The CIA was also

granted in 1952 sweeping "other" powers besides merely the gathering of intelligence. And despite the fact that it was created for that purpose, due to counterintelligence and countermeasures, the CIA has only been able to get minor information, mostly from serendipitous occasions, such as getting their hands on a defector that was not a "plant." Despite the glamourizations of the spy trade in James Bond movies, the truth is that field operatives can only get so much information on troop movements, weapons stockpiles, and the intentions of foreign leaders. For that reason, the CIA has relied ever increasingly on electronic techniques; but spy sattelites, wiretaps, and spy planes are subject to electronic (and other) countermeasures. It has often been demonstrated in the past that the CIA took intelligence and distorted it to support the policy inclinations of its Director or the current Commander-in-Chief, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Reams of data are collected by the agency every day, much more than anyone can ever process, and no one coordinates what to do with the humongous piles of uncracked ciphers and unprocessed intelligence.

Perhaps because of the limitations of 'intelligence,' or in spite of them, the CIA has chosen to excel in an entirely different area: covert operations. The CIA has become a secret branch of the President's foreign policy apparatus, able to act where he cannot do things openly, because the CIA does not have to answer questions from the press. All agents agree that, when necessary, they will lie to anyone, including Congressional Oversight committees, in the interests of 'national security.' This policy, called "plausible denial," goes hand-in-hand with the fact that every agent must sign a contract agreeing not to reveal anything 'sensitive' that they learned during their service without the CIA's prior consent. To the "imperial presidency", the CIA became seen as a 'can-do' agency, because unlike any other part of the government, they had full control over their own budget and operations - they answered to nobody. This is part of what Victor Marchetti called the 'theology of national security,' maintained through the 'cult of intelligence.' It is a theology of salvation through duty to country - and adherents of the ritual believe all sins may be forgiven them.

The CIA has always maintained that all its secrecy and "clandestine mentality" are part of its efforts to keep vital secrets out of the hands of America's enemies. They claim that disclosure of their activities might jeopardize agents in the field and also destroy many important efforts of foreign policy, because CIA-controlled foreign agents would be revealed as such to their own people. As far as they are concerned, freedom of the press and freedom of information take a back seat, because any secrets given up are secrets betrayed into the hands of the enemy. Of course, to many others, all this secrecy is just a way for the CIA to hide its activities from the criticism of the American people, in the name of national security. But the art of the spook trade is like a poker game: know as much as you can about your enemy while giving the least away. In a world where anybody can be working for the other side - and paranoia is never in short supply in the halls of Langeley - you can't trust anybody, and anything is fair game. "Black operations" are necessary, 'cause we gotta do it to 'em before they do it to us. That is the commandment at the heart of the cult of intelligence and its spookly apostles.

The CIA, whose chief sphere of operations during the Cold War was to be the Soviet Union and China, made much of its actual focus the developing or "Third World." It was there that the CIA flexed its political muscle, recruited its hired hands, and interfered in other peoples' business, all the while pretending to be aiming its operations against the other threatening "superpowers." Unfortunately, the KGB was as good at the game as the CIA, and for that reason the CIA was never able to score very many successes in either the intelligence or covert operations field - which is why they made the Third World, an area the U.S. has always been better at pushing around, their chief focus of activity. Most Third World nations were no real security threat to the United States, but the CIA could always claim that there was the danger of their falling into the "Soviet sphere of influence." The CIA's goals in the developing world were really based on other factors: strategic interests (military bases, listening posts, naval ports), material interests (natural resources and trade goods), and economic interests (protecting the property of multinational U.S. corporations such as United Fruit, IT&T, and Exxon.) Democracy and freedom necessarily took a back seat.

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the Editor   |2008-05-26 01:16:56 scary shit Reply | Quote

the Editor   |2008-05-26 01:17:31 oh, and by the way, i don't work for the cia of course thats exactly what i would say if i worked for the cia OH NO!!1 we're all going to DIE!!11 Reply | Quote

Anonymous   |2008-05-26 05:42:01 As the world already knows, every cia operative claims they are not a cia operative. WTF over? Reply | Quote

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