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Kondor3, shall we move on to the 1954 Guatemalan coup?
But before we do I would like to share this story I came across the other day. Kermit Roosevelt, the architect of the Iran coup, conceived a plan to orchestrate the overthrow of the Syrian Baathist government in 1957. Although the plan was not put into play until the Obama administration dusted it off, it is lucky for this discussion that it was documented and clearly shows that US officials were not averse to using terrorism in achieving their goals.
Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot
Sabotage
The report said that once the necessary degree of fear had been created, frontier incidents and border clashes would be staged to provide a pretext for Iraqi and Jordanian military intervention. Syria had to be "made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments," the report says. "CIA and SIS should use their capabilities in both the psychological and action fields to augment tension." That meant operations in Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, taking the form of "sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities" to be blamed on Damascus.
The plan called for funding of a "Free Syria Committee", and the arming of "political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities" within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus.
The planners envisaged replacing the Ba'ath/Communist regime with one that was firmly anti-Soviet, but they conceded that this would not be popular and "would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power".
