A State of Secrecy

In Washington these days, the great unanswered question about the Iran-contra scandal is the nostalgic Watergate favorite, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" Congressional committees and a special grand jury will spend most of 1987 seeking the answer. But the real mystery about the whole affair is why anyone is surprised by it.

White House aide Oliver North's involvement in illegal funding of the contras was exposed almost two years ago. Israel's arms sales to Iran have been an open secret for even longer. Given the unique nature of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which since 1983 has been closer than ever, it took no Sherlock Holmes to suspect that those sales had the approval, and perhaps the complicity, of our own government even before the hostage bartering began.

Both of these policies involved law-breaking of the sort for which the impeachment provisions of the Constitution were written. Both involved the waging of war in direct violation of the will of the people as expressed in acts of Congress, which should fit any definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors." But instead the Iran-contra controversy has come to focus less on the administration's secret wars than on the relatively narrow issue of funds transferred from one illegal military operation to another.

That should come as no surprise either when we recall that Richard Nixon didn't face impeachment for the secret murders in Cambodia and Chile, but for the considerably lesser charge of obstructing justice. The fact is that secret military and paramilitary operations carried on by a secret government with no accountability to democratic institutions have been business as usual in post-war America. Acceptance of such operations is part of the 40-year-old bipartisan Cold War consensus, and every president since Harry Truman has engaged in them.

Shortly before his death, former President Lyndon B. Johnson gave an interview that focused on his White House years. In that interview Johnson, a man not easily shocked, recalled his dismay when, upon becoming president, he learned of the secret U.S. government's war against Cuba. He learned that the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion was only the tip of the iceberg. The United States had also been running an ongoing anti-Castro terror campaign, which included several attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader and an ongoing CIA partnership with the Mafia. With his characteristic bluntness, Johnson exclaimed, "We were operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean."

And it wasn't just in the Caribbean. During the Kennedy years alone, the United States also waged an unofficial war in the Congo (now Zaire), an operation that culminated in the CIA assassination of Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. We dispatched Green Berets (the freedom-fighting heroes of that simpler time) across the globe on secret counterinsurgency missions. And Kennedy expanded Eisenhower's secret Indochina war into a full-scale immersion in Vietnam's internal affairs, including engineering the 1963 overthrow and assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem when he proved inconvenient.

To be fair, Johnson made his own independent contributions to this litany of high crimes, most notably with the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident the same year that provided the pretext for total war in Vietnam. Earlier, in the Eisenhower years, the United States secretly overthrew democratically elected governments in Guatemala and, irony of ironies, Iran. And of course President Truman got the ball rolling with a post-war campaign of covert dirty tricks against the Communist parties of Western Europe and his military intervention in the Greek civil war. The latter was the occasion for codifying our secret foreign policy in the Truman Doctrine, which sanctioned global interventionism to prevent the rise of unfriendly governments by any means necessary.

NOW WE HAVE THE Reagan Doctrine, which additionally asserts America's duty to overthrow any sitting government it happens to find distasteful. As Vicki Kemper reports in this month's lead "Times" piece, the Reagan-contra campaign has apparently taken on all the earmarks of another "Murder, Inc.," with some of the same characters from the anti-Castro days still active and with the addition of some "Miami Vice"-type drug smuggling. And, according to a recent report in the Miami Herald, aside from the recently publicized dirty business regarding Nicaragua and Iran, the Reagan administration has executed or attempted covert actions in Libya, Cambodia, Vietnam, Chad, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mexico, Suriname, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The Herald also added to its list of Reagan covert action targets "The United States," noting FBI surveillance of U.S. dissenters.

In every case, from Truman to Reagan, these actions have been carried out with total disregard for democratic process or principles, not to mention human life. The Iran-contra mess is only the latest reminder that the United States has developed a permanent and secret national | security state, the conduct of which is largely unaffected by domestic election results or public opinion.

In fact Watergate taught us that the national security state apparatus is sometimes used to manipulate domestic politics. And the current scandal has already produced reports that some of the $10-to-$30 million rake-off from the Iran arms deal found its way into right-wing Republican Senate campaigns. At the very least, the timing of arms shipments to Iran suggests an attempt to engineer an "October surprise" hostage release that might have saved the Republican Senate last November.

Since the time of Jefferson, there has been an unresolved contradiction between the United States' profession of democratic ideals at home and the undemocratic conduct that comes with empire abroad. We've known that eventually we have to choose between democracy and empire. Each time the question has arisen in our history so far, we have chosen in favor of empire.

But at each juncture, from the Spanish-American War to Vietnam, widespread public protest has indicated that the American people do not rest easily with the contradiction. Through the fortuitous intervention of an Iranian news leak, the question of empire is again before the American people, this time before we managed to enter another Vietnam.

Once again the lies, murders, and manipulations that come with empire are being briefly exposed. Once again we are being offered the opportunity to turn in a different direction, to put aside the cloak and dagger for the greater power of moral example and the higher calling of building a just society.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.