The war on the CIA
Here’s a must-read piece on the decades-long war waged against the CIA by liberals:
This war has also been enshrined in one disastrous liberal-led “reform” of the CIA after another. The wreckage reaches back to congressional hearings conducted in the 1970s, to the disastrous cutbacks in CIA activities under Jimmy Carter, and to the Clinton administration’s ban on sharing intelligence between the CIA and domestic law enforcement.
So what is it about the CIA that makes liberals and Democrats lose their common sense?…One cannot deny that Republican administrations have made disastrous decisions regarding the CIA as well. And there is no covering over the fact that the CIA has sometimes been its own worst enemy””not least when it decides to act on the advice of its liberal critics. At any rate, a serious examination of this implacable hostility toward America’s leading spy agency on the part of the American Left over the course of the past 35 years reveals a great deal about the nature of modern liberalism itself and its often self-destructive course.
It’s a long piece, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.
i noticed you stripped out that its 35 years and more…
this war goes back to Angleton, and Golytsin…
you know, the guy that way back then was trying to warn us about what is happening now.
i guess being involved in such planning and everything isnt enough experience to count either.
notice how we are now incapable of learning from experience? we are like a mongoose looking at the cobra and not knowing what to do.
Golitsyn worked in the strategic planning department of the KGB in the rank of Major.
the official historian for Britain’s MI5 Christopher Andrew described him as an “unreliable conspiracy theorist”
[however if you compare what he said was going on with what happened, its andrew that now seems to be on the wrong side]
that WRECKAGE that is brought up can be of several wrecks. however the attacks started 10 years before that, with removing angleton
Angleton was labled as crazy because he supposedly knew that trusted people high up in various governments were agents of the kgb.
ever since that time, the cover has been that its crazy to think the KGB actually does ANYTHING…
one can read Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton, by william F buckley (a CIA man too).
Edward Jay Epstein is among those who have argued that the positions of Ames and Hanssen–both well-placed Soviet counter-intelligence agents in the CIA and FBI respectively–would enable the KGB to deceive the American intelligence community in the manner that Angleton hypothesized
at the time you mention above, George Bush Senior was head of the CIA… (any one care to list out the leaders who ahve been cia men, like russian kgb leaders)
“The term Angletonian is an adjective used to describe something conspiratorial, overly paranoid, bizarre, eerie or arcane.”
kind of like McCarthyism..
notice a pattern of diffusing such
and here is a bit more… but for fun.
get smart was a show that made funny the CIA
and he was fighting the evil KAOS…
meanwhile at the same time, or rather before it…
the CIA was running angeltons operation CHAOS, which spied domestically
on people like ayers and other democrats with anti war connections and soviet keepers.
Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. A department within the CIA was established in 1967 on orders from President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson and later expanded under President Richard Nixon. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms, by chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober. The program’s goal was to unmask possible foreign influences on the student antiwar movement.[1][2] The “MH” designation is to signify the program had a worldwide area of operations.[3]
When President Nixon came to office in 1969, all of the existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS.[4] Operation CHAOS first used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar activities of United States citizens traveling abroad, employing methods such as physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, utilizing “liaison services” in maintaining such surveillance. The operations were later expanded to include 60 officers.[3] In 1969, following the expansion, the operation began developing its own network of informants for the purposes of infiltrating various foreign antiwar groups located in foreign countries that might have ties to domestic groups.[2] Eventually, CIA officers expanded the program to include other leftist or counter-cultural groups with no discernible connection to Vietnam, such as groups operating within the women’s liberation movement.[1] The domestic spying of Operation CHAOS also targeted the Israeli embassy, and domestic Jewish groups such as the B’nai B’rith. In order to gather intelligence on the embassy and B’nai B’rith, the CIA purchased a garbage collection company to collect documents that were to be destroyed.[5]
Targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement included:[4]
Students for a Democratic Society
Black Panther Party
Women Strike for Peace
Officially, reports were to be compiled on “illegal and subversive” contacts between United States civilian protesters and “foreign elements” which “might range from casual contacts based merely on mutual interest to closely controlled channels for party directives.” At its finality, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000 groups.[6] The initial result of investigations lead DCI Richard Helms to advise then President Johnson on November 15, 1967, that the agency had uncovered “no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace movement leaders and foreign embassies in the U.S. or abroad.” Helms repeated this assessment in 1969.[1] In total 6 reports where compiled for the White House and 34 for cabinet level officials.[2]
i hope that covers the core without being too boring.
