Page 1 of 4 The life and times of the CIA
By Chalmers Johnson
(This essay is a review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by
Tim Weiner. [1])
The American people may not know it, but they have some severe problems with
one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency.
Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of
cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within
the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA's
approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the
yearly US$44 billion to $48 billion or more spent on "intelligence". This
inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with
the agency, and hardly the most serious one, either.
There are currently at least two criminal trials under way, in Italy and
Germany, against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those
countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and
Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for
torture, and causing them to "disappear" into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons
outside the United States without any form of due process of law.
The possibility that CIA funds are simply being ripped off by insiders is also
acute. The CIA's former No 3 official, its executive director and chief
procurement officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is under federal indictment in San
Diego for corruptly funneling contracts for water, air services, and armored
vehicles to a lifelong friend and defense contractor, Brent Wilkes, who was
unqualified to perform the services being sought. In return, Wilkes allegedly
treated Foggo to thousands of dollars' worth of vacation trips and dinners, and
promised him a top job at his company when he retired from the CIA.
Thirty years ago, in a futile attempt to provide some check on endemic
misbehavior by the CIA, the administration of Gerald Ford created the
President's Intelligence Oversight Board. It was to be a civilian watchdog over
the agency. A 1981 executive order by president Ronald Reagan made the board
permanent and gave it the mission of identifying CIA violations of the law
(while keeping them secret so as not to endanger national security). Through
five subsequent administrations, members of the board - all civilians not
employed by the government - actively reported on and investigated some of the
CIA's most secret operations that seemed to breach legal limits.
However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that,
for the first five and a half years of the administration of President George W
Bush, the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing - no investigations, no
reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to
inquire into the interrogation methods agency operatives employed at secret
prisons or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or domestic
wiretapping not warranted by a federal court.
Who were the members of this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil,
speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by former Bush economic
adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a former commerce secretary
and friend of the president, former Admiral David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B
Culvahouse. The only thing they accomplished was to express their contempt for
a legal order by a president of the United States.
Corrupt and undemocratic practices by the CIA have prevailed since it was
created in 1947. However, US citizens have now, for the first time, been given
a striking range of critical information necessary to understand how this
situation came about and why it has been impossible to remedy. We have a long,
richly documented history of the CIA from its post-World War II origins to its
failure to supply even the most elementary information about Iraq before the
2003 invasion of that country.
Declassified CIA records
Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes is important for many reasons, but
certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the possibility that
journalism can actually help citizens perform elementary oversight on the US
government.
Until Weiner's magnificent effort, I would have agreed with Seymour Hersh that,
in the current crisis of US governance and foreign policy, the failure of the
press has been almost complete. American journalists have generally not even
tried to penetrate the layers of secrecy that the executive branch throws up to
ward off scrutiny of its often illegal and incompetent activities. This is the
first book I've read in a long time that documents its very important
assertions in a way that goes well beyond asking readers merely to trust the
reporter.
Weiner, a New York Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy of Ashes
for 20 years. He has read more than 50,000 government documents, mostly from
the CIA, the White House and the State Department. He was instrumental in
causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST) program of the National
Archives to declassify many of them, particularly in 2005 and 2006. He has read
more than 2,000 oral histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers and
diplomats and has himself conducted more than 300 on-the-record interviews with
current and past CIA officers, including 10 former directors of central
intelligence. Truly exceptional among authors of books on the CIA, he makes the
following claim: "This book is on the record - no anonymous sources, no blind
quotations, no hearsay."
Weiner's history contains 154 pages of endnotes keyed to comments in the text.
(Numbered notes and standard scholarly citations would have been preferable, as
well as an annotated bibliography providing information on where documents
could be found; but what he has done is still light-years ahead of competing
works.) These notes contain extensive verbatim quotations from documents,
interviews and oral histories. Weiner also observes: "The CIA has reneged on
pledges made by three consecutive directors of central intelligence - [Robert]
Gates, [James] Woolsey, and [John] Deutch - to declassify records on nine major
covert actions: France and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the
1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the 1950s and 1960s; and the
Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Laos in the 1960s." He is nonetheless able
to supply key details on each of these operations from unofficial, but fully
identified, sources.
In May 2003, after a lengthy delay, the government finally released the
documents on president Dwight D Eisenhower's engineered regime change in
Guatemala in 1954; most of the records from the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in
which a CIA-created exile army of Cubans went to their deaths or to prison in a
hapless invasion of that island have been released; and the reports on the
CIA's 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq were leaked.
Weiner's efforts and his resulting book are monuments to serious historical
research in America's allegedly "open society". Still, he warns,
While
I was gathering and obtaining declassification authorization for some of the
CIA records used in this book at the National Archives, the agency [the CIA]
was engaged in a secret effort to reclassify many of those same records, dating
back to the 1940s, flouting the law and breaking its word. Nevertheless, the
work of historians, archivists, and journalists has created a foundation of
documents on which a book can be built.
Surprise attacks
As an idea, if not an actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came into
being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the US naval
base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It functionally came to an end, as Weiner makes
clear, on September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew hijacked
airliners into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in
Washington, DC. Both assaults were successful surprise attacks.
The Central Intelligence Agency itself was created during the administration of
Harry Truman to prevent future surprise attacks like that on Pearl Harbor by
uncovering planning for them and so forewarning against them. On September 11,
2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely because it had been unable
to discover the al-Qaeda plot and sound the alarm against a surprise
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