Hey everyone, thanks for coming out on a Saturday morning to learn more about the history of the CIA, and really, the history of the 20th century. I'm starting to… as I prepare each week for these lectures, I'm just like, there's way too much to explain. And so I've had to be… sparse, uncertain details, and be really parsimonious with which events I choose to focus on.
But really, there's… three different ways that any lecture could have really gone and could have focused on, different events, so… I encourage you to check out the material itself, like, dig into the history, but the truth is that the history of the CIA really is the history of the 20th century. Like, it's a way… the CIA gives you a through-line to understand all of the events, and also the kind of, like, machinations of the American state.
I came to understand, like, through studying this history, I came to understand figures whose names I'd heard but didn't know anything about. I came to understand how the current structure of the American state, like, where did the National Security Council come from? Like, all these things, like, what does it do, all that kind of stuff, so… it really is a way in to the story, and that means that it's just… the tentacles sprawl everywhere. So… This lecture this week is going to be looking at JFK, LBJ, and hopefully Nixon, because this string of presidents in the United States exemplifies kind of the conflict between the presidents and the CIA, or you could even say between the presidents and the deep state.
whether that's the National Security Council. colluding with the CIA, whether it's the president trying to control the CIA and getting resistance, whether it's the CIA actively misleading the president, there's all kinds of conflict between these various groups at this time, as we can see with with Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon. So, I want to kind of focus on those three.
in succession. But in… before we talk about them, I want to zoom out and kind of set the stage of… we've gone… we've looked at… the predecessor of the CIA and the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, that existed during World War II. Then we saw Truman creating the CIA along with the National Security Council, which is this whole new agency that's able to issue directives, that's able to coordinate a national policy, that advises the president, but that also is this kind of clearinghouse for all of the intelligence and decisions that's coming in from you know, the Department of Defense is able to get a say in here, the Secretary of State is able to get a say, the Vice President is involved, so… All of these meetings are happening in a non-democratic way. They are coming together, they are privy to information that the public is not privy to, they are making decisions, they are defining policy, they're issuing, they're issuing orders.
They're advising the president in secret meetings, all of this kind of stuff. And this was all a whole newly created apparatus at the time. We looked at Walter Bedell-Smith, who was the third Director of Central Intelligence, who was really pretty consequential for setting the overall culture and tone. And then we looked at Alan Dulles, who… was the longest-serving Director of Central Intelligence, and he really exemplifies this early phase of, the idea of the New England gentleman's spy as sort of using the CIA to LARP as an international spy.
And we looked at how the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in Iran, and reinstalled the Shah. We looked at the coup in Guatemala that we engineered, overthrowing an elected leader who was threatening the business interests of the United Fruit Company. There's a lot of other stories there. We also looked at the U-2 spy plane, and also the failures of the CIA in Europe.
So… Under Truman and Eisenhower, the CIA was undergoing… was doing a lot of covert action, and we were in the very early stages of the Cold War. And a lot of focus was on Europe. However, the focus begins to shift Especially towards Southeast Asia. and, Africa and South America, the shift begins to globalize more, because what we begin to deal with especially during JFK's time, is the process of decolonization, which has been underway for a while, but it really reaches ahead after World War II. So the decolonization process is… a phase of history, very recently, when a lot of countries that were previously colonies of European nations are trying to emerge as their own sovereign nation-states, and many of them, they want to be self-determining. So you've got countries, we'll talk about, We're gonna talk about… Indonesia, for instance, but there's many other countries as well, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, even to an extent we talked about Iran. Iran was not formally a colony, but was heavily controlled by the British. So… But in the wake of World War II and Europe's destruction.
a process that had begun with the destruction in World War I really reaches ahead in the Cold War. Where countries like Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony, it was controlled by the Dutch, it was run by Dutch administrators, Dutch was the official language of all governmental activities, Dutch companies had rights to extract and to invest in and to own the country.
in nations like Indonesia, are standing up and saying, no, actually, we're gonna run our own country. And… by and large, because Europe had grown so weak, they had to acquiesce to this. But the problem is that they were trying to cover their asses and get as much as they could out of the retreat as possible. And it was further complicated by American involvement, because the Americans are deeply concerned about communist socialist influences in these new governments. So, in the midst of the conflict between America And the, sort of, Soviet-Sino alliance There is this concern that all of these new governments, these fledgling governments, these people who have not governed themselves before in a democratic way.
