[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Secret History of the American Empire

[Bill Totten]

Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption

John Perkins interviewed
by Amy Goodman

http://www.democracynow.org (June 05 2007)


Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep
inside the forces driving corporate globalization.  From 1971 to 1981,
John Perkins worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T Main
where he was a self-described "economic hit man".  In his first book,
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, 2005), John Perkins told the
story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm
leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and
corporations - what he calls the "corporatocracy". Perkins says 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.

Mr Perkins has just come out with a new book. It's called The Secret
History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth
about Global Corruption (Dutton, 2007).  He me now in the firehouse studio.

AMY GOODMAN: Hundreds of thousands of protesters are gathering in
Germany ahead of tomorrow's G8 meeting of the world's richest nations.
The three-day summit is being held in the coastal resort of
Heiligendamm. German police have spent $18 million to erect an
eight-mile-long, two-meter-high fence around the meeting site.

Global warming will be high on the agenda. Going into the meeting,
President Bush has proposed to sideline the UN-backed Kyoto Accords and
set voluntary targets on reducing emissions of greenhouse gas. Other top
issues will include foreign aid and new trade deals.

Today, we spend the hour with a man who claims to have worked deep
inside the forces driving corporate globalization.  From 1971 to 1981,
John Perkins worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T Main
where he was a self-described "economic hit man".  In his first book,
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Plume, 2005), John Perkins told the
story of his work as a highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm
leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and
corporations - what he calls the "corporatocracy". Perkins says 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.

Mr Perkins has just come out with a new book. It's called The Secret
History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth
about Global Corruption (Dutton, 2007).  He me now in the firehouse
studio.  Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It's great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we go further, "economic hit men" - for those
who haven't heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as
this, what do you mean?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it's fair to say that since World
War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world's first
truly global empire, and we've done it primarily without the military,
unlike other empires in history. We've done it through economics very
subtly.

We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we
will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations
covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from
the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never
actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who
build big infrastructure projects - power grids, industrial parks,
harbors, highways - things that benefit a few very rich people but do
not reach the poor at all. The poor aren't connected to the power grids.
They don't have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and
the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it's such a big
bet that the country can't possibly repay it. So at some point in time,
we economic hit men go back to the country and say, "Look, you know, you
owe us a lot of money. You can't pay your debt, so you've got to give us
a pound of flesh."

AMY GOODMAN: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston
University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the
nation's largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.

AMY GOODMAN: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many
times larger.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it is larger. It's much larger. At least it was in
those days. And it's very, very secretive. We all - there's a lot of
rumors. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very,
very little about the NSA. It claims to only work in a cryptography, you
know, encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we all know that
they're the people who have been listening in on our telephone
conversations. That's come out recently. And they're a very, very
secretive organization.

They put me through a series of tests, very extensive tests, lie
detector tests, psychological tests, during my last year in college. And
I think it's fair to say that they identified me as a good potential
economic hit man. They also identified a number of weaknesses in my
character that would make it relatively easy for them to hook me, to
bring me in. And I think those weaknesses, I [inaudible] might call, the
three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. Who amongst us
doesn't have one of them? I had all three at the time.

And then I joined the Peace Corps. I was encouraged to do that by the
National Security Agency. I spent three years in Ecuador living with
indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at
that time were beginning to fight the oil companies. In fact, the
largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world has just been
brought by these people against Texaco, Chevron. And that was incredibly
good training for what I was to do.

And then, while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and
recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T Main, a
consulting firm out of Boston of about 2,000 employees, very low-profile
firm that did a tremendous amount of work of what I came to understand
was the work of economic hit men, as I described it earlier, and that's
the role I began to fulfill and eventually kind of rose to the top of
that organization as its chief economist.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did that tie to the NSA? Was there a connection?

JOHN PERKINS: You know, that's what's very interesting about this whole
system, Amy, is that there's no direct connection. The NSA had
interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over to
this private corporation. It's a very subtle and very smart system,
whereby it's the private industry that goes out and does this work. So
if we're caught doing something, if we're caught bribing or corrupting
local officials in some country, it's blamed on private industry, not on
the US government.

