Economic Hit Man by Maureen Tkacik

The shocking, supposedly true confessions John Perkins has written about the double life he once led place a defunct Boston company at the center of a shadowy network that secretly controls world affairs. But just because his unlikely bestseller is filled with tall tales doesn't mean there's no such thing as an economic hit man.

Claudine Martin is the name on the business card she slips to him across the table, though he will come to doubt that it is real. The next line reads Special Con-sultant to Chas. T. Main Incorporated, the stodgy engineering firm that has just given 26-year-old John Perkins, fresh from a stint in the Peace Corps and woefully lacking in financial training, a plum job as its newest junior economist. And instructed him, in early 1971, to come here to the Boston Public Library reference room, to prepare for one of his first projects.

I've been asked to help in your training.

Naturally she's gorgeous. And brilliant, and Perkins had married too young, and all of this training is to take place in the private confines of Claudine's idyllic Beacon Street apartment, blocks out of the way of the company's Prudential Center headquarters. Most of his bosses are strait-laced guys who'd gone military academy, then MIT, then Main; Perkins is an unshaven liberal-arts type who opposes the Vietnam War. Even if he were allowed to talk about his liaisons with her, he can't confide in them. As it is, he isn't supposed to tell anyone, not even your wife, that he has just received a second, unofficial title. That from now on, he will be an Economic Hit Man.

We're a small, exclusive club, Claudine tells her disciple. We're paid — well paid — to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars. The duties of the economic hit men, who always refer to themselves as EHM, are threefold: First they generate wildly optimistic economic forecasts that international banks will use to justify big loans to developing countries. The countries then spend the money on power plants and roads, showering American engineering firms like Main and Bechtel and Brown & Root with contracts. But the crucial step, the real key, is to ensure that the projects are so ambitious, the loans so huge, that the leaders in charge of paying them back will be forced to appeal for mercy — and that's when they'll have to do the United States a favor, a military base, a UN vote, whatever. They become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty. We can draw on them whenever we desire to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs.

After Claudine takes full advantage of Perkins's post-adolescent weaknesses, she tells him the history of economic-hit-manhood, how it's a job CIA agents used to be charged with, how they had played a hand in toppling uncooperative heads of state. How the so-called experts, bookish economists who didn't understand the real object of the game, would try to undermine his rosy forecasts. And over a bottle of beaujolais, how, in no uncertain terms:

Talking about us would make life dangerous for you.

"Close your eyes for a minute." On a Thursday evening in May, John Perkins is in New Hampshire, speaking to a packed house in the chapel at Tilton, his old boarding school. As it turned out, some 33 years after the fact, Perkins did talk about Claudine, told the world about her in a 250-page geopolitical memoir called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. What finally convinced me to ignore the threats and bribes? Fatherhood and patriotism, he explains in his preface, a deep commitment to the American republic, and his fear, after September 11, that the EHMs who followed him were turning that republic into a global empire. The book hit stores in November. And nothing more dangerous than unexpected success has befallen him.

More than 20 editors turned down Perkins's manuscript before his agent got a yes from Berrett-Koehler, a little-known independent San Francisco publisher. The deal did not pay Perkins an advance. Without the benefit of marketing blitz or name recognition, Confessions has since sold more than 125,000 copies in hardcover, about twice as many as the much more mainstream Globalization and Its Discontents, by Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank chief Joseph Stiglitz. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez referenced the book during a state-of-the-nation address and talked about his own face-offs with economic hit men. Beacon Pictures optioned the book for a possible film after Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions passed. For the better part of four months this spring, Confessions was on the New York Times bestseller list, despite being ignored by the rest of the paper, not to mention pretty much every section of every major newspaper and magazine in the country. Which would have found some pretty incredible claims had they bothered to look.

Confessions is a triumph, Perkins's website boasts, of word-of-mouth marketing, of the new e-mail–enabled buzz-producing power of Howard Dean clubs and MoveOn volunteers, of peacenik blogs. Maybe you, too, are ready to listen to new arguments, stuff you would have rolled your eyes at a few years ago, back before WorldCom and Abu Ghraib and the Downing Street memo. Maybe you caught that we were shipping prisoners out of Gitmo to have them interrogated in countries like Uzbekistan — whose crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators has been branded a massacre by human rights organizations — a tactic even the Weekly Standard thinks is a bad idea. Maybe you're one of the 65 percent of Americans who do not feel the country is headed in the "right direction." Maybe the job has been outsourced, the executive indicted, the election lost.

