Upstream - A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations w/ Vijay Prashad

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

“What is the price of an assassin’s bullet? Some dollars here and there. The cost of the bullet.  The cost of a taxi ride, a hotel, an airplane, the money paid to hire the assassin, his silence purchased through a payment into a Swiss bank, the cost to him psychologically for having taken the life of one, two, three, or four. But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities.  Each bullet fired struck down a Revolution and gave birth to our present barbarity. This is a book about bullets.” These are the words of Vijay Prashad in the opening paragraphs of his book, Washington Bullets: The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations—a fascinating and meticulously researched and gut-wrenchingly evocative book which takes readers on a tour of the US empire’s wide-ranging project of global dominance.  Vijay Prashad is a journalist, political commentator, and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He’s the author of many books including Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations, and the book that we’ll be discussing today, Washington Bullets. This conversation explores many of the concepts outlined in the Washington Bullets, from the CIA’s manual for regime change to how economic shock and military coups were utilized to achieve said regime changes in countries like Chile. But more than just a chapter by chapter overview, today’s conversation with Vijay takes many side-alleys and side-paths that range from the importance of art and emotion in politics, why we need to rethink the idea of conspiracy theories, why cancel culture is a dead end, and why the left needs to reexamine its use of language and propaganda in the face of a US cultural apparatus that won the PR campaign against socialism decades ago.  Further Resources Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Washington Bullets, by Vijay Prashad Related Episodes: China Pt. 3: Bourgeois Democracy vs Socialist Democracy w/ Vijay Prashad The Fight for The Congo w/ Vijay Prashad Intermission music: "Stolen Empires" by Andrew Glencross Artwork: Tings Chak Upstream is a labor of love—we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Washington Bullets isn't in that sense a compendium of horrors. It's an attempt to remind us of the kind of suffering and pain that the struggleers who were trying to make the world better had to face and faced with the barrel of the gun in their face, you know, like right there, they didn't flinch. I think that's pretty powerful, you know. They looked the gun in the face and said, no, I'm here. I belong. I exist.

You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

What is the price of an assassin's bullet? Some dollars here and there, the cost of the bullet, the cost of a taxi ride, a hotel, an airplane, the money paid to hire the assassin, his silence purchased through a payment into a Swiss bank, the cost to him psychologically for having taken the life of one, two, three, or four. But the biggest price is not paid by the intelligence services. The biggest price is paid

by the people. For in these assassinations, these murders, this violence of intimidation, it is the people who lose their leaders in their localities. Each bullet fired struck down a revolution and gave birth to our present barbarity. This is a book about bullets. These are the words of Vijay Prashad in the opening paragraphs of his book, Washington Bullets, the History of the CIA Coupoups, and Assassinations, a fascinating and meticulously researched and gut-wrenchingly evocative book which takes readers on a tour of the U.S. Empire's wide-ranging project of global dominance.

Vijay Prashad is a journalist, political commentator, and executive director of Tri-Continental, Institute for Social Research. He's the author of many books including Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations, and the book we'll be discussing today, Washington Bullets. This conversation explores many of the concepts outlined in the book Washington Bullets, from the CIA's manual for regime change to how economic shock and military coups were utilized to achieve said regime changes in countries like Chile. But more than just a chapter-by-chapter overview, today's conversation with Vijay takes many side alleys and side paths that

range from the importance of art and emotion in politics, why we need to rethink the idea of conspiracy theories, why cancel culture is a dead end, and why the left needs to reexamine its use of language and propaganda in the face of a US cultural apparatus that won the PR campaign against socialism decades ago. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bi-weekly episodes, ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing

up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Sign up and find out more at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And if Patreon is not really your thing, you can also make a tax deductible, recurring or one-time donation through our website upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through this support, you'll be helping keep Upstream sustainable and helping us to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Vijay Prashad.

Vijay, it is very wonderful to have you back on the show. Great to be with you. Thanks a lot. I believe this is your third appearance on the show. And I honestly I couldn't be more delighted to be saying that because you're kind of a regular guest now. And our first episode with you was, of course, last year where you explained all about what's going on in the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And then we had you on earlier this year, very recently actually for part three of our

China series, which we've gotten really great feedback on. People really enjoyed that episode. But today we're going to be talking about your terrific book, Washington Bullets, a history of the CIA, coups, and assassinations. And I also just want to shout out Guerrilla History for their episode with you on this book as well, which was, I think about four or five years ago now. Maybe that's, maybe not that long ago, but also a great conversation.

And I'm gonna try to make it so that this conversation doesn't just repeat that one with my questions, but also, folks, check out that episode two, it's really relevant and really great. And it did help me sort of think through some of what I wanted to talk to you about today. But maybe just first, since you know, there might be some listeners who are listening who have not listened to past episodes with you, or may not know who you are. Maybe if you

could just briefly introduce yourself, and then we'll hop into Washington Bullets. Well, I wish I could say that I was ex-CIA and that I was a CIA hitman who decided to spill the beans in the book called Washington Bullets, but unfortunately not so exciting. I'm the director of Tri-Continental, which is a kind of inter-movement research institute. We work across the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, producing, you know, knowledge, the facts about the world, in a sense to orient ourselves about where the world is, but also to have a discussion, to spur discussion amongst movements about where people think the

world is and where it should go, where it's going, things like that. Also I get worked up about things in the world and I end up writing books like Washington Bullets, which I of course never planned to write. I just wrote it because I was very angry about things happening in the world. I just wrote it because I was very angry about things happening in the world. I love Tri-Continental. I just want to definitely underscore everybody should be checking out all of your dossiers and your essays and your newsletters and everything that you guys do is really top notch. And I also remember from that Gorilla History episode with you from a few years ago that I just mentioned that you talked about how you first sort of started writing the book by leaving an audio note or whatever in

your iPhone or your phone as you were walking or something like that and that really resonated with me because I used to do some writing like freelance writing and I've written entire first drafts of pieces just voice to text into Google Docs. I really appreciated hearing that. That's funny. You know, it's interesting because people have different methods of writing things. I am very much opposed to people writing on the computer. I just think it produces really bad pros, you know, because you end up thinking that what you're writing is amazing. And you know what? It just isn't. And I very much prefer writing by hand, partly, you know, to get a sense of, of like what my thought process is, you know, what am I thinking? What am I, what do I have in mind? And, and I like to sort of scribble things and write notes.

