ThothWeb - Your Portal to the Unknown - Games without Frontiers: The Shadow World of the CIA

America’s Central Intelligence Agency operates throughout the world, seemingly with and without presidential remit as the sensitivity of their operations demands. As more information emerges as to the nature of their activities, many observers are beginning to question whether it has become a renegade organisation, one that operates so far outside of the law and with such limited accountability, that it is a threat to world security.

History shows that the organisation, which celebrates its 60th birthday this year, has left a trail of horror and destruction throughout its shady history.

During the last six decades, the agency quietly set about shaping the world, it achieved this by sponsoring coups, destabilising governments, suppressing democracy, engaging in drug and arms dealing, mind control experiments and all manner of illegal or morally questionable activity.

The CIA has left a trail of unimaginable global destruction in its wake and repeatedly abdicates responsibility for the repercussions that arise from its operations. Yet, despite its $5 billion dollar budget, the catastrophic events of 911 demonstrated that the eyes of America ultimately failed in its remit to protect America, and in the case of 911 that attack happened on its own soil. Was this failure a one-off event or does the CIA really have a less than impressive track record that should have rang alarm bells a long time ago? To mark the organisation’s sixtieth birthday, we thought we’d take a closer look at the CIA.

The CIA and the Nazis

Nazi - Swastika

Shortly after its formation in 1947, Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s former spy chief, made secret deals with the CIA, turning over his agencies’ files to the agency. In return, he received a guarantee that he wouldn’t be tried for war crimes. The fledgling organisation then scrambled to recruit as many former Nazi intelligence officers into their ranks as they could. These men, many of who should have been tried at Nuremburg, were instead retrained as CIA operatives, and given immunity from prosecution. It wasn’t just field operatives that were recruited from the Nazi ranks, almost 800 former Nazi scientists were recruited in this manner also. The staff were debriefed and then employed in covert CIA programmes such as MKULTRA, a horrific program to develop and test mind warfare initiatives. The experiments they conducted included ‘brainwashing’ thousands of individuals, most of which were American citizens, using techniques such as electric shock therapy, sleep deprivation and a cocktail of synthetic drugs. The plan was to create sleeping agents that could be called upon if needed and other times just because they needed human guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of their product. Some of the techniques developed by the MKULTRA project are still used in interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo Bay today.

Communism – The Enemy at the Door

The Central intelligence Agency was born into a post war climate of suspicion and fear as the political ideologies of East and West polarised as capitalism and communism. Any nation caught between America and the Soviet Union, even neutral ones such as Cambodia, posed a threat to democracy and was a legitimate target in the CIA mindset. While its intention of protecting America may have been legitimate, its methodology was anything but that.

The CIA’s interest in the Middle East started in the early 1950’s when Iran’s President Mohammad Mossadeq made the mistake of starting talks with the Soviets. Mossadeq’s government was immediately flagged up as a threat. In response to the threat, the CIA spent millions of dollars organising and hiring rent-a-mobs to create instability in the country. Their tactic paid off and the CIA was successful in orchestrating the overthrow of Prime Minister Mosaddeq’s government. Mossadeq was replaced with a puppet president of America’s choosing, rather than the peoples; the pro-American, Shah of Iran. In 1979, the religious opposition, lead by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, drove the shah into exile. Khomeini sought the capture of the shah, and when it was learned that he had been admitted into the United States for medical treatment, Iran's response was the start of the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

Installing their own ‘government approved’ leader to bring pro-soviet nations into the American fold swiftly became part of CIA modus operandi. In 1960 when the African republic of Congo approached the Soviets for help, the CIA mechanism sprung into life once more. The agency financed the relatively unknown Colonel Mobutu, enabling him to overthrow and later assassinate the deposed Patrice Emery Lumumba.

The CIA installed Colonel Mobutu as the leader of their (the CIA’s) choice. Mobutu turned out to be a sociopath who committed appalling human rights violations and stole over half the nations GDP in the course of his rule. Despite knowing what Mobutu was up to, the CIA continued to support him until the 1990s. Today the Congo is still considered one of the most unstable countries in the world after the CIA’s involvement in its politics, but the CIA’s remit of preventing the spread of communism was seen as justification for their actions.

The CIA consistently acts without conscious when it came to getting the job done, but their operations have often caused not only grief for other nations, but embarrassment for their own administration.

The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba is a perfect example of a CIA plan that failed abysmally. Having a communist country on America’s doorstep was considered a huge threat, not to mention embarrassment for the Kennedy administration. The agency devised a covert paramilitary operation to overthrow Fidel Castro, using tried and tested methods of funding rent-a-mobs, mercenaries and in this case 1,500 anti-communist Cuban exiles to do the job for them.

