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THE CIA: AN EXPOSE OF THE AGENCY'S HISTORY AND COVERT OPERATIONS |
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by wakeupmag.co.uk
The Central
Intelligence Agency is the world's largest secret police force. Its
official function is to conduct foreign intelligence operations and
intelligence-gathering abroad. It has no authority to operate
domestically in the United States and no power of arrest. The Agency, as
advertised to the public and to Congress, is supposed to function
primarily as a producer of intelligence for the U.S. Government.
However, its actual mission is that of clandestine operations,
particularly covert action - the secret intervention in the internal
affairs of other nations. The purpose of this is to further the foreign
policies of the U.S. Government, to attack its avowed enemy - Communism
- and to foster a world order in which America reigns supreme,
financially and politically.
Bill Gates was the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence during Washington's war against the Nicaraguan government. At Gates' confirmation hearing as CIA chief, one of his own staff testified: "Mr Gates' role was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence."
CIA clandestine operators assigned overseas are called case officers; their tours of duty are normally two to three years and most serve with false titles in American embassies. Some live under "deep cover" in foreign countries, posing as businessmen, students, newsmen, union workers, missionaries or other "innocent" visitors. The case officer's role is to find agents willing to work with or for the CIA. His aim is to penetrate the host government, learn its inner workings and manipulate it for the Agency's purposes. A network of agents - often hundreds - is built up in that country's government, military forces, press, labour unions and other important groups. It is not just the party of government that is infiltrated by the Agency, but usually every possible political party, group or organisation, so that each can be steered in the desired direction, ready to serve the CIA as and when the need arises. In his talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, ex-CIA chief Richard Bissell listed eight types of covert action that the CIA uses to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries:
William Casey arriving on Capitol Hill, December 5th 1984, to testify about the CIA-produced manual which advised Nicaraguan contra forces on the "selective use of violence" to "neutralise" Nicaraguan officials. At "The Farm", the CIA's West Point, near Williamsburg in Virginia, young recruits are trained in such paramilitary activities as infiltration, heavy weapons and demolitions. One former officer who was trained in special operations wrote: "Some of the training was conventional. But then we moved up to the CIA's demolition training HQ. And it was here that we received training in tactics which hardly conformed to the Geneva Convention. The array of outlawed weaponry with which we were familiarised included bullets that explode on impact, silencer-equipped machine guns, home-made explosives and self-made napalm for stickier and hotter Molotov cocktails.. And there was a diabolical invention that might be called a mini-cannon. It was constructed of a concave piece of steel fitted into the top of a can filled with a plastic explosive. When it was detonated, the tremendous heat of friction of the steel turning inside out made the steel piece a white-hot projectile. There were a number of uses for it, one of which was demonstrated to us using an old army school bus. It was fastened to the gasoline tank in such a fashion that the incendiary projectile would rupture the tank and fling flaming gasoline the length of the bus interior, incinerating anyone inside. It was my lot to show the rest of the class how easily it could be done. It worked, my God how it worked. I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess, the moment of truth. What did a busload of burning people have to do with freedom? What right had I, in the name of democracy and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die? The intellectual game was over. I had to leave."
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia The CIA officially
has authorised manpower of 20,000 and an authorised budget of $800
million; however these figures do not tell the whole picture. Tens of
thousands of additional people serve under contract - the CIA's
membership extends far beyond government circles and reaches into the
power centres of industry, commerce, finance and labour. The agency's
proprietary (cover) enterprises such as the airlines Air America and Air
Asia conduct as much private business as possible and re-invest the
profits; tens of millions of dollars each year are generated by these
companies. Hundreds of millions of additional dollars are contributed by
the Pentagon to fund major espionage and clandestine programmes. $50 to
100 million is on call for unanticipated costs in a special account
called the Director's Contingency Fund. The CIA is not merely a
multi-million dollar agency but a multi-billion dollar conglomerate.
