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The Colonels’ Coup and the American Embassy – A Book Review Essay - June 2011 Update Note

By Patricia H. Kushlis

(A shorter version of this review essay appeared in the FS Journal's June 2011 issue.)

On April 21, 1967, a tightly knit group of shadowy Greek colonels staged a coup d’état that deposed the Greek government and set the course of democracy in Greece back seven years.    In his memoir about that watershed event and all that surrounded it, Robert Keeley, then a middle grade political officer in the US Embassy in Athens, describes the colonels’ coup and its effects from the vantage point of an Embassy reporting officer trying to keep up with a rapidly unfolding and confusing situation, all the while offering his own analyses and prescriptions for US policy – none of which, he tells us, were followed. 

Despite or perhaps because of Keeley’s unreceptive audience, this is a unique and important book in US-Greek relations. It is also the only one written about that turbulent period by a knowledgeable Embassy insider.  The US has often been accused of complicity in bringing about that coup, or at least knowing beforehand that it would happen.  Keeley persuasively debunks these accusations.  

Adding credence to Keeley's debunking of a popular but erroneous myth

To add credence to Keeley’s debunking, I think it important to mention that the Deputy Chief of Station at the US Embassy at the time of the 1967 coup had described to me several years later what he had seen that fateful day inside those Embassy walls in an interview for my dissertation research on Greek politics.  What the CIA Deputy Chief told me then and Keeley’s observations in The Colonels Coup about the Embassy’s lack of knowledge about the colonels and their coup agree.  

The truth is the US Embassy did know about a potential generals’ plot to have taken place later in the month, but the actions of these unknown undercover midlevel army officers who had spent their lives working in the shadows for Greek military intelligence– no.  According to Keeley, the CIA had had an informant among the group that staged the coup, but the information had run dry by February 1967.   One can only guess why:  perhaps as Keeley conjectures because the plotters wanted to be sure the secret was safe within their small inner circle of officers who eventually pulled it off.

Keeley also makes another excellent and troubling point that I don’t remember seeing previously in print when he writes that almost all embassy staff had little or no personal contact with the Greek centrists – either George and Andreas Papandreou, the father and son leaders of the country’s major political opposition or other leaders of their party in the years leading up to the coup.  I take Keeley’s word for it.  I agree with him that if so, this was indeed a serious omission that should never have happened. It was clear well before the fact - after all - that Greece’s center/center-left party would win the 1967 elections if they had been held as scheduled.   

Contacts with the opposition

Keeley argues that the CIA should have been in contact with these people – and was caught with its pants down. He said that the Embassy had become so vested in the ruling political right over the years that the US had failed to grasp the need to broaden its contacts so as to be able to predict, if nothing more, let alone adapt to the coming political sea change.  

Gaddafi’s Mercenaries - Useless, dangerous or crucial?

 By Patricia H. Kushlis

The late veteran Middle East correspondent John K. Cooley began the second edition of his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism with Machiavelli’s admonition to rulers about the inadvisability of relying on mercenaries to fight their battles for them.   Here are the first two sentences from the longer quote:  “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous . . . for mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy. . .”

If Cooley were alive today (he died in 2008), I wonder what he would have said about the Arab revolts raging in the Middle East and how he would have assessed  Gaddafi’s apparent heavy reliance upon sub-Saharan African and other mercenaries to suppress his own people.

Cooley’s book Libyan Sandstorm (1983) is a classic – a review by Michael Yapp published in The London Times was republished in February – just as the latest revolt in Libyan began. 

I don’t profess to be a North African or a Libyan expert – but I know Europe and the eastern Mediterranean rather well. I also knew John Cooley and had the utmost respect for his painstakingly well researched reports and analysis based upon that research.

I also have that sinking feeling that too many of today's instant North Africa “experts” interviewed in the media thus far know even less about Libya than I do.  That's scary. Moreover, the reverence being paid – or at least lip-service given – to the supposed invincibility of Gaddafi’s hired gun slingers makes me wonder just how familiar many of today's pundits are with Machiavelli’s centuries old warning.     Or maybe they are but have discounted its relevance because Gaddafi’s ties to African mercenaries have been long and deep and he had previously used them to squash a revolt in 1996.    

