The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

There was a time when there was no CIA. The time was not back when George Washington was president, but in lately days when FDR was busy with economic matters and got his foreign intelligence from the State Department and the War Department, and maybe a rumor or two from the FBI. At that time, the greatest threat to the US was from a domestic enemy — Wall Street, et al — and the Great Depression.

When WW II began in Europe, Roosevelt was out of the loop and needed some intelligence Made in the USA. In December 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) by executive order. The nation was pretty much behind him, and spying was considered a necessity. Even Julia Child, who later became the “French Chef,” patriotically signed on with the OSS. Or, was she after those secret French recipes?

The British, with a long history of running the spy agency, MI6, were called on to train agents for the OSS. A school for gathering and assessing intelligence was set up in Canada so America could learn the trade. It is remembered with affection as the “School of Murder and Mayhem.”

During the war, the OSS actively worked with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung, two important figures in the resistance against Japanese occupation. Why not? We had been allied with Joseph Stalin against the Nazis. When the war was finally over, the OSS was disbanded, and intelligence was returned to the Departments of State and War. Secretary of State Marshall declined the honor, spying being considered inimical to the conduct of diplomacy. He may well have explained to then President Truman, in the words of a former Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Some of the former members of the OSS lobbied both Congress and the President to create an ongoing intelligence (spy) agency. Thus was created the CIA in 1947 under the National Security Act. The language of the Act, of course, specified the activities of the new agency to include collection and analysis of intelligence, but it also contained vague language that permitted “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting national security as the National Security Council may direct.” Within a year, a few international incidents and events occurred, and the NSC so directed the CIA to plan and carry out: “propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, and subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups.”

Allen Dulles, an OSS officer, was always fascinated with secrecy and covert spookery. Truman, on the other hand, thought more like a statesman. He wrote later that the CIA “was intended to keep the President informed on what was going on in the world,” not as a “Cloak and Dagger” agency. Truman rightly felt that the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen just brought out the worst in each other and, as President, he would have no part of either of them. Allen, a compulsive activist in the OSS, admitted his attraction to the world of practical (no) joking, “Once one gets a taste for it. it’s hard to drop.” But, he had to wait until 1951 to get any kind of position at the CIA and till 1953 and the Eisenhower presidency to be offered the job of Director. Once he was DCI, an early scheme was MK Ultra, a Top Secret (not just plain Secret) mind control project. He told openly of his admiration for James Bond in Ian Fleming’s spy novels. You historians may object, noting that the first, Casino Royal, came out in 1953, the same year that Dulles became DCI. Well, Dulles may have been in touch with Fleming back in the days of the OSS — he was not a spy in those days for nothing.

Dulles headed the Agency through the early “successes” of bringing down the democracies of Guatemala and Iran, and through many disasters ending with the Bay of Pigs debacle. He was fired by JFK in later 1961.

During the years when Dulles ran the cloak & dagger show (1953-61), he failed to include Murphy’s Law in his calculations. A few other disastrous results (for the CIA) include:

• the shooting down of a U2, two weeks before Eisenhower was to confer with Khrushchev at a summit meeting,
• failure to overturn the government of Jose Figueres in Costa Rica because that country had abolished its army (so, no coup),
• the loss of 212 agents dropped into Manchuria during the Korean war,
• failure to defeat (or eliminate) Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam,
• failure to remove Nasser from Egyptian leadership and overall Arab politics,
• failure to bring down Sukarno of Indonesia,
• failure to foresee the 1956 Hungarian uprising or the Soviet response by way of tanks and invasion,
• failure to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The CIA, ever since, has been burdened with a reputation for skullduggery, corruption and wastefulness, and being dependably inaccurate. Let’s continue the failure list:

• failure to predict the Tet Offensive,
• failure to predict or prevent the Iranian Revolution of 1979,
• failure to know that Pakistan was exchanging nuclear technology   for North Korean missile development from at least 2002 to 2006.
• failure to predict the hijackings of the planes that flew into the Twin  Towers
• wrong on: Iraq having WMDs, importing uranium yellowcake ore from Niger, and collaborating with Osama bin Laden,
• torturing of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram and convincing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that it was all fraternity pranks,
• running the CIA drone program of targeted killing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen and setting a precedent by mistakenly bombing a wedding party and a gathering of elders (loya jirga),
• deaths of six CIA officers in Afghanistan in 2013.

When John Brennan appeared before Congress prior to confirmation as DCI, he said he wanted the CIA to return to its roots of collecting and analyzing intelligence and suggested the Pentagon handle the drone program. He had been unhappy over the increasingly bad press the CIA has gotten for 6o years and now wanted to return to the glory days of the OSS.

So, whom do we have to do the clandestine programs of: subversion, sabotage, counter espionage (and regular espionage), kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, solicitous interrogation, bribery, and assassination?

Well, the Pentagon already has in place the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), whose Navy Seals, Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force Commandos, and supplementary civil affairs folks roam the world searching. SOCOM has over 70,000 employees, and JSOC teams already in over 100 countries, invited or not. Their budget is over $10 billion, plus a supplemental $3 billion. Might not we, as taxpayers, ask how our money is being spent? At least, we can ask why we still need the CIA.