And, you know, I always keep looking for it. I always keep my notebook around and in my notebook, you know, I, I write thoughts, I write notes, I write bits of, of text. I write, I write sentences that come to me, you know, Israel arms companies are making a killing on Gaza. Not a great sentence, but somehow I wanted to play on the word killing. It's a cliche. Lots of people do it, but it was good to put it down here so I don't use it in an essay. Because this is my notebook and it has my notes and things. And I highly recommend to people.

But this book, I really was trying to find the tempo. And, you know, people who've written long form things know that tempo is extremely important because, you know, when you write something short form, you can just sort of burst it all out because you have like 300 words, maybe a Facebook post or something or an email. You can just get everything out there. But when you're writing a longer form, you got to get the tempo right, because you got to get the readers with you fast enough so that they'd stay with you. But you also don't want to get everything out there immediately. You need to draw them in and you need to make them invest in in the practice of reading. And I think a lot about readers and and what it means to get people to invest in something, you know, even listening to a podcast, you know,

people may have tuned out already said, you know, this is boring a podcast, you know, people may have tuned out already said, you know, this is boring. I'm not interested. I want to know what Trump's doing. I'm not interested in, you know, this guy rambling on about reading or writing, but that thought crosses my mind, like, why would somebody stay with you? And so I found it interesting. And I've used this method since then of going for a walk and just talking into my phone, trying out different openings, you know, what would work as an opening. It's again, it's something that people have often thought about what's a great first sentence, you know, but it's not really the first sentence. It's the tempo. It's the pace. It's the,

it's the story and how you're going to enter into it. I love that we're doing just kind of like a impromptu writing class right now. You know, it's actually really funny that you bring up your notebook with like little phrases and words that you like or ones that maybe you want to make sure that you don't use. I have not sort of like as old-school as a notebook necessarily, even though I've tried to do that and I just find it difficult to remember to bring it with me all the time. Sadly one thing that I always have on me no matter where I am or when it is is my fucking smartphone and on it I have a couple of notes docs. One is titled use these phrases and the other

one is titled do not use these phrases and just so a quick example of a couple things that I have on mine. One is every now and then you have to take a bite out of the low-hanging fruit otherwise it spoils and then a couple of phrases that I've come across recently that I really like is dancing on the tips of icebergs and lost in the various cul-de-sacs of thought. So maybe I'll try to use those at some point in this conversation. And then also do not use these phrases or do not use these words. And a couple of words that I just, for an irrational reason, whatever reason, I just hate the word stymie.

I hate the word rampant. I hate the word meld. I hate the words flesh out, ramifications, quash. I hate that word. But I really appreciate everything that you just said. And in fact, this is a really good sort of intro into something I wanted to ask you about specifically or maybe not even necessarily ask you about, just kind of share with you when we're talking about the craft that goes into writing or any kind of sort of creative

endeavor. I think it's really fascinating to get a little bit of an insight. Like, I really appreciate what you're talking about tempo with, you know, that's something I never really thought about as to I always thought like the first line. For me, it was always the hardest one. And I agree that there's like maybe a little bit too much emphasis on that. If you spend too much time on the first line and the rest of the piece is shit, it doesn't really matter how good the first line was. But also visuals, right, are huge. Like that's why we spend a lot of time on the cover images for our episodes.

That's why we have music intermissions. Like creating an experience for people I think is really crucial. And one thing about Washington Bullets that I really, really love is the cover art. And shout out, of course, to Ting's Chak, who will be on the show next week for part five of our China series. Thank you so much for recommending her as a guest. And I had actually sent her an email a few days ago because I didn't realize that she did the cover design.

And I just said, you know, thank you for doing that. It was beautiful. I really loved it. And she wrote back sharing with me a blurb, which I'm not sure maybe you're familiar with this already, but I'm sure our listeners might not be. She wrote, the cover art of Washington Bullets was inspired by two important design objects of the Cold War era of 21st century imperialism, the.223 Remington rifle cartridge and the Helvetica typeface.

Both were created in 1957. The Remington rifle cartridge was developed for the M16, the longest continuously serving rifle in military history, the international benchmark of assault rifles, and the carrier of Washington bullets. Indonesia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Helvetica is the defining fault of the hegemonic international typographic style, or quote, Swiss style, whose ambitions were to create a universal rationalized neutral graphic design.

It's a visual expression of imperialism. You have seen it too many times to remember. OAS, Bank of America, Apple, Facebook, from bullets to typefaces. Design is a science. It has a politics and it is never neutral. So, yeah, pretty powerful. I mean, there's an intellectual designer. You know, the thing is, in our institute,

we talk a lot about the battle of emotions, you know, how it's not just a matter of ideas, but of emotions, and you use how it's not just a matter of ideas, but of emotions. And, you know, you use the word experience a while ago. Look, there's just a lot of books out there on coup data on, you know, US foreign policy, there's books that just are like timelines, you know, they just give you the timeline, this coup, this coup, this coup, this coup. I was not interested in a book like that. I was interested in packaging a kind of feeling, you know, which is why I like poetry a

