Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke as they discuss O’Rourke’s remarkable book, Covert Regime Change. US foreign policy is based heavily on trying to overthrow foreign governments, and O’Rourke’s account is a powerful and deeply scholarly account of America’s frequent resort to secretive regime-change operations. Her book focuses on the Cold War years (1947-1989), but Sachs and O’Rourke bring the issues up to the current day.
O’Rourke’s highly insightful study offers a deep and rare look at the how’s and why’s of US foreign policy. Together, Sachs and O’Rourke discuss why U.S. covert regime-change operations have rarely succeeded, but have often left a colossal mess in their wake.
The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.
Footnotes:
⭐️ Thank you for listening!
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➡️ Website: bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org
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Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke as they discuss O’Rourke’s remarkable book, Covert Regime Change. US foreign policy is based heavily on trying to overthrow foreign governments, and O’Rourke’s account is a powerful and deeply scholarly account of America’s frequent resort to secretive regime-change operations. Her book focuses on the Cold War years (1947-1989), but Sachs and O’Rourke bring the issues up to the current day.
O’Rourke’s highly insightful study offers a deep and rare look at the how’s and why’s of US foreign policy. Together, Sachs and O’Rourke discuss why U.S. covert regime-change operations have rarely succeeded, but have often left a colossal mess in their wake.
The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.
Footnotes:
⭐️ Thank you for listening!
➡️ Sign up for the newsletter: https://bit.ly/subscribeBCJS
➡️ Website: bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org
🎉 Don't forget to subscribe and share your favorite episode with your friends!
📣 Leave a rating and tell us what you thought about this episode!
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I am absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Lindsay O'Rourke, associate professor of political science at Boston College and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. And we're discussing a wonderful, really a remarkably important book and a wonderful book, Covert Regime Change. very apropos and extremely important that Lindsay published in 2018. And it is a comprehensive study of American-led regime change operations during the Cold War period. And it's got enormous relevance for everything about modern geopolitics and our current travails and issues as well. So, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining the book club. Welcome.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Thank you
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And
Lindsey O'Rourke:
so much for having me.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
tell us about this incredible project. First, just to say, the book is about covert regime change. So, covert secret.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
You have written a book about secretive actions by the United States government during the Cold War period. and you document dozens of cases. So I'd like to understand the project, how you developed this comprehensive view. How does one study covert operations and give us some definitions so that everybody listening from around the world knows the category of things that you are investigating in this book.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Okay, wonderful, thank you. Well, the definition of a covert regime change is an operation to replace the political leadership or change the regime type of a foreign state where the intervening state does not intend for its role to be publicly acknowledged. So the heart of covert action is the idea of plausible deniability and that it's somehow concealed so that the intervening state's role is hidden. So in my study, I talk about five different tactics, assassinations. sponsoring coups, meddling in foreign elections, trying to move popular revolutions and covertly supporting foreign armed groups and their armed bids to overthrow a state. So obviously with that definition, it's easy to see the problem studying that, namely that states tried to conceal their role in it. So the object, the idea behind my project, which came out of my dissertation, was I wanted
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And
Lindsey O'Rourke:
to talk.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
a dissertation, if I'm correct, with our friend John Mearsheimer,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
your advisor, John Mearsheimer.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So the great realist,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
and you did a PhD on regime change. One thing just to start, it's an incredibly important topic because the US does it a lot or
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, we
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
has
Lindsey O'Rourke:
do.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
done it a lot. But your book is, I think, the only one I know of a comprehensive study of covert regime change. So how can that be, by the way? It's so important, but it's not, it is not central for political scientists.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, well, I think the problem with studying it for a long time is that when you talk about these things, you know, a lot of people tend to hear conspiracy theories, you know, it's hard to systematically talk about it or authoritatively talk about it just because of the backlash you might get. And so what I tried to do with my dissertation in the book was I did a ton of archival research, which I came up with, you know, declassified government documents to prove each of the cases in my book. So I had a standard. I had to have at least three primary sources. government documents saying that this was in fact a covert regime change attempt. And because of the 25 year time lag, I could, I felt like I could do the entire Cold War. I don't think I got every case, but I think I got a lot. And ultimately what I came up with was a 64 covert regime change attempts during the Cold War. 25 of these succeeded and brought the US back forces to power and the other 39 failed.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So before we get to the cases. These are, every one of them, in some sense, a conspiracy, obviously.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So I always say, if you don't believe in conspiracies, you just don't get it. Conspiracy theories have a bad name in the US. And you're regarded kind of as a kook if you deal in conspiracy theories. But I think it's extremely important. You have 64 cases. of the US trying and in some cases succeeding in overthrowing other countries' governments, every one of which to my mind would qualify legally as a conspiracy.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
