Fifty-one years ago to the date, June 18, 1954, the CIA secretly toppled Guatemala’s socialist government, drove its handpicked new president over from Honduras in an old station wagon, and received President Eisenhower’s congratulations on “averting a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere.”
Sounds familiar?
Hollywood’s not yet filmed the story.
In 1959, when Cuba’s Fidel Castro seized power, the CIA secretly created a plan to overthrow him.
Sounds familiar?
Hollywood’s not yet filmed the story.
In 2003, when neocons decided to take over Iraq from Saddam Hussein, it’s not yet clear exactly what the CIA did, apart from supposedly giving a lot of bad advice for which its Director George Tenet resigned.
Hollywood’s not yet filmed the story.
That’s what makes Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi so intriguing.
Osama Bin Laden, portrayed as a deranged, suicide-abetting ascetic, is nowhere near so devilish and clever a fiend as Zarqawi has turned out to be. Zarqawi’s the one-legged man who’s rarely seen. He makes grandiose announcements from anonymous websites. Coalition forces claim they’ve found his laptop computers detailing truly fiendish terrorist plans. They raid his hide-outs but Zarqawi’s always one step ahead.
A few photographs show his purported features clearly, and yet in his beheading videos, Zarqawi is completely masked in a Ninja-black shroud. And like a Ninja, Zarqawi is supposedly a master poisoner, kidnapper and assassin. One could hardly invent a better archetype enemy to justify brutal onslaughts against those persons and places supposedly defiantly harboring him.
The CIA is good at inventing archetypes. And like Hollywood, the CIA knows the best scripts start with a story that’s at least half true. This the CIA did when it prepared to invade Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, which Walt W. Rostow called “the most screwed up operation there ever has been.” America wanted to topple Castro but make the world believe the action was independently conceived and executed by disgruntled Cuban patriots. An essential element of this invented scenario was for the military to rise up against Castro.
Since the CIA could never get any real Cuban military soldiers to do this, they persuaded a Florida exile pilot, Mario Zuniga, to fly to Miami posing as a defecting pilot from Castro’s air force. Two other US-based exile pilots pretending to be defecting Castro-Cuban pilots struck Castro’s three military bases, bombing Castro’s air force so that Cubans couldn’t defend themselves by air from the coming US-sponsored invasion. CIA and other US officials were completely convinced that “the whole Cuban nation was ready to rise up and throw Castro out, and all they needed was someone to come and help them,” historian Peter Wyden quotes officials then as saying.
“As soon as ‘the first shot was fired,’ the populace of several provinces would arise, political prisoners...would be released and join the invading Brigade,” and “Castro’s own troops would defect and ‘jump aboard.’”
The CIA coached Zuniga to say: He and two fellow pilots, all disenchanted with Castro, had plotted their escape for months; he’d been flying a routine patrol when he decided to escape and impulsively turned back only to make two strafing runs at his airfield; he was then hit by small-arms fire (the CIA helpfully fired bullets through a removed engine cover and put it back on to make the plane, carrying fake Cuban markings, look targeted), and had headed for Miami when he ran out of gas.
Zuniga dutifully took off from Nicaragua and landed in Miami, reciting his story to reporters as US Immigration and Naturalization Service whisked him away “for interrogation.”
Castro disparaged Zuniga’s “defection” claims: “The whole world knows that attack was made with Yankee planes piloted by Yankee mercenaries paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. “Even Hollywood,” Castro raged, “would not try to film such a story!”
Zuniga, Zarqawi....There was a Zarqawi Jordanians remember as a brutish, left-handed illiterate drunken lout who had two working legs. There’s now a Zarqawi the US describes as the one-legged criminal mastermind behind virtually every bad act in Iraq, who writes lucid, lengthy missives about his plans with Al-Qaeda and others, who dispenses money, weapons, and poisons across the Middle East, and who was “the brains” behind the Madrid train attacks. Videos show a veiled Zarqawi sawing off hostages’ heads with his right hand. He’s reportedly injured, near death, or just fine, thank you.
Who’s Zarqawi? How much is real? How much invented? We don’t really know. And Hollywood has not yet filmed the story.
—Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.