And maybe you're at your neighborhood Barnes & Noble when your eye catches a book, a wonky-looking thing with an intriguing title rendered in a subdued sans-serif font and a cover photo showing a man in a suit with a steel briefcase walking through a Third World slum, a picture that promises to force you to confront the uncomfortable inequalities of the world. Maybe you go in expecting some statistics and sober analysis and don't know quite what to think when you get to the first chapter and Perkins is visualizing himself as a dashing secret agent, heading off to exotic lands, lounging beside hotel swimming pools. But by the time you're in the library and he's looking into the soft green eyes of his scheming seductress, you're — well, to quote Claudine, once you're in, you never get out.

After his last night with Claudine, Perkins never sees her again. He repairs to his apartment in the Back Bay and packs his bags for Indonesia, where his job will be to convince Howard Parker, a curmudgeonly veteran Main forecaster, that the country's surging economy will create massive energy demand. Parker refuses to budge from his conservative predictions, and upon their return to the Prudential Center, the old man gets fired. He's lost touch with reality, says Perkins's mentor, Bruno Zambotti, an irascible Cary Grant look-alike who will eventually become Main's president. You've just been promoted.

Then it's off to Panama, a grim vestige of colonialism where the graffiti bears messages like Death for Freedom Is the Way to Christ, the locals are trying to regain control of their canal, and Perkins finds himself invited for a completely unexpected private audience with the country's populist dictator, Omar Torrijos. Somehow, conversation turns to events 8,000 miles away, in Iran, where the U.S.-friendly shah is coming under threats from the mullahs. Despite his own anti-American reputation, Torrijos is sympathetic to the shah; it's a lose-lose situation, he says, trying to lead a poor country rich in natural resources crucial to the appetites of the global economy without succumbing to either communism or what Perkins will refer to, again and again, as the corporatocracy. Bodyguards? I have a few myself, Torrijos tells Perkins. You think they'll save my life if your country decides to get rid of me?

Six chapters later, contracts for work in Iran land our hero in a dimly lit restaurant with a radical named Yamin, who happens to have heard that Perkins is a man in the middle, a man between two worlds, an EHM open to the truth. Yamin drives Perkins out of Tehran and through the desert to a shack in a small oasis. Inside, Yamin introduces him to a victim of the shah's brutal regime: Doc, a once trusted government adviser who has been purged, reduced to a shadowy form in a wheelchair sitting in the dark.

I could see the outline of the man's face in profile, his shaggy beard, and — then it grabbed me — the flatness. He had no nose! I stifled a gasp.

And Confessions goes on and on like this, with Perkins sharing his astonishing recollections like an increasingly cynical Forrest Gump. In another chapter, Perkins writes of spending eight months during the thick of the 1970s oil crisis sequestered on and off in a private conference room in Main's offices, thinking of ways to get the Saudis to funnel the money Americans were spending on their oil back into the U.S. economy. He sees himself as a whiz kid and a Merlin who could cause industries to magically sprout like flowers. He envisions power plants. Office parks. Roads. Waste management facilities to process all the stuff the Saudis would churn out if someone just drew the blueprints for them. With the help of Perkins and Main, the U.S. Treasury Department devises a plan: It will oversee the construction of several modern cities that will rise, en masse, from Saudi Arabia's barren deserts. There's just one slight obstacle. We would have to convince key players in the Saudi government.

Perkins's assignment is a fellow he calls Prince W., who displays a weakness of his own: blondes. "Sally" was a beautiful blue-eyed woman whose husband made little attempt to hide his infidelities. She agreed to give Prince W. a try. Pimping was then, and is now, illegal, Perkins reminds his readers. But fortunately he'd always been a good tipper. The posh Boston restaurants he frequents have no qualms about giving him blank receipts, which are enough to fool his clueless colleagues. Luckily, the accounting department allowed me great liberties with my expense account.

