did later, as Arbenz did in Guatemala as Allende did in Chile.

If I remember correctly, Truman refused to be a part of this, but then Eisenhower came in and decided to support Britain in this.

That’s correct. Truman took a very integritous stand. He said we’re not going to mingle in these affairs. This is a democratically elected premier, Mossadeq, and he is doing what he’s doing, and we’re not going to step in on the side of private industry. But very shortly after that, he was out of office and Eisenhower came into office, and he went along with the CIA’s plan to overthrow Mossadeq and replace him with the Shah.

Oil is the source of so much pain.

Every country in the world that has major supplies of oil has suffered. Oil is not a benefit for these countries. It’s a benefit for a few of the very wealthy people at the top of the economic totem pole in these countries. But for everybody else, it’s a curse. Oil is a curse to the world. It may be the greatest curse the world has ever experienced. It’s destroying our environ-ment, it’s destroyed a lot of world economies, it’s destroyed tremendous numbers of indigenous people who are suffocating from the results of the carbon dioxide that oil has produced. It’s amazing. And isn’t it also amazing, Amy, that when the first President Bush went into Iraq in 1990, we were importing about eight million barrels of oil a day. When the second President Bush went in, that had gone up by 50% to twelve. In that period of time, our imports had increased.

What about Saudi Arabia?
Well, Saudi Arabia was our greatest success as economic hit men. I mean, that’s how we judge ourselves. In the early 1970s, OPEC really flexed its muscle. It didn’t like US policies supporting Israel, and decided to do something about it. So it shut down oil production significantly. And as a result, the US economy went into a tail spin. There were long lines of cars at gas stations, many of us still remember that. And we were afraid that it was going to be another crash like 1929 as a result of OPEC. And so the treasury department came to me and some other economic hit men and said this must never happen again. You have got to devise a plan. What are you going to do about this? How can you make sure this never happens? And we knew the key was Saudi Arabia. For one thing, it had more oil than anybody else. Even at that point in time, the Shah was getting a little bit shaky, and we’d seen that he probably wasn’t going to take over the rest of the Middle East. We knew that the House of Saud, the royal Saudi family, was corruptible. They were corrupt, they are corrupt, and they were corruptible.

So, to make a long story short, we put together this deal whereby the House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro dollars, the money we paid for petroleum, back to the United States and invest it in US securities. The interest from those securities would be dealt out by the treasury department to US engineering construction firms to build Saudi Arabia in the Western image, to build huge cities out of the desert, which we’ve done—power plants, highways, McDonald’s, the whole works—to make Saudi Arabia a very westernized country. And the House of Saud would guarantee to keep oil prices within acceptable limits, limits acceptable to us, and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power.

And we have done all those things since the early 1970s. The policy still holds. Even to the point where, you know, we know that the House of Saud supports Osama bin Laden, supported him at our encourage-ment, of course, in Afghanistan, continues to support him and a lot of terrorist movements. We knew that the House of Saud provided sanctuary to Idi Amin, the Hitler of Africa. In fact, that’s where he spend the last years of his life, living in a mansion, he just died a little over a year ago there. We’ve supported the House of Saud throughout all of this, despite the fact they’ve done a lot of things that ostensibly we disagree with, but they have provided us with stabilized oil prices and a huge market for our engineering construction companies.

You tried to write this book over several decades. What happened?

It always bothered my conscience, what I was doing, and I really wanted to expose it because I didn’t like what was going on in the world, what I saw my country doing. And I’m a very loyal American and I believe very deeply in the principles of this country, the founding fathers. And as time went on, I began to see how we were cheating those principles, how we were distorting them, how we’re losing our sense of democracy almost completely and becoming such a capitalistic corporatocracy-oriented country, a great empire, an imperialistic country. We’ve created this empire in the most subtle way possible, other empires have been created militarily and everybody in the country knows the armies are going out there and creating empire. But this one has been done so subtly that most Americans have no idea that it is going on.

Although it’s not so subtle anymore, which interestingly, at least at the beginning, is why some of corporate America was actually opposed to the invasion of Iraq, because it’s not so subtle anymore.

