CovertAction Institute

North Korea Aided African Liberation Movements CIA Tried to Suppress

North Korea’s historic achievements have been airbrushed amidst a relentless CIA-State Department-media demonization campaign lending support to regime-change efforts

North Korea is not a country that most people would invoke favorably in polite company.

A relentless CIA-State Department-led demonization campaign over 70+ years has engrained the public with the perception that North Korea is an oppressive place with a threatening nuclear program ruled by a buffoonish family dictatorship.

Even normally astute political analysts attuned to the government’s use of the media and educational system to “manufacture consent” with the political status quo, have called North Korea “one of the most horrible countries in the world,” with “nothing good to say about it.”

Tycho van der Hoog’s book, Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa (London: Hurst & Co., 2025), shows this latter viewpoint to be wrong-headed and that there are actually many good things to say about North Korea.

Among them is the important contributions made by North Korea to post-colonial African development and to the success of African liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s that the U.S. government and CIA worked to suppress in collaboration with Apartheid South Africa. [...]

North Korea Aided African Liberation Movements CIA Tried to Suppress - CovertAction Magazine North Korea’s historic achievements have been airbrushed amidst a relentless CIA-State Department-media demonization campaign lending support to regime-change efforts North Korea is not a country that most people would invoke favorably in polite company. A relentless CIA-State Department-led demon...

Elusive Language: What is Terrorism Really?

Actually I have grown tired of explaining to people the deception at the heart of airport security procedures. For years I have tried to show that the explanations given for the increasingly intrusive, not to mention time-consuming, controls to which passengers in international travel and for decades now in domestic movement have nothing to do with safety or protection of travelers, nor the safety and protection of transport assets such as aircraft or railway rolling stock. I have told younger people how easy it was to board a train or enter an airport in the 1970s. The response was either incredulity or claims that the world has become more dangerous than in those “good old days.”

Recently I read a scholarly article in which the author attempted to summarize the history of U.S. policy in Africa, dating from when the Kingdom of Morocco was the first government to recognize the newly formed confederation of North American states that had won their independence from Great Britain. The author supplied a diplomatic history which culminated in the regime’s focus on the risks of “terrorism” in Africa as a key element of its foreign policy. Nowhere in the article—and this is no exception—was the concept of terrorism defined or elaborated. Apparently there was no need to identify or even to investigate the content of a “terrorism” or “counter-terrorism” policy.

In previous reflections I have attempted to clarify the political language used to manage and confuse both the ordinary person and those who for whatever reason have devoted professional efforts to understand the course of events since the end of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “long 19th century.” Economist Michael Hudson has argued that, until the outbreak of the Great War (World War I), the world—at least the industrialized part—had in fact been moving toward socialism. Anglo-American scholarship has traditionally mocked this observation attributed most notably to Karl Marx. However, such a denial of historical facts only served to justify the wars initiated by the British and American Empires to prevent this development. Professor Hudson argued that there were competing forms of socialism. Marx was a partisan for a particular tendency. However, Marx had every reason to believe that some form of socialism was inevitable. The successful October Revolution in Russia and the failed November revolution in Germany were not aberrations. On the contrary, the two world wars and subsequent long war after 1945 were concerted efforts by the meanwhile merged Anglo-American Empire to resist and ultimately defeat socialism—except in China.

The summary argument below is based on the assumption that the 20th century and its extension into the 21st century have been shaped by the Anglo-American war against any form of socialism, especially to the extent based upon popular democratic political culture. The principal obstacle to understanding this long war lies in a failure to properly comprehend the underlying philosophy of governance in the Anglo-American Empire and its idiosyncratic use of the term “democracy.”

The U.S., due largely to its settler-colonial history, but also to the culturally diverse immigrant pool that would compose its population, has been the site of considerable conflict over the terms of “democracy” to the extent that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries also brought their own political and social culture with them. Hence, much of U.S. political warfare has been the concerted effort by the Anglo-American elite to impose that idiosyncratic democracy model on ethnic communities with different social and political traditions. The imposition of a highly concentrated mass media propaganda apparatus and industrial management structure was facilitated by the absence of any surviving Indigenous socio-political culture or entrenched population. Thus, it is hardly surprising that numerous foreign observers of U.S. society were struck by the extreme conformism among the country’s inhabitants, something quite unfamiliar to visitors from the European continent or other parts of the world.

Anglo-American political theory, going back at least as far as the so-called Glorious Revolution, defined democracy, not as a principle of popular political rule but as a model for the governance of joint stock companies. The franchise was not only explicitly restricted to property ownership. The scope of the franchise extended to the appointment of officers and servants and the allocation of profits generated by business operations.