lot. I like thinking about things like what is a cover? What is a title? You know, why is Washington of course it's the song by The Clash. Of course I don't agree with everything in the song, you know, the Clash have their own views but they were right in that period when they sang with such ferocity in the 1980s against the way the United States was intervening in Central America. Think about the album that came after that Sandinista, an important album for the clash. This is part of the battle of emotions. The idea that people don't just experience a coup by being shot in the head, but how their reputations are destroyed or entire projects that they were trying to create are maligned and reduced to rubble. People will laugh and say, the Congo, my God, that's a mess. Oh, God, who would want to visit Guatemala? You know, what a shithole country, right? That's the term that Trump had used, you know, shithole countries. And, you know, we sort of forget emotionally or the journey of these places. You know, what was their journey? What was done to the Congo from the 19th

century onward? When the Congo tried to stand up, Patrice Lumumba tries to stand up, he's assassinated. Periodic destruction of hope in these places. How do you convey that to people? It's not just a matter of facts and ideas, it's also the emotional resonance that you have to carry. And so, you know, I think a lot about that and I'm glad you mentioned this about the cover art for the show and the music and so on. Art is not decoration. Art is actually integral to the way we think about things.

I think it's a kind of bourgeois approach to consider art as decoration, you know, the decorator, you know, the cover is a decoration, it's not a decoration, it's something that welcomes you into an experience and you know, you enter the experience to basically not only inform yourself but have an emotional reaction to it. I'm very keen on changing the emotional resonance that people have towards the third world experiments. How do you see Thomas Sankara? What is your vision of Kwame Nkrumah? Do you know their names? I mean, what do their names mean for you? What about all that great poetry produced alongside the attempt to industrialize

these countries? You know, have you forgotten all of that? What did it mean that, you know, Fahez Ahmad Fahez in Pakistan was writing while in prison and imagining better worlds? What's the point of dreaming? Well, as the Haitian poet Frank Etienne said, you dream to dream, you know, what's wrong with you? Like, what do you want? Do you want the dream to become a reality? Well, you got to fight and make it so. But you dream to dream. There's nothing wrong with that. It's better to dream than to be mind-numbed, you know, and so, so yeah, you know, yes, Washington Bullets isn't in that sense, a compendium of horrors. It's an attempt to remind us of the kind of suffering and pain that strugglers who were

trying to make the world better had to face and faced with the barrel of the gun in their face, you know, like right there. They didn't flinch. I think that's pretty powerful. You know, they looked the gun in the face and said, No, I'm here. I belong. I exist. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After October 7 took place, I really dove into reading a lot about Palestine. And I learned a lot of facts, I learned a lot of information. It wasn't until I began watching some documentaries and weeping that I felt like I really understood. So just looking at the wider experience, right?

The different spheres, the artistic, visual, emotional spheres. And I really do think that you bring that into a lot of the Tri-Continentals work. It's really compelling in ways that are not just limited to the intellectual sphere. I also wanted just to set the tone for the conversation today. Another quote of yours from that Gorilla History episode, you write, or you said, of yours from that Gorilla History episode, you write, or you said, I'm not one of those who romanticize struggle for its own sake. I want to win.

I actually want to win. And I really love that because forever I've been quoting, and I have a lot of respect for Chris Hedges, and I've been quoting him when he said something that I thought was really beautiful at the time. And I still think has a lot of importance, is, I don't fight fascists because I think I'm going to win. I fight fascists because they're fascists. And I think the two quotes can exist together,

and I think yours takes it to a point of actually setting a goal and attaining that goal, and it stops us from getting lost in the sort of David Graber ask the means being more important than the ends falsehood that I've kind of have learned to kind of step out of as I made my journey for more like. Anarchism inspired left to the more marxist lennon is left but anyways I don't want to get too into my trajectory and all that stuff. I just wanted to say I love that quote. I really agree with you on it. And let's jump into the book itself. So the preface of Washington Bullets, it opens with a very powerful passage by Ivo Morales, who writes, quote, The book is is about bullets bullets that assassinated democratic processes that assassinated revolutions and that assassinated hope and I want to underscore that to hope and so the book is very much about bullets but it's also about other forms of power and how they are imposed on the

global level so for someone who may be unfamiliar, can you give a basic overview of Washington Bullets? Yeah, I mean, look, the part that's meaningful to a reader who doesn't really know how this shop works, the shop of US power, the middle section might be an interesting place to go. Because what's fascinating about the CIA is that as a consequence of the contradictions of democracy, the intelligence services have been forced to,

you know, unlock some of their materials after 50 years, 40 years, whatever. You can, you can go to the US government websites and make requests for material for your own file and other pieces of documentation. As long as it's past the due date, the 50 year period, 40 year, depending on what kind of information they're going to give it to you. Well, there was a coup d'etat against the government of Jacob R. Benz in 1954 in Guatemala and as with all good corporations, the Central Intelligence Agency after the coup did an after-action study, a very big report on what they had done in the coup and so on. Well, I read that report many, many years ago and thought this is fascinating. You know, they, they really tell you how they do a coup.

And so when I started writing this book, I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to go and reread the CIA's after action report on Guatemala and actually take out from that document the elements of a coup, the things you need to do for the coup, how do you prepare for a coup, you know, what do you need, who are your allies and so on. And so I made a kind of mini manual to do a coup, drawing on the CIA's own material. A part of it I had to borrow from the Church Commission, which was Frank Church, was a US senator, 1975, and paneled a Senate hearing on the operations covert work of the CIA. And one of the staff reports of the church commission report is on the covert activity in Chile in 1963, 1973.

