On the other hand, Obama has struck a well-publicized alliance with Warren Buffett, the son of a Bircher (Nazi), a CIA collaborator with ties, as delineated in John DeCamp's Franklin Cover-Up, to a national CIA/RNC pedophile ring. I am also alienated by his choice of Joe Biden as a running mate. Sad to say, I do not support Obama, nor does he have my endorsement. Neither does Mr. Magoo McCain. I suppose they will live ...
- AC
Tom MboyaFrom: "The other Obama-Kennedy Connection":
" ...Barack Obama has inspired many a comparison to John F Kennedy ... but the two men forged a less known link - before Obama was even born. The bond began with Kenyan labour leader Tom Mboya, an advocate for African nationalism who helped his country gain independence in 1963. In the late 1950s, Mboya was seeking support for a scholarship program that would send Kenyan students to US colleges - similar to other exchanges the US backed in developing nations during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Mboya appealed to the state department. When that trail went cold, he turned to then-senator Kennedy. Kennedy, who chaired the senate subcommittee on Africa, arranged a $100,000 grant through his family's foundation to help Mboya keep the program running.
Kennedy: " ... 'Mr Mboya came to see us and asked for help, when none of the other foundations could give it, when the federal government had turned it down quite precisely. We felt something ought to be done.'
"One of the first students airlifted to America was Barack Obama Sr., who married a white Kansas native named Ann Dunham during his US studies. Their son, born in 1961 and named for his father, has only once mentioned his Kennedy connection on the campaign trail. ... "
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/11/other-obama-kennedy-connection.html
••••••••
Commentary from researcher Bob Feldman:
"The Guardian article apparently doesn't indicate to its readers that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, was employed by the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia shortly after the CIA and U.S. Embassy in Jakarta helped set-up the bloody right-wing Indonesian military coup of 1965 that led to the slaughter of between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesian leftist civilians. In addition, the Guardian article apparently doesn't indicate that the now-defunct anti-war muckraking magazine of the 1960s and early 1970s, Ramparts, apparently discovered some kind of connection between the CIA and Tom Mboya. ... "
•••••••
Kenya - Tom Mboya’s fatal links with CIA
28 July 2008
By Douglas Okwatch
Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”
Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.
Jomo KenyattaRamparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the economic planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.
The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.
“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.
Trail of Questions
In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”
Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.
In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.
“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”
“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”
“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”
Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.
The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”
He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.
The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.
Traitor or Nationalist?
Ramparts reported that:
“The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.
Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying:
“Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.
“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”
This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.
Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.
But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.
Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.
An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.
But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.
It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga – use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.
But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?
REFERENCES:
1. "Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s murder & the return of one-party State"
2. "Ready or Not", TIME Magazine.
3. "Setback for Tom," TIME
http://www.politicalarticles.net/blog/2008/07/28/kenya-tom-mboyas-fatal-links-with-cia/
1 comment:
Not sure antiwar and anticorporate activists in the USA should yet rule out the possibility that Obama's mother may have worked with CIA people at the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia or at the Ford Foundation project in Indonesia (in the same way that Gloria Steinem apparently accepted CIA funding in early 1960s) or that Obama's father was "tapped" by liberal wing of the CIA that RFK helped coordinate in early 1960s.
Following is some more info about the apparent role that the CIA played in attempting to manipulate the internal politics of Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s that I came across on the internet (apparently the article appeared in the Black Panther Party newspaper in the late 1960s or early 1970s):
THE CIA AS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER
President Nixon has made a surprising alliance with certain forces of black militancy. This may seem audacious, even dangerous, like playing with the fires of a revolutionary black consciousness. But it is actually a time -- tested technique.
(I. BLACK POWER COMES TO WASHINGTON)
Black Power has come a long way since that night in 1966 when Stokely Carmichael made it the battle cry of the Mississippi March Against Fear. For a time it was a slogan that struck dread into the heart of white America -- an indication that the ante of the black man's demands had been raised to a point where the whole society would have to be reoriented if they were to be met. But Black Power hardly seems a revolutionary slogan today. It has been refined and domesticated, awarded a prominent niche in the American Dream. And Carmichael's statement of a few years ago, that the President of the United States might say "We shall overcome" over national television but would never call for Black Power, has also been disproven -- by Richard Nixon, seemingly the most unlikely of men. The country needs "more black ownership," Nixon said during his campaign, "for from this can flow the rest: black pride, black jobs, and, yes, Black Power."
