John Perkins (author)

Perkins's story is the main theme in part II of the movie Zeitgeist: Addendum, released in October 2008. Perkins was awarded the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace 2012, and Rainforest Action Network Challenging Business As Usual Award, 2006.

In a 2006 statement, American State Department stated that much of the book "appears to be a total fabrication... the National Security Agency is a cryptological (codemaking and codebreaking) organization, not an economic organization... Neither of [its] missions anything remotely resembling placing economists at private companies in order to increase the debt of foreign countries." Perkins responds that Wikileaks and Edward Snowden documents clearly demonstrated that the NSA is involved in a wide range of activities that have nothing to do with codemaking and codebreaking and that often serve to undermine other countries and their leaders.

In the 1980s Perkins left Main and founded and directed an independent energy company. In the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins claims that his company was successful due to 'coincidences' orchestrated by those appreciative of his silence about the work he says he did as an economic hit man. Perkins implies in New Confessions of an Economic Hitman, published in 2016, that he was poisoned in 2005 on behalf of the NSA or CIA. Doctors diagnosed him with diverticulosis.

Sebastian Mallaby, economics columnist of the Washington Post, reacted sharply to Perkins' book: describing him as "a conspiracy theorist, a vainglorious peddler of nonsense, and yet his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is a runaway bestseller." Mallaby, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, holds that Perkins' conception of international finance is "largely a dream" and that his "basic contentions are flat wrong." As an example, Mallaby states that Indonesia reduced its infant mortality and illiteracy rates by two-thirds after economists persuaded its leaders to borrow money in 1970.

Perkins graduated from the Tilton School in 1963. He subsequently attended Middlebury College for two years before dropping out. 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 to 1970. He spent the 1970s working for the Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main; he claims to have been screened for this job 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 that Greve has denied). Perkins claims that he was seduced and trained as an "economic hitman" by a mysterious businesswoman named Claudine, who used his NSA personality profile to manipulate and control him.

John Perkins (born January 28, 1945) is an American author. His best known book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), in which Perkins describes playing a role in a process of economic colonization of Third World countries on behalf of what he portrays as a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. The book's claims were met with skepticism and rebuttal by some involved parties. The book spent more than 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.