Fascinating, fascinating volume. It's available as a PDF online. So I took mostly the CIA report on Guatemala, but also bits of it on Chile, and I reconstructed, you know, how what's the best way to do a coup? So it's like a recipe, you know, first you do this, then you do that. And I gave examples and quotations from their documents. That's really what the book is about. It's about how the CIA and other US intelligence services use their power in the world to basically stop sovereignty from being exercised by the poorer peoples of the world. That's the thesis of the book. Now, there's a front section, which is basically on the elements of the United States

thinking like why did the US believe that it needed to exercise power in the world because it needed resources, it didn't want its enemies to get the resources, you know it very bluntly says that in its own documentation that's a front part of. That's the front part of the book. And the last part of the book essentially looks into some of the elements of contemporary politics, including the war on terror and things like that and the destruction of Haiti. But really, the heart of the book is that central part is very brief.

And interestingly, a couple of my friends are making a comic book version of Washington Bullets. They're working on it now. And most of their comic book is the manual. And the way they've done it is I'm a character and I discovered this manual in the CIA archive. And so, you know, I walked them through the CIA's own manual. And in fact, it is interesting because I've met a lot of very senior people in the intelligence world and I've asked them to walk me through coup d'etat from the past. Obviously, they won't tell you what they're doing in the present or in more recent times, but I was really interested in how the intelligence services of the United States operate.

And they walked me through it. So in the comic book version, they have been meeting some of these people. It's a pretty good comic book. You know, Joe Sacco is going to write the introduction to it. I hope it will be out next year. I'm pretty excited about it. And if any comic book publisher wants to publish it, get in touch with me. It's going to be a fun book for a lot of people. I think anyway, you asked me, what is the book about man?

The book should be compulsory reading to young agents in the CIA to prepare them for conducting coup data's around the world. conducting coup data around the world. So the manual for regime change, and we'll get into that a little bit in more detail. I think I'll list them out and we can kind of decide if we want to dive into any specific examples. I do want to ask you before we dive into the content of the book a little bit to sort of examine it from a bit more of a wider relief and look at the sources. So starting kind of at the end of the text, because first of all, maybe there are some people out there who are thinking like conspiracy theory when listening to this or something like that,

or maybe they're just interested in knowing sort of where you dug up all of this information that went into the manual for regime change, which you mentioned a little bit the Church Commission, but other stuff as well. I mean, you mentioned talking to ex CIA agents as well. So maybe I'm wondering if you can just give us a little bit of an insight into what went into writing and the research for this book. Any stories or anecdotes that you think might be particularly noteworthy or of interest in that sense? I mean, look, firstly, the CIA, as I said, produces a lot of its own material, some of it gets leaked, but most of it is available because of the statute that allows you to

go and call files up and so on. And then there's the foreign relations of the United States documents which the State Department releases. WikiLeaks was a huge treasure trove. I think I must have been one of the few people that read at least 20% of the WikiLeaks State Department documents. It's impossible to have read them all. It's just a lot. I picked certain countries that I was interested in, Pakistan, Egypt, and so on. I read through almost all the cables. So there's all that that's available. Yeah, then the CIA, ex-CIA people who are interesting,

write their memoirs. There's a number of those. There's whistleblowers, all kinds of fascinating people. And then there's the people that when you write and publish things about Afghanistan or this or that part of the world, they get in touch with you. And they tell you, you're getting it wrong

or you're getting it partly right or why are you writing this? Or you're talking to the wrong guy, talk to me. I'll tell you the real story. Because they also in a way seeking not, they don't want a legacy because some of them don't, they can't be published, you know, they can't be quoted. They don't have permission from the CIA to talk to you. But you know, they want to get the story straight. They have their egos on the line. And a lot of retired people

are fascinating for that. I mean, I've talked to a number of also people who who changed their minds, who after they are toward the end of their career began to see the work they were doing is horrible, and felt terrible about it. And, you know, didn't have permission to talk, but would contact and say, look, I agree with the kinds of things you're saying, let me give you more. I'm going to wink if you're on the right track, that sort of thing. I mean, I would also say that I was doing a story that I was begged off doing, which is about the assassination of a US ambassador. And a lot of intelligence people got in touch with me to tell me to stop investigating that story. In fact, this is the second

assassination story that I was told directly by people from upper levels of US intelligence, whether military or national security, who said, don't go into that. One of them told me that it is bad for your health. that one of them told me that it is bad for your health. Wow, that is bone chilling, Jesus. Well, so on that note, I think one of the things that came out with the declassified so-called JFK files, which revealed very little about the JFK assassination, but interestingly revealed that almost half, I believe 47% of political officers working in overseas US embassies in 1961 were actually intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover.

And so that's just a slice of one year. So you can imagine that's probably not an outlier. So, I mean, this is just the way that US Empire works. And, you know, I bet a lot of comic books could be written about it too, I'm sure. Listen, just two days ago, Senator Charles Grassley, you might know him by his mediocrity, sent a letter to the FBI in which he openly accuses me of being basically on the Chinese payroll. And what is the citation, the New York Times and the Nation magazine? I mean, who knows what, you know, I am not comfortable with the term conspiracy theory, because I think that undermines actualities. You know, I mean, it's kind of dumb that we need to have a phrase conspiracy

theories, because after all, there are decisions made behind closed doors. And these decisions do impact the real world. It's not a conspiracy. It's a decision. These are decisions governments make like the very fact that a door is shut, let's say in the White House or that there's the Central Intelligence Agency or whatever and they seal the door and you can't hear what they're talking about means they are discussing something and they're going to have a decision and then they act upon it. It's not a conspiracy, it's a decision. Now they don't want

you to know what the decision is, that's okay, but this term conspiracy theory, it is used very strategically to effectively disarm certain people's opinions. You know, if I say Grassley, you know, has a crazy idea that I'm paid by the Chinese government. I don't know where this comes from. It is interesting that Grassley, last year Marco Rubio wrote a similar letter. The New York Times runs this article. What's going on here? Well, maybe somebody had a meeting somewhere and said, let's get these people.

