The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

by John Perkins

“You see, this man who calls himself the King of Kings is in reality satanic. His father was deposed by your CIA with — I hate to say it — my help, because he was said to be a Nazi collaborator.

“Quite simple. He is your only real ally in the Middle East, and the industrial world rotates on the axle of oil that is the Middle East.

Your politicians must placate the Jewish vote, must get their money to finance campaigns. So you’re stuck with Israel, I’m afraid.

“I don’t doubt you,” I said. “But I must say that, during four visits here, I’ve seen nothing of it. Everyone I talk with seems to love the shah, to appreciate the economic upsurge.”

“You don’t speak Farsi,” Yamin observed. “You hear only what is told to you by those men who benefit the most. The ones who have been educated in the States or in England end up working for the shah. Doc here is an exception — now.”

Of course, for the most part, your press is also controlled by oil. So they hear what they want to hear and write what their advertisers want to read.”

“Because we’d like to convince you to get out and to persuade your company to stay away from our country. We want to warn you that although you may think you’ll make a great deal of money here, it’s an illusion.

Yes, you will not be paid. You’ll do all that work, and when it comes time to collect your fees, the shah will be gone.”

knew during our dinner together, when we spoke of the Flowering Desert project, that you were open to the truth. I knew that our information about you was correct — you are a man between two worlds, a man in the middle.”

“Let’s get right to the point,” he said. “I’m flying to Rome tomorrow. My parents live there. I have a ticket for you on my flight.” He handed me an airline ticket. I did not doubt him for a moment. I had a job to do, but by now I figured part of that meant staying out of trouble — and staying alive.

“Mark my words,” he said solemnly, “the shah’s fall will be only the beginning. It’s a preview of where the Muslim world is headed. Our rage has smoldered beneath the sands too long. Soon it will erupt.”

The rage that Farhad’s father had described exploded in a violent Islamic uprising. The shah fled his country for Egypt in January 1979, and then, diagnosed with cancer, headed for a New York hospital.

Followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini demanded his return. In November 1979, a militant Islamic mob seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two American hostages for the next 444 days.

The Reagan–Bush administration marched into Washington with promises to free the hostages, to bring down the mullahs, to return democracy to Iran, and to set straight the Panama Canal situation.

Colombia’s situation was more typical, and MAIN was the designer and lead engineering firm on a huge hydroelectric project there.

Colombia did not mistrust the United States. The image of Colombia as a reliable ally has continued, despite the blemish of its drug cartels.

Magnificent forts, haciendas, and cities were constructed over the bones of Indian and African slaves.

More recently, a controversial presidential election in 1945 resulted in a deep division between political parties and led to “La Violencia” (1948–1957), during which more than two hundred thousand people died.

the fact that the country is both a source of many products purchased in the United States — coffee, bananas, textiles, emeralds, flowers, oil, and cocaine — and a market for

our goods and services.

One of the most important services we sold to Colombia during the late twentieth century was engineeri...

It was relatively easy to demonstrate that the country could assume vast amounts of debt and then repay these debts from the benefits realized from the projects themselves and from the country’s natural resources. Thus, huge investments in electrical power grids, highways, and telecommunications would help Colombia open up its vast gas and oil resources and its largely undeveloped Amazonian territ...

My job,

as it had been in so many places, was to present the case for exceedingly large loans.

As I have said before, life is composed of a series of coincidences over which we have no control. For me, those included being raised as the son of a teacher at an all-male prep school in rural New Hampshire, meeting Ann and her Uncle Frank, the Vietnam War, and meeting Einar Greve. However, once we are presented with such coincidences, we face choices. How we respond, the actions we take in the face of coincidences, makes all the difference. For example, excelling at that school, marrying Ann, entering the Peace Corps, and choosing to become an economic hit man — all these decisions had brought me to my current place in life.

I often found myself questioning what I was doing, sometimes feeling guilty about it, yet I always discovered a way to rationalize staying in the system.

She convinced me to go deep inside myself and see that I would never be happy as long as I continued in that role.

Even people in the cities, who aren’t directly affected, sympathize with the guerrillas who’ve been attacking your construction camp. Your government calls these people Communists, terrorists, and narcotics traffickers, but the truth is they’re just people with families who live on lands your company is destroying.”