That's true.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
It's a lot, actually. So I just want to encourage people to believe in conspiracies, not every conspiracy that they hear of, but to understand that governments operate secretly.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And some governments with a lot of power, like the United States, the government we're talking about, has a lot of power. And it has a tradition of secrecy, actually, in foreign policy.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
That's true. Actually, even if you look at my cases, so each case is like, you can think of it as a covert campaign. So oftentimes it involved many different covert tactics. Think of like Cuba is my case from 1960 to 1968. But during that time we had, you know, the pair of military assault with the Bay of Pigs, we had an assassination program and we had coup attempts. So there's actually many more covert actions than just 64 cases, but that's.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And that, by the way, is counted as one case, that
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Exactly,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
eight years.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So it's almost a full-time job, this conspiracy business, actually. It is kind of incredible to me. So differentiate between overt and covert, because you talk about six overt regime
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
change operations and 64. covert regime change operations. And to keep everybody's mind on this focus, your data covers the period 1947 to 1989, I believe,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, that's correct.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
which is the kind of classic Cold War period. Because by 1989, the Cold War was ending in central and Eastern Europe. I happen to be involved already in the regime changes, not as a covert agent, I have to say, but as an economist
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
in 1989 in Poland and in a number of other countries. So you take that period. What are these six overt regime change cases and what's the difference of overt and covert regime change?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
So the overt cases are just the cases where the United States did not intend to conceal its role. So Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, when we crossed the 38th parallel during the Korean War. So these were just public known attempts to overthrow
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
These
Lindsey O'Rourke:
a
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
are
Lindsey O'Rourke:
government.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
wars with
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
the aim of changing the government
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
of the other country.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And six of those took place on your account during the Cold War period. And 64 somewhat secret. Because one thing that comes to mind immediately, if a president of another country is assassinated or there's a coup. It's a little hard to keep everything secret, isn't it?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, quite hard. I found that in 70% of my cases, the US was actually accused of overthrowing the country at the time of the operation. And in many more cases, they actually knew that the US was trying to overthrow them, but they kept it secret because they didn't want to reveal any weakness that they had. So it's incredibly difficult to keep secret.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Especially when you're overthrowing a government, actually.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Exactly,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Because
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
that's a pretty public event in a way.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Hehehe
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
But I mean, I have some questions about that, because I know of cases. And I think one we should talk about later on is when the Ukrainian president was overthrown in February 2014.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Well, we'll come back to that. Because was that a US operation or not is still debated. very much. So that's in a sense, if it was, it was covert, although the interpretations differ among observers. But here we have 64 secretive or attempted secret changes, 30% of which, by the way you say, actually the US wasn't. really fingered at the time. In other words, the attempt was made, but it wasn't found out. Is that mainly because the regime change didn't actually happen in those cases? Do you know that offhand?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
There's really two reasons. In some of the cases, it was when the US meddled in elections and the party supported by the United States
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Uh-huh.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
won the election, so they have no incentive to reveal that they were getting funding from the United States.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Good point.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes. And then in some other cases, when we were targeting Soviet allies, they understood that the US was trying to overthrow it, but either they had infiltrated the operation or trying to keep... that knowledge secret so they could learn more about it. Or they were afraid that if they, you know, accused the US of overthrowing them, people would think they had more of a resistance movement at the time. So they kept it secret for the United States actually.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Uh-huh. You know,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
it's actually a good reminder for me. One way that a covert operation happens is you try to meddle in the election of the other country. You fund the campaign or you repress the opposition or you put in fake news or something like that. And then when one of the parties wins and... perhaps the one backed by the United States, they do not have an incentive to say, hey, the United States put us in power. So that's a reason why it could actually remain secret
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