And it's interesting that in the few instances when economic hit men
fail, what we call "the jackals", who are people who come in to
overthrow governments or assassinate their leaders, also come out of
private industry. These are not CIA employees. We all have this image of
the 007, the government agent hired to kill, you know, with license to
kill, but these days the government agents, in my experience, don't do
that. It's done by private consultants that are brought in to do this
work. And I've known a number of these individuals personally and still do.

AMY GOODMAN: In your book, The Secret History of the American Empire,
you talk about taking on global power at every level. Right now, we're
seeing these mass protests taking place in Germany ahead of the G8
meeting. Talk about the significance of these.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I think it's extremely significant. Something is
happening in the world today, which is very, very important. Yeah, as we
watched the headlines this morning, you know, what we can absolutely say
is we live in a very dangerous world. It's also a very small world,
where we're able to immediately know what's going on in Germany or in
the middle of the Amazon or anywhere else. And we're beginning to
finally understand around the world, I think, that the only way my
children or grandchildren or any child or grandchild anywhere on this
planet is going to be able to have a peaceful, stable and sustainable
world is if every child has that. The G8 hasn't got that yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Group of Eight are.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in
the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the
United States, and it's actually the corporations within these companies
- countries, excuse me - that run it. It's not the governments, because,
after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations. In
our own country, we know that the next two final presidential
candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to
raise something like half a billion dollars. And that's not going to
come from me and you. Primarily that's going to come from the people who
own and run our big corporations. They're totally beholden to the
government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent
the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at
their behest.

And what we're seeing now in Europe - and we're seeing it very strongly
in Latin America, we're seeing it in the Middle East - we're seeing this
huge undercurrent of resistance, of protest, against this empire that's
been built out of this. And it's been such a subtle empire that people
haven't been aware of it, because it wasn't built by the military. It
was built by economic hit men. Most of us aren't aware of it. Most
Americans have no idea that these incredible lifestyles that we all lead
are because we're part of a very vicious empire that literally enslaves
people around the world, misuses people. But we're beginning to
understand this. And the Europeans and the Latin Americans are at the
forefront of this understanding.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we're going to talk to you about Congo, about
Lebanon, about the Middle East, about Latin America, much of what you
cover in The Secret History of the American Empire, when we come back.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is John Perkins. From 1971 to 1981, he worked for
the international consulting firm of Charles T Main, where he was a
self-described "economic hit man". His new book is called The Secret
History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth
about Global Corruption. Let's talk back, going to Latin America, about
this ChevronTexaco lawsuit.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, that's extremely significant. When I was sent to
Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1968, Texaco had just gone into
Ecuador, and the promise to the Ecuadorian people at that time from
Texaco and their own politicians and the World Bank was oil is going to
pull this country out of poverty. And people believed it. I believed it
at the time. The exact opposite has happened. Oil has made the country
much more impoverished, while Texaco has made fortunes off this. It's
also destroyed vast areas of the Amazon rainforest.

So the lawsuit today that's being brought by a New York lawyer and some
Ecuadorian lawyers - Steve Donziger here in New York - is for $6
billion, the largest environmental lawsuit in the history of the world,
in the name of 30,000 Ecuadorian people against Texaco, which is now
owned by Chevron, for dumping over eighteen billion gallons of toxic
waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That's thirty times more than the
Exxon Valdez. And dozens and dozens of people have died and are
continuing to die of cancer and other pollution-related diseases in this
area of the Amazon. So all this oil has come out of this area, and it's
the poorest area of one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. And
the irony of that is just so amazing.

But what I think - one of the really significant things about this, Amy,
is that this law firm has taken this on, not pro bono, but they expect
if they win the case, which they expect to do, to make a lot of money
off of it, which is a philosophical decision. It isn't because they
wanted to get rich off this. It's because they want to encourage other
law firms to do similar things in Nigeria and in Indonesia and in
Bolivia, in Venezuela and many other places. So they want to see a
business grow out of this, of law firms going in and defending poor
people, knowing that they can get a payoff from the big companies who
have acted so terribly, terribly, terribly irresponsibly in the past.

