Page 4 of 4 The life and times of the
CIA By Chalmers Johnson
should have
consulted Frances Stonor Saunders' indispensable
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of
Arts and Letters.
Hiding
incompetence Despite all this, the CIA was
protected from criticism by its impenetrable
secrecy and by the tireless propaganda efforts of
such leaders as Allen W Dulles, director of the
agency under Eisenhower, and Richard Bissell,
chief of the clandestine service
after
Wisner. Even when the CIA seemed to fail at
everything it undertook, writes Weiner, "The
ability to represent failure as success was
becoming a CIA tradition" (p 58).
After
the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the
CIA dropped 212 foreign agents into Manchuria.
Within a matter of days, 101 had been killed and
the other 111 captured - but this information was
effectively suppressed. The CIA's station chief in
Seoul, Albert R Haney, an incompetent army colonel
and intelligence fabricator, never suspected that
the hundreds of agents he claimed to have working
for him all reported to North Korean control
officers.
Haney survived his incredible
performance in the Korean War because, at the end
of his tour in November 1952, he helped to arrange
for the transportation of a grievously wounded
marine lieutenant back to the United States. That
marine turned out to be the son of Allen Dulles,
who repaid his debt of gratitude by putting Haney
in charge of the covert operation that - despite a
largely bungled, badly directed secret campaign -
did succeed in overthrowing the Guatemalan
government of president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. The
CIA's handiwork in Guatemala ultimately led to the
deaths of 200,000 civilians during the 40 years of
bloodshed and civil war that followed the sabotage
of an elected government for the sake of the
United Fruit Co.
Weiner has made
innumerable contributions to many hidden issues of
postwar foreign policy, some of them still
ongoing. For example, during the debate over
America's invasion of Iraq after 2003, one of the
constant laments was that the CIA did not have
access to a single agent inside Saddam Hussein's
inner circle. That was not true. Ironically, the
intelligence service of France - a country US
politicians publicly lambasted for its failure to
support the United States - had cultivated Naji
Sabri, Iraq's foreign minister. Sabri told the
French agency, and through it the US government,
that Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear
or biological weapons program, but the CIA ignored
him. Weiner comments ruefully, "The CIA had almost
no ability to analyze accurately what little
intelligence it had" (pp 666-67, n 487).
Perhaps the most comical of all CIA
clandestine activities - unfortunately all too
typical of its covert operations over the past 60
years - was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly
appointed US ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn
McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human
rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the
murderous Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA
had bugged her bedroom and picked up sounds that
led their agents to conclude that the ambassador
was having a lesbian love affair with her
secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station chief
"recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy". The
agency spread the word in Washington that the
liberal ambassador was a lesbian without realizing
that "Murphy" was also the name of her
two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her
bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. She was
actually a married woman from a conservative
family (p 459).
Back in August 1945,
General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, said
to president Truman, "Prior to the present war,
the United States had no foreign intelligence
service. It never has had and does not now have a
coordinated intelligence system." Weiner adds,
"Tragically, it still does not have one." I agree
with Weiner's assessment, but based on his truly
exemplary analysis of the Central Intelligence
Agency in Legacy of Ashes, I do not think
that this is a tragedy. Given his evidence, it is
hard to believe that the United States would not
have been better off if it had left intelligence
collection and analysis to the State Department
and had assigned infrequent covert actions to the
Pentagon.
I believe that this is where we
stand today: the CIA has failed badly, and it
would be an important step toward a restoration of
the checks and balances within the US political
system simply to abolish it. Some observers argue
that this would be an inadequate remedy because
what the government now ostentatiously calls the
"intelligence community" - complete with its own
website - is composed of 16 discrete and
competitive intelligence organizations ready to
step into the CIA's shoes. This, however, is a
misunderstanding. Most of the members of the
so-called intelligence community are bureaucratic
appendages of well-established departments or
belong to extremely technical units whose
functions have nothing at all to do with either
espionage or cloak-and-dagger adventures.
The 16 entities include the intelligence
organizations of each military service - the air
force, army, coast guard, Marine Corps, navy, and
Defense Intelligence Agency - and reflect
inter-service rivalries more than national needs
or interests; the departments of Energy, Homeland
Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement
Administration, as well as the FBI and the
National Security Agency; and the units devoted to
satellites and reconnaissance (National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance
Office). The only one of these units that could
conceivably compete with the CIA is the one that I
recommend to replace it - namely, the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR). Interestingly enough, it had by far the
best record of any US intelligence entity in
analyzing Iraq under Saddam Hussein and estimating
what was likely to happen if the US pursued the
Bush administration's misconceived scheme of
invading his country. Its work was, of course,
largely ignored by the White House of President
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Weiner does not cover every single aspect
of the record of the CIA, but his book is one of
the best possible places for a serious citizen to
begin to understand the depths to which the US
government has sunk. It also brings home the
lesson that an incompetent or unscrupulous
intelligence agency can be as great a threat to
national security as not having one at all.
Note 1. Legacy of
Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner.
Doubleday (June 28, 2007). ISBN-10: 038551445X.
Price US$27.95, 702 pages.
Chalmers
Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last
Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan
Books, 2007). It is the third volume of his
Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback
and The Sorrows of Empire. A retired
professor of international relations from the
University of California (Berkeley and San Diego
campuses) and the author of some 17 books
primarily on the politics and economics of East
Asia, Johnson is president of the Japan Policy
Research Institute.
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