THE CIA AND AMERICA’S PRESIDENTS
Some rarely discussed
truths shaping contemporary American democracy
John Chuckman
NOTE: PLEASE ALSO SEE MY LATER COMMENT ON AN IMPORTANT NEW PIECE OF INFORMATION, BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT WE HAVE RECEIVED AS IT CONTAINS OUR FIRST BITS OF TRUTH ABOUT THE ASSASSINATION FROM A GOVERNMENT SOURCE:
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/
Many people still think of the CIA as an agency designed to
help American presidents make informed decisions about matters outside the United
States. That was the basis for President Truman’s signing the legislation which
created the agency, and indeed it does serve that role, generally rather
inadequately, but it has become something far beyond that.
Information is certainly not something to which any
reasonable person objects, but the CIA has two houses under its roof, and it is
the operational side of the CIA which gives it a world-wide bad reputation. The
scope of undercover operations has evolved to make the CIA into a kind of civilian
army, one involving great secrecy, little accountability, and huge budgets -
altogether a dangerous development indeed for any country which regards itself
as a democracy and whose military is forbidden political activity. After all, the
CIA’s secret operational army in practice is not curtailed by restrictions
around politics, many of its tasks having been quite openly political. Yes, its
charter forbids operations in the United States, but those restrictions have
been ignored or bent countless times both in secret programs like Echelon
(monitoring telephone communications by five English-speaking allies who then
share the information obtained, a forerunner to the NSA’s recently-revealed
collection of computer data) and years of mail-opening inside the United States
or using substitutes to go around the rule, as was likely the case with the many
Mossad agents trailing the eventual perpetrators of 9/11 inside the United
States before the event.
As with all large, powerful institutions over time, the CIA
constantly seeks expansion of its means and responsibilities, much like a
growing child wanting ever more food and clothing and entertainment. This
inherent tendency, the expansion of institutional empire, is difficult enough
to control under normal circumstances, but when there are complex operations in
many countries and tens of billions in spending and many levels of secrecy and secret
multi-level files, the ability of any elected politicians - whose keenest
attention is always directed towards re-election and acquiring enough funds to
run a campaign - to exercise meaningful control and supervision becomes problematic
at best. The larger and more complex the institution becomes, the truer this
is.
Under Eisenhower, the CIA’s operational role first came to
considerable prominence, which is hardly surprising considering Eisenhower was
a former Supreme Commander in the military, the military having used many dark
operations during WWII, operations still classified in some cases. In his
farewell address, it is true, Eisenhower gave Americans a dark warning about
the “military-industrial complex,” but as President he used CIA dark operations
extensively, largely to protect American corporate interests in various parts
of the world – everything from oil interests to banana monopolies in Central
America. Perhaps, he viewed the approach
as less destructive or dangerous or likely to tarnish America’s post-WWII reputation
than “sending in the Marines,” America’s traditional gang of paid-muscle for
such tasks, but, over the long term, he was wrong, and his extensive use of CIA
operations would prove highly destructive and not just tarnish America’s image
but totally shatter it. It set in motion a number of developments and problems
which haunt America to this day.
In the 1950s, the CIA was involved in a number of operations
whose success bred hubris and professional contempt for those not part of its secret
cult, an attitude not unlike that of members of an elite fraternity or secret
society at university. The toppling of disliked but democratic governments in
Guatemala and Iran and other operations had, by about the time of President
Kennedy’s coming to power in 1960, bred an arrogant and unwarranted belief in
its ability to do almost anything it felt was needed. The case of Cuba became a
watershed for the CIA and its relationship with Presidents of the United States,
President Eisenhower and his CIA having come to believe that Castro, widely
regarded by the public as a heroic figure at the time, had turned dangerous to
American corporate and overseas interests and needed to be removed. Fairly
elaborate preparations for doing so were put into place, and parts of the southern
United States became large secret training grounds for would-be terrorists selected
from the anti-Castro exile community by CIA officers in charge of a project
which dwarfed Osama bin Laden’s later camp in the mountains of Afghanistan.
