Central Intelligence Agency
- The Other Side
Never have so many done so much that was so bad to so many others for so little discernible benefit to so few.
Spies have been with us always, but the Central Intelligence Agency is purely a 20th century phenomenon. While intelligence
agencies like the KGB and Israel's Mossad have often employed appalling tactics to further their goals, the CIA has earned itself a special distinction for using most
of the same appalling tactics much less effectively.
Prior to World War II, U.S. intelligence operations were informally conducted under the auspices of various military and
law enforcement agencies. In 1941, the Japanese "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor highlighted an apparent flaw in this system
— namely that U.S. intelligence sucked.
There is a perennially recurring story that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had advance warning of the attack but allowed it to proceed in order to galvanize the American people into a war frenzy.
Regardless of the veracity of this allegation, the perceived failure at Pearl Harbor provided the pretext for a new consolidation
of intelligence power in Washington.
In 1942, FDR ordered the formation of the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS served as a clearinghouse for intelligence
reporting, but it wasn't empowered (officially) to take charge of the various spy shops scattered across the U.S. executive
branch.
Toward the end of the war, General William Donovan began floating a proposal to create a super-powerful centralized agency
answerable only to the president, which would coordinate intelligence gathering, determine national security objectives and
execute "subversive operations" to accomplish said objectives.
In 1947, the CIA was officially born (about a year after it had already effectively started operations), under the
auspices of President Harry Truman and the National Security Act. In 1948, its charter was expanded to include "covert actions"
in addition to intelligence-gathering. In 1949, the Central Intelligence Act broadened the scope of the CIA's powers and eliminated
most oversight and accountability.
Under its charter, the CIA was expressly forbidden from conducting domestic operations — within the context of the
aforementioned absence of oversight and accountability.
In the absence of a major international conflict, the CIA floundered aimlessly for its first few years of existence. The
onset of the Korean War in the 1950s helped bring the organization into sharper focus. In 1953, Allen Dulles took over as
director, and the agency began to morph into the feared-yet-seemingly-ineffectual behemoth it is today.
The looming threat of Communism fueled huge increases in CIA staff and budget through out the next two decades. The mission
and ambition of the CIA also grew during this period. Intelligence-gathering is all well and good, but it lacks the joie
de vivre of a needlessly elaborate covert action to accomplish a morally ambiguous goal. Under Dulles, and continuing
through the present day, the CIA took on the jobs nobody else could... or would... or should...
The Columbia Encyclopedia entry for the agency unintentionally points out the major problem with the CIA's execution of
its mission: "While covert operations receive the most attention, the CIA’s major responsibility is intelligence." Covert
operations receive the most attention? Hmmm...
The directive empowering the CIA's activist role defines covert actions as activities "conducted or sponsored by this Government
against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed
that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government
can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."
Among a few of the more colorful highlights of this "plausibly disclaimed" activity:
- Cuba: Two words: Exploding cigar. The history of the CIA and Cuba is storied and well-known, involving repeated attempts to assassinate
Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which the agency guided John F. Kennedy to a spectacularly failed attempt to overthrow the
Castro regime. In the latter case, the CIA's post-mortem on the incident identified such strategic failures as neglecting
"to advise the president, at an appropriate time, that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore
canceled" and failing to recognize that covert operation "had become overt."
- In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with mind-control as part of an infamous program known as MK Ultra. The agency shredded all its documentation on the program in the 1970s, but several details have been leaked and subsequently
proven. In the 1950s, the agency discovered LSD. Its chief scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, experimented with the drug extensively
— on himself and others. According to the New York Times, "the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments,
and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. First-hand testimony, fragmentary Government documents and court records show
that at least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in
the project, known as MK Ultra. The experiments were useless, Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired." One
of the most notorious MK Ultra projects involved using San Francisco hookers to dose unsuspecting clients and filming the
results.
- In the late 1950s, the agency trained assassins to kill a CIA-drafted list of political officials to advance a coup in
Guatemala. The successful coup overthrew the democratically elected president in favor of a procession of fascist dictators
who ruled the country through military force and brutal suppression for the next four decades.
