The CIA as Agent and Template of Fascism
I met George Crile III in Middle School in Cleveland OH in 1957. He was in 7th grade, and I was in 8th. I heard his name early in the school year and thought that I had heard it before. Then I remembered reading a book entitled Treasure Diving Holidays by Jane and ‘Barney’ Crile a few years before when I was in a tropical-seas-exploration phase. The book title was definitive, because it was about scuba diving in the Caribbean, looking for sunken artifacts during family vacations. George and his sister showed up in several pictures within the book. So I made a point of meeting him to see what tales of underwater adventures he had to share. He was a bit embarrassed by my enthusiasm and my questions, and that was an introduction to a consistent, if somewhat shallow, friendship until my family moved to western New York when I was halfway through 9th grade. George was a very pleasant, bright, quiet guy with no apparent egotism – which was somewhat unusual in our school. George was a teammate on the Swimming team during the Winter sports season, so I knew him in that context as well, which was as a serious and committed competitor.
Forty plus years later, I rediscovered George via his book, Charlie Wilson’s War. If I had been paying more attention to Mainstream Media, I would have been gratified to discover his role in CBS News and 60 Minutes’ documentaries on the CIA (1976) and General Westmoreland’s maneuvers (1982) to mislead the US government (and public) about ‘progress’ in the Viet Nam war – among other critical pieces of actual journalism. I was busy with establishing life and family after leftist activism; while George was busy with some of the deepest and most crucial reporting work in the ‘West’. I salute him as a peer to Seymour Hersh and John Pilger.
I have had a ‘60s leftist opinion of the CIA and its activities since the assassination of President Kennedy. There was just something too proximate with the emerging information about his feud with Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA until he was ‘retired’ in November 1961 due to the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle in April 1961. Iranian students at the University of Texas during the mid-60s quietly mentioned that the CIA was involved in the removal of their elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953. In our anti-war-in-Viet-Nam activities, we began to read that the CIA played peripheral, but significant, roles in many parts of the world, such as ‘Air America’ in Laos, which transported the opium that supported their US-allied militias – and the CIA itself.
The coup in Chile in 1973 that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende was a chapter of its own. Kissinger used the CIA to organize the General Pinochet camp and to supply his military with names and addresses of Allende’s supporters – especially younger ones. Kissinger – and the CIA honchos – understood that the anti-war community in the US were both focusing on the denouement in Viet Nam and losing focus on government misfeasance due to our turn, or return, to careers, to family responsibilities, plus to the apparent reduction of US trouble-making. Most folks had little information about Chilean politics other than the constant news-media description of Chilean government as SOCIALIST. That term sounded good to some of us, but, with the dissolution of any broad socialist movement in the USA (starting with the dissolution of sds in 1969), there were few folks ready to organize so much as a protest.
Rather, with the nationalist victory in Viet Nam, the Church Committee belaboring the CIA, the Jimmy Carter election (and Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel), my emerging family and my new-found career in the steel industry, I lost interest in geopolitics. The CIA seemed to be reduced to a non-actor. A Halcyon period seemed to be a-borning after all of the turmoil and all of our efforts in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
The election of Ronald Reagan seemed a minor inconvenience, but in fact it was an undercover operation; our Democratic Party congressional heroes were charmed by a Hollywood fakir. I watched important elements of US industry disappear without grasping the extent of devolution for the decade of the ‘80s. Iran/Contra and some kind of role in a civil war in Afghanistan were noticed, but seemed remote from daily routines. I was willing to suspend disbelief and suspicion.
The ‘90s were a stagnant, hanging-on-by-your-fingernails decade for many of us, even though it started with unjustified US aggression in Iraq and ended with unjustified US involvement in war against Serbia. The government, however, was very busy. The agenda included starving folks in Iraq via sanctions (that actually had some effect due to the new status of the US as surviving Great Power after dissolution of the USSR); manipulating governments into debt traps and ‘free’ markets (plus election interference in, for example, the new Russian Federation); empowering the largest US banks with investment rights (but no additional responsibilities); then icing the banks’ cake with a prohibition against regulation of ‘financial derivatives’ (more ‘ finance market’ casino chips but without even the sort-of concrete value of stock ownership).
The 2000s arrived with an unelected President placed into office by the U.S. Supreme Court (also an uncharged Air National Guard officer who was AWOL for at least half of 1972 during heavy US involvement in the Viet Nam war). Shortly after, some chickens from our involvement in the Afghanistan civil war came home to roost in the Twin Towers in downtown Manhattan.
And that’s where my relationship with George Crile III picked up again, albeit remotely. I had made the connection between General Westmoreland’s lawsuit and George’s reports via some retrospective on the CBS show, 60 Minutes, and delved into more of his reports. In 2003 he published his book, Charlie Wilson’s War, and I bought and read it, posthaste. (Yes, I am almost that old, and I admit to reading English literature from the 18th and 19th centuries.) It was a fascinating story for me, and, then, I also remembered meeting Charlie Wilson. However tangential, here’s that story:
I worked on The Rag (Austin ‘underground’ newspaper) from mid-1967 to early 1970. Started as a shitte worker, which became shit worker as we realized that the local authorities couldn’t bust us for writing the word shit. That work was typing copy (manual typewriter at first, then someone donated an electric, but we still had to white-out mistakes and type the correct word over it when the stuff dried. You have no idea of the joy that was felt when we copped a Selectric with a built-in white-ink tape.) Other shit work was lay-out and paste-up of the typed copy on poster board, hauling these posters to the printer, picking up and distributing the newspapers, and street sales. The writing was done by the Funnel and the Funnella at first along with a very few inner-circle folks – all of whom were actually talented writer/reporters in the case of The Rag. I slowly graduated to trusted author, and by dint of longevity an eminence-grise in terms of procedures.
The Rag had had to move several times, but by 1969 we were entrenched at the University Y – which is to say that we occupied the basement. One Spring night we had put The Rag to bed – which is to say that copy had been sent to the print shop. The Y had wide concrete steps from The Drag – Guadalupe Street – up to the main floor. On both sides of the steps there were short concrete walls. I hoisted my butt up onto the end of the southern wall to enjoy the cool evening and to people-watch. A tall, athletic-build guy hailed me and came over to chat, and in fact he chatted me up, to coin another old phrase. He said, “I’m Charlie Wilson”. I am not a chatty person, so I probably said “Howdy” and sat there. He proceeded to tell me that he was a state senator from Lufkin. I probably said “That’s nice. I like East Texas” and sat there. Undeterred, he told me that he was a Civil Rights advocate in the legislature. That got my interest, plus my bs-detector, going. He must have noticed my reaction and, warming up to his task, plowed on about his particular bills, confrontations with constituents, how to disarm their arguments, and on. That ol’ boy could talk. I actually began to enjoy his stories, and I thought that he just might be telling more than Texas good-ol’-boy stories. So I allowed as how we (Movement people) appreciated such efforts. Big smile – then the point of his game was announced. Was I going to any parties tonight? No, I’m going home to my girlfriend. Well, do you know any hippy girls who like to party? No, not my kind of thing. Oh well, nice talking to you…
That’s my Charlie Wilson story, so back to George’s book about Charlie’s war. The most important insight that I got from it was that the CIA was halfway organized and halfway ad hoc. Of course the ad hoc parts have somewhat of an overview and a sort-of charter, but they were very much only united in the notion that, if you can’t reach some actual, prescribed goal, then just create chaos. In George’s narrative Gust Avrakotos was more of a mob enforcer than a CIA spy; he was more of a Snowman than a CIA manager; he was more of an opportunist than a CIA bureaucrat. I felt that my acquaintance with George Crile and some of his published work allowed me to assume that he was not trying to sell books via sensationalism; that in fact he was telling the tale of a pivotal character working for a secretive and conservative institution on crucial and delicate projects in an ad hoc manner – and at least in the 1980s this was true of a portion of the CIA’s foreign adventures.
George H. W. Bush ran the CIA in 1976. At the time I thought that this was a ploy to give him exposure on a national political level for future runs for the US Senate from Texas (he lost in 1964 to Ralph Yarborough and in 1972 to Lloyd Bentsen). But I didn’t know that his father, Prescott Bush, was a US Senator who had an almost proprietary interest in the creation and maintenance of the CIA. Those were likely factors, but George HW’s CIA gig was – I think – to bring an earnest ‘war hero’ to try to retrieve some gravitas for ‘the Company’, after the marathon embarrassments of the several Congressional hearings on CIA lawlessness during the mid-1970s. Jimmy Carter continued this effort by nominating ‘straight arrow’ Stansfield Turner to replace Bush after the change of administrations.
This five-year interim was an attempt at reform of the agency – at least under Carter. Turner ‘retired’ a large number of ‘Operations’ personnel (CIA called it the Halloween Massacre), especially those with Viet Nam roles. (An aside: The CIA was divided into an Intelligence section and an Operations division for much of its history – literally divided physically within the headquarters building. The idea was to keep Intelligence independent of political pressure that might arise from the fact that covert actions are planned and approved by officials within the federal government administration. According to Ray McGovern, this arrangement was made in order that the Intelligence agents could actually analyze actions and effects of their ‘fellows’ in Operations.) This post-Vietnam-War reform project ended with Reagan’s election.
Although George H. W. Bush was now Vice President rather than CIA boss, he probably had a role in choosing William Casey as the new chief. They were both WWII US Navy veterans, and Casey was instrumental in convincing Reagan to bring Bush on as his VP candidate through his position as Ronnie’s campaign manager. The Reagan team, including Bush, also shared the intention to renew the Allen Dulles’ mission of US global dominance. Casey had in fact worked with Dulles during WWII in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA).
Operation Cyclone was soon designed and deployed in Afghanistan in order to ‘give the USSR their own Viet Nam’ (as per Zbigniew Brzezenskiy’s thesis, circulated at the end of Carter’s term). Charlie Wilson was maneuvered by a fundamentalist Texas belle (rich and connected) into a visit to Pakistan wherein he was introduced to Afghani refugees from the low-level civil war in which the USSR was involved in support of their selected government, and which was opposed by tribal, Muslim fundamentalist, and rural sectors of the populace. Charlie had perhaps never been apprised of the ‘wily Pathan’ (Pashtun) of British lore, who skinned their adversaries alive; but, given his own fundamentalist and rural/populist upbringing, he identified with the cultural attributes of the mujihadeen and their ‘friends’. He became their advocate in both the Congress and in Texas’ resource-based business community. The rest of the story can be found in Crile’s book, but the upshot here is that Charlie was marked for CIA manipulation. Gust Avrakotos was the agent in charge of the South Asia ‘station’, and, whether tasked by the agency or following personal motivations, he had a mission which required a co-conspirator with enough clout in Congress to bring in more funding than provided through normal CIA channels. He spotted his ‘mark’ readily, because that was both his trade and his native skill.
The CIA was back in the saddle. The Afghanistan caper was not high priority until Wilson’s fund-raising efforts brought in a few more Soviet Union soldiers’ skins (ears actually). The main play was in South and Central America. Iran/Contra may have seemed to be a State Department and US’ military project when Ollie North took the fall for illegal activities, but the CIA facilitated both the arms sales to Iran and the money/weapons to the counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. El Salvador was high on their list, too, and no priest was going to prevent military dictatorship (or Yankee imperialism) there, even if he was a Bishop (Romero). Slowly, folks that paid attention learned about Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and many others – the list is long and bloody.
