By Stephen Kinzer
January 15, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - "Boston Globe" - Outrage is shaking
Washington as members of Congress compete to demonize Russia for its alleged
interference in America’s recent presidential election. “Any foreign
intervention in our elections is entirely unacceptable,” Speaker of
the House Paul Ryan has asserted. Russian actions, according to other
legislators, are “attacks on our very
fundamentals of democracy” that “should alarm every American”
because they “cut to the heart of
our free society.” This burst of righteous indignation would be
easier to swallow if the United States had not itself made a chronic habit of
interfering in foreign elections.
One of our first operations to shape the outcome of a foreign
election came in Cuba. After the United States helped Cuban rebels overthrow
Spanish rule in 1898, we organized a presidential election, recruited a
pro-American candidate, and forbade others to run against him. Two years later,
after the United States annexed Hawaii, we established an electoral system that
denied suffrage to most native Hawaiians, assuring that only pro-American
candidates would be elected to public office.
During the Cold War, influencing foreign elections was a top
priority for the CIA. One of its first major operations was aimed at assuring
that a party we favored won the 1948 election in Italy. This was a multipronged
effort that included projects like encouraging Italian-Americans to write
letters to their relatives warning that American aid to Italy would end if the
wrong party won. Encouraged by its success in Italy, the CIA quickly moved to
other countries.
In 1953, the United States found a former Vietnamese official who
had lived at Catholic seminaries in the United States, and maneuvered him into
the presidency of newly formed South Vietnam. He was supposed to stay on the
job for two years until national elections could be held, but when it became
clear that he would lose, he canceled the election. “I think we should support
him on this,” the US secretary of state said. The CIA then stage-managed a
plebiscite on our man’s rule. Campaigning against him was forbidden. A reported
98.2 percent of voters endorsed his rule. The American ambassador called this
plebiscite a “resounding success.”
In 1955 the CIA gave $1 million to a pro-American party in
Indonesia. Two years later the United States maneuvered a friendly politician
into the presidency of Lebanon by financing his supporters’ campaigns for
Parliament. “Throughout the elections, I traveled regularly to the presidential
palace with a briefcase full of Lebanese pounds,” a CIA officer later wrote.
“The president insisted that he handle each transaction by himself.”
Our intervention in Lebanon’s election provoked protests by those
who believed that Lebanese voters alone should shape their country’s future.
The United States sent troops to Lebanon to suppress that outburst of
nationalism. Much the same happened in the Dominican Republic, which we invaded
in 1965 after voters chose a president we deemed unacceptable. Our intervention
in Chile’s 1964 election was more discreet, carried out by covertly financing
favored candidates and paying newspapers and radio stations to skew reporting
in ways that would favor them.
Condemning interference in foreign elections is eminently
reasonable. The disingenuous howls of anti-Russian rage now echoing through
Washington, however, ignore much history.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and author of the
forthcoming book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth
of American Empire.” Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.