It is obvious that the Nixon Administration has made some crucial decisions concerning the possibilities of Black Power during its short time in office. With great fanfare it unveiled an elaborate program of black capitalism. And while it failed to lure Whiteny Young, Roy Wilkins or others in the moderate civil rights establishment into cabinet posts, it did find a man with even better credentials as a militant -- James Farmer, former national director of CORE. The President has indicated since assuming office that he sees nothing dangerous in the upsurge of a black militancy, provided that it seeks a traditional kind of economic mobility as its end, even if it wears Afro costumes and preaches a fiery race pride while it sets up businesses and replaces white capitalists as our society's most visible contact with the ghetto. Of course, other black militants, the thrust of whose political programs cannot be absorbed by black capitalism or by a mere cultural renaissance, who do not look to the ruling powers of society for assistance in their revolution, will continue to be denounced, imprisoned, hunted and destroyed. For them there is the method of the stick. But in other cases the use of the carrot is preferred as more potent -- and less predictable, as Mr. Nixon has well demonstrated.
He has made a surprising alliance with certain forces of black militancy. This may seem audacious, even dangerous, like playing with the fires of a revolutionary black consciouness. But it is actually a time-tested technique. The Nixon Administration's encouragement of cultural nationalism and its paternal interest in black capitalism are little more than an updating and transposition into a domestic setting of pattern established years ago by U.S. power abroad. Although the State Department, the U.S. Information Agency, the Ford Foundation and hosts of other organizations were involved, it was primarily the Central Intelligence Agency which discovered the way of deal with militant blackness. It found that the U.S. could maintain a foothold in the newly independent African states by creating and subsidizing an American elite of Afro-oriented black leaders (James Farmer himself was only one of many) whose positions in the civil rights movement were an invaluable, if often unconscious, cover for the Agency's primary aim -- to emasculate black radicalism in Africa, and eventaually at home.
[II. AMSAC'S AFROS]
IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1963, and at first glance it looked like a revolutionary round table in Havana. The list of participants in the conference read like a Who's Who of the Southern African independence movement: Oliver Tambo, acting president of the African National Congress of South Africa; Eduardo Mondlane (recently assassinated), leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front; Jariretundu Kozonguisi, president of the Southwest African National Union; leaders from virtually every other political faction of these countries as well as Zimbabwe, Angola, and Zambia. They were all wanted men at home, engaged in directing armed struggles against hated colonial regimes. But the meeting hadn't been convened by Fidel Castro. In fact, it took place at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The architects of a Southern Africa liberation movement had agreed to come to Washington because the convening organization was a black group meeting at the nation's leading black university. The American Society for African Culture (AMSAC), composed of important black American scholars, writers, artists and professionals, was the most prestigious and articulate of all black groups interested in advancing African culture and building bonds between U.S. blacks and their African brothers. This conference was AMSAC's fourth international meeting in as many years. It looked like the beginnings of a black revolutionary's dream-come-true, the linking up of African and Afro-American freedom struggles. But what most participants didn't know was that the whole affair had been sponsored by the CIA.
The Howard University meeting provided an ideal opportunity for the CIA to look over the top American revolutionaries while providing an illusion of U.S. concern for their cause. AMSAC itself had begun as a way of keeping an eye on the resurgent African independence movement. It was organized in the aftermath of the first International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Paris in late 1955. This conference had been convened by a group of African exiles and European intellectuals organized into the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC), which published the journal Présence Africaine, featuring men like Camus, Sartre, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. But giving impetus to an organization like AMSAC was by no means on SAC's agenda.
