- failure to predict the June 1950 North Korea invasion of the South Korea
- failure to predict the “Fall of Czechoslovakia”
- failure to foresee “Tito’s defection” from Moscow
- failure to predict the “Fall of Chinese Nationalists”
- failure to foresee the Israeli victory in Palestine
- failure to judge the mood of the Latin American states at the Bogota Conference in 1948
1960-1961
CIA with the help of Mafia assasins pursued a series of plots to poison or shoot Fidel Castro according to the assassination plots proposed by Colonel Sheffield Edwards, Director of the CIA Office of Security.
1962
Prior to the 1962 Cuban crisis, the CIA reported to President Kennedy that the USSR wouldn’t risk a nuclear war. During the crisis they insisted that the USSR might risk nuclear war. In both cases their National Intelligence Estimate was grossly off-base.
1968.
The CIA supported the Ba’ah Party coup d’etat against the government of Rahman Arif, with Saddam Hussein eventually assuming power.
1980
The Reagan transition team for the CIA (November, 1980) reported the following:
“The fundamental problem confronting American security is the current dangerous condition of the Central Intelligence Agency and of national intelligence collection generally. The failure of American intelligence collection has been at the heart of faulty defense planning and misdirected foreign policy.”
The team pointed out to the following intelligence failures:
- the general and continuing failure to predict the actual size and scope of the Soviet military effort and military sector of the Russian GNP
- the consistent gross misstatement of Soviet global objectives
- the wholesale failure to understand or attempt to counteract Soviet disinformation and propaganda
- the general failure to explain the characteristics of Soviet conventional weapon systems and vessels — for example the new Russian guided missile cruises
- the wholesale failure to understand and predict the nature of the so-called wars of national liberation in Africa and Central and South America
- the consistent miscalculation regarding the effect of and general apology for massive technology transfer from West to the East
- the apparent internal failure of counterintelligence generally.
The team went on to observe.“The unhealthy symbiosis between the CIA and the Department of State is the chief underlying cause of the security position of the United States. The next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency … will be told repeatedly by virtually everyone in policy positions at the Agency that the CIA is a highly professional, non-political agency that produces ‘objective’ intelligence. Those assertions are arrant nonsense. In part out of mutual drive for individual and corporate self-preservation, the CIA has become an elitist organization which engenders unshakable loyalty among its staff. The National Intelligence Estimate process is itself a bureaucratic game. These failures are of such enormity, that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence.” 1991
The CIA appears to have failed completely to predict the Soviet empire collapse and the end of the Cold War as such. Robert Gates, the fifteenth CIA Director (and later George W.’s Defense Secretary), as much as said in his acceptance speech on November 12, 1991 that the CIA is a mafia: “The people at Langley were more than a team; they were a family. I hope this sense of family, with all that implies, can be strengthened in the time ahead.”
1992-1995.
CIA orchestrated a bomb-and-sabotage campaign against civilian and government targets in Baghdad .The civilian targets included, at least, one school bus,killing schoolchildren; a cinema, killing many people. The campaign was directed by the CIA agent Dr. Iad Allawi, later installed as prime minister by the U.S.-led coalition after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
1996
The House Permanent Select Committee om Intelligence issued a congressional report estimating that the clandestine service part of the intelligence community “easily” breaks “extremely serious laws” in countries around the world, 100,000 tiemes every year.
1998.
In 1996 the San Jose Mercury News wrote about the use of CIA aircraft, which had ferried arms to the Contras, to ship cocaine to the United States during the return flights. It was revealed also that Central America narcotics traffickers could import cocaine to the U.S. cities in the 1980’s without the interference of normal law enforcement agencies; this led to the crack cocaine epidemic, especially in poor neighborhoods of Las Angeles, and CIA intervened to prevent the prosecution of drug dealers who were helping to fund the Contras. After that the CIA Inspector General Hitz was assigned to investigate these allegations. In 1998 the DCI George Tenet declared that he was releasing the report, which showed that the “CIA did not ‘expeditiously’ cut off relations with alleged drug traffickers” and the “CIA was aware of allegations that ‘dozens of people and a number of companies connected in some fashion to the contras program’ were involved in drug trafficking”.
The Kerry Committee report also found the the U.S. State Department had paid drug ttraffickers (!).
2001
The US lost 3,000 lives at Pearl Harbor in 1941 because someone was instructed not to pay attention to certain intelligence information that was available. Who was managing the intelligence and deciding where to look closer and where to turn a blind eye on September 11, when another 3,000 American lives were lost?
2005
Arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents were issued within the European Union. The agents are alledged to have taken an Egyptian,Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a suspected terrorist, from Milan on February 17,2003 for extraordinary rendition to Egypt, where he was tortured.
German Khalid El-Masri filed a lawsuit against former CIA Direrctor George Tenet, claiming that he was transported from Macedonia to a prison in Afghanistan and held captive there by the CIA for 5 months on a case of mistaken identity.
What We Learn from CIA Practice
Nothing positive.
1. The CIA’s history up to today is a history of paralysis.
The grand problem is — our government can’t preemptively handle foreign policy and national security matters because it has no adequate intelligence information; in fact it has no idea (neither has the CIA) what such high level political intelligence information would be.
Yes, I’m talking here about the Senate Intelligence Committee which has primary oversight responsibility for the CIA in Congress. Ask the National Security Agency to start intercepting world leaders’ talks and phone calls worldwide — if we are spending this much money on NSA special intelligence, we ought to be able to intercept the calls and break the coded communications. This information would have to be the essence of the US President’s Daily Briefings and this information has to be the base of National Intelligence Daily Report and National Intelligence Estimate — which is a regular failure of the CIA — many presidents ignore these reports as trash. This information would have to be the basis of National Security Council decisions. Sorry, we don’t have a global US intelligence strategy or intelligence strategists and I’m not going to do the job while 16,000 “good ol’ boys” drink the day away at Langley.
2. I strongly recommend to stop the CIA’s secret funding right now, funding that is not made public or audited by the Congress. The CIA has its own budget but they want more, which they will waste, and some so-called “operations” are financed by secret transfers of funds from the appropriations accounts of other agencies, primarily the Defense Department.
3. You can’t reform the CIA — they are too accustomed to a comfortable existence, uncontrolled and irresponsible, because they, unlike military intelligence, do not function according to discipline, strict and understandable orders and patriotism.
The CIA has to be shut down, and its political intelligence functions and funding have to be transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Platitudes like “the transition period is complex and takes time” are not convincing — military personnel should take over the Langley headquarters with not a single CIA employee (and all the inevitable “moles”) within a week and start cleaning up the so-called top-secret papers and files, 90% of which is “information noise.” While the CIA is a “family” ruled by the so-called “four princes” (heads of four directorates), the Army is a brotherhood of patriots whose leader is the US President, the Commander-in-Chief. He can trust them — show me a single American (or anyone else) who trusts the CIA.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment