Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

None of the statements in either document were outright lies—the backup for both documents was on the record, in my file; however, they conveyed a perception that I now found to be twisted and sanitized. And in a culture that worships official documents, they perpetrated something that was even more sinister. Outright lies can be refuted. Documents like those two were impossible to refute because they were based on glimmers of truth, not open deceptions, and because they were produced by a corporation that had earned the trust of other corporations, international banks, and governments.

This was especially true of the résumé because it was an official document, as opposed to the article, which was a bylined interview in a magazine. The MAIN logo, appearing on the bottom of the résumé and on the covers of all the proposals and reports that résumé was likely to grace, carried a lot of weight in the world of international business; it was a seal of authenticity that elicited the same level of confidence as those stamped on diplomas and framed certificates hanging in doctors’ and lawyers’ offices.

These documents portrayed me as a very competent economist, head of a department at a prestigious consulting firm, who was traveling around the globe conducting a broad range of studies that would make the world a more civilized and prosperous place. The deception was not in what was stated, but in what was omitted. If I put on an outsider’s hat—took a purely objective look—I had to admit that those omissions raised many questions.

For example, there was no mention of my recruitment by the NSA or of Einar Greve’s connection with the Army and his role as an NSA liaison. There obviously was no discussion of the fact that I had been under tremendous pressure to produce highly inflated economic forecasts, or that much of my job revolved around arranging huge loans that countries like Indonesia and Panama could never repay. There was no praise for the integrity of my predecessor, Howard Parker, nor any acknowledgment that I became the head load forecaster because I was willing to provide the biased studies my bosses wanted, rather than—like Howard—saying what I believed was true and getting fired as a result. Most puzzling was that final entry, under the list of my clients: U.S. Treasury Department, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I kept returning to that line, and I wondered how people would interpret it. They might well ask what is the connection between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps some would take it as a typo, two separate lines erroneously compressed into one. Most readers, though, would never guess the truth, that it had been included for a specific reason. It was there so that those in the inner circle of the world where I operated would understand that I had been part of the team that crafted the deal of the century, the deal that changed the course of world history but never reached the newspapers. I helped create a covenant that guaranteed continued oil for America, safeguarded the rule of the House of Saud, and assisted in the financing of Osama bin Laden and the protection of international criminals like Uganda’s Idi Amin. That single line in my résumé spoke to those in the know. It said that MAIN’s chief economist was a man who could deliver.

The final paragraph of the MAINLINES article was a personal observation by the author, and it struck a raw nerve:

The expansion of Economics and Regional Planning has been fast paced, yet John feels he has been lucky in that each individual hired has been a hard-working professional. As he spoke to me from across his desk, the interest and support he holds for his staff was evident and admirable.

The fact was that I had never thought of myself as a bona fide economist. I had graduated with a bachelor of science in business administration from Boston University, emphasis on marketing. I had always been lousy in mathematics and statistics. At Middlebury College, I had majored in American literature; writing had come easily to me. My status as chief economist and as manager of Economics and Regional Planning could not be attributed to my capabilities in either economics or planning; rather, it was a function of my willingness to provide the types of studies and conclusions my bosses and clients wanted, combined with a natural acumen for persuading others through the written word. In addition, I was clever enough to hire very competent people, many with master’s degrees and a couple with PhDs, acquiring a staff who knew a whole lot more about the technicalities of my business than I did. Small wonder that the author of that article concluded that “the interest and support he holds for his staff was evident and admirable.”