Most of these projects were between indigenous revolutionaries and US-backed local oligarchs and their military establishments. One of the few CIA adventures that was publicized in the ‘80s was their Angolan project, probably because it was obvious that there were Soviet and Cuban physical support for the revolutionary government there, so it was mano-a-mano, which some elements of the CIA preferred. (The fact that the Angolan revolutionaries beat down the US-backed forces there had a knock-on effect on other anti-colonial movements in the region. See South Africa and Rhodesia as two major examples.)
When Casey died in office, there was the brief directorship of William Webster, then Bobby Gates was installed by G. H. W. Bush. According to Ray McGovern, who was his supervisor in the ‘70s, Gates was a kiss-ass – most particularly to the political leadership. Bush, as former chief, would know and appreciate this. Iran-Contra had been a scandal; but the Afghan project had been a triumph that was seen as a necessary, and perhaps sufficient, set of steps that resulted – almost immediately – in the dissolution of the USSR. This result had a lot of ‘fathers’ besides Charlie and Gust Avrakotos – once accomplished – but it had also consolidated CIA budgets and standing among the secret services of the newly-anointed and lone Superpower.
My second main discovery from George’s book (published 2003) was the breadth and depth of CIA activities over the decades. From the few media reports – and from the vantage point of reading Liberation News Service articles in The Rag office in the ‘60s – some of us knew about JFK assassination theory, Air America in Laos, the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, the Savimbi counterrevolution in Angola, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia. Later, one could read in MSM reports about the Pinochet coup in Chile, the Viet Nam debacle in the Pentagon Papers, the CIA alumni in the Watergate scandal, the Church Committee revelations (limited by ‘national security concerns’, as it turned out), Iran/Contra, the Argentina junta, the Brazil junta, the you-name-it junta – a few tips of the iceberg sticking out of a very murky ocean.
However, the MSM did not mention the details of the CIA’s involvement in these events. When they mentioned The Agency at all, the MSM acted as ‘stenographers’ for the CIA’s official narrative. Of course, this was because of ‘national security concerns’, too. Thus there were a few ‘reporters’ with inside access, partly due to perceived needs of The Agency to deflect criticisms, partly to ‘plant’ some information, partly to bait traps for adversaries, partly to bolster reputation – and partly because some ‘intelligence’ agents just wanted someone outside of their cohort to appreciate their struggles, their deprivations, and their triumphs (no failures, naturally).
This last aspect was the door through which George Crile III entered the weird world of Charlie Wilson. Charlie had to tell someone; he had to make his mark on history (or ‘mark’ his history). Interestingly, the same type of door was opened for Doug Valentine, author of The CIA As Organized Crime. He found his doorman in William Colby, who was the DCI – Director of Central Intelligence – from 1973 to 1976. Colby was an ‘old hand’, coming from the OSS – Office of Strategic Services – spy operations in WW II. He was deeply involved in the creation and deployment of the Phoenix Project in Viet Nam in the late 1960s, which contributed to his removal from his position as chief of the CIA via the contexts of Church Committee findings, the Pike Committee, the Pentagon Papers, and the general search for scapegoats to blame for the Viet Nam War debacle. Valentine had settled on the Phoenix Project for the subject of his first book, and Colby wanted to use it to vindicate his role.
From The CIA As Organized Crime by Douglas Valentine, published 2017:
“When I decided to research and write about the CIA’s Phoenix program, that was how I went at it. I went directly to William Colby, who’d been Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Colby was the person most associated with Phoenix, the controversial CIA “assassination” program that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War. No one had written a book about it, so I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. I told him I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, and he was all for that. Colby liked my approach – to look at it from all these different points of view – so he got behind me and started introducing me to a lot of senior CIA people. And that gave me access from the inside. After that it was pretty easy. I have good interview skills. I was able to persuade a lot of these CIA people to talk about Phoenix.
“So I lucked out. Through Colby I had access to the people in the CIA who created the Phoenix program, and I was able to find out what was on their minds and why they did what they did. That never would have happened if I had gone to the Columbia School of Journalism, or if I’d been involved with journalism for many years. I’d have had a much narrower way of going at the thing. But the CIA officers I spoke with loved the broad view that I was bringing to the subject. They liked me asking them about their philosophy. It enabled me to understand the subject comprehensively.”
Many of us have known pieces of the CIA story, but few have strung the fatal necklace. And I use the metaphor advisedly. Phillip Agee joined The Company in 1957 and resigned in 1968. He made the potentially fatal mistake of naming names and telling tales in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published in 1975. Here is his statement of motivation: “When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn't sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book.” He made his way to Cuba after being expelled from several European countries at the behest of the CIA.
I heard rumors about the resigning CIA agent through anti-war resources, but there was almost no detail until his book was published. The content of the book was not widely discussed, other than the dismissals and epithets that one should expect when confronting a powerful evil. And, besides difficulty in finding a copy, there was another obstacle to dissemination: it was dry as a Dust Bowl sandstorm. It was literally a diary – a chronological accounting of the daily routine of a bureaucracy – mostly… For instance the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 received perhaps 2 pages of notes of the effects that it had on operations at his station in Ecuador. The resignation of Allen Dulles as Director as a result of the failure of this invasion (and his lies to promote it) went unreported in Agee’s book. The upshot was that Agee’s revelations were little regarded in our mainstream media or in our political culture.
The Company ‘skated’ for most of 20 years after Agee’s whistleblower account. Occasionally, some academic or some journalist would “get a wild hair up their butts” as we used to say in Texas. FOIA – the Freedom of Information Act – was approved in 1967, but was obstructed in various ways for years. Interest in the CIA was particularly opposed for obvious reasons – at least obvious when we realize the effects of their projects. Eventually, the agency must have decided to give up some information in order to appear compliant. The first tranches of data started to be transmitted in the mid-90s. Apparently, this whetted the appetites of researchers. Answers to some questions begat more questions. The ensuing answers became the raw material of further critiques of the CIA.
The 2000-oughts birthed Crile’s book and Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, and a plethora of exposes, apologia, and critiques showed up in the 2000 teens. Additionally, the document dribble from the CIA, slow and piecemeal though it was, legitimated and corroborated Doug Valentine’s book and helped to validate Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine.
These books and reports have outlined, and occasionally illustrated, the nature of the CIA. My particular perspective is that it operates – or vacillates – between immorality and amorality. Its charter, plus subsequent Congressional and Presidential findings, exclude the Agency from transparency requirements, legal sanctions, and government regulation. It is allowed to find or create funding sources that are not specifically assigned either by law or by federal budget. It is an independent power center, ideally constructed and maintained for corruption and mayhem
When studying the CIA, one might notice that there is not a comprehensive list of operations or projects. Different authors have compiled partial lists of operations that fit their particular thesis. Also, it is apparent by ongoing discovery of such projects that some (probably many) operations are still kept secret. In any case I have compiled two lists of known actions. The first one follows this paragraph and is comprised of their most egregious acknowledged crimes. The second list is an appendix and contains what could be considered legitimate intelligence-agency successes along with their less harmful interventions.
1947: Operation Gladio – (Operation Paperclip was related in terms of ‘rehabilitating’ NAZIs) Operation Bloodstone
Development of “stay behind” resistance groups in countries like Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland (neutral status) was a joint venture between the CIA and, subsequently NATO, started by OSS at the end of WW II, using the German SS group under General Gehlen that had supervised militias and partisan groups in captured countries. Secret operation until declassification in 1990 and 2006.
1948? – Present: Operation Mockingbird
The CIA keeps as much ambiguity and denial as possible on this element of their toolbox. The alleged (as Wikipedia labels it) objective is to influence – or infiltrate – mass media in order to slant, distort, or fabricate reports for CIA purposes. Seymour Hersh was one of the first reporters to describe the project at an almost comprehensive scale in 1974. The Church Committee reported that hundreds of reporters and columnists within the print media had so conspired. Over the years reports of particular violations of the CIA’s charter emerged that involved modern media, academia, agencies, and, nowadays, ‘charitable’ non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These reports continue to surface, indicating that the activities continue, whatever their current CIA operational designation.
1950: CAT Airlines/Air America.
Starting point for southeast Asian drug production and smuggling using Kuomintang military unit supported in Laos/Thailand area to run heroin drug smuggling operation.
1952: Project FF
Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., chief of the CIA’s Near East and Africa (NEA) division, was tasked to persuade Egypt’s King Farouk to implement a reform program to quell violence from revolutionary forces in Egyptian communities. The classified operation was informally named Project FF after the CIA’s unflattering nickname for Farouk: “Fat Fucker”. If this effort of peaceful volition failed, Roosevelt was instructed to abandon Farouk and oust him from power. [The Society of Free Officers staged a military coup d’état on July 22-23 and installed Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser.]
1953: Operation Ajax
Overthrow of elected Iranian President Mossaddegh to reinstall Reza Pahlavi as Shah.
Early 1954: Operation WASHTUB
Covert operation to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua as a part of the CIA's effort to portray the administration of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz as having ties to the Soviet Union, prior to the 1954 Guatemalan coup.
1954: Operation PBSuccess covert United States operation to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz.
1954: U-2 Spy Plane
Overflights of the USSR by a type of plane designed to fly at very high altitude to avoid the anti-aircraft weapons of the era for purposes of high-resolution photography of potential military sites and related activities. This was probably a legitimate surveillance project, but was provocative. When Gary Francis Powers was shot down by an improved defense system, it was also embarrassing – particularly since it occurred on the first day of a US/USSR summit meeting in Paris.
1951: Project ARTICHOKE - Mind Control – “Manchurian Candidate" CIA Files.
CIA's 1950's human behavior control experiment and research program.
1953: Project MKUltra - Successor to Project Artichoke.
1950s to the 1970s: Operation Midnight Climax - This was an early subdivision of the Project MK-Ultra, a drug study that employed local sex workers in the San Francisco area, who would then dose their clients with drugs and engage them in conversation. These conversations were monitored via one-way partitions to identify chemicals that might be helpful when interrogating foreign enemies.
The Central Intelligence Agency and United States Army collaborated from 1952 until 1970 to develop biological and chemical substances for various uses that included killing and incapacitating enemy targets, including surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting human subjects in the United States.
1957 – 1967: Indonesia
Military coup in 1967 against President Sukarno apparently due to his work to build a non-aligned movement of nations in the southeastern Asian area. General Suharto was installed as president and proceeded to orchestrate killing of alleged Communists to a level rarely seen in one nation. Estimates range up to 3 million murdered.
1959-1961: Project HOTFOOT
Battle of Luang Namtha Project Hotfoot was a secretive military training mission from the United States in support of the Kingdom of Laos. It ran from 22 January 1959 through 19 April 1961. Working in civilian clothing in conjunction with a French military mission, it concentrated on technical training of the Royal Lao Army.
1961: Operation Momentum
CIA secret mission to create a clandestine force of guerrilla fighters during Laotian Civil War.
Covert training program for hill tribe recruits to become guerrilla soldiers during the Laotian Civil War.
1960 – 1961: Operation Celeste
An ALLEGED CIA plan to use Union of South Africa agency to assassinate Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations at the time. The UN had plans to reopen the investigation of the airplane ‘accident’ that killed Hammarskjold in 2014. There have been various starts and stops to this investigation with interim reports and inquiries, but there are no definitive results to date. There are documents that show Allen Dulles as having an active interest in the removal of Hammarskjold from his role at the UN.
1960: Operation 40 Cuban Task Force
Training of Cuban dissidents and counter-revolutionaries for eventual invasion.