They are too big for their boots. It could also be a bunch of accidental things. Yeah, whatever it might be. I don't really care whether there was a lock-down discussion and a decision made or not. They are behaving as if there has been one. And it's probable that they did. Somebody did have a discussion.

If I call that a conspiracy, I would be somebody would say this guy's a nutter. You know, he believes there are aliens involved in a plot against him or whatever. It's a way to basically discredit a viewpoint. So it's both crazy and not crazy because there are decisions made by people behind closed doors. And if you point that out, they use that fact, which is something that they would not deny that they are they close the door and make a decision. They'd use that fact to say that you're a nutter, something that is completely

banal, which is that we're going to shut the door and make a decision. So yeah, I really don't like the term conspiracy theory at all. But I do know how it works in the world. And it works to discredit people who are basically talking about how the powerful work. They don't want you to see how they work. And so they discredit you by saying, well, you're a conspiracy theorist. No, I'm just saying you closed the door and made a decision. You call it a consp- you are the one calling it a conspiracy. I'm just calling it a decision. In the book, you actually write about how the term conspiracy theory was

developed by Karl Popper, who was a very anti-communist philosopher, to quote the book. Popper was against the view that war, unemployment, and poverty were the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. Theories of society such as Marxism, which attempted to understand the social mechanisms of war and unemployment, could be softly dismissed as merely conspiracy theories. Popper pointed out that conspiratorial groups were paranoid and, like Nazism, would lead to totalitarian and genocidal policies. Puppers liberals viewed any left-wing criticism of the US state and society as conspiratorial. This was not a principled objection to conspiracies, but a class attack on any

criticism of capitalism and imperialism. So there's a quote for everything in Washington Bullets. Well, you know, it's interesting that you you cited that because I don't know why I'm in the middle of all this, but the Heritage Foundation, I think, published a report last year accusing me this time of being a leading intellectual of the anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian movement. And they made a picture, you know, a graphic, and it was me and the other leaders. One of them was George Soros. And they put me next to George Soros. That's funny because George Soros is a great admirer of Karl Popper. Karl Popper's book is called The Open Society. George Soros named his foundation the Open Society Foundation. Soros is a Poparian. They believe that there should be no theory of the world. You can't have a theory of the world. Popper and myself or myself and Soros could not be further apart in our thinking because I think I look out of the window and I say, obviously there is no unified theory of everything because the world is very complicated,

but it is the role of intellectuals to try to unravel the historical process. It's the role of intellectuals to see if there's a system out there and to create a kind of thinking model which you then present to people and say, look, there are classes in society. Obviously, I can't walk down on the street and see a sign which says working class

and everybody lines up. Doesn't work but I understand that there are classes out there it's a theory of the world. You can argue with my theory but it's a theory of the world. Nobody can exist without a theory of the world. Even Karl Popper had a theory of the world which was that the world is Nobody can exist without a theory of the world. Even Karl Popper had a theory of the world, which was that the world is filled with individuals who are all liberals and if only the individuals would get together and allow their brains. That's a theory of the world. It's a totalitarian theory. In other words, it tries to explain the whole system. Nothing wrong with that. I don't agree with this theory, but nothing wrong with having a theory of the world. But very cleverly, you can see how the language works. Very cleverly,

association with Nazism. Same with Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt writing a similar period of time. Basically, her work was underwritten by the US government. Let's set that aside. I don't want to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. But they supported her because they agreed on certain things, one of which is communism and Nazism are the same thing. And she wrote a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, where she made the case that there

was democracy, or Popper's free society, open society, and there was totalitarianism, which There was democracy or Popper's free society, open society. And there was totalitarianism, which is communism and Nazism, same as Karl Popper. No wonder these people are lionized in a capitalist society. They do the ideological work for the people in power. And they allow you to then dismiss critics saying,

well, these are nutters, conspiracy theorists, paid by the Russians, paid by the Russians, paid by the Chinese, Putin talking points and so on. So fabulously elegant way of not having to have a conversation. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Vijay Prashad. We'll be right back.

I'll be back. Out in the square, people are singing Old songs of freedom and rage One million men desperately clinging Rattles the bars of his cage The vampires will be golden bonfires tonight Don't try to say we didn't warn you You saw the banners and signs This is on you and your investors Stolen empires, sold to vampires, will be golden bonfires tonight. Rule Britannia, dos Britannia, may the fool who ran you ignite Love was a joke when people were money Friendship a deal we'd allow Love wasn't funny, sing solidariously now Stolen empires, sold to vampires Will be golden bonfires tonight Rue Britannia, dos Britannia, may the cool Samandia burn bright. You That was Stolen Empires by Andrew Glencross. Now back to our conversation with Vijay Prashad. All right. So as much as I really love to talk about philosophy and ideology and take these, um, you know, little side alleys with you, I am going to ask you a specific question about the book because, um, I think it is very relevant to what we're

talking about and also what's happening right now in terms of this shakeup, right? Like the Trump administration has come in, they're cutting USAID, they're engaging in a trade war. From the outside, it might look like they're sort of abandoning this soft power role that the State Department or the CIA might have had a role in and using these like blunt force objects to sort of get their way and maybe that's a sign of desperation. Maybe there's some strategy there that maybe isn't as clear. But the CIA, so probably a main character, the sort of an antagonist, at least of the book, if there was one. What do Americans typically think of when they think of the CIA? Like, what is the popular image, like the liberal image, right? Like we see a lot of liberals jumping to the defense of the CIA,

jumping to the defense of USAID right now. So what is this popular image that we, the liberal establishment sort of presents of the CIA versus what role does the CIA actually play in the broader project of US imperialism? Yeah, so, I mean, it really depends on where you fall on the meter about homeland, shows like Homeland, or Matt Damon, who's my contemporaries, maybe three, four years younger than me. Matt Damon playing CIA character, Tom Cruise playing a CIA character. I mean,

the glamorization of the CIA in film in the United States matches what the James Bond movies did for British intelligence. There's a kind of glamour in it. You want to be the agent to wins in the movie. Who wants to be the Arab who's getting shot in the forehead? I remember thinking, when you play the war, second world war, who wants to play the Nazis? Nobody wants to be the Nazi. Yeah. Everybody wants to be the allied soldiers. Everybody wants to be the cowboys.

