CIA

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"CIA" can also refer to Christians In Action. This article is about a U.S. government agency.

Release version (Declassified) Psst! You can reveal the blacked-out text by highlighting it.

The CIA, or Central Intelligence Agency is the arm of the United States government in charge of intelligence gathering for military and other purposes.

Piece of advice: Never refer to a CIA employee as an "agent." They are an "officer." The agents are the ones giving information to the officers.

The CIA is charged with providing all decision makers in the US with the intelligence needed to do so. It was set up to be the foreign intelligence agency for the United States; however, due to the fragmentary nature of the US political system, there were soon many, many others. Today, the CIA is just one of many intelligence services vying for resources and the attention of policy makers. Until this decade, however, the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) was still considered the top figure in the intelligence field; after 9/11, Congress passed a law creating a new post above the DCI, the "Director of National Intelligence." In theory, the DNI is above all intelligence agencies, but is instead a (slightly) more glorified and (vastly) more removed Director of Central Intelligence, one more beholden to the White House than the actual CIA; the latter was pissed about this.

Questionable things they did

“”Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?

—Private letter from retired MKULTRA leader George Hunter White to retired MKULTRA head Sid Gottlieb

While the CIA is in charge of gathering intelligence and conducting covert operations to defend the United States, not all of the things they did are justifiable.

Here is a list of actions known to have been done by the CIA:

• Orchestrating the 1949 Syrian coup, installing a client regime in the interest of constructing the Trans-Arabian Pipeline.
• Conducting unethical and involuntary human experimentation on men, women and children under Project MKULTRA (1953-1973), with such methods as psychological torture, bizarre medical experiments, rape and physical abuse, driving many of them permanently insane.
• Removing the democratically elected (although increasingly authoritarian) Mohammad Mossadegh, replacing him with the Shah in Iran (1953), and creating SAVAK (Pahlavi's secret police). The subsequent (26 years later) Iranian Revolution resulted in Pahlavi's defeat and the rule of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thereby turning Iran into an Islamic theocracy.
• Staging a military coup in Guatemala in 1954 against the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz. Human rights groups estimate 200,000 were killed and 40-50,000 "disappeared" under successive US-backed regimes. The CIA supported and worked inside a Guatemalan army intelligence unit called G-2 which operated a network of torture centers with crematoriums to dispose of the victims.
• Failing to eliminate Fidel Castro (1960-1965). (Over 600 times!)
• Dwight Eisenhower directly ordered CIA Director Allen Dulles to "eliminate" Patrice Lumumba, Congolese politician fighting for independence from Belgium, and Allen Dulles sent one of its scientists to the Congo in September 1960 "with a vial of deadly poison that could be injected into something Lumumba might eat." They failed to even get the vial to Lumumba, but Lumumba was assassinated anyway by Mubutu Seso Seko, Lumumba's army chief who the CIA directly supported and propped up.
• The Phoenix Program (1967-1972), a covert torture, assassination and terrorism campaign in Vietnam.
• Helping Richard Nixon spy on the government (including Henry Kissinger), c. 1969-1973. Nixon's Plumbers were former CIA spooks like Howard Hunt, Jim McCord, and Eugenio Martinez .
• Assisting in the rise of Augusto Pinochet by ousting Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. This is after spending more in 1964 in support of Allende's electoral opponent than was spent on Johnson's and Goldwater's 1964 electoral campaigns combined. The CIA also trained Pinochet's secret police (D.I.N.A.) who tortured and murdered thousands of Chileans.
  • Giving covert support to Operation Condor, a mass murder campaign initiated by Pinochet in which six South American regimes participated. 400,000 were imprisoned and 80,000 killed or "disappeared". Latin intelligence chiefs communicated through a CIA telecommunications database (CONDORTEL) and were on the CIA payroll.
• At least collaborating with and funding right-wing terrorist groups in NATO member states (Italy in particular), 1978-1982, if not running them entirely.
• Helping Ronald Reagan with his sordid Contra affairs (1981-1986).
  • Was involved in terrorist activities in Nicaragua during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations.
• Training and funding the secret police of Chadian dictator Hissene Habre (dubbed "Africa's Pinochet" by human rights groups) and lavishing his regime with covert aid as a bulwark against Libya from 1982-1990. A UN-sponsored truth commission holds him responsible for systematic torture and up to 40,000 political murders.
• Collaborating with Cuban exile terrorist groups, who attempted to "liberate" Cuba by bombing a night club full of German tourists in 1997 in Havana. Despite all the participants being known, none have been prosecuted.
• Torturing prisoners in the War on Terror (2001-).
• Spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee (2009), though typical of the agency, denying it first.
• Trying to advertise themselves as a "progressive" employer (2021): Poe's Law?
• Collaboration (at minimum) with drug traffickers all around the world at various times with varying levels of evidence (CIA drug trafficking allegations)

