5
5
2
- Actively traded in drugs around the world since the 1950s to fund its operations. The Contra/crack scandal is only the tip of the iceberg --- other notorious examples include Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle and Noreiga's Panama.
- Has been implicated in helping to facilitate the cover-up if not the execution of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Even if the CIA is not responsible for these killings, the sheer amount of CIA involvement in these cases demands answers;
- Has routinely lied to Congress about all of the above.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations.4 Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
We should note that the CIA gets away with this because it is not accountable to democratic government. Former CIA officer Philip Agee put it best: "The CIA is the President's secret army." Prior to 1975, the agency answered only to the president (creating all the usual problems of authoritarianism). And because the CIA's activities were secret, the president rarely had to worry about public criticism and pressure. After the 1975 Church hearings, Congress tried to create congressional oversight of the CIA, but this has failed miserably. One reason is that the congressional oversight committee is a sham, filled with Cold Warriors, conservatives, businessmen, and even ex-CIA personnel.
The Business Origins of CIA Crimes
Although many people think that the CIA's primary mission during the Cold War was to "deter communism," Noam Chomksy correctly points out that its real mission was "deterring democracy." From corrupting elections to overthrowing democratic governments, from assassinating elected leaders to installing murderous dictators, the CIA has virtually always replaced democracy with dictatorship. It didn't help that the CIA was run by businessmen, whose hostility towards democracy is legendary. Why did they overthrow so many democracies? Simple. It was because the people in these countries voted for leaders and policies that multi-national corporations didn't like: land reform, strong labor unions, nationalization of their industries, and greater regulation protecting workers, consumers and the environment.
So the CIA's greatest "successes" were really more pro-corporate than anti-communist. Citing a communist threat, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But there was no communist threat -- the Soviets stood back and watched the coup from afar. What really happened was that Mossadegh threatened to nationalize British and American oil companies in Iran. Consequently, the CIA and MI6 toppled him and replaced him with a puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran and his murderous secret police, SAVAK. Unbeknownst to the American people, the reason the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979 was because the CIA had helped SAVAK torture and murder their people.
Another "success" was the CIA's overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Again, there was no communist threat. The real threat was to Guatemala's United Fruit Company, a Rockefeller-owned firm whose stockholders included CIA Director Allen Dulles. Arbenz threatened to nationalize the company, albeit with compensation for United Fruit's land that was based on the value of the land as estimated by United Fruit for determining the property tax they would pay to the government of Guatemala. In response, the CIA initiated a coup that overthrew Arbenz and installed the murderous dictator Castillo Armas. For four decades, CIA-backed dictators would torture and murder hundreds of thousands of leftists, union members and others who would fight for a more equitable distribution of the country's resources.
A third CIA "success" story was Chile. In 1973, the country's democratically elected leader, Salvadore Allende, nationalized foreign-owned interests, like Chile's lucrative copper mines and telephone system. International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) offered the CIA $1 million to overthrow Allende -- which the CIA allegedly refused -- so ITT paid $350,000 to his Allende's political opponents. The CIA joined in by helping to facilitate a coup that resulted in Allende's death and his being replaced with a brutal tyrant, General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of leftists, union members and political opponents, as economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman installed a "free market" economy. Since then, income inequality has soared higher in Chile than anywhere else in Latin America.
Even when the communist threat was real, the CIA first and foremost took care of America's elite. In testimony before Congress in the early 50s, it artificially inflated Soviet military capabilities. "Team B" was the name of a group of hawkish CIA analysts who seriously distorted Soviet military data. A notorious example of their work was the "bomber gap" that later turned out to be grossly exaggerated. These scare tactics worked. Congress awarded giant defense contracts to the U.S. military-industrial complex, from which the lion's share of the proceeds ended up in the pockets of America's economic elite.
Not even the fall of the Soviet Union and the demise of American defense contracts have stopped the CIA from serving the elite. Journalist Robert Dreyfus writes:
"Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has been abuzz with talk about using the CIA for economic espionage. Stripped of euphemism, economic espionage simply means that American spies would target foreign companies, such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda, and then covertly pass stolen trade secrets and technology to U.S. corporate executives."5
If this isn't bad enough, a worse problem arises in that the CIA certainly does not hand over this technology to every American auto-related company, but only the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
In a 1975 interview, Ex-CIA agent Philip Agee summed up his personal observations of the agency:
"To the people who work for it, the CIA is known as The Company. The Big Business mentality pervades everything. Agents, for instance, are called assets. The man in charge of the United Kingdom desk is said to have the "U.K. account.'"