It is my greatest wish that Perkins is telling the whole truth all the way through, one of Perkins's 150 Amazon.com reviewers writes. Even the smallest of fibs could tarnish a work of great importance, given our media's
inability to see bigger pictures. The truth is, it's hard to know for certain what parts of Confessions are true: Perkins, as EHMs are no doubt wont to do, has left few easily traceable tracks. Parsons Corporation, the privately held firm that acquired Main in 1985, is headquartered in Pasadena, California. "I really don't know where their records would be," says a spokeswoman, referring to the files that might contain the restaurant receipts used to cover up the arrangement with "Sally." Torrijos is dead. So are Parker the curmudgeon and Charlie Illingworth, the project manager who oversaw Perkins's first assignment, and most of the men who ran Main when Perkins was there. Perkins says he doesn't know "Doc"'s real identity or what became of "Yamin." His first wife, Ann — whose father's friend, "Uncle Frank," set him up with the National Security Agency interview he claims profiled him for the job of economic hit man — does not want to be contacted, Perkins tells me in an e-mail. Please respect this.

The one person who would indisputably know if Claudine or the economic hit men or the bribes ever existed is Bruno Zambotti. A man by that name lives in Potomac, Maryland, and seems to relish slamming down his phone. He did not respond to a note I left on his doorstep or to the letter I sent in a final fruitless attempt to get him to talk. But several of the other surviving Main alumni, who gather each year for a reunion ("We are still stepping out," announces the 2004 program), have read Confessions, and a few of them have spotted holes in Perkins's stories: Noreen Illingworth disputes that her husband ever harbored an obsession with General Patton or wore anything like the khaki shirt with military-style epaulettes Perkins depicts. Frank Fullerton, Perkins's one-time supervisor, says Perkins left Main not out of a crisis of conscience but because he "thought he was worth more than he was." Most, however, simply can't see why anyone would want to sully the firm's good name. These are guys who spent their formative years in the Great Depression, their adolescences fighting or preparing to fight World War II, their twenties studying to master the math that would underlie the elegant, efficient foundations of future economies. They can't conceive how Perkins could see the world — the Big Picture, if you will — so differently. ("There was never a time," says Bob Ender, an old colleague of Perkins's, "when I felt like a team that was more than the sum of its parts the way I did at Main.")

When pressed for documentation to verify his claims, Perkins and his publisher produce a flimsy package of materials. The most convincing is an article from the Tucson Citizen written by a reporter who recognized the name Einar Greve — the curious Norwegian who originally recruited Perkins to Main — as that of the infamous Tucson Electric Power CEO who had left the company amid insider-trading allegations in 1989. Tracked down at his new home in Santa Barbara, California, Greve tells the reporter, "Allowing for some author discretion, basically the story is true."

That call to Greve is followed by others — from Scandinavian journalists, from other American reporters, from me. (And, oh yes, a production company, a Plan B, owned by Brad Pitt. "I got the sense Pitt very much wanted this story to be true." To impress Angelina? I wonder.) By now Greve has gone back and re-read the book. He has some bones to pick. For instance, the part where Perkins writes that they met on an airstrip and Greve informed me that he sometimes acted as an NSA liaison and gave me a look that made me suspect that part of his assignment was to evaluate my capabilities. It was actually a hotel bar, Greve says, and "I don't know anyone in the NSA," and, anyway, well, "if I do they wouldn't tell me about it." Perkins contends that he later penned 15 letters to Greve from Ecuador. "I don't know what he's talking about," says Greve. That it was Greve who sent him to the library where he was seduced by Claudine. "Oh, that part was fiction."

So that's it: Perkins is lying?

Long pause.

"I think that John," Greve says, "really has convinced himself that a lot of this stuff is true."

Maybe you are tired. Maybe the trillions of terabytes of instantly Googlable facts you can summon to support or refute whatever point you're supporting or refuting just leaves you dizzy, numb, small. Maybe everyone, even the bloggers spouting opinions that rack up countless hits, feels that way, because we're just arguing about technicalities. The known- and unknown-knowns, as a certain defense secretary might say.

