Mommy, what is the CIA?

[frank frankly]

I must admit I never investigated this organization until the 2000 Selection.

What is this Central Intelligence Agency?

Who comprises it?

What are its functions?

Just throwing this bone out there...please chew.

[Octafish]

1. Started out as intel co-ordinators.

Then the agency became gatherers.
Then CIA became actors.
Somwhere along the way, democracy got tossed.

[frank frankly]

4. but surely there is a legitimate faction of this agency

right? some of it isn't drug running assasins...right?

[kiahzero]

6. The CIA does still gather information

Check out the CIA website, especially the CIA factbook. Great for research papers.

[Octafish]

23. President Truman was advised the OSS needed to evolve to fight the Reds.

The Office of Strategic Services was established in World War II to serve as the US intelligence and counter-intelligence arm of the federal government. After beating the fascists, Truman began to close the OSS down. Then, the big thing became fighting the Red Menace, which was a very real threat to the US -- read Solzhenitsyn to discover what kind an evil bastard Josef Stalin was (BFEE scale).

So, Uncle Sam organized the National Security Act of 1947. It created the national security council apparatus and founded an organization, using many of the people and facilities of the OSS, called the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the guys who helped draft all this was presidential advisor Clark "BCCI" Clifford.

Things may've gone as intended, but the top CIA brass thought they needed more help in fighting the commies. Who'd they bring in? General Rheinhard Gehlen, he was the top NAZI spymaster on the Eastern Front. Gehlen promised to bring his contacts and agents to bear on the Reds on behalf of the US. In return, we protected tens of thousands of Nazi Germany's vilest murderers.

Here's a nice overview:

CIA'S WORST KEPT SECRET

By Martin A. Lee
Consortium News

"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ... unprejudiced mind..."

That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties," a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs.

Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/051601a.html

[Webster Green]

2. Gun runners, drug smugglers, assasins, and other low lifes.....

whose mission is to thwart any government that doesn't support U.S. corporate fascism worldwide.

[kiahzero]

13. Yup... that's all the CIA does, alright

And people wonder why the "left hates America" meme is so prominent.

[frank frankly]

16. that is certainly a part of it

Golden Triangle
Mena Arkansas
Crack in LA

they've been (or part of them) quite despicable

[kiahzero]

17. No argument the CIA has done schevy things

The OP stated that it was the ONLY thing they did. That's what irritated me.

[frank frankly]

18. I know

I'm trying to figure out what is the complete picture

although, the Crack into LA thing makes me maybe hate them all

working on it...

:shrug:

[kiahzero]

19. Not too sure about that one

The evidence I've seen never rose above the level of... excuse the pun... crackpot conspiracy theory. I didn't look too deeply into it, though.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

3. This link will do for starters...

<http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/ciahist.htm>

[kiahzero]

5. Ironically, we just discussed the CIA in my American Foreign Policy class

CIA was created in the 1950s, in the midst of restructuring the government after WWII... I believe it was the National Security Act which created it.

Its original mandate was to collect, analyze, and disseminate information about foreign countries. Its secondary purpose, and the one that most people are more familiar with, is covert ops. This function was borne out of the percieved need to influence an Italian election.

The covert ops function grew dramatically under the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower's administration was regarded as doing nothing against communism, but in fact used the CIA extensively to take out communists and "communist sympathizers."

One example, Guatemala, seems appropriate for the times. Guatemala's president nationalized the plantations of United Fruit Company. Many people in the company were in the higher echelons of government. There were rumors of the president being a communist sympathizer - these officials told Eisenhower that the president was a communist. Since Eisenhower was so extremely anti-communist, it didn't take much more than that to authorize the coup.

[mobuto]

9. United Fruit Company

aka Chiquita Brands

aka "La Pulpo" - the octopus - for the way its many arms controlled everything.

[bobbieinok]

was it developed out of the OSS in WWII?

...

[Kathy in Cambridge]

24. Guatemala Coup

I remember a good book called "Bitter Fruit" by Stephen Kinzer that really exposes the machinations of the coup. You may find it interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674075900/103-8435749-4657447?v=glance

[mobuto]

7. The Purpose of the CIA

has long been to promote full employment among the marginal intelligentsia.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

12. lol! fantastic definition! nt

[frank frankly]

8. Who are the agents?

where do they come from?

[kiahzero]

10. Um...

not sure how to answer that one.

Civilians and military can work for the CIA, if that's what you're asking.

[bobbieinok]

11. early on many from ivy league schools, like British intelligence

agents from Oxford and Cambridge

[bobbieinok]

14. AND what were the roles of Allen and George Foster Dulles

in the CIA, the govt, and the Cold War????

