John Perkins (author) - Biography

Biography

Perkins graduated from the Tilton School in 1963. He subsequently attended Middlebury College for two years before dropping out due to lackluster grades. He later earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from Boston University in 1968. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador from 1968–1970. He spent the 1970s working for the Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, where he was employed, according to his own account, after first being screened by the National Security Agency (NSA) and subsequently hired by Einar Greve, a member of the firm (alleged by Perkins to have been acting as an NSA liaison, a claim which Greve has denied).

Perkins's time at Chas T. Main, an engineering consultancy, provides the basis for his subsequent published claims that, as an "economic hit man", he was charged with inducing developing countries to borrow large amounts of money, designated to pay for questionable infrastructure investments, but ultimately with a view to making the debt-laden countries more dependent, economically and politically, upon the West.

In the 1980s Perkins left Main and founded and directed a successful independent energy company. In the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins states that he suspects the success of his company was due to 'coincidences' orchestrated by those appreciative of his silence about the work he says he did as an economic hit man.

Perkins's self-described role as an economic hit man is the main theme in part II of the movie Zeitgeist: Addendum, released in October 2008. In that same year, he appeared in the documentary film, The End of Poverty?. He also appears in Boris Malagurski's documentary film The Weight of Chains, released in December 2010, and the documentary movie Let's Make Money (in German) by the Austrian director Erwin Wagenhofer, released October 2008.