- The CIA spent 20 years or so sponsoring violent coups to eradicate popular leftist movements in Laos, only to meet with
continual failure. Finally, after it became clear things just weren't working out, the military flew into Laos and bombed
the country back into the stone age during the Vietnam War. Laos pretty much remains in the Stone Age today.
- In the early 1970s, Richard M. Nixon recruited "former" CIA officials (including E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy) to work as part of the Plumbers, a group of vigilante operatives charged with stopping leaks and spying on behalf of the
president's re-election efforts. Nixon would eventually fire Richard Helms, then CIA director, when Helms refused to concoct lies about national security in order to stop the FBI's investigation of
Watergate.
- In 1953, despite a series of gaffes, the CIA succeeded in installing the Shah of Iran, a more or less fascist dictator whose oppressive looting of the nation benefited the U.S. for a couple decades, but ultimately
bred the Islamic revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in the 1970s (a revolution which caught the CIA completely by surprise).
Iran was representative of the CIA's seeming inability to comprehend the Islamic and Middle Eastern mindsets, resulting
in countless examples of "blowback," the agency's term for covert operations in which U.S.-supported operatives subsequently
turn against their sponsors.
Other boners regarding Iran included the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, which made Oliver North a household name. Talk about your blowback... The CIA's role in the scandal was never proven, and only a single CIA official
was ever indicted in the probe. Then-CIA director William Casey, renowned as one of the spookiest of all spooks, was strongly suspected of having a role in the affair, but he took his secrets
to his deathbed (except for a controversial last-minute confession of evilness to which Bob Woodward claims to have been the
sole witness).
The CIA's extreme inability to comprehend the consequences of personalities and religion in the Middle East was put on
dismal display by two historically disastrous alliances, both formed in the name of fighting communism, which would very publicly
highlight two of the CIA's most lavishly funded employees — Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden was a member of a small army of Islamic Jihadists fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The strategic minds of the CIA decided that this whole jihad thing looked like a great idea,
and provided funding and weaponry to the mujahideen fighters, hoping to enflame the global Muslim community into jihad
against the Soviets. The success of that strategy speaks for itself.
Around the same time, Iraq launched a war against neighboring Iran, which was itself a CIA-created disaster. At the time, Iran was stridently anti-American
and loosely aligned with the Soviets. The U.S. government operated through both overt and covert channels to provide massive
assistance to Hussein's war, including money and conventional weapons. 
The CIA also facilitated the transfer of supplies and technology for the construction of Biological Weapons, Nerve Agents and other Weapons of Mass Destruction for Iraqi use. Some of these weapons may have been employed against U.S. troops during the first Gulf War (which was conducted by George Bush Sr., himself a onetime director of the CIA), and they provided George Bush Jr. with a pretext for the second Gulf War (which ran along the lines of "How dare they stockpile these awful weapons we gave
them?").
Not content with merely creating foreign policy disasters, the CIA also failed to anticipate the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, working in close concert with the FBI to aggressively ignore vital intelligence already in its possession.
Of course, all of the above are merely the indisputably proven gaffes of the CIA. In addition to these known disasters,
which are all true despite how ludicrous they might sound, there's a whole slew of suspected disasters which the Agency has
not (yet) admitted to. These include:
Based on what we know about the CIA's activities, most or all of the above claims could quite possibly be true. Sadly,
the most compelling argument
against most of these claims is Fidel Castro's longevity — evidence which seems
to suggest that the CIA just isn't that good at
assassinations.
In the aftermath of September 11, a great deal of intelligence authority has now been vested in the Department of Homeland
Security. It's unclear how much of a change this actually entails for the Agency, but odds are it's somewhere between "not
much" and "none at all."
Despite massive amounts of refreshed public scrutiny, new presidentially granted authority to kidnap and kill terrorists
and even U.S. citizens abroad, and all the other new powers and funding we haven't heard about yet, there is little sign that
the CIA is poised to re-invent itself for the 21st Century. Given its history, it's not clear whether that should be cause
for recrimination or relief.
Either way, Rotten.com would like to stress that it's plain old common sense to be careful about drinking anything a hooker
offers you. Just bring bottled water. You'll be glad you did.
