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.In the outline presented to the congressional leaders, there is no hint of what theCIA's actual role might have been had the plot reached fruition.19The dissidents involved in the alleged plot were embittered French army officersand former Algerian settlers who still bore deep resentment toward de Gaulle for having"sold out French honor" by his retreat from the North African colony.There was no mention in the reported CIA testimony about any involvement ofLyndon Johnson, although it was well known that there was no love lost betweenJohnson and de Gaulle.The French leader was firmly convinced that the United Stateswas behind the failure of his trip to South America in 1964.He believed that the CIAhad used its network of agents in South America to prevent a big turnout of crowds.20There is some evidence to indicate that the General was not just paranoid.In 1970, DrAlfred Stepan, a professor of political science at Yale, testified before Congress abouthis experience in South America in 1964 when be was a journalist for The Economist.When De Gaulle was going to make his trip through Latin America, many of theLatin Americans interviewed [officers of various embassies] said that they wereunder very real pressure by various American groups not to be very warmtowards De Gaulle, because we considered Latin America within the UnitedStates area of influence.21After the appearance of the Chicago Tribune story, CIA Director William Colbyconfirmed that ''foreigners" had approached the Agency with a plot to kill de Gaulle.The Agency rejected the idea, Colby said, but he did not know' if the Frenchgovernment had been advised of the plot.22 It is not clear whether the incident referredto by Colby was related to the one discussed in the Tribune.152In the early evening of Monday, 9 November 1970, Charles de Gaulle diedpeacefully at the age of 80, sitting in his armchair watching a sentimental televisionserial called "Nanou".25.Ecuador 1960-1963A textbook of dirty tricksIf the Guinness Book of World Records included a category for "cynicism", onecould suggest the CIA's creation of "leftist" organizations which condemned poverty,disease, illiteracy, capitalism, and the United States in order to attract committedmilitants and their money away from legitimate leftist organizations.The tiny nation of Ecuador in the early 1960s was, as it remains today, a classic ofbanana-republic underdevelopment; virtually at the bottom of the economic heap inSouth America; a society in which one percent of the population received an incomecomparable to United States upper-class standards, while two-thirds of the people hadan average family income of about ten dollars per month people simply outside themoney economy, with little social integration or participation in the national life; a taletold many times in Latin America.In September 1960, a new government headed by Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra cameto power.Velasco had won a decisive electoral victory, running on a vaguely liberal,populist, something-for-everyone platform.He was no Fidel Castro, he was not even asocialist, but he earned the wrath of the US State Department and the CIA by hisunyielding opposition to the two stated priorities of American policy in Ecuador:breaking relations with Cuba, and clamping down hard on activists of the CommunistParty and those to their left.Over the next three years, in pursuit of those goals, the CIA left as little aspossible to chance.A veritable textbook on covert subversion techniques unfolded.Inits pages could be found the following, based upon the experiences of Philip Agee, aCIA officer who spent this period in Ecuador.1Almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right,were infiltrated, often at the highest levels.Amongst other reasons, the left wasinfiltrated to channel young radicals away from support to Cuba and from anti-Americanism; the right, to instigate and co-ordinate activities along the lines of CIApriorities.If, at a point in time, there was no organization that appeared well-suited toserve a particular need, then one would be created.Or a new group of "concerned citizens" would appear, fronted with notedpersonalities, which might place a series of notices in leading newspapers denouncingthe penetration of the government by the extreme left and demanding a break withCuba.Or one of the noted personalities would deliver a speech prepared by the CIA,and then a newspaper editor, or a well-known columnist, would praise it, bothgentlemen being on the CIA payroll.Some of these fronts had an actual existence; for others, even their existence wasphoney.On one occasion, the CIA Officer who had created the non-existent"Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Front" was surprised to read in his morning paper that areal organization with that name had been founded.He changed the name of hisorganization to "Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action".153Wooing the working class came in for special emphasis.An alphabet-soup oflabor organizations, sometimes hardly more than names on stationery, were created,altered, combined, liquidated, and new ones created again, in an almost frenzied attemptto find the right combination to compete with existing left-oriented unions and takenational leadership away from them.Union leaders were invited to attend variousclasses conducted by the CIA in Ecuador or in the United States, all expenses paid, inorder to impart to them the dangers of communism to the union movement and to selectpotential agents.This effort was not without its irony either.CIA agents would sometimesjealously vie with each other for the best positions in these CIA-created labororganizations; and at times Ecuadorean organizations would meet in "internationalconferences" with CIA labor fronts from other countries, with almost all of theparticipants blissfully unaware of who was who or what was what.In Ecuador, as throughout most of Latin America, the Agency planted phoneyanti-communist news items in co-operating newspapers.These items would then bepicked up by other CIA stations in Latin America and disseminated through a CIA-owned news agency, a CIA-owned radio station, or through countless journalists beingpaid on a piece-work basis, in addition to the item being picked up unwittingly by othermedia, including those in the United States.Anti-communist propaganda and newsdistortion (often of the most farfetched variety) written in CIA offices would alsoappear in Latin American newspapers as unsigned editorials of the papers themselves.In virtually every department of the Ecuadorean government could be found menoccupying positions, high and low, who collaborated with the CIA for money and/ortheir own particular motivation.At one point, the Agency could count amongst thisnumber the men who were second and third in power in the country [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]