Posted on 07/02/2007 11:49:10 AM PDT by OESY
The CIA last week released a heavily redacted version of a 1973 report what it considers its fathers' sins....
Because this faction succeeded, important changes took place in the CIA. Beginning in 1975, counterintelligence - which was principally quality control of operations - became the responsibility of those conducting the operations. Freed from independent scrutiny, CIA officers gullibly accepted more information than ever from "walk-in" sources and from foreign governments' intelligence services.
Since then, whenever we have had a intelligence windfall (e.g., access to the East German Stasi files after 1989) we have learned that all or nearly all CIA sources had been controlled by hostile services. In Iraq, in 2003, CIA sources reported watching as Saddam Hussein and sons entered a house with bunker; U.S. aircraft immediately demolished it. But there had never been any bunker, never mind Saddam. As usual, the CIA's agents were doubles....
Another change was that, after 1975, the CIA would never again make a serious effort radically to change a foreign situation in America's favor, as in 1953 Iran. Indeed, in the 1980s the CIA fought against congressional and White House attempts to help the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion and against enabling Nicaragua's Contras to depose the Communist Sandinistas.
And as CIA covert action became cheap tricks, the agency often focussed on altering U.S. policy: Recall its campaigns to convince the press that Saddam was innocent of terrorism and that Czech intelligence had never seen Mohammed Atta in Prague.
But the most consequential change of all was in personnel and attitude: In all fields and functions, the CIA became the leftmost influence on foreign policy within the executive branch....
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Watching the process unfold by which Valerie Plame and associates were allowed to conduct a covert, wildly dishonest media campaign to bring down the elected government of the USA makes me think that the CIA is filled with treasonous hacks. I hope there must still be some good apples somewhere in there, but no intel organization of any competence and loyalty could have behaved as the CIA has behaved in the past few years.
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Since then, whenever we have had a intelligence windfall (e.g., access to the East German Stasi files after 1989) we have learned that all or nearly all CIA sources had been controlled by hostile services.
I hope her understanding of the intelligence business is better than her writing skills.
...or his understanding/writing skills. (Angelo, not Angela...)
The real sin of the CIA isn’t what they do, but that they do it so poorly.
I agree on both counts. Treasonous, because they tried. Hacks, because they failed.
The warrior elements, by their nature are adrenaline junkies. They often stay in the field for as long as they can, depriving their organizations of much needed leadership.
Both CIA and State seem to be filled with people who "go native" to copy all the wrong people—namely, the Communists, the Arab terrorists, academics, and reporters. (Am I being redundant?)
It's a matter of national survival that these organizations, which operate like parasitic city-states, be destroyed from the ground up and get rebuilt using entirely different people. Reading about the track record of CIA and DOS makes you think that the best minds there know a lot about things that don't matter, and nothing about the things that do.
Know many agents?
Some. What's your impression?
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