SAC had asked the late Richard Wright, the black American writer self-exiled in Paris, to invite some American Negroes to the international gathering. Wright did so, although many whom he invited were unable to afford the trip. Thsoe who did show up were among the most influential of America's black bourgeoisie, and many later became influential in AMSAC. Headed by Dr. Horace Mann Bond, a leading black educator and father of Georgia legislator Julian Bond, the American delegation included Mercer Cook, who later received the ambassadorship to Niger during the Johnson Administration; John A. Davis, later to become head of AMSAC; James Ivy, editor of the NAACP magazine, Crisis, and eventully AMSAC treasures; Thurgood Marshall, and Duke Ellinton. These were AMSAC'S founding fathers.
At the outset of its career, AMSAC shared its New York offices with the Council on Race and Caste in World Affairs, a largely paper organization founded some years earlier by the CIA, specializing in information about and analysis of racial problems affecting international relations. The council merged formally with AMSAC in 1957, and acted as the major financial conduit to the new group, which was not officially incorporated until February 1960. The CIA conduits reporting contributions to AMSAC over the years included the Pappas Charitable Trust ($65,000), and these foundations: Marshall ($25,000); Benjamin Rosenthal ($26,000); J. Frederick Brown ($103,000); Colt ($47,000); C. H. Dodge ($28,000); Rabb ($40,000), and Ronthelym ($20,000). AMSAC's statement of purpose declared an intention "to study the effects of African culture on American life; to examine the cultural contributions of African people to their societies; to appraise the conditions affecting the development of ethnic national and universal culture; to coopeate with international organizations with a view to … exchange of information on African culture.…"
"I joined AMSAC because I thought it would be really pursuing the ideas advocated by the Société Africaine de Culture," Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, told us, "but I was quickly turned off when they began to move in another political direction. It was composed of a combination of careerists, slick articulate operators with little conviction, and leaders of the integrationist Negro intellectual establishment. They were liberals without a base whose legitimacy came entirely from their association with established groups like AMSAC. I even doubt they were capable of thinking this kind of operation up themselves."
It will never be clear to what exent the "AMSAC Afros," as Cruse calls them, did think up the organization for themselves; but even if they did, they certainly didn't pay for it. That was taken care of by the CIA, which realized that AMSAC's brand of non-radical cultural nationalism could be useful abroad and perhaps eventually at home. The organization's 1962 conference report declared, "American Negroes do not hold important posts in the great corporations doing business in Africa. Nor can it be said that they seek to make or have been given the opportunity of making money in Africa. Mainly they bring service and love to the complex of Afro-American relations." This they indeed did, but often without knowing what and whose ends they were serving.
AMSAC's cultural and educational programs -- the frosting on the political cake the CIA was serving up to emerging Africa -- involved some of America's most prominent black artists: Odetta, Randy Weston, Nina Simone, Lionel Hampton and Langston Hughes. The organization also sponsored visits to Africa by American Negro scholars, writers, lawyers and intellectuals. AMSAC's representatives included scholar Saunders Redding, the man whom Harold Cruse describes as the chief of intellectual spokesmen for the American Negro establishment; artists Jacob Lawrence and Elton Fax, and former NAACP counsel Robert Carter. Men like these provided the cultural camouflage which not only disguised the political nature of AMSAC's work, but deepened its impact on Africans as well. But the careers of others, far less celebrated, tell more about the real AMSAC enterprise.
[III. BLACK CIA AGENT]
ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING case studies of AMSAC's use of its Afros centers on the man who was the organization's assistant executive director from its early days through 1961 -- a tall, frequently goateed, black CIA agent named James T. ("Ted") Harris.
Born in Philadelphia in 1924, Harris won a DAR medal for good scholarship at La Salle College. After service during the war, he returned to La Salle where he built a reputation as a concerned and outspoken liberal. Visible, articualte black collegians were a rarity in those days, and Harris' reputation grew nationally when he became involved in student politics. In 1948, when the newly formed National Student Association elected him president, he quickly won admission to the inner circle, the CIA's "old boy network" which came to dominate NSA activities for almost 20 years.