for quite a while, in fact.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, 16 of my cases was the US meddling in foreign elections and the US backed forces came to power in 12 of those cases, you know, countries like Italy, France, Japan at the start of the Cold War. So of course these governments would have no incentive to say that they were getting American support at the time.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Right. Yeah, that's a good reminder that some of these cases are, you know, the European countries after World War II. There were large popular communist parties. After all, the Soviet Union had been an ally of the United States in World War II, a victorious ally and The communist parties of Italy and France were very popular, and it was U.S. policy to prevent them from coming to power, even though we ostensibly were saying, this is a democracy and it's open competition.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, part of our containment policy at the time.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So 64 cases and remind us of all the different methods that could be used and that the US has used in those 64 cases.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Assassinations. So we had three assassination attempts. None of them succeeded actually, although several foreign leaders were killed inadvertently during U.S.-backed coups, Di
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So Diệm in Vietnam in 1963, Trujillo in 1961, was it?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, in
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
the Dominican Republic, yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
in 1961 in the Dominican Republic. And those were coups where the US sided with the plotters locally. And then those plots ended up with the assassination of the leader not necessarily pushed by the US. Maybe yes or no. There is the famous story of John F. Kennedy learning that in the coup, which he knew about against the South Vietnamese leader in, I think, September 1963, he is whispered in the ear that Diem has been killed and he runs out of the room, blanched, almost nauseous from what has happened to learn that. that it ended up in an assassination. It was supposed to end up in a coup.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, there's actually a White House tape you can listen to where he's, before he's assassinated. So Diem's dies, I think on November 3rd, and
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Oh, November.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Kennedy of course
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Uh-huh.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
is on the 22nd. And in the meantime, Kennedy was taking notes for his memoirs and he talks about the assassination, and he's very upset and it's a very human moment. And then his son walks in and he starts playing
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Uh huh.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
with his son in the middle. And then his son walks away and he goes back to talking about the coup. It's just a real, you
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Wow.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
know, human moment, yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So it can be done, assassination, a coup,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
an election meddling.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, promoting a popular revolution. So probably,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
the Maidan in
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Ukraine,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
perhaps.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
During the Cold War, you know, probably the most famous example would be supporting solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, the same type of idea. And then finally supporting armed dissidents, which was actually the most common one. We had 35 attempts to do that. Only four of them actually brought the US back forces to power.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Wow, really?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Of all those insurgencies.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, it's a kind
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Because,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
of remarkable home.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
yeah, we were giving arms to lots of insurgencies, but almost never succeeding,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
or 10% of the time or so.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, that's.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
That's very interesting, because it creates a lot of commotion and a lot of destruction and unrest, but not very successful. So 64 cases. all over the world, by the way,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
central and Eastern Europe, what was the Soviet Union, Asia, Latin
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
America,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Africa. Yeah.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
all of them.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
of those 64, what was the track record? You distinguish between short-term and long-term track record. So short-term is just, did the operation replace the government?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, so, so sorry. So only 39% of the cases in the short term did the US back forces come to power, 25 cases. And here I found there was a number of different things that suggested why it was likely to succeed or not. One thing was the nature of the targeted state. It was much easier to overthrow weak states. It was easier to overthrow American allies. It was easier to intervene in democracies. which sort of suggests that paradoxically, the places where we were most likely to succeed with covert actions were actually the ones where we needed to do the least.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Mm-hmm.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
And when we tried to go against the Soviet Union or its adversaries, we were much less successful. I think we had a 10% success rate against Soviet allies, a 43% success rate against non-aligned state, but a 70% success rate against American allies. And another thing that mattered a lot was trying to compare the relative balance of forces between the US-backed forces and the party in power. Convert operations were most likely to succeed when basically they just had to tip the scale a little bit in that party's favor. They may have won anyway. In a lot of the cases, like in election meddling, they were leading in the polls before the US-backed them, so it's hard to say that the US was the definitive source. It was simply just much, much more difficult to successfully overthrow a state when you were going up, trying to overthrow. a powerful state.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
When you started to collect this database, did you have any expectation of how many cases you were going to find?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
No.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And did the numbers surprise you as being high and, my god, I didn't know that they intervened there? Or it was kind of what you and your advisor, John Mearsheim, were expected?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
No, it just kept on creeping up. You know, before I did this, you know, you know, just studying US foreign policy, you know about Guatemala and Iran and Chile and the famous cases. And so I thought maybe there'd be 20 cases or something. And then it just kept on creeping up the more I did it. And yeah, that really kind of is remarkable to me.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So you share my feeling is, my god, 64 cases. Are you kidding?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And just meddling everywhere. And my sense, by the way, is meddling in places we don't understand very much, don't have very strong stakes in often, places where there's almost no American business, almost no American history, almost no American footprint, oh we got to do something in Iraq, we have to do something in this place, we have to do something in that place, as almost, how do you explain that? It's quite an attitude actually.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Well, I think the thinking in Washington was that covert operations are really cheap. You know, the US isn't putting boots on the ground. It's somebody else who's doing the heavy lifting of overthrowing the regime and will take the retaliation if they get caught. Economically, they're a fraction of the cost of trying to put US boots on the ground. Reputationally, they think they can do things that will go against, you know, things the United States wouldn't want to publicly do. And so they think the costs are very low. Because the costs are just so low, they think they might as well attempt these things, even if they're, you know, not terribly likely to succeed. Because-
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
We don't like it very much when ostensibly another country interferes in our domestic politics.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Is that right?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
of course. I mean, look what happened to the United States after, you know, accusations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, you know, really helped to increase threat inflation against Russia. But I don't know, I think American policymakers would be wise to understand how these things are viewed by the other countries. They don't like having their politics meddled in either, and it increases, you know, anti-Americanism and
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
You don't
Lindsey O'Rourke:
erodes
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
find
Lindsey O'Rourke:
trust.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
a lot of self-reflection on that in the record, do you?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
I can't say I do, no. There's surprisingly little learning when it comes to this. One of the kind of remarkable things is that throughout the Cold War, there was a number of times when the CIA commissioned or the president commissioned a study of the covert actions. And they all came to the same conclusions that these things don't really work. They weren't worth the investment of resources versus the blowback they got to it. And despite being warned, they just kind of did this. time and again. You know, Kennedy was warned right before he did the Bay of Pigs. Nixon did the same thing. Even Obama, before he decided to go into Syria in 2012, he commissioned a study by the CIA that basically said the same thing.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Wow.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
And yet he decided to go in as well. I think it's just the idea. It gives you the ability to do something, you know.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Well, you know, I obviously have not studied it remotely like you have, but in my work, of course, I've come across it nonstop for
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
the last 40 years. And the thing that has amazed me is how casually it was done in some cases. Again, I don't know because I've never gone necessarily to the core, almost never to primary data. or to the archives. But for example, the CIA engagement in the assassination of Lumumba, who was the popular democratic leader of the first independent government of what became the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the time it was the Belgian Congo, and then it gained independence. And Lumumba was a very bright, charismatic, popular young leader. And from what I understand, there was a meeting in the White House. And one of Eisenhower's advisors said, the guy leans to the Soviets and isn't safe. And Eisenhower said, well, finish him up. And it was as casual as that. Really, spook story stuff. not in a deep, profound, my God, what will the implications be, but rather casually carried out.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
I don't think that's always the case, but in a lot of cases it is, you know. It's actually kind of interesting. You often see that, you know, these decisions are made at the highest levels in the White House and you can see sort of cavalier thinking on behalf of the President and National Security Council. Although many times, if you looked at the CIA, the CIA agents who were actually in charge of the country, who had a much better understanding was actually going on. were much more hesitant of these things because they actually understood the stakes better, which is kind of interesting. The CIA is sometimes considered, you know, this rogue elephant rampaging out of control in the words of Frank Church. But at least in these cases, you know, a lot of times they were kind of an ignored voice, sort of warning about the repercussions.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, I think it's very interesting. And I concur with you on that, that these are not rogue operations. They typically come from the Oval Office, actually. The presidents are typically engaged in a decision like this. They can be rather casual,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