A just-elected President Kennedy was faced with a momentous
decision: whether to permit and support the invasion of neighboring Cuba, great
effort and expense having gone into the scheme. Kennedy supported it with
limited reservations, reservations which became the source of the deepest
resentment by the old boys at the CIA looking for someone to blame for the
invasion’s embarrassing public failure. The truth is the CIA’s plans were ill-considered
from the beginning, the product of those arrogant attitudes bred from
“successes” such as Guatemala. Cuba was not Guatemala, it had a far larger
population, fewer discontented elements to exploit, a cohort of soldiers
freshly-experienced from the revolution against former dictator Batista, and
Castro was widely regarded as a national hero. The Bay of Pigs invasion never
had a chance of success, and the very fact that the CIA put so many resources
into it and pressured the President to have it done shows how badly it had lost
its way by that time.
That failure of the invasion, a highly public failure, created
a serious rift between the President and the CIA. When the President, in an
unprecedented act, fired three senior CIA figures, holding them responsible for
the fiasco, we can only imagine the words which echoed in the halls of Langley.
CIA plots against Castro nevertheless carried right on. America was an
intensely hostile place on the matter of communism at that time, its press
continuously beating the drums, and no President could afford politically to
appear even slightly indifferent. Kennedy himself was not quite the peace-loving
figure some of his later admirers would hold him to be. He was a work in
progress, and he gave speeches often colored by strident martinet and jingo
phrases. Secret attempts were made to assassinate Castro, and the Kennedys, at
that time, undoubtedly would have been pleased had they succeeded.
Again, in some these attempts, the CIA went to great and
genuinely weird lengths, including an arrangement with Mafia figures, something
the public did not know until the 1975 Church Committee looking into illegality
in CIA operations. Rumors and threats of another invasion, likely often fed by
the CIA itself as psychological warfare against Cuba, led to the confrontation
known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962. Here, more than ever, the
President was ill-served by the CIA and the Pentagon. They wanted an immediate
invasion of Cuba when U2 spy cameras detected what appeared to be missile
installations under construction, utterly unaware that Russia already had battlefield-ready
tactical nuclear weapons mounted on short-range missiles ready to repel an
invasion.
The 1975 Church Senate Committee looking into earlier
illegality came into being because a number of sources were suggesting the CIA
had been engaged in assassination and other dark practices, matters which at
that time quite upset the general public and some decent politicians. The names
in rumors included Lumumba of Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Diem of
Vietnam, Schneider of Chile, and others, but since only part of the Church
Report was released we cannot know the full extent of what had been going on.
Another possible name is Dag Hammarskjöld of the UN. It is perhaps a key measure of how far things
have deteriorated with the CIA that the Church Committee today appears almost naïve.
Following the committee’s report, President Ford issued an Executive Order
banning assassinations. This was replaced just a few years later by an
Executive Order of Ronald Reagan’s, Reagan being a great fan of dark operations,
having appointed one of the more dangerous men ever to hold the title of CIA
Director, William Casey.
The CIA, of course, now runs a regular assassination air
force which has killed thousands of innocent people apart from the intended
targets, themselves individuals proved guilty of nothing under law. The CIA
today thinks nothing of using mass killing to reach desired goals, the Maidan
shootings of innocent people demonstrating in Kiev being an outstanding example,
shootings which precipitated a coup last year in Ukraine against an elected
government. And then there are the trained and armed maniacs which were set
loose upon the people of Syria to do pretty much whatever they pleased.
Kennedy managed to resist demands for invasion in 1962,
perhaps his one great achievement as President, and he took another path which
eventually led to an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. That
agreement, which included America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, made Kennedy a
marked man. He was hated by the fanatical and well-armed Cuban émigré
community, and he was hated by all the men who had devoted a fair part of their
lives to eliminating Castro, the émigrés’ recruiters, trainers, handlers, and
suppliers - members all of the CIA country club set whose commie-hatred was so
intense it could make the veins in their foreheads pop. Some at the CIA were undoubtedly
even further irked by backchannel communications which opened up between Kennedy
and Khrushchev, and tentative efforts to open something of that nature with
Castro. They weren’t supposed to know about these efforts, but they almost
certainly did.
It is difficult today for people to grasp the intensity of
anti-communist and anti-Castro feelings that pervaded America’s establishment
in 1963, more resembling a religious hysteria than political views. One thing
is absolutely clear, Kennedy’s assassination was about Cuba, and it was
conceived out of a simmering conviction that Kennedy literally was not fit to
be President. No important person who ever expressed a quiet opinion on the
matter – including Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon,
and some members of the Warren Commission - ever believed the fantasy story fashioned
by the Warren Commission. Neither did informed observers abroad – the Russian
and French governments for example later expressed their views - as well as a
great many ordinary Americans.
