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List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ® Understanding the CIA. We live in a world of than enjoys making things public. The problems of secrecy are far from the minds of most people. Four Things to Remember In trying to understand the CIA, there are four things to keep in mind: First, when we talk about the CIA, we should recognize that the conversation is about all secret U.S. government agencies, with the CIA only used as an example. There may be secret agencies that the public doesn't know exist. Second, the problems discussed here seem to come only from one department of the CIA, the department that supports secret action. The other main department of the CIA collects information. There don't seem to be problems with collection of information. Third, we should realize that a huge amount of money is spent to keep the secret agencies secret. There have been articles in U.S. newspapers that said that the CIA sometimes puts false information into U.S. newspapers because the agency wants to mislead foreign intelligence agencies. It is often important, when reading a sentence like this, to cut off the word "because" and everything after it. Obviously, if secret agencies are allowed to put lies in public news, then they are allowed to lie about why they are doing it. Any organization that is allowed to lie cannot be trusted to tell the truth. For this reason, it is difficult to get accurate information about the secret agencies. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about them, however. An example of the CIA mis-leading the public that pays its bills is the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov]. Click on the Country Listing for Afghanistan on the left. Under Background, the CIA makes no mention of its own involvement in fighting a war in that country. The CIA World Factbook is often used by people with no political involvement to check facts about other countries. It is not copyrighted because U.S. taxpayers pay to have it written and updated. Fourth, we should realize that, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter that we don't know exactly what the CIA has actually done. The most important issue is that we are not allowed to know. The United States is a democracy and citizens cannot do their democratic duty of making choices if they don't know the facts. Is democracy a better form of government, or isn't it? If it is, then secrecy about matters affecting policy should not be allowed. Secrecy destroys trust. Because the U.S. government allows itself to take secret action, it leaves itself open to any accusation from anyone. An example is the September 5, 2000 BBC News article, Libya accuses CIA, Mossad over killing [bbc.co.uk]. The article says: Libya has accused American and Israeli agents of being behind the killing of its ambassador to the Central African Republic last week. An official statement said the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad had planned the killing even if they had not directly carried it out. [Mossad is the Israeli equivalent of the CIA.] Did the CIA aid in murder? Obviously BBC News thought the story was likely to be true, or it wouldn't have published it. There are certainly many pronouncements of other countries that the BBC ignores. Presumably if the BBC had supportive information, it would have presented it. Since there is no supportive information in the article, presumably there was none. The problem with allowing secret action is that anyone who claims that some illegal act was performed by the CIA has a chance of being believed. Therefore trust in government tends to fall to zero. For example, consider this article, The Kennedy Assassination: The Nixon-Bush Connection [mediaone.net]. The article says that former U.S. president George Bush, senior, the father of the present president of the U.S., was in the CIA before he was appointed head of the CIA. The article says that the CIA killed former U.S. president John Kennedy, and that George Bush helped. The purpose of mentioning this is not to claim that this is true, but to show that secrecy erodes trust. For perhaps a decade, polls showed that about 40 percent of citizens of the U.S. thought it was possible that the CIA killed John Kennedy. This is a huge erosion in positive feeling for the government. People who don't trust are less willing to invest time and energy in performing their democratic responsibility. (For readers who are not U.S. citizens, George Bush is from the Republican Party. John Kennedy was from the Democratic Party. Generally, the Republican Party is thought to represent the desires of the rich more than the Democratic Party.) We know from many books and articles that the CIA arranges the murder of people. What would keep the CIA from murdering a U.S. president? Certainly it would not be morality; once someone is willing to murder, it must be considered that there is no limit to what they would do. This is NOT a claim that the CIA murdered a U.S. president. It is only a discussion of the problems that arise when a government has a department that is secret and allowed to break the law. The CIA works with other secret agencies. Any idea that there is a limit on what damage the CIA might cause is answered by the observation that the CIA works with secret agencies who belong to other countries. These other secret agencies certainly do not observe limits imposed by the United States government. Encouraging the secret agencies of other governments is equivalent to encouraging anything those other agencies might decide to do. Many, many articles claim the CIA and Israel's comparable agency, Mossad, work together. The CIA has limitations imposed by U.S. law. For example, the CIA is not supposed to kill foreign leaders. This law is meaningless since the CIA probably seldom directly killed anyone; the agency is said to work through others. It is said that Mossad has no legal limitations, and when the CIA wants to accomplish something violent, it often arranges the action with Mossad. An Oct. 11, 1997 (note: 1997, not 2001) article in Slate magazine, Mossad [slate.msn.com] gives an idea of the involvement of the CIA and Mossad. Slate is an online magazine from Microsoft Network [MSN.com], also known as MSN. Here are some paragraphs from the article: Unlike the CIA, which tries to keep its covert actions secret, Israel has meant for its assassinations to be highly visible. Mossad has tried to incite conflict within Arab countries to mixed effect. Egypt foiled a 1954 plot to discredit Egyptian ultranationalists by planting bombs in Cairo buildings. Egyptians hanged the two Mossad agents behind the campaign. Recent best-selling memoirs by former agents tell of colleagues who ran drugs and free-lanced as mercenaries. Mossad also brokered secret, dubiously legal, private arms sales to Central American regimes and South Africa's white government. The Israeli press, which historically has respected the agency's request not to probe its workings, splashed these stories across the front pages. Mossad has spied on the United States: Mossad has also been handicapped by U.S. mistrust. In 1986, the FBI caught Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American naval-intelligence officer, shipping sensitive satellite photos to Lakam--a now-defunct arm of Israeli intelligence largely devoted to stealing nuclear secrets. Following the Pollard affair, rumors circulated that Israel had penetrated other agencies. The issue of mistrust is a huge one for every U.S. citizen, not just the U.S. government. Some people say that Mossad could have engineered terrorism in the United States, so that the U.S. government would give more support to Israel. Basically, this article, from a respected company, opens the door to that kind of thinking. Certainly nothing in the article suggests that Mossad has moral limits, or even limits of any kind. The article says that Mossad owns businesses in which it sells arms. This has been reliably reported about the CIA, also. For example, during the Vietnam war the CIA owned an airline in Asia it called Air America. The ownership of businesses means that the secret agencies are not limited by funding from their governments. Note that when an article says that the CIA trained Osama bin Laden, this does not necessarily mean that there was direct contact between the CIA and Bin Laden. The CIA often accomplishes its aims without direct contact. The important issue is only that the CIA introduced training in terrorism into Afghanistan, and now every U.S. citizen pays the price. Osama bin Laden and the CIA both had a large presence in Afghanistan for many years, so it is difficult to imagine that there was no involvement. However, whether Bin Laden was trained directly by the CIA is irrelevant. Mossad apparently has been expanding. A September 6, 2000 article in the Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper in Israel, says that Mossad is openly advertising for new personnel, something it did not do before: They're looking for a few good spies. The CIA can be destructive without doing anything. Note that the CIA can be extremely destructive without actually doing anything. When people in a region feel mistrustful and angry, the presence of a CIA officer, or even the rumor of such a presence, can increase the instability enough so that there is violence. The CIA associates with people who act out their anger. The CIA associates with people who have a particular kind of mental illness that causes them to want to act out their anger. These people look for ways to express their hostility. One of the effects of the mental illness is that they are not in control. They are certainly not likely to stay within any limits set for them by the CIA. So, a lot of the destruction caused by the CIA is not necessarily planned by the CIA. Nevertheless it would not have happened without CIA presence. List of Chapters | Main Menu | Contact | About Futurepower ® | Go to top Futurepower
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