You know, you don't want to be the arabo shot in the forehead. I mean, that's not where you want to be. There's a glamorization and you're right to link this to USAID. USAID is an instrument to be quite blunt with you. USAID is an instrument of United States blunt with you. USAID is an instrument of United States hard power. Nothing soft about it. It is used to provide funds to media organizations to help destabilize governments. It pushes liberal agendas. That's okay. You want to push a liberal agenda, go ahead, it that's fine but why not have a little

transparency you know so many Ukrainian radio stations were opened up after 2014 paid by USAID you know why for what reason it's interesting you know the names are all available when USAID was shut down we learned a lot about that It was also funding the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, you know, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Do they really need the money? Give me the money. You know, I'll make good use of it. Thanks. Thanks, America. So, you know, in the sense that the CIA then is glamorized, or intelligence is glamorized, you're at a disadvantage because then when you talk about you know these terrible things that happen well look the terrorist is a bad guy you know don't you know that I mean don't you know

that the commie is a bad guy don't you know that I mean somebody has to do something it's interesting I'm an enormous fan of John Lacar novels and Lacar was kind of a critic of the cold war but you could read his novels and you could sympathize with the anti-communist intelligence agents because the story is told from their standpoint you know that's just a fact and and so yeah you ask what's the image of the CIA well by and large it's like they're protecting America really are they protecting America or they're protecting the billionaires or even that? I mean, they're certainly destroying a lot of people's lives. And you outlined this in the book in many different examples. And like you said earlier,

the book isn't sort of a compendium of like listing out every single coup, every single assassination, but you do dive into a few of them at length to illustrate the points. Might be a good time actually now to look at that manual for regime change. So there's nine points in it. I'll just read them out so that we can kind of present them for people to give them a sense. So number one is lobby public opinion. Number two, appoint the right man on the ground. Number three, make sure the generals are ready. 4. Make the economy scream.

5. Diplomatic isolation. 6. Organize mass protests, the so-called color revolutions. 7. Give the green light. 8. A study of assassination. And then 9. Deny. give the green light, eight, a study of assassination, and then nine, deny. And so somewhat abstract is just a list, right? But I'm sure people listening can kind of start

to put some pieces together, maybe think of some examples that come out on specific points of the regime change manual. So yeah, I'm wondering, maybe bringing the last question in terms of like what the CIA actually does and then this manual for regime change that lists out nine points. Any overlaps in those two questions that you want to maybe dive into or explore to help illustrate what the CIA does and how it sort of plays a role as a sort of a part of US empire? plays a role as a sort of a part of US empire? Well, the section on make the economy scream, that phrase comes from a meeting held between Nixon, Kissinger and others. And Richard Myers took notes and he wrote this down in his pad, make the economy scream. It's generally attributed to Nixon telling Kissinger and others, make the Chilean economy scream.

I'm on Avenida Suecia in Santiago, Chile, and just down the road from me is the office of the right wing. Not far away from me is the office where the group that conducted the economic war against the Allende government used to meet, but not very far. It's walking distance. They would meet there and they would make the economy scream. How did they do it? The US government simply denied Chile credit. It couldn't get money to borrow. It couldn't get money to conduct basic commerce and trade. Couldn't get access to dollars. That created enormous problems of prices in Chile and as the prices started, our friends down the road organized particularly women from upper middle class neighborhoods to walk down the streets and bank pots and pans and say the prices are too high.

The protests start in the upper middle class areas and that's the preparation on the ground. They had the right ambassador in charge here. That's the right man on the ground. They informed the generals. That was General Augusto Pinochet. He already knew that he had permission from the United States to do whatever he wanted. He may not have told them operationally what he was doing. That is, in other words, going to take power on the 11th of September. He may not have said that to them, but he knew that he had complete open road to do whatever he wanted. He acted, they killed a lot of people. A study of assassinations is actually the title of a manual that the CIA actually produced on assassinations. It's chilling reading because in this entire text,

which again you can download as a PDF, it talks about how you pull nails out, how you use hammers to, you know, use ordinary objects to torture people and to assassinate them. They did that to, you know, tens of thousands of young people, trade unionists and so on again a short car ride away at the national stadium where Victor Hara the poet and songwriter and theater director was killed you know and then deny. Deny is the most crucial word because if you don't deny then it looks bad and you just say well we didn't have anything to do with it it's the Chilean military and the Chilean military knows you're going to deny but they don't care because they know you're going to be behind them and that doesn't matter because the next day you're going

to show up and say well look now they've done the coup somebody has to stabilize the situation and somebody needs to talk to them and tell them to be less harsh with people and so on. You know, we are after all the voice of liberalism and we'll calm them down. I've heard this story a million times and that's exactly what what you see and indeed in cables that's exactly what ambassadors are trained to do, deny and then the the next day say, Hey, listen, we have to meet with this government, however repellent it is to us, because we need to temper down their violence and their brutality. And that's exactly what happens time after time.

And so then who's the conspiracy theorist and who wrote the text for it in the first place? And of course, you know, all that that you just described was done to a democratically elected president, right, of Chile, Salvador Allende, who really just wanted to make some very modest reforms, you know, like maybe nationalize some industries, for example, so that the Chilean people could actually benefit from their own natural resources. So you write in the book about how Allende specifically nationalized the copper industry, and he told the main companies, Kennecott and Anaconda, quote, that he would compensate them by forgiving the $774 million in excess profit taxes that they did not pay. Chileans celebrated this day as the day of national dignity. The companies, of course, went to the White House to complain.