Neo,
Why do you think that liberals have common sense?
For a different take on the 1953 coup in Iran, link to Mossadegh, Iran, and the CIA’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Coup, in three parts.
From the Commentary article on the CIA:
The second paragraph is spot-on. In 1964, Allende got 38% of the vote to Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei’s 56 %. In 1970. Allende got a LOWER perecntage of the vote than in 1964- 36.3%. Allende gained a plurality comared to the Nationalist Party’s candidate, (right) former President Allesandri’s 35.2% and the Christian Democrat Party’s candidate. Tomic’s 28.1%.
Allende’s daughter Beatriz married Cuban Luis Fernandez de Oé±a, by some reports a DGI agent, by some reports a diplomat. She committed suicide in 1977 in Cuba.
While many blame the CIA for the coup, the historical record clearly states that the coup was made in Chile, and in fact was at least in part inspired by a vote of the Chilean House of Deputies. Three weeks before the coup, the ademocratically elected House of Deputies passed by 81-47 a resolution titled the “Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy.” An excerpt follows.
In general and in specific, the resolution could be interpreted as an invitation to a coup. Allende himself called it such. The democratically elected members of the House of Deputies would not have passed such a strongly-worded resolution by a commanding 63- 37% majority if their constituents, the Chilean people, were not also disgusted with the Allende government’s repeated violations of law and democratic procedure.
The Left’s ‘strained’ relationship with the CIA?
Jack Bauer said it best:
“You people want results. But you don’t want to get your hands dirty.”
So what is it about the CIA that makes liberals and Democrats lose their common sense?
Gee, I dunno. What is it about police that makes criminals lose their common sense?
…and yet the CIA fought back — against the Bush Administration. Very strange indeed.
I think it’s simpler than you think. Liberals are in love with themselves and particularly with their assumed radical natures and power. To them the CIA is an all powerful secret police force working to snuff out the courageous progressive forces. Without this daydream, even they cannot make their humdrum daily stuff sound like the Spanish Civil war.
Once I was at a party for a neighbors birthday. He was a newly minted history prof and his collegues were in attendence. One commented to me that this was a nice neighborhood and I noted that we had a wide variety of people. We even had one who’s father was a CIA spy. I thought this was kind of cool, but the academics went off into long discussions of Vietnam and demonstrations etc.
Yup, aging boomers who didn’t get the chance to do something exciting in their lives and are pretending to have done it.
Let me add an oversimplification that I think adds value nonetheless, piggybacking on DirtyJobsGuy. Many liberals are essentially paranoid, because they project their own motives onto others. The CIA provides an excellent focus for this. It is secret, it actually does some things wrong, and it can seldom fight back in a PR war.
Yup, aging boomers who didn’t get the chance to do something exciting in their lives and are pretending to have done it.
If you want to see a visual definition of “crestfallen,” catch the expression on a leftist’s face when he files an FOIA request with the FBI … and finds out they’d never heard of him.
Many South Americans have CIA on the brain.
Some three decades ago when I was working in Argentina, I got into a discussion on politics with a Bolivian at the cheap hotel where I was lodging on my time off. Bolivian politics is never a boring topic.
As I had worked in Bolivia, and was working in Argentina with several Bolivians, I had a certain level of interest in and knowledge of Bolivian politics: coup of the month, etc. I had had many discussions of Bolivian politics with my Bolivian coworkers, on the level of I asked and they talked. They loved talking politics.