1961: Operation Mongoose
A direct assault against Communist Cuba, where CIA cells collaborated with the American Mafia. This included arms deals and industrial sabotage efforts with the intention of removing Fidel Castro by 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis halted Operation Mongoose (though some analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, claim that the terrorist actions continued after the crisis).
April 1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion
CIA organized invasion of Cuba, primarily using Cuban émigrés to the US, plus some mercenary specialists (such as pilots who bombed airfields and Cuban forces via ‘borrowed’ military airplanes), and some ‘borrowed’ ships for both artillery fire support and troop landing operations. Allen Dulles was sure that JFK, who had excluded use of US military service assets, would give in if the invasion was stalled or forced to retreat. Kennedy did not comply.
1961: Operation Northwoods
Various plans and related training to set up a ‘false flag’ terror attack on US citizens (discussions included possible hits on US military personnel) to be blamed on the Cuban government. Rejected by JFK’s administration – apparently.
1960-1968: Congo military coup
Assassination of President Patrice Lumumba (1961), civil war.
1965: Operation White Giant
Military offensive conducted by the forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and its allies to retake northeastern Orientale Province from insurgents during the Simba rebellion.
1967 - 1974: Operation CHAOS, CACTUS, RESISTANCE, & MERRIMACK (COINTELPRO)
CIA domestic intelligence-gathering efforts focused on the growing US anti-war movement. It was a domestic intelligence program compiling information on Americans from 1967 to 1974. Established by President Johnson and expanded under President Nixon, the program's original mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war, and other protest movements. Under President Nixon CHAOS focused on targets such as the Black Panthers, with files on over seven thousand citizens, including me.
1967: The Phoenix Program
Its mission was to destroy the Viet Cong. Targeted killings, torture, terrorism were deployed. The project faced intense criticism, once details were made public. It was officially shut down in 1972, but continued under the South Vietnamese government and was called Plan F-6,
Allegations of CIA drug trafficking were also a feature of this period of the war and often involved interference with efforts of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and of local and regional law enforcement agencies.
1971: Project FUBELT
Codename for the secret Central Intelligence Agency operations that were to prevent Salvador Allende's rise to power
1973: Chile coup d'état
CIA was the main organizer and facilitator of a faction of the Chilean military that wanted to remove the Allende government and supporters. The coup itself was the usual CIA clown show but finally found its anchor in General Augusto Pinochet, who thoroughly eliminated resistance and resistors.
1975 - 2002: Angola
Money, training, contractors, weapons to Jonas Savimbi and his anti-communist organization, Unita. Standard CIA involvement, but notable for the duration of their project. It was originally supported by the Congo dictator Mobutu and the apartheid regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, but Mobutu had to deal with multiple challenges internally and at the borders; Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980; South Africa overcame apartheid as a unified country in 1994. These developments undercut Unita’s support, and the original revolutionary force – MPLA – won control of the government. Savimbi was killed in 2002.
1975 -1983: Operation Condor
Initial members were the governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia; Brazil signed the agreement later on. Peru later joined the operation in a more peripheral role. The United States (CIA) provided planning, coordinating, training on torture, technical support, and military aid to the juntas during Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.
1970s and 1980s: Operation Charly was a program undertaken by the junta in Argentina with the objective of providing military and counterinsurgency assistance to right-wing dictatorships and insurgents in Central America.
1979-1981: Battalion 3-16 (Honduras) was the name of a Honduran army unit responsible for carrying out political assassinations and torture of suspected political opponents of the government during the 1980s.
1981-87: Contras in Nicaragua - Typical regime change operation in the Central and South American region, but it became infamous because of a funding gambit. US government embargoed weapons sales/shipments to Iran due to the hostages held there after the takeover of the US embassy in Teheran in 1979. By 1981 the US decided to use weapons sales to entice Iran to release the hostages, but this was illegal by US law. Meantime, there were also congressional restrictions on military aid to the rebels (‘Contras’) who sought to overthrow the ‘Sandinista’ government in Nicaragua. Since both weapons sales to Iran and military support for the Contras were illegal, the CIA naturally decided to combine both elements into one project on the spy agency principle of throw the dice and see what happens. Sales to Iran generated funds to buy additional weapons for the Contras without having to arrange a budget via the US Congress’ process. A military supply plane was shot down by the Nicaraguan government, one of the crew admitted to being a CIA employee, and the full story emerged. Lt. Colonel Ollie North took the fall as a Gung Ho Marine, as opposed to an admission that the CIA was involved in extra-legal activities in contravention of specific US law.
1979 – 1989: Operation Cyclone
This was the program to arm and finance the Afghan mujihadeen in Afghanistan described in George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War. The name for the operation was promulgated after Charlie’s war showed enough success to gain official favor and formal budgets.
1992: Operation MIAS (Missing-in-Action Stingers), trying to pry the missiles from Afghans to stop them from being sold to terrorist entities.
1999: Operation Noble Anvil (NATO Bombing of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
78 days of US-led bombing of civilian targets and infrastructure for no purpose other than the final break-up of the former Yugoslavia. CIA’s role was long-standing and entirely undercover in organizing nationalist militias in several component republics of the original Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
2003: Invasion of Iraq
Between Desert Storm (1990 - 1991) and the 2003 invasion, the CIA was given the responsibility to find, later manufacture, casus belli to justify war. They decided to focus on WMD – weapons of mass destruction. Events and UN weapons inspectors (Scott Ritter primarily) might have conspired to foil their plan, except that they had secret weapons within the MSM (mainstream media). In their usual CIA manner, they lied; and in the usual MSM response, they lied, too.
Extraordinary rendition program involved kidnapping of people of interest – or random people – for ‘rendition’ to various prisons in several countries, including within Iraq, to torture them into giving up military secrets – or whatever the psychopaths in charge might want to test. No biggie…
2011: NATO bombing of Libyan government
A US-led campaign to topple Muammar Gaddafi’s government. The US maneuvered the UN and the ICC into investigations of Gaddafi’s government with regard to their actions in an alleged civil war. The CIA’s role was – as usual – to organize (buy and proselytize) anti-government militias, which included their new-found friends among Islamic fundamentalist and statist organizations.
2012: Timber Sycamore
A classified program to remove the elected Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, from power. It supplied money, weaponry and training to Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian government forces – more of their new-found friends among Islamic fundamentalist, statist organizations.
2014: Maidan coup in Ukraine
Starting with Operation Gladio, the CIA paid special attention to the USSRUkr (Ukraine). There was a particularly virulent strain of fascists in the western third of the state who volunteered to form an SS group known as Waffen SS Galicia. They had proven their fealty by murdering 100,000 to 200,000 ethnic Russians, Poles, Jews, and Roma in the early stages of the German invasion of Russia via the Ukrainian steppes. After the German surrender, they reorganized with CIA assistance to fight a civil war for several more years. Many of these militants were imprisoned in Siberia. Khrushchev released them to show his non-Stalinness, and they went home to develop an underground neo-Nazi ideology. They ‘laid low’ while slowly building a militia, still with the support of CIA agents, albeit on a long-view schedule. In 2004 the Orange Revolution caught them unprepared to attempt leadership. In the 2008 election they were more confident, but again played a supporting role. In 2014 they were ready when pro-EU demonstrations stressed the government. They were organized, trained, and equipped by the CIA, and they were abetted by US State Department agents who convinced the elected officials to stand down the national armed forces and to disarm the Kiev police. Since then, the CIA handlers have been advising the Ukrainian national police (SBU) and their military forces.
Why am I harshly critical of the CIA? Why do I find their actions and their role deplorable? The operations listed, plus their intended consequences, resulted in millions dead, millions maimed, millions tortured on their way to death or mutilation, millions displaced from their homes and nations, trillions of wasted money (weapons of war are by definition waste production). Sure – the military and other agents of other agencies were often the visible and purposeful actor in all of these humanitarian debacles. Sure, they and their government enabler/controllers had an ideological/philosophical basis for their activities and outcomes. But the CIA per se was the fire-starter – the pyromaniac – in every case on the list above. They did it for love of action, for love of power, to feed their sadism, for revenge of the fight that they lost in 5th grade, for acceptance by their perceived superiors, for whatever. Who cares… They did it, and that’s what counts.
Underlying the immorality/amorality of this organization was the class nature of the originators. William (Wild Bill) Donovan was the Energizer Bunny of the early-to-mid-1900s. He started a storied college experience as a scholar-athlete at Columbia University (BA, LLB). His first career was as a lawyer in his hometown, Buffalo NY, but he was also involved in the formation of a cavalry troop within the New York (State) National Guard. This became a temporary career in 1916 when they were mobilized at the federal level to guard the border with Mexico against Mexican informal militias. This tenure and experience made him a likely officer in the regular US Army just before we became fully involved in WW I, during which he emerged as a stalwart and bemedalled hero. In other words he was the lucky one who didn’t catch the fatal bullet despite leading from the front.
During this period, he had started a law partnership with a scion of a leading US industrial family (Goodyear) and married into a family (Rumsey) that was an early land owner in Buffalo during the era from the development of the Erie Canal to the early 1900s in which this city was an important trading, transportation, and industrial center – with a near location to the Niagara Falls electrical generation system that jump-started the deployment of electrical power at scale.
Donovan’s connections were such that the Rockefeller Foundation sent him to Berlin in 1916 to promote one of their programs at a time when the Germans were already at war with France and Great Britain. As a measure of his adventurousness and eclectic interests, he stayed in Europe after the Armistice, then went on a world tour – and spying mission – that included travel to Siberia during the Russian Civil War.
He went home to Buffalo, rejoined his law firm, but was soon back in Europe on an assignment for J. P. Morgan – and some spying. He also took on a public legal office – US Attorney for the Western District of NY. Known for a hard-ass attitude during Prohibition, he was also known for even-handed enforcement, busting an upper-class social club in which he was a member. By coincidence “Silent Cal” Coolidge was looking for a hard-ass reformer for his Attorney General. He brought in Harlan Stone, who had been one of Donovan’s professors, and recruited Wild Bill as his assistant. Stone was soon elevated to the US Supreme Court, and Donovan was de facto AG until John Sargent was installed.
Donovan left the government when Herbert Hoover was elected President and started a new “white shoe” law partnership in NYC. Besides being ‘connected’, this firm was a pioneer in the consolidation of capital following the stock market crash of 1929. The ‘crash’ made cash the only asset of value. That is, businesses had incorporated at an accelerating rate as the early entrepreneurs and industrialists had figured out, or helped to configure, the Marxist (and Adam Smith’s) notion of the tendency of capitalism toward monopoly. In pursuit of that status owners had worked to enhance the protection of their personal wealth by control of an ownership entity, rather than direct proprietorship – a corporation owned via stock that permitted confiscation of profit without the liability of personal financial responsibility. If something goes wrong, then the corporation takes the hit all by its lonesome.
Donovan’s crew was one of several who focused on scavenging bankrupt corporations and companies for the financiers who actually had retained cash and fungible assets – stocks being almost valueless via their price losses during the ‘crash’ and the subsequent Depression which had suppressed the demand, and therefore the supply, sides of most Markets, closing many businesses. Between the ‘fire sales’ and pennies-on-the dollar acquisitions, real consolidation of businesses started moving toward domination via the financial corporations. Mutual Assurance companies became modern insurance corporations; basic industries consolidated into The Big Three Automakers and similar alignments in other fields; agricultural co-ops amalgamated and were essentially engulfed in the modern Agribusinesses; the Federal Reserve Bank became the quasi-formal, but privately owned, national bank for the USA. The work of lawyers such as William Donovan was a major force in acceleration of these processes. In this context Donovan himself consolidated his position within the emerging ruling class.