[kiahzero]

15. Sec. Defense and head of the CIA

I don't remember whom was which. The Sec. Defense one had ties with the aforementioned United Fruit Company, so they at least had involvement with the Guatemala coup.

[mobuto]

20. Secretary of State and CIA Director

Allen Dulles was Director of Central Intelligence.

John Foster Dulles (not George) was Secretary of State.

Both were bad.

[kiahzero]

21. Thanks (n/t)

[sweetheart]

22. You mean the guatemala genocide?

sponsored by the US against the native peoples there, to keep up with the track record of murdering native indian populations... indeed.

The CIA is a criminal waste of taxes. It is designed to provide institutional knowledge and protection from suprise attack, to act as a proactive arm of politics and statesmanship that war be avoided and huge loss of life ended.

Instead the incompetents stood by in lethargic incompetence whilst the nation was attacked to 3000 deaths.... and instead of firing those responsible, bush promoted them to do it again. The CIA, NSA and other supersecret incompetent orgs out there are a total waste of money, and should be fired and dissolved for the "nothing" that they do.

They started the civil war in lebannon. They made a mess in iran that we are still living with. Guatemala as well, chile as well,...
geesh, this organiation is responsible for nothing but a bunch of
mass murders and fuckups across the planet....

Well, when nobody in american government is wrong, even when they are, it sorta screws up the metric of knowing when the organization has become incompetent.

Hell, were i president in bush's term, i would have fired every single manager/leader in the entire CIA, FBI and NSA for gross derelition of duty. Then i would have made arrangements to de-fund these orrganizations completely... and finally, would have created a new intelligences service, hiring back only those few competent amongst all the hoarde of boobs that suck on the taxpayer for no real result except incompetence, genocide and murder.

[joyautumn]

25. Created by Prescott Bush's lifelong S&B buddy

It was created by Robert Lovett, a partner of Prescott Bush (dubya's grampa) at Brown Brothers Harriman and a fellow Skull and Bones member (tapped by Prescott Bush, actually). Lovett created and ran the Office of Special Services (OSS -- think Richard Perle and Office of Special Plans) during WWII, then converted it into the CIA after the war.

http://www.tarpley.net/bush4.htm

Skull and Bones members have been old-boy-networked into top echelons of the CIA ever since.

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Skull_Bones_2.htm

Lovett continued to play a key role in U.S. war, intelligence and covert operations into the sixties, when he was in charge of planning terror-bombing campaigns in Vietnam.

This is why I don't trust Kerry on national security, because I think Kerry is way too cagey about where he really stands on stuff -- like he's hiding something, and that doesn't sit well with me for a member of a secret society intimately tied up with the CIA.

GHW Bush was the first President who had been CIA Director, and his father had tapped Lovett into Skull and Bones, and then been business partners with him prior to Lovett's creation of the CIA.

When Kerry was a sophomore at Yale, John Heinz (Kerry's wife's deceased first husband) joined Skull and Bones and Lieberman was tapped by Skull and Bones the same year but joined Scroll and Key instead. When Kerry was tapped, Dubya was a sophomore. When Dubya was tapped, Howard Dean was a Freshman and he doesn't appear on any Skull and Bones list but his father worked for the China Naval Air Command, a CIA operation whose VP was Theodore Roosevelt's grandson Quentin II (more on that in a different post). Dean's father was also V.P. of Dean Witter Reynolds, and Dean Witter was Skull and Bones.

I don't think we should have presidents whose familes are tied up with the CIA like that, because only the President has the power to hold the CIA accountable -- Congress can be kept in the dark about everything the CIA does if the President chooses to make it so. Where is the check and balance?

What is the purpose of the CIA? To defend America's interests abroad through covert operations. The question is, who is deciding what America's interests are for them? Rich powerful families like the Forbes, the Deans, the Bushes, the Heinzes, etc.

[frank frankly]

26. do you find it possible that Kerry is not beholden to them?

no offense, please.

i, too, can see that Kerry is from this part of the pool.
i just think maybe he isn't like them.
part of me believes in him.

[diamond14]

27. right after the Vietnam war, Kerry wanted to dismantle the CIA

as he put it, because OUR soldiers were conducting a WAR in Vietnam, and Kerry became very aware that the CIA was conducting an entirely different war in Laos...every President needs to have connections to the CIA...the lack thereof is one of the current bush* BIG mistakes...pappy bush was the head of the CIA once, in fact, the whole CIA center is named after him...the "George H.W. Bush Intelligence Center"....pappy bush knew how to KILL and saddam is almost entirely his creation...it was also pappy bush that built up the CIA into the monster it is today....

here's a short summary of what the CIA does...
watch flash video here...very short two minute history of saddam hussein and the USA, highlightling the CIA, which was headed by pappy bush* and donald rumsfeld, who served under reagun/bush...it's an eye-opener...

http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html


relentlessly pursuing BLOOD FOR OIL....