Gaddafi's sub-Saharan mercenary army

Various reports tell us that Gaddafi’s mercenary troops primarily come from Chad. Mali, Niger, Zimbabwe, Liberia and likely Sudan are also on the list.  Reports also tell us that he pays each mercenary between 300 and 2,000 US dollars per day to do his bidding.  (Please note:  foreign guest workers in Libya and Gaddafi's mercenary troops are not the same.)

In an excellent Christian Science Monitor blog post on February 28, Alex Thurston argues that some of Gaddafi’s mercenaries are more loyal and better trained than others and those that comprise his elite mercenary troops are linked to him through long-standing financial and political ties. 

According to Thurston, “Qaddafi’s sustained and deep involvement in African politics, especially the affairs of neighboring countries like Sudan, Chad, and Niger, have included “funding and training many fighting groups and rebel organizations in West Africa and other places.”

Thurston quotes Peter Bouckaert [of Human Rights Watch] who described the fighters from Chad as men “who were not mercenaries specifically recruited to defend Gadhafi but members of (a Chadian) rebel movement Gadhafi has been funding and training for many years who would lose that support if he fell.” 

Harder "to get your own people to shoot your own people"

Thurston quotes Reed Brody also from Human Rights Watch, who argues - in opposition to Machiavelli - that Gaddafi’s mercenaries are important because “it’s hard to get your own people to shoot your own people” whereas, by implication, soldiers from somewhere else organized into well trained units and paid well for their efforts have no qualms about undertaking such odious assignments on behalf of their foreign paymaster.

Some of Gaddafi’s other mercenaries, however, are not as loyal or as well trained as the rebel group from Chad.  Their ranks include men brought to Libya under false pretenses in an apparent last minute recruitment drive with no training or experience as fighters. Upon arrival they were blackmailed into joining Gaddafi loyalists and sent to the provinces to fight against the Libyan rebels. In a March 26 Christian Science Monitor article based on interviews in rebel-held Benghazi, reporter Dan Murphy observed that:

“Though there’s been much discussion of Qaddafi’s use of “foreign mercenaries” in the conflict, a lot of the fighters he’s using appear to be poor and unemployed migrants who found themselves in Libya when the uprising began.”

One described himself to Murphy as a doorman with no prior weapons experience. 

Now maybe mercenaries like the former doorman who the Libyan rebel forces captured and made available to foreign journalists are simply a few untrained, unfortunates who should never have been recruited for battle in the first place and landed unwittingly at the wrong place at the wrong time while the crack Chadian mercenary troops are kept elsewhere – perhaps closer to Tripoli - there to defend the Gaddafi family perhaps even from its heretofore loyalist supporters if and when that time comes.

 But this makes me wonder  how significant Gaddafi’s sub-Saharan mercenary army will prove to be if and when he needs to defend himself and his praetorian guard - perhaps even or especially from those from within the inner circle who have seen the desert sun, counted the rays and decided the time has come to abandon the embattled Gaddafi ship of state.

 

 

American Art At Home and Abroad - A Modest Proposal

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The New York Times March 16 Arts Section featured the remarkable story of the White House’s art collection and how it has changed under the Obamas.  The collection is, according to reporter Randy Kennedy, not just a collection but also a museum under federal legislation that dates back to 1961.

Say It Isn't So

Well and good, but then why are the photo rights owned by the nonprofit White House Historical Association which forbids Internet distribution. Website use by other nonprofits - apparently for single digital image - is a whopping $50 and for commercial enterprises $75.  Or maybe I have it wrong - but if I’m right this looks akin to highway robbery.    Who bought, paid for or donated those paintings anyway and what gives the White House Historical Association the right to play gatekeeper and charge such exorbitant fees. 

Admission to the museum for the public is free – this is, after all, not a private residence - but the wait time to enter takes as long as six months – so don’t expect to knock on the White House door some morning and be instantly ushered in to see these little seen works of American art by Thomas Hart Benton, Ed Ruscha and Georgia O’Keeffe among the many others mentioned in the Times story.  Admittance takes patience and perseverance.  Moreover, you can pretty much kiss off viewing the collection on line.  The Association seems to be more into selling Christmas ornaments and turning a profit than anything else.

Yet it wasn’t long ago that Ruscha would not have appeared in the White House Museum and who knows what would have happened to the O’Keeffe.  In fact, Kennedy tells us that until the Obama administration made needed changes, the collection did not even include abstract expressionists. Even today it does not contain purely abstract work – although an O’Keeffe donated in 1998 “plays with it.”