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  Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan ruler pictured in 1960

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  The Shah seen here cosplaying as a czar

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  Ronald Reagan with Habré in the White House

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  Pinochet, here seen dressed as his wrestling persona, "M. Bison"

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  Luis Posada Carriles in uniform of the United States Army, during his stay at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1962

Institutional function (plausible deniability)

Pretty much all of the operations listed above (and many more omitted ones) are in the service of extending the power and influence of the Executive branch of the US government (incl. by proxy that of the corporate elites backing that government). Since the CIA's actions so abundantly often undermine democracy and human rights which the US government publicly professes to promote one of the CIA's main institutional roles within the US power structure may be boiled down to giving the Executive branch plausible deniability to deflect charges of criminality and immorality from the public and shifting the blame for unlawful or immoral activities onto the supposedly independent acting agency or rogue elements within it. This doctrine was very much in full force at the height of the Cold War. Attempts have been made to rein plausible deniability in and to try to put the agencies activities under more direct presidential control after the Watergate Scandal. A couple of CIA lawyers even wanted to do away with that concept completely since to them it reinforced the notion that the agency should be tightly supervised to guarantee it would abide by US and international law. They in essence followed the logic of Jack Nicholson's Col. Jessup: "Hey, our work is dirty, so just look away and don't complain when we come home with dirty hands. Our propaganda operations are for the greater good." At least since the W. Bush administration one tactic to elude public scrutiny and prosecution is to invoke a supposed threat to national security if journalists or other branches of government look for paper trails documenting orders and directives that led to unlawful activities, e. g. that of torturers and their superiors in Iraq.

Electronic Reading Room

The CIA publishes declassified records readable online as scanned PDF documents, often made available via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Although this can yield significant historical value, one should be discerning because these kinds of programs can also be liable to misuse regarding hosted files that may not have originally been produced by the CIA itself; this can be as insignificant as whatever happened to show up in the agency's mailbox in 1970 or that an agent happened to shove in some filing cabinet. This was put on full display in 2020, when the FBI's equivalent "FBI Records Vault" program responded to an FOIA request for mentions of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which yielded copies of the text (along with other antisemitic propaganda plus letters urging the agency to investigate) that had been mailed to the FBI by random citizens. The automated release of a copy of the Protocols via a Twitter post became misinterpreted as a statement by the FBI supportive of the black propaganda text, even though the full release included repudiations by the agency (even by J. Edgar Hoover) against the hoax.

Even documents based on genuine government projects could be bullshit. As of 2021, TikTok users had discovered CIA files teaching them how to time travel, which is how we've recovered all the lost episodes of Doctor Who (probably).

Further reading

• Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage Press (1995). ISBN 1-56751-052-3

See also

• FBI
• Information Awareness Office
• Blowback
• Agent 711

External links

• Ok, at least their World Factbook is pretty good.
• And now they have a Twitter account to keep up with the young'uns.