as the one that I cited. And there's another famous one. I don't know if you've studied it. I think it's a Jagan. It was the. Democratic leader of Guyana, if I
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
have it correctly. And there's a famous story, I don't know if I have it right, but of Kennedy and Kennedy's advisor, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. meeting with Jagann in the White House. And this was a young independence leader of his country, which was going to gain independence in 1961. And he makes a remark at the end. about apparently about some Marxist article in the monthly review. He's let out of the Oval Office and Schlesinger says, you know, this guy could be another Castro. He's dangerous.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
and
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
I think we should get rid of him. And four weeks later, he's overthrown in a according to your typology in a manufactured unrest, general strike, violence and so forth. And then what is an unbelievable event, 30 years later, I think to the year, this gentleman had since the overthrow become the prime minister of his country several times. He was highly respected. And he showed up one day, I think in 1991, if I remember correctly, at the Council on Foreign Relations. And Arthur Schlesinger Jr., now an old man. shows up and listens to him and then stands up in the back of the room and says, you know, I'm here to make an apology to you.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Oh, I didn't know this part.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, yeah, this is apparently a true story. Schlesinger says, you know, 30 years ago, you walked out of the Oval Office and I suggested to the president, we take you out. And I'm here to apologize for that.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
God, I did
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
not know that. That's amazing.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, so really, really. So I wanted to ask you about the CIA, not as a rogue elephant, but as the actual agent for these operations, how often the CIA shows up in your 64 cases. I didn't see a number and maybe you didn't have a number, but is it the main instrument that the US has used or did use over a certain period of time? Because afterwards it started using. different instruments like the National Endowment for Democracy and so forth.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, I think that characterization is correct. In my cases, I think virtually all of them have the CIA as the primary actor. It's just at the end of the Cold War that you start seeing the National Endowment for Democracy and you see the US trying to exert influence in this, I don't know how to call it, pseudo covert way through National Endowment for Democracy. But during the Cold War, they were overwhelmingly the dominant
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So these
Lindsey O'Rourke:
agency.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
are CIA operations,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
basically.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, the thing that always impressed me about, impressed not in the clarification, but in the mistake of US foreign policy was in 1947 in the National Security Act, the CIA was created with literally two extremely distinct roles. One was as an intelligence, operation. It is the central intelligence agency. And there I have, you know, generally, yeah, of course the country needs an intelligence operation in a complex world. But it was also created as almost a presidential army, that it was something that was accountable to the president. It could do covert operations. And that's quite different from the intelligence operation. And it seems, I know that Truman wrote about this later. And apparently, even at the time that he was signing it, I think he said to Dean Atchison that this doesn't feel right to give this general power to the CIA, or maybe not to the CIA, to the president, because the president became the leader of a secret army, not accountable to the public, certainly, able to carry out covert operations, most of which still got pinned on the CIA because very hard to do this stuff really secretly, but I would say almost totally unaccountably.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, that I think is a fair characterization. I mean, with the intelligence reforms in the 1970s, there were some efforts to exert congressional control over it, although at least for the rest of the Cold War, they didn't exert that much control over it. You know, I think they didn't necessarily want to take a very active role in doing it. So it kind of remained just a vessel of presidential power.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
There were the church committee hearings on the CIA. It was at 1977, 78, I think, something
Lindsey O'Rourke:
75
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
like that.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
through
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Oh,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
77, I think. Yeah, yeah,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
yeah, okay, 75
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
to 77. There was nothing before and nothing after comparable to that as far as I know.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, I think that's right. Nothing comparable. I guess just maybe just after Vietnam, there was a real reckoning. And
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
But you know,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
there.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
that's almost, it's, well, it's 46 years ago,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
and we haven't had public hearings on CIA operations or all of this meddling since then,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
It's
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
which
Lindsey O'Rourke:
true.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
is a long time actually.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
could
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
But
Lindsey O'Rourke:
argue
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
you
Lindsey O'Rourke:
that
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
know,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
we're
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
it's
Lindsey O'Rourke:
overdue.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
interesting. So you say that there were a number of internal memos and reviews and you could find those, those were declassified or...