In comments on a recent post of mine, John Brown argued that the wonderful collection of American art assembled by US Ambassador and Mrs. Susman in their London residence needs much greater public access - as a matter of course.    John and I have been going back and forth on this question since then. Partially as a result of the dialog I have come to the following conclusions:

• US Ambassadors and former American Ambassadors to London should spearhead a public/private sector fund-raising initiative to establish and maintain a permanent museum of American art in a historical home with American connections along the lines of the Lauder Museum in New York or the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC before the building was expanded and modernized.  This “home” museum for American art needs to be in the city’s center – not the leafy green suburbs on some commuter rail stop. I begin with London because it seems to me – despite the nearly century long “special relationship” –the US continues to be treated by British officialdom as the red haired stepchild in comparison with the more favored treatment of the more compliant ex-colonies that continue to pay obeisance to the crown, even though America’s departure from the Empire occurred more than two hundred years ago and Americans themselves have been fascinated with the antics of the royals ever since.

Winning but Not Winning in Pakistan and Elsewhere

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Raymond Davis is safely out of Pakistan, but at what cost?  If ever there was a lose-lose proposition, this was it.   

Here’s the scenario: U.S. citizen and sorta quasi pseudo diplomat cum CIA contractor Raymond Davis kills two guys on a motorcycle in Lahore, Pakistan.  He claims they’re robbers and he shot in self-defense.  Yet the cops in Lahore say the men were shot in the back, which means they were fleeing not attacking.  So what does Davis do next?  He jumps out of the car to photograph the bodies.  More abnormal behavior. Next Davis himself attempts to flee, which can be interpreted as sensible or sinister, sensible considering that most Americans would flinch from being the target of an angry crowd in today’s Pakistan, sinister if the killing was actually an assassination as claimed in an al Jazeera report.  Al Jaezeera also happens to have run the best summary of the Davis affair that I have read so far. 

Sorry New York Times.  Not only did you truly pathetically cover up for the Obama administration when the truth was already out, you’ve also heeded the government’s request not to speculate.  Two strikes against you. 

So here’s the al Jazeera version (and why, please tell me, can’t I get al Jazeera on my TV set along with Faux—er Fox News—dare we call it censorship?): Davis, tasked by the U.S. with uncovering ISI connections to Lashkar-e-Taiba, was being tailed by ISI agents who (my speculation now) might very well have been interested not only in knowing what he was doing but in silencing him.  Fortunately for the Americans, unfortunately for the Pakistanis, Davis shot first. (Since when do diplomats carry guns?)  Thereafter, popular clamor nothwithanding, ISI would have had zero interest in a murder trial, which would have revealed its unsavory role in what should have been a quick and simple drive by shooting.  The U.S., of course, wanted Davis whisked instantly out of the country. Why?  Same argument. The less said the better.  But two murders plus an accidental homicide stoked a fury running the gamut from Islamists to secular liberals, so the Pakistani government had to do something to save face.  It had to appear to stand up to the Americans.  As luck and irony would have it, traditional and Islamic law provided the out: blood money.  Payment for pardon. Murder wiped away by cold cash.

So the charade runs its course.  Davis is arrested, jailed, brought to court—and released.  Honor is satisfied.  The U.S. is happy. The Islamists can’t complain.  The bereaved are millionaires.  In dollars, not rupees.  What’s more they’re whisked out of sight (maybe on the same plane as Davis!) before they can confirm rumors that they were pressured (threatened?) into taking the money.  They got visas to the U.S., too, if some reports are to be believed, which sets in motion another chain of delicious ironies. 

Still Blaming the Victim: Why International Women’s Day is Still Relevant

Patricia Lee Sharpe

While I was in India last month, I was asked by some female tourists if I thought all the bumping and brushing they were encountering on the sidewalks of Kolkata was a creepy sort of molestation.  I said I didn’t think so.  The sidewalks are crowded, people are in a hurry and everybody shoves everybody else.  They’d have known if some guy were really intent on getting fresh.

However, there is a form of molestation that young girls encounter all too often in India, especially in Delhi.  It’s called Eve-teasing and it can be pretty scary when it happens to you as it did to me once.  I was waiting for a bus when a bunch of college boys surrounded me and started shoving me back and forth from one to the other.  I was totally helpless and so busy trying not to fall I couldn’t scream.  After a few minutes they sauntered away, laughing. 