are extremely open to being influenced, controlled, or being brought over to the side of the Soviets. So you have all of these brand new governments popping up, and the Americans are extremely afraid that, well, we're just gonna have a ton new communists on our hands, basically. Because the thing is, a lot of these countries that are emerging, they are wanting to undertake reforms that do look very socialist. For instance, a lot of these countries, they are… coming out of a time when there's very large landholders. Like, there's usually, like, a 1% of people hold the vast majority of the land in the country, so a lot of these early democratically elected Officials are wanting to break up large land holdings. They're wanting to do land reform. Many of them are wanting to advocate for rights for workers, for better working conditions.
they might be wanting to set up their own banking system. They might not be cutting sweetheart deals that the… that businesses and corporations were used to. And so… What ends up happening is that these democratically elected leaders are being portrayed as socialists, as communists, and the CIA Is the mechanism that, that the, one of the primary mechanisms that the American state is going to use to try to get a handle on this decolonization process to avoid ending up with a bunch of non-capitalist states, essentially, that aren't integrated fully into the current monetary system, which is emerging at this time, called the Bretton Woods system. So the Bretton Woods system was agreed on in 1944, I believe. At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
And it's this new global international order of money. where you've got international banks, and the U.S. forces all of the other countries, like the major countries, such as, you know, in Japan and Europe, anybody who's not aligned with the Soviet axis, essentially. agrees that, international settlement is going to take place in American dollars, that American dollars are going to be interchangeable with other currencies, and that other currencies… and that the American dollar can be exchanged for gold.
basically, this system sets up a situation where all international settlement's happening in dollars, which creates demand for dollars, and then the dollar is backed by the value of gold. So there is this, okay. I know that I could exchange my dollars for gold, which creates trust, on top of the I'm being forced to use the dollar.
So this whole Bretton Woods system. That is emerging right as World War II ends. The U.S. is taking… has taken on a ton of debt in World War II, and they take on a ton more debt because they invest in, rebuilding Europe and rebuilding Japan. And now they're setting their sights to the rest of the world of how do we protect these… protect these new, emerging.
colonial, like, ex-colonial powers, From being basically turned into communist satellites. And so, the Bretton Woods system allows the U.S. to take on a ton of debt. Without it affecting our ability to operate? because people are just buying U.S. bonds, they're buying the debt with American money, so they're just recycling money back into the system, and you've got the gold backing the system as a way to create trust.
On top of that, the Americans are projecting power credibly, and so that also creates trust. The goal of… the decolonial… like, the decolonial situation is to bring more and more of these countries into the Bretton Woods system. You want these colonial powers to be using American dollars. You want them to not be aligned with the Soviets and with the Chinese.
And so, JFK, is… JFK's a really unique figure. And… One thing that makes him unique is that he is not so bought into… This system, and he's not so bought into ensuring that every decolonial power looks exactly the way that we want it. So, for instance, JFK is really not terribly concerned with Indonesia and with the leader, Sukarno, at this time. In fact, has some sympathy for him.
JFK… he… he opposes putting American boots on the ground in a lot of places where the CIA and the National Security Council are pushing for those things. He is genuinely motivated by this idea of peace. He is a little bit more, sort of, aristocratic and open in his mindset. part of that, I think, comes from him being the children of, like… like, he's a… he's a first-generation immigrant, so, like, his parents were immigrants, and so he is… he was born in America, but his parents were immigrants, and so he's, like.
he's also an outsider because of his faith, because he's Roman Catholic. So he's young, he's Roman Catholic, and he's an immigrant in a country where the establishment has historically been old-money Protestant. And that is also kind of what the CIA is as well. I mentioned in the past, the CIA, a lot of the leadership, they come out of this New England upper crust, they go to Yale, they've gone to the super expensive private boarding schools where rich young men become friends and stay connected for the rest of their lives. And so he and his brother.
Bobby Kennedy, who he makes the Attorney General in his administration, They are, they've got money. But their family is also young and idealistic and charismatic, and they're sort of these outsiders. He's also… he's only in his 40s. So, I mean, you think Donald Trump is in his early 80s. And so, like, when we think about how old our presidents are compared to who JFK was, JFK was this, like, breath of fresh air. Like, he's sort of… you know, you kind of could see him as, like, an Obama sort of figure in his time, of hope, and he's sort of younger, he's this outsider, and so there's a lot of hope riding on him.
And JFK and the CIA really have an antagonistic relationship during this time. Now, JFK uses the CIA. He absolutely does. In fact, in the less than 3 years that JFK was in office, he authorized 107… 163 covert operations, compared to Eisenhower's 170. So… if he'd stayed alive for the rest of the administration, he probably would have surpassed Eisenhower's use of the CIA. How… so, I mean, we've even got, like.
