Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Summary

Confessions of an Economic
Hit Man Summary

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The Hit Brigade

An invisible army of highly paid Economic Hit Men (EHMs) marches with every single economic delegation and every bilateral state visit. Its members are disguised as analysts and statisticians, but they use sophisticated methods to cheat companies around the globe out of vast sums of money. They provide the arguments and calculations for expensive, complex projects that developing nations cannot afford. Then, their optimistic economic forecasts encourage the World Bank and other institutions to grant the credit needed.

The economic hit men will do anything to accomplish their ends, but when they fail, more nefarious, shadowy “CIA-sanctioned jackals” step in, wielding violent coups and “accidents.” For example, two national leaders – Jaime Roldos of Ecuador and Omar Torrijos of Panama – died in fiery crashes, which were mostly likely jackal assassinations. Sometimes the jackals fail, too. Then young Americans become the marchers, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Peace Corps to Hit Man

John Perkin’s early years reflected a narrow New Hampshire upbringing. He attended Middlebury College, graduated from Boston University and joined the Peace Corps to avoid the Vietnam draft. He once considered a career in intelligence and engaged in a series of interviews with the NSA. He expected some of his relatives to resist his decision to enter the Peace Corps in remote Ecuador. Instead, a relative approved, saying, “We’ll need good agents there people who understand the natives.” The Peace Corps was part of his preparation to become an economic hit man, although he did not know it at the time.

On January 1971, after his Peace Corps duty, Perkins took a job as an economist with Chas. T. Main, Inc., a consulting firm. The company was conducting studies to determine if the World Bank would lend billions to Ecuador and neighboring countries. Shortly after he began the job, an attractive brunette with green eyes approached him and introduced herself as Claudine Martin, a special consultant. “I’ve been asked to help in your training,” she said, telling him that her job was to “mold him into an economic hit man. ‘We’re a rare breed, in a dirty business,’ she said. ‘No one can know about your involvement – not even your wife’.”

As an EHM, he learned, he would have two roles. The first would be to justify “huge international loans” for massive construction and engineering projects that would bring income to his employer and a roster of other U.S. companies, including Bechtel, Halliburton and Brown & Root. His second job was to work methodically to bankrupt the countries that accepted the loans, so that they would grow vulnerable. Dependent on their creditors, they would almost have to comply with requests for access to oil or military bases. “We’re a small, exclusive club,” Claudine said. “We’re paid – well paid – to cheat countries...out of billions of dollars. A large part of your job is to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes U.S. commercial interests.”

Economic Poker

Organizations such as USAID and the Asian Development Bank hire consultants, such as Main Inc., to visit the primary cities in their grant program areas. During Perkins’ two or three-day visits to Indonesia, officials from Jakarta and Bandung received him with the strained politeness of a poker player keeping his cards close to his chest. However, the ordinary people he got to know told a more candid story: The West, and particularly the U.S., merely wanted to exploit them. The greedy U.S. had turned a cold heart on the needy, was fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam and was an enemy of the rising Muslim peoples.

Perkins began to waver from Claudine’s certainty of purpose. And, when he came back to Boston, he learned that she had vanished without a trace, presumably having moved on to another assignment. He was promoted simply because his growth forecasts for Indonesia were very aggressive and promising – which is what his employers wanted to hear. Over the next few months, he attended meetings in Tehran, Caracas, Guatemala City, London, Vienna and Washington, D.C. He met the likes of the shah of Iran and Robert McNamara. He didn’t like to think of himself as an EHM. He told himself he was a chief economist.

Iran: The Shah’s Collapse

In 1978 Perkins was on assignment in Tehran. One night he was having a drink alone in the lobby of Tehran’s Hotel InterContinental when he felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned to see a college friend named Farhad who apparently had ties to the Iranian intelligence apparatus. “Things are falling apart here,” his friend warned him. “You’ve got to get out.” Farhad handed him an airline ticket to depart the country immediately.

The seeds of the Iranian revolution had been sown in the 1950s, when the U.S. overthrew the shah’s predecessor. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the shah’s rival. Soon word spread of riots, bombings and attacks in Iran, the beginning of a revolutionary offensive by Khomeini and his mullahs. In January 1979, the shah fled to Egypt. In November 1979, an Islamic mob took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 U.S. citizens hostage for almost a year and a half. The shah’s collapse showed that the U.S. had gravely misinformed its people about its true role in the world. The tide of animosity toward the shah struck like an unforeseen storm. The NSA and CIA must have seen the obvious – but the reality never filtered down to the American voters.