We, who work every day just to survive, swear on the blood of our ancestors that we will never allow dams across our rivers. We are simple Indians and mestizos, but we would rather die than stand by as our land is flooded. We warn our Colombian brothers: stop working for the construction companies.’”

An odd feeling crept over me, a sort of jealousy for Yamin and Doc and the Colombian rebels. These were men with convictions. They had chosen real worlds, not a noman’s-territory somewhere between.

hate it,” I continued. I thought about the men whose images had come to me so often over the years, Tom Paine and other Revolutionary War heroes, pirates and frontiersmen. They stood at the edges, not in the middle. They took stands and lived with the consequences. “Every day I come to hate my job a little more.”

She had forced me to understand the essential truth: it was not my job, but me, that was to blame.

know that some of the guerrillas have trained in Russia and China.” She lowered the spoon into her café con leche, stirred, and then slowly licked the spoon. “What else can they do? They need to learn about modern weapons and how to fight the soldiers who’ve gone through your schools. Sometimes they sell cocaine in order to raise money for supplies. How else can they buy guns? They’re up against terrible odds. Your World Bank doesn’t help them defend themselves. In fact, it forces them into this position.”

was protesting drilling on indigenous lands, in the forests of a tribe facing extinction — him and a couple dozen of his friends. They were attacked by the army, beaten, and thrown into prison — for doing nothing illegal, mind you, just standing outside that building waving placards and singing.”

“They kept him

in jail for nearly six months. He never did tell us what happened there, but when he came out,...

The global empire, on the other hand, is the republic’s nemesis. It is self-centered, self-serving, greedy, and materialistic, a system based on mercantilism. Like earlier empires, it opens its arms only to accumulate resources, to grab everything in sight and stuff its insatiable maw. It will do whatever is needed to help its rulers gain more power and riches.

Claudine had warned me; she had honestly outlined what would be expected of me if I accepted the job MAIN offered. Yet, it took the experience of working in countries like Indonesia, Panama, Iran, and Colombia in order for me to face the deeper implications.

I was loyal to the American republic, but what we were perpetrating through this new, highly subtle form of imperialism was the financial equivalent of what we had attempted to accomplish militarily in Vietnam.

In countries on every continent, I saw how men and women working for US corporations — though not officially part of the EHM network — participated in something far more pernicious than anything envisioned in conspiracy theories.

They would do whatever they thought it would take — or were told it would take — to perpetuate the system we EHMs advocated. Like many of MAIN’s engineers,

these workers were blind to the consequences of their actions, convinced that the sweatshops and factories that made shoes and automotive parts for their companies were helping the poor climb out of poverty, instead of simply burying them deeper in a type...

My own empire kept expanding; I added employees, countries, and

shares of stock to my various portfolios and to my ego. In addition to the seduction of the money and lifestyle, and the adrenaline high of power, I often recalled Claudine warning me that once I was in, I could never get out.

It was a refrain Paula often came back to, and I eventually agreed. I admitted to her and to myself that it was growing more difficult to use the money, adventure, and glamour to justify the turmoil, guilt, and stress. As a MAIN partner, I was becoming wealthy, and I knew that if I stayed longer, I would be permanently trapped.

“What if you never say anything about the things you know?” she asked. “You mean . . . just keep quiet?” “Exactly. Don’t give them an excuse to come after you. In fact, give them every reason to leave you alone, to not muddy the water.”

I would not be a crusader; instead, I would just be a person, concentrate on enjoying life, travel for pleasure, perhaps even start a family with someone like Paula. I had had enough; I simply wanted out.

“Everything you’ve learned is a lie,” Paula said. “Your life is a lie.” She added, “Have you looked at your own résumé recently?” I admitted that I had not. “Do,” she advised. “I read the Spanish version the other day. If it’s anything like the English one, I think you’ll find it very interesting.”

anger. The material in these documents represented intentional deceptions. The basic facts were correct, but the important stories behind the facts were omitted. And these documents carried a deeper significance, a reality that reflected our times and reached to the core of our current march to global empire: they epitomized a strategy calculated to convey appearances, to shield an underlying reality.

however, it omitted any reference to the Peace Corps itself, leaving the impression that I had been the professional manager of a construction materials company instead of a volunteer assisting a small cooperative comprising illiterate Andean peasant brick makers.