The CIA as the empire’s mass-murdering muscle

President Harry Truman published an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he claimed that the CIA lacked control and was engaging in “strange activities,” and he called for it to be broken up. Truman asserted, as the president who authorized its creation in 1947, that the CIA had strayed from the mission he had intended for it.

He had supported the emergence of the CIA so that a president would have an agency that provided objective foreign intelligence, rather than having to rely on the often conflicting information supplied by the State Department, the Defense Department, and others that was “slanted to conform to established positions of a given department.”

“I wanted and needed the information in its ‘natural raw’ state and in as comprehensive a volume as would be practical for me to use fully. But the most important aspect of this move was to protect against the danger that intelligence might be used to influence or lead the president into unwise decisions …”

As a former president, Truman was regularly briefed by Kennedy’s White House on foreign policy matters and decisions, and he knew how the CIA had essentially forced Kennedy into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (and other actions against Castro), which led Kennedy to tell a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Kennedy never got the chance to follow through on that idea, but that was essentially what Truman proposed one month after Kennedy’s death.

“I would therefore like to see the CIA restored to its original mission as the president’s intelligence arm, and that all else it may perform in that special field—and that its operational duties—be terminated or used elsewhere.”

Without a doubt, the Bay of Pigs and Cuba in general were not the only examples of CIA interventions that troubled Truman. In the years from the end of Truman’s administration up to his Washington Post article, the CIA had overthrown governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960), the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), and Brazil (1964). Less than a year after Truman’s death, the CIA succeeded in overthrowing the Allende government in Chile (1973).

According to historian William Blum, writing in Foreign Policy Journal, over the past 69 years the CIA (often together with the military) has “(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically elected; (2) tried to suppress populist or nationalist movements in 20 countries; (3) extensively interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; (4) dropped bombs on people in more than 30 countries; (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.”

Truman believed that the CIA’s sole mission concerned intelligence gathering, and he was disturbed “by the way the CIA has departed from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” He said he had “never intended” for the CIA to engage in “cloak-and-dagger operations.” But it had done so, and this “has led to problems and may have compounded our difficulties in several unstable areas.”

Charles Faddis, a retired CIA officer who spent twenty years in the Middle East and South Asia working against terrorist groups, WMD smuggling networks, and rogue states, placed the first CIA team into Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion. He wrote the book Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, in which he proposes that the CIA as an institution should cease to exist and be replaced with a 21st-century version of the OSS. His proposal seems quite sensible, as it includes the idea of a revived OSS that is small, diverse, and agile. He would implement a “flat management system” that pushes decision-making and accountability down to the lowest levels. And of course, the new OSS operatives would function far from the enfeebling official cover provided by U.S. embassies. All of this seems worth considering.

Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence (1977–1981), a former U.S. Navy admiral, commander of the U.S. Second Fleet, and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO’s Southern Europe, wrote in 2005 in Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence about how he advocated fragmenting the CIA. Turner said running the CIA was “like running a power plant from a control room with a wall containing many impressive levers that, on the other side of the wall, were disconnected.” Turner’s response was to accelerate the downsizing of the CIA subdivision most resistant to higher management: the Directorate of Operations (DO), which handled the agency’s spies. This personnel reduction had begun four years earlier at the urging of DCI James R. Schlesinger (1973), who for his efforts became known at headquarters as “the most disliked director in CIA history.”

Stansfield Turner was also critical of MKUltra. According to official testimony given by CIA Director Stansfield Turner in 1977, the project was conducted under extreme secrecy due to ethical and legal issues surrounding the program and the negative public response the CIA anticipated if MKUltra became public.

Under MKUltra, the CIA granted itself authority to investigate how drugs could “enhance the intoxicating effects of alcohol,” “make hypnosis easier to induce,” “improve an individual’s ability to withstand deprivation, torture, and coercion,” create amnesia, shock, and confusion, and much more. Many of these questions were explored using unwitting test subjects, including drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers (Operation Midnight Climax), and terminal cancer patients—“people who could not fight back,” according to Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.

Operation Midnight Climax was an operation originally established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts, with officer George Hunter White operating under the alias Morgan Hall for the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control research program launched in the 1950s. Before the programs were shut down, hundreds of researchers worked on them.

The project, which began in 1954, consisted of a network of CIA-run safe houses in San Francisco, Marin County, California, and New York City. It was launched to study the effects of LSD on unsuspecting individuals. Prostitutes paid by the CIA were instructed to lure clients to the safe houses, where they were secretly dosed with a variety of substances, including LSD, and observed behind one-way mirrors.