Sometimes Eve-teasing is confined to the sorts of catcalls that all American women have had to deal with at home, but rape happens in India, just as it does everywhere else in the world.  

Two recent rape targets are described below.  The first victim lives in Cleveland, Texas.  The second lives in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.  The first statement was elicited from neighbors.  The second statement came from a government official.  What do the descriptions have in common?

“...she dressed much older than her age [eleven years old], wearing make up and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.”  

She was a “divorcee” and “she used to return [home] around 11 to 11:30 every night.” 

Imagine! Two vastly different cultures on opposite sides of the world.   A child in America, a young woman in India, and each victim is being blamed for attracting the attentions of a lecherous gang of males.  Each, in effect, was “asking for it.” 

Showcasing American Art and Culture Across the Atlantic Sea - Well, Maybe

By Patricia H Kushlis

The March 2 Arts Section of The New York Times showcased the contemporary American art collection of the US Ambassador to the UK extolling its quality and importance to the London  arts scene. 

On the one hand, the collection sounds terrific; on the other hand, I have my doubts about its public accessibility and hence impact beyond the select few.  The residence collection is a combination of works from the private collection of Chicagoans Ambassador Louis B and Marjorie Susman and those from galleries, museums and other collections  through the State Department’s Art in Embassies Program which helps US Ambassadors decorate their official residences with borrowed works from  important American art collections.

Decorating Ambassadors' residences and displaying art for the public are not the same.

That’s well and good, but I have never thought the decoration of Ambassadors residences equated to public access to the works of art hung on their residence walls.  This just doesn’t compute.  True, Ambassadors need to hold receptions for guests of particular importance to the US government –foreigners, visiting American officials, and others and they certainly need appropriate places - at taxpayer expense - to do so.

When Henry Catto was Ambassador to London at the end of the Cold War, for instance, he entertained journalists at the residence to excellent avail.  I attended - and helped organize - any number of cultural functions at US Ambassadorial residences when I was in the Foreign Service.  But never have I seen  US embassy residences open to the public. And they weren’t before 9/11 either. 

So if anyone thinks he or she can just walk up to Winfield House, the residence of the American Ambassador to the UK's residence in London, and be let in for a tour of the art objects inside, think again.  It’s not in the cards. This is far from Pemberley where Elizabeth Bennett and her aunt and uncle in Pride and Prejudice petitioned for a tour of the estate - and was immediately invited in by the housekeeper.   

Where is American art permanently on display in a coherent collection?

Having spent nearly a month in London last year, I came away with the impression that American art is not all that available to the public there – nothing like the wonderful French impressionist collection at London’s National Gallery for instance. 

Rather American art shows up in bits and pieces here and there and at special exhibits that come and go in small museums in the near suburbs  as opposed to permanent collections of enough heft in the city center to make lasting impressions on anyone.

I’ve written about this topic before on WhirledView and to my knowledge nothing has changed.  The US government still lacks a robust program to showcase American  arts or artists – at least not enough to make an impact.  It merely plays at it. The problem is worldwide - not just London. The State Department is excellent with press releases, I’m told - to announce  not very significant events  and does not really go about displaying American cultural genius the way it could and should be done.  And lest I forget, did, during the Cold War. 

Doing it right

To do this right would take a steady infusion of money and talented staff –not just one shot sporadic deals.   I'm sure that money could be found - a slim shaving from the Pentagon budget surely would not be missed. 

And not to forget but while Americans may have forgotten about World Expositions, the rest of the world has not – and the State Department needs to start planning for America’s participation in the 2015 world exhibition in Milan. To do it right, however, will require both public and private financial support. 

The World Expo Conundrum - part of the same 

I’ve learned that the Department still thinks it can throw up a pavilion without public support just like this past year’s one in Shanghai.  Fine. I guess if one thinks that an exhibit in a world class exhibit setting can be comprised of videos and company logos  designed by a Canadian architect is the appropriate way to present this country to the world. 

Sadly, I understand the State Department thinks, I’m told, that it can do just that for 2016 – and get away with it. 

Now I realize that art exhibitions and world trade exhibitions are not the same -  but it seems to me that both are important enough in terms of American image building among the public and the elite groups –in a non-propagandist way – to be taken seriously and handled right.