Early in the '50s, Harris moved to Geneva, where he served as assistant secretary-general for the CIA-supported World University Service. From that post he returned to the U.S. for more training. After receiving a master's degree at Princeton's Public Affairs Institute, where he studied on a CIA Whitney scholarship, he was off to Cairo for field experience, this time on a Ford Foundation Research Fellowship. He returned to the NSA after his stint in Egypt, to run the important CIA-funded Foreign Student Leadership Program to "assist active student leaders in the Third World." Through this job, Harris came to know and befriend many African students in the U.S. His next assignment followed naturally. He moved on to AMSAC.
Harris was active in AMSAC through 1961. In that year, while the U.S. was desperately trying to stabilize a friendly national government in the Congo, Harris went back to the Ford Foundation, which made him secretary-general of a Ford-funded National School for Law and Administration in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Harris spent two years there, shaping an educational program which, as he was later to tell AMSAC's Howard University conference on Southern Africa, provided a way to instruct the Congolese in Western administrative techniques. Congolese sources strongly suspected that the school also served as a conduit for CIA money which was pumped into the pockets of selected Congolese politicians. As soon as a dependable Congolese was groomed to take over the school. Harris returned to New York to help the Ford Foundation shape its overseas development programs for Africa and the Middle East. In 1964, he left Ford to direct education and training for the Corning Glass Works in New York, working under Amory Houghton, the man who had headed the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA), the CIA's principal agency for funding its international student programs. In 1966, while remaining a consultant to Houghton, Harris moved on to join yet another CIA creation, the African-American Institute. At the AAI, he directed field programs, traveling frequently to Africa.
By January 1969, when Harris left AAI and international work, he had compiled an impressive record. He had traveled to all of Western Europe and to the Middle East, to India, Pakistan and 23 countries in northern, eastern, western and central Africa (as well as 49 states of the U.S.) often on speaking tours. His languages included Arabic, French, Italian and Spanish. He was a member of the powerful and prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and the NAACP, and a director of an offshoot of CORE, the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality.
The CIA backed AMSAC and supported people like Harris because its strategists has a sophisticated understanding of how a certain brand of African cultural nationalism could be dangerous to America's international objectives. They realized that cultural radicalism often stimulated political radicalism and that cultural issues, especially in the emerging African states, were often latent with explosive political implications. Maintaining an effective political presence in resurgent Africa thus required an active cultural dimension, and the CIA took an early interest in attempting to control the emerging cultural-political elites and, as much as possible, making sure that their concerns stayed at arm's length from revolution. The Agency saw cultural nationalism and new notions of "negritude" as alternatives to the type of revolutionary culture called for by such radicals as Frantz Fanon, who once said, "It is around the people's struggles that African Negro culture takes on substance and not around songs, poems, and folklore."
The architects of the CIA's covertly-backed cultural program selectively encouraged those black writers most friendly to the West. Through its program of enlightened patronage, these writers found a ready outlet for their work in a whole series of cultural magazines in and about Africa, funded by CIA-backed foundations: Africa Report (African-American Institute); Transition and The New African (Congress of Cultural Freedom); Classic (Farfield Foundation); and others. And finally, AMSAC had its own magazine, African Forum. The writers favored by these publications were not agents, but simply men whose politics were acceptable to the American culture brokers. And what Fanon later called "a charmed circle of mutual admiration at the summit" quickly emerged. Patronage
-- 5 --
and promotion won international recognition for the CIA's cultural elite while providing a cultural framework important to the directed development of African consciousness.
The CIA did not become the leading international impresario of black culture for the aesthetic pleasure of the experience. The great question during the heyday of AMSAC and similar organizations was what formal African independence would actually mean once it became a reality. And at some point, the CIA decided that the development of a safe cultural nationalism was critically important to U.S. interests in Africa. It was essential not only as a way of keeping cultural energies in line, but primarily (though the two are intertwined) to channel the explosive force of nationalism itself in directions suitable to the U.S. The tide of decolonization rolling over the continent could open the way for a new American Empire to break the old imperial monopoly of the European order that had controlled Africa. Or it could produce the kind of radical nationalism which would guard the new Open Door with inhospitable vigilance, and might even make accommodations with the communist powers. Thus the CIA made every effort to promote a kind of cultural nationalism in Africa which would be satisfied with the removal of the most obvious forms of foreign domination; one in which concern for cultural integrity did not reinforce, but rather replaced, demands for basic economic and political autonomy.