Each of these actions was clearly illegal, and several significant operational techniques were developed in this setting, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the potential use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. The Operation Midnight Climax program soon expanded, and CIA operatives began administering doses to people in restaurants, bars, and on beaches.

In 1974, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the CIA’s illegal spying on U.S. citizens and its non-consensual drug experiments. His reporting marked the beginning of the long process of uncovering deeply buried information about MKUltra. Project MKUltra was publicly revealed in the spring of 1977 during a wide-ranging investigation of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. John K. Vance, a member of the CIA inspector general’s staff, discovered that the agency was running a research project involving the administration of LSD and other drugs to unwilling subjects.

“The research and development program, and particularly the covert testing programs, resulted in massive violations of the rights of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences,” concluded a Senate hearing in 1975–76. “The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from residual effects,” and “the nature of the tests, their scope, and the fact that they continued for years after the dangers of covert administration of LSD to unwitting individuals became known, demonstrate a fundamental disregard for human values.”

MKUltra was not a single project, as the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in a 1985 ruling on a similar case. It consisted of 162 separate secret projects indirectly funded by the CIA but “contracted out to various universities, research foundations, and similar institutions.” At least 80 institutions and 185 researchers were involved, though many were unaware they were dealing with the CIA.

Much of MKUltra’s documentation was destroyed during a purge in 1973, and much had been routinely destroyed throughout the program. However, 8,000 pages of records—mostly financial documents that were accidentally not destroyed in 1973—were discovered in 1977 and initiated a second round of investigations into MKUltra. Although the renewed inquiry sparked public interest and even led to two lawsuits, Blevins writes, the 1977 documents “still provide an incomplete record of the program,” and no one was ever held accountable for MKUltra. Two lawsuits related to the program reached the Supreme Court in the 1980s, she notes, “but both protected the government at the expense of citizens’ rights.”

During his 1974 Senate campaign on Vermont’s Liberty Union Party ticket, Bernie Sanders called the Central Intelligence Agency “a dangerous institution that must disappear.” Sanders complained that the CIA was accountable only to “right-wing lunatics who use it to support fascist dictatorships.” In both 1991 and 1995, then-Senator Daniel Moynihan (D–N.Y.) called for the CIA to be abolished.

Republican Congressman Ron Paul gave a speech in 2010 at the regional Campaign for Liberty conference in Atlanta, stating that the CIA runs the U.S. government and military after its coup. He said: “There has been a coup, have you heard about it? It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything; they run the military. They’re the ones out there lobbing missiles and bombs at countries. … And of course the CIA is just as secretive as the Federal Reserve. … And just think of the damage they’ve done since they were founded after World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They’re in corporations, in drug companies, they topple dictators … We need to get rid of the CIA.”

Another strong critic of the CIA with firsthand experience working with it was Leroy Fletcher Prouty. Prouty spent nine of the 23 years of his military career at the Pentagon (1955–1964): two years with the Secretary of Defense, two years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and five years at Air Force headquarters. In 1955, he was appointed the first coordination officer between the CIA and the Air Force for covert operations under National Security Council Directive 5412.

Prouty served as briefing officer for the Secretary of Defense (1960–1961) and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wrote: “Events of world-historical significance are planned and organized by an elitist cabal composed of very powerful people who do not belong to just one nation, one ethnic group, or one major business group. They are a power unto themselves, for whom others work. Nor did this power elite arise recently. Its roots go far back in time.”

In 2017, it was reported that President Donald Trump planned to reduce the size of the operations of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, out of concern that the agencies had become too large and politicized.

Some obvious reasons why the CIA should be shut down, and why it long ago exhausted its right to exist legally—beyond its overthrow of fifty governments and as many attempted assassinations of foreign political leaders—are the following:

Planned false flag attack
The U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks using Soviet aircraft in order to provoke a war with the Soviet Union and its allies, according to recently declassified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In a three-page memo, members of the National Security Council wrote: “There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a diversionary operation designed to confuse enemy aircraft in the air and to initiate a surprise attack against enemy installations, or in a provocative operation in which Soviet aircraft appear to attack the United States or friendly installations in order to justify U.S. intervention.”