Likewise, Allen and John Foster Dulles operated within the same Wall Street milieu and used the same tactics. These two were, of course, famously WASPs, as opposed to Donovan the second-generation Irish Catholic. (Of course, an Ivy League college degree helped to build his pedigree.) Ultimately, they all understood the inflection point for control of the US economy via financialization represented by the 1929 stock market crash.
Their relationship, which led to the creation of the CIA in 1947, evolved from parallel activities in Europe in service to their Wall Street clients, then, increasingly, for FDR’s government. Both men had developed business and political contacts overseas to the extent that they both had separate conversations with Mussolini and with NAZI officials. Both had a knack for making men comfortable in conversation. Wild Bill in particular was well regarded by Roosevelt for his pursuit of information, his energy, and his insights. Both Donovan and Allen Dulles came to realize that WW II was inevitable, and both began preparations to play a national role in it. Without going into a dissertation about the ins and outs of the political machinations of that era in the federal government, suffice it to say that Donovan was assigned to create a new ‘intelligence service’ within the US Army based on the British secret service design, labeled the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan chose Dulles to manage their central European office in Switzerland.
Neither of these two men held strongly averse positions with respect to the Axis powers or to their respective political systems. They were simply pro-American due to self-interest. Dulles in particular was, however, pro-Dulles first and foremost. The upshot was that they – particularly Dulles – could work with double agents, opportunists, and nationalists of various persuasions as readily as with loyal anti-fascists in pursuit of their assignments. Such contacts became the manpower base of much of post-war intelligence (spy) and counterintelligence work.
Obviously, within the context of military activity, there are dynamic elements, euphemistically called Operations. These require agents with the physical ability, the will, and the ‘emotional distance’ to do what is needed to be done… William Colby, mentioned above as the CIA’s Director from 1973 – 1976, had interrupted his law degree program in 1941 to join the US Army and was assigned to the OSS. He was involved in guerrilla-type actions for the duration, then returned to Columbia University to finish his LLB. He became, briefly, a member of Donovan’s law partnership, then was recruited into the newly established CIA. As in his OSS experience, he was ‘in the field’ primarily, first in working directly with the former NAZIs recruited under Operation Gladio, then moving into the somewhat dangerous confrontations in Italy between the communist and anti-communist forces there. He was sent to Viet Nam to back the US proxy regime in the very early 1960s. He returned to Viet Nam in 1968 and was the prime architect of the Phoenix Program, which story is told in Doug Valentine’s book.
War hardens warriors. War undermines civil society and humane behavior. All things are fair. Wild Bill had smelled plenty of rotting flesh in WW I. Colby saw his share in WW II. Dulles was more of an REMF, but fresh-killed human beings were piled up within a day’s automobile drive in all directions. In their respective roles, a warrior overcame, and they were warriors. They were all instrumental in the creation of the CIA, and they brought their warrior ethos with them.
Perhaps I should bracket this next paragraph, because I’m going to digress from my review of CIA history and its interaction with the US political economy to discuss my personal biases. As my best friend, David Hamilton, might put it: You can say that you’re unbiased, but it’s not true. If you want to give me information, tell me your biases first. So – here are some of mine. I am a Realist. I’m a Marxist, because I think that both Dialectical Materialism and the Marx-Engels critique of capitalism are realistic. I find many kinds of anthropological, psychological, ecological, archeological, and cosmological speculations interesting but lacking sufficient evidence in most cases to compel belief. I find geology, astronomy, history, chemistry, mechanical and atomic physics, meteorology, and biology to be sufficiently evidence-based for substantial confidence. I appreciate art, music, and drama in many forms; but I do not equate those forms – or any other phenomenon – with some kind of spirituality. What that all means to this article is that I try to describe events and agents in Realist terms. When I write “War hardens warriors”, I mean that as a known equation. It is not meant to be ‘psychologizing’ or romanticizing or moralizing. At the end of the tale, however, I do have a moral code. It’s not much different from that of Gandhi, MLK Jr., and/or Jesus Christ. (It doesn’t include turning the other cheek other than as a tactic, but the major points are similar.) Most of the early CIA warriors either never had a moral code, or they lost it.
Dulles was the chief architect; Donovan was the heroic symbol and chief lobbyist; Colby was the prototype field agent. Elements of the FDR, then Truman, administration were wary of a secret service by first principles of both democratic organization and of the US Constitution. FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover resisted the creation of a spy agency, because he already had one in the US, with penetration in various parts of South America as well.
The OSS was disbanded soon after the end of the war, but Dulles was active to the last day and beyond as station chief in Berlin (post surrender, of course) and then as a sort-of lobbyist for some of the NAZI officials at the Nuremberg war crime trials. He had returned to his Wall Street law partnership, but used their European business connections to rationalize return trips in which he maintained contacts with his OSS (by then called the Strategic Services Unit) comrades and subordinates – and some of the former NAZI officials who had collaborated with him during WW II. Some – perhaps most – of the business related elements of his trips involved rehabilitation and legitimization of German industrial and financial giants who had served the Wehrmacht and the NAZIs – both the entities per se and the individuals who controlled them.
After the OSS was disbanded (October 1945), the CIA – and spy, counter-intelligence, and covert operations – becomes the Allen Dulles Story. He had been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations before the war and now took the role of President of the organization. He was hired as staff on the Herter Committee that extensively studied post-war Europe in the context of the proposed Marshall Plan. (That might seem to indicate reduced status, but it was another opportunity to study, to proselytize, to contribute to a hugely important project, to cultivate the Truman administration’s admiration for service to their prize program – generally to be seen as an important part of high-visibility, high-significance politics.)
From David Talbot’s book, The Devil’s Chessboard:
“A steady stream of former OSS colleagues came to pay their respects at Dulles’s Wall Street office, chatting about the war while “the Old Man,” as he was already affectionately known in spy circles, though he was only fifty-two, puffed genially on his pipe. But these conversations were not simply fond exercises in nostalgia. The men who called on Dulles – OSS veterans like Richard Helms, Frank Wisner, Tracy Barnes, and Kermit Roosevelt—all shared the Old Man’s view that the blissful reign of postwar peace would be short-lived and that the West must quickly gird itself to confront the growing threat from the East.
“That threat was not simply a convenient creation of “Western imperialism.” Stalin’s military machine might have been no match for America’s global reach and nuclear firepower. But it was quite capable of crushing democratic aspirations in Eastern Europe, which the Soviets, following the devastation of World War II, felt they were entitled to controlling as a buffer zone from Western aggression. American intelligence officials like Frank Wisner, who had been stationed in Romania near the end of the war and had witnessed the beginnings of the Soviet-dominated police state there, deeply empathized with the liberation struggles of the peoples in the Eastern bloc.
“As they chatted in Dulles’s law suite and gathered for drinks at William Donovan’s town house on Sutton Place, this rarefied group of OSS veterans —who straddled the worlds of espionage, foreign affairs, and finance [my emphasis]—were already plotting to create a powerful intelligence apparatus for the coming Cold War. Spurned by Harry Truman, Donovan began to feel that his own hopes for a return to postwar action would never be realized. “Our war is over, Allen,” he told Dulles one day. But Dulles would have none of it. The man’s irrepressible ego and ambition never ceased to amaze Donovan.
“In truth, while Dulles punctually showed up for work at Sullivan and Cromwell each morning, he never retired from the intelligence game. No sooner had he resumed his life in New York than he began taking a leadership role in prestigious organizations and placing himself at the center of postwar political debates. At the end of 1945, Dulles was elected president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a group whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus. Dulles would huddle with his colleagues in a soundproof room at the council’s headquarters on the Upper East Side as if he were already running the robust new spy agency that he envisioned.
“Dulles’s stubborn insistence on staying in the middle of the postwar action paid off. In April 1947, he was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.”
[Talbot’s book (published 2015) had two particular vantages for his research. First was the growing catalog of published information, such as the Crile and the Valentine books, and declassified government reports. The second was that, perhaps in the spirit of CIA agents who wanted to justify/rationalize their activities, Talbot was able to tap the personal observations of Allen Dulles’ wife, oldest daughter, sister, and one of Dulles’ main mistresses. All of these women were trying to make sense of their own personal involvements in this historical drama and with its characters.]
Subsequent to the reelection of Truman in 1948, both Dulles brothers were temporarily sidelined due to their well-known support for his opponent, Thomas Dewey. The CIA – which, I repeat, was very much a creature of Allen Dulles – had been chartered within a remarkably vague section of the National Security Act of 1947. And, I repeat, it was unwanted by the Department of Defense, the FBI, and by elements of the administration who had a natural concern about espionage in peace time – plus doubts about some of Dulles’ reputed adventures and ‘policies’ during his OSS tenure. Meantime, the CIA was having organizational birthing pains – no doubt partly due to obstacles set up by its opponents. To further complicate matters, Dulles was recruited to be a main contributor to the Jackson, Dulles, Correa report from January 1949, which was ostensibly a critique of coordination and lack of actual, actionable intelligence collection. Dulles turned it into a report on the need for secret ‘operations’ (counterintelligence) within the newly created security agency.
Between the disbanding of the OSS and the legal advent of the CIA (and NSA), Allen Dulles was involved in his own privately-organized operations. One example was fulfillment of his scheme, devised while he was the OSS Berlin station chief, which was meant to trick USSR into hyper-paranoia in 1946 – when he was no longer officially associated with the US government. This was covered in a chapter of David Talbot’s book titled Little Mice (starts on page 120), and it is instructive as to Dulles’ character. You can read the full story in David’s book, but the lesson is that Allen Dulles was capable – without even the figleaf of governmental authority – of putting harmless and innocent citizens under extreme duress (some years of imprisonment within an infamous gulag in the USSR) for his notion of an ‘operation’ to create disadvantage for rivals – Stalin and the KGB. And he apparently coined the term “little mice” for such cases.
Without trying to write another book on the CIA, I will ‘round out’ this creation history with a mention of two more CIA prototype characters. First specimen is James Jesus Angleton, a true Cold Warrior with a fanatically Manichean outlook. Angleton was an Ivy League WASP, which was, of course, a high recommendation to the Dulles’ circle. He began an OSS career under the tutelage of MI5 in London, then became the OSS’ chief in Italy toward the end of WW II. He was instrumental in conjunction with Dulles in buying and managing the anti-Communist forces in Italy, which culminated in establishment of a coalition government that melded the interests of Italian capitalists, the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, the remnants of Fascist officials and military officers, and US occupation purposes.
He was one of the first hires for the new CIA and was given responsibility for ‘Office of Special Operations’, which was the most nebulous part of The Agency’s charter. Initially, it included liaison with allied spy services. In 1951 his job grew to include liaison with the Israeli intelligence services. He kept ‘the Israel desk’ as it was called until resignation in 1974 [and may have been instrumental in providing atomic weapon design information to them]. When Dulles took over the CIA in 1954, he was able to gratify his long-term desire to create a Counterintelligence branch within it and handed it to his disciple, James Jesus.
The other prototypical character of note was William Harvey – premier thug, assassin, friend of the Mafia and related gangsters, alcoholic, loudmouth (his one non-CIA personal characteristic), and adventurer (in the sense of ‘loose cannon’). Interestingly, he was an FBI agent for 7 years, working in counterintelligence in Europe during their soon-to-end (?) foreign enterprises in the context of WW II. He was threatened with demotion for an alcohol-related incident, decided to resign in 1947, then signed on with the CIA. As a result (?), he became an active participant in the internal US politics of CIA vs FBI.
