“Economic hit men,” John Perkins writes in his controversial new book, “are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as Empire but one that has taken on terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”

John Perkins should know about economic hit men—he was covertly recruited by the U.S. National Security Agency to be one. For years, he worked for an international consulting firm where his job was to convince underdeveloped countries to accept enormous loans, much larger than what was really needed, for infrastructure development—and to make sure that the development projects were then contracted to U. S. multinationals. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the American government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able, by dictating repayment terms, to essentially control their economies. It was not unlike the way a loan shark operates—and Perkins and his colleagues didn’t shun this kind of unsavory association. In fact, they even referred to themselves as “economic hit men.”

This is a story of international political intrigue at the highest levels. For over a decade, Perkins traveled all over the world—Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Columbia, Saudi Arabia, Iran—and worked with men like Panamanian president Omar Torrijos,  who became a personal friend. In 1974, he helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of Saudi petrodollars back into the U. S. economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the Islamic fundamentalist House of Saud and a succession of American administrations. Perkins’ story illuminates just how far economic hit men were willing to go, and unveils the real causes of some of the most dramatic developments in recent history, such as the fall of the Shah of Iran and the invasions of Panama and Iraq.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which many people urged Perkins not to write, is a blistering attack on--and exposé of--the little known inner workings of both government and corporate policies that have fostered globalization and led to the impoverishment of untold millions of people across the planet. It is a story that will increase the reader's understanding of why so many people in so many countries hate America and what is has come to stand for.

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