Within the first few days of his administration. There is a plot that was already underway in the final days of the Eisenhower administration to overthrow, General Trujillo, who's the leader of the Dominican Republic. And basically, in the first few days of administration, Kennedy personally cables the ambassador in Santo Domingo and says, we don't care if anyone assassinates Trujillo, but we just don't want anyone to pin that on us.
the CIA had been shipping weapons to dissidents in the Dominican Republic, and two years… two weeks later, Trujillo's shot, and killed. We don't know by who… we don't know who… like, what the weapon was, like, whether it was one of our weapons, but we were shipping weapons to, dissidents we were in touch with weeks prior to this event. So… And we know that JFK's primary obsession while he was in office was assassinating Castro and overthrowing his regime. Like, this was, like, an obsessive thing that JFK and his brother were fixated on.
But I think that JFK was also operating with a significant degree of blindness, because of some duplicity, as well as hubris on the part of the CIA. There were some successes, you know, they had those successes under Dulles with Guatemala and with Iran. Of course, they gloss over their mountain of failures, but there are some, you know, the mind sort of anchors on the successes, and you think, oh, how could we do that again?
And, Richard Bissell. has taken over the clandestine Services Division at this time. Frank Wisner's out of the picture. And so, Dulles and Bissell are kind of these, just, like, they're obsessed with covert action. They love this stuff. To them, it's like life is just kind of a giant spy novel that they're writing themselves as the main characters, and… they've got this cover of anti-communism, you know, we've got to fight communist regimes, we have to protect the American way of life, and that's sort of the whole, Covered that they have that allows them to act in an extra legal way.
So, one of these failures that is significant early on is the Bay of Pigs invasion. Under JFK, the Bay of Pigs invasion is probably, like, the first It's the first significant failure in… under the JFK administration that ultimately leads to Alan Dulles' departure, as well as Richard Bissell's departure as well. So, like… even before JFK had entered office, he was already thinking about how do we topple Cuba? When he gets into office, the CIA, he's in constant conversation with them of, like, just coming up with tons of plans. They're the ones… he wants them to do something, and so Bissell and Dulles are basically just coming up with tons of different plans, pitching them to the president, and he doesn't find any of them satisfying, like, to give the go-ahead, because JFK's really obsessed with not putting American boots on the ground, and he really, really wants it to not be traceable to the US. So, he wants a covert action, silent coup.
With total deniability. And everything that they keep pitching to him is just so risky, and they did not have the infrastructure in place to do. Ultimately, They land on this strategy. They have… There's a lot of Cuban expats in the Miami area at this time. They get together, they train a force of… Cubans. They train them in the Miami swamps, they train them in the hills of Guatemala, all these places.
What they're going to do is they are going to land at the Bay of Pigs under the cover of American planes, flown by a mixture of Cuban nationals and some members of the Alabama National Guard that they had contracted with. not gonna be bearing American markings, and in fact. Interestingly, they… what they did on the day of the invasion They staged one of the Cuban national planes, had an emergency landing in Miami.
Which caused the press to show up on the tarmac to meet this person, and this guy basically comes out, and he pretends that he was a member of the Cuban Air Force, and that he and a group of his friends have defected, and that he's had to, emergency land in Miami. And so… very quickly, this story becomes implausible, like, within 48 hours, the media sees through it, but by then, it's too late. And so they're trying… they've created this cover where, basically Cubans are attacking their own country to free their country from Fidel.
Unfortunately, it goes horribly. W… Partially because they had, The maps they were operating from were made in 1895, and had not been updated since. So, first off, your maps are not up to date. They did not understand the terrain that they were getting themselves into. But, at the last second, Bissell actually cut some of the airport… air support down from 16 planes to 8 planes, because JFK was so concerned about, Basically getting discovered and it being traced to us.
those… so those 8 planes are going up against Castro's 36 planes. They land under cover of darkness. One of the planes immediately blows up one of the ships, full of ammunitions and, like, millions of tons of, of oil. It explodes in, like, a mushroom cloud, basically. And then, about, is like, the Cubans proceed to… fight in the water and on the beach for 48 hours, for 2 days, with the Cuban military, all the while they're calling for help, and we send none.
In the end, about 119 of them are dead, and 1,200 of them are captured after 48 hours of fighting, where we completely abandon them. So… The plan was both poorly conceived from the start. But you had Dulles and Bissell the entire time, like, no, we're gonna do this, we've got this, we can do this, Mr. President, like, just blowing smoke up his ass the entire way. And JFK was even, like, unsure and anxious about the operation.