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes, yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Did you do your own Freedom of Information Act at all or you
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Eee. Cough.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
were able to just get the declassified files?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, I did a ton of Freedom of Information Act requests.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Did they come through?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Some. There was, there's particularly at the 1980s, the Reagan Library, there's just such a backlog. I put in a number of requests and I would get a letter back and it literally said that it would be in 14 years.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Oh my God.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
So I couldn't wait to publish the book. So, you know, I just had to go with what I have. But yeah, there was. There is a lot of publicly available things. If you do look, you can look at the Foreign Relations United States series online, has a lot of these documents and the CIA electronic reading room is really useful as well. But yeah, I had to do a lot of, you know, just either in the archives or FOIA requests to get what I have.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Were people ready to speak with you about these things?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, they were actually pretty eager. I think by the time I wrote, because it was Cold War stuff, you know,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
And that's it.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
I met a lot of, um, older CIA officers and they were quite forthcoming, um, spoke about it quite openly and honestly, and, um,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Did
Lindsey O'Rourke:
honestly.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
they generally tell you don't use my name but I'll fill you in on the background?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, basically, yeah. And I'd have them look at my cases and, you know, is there anything else I missed? And, you
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Wow.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
know, they gave me some advice on, you know, why they thought a certain operation succeeded or failed.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So let's go through the successes and failures. Twenty, twenty-five successes, you
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
say?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Not great, by the way, out of, I mean, and successes in quotation marks, I want to emphasize, because success is not only in the eye of the beholder, it depends on the definition of what success means. In this case, it means that the U.S. replaced the government as it sought to do.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, I actually looked, I went further too, and I looked to see when we did succeed, when we did overthrow the government, did that ultimately achieve America's foreign policy aims? And here I found largely it didn't. And it's just very difficult to actually change the policy preferences of another state. A lot of times before the operation, you would have somebody approach the CIA or the United States and say that, They have the support in this country. If you install me, I will act in your interest. But the reality is, if you look at the subset of international disputes that become, that sort of escalate to the point of covert regime change, it's normally that there's a very intractable problem between the target state and the United States. You know, it's something very difficult. And for
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
a weak
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
in
Lindsey O'Rourke:
state...
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
other words, there's an underlying crisis that's a
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
deep political circumstance of some reason.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, exactly. And for the weak state not to acquiesce to the United States when, you know, they're trying to resolve it via coercion, they really had to have, you know, persuasive reasons not to, either they, you know, their international environment, or they had powerful domestic constituencies demanding it. And so what happened in a lot of these cases is we installed the new regime, and once they were in power, they faced the same exact... pressures as their successors. And so they're then in the spine. Do they either turn against the United States in order to appease domestic constituencies, which many of them did, or do they turn against domestic constituencies in order to appease the United States and kind of just use USAID to stay in power? Think of the Shah of Iran. The problem is that when you do this, it tended to generate a lot of nationalist backlash to them, understandably. Nobody likes their rulers to be seen as a puppet of the United States. And more than 50% of the leaders installed by the United States were later violently removed by power from assassination to a coup or revolution.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
That's extraordinary, and I want people to follow that. That 25 cases out of the 64 replaced the government in the way the US intended. But then, so often, disaster followed. And like you said, I think you make a very basic and very important point, which is that the US has a lot of power over weaker governments, it's got economic power, it can bribe leaders, it can coerce leaders, it can impose sanctions, it can do all sorts of things. So that by the time you get to a regime change, the US is trying to do something that probably has a lot of resistance
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
in
Lindsey O'Rourke:
exactly.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
that other place. And so the mere fact that you put someone else in the seat of power means relatively little about actually changing. the policies, whether it's right or wrong to have, you know, whether what the US wants is right or wrong for them or for the United States, even putting that aside just very cynically and in a hard nosed way, the US couldn't change that country's policy through normal pressure. So it had to resort or it chose to resort to something absolutely extreme, replace the government. And then lo and behold, civil war, assassinations,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
coups. What a mess.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah, no, it's true. Another thing I looked at was the effects on the target states themselves, not just their relations with the United States. And there, the picture is just grim. You know, successful operations decrease the likelihood of democratization. Across the board, increase the likelihood of civil war, increase the likelihood of government-sponsored mass killings, whether the operations exceeded or failed. And so, you know, for the target states themselves, you know, obviously just terrible things. You're going in, you're messing with their infrastructure, their political infrastructure, you're empowering different domestic groups, you know, in flaming passions. So, yeah, quite negative.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Do you have a sense of how many other power, it has to be a big power to be engaged in this kind of thing? Soviet Union presumably did this, of course, Russia perhaps now. Is there any data comparable to yours looking at what other countries are doing in this area and comparing? the US proclivities in this regard to those of other countries.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
There is. Unfortunately, there's not an international data set. It's just simply, you know, other states don't have the openness of the US system. Rory Cormack in the UK has done a great study of UK interventions since World War II.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Uh-huh. Yeah,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
It's
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
we
Lindsey O'Rourke:
a…
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
learned a lot from the UK, actually.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
They were
Lindsey O'Rourke:
we did.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
the big empire before us.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Exactly. And we did many of these operations alongside them, actually. So he has a great study. At least during my study, in many of the interventions, particularly in non-aligned countries, the Soviets were on the other side. And so I can say that they did a great number of cases as well. But yeah, I think it's largely a tool of great powers. I suspect, although I couldn't prove that some states like France might intervene in their former colonies and so forth today, but unfortunately, I don't have the data to.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, but basically, probably mostly US, Russia or Soviet Union, Britain, for sure. France, the colonial powers, basically. And I always feel the United States learned its handiwork from the British Empire. And still. The British Empire is the biggest cheerleader of all of this stuff. They really have a James Bond complex, it seems to me. But actually, they continued to do it, in fact, for a while before
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yum.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
losing all relevant power, I would say.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah. Can I ask you a question, if you don't mind?