And Steve Donziger, the attorney - I was in Ecuador with him just two
weeks ago - and one of the very touching things he said is - he's an
American attorney with, you know, very good credentials, and he says,
"You know, I've seen a lot of companies make mistakes and then try to
defend themselves in law courts". And he said, "That's one thing. But in
this case, Texaco didn't make mistakes. This was done with intent. They
knew what they were doing. To save a few bucks, they killed a lot of
people." And now they're going to be forced to pay for that, to take
responsibility for that, and hopefully open the door to make many
companies take responsibility for the wanton destruction that's occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's talk about Latin America and its leaders, like Jaime
Roldos. Talk about him and his significance. You wrote about him in your
first book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, Jaime Roldos was an amazing man. After many years of
military dictators in Ecuador, US puppet dictators, there was a
democratic election, and one man, Jaime Roldos, ran on a platform that
said Ecuadorian resources ought to be used to help the Ecuadorian
people, and specifically oil, which at that time was just coming in.
This was in the late 1970s. And I was sent to Ecuador, and I was also
sent at the same time to Panama to work with Omar Torrijos, to bring
these men around, to corrupt them, basically, to change their minds.

You know, in the case of Jaime Roldos, he won the election by a
landslide, and now he started to put into action his policy, his
promises, and was going to tax the oil companies. If they weren't
willing to give much more of their profits back to the Ecuadorian
people, then he threatened to nationalize them. So I was sent down,
along with other economic hit men - I played a fairly minor role in that
case and a major one in Panama with Torrijos - but we were sent into
these countries to get these men to change their policies, to go against
their own campaign promises. And basically what you do is you tell them,
"Look, you know, if you play our game, I can make you and your family
very healthy. I can make sure that you get very rich. If you don't play
our game, if you follow your campaign promises, you may go the way of
Allende in Chile or Arbenz in Guatemala or Lumumba in the Congo." On and
on, we can list all these presidents that we've either overthrown or
assassinated because they didn't play our game. But Jaime would not come
around, Jaime Roldos. He stayed uncorruptible, as did Omar Torrijos.

And both of these - and from an economic hit man perspective, this was
very disturbing, because not only did I know I was likely to fail at my
job, but I knew that if I failed, something dire was going to happen:
the jackals would come in, and they would either overthrow these men or
assassinate them. And in both cases, these men were assassinated, I have
no doubt. They died in airplane crashes two months apart from each other
in 1981 - single plane; their own private planes crashed.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain more what happened with Omar Torrijos.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Omar, again, was very stalwartly standing up to the
United States, demanding that the Panama Canal should be owned by
Panamanians. And I spent a lot of time with Torrijos, and I liked him
very, very much as an individual. He was extremely charismatic,
extremely courageous and very nationalistic about wanting to get the
best for his people. And I couldn't corrupt him. I tried everything I
could possibly do to bring him around. And as I was failing, I was also
very concerned that something would happen to him. And sure enough - it
was interesting that Jaime Roldos's plane crashed in May, and Torrijos
said - got his family together and said, "I'm probably next, but I'm
ready to go. We've now got the Canal turned over." He had signed a
treaty with Jimmy Carter to get the Canal in Panamanian hands. He said,
"I've accomplished my job, and I'm ready to go now". And he had a dream
about being in a plane that hit a mountain. And within two months after
it happened to Roldos, it happened to Torrijos also.

AMY GOODMAN: And you met with both these men?

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, I'd met with both of them.

AMY GOODMAN: What were your conversations like?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, especially with Torrijos, I spent a lot of time with
him in some formal meetings and also at cocktail parties and barbecues -
he was big on things like that - and was constantly trying to get him to
come around to our side and letting him know that if he did, he and his
family would get some very lucrative contracts, would become very
wealthy, and, you know, warning him. And he didn't really need much
warning, because he knew what would be likely to happen if he didn't.
And his attitude was, "I want to get done what I can in my lifetime, and
then so be it".

