News Release

Blum, Documenter of U.S. Interventions, Memorialized

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While much of official Washington has focused on allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly call for the ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, a leading chronicler of the U.S. government’s numerous invasions, interventions and assassination plots is being memorialized in Washington, D.C.

William Blum died in December. See obituaries in CovertAction Magazine, the Washington Post and the New York Times: “William Blum, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85” as well as by FAIR: “William Blum, U.S. Policy Critic Derided by NYT, Dies at 85.”

The memorial will take place Sunday, March 17, 2019 from 4:00-7:00 p.m. at the Washington Ethical Society. CovertAction Magazine states that reminiscences from the stage or via video are anticipated from filmmaker Oliver Stone; former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou; author Michael Parenti; political commentator Bill Moyers; consumer advocate Ralph Nader; political activist Noam Chomsky, and CovertAction Magazine co-founders Louis Wolf and Chris Agee.

In a 2011 talk, Blum called the U.S. government “An equal opportunity bomber. There’s only two qualifications to being a bombing target: You have to pose some sort of obstacle to the desires of the empire and you have to have very poor defense against aerial attacks.” See video.

CovertAction Magazine reports: “What first put Mr. Blum on the CIA’s radar (and kept him there for nearly 50 years) was his 1969 blockbuster exposé that revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 theretofore anonymous CIA employees who were hard at work fomenting coups, subverting democratic institutions, and assassinating popular leaders in dozens of countries throughout the globe. Blum’s articles, together with Inside the Company: CIA Diary — the 1975 international best-seller by ex-CIA agent Philip Agee — so frightened the CIA that it pressured Congress into passing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act which thereafter made exposés like Blum’s and Agee’s a federal crime.”

Blum wrote several books including Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (which is ironically, and perhaps illegally, on the CIA website) and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.

Blum also wrote his regular “Anti-Empire Reports.” In one of its final editions, he wrote that Russiagate was “Much ado about nothing,” broke down the subject and contrasted it with election interference as done by the U.S. government in country after country. One central resource of Blum’s was his “Master List” of overthrowing other people’s governments, see below.

LOUIS WOLF, ‭LOUW7 at live.com
Co-founder and research director (1978-2005) of CovertAction Information Bulletin, later renamed CovertAction Quarterly. The magazine was relaunched as CovertAction Magazine. Wolf also co-edited two books, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe with CIA whistleblower Philip Agee and Dirty Work II: The CIA in Africa. Wolf and Blum were lifelong friends and worked on numerous projects together, including the latest relaunch of CovertAction Magazine.

CHRIS AGEE, chris.agee at icloud.com
Agee is the son of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee. Together with Wolf and other writers, he relaunched CovertAction Magazine last year. As a political sociologist and historian, he has written numerous articles for publications including for CovertAction Magazine, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and The International Encyclopedia of Revolutions and Protest: 1500 to Present.

Blum had a “Master List” of the United States overthrowing foreign governments since the Second World War. Here’s that list of countries, with links to Blum’s writing or other background. This list below doesn’t include major interventions that didn’t actually result in ousting the government, like ongoing U.S. “covert” operations in Syria since 2012. A few ousters of governments were short-lived, like Venezuela in 2002:

Iran 1953
Guatemala 1954
British Guiana 1953-64
Iraq 1963
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70
Laos 1958, 1959, 1960
Ecuador 1960-63
Congo 1960
Brazil 1962-64
Dominican Republic 1963
Bolivia 1964 
Indonesia 1965
Ghana 1966
Chile 1964-73
Greece 1967
Bolivia 1971 
Australia 1973-75
Portugal 1974-76
Jamaica 1976-80
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82 
Grenada 1983
Fiji 1987
Nicaragua 1981-90
Panama 1989
Bulgaria 1990
Albania 1991

Afghanistan 1980s
Yugoslavia 1999-2000
Ecuador 2000
Afghanistan 2001
Venezuela 2002
Iraq 2003
Haiti 2004
Honduras 2009
Libya 2011
Ukraine 2014

Blum asks:
Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?
A: Because there’s no American embassy there.