Apparently the Bolivian at the hotel didn’t have a good comfort level regarding discussing politics with me. Soon into the conversation, he asked me if I was a member of the CIA. ¿Eres CIA?
I walked away from the conversation, a conversation he had initiated. Disclaimer: I already had a certain level of discomfort with him as he was drunk and had pulled up his pants leg while telling me, “I am as white as you,” which I found odd because I had never brought up the issue of race. It was the only time a Bolivian brought up the issue of race with me.
Several months later I met an American who, after spending two years in the Peace Corps in Colombia, was taking a tour of South America. Coincidentally, I knew his Colombian boss in the Peace Corps. The American told me that after smoking some weed with some Colombians, they informed him that until he had smoked some weed with them, they thought he was a CIA guy.
IMHO, the CIA is as much fiction as fact.
“IMHO, the CIA is as much fiction as fact.”
I am pretty sure of that, actually. I think there are a lot more skeevy people claiming that they are CIA agents that actually are.
And that there are are a lot of people who ought to know better, who are seeing the CIA behind every potted plant around.
I used to tell a lot of people on-line usually, but not always – that the CIA itself was really a CIA front. That behind the public persona of a bumbling, inept, incompetent and paranoid organization … there was a core of competent, patriotic and squared-away people. The CIA itself was a front organization.
OMG – maybe I will be in danger from revealing this!
Dennis Miller is regularly wonderful an the subject of standing by our Dirty Job guys in wartime. They AREN’T meant to play by the rules! They’re SUPPOSED to play dirty. They’re supposed to bring ruin and death and destruction to the Dark Age Death Cult who wishes our End.
Works for me. Those who undercut and expose them need to be hammered without mercy.
Gringo, I once worked with a Jordanian who was utterly convinced that poor rainfall back home was attributable to the CIA’s monkeying with the climate. Seriously (and this from a science Ph.D., no less).
We tried to tell him that,while we were sure the CIA would have no scruples against such, we would be pleased if they were half that competent. But we never did convince him.
Let the CIA fail. They betrayed the country releasing one classified document after another during 8 years of Bush to the NY Times. They and the liberals deserve each other.
Occam, It’s like trying to dissuade someone from falling for psychics or seances. Irrational epistemology is the root cause most bad ideas.
Hong, One bit of information in the full version of the article that Neo linked to was that the CIA is now only a small part of the intelligence gathering apparatus of the US. NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, etc. cover most areas, so living without an immolated CIA may be a reasonable action.
According to the article, recruiting informants who can provide info about bad guys is the CIA’s specialized skill and is precisely what they shyed away from as a result of the assault by the left.
Too bad innocent Americans die as a result of the left’s disabling of the CIA and other tools of American self defense.
I had some experience with that world – more years ago than I’d care to admit. There are things I won’t talk about to this day to anyone. Dramatic? Absolutely not. Terribly mundane. But you don’t reveal any pieces of the puzzle.
I don’t believe that the public has any hope of evaluating the performance of our intelligence agencies. The information is diced and sliced to a bewildering degree. The title of my security clearance is still classified but I never learned anything more than was necessary for my duties.
This is good. If something good happens you want them to believe that they f’d up and shoot one of their own.
The CIA, those all knowing all seeing patriots who in 2007 discovered Iran was NOT working on the bomb!
And next time you meet a CIA agent ask him/her if he/she thinks the Soviet Union will fall?
Nixon complained that he never received an intelligence analysis that he hadn’t read three days earlier in the NYTimes.
And the liberals want to reduce their effectiveness!!!
Self loathing and an insatiable need to be liked, causes those on the left to be at war with themselves. I would guess that lefties working within the intelligence community, might be a problem.
Occam’s Beard : regarding the (current?) competence of the CIA, my rejoinder is that the CIA couldn’t rig a school board election in Frostbite Falls. (Nor could the CIA locate Boris and Natasha even if the two walked into an American Embassy.)