The CIA began in
1947 when President Truman proposed the creation of a secret
intelligence agency. In 1951, the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC)
and the Office of Special Operations (OSO) were merged into the Central
Intelligence Agency. Its originators saw the Agency as the instrument by
which Washington could achieve its foreign policy goals that were not
attainable through diplomacy, i.e. by covert action. Allen Dulles was
appointed the first Chief of Clandestine Services. In practice, as ex-CIA agent Philip Agee was to write: "The more successful we were in our operations to repress the left, the further away any possibilities for reform moved . The result? The same old oligarchies, the large land-owners and commercial interests - our "best friends" - continued enjoyment of their power, prestige and privilege as they always had. For years in our propaganda operations we peddled the tired slogan "Evolution not revolution" and the only thing that evolved were bigger bank accounts for our friends. I wondered why we were so afraid of governments that put priorities on helping peasants and other poor people."
Fidel Castro, President of Cuba. A force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA in Guatemala made an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April 1961. They were met by a stronger Cuban defence than had been anticipated. Four Americans flying CIA planes and nearly 300 Cuban exiles died during the fighting. The invasion was a complete failure and within 72 hours had been roundly defeated. It was one of the greatest humiliations of newly-appointed John F. Kennedy's presidency. After the affair, Richard Dulles was forced out of the Agency and Richard Helms took over as Clandestine Services Chief in 1962.
Richard Bissell, CIA Deputy Director for Plans, responsible for overseeing the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, receives the National Security Medal from President Kennedy exactly one year later. A campaign of
smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately.
Throughout the 1960s there were countless sea and air commando raids by
exiles, often accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage
upon Cuban oil refineries, chemical plants, bridges, cane fields, sugar
mills and warehouses. Spies, saboteurs and assassins were infiltrated;
and there were pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships
- anything to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection or make the
revolution look bad. During 1969 and 1970, the CIA used futuristic weather modification technology to ravage Cuba's sugar crop. Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains and killer flash floods over non-agricultural areas and left the cane fields arid. In 1971 the CIA supplied Cuban exiles with a virus that causes African swine fever. Six weeks later, an outbreak of the disease in Cuba forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nation-wide animal epidemic. Ten years later, the targets may well have been human beings, as an epidemic of dengue fever swept Cuba in 1981. Transmitted by blood-eating insects, usually mosquitoes, the disease produces severe flu symptoms and incapacitating bone pain. Over 300,000 cases were reported in Cuba, with 158 fatalities, including 101 children under 15. Declassified CIA documents later revealed that in 1956 and 1958 the US Army had loosed swarms of specially bred mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida to study their use as weapons in a biological war. (The mosquitoes bred for the tests were of the Aedes Aegypti type, the precise carrier of dengue fever). In 1967 it was
revealed that at the US government centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland,
dengue fever and other diseases "are the objects of considerable
research and appear to be regarded as potential BW [biological warfare]
agents." (In 1977, newly-released CIA documents disclosed that the
Agency maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program that
was "targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries throughout the
world."). When the British Leyland Company defied the US embargo to sell a number of buses to Cuba in 1964, the cargo ship carrying the buses collided in thick fog with a Japanese vessel in the Thames; the ship was breached on its side and the buses were "written off". A decade was to pass before the CIA and National Security Agency confirmed that the collision had been arranged by the CIA with the co-operation of British intelligence. The Agency
enlisted the help of Mafia figures to attempt the murder of Cuban leader
Fidel Castro in early 1961, and there were dozens of plots to
assassinate or humiliate him. They ranged from poisoning his cigars and
food to a chemical designed to make his hair and beard fall off (thereby
reducing his appearance of "manliness" to the Cuban public) and even a
plan to administer LSD just before a public speech. In another plot, a
CIA agent code-named AM/LASH was given a ball-point pen rigged with a
hypodermic needle so that Castro would not notice its insertion. The CIA
case officer had recommended the use of Blackleaf-40, a commercially
available high-grade poison. The delivery of the assassination device
took place on November 22nd, 1963, as a CIA Inspector General's Report
of 1967 noted almost offhandedly "it is likely at the very moment
President Kennedy was shot." There were also more traditional methods of
disposing of Castro, one being an attempt to drop bombs on a baseball
stadium while Castro was speaking; the B-26 bomber was driven away by
anti-aircraft fire before it could reach the stadium.