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah
being chauffeured by the shrub....

photo taken at the exotic expensive Egyptian resort
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt
June 03, 2003....shortly after the aircraft stunt on May 01, 2003

[frank frankly]

28. I hear that!

nice words yo!

[joyautumn]

37. of course not

of course i can't believe he's not beholden to them. skull and bones is like the mafia insofar as its members are involved in many secret business dealings and every member is supposed to be loyal to the group's common interests. where do you think the Carlyle Group is coming from, and Halliburton?

http://www.halliburton.com/about/history_entrep.jsp

Halliburton, Brown and Root is the result of a 1957 merger of Halliburton and Brown and Root, which was Prescott Bush and Robert Lovett's company. At least seven members of the Cheney clan are Skull and Bones, and Cheney isn't only because he dropped out of Yale to go seek his fortune. Lieberman was tapped to be in Skull and Bones, but joined Scroll and Key instead. Dean's father and grandfather both went to Yale -- Dean's father had CIA/S&B connections (see my post on this topic).

Skull and Bones is a business club that started with the Opium Trade in China back in the 1830's. John Kerry's great-grandfather on his mother's side (the Forbes side) was Rev. John Murray Forbes, who inherited the family business in China and ran it for 25 years. The family business? Opium Trade, of course.

http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/johnforbes.html

Look into every one of these guys' backgrounds and you will find the history of Skull and Bones -- opium trade in China in the nineteenth century, OSS and CIA in the twentieth. If you read through the link above you'll see mention also that John Murray Forbes carried out secret missions for President Lincoln. He was an intelligence operative. My favorite bit, though, is the part about how he decided to use the freed slaves as scabs to break union strikes, and to break the anti-draft uprising during the Civil War (immigrants, mostly Irish, were shanghaied, often right off the boat once they arrived, and sent to die in the Civil War). So much for Kerry's Irish roots. Ah, what happened to the good old Republican Party of Lincoln, who freed the slaves to use them as cannon fodder, and to pit against unions and immigrants. cannon fodder -- John Murray Forbes also "formed the Committee of One Hundred for Promoting the Use of Negroes as Soldiers" (see link above).

Look, I believe one can truly turn one's back on the family business and all it stands for. I believe in John Robbins, for example:

http://www.foodrevolution.org/

He cut all ties to the Baskin-Robbins fortune he was heir to, and has campaigned for healthy food and better food policy ever since. He's made it his life's work to fight everything his family's business stands for.

So could Kerry do that too? Sure, but if he was going to, he would have done it long ago. Perhaps his anti-war activism genuinely was an attempt to break away, but his record since then has shown an inexorable shift back into the family fold. Let me ask you this -- are you prepared to devote your life to destroying your family name? And I don't know, but I think the CIA and the old Opium Trade families deal with disloyalty rather differently than the ice cream folks.

Kerry obviously had courage chasing and killing that Viet Cong, but that really is a completely different kind of courage than standing up against your own powerful family and their entire network of power, who could destroy you in more ways than just death. He doesn't have that kind of courage -- if he did, we would have heard him denouncing his family, Skull and Bones, and exposing all their secrets long ago. He hasn't, not even in his young supposedly radical days, and he won't as President.

[knight_of_the_star]

34. OSS wasn't like the OSP

OSS was more akin to MI5 and MI6. And they were GOOD at what they did fighting Hitler and Tojo.

[bpilgrim]

29. President Truman's directive establishing CIG on 22 January 1946 created

the first civilian, centralized, nondepartmental intelligence agency in American history. His purpose was to end the separate cabinet departments' monopoly over intelligence information, a longstanding phenomenon that he believed had contributed to Japan's ability to launch the surprise attack against Pearl Harbor. As he stated in his memoirs, "In those days the military did not know everything the State Department knew, and the diplomats did not have access to all the Army and Navy knew." Truman also was irked because reports came across his desk "on the same subject at different times from the various departments, and these reports often conflicted." He intended that CIA, when it replaced CIG in September 1947, also would address these concerns.

more...
http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/coldwaryrs/foreword.html

so... whaddaya know, privatization of our gov was good for the dems as well way back in the day.

$BS = {
Pearl Harbor -> CIA,
911 -> HOMELAND SECURITY,
??? -> MILITARIZATION,
WWIV -> sayonara };



peace

[Silverhair]

30. Look at all the hatred of the CIA in the responses. Now is it any...

wonder that nobody really believes that the left really cares that a CIA agent was exposed in the Palme affair. It is seen as a convienent vehicle to attack Bush with, and nothing more.

