COVERT WARRIOR
COMES OUT OF THE COLD
- Dennis Small
An old spymaster from the Reagan era
surfaced in Aotearoa/New Zealand towards the end of 2001, as part of the US
"war on terrorism". Richard Allen, a former National Security Adviser
to President Reagan, was on a visit here to drum up support for the policies of
the Bush Administration. Eagerly promoting lots of hot wars against
"terrorism", Allen was representing the ultra Rightwing Heritage
Foundation, the outfit which used to be Reagan's favourite think tank, and also
a key support group for the first President Bush. Heritage now has the ear of
President Bush junior.
Interviewed by Kim Hill (Radio New
Zealand, 4/12/01), the former Cold Warrior was obviously enthused with the
blood and oil approach of the current American national security strategy.
Allen considered that the war on Afghanistan was going "splendidly".
He acknowledged that the ultimate results could be anybody's guess, but he was
clearly pleased that the Bush Administration was killing plenty of its enemies.
In his terms, the people of Afghanistan were being liberated and the United
Nations would sort things out. Iraq, he said, ought to be the next US target on
the list. The West had to uproot terrorism although it would certainly be a
long and bloody struggle. Making war on Afghanistan was only the first phase of
this. He defended the institution of secret military tribunals with the comment
that we should trust the American Administration. After all, he said, we are in a state of war and we need to
defend ourselves effectively.
Dick Allen's Dirty Dealing
So just who exactly is Richard Allen?
To quote the New Zealand Times
(20/7/86): "Allen was a founding member of the Committee on the Present
Danger (CPD), a Rightwing group created to lobby Jimmy Carter as soon as he
became president (1976-80), whose members infiltrated many levels of the Reagan
Administration after the 1980 election". Allen became Reagan's Assistant
to the President for National Security, heading the National Security Council
"till allegations of financial kickbacks drove him from the Administration
in December 1981" (ibid.). In 1986, when the NZ National Party invited him
to speak at its 50th annual conference, Allen was acting as senior counsel to
Reagan. Significantly enough, he was then billed as "a good friend"
of senior National Party members who met him regularly via meetings of the
International Democrat Union, a grouping of conservative political parties.
National Party sources dismissed any concern about Allen's "financial
kickbacks". However, obvious embarrassment over this, along with Allen's
far Right position, and his record of covert action as documented in material
distributed to the media by the anti-nuclear group, Educate for Nuclear Disarmament,
resulted in his non-appearance at the National Party conference at virtually
the last moment.
The actual incident involving Allen and
"financial kickbacks" was over his failure "to report $US1,000
that Japanese journalists had tried to give Nancy Reagan [Reagan's wife] after
a brief interview. Allen had helped arrange the interview through one of his
former Japanese business associates" ("Reagan's Ruling Class:
Portraits of the President's Top 100 Officials" by R Brownstein & N
Easton, Presidential Accountability Group/Ralph Nader, 1982, p725). A Federal
Bureau of Investigation inquiry arranged by a White House mate supposedly found
no evidence that Allen had kept the money "for a corrupt purpose",
with Allen claiming he had forgotten about it (ibid.). But Allen also pocketed
a couple of wristwatches from the same Japanese friends, and was implicated in
several other shady business transactions. Indeed, by the early 1980s he had
collected quite a raft of accusations made against him over the years going back
to the time when he was a White House aide for President Nixon (1968-74) and on
the Republican Administration’s national security staff. One of the accusations
was connected with bribes "in the form of illicit foreign campaign
contributions - possibly in 1968, and more clearly in 1972 . . . [and] in each
case a principal suspect was Richard Allen . . ." ("The Iran Contra Connection: Secret
Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era" by J Marshall et al., South
End Press, 1987, p81).
During the 1960s, Allen was a staff
member of two conservative think tanks, the Central Intelligence Agency-linked
Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies and
Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He was a
founder member of the Georgetown Center. In the 1970s he had his own consulting
firm. In 1972, Allen left the Nixon Administration to join the Overseas
Companies of Portugal " . . . to become a Washington advocate of white
colonial rule in Africa", according to the Wall Street Journal ("Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the
Present Danger and the Politics of Containment" by J Sanders, Pluto Press,
1983, p302). In the early 1980s he was appealing for the US to develop a new
and positive relationship with South Africa, what he called a "politically
courageous act" on America's part (ibid).
Later still, he became involved in a
rather bizarre effort with Robert Vesco * to wrest control of the Azores
islands from Portugal and turn them into a tax-free haven for financial
pirates. The murky Azores affair comprised "a mixture of national security
and greed and Richard Allen was a common denominator to both" (Covert Action Information Bulletin 10,
1980, p42). Allen had extensive personal investments in the Azores and also
acted as a highly paid consultant for other investors, such as Vesco. In the
Portugal/Azores covert action, Allen was associated with future President
George Bush senior, who was also CIA Director from 1976-81. Various other
leading national security figures were participants too, including William
Colby, Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci. Basically, the Azores affair was an
attempt at "a Eurofascist secessionist coup", sponsored by the
Aginter-Presse intelligence service with which the Italian terrorist and CIA
asset, Roberto delle Chiaie, was affiliated ("The Iran Connection",
p76). * Robert Vesco was a shonky
financier and leading Nixon crony who was indicted for making illegal
contributions to Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign (amongst other serious
charges). He went on the run and has remained the “fugitive financier” ever
since, last being heard of in Cuba.