What could and should be done - to be shared with the Susmans

It’s nice that the Susmans want to decorate their walls with fabulous paintings, but wouldn’t it be far more effective if they launched a public-private sector initiative that established a permanent collection of American art in a gallery in London like the Lauder one in New York or the Georgia O’Keeffe in Santa Fe, New Mexico with room for traveling exhibitions and the possibility of holding programs on America on premises?  It wouldn’t have to be huge –just something small, classy, and accessible to a discerning public that stays permanently.

Et Tu, Barack! The Torture Continues

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The handwriting was boldly on the wall during the first months of the Obama administration.  That’s when we learned that there would be no serious hearings—no names named let alone perpetrators punished—in the matter of torture sanctioned and carried out as U.S. government policy during the George H.W. Bush administration.  No raking up the past, the Obama people said.  No confession.  No atonement.

And so the rot continues.  How far we Americans have descended on this ghastly slippery slope called torture.  Now it’s okay to throw an American into prison and to let him languish in solitary for months and months.  No formal charges.  No early prospect of a trial.  All in hopes that he will provide what prosecutors need to make a case against someone else. 

Prolonged solitary confinement is a form of mental and emotional torture.  It surely amounts to cruel and unusual punishment—and this man hasn’t even been convicted.  As the Red Queen chortled, “First punishment, then the trial.”  Actually, it’s more like Kafka, whose books are no laughing matter; you can go mad just reading them. Solitary confinement is a very distressing and unnatural state for a social creature.  Prolonged, it drives sane men mad.  For relief, this particular American prisoner gets a parody of exercise: an hour a day circling an empty room, in chains. 

And now, the screws are getting tighter.  Lest he “harm himself,” this prisoner must sleep naked and present himself, in front of his cell, still buck naked, for early morning inspection.  This is humiliation, which is a form of emotional torture forbidden even to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions..  Like physical torture, humiliation strips a man of dignity and selfhood for the purpose of reducing his will to resist doing or saying whatever his captors want to hear. If punishment amounting to torture is not what government officers intend here, as they insist,  there are better, more merciful ways to deal with suicidal prisoners.    

Ah, the days of hope, when we thought that the election of Barack Obama would restore America’s honor!

Yes, special renditions had occurred during the administration of William Jefferson (!) Clinton, but the institutionalization of torture practiced by Americans as well as foreign sub-contractors seemed to be a speciality of the George H.W. Bush administration under the baleful influence of Vice President Dick “Darth Varder” Cheyney.  What a black time that was.  The President of the United States felt no moral qualms about waterboarding.  Surely, Barack Obama would reverse all this even as he closed Guantanamo down.

Evidence and limits of the “demonstration effect” in the Middle East

By William A. Rugh, Guest Contributor

(Ambassador William A Rugh is a retired career US Foreign Service Officer with extensive Middle East experience.)

Recent developments in the Arab world have shown signs that the so-called “demonstration effect” has been working. That is, Egyptians watching the uprising in Tunisia against President Ben Ali on al Jazeera Television were inspired to copy it and demonstrate against their own long-serving president,  Husni  Mubarak.  Public protests had taken place in Egypt many times before but they had not been sustained and they had not led to regime change.

The demonstration effect does not always work automatically. Indeed, many factors account for the Egyptian revolution, and the reports in al Jazeera of Tunisian street protests alone were not enough. One difference this time was that the Tunisian protestors actually succeeded in ousting Ben Ali. His downfall had an especially powerful impact on Egyptians because of all the long-serving dictators in the region, Ben Ali was considered one of the least likely to fall: Tunisia is economically relatively well off and there have been few outward signs of real discontent.  When he actually fled the country, the Egyptian opposition was inspired to persist. They no longer feared the Egyptian authorities.

The "demonstration effect" and shared common language and culture

One major reason the demonstration effect worked at all in Egypt – and has now been seen in several other countries, notably Yemen, Bahrain and Libya – is that all of these countries share a common language and culture. When the Iranian revolution in 1979 ousted the shah, some people predicted that there would be a demonstration effect in the Arab world, but it did not happen.  Persians and Arabs live in the same region but they do not share the same language or culture.

Unique local conditions also significant

Although the demonstration effect has had an impact elsewhere, it has so far not yet succeeded in regime change other than in Egypt and Tunisia, because local conditions elsewhere are not exactly the same.  On most of the Arabian Peninsula the regimes seem to be shaken but still relatively stable, despite the fact that they are authoritarian systems with limited accountability. There have been some signs of public protest in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia but the governments there are very wealthy and they have handed out money to quiet the complaints and that may work.