The CIA in Australia:
Our Burgeoned Alliance with A United and Unstated Empire - the USA
by Alex Young

"We have never interfered in Australian politics. And so, whatever the charges,
the answer is no. We don't interfere in Australian politics period."
William Colby, ex-Director of the CIA, 1981

"The CIA's aim in Australia was to get rid of a government they did not like and that was not co-operative... it's a Chile, but in a much more sophisticated and subtle form."
Victor Marchetti, ex senior CIA officer, 1980.

For most people, the existence of a secret and covert operative such as the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA is something that isn't necessarily denied, but it is a common pattern of thought that the scope of such an agency is something that is only to be found overseas and made reference to in typical Hollywood dramas which adorn our televisions. Many fictional works have their basis in non-fiction. The intellectual divide is made smaller when comparing the fictional CIA and the real CIA, and when realizing that story and subject apart, the methods or modus operandi of such an organization leaves much to be desired when innocent people are deemed expendable and killed for the sake of capital gain and empirical expansion.

A paradigm shift is needed by the average westerner, including Australians, to least admit that the CIA uses and takes part in covert and subversive intelligence operations (or intelli-ops), which in the name of "national security" of the United States of America, is directly responsible in promoting and aiding US foreign policy abroad or outside the United States.

The CIA has been involved in numerous US interventions of over 58 nations since World War II, specifically in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. These are nations, many of which contain natural resources to which the West/USA does not have or is in short supply. One can immediately begin to understand that the term "national security" and nearly all the actions carried out under its banner is simply an excuse for the de-stabilization of many sovereign and non-western democracies and gaining access to resources previously unattainable. The words "freedom" and "democracy" are often used and abused in application. Chile is a case in point. Iraq is another. Recall the US operation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq - "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the slogan "Democracy for the Iraqi people".

On September 11th 1973, the CIA and the US covertly attacked the democratic government of legally elected Salvador Allende and overthrew the people of Chile's rightful government in a well thought out coup. Recently declassified documents attest to US prior knowledge and involvement in the coup. The CIA installed their man General Pinochet who would usher in an oppressive regime, killing thousands of Chileans during his reign as President of Chile, with the US Administration giving its quiet approval. After this illegal installation, Chile itself became an economic experiment of the West, which succeeded in making the nation of Chile a heavily US invested country, whilst at the same time denying the most basic of rights and utilities to its original inhabitants.

Events surrounding Chile, provide the basis for understanding the quote by Victor Marchetti above. Today, modern Chile appears normal on the surface albeit with a bloody history, manipulated and nurtured by the guiding ideology of fascist principles. Anything that opposes this ideology is branded as "Communism" and thus must be stopped. Chile is only but one example. The irony is, in terms of ideology which deters and destroys proper elected governments of a sovereign people and nations, is that fascism and communism, the resulting power is indistinctive between the two. For as a man thinks, so he is. And so are powerful nations. Such ideologies are forcibly guided internally by capital and multi-lateral/transnational interests which foist themselves upon other less powerful nations who also struggle to maintain their traditions in the face of such malevolent forces seeking to usurp their natural resources.

The struggle for global dominance, the USA being the current superpower, back by decades of entrenched $US trading with oil, drugs and arms dealing, is a story of the creation and maintenance of a modern Empire, whilst at the same time manipulating its own Congress and the United Nations to bend to its own desires. Since its rise to near absolute dominance since the end of the Second World War, the USA has enjoyed the privilege of technological advancements in almost every sector. Indeed the strength of any Empire, whether Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, British or American is in its accessibility to resources to sustain that Empire. An inability to sustain such access to resources would mean over time, the inevitable collapse of an Empire from within. Such inevitability creates desperation, akin to a singular living organism struggling for its very existence. Demand for consumer sustenance and maintenance of a particular lifestyle is threatened by diminishing supplies. War, therefore is sadly what appears to be the recourse of history, used for the sustainability and expansion of Empires.

Empirical sustainability is predicated by creating new democracies conducive to the Empire. This can be seen in modern times in the Statement of Principles as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which echoes the fascist, might is right ideology. Note the persons who comprise PNAC and the inherent idealogy which has no regard for another culture -"we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." 

Of course such a statement cannot be denied, although it has been falsely attributed as Reaganite in origin. Such ideology existed long before the Reagan Administration, is clearly summed up as - "Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next." Moral clarity at the exclusion and killing of others external to the Empire? Is such a thing permissible under Divine Law? Human law? Such is the Empire that is America, for America itself was once a land of the free, long since subjugated since the introduction of the Federal Reserve Act 1913 and the addition of the 16th Amendment which for the first time gave "legitimacy" to taxation upon the labor workforce of the American people.

Nations which exist outside an Empire, are always in a state of dynamic flux, as is the Empire itself. The flux is human and can be defined as that natural tendency for sovereign people to oppose human oppression, economic depression and forced occupation. While Chile provides the classic example of such forced installments of illegal regimes, other real and historical events around the world also serve as events which have subjugated many non-Western and Western nations. In regards to implementing US foreign policy abroad, intelligence agencies such as the CIA work to de-establish and re-establish democracies to suit. Of the latter, particularly in re-establishing and maintaining democracies that deviate from the imposed norm, Australia is a perfect case in point.  Remember the hidden hand as spoken about by General Smedley Butler. Australia's history as being a free and lucky country is only true to a point and this certainly ended in the mid-1970's, culminating with the Dismissal and the agreeing to of the Lima Declaration. Governments installed thereafter, whether Labor or Liberal, throughout the 80's and 90's, differ not in their overall policy in the current period. It seems relevant to remind the reader of the saying - "*sighs* they were the good old days!".

The Whitlam/(Labor government came into power in 1972, after a 23 year stint of successive Liberal governments. The Whitlam/Labor government, bore the distinction as the only government who became true to itself in implementing most of its election promises. Aboriginal rights to health, education & welfare, equal pay for women, Vietnam troops were ordered home, divorce laws reformed, the establishment of the world's first family court & more. These kept promises, whilst effective and applicable for the nation of Australia at the time, were in direct contrast to the foreign interests abroad and thus started to seek to "re-stabilize" Australia in accordance to their own policy. Whitlam's actions, especially his withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and his unwillingness to renew the US military installation Pine Gap treaty due December 1975, put him at odds with the US Administration. The new road to the future that Whitlam had started to pave was radically different to his predecessors, Liberal Prime Ministers Sir Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon, all of whom who supported the Vietnam war and the Pine Gap installation, that America became concerned at the new developments in Australia and sought to take matters into their own hands. The illusion of democracy amongst US allies must be maintained, covertly. Australian history points to Liberal governments being very liberal indeed to offshore interests.

This page deals with the involvement of the CIA in Australia and although many Australians may refuse to admit it or look the other way in disbelief, the fact remains that our lives, fate and fortune have long been guided by political and economic interests abroad. The timeline below serves as a display and pointer to the events that have shaped our past, our forging of alliance to the United States, leading to shallow, but consistent political machinations of the current day, regardless of party.

The Australian/USA Timeline. (Work in Progress) - seehere

SOURCES:

Pilger, John. A Secret Country, Melbourne: Global Press, 1989.