They were joined by the telecommunications giants ITT and the soda drink maker Pepsi Cola. The retaliation was swift. The story of Allende and the coup is such a sad one. It's the September 11th that we unfortunately don't remember. One thing that really just utterly shocked me when I read the book, and I consider myself to be someone who pays a decent amount of attention to history and looking into these things, but it's just how many movements, governments, and entire states

were sabotaged or overthrown or derailed in some way, shape, or form by the United States in this quest really to stamp out communism and crucially anti-imperialism and not just in the global south but like every nook and cranny of the of the planet and I'm gonna read a just a partial list here that I compiled from the book so the US overthrew or sabotaged either movements or governments from Afghanistan to the Congo to Bolivia to Japan to Chile to Tanzania to Iran to Guatemala to Indonesia to Iraq to Venezuela to Guyana to France to the Dominican Republic to Egypt to Brazil to Honduras Ghana Argentina Saudi Arabia Paraguay Nicaragua I could just keep going on and on and on that That's just a partial list. So we're taught to think that the Cold War period

was this sort of epic standoff, right, between the United States and the Soviet Union. But really, as you've said, it was a series of many hot wars and interventions taking place all over the globe. And so you write in the book, quote, the main contradiction of this new period after World War II was between the forces of decolonization, which included the USSR when it allied

with anti-colonial national liberation movements and imperialism. This contradiction between North and South, rather than the Cold War between East and West, shaped the character of US ledS. led imperialism. And so I would love it if you could talk a little bit about the role of counterrevolution, the stamping out of communism and anything that resembled it or any kind of liberatory movement, how this was like the United States's number one priority, a massive amount of resources

and attention that went to this throughout the entire 20th century, at least the second half of it. Yeah, I mean, you know, right after World War II, the attention was on Europe and Japan. I mean, these places had to be in a way subordinated. And so in the elections in France, Italy, the United States intervened to make sure that their candidates won. I mean, the evidence for that is now very well available. You know, Germany and Japan remained under occupation for a good part into the 1950s. It's when the Bandung conference happened 70 years ago in Indonesia, that the United States really focus its attention fundamentally on the third world. I mean there is the coup against Mossadegh in Iran in 53 and against Arbenz in Guatemala in 54 but these were

coups around specific commodities. You know with Mossadegh it was oil, with Arbenz it was united fruit and you know the Dulles brothers and all were personal beneficiaries of the fruit company. When Bandung happened, the United States, actually, in my opinion, conduct three coups, which are fundamental and structure the whole system that follows. First, the coup against Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, right in the heart,

the biggest country in Africa. That coup is really important, partly because of the uranium that the US had mined from there for the bombs in Japan. But they also then were able to use that central part of Congo to destabilize and disrupt every liberation movement. Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana had no access to southern Africa as a consequence of the Congo going to Mobutu Sekoseke, earlier James Mobutu, who was basically a US puppet. That's 1961. 1964, the United States basically pushes for the coup in Brazil against the Liberal government of Joao Goulart. The coup in 1964 changes the balance of forces in Latin America because then in Brazil, the military runs Operation Condor to ensure that the military is in the rest of the continent,

basically overthrow any attempt to repeat the Cuban revolution, whether it's the coups in the southern cone or it's the militarization of the wars in the north, including in Colombia, where the Communist Party is pushed into arms struggle in 1964, the same year as the coup in Brazil. And the third coup is Indonesia, 1965, million communists killed. The largest Communist Party outside China in numbers was absolutely completely erased. And this really stops the domino in Asia. It's not Vietnam, it was Indonesia. And that's a coup in 65.

These three coups set the grammar for the next period. And so anybody who wants to understand the histories of Latin America, Asia, and Africa in the 1960s, 70s onward, you've got to look at these three coups. Because these were foundational for the modern world. These three coups, they were not accidental. They were the largest countries with the largest

lefts or the largest potential lefts in the world. It explains way too much of why the US was able to dominate these continents despite the fact that there was so many contradictions in these countries. The US could dominate because it was able to erase the most powerful forces of the left in these parts of the world. So another thing that you talk about at length in the book and I think is really fascinating, we kind of might have touched on it a little bit, is the role that cultural propaganda plays in US imperialism. And I'm particularly fascinated by this idea of like, manufacturing this conception of freedom, which is a really good brand, right? Like, we touched on this a little bit with you in

our episode on China, but I'd love to maybe just read a quick passage from the book, and then I'm going to ask you to sort of unpack it and and sort of reflect on it. So you write, freedom. It was a public relations coup for these words to be associated with the West and to paint the USSR and its allies as well as the newly independent post-colonial states as dictatorial and authoritarian. The idea of the quote free world was produced not by reality, namely that the US and its allies were truly free or were committed to basic liberal principles, but it was produced by a massive project that involved money and talent, the construction of institutions and organizations, as well as a cultural imagination. This goes back to the sort of war of culture and imagination and emotion that we were talking

about earlier. The West became associated with the idea of freedom through propaganda. And I've always thought of it as like just one of the most successful PR campaigns, one of the most successful marketing campaigns of US being the home of freedom, the representation of freedom when the reality could not be more different, right? So can you talk a little bit like, how does the West deploy this idea of freedom as sort of a marketing tactic and a way to split the world up into two halves? Yeah, I mean, a marketing tactic is an interesting way to talk about it.

But it's actually super serious project that they had. Very cleverly, right after World War II, in fact, during World War II, the Western countries, the Western Atlantic countries began to use the word free a lot. You see it right after the war, radio free Europe, we are the apostles of freedom, free this, free that, you know, and they are unfree. That side of the Iron Curtain is unfree, this side is free. I mean, one of the things that socialists failed to do after 1917 is steal the entire language systems of all languages and take all the good words for themselves. You know, sometimes we do stupid things like with the word dictatorship. Do we really need a phrase dictatorship of the proletariat?