Other facts about Kennedy undoubtedly added to the volatile
reactions of the plotters, facts not known by the public until decades later, one
fact in particular was his relatively long and intense affair with Mary Pinchot
Meyer, a highly intelligent woman, socialite, and former wife of a senior CIA
agent, Cord Meyer, who for a time ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
Kennedy and Mary Meyer are said to have had long talks about world affairs and
prospects for peace, and she also is said to have introduced Kennedy to
marijuana and LSD, he, given his chronic back pain, willing to try almost
anything. She kept a diary which was known to the CIA’s James Angleton because
he was discovered searching for it after her mysterious, professional hit-style
murder in 1964 (small calibre bullet by a gun held to the head). One can only
imagine the raised eyebrows of CIA officials when they learned about drugs and
Mary’s influence on Kennedy (could some of their numerous meetings possibly not
have been bugged?). Double betrayal over Cuba, backchannel communications with
Russia, and drugs and sex with an artistic, intellectual type – those surely
would have made the men who decided the fates of leaders in much lesser places
extremely uneasy about the future.
My focus is not the assassination, but I’ve gone into some
length because I believe it was a defining event in relations between future
Presidents and the CIA. After this, every President would work under its rather
frightening shadow.
Lyndon Johnson was ready from day one to give the CIA
anything it wanted. Whether Johnson was involved in the assassination as some plausibly
believe, or whether he was just intimidated by those involved – after all, like
all bullies, Johnson was at heart a coward as he demonstrated numerous times.
He wasn’t long in launching the most vicious and pointless war since World War
II with the cheap trick of a story about an attack upon American ships. The CIA
got right into the fun in 1965 with its Operation Phoenix, which over some
years involved tens of thousands of silent assassinations of village leaders
and others by night-crawling Special Forces soldiers guided to their targets by
CIA agents.
Like all the CIA’s more lunatic operations - this one just kept
running until at least 1972 - chalking up a toll of murders estimated as high
as 40,000 and proving a complete failure in its goal of securing America’s
artificial rump-state of South Vietnam. It was madness to be involved in
Vietnam, and it proved in the end infinitely more embarrassing and destructive to
America’s morale and reputation than the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then more a
few people who knew and worked with Johnson have said that he was pretty much
mad himself. The CIA fed Johnson the kind of things he wanted to hear, but the
War in Vietnam was always characterized by poor intelligence, and when the Viet
Cong and North Vietnamese launched the huge, surprise of the Tet Offensive in
early 1968, Washington was hit by an earthquake, and a lot of people suddenly understood
Vietnam was a lost cause. Johnson, always the coward, his party starting to
split into factions over the matter, announced his resignation not long after.
Of course, the truth is that the information side of the
CIA’s house has never been very good at its work. Apart from the abject
failures of Vietnam, the CIA is said to have never once got the most critical
assessments of the Cold War era, those of the Soviet Union’s economic and
military strength, anywhere close to accurate. There were many reasons for
that, but the perceived need to exaggerate your enemy’s strength to inflate the
size of CIA budgets was an important one. Whether Big Intelligence ever really
works in obtaining reliable information and reliable information which will be
used by politicians is certainly a topic open for discussion. The most
successful information-gathering intelligence service of the early Cold War,
the KGB, often had its sometimes remarkable material questioned or cast aside
by Stalin.
Richard Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal likely was
served up by CIA dirty tricks. The Watergate break-in was in mid-1972, although
it took more than two years before Nixon resigned. Some of the old CIA hands
who worked for Nixon’s secret “plumber’s unit,” a private operations group
which did jobs like breaking in to the Watergate Hotel offices of the
Democrats, had a history going back to the assassination. They undoubtedly kept
Langley informed of what steps they were being ordered to take. Nixon was a
problem for some of the CIA’s darkest secrets: he was jealous and bitter
towards the Kennedys for beating him in the 1960 election (he also knew election
fraud was used), and he had an obsessive curiosity about the assassination, having
made a number of attempts to ascertain just what happened for which he was
rebuffed.