And it's been interesting, Amy, that since I wrote the book Confessions,
Marta Roldos, who's Jaime's daughter, has come to the United States to
meet with me, and I just spent time with her in Ecuador. She is now a
member of parliament in Ecuador, just elected, and she married Omar
Torrijos's nephew. And it's really interesting to hear their stories
about what was going on - she was seventeen at the time her parents -
her mother was also in the plane that her father died in; the two of
them died in that plane - and then to hear her talk about how her
husband, Omar's nephew, was in that meeting when the family was called
together and Omar said, "I'm probably next, but I'm ready to go. I've
done my job. I've done what I could do for my people. So I'm ready to
go, if that's what has to happen."

AMY GOODMAN: So what were your conversations at the time with other
so-called economic hit men? I mean, you became the chief consultant at
Charles Main.

JOHN PERKINS: Chief economist.

AMY GOODMAN: Chief economist.

JOHN PERKINS: Right. Well, you know, when I was with other people that -
we could be sitting at a table, say, in the Hotel Panama, knowing that
we're both here to win these guys over, but we also had our official
jobs, which were to do studies on the economy, to show how if the
country accepted the loan, it was going to improve its gross national
product. We would talk about those kinds of things. It's, I suspect, a
little bit like if two CIA agents, spies, get together or have a beer
together, they don't really talk about what they're really doing beneath
the surface, but they've got an official job, too, and that's what you
focus on. And, in fact, the two, in my case, are very closely linked.

So we were producing these economic reports that would prove to the
World Bank and would prove to Omar Torrijos that if he accepted these
huge loans, then his country's gross national product would just
mushroom and pull his people out of poverty. And we produced these
reports, which made sense from a mathematical econometric standpoint.
And, in fact, it often happened that with these loans, the GNP, the
gross national product, did increase.

But what also was true, and what Omar knew and Jaime Roldos knew and I
was coming to know very strongly, was that even if the general economy
increased, the poor people with these loans would get poorer. The rich
would make all the money, because most of the poor people weren't even
tied into the gross national product. A lot of them didn't even make
income. They were living off subsistence farming. They benefited
nothing, but they were left holding the debt, and because of these huge
debts, their country in the long term would not be able to provide them
with healthcare, education and other social services.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Congo.

JOHN PERKINS: Oh, boy. The whole story of Africa and the Congo is such a
devastating and sad one. And it's the hidden story, really. We in the
United States don't even talk about Africa. We don't think about Africa.
You know, Congo has something called coltan, which probably most of your
listeners may not have even heard of, but every cell phone and laptop
computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few
years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because you and I and
all of us in the G8 countries demand low - or at least we want to see
our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. And, of
course, the companies that make these sell them on that basis, that "Oh,
here, mine's $200 less than the other company". But in order to do that,
these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners, the people
mining coltan, they're being killed. There's these vast wars going on to
provide us with cheap coltan.

And I have to say, you know, if we want to live in a safe world, we need
to be - we must be willing, and, in fact, we must demand that we pay
higher prices for things like laptop computers and cell phones and that
a good share of that money go back to the people who are mining the
coltan. And that's true of oil. It's true of so many resources that we
are not paying the true cost, and there's millions of people around the
world suffering from that. Roughly 50,000 people die every single day
from hunger or hunger-related diseases and curable diseases that they
don't get the medicines for, simply because they're part of a system
that demands that they put in long hours, and they get very, very low
pay, so we can have things cheaper in this country. And the Congo is an
incredibly potent example of that.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the so-called defeats in Vietnam and Iraq
and what they mean for corporations.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, that's - yeah, we, you and I, look at them as
defeats, perhaps, and certainly anybody who lost a child or a sibling or
a spouse in these countries look at them as disasters, as defeats, but
the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military
industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, of course,
they're doing it in a very, very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy,
the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women
continue to go to Iraq and fight, they're making a tremendous amount of
money. These are not failures for them; they're successes from a very
strong economic standpoint. And I know that sounds cynical. I am cynical
about these things. I've been there. I've seen it. And, you know, we
must learn not to put up with that anymore. All of us.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. His book is The Secret
History of the American Empire. It's the fortieth anniversary of the
1967 Israeli-Arab war. You talk about Israel being a Fortress America in
the Middle East.