Those characters – really Dulles, Colby, Angleton, and Harvey, since Wild Bill had become an emblem rather than an actor – typified the operating characteristics of the CIA: schemer, action freak, ideologue, and thug – all true-believers and realists (according to themselves). Some may say, rather, that they were narcissistic, amoral, authoritarian, and devious troublemakers in the rare confluence of events that would certify the change in military and political dominance in the Western Empire from Europe to the USA. (An aside observation might be that they dabbled in the creation of Cunning Plans that were reminiscent of those of Baldrick in the Black Adder BBC series. That is, some of their schemes were merely useless rather than their usual outcomes of murder, mayhem, and the resultant enmity of broad sectors of our world. Occasionally, they pulled off something technically interesting such as Project Azorian, which secretly raised and captured most of a sunken Russian submarine in the Pacific Ocean in 1974.)
To summarize:
1) The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America is the secret police agency of a ruling class based in the financial control center of the ‘Western’ sector of the world, known colloquially as Wall Street.
2) The tendency toward hegemonic development was boosted in the standard capitalistic boom-bust cycle of the 1930s that, aggravated by economic stresses of post-war recovery after WW I, plus by worldwide drought conditions, had become exceptionally painful. In this context portable and mutually-agreed assets (money) bought real assets at huge discounts.
3) A propertied establishment of long-term financial and industrial operators had the cash and credit – plus education and connections – to organize a legal and cultural takeover of the US government via control (ownership) of the US economy.
4) WW II was a welcome cover for development of an espionage service that would be trained by European experts while pursuing a separate strategy for US’ advantage in geopolitical and economic affairs.
5) Despite birthing issues, the CIA was able to leverage the social and political power of the Power Elite (TM – Charles Wright Mills) to implement the vision of Allen Dulles for full deployment of an MI5/MI6/KGB/Gestapo service for the USA by 1954.
6) The CIA ‘hit the ground running’ even before its initial charter was approved by Congress with residual projects and ‘operations’ from OSS activities during WW II. This included the recruitment of NAZI military, technical, and business experts for US purposes and political projects within Europe, both during occupation and for future influence/control potential.
7) The CIA experimented with drugs, psyops, propaganda, and electronic devices using unwitting victims as ‘guinea pigs’, including US citizens.
8) The CIA was involved in ‘regime change’ by early in Eisenhower’s presidency in diverse parts of the globe: e.g., Egypt, Iran, Guatemala, and Viet Nam (prevent Viet Minh election). They started agitation against geopolitical neutrality in Indonesia and were well along in planning the elimination of Castro’s government in Cuba by Kennedy’s inauguration.
9) CIA agents were coordinators and facilitators of supply and smuggling of various illegal drugs and moved their activities according to the needs of markets and their client allies. It started with heroin in Laos in support of Kuomintang units that had been isolated from their forces on Formosa; continued with heroin in the service of Thai and Laotian warlords who were opposed to Viet Nam’s nationalists; moved to various counterrevolutionary forces in South and Central American nations while expanding to include an array of illegal drugs; found its zenith perhaps in the poppy fields of several Afghan warlords.
10) Back to ‘regime change’ – Bay of Pigs invasion (failure); overthrow of Lumumba in the Congo (including dissolution of his burned body in acid); Allende in Chile (mass murders); various coups and death-squad depredations in South and Central America, including the Contra scandal in Nicaragua.
11) Assassinations – besides Lumumba and Allende, there were probably John Kennedy and Dag Hammarskjold, possibly Olaf Palme and Bobby Kennedy and Che Guevara. It’s unlikely that a CIA agent pulled triggers or an air-to-air missile switch, but The Agency had agency. If loudmouth Bill Harvey wasn’t simply a drunken loudmouth, then you can take his word for the fact that he was involved in such activities.
12) Back to ‘regime change’ – Afghanistan (twice), Brazil (twice at least), Argentina (twice at least), miscellaneous South and Central American countries leading to failures in most cases (current failures in Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia), Iraq (WMD), Syria (Russian Federation intervention), Libya, Georgia (RF intervention), Chechnya, Yemen, Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Pakistan (long-standing CIA relationship with their military), Ukraine, et al.
13) Rendition and torture of victims of personal vendetta, collective punishment, mistaken identity, and other random arrests served to satiate – we can only hope – some of the native sadism of some agents and some of their clients.
14) Operation Mockingbird started in 1948 and continues to the present day. Henry Luce, who owned Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time magazines, was an early volunteer for CIA input due to friendship and ideological agreement with Allen Dulles. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (Washington Post and Twitter/X respectively) have reportedly worked with the CIA on projects. WAPO is objectively considered to transmit CIA media inputs.
15) COINTELPRO is an antique rubric, but surveillance is widespread via diverse agencies so that to say that the CIA may not be involved domestically is irrelevant. They can now tap all such information from whatever three-letter department is the ‘responsible’ receptacle.
16) The CIA is widely seen by the Rest of the World (ROW) as a malign, but decreasingly effective, organization due to its many failures and its obvious connections to other malign forces and organizations. Okay – this last statement isn’t a Summary point; it’s a commentary on current events, recognitions, and others’ commentaries.
The CIA as Template of and Agent for the neo-Imperialist Hegemon
From The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph Trento, published 2001:
“The Secret History of the CIA is the record of what happens when a free society engages in an activity that is totally alien to its character. This book is the culmination of hundreds of interviews and 30 years of journalism covering the men and women who were the Agency during the Cold War. It collects and preserves an unofficial institutional memory about events that have been turned into mythology.
“I came to write this story because I realized the intelligence service has more to do with how the United States behaves around the world than any other government agency. In some ways, the CIA exerts more power than the Pentagon. Its analysis of the world is crucial in determining the weapons we develop and in defining the threats to which we respond. Presidents come and go, but the intelligence bureaucracy remains in place as the real ruling class in our political system.”
Trento’s book was an early compilation of CIA’s operational history – early in the sense of the observation above that The Agency stone-walled research and oversight successfully for the first half-century of its existence. As the failures and the horrors of CIA interventions around the world piled up, and as reports of these failures and horrors accumulated, some of its actors seem to have felt the need to try to ‘tell their story’: the successes, the excuses, the exigencies, the stupid ‘others’, the venality – whatever their personal need or perspective. The information dribble slowly expanded and built upon itself to the point where, today, we have a fairly well wrought history – not to say that there aren’t plenty of secrets and secret horrors untold.
This article is essentially about the last century of civilizational conflict between a privileged elite and normal folks worldwide as implemented principally by the USA’s predatory controllers. Why have I spent so much time and verbiage on the CIA. Besides their egregious damage to individuals and countries – including the USA – the CIA is emblematic of ruling class behavior and attitude. CIA Director Pompeo summed it up in 2019 when he giggled about the fact that “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” Hillary Clinton cackled that “We came, we saw, he died.” in reference to Moammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011. Madeleine Albright when asked about reported deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq in 1996 due to US sanctions – “… we think the price is worth it.” When we look at the actions and attitudes of the CIA, we see the psyche of the ruling class, the predators, the establishment — whatever label you prefer.
The CIA was originally created by a northeastern US Power Elite, as Charles Wright Mills soon came to label it. The leadership core were primarily private school, Ivy League college, Wall Street career, and, initially, had a military service connection. They brought in young men with similar characteristics (Caucasian, privileged, ostensibly Christian, predatory) to build their initial fraternity of cavaliers and managers. In the context of the Cold War, which was instigated and developed by an increasingly monolithic, US-based corporatocracy; there came to be almost a geopolitical consensus in ‘Western’ countries. The CIA cadre were involved in defining, building, and enforcing this consensus throughout the world.
There were a few potential obstacles, such as de Gaulle in France. (One assassination attempt that didn’t succeed.) The workaround there was to foment revolution in Algeria and to isolate France from their European neighbors – easily done with a fascist dictator in Spain, the US’ ownership of the Italian government, and military/political control of the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”).
Another was the political ambition of Joseph McCarthy. Solution was to recruit Richard Nixon (strong, well-publicized California conservative credentials who ‘made his bones’ on the House Un-American Activities Committee) to counteract Uncle Joe’s attacks on the elites in concert with Dulles’ Senate and Media friends. The particular focus was the Marshall Plan, which McCarthy saw as an easy target for Conservatives’ ire, but Dulles and friends had recruited Nixon on a long and richly-serviced Congressional tour of Europe designed to sell the plan. Without a unified opposition among Conservatives, McCarthy’s campaign lost standing. He had made many political enemies in his witch-hunts, and this loss whetted their appetites for further defeats. Apparently due to McCarthy’s personal devils, this began a cycle of defeat, increased alcohol abuse, increased bullying, decreased cognitive coherence, and finally death. A side benefit for Dulles was that he gained political stature in this contest by stone-walling McCarthy’s demands for public sacrifices on the basis of national security.
The initial flailing of CIA management in the context of personal and political rivalries ended with the ascendance of the Dulles brothers to their key roles in foreign policy within the Eisenhower administration. Allen took formal control of The Agency in which he had already seeded acolytes in leadership positions. In many ways they were pre-positioned to launch operations around the world, and Eisenhower was predisposed to approve counterrevolutionary and regime-change operations. The Iran and Guatemala projects were seen as successes (Republican Party) to counteract the perceived failures (Democratic Party) in China and Korea. The CIA’s friends in the mass media ignored the anti-democratic features of both coups, while lying about the actual natures of the governments and persons attacked. All of this became SOP in the 1950s. The neutering of McCarthy consolidated the home front.
As shown in the list of CIA atrocities and illegal activities starting on page 7 above, there were many – perhaps most – projects that were kept secret from the US public for decades. There are almost undoubtedly some that still are undisclosed. Most involved Pompeo’s admission of cheating, lying, and stealing, and/or Clinton’s approval of torture and/or murder. Many involved harm to citizens of the US – Dulles’ Little Mice – especially in the procurement, transportation, and sales of harmful drugs. So – as implied or stated often in the above sections of this article, the CIA is a harmful, almost shameless, ruthless, and immoral/amoral organization largely populated by debauched and immoral/amoral agents of – okay, here’s the main question: agents of what?
The organization was created by a small group of ethnically, ethically, ideologically, financially homogeneous men. (The word “financially” covers both their families’ original lifestyles, but, more significantly, their career-related goals.) The majority of them had working relationships with wealthy patrons/clients. They were personally aligned with the intentions and plans of these clients. “These clients” were the emerging investment-based ruling class who brought/bought the lawyer skills, the macho adventurism, the class solidarity and understanding, the cunning, and the remorselessness of the Dulles’ crew. Originally, the CIA were agents of maintenance, and, when possible, expansion of power for the newly-wrought, U.S.-based corporatocracy in the world at-large.
Of course, initially, there were remnants of the extraction and trade corporations of pre-WWII influence to ‘protect’: e.g., United Fruit in Guatemala, oil companies in Iran (British interest primarily), rubber plantations in Indochina (French interest primarily). As the USA developed a notion of itself as the leading world power, the emphases became more strictly geopolitical. Thus the defeat of the French in Indochina became the war to stop Communism in Southeast Asia; the opposition to the Cuban revolution and subsequent government became the bulwark against Communism in Latin America; the coup and reign of terror in the Congo became the war on Communism in Africa. In other words the CIA – as intended by Allen Dulles and his core group – took on any revolution or significant movement toward socialism (or democracy for that matter) throughout the world.