A former US military intelligence officer in Vietnam, Barry Osborn, reported: "By late 1968, the Phoenix programme was not serving any legitimate function that I know of, but rather had gone so wrong that it was the vehicle by which we were getting into a bad genocide programme." Osborn testified before a House Committee that suspects caught by Phoenix were interrogated in helicopters and sometimes pushed out. He also spoke of the use of electric shock torture. Jeff Stein, a senior CIA agent, stated: "I learned of the insertion of a six-inch dowel into the circular canal of one of my detainee's ears and the tapping through to the brain until the person died; the starving to death of a Vietnamese woman suspected of being part of the local education cabinet . Atrocities are normal; atrocities are taught to us as being normal." Stein also stated: "I would send in a report which would say, one person who was suspected of being VC, unconfirmed, uncorroborated, should be at this point, co-ordinate, at this time on this day, and I would find out later that a B-52 strike had hit that spot at that time and wiped out the whole village."
The Bombed Ruins of Hongai, Vietnam 1975
Child Burned by U.S. Napalm, Vietnam 1966 Frank Snepp, another senior CIA agent, reported: "I would put together a list and I would turn it over to Mr Colby's people. He would feed this list out to the strike teams and they would go to work. The hit teams became impatient and they decided to take the law as such into their own hands. And instead of bringing the sources in, they began killing them piece-meal. I looked at a list of the Phoenix programme's latest casualty count and I discovered it ran about 20,000 killed. And that is how you became a collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programmes, in the most atrocious excesses of the U.S. government." US Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was reported to have said that while he was in Vietnam, the CIA told him that the Agency disguised people as Vietcong to commit atrocities, including murder and rape, so as to discredit the Communists. In 1975 a Senate committee investigating the CIA's secret operations in Vietnam reported: "Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying towards Saigon. The first refused to answer all questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he too was thrown out. Other techniques usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk involved cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner." According to William Colby's own testimony before a congressional committee in 1971, 20,587 suspected Viet Cong were killed under the Phoenix programme in its first two-and-a-half years. The South Vietnamese government credited Phoenix with 40,994 deaths. Colby, the architect of the murder programme, said: "I was not able to say that no-one had been wrongly killed. But the purpose and the effect of the Phoenix programme was to bring decency and intelligence to our side of the battle." Two years later, Colby became Director of the CIA.
Howard Hunt, a security consultant at the White House, on trial for burglary at the democratic Party National Committee Headquarters in Watergate. Questioned about his forgery of a State department cable directly linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Hunt told the federal prosecutor "I had been given some training in my past CIA career to do just this sort of thing . Floating forged newspaper accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing." During later congressional hearings into the activities of the CIA, William Colby meticulously detailed decades of assassinations, destabilisation campaigns and domestic surveillance in the U.S. itself, going so far as to bring along dart guns, vials of snake poison and other Company hardware as exhibits. George Bush replaced Colby as CIA Director in early 1976 and the year-long House investigation of the CIA under Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church was wound down. In terms of reform or control of the CIA's covert operations, those investigations produced little more than the establishment of intelligence oversight committees in both chambers and recommendations for future legislation. However, a couple of weeks after the House of representatives voted to allow the White House to censor the Pike Committee's report, it was leaked to the Village Voice. It was sensational, with details of CIA intervention in foreign elections, paramilitary operations and black propaganda. Stung by these exposures, President Ford established by Executive Order new charters and duties, hyping it all as "reform" of the CIA, when in fact he made legal many activities considered to be abuses in the past. The only restriction on covert operations in other countries was a prohibition of political assassinations. For nearly every other apparent restriction, exceptions were provided. The only legislation that Ford asked Congress for, was for laws making it a crime to reveal classified information on intelligence activities. 
George Bush's Swearing-in as
Director of Central Intelligence, 1976
In 1979, following the deposal of the Shah of Iran's brutal regime, a Dutch television crew discovered a secret torture centre in Tehran, used by the Shah's SAVAK secret police. It was a basement with steel beds that had horizontal wire mesh at different levels. Coal fires were started under the beds and prisoners were strapped to the mesh, then gradually lowered until they were barbecued. The reporters found two severed, charred human hands that the torturers had left behind. The CIA had backed the Shah for decades; the Agency had set up the SAVAK and trained its officers in such practices. That film was never shown in the United States.
