From alt.conspiracy From: Ralph McGehee Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy Subject: What Are CIA Covert Operations? Message-ID: Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 10:14:20 -0800 (PST) /* Written 10:13 AM Jan 15, 1997 by rmcgehee in igc:alt.pol.org.ci */ /* ---------- "What Are CIA Covert Operations?" ---------- */ CIA Covert Operations The CIA has overthrown popularly elected governments and imposed military dictatorships from its earliest days. It has supported death squads for those dictatorships. It has ignored drug traffickers when they were part of its operations. It has stimulated mass killings -- the Phoenix program in Vietnam and the near genocide in Indonesia. It has violated its own rules and operated here when such were illegal; and, it conducts propaganda operations that it frequently echoes in its intelligence. The Agency is a covert action agency which in all cases relating to its major covert actions, slants, creates, and adjusts its information to support its covert goals. The recent Director, John Deutch, following the practice of some of his predecessors, sent the CIA off on an intelligence-supported, covert action binge. The Agency's inability's and intelligence failures are legend. My own experience was the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. To me this, in the history of the world, is its most egregious intelligence failure. Also the United States stayed in the war for over 25 years and never once did the CIA predict the inevitability of our defeat. Vietnam was by no means the only major intelligence disaster. The CIA was one of the last government institutions to accept the collapse of the Soviet Union. Robert Gates, the Director of Intelligence and later the Director of the CIA, traveled the U.S. exhorting all not to be fooled by the USSR's apparent collapse. The list of CIA intelligence failures is massive. A list of slanted intelligence in support policy is even longer. As just one example, the House Pike Committee report of the mid 1970s examined six major world events and retroactively evaluated CIA intelligence against those events. The Committee concluded that CIA intelligence over the extended period of those events was either completely non-existent or totally inaccurate. The recent examination of the CIA by the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community took note of part of the problem and said: there is ``arrogance, parochialism, disdain for oversight, lack of diversity, and tolerance of inadequate professional performance'' in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO). Even John Deutch said he was shocked by DO's "inability to formulate solutions." Deutch indicated that the deep rot of the DO in Guatemala is a core sample of the deep rot of the overall DO. The curse of old boys is the patrimony of an elite secret society that degenerated into an elitist bureaucracy, an inbred tribal culture. Rules and laws were not for them. The problem is not solely that of the Directorate of Operations - in many cases the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) is just as bad. The DI is so bureaucratized that legitimate intelligence cannot survive or cannot survive intact. The other major problem is the politicization of intelligence. John Gentry's incisive review of those problems are recorded in his book, "Lost Promise: How CIA Analysis Misserves the Nation." Since the United States leads the world community it needs the best intelligence. It needs it for itself -- and also hopefully so that it will curtail mistaken impulses to destroy governments it does not agree with or accept. I am not the only former member of the intelligence establishment to feel this way. One well-connected academician with a past in the highest levels of national security apparatuses holds similar views. Samuel P. Huntington [one of the fiercest hawks re Vietnam] says in his 1996 book, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF THE WORLD ORDER, that the war of ideologies and interests was over. The war of cultures -- Western, Eastern Orthodox, Latin America, Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and (possibly) African, had begun. He said Jews lined up with Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. These were the real actors to now watch. Realist analysts of international affairs had neglected these deeply buried religious allegiances during the Cold War. Now, "Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multi-civilizational world." Western intervention is also useless -- problems, for example, between Islam and Orthodoxy aren't susceptible to Western mediation (differences have existed for centuries). "Core states [must] abstain from intervention in conflicts in other civilizations." Huntington's argument that the West should stop intervening in civilizational conflicts it doesn't understand makes a powerful claim that internationalists cannot easily ignore. If Huntington's arguments are valid them the reasons for the CIA's covert operations cease. This of course will be vigorously resisted by the CIA's Operations Directorate that will continue to justify itself on the basis of its [extremely biased and flawed] perceptions of the world -- many consciously or subconsciously manufactured to ensure its continued existence. The CIA in its 1980s covert action in Afghanistan supported, over the objections of its Pakistani implementers, radical Islamic fundamentalists -- that flocked in droves from all over the Middle East to receive CIA weapons, training and financing. After the war, these groups disbanded and returned to their various homelands where they now lead wars to impose their wills over those who resist. The CIA justifies its continued existence, to a large degree, by fighting the Frankenstein monster of its own making. It now sponsors counter-terrorists to fight its former Afghanistan-based radical Islamic fundamentalists. Another generation may see the CIA fighting its present day counter-terrorists. The CIA has declared a new holy crusade on these radical Islamic fundamentalists and some other Arab states, calling them the more explosive "International Terrorists." The CIA now directs paramilitary operations against Iraq, Libya, and Sudan. (The former Director of the CIA, Robert Gates said the CIA picks on the weaker Islamic countries to avoid the consequences of attacking the more powerful nations.) The CIA today runs political action operations in many other states. It uses its surrogate, the National Endowment for Democracy, to conduct political action operations in about 70 countries from Africa to Latin America. The potential consequences of all this interventionism could be devastating. I cannot think of more powerful arguments for abolishing the covert operations of the CIA than those presented by the current state of the world, and, its nearly fifty years history of misunderstanding world events while exacerbating them with its covert operations. Ralph McGehee CIABASE