There were only finitely many Ivy League graduates with the requisite intentions, personalities, and skills to ‘man’ (intentionally used term) the growing demands within the evolving empire; so the leadership had to hire from mongrel stock on criteria of intelligence and skills. In the post-McCarthy era, it was still assumed that US citizens subscribed to the national purposes and values as portrayed in WWII propaganda, so a few White Hats got past the psychological tests. Also, a few skilled and purposeful agents were hired who were distinct from White Hat types. That’s where a Gust Avrakotos fits into the story, highly motivated by his personal history and cultural heritage.
This enlargement was temporarily set back due to a low-level civil war within the USA that was prompted by the strategic defeat of military dominance in Viet Nam. (Failures in wars often create such conditions.) The halcyon days from 1953 to 1961 had perhaps given CIA bosses a case of hubris that began to dissipate with the Bay of Pigs debacle. The propaganda machine was revved up for the Congo coup, but there were some concerns expressed in the wider world that somehow insinuated into polite political discourse. The deaths of Dag Hammarskjold and John Kennedy unsettled some observers. By the time of the coup in Indonesia, doubts about US policy – if not US involvement – were being amplified by concerns about the war in Viet Nam. The CIA was running business-as-usual, such as their Phoenix Project in Viet Nam, but facts about their operations were leaking to a few practicing ‘western’ journalists. Of course, it was all Communist propaganda, but citizens were less attuned to that rubric, true or not.
Besides their own interests, the CIA had been very much aligned with Richard Nixon who had been an excellent friend in the ‘50s, both in Congress and as Vice President. Richard Helms, another OSS veteran and Dulles’ disciple, was approved by Lyndon Johnson as the Director of the CIA in 1966. Helms had experience in almost all of the most important operations during the 1950s with a particularly big role in the drug and mind-control experiments labelled Operation MKUltra. He also played a role in publicity management campaigns, such as reinforcement of the account of JFK’s assassination as developed by the Warren Commission (in concert with the committee management work of ‘retired’ Allen Dulles).
In the ‘60s, up to the downfall of Johnson’s presidency, scrutiny of CIA and their activities was confined to a small portion of the US population whose loci were academe and church. Due to Civil Rights and Voters’ Rights legislation, Johnson ‘skated’ for most of his tenure. The CIA ‘did their thing’ in relative anonymity without public scandal. (They were generally ineffective in spy craft, too, often ‘played’ by their adversaries, plus misestimating quality, quantity, plans, and/or actions of opponents.) The upshot was that Helms was well regarded by LBJ, until the Tet Offensive. Even that intelligence failure did not tarnish Helms’ relationship with Johnson.
However, the fallout of the Tet Offensive kick-started expansion of disclosures of, and criticism of, the humanitarian debacle of the war. The domestic sociopolitical environment became more divisive and adversarial. Helms, as Director, knew about Operations Chaos and COINTELPRO, but, allegedly, he had some doubts about CIA involvement in domestic spy work. He finessed concerns via the idea that protestors in the US were connected to foreign resources, which was interpreted to be covered by the CIA charter. Eventually, he had to report to LBJ, and later to Nixon, that they could not find any illegal influence. Nixon then transformed a personal distaste for Helms into distrust of information from the CIA. His solution was to isolate CIA management from policy and planning and simply order actions based on his and his advisers’ perceptions.
Nixon and his in-house sociopath, Henry Kissinger, were Rockefeller family retainers, plus Dulles’ disciples in terms of Realpolitik. The Rockefeller brothers were the industrial mainstays of energy production (Standard Oil system) and a main financial pillar (Chase Manhattan Bank), consolidated – ‘coincidentally’ – in 1930. (Either the brothers’ father or grandfather employed Allen Dulles in the 1930s for various contracting and banking business in Europe. Dulles and a Rockefeller were co-founders of the Council on Foreign Relations.) It seems that, associated with their monopolistic business interests, they decided to order US foreign policy more directly, too, through the agency of Nixon’s presidency. But – best laid plans and all that – geopolitical events and a wary populace interrupted their attempts to bend the government to their aims.
The Nixon/Kissinger team were very much in charge when they ordered the CIA to prevent the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1972. Helms’ team failed to keep him out of office, which became another CIA failure in Nixon’s assessment. In the course of two years of CIA subversion there, however, they had developed enough cadre within the military to carry out a bloody coup in 1973. The corporate ruling class was gratified by success in their campaign against the socialist menace, but by then Nixon had other issues on his mind.
Nixon did have backdoor connections with some CIA alumni, and in a paroxysm of paranoia set his friendlies to work on dogging the Democratic Party in the 1972 presidential election. Without trying to ascribe purpose, or even purposefulness, to those who prosecuted the matter, suffice it to say that the project resulted in Nixon’s resignation from office – a side effect of the Watergate burglary botched by the ex-spooks. Another interesting coincidence occurred previously to this result, when Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned due to a bribery allegation. Gerald Ford was approved by Congress to be the replacement Vice President. When Nixon resigned, Ford became President, leaving the administration without a VP again. After a ‘search’, Nelson Rockefeller became the new VP in Ford’s administration. In yet another interesting coincidence, George H. W. Bush – son of CIA enthusiast, Wall Street banker, former US Senator, Prescott Bush – was appointed to head up the CIA.
Due to the turmoil within the society at large (throughout the world really) promulgated by the war in Viet Nam primarily, government became enmeshed in a sort-of mirrored imbroglio. Daniel Ellsberg had caused to be published “The Pentagon Papers” in 1971, which were essentially a documented history of the details of US involvement – policies, actions, events – in the war (not unlike Agee’s ‘diary’ of his CIA activities in terms of being an unvarnished record). Most of the initial controversy was about Ellsberg’s criminal liability in disclosing government secrets (again, Phillip Agee’s experience…). Ellsberg beat the rap on a technicality – fortunately – and then, slowly, the public became aware of the content of the disclosures. The judgment of history was occurring in real-time. US youth had already expressed their negative opinions of the war; now their message was amplified by corroboration of their observations and analysis. Concurrently, the Viet Cong/Minh/Hanoi government was defeating the US military and their proxy forces.
The US MICIMATT (Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academic Think Tank) Complex was working overtime to ignore or to deflect the criticisms, but the Nixon spy debacle stirred the pot. The next three years brought forth revelations of egregious behaviors on the parts of many institutions via Congressional Committee investigations. To a fair degree the CIA was a main focus, and Jim Helms was called upon numerous times to elide the concerns. As in the Joe McCarthy era, Congressional oversight was somewhat mitigated by national security stonewall technique. Nonetheless, the Halloween Massacre occurred, and there was a reported general funk at Langley HQ. Agency stalwarts liked to say that the Family Jewels were lost via public disclosure, but in fact most were saved by selective disclosure.
Nonetheless, the 1976 Church committee’s findings included strong criticisms such as:
“Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
“Illegal activities - The committee uncovered a wide range of illegal activities, including the torture and drugging of US citizens, surveillance of political and civil rights organizations, and assassination plots.”
Helms’ elisions at the Congressional hearings resulted in a perjury trial in 1977 at the end of which the federal Judge, Barrington D. Parker, stated that no citizen has "a license to operate freely outside the dictates of the law. ... Public officials must respect and honor the Constitution ... You considered yourself bound to protect the Agency [and so] to dishonor your solemn oath to tell the truth...If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy.”
The Jimmy Carter administration calmed the furor by at least seeming to downgrade military solutions in foreign policy. Putting Straight Arrow Stansfield Turner in charge of the CIA worked quite well in the media, while the agents of The Agency stonewalled any actual reform actions. The internal “funk’ was apparently real enough, but it was mostly passive-aggressive behavior. And in any case agents and managers were mostly interested in staying on the ‘gravy train’ of CIA salaries and perks (all secret power bases include perks – it’s a known and universal rule). So – the world was relieved of CIA machinations and massacres for a few years, which helped Iranian nationalists to organize a resistance to the Shah via alliance with outlawed Shia Muslim fundamentalists.
The US MICIMATT was not passive during this period. In fact they are never passive. (Passivity is an unknown trait within this quasi-organization.) The MICIMATT can only be seen as a multi-component activist front for a corporatocratic ruling class. Nowadays their agents come from a diverse geographic base, too, expanding from the northern and eastern US industrial bases of their birth. Their controlling ideology was disseminated from their Ivy League base via infiltration of universities across the USA: (Herbert) Hoover Institution within Stanford U; ‘Chicago School’ of economics at the U of Chicago; the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT-Austin; etc. Another route of ideological penetration of government was through quasi-academic institutions such as The Council of Foreign Relations, which was an early version of ruling-class ‘think tank’, along with the Brookings Institution. The American Enterprise Institute was created in 1938. In 1948 Rand Corporation was organized; Hudson Institute was born in 1961; Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973; the Cato Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are more recent creations.
This evolution of multiple institutions might tend to result in diverse analyses and, therefore, policy proposals; but functionally, the opposite is true, and the basic intentions, perspectives, and plans are shared. Nowadays, any and every issue seems to have a foundation, which gives a perception of diversity, but the question is, who gets the audience with the standing to actually do something. The MICIMATT assures that only their prescribed analyses and their derived policy solutions have such an audience. The evolution of approved geopolitical purpose and analysis by and for the US government has barely deviated from the early hegemonic dreams of the Council of Foreign Relations through the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council and on through the various ‘think tanks’ listed above.
In support of such purpose a plethora of international non-governmental organizations – e.g., the National Endowment for Democracy or World Economic Forum – and ‘intergovernmental’ agencies (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) have been chartered. [Strictly speaking, SWIFT is a consortium of banks to handle international bank relations in some ways similar to the domestic Federal Reserve Bank.] Most were invented and dominated by the US government. Domination became especially evident after the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact alliance in 1991. And what was their purview and provenance? It was financial ‘stabilization’, of course, or, better said, control. [The origination of this system was the Bretton Woods Agreement, where, according to Michael Hudson, the debate was between Democratic Socialism and National Socialism, and National Socialism won.]
It is not, however, the case that “hegemonic dreams”, though monolithic in purpose, are linear in strategic or tactical planning. The US and their ‘western’ allies careered through the Cold War confrontations initiated by Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1946 and implemented during the CIA’s ‘golden’ era of coups, until the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Within the obscure world of the ‘think tanks’, Herman Kahn (Dr. Strangelove) at Cato Institute (and a co-founder of Hudson Institute) began to prescribe ‘survivable’ nuclear weapons strategy as a policy counterweight to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). (He was also an early proponent of the use of Israel in West Asia as a US beachhead.) The next strategy was militarization via the Domino Theory with a war cry of Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age. After the Chile coup, massive violence was suspended temporarily in favor of Détente and The Opening of China. War was resurrected – in an early movement toward proxy wars – in the Iran-Contra Affair and the Give the Russians Their Own Viet Nam (Afghanistan) project in the 1980s, as told in Charlie Wilson’s War.
The success of the Afghanistan operation in undermining the USSR economy, plus their social and military morale, was a surprise to most of the world, including the CIA. According to legend, the news services were the first source of information that President G. H. W. Bush and his crew had about indications of political problems there – which said a lot about ‘intelligence’ in The Agency. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the Warsaw Pact was quickly identified within the US ruling class as Victory!! And the CIA was instrumental in the proximate cause – kudos and budgetary bonanza abounded. The Bush I administration began to assert itself in multiple directions. It had a well-trained military with state-of-the-art equipment but without a current mission. It was time to give it some exercise, and Iraq made the fatal error of believing that they had a friendly relationship with the USA. Desert Storm disabused them of that idea. War was back on the agenda.