The memo shows that the department, together with the CIA, considered purchasing Soviet aircraft to stage the attacks, and even obtained estimates from the Air Force on how long it would take and how much it would cost to produce the planes domestically and secretly. The costs ranged from $3.5 million to $44 million per aircraft, depending on the model, with most taking several months to build.

The document also described the possibility of acquiring such aircraft from countries outside the Soviet Union that had received planes from the USSR, or from defecting pilots, instead of building them domestically. The CIA considered these plans too risky and wrote: “The fact that the United States was actively involved in efforts to assist defecting pilots from ostensibly friendly countries could be revealed.”

Drug trafficking
Skeptics often say that Barry Seal was not a proven CIA agent while he was selling drugs, as if that were the only information that exists about possible CIA drug trafficking. The academic world has demonstrated that the CIA has had a leading hand in the largest heroin production networks in the world, in Asia and other parts of the globe.

National Security Council staff member Roger Morris said that Seal’s personnel records showed he worked for the CIA both before and during his years of drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas, in the 1980s (Webb, Dark Alliance, pp. 117, 119. Webb cited former National Security Council employee Roger Morris’s 1996 book on the Clintons, Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Henry Holt, 1986). Roger Morris was also a historian, foreign policy analyst, and journalist who twice won the Investigative Reporters and Editors National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism.

The Nugan Hand Bank, like the BCCI bank, was also a CIA bank where money was laundered and which financed drug trafficking, money laundering, and international arms trading. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles by journalists and authors such as Alfred W. McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Henrik Krüger, Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Jonathan Marshall, Douglas Valentine, Daniel Hopsicker, and Bill Conroy—as well as revelations by former DEA investigators such as Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo III—have documented the United States’ long and bloody involvement in the global drug trade.

The CIA has a long-standing relationship with Central American drug traffickers, ranging from Contra commanders to Panama’s Noriega. In fact, the doctrine from the Contra era is simply reinforced by the long and dirty history of CIA involvement with the Sicilian Mafia, the French Corsican underworld, the heroin producers of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, the marijuana and cocaine trade among Cuban exiles in Miami, and the opium smuggling of the mujahideen in Afghanistan: U.S. intelligence agencies do not view drug networks as enemies at all, but have instead made them an important ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad.

The most dramatic increases in drug trafficking since World War II occurred alongside—and partly because of—covert operations in the same regions. CIA involvement in Southeast Asia contributed to the American heroin epidemic of the late 1960s, just as CIA involvement in Central America contributed to the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

These alliances in Thailand and Indochina were carefully documented, in part using former CIA sources, by Alfred McCoy in his 1972 book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. McCoy showed how opium production by CIA-backed warlords increased tenfold over a short period after the CIA moved in, and how heroin distribution to the West was facilitated by the intelligence connections of the Sicilian and Corsican mafias in Palermo and Marseille.

Ralph Blumenthal, a reporter for The New York Times, observed the same in a book about the notorious heroin ring known as the “Pizza Connection.” After summarizing research by a former CIA and DEA agent, he wrote: U.S. authorities helped revive the Sicilian Mafia [even as] they persuaded the Italian government to successfully crack down on heroin smugglers [to the United States]. This left the Corsicans—who had also been strengthened by the CIA as an anti-communist force—as the primary suppliers of illegal heroin to the United States. The Corsicans had two major advantages: their connections to the Southeast Asian heroin market through France’s colonial presence in Indochina, and their influence over French intelligence services through their participation in official anti-communist agitation.

It would be foolish to assume that these connections belong entirely to the past, even if the CIA has severed its ties with the Mafia. Blumenthal shows that the Pizza Connection was “the successor to the French Connection, the postwar heroin pipeline from Marseille which at its peak in 1971 poured an estimated ten tons of heroin per year into the United States.”

Unlike the French Connection, however, this Sicilian ring obtained much of its heroin from Afghanistan, the single largest exporter of the world’s opium in the mid-1980s and the source of half of the heroin consumed in the United States. The top smugglers of Afghan opium were the CIA-backed, anti-Soviet guerrillas working alongside Pakistan’s military intelligence service. “You could say that the rebels are earning their money from opium sales,” admitted David Melocik, the DEA’s congressional affairs liaison, in 1983. “There is no doubt about it. The rebels keep their operations going through opium sales.”

This story from Afghanistan has been repeated in Central America, and the pattern is deeply embedded in the CIA’s history and structure. In the name of law and freedom, alliances were forged for decades with criminals and dictators. Now, in the name of fighting drugs, U.S. funds are funneled to those whose political careers are intertwined with drug traffickers. Paradoxically, this money strengthens both these traffickers and the social systems of which they are a key part.