That’s right. It’s coming out more and more. And probably that’s one of the reasons why I could write the book, too. When I first started writing it I was interviewing others to get their assistance in certain details, and I received subtle threats, but more importantly, bribes. So in the early 1990s, for example, when I started writing the book called Conscience of an Economic Hit Man, a large engineering company, Stoner-Webster Corporation, also of Boston, came to me and basically gave me about a half a million dollar bribe with a complete understanding I wouldn’t write the book and I wouldn’t have to do much work at all. I would be on their roster.

Why did Stoner-Webster care?

Because they were very much involved in the business, too, and many of the people who had left Charles T. Main at that time, my old company which had been bought out, had gone to work for Stoner-Webster. And they were very much involved in doing the same thing. It’s all part of the family. And I call it a bribe, but legally speaking it isn’t a bribe. I was hired to be a consultant to them, paid the fee to be a consultant with a very strong understanding that I was not to talk about my former life in this business or my current life at that time. I used a lot of that money to form a nonprofit organization called Dream Change that helped indigenous people in many of the countries that I had screwed as an economic hit man. So I used this money that I was making to assuage my guilt and to do good things—things I’m very, very proud of.

How much money were you making?

I ended up taking about a half a million dollars from Stoner-Webster over a period of several years, basically for doing nothing. But I didn’t write the book. I went off and had a few dinners in Rio de Janeiro and other places with some of their clients. Tough assignment. Flew around in a corporate private jet a few times. Although I always justified on one level that I was using this money to do good work in the nonprofit sector, which was true, I knew deep in my heart I needed to write this book. I needed to expose the truth behind what’s going on in the world. I could justify not writing this book on many, many levels—and I was sworn to secrecy on it.

Then 9/11 struck. I was in the Amazon, but I came up here a few weeks later and sat close enough to where I could still smell the burning flesh and see the smoke coming out of the hole, and I sat there and I knew that I had to take responsibility for what had happened there. I knew that I had to expose the truth because what happened is a direct result of the empire building, of what we economic hit men did, and I knew as I sat there that if we don’t do something to change the course we’re on in the world, my daughter basically has no future and certainly her children don’t, and I’m leaving them a much worse world than the one I inherited. So at that point, I knew that no matter what the consequences, no matter how big a noose I was sticking my head into, I had to expose what’s been going on in the world. This empire that we’ve created has made so many people around the planet angry, and has resulted in destitution for billions of people—24,000 people starve to death every day, 30,000 children die every day from lack of medicines for diseases that could be cured—we have to take responsibility for that. We can change that and we will change it. But we’ll only change it when we really come to understand what’s going on.

You write about a top corporate publisher who was interested in the manuscript.

The president of one of the major publishing houses invited me to New York, he said this is a great book, it’s riveting, it’s very well-written, it’s a story that needs to be told, but I can’t tell it because I’m owned by a major international corporation that doesn’t want this kind of story getting out there. I have a very good New York literary agent who submitted this book to all the major publishing houses and got back letters that said things very much like that—this is a really good book, we really enjoyed it, but it is not for us right now.

So, this major publisher offered to publish one of your books, but said it had to be fictionalized?

Right. He said, Why don’t you fictionalize this book, why don’t you be John LeCarre or Graham Green or Dan Brown with The Da Vinci Code, fictionalize it, then we can consider publishing it. And I am considering fictionalizing it, I think it would make a good novel, but what that said to me was what kind of a country is this that we’re in where the press, where the main publishers won’t publish the truth when it’s written as the truth, they’ll only publish it if it’s fictionalized? What does that say about our freedom of the press? And, of course, subsequently a very brave publisher, a family-owned firm in San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, published the book. But it has been very interesting that I still haven’t been on what we call the mainstream press. Kudlow & Cramer and a number of other programs invited me on, but at the last moment, told me I’m uninvited. They didn’t like the politics. Somebody, an advertiser, objected. I don’t know the details behind it, but I was yanked off at the last minute.

But as a chief economist of the Main international consulting firm, you were the type that usually gets on these shows.

I was, but now I’m dangerous, you know? And the truth is coming out—I was on your show about a month ago and the next day the book went to number one on Amazon.com, and what that said to me is once people know that this story is out there to be told, they want to read it. It’s now gone on to the New York Times best seller list. In its fifth week of publication, it went into its fifth printing. I mean, the publisher hasn’t been able to keep up.