JOHN PERKINS: I think it's very sad and very telling, once again, that
the Israeli people, for the most part, are led to believe that they've
been given this land as a payoff, basically, for the Holocaust, because
they deserve to be recompensed. And, of course, the Holocaust was
terrible, and they do deserve to be taken care of and recompensed and
have stability.

But why would we locate that place in the middle of the Arab world,
their traditional enemies? Why would we locate that place in such an
unstable area? It's because it is serving as a huge fortress for us in
the biggest oil fields known in the world today, and we knew this when
Israel was located there. And I think the Israeli people have been
terribly exploited in this process.

So, in fact, we built this vast military base, armed camp, in the middle
of the Middle Eastern oil fields that are surrounded by the Arab
communities, and in the process, we've obviously created a tremendous
amount of resentment and anger and a situation that it's very difficult
to see any positive outcome there. But the fact of the matter is, our
having this military base in Israel has been a huge defense for us. It's
been a place where we could really launch attacks, rely on. It's been
our equivalent of the Crusaders' castles in the Middle East. And it's
very, very sad. I think it's extremely sad for the Israeli people that
they're caught up in all of this. I think it's extremely sad for the
American people. It's extremely sad for the world that this is going on.

AMY GOODMAN: As we crisscross the globe, John Perkins, which is exaclty
what you did in your years as an international consultant, having been
groomed by the National Security Agency, but then becoming a top
economist in an international consulting firm, you have also written
books about Shamanism. You also write about Tibet. Where does Tibet fit
into this picture?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, I was just in Tibet a couple of years ago,
and it was an interesting thing, because I took a group of about thirty
people into Tibet with me as part of a non-profit organization. I was
leading the trip. And some of these people had been in the Amazon with
me, been to other places. And, of course, Tibet right now is - it's very
depressing, because the Chinese presence is extremely strong, and you
see how the Tibetan culture has been put down. And you're always aware
that there's Chinese soldiers and spies all around you. And many of the
people on the trip came to the realization, yeah, this terrible here.
"Free Tibet", we all know about that, but the ones who had been with me
on a trip to the Amazon, where the oil companies and our own military
are doing the same things, said, "But doesn't this remind us of what
we're doing in so much of the world?" And it's something we tend to forget.

We can all wave banners about "Free Tibet", which we should, but how
about freeing the countries that are under our thumb, too? And certainly
Tibet is not nearly - well, I hate to say it this way, because some
people might disagree with me, but I think Iraq is in worse shape than
Tibet is these days, although both of them are in pretty bad shape. But
so, what we saw in Tibet is that same kind of model that we're
implementing around the world. And yet, most Americans are not aware
that we're doing it. They're aware that the Chinese are doing it, but
not aware that we're doing it on actually a much bigger level than the
Chinese are.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, talk about your transformation. You were
making a lot of money. You were traveling the world. You were in a
position where you were meeting presidents and prime ministers of
countries, bringing them to their knees. What made you change, and then,
ultimately, the decision to write about it?

JOHN PERKINS: You know, Amy, when I first got started - I grew up -
three, four hundred years of Yankee Calvinism - in New Hampshire and
Vermont, with very strong moral principles, came from a pretty
conservative Republican family. And all during the ten years that I was
an economic hit man, from 1971 to 1981, I was pretty young, but it
bothered my conscience. And yet, everybody was telling me I was doing
the right thing. Like you said, presidents of countries, the president
of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, patted me on the back. And I was
asked to lecture at Harvard and many other places about what I was
doing. And what I was doing was not illegal - should be, but it isn't.
And yet, in my heart, it always tore at my conscience. I'd been a Peace
Corps volunteer. I saw. And as time went by and I began to understand
more and more, it got to be more and more difficult for me to continue
doing this. I had a staff of about four dozen people working for me.
Things were building up.