But we left… 1,200 Cubans. who were risking their lives. We left them to die on that beach. And it's because we were stupid. And it's also because we lacked the nerve to really follow through and do what we needed to do. This disaster completely wrecked JFK's confidence in the CIA and its ability to act. So, there was a big cleaning house, eventually Dulles and Bissell, within about 6 months, they leave.
And basically, JFK puts his brother, Bobby, not in charge of the CIA, but they find a guy named John McCone, who they put in charge, and then Bobby basically, So then they create a second secret group called the Special Group. that Bobby helps run, and they… that the special group influences the CIA. The special group they actually brought on Ed Lonsdale.
who's a longtime CIA veteran and clandestine operative. who famously, Dave and I talked about this in the conversation, he famously created a vampire in the Philippines to combat local insurgent forces, created the… he created the belief that there was actually a vampire from Filipino lore, killing communists. And, which seriously cowed the local insurgents into, into defeat.
This Ed Leynstell is the guy who's putting… is in charge of, like, the director of operations, basically, for this special group. And their single-minded goal is, how do we kill Castro? And that's basically what that group focuses on for the rest of Kennedy's administration. John McCone, who they put in charge of the CIA at this time, he is an anti-communist, he's also a Roman Catholic, he's a California Republican who made a ton of money building ships during the, during World War II.
he served as the Undersecretary of the Air Force during the Korean War, and the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Committee under Eisenhower. So this guy is rich, he's connected, he's been everywhere, but he's somewhat of an outsider because he's, like, a California Republican. And RFK, JFK are Democrats, and, you know. anybody who's from the West at this point is somewhat of an outsider.
So it's really interesting, they bring this guy in, and he and Bobby Kennedy become fast friends, and… basically Bobby, and this guy, and then the special group. are exerting immense pressure on the CIA, to the point where Richard Helms, who's the director of the clandestine Services at this time. he has to move a bunch of guys from Southeast Asia to try to focus on Cuba.
So… As you're aware, we never managed to successfully kill Fidel Castro. We, there's so many different, cockamamie plans that we came up with, and none of them succeeded. We were never able to successfully have, like, a… we were able to get some folks inside. Inevitably, they ended up either getting taken out, or they were used, or we just… they were not useful enough.
And we just weren't able to do it. This all comes to an end when JFK gets assassinated in Dallas. And I'm not gonna go into the JFK assassination. I will just note specifically that studies have shown that as little as 11% of the American public buys the story of a lone shooter. So, even… Even LBJ, his vice president.
doubted the story, even in the end of his life. He's like, I can accept that perhaps Oswald pulled the trigger, but he never… but he didn't act alone. And this is from the president who succeeded him, you know? So there was a whole… there was a committee that was designed to look into it, the Warren Committee. Nobody bought the results. Even Alan Dulles, the former DCI, was on the committee.
you can go… there's a whole entire industry of very intelligent, schizos who are able to bring the lines together much better than I can. I will just personally say that I don't buy the official story either. But we're not going to go into the JFK assassination here. JFK is assassinated, bringing an abrupt end to his… to what was, like, a bright and shining star in the American political landscape, and his vice president, Linda B. Johnson, LBJ, is sworn in two hours later on Air Force One. Interestingly enough, LBJ's the only president to ever been sworn in by a woman, which is kind of interesting.
I believe she was the… she was, like, a head judge in Texas somewhere. So, LBJ is a really interesting figure. he's known for many significant reforms in American society, including, like, he's the guy who passed Medicare and Medicaid. He's the guy who signed the Civil Rights Act. He's kind of considered the high watermark of progressive democratic power in the 20th century. I believe that his re-election In, his… in 64, Is the most… is the largest margin that anyone's ever won in a presidential election.
So he was extremely popular and had a strong public mandate. John McCone, the, the DCI, who was appointed by the JFK brothers, or by the Kennedy brothers, left into… a few months into LBJ's second term in 1965, and LBJ brings, William Rayborn on? And Rayborn barely lasts a year. He's, totally unqualified for the job. Nobody respects him.
And he's quickly replaced by Richard Helms, who's a CIA veteran who headed up the clandestine Service for a while, and had been Rayborn's deputy director. Helms is interesting. Richard Helms is the son of the daughter of the first president of the Bank of International Settlements. Which is… The oldest international bank in the world, founded in Switzerland. It was controlled by the Nazis during World War II.
And, richard went, he studied at a boarding school in Switzerland, a very, very exclusive boarding school. He then went to Williams College, which is also, like, the most… It is one of the most elite schools you've never heard of. And… Then he goes into the CIA. So this guy's fluent in multiple languages, he's really smart, he's really professional, he's connected. And, this is the kind of guy who ends up… he moves up the ranks, and now he's the Director of Central Intelligence.
