About
This Project
Introduction
PART
ONE: Cold War and Special Warfare
1.
Interest,
Intervention, and Containment
2.
Toward a Doctrine of
Special Warfare
3.
The Legacy of World
War II
4.
Toward a New
Counterinsurgency: Philippines, Laos, and Vietnam
5.
Waging Unconventional
Warfare: Guatemala, the Congo, and the Cubans
PART
TWO: Camelot and Counterinsurgency
6.
The Kennedy Crusade
7.
The Apparatus in the
Field
8.
Edward Geary
Lansdale and the New Counterinsurgency
9.
The Heart of
Doctrine
10.
Counterterror and
Counterorganization
11.
Tactical
Totalitarianism
12.
The Problem of
Ideology
PART
THREE: Special Warfare and Low-lntensity Conflict
13.
The Carter Years
14.
Morning in America
and the Special Warfare Revival
15.
The Special Forces’
Buildup
16.
The Middle East
Calls the Shots
17.
Watching the Neighbors:
Low-Intensity Conflict in Central America
18.
An Un-American Way
of War
Epilogue
About This Project
Instruments of Statecraft:
U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990
was published in 1992 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Informed by recently
declassified and previously unpublished documents, Instruments of Statecraft
is an authoritative study of American covert, unconventional warfare waged
against ideological adversaries, from the Truman administration up to the
recent war in the Persian Gulf.
Since World War II,
assassination, sabotage, kidnaping, torture, the overthrow of foreign
governments, and other terroristic activities have been intrinsic to our
national defense policy. These have been justified time and again as necessary
to combat communist insurgency and, more recently, terrorism-as the only
effective response to the barbarism ascribed to, or projected onto, our
enemies- be they Sandinistas or the PLO.
So it is that America has
maintained forces -including the OSS, the CIA, the Green Berets, and the Delta
Force-that have specialized in dirty warfare with impunity, in Nicaragua,
Lebanon, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Africa, Cuba,
Central America, and Greece, among other places.
Michael McClintock gives a
fascinating and alarming expose of the dark side of American foreign policy,
while examining its tactical roots-from the pronouncements of Clausewitz and Raymond
Aron, to its ideological basis in the Monroe Doctrine, Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big
Stick” foreign policy, and Woodrow Wilson’s post-colonialist crusade.
Michael McClintock was born in
Ohio and holds a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University and a master’s degree
in political science from the University of Wisconsin. He has been a human
rights monitor for the past sixteen years, traveling extensively throughout all
of Central America, as well as in Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Thailand, and the
Philippines. He is the author of The American Connection, a study of
U.S. covert activities in Latin America.
Introduction
The conduct of foreign affairs
by the United States in the latter half of this century has a military
dimension that can be seen only obliquely. The awesome military machine that
emerged with the Cold War was designed largely for deterrence, for a war never
meant to happen. It served, too, for occasional, limited, conventional wars;
lesser conflicts; and shows of force. But the manpower and armaments of this
behemoth were only a part of the United States’ military response to the Cold
War. Another, nearly opaque, military dimension entailed what has been
variously referred to as secret, special, unconventional, or political warfare.
This hidden dimension became the chosen instrument for permanent military
action below the threshold of full-scale war or open intervention—another kind
of war, that was waged continuously behind the false peace of the post-World
War II era.
This secret warfare introduced
a unique new element into foreign affairs and into the domestic arrangements of
nations friendly to the United States. Its influence was most significant in
the lesser theaters of the Cold War—including much of the Third World—where
military answers to new global challenges were removed from public scrutiny.
Through the efforts of the armed forces’ special warfare establishment and the
Central Intelligence Agency, the military thread of the new warfare wound
around and through the formalities of above-board international relations.
The paramilitary covert
operation became the occasional signpost of the secret war, deflecting
attention from long-term policies or programs, from the unconventional side of
America’s regular armed forces, and indeed, from the larger goals of American
foreign policy. Responsibility for such operations was usually displaced to the
CIA, which was neatly set apart from the regular armed forces—in public
perception if not wholly in fact—while the military remained prudently in the
shadows. The impact of the armed forces’ special warfare apparatus and doctrine
was most telling, not in the record of American operations, but in the extent
to which it influenced the attitudes, organization, and programs of American
allies throughout much of the Third World during the Cold War.
A fascination with special
warfare, from guerrilla warfare to the subtleties of ideological
indoctrination, was characteristic of U.S. foreign policy makers at the onset
of the Cold War. Belief that the Soviets were masters of special warfare,
wielding an instrument of great power helped shape our Cold War attitudes
toward them while creating anxiety over whether the United States, constrained
by its self-proclaimed virtue, could compete in a war without rules.
Argument prevailed that this
kind of war was best fought at two levels: through occasional use of
overwhelming military power (e.g., Greece and Korea); and through uninterrupted
use of the kind of unconventional methods of low-level conflict attributed to
the Soviets. The guardians of the national interest concluded that the United
States should respond to communist treachery in kind—fire against fire.
The United States learned
secret warfare from the experiences of World War II, from both its allies and
its enemies. American officers were baptized in the fire of what seemed to be a
new kind of war in enemy-occupied territories of both European and Pacific
theaters. The tactics and attitudes they developed found ready application in
the tensions of the postwar world. Officers who had operated with resistance
movements were brought together to organize the new special warfare
establishment. The Army Special Forces were developed to take American-style
guerrilla warfare to nations under Soviet domination.
