Hitting below the belt

Jim Dee examines the veracity of a book that claims there is an underworld of 'Economic Hit Men' maintaining and encouraging world debt

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. €18.60

A devious global conspiracy to snare some of the world's poorest nations into perpetual debt slavery, and expand America's economic empire, has covertly spread its tentacles in the shadows for decades. So says John Perkins, an alleged past conspirator who wants to expose the whole dirty business.

His Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an account of how an innocent, from rural Vermont, became a clandestine agent for this devastating plot. Currently at number five on the New York Times' list of best selling business books, it is a sordid tale of corruption, greed, and, eventually, personal redemption.

According to Perkins, Economic Hit Men (EHM) – a term they used themselves – went to countries and used phoney economic forecasting to convince governments to take out huge infra-structure development loans that they couldn't possibly repay. Loan terms stipulated that US-based multi-nationals – such as Bechtel, Halliburton, etc, – were guaranteed the lucrative engineering and construction contracts.

When, as expected, the duped nations defaulted on their loans, Perkins writes, "like the Mafia, we demanded our pound of flesh. This often included one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal".

This is powerful stuff. Especially when he mentions that, standing in the shadows, were a group of hit men. "We EHMs refer to (them) as the jackals .... the jackals were always lurking there in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown, or die in violent 'accidents'."

He says that's what happened when two Latin American presidents didn't play ball. Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos and Panamanian President Omar Torrijos died in helicopter and airplane crashes respectively, three months apart from each other in 1981.

Perkins writes, "We EHMs had failed to bring Roldos and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were right behind us, stepped in."

Perkins' journey to the belly of the beast began in 1971, after a stint in Ecuador working for the Peace Corps. He took a job with the Boston-based Chas. T. Main, a private economic consulting firm. The Vietnam War was then raging, and Perkins wanted to duck the draft, so he took the advice of his then wife's "Uncle Frank", and also sat a test for the shadowy National Security Agency, to win a draft-deferrable job.

He apparently didn't get in, but he was suddenly approached one day by a mysterious woman with "soft green eyes" named Claudine Martin. They begin an eight-month affair, during which she used promises of sex, wealth and power to recruit him as an Economic Hit Man.

"We are a rare breed, in a dirty business. No one can know about your involvement – not even your wife," the mystery lady warned.

Such dime-store detective thriller dialogue permeates the book. At another point, femme fatal Claudine warns him, "Once you're in, you're in for life". Nonetheless, he claims, when he tells her that he has major moral reservations, and that he might join – but only with the aim of eventually writing a tell-all insiders' account – Claudine, um ... does nothing. She recruits him anyway – although she later warns him "talking about us would make life very dangerous for you".

No thoughts in Claudine's head that "this guy might be a liability". No siree. She's out to get her man, and get him she does.

For the next nine years, Perkins jets into unsuspecting countries to carry out his secret mission of expanding US economic hegemony.

Through it all, his inner moral compass wages epic battles against his greed. He mulls over global inequality with "Fidel" in Jakarta's back alleys, and then with a revolutionary in Tehran, just days before the fall of the Shah. He does likewise with an attractive woman journalist in Colombia who has rebel ties. Always, he is torn between living the good life and being moved by their passion for economic justice.

In 1980, while on a sailing trip in the Virgin Islands, he has an epiphany sitting amidst the ruins of an old slave plantation. He writes "for ten years, I had been the heir of those slavers.... I had never had to see the dying bodies, smell the rotting flesh....but what I had done was every bit as sinister...". Two days later, he flew back to Boston and quit being an Economic Hit Man for Chas. T. Main.

Good show! But, lo and behold, he quickly signs back on as a "consultant" for Main at three times his previous salary. Amongst his new duties is providing expert testimony espousing the benefits of the highly controversial Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. So much for conscience.

Perkins takes some of his spoils and creates his own alternative energy outfit – until he eventually decides to sell-out to a big oil company. "I felt like a traitor," he muses. Why break a pattern, right?

Time and time again, he concludes that he "can't do it any more". But, in fact, he does – again and again.

Perkins' final epiphany came while standing next to the smouldering rubble of the World Trade centre in November 2001. He then dramatically realised, "I knew I could no longer postpone taking action to atone for what I had done. I had to come clean about my life".

Thus the book.

And, sadly, it is one with many glaring inconsistencies. Firstly, he claims the NSA sent Claudine to recruit him. But he admits that she 1) never identified herself as NSA 2) never again contacted him after their 8-month fling, and, astonishingly, 3) at no time afterwards – until he quit being an EHM in 1980 – did he report to, let alone discuss, the progress of this master plan for global domination with anyone.

No one. Not a soul. Ever.

Yet, he proceeded along in this James Bondish world on his secret mission for nine full years – despite receiving no instruction or feedback about what he was doing from anyone.

Perkins claims "the system" kept buying him off throughout the 1980s and 90s to prevent him from carrying out his openly professed intention to write a book and expose everything.

But this really beggars belief. If there really is a system of Economic Hit Men, sent out by the NSA – backed up by "the jackals", (who allegedly killed non-cooperating heads of state such as Panama's Torrijos and Ecuador's Roldos) – why did the jackals not cut the brake line on Perkins' car one night? Or poison him? Or perpetrate any other manner of foul play to ensure that the system, which he alleges made trillions for a cabal of wealthy elites, remains untouched?

I asked Perkins about this during an interview with him last week prior to his speech to a packed bookstore in western Massachusetts. He replied, "I'm not attacking individuals, I'm attacking a system. Systems don't kill people".

Huh? Tell that to El Salvador's Archbishop Romero, South Africa's Stephen Biko, US nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood – or the thousands of unknown souls who perished unnoticed in unseen places while trying to change corrupt systems.

Make no mistake, Perkins is not one of the "bad guys"– at least not now. His book oozes social concern for all the right areas – environmental, economic, anti-militarism, etc.

His book carries capsulated summaries of some appalling episodes of American foreign policy over the last 50 years or so, including the CIA's toppling of democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Guatemala's Arbenz in 1954, and Allende in Chile in 1973. He also recaps US support for dictators like Noriega in Panama, and the Shah of Iran.

To protect and extend its economic and political interests, the US clearly supported vile characters in all corners of the globe – often not only ignoring their flagrant abuses of human rights, but also regularly offering logistical and financial support to help dictators carry out these crimes.

Who doubts that empires, past and present, utilize shadowy assassins to advance their aims? Likewise, who doubts that nations as powerful as the US, along with the huge multi-national corporations that influence it, will seek – legally or illegally – to dominate the global economic system with scant regard for the human misery left in their wake?

The world is an unfair place, and that is not by accident. Global capital does indeed wield unprecedented power, and the military might deployed by nations like the US and Britain to protect "vital interests" such as Middle East oil reserves, is proof positive of that.

And there is little doubt the mechanisms of the World Bank, the IMF, GATT, NAFTA, and other free-market-expanding tools often punish the poorest people in underdeveloped nations.

But did John Perkins himself actually participate in such a clandestine system designed to economically enslave country after country, in order to expand the American empire through stealth manipulation?

Only he knows for certain. But his offering of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man fails to give convincing evidence that he was wrestling with any grandiose entity other than his own ego – and, eventually, his own conscience.