In the 1960s, humanitarian aid to Laos took the form of food deliveries. But those food deliveries hid the delivery of weapons.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-us-has-a-long-history-of-weaponizing-aid-to-other-countries/

By  Ted Snider,

Truthout

The spread of the coronavirus will not save Iran from sanctions, the U.S. cried. “Our policy of maximum pressure on the regime continues,” U.S. Special Representative for Iranian Affairs Brian Hook said, as the State Department added more sanctions on Iran, one of the countries worst hit by the pandemic.

Iran had pleaded for an easing of sanctions, since U.S. sanctions are “severely hampering” Iran’s fight against the coronavirus. Intensifying the sanctions rather than easing them to allow Iran to fight the virus is a form of “medical terrorism,” according to Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif. Medical terrorism that locks a country under pandemic out from humanitarian aid is one way of using humanitarian aid as a weapon of war or regime change.

Like Iran, Venezuela is on its back, struggling through the COVID-19 pandemic with the grip of U.S. sanctions on its throat. As it gasps for breath, the U.S. will only release Venezuela’s throat if the democratically elected president, Nicolás Maduro, surrenders to regime change demands and abandons his office, completing a decades-long attempt at a coup that dates all the way back to Hugo Chávez in 2002. The U.S. is taking advantage of mass Venezuelan deaths during a pandemic to force Maduro and the party of Chávez out of office. Though disguised as a compromise transition, it is neither a compromise nor a transition, as Maduro would be forced from office and not allowed to run again. Meanwhile, the lives of Venezuelans held hostage, while the pretender, Juan Guaidó, would be allowed to compete in the next election. Humanitarian aid as blackmail to carry out a coup is another way of using humanitarian aid as a weapon.

Both of these strategies were overt actions in which human lives were leveraged and humanitarian aid was withheld to accomplish foreign policy goals. But there is a covert U.S. strategy in which humanitarian aid is weaponized not by withholding it, but by providing it. In this act of betrayal of trust, humanitarian aid is sent into a suffering country as a Trojan Horse carrying weapons or other acts of war in its belly. This strategy makes an early appearance in the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan

The Marshall Plan was sold to the public as a humanitarian plan to rebuild Europe after World War II to insulate it against communism. But, while aid money was flowing into Europe, some of it was being diverted for covert purposes. CIA expert John Prados reveals in his book Safe for Democracy that the CIA used that humanitarian aid vehicle as a way of hiding the source of money being smuggled into Europe for propaganda and political actions.

According to Joel Whitney, in his book, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, those propaganda actions included using “confidential funds” from the Marshall Plan to finance magazines, like Der Monat, which were injected into nearly every foreign nation to advance the U.S.’s clandestine Cold War cultural and foreign policy propaganda war.

From 1951 to the closing of the Marshall Plan in 1952, under the direction of Frank Wisner, the head of CIA covert operations, Marshall Plan funds were diverted for covert programs. Prados says that several organizations have been used, or set up, by the CIA to funnel funds and that the CIA’s role is often concealed by funneling money through legitimate foundations.

But the covert U.S. strategy extends beyond money; humanitarian aid was used to camouflage the delivery of weapons.

Laos: Hard Rice

Originally approved by Eisenhower in the 1960s, as well as attacking North Vietnam, the CIA’s clandestine guerilla forces in Laos targeted the Laotian Pathet Lao, whom the State Department considered communists. The U.S. believed Laos was part of the key to stopping the domino spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. The covert force would play a major role in keeping Laos from falling to the communists. As the wars in Vietnam and Laos merged into one, the CIA force would also act to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route to Vietnam.

But the Pathet Lao were not so simply defeated, and as the ground war began to fail, the U.S. took to the air, and the secret American bombing campaign — which would make Laos one of the most bombed countries in history — began.

In the 1960s, humanitarian aid to Laos took the form of food deliveries. But those food deliveries hid the delivery of weapons. In The Ghosts of Langley, John Prados describes the way weapons were flown into the country on humanitarian aid planes flown by Air America. Air America pilots developed a cynical code word to distinguish legal food cargo from illegal weapons cargo: “soft rice” meant food and “hard rice” meant arms. The humanitarian delivery of food was cynically used as a Trojan Horse for getting weapons into Laos.

Two decades later, in 1986, an operation that looked a lot like the “hard rice” operation in Laos was unfolding in the skies over Nicaragua.

Nicaragua: Mixed Cargoes

Like Pegasus, the Trojan Horse had developed wings. The Reagan administration used planes full of humanitarian aid to hide the weapons that were mixed in in the belly of the plane. The current U.S. special envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, was part of a special group managed by then-White House aide Oliver North that delivered the decisions on the Trojan Horse weapons operation. At the time, Abrams was assistant secretary of state. On one known occasion, the special program’s decision was to fly humanitarian aid into Honduras. From Honduras, the plane would then fly to El Salvador, where it picked up seven tons of weapons that were airdropped into Nicaragua. At least twice, the U.S. flew such “mixed cargoes” on planes that were carrying weapons mixed in with the cargo of humanitarian aid. Read the rest of this entry »