This was the scope of the enterprise in which American blacks became indispensably involved, through AMSAC and other vehicles. But to appreciate the effect of this misalliance on African development and to see what the alternative of cultural nationalism meant in its social and political context in Africa (and could mean in the United States, if the Nixon Administration is successful), one must also view the operation from the receiving end. A particularly vivid example of America's ideological manipulation of African society in transition is seen in the role played by the CIA in shaping the nationalist movement in Kenya.
[IV. A CIA JET SET]
THE NIGHTMARE OF PRIMAL BLACK SAVAGERY that pervades white fantasies about Africa has been evoked most vividly by Kenya, seene of the bloodlust and carnage of the Mau Mau. This myth of the Mau Mau (as the Kenya Peace and Land Army was known in the West) is the inverse of the reality. Throughout the entire Mau Mau "Emergency," fewer than 100 whites were killed -- including 57 counterinsurgency police; among Africans the toll was greater than 11,000. Colonial security forces, like the American "scalphunters," hunted men for bounty. Tens of thousands of Africans were herded into British detention camps. In one roundup, 35,000 were arrested in a single day.
The Mau Mau myth and similar racist inventions still hold firm in the popular mind, but responsible agencies of the U.S. government cannot afford to hamper their own effectiveness with such unsophisticated views. Thus, in the decade preceding Kenyan independence and since that time, the CIA has provided carefully selective support to elements of the same independence movement which most Americans could think of only with revulsion and horror.
The United States may seem in any case to be an unlikely supporter of national liberation struggles in the Third World. Both the fact is that U.S. policy has never stopped at sponsoring black militancy, whether of the Mau Mau or of CORE, when it served the right purpose. As Vice President, Nixon reported to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee following his 1957 African tour; "American interests in the future are so great as to justify us in not hesitating even to assist the departure of the colonial powers from Africa. If we can win native opinion in this process the future of America in Africa will be assured." The trouble with old style colonialism in Africa, Nixon perceived, was that it was so un-American.
The CIA's program in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficary was Tom Mboya, who in 1953 became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labor. During the "Emergency," when all other African political organizations were banned, the KFL was the leading vehicle for the independence movement. It was harassed, its offices were ransacked, and many of its leaders were detained. But it survived and Mboya became a hero. Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya was ideal for the CIA's purposes -- the main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Jorno Kenyatta, not being considered sufficiently safe. Mboya even propounded a brand of African socialism which favored "free" (i.e. anticommunist) trade unions and encouraged foreign investment, foreign banking and foreign land ownership. African socialism, he said, meant "those proven codes of conduct in the African societies which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life. I refer to universal charity, which characterizes our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society."
Like America's black capitalism today, this prescription hardly struck the strategists of white America as a threat. Mboya's cultural socialism was seen as something which could inocuiate against the actual disease of revolution; it clearly deserved support. Mboya soon joined the CIA jet set, traveling the world from Oxford to Calcutta on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. (ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc. Its extensive international operations in Africa and elsewhere were funded and manipulated by the CIA through various of its U.S. based affiliated secretariats. Recently, however, there has been a split with U.S. labor organizations.)
Mboya later became ICFTU representative in the region. His articles were published by other CIA recipients, including the International Union of Socialist Youth, the International Student Conference, and the World Assembly of Youth. Meanwhile the American press was touting him as a future leader of East Africa. Even the Wall Street Journal's article on Mboya was headed: "Businessmen Favorably Impressed."
The ICFTU also supported Mboya and his African socialism through his KFL, a model "free trade union"-- aid which reached £1000 a month in outright grants during the early '60s. In addition, the CIA-supported Fund for International Social and Economic Education contributed more than $25,000 to the Federation's coffers. One of the directors of this Fund, George Cabot Lodge (Henry's son), explained the importance of this aid in Spearheads of Democracy, a book which grew out of a Council on Foreign Relations study group which brought labor experts together with Cord Meyer Jr., the chief of the CIA's covert funding program. Speaking for the group, Lodge wrote: "The obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow. In many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, trade unions are almost the only organized force in direct contact with the peopel and they are frequently among the most important influences on the people." Aid to Mboya, he added, "has not only strengthened [ICFTU] but the whole cause of freedom and democracy in Africa."