Shortly after, Allen was on both the
executive and board of CPD, which was the main driving force behind the Reagan
Administration's assumption and exercise of power. Again, Allen was a founding
member of this pressure group. The CPD took the US from nuclear deterrence to
the explicit adoption of a nuclear war-fighting strategy, as well as
eliminating any concern for human rights in American foreign policy, other than
for propaganda purposes. Allen excused the flagrant violation of even the
primitive Reaganist human rights code in such countries as Pakistan, South
Korea and El Salvador ("Peddlers of Crisis", p296). At one point, he
attacked Western Europe for what he called "a better Red than dead"
philosophy, and attacked the "advocacy of arms control negotiations as a
substitute for military strength" (ibid, p8 & pp324/5). During the
Polish crisis in early 1982, Allen, who had continued to serve on Reagan's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, called for the end of loans, food and
technology to Poland, as well as to the Soviet Union, to expose the illusions
of detente and cripple the Soviet system (ibid, pp321/22).
In pushing US repression in Latin
America, Allen liaised with Central American death squad leaders like the
psychopathic Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, and supported US-sponsored
terrorism in Guatemala through contact with groups like the so-called Guatemala
Freedom Foundation and the Amigos del Pais.
Allen's backing for Guatemalan terrorism included giving the green light
for more death squad killings and torture, thus eliciting monetary
contributions by Guatemalan businessmen for Reagan's political campaigning in
the US (Covert Action 12, 1981).
Suppressing Freedom And Promoting
Terror
In his recent visit to Aotearoa/NZ,
Allen was acting in his role as the chairperson of the Heritage Foundation's
grand sounding Asian Studies Center Advisory Council. Allen has long been
active in Heritage and was head of the Advisory Council back in the 1980s (New Statesman, 29/5/87, p21). He was
strongly supported by the Foundation at the time of the "financial
kickbacks" scandal. As Heritage's President Ed Feulner aptly affirmed,
Allen was "one of our own" ("Reagan's Ruling Class", p725).
Heritage was the flagship of the New Right in the 1980s and has carried on in
the same vein ever since. It gets its funding from major corporates like Gulf,
Mobil Oil, Chase Manhattan, Readers Digest, Amway, Coors, etc., plus plenty of
other wealthy donors. For almost 30 years now it has been a bastion of
reactionary views with a notorious reputation for "shoddy sensationalism,
telling lies, and deliberate omissions" - to quote Elliot Richardson,
former US Attorney General (World Citizen
12, no.1, Summer 1986). The Foundation attacks the United Nations and all forms
of international cooperation that do not directly reflect American interests as
it sees them. It peddles the free market; privatisation; war on
"welfarism"; protection for big business; "Star Wars";
militarisation; interventionism in the Third World; international war on the
US's opponents - in a word Heritage is the voice of US imperialism at its
crudest.
A Heritage Asian Studies Center backgrounder
paper published in April 1989, looked at the problem of "Dealing with
wayward New Zealand" and the ANZUS* question. The paper's author, Richard
Fisher, castigated NZ for acting "like a Third World country" and
called on Washington to step up the activities of the US Information Service
(USIS) and other methods of persuasion. Then in a report published in 1991,
Heritage proposed that: "The US should offer NZ a free trade agreement as
a step toward mending the rift over the ANZUS alliance" (Dominion, 22/7/91; also see the Press, 22/7/91). This particular
Heritage report, titled "How to Reinvigorate America's Alliance with
Australia and NZ", and again by Fisher, advocated that the first Bush
Administration should "increase its efforts to convince Wellington to
build a public consensus that would allow NZ once again to become an active
member of the alliance" (ibid). Once more, there was a call for a
substantial boost for USIS action. The National Party was enjoined to do more.
Similarly, in September 1991, Heritage appealed to National to "re-educate
their citizens about the value of ANZUS" ( Dominion, 11/9/91). Seeking
"Australian and NZ support for greater free trade in Asia" was a key
element of Heritage's approach. *ANZUS –
the 1951 military treaty between Australia, NZ and the US. The US unilaterally
suspended NZ from it, in 1986, as punishment for NZ’s nuclear free policy. It
still exists between Australia and the US. But as far as New Zealand is
concerned, it is dead. Ed
In 1982, Allen was involved, when still
Reagan's first National Security Adviser, in setting up the Pacific Democratic
Union with which the National Party is closely associated. It was disclosed
that Allen worked with a number of National Party people, among others, in
getting this organisation under way. The Pacific Democratic Union incorporates
National along with other conservative parties. In turn, the Union was partly
funded by the US's so-called Project Democracy or the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED), which has operated a worldwide American covert action
programme to influence political outcomes in line with the objectives of US
foreign policy. During the 1980s, Project Democracy funded overseas trips for
some National Party members (TV1 News,
19/2/87). Obviously, Allen and co. were working hard to establish leverage in
NZ politics.
Trade Wars
Allen's visit in 2001 to NZ reminds us
of the parade of USIS and other agency-funded visits by American foreign policy
personnel (and certain other related people) during the stand-off over the
issue of nuclear ships in the decade of the 1980s. There is a definite
continuity evident with the Heritage linkage of ANZUS and free trade also again
being promoted in 2001 according to reports we have received. We need to view
Allen's visit as yet another indication of a newly charged phase in an ongoing
US programme to inveigh and/or coerce NZ fully back under the umbrella of its
military machine reinforced by strong economic and cultural ties. Given the
present servile Labour leadership, its enthusiasm for a free trade deal, and
the hype of the "war on terrorism", we can expect rapidly growing
pressure to conform to US imperatives in the near future.
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