What The CIA Won't Declassify:
Old Secrets and New

by Deirdre Griswold





The CIA wants everyone to think it's warm, cuddly and open. Why, can't you get a CD-ROM disk with CIA data on every country in the world? And doesn't this prove that the CIA is doing what its name says, providing people with intelligence?

However, there are a few things the CIA doesn't want you to know. Like how it organized the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. How it overthrew the elected government of Guatemala in 1954, setting off a long and bloody struggle that continues to this day. How it overthrew the progressive and secular government of Iran and put in the Shah, who decimated the left--so that the only force in Iran strong enough to take power when the Shah was overthrown in a popular revolution was the fundamentalists led by Khomeini.

CIA documents on all these events remain classified, despite much fanfare over "openness" since the end of the cold war. In fact, the CIA has so many old classified documents that, if stacked up like pancakes, they would rise higher than 50 Washington Monuments! (New York Times editorial, April 20)

In the 1930s, when the workers' movement in the U.S. was growing and people were defecting from mindless loyalty to imperialism, retired Marine Gen. Smedley Butler confessed he had acted as a "gangster" for U.S. big business when he commanded earlier invasions of Mexico and Nicaragua.

It's no different now. And that's what the CIA doesn't want people to know. They grabbed Iran for the oil companies. Guatemala for United Fruit. They tried to return Cuba to U.S. sugar companies.

And today? Which billionaire outfits expect to wring juicy profits out of the areas torn from Yugoslavia? What rich areas in Africa are the target of CIA machinations? How active is the agency in bankrolling pro-"democracy" movements in China?

Next time you see a stirring image of the Washington Monument, think of all those classified documents. They catalogue the crimes of U.S. big business around the world, crimes so foul that they must be kept under the most high- tech lock and key.

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