The British were uncomfortably aware of what their "special ally" was doing in Kenya. In a British Cabinet Annexe marked for "UK EYES ONLY," dated December 21, 1959, they complained: "The aim seems to be to take advantage of the difficult situation in which the United Kingdom and other European powers find themselves and to replace their influence and interests by direct U.S. machinery of the ICFTU and American contacts that have been built up with American leaders for this purpose." The document concluded that "Americans are not interested in the creation of genuine African trade unions as we know them. America has no Labour Party. … As a result, the American trade union leaders such as Meany, Reuther, and Dubinsky can afford directly and openly to execute governmental and particularly State Department and CIA policy."
The ICFTU often works through the mainly U.S.-based international union secretariats. In Africa, where unionization has been concentrated in government employment, the most important secretariat -- and accordingly the main CIA instrument -- has been the Public Services International (which was also instrumental in the overthrow of the Cheddi Jagan government in British Guiana). W. C. Lawrence, a PSI representative in East Africa, laconically expressed the organization's role in a February 15, 1962 letter to his superior, Paul Tofahrn: "It seems to me that it is up to us to see that they (East African unionists) know what is right."
In 1963, just after Mboya left his post with the Kenya Federation of Labor, it looked as if the Federation might be losing sight of "what is right." Strikes threatened throughout the economy, and PSI feared some kind of class polarization of the society during the critical transition to independence, perhaps leading to the wrong kind of independence entirely. PSI records reveal how it stepped in. General Secretary Tofahrn sent a "Dear Tom" letter to Mboya on January 29, 1963, reading in part: "Perhaps the Goverment can do nothing else but say 'no' to their claims, but then the question arises how to say 'no' in a manner so convincing that the people concerned accept 'no' for an anser." He added that he was sending a special representative, T. Nynan, to Nairobi "to seek to avoid a strike," and he concluded with the comment that "this letter is written in order to urge you to drop hints in the appropriate quarter."
Mboya's hints were right on target, and on February 13, Nynan was able to report that the situation was in hand. "I was very lucky," he wrote, "getting the support of Brother Tom Mboya in my tries to avoid the strike."
[V. PEACE WITH FREEDOM]
UNDERWRITING MBOYA AND HIS Labor Federation was a natural strategy for the U.S. in Kenya during the '50s and early '60s. It advanced responsible nationalism; and it was painless, because the employers faced with higher wage demands were British, not American. By 1964, however, American investments, which would reach $100 million by 1967, were becoming significant, and some of the Kenyan union demands began to lose their charm. But even more important, 1964 also brought dangers of "political instability" serious enough to make radio communications with the Nairobi Embassy eighth highest on the State Department roster for the year. Zanzibar revolted and Tanzania's Nyerere was nearly overthrown. Rebellion was spreading through the Northeast Congo, and Kenya lay astride the natural supply route. The CIA decided that a new approach was in order.
Mboya had long been supported as a force to the right of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, but an accommodation with Kenyatta was now seen as necessary, particularly to insure that he did not support the Congolese rebels, and more generally to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left. It was a strategy which has since become familiar enough: utilize the credibility of the appropriate flexible militants to crusth the rest.
In June 1964, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya William Attwood met with Kenyatta and agreed that Western labor groups would stop subsidizing Mboya and the KFL; for balance, Kenyatta assured him that Russian and Chinese aid to the leftist leader, Vice President Odinga, would also end. Simultaneously, the CIA was making appropriate shifts in its operations, throwing its resources into a new kind of vehicle which would embrace the whole Kenyan political mainstream, while isolating the left and setting it up for destruction by Kenyatta. To this end the CIA shifted its emphasis to an organization by the name of "Peace With Freedom."
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