in the fashion of Senator McCarthy whose -ism was then ail the rage in the United States.

Four and a half months after Jagan took office, the government of Winston Churchill flung him out. The British sent naval and army forces, suspended the constitution and removed the entire Guianese government. At the same time, the barristers drew up some papers which the Queen signed, so it was alt nice and legal.1

Her Majestys Government, said the British Colonial Secretary during a debate in Parliament, are not prepared to tolerate the setting up of Communist states in the British Commonwealth. 2

The American attitude toward this slap in the face of democracy can be surmised by the refusal of the US government to allow Jagan to pass in transit through the United States when he tried to book a flight to London to attend the parliamentary debate. According to Jagan, Pan Am would not even sell him a ticket. (Pan Am has a long history of collaboration with the CIA, a practice initiated by the airlines president, Juan Trippe, the son-in-law of Roosevelts Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius.)3

By this time the CIA had already gotten its foot in the door of the British Guiana labor movement, by means of the marriage of the Agency to the American Federation of Labor in the United States. One of the early offsprings of this union was the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT from the Spanish). In the early 1950s, ORIT was instrumental the conversion of the leading confederation of unions in Guiana, the Trades Union Council, from a militant labor organization to a vehicle of anti-communism. Wrote Serafino Romualdi, at one time the head of AIFLD (see below) and a long-time CIA collaborator: Since my first visit to British Guiana in 1951, I did everything in my power to strengthen the democratic [i.e., anti-communist] trade union forces opposed to him [Jagan]. 4

This was to have serious repercussions for Jagan in later years.

In 1957, running on a program similar to that of four years earlier, Jagan won the election again. Following this, the British deemed it wiser to employ more subtle methods for his removal and the CIA was brought into the picture, one of the rare instances in which the Agency has been officially allowed to operate in a British bailiwick. The CIA has done so, unofficially, on numerous occasions, to the displeasure of British authorities.

The CIA set to work to fortify those unions which already tended somewhat toward support of Jagans leading political opponent, Forbes Burnham of the Peoples National Congress. One of the most important of these was the civil servants union, dominated by blacks.

Consequently, the CIA turned to Public Services International (PSI) in London, an international trade union secretariat for government employees, one of the international networks which exist to export the union know-how of advanced industrial countries to less-developed countries.

According to a study undertaken by The Sunday Times of London, by 1958 the PSIs finances were low, and its stocks were low with its own parent body, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions [set up by the CIA in 1949 to rival the Soviet-influenced World Federation of Trade Unions]. It needed a success of some kind. The financial crisis was resolved, quite suddenly, by the PSIs main American affiliate union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). AFSCMEs boss, Dr Arnold Zander, told the PSI executive that he had been shopping and had found a donor.

The spoils were modest at first-only a couple of thousand pounds in 1958. It was, the kind donor had said, for Latin America. The money went towards a PSI

recruiting drive in the northern countries of Latin America by one William Doherty, Jr., a man with some previous acquaintance of the CIA. (Doherty was later to become the Executive Director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, the CIAs principal labor organization in Latin America.)

The donor was presumably pleased, because next year, 1959, Zander was able to tell the PSI that his union was opening a full-time Latin American section in the PSIs behalf. The PSI was charmed.

The PSIs representative, said Zander, would be William Howard McCabe (a CIA. labor apprentice). The Times continued:

McCabe, a stocky, bullet-headed American, appeared to have no previous union history, but the PSI liked him. When he came to its meetings, he distributed cigarette lighters and photographs of himself doling out food parcels to the peasants. The lighters and the parcels were both inscribed with the compliments of the PSI .5

In 1967, in the wake of numerous revelations about CIA covert financing, the new head of AFSCME admitted that the union had been heavily funded by the Agency until 1964 through a foundation conduit (see Appendix I). It was revealed that AFSCMEs International Affairs Department, which had been responsible for the British Guiana operation, had actually been run by two CIA aides .6

CIA work within Third World unions Typically involves a considerable educational effort, the basic premise of which is that all solutions will come to working people under a system of free enterprise, class co-operation and collective bargaining, and by opposing communism in collaboration with management and government, unless, of course, the government, as in this case, is itself communist . The most promising students, those perhaps marked as future leaders, are singled out to be sent to CIA schools in the United States for further education.