Dennis Dayle, a former head of an elite DEA crime-fighting unit, traveled the world as chief of the Central Tactical Unit (Centac), through which he battled international criminal cartels. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Dayle led investigations into international drug trafficking for the DEA. He left Centac in the early 1980s and moved to Orlando. He retired from federal government service in 1982, led the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation from 1984 to 1986, and later helped launch the nation’s first street-level anti-drug unit.

Dennis Dayle said: “In my 30 years with the DEA and similar agencies, it turned out that the major targets of my investigations were almost always working for the CIA.” In Mexico, for example, the CIA’s closest allies in government for many years were the DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad), whose badges were issued to high-ranking Mexican drug traffickers and which DEA agents described as essentially a “license to smuggle.” Like Peru’s SIN, the DFS was partly created by the CIA, and CIA involvement in the DFS became so dominant that some of its intelligence reached U.S. authorities only indirectly, according to well-known Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía.

The Guadalajara Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking network in the early 1980s, grew strong largely because it enjoyed the protection of the DFS under its chief, Miguel Nassar (or Nazar) Haro, one of the CIA’s agents. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that members of the Guadalajara Cartel became prominent among the drug-smuggling supporters of the CIA’s Contra operations.

The CIA’s iron grip on the mass media
Shortly after its formation, the CIA established a division called the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its most active period was able to influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines, and public information organizations around the world. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pressed a button, you could hear whatever tune it wanted played across the world. The network consisted of journalists, columnists, book publishers, editors, entire organizations such as Radio Free Europe, and freelance reporters from multiple news organizations. CIA intelligence officers were sometimes trained to function as journalists and were then placed in major news organizations with the help of management. CIA Director Allen Dulles and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham were closely connected, and the Post developed into one of the most influential news outlets in the United States due to its ties to the CIA.

Psychological operations in the form of journalism were considered necessary to influence and manage mass opinion as well as elite perspectives. “The U.S. president, the secretary of state, members of Congress, and even the CIA director will read, believe, and be impressed by a report from Cy Sulzberger, Arnaud de Borchgrave, or Stewart Alsop when they won’t even bother to read a CIA report on the same subject,” noted CIA agent Miles Copeland (cited in Pease, The Media and the Assassination).

Since the early 1950s, the CIA has “secretly financed several foreign press services, magazines, and newspapers—both English-language and foreign-language—providing excellent cover for CIA operatives,” reported Carl Bernstein in 1977. “One such publication was the Rome Daily American, of which 40 percent was owned by the CIA until the 1970s” (Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977).

The CIA had informal contacts with media executives, unlike its relationships with salaried reporters and freelancers, “who were much more subject to guidance from the agency,” according to Bernstein. “Some of the executives—among them Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between agency officials and media executives were usually social in nature—‘the P and Q Street axis in Georgetown,’ said one source. ‘You don’t ask William Paley to sign a piece of paper saying he won’t squeal.’” The “personal friendship” between CBS chief William Paley and CIA Director Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant relationships in the communications industry, explains author Deborah Davis. “He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied news film footage, allowed reporters to be debriefed, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and major broadcast companies that lasted into the mid-1970s” (Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post, 2nd ed., Bethesda, MD: National Press Books, 1987, p. 175).

The agency’s relationship with The New York Times was, according to CIA officials, by far the most valuable newspaper, Bernstein notes in his landmark 1977 article. “From 1950 to 1966, approximately ten CIA employees were given Times cover under arrangements approved by the paper’s then-publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—established by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.” Moreover, Sulzberger was a close friend of CIA Director Allen Dulles. “At that level of contact, it was the powerful talking to the powerful,” said a senior CIA official who attended some of the discussions. “There was basically an understanding that yes, yes, we would help each other. The question of cover came up on several occasions. It was agreed that the actual arrangements would be handled by subordinates… The powerful did not want to know the details. They wanted plausible deniability” (Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media”).

“There is an incredible spread of relationships,” former CIA intelligence officer William Bader informed a U.S. Senate intelligence committee investigating CIA infiltration of journalists. “You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are agency people at the management level” (Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media”).

