http://www.slate.com/id/2254620/

After being rejected by a number of large publishers, John Perkins sold his memoirs to a smallish press called Berrett Koehler in 2004. Confessions of an Economic Hitman—equal parts political exposé and James Bond novel—recounts his role in what
he claims is a carefully choreographed effort by the U.S. government to
promote American commercial interests abroad. In Perkins' retelling,
everything from economic advising to CIA paramilitary operations served
the same master: U.S. corporate interests. Confessions struck a chord among believers in grassy knolls and Roswell and became a best-seller. (Berret claims on its Web site that 850,000 copies have been sold, making the book its top-seller ever.) The State Department responded with "Confessions—or Fantasies—of an Economic Hit Man," a document disputing many of Perkins' claims of government involvement.

But conspiracy theories die hard. Is the State Department response setting the record straight, or is it just a coverup? Though most of Perkins' book may be pulp fiction—we'll probably never be able to
verify his tales of payoffs, espionage, and sexual escapades—one of his
claims just received unexpected confirmation from a group of serious
scholars. New York University researchers Daniel Berger, Bill Easterly, Shanker Satyanath—together with Harvard economist Nathan Nunn—have
analyzed Perkins' "economic hitman" theory—that is, the theory that the
U.S. government has used the CIA to promote American corporate
interests abroad. (The economists prefer the term "political influence
hypothesis" to "economic hitman theory.") Based on information from
declassified documents detailing covert CIA operations during the Cold
War, the social scientists find that Perkins' claims are backed up by
the numbers: Countries targeted for CIA political interventions started
importing more U.S. products, a sign of American economic imperialism
at work.

The study by Berger and his colleagues is a product of the relatively young field of forensic economics, which aims to shed light on shadowy corners of the economic world that trade in much speculation but few verifiable facts. Forensic economists
have applied their analytic techniques to expose shenanigans ranging
from vote-trading by Olympic figure skating judges to insider trading to political favor-seeking by companies in America and around the world.

All of this work is based on the insight that backroom deals and illicit transactions often leave traces in the data, which creative researchers
can find. The authors never get to hear wiretapped conversations
between Richard Helms—Director of Central Intelligence under Nixon—and
Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who came to power in a
Nixon-backed coup. But they do see how such political interventions
affected American business interests by looking at international trade
data.

The authors put together a list of the years that the CIA was active in each of 156 countries, using recently declassified documents detailing the agency's clandestine operations around the
globe during the Cold War, when American intelligence was trying to
thwart the spread of Soviet influence. (The KGB was similarly engaged
in countering the specter of American capitalist imperialism.) The
CIA's activities ranged from active interventions, like operatives
blowing up dams or "neutralizing" opponents, to the softer touch of
handing out propaganda pamphlets and providing funds or expertise for
the campaigns of U.S.-friendly politicians. (One shocking fact the
researchers mention in passing—fodder in itself for conspiracy
theorists—is that the CIA operated secretly in nearly a third of the
countries on earth at some point between 1947 and 1989.) They match up
this history of CIA interventions to data on imports and exports
between the United States and each of its trading partners over the
same time span to see whether trade was affected by CIA operations.
Indeed it was: In years the CIA was active in a country, the United
States enjoyed a boost in exports to that country of about 13 percent.
Over a few years, this adds up to a lot of extra business for U.S.
companies. For example, the authors estimate that the multi-year
commitment of Helms and his successor to support Pinochet may have
translated into a doubling of exports to that country by 1988, relative
to what they would have been in the absence of CIA involvement.

Unfortunately for the local Chilean economy, the United States didn't reciprocate by taking Chile-produced goods—the authors find no effect on exports to the United States from Chile or other CIA-targeted
economies. Nor is it the case that imports were growing simply because
U.S.-style capitalism was good for economic development overall: CIA
operations don't affect total imports, suggesting that U.S. business
came at the expense of imports from other countries.

How did the CIA persuade these friendly governments to "Buy American"? A pair of additional analyses in the study provide some answers. First, the
researchers find that the boost to imports came from CIA operations
that helped to install or maintain U.S.-friendly dictatorships—it seems
that the will of the people in democracies was effective in
counteracting CIA influence. So U.S. exports didn't benefit from
"softer" interventions like the ones in postwar Japan or failed
attempts at regime change, as in Syria, for example. (This may explain
why CIA operations so often promoted dictatorships at the expense of
democracy, a finding that a subset of the same authors report in a separate study.)
Further, the authors report that the CIA-produced increase in U.S.
imports is greatest for countries with government-dominated economies.
It's not that dictators were foisting U.S. toasters or microwaves on
their people. Rather, U.S. interests were served primarily through the
export of American-made power plants, fighter planes, and other
government purchases.

With this evidence in hand, it seems harder for the State Department to fall back on the "fantasy" defense, at
least when it comes to the economic implications of Perkins' storyline.
It can provide a statistical rebuttal—the study, after all, is work
that has yet to be fully vetted by the academic peer review process.
Alternatively, government officials might own up to the fact that
America has in its closet economic skeletons to go along with the many
political ones that have already been exposed courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. It might also suggest that American foreign policy in the 21^st
century is on a more enlightened path than the cloak-and-dagger days of
the Cold War. We can then wait for more forensic economists like
Berger, Easterly, Satyanath, and Nunn to evaluate whether this is
indeed the case.