THE MULTINATIONALS GET SMARTER ABOUT POLITICAL RISKS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00901R000500150058-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 1, 2000
• Sequence Number: 58
• Publication Date: March 24, 1980
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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rll7'I l1 E ;~''P kED
ON PAGE __ SS a - - .
FOR 1T E
21. ?LARCH 1980
STATINTL
Over the past decade, American corpo-
rations have been discovering one suppos-
edly rich foreign market after another
-only to have their hopes clashed or
diminished by unexpected political chang-
es or upheavals. But it remained for the rev-
olution in Iran, which exposed U.S.
companies to potential losses totaling $1
billion, to drive home the lesson in global
survival. Now even the most seasoned
multinationals are looking for. better
means to assess-and manage-their po-
litical risks. As Stephen Blank, a political
scientist with the Conference Board (the
leading nonprofit research group for busi-
ness), says: "Many chief executives got
clobbered by winging into Iran withoutact-
equately understanding the country, and
they've gone into China the same way.
Now a. lot of thorn want to irnprove their
grasp of the world."
Like the U.S. government, the nation's
businessmen confront greater turbulence
abroad and wield less power than in the
past. The once-favored stratagems to sh ape
or even topple a foreign regime-in the
brash tradition of United Fruit in Central
America-are no longer acceptable corpo-
rate practices. In lands where payoffs to
gain leverage or win contracts are custom-
ary, Americans are bound-or at least in-
hibited-by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act. As one executive remarks,
"The time has passed when we could
buy or rent governments."
 STATINTL
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. Jt T I CIE A 'i c. J i)
O,N PA;_ .
By Nat Hentoff
The citizens of Chile clearly were too
irresponsible to be left free. Why, Salvador
Allende was about to come to power as the
result of a democratic election. God knows
the CIA had tried -terribly hard to save
these people from themselves. The Agency
had secretly funded-.with your tax dollars
-huge propaganda campaigns in Chilean
newspapers. It had paid workers to stay
out on strike to further "destabilize" the
situation, and it had spread bountiful
anti-Allende bribes around. Nonetheless,
the natives had insisted on making up
their own minds.
And so, on September 15, 1970, CIA
Director Richard Helms attended a me e -
ing with -President Richard Nixon, At
torney General John Mitchell, and Na-
tional Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.
The sole item on the agenda was "Track
II"-the mounting of a military coup in
Chile. (Not Afghanistan. Chile.) When he
left, Helms quickly wrote down . the es
sence of the Star Chamber resolution:
I in 10 chances perhaps, but save,
Chile!
worth spending
not concerned risks involved
no involvement of embassy
$10,000,000. available, more if
necessary,
full-time job--best men we have
game plan
- `:make the economy scream
48 hours for plan of action.
It didn't work then `Three years later,
it did. Largely because of the CIA, Ameri-
can :.banks, and multinational corpo-
rations, Allende was killed, and the child-
ishly. free-thinking, citizens of Chile were
placed under the protectorate of, a dic-
tatorship.. Many had tobe murdered _be-.
THE VILLAGE VOICE
17 March 1980
cause of their incurable. addiction to liber--
ty, but what the hell, Chile had been:
saved. Fa
This Helms document-both the hand
written original and a typewritten copy-
can be found in the recently ' published'
DOCUILILNTS:A shocking collection of`
memoranda, letters, and telexes from the
secret- files of the American intelligence'
community- Christy Macy._ and Susan
Kaplan assembled and . annotated the
documents, and the publisher of this in
-baluable outsize paperback is Penguin.
The book could not have been pub-
lished without the Freedom of Information
"Act which, as Macy and Kaplan say, "is
responsible for much of what we now known
about the clandestine world of the na-
tional security apparatus."
Also in Documents is a draft of the
anonymous (actually, FBI) letter, to
Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964 urging
that he commit suicide to forfend the,
release of tapes made from bugs planted
by the FBI. in his hotel rooms: "There is
but one way out-for,you. You better take
it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent
self is bared to the nation." '
That's an. FBI document,, but the CIA
also spied on King. Not only overseas, but
here. As George Lardner, Jr., has pointed
out in the Washington Post, not a trace of
the CIA's surveillance of.King appeared
"in the extensive congressional or ex-
ecutive branch investigations of the agen-
cy conducted in recent years." But, when
Harold Weisberg, a writer from Frederick,
Maryland, filed a Freedom of Information
Act lawsuit to get the CIA documents on
King, they finally made their way-much'
to the discomfiture of the, Agency-into
the light. There is a long list of crucially instruc
CIA Direetor"Stansfield Turned,:, .
Only the Shadow knows.
tive books that could not have beet writ-
ten without the FOIA. One is William
Shawcross's Sideshow. Another is John
Marks's The Search for the Manchurian
Candidate': The CIA and Mind Control,
just reissued in a McGraw-Hill paperback.
In. 1975, Marks noticed two sentences- ini
the Rockefeller Commission report on the
CIA. They had to do with a "CIA pkogram
to study possible means -for con rolling.
human behavior" and said that some of
the studies had "explored the effects of
radiation, electric-shock, psychology, psy-
chiatry, sociology, and harassmet)t sub-:
i.
stances."
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 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP91-00901 R00050015
y~c THE WASHINGTON MONTHLY
ON PAG> March 1980
STATINTL
The problem of choosing wars wisely
by Thomas N. Bethell
Cold wars have a way of making people
very nervous. "While we are sleeping,"
Dean Rusk once wrote, "two thirds of the
world is plotting to do us in." For nearly 30
years-from the end of the second global
war in 1945 until the first murmurings of
detente in the early 1970s-Rusk and the
other political householders of Washing-
ton slept fitfully, hearing burglars when-
ever the wind shifted, padding downstairs
at all hours to check the locks, going out on
the porch and peering anxiously into the
darkness, listening for wolves and jumping
when the cat rubbed up against their legs.
Dean Rusk's counterparts on the other
side of the world slept the same way,
afflicted with the same fears. When the
chill night slipped silently across the
steppes, it was assumed in Moscow that the
fading light and the drifting snow were
somehow engineered in Washington.
Paranoia is the natural bedfellow of in-
somnia; together they became the basis for
formulating foreign policy on both sides of
the global community.
In such a place the streetsare not safe.
You never know when someone in a
flapping bathrobe might come lunging off
a porch, mistaking you for a bear or a bird
of prey and filling you with nuclear buck-
shot. The cold war was a hard time for
innocent bystanders living in a community
Thomas N. I3ethell is an editor of The
Washington Monthly.
where, in due course, nobody could get a
good night's rest-a place where irritable
neighbors snarled at each other's children
and heaved bricks through each other's
windows. Many people would have moved
out if they could have, but there was
nowhere to go; the zoning laws were very
strict.
Nobody could figure out a way to make
the principal householders resolve their
differences. In the absence of communica-
tion, the adversaries took extraordinary
precautions to protect themselves from the
real and imagined terrors of the night. At
vast expense, they maintained forces
equipped with the latest tanks, planes,
bombs, missiles and ships. They also
surrounded their porches with plain-
clothesmen who went abroad under cover
of darkness to do unmentionable deeds.
These people were called KGB on one side
and CIA on the other.
The initials stood for different words
and, in theory, for different philosophies,
but sometimes the distinctions tended to
blur. Richard Helms was one of the
plainclothesmen on our side, and Thomas
Powers has written a remarkable book
about Helms and the C1A* which goes a
long way toward clarifying the blur.
Flashes of insight flicker through the book,
*The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard
Helms and The CIA. Thomas Powers. Knopf
($12.95).
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