A good part of Perkins's book is known-knowns that have simply been forgotten. But that winds up being one of Confessions' weird strengths: For page upon page, he stretches your credulity to the breaking point, only to — snap! — pull you back with an aside on the verified surreality of Cold War foreign policy. Though the Treasury Department wouldn't refer to it by Perkins's label, the Saudi Arabian Money–laundering Affair, the department did indeed form a commission, known as JECOR, through which the Saudis basically outsourced the modernization of their entire country. (It was also the vehicle through which a lot of rich Saudis got richer, as a single prince did to the tune of $200 million when Bechtel bribed him in order to snag the Riyadh Airport contract in the late 1970s.) In one passage, Perkins quotes Oscar Torrijos talking about the coup that ousted Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz, whose land reform campaign had threatened property held by the American-owned United Fruit. Sure enough, Google will have you know, the CIA has declassified dossiers confirming that in 1952 the agency decided Arbenz must go: "How does not matter." Eight years after Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash, Perkins reminds us, the United States invaded Panama and imprisoned General Manuel Noriega, an episode lost in the first Gulf war but that in retrospect replays as an affront to the most basic notions of sovereignty and self-determination.

I was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone and my father worked for the infamous United Fruit Company, writes another of Confessions' Amazon.com reviewers. To say the least, I agree with Mr. Perkins. For all the online commentary and the thousands of browser hits, Perkins's book is really about something you can't glean from search engines. It's about perceptions, and how they reflect your own. It is often the personal stories that tell the bigger truths, an Amazoner weighs in. I value the perspective I get from Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. None of these, though, explains it from the ground up. The ground, after all, is where invasion really feels like invasion. Where torture feels like torture. If you want to understand "why they hate us," writes Yan in Shanghai, read this book.

And that's where Perkins gets to me. My grandfather built nuclear power plants for Bechtel in Taiwan, and my dad was a diplomat in China. When I was a kid we lived in a crowded, beige former opium port called Guangzhou. My dad spent much of his time meeting provincial officials, advancing the causes of American companies like Nike and Proctor & Gamble. It was a bitch. Perhaps to get away, to detach himself from all the dilemmas created by geopolitics, my father devoted many of his vacation days to visiting shrines to those mostly altruistic pioneers of globalization, the Jesuits. On one of those trips he met a beggar child who was badly burned — deliberately burned, he realized, to elicit sympathy. Now, we had met hundreds of beggars in those years, fellow men with distended bellies and limbs the width of pencils and deformities you couldn't in your wildest dreams believe, and my dad is a big-hearted man. But never before had he felt so personally responsible, so overcome with the rottenness of the system, that he broke down sobbing.

That night after dinner, sitting with my mom alone at the ostentatious marble table the government had provided us, I heard him crying again. The thing is, he wasn't responsible, and he knew that. But my dad still cries, when you bring up that story. I'm crying right now.

For Perkins, writing Confessions was part of the mission he's pursued for the past dozen or so years, which is no less than changing the world. It says so right on the website of his nonprofit, Dreamchange.org. With the new millennium came the realization that a powerful grassroots movement is necessary to channel the energy from our awakened individual consciousness into actions. If it sounds New Age, it is, but the basic idea is the same one that leads people to become, say, journalists (a career in which Perkins himself dabbled as an assistant at the Boston Record American back in 1965): that knowledge, consciousness, breeds understanding and, ultimately, more-enlightened policies, more-just systems.

Before Confessions, Perkins wrote five books on shamanism and indigenous cultures. All of his efforts — Confessions included — are full of dreams and visions. In The World Is as You Dream It, he takes the hallucinogen ayahuasca and sees a flock of what I took for birds that turns out to be the Wright brothers in small airplanes that zoom overhead, and later finds himself surrounded by dangerous, speeding cars. Sometimes I wondered whether I had gone too far, Perkins wrote in another book. There were many occasions when I feared that I might be losing my sanity and the ability to discern between the different levels of reality. (A blogger known as the Opinionated Bastard writes, Given that his last few books were on shamanism, I was deeply skeptical that John didn't just make up the whole thing after a little too much peyote. The Bastard has a point.)