So, a lot of what happens under LBJ happens under Helms, although a little bit of the early stuff is under McCone. And… a lot of A lot of things happened under LBJ, including the Indonesia incident that we'll talk about, but I wanted to focus initially just on Vietnam, talk a little bit about that. So… what we call the Vietnam War is actually just a very brief period of time when we… when America actually had boots on the ground, but the conflict known as the Vietnam War had went on for roughly about 20 years.
It started in the 1950s, when Vietnam was attempting to decolonize, to basically attain its sovereignty from its French colonial warlords. So the… What happens is that there is an agreement reached. for Vietnam to engage in some, some self-determination to begin to separate from the French, but there's this split between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. And part of where this split comes from North Vietnam is more influenced by communism.
And South Vietnam is a place where there's a larger predominance of Catholics. There's… it's also a place where persecuted Buddhists have fled to. And there… it also tends to be a little bit more rural. And so there's this… split that develops that basically the West kind of gets a wedge into, between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and so… they're trying to form one country, but North Vietnam won't recognize South Vietnam, and South Vietnam doesn't want to be a part of North Vietnam.
And so, you end up with a situation now where you basically have a communist regime with a bunch of sort of ancillary guerrilla armies that it's funding that that are engaged in war on multiple fronts. So this is… we talked about the war in Laos last week. The war in Laos is actually a one front of the Vietnam conflict.
the CIA is funding Hmong people, the mountain people in Laos, to fight the Viet Cong and other ancillary groups, basically, from North Vietnam to keep Laos from falling to communism, but also just to put pressure on North Vietnam to keep them from being able to overthrow South Vietnam and basically just thwart their efforts.
You've also got… Conflict. Between North and South Vietnam, where the Viet Cong are going along what's called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is this, basically a swath cut through the jungle, which basically became, like, a supply line for the Viet Cong to be able to sort of move up and down Vietnam. Interestingly, ARPA was operative in, the, ARPA was working with the CIA at this time in Vietnam, doing all kinds of weird things, like developing, this is where they developed napalm.
And they're basically just, like, completely blasting the jungle with chemicals. They also developed a chemical for making mud more slippery. This was, like, one of their attempts at counterinsurgence, like, well, if we make the mud even more slippery, it'll be really hard for them to navigate on the trail. All kinds of just, like, weird stuff that they're trying out, basically, because they're like, well, we're fighting a counterinsurgency, we're just gonna… We're just gonna test out strategies.
So in the south at this time, we are propping up… somewhat. It's complicated. We're propping up a guy named Diem. He's actually a Vietnamese Catholic, so very… actually staunchly Roman Catholic. He's getting a ton of aid and funding from us. At the same time, he's generally regarded as somewhat… he's generally regarded as pretty authoritarian, although it actually seems like his brother was the worst of the two. His brother basically had, like, a secret police, and was totally corrupt, just buying people off, So, he and his brother together are generally seen as authoritarian, as oppressive. At the same time, they were staunchly anti-communist. They also did do a lot of things for getting the infrastructure and government set up for the country. They did engage in land reforms and, did improve people's quality of life. So… However, under LBJ, it was decided by the CIA that we were going to take out Diem.
And I said the CIA decided, because it really wasn't LBJ's decision or directive to make that happen, but, we did, we worked with the government, we worked with elements within the military and the South Vietnamese Society. who ended up kidnapping and killing Diem and his brother in a church, actually. So, it's… it's… there's a picture… actually, there's a picture online of, Diem's body when he was shot, which is kind of interesting to see.
But we took out Diem, and famously, Ho Chi Minh said, like, the Westerners are idiots, like, they should have left him in place, because now the government in South Vietnam is totally weak, without a leader, and they're gonna fall. And he ended up being right. There was… after that, there was a series of coups, and nobody could establish genuine power over South Vietnam.
And ultimately, like, without being able to be a well-run and sovereign society, they weren't able to resist North Vietnam. So we were involved in Vietnam well before we ever put troops on the ground. The way that troops started getting onto the ground in Vietnam is through the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was abs… which was basically manufactured by the intelligence community in the US.
So the Gulf of Tonkin incident. We were running, we had boats. in the Gulf of Tonkin, and we were basically running signal intelligence on the North Vietnamese. So we were constantly picking up their signals, we were basically just projecting power, but there was no, We were basically, sort of, like. Roughly out where international waters start, we would incur a little bit, but the point is that we were projecting power, but not with any official mandate to engage.