National Enquirer publisher Gene Pope Jr. worked briefly at a CIA office in Italy in the early 1950s and thereafter maintained close contact with the agency. Pope refrained from publishing dozens of stories containing “information about CIA kidnappings and murders—enough material for a year’s worth of headlines”—in order to “collect gossip, IOUs,” writes Pope’s son. “He figured he never knew when he might need them, and those IOUs would come in handy when circulation reached 20 million. When that happened, he would have a voice large enough to become his own branch of government and would need protection” (Paul David Pope, The Feds of My Fathers: How My Grandfather and Father Built New York and Created Today’s Tabloid World, New York: Philip Turner/Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 309–310).

During the Pike Committee hearings in 1975, Congressman Otis Pike asked DCI William Colby: “Do you have anyone working for television networks who is paid by the CIA?” Colby replied, “I believe I am getting into the kind of detail, Mr. Chairman, that I would prefer to address in executive session.” After the chamber was cleared, Colby admitted that “the CIA specifically in 1975 used” media cover “for eleven agents—many fewer than in the glass days of cloak-and-pencil operations—but no amount of questioning would persuade him to discuss the publishers and network executives who had cooperated at the top” (Schorr, Clearing the Air, p. 275).

Emma North-Best writes: “A document in the Central Intelligence Retirees Association archives points to the existence of an unofficial ‘Common Interest Network’ of retired intelligence officers. The network, also known as CIN—‘as in living in sin,’ according to one of its founders—exists to coordinate the efforts of various organizations.” It is described as “an informal intelligence community,” existing only abstractly, with no chairman, no agenda, and “not even the formality of a rotating host list.” Yet it exists and meets to discuss how to influence Congress and the press, successfully attack the Freedom of Information Act, and coordinate the efforts of the organizations that make up the Common Interest Network.

Captain Richard Bates, who chaired two of the organizations that made up the Common Interest Network, sat on the boards of three others, and for a time ran CIN, wrote that it “is a network. It is not an organization. It has no charter, no list of officers, no bylaws, no recurring obligations, and no plans to acquire any.” According to Ray Cline, one of CIN’s principal members, the acronym was fitting because it would inevitably be pronounced “like living in sin.” Captain Bates added that “CIN implies a network… a loose, informal but regularly meeting group of representatives of organizations with offices in and around Washington.”

According to Captain Bates and CIA historian Thomas Troy, CIN’s origins can be traced to a response to the “unceasing round of accusations, investigations, disclosures, and condemnations of the intelligence agencies.” Congressional investigations were explicitly cited as one of the factors leading to the formation of organizations of retired intelligence officers. Some of these investigations into intelligence agency abuses were seen within the community as threats to the agency’s very existence. The retired intelligence officers “found natural allies [among] retired military officers, defense specialists, certain academics, and public-spirited citizens.”

The result, according to Thomas Troy, was “more than a dozen either new intelligence organizations or old organizations with a newly awakened interest in intelligence.” This led to so much “talking, meeting, fundraising, and promoting causes and projects” that retired Ambassador Durbrow finally called for “some coordination.” By 1986, there were at least fifteen organizations that made up CIN, and one source stated that it consisted of “about sixteen different intelligence organizations.”

CIN’s focus on the Freedom of Information Act was far from accidental—according to Thomas Troy, it was one of the issues on which CIN initially sought “to achieve a great deal of agreement.” CIN members not only achieved consensus, they succeeded in changing FOIA to exclude large portions of CIA records from disclosure.

At each of its quarterly meetings, CIN members discussed the activities of their various organizations, compared notes on their work, and coordinated “when to meet, new projects, resolutions to be offered to the membership at conferences, and who would speak at meetings.” CIN members also discussed how to deal with changes to FOIA that would exempt the CIA from “legislation before Congress.” Other topics included “how the press reports on intelligence developments,” according to Captain Bates; “no voting is done, [but] from these meetings there is often the result of a joint effort.”

CIN was confirmed by Ronald Kessler to have still been active as late as 2012, in the only publication outside CIA archives to address CIN. According to Kessler, “there are a number of associations of retired intelligence officers, and they all exchange information through an information organization known simply as the Common Interest Network Luncheon…” It appears that Kessler barely scratched the surface of CIN. “As an informal, unofficial intelligence milieu, CIN has no intention of mirroring the official intelligence community or any particular agency.” However, to educate the public and Congress, “CIN is behind virtually everything.”

Although CIN may not be widely known outside the group, it has promoted CIA policies, attacked the agency’s enemies, and secured for the agency previously unprecedented exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.

The CIA as the empire’s mass-murdering muscle