The Clinton administration seemed peaceable on the surface, but foreign policy was devolving to a neoconservative cabal that saw hegemony as their goal. Ray McGovern reports that Clinton only held two meetings with the CIA brass in his 8 years of governance, which suited the ‘Suits’ quite well. A calm political relationship, heroic standing, budgetary largesse, and the backing of the new, lean, and hungry foreign policy establishment of Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle, [all three from the office of Senator Scoop Jackson], Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Eliot Abrams (the resurrected Bill Harvey) created an ideal environment for stealthy development of a truly independent and self-contained secret service, including paramilitary arms (no need to rely on subcontractors only – although plenty of such were employed in the succeeding years).
The ‘funk’ was gone, the perks were good, and the scope of everything from technical advances to political power to foreign adventure to psychopathy was enlarged. Within these changes in strategic imperatives from 1947 to the remilitarization phase under Bush I, the military-industrial component of ruling class control was growing in terms that President Eisenhower predicted in his Farewell Address in early 1961. The neoconservatives’ ascendancy both derived from and served the MICIMATT. And in that tautology – within that Logos – was the evolved connection between the movement of capitalism to imperialism via monopolization of the financialized construct of corporatocratic control served by a military agency – which is to say fascism.
Momentarily – if we can call most of a decade a moment – we (USA) weren’t actively bombing any other countries. Instead, we were boosting ‘defense’ spending, inventing new weapons, and training a volunteer (no conscription anyway) military for ‘combined arms’ warfare. The core of the real action, though, was directed by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Ivy League colleges, Wall Street lawyer experience, Goldman Sachs, Board of the New York Stock Exchange, and – oh yeah – Council of Foreign Relations. The eventual outcome of his stewardship was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed banks to become investment houses, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which effectively prevented regulation of financial derivatives – which is to say, Rubin facilitated the creation of the conditions for the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and for the financial quandary of today which is that nobody knows how many trillions of dollars of these investment-market casino chips are floating around in the digital make-believe world of the financial ‘industry’.
Of course, Clinton had to make his bones before retirement and exercise some of the new toys of the Pentagon – for sales purposes, if nothing else – so NATO, meet Serbia. That was a good warm-up for the coming Shock-and-Awe period of Dick Cheney Unchained. Equally important as control of petroleum to Cheney – and Bush (got to give him partial credit) – was Hegemony. The USSR was so 20th Century; time to look forward to the American Century. Given the smug expressions of these characters in pictures and pronouncements from the early 2000 oughts, they seemed to think that they had achieved a Stasis – The End of History. They may have been correct in that we seem to have achieved a sort-of stasis of one crisis after another.
To an important extent the military/security/intelligence services melded with the suppliers of their tools via a ‘circular door’ of career cycling. And the actual divisions of labor among them were less defined and more often superseded. In this milieu, which started in the early ‘80s and continued to the present, the vestiges of industrial capital were finally subverted and bought out by financial capital, which promptly moved physical production to Mexico, Bangladesh, South Africa, etc. in order to reduce labor costs along with labor’s standing in the USA.
V. I. Lenin covered this same basic analysis of financial monopolization over 100 years ago in his book Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism. His political frame of reference was newly-formed republics emerging from kingdoms, or kingdoms per se, which were essentially in an autocratic political milieu, so he looked only at class divisions without regard to governmental forms. Post-Lenin, and early in republican development, it became apparent that monopolistic corporations could subjugate ‘democratic’ republican governments through thuggery and bribery. Mussolini called it Fascism. I suggest that Imperialism is the natural tendency of any and all perceived geopolitical power to expand control, and that Fascism is the final stage of Capitalism. And that is where we are in the USA.
So – the CIA was from its beginning in the OSS ruthless, power-obsessed, hypocritical, corrupt, devious, autocratic, and Narcissistic – very much in the spirit and intent of its main designer and proponent, Allen Dulles. And the core denizens of our current political duopoly – a fake duality at that – can be similarly characterized. Maybe it’s a mirage or just wishful thinking, but I look back at some of the main political actors of 50 years ago, and I don’t see the pure corruption, ignorance, and malfeasance of today. It seemed to most of us that there were generally a few good actors within every federal and local agency. Today only the whistleblowers who step away from The System can be so qualified. And that is the triumph of the CIA – and the class from which it arose, in lock-step with the triumph of the financialized corporatocracy.
What Is To Be Done?
Is the title of another famous pamphlet by V. I. Lenin. And that is always the question, except that there should be no question mark, because there needs to be a plan and a strategy. Interestingly, the plan that can save humanity is being created and developed by the ‘Global South’ and ‘East’. That plan is the multi-polarity, rule-of-law-based-on-the-United-Nation-charter, humane approach that is being promulgated primarily by the Russian Federation and the Peoples’ Republic of China. It can be argued that this movement was started with the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2001. It is demonstrated in the growth of bilateral and multilateral mutual assistance (e.g., the Collective Security Treaty Organization – CSTO – 2002); in multinational development initiatives (e.g., the Belt and Road Initiative – BRI – 2013); but, most importantly and convincingly, with the BRICS organization (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) – 2009. (In 2024 BRICS+ should become the new rubric by adding five more nations at their annual meeting.)
There is plenty of information on the internet concerning the depth, breadth, and details of these developments, so let’s consider strategy. As in the SMO (Special Military Operation) in Ukraine, strategy is always adaptive; because, as von Moltke’s military adage/joke says, "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy". When the SCO and the CSTO were organized, were the principal authors thinking in terms of building up to BRICS+? I doubt it. Maybe they were looking back to the Warsaw Pact, but I doubt it. Maybe they intended to build a competing system to that of the US/UK/EU, but I doubt it. I don’t doubt, however, that the SCO charter speaks to systems of cooperation and peace and rational international relations. And therein lies the starting strategy. Due to events, the strategy that is currently informing the BRICS+ countries, plus perhaps 30+ candidates for membership, does include systems in competition with ‘Western’ organizations. For instance, the annual meeting is likely to approve a payment/banking system within the BRICS+ that avoids the current US/UK/EU-dominated SWIFT system. We shall see, but negotiations have been ongoing for more than a year, and the likelihood of approval has been ‘leaked’ assiduously.
I would like to think that, as some of us did in the mid-1970s, we could engage a similar starting strategy of peace, cooperation, and rationality – but I doubt that it’s possible in the US or the UK nowadays. I ascribe the difficulty primarily to former CIA Director Bill Casey’s comment that: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Of course there are other obstacles, such as the material benefit to a large portion of citizens of an imperialist power – USians primarily at present – from violence (MIC profits) and underhanded dealings. Irrationality speaks for itself in our current social and political environment.
Given the notion that BRICS+ nations, their friends, and their potential allies have an approach and an ability to build more humane international relations based on multipolarity and cooperation between nations, what is our – USian – role? I think that it has to be to proselytize for peaceful coexistence and for recognition of the humanity of the ‘other’. It needs to advertise the benefits of the economic contributions to publics at-large of socialistic institutions and policies. We should aim for recognition of the social benefits of these systems by publicizing these practices in the countries where they are in service.
The ‘good news’ for our work in these regards is that the bad news is increasing in our ‘Western’ world at a high rate. Our fellow citizens recognize the issues, whatever the magical or fascistic solutions they may formulate. Our role, then, is to: 1) point out the rationality of socialistic policy where deployed; 2) build community by being good neighbors; 3) bring factual information to the public forum; and 4) model healthy lifestyles. There are, no doubt, some other beneficial habits or rules, but these four approaches are obviously important elements in the creation of a social environment for a useful social movement. For some of us who were involved in such a quest for 50+ years, it feels similar to 1975: big troubles and great potential…
Appendix A:
· Acoustic Kitty - intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies
· Air Bridge Denial Program was an anti-narcotics program operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Colombia and Peru in the 1990s. It targeted traffickers transporting illicit drugs through the air by forcing down suspicious aircraft, using lethal force if necessary.
· Exercise Amalgam Virgo 10 - Miami on Jan. 28, 2010, to test command and control and execution procedures for air defense for Super Bowl XLIV.
· SS Aquila (1940) 1958 CIA sunk it along and damaged two other freighters in an Indonesian port to try to damage economy to undermine Sukarno.
· Civilian Irregular Defense Group was a military program intended to develop South Vietnamese irregular military units from indigenous ethnic-minority populations.
· Disposition Matrix - informally known as a kill list, is a database of information for tracking, capturing, rendering, or killing suspected enemies of the United States.[1] Developed by the Obama administration beginning in 2010
· Farewell Dossier – successful recruitment and operation of a CIA asset in capture of USSR technical information and names of spy personnel.
· SS Flying Lark – sunk in 1958 by CIA pilot to destabilize the Sukarno government in Indonesia.
Allen Lawrence Pope - CIA pilot bombing Indonesian ports to harm economy in order to destabilize Sukarno government. Shot down in 1958
1958: SS San Flaviano a British oil tanker that was bombed and sunk by the CIA in Balikpapan Harbour, Indonesia.
· HTLINGUAL was a secret project to intercept mail destined for the Soviet Union and China. It operated from 1952 until 1973.
· 1989 Jamba Hercules crash crashed on final approach at Jamba, Huíla in Angola while delivering arms to UNITA.
· JMWAVE was the codename for a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station operated by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1961 until 1968.
· Operation WASHTUB was a covert operation to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua as a part of the CIA's effort to portray the administration of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz as having ties to the Soviet Union, prior to the 1954 Guatemalan coup
· MKCHICKWIT was to "identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia and to obtain information and samples".
· MKOFTEN was to "test the behavioral and toxicological effects of certain drugs on animals and humans". Late 1960s:
· SS Springfjord sunk in San Jose, Guatemala harbor 1954.
· Operation AMSWEEP: Use of a Cuban intelligence asset to provide political and military information.
· Operation AMTABBY: An effort to send saboteur groups into Cuba to disrupt targeted sites and hinder the Castro government. (MFF) (Group Members: Jose Miguel Carvajal Gonzalez, Armando Caballero Parodi, Antonio Soto Vazquez, Alberto Perez Martinez)
· Operation AMWARM: This Central Intelligence Agency "FI (Foreign Intelligence) Operation" focused on Cubana Airlines, the largest airline in Cuba. The communications detailed Cuban "personnel, negotiations, scheduled flights of Cubana Airlines and coverage of traffic at Rancho Boyeros Airport." The reports were generated by an "on-island asset" (Cuba) and sent to Agency operatives.
· Operation FJPLEAD: Foreign Intelligence collection activities targeting the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese communists.
· Operation LIFIRE: This Operation gathered intelligence and "provided a limited surveillance capability, and could fellow a traveler to his hotel." The majority of the activities were focused on acquiring travel manifests from international flights.
· Operation LIHABIT: A CIA Mexico City Station photographic surveillance base house targeting the Czechoslovakian Embassy.
· Operation LIROMANCE: A CIA Mexico City Station audio surveillance operation.
· Operation LITABBY: One of multiple CIA photographic surveillance base houses targeting the Mexico City Soviet Embassy.
· Operation MHCHAOS: A domestic and international program that sought to gather information on groups protesting against official policies that were deemed possible threats and subjects who had committed illegal actions targeting Agency and national security interests.
· Operation PBGROVEL: A Guatemalan operation that was supported by David Atlee Phillips amidst the nineteen fifties.
