New American Empire
When the Second World War finally came to an end in August 1945 with Japan's surrender, the ideas discussed at Bretton Woods began to take shape leading eventually to the creation of the three so-called Bretton Wood institutions that operate to this day: The International Monetary Fund (IMF), General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, which in 1994 transforms into World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank, with its branches, including International Bank For Reconstruction and Development. The IMF formally came into existence on December 27, 1945, when the first 29 countries ratified its Articles of Agreement. The British Parliament reluctantly agreed to ratify Bretton Woods agreements, and did it in return for further financial assistance, thereby accepting the secondary role of the City of London as the financial centre of the world. Consequently, in 1947, the role of the president of the World Bank was assigned to John McCloy, Wall Street banker and lawyer, U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, and a trustee of Rockefeller's Foundation. In his capacity of High Commissioner of Germany, John McCloy granted an amnesty to Nazi-German war criminals and agreed removing a number of Nazi-German industrial plants from the industrial dismantling programme thus helping the Germans to rebuild their eonomy. John McCloy also chaired Chase Manhattan Bank which was the first post-war U.S. bank to open branches in Germany and Japan.392
The purpose of the International Monetary Fund and its subsidiary institutions, in accordance with art 1 of the Articles of Agreement, was “to promote international monetary cooperation”, “to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade”, “to assist in establishment of multilateral system of payments” and “to give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them.”393 The Articles also granted rights of surveillance over the monetary policy of the member states. The true purpose behind these agreements was to turn the IMF into a central bank for the world with the World Bank as its lending arm, as an instrument of projection of the American power and its control over monetary policies of the other nations. The method by which the America's elites' domination was to be established was by transfer of vast amounts of money – disguised as loans – into the hands of corrupted politicians in order to tie up the resources of their countries and force policies that would benefit US investors. Part of this strategy was to encourage decolonisation, as that would open up new markets for the American corporations. By bringing in monetary aid to newly freed countries, the American elites also wanted to ensure that emerging national leaders, who often chose to embrace Marxism or socialism as the antidote to colonialism, did not fall under tutelage of the Soviet Union. This strategy was in line with George Kennan's policy of containment of Soviet influence as well as Dean Acheson's doctrine created under Presidency of Harry Truman, to supply aid to anticommunist regimes throughout the world, no matter how undemocratic.
Concurrently, Allen Dulles, the head of Office of Strategic Services (OSS), pressed for the creation of the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA), which role was to work behind the scenes to support American policy and work in favour of the Wall Street corporations. After the 1946 congressional elections, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, named one of Allen's old OSS comrades, Lawrence Houston, to his staff. Together they drafted a bill that would create a National Security Council (NSC) to advice president on foreign policy, and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) authorized to collect information and act on it. The bill made its way through Congress and on July 26, 1947 was signed into law. The new National Security Act contained a clause authorizing the CIA to perform not only duties spelled out by law but also “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.”394 Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who had been naval attaché in Moscow, was appointed as first CIA director. Four months after Communists took power in Czechoslovakia and two months after the Italian elections, in which CIA supported financially the Christian Democrats against the Communist Party, the NSC empowered the CIA to engage in “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, [and] subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups”. These operations were to be “so planned and executed that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorised persons....”395
In 1950, Allen Dulles resigned from Sullivan and Cromwell and quit his post as president of Council on Foreign Relations, becoming deputy director for operations at the CIA. Congress soon approved the CIA's request for $100 million to be used for arming paramilitary exile groups. With approval of President Truman and later President Eisenhower, CIA used hundreds of former Nazi-Germans war criminals as spies in Europe and America granting them immunity and protection.396 These Nazi informers provided the CIA with information on interrogation methods and intelligence operations. Subsequently Dulles established secret prisons in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Zone where suspected double agents were subjected to what would later be called “enhanced interrogation”. In majority of its operations, CIA would closely co-operate with Mossad, and with British MI6, in places where their interest overlapped. In 1954, Allen Dulles met with new chief of Israeli Intelligence Agency Mossad, Isser Harel, who presented him with a dagger bearing the engraved word of the psalmist: “the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers or sleeps”. Dulles replied: “You can count on me to stay awake with you.” This was a confirmation of a unique partnership between Israeli Mossad and the American CIA.397
Allen Dulles recruited a number leading American journalists from ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps- Howard, Copley News Service and more to help to disseminate propaganda and mould public opinion in favour of agency's work. Dulles found it vital in his work to combine espionage and psychology, an idea he got from his meetings, a decade earlier, with Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, whilst he was stationed in Switzerland. In order to gain support for U.S. foreign interventions, Dulles decided to utilize the knowledge of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who was a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda. During the First World War, Bernays worked for the Committee on Public Information, building support for war, domestically and abroad, and after the war he owned public relations business in New York, advising a number of American Corporations. In his books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), he compiled the relatively new knowledge on crowd psychology and psychoanalysis, also by citing works of other writers such as Gustav Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter and Walter Lippmann, and his own uncle Sigmund Freud. Therein, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct, outlining how skilled practitioners could use this powerful knowledge to control the public in desirable ways. "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind”, wrote Bernays in his book Propaganda, “is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”398
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392 Further reading: Kai Bird, The Chairman. John J. McCloy. The Making of The American Establishment (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992) »
393 See full text of the Articles of Agreement https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/pdf/aa.pdf »
394 Kinzer, The Brothers, p. 88 »
395 Ibid., p. 90 »
396 Eric Lichtblau, The Nazi Next Door (USA, 2014), p. 30 »
397 Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies. The Inside Story of Israel's Legendary Secret Service. The Mossad (London: JR, 2010), p. 41 »
398 See Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928); Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of a Popular Mind (1895), Wilfred Totter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1922); »