The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Between 1975 and 1978 Perkins travels extensively. Iran is wealthy but unstable; American agents work to present the shah, Iran’s “King of Kings” (117), as a man of progress. The shah enacts land reform, builds up the military, and initiates social reforms. MAIN develops electrical systems to help improve the country’s infrastructure.

In Tehran a young radical named Yamin invites Perkins to speak privately. They meet at an elegant restaurant, where Yamin explains that he singled Perkins out “because he knew I had been a Peace Corps volunteer and because […] I took every possible opportunity to get to know his country and to mix with its people” (119). Yamin explains that the shah’s plan to plant trees in the desert is not his own idea but that of Americans who stand to profit from such a project. The plan, though, will threaten Bedouins like Yamin, whose culture centers on desert life.

Perkins and Yamin get on well. Finally, Yamin offers to introduce Perkins to a man “who can tell you a great deal about our King of Kings. He may shock you, but I assure you that meeting him will be well worth your time” (121).

Yamin drives Perkins out to an old desert oasis. There, inside an ancient building, is a mysterious man, Doc, who was once a trusted advisor to the shah but was mutilated by the shah’s agents—his nose was cut off, and he was left for dead. Now, weakened and aged, he warns Perkins that the shah is a devil, widely reviled not only by Iranians but by people all over the Middle East, and soon he will be deposed.

The old man and Yamin both agree that Perkins’s company will never get the money it hopes for in Iran: “you will not be paid. You’ll do all that work, and when it comes time to collect your fees, the shah will be gone” (125). Why, Perkins asks, do they wish to warn him? While they admit they would be happy to see MAIN go bankrupt, they’d rather the company depart Iran: “Just one company like yours, walking away, could start a trend” (125).

Perkins encounters Farhad, his old school friend, in Tehran in the fall of 1978. Farhad warns him that he must leave Iran: “He told me that something ‘dangerous’ was about to happen and that it was his responsibility to see to it that I left the country” (126). Perkins guesses that Farhad now works for “the CIA or some other US agency” (126).

The next day, Perkins and Farhad fly to Rome, where they dine with Farhad’s parents. Farhad’s father, once a general loyal to the shah, “expressed disillusionment with his former boss” (126). He blames the American policy that set up the shah as a puppet, saying the US “thought it very clever back then—as did I. But now it returns to haunt you—us” (126). Perkins realizes that if this former general believes the shah is doomed, then MAIN’s belief in the shah’s popularity is built on sand.

The old general mentions a conservative cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, who has been building a resistance movement. While Farhad and his father do not support “his fanatical Shiism” (127), they believe Khomeini’s rebellion is just the beginning for the Middle East.

Two days later, riots begin that will lead to the shah’s overthrow. In January 1979 the shah escapes Iran. In late 1979 revolutionaries take over the US embassy and hold its occupants hostage for more than a year, demanding the return of the shah. The shah receives sanctuary in Panama from Torrijos, of all people, but later moves to Egypt, where he dies of cancer.

The situation teaches Perkins irrefutable lessons: “Iran illustrated beyond any doubt that the United States was a nation laboring to deny the truth of its role in the world” (128).

Colombia, long considered the keystone of America’s Latin American policy, is Perkins’s next stop. Though relatively well off and democratic, Colombia, like most third-world nations, does not have a huge resource like oil or a canal with which to pay off the large loans it needs to improve its infrastructure. Thus, both MAIN and the United States fully expect Colombia to become ensnared and dependent on American interests.

Perkins, however, meets a Colombian woman named Paula who will change everything. The blonde and green-eyed daughter of Italian immigrants, Paula runs her own Colombian clothing-design business; she also is a political activist. Her views will change Perkins’s attitude about being an EHM. She convinces him “to go deep inside myself and see that I would never be happy as long as I continued in that role” (132).

One day at a coffee shop, Perkins and Paula discuss the latest rebel attack against a dam project managed by MAIN. A Colombian engineer is fired on, handed a letter, and sent downriver to deliver it. The letter declares the locals’ refusal to let a dam flood their territory; it demands that Colombians cease work on the project. Perkins interviews the engineer and gets him to agree that the rebels are communists.

Paula asks if Perkins believes that. Though he replies, “I have a job to do” (134), he is wracked by guilt. He stammers “standard justifications: that I was trying to do good, that I was exploring ways to change the system from within, and—the old standby—that if I quit, someone even worse would fill my shoes” (135).

Paula doesn’t buy it. She points out that many rebels have nowhere to turn but the communists, who offer training and guns: “Your World Bank doesn’t help them defend themselves. In fact, it forces them into this position” (135). On the other hand, Paula sympathizes with the rebels; her brother, beaten and jailed for demonstrating against oil development, has joined them.