The Carter administration attempted a military mission to rescue the 52 hostages, but it was a dismal failure. The following November, the American people replaced Carter, a president who had made world peace his primary goal, with Ronald Reagan, a throwback who sought to use U.S. military muscle to keep the country’s place atop the heap of the world’s nations.

Saudi Arabia: Hustling for Oil and Money

When the Arab oil embargo elevated Saudi Arabia as a major world player, Perkins was assigned to develop forecasts on the benefit of spending that country’s new wealth on major infrastructure projects. Of course, U.S. engineering and construction firms would benefit. Perkins’ had to make sure as much Saudi oil wealth as possible made its way to U.S. coffers. To make the plan work, Perkins had to convince “Prince W,” a Saudi official, that this “Saudi Arabia money-laundering” plan was in his country’s best interests. “Prince W” let it be known that in Boston he expected Perkins to arrange for attractive blondes to have sex with him. Perkins found that fulfilling that request encouraged Prince W to see things his way.

From Bad to Worse

Eventually Perkins own perfidy caught up with him: “For 10 years, I had been the heir of those slavers who had marched into African jungles and hauled men and women off to waiting ships.” He also had inflated economic forecasts, and collected perks and bonuses, but over time he had come to hate the life he was leading. On April 1, 1980, he resigned.

For several years, he worked as an expert witness, usually for U.S. electric utilities trying to justify new power plants. He married environmental planner Winifred Grant. Their first child, Jessica, was born on May 17, 1982. A few months later, he founded Independent Power Systems (IPS), a company that sought to develop environmentally friendly power plants. Working as a consultant and energy expert throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Perkins kept in touch with his contacts at the World Bank, USAID and IMF. He observed the activities of EHMs throughout the world, especially in Iraq.

Iraq

Reagan and Bush wanted to pacify Saddam Hussein the way they did the Saudis: with money and debt. EHMs did not care that Hussein was a murderous tyrant; they maintained a very active presence in Iraq throughout the 1980s: “We would be willing to sell him tanks and fighter planes and to build him chemical and nuclear power plants, as we had done in so many of their countries, even if these technologies could conceivably be used to produce advanced weaponry.” Iraq had oil, water and a strategically important geopolitical location. Perhaps most importantly it had attractive potential for EHM investments.

George H. W. Bush already had a weak image when Hussein invaded oil-rich Kuwait, in August 1990. This was a mistake on Saddam’s part, although driving him away from Kuwait bolstered Bush’s political image and popularity. In November 1990, Perkins sold IPS in a lucrative deal. He fretted about succumbing to the rule of multinational corporations, a force he called “the corporatocracy.” IPS had been under great pressure from Ashland Oil Company. Still, selling his alternative energy firm to an oil company made Perkins feel like a traitor.

Throughout the 1990s, Perkins became involved in nonprofits. He started a nonprofit company, Dream Change Coalition, to help people understand and appreciate the global environment. He continued to consider writing a book to expose the activities of global economic hit men, but spent his time focused on taking people on tours deep into the Amazon to facilitate their interaction with tribes that had barely been touched by the industrial world. All that changed, however, on September 11, 2001.

On September 10, Perkins was traveling down a river in Ecuador, guiding 16 North American travelers. The next morning, he visited a small office to arrange for pilots to fly in and pick the group up. He was on the radio talking with them when he heard someone on the other end shout, “My God! New York is under attack.”

As soon as possible he flew home and visited Ground Zero. As he gazed into the smoking hole left by the collapse of the World Trade Center, he thought of bin Laden accepting cash and millions of dollars worth of weapons from the U.S. government. As he walked away, he saw a man handing out Spanish-language newspapers and shouting, “Venezuela on the brink of revolution!” The EHMs had failed.

Epilogue

You have a role in stopping the insane march toward global empire. Henceforth, you should:
• Study the news carefully and read between the lines. Question the deeper forces underlying every television and radio report.
• Realize that mammoth corporations control most of our media. General Electric owns NBC. Disney owns ABC and CNN is part of AOL Time Warner. Those running these news outlets want to preserve and expand their inherited system and values.
• Speak frankly about what is going wrong. Get others involved.
• To strike a blow for a better world, reduce your consumption, particularly of oil.
• It's not the institutions themselves that are to blame. The problem lies with misconceptions and erroneous concepts about economic development.
• Our educational system needs to undergo a revolution, empowering young people to act and think for themselves.
• Teach kids to pity, but not imitate, people who lead "gluttonous, unbalanced lives."
• Make your confession. How have you deceived yourself and others? Come clean about who you are and what you have done. You may feel euphoric relief.
• Believe that, in concert with others, it is possible to change the economic paradigm and create a better world.
Ask yourself what you will do to teach others and to help make the paradigm shift occur. This is the challenge of our time.

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