Following the example of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company became the model of the corporate state, where even the monarch was reduced to the role of shareholder. The “democracy” and democratic procedures formulated for directing the business of the chartered companies were never intended for determining, let alone implementing, policies for the general welfare. The general welfare, although occasionally the subject of English and Scottish theories, was effectively limited to the privileges and immunities of shareholders, individually or collectively. The origin of parties in this system was not the organized interest of citizens but of economic actors, i.e., adventurers (investors), landowners, and merchants. The fact that Anglo-American political theory has been extrapolated to include citizens, i.e., nominally independent commercial actors, does not mean that the underlying qualification for the franchise has been altered.

Here it is important to note that the joint stock company is an exclusive, not an inclusive, entity. The substance of political struggle throughout the 19th and 20th centuries can also be understood as efforts to either reduce the entry barrier to shareholding or expand the scope of business interest to include elements of the general welfare. The so-called progressive movement was essentially an effort to subject social or general welfare interests to the principles of scientific management. Management principles that evolved in the concentration of industry were adapted to discipline populist demands. [...]

Elusive Language: What is Terrorism Really? - CovertAction Magazine Actually I have grown tired of explaining to people the deception at the heart of airport security procedures. For years I have tried to show that the explanations given for the increasingly intrusive, not to mention time-consuming, controls to which passengers in international travel and for decade...

Ship Used to Breed Disease Epidemics in the Korean War Is Discovered!

The notorious “Bubonic Plague Ship” of the U.S. Navy has been found beached in Northern California. LSIL 1091 laboratory vessel was used to breed dysentery and cholera epidemics among North Korean and Chinese POWs at the sprawling Koje Island Prison Camp during the Korean War.

Samoa, California, is remote even by the local standards of Humboldt County. A few hearty souls live on this sandbar, huddled in the lee of its dunes in quaint hand-built seaside homes reminiscent of the “drop city” camps of the 1960s.

This spit of heaved up sand dune runs north to south to create the natural estuary of Humboldt Bay and the safe harbor of the Gold Rush city of Eureka. From the windward side of Samoa, only a hundred yards away, the Pacific Ocean, North America’s deepest and widest moat, stretches 5,000 miles (8,000 km) across unbroken sea to the rugged and rocky islands of Japan.

Considerable local history has accrued to this remote outpost of California civilization including the Trinity gold rush, horrific Indian massacres, the expulsion of the Chinese, the glory days of the Redwood Empire, the once thriving salmon industry, and the short-lived but flourishing ship-building industry. Rolled out of the water on redwood logs and under the shadow of the vast depot of the Samoa Smokehouse sits the rusted, beached hulk of the most unheralded naval vessel in all American history. This craft is LSIL 1091.

Originally classified as a Landing Craft Infantry (Large) LCI(L), 1091 is an ugly duckling even as gray World War II steel-clad warships go. It is flat-bottomed and square-hulled. Steel plates run up the ship’s sides to enclose the mid-ship house with its two forward cannon turrets, and two aft machine gun turrets. There is a forepeak house for repairs and ramp stowage at the bow, and there are open fore and aft decks, but there are no outside passageways, no masts, no lifeboats, and few portholes to clutter the severity of its profile. It is a military product of form follows function.

This particular landing craft design is attributed to Winston Churchill, and it is a foreboding war engine. Its purpose was to transport and rapidly discharge an invading amphibious force of 200 marines equipped with guns, ammunition and rations sufficient to establish a beachhead. The flat bottom allowed the LCI to run ashore in shallow water. An innovative hatch in the ship’s bow swung open at the waterline. From this maw slid a 40 ft. (12 m.) ramp like an extending tongue to grapple onto the beach. When the ship grounded the entire deployment of troops could charge onto the beach in a matter of minutes while covered by the ship’s cannons and machine guns. Half a dozen of these vessels launched against a fortified shoreline was a formidable manned amphibious assault.

Number LCI(L) 1091 was built late in the war (1944) by Defoe Shipbuilding Company of Bay City, Michigan. (The total production run of LCI (L) ships for World War II was 1098.) It was 158 feet (51 m) long and 23 feet (7.4 m) wide, with a 236-ton (214 mt) displacement when empty. It was propelled up to a sustained speed of 14 knots by two sets of four harnessed diesel engines driving twin propellers, and it carried a crew of 24 sailors with four commanding officers. It arrived in the Pacific Theater in time to participate in the assault on Okinawa Gunto (April-June 1945). When the Pacific War ended two months later in August 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Japan, 1091 was reassigned to Occupation mine sweeping duty at Kochi-Shikoku and Nagoya harbor. [...]

Ship Used to Breed Disease Epidemics in the Korean War Is Discovered! - CovertAction Magazine The notorious “Bubonic Plague Ship” of the U.S. Navy has been found beached in Northern California. LSIL 1091 laboratory vessel was used to breed dysentery and cholera epidemics among North Korean and Chinese POWs at the sprawling Koje Island Prison Camp during the Korean War. [This article is p...