Dreams are important, Perkins contends, because they enable the dreamer to visualize a different future, and then shapeshift to fit it. This shapeshifting takes three forms: There's cellular, which involves actual physical transformation, such as cancer or aging, or becoming something else, like a jaguar or a tree. (Or a piece of furniture: Jessica Perkins swears her father once disappeared into thin air during a game of hide-and-seek, then reappeared a few minutes later, explaining, "I shapeshifted into the chair.") There's institutional. The American Revolution, democracy, was a shapeshift. Christ walking on water. September 11. Death. All shapeshifts. What we dream, happens.

And then there's personal shapeshifting, which is what Perkins did when he left Main to start a new career as an energy entrepreneur. He takes credit for revolutionizing — institutionally shapeshifting — the entire utility industry, which seems a stretch: The power plant designed by Perkins's company was beset by technical problems and closed ahead of schedule. "But it sure was great spending time with John," says his partner, Dan Shalloway. "He's full of ideas." After relocating to Florida and moving on to other ventures — leading expeditions into the Amazon, lecturing on native religions — Perkins shapeshifted again. There he was, in a candlelit Embassy Suites ballroom, giving his consciousness-raising spiel before 50 or so cross-legged free thinkers at the 2003 Bioneers conference in San Rafael, California, when suddenly he said something nobody expected:

"I used to be an economic hit man," he told the audience. "I'm coming clean for the first time."

I had hoped Perkins would do the same with me. His publicist had promised us time together. He was going to come to Boston, and the plan was for him to show me Claudine's apartment and the library room where they met, to make it all real. Then, two weeks before he is to make the trip, Perkins goes through another shapeshift of amazing proportions. He gets sick: diverticulosis, a disease associated with a high-fat, low-fiber diet. He's in the hospital 10 days. I lost half the blood in my body, he writes in a posting on his website. He cancels his visit.

Nearly dying a month ago — partly from overwork and overstress — taught me that if I want to live long enough to change the world, I must be much more careful about schedules. So I press him for verification over the phone. "Claudine, well, I don't know how else to describe her but 'seductive.' Someone asked who I'd cast to play her in the movie. I said Catherine Zeta-Jones." Later I e-mail him about my doubts: Why are so many people in his book given pseudonyms? Why won't his ex-wife Ann back him up? Why can't he give the real name of "Farhad," the Iranian friend he met while studying at Middlebury, who later warned him to leave Iran? Come on, Maureen! Get real, he replies. Ann is a businesswoman now and can't get involved without jeopardizing her job. Would you want Farhad to get killed? As a journalist you ought to know the importance of confidentiality. Did you learn nothing from Deep Throat? The sources that have come out — other EHM and jackals who have contacted me in the last months — are in my next book, but I don't intend to reveal them until I publish that book.

Perkins hasn't sold his new project yet, but he shouldn't have any trouble finding takers. (The corporatocracy, represented by Penguin, bought the paperback rights to Confessions earlier this year.) When his next book comes out, it will have the gravitas of a bestselling author behind it. And whatever visions it contains will be only that much more convincing.

"Close your eyes for a minute." As Perkins addresses the crowd in the Tilton chapel, it's clear the school has experienced something of a shapeshift. In Confessions, he portrays his alma mater as a puritanical, haughty institution where he endured torment as the son of a poor teacher studying among sneering teenage lords. But today's faculty and students are an open-minded bunch. Many are dressed in bright, flowing, ill-advised garb, and they've been joined by scores of people from every edge of New England who have turned out to hear what Perkins has to say. He is gaunt but in good spirits. They are all ready to dream. He invites everyone in the building "to think where your special talents and gifts are, what you are going to do personally to create this better world."

After his speech, a raven-haired teenager named Audrey, a Zeta-Jones type, comes up to Perkins. He signs her book. She talks about CAFTA. "It's just like NAFTA, only Central American, and like, no one supports it. None of the people. But it's obvious guys like these guys" — EHMs — "are running things." Perkins smiles and nods authoritatively. "This is my friend," says Audrey, introducing a girl in a long purple skirt. "She's like, skeptical? But then she read your book. And she believes!"

Perkins gets to me. I give him my book. It's full of yellow stickies where I've marked suspicious passages, and scrawled with phone numbers and notes from sources.

Keep up your great work, he writes. Change the world!