What we mean is it's a democracy, proletarian democracy. We mean that the proletariat will rule. You know, do we need the word dictatorship for that? We are not very clever with our use of language, you know, they don't talk about bourgeois dictatorship, they don't mention it at all. They talk about democracy and freedom. We are not so smart and that language, that lexical game is not a game, it's deadly serious because they're able to then appropriate to themselves the idea that they are the champions of freedom and that there is unfreedom on the other side, regardless of the fact that your freedom is purchased on the back of somebody sleeping on the sidewalk, you know, with no pants on and is miserable.

freedom. But then you hear well, but on the other side, they have the Gulag. I mean, Solzenetsen's book Gulag Akepelego does so much to help push the idea of freedom and unfreedom. The West banned a lot of books. Yeah. The Nazis burnt books. Yeah. The West banned in the United States books were being banned in the 1950s. In the US, books were being banned in the 1950s. But when you think of book banning, you think of the Soviet Union or other places. You don't think of the banning of books in the West. What was it? Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses by James Joyce.

Now some progressive bookshops will have book banning week and they put the books in the window. It's too late for that. Where were you in the 1950s? Yeah. Where were you? I mean, there were a handful of publishers, you know, that were gutsy enough to say, look, we're going to stand up for this. But by and large, people were cowed into unfreedom. And that's the point, isn't it? Firstly, it is the right of a government to intervene regarding certain kinds of things. Governments have that right. Democratic governments one way or the other can say we don't want, let's say, pornography. I'm just giving an example, you know, we don't want books that show violence against children. Yeah, I mean, it's perfectly reasonable in a society to have a debate and discussion about that.

But the idea that there is pure freedom and beyond freedom, that was a public relations thing. But it's not just that the West was good at it. It's that the left was really bad at putting its ideas forward, you know, and use terminology and didn't use other terminology. It should have. You know, there was once a meeting in Delhi when E.P. Thompson, the British historian, had come there and the people who had come to meet him, the young history students, kept saying, you know, bourgeois democracy, bourgeois democracy, bourgeois. E.P. Thompson at one point got annoyed and said, stop saying Bushwa democracy. Democracy is too precious a word to put the adjective Bushwa before it. You know, we all must be fighting for the more, any whatever. The point is language matters and you have to be thoughtful about that.

The last question that I want to ask you is, is Washington Bullets just a history book? Should people be engaging with it as a history book only? Or is this an ongoing process? Like, does the manual for regime change need any updates five years after the book was written? No, it's already out of date. I mean, it's based on coups that took place in the 50s and the 70s and so on. That's the evidentiary base for it. Yeah. And bits and pieces of things that picked up over the years. But look, we are living in the age of artificial intelligence, we are living in the age of all kinds of digital things that can be done, you can get a photograph of me doing something horrible, that perfectly authentic and into people say, look at him, he's horribly kicked his dog or whatever, you know, I mean, there are so many ways that the people have to basically ruin your reputation. Yeah, that's part of this process. of this process, correct? I mean, you want to get rid of some progressive minister

from a government, you show them a photograph and say, we got this of you doing X, Y. They say, it's not me. I didn't do this. Well, it's bloody authentic looking picture. Sorry, guy. Yeah, you got to resign. And so the technologies of the 1970s or maybe even later,

already out of date. I mean, the book is now a few years old, not that many years old. I need to update that in a way. Yeah, I'm not going to update the book, but maybe write a different book. A coup today. You know, what does it look like? It's going to look different. And that's the thing, you know, and the problem is that all these aspects of life make it harder for us to trust anybody, which is exactly what benefits the powers that be. Because in a way, progressive political movements require trust. You need to trust me. You need to trust what I'm saying. You need to trust that if we follow a certain strategy, we may win.

saying you need to trust that if we follow a certain strategy, we may win. Yeah, it's all built on trust. We don't can read the future. You want to sacrifice a lot based on trust. If you're taught not to trust people because you don't know what's true or not, that benefits the powers that be. We have a society of individuals who don't trust each other. Wow, that's a fantasy of Karl Popper and Margaret Thatcher. Not my fantasy.

I would like to live in a community where people trust each other. They do things together. You tell me something I trust that you've tried your best to find out if it's true. So yeah, it's getting tougher and tougher. We have to fight to earn the trust of people, the trust and love of people.

People will follow your show because they trust you. You know, they love you. They have a sense of who you are. There was a very young American whose show I love being on Michael Brooks, who died very young, you know, but he had an enormous following of people who loved him. I've talked to many times about that he used to be in distress many times saying you know we're doing nothing and I would tell him man you have this enormous following that loves you, you know it's because they love you they know you're sincere that they trust you

not the other way around. You learn to trust people because they're sincere at least you read the sincerity. Yeah but then on Twitter there's a picture of you doing something terrible and they're like, Oh, I don't like him anymore. And that's it. You're finished. Yeah. The cancel world. You're done. You're finished. Well, what can I say? You know, I don't want to come on your show anymore. You did some horrible thing. Yeah. And that's the new technologies. I don't think we really know how to deal with that. And we very quickly throw people off the bus.

You know, that's the other side of it. Nobody really gives anybody a listen. Partly because the world is shit and people behave badly. So you always assume the worst, but there are also times when maybe they didn't do anything wrong and this is one of those things. You know, who knows?

wrong and this is one of those things. You know, who knows? You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Vijay Prashad, a journalist, political commentator, and executive director of Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research. He's the author of many books including Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations, and the book that we are discussing today, Washington Bullets, The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Andrew Glencross for the intermission music. The artwork for

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