Perkins begins to believe that America has two sides. One shines as a beacon of hope for the world “based on concepts of equality and justice for all” (136). On the other hand, the “global empire […] is the republic’s nemesis. It is self-centered, self-serving, greedy, and materialistic, a system based on mercantilism” (137). Still, Perkins cannot bring himself to relinquish the perks of his life. Paula haunts him with the refrain: “You’re not happy with yourself. What can anyone do to make things worse than that?” (138). She suggests that Perkins leave MAIN and remain silent, saying, “Don’t give them an excuse to come after you” (139).

At Paula’s urging, Perkins rereads his resume as well as a flattering news article about him from several years earlier. Though nothing in either is untrue, they both paint a picture that whitewashes Perkins’s work. Much of his initial efforts in Ecuador, for example, are described as managing a major project and not simply helping poor brickmakers make a small living for the Peace Corps. In short, “they conveyed a perception that I now found to be twisted and sanitized” (144). The deception lay “not in what was stated but in what was omitted,” including his recruitment by the NSA, the “tremendous pressure to produce highly inflated economic forecasts” (145), and his work setting up loans that countries could never repay.

One line in his resume, “US Treasury Department, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” (145), is a coded reference for those in the know that Perkins participated in the Saudi development “deal of the century, the deal that changed the course of world history but never reached the newspapers” (146), a deal that helped sponsor terrorism and protect a murderous dictator.

Perkins’s education hasn’t prepared him to be an economist; instead, his success at MAIN “was a function of my willingness to provide the types of studies and conclusions my bosses and clients wanted, combined with a natural talent for persuading others through the written and spoken word” (146). The people he hires know more than he does about economic technicalities, and he relies on their help to produce reports.

Perkins trains these employees using a “sort of gentle style of brainwashing” (147) to get them to produce the optimistic economic forecasts he needs. Unlike Perkins, who understands full well what he’s doing, his staff become EHMs without knowing it.

In a way Perkins’s job reminds him of a mafia boss who starts out as a criminal but ends up a respected, well-dressed citizen who donates to charities, though “beneath this patina is a trail of blood” (148). Perkins’s work is aimed “at promoting the most subtle and effective form of imperialism the world has ever known” (148). Even China and England have begun to use the same techniques.

Rereading his resume transforms Perkins: “By getting me to read between the lines, Paula had nudged me to take one more step along a path that would ultimately transform my life” (149).

Oil exploration in the Ecuadorean Amazon begins in the late 1960s. A religious organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), arrives from the United States and, while recording for posterity the languages of native populations, encourages those same people to deed their land to oil companies and move onto reservations. Rumors fly that SIL gives free food to natives that sometimes gives them diarrhea, and SIL workers then bring medicine to cure them, making them grateful.

Some of these missionaries are murdered; one victim’s sister tours America, raising funds to continue SIL’s work. Money also may come from Rockefeller charities, which are built on oil money.

Chief among Ecuador’s accusers is Jaime Roldós, a charming attorney-professor who in 1978 runs a nationalist campaign for president, opposing SIL and the oil companies. Roldós is not a communist; he asserts his country’s right to determine its own destiny. Roldós’s Hydrocarbons Policy would direct the benefits of drilling toward the poor, not just the richest families. Roldós wins the election.

The new administration goes after Texaco. Roldós wants Ecuador to own drilling operations abandoned by the company. In America, President Carter takes a hands-off approach. The problems linger.

At the start of 1980, Perkins resolves “that during the next year I would make a major change in my life and that in the future I would try to model myself after modern heroes like Jaime Roldós and Omar Torrijos” (154). Then a major surprise hits MAIN: its president, Bruno Zambotti, suddenly is fired.

At MAIN, the scuttlebutt is that founder Mac Hall is jealous of Zambotti’s great success as president, which explains the firing. This suspicion is confirmed when Hall promotes Vice President Paul Priddy, friendly and competent but “lackluster, a yes-man who would bow to the chairman’s whims” (155).

Perkins is devastated his mentor’s sudden departure. He contacts Zambotti, who tells him, “Keep your eyes open” because Hall “has lost touch with reality” (156).

On a sailing vacation in the Virgin Islands, Perkins has an epiphany: He has blamed his parents for mistakes he made. He recognizes that blaming them is “not just foolish and unfair” but “self-defeating” (156). He moors his sloop at an island with the ruins of an old slave plantation; he rows ashore. Perched on the plantation’s crumbling wall, Perkins realizes he is the heir to the slaver’s job of exploiting helpless people. And so, on April 1, 1980, he resigns.