The men who drafted the field
manuals for the American guerrillas— or what they generally referred to as unconventional
warfare—used as models, the guerrilla campaigns in the Philippines; the
partisan movements in the Soviet Union and the Balkans; the experiences of
emigres’ co-opted into American service, and former German officers. The Army’s
secret review of the European partisan movements was assisted by ex-Wehrmacht
officers who had taken part in their suppression; they were coauthors of
reports that colored American views of the nature of guerrilla (and
counterguerrilla) warfare for decades to come. A common view emerged that
terror was an essential tool of both guerrillas and counterguerrillas. The
American manuals and assorted training materials made explicit reference to the
utility—indeed, the necessity—of its use from hostage-taking to selective
assassination.
The counterinsurgency era (the
subject of Part Two)
began with John F. Kennedy’s call for a radical reappraisal of U.S. special
warfare. His fascination with the Special Forces and the idea of American
guerrillas meshed neatly with his Cold War view that the small wars of
subversion and insurgency on the periphery of the “Free World” posed the
greatest challenge to our national security. In particular, Kennedy emphasized
counterinsurgency’s use for political and economic reform. Chapter Eight
profiles one of the President’s principal counterinsurgency advisers, Edward
Geary Lansdale, who is known both for his advocacy of reform and “civic action”
and for his pioneering role in the field of dirty tricks and psychological
warfare.
Until 1961, the purpose of the
Special Forces was to train guerrillas, rather than combat them. In accord with
Kennedy’s wishes, the military redefined counterinsurgency as a discipline of
special warfare, departing from the pre-World War II concepts of
counterinsurgency based on conventional tactics—i.e., occupation and
administration. The unconventional dimension of counterinsurgency became an
integral part of American Cold War doctrine. Counterinsurgency became a medium
of the secret war directed against internal enemies wherever friendly
governments were under threat of subversion or insurgency. These domestic
campaigns were aspects of a larger war within which the United States also
launched unilateral “guerrilla” operations (which often includcd air and naval
support) to overthrow undesirable regimes. The crux of the new doctrine (set
out in Chapter Nine), that the adversary was best fought with its own methods,
was based as much on assumption as on fact, and proposed that we should become
the “mirror image” of what we imagined the enemy to be.
As terror was seen as integral
to guerrilla tactics, the counterguerrilla would apply counterterror;
guerilla organization (e.g., recruitment surveillance) would be mimicked by counterorganization.
Counterorganization, taken to its extreme, could (and often did) cutrail
placing hundreds of thousands of people under virtual totalitarian control.
Which combined with the psychological warfare technique of ideological
indoctrination, totalitarian potential could become reality. The consequences
were most dramatic in countries where friendly governments uncritically adopted
the American model on a massive scale.
The end of the war in Vietnam
was a watershed in the development of special warfare, both offensive
(guerrilla operations) and, nominally defensive (counterinsurgency). (Part Three outlines the
development of special warfare from the end of the Vietnam War to the last days
of the Reagan administration.) Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy, which might
have Ied to a radical reassessment of covert U.S. foreign policy, faltered and
failed in the face of political pressure and the intransigence of the military
and foreign-policy establishments. By 1980, the spirit behind the housecleaning
of the CIA, which had begun with Carter, was superseded by measures
strengthening the United States’ special operations potential and by open-ended
commitments to secret wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle
East.
The real post-Vietnam revival
of special warfare—as part of the new concept of “low-intensity conflict”—came
with the Reagan administration. The rollback of perceived gains made by the
Soviet Union, notably in Central America, was the centerpiece of foreign policy
during his first term in office. The apparent American slippage in the Cold War
was taken up as a challenge that would justify a newly aggressive pursuit of
special warfare. (The rapid buildup of the United States’ special warfare
apparatus and its role in planning for new wars on the periphery is outlined in
Chapter Eighteen.)
Developments in the Middle East
during Reagan’s first term complicated the administration’s response to
low-intensity challenges (see Chapter
Sixteen). The loss of American lives, particularly the 246 Marines killed
in Beirut, prompted a new direction in the White House’s action and a new
vehemence in its rhetoric. Onto its crusade against the ideological enemy in
Central America and the Caribbean was superimposed a campaign against
international terrorism. In doing this, the Reagan administration broke with
the reticence of past advocates of counterterrorism and openly espoused the
logic of adopting terrorist methods to fight terrorists. Implying the
legitimacy of a state’s turning to terror tactics as a utilitarian means to an
end, the Reagan administration publicly extended the logic of covert
counterinsurgency in internal conflicts to the sphere of international
relations. Despite Reagan’s overwrought rhetoric about terrorism, there was
evidence that the United States had, indeed, experimented in perpetrating the
very kind of terrorism it claimed to oppose.
The new commitment to special
warfare was most amply and visibly manifest in Latin America and the Caribbean,
from the Windward Islands to the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The
consensus of the special warfare experts then, as now, was that low-intensity
conflict was intrinsically an “un- American way of war.” The substance of the
United States’ doctrine for these unpalatable, dirty wars, however, was to
reaffirm the logic of the 1950s. The special warfare establishment would do
whatever was necessary to prevail in secret, political warfare. The United
States could wage dirty wars with the best (or worst) of them.
The events of the first three
years of George Bush’s presidency— most notably the collapse of communism, the
invasion of Panama, and the Gulf War—required an epilogue to this study. The
end of the Cold War did not eliminate at a stroke the Cold War attitudes,
ideology, and military doctrine that fuel the secret war on the periphery;
there is little to show that the United States has modified its use of special
warfare in any discernible manner. Even if it were to progressively do so, the
legacy of decades of clandestine special warfare and its influence on foreign
affairs will not readily dissipate. The United States’ Cold War doctrine and
ideology remain particularly potent for the many “Free World” clients that have
used them as a template with which to remodel their societies, political
institutions, anal security systems into effective instruments of
counterinsurgency. The overarching threat which once welded American special
warfare into a cohesive and comprehensive program may be gone, but special
warfare remains a principal instrument of low intensity conflict in the new
world order.
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