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9. Arming Tyrants II: Police Training and Neocolonialism in the Mediterranean and Middle East
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Chapter 9 Arming Tyrants II Police Training and Neocolonialism in the Mediterranean and Middle East We were so obsessed with the communists that we were willing to get into bed with anyone who claimed to be anti-communist and this included Nazi collaborators, extreme right-wingers, crooks, inept people, etc. - JAMES KELLIS, U.S. investigator, quoted in Kati Marton, TIle Polk COrlSpiracy, 1990 In the mid-1950s a reporter asked a member of the Iranian Gendarmerie why he was shooting at fellow Iranians. "They are your brothers;' said the reporter. The officer replied, "Our shoes are American, our clothes are given by Americans, and our salaries are paid by them. They instructed us to fire."l The response sums up the devil's bargain local officials worldwide made in allying with the United States. In return for modern equipment and weapons capable of securing their power, they in effect gave up their sovereignty and helped to sow internecine conflict. As the reconstruction of western Europe proceeded after World War II and the American war machine grew ever more dependent on oil, a lever of global domination, State Department planners characterized the Middle East as a "stupendous source of strategic power" and "one of the greatest material prizes in history:' Their greatest fear besides the Soviet Union was that the rise ofsocialist and pan-Arabist movements would threaten nationalization.' Alongside CIA operations, police modernization and technical aid projects were crucial in U.S. efforts to thwart these movements and in consolidating pro-Western regimes open to foreign investment. A State Department envoy stated in a 1951 cable that "stronger police controls could solve most ofthe internal communist problems" across the region and thus ensure America's access to oil, which he called "the single most important factor in American relations with the area:" The United States began implementing this strategy at full strength in 1953 after the overthrow of the secular nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran. Through the use of techniques refined in other Cold War hotspots, including the creation of advanced telecommunications and data management systems, police were trained in counterintelligence and mobilized for "internal secu188 rity" purposes. Extensive human rights violations ensued. In the short term, the police programs served Washington's interests in helping to fortify client regimes such as that of the Shah and in securing access to oil. Over the long term, however, they fostered a vigorous political backlash and a "blowback" effect, both of which have proved to be cataclysmic. "Stern Measures to Defeat the Guerrillas": Police Training and the Greek Civil War Like the U.S. occupations ofJapan and Korea, the American intervention in the Greek civil war ofl946-1949 set a precedent for the rest ofthe Cold War. During the late 1940s, the Truman administration tried to keep indigenous communist movements throughout western Europe in check by means of the Marshall Plan as well as covert methods such as the infiltration of labor unions. In Italy, the military and the CIA equipped the paramilitary Carabinieri to suppress communist demonstrations and to spy on Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party, and his associates. In occupied Germany, American advisers reorganized municipal police and established a constabulary responsible for patrolling the border, maintaining order in displaced persons camps, overseeing denazification, and curtailing the black market.4 American advisers also oversaw the penal system, and according to a secret report, Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents in some instances obstructed prison management and "interfered with the responsibility of prison wardens by making demands for the release of prisoners;' notably Nazi scientists and intelligence agents as part of Operation Paperclip, "contrary to the due process oflaw.'" Denazification, as the historian Carolyn Eisenberg notes, was generally carried out differently in different occupied zones, with U.S. policy contributing to the revival of the old economic order in the belief that the managers of capital would be capable of restoring the country's productivity. Rebuilding the police apparatus was crucial in this context in controlling labor unrest and leftist activists, who, freed from Hitler's concentration camps, were seeking to engender a more sweeping societal transformation' The head ofthe U.S. police mission in Germany, Colonel Orlando W. Wilson, had been chief of police in Wichita, Kansas, from 1928 to 1939. A protege ofAugust Vollmer, in the 1950s, he wrote an influential textbook synthesizing many of the progressive ideals in law enforcement. It was used as a blueprint for the international police programs and disseminated in the training...