The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan illustrate that this general rule still holds since both countries have atrocious human rights records. The military, of course, argues that it has to deal with regimes as it finds them and that the presence of a base does not necessarily constitute an endorsement. But, as a matter of fact, in Asia alone the United States was directly responsible for helping to bring to power and sustain brutally repressive military governments in Indonesia, South Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, and the Philippines. At one time or another, we had extensive military bases in each of them except Cambodia and Indonesia.

When in 1975 North Vietnamese forces finally conquered South Vietnam’s regime despite its lavish American backing, other countries felt emboldened to deal with their own potentially lethal combinations of American-backed indigenous rightists and military bases on their soil. The death of Francisco Franco in Spain on November 20, 1975, brought an end to the last of the fascist dictatorships that had dominated Europe during the 1930s. He had been the right-wing victor in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, an ally of the Nazis, and the notorious Caudillo de Espana (as is still inscribed above his tomb at the Valle de los Caidos near Madrid). The United States liked him because he was, of course, anti-Communist.

Franco had leased us for indefinite use Torrejon Air Base near Madrid, Zaragoza Air Base with its 13,000-foot runways for B-52s, Moron Air Base near Seville, and Rota Naval Base just west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The democratic government that succeeded him set out at once to renegotiate all these agreements. In the ensuing discussions, we ultimately retained some but not all of these sites, primarily because Spain was also seeking belated integration into Europe, including membership in NATO, and this would have been threatened had they simply thrown the Americans out wholesale. But ever since the death of Franco, the Spanish bases have been hostage to Madrid’s latent anti-Americanism because of the long-term support we once gave the dictator. Only Moron and Rota are still open at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In the case of Spain there is some plausibility to the argument that the United States had to deal with the leader it found there, even if he happened to be a fascist. But the story was different in Greece. We helped bring the militarists to power there, and the legacy of our complicity still poisons Greek attitudes toward the United States. There is probably no democratic public anywhere on earth with more deeply entrenched anti-American views than the Greeks.²³ The roots of these attitudes go back to the birth of the Cold War itself, to the Greek civil war of 1946-49 and the U.S. decision embodied in the Truman Doctrine to intervene on the neofascist side because the wartime Greek partisan forces had been Communist-dominated. In 1949, the neofascists won and created a brutal right-wing government protected by the Greek secret police, composed of officers trained in the United States by the wartime Office of Strategic Services and its successor, the CIA.

During the 1950s, George Papandreou, the future prime minister, was fond of saying that Greece was an American puppet state and its officials “exercised almost dictatorial control,... requiring the signature of the chief of the U.S. Economic Mission to appear alongside that of the Greek Minister of Coordination on any important documents.”²⁴ Under these conditions, we faced no difficulties in building naval bases and airfields at Souda Bay and Iraklion on the island of Crete, Hellenikon Air Base near Athens, and Nea Makri Communications Station at Marathon Bay, northeast of Athens.

In February 1964, George Papandreou was elected prime minister by a huge majority. He tried to remain on friendly terms with the Americans, but President Lyndon Johnson’s White House was pressuring him to sacrifice Greek interests on the disputed island of Cyprus in favor of Turkey, where the United States was also building military bases. Both Greece and Turkey had been members of NATO since 1952, but by the mid-1960s the United States seemed more interested in cultivating Turkey. When the Greek ambassador told President Johnson that his proposed solution to the Cyprus dispute was unacceptable to the Greek parliament, Johnson reportedly responded, “Fuck your parliament and your constitution. We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament, and constitutions, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last very long.”²⁵ And they did not.

The CIA, under its Athens station chief, John Maury, immediately began plotting with Greek military officers they had trained and cultivated for over twenty years. In order to create a sense of crisis, the Greek intelligence service, the KYP, carried out an extensive program of terrorist attacks and bombings that it blamed on the left. Constantin Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film, Z, accurately depicts those days. On April 21, 1967, just before the beginning of an election campaign that would have returned Papandreou as prime minister, the military acted. Claiming they were protecting the country from a Communist coup, a five-man junta, four of whom had close connections with either the CIA or the U.S. military in Greece, established one of the most repressive regimes sponsored by either side during the Cold War.

The “Greek colonels,” as they came to be known, opened up the country to American missile launch sites and espionage bases, and they donated some $549,000 to the 1968 Nixon-Agnew election campaign.²⁶ The U.S. Senate suspected that this was CIA money coming home from Greece to influence domestic politics, but Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser, urgently requested that any congressional investigation be canceled. Since 1995, the State Department has had ready for publication a book of documents concerning U.S.-Greek relations for the years 1964-68 in its legally mandated historical series Foreign Relations of the United States, but the CIA has prevented its release.²⁷

The leader of the junta, Colonel George Papadopoulos, was an avowed fascist and admirer of Adolf Hitler. He had been trained in the United States during World War II and had been on the CIA payroll for fifteen years preceding the coup. His regime was noted for its brutality. During the colonel’s first month in power some 8,000 professionals, students, and others disliked by the junta were seized and tortured. Many were executed. In 1969, the eighteen member countries of the European Commission on Human Rights threatened to expel Greece—it walked out before the commission could act—but even this had no effect on American policies.

On July 15, 1974, after seven years of misrule, the Greek junta, in league with militarist colleagues on the island of Cyprus, attempted a coup d’etat against Cypriot president Makarios, who was simultaneously primate and archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church and a person who had promoted peaceful coexistence between the Greek and Turkish communities on the island. On July 20, Turkey responded by invading the island and dividing it into a Turkish-dominated north and a Greek-dominated south. The only country ever to recognize the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus is Turkey. In Athens, largely because the Turkish assault was an embarrassing defeat for Greece, the junta collapsed.²⁸ It was replaced by a civilian government under a conservative politician, Constantine Karamanlis, which withdrew Greek troops from NATO’s military wing but continued to cooperate diplomatically with the United States—until the elections of 1981.

Andreas Papandreou, the son of George Papandreou, had been in exile in Sweden and Canada during the reign of the colonel. In August 1974, after the fall of the junta, he returned to Athens and created a new political party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). Reflecting the events of the previous decade as well as the Communist victory in Vietnam, its platform was explicitly anti-American: get the bases out of Greece and get Greece out of NATO. In 1981, PASOK won a landslide victory and Andreas Papandreou became prime minister. The party repeated this success in the elections of June 1985. Papandreou never fully delivered on all his promises, but when it came to the bases, he did: there are only two small detachments of U.S. Air Force and Navy technical personnel left in Greece, both on Greek military bases.

THE PHILIPPINE BASES

The Spanish-American War created the Philippine bases, and the outcome of the Vietnam War started a process that in 1992 brought them to an end. America’s almost century-long record in the Philippines is one of colonialism, neocolonialism, and sponsorship of a hated dictator, which ultimately led to a successful anti-American