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Of course, of course, of course.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Just in your work in the post-Cold War, you know, you said that you've encountered many of these things on the ground in your own
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
experience. You know, what did that look like? How did you become aware of them? You know, what...
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Well, there are some cases, for instance, in Haiti, just as an example. President Aristide asked me to help him economically with economic advice. And he said to me at one point, they're going to take me out. And I was really surprised. I'm an economist. Not a spook. And I said, no, everything's going to be fine. He said, no, they're going to take me out. And it didn't even process properly with me. And then it started. First, the US cut off all of Haiti's access to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, all the economic pressures. Aristide remained popular. And then literally one day, US backed the for troops across the border from the Dominican Republic. And the US ambassador walked up to Aristide's door and said, well, we happen to have an unmarked plane, you know, an unmarked tail, we can save your life. You have to get in it. And 23 hours later, Aristide was in Central African Republic. You know, he'd been overthrown in broad daylight. And what was fascinating to me in that, First, it was extremely distressing and depressing. It was a coup in broad daylight, masterminded by the US. No pickup in the US at all. So it's a case of a covert operation that was not really covert, but no attention. So I called the New York Times, and I talked to the reporter on the beat. And I said, are you going to cover this story? The president was just overthrown in broad daylight. Nah, my editor is not so interested. So they never covered it. Then I testified in the house, it was, the next week, saying this was a coup. And everyone else looked at me like I was crazy. Oh, we love Haiti. We care so much. And so this was a case because no one in the US cared about Aristide were the coup happened and there wasn't even a ruffle. There wasn't even a news story afterwards. So that was
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
one example. I had a strange experience with the Maidan with Ukraine because after Yanukovych, the Ukraine president was overthrown and I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't advising any of the governments. I hadn't worked in the region for two decades, actually. But I got a call the next day that the new prime minister wants to meet you. And I said, OK, you know, my job is to help with the economic crisis. So I actually flew to Kiev to meet. And I was shown around the Maidan by an NGO, quote unquote, which told me about all of the American money that went into this operation on the Maidan. And it really turned my stomach, I have to tell you. I had my meeting and I went home and I understood how deep the U.S. engagement was and it really made me sick, actually, until today. And that was before the release of the tape.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
of Victoria Nuland on tape with the U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Piatt planning who the post-Yanukovych government would be. What's fascinating is, of course, Nuland picked the person I met. And that
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yeah.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
call was about three weeks before the actual event took place. We didn't know about it till the Russians. who did the interception posted it so we could listen to what the US was doing. But even till today, Lindsay, even though what I saw directly with my own eyes was so disgusting, frankly, it's still when I say the US was part of a coup, oh, no, that was a popular uprising.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Revolution and dignity.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So that's really an example to me of. a narrative which is preposterous because how much more vivid can you get than being on tape saying,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
can.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
no, that one stays out, this one comes in, that one's the prime minister. It's like a bad joke. But even in broad daylight, they have a narrative way of just fluffing over this because again, the New York Times or the other mainstream media won't report this stuff.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
again. That's.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So those are the kinds of examples that I've seen. And sometimes I've been in places where I haven't understood things swimming around me because I didn't really understand what the National Endowment for Democracy was or wasn't doing and how elections were or weren't manipulated. I tend to come in when a government asks me for financial or macroeconomic advice. So I don't see. the undercurrent, but then you hear a lot of, you know, because I've been involved at the UN for more than 20 years, you also hear a lot. Another example, one of the shocking cases of covert regime change for me is the Obama-led attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And... This started in 2011. You talk about the presidential finding operation Timber Sycamore, which starts in 2012, where the CIA is instructed to train the opposition forces and so forth. So I didn't know about that at the time, of course. But I did know the senior UN diplomats that were trying to negotiate peace in the United States. Syria in 2012 because Kofi Annan had been asked to be the special envoy of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who I was advising. And I had advised Kofi Annan personally also as his special advisor
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Yes.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
for many, many years. And they explained to me the US was blocking, completely blocking the peace accord that everyone else agreed with. And, you know, when you hear it at the most inside level. You'd never read about this.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
No, no, that's not in any of the stories, even after...