Yet no major corporate network has interviewed you.

Exactly. Nobody who is owned by a big corporation or depends on big corporations for their advertising has interviewed me at this point. Isn’t that interesting?

How does that fit into the stories you have told us during this interview?

Well, Iraq followed Saudi Arabia. After our tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, we decided we should do the same thing in Iraq. We figured that Saddam Hussein was corruptible. Of course, we had been involved with Saddam Hussein anyway for some time, so the economic hit men went in and tried to bring Saddam Hussein around, tried to get him to agree to a deal like the royal House of Saud had agreed to. When he didn’t we sent in the jackals to try to overthrow him or to assassinate him. They couldn’t. His Republican Guard was too loyal and he had all these doubles. We couldn’t do it. So, when the economic hit men and the jackals both failed, then the last line of defense that the United States, the empire, uses these days, is the military. We send in our young men and women to die and to kill, and we did that in Iraq in 1990. We thought Saddam Hussein at that point was sufficiently chastised that now he would come around, so the economic hit men went back in in the 1990s, failed once again. The jackals went back in, failed once again, and so once again the military went in—the story we all know—because we couldn’t bring him around any other way. Iraq had become very, very important to us for many reasons. Its strategic location, the fact it controls a great deal of the water of the Middle East—the Tigris and Euphrates both flow through and out of Iraq—and, of course, its oil.

But now we’re not so sure we can keep the House of Saud in control. It’s become extremely unpopular amongst its own people. Over 100 assassinations this year. The US Consulate was recently attacked in Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud is losing control. It’s very unpopular, partly because it accepted this deal with the West. It did a lot like what the Shah of Iran has done. And Osama bin Laden, of course, is very against it. But so are a tremendous number of Muslims around the world. The seat of the Muslim faith, Mecca, is in Saudi Arabia, very upset with what the House of Saud has done. We’ve been afraid that we’re going to lose the grip on the House of Saud, and one way to protect against that is by taking over Iraq oil fields, which may be larger than those in Saudi Arabia. We’re not sure exactly how large they are.

Your job as an economic hit man was to convince countries that are strategically important to the US to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to US corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the US government, the World Bank, and other US-dominated aid agencies that acted like loan sharks, dictating repayment terms and bullying them into submission. You work with a lot of people in other countries and in international financial institutions, like the World Bank. What do they say? What understanding do they have? Do a lot of people feel the same way you do?

That’s a good question. It’s hard to answer for a lot of other people. Within those organizations, most of the people don’t realize what’s going on. The engineers at Bechtel and Halliburton and the financial specialists at the World Bank don’t really realize what’s going on. They should. They ought to look into it and find out. But there is every excuse not to on their part. They do their job. My father-in-law was chief architect at Bechtel Corporation. He has since retired, and you know he built big cities in Saudi Arabia. He was in charge of that. For him, it was a plum. He was an architect. To be given, basically, all the money that he wanted to build huge cities out of the desert was a dream for an architect. He never thought what was going on beneath the surface, and unfortunately, too many of us don’t.
I’m struck by the fact that as I travel around the world—I just got back recently from Nepal and Tibet, I travel a lot to South America—how many people in these countries, even people we consider illiterate, question their government. They assume their government is corrupt, they assume ours is corrupt, but we don’t. It is amazing to me how many of us don’t, at least not openly. And as I speak, I’ve been on tour with this book for the last month, people keep saying, gee, I knew that was going on. Some place in my heart, I knew that was going on, but I really didn’t understand it. And the fact is that Americans, for the most part, we don’t really want to know, I’m afraid, what’s going on. But we need to. We really need to question that. So within these organizations, you’ve got tremendous numbers of people that are just going along with the system, getting paid really well to do it, and getting jobs that they were trained to do. But then you always have a number of people like me at the top of the organizations that know what’s going on. They are part of this and they use every means they can to keep the system moving.

This interview first aired on Democracy Now! (democracynow.org). See page 3 for radio and TV stations in Oregon and Northern California with daily broadcasts from Democracy Now!

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