And then, one day I was on vacation, sailing in the Virgin Islands, and
I anchored my little boat off the St John Island, and I took the dinghy
in, and I climbed this mountain on St John Island in the Virgin Islands
up to this old sugar cane plantation in ruins. And it was beautiful.
Bougainville. The sun was setting. I sat there and felt very peaceful.
And then suddenly, I realized that this plantation had been built on the
bones of thousands of slaves. And then I realized that the whole
hemisphere had been built on the bones of millions of the slaves. And I
got very angry and sad. And then, it suddenly struck me that I was
continuing that same process and that I was a slaver, that I was making
the same thing happen in a slightly - in a different way, more subtle
way, but just as bad in terms of its outcome. And at that point, I made
the decision I would never do it again. And I went back to Boston a
couple of days later and quit.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, worked for Chas Main
International Consulting Firm, self-described "economic hit man", now
has written a new book called The Secret History of the American Empire.
When we come back from break, we'll talk about - well, from quitting the
American empire to taking it on. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. His second book on the issue
of economic hit men is called The Secret History of the American Empire.
John Perkins is a New York Times bestselling author. His book
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man took this country by storm.

So, you quit, but that was one step. Writing about it was another. Talk
about your attempts over time.

JOHN PERKINS: Oh, yes. After I quit, I tried several times to write the
book that became Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and each time I
reached out to other economic hit men I had worked with or jackals to
try to get their stories, word got out and I was threatened. I had a
young daughter at the time. She's now twenty-five. And I also was
offered some bribe. In fact, I accepted a bribe of about a half a
million dollars. It's what's called a legal bribe, but it's a bribe, and
it was given to me with the condition that I not write the book. There
was no question about that. I describe it in detail.

And I assuaged my guilt by putting a lot of that money into nonprofits I
had formed - Dream Change and Pachamama Alliance - that are helping
Amazonian people fight oil companies, so to assuage my guilt some. But I
didn't write the story. And this happened a number of times, and I would
find one excuse or another, and I wrote other books about indigenous
people. I worked with these people. I wrote the books you mentioned
earlier about Shamanism and so forth, and so I kind of, you know,
distracted myself and assuaged my guilt and went on with this.

And then, on 9/11, I was in the Amazon with the Shuar people, had taken
a group of nonprofit people in to learn from indigenous people in the
Amazon. But shortly after that, I came up to New York to Ground Zero,
and as I stood there looking down into that terrible pit, that
smoldering - and it still smelled of burning flesh - I realized that I
had to write the book, I could no longer defer, that the American people
had no understanding of why so many people around the world are angry
and frustrated and terrified, and that I had to take responsibility for
what happened at 9/11. In fact, we all have to take a certain
responsibility, which is not in any way to condone mass murder by
anybody ever - I'm not condoning that in any way - but I did realize
that the American people needed to understand why there's so much anger
around the world. I had to write the book.

So this time I didn't tell anyone I was writing it, and even my wife and
daughter, they knew I was writing something, but they didn't know what.
I didn't reach out to other people. It made it a little more difficult
to write it. But finally I got it in the hands of a very good New York
agent, and he sent it out to publishers. At that point, this manuscript
becomes my best insurance policy, as at that point if something strange
happens to me, including now, suddenly the book will sell. Even though
it's been a bestseller for a long time, it will sell a lot more copies,
if something - people sometimes laugh and say, "Do you worry that your
publisher may be trying to assassinate you, because it would certainly
help book sales?" I don't worry about it. But, you know, so at that
point, once I got the manuscript there, it became my insurance policy.

AMY GOODMAN: You write "A jackal is born", about Jack Corbin. Who is he?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Jack Corbin - and that's not his real name, but he's
a real person - he's alive and well today, working for us in Iraq. But
he is a jackal, he is an assassin. And one of the most fascinating
stories, I think, involves Seychelles, which is a small county, an
island country, off the coast of Africa. And it happens to be located
where Diego Garcia, one of the United States's most strategic air bases,
is located.

