Declassified Covert Action Documents From The Cold War

The JFK Assassination Files included some important insights about the CIA and US covert contributions to overthrowing democracies and subverting labor during the Cold War.

I’m sharing this both because it’s straight-up fascinating and because digital records like this are probably going to end up getting disappeared in the not-too-distant future. The JFK files that Trump ordered released didn’t have too much on the JFK assassination itself, but did include a bunch of insights about CIA operations against labor unions and democratically elected political leaders around the world.

One theme that jumps out across these newly declassified documents is that the US national security state literally conspired to weaken labor movements in the Third World—which is also a claim on which our arguments rest in The Rivalry Peril. Cold War liberalism broke organized labor around the world, which in turn broke organized labor in the US when American firms decided to offshore operations to avoid US unions; allowing the subversion of foreign unions weakened US unions. This is one of several reasons my co-author and I believe that confrontation with China—so often analogised as a new Cold War or worse—necessarily comes at the expense of democracy and the working class.¹

Anyway, some fascinating glimpses into history here. And if you’re like me, you have something of a fetish for archival documents, especially when they unearth previously unknown secrets like these ones do.