Castro was popular with the Cuban people and despite gaining the approval of JFK, the plan was ill thought out and destined to fail. The agency made eight further attempts in the following ten years to assassinate Castro, not only did they fail but there are some who believe that Castro was actually behind the assassination of JFK. It’s also interesting to note that a few days prior to his assassination in 1963, there were secret communications between President Kennedy and the Castro government. Whether Castro had Kennedy assassinated as revenge for the repeated attempts on his own life by the CIA or whether the CIA were worried that Kennedy himself was becoming a problem will probably never be known but either scenario, if true puts an alarming spin on the CIA involvement.

See the article "JFK assassination 'was Cuba plot'" for more details.

Repercussions

One of the hallmarks of the CIA is their inability to consider the repercussions of the actions. Many consider the current drugs epidemic to have been created as a result of the CIA. This is often illustrated by their involvement in places such as Indonesia and Laos during the Vietnam War.

Laos was of strategic importance to the US during the war, so the CIA signed up 30,000 Hmong tribesman to fight for them. To ensure their continued support, the CIA set up the notorious ‘Air America’ to assist the tribesmen in distributing the opium they grew. This in turn created an immense source of black money for the CIA. Most of the drugs made their way to the troops in Vietnam or back to America itself, so while the CIA funded their operations, America began its descent into the sordid reality of the drugs culture, courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

This entry into the drugs trade created new possibilities for the CIA when it came to funding their operations and was used again in Nicaragua in 1983 to fund the Contra rebels’ war. This time the press got hold of the story, resulting in the scandal known as the Iran-contra affair, which revealed how the CIA provided funds to the Nicaraguan contra rebels from profits gained by selling arms to Iran. Incidentally, George Bush Snr subsequently pardoned those found guilty in the Iran-contra affair.

During the past sixty years, the CIA has intervened in politics in many countries that have become highly unstable or suffered greatly as a result. In Chile, they replaced Salvadore Iande with Augustas Pinochet with disastrous results for Chile. In Cambodia, they engineered a coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouck in 1970 which ultimately led to the CIA’s puppet leader Lon Nol being deposed by the Marxist Polpot. 1.7 million Cambodians were executed under Polpot’s regime.

Ernesto Che Guevara

The CIA also has a knack of creating martyrs that live on long after their own demise, and as they’ve learned to their cost, the legend lives on far longer than the man; Che Guevara being a perfect example. Desperate to halt the spread of communism in Bolivia, the CIA under the command of Felix Rodriguez, ordered the assassination of the young freedom fighter. Guevara was undoubtedly popular with the Bolivian people, but realistically he was never a threat to democracy. As it was the CIA turned him into a legend and a symbol of those who fight oppression and Bolivia is still a troubled country that causes the United States a great deal of concern.

The CIA’s ability to interfere in domestic politics on an international scale resulted in their funding of the Mujahadin in Afghanistan in 1979. It was through the ranks of the Mujahadin that Osama Bin Laden rose to prominence. When the Soviets finally left Afghanistan, the Americans left too, leaving the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan and for Osama Bin Laden to create Al Qaeda from the ranks of the Mujahadin.

Osama Bin Laden, the CIA’s lasting legacy

On September 11th 2001, 2991 people died when Al Qaeda launched their attack on the World Trade Centre. It was clear that the CIA knew who was responsible but they had missed the planning of the attack completely. It was a catastrophic failure of intelligence that left America reeling. The cold war threat of communism was now replaced by a new and more deadly threat, the Islamic terrorists, in many ways a threat cultivated by decades of CIA covert operations.

The CIA responded to this new threat by failing to capture Bin Laden. Instead, they focussed their attention on Iraq and another former associate of the CIA, Saddam Hussein. The CIA claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, knowing that they had supplied him with them twenty years earlier. George Tenant, the CIA’s director is said to have personally ordered the ‘sexing up’ of the intelligence reports to support George Bush’s case for war. What no one banked on was the embarrassing fact that the WMDs had all been disposed of before America’s invasion, leaving Bush and his allies without any justification for the war other than to save the Iraqi people from a dictator that once again, the CIA had financed.

Sixty years of CIA activity have led to millions of deaths and a growing culture of hostility directed against America, but still the American taxpayer throws its tax dollars into the CIA money pit. For its entire billion dollar funding, international agents, private airlines and lack of accountability, the CIA admits that it is highly unlikely that it can stop the next terrorist attack on the US; it’s only a matter of time.

After sixty years of CIA involvement in world politics, America herself is suffering the blowback from the CIA’s covert operations.

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