There's a long history behind Diego Garcia. But in the late 1970s,
Seychelles had a president that was very friendly to us, James Mancham,
and he was overthrown in a bloodless coup by [France-Albert] Rene, a
socialist. And [France-Albert] Rene threatened to get us out of Diego
Garcia, to expose the real facts behind the terrible things that went on
to put us in Diego Garcia. There's a lot of details that I won't get
into now.

In any case, I was called down to Washington to meet with a bunch of
retired generals and admirals, who were trying - who were all working as
economic hit men for consulting firms, and they were prepping me to go
in and corrupt [France-Albert] Rene and bring him around to our side.
But before doing that, they wanted to find out whether he was really
corruptible or not. And it was sort of interesting that they - one of
these generals had a young protege, a young man, and the general had
noticed that a high diplomat from Seychelles in Washington had a young
wife who was not very happy. So this young man was sent in to seduce the
wife and compromise her and get information from her, which is a fairly
common tactic. Sex is a big thing in this game of diplomacy and economic
hit people. And sort of an interesting bi-story here is that one time at
lunch this general came back, and he said, "You know, I think you
economic hit men have a much tougher job than you women counterpart,
because", he said, "now this woman, the diplomat's wife, is buying into
this with the young man, but she wants to be convinced that he loves
her. So, you know, my god, you know, I'd give the keys to the Pentagon
to a young lady just for some good sex. I don't need to be convinced
that she loves me. But I guess that's the difference between men and
women." That's what he said. Kind of interesting. Anyway, in the end,
the young man did get the information from the wife, and the information
was that [France-Albert] Rene was not corruptible. There was no point in
even trying.

AMY GOODMAN: Also, Diego Garcia is very significant as a military base.

JOHN PERKINS: Extremely significant. And it was used - it's being used
in Afghanistan and Iraq and sorties that we fly in to Africa or any part
of that world. In any case, I was called off the job, and a little while
later a team of assassins were sent in from South Africa - forty-five,
forty-six, I can't remember the exact number - were sent in as a rugby
team to bring in Christmas gifts to children of the Seychelles, but
their real job was to overthrow the government and assassinate Rene. At
the time, I didn't know these individuals. Now, I know Jack Corbin. I
know him very well, personally. I've met him since. Our paths crossed
back then, but we didn't know each other.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly did he do?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the team went in, and they were apprehended at the
airport. A security guard discovered a hidden weapon on one of them. A
huge gun battle broke out at the Mahi airport, and these mercenaries
were surrounded by perhaps a thousand soldiers on the outside. Jack told
me it was one of the few times in his life where he figured he was going
to die and had time to think about it. Many times he could have died,
but he just reacted quickly. And they didn't know what to do, but
eventually an Air India 707 came into view and asked permission to land,
and they gave it permission to land. As soon as it landed, they hijacked
it, and they flew it back to Durban, South Africa.

And I'm now watching this on the national news. This was now on US
national news, and I'm knowing that this is - I didn't know what was
going to happen when I was called off the case, but now I'm seeing it
unfold. And to the world, what we saw is this plane, Air India 707,
flies into Durban, South Africa, surrounded by South African security
guards. The men on the plane give themselves up. They march off. They're
sent to court and then sentenced to prison, and some, I think, to
execution, and that's the end of the story, as far as we know.

Now that I know Jack, what actually happened was when the plane was
surrounded, the security forces got on the telephone with the plane and
discovered there was their good friends, their teachers in fact, on the
plane. They worked out a deal. The men gave themselves up. They did
spend three months in prison. They had their own wing with television,
et cetera, and then were quietly released after three months. A lot of
those same men, that team, a lot of them today are in Iraq working for
us there, doing things that, you know, our soldiers are forbidden from
doing. And they're making very good money doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is this man, so-called Jack Corbin, working for today
in Iraq?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, he works for a private company in Iraq that has a
contract, you know, that comes through the Pentagon, CIA, one of those
organizations. So, like so much of this work, there's a tremendous, as
you've reported on this program, a tremendous number of these
mercenaries there. Jack Corbin and his people are at the very top of
that level. They're the extremely skilled ones who do the really
delicate work. We've also got a lot of people working for Blackwater and
others that, you know, are not quite as skilled and are just out there
doing kind of the grunt work. But there's all kinds at that level.