· Chilean newspaper run by Paul Langevin 1952 – 1972?
· Operation REDSKIN: A program using legal traveler sources who gathered intelligence while visiting the Soviet Union.
· Operation STGANG: Audio surveillance operations targeting Chinese Communist targets in Mexico City.
· Operation YEAST: An infiltration and landing plan for anti-Castro Cuban exiles to provide support for the Bay of Pigs.
A CIA project is usually a large encompassing plot, requiring substantial duration and resources:
· Project CHATTER was a United States Navy program beginning in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs in interrogations and the recruitment of agents.
· Project Dark Gene was an aerial reconnaissance program against the Soviet Union. The program was run in conjunction with Project Ibex. The first operations were during the 1960s. Dedicated aircraft, air-bases, and U.S. personnel were stationed at numerous sites in Iran and would regularly fly across the border into the USSR through potential holes in their radar coverage. The intention of the program was to test the effectiveness of Soviet air defence and interception and resulted in one confirmed and possibly more combat losses in engagements with Soviet aircraft.
· Project AECARRERA: A CIA project that supported intelligence gathering using East German nationals with debriefing and propaganda operations.
· Project AECOB: A foreign intelligence operation within Soviet controlled Latvia using infiltration and exfiltration of agents. It also involved the recruitment of legal residents of the USSR focusing on Latvia.
· Project AMLISP: A foreign intelligence project targeting political and financial holdings, among these targeted locations were those receiving vehicles and military hardware.
· Project AEREADY: The project was conceived to provide the CIA's Soviet Russia Division with a trained "Hot War" cadre of personnel that could be used during possible hostilities with the Soviet Union.
· Project AMSPILL: Use of a Cuban intelligence agent to provide economic and political information for Agency use.
· Project ANTLERS: The Agency undertook removing a defector from Europe "and into the US without leaving any trace of his true identity." Using forged documents the Agency was able to undertake the mission successfully.
· Project BECRIPPLE: A project undertaken by the CIA's Berlin Station targeting Polish holdings to establish intelligence operations within Poland using clandestine photographs and monitoring local émigré activities.
· Project BESMIRCH: The operation maintained communications links over the Polish-German border by using legal travelers.
· Project BESMOOTH: A project located in Mexico City that inspected Polish government employees using phone tap and observational intelligence. Targets were noted for possible use and information.
· Project BGFIEND: This was a United States and English controlled intelligence project for the purposes of overthrowing the regime of Albania. It relied using infiltration agents within the country to develop resistance activities using propaganda and economic warfare.
· Project BGSPEED: This subproject of BGFIEND was designed to support the propaganda efforts in Albania.
· Project BGWOEFUL: This project used Counterespionage activities targeting the area of Slovakia, Hungary.
· Project BUTANE: The Director of Central Intelligence ordered the short-term surveillance of former Agency employee Victor Marchetti "...to determine his activities and contacts with Agency employees and others in regard to his publications exposing Agency operations."
· Project CABEZONE: A Defector Reception Center (DRC) in Germany used to conduct debriefings and interrogations of varying subjects for intelligence use.
· Project CADROWN: Project CADROWN was developed to support Project TPEMBER by forming a paramilitary apparatus of East German agents.
· Project CATOMIC: An intelligence project targeting the Soviet Embassy in Bonn, Germany.
· Project CAUTERY: The project was developed to induce Communist defectors and debrief refugees to generate intelligence leads concerning likely defectors in Soviet controlled East Germany.
· Project CELOTEX-1: Months long Agency surveillance of Washington Post reporter Michael Getler to determine his source of classified information appearing in his news column.
· Project CELOTEX-2: Extended Agency surveillance of media figures that includes Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, Brit Hume, and Joseph Spear. The project sought to learn "...the source of classified Agency information appearing in Anderson's syndicated columns."
· Project COLDFEET 1962 - extract intelligence from abandoned Soviet Arctic drifting ice station.
· Project HARVARD: A project initially designed to provide safe houses and operational aid facilities for CIA activities in Germany.
· Project HARPSTAR: An undertaking by the Agency to gather intelligence using female informants that were sent to engage in relationships with President Sukarno of Indonesia. A female agent was used in attempts to influence Sukarno' actions as well. Agency funds were sent to Twentieth Century Fox studios to further substantiate the cover of one "actress" used for the program.
· Project JBPARSON: An Albania holding/training camp in West Germany. Associated with Project BGFIEND.
· Project KDFACTOR: The later name of Mexico City Station’s Project LIEMPTY that provided photographic surveillance of the Soviet Embassy in the Mexican capital.
· Project KLANVIL: A CIA project that used Bolivian civil service employees as operatives to monitor its government officials.
· Project LIANCHOR: A program to create an Agency controlled "leftist" Press Service that distributed political articles in South American countries.
· Project MERRIMAC: "Office of Security proprietary agents covertly monitored dissident groups in the Washington area considered potential threats to Agency installations and personnel. In addition, Office of Security field offices collected intelligence
on dissident groups."· Project MKNAOMI: The Central Intelligence Agency and United States Army collaborated from 1952 until 1970 to develop biological and chemical substances for various uses that included killing and incapacitating enemy targets.
· Project NORFOLK: A project used to provide female companionship for a visiting dignitary. Additional visits and a property for meeting was obtained. The efforts were to gather intelligence. According to the female informant, part of the project included allegations of the Agency indicating sex with the target would be beneficial. The Agency used aliases and implied State Department associations.
· Project OBHUNT: A subproject of Project BGFIEND seeking to use infiltration teams to establish and assist Albania resistance forces.
· Project OBLIVIOUS: The National Committee for Free Albania that served as a project created by the CIA to support Albanian resistance forces.
· Project OBSIDIOUS: A team constructed to launch "infiltration missions into Albania via airdrops or overland to organize underground resistance, establish safe houses, collect operational intelligence, and to spread propaganda".
· Project OBTEST: This subproject of BGFIEND sought to broadcast radio propaganda into Albania.
· Project OBTUSE: A subproject of BGFIEND focused on propaganda activities targeting Soviet controlled Albania.
· Project OMEGA: A plan by paramilitary exile groups to unseat the Castro regime and liberate Cuba led by probable Cuban intelligence agent Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo.
· Project PARAGON: A domestic surveillance project the CIA used for targeting an alleged New Orleans urban guerilla group. One named in connection was Frances Herbert who had "allegedly developed ties with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison."
· Project PBCRUET: This project sought to create clandestine radio contacts with groups inside the Ukraine to exploit them for penetration of the USSR and to establish resistance groups and undertake psychological warfare.
· Project QJWIN: A program to spot and recruit agents for sabotage and covert intelligence activities.
· Project QKDEMON: A psychological warfare project producing and disseminating covert propaganda against the Soviet Union and its satellites.
· Project QKENCHANT: Provided security approvals for non-Agency personnel and facilities. Such approvals were required so that Agency personnel could meet individuals to discuss proposed projects, activities, and possible relationships.
· Project QKREPAIR: A project seeking to establish a safe zone in Central Austria to launch escape and evasion operations.
· Project SGHOUSE: The purpose of this accounting project was to provide money for administrative purposes via an unvouchered funds account.
· Project SLEEPER: A Cuban official and informant that penetrated various Communist political circles to provide the CIA information.
· Project TPEMBER: A project seeking to expose and prevent illegal acts by Soviet officials in East Germany.
· Project TPRANSACK: A covert program designed to disrupt leftist groups by using the International Federation of Journalists.
· Project WIROGUE: A plan designed to recruit agents for intelligence gathering, sabotage, and proposed assassinations.
· Project ZRCHEST: A CIA project with special routing indicators that allowed the Technical Services Division to surveil the New China News Agency within Cuba and sought to decipher their commercial codes.
· Project ZRLYNCH: A foreign intelligence operation to recruit Soviet citizens and members of the Latvian Resistance to serve as CIA assets in Latvia.
1954: Operation Gold - The Berlin Tunnel
A joint venture between the CIA and MI6 consisting of a tunnel dug beneath occupied Soviet territory in Germany. Agents were able to tap into conversations conducted by the Soviet Union, who became aware of the tunnel due to a mole planted within MI6.
1957: CORONA Program
United States’ first photographic spy satellite mission, in operation from 1960-1972.
1962: A-12 OXCART - Lockheed Skunk Works designed successor to U-2 high-altitude spy plane.
1974: Glomar/AZORIAN 1970 to 1974: Project Azorian
The US Navy used underwater sonar technology to discover the precise location of the Soviet K-129 Golf II-class submarine, which sank 1,500 miles from Hawaii in 1968. The submarine had three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles onboard and was resting on the ocean bottom 16,500 feet below the surface. The massive 1,750-ton and 132-foot-long submarine was an intelligence goldmine if it could be recovered. The Soviets had already tried but failed.
So the CIA hired creative-thinking engineers to construct a large mechanical claw that was capable of lifting the metal relic 3 miles up from the depths of Pacific Ocean. To execute the plan, the CIA recruited billionaire Howard Hughes. From, the engineers worked in total secrecy to install special capabilities aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a commercial deep-sea drilling ship.
The ship had a derrick similar to an oil-drilling rig, a pipe-transfer crane, two tall docking legs, the mechanical claw, a center docking well called the “moon pool” to hold the captured sub, and doors that opened and closed on the well’s floor. This enabled the team to conduct the entire recovery mission underwater without risking discovery by other ships, reconnaissance aircraft, or spy satellites.
On July 4, 1974, the Hughes Glomar Explorer left Long Beach, California, and sailed to the location of the sunken submarine. Hughes provided the CIA with the perfect cover story in that if questioned they could suggest that they were conducting marine research. The month-long mission was dicey, and engineers had to apply supporting steel pipe in 60-foot sections to counter the force of the ocean’s current on the mechanical claw’s descent. When it had the submarine in its grasp, they reversed the process by removing the steel beams. While the K-129 was a third of the way up, a section broke off, but the operation still managed to salvage some of the vessel, recovering the submarine’s crew and giving them a burial at sea.
A second mission was planned to recover the lost section. However, in 1975 the Los Angeles Times exposed the story of Project Azorian and further recovery efforts were cancelled. The top-secret mission remains an engineering wonder and is considered one of the most daring US intelligence operations ever conceived.
2001: JAWBREAKER. – First elements of attacks in Afghanistan to pursue 9/11 planner(s).
2006: Operation Cannonball
An effort to capture Osama bin Laden and eliminate Al Qaeda forces in Pakistan.
The Lunik ‘Kidnapping’
CIA Agents intercepted and studied the Lunik at a rail yard, and discovered that some of the internal mechanisms were left behind. These were confiscated and brought back to the U.S. for study.
The Stargate Project
If you’ve seen the 2009 film “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” then you might be familiar with the next CIA-sponsored project on this list. The Stargate Project was developed by the U.S. Army with the intent of studying whether or not psychic abilities could be harnessed and developed within ordinary soldiers or intelligence agents. These “psychotronic” studies, a term used by the States’ KGB contemporaries, didn’t end up amounting to much and were not overseen by a large group. Indeed, the sum of The Stargate Project never exceeded twenty participants and was largely seen as a failure, because humans can’t be harvested as psychic weapons against other governments.
1976?: Tacana Project
A BBC article in 2019 reported that the U.S. was attaching tiny cameras to pigeons to test utility. Results were encouraging enough to underwrite a pigeon mission. The rest of the story remains classified.
[Space for more disclosures and discoveries in the future…]