What happens one night, is that a number of North Vietnamese speedboats go out into the water, And… We actually end up firing on them. they never fired a shot at us. However, there was some intercepted communications that were mistranslated that we thought they were there to engage us. And what happens is, we open fire on these boats.
We ended up… we ended up killing some of them. And the next day. The way the story gets told to the president is that we were shot at. it… it comes out very quickly that this wasn't the case. There was all kinds of, conflicting information, because in the fog of war, you know, these things happen. The next night. something similar happens again, but this time, the boats start… the American boats start firing way more. They start spinning, they start, like, kind of turning themselves, and what happens is they start kicking up waves, which starts messing with their sonar.
And we were basically firing at nothing. Like, we were firing at ourselves at this point. And so these two, like, incidents in succession create a situation where the CIA is like, we're gonna use this as an opportunity. we're gonna tell LBJ that we were fired at. And LBJ has been wanting to go into Vietnam. Or at least he's been conflicted about it, but he's been leaning towards wanting to actually get involved. And so he just believes this when he's told it. He takes this incident to Congress and gets, a unanimous vote.
for war powers that he uses to expand into bombing raids. And so, this is the first time that we actually begin to actively engage in Vietnam. From a military perspective, with bombing raids that last about 3 years. It's then about a year later that we send Marines to Vietnam. to… ostensibly to defend one of our air bases there in South Vietnam. So at this point, there's still no mandate to actually engage in conflict.
The bombing raids are all that's actually taking place. But… from this point, LBJ, with the assistance of the CIA and the security community, intelligence community, begins to… Just continue to escalate things until we're in a full-out war. Vietnam doesn't come till an end until the fall of Saigon in 1975. We kind of bungle that situation. We leave a lot of our allies behind, unfortunately. And, although, from what I understand, it is the largest helicopter evacuation operation in human history. So there's, you know, there's some success there, but ultimately.
We didn't have boots on the ground until 65, and we left at the fall of Saigon in 1975, when North Vietnam rolled into the capital of South Vietnam, and South Vietnam fell to communism. So, we only had boots on the ground for half of that. But like I pointed out, the CIA had been involved from the very beginning. They were involved with, the French are figuring out how to decolonize in a way that is acceptable to them.
There's a mixture of communist, anti-communist, socialist, nationalist sort of, figures. And we're just in the midst of it, trying to leverage that, trying to oppose communism, trying to prop people up. We decide we don't like Diem anymore, so we get rid of him. And ultimately, Vietnam is just a total embarrassing failure for the U.S. that costs, hundreds of thousands of American lives. That… kills, kills a lot of Vietnamese, costs us a ton of money.
It was an embarrassment, it wasn't until, shoot, 75, I don't… was Nixon even in office in 75? I can't remember. So, the, continuing to focus on Southeast Asia, we… there's the story of Indonesia as well. The story of Indonesia is really well told in the Jakarta Method by Vince Bevins, that Dave and I are both… we're both a fan of that book. I recommend picking it up to get a lot of this history as well.
the story in Indonesia is… Everything, everything rhymes. Around here. So there's Dutch decolonization happening. Indonesia was the Dutch West Indies. And so the Dutch are leaving at this time, and the Indonesians, which… it's an island chain with thousands of different languages and many different people groups, so it's much more difficult to unite than, say, Vietnam, but one thing that they do have in common is that there's, like, Islam is a uniting force across Indonesia. Indonesia's actually the most populous Islamic nation in the world. So… it's really interesting that Sukarno and one of his, his collaborators, they basically are the ones who create the Indonesian national state, and… Sukarno is this character. He is just… he's totally independent, does what he wants, thinks for himself.
is very patriotic. He's also a womanizer, which is sort of understood about him. But he's kind of this, You could almost say he kind of has, like, Trump vibes a little bit, like, sort of this, like. this chaotic figure who's sort of out for themselves, but sort of, like, puts on a show of, like, this patriotism that is probably real, you know? To an extent.
But what's interesting about Sukarno is He's governing a democracy where the Communist Party. Is basically a quarter of the electorate. So, Indonesia at this time is the largest… is the largest communist party outside of the USSR in China, but it's not a governing party. So what Sukarno does is he basically has some sympathies for them, because they want to do a lot of the sort of reforms that he wants in the wake of decolonialization, pushing out foreign governments.
And their business interests, For instance, they go to… he's trying to push the Dutch out of Borneo. We actually are giving money to the rebels who are fighting back against Sukarno on Borneo, and There was a scandal caused when an American pilot, who was a part of the bombing raids there, actually ended up getting, he was injured and had to emergency land in Indonesia, and it turned out that there was an American pilot.