AMY GOODMAN: Bechtel, Bolivia, the water wars. You're based in the Bay
Area, where Bechtel is based, and the continent you know best, South
America.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, well, you know, Bechtel was given the franchise to
own and operate the water system of Cochabamba, Bolivia, third largest
city in that country. And the World Bank forced this to happen. It's so
sad. When it happened, suddenly the price of water quadrupled for some
people, went up by tremendous amounts. People could no longer afford
water. Cochabamba is a pretty poor city. There's sections of it that are
extremely poor.

And so, the people took to the streets. They rebelled against this.
There were riots. And Bechtel dug in its heels, but eventually they
threw Bechtel out of Bolivia. Bechtel then sued Bolivia for $50 million
in a European court, because they couldn't sue in a US court, because of
the laws between Bolivia and the US. And then Evo Morales was elected
president of Bolivia, and very shortly after that, Bechtel dropped its
lawsuit. But it was interesting that the lawsuit was for lost profits
that they hadn't been able to realize because they had been thrown out
for doing things that were so onerous to the people there.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, what do you see as the solutions right now?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, you know, Amy, this empire that we've created really
has an emperor, and it's not the president of this country. The
President serves, you know, for a short period of time. But it doesn't
really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White
House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it's really run
by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our
biggest corporations. This isn't a conspiracy theory. They don't need to
conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really
are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish
of the people, they're not democratically elected, they don't serve any
limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own
boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than
the other way around. And they are the power behind this.

And so, if we want to turn this around, we have to impact them very
strongly, which means that we have to change the corporations, which is
their power base. And what I feel very strongly is that today
corporations exists for the primary purpose of making large profits,
making a few very rich people a lot richer on a quarterly basis, on a
daily basis, on a very short-term basis. That shouldn't be. There is no
reason for that to be.

Corporations have been defined as individuals. Individuals have to be
good citizens. Corporations need to be good citizens. They need to take
- their primary goal must be to take care of their employees, their
customers and all the people around the world who provide the resources
that go into making this world run, and to take care of the environments
and the communities where those people live.

We must get the corporations to redefine themselves, and I think it's
very realistic that we can do so. Every corporate executive out there is
smart enough to realize that he's running a very failed system. As an
economist, as a rational person, nobody can conclude anything otherwise.
If you look at the fact that less than five percent of the world's
population live in the United States and we consume more than 25% of the
world's resources and create over thirty percent of its major pollution,
you can only conclude that we've created a very flawed and failed
system. This is not a model that can be sold to the Chinese or the
Indians or the Africans or the Middle Easterners or the Latin Americans.
We can't even continue with it ourselves. It has to change. And
corporate executives know that. They're smart individuals. I believe
that they want to see change.

And when we have really pushed them to change, we've been extremely
successful. For example, we've got them to clean up rivers that were
terribly polluted in the 1970s in this country. We got them to get rid
of the aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer. We got them to
change their policies toward hiring and promoting minorities and women.
We've gotten them to put seatbelts in cars and airbags, against their
initial resistance. We've got them to change tremendously in any
specific area where we've set out to do that.

Now, it behooves us, we must convince them that their corporations need
to be institutions to make this a better world, rather than institutions
that serve a few very rich people and their goal is to make those people
even richer. We need to turn this around. We must.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask one last quick question on Ecuador, and that
is the death of Ecuador's Defense Minister Guadalupe Larriva, who died
in a helicopter crash last year near the Manta US Air Base installation.
Do you know anything about that?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yeah. I just came from Ecuador, and everybody is
talking about it, because the same thing happened to Jaime Roldos's
minister of defense before he was assassinated. And the fact that it
happened next to the US air base in Manta and it was a freak crash, two
helicopters collidng, the similarities between what happened to Jaime
Roldos, people all through Ecuador are saying this was a warning to
Rafael Correa, the new president of Ecuador.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. John Perkins, thanks
for joining us. John Perkins's new book is called The Secret History of
the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about
Global Corruption.

_____

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