CIA agent Philip Agee, who, disillusioned by his years with the Agency, embarked on a campaign to alert the public to the dangers of CIA covert operations world-wide. Agee told a London press conference: "The CIA's promotion of fascism in Chile is no isolated case. It has intervened to destabilise the forces of change and to support traditional ruling elites in other countries where fascism has developed: in Brazil, Indonesia, Uruguay, Greece, South Korea, the Philippines, Iran and Portugal ." In 1981 William Casey became Director of Central Intelligence. That same year at a press conference, secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of "training, funding and equipping international terrorists." Ronald Spiers, head of the State Department's intelligence branch, told Haig privately that there was no evidence for this; he was referred to a book, The Terror Network by Claire Sterling, an American correspondent in Italy. In it, Sterling had written: "There is massive proof that the Soviet Union . has provided the weapons, training and sanctuary for a world-wide terror network aimed at the destabilisation of western democratic society." Casey ordered his intelligence experts to corroborate this view; when they could find no evidence to support it, he waved Sterling's book at them and barked: "I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year." Lincoln Gordon, a senior member of a CIA review panel, later found that Sterling's information was based on part of an old CIA covert propaganda operation. In other words, the CIA's own black lies were now fuelling its present policies. Gordon's report was classified secret. So far as the American public was concerned, the Soviets still stood publicly branded by the Secretary of State as active supporters of terrorism. The record was never corrected.
Ronald Reagan and William Casey; Casey was Reagan's campaign manager during the 1980 presidential campaign. In June 1982 U.S. Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act into law, criminalising the publication of the names of CIA undercover employees. From then on, any publication or journalist who identified a "covert agent" would suffer criminal penalties, including imprisonment and substantial fines. The offender would be guilty even if the information was unclassified and lawfully obtained and even if the person exposed was engaged in criminal activities. The law covered exposure not only of CIA officers but also of everyone who was working with the Agency. As one paper put it: "This means thousands of CIA-bribed politicians and trade union officials; this encompasses the security police of dozens of countries; this includes kings, sheikhs, presidents, party leaders, dictators and juntas from one end of the third world to the other." The law even made it a crime for a US religious organisation, university or political group to expose a CIA or FBI agent infiltrated for information, manipulation or disruption. In early 1985, William Casey met Saudi Ambassador Prince Bander to set up CIA hit teams to attack terrorists "pre-emptively". Their first target was the fundamentalist Muslim leader Sheikh Fudlallah. The Saudis contributed $3 million to the plan and on March 8th 1985 a car packed with explosives was driven into a Beirut suburb about 50 yards from Fudlallah's high-rise residence. The car exploded, killing 80 people and wounding 200, leaving devastation, fires and collapsed buildings. Anyone who happened to be in the immediate neighbourhood was hurt or killed but Fudlallah escaped without injury. His followers strung a huge "MADE IN USA" banner in front of a blown-out building. 
VEIL was the top
secret code word for covert operations undertaken during the Reagan
administration to influence events abroad. Casey wanted a comprehensive
plan of action for Central America. On March 4th 1980, the President
signed a top-secret finding calling for propaganda and political and
financial support for military officers in El Salvador, the smallest
country of the Central American republics. Despite horrendous repression
by the US-supported ruling junta, the left-wing opposition rebellion by
the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was gaining
strength. Paramilitary death squads were developed by the CIA to combat
the left; over 30,000 people were murdered by these death squads since
1979, including an archbishop and four American church women. CIA
surveillance programmes routinely supplied the security agencies with
information on, and the whereabouts of, suspects who ended up as death
squad victims. Colonel Nicholas Carranza, head of the Treasury Police,
who were most responsible for human rights abuses, was for several years
a paid CIA employee, receiving about $90,000 a year for five or six
years from the CIA. 