Fighting there, so that was a big scandal. The CIA was involved with hiring and, you know, positioning that individual and all these sort of things. So… From the very beginning, the CIA has… is working with the ambassador in Indonesia the Far East Division is deeply embedded in trying to understand what's going on inside the country.
They want to figure out how to, overthrow the Communist Party. And they're interested specifically in getting rid of Sukarno, because he's sympathetic. One thing that Sukarno does, actually, is he actually ends democracy. in Indonesia. by basically… he starts what he calls guided democracy. So he gets rid of democracy in order to save the country, because the communists were doing so well democratically, that he was like, I need to save this country and show that we're not communists. So he actually becomes more authoritarian.
And starts to run things without democratic input. And then what he does is he allows the Communist Party to just engage in soft power. So he doesn't persecute them, they have a voice at the table, but there's not actually democratic process happening at this time. Sukarno's significant not just because of what he did for Indonesia, but because he created a movement called the Non-Aligned Movement, or the Bandung Movement. And the Non-Aligned Movement is pretty significant at this time, because it represented an attempt to create an international coalition that was neither America aligned nor USSR-aligned.
You had figures like Nasser, who were involved, who's the president of Egypt. A lot of these decolonial powers didn't want to take the false choice between America or the USSR. They wanted to say, we'll work with anybody who's willing to work with us, we don't want to be ideological about it, all we care about is being able to be self-determining as a people.
And so this non-aligned movement was something that Sukarno was at the head of. Indonesia was taking aid from both America and the USSR at this time. There was actually a… Over time. the Communist Party in Indonesia drifted more towards China, and there was a… there was a, break with the USSR. Eventually, the Soviet Union was not… they didn't like Sukarno so much.
both America and the USSR both produced fake sex tapes to try to get rid of Socano. So the USSR did this. America… the CIA hired, a Hollywood studio to create a fake sex tape of Sukarno having sex with a Russian woman. It was basically completely laughed off, and it never ended up damaging his reputation, but this is the kind of… try anything, totally, like, hit-below-the-belt strategy that the CIA was willing to try.
Sukarno is in close communication with the PKI, the Communist Party in Indonesia. He's not a communist himself, and openly is very open about that. But he's a nationalist, which means that he pursues sort of an Indonesian-first strategy, if you will, opposing the attempt of Western corporations to try to monopolize mineral rights and that kind of thing.
The CIA, at the same time, is in close communication with various dissenters in the military, so Sukarno basically has to appease two very different groups, so… He needs to figure out, how do you manage the military? And how do you manage the communists? And… the military, over time, grew to resent Sukarno's sympathy to the communists.
even though he, like I said, was never openly communist, the CIA was constantly in communication with dissenters within the military, looking for an opportunity to overthrow Sukarno. September 30th, 1965, is what's called the September 30th Movement? And it's still a little unclear what exactly happened. But… We do know that the CIA was heavily involved and in communication with the individuals who undertook the operation, and we do know that after the operation took place, the CIA immediately started sending aid to the new, the new leaders, and, actively abetted the massacre that followed. So.
On September 30th, 1965, army leaders carried out a secret military operation in the middle of the night, where they kidnapped Sukarno and other key leaders in his government, and then they took over all of the radio stations, shut down the ones that they didn't control. occupied a bunch of important government buildings, and basically said, we had to take over the government because there was a right-wing coup that was underway last night. And we saved the government from being overtaken by these right-wing reactionaries.
And so… under the cover of preventing a coup, they carried out a coup. Which is just… brilliant. Just… cinema, you know what I'm saying? So… The guy who leads this is General Suharto. I know it's very confusing, Sukarno and Suharto. Suharto goes on to be the dictator of Indonesia for, I don't know, next 25, 30 years, basically. So, there's this pattern of, like.
we… we overthrow the democratically elected leader in a country and replace them with a dictator that basically sets the country back 30 years. We've got, Indonesia putting Suharto in charge. We've got Chile, where we overthrow Allende, and Augusto Pinochet is in charge for who knows how long. I haven't looked up the dates. That's over 20 years. And then you've got the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we end up, we end up assassinating Lumumba, Patrice Lumumba, and, put Joseph Mobutu in charge, who ends up being in charge for another 30 years as well. So, like, all of these incidents we can see the CIA has people in the country trying to figure out, how do we get rid of these guys? We're collaborating with the State Department ambassadors, or sometimes we're lying to them that we're not doing anything, you know? That's what they do. You collaborate with the good ones, you lie to the ones who are naive.
