“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”
-President Harry S. Truman
Jack Ryan was a stud; so was John Clark. For those who aren’t familiar with these names, they were the primary characters throughout most of Tom Clancy’s best novels. Jack Ryan was the brainy CIA intelligence analyst thrust into action against his will. John Clark was the hardened field operative willing to perpetrate all variety of acts in furthering freedom’s cause. Taken together, these characters covered all aspects of clandestine intelligence operations, and Clancy’s stories influenced several generations’ views of the CIA and its mission. Guys like me were steeped in a belief that intelligence agencies dealt in shadowy matters for an all-important goal: to save American, or British, or Israeli, or other lives. And where the agencies faulted, it was always due to a tiny group of slimy D.C. bureaucrats with a hidden agenda – never at the street-level, and never with morally ambiguous operators. The same held true with the Jason Bourne series of films, and countless others.
What many of us failed to realize – or in realizing, managed to justify – was that in the real world, these intelligence agencies, CIA, Mossad, MI6, etcetera, were conducting some reprehensible operations, and still are. We were presented a romanticized view of the necessity for this business and we trusted that our governments were doing what simply needed to be done. We were okay with torturing and assassinating terrorists, or bombing apartment buildings and cartel hideouts just so long as it prevented innocent bloodshed. We didn’t need to know much more than that.
The problem is that those agencies (and their Soviet bloc counterparts) shed plenty of innocent blood and committed plenty of atrocities of their own. If the past three years’ worth of media lies and government psy-ops haven’t convinced you of that fact, then here’s a gentle head smack: The mainstream media is lying to you.
Governments lie to you, all of them, from both sides of the aisle. Social media propagandizes you on every issue. And the higher-ups in every tentacle of government are people who’d burn their own puppies to get there.
The days of blind allegiance to government agencies (especially intelligence agencies) need to end. As more and more of their archives are exposed, the rot just gets uglier. Whatever degree of trust we once granted them has long expired and the narratives of reluctant good guys doing bad-but-necessary things is – and always was – fiction. In light of that, and in order to better understand what’s happening across the globe presently, we need to go back and examine the historical records.
Two generations of Americans have never heard of this stuff. I hadn’t. We need remember what intelligence agencies have done if we have any hope of discerning what they may currently be doing, and we don’t need to go very far back in time to do it.
Someone We Can Work With
One of the world’s most dangerous terrorists was on a losing streak and needed a win. He’d just been thwarted in Thailand and decided to up the ante. He ordered his men to Sudan and captured nearly the entire western diplomatic corps at an official gathering.
The year was 1973 and the terrorist, Ali Hassan Salameh, was a Palestinian, one of Yasser Arafat’s lead men. After some wrangling, Arafat ordered Salameh to release all but three of the hostages: the acting Belgian ambassador and two Americans, Ambassador Cleo A. Noel and his deputy chief of the U.S. mission, George C. Moore. But Salameh was given a free hand to do whatever he wanted with the remaining captives, and he wanted to brutally murder them. And he did.
If this were a Tom Clancy novel, at this point the narrative would cut to a scene of a righteous CIA analyst giving a calculating White House Situation Room a list of options. They’d argue about the best way to bring Salameh to justice – capture him, assassinate him, go to war with his organization, or maybe just drop a bomb on his villa.
But this wasn’t a Clancy novel; this is history, and the priorities of those in that Situation Room were entirely different.
In the real world a few low-level diplomats to countries most people can’t locate on the globe don’t count for much to those in power, or to the media that keeps them there. Neither do you and I, for that matter. The news at the time hardly mentioned it and the public certainly didn’t protest about it. The New York Times ran a tiny sliver of a story about it on page 2, squished between ads for wool rugs, office furniture, and Stetson hats.
But that’s not to say that the CIA wasn’t hard at work. In fact they worked overtime to locate Salameh and pin him down – not to kill or capture him…but to recruit him.
Keep in mind, this was one of the Black September terrorists who murdered the Israeli Olympians in Munich, and he was arguably one of the most wanted men in the Western world at the time. Yet the CIA was mostly concerned with picking him up as a free agent.
Fortunately, the CIA failed to put him on their payroll, in spite of lavishing him with a several week’s long CIA-funded vacation with his supermodel girlfriend in Hawaii, and an offer of a six-figure salary.
There is no report on how the family of Ambassador Cleo A. Noel felt about that. In fact, I could hardly find any histories about him at all – which is something to keep in mind the next time one of your conspiracy fact-telling friends tries to inform you about the CIA’s ties to Osama Bin Laden.
Operation Phoenix: “A sterile depersonalized murder program.”
The reports were shocking. Attackers entered villages, raped, tortured, and murdered. Some of the villagers they captured and took to hidden facilities. In the wake of each event, as the images and tales of the atrocities spread, an increased determination to escalate the war galvanized many across the globe. The monsters needed to be hunted down and killed.
The problem was that the attackers were American allies, the operations were directed by the CIA, and the victims may or may not have had anything to do with the Viet-Cong.