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So these are the ways that I come to see this. And I find it, of course, the difference. I love your advisor, as you may know, John Mearsheimer. I think he's such a great political scientist. But. I am still enamored of the idea, which he thinks is very naive, that we could have international law, we could have the UN Charter working. So I'm a believer in all of that, because I think we need to. And I always say to John, you know, your greatest book, which is a great, great book, is the tragedy of great power politics. And I don't want a tragedy. A comedy would be okay.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
You know,
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Or...
Lindsey O'Rourke:
I say that same thing to him all the time. Like it's the tragedy, John.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Right?
Lindsey O'Rourke:
That's
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
No,
Lindsey O'Rourke:
the like.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
exactly. So I'm trying to get past the tragedy. So I like international law. He says, Jeff, come on. Say, no, international law can really work. So this is the debate that we have all the time. And that's
Lindsey O'Rourke:
No, I
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
why...
Lindsey O'Rourke:
liked it in your book. I mean, I think in your book on American exceptionalism, you make a powerful case that, you know, there's these very pressing problems, climate change, that we're not going to fix it unless we have an international solution. So
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
I really appreciated your book for that.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
So thank you. This is the sense that I find all of this really troublesome. And I think the blowback for me, and your book is so powerful in this also, in helping people to understand the scale, the dangers, and everything else, when we say, and maybe American leaders even mean it, although I'm not. You're never sure what they mean, but they say to Russia, why are you concerned about NATO being in Ukraine? We're peace loving and so forth. If we weren't, OK, I'm going to use a strong word. I don't want to put it in your mouth. But if we weren't addicted to regime change, maybe such an attitude would be credible. But for another country's point of view, when they see the US behaved repeatedly in this way. It doesn't seem so peace loving. It seems like, well, that's a good way to lose your sovereignty is to have the US next door. So to my mind, it deeply undermines the possibilities of cooperation in the world.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
No, I concur with you. I mean, it's hard to agree with Putin on many things, but when you think about it from the Russian perspective that the US has this very long history that they're very intimately aware of, and they see the color revolutions as being promoted by the United States, they see the US intervening in Ukraine, it's very, from their perspective, you can understand why they would perceive this in an offensive way, why they would think that, you know, National Endowment for Democracy funds in Russia was aimed to try to overthrow Moscow. So, you know, you can see why they have little faith in the United States and why they were so worried.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
It's another case when you ask me how I hear this. I hear leaders tell me they're out to get me, whether it's a National Endowment for Democracy or other groups that I won't mention that are part of all of this. And I agree with them, by the way, because I know the story, because I've read your book, because I see what's going on. And it means that we, I think the deepest point is First, the failures are clear and you document them. The successes turn into failures with an absolutely alarming rate. But the poison to the international milieu, because everything looks like it's a conspiracy this way, even those that aren't by the time you're done with it, means that we've really undermined the path to cooperation. Now, I want to end by urging you to bring this up to date to 2023. I know it's hard because you were able to get so much information because of the lag of time, but your work is extraordinarily important. And the systematic database is unique. And anything you can do to help fill it in, I think... you know, is a huge service for the world.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
Well, I might be hitting you up to hear more of your stories because
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Good.
Lindsey O'Rourke:
they're remarkable. Thank you so much. It really was a pleasure being here.
Jeffrey D. Sachs:
Yeah, thank you. It's been great to speak with you. We've been speaking with Lindsay O'Rourke on Covert Regime Change, America's Secret Cold War, a most remarkable book. People are listening all over the world, and I know they're going to read your book, and they're going to learn a tremendous amount. And let me say to everybody, thank you so much for tuning in with us today. and I hope and expect you've enjoyed today's episode. Please remember to subscribe for the future content for future Book Club episodes. And if you have a moment, please leave a review. I can't tell you how much we value your support and participation. And so until the next time, take care. Thank you again and join us again for Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.