US PROPAGANDA

EXCERPT FROM VIJAY PRASHAD BOOK'S WASHINGTON BULLETS 

The hot breath of the coup that blew over Guatemala lingered over the Caribbean and then swept towards British Guiana. There, in 1953, the people elected as their chief minister Cheddi Jagan, the leader of the Sawmill and Forest Workers’ Union as well as of the People’s Progressive Party. Jagan was not a member of a Communist party, but he was a Marxist who came from Port Mourant – British Guiana’s ‘Little Moscow’. Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, which was the colonial master of British Guiana, wanted Jagan overthrown. Jagan’s new labour laws and his threat to move on a socialist agenda terrified Churchill. ‘We ought to get American support in doing all that we can to break the communist teeth in British Guiana,’ he wrote to Oliver Lyttelton, his Secretary of State for the Colonies. The US did not seem immediately interested; it was busy with Iran and Guatemala. Churchill sent in his troops to remove Jagan. It was a simple operation, and mass support was not necessary.
A decade later, Jagan was back in power, and this time the United States was interested in his removal. US President John F. Kennedy’s advisor wrote to him in August 1961 about the ‘possibility of finding a substitute for Jagan himself’, in other words, for regime change in Guyana. Jagan was very popular, and a simplemilitary intervention seemed too difficult. This time the CIA decided to use the trade unions against Jagan. The CIA worked closely with the US trade-union movement – the AFL– CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the US) – to create a range of fronts, such as the Free Trade Union Institute and the American Institute for Free Labor Development. These fronts channelled US government money to trade unions across the world; their agents built up the right-wing unionists against the left. Their collaborators across the world were often people and organizations of the seediest interests – including people from the mafia and from fascistic groups. Anything was acceptable to undermine the class struggle, both inside Europe and in the national liberation states.
In 1947, during the strike wave in France, the right wing and the mafia went on a rampage against the workers. One of them – Vincent Voulant, a Communist militant – was killed by the Marseilles mafia, an early indication of
the kind of alliances at work. Three of four workers in Marseilles went on strike during the day of his funeral. Dockworkers joined miners to shut down the city. They threatened a Communist insurrection in the southern region of France. The CIA’s Frank Wisner met with the Free Trade Union Committee’s Jay Lovestone (a former US Communist Party leader), who then began to courier cash to the anti-Communist trade union Force Ouvrière and to Le Milieu (the mafia), but more precisely the Corsican front. The deal was that the mafia would intimidate the union members and murder Communists, while in exchange the French and US authorities would allow them to bring heroin into Europe. This was known as the French Connection. Additionally, the CIA sent a psychological operations unit to undermine the reputation of the Communists. When a ship arrived with 60,000 sacks of flour and when the dockers refused to unload it, the CIA spread the story that the unions and the Communists were against the hungry.

(...)
It was these ‘free labour’ groups funded by the US that began to create mischief amongst the working class in British Guiana. They funded and disaggregated the trade-union movement. This is how the CIA brought the ‘masses’ to turn against the left governments. American Federation of Labor’s Serafino Romualdi was in Guiana in 1951, where he had begun to set the roots for what would come a decade later. In 1962, eight trade-union officials from Guiana came to a training course run by the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). They returned to Guiana charged up against Jagan’s government, which came to power in September 1961. In 1963, these men and their unions organized a general strike that lasted for three months and deeply damaged Jagan’s government. The unions could hold out because they received funds from two AFL–CIO unions. These were the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Retail Clerks International Union. These CIA funds came to the AFL–CIO from private foundations such as the Gotham Foundation (created by the CIA). The CIA had its fingers all over a series of labour fronts, such as the international department of the Public Services International Union (whose main person William Howard McCabe was a CIA agent) and the labour lawyer of the AFL–CIO Gerald O’Keefe (also reportedly a CIA agent). O’Keefe is said to have provided funds to Richard Ishmael, a labour leader who opposed Jagan, and to Forbes Burnham, Jagan’s main political opponent, to hire men to conduct acts of violence and sabotage against the government and its supporters. The intimacy of the CIA and the AFL–CIO was such that after this Operation Flypast, J.C. Stackpoole of the British Foreign Office began to call them the AFL– CIA. Jagan’s government fell, and then – deeply damaged – lost the elections in 1964. Burnham, who won, would rule Guyana with US support till 1980, while his party stayed in office till 1992.

ARTICLES AND DOCUMENTS 

• CIA Covert Operations: The 1964 Overthrow of Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana
• MI5 files reveal details of 1953 coup that overthrew British Guiana's leaders
• Guyana Politics: The suspension of the British Guiana constitution in 1953
• Coup d’etat in British Guiana
• The Suspension of the British Guiana Constitution - 1953 (Declassified British documents)