Peace Corps Volunteer Perkins Confesses Up

Some of you might have read or heard about Confessions of an Economic Hit Man written by John Perkins (Ecuador 1968-71). It was published a year or so ago and is about his work as a "highly paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the U.S. government and corporations." Perkins called his 'coporatocracy.'

Perkins is back with another book: The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and the Truth about Global Corruption.

Now I'm as much as a conspiracy buff as the next guy, and much of what I read about in this book has the possibility of truth. I mean I write fiction I can believe anything. But from my experience with the Peace Corps, and all the alleged tales of Volunteers being secret CIA agents, I still am not buying Perkins' suggested that he was recruited by the National Security Agency, which he says is the "largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization" and told to join the Peace Corps. He said that recently on the Amy Goodman radio program at the start of the G8 meeting in Germany.

After he graduated from Boston University, John was hired by the NSA who ran him through a series of tests, lie detector tests, psychological tests, etc., all in his last year of college. And then he was "encouraged" by the NSA to join the Peace Corps.

Now, as I recall from a phone conversation I had with Perkins shortly after his first book came out, it was his ex-wife's father who encouraged him to join the Peace Corps, where he and his wife were sent to Ecuador to "live with indigenous people in the Amazon and the Andes, people who today and at that time were beginning to fight the oil companies." He goes onto say on the Amy Goodman program that the experience, "was incredibly good training for what I was to do" implying that yes, the NSA was using the Peace Corps to train their future spies.

Next, he says, "while I was still in the Peace Corps, I was brought in and recruited into a US private corporation called Charles T. Main. It was here that he learned how to be an "economic hit man." [I goggled Charles T. Main without finding anything about the corporation.]

You might now ask: "what the hell is an 'economic hit man'?" According to Perkins and economic hit man goes into a third world country that has resources corporations covert, such as oil, and arranges huge loans to that country from the World Bank or some other "sister" organizations. The money never goes to the country. It goes to US corporations who build the infrastructures projects, power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways, etc. All of this benefits the very rich but not the poor. The poor, for example, don't have the skills to get jobs in the industrial parks. The country then, and the people, are left with huge debts and no jobs. Then, Perkins says, "we economic hit men go back to the country and say, "Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can't pay your debt, so you're got to give us a pound of flesh." i.e., the oil.

In his book, Perkins gives examples of what he means from the Congo, Lebanon, Latin America, and he begins always by linking his Peace Corps years with his career of destroying third world countries. He say he is writing these books to make amends for his past behavior. But I don't think he is giving his advances to fund Peace Corps School-to-School projects.

All of us have seen enough corruption in our host countries, as well as here at home, to know that what Perkins is writing has more than a grain of truth in it. However, I don't buy that the NSA had an elaborate scheme of recruitment of college students, sending them into the Peace Corps for "seasoning" and then recruiting then into the agency. There are laws against hiring PCVs into CIA and other agencies. But Perkins, of course, says he was recruited into a "private" firm. He says, "NSA had interviewed me, identified me and then essentially turned me over to this private corporation [Charles T. Main]. That makes the Peace Corps tour sound like a college internship.

"It is a very subtle and very smart system," John told Amy Goodman on her radio program last week. "It's the private industry that goes out and does this work. So if we're caught doing something, if we're caught bribing or corrupting local officials in some country, it's blamed on private industry, not on the US government."

Since when did the CIA worry about or need private industry to do what they have been doing successfully for years in the developing world?

Comments

[Elizabeth Thompson]

Intriguing.

[James Foster]

These agencies may not directly funnel people into the Peace Corps, but they certainly encourage serving as a great stepping stone into the intelligence business - but there is nothing either illegal OR devious about that.