Victims Shot in the Head by
Death Squads, El Salvador
Entire villages were massacred by the Salvadoran death squads. In December 1982, 700 to 1,000 people were killed in the village of El Mozote, mostly the elderly, women and children. People were hacked to death by machetes and many beheaded; a child was thrown in the air and caught on a bayonet; and there was an orgy of rapes of very young girls before they were killed. An officer barked to a reluctant soldier: "If we don't kill the children now, they'll just grow up to be guerrillas." One month later, President Reagan certified to Congress that the El Salvador government was "making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognised human rights." But the killings went on. For instance, in February 1989, the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion - which was believed to have a US trainer assigned to it at all times - attacked a guerrilla field hospital, killing ten people, including five patients, a doctor and a nurse, and raping at least two of the female victims before shooting them. The School has produced some of the most brutal human rights abusers and dictators in the world. Of the 57,000 who have been trained there, notable graduates include Haitian police chief Joseph-Michel Francois, Panama's Manuel Noriega, Argentina's General Galtieri and Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. The UN Truth Commission Report on El Salvador released in 1993 found that of the 27 officers involved in the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, 19 were graduates of SOA training programmes. Roberto D'Aubuisson once told three European reporters: "You Germans are very intelligent. You realised that the Jews were responsible for the spread of communism and you began to kill them." A former member of the Salvadoran National Guard later testified: "I belonged to a squad of twelve. We devoted ourselves to torture, and to finding people whom we were told were guerrillas. I was trained in Panama for nine months by the United states for anti-guerrilla warfare. Part of the time we were instructed about torture."
A 1994 protest at Washington, demanding that the multi-million dollar budget School of Americas be shut down.
The list of CIA activities and agents around the world is virtually endless. In 1977 it was publicly disclosed that King Hussein of Jordan had been a paid CIA agent for 20 years. President Hissen Habre of Chad came to power after receiving covert CIA paramilitary assistance. Other CIA agents include Philippine President Marcos, Sudan President Nimeri, Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Pakistani President Mohammed Zia and President Duarte of El Salvador. In Cambodia, Reagan authorised $5 million in aid to the non-communist alliance; this group was dominated by the Khmer Rouge who killed three million Cambodians during its four year rule of genocidal terror from 1975 to 1979. Another $12 million was donated to them by Washington the following year. And the list goes on. Facts cleared by a CIA review panel in the late 1980s stated the following: "The 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations in the CIA's history has helped bring about some six million deaths world-wide. The CIA has overthrown functioning constitutional democracies in over 20 countries and has manipulated elections in dozens of other countries." Washington is prepared to support any group that declares itself anti-Communist and will support them in the use of terror, repression and mass murder. Embedded in the CIA's clandestine mentality is the belief that human ethics and social laws have no bearing on them, that because of their "national security" goals they are free from all moral restrictions and can act wholly independently of public accountability. The feeling is strong among the top officials in the CIA and elsewhere that America is somehow responsible for what happens in other countries and that it has an inherent right (a sort of modern Manifest Destiny) to intervene in other countries' internal affairs. In short, the CIA - and the people that guide it - is the greatest threat to peace and democracy in the world.
As the following links show, the "democracies" of America's supposed allies, such as Europe and Australia, are just as vulnerable to infiltration, manipulation and subversion by the Agency as any Central American or Eastern Bloc country. These activities show that not only has the CIA consistently broken the rules of its own charter, it has also dragged the entire United States into transgressions against the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Genocidal Convention and the Nuremberg Tribunal Principles - all international agreements signed by the United States. Not for nothing did ex-CIA agent John Stockwell state: "The CIA poses the ultimate threat to democracy and should be dismantled for the good of the United States and the world." The Nazi holocaust may be permanently etched in the conscience of the West with numerous museums, histories, remembrance ceremonies, memorial sculptures, documentaries, novels, movies and television series. But the holocausts created by the CIA - which have killed many more millions of people throughout the world - remain largely veiled from the world's consciousness and from public debate. In the words of American journalist William Blum, "Who hears the voice of the Vietnamese peasant?. What was the fate of the Vietnamese Anne Frank?" We should all be aware that we cannot understand history, we cannot understand the world and our current place in it, without knowing how the CIA has controlled, manipulated and affected virtually every single country throughout the second half of this century. And it is crucial that we understand the Agency's methods if we are to prevent further manipulation and atrocities.
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