The CIA, said The Sunday Times, also appears to have had a good deal of success in encouraging politicians to break away from Jagans party and government. Their technique of financing sympathetic figures was to take out heavy insurance policies for them. 7

During the 1961 election campaign, the CIAs ongoing program was augmented by ad hoc operations from other American quarters. The US Information Service took the most unusual step of showing its films, depicting the evils of Castroism and communism, on street corners of British Guiana. And the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade brought its traveling road show down and spent a reported $76,000 on electoral propaganda which lived up to the organizations name.8 One historian has described this as a questionable activity for a private organization, which the State Department did nothing to discourage .9 On the other hand, the activities of US government agencies in British Guiana were no less questionable.

Despite the orchestrated campaign directed against him, Jagan was re-elected by a comfortable majority of legislative seats, though with only a plurality of the popular vote.

In October, at his request, Jagan was received at the White House in Washington. He had come to talk about assistance for his development program. President Kennedy and his advisers, however, were interested in determining where Jagan stood on the political spectrum before granting any aid. Oddly, the meeting, as described by Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who was present, seemed to be conducted as if the Kennedy men were totally unaware of American destabilization activities in British Guiana.

To Jagans expressed esteem for the politics of British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan, those in the room all responded agreeably .

To Jagans professed socialism, Kennedy asserted that We are not engaged in a crusade to force private enterprise on parts of the world where it is not relevant .

But when Jagan, perhaps naively, mentioned his admiration for the scholarly, leftist journal, Monthly Review, it appears that he crossed an ideological line, which silently and effectively sealed his countrys fate. Jagan, wrote Schlesinger later, was unquestionably some sort of Marxism. 10

No economic aid was given to British Guiana while Jagan remained in power, and the Kennedy administration pressured the British to delay granting the country its independence, which had been scheduled to occur within the next year or two.11 Not until 1966, when Jagan no longer held office, did British Guiana become the independent nation of Guyana.

In February 1962, the CIA helped to organize and finance anti-Jagan protests which used the newly announced budget as a pretext. The resulting strikes, riots and arson were wholly out of proportion to the alleged instigation. A Commonwealth Commission of Enquiry later concluded (perhaps to the discomfort of the British Colonial Office which had appointed it) that:

There is very little doubt that, despite the loud protestations of the trades union leaders to the contrary, political affinities and aspirations played a large part in shaping their policy and formulating their programme of offering resistance to the budget and making a determined effort to change the government in office.12

The CIA arranged, as it has on similar occasions, for North American and Latin American labor organizations, with which it had close ties, to support the strikers with messages of solidarity and food, thus enhancing the appearance of a genuine labor struggle. The agency also contrived for previously unheard-of radio stations to go on the air and for newspapers to print false stories about approaching Cuban warships.13

The centerpiece of the CIAs program in British Guiana was the general strike (so called, although its support was considerably less than total) which began in April 1963. It lasted for 80 days, the longest general strike in history, it is said.14

This strike, as in 1962, was called by the Trades Union Council (TUC) which, as we have seen, was a member in good standing of the CIAs International labor mafia. The head of the TUC was one Richard Ishmael who had been trained in the US at the CIAs American Institute for Free Labor Development along with other Guianese labor officials.

The strike period was marked by repeated acts of violence and provocation, including attacks on Jagans wife and some of his ministers. Ishmael himself was later cited in a secret British police report as having been part of a terrorist group which had carried out bombings and arson attacks against government buildings during the strike.15

No action was taken against Ishmael and others in this group by British authorities who missed no opportunity to exacerbate the explosive situation, hoping that it would culminate in Jagals downfall.

Meanwhile, CIA agents were giving advice to local union leaders on how to organize and sustain the strike, the New York Times subsequently reported. They also provided funds and food supplies to keep the strikers going and medical supplies for pro-Burnham workers injured in the turmoil. At one point, one of the agents even served as a member of a bargaining committee from a Guiana dike workers1 union that was negotiating with Dr. Jagan. This agent was later denounced by Jagan and forbidden to enter the country.16 This is probably a reference to Gene Meakins, one of the CIAs main labor operatives, who had been serving as public relations advisor and education officer