[bpilgrim]

31. this was an agent worging for all of us, tracking WMD

this is simply UNBELIEVABLE to ALL AMERICANS not just the 'right' or 'left'

FROGMARCH :bounce:

peace

[hang a left]

33. Actually, the more I have been thinking about it, I think the whole

Plame affair was a set-up show from the get go. I believe that it was the first event to get the ball rolling down hill for scumbush and company. I think he was selected for a reason, he has served his purpose he is going down. To be replaced by the next selected one. But don't mind me Silverhair, I'm a mihopper and I know how you feel about those.

[frank frankly]

39. I don't fall into your stereotype. I don't throw baby with bathwater

and, no, I don't hate America first.

[mitchum]

32. A cancer on American democracy

[joyautumn]

35. Howard Dean's CIA connection

Some googling turned up the fact that Howard Dean comes from a rich NY family going back to the whaling trade -- that's exactly the same trade that made the Forbes of Boston rich, and back then the leading Boston and NY familes in the same trade would surely know each other. So Kerry and Dean's familes are connected.

But that's an aside to this post. Here's the kicker. Howard Dean's father, Howard Brush Dean II, could not serve in WWII because of a medical problem -- sound familiar? Instead, he went to work as a manager for Pan-Am Airways in Africa ('41-'43) then China National Aviation Corporation ('43-'46), which was a joint U.S./Chinese military air cargo support operation (the famed "flying tigers") critical to the Allied war effort against Japan. (http://www.cnac.org/dean01.htm) CNAC's VP and Director was Quentin Roosevelt II, grandson of Pres. Teddy Roosevelt, now openly acknowledged to have been a CIA agent like his father of the same name, and like his father was shot down (Quentin I in '18, Quentin II in '49). Well, obviously there's nothing sinister about working on secret operations during WWII, tons of stuff was secret then. Dean was an Operations Clerk, in a relatively small operation with a couple hundred people in all.

The plot thickens with Dean's younger brother Charles' disappearance in Laos in '74 -- killed because the Laotions thought he was a spy. When asked if they thought Charles was working for the CIA, the Dean family said they aren't sure. But the year after Charles disappeared, Howard II (dad) contacted his old Yale classmate (the Deans go back 3 generations at Yale like the Bushes) Charles Sheldon Whitehouse (Yale and Skull and Bones '47), who just happened to be serving as U.S. Ambassador to Laos then, as well as other contacts in southeast Asia he had from his WWII days at CNAC. Pretty soon he was able to find out that Charles was dead -- most MIA families don't have connections that can give them that kind of info so quickly, most are still waiting to find out.

In short, Dean's family is old money and has been intimately connected to the CIA, if not directly on the CIA payroll (even they say they're "not sure" if they are, so what are we to think?). As I said in my other post, I think any President with family connections to the CIA has a conflict of interest, since the President is the only check and balance to the CIA.

here are links:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/story/0,9171,1101030811-472817,00.html
(search for 'cia' or 'Charles' for paragraph on family's uncertainty)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/politics/campaigns/28DEAN.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&en=4efc97e1efc18ce0&ex=1077339600
http://www.cnac.org/roosevelt01.htm

[Media_Lies_Daily]

36. One correction. The famed "Flying Tigers" were definitely not a...

..."cargo support operation". Here are a few links about the Flying Tigers:

<http://www.flyingtigersavg.com/tiger1.htm>

<http://www.danford.net/avg.htm>


I think what you're referring to as a "cargo support operation" was actually known as "Flying the Hump". My uncle was a radio operator for more than 80 missions on one of the unarmed C-46/47 cargo planes that flew supplies into China. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster for his efforts.

<http://www.comcar.org/comcarhome.htm>

<http://www.palletmastersworkshop.com/hump.html>

<http://www.afa.org/magazine/1991/0391hump.asp>

[joyautumn]

38. thanks

thanks for the correction!

[ConsAreLiars]

40. Essentially, understanding the CIA is understanding how things work- read

THE SECRET TEAM
The CIA
and Its Allies
in Control of the United
States and the World

by L. FLETCHER PROUTY
Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.)


online at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html

[frank frankly]

41. thanks

i printed some of the book and will read tomorrow!

:hi:

[ConsAreLiars]

42. This book is written from a single point of view, so it is a bit limited.

But it goes to the mechanics very well.

If you are using Mozilla or a variant like Firefox (Yay!) there is a plugin called Spiderzilla that will download a whole site for later offline viewing. I've used this for books like this one and it also allows me to send this downloaded mirror to others as a part of a compilation on a CD.

There are more resources, but this "insider" viewpoint is very instructive.