Designed as what the CIA called, “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.” Operation Phoenix, from 1968 to 1972, officially “neutralized” anywhere from 26,369 to 81,740 people, with journalist Seymour Hersh estimating it closer to 41,000 based on South Vietnamese official statistics. Nobody will ever know the actual numbers, because that’s how intelligence agencies roll. Separating the sensationalist accounts of Operation Phoenix from the truth is impossible. Intelligence operations are a shady business by design, created to achieve hidden goals while cloaking accountability.
Varying accounts and books have been written about Phoenix, accusations and counter-accusations levied before journalists and official inquiries. It was a major topic of discussion during the investigation by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (AKA, the Church Committee), where numerous intelligence crimes against both the American public and foreigners across the world were exposed.
Prior to that, during hearings before the House Committee on Government Operations, Ninety-fourth Congress, first session in 1973,U.S. Representative Ogden Reid and U.S. intelligence agent K. Barton Osborn had this exchange:
Mr. Reid: “…Do you have any knowledge of the inventory and prior to your departure from Vietnam were there anything representing accurate reports as to where the Vietcong Infrastructure detainees or insurgents are being held?”
Mr. Osborn: “No; as I said before, I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died.”
Mr. Reid: “They all died?”
Mr. Osborn: “They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the Vietcong, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown from helicopters.”
During the Iraq War in the early 2000s we were told of the horrors of Saadam Hussein and his brutal interrogation methods of suspected disloyalists. How many Americans know that testimonies abound detailing how the CIA funded the same kind of methods against our purported enemies? How many know that genital shock treatment and gang rape were communis modus in extracting information from suspected enemies, while CIA handlers looked on, or maybe just turned their backs? One official testimony detailed how a detainee had a dowel rod slowly inserted into his ear until it killed him. I apologize for the graphic descriptions, but there are many worse accounts I could share. The point is that our nation’s intelligence agencies did these things. They may be doing them still.
One of the CIA whistle blowers at the time, Ralph McGehee, later wrote a book detailing the CIA’s corruption then and afterward in Philippines and elsewhere in the 1980s. It’s noteworthy that in 1969 McGehee considered shooting himself after placing a sign in his Saigon apartment reading THE CIA LIES. Instead, he played good soldier and continued to do bad things for evil men.
I don’t tell you this to stoke a moral outrage over past sins. The history is what it is. I’m not making the case for reparations or to besmirch individual military units or members who oftentimes blew the whistle, or refused to comply with these events. I would like to see some accountability for those who authorized it, perpetrated it, or covered it up. As far as I can ascertain, nobody was ever charged with a crime for the murder or cover up of 26,000 – 81,000 people in Vietnamese villages. At the very least we should have every page of the official documentation released to the public unredacted. It hasn’t been. My larger goal is to remind people that this stuff happened, and that things like it are likely happening still.
“The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President’s foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying those activities. . . . Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.”
– Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA
Know that. Especially when you click on FoxNews, or Facebook, or whichever media aggregator you gravitate toward.
The history testifies to the fact that intelligence agencies commit crimes with impunity, that those responsible for governing them are derelict, and that we need to stop granting any of them carte blanche for covert and overt activities based on world events and supposed domestic threats. And on the domestic front, their records are even worse.
COINTELPRO and CHAOS
The FBI tagged another man as a dangerous subversive threat, and truth be told he may have been. So the FBI went to war with him and his sect of insurrectionist friends across the country. The feds arrested him for attempted murder in the drive-by shooting of two police officers, then hid exculpatory evidence. Despite the FBI’s best efforts toward stacking the deck, two trials ended in a hung jury and a mistrial respectively before a third finally led to his conviction. The year was 1973 and Dhoruba bin Wahad was a member of the Black Panther Party. He served 19 years before learning about COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infiltration and surveillance program designed to take out supposed communists in the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Native American groups, and pretty much anyone who said anything remotely anti-government from the mid 1950s onward.
From prison, Wahad managed to get the agency to release 300,000 documents that eventually led to his release. Additional lawsuits forced the FBI to award him over $800,000 to keep their dirty laundry out of court. We’ve got a few thousand American’s in the same boat as Wahad – known as J6ers – and we can only imagine what hidden FBI programs the history will eventually reveal about their cases.
For most Americans, the term domestic threat elicits images of foreign spies or Islamic jihadists. But to intelligence agencies past and present, that term often if not predominantly meant ordinary Americans with strong opinions. And few Americans were more opinionated than the civil rights leaders of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which meant they were public enemy #1 for the FBI – not the mafia, not communist spies, but Americans who took the Constitution literally and exercised their freedoms accordingly.
Of course, the FBI is not considered an intelligence agency, but it is, and always has been. Consider the fact that in 1959 the New York field office had four hundred agents assigned to internal security squads spying on Americans for political affiliations and subversive beliefs, like freedom of speech and equality under the law. By contrast the FBI in New York had only four special agents assigned to organized crime. The FBI, CIA, and NSA (and the list goes on) spying on ordinary Americans is not new. Beginning in the late 40s, the CIA and later the FBI took domestic spying to levels the Eastern Bloc communists would be proud of. They targeted activists, writers, pastors, students, veterans who didn’t tow the party line, journalists, teachers, and even hippies. Their infiltration methods and operations were cross-country and infected every facet of American life.