We're in active communication with the… with dissident elements within the military, trying to cultivate connections within the society of people who don't like socialist, communist, reforms in the society. And then we end up engineering a coup that's sort of like, hmm, what happened, you know? Like, we can see the CIA was involved, but they never pulled the trigger exactly. Well, in Lumumba case, it's even less clear.
But… What happens in all these countries is that you end up with a dictator who's anti-communist, but they're not pro-democracy. But what they do is they open up the nation to, basically be overrun by foreign corporations taking over mineral rights, and setting up big factories, and just extracting from the local peoples.
no worker… you know, stripping away worker protections and these kind of things, so… the empire where, say, the Dutch ran Indonesia and had the rights to everything. During this decolonization process, there's this attempt for the nation to become self-determining. in the name of fighting communism, the CIA overturns these governments.
promoting someone, almost always somebody in the military, to the level of a dictator, who then, in order to enrich himself and his family, and to secure his own, long-term, governmental stability brings in international corporations, and then the resources that were once owned by this… by an empire now get divided up amongst the private corporations. So… You have these countries, just as they're attempting to become self-determining, they get divided up again, but in a much more opaque way, because now you have private corporations.
And those corporations are owned by various people, or they're owned by other corporations, and they owe… and their… their debt is owned by international banks. And so all of this is a total mess. And it's supported by the CIA and the whole intelligence community under the guise of, we're fighting communism. So this all happens under LBJ. LBJ doesn't run for and, and Chile doesn't happen under LBJ, happens under Nixon, but… LBJ doesn't run for re-election.
Nixon run… Nixon is the one who is elected next. Nixon hates the CIA. He believes that they are the ones who cost him the election in 1960 against JFK. He's probably wrong about that. We don't know for sure, but he's probably wrong. But… Nixon hates the CIA. he is somewhat of an outsider as well, he's a Californian. he has seen the havoc that they've wreaked, and of course, he's got a personal vendetta against them. So, from the very beginning, there's conflict between… yes, he was a Quaker, thank you, Jacob, that's… that's really interesting. Like, growing up in Southern California, he grew up in a Quaker community, which very much makes him sort of, in terms of his headspace and his, like, culturally very outsider to the culture, you know, he's not a part of this… He's not a part of a… established church tradition that views itself as being in power?
Yeah, there's a lot more to probe there, but that's interesting that, thank you for mentioning that. Famously, nixon is the only president who've ever resigned. the reason Nixon resigns And I highly recommend, I've mentioned Aaron Good's American Exception, and we're looking at it, but if you look specifically at chapters, 9 and 10?
Good goes… he spends about 30 pages on, like, a deep dive on the his… on, like, the history of what happens with Watergate. But Watergate is basically a deep state event, where the CIA and Nixon were in conflict, and Nixon lost because he got, because he was countering the… he was engaged in conflict with the Deep State, and they were able to cover their ass while he wasn't able to cover his ass, basically.
So… the story basically goes Nixon has been in conflict with the CIA for most of his presidency. there's this guy named Daniel Ellsberg, who works at the RAND Corporation. The RAND Corporation is… Some… quasi-private, public… policy, security, sort of think tank. it's hard to describe them, you can go look it up, go look up the RAND Corporation. But they're… they're basically extremely influential.
for producing policy, but also as a place where people who end up in government kind of get their start as interns, or on research projects. They offer a master's and a PhD program, actually, as well. So… It's also a place people can cycle into, out of government as well. So… Daniel Ellsberg is working at the RAND Corporation.
on a project. which eventually ends up getting called the Pentagon Papers, which is a thorough investigation and debrief on what happened in Vietnam. And… It's extremely embarrassing, it's extremely detailed, and Ellsberg and one of his colleagues basically says. The public needs to know about this. So they frantically copy… The whole report, and they end up leaking it to the press.
What? Obviously, this causes a lot of legal trouble for him, but one thing that ends up happening Is that the, there's a group called the White House Plumbers within the CIA, who are a group that is basically a part of the counterintelligence agency within the CIA, which is basically, we investigate ourselves in order to see if there's any moles, spies, or leaks within our own ranks.
And the plumbers… end up breaking into the doctor of Daniel Ellsberg to access his medical files, with the goal of trying to identify whether they can pin some sort of mental illness on him, basically. So the goal is to basically discredit Ellsberg as mentally ill. they… it ends up coming out that they did this. They did a poor job with covering their own tracks.
And… from here. Nixon ends up trying to, shoot, the details are escaping me right now about how Nixon is, like, in… Give me just a moment. I'm trying to recall. I've got so many details swirling in my brain. Hmm. Shoot. Sorry, guys, give me a sec. Been looking at too many details today.