There is ample evidence to suggest that Charles Manson, the supposed mastermind of the Tate/LaBianca murders of 1969, was connected with (or at the very least protected by) Federal agencies. Dozens of felonies, including murder and his countless parole violations, were habitually swept aside by higher-ups to the maddening frustration of his parole officers. Manson’s seemingly supernatural power over his followers is eerily reminiscent of the CIA mind control experiments discovered in Project Bluebird and MK-ULTRA exposés.
“Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poison expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, that mind control ops were the future…[MK-ULTRA]’s broadest goal was ‘to influence human behavior.’ …Under its umbrella were 149 sub-projects, many involving research using unwitting participants…Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replace the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to plant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.”
– Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
An often repeated sentiment is that the 60s officially ended with the Manson murders. The nation was shocked by brainwashed hippies who could be ordered to murder the elite. Public sentiment shifted away from counter-cultural ideas like unnecessary wars, true freedom of speech, natural remedies instead of pharmaceuticals, or supernatural Jesus movements instead of dead religion in safe churches. Reading the history, one can’t help but come to the conclusion that this was exactly what the intelligence agencies wanted, and worked overtime to achieve.
Whereas COINTELPRO was the FBI’s dirty secret, the new CIA director Richard Helms, at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, launched operation CHAOS, to locate and eliminate the subversive elements tearing 60s America apart at the seams. The CIA spied on 300,000 individuals with 52 dedicated agents working on American soil against American citizens. The Church Committee investigated it but as the years went by and the final report faded from the headlines, new administrations and the agencies involved stonewalled investigations and squelched the findings and followups. When willing stooge Gerald Ford was installed in the White House (another U.S. president that nobody wanted or voted for), he removed CIA director William E. Colby for refusing to stonewall the investigations into his predecessors.
“‘Among those who directly or indirectly urged him to say less,’ Mr. Colby writes, ‘were Henry A. Kissinger, then Secretary of State; Brent Scowcroft, then the head of the National Security Council, and Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, who at the time was chairman of a Presidentially-appointed executive commission that was investigating alleged C.I.A. abuses.’”
– Seymour M. Hersh, New York Times, March 14th 1978
The do-nothing Rockefeller Commission intentionally produced no criminal convictions and little insight, while Ford sealed what documents remained and allowed untold numbers of others to be destroyed.
The countless crimes perpetrated by the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and others from the 40s on up to the present day have never been meaningfully prosecuted. And yet still there are scores of neoconservatives with platforms far and wide clamoring to give our world’s intelligence agencies even more power.
By way of deception thou shalt do war.
– motto of Israeli intelligence service MOSSAD
In October of 2023, veteran CIA operations officer Charles Faddis gave a talk at conservative Hillsdale College. The tenor of the speech was of getting the CIA back to its roots. He proposes doing that by eliminating the politically motivated, starched-collar middle managers directing the agency. And while he gets points for specifically denouncing any involvement in domestic politics, I wonder which CIA roots he wants to tap into.
“The structure of the CIA must be flattened and simplified. The organization must be field-centric. It is not the job of those in the field to wait for people in Langley to finish rounds of meetings and reviews before moving. It is the job of the people in Langley to keep up. Anything and everything that impedes those in the field accomplishment of the missions must be eliminated.”
Charles Faddis, Hillsdale College speech 2023
That’s a pretty chilling sentiment when one considers the gallons of blood on the hands of CIA field agents through its history. Intelligence agencies by design are spy agencies, and there are real world threats that necessitate the need for rough men to step into the shadows and stop them. But that’s not license for murder, or to a lesser degree, dishonorable methods of deception. I’ve often heard modern neocons ridicule agents of Hamas or the Taliban for cloaking themselves in civilian populations and clothing in order to infiltrate and kill their enemies. If that’s something we find abhorrent, it says something significant about a man like former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, who once dressed as a woman and made out with a fellow Mossad operator in order to carry out the assassinations of Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Abu Yussef – and innocents like Yussef’s wife, as well as an elderly Italian woman, in the process.
Do we want our own operators using every deception in the book to carry out operations, irrespective of international law, civilian casualties, and common morality? Where does the buck stop when authorizing those methods?
Faddis continues:
“All this needs to happen immediately upon the appointment of a new director. There can be no more blue ribbon panels of interminable outside reviews. We know what the problems are. We know how to fix them. What we have lacked until now is the willingness to do what is needed.”
No disrespect to Hillsdale College or Mr. Faddis, but the one thing that western intelligence agencies have lacked up to this point in their long histories is the foundational layer that they never bothered to construct in the first place: accountability.
This is part of an ongoing series titled, The Bad Guys. Previous articles:
The Bad Guys: Part I, History.
The Bad Guys: Part II, Abortion…and Cobra Kai.
The Bad Guys: Part III, The Feds
The Bad Guys: Part IV, The GOP
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My latest book, Those Who Face Death, is now available online wherever books are sold. This is the fourth book in the Modern War series.
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Photo Credit: President Gerald R. Ford meeting with CIA Director-designate George Bush in the Oval Office. Date 17 December 1975 Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library:
Public Domain