A possible second reason for the CIA’s wanting to dump Nixon
was the deteriorated situation in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed
early in 1973, however there is evidence that Nixon and Kissinger actually put
forward their proposals in the hope that they would be rejected and Congress
then would allow them a free hand in seeking a clearer victory. But by that
time even the CIA recognized the war in Vietnam could not be won by
conventional means and that the interests of the United States were being
damaged by its continuation. Despite press blurbs about peace, Nixon always desperately
wanted to triumph in Vietnam, having gone so far in secret as to discuss the
possibility of using nuclear weapons on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Despite various speculations, we have never learned just
what Nixon’s burglars were after at the Watergate, and the reason for that may
just well be the CIA’s having baited him with false information about what
might be discovered there. The job very likely was deliberately sabotaged when
old CIA hands do things like sloppy door-taping. The neat little trick alerted
a security guard and led to the whole long Watergate Affair and Nixon’s
eventual resignation, just the kind of neat outcome operations-types love to
chuckle over at expense account lunches.
George H. W. Bush senior, the man for whom the Langley
headquarters is named was more than a short-term appointed CIA Director. He had
a long but never acknowledged background in CIA, a fact which has come to light
from a few references in obscure documents obtained by assassination
researchers over decades. He almost certainly was involved with the operations
against Castro before the assassination. He was likely America’s first official
CIA President. One of the regular activities of the CIA abroad is to pay secret
pensions to likely future leaders in select countries so that they will be both
beholden and in a position to be compromised. They do this in dozens of
significant countries as part of an effort to control future relations with
America. So why not take a similar approach to leadership inside the United States?
The first clear example was George H. W. Bush whose single term as President gave
the CIA several schemes abroad dear to their hearts, including setting up
Saddam Hussein for invasion after his foolish invasion of Kuwait (done
following the seeming approval of the United States’ ambassador to Iraq), and
the invasion of Panama in 1989. Panama’s General Noriega had apparently done
the unforgivable thing of setting up “honey traps” in which American diplomats
and CIA officials were photographed having sex, giving Noriega a powerful
weapon against Washington’s interference. So he was set up on drug charges -
which may or may not have been true, but they were not the business of American
justice - other provocations were arranged like a silly stunt about an American
sailor being beaten up, and Noriega’s country promptly was invaded.
Of course George Bush Junior was not CIA, lacking the
fundamental requirement of a decent brain. But his presidency was effectively America’s
first dual presidency, with Dick Cheney serving as senior partner despite his
lesser title, and Dick Cheney was CIA-connected, having served as Secretary of
Defense under George Bush’s father, overseen such operations as Desert Storm,
and after George H. W.’s election defeat, serving as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton,
a gigantic oil services company which operates all over the globe. Such
companies - in much the same fashion as large American news organizations such
as Time-Life, CBS, or The New York Times - notoriously are well connected with
the CIA. Because companies like Halliburton operate in scores of countries, deal
with strategic resources, travel to remote sites, and often have access to important
figures, they provide perfect cover for CIA agents and other intelligence assets.
The Bush-Cheney period was certainly a golden one for the CIA in terms of
institutional growth and new projects. Many ugly projects now making our world
a less secure place were started in this period.
The CIA now is so firmly entrenched and so immensely well
financed – much of it off the books, including everything from secret budget
items to peddling drugs and weapons – that it is all but impossible for a
president to oppose it the way Kennedy did. Obama, who has proved himself a fairly
weak character from the start, certainly has given the CIA anything it wants.
The dirty business of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is one project. The coup in
Ukraine is another. The pushing of NATO’s face right against Russia’s borders
is still another. Several attempted coups in Venezuela are still more. And the
creation of a drone air force for extrajudicial killing in half a dozen
countries is yet another. They don’t resemble projects we would expect from a
smiley-faced, intelligent man who sometimes wore sandals and refused to wear a
flag pin on his lapel during his first election campaign.
More than one observer has speculated about Obama’s being
CIA, and there are significant holes in his resume which could be accounted for
by his involvement. He would have been an attractive candidate for several
reasons. Obama is bright, and the CIA employs few blacks in its important jobs.
He also might have been viewed as a good political prospect for the future in
just the way foreign politicians are selected for secret pensions. After all,
before he was elected, there were stories about people meeting this smart and
(superficially) charming man and remarking that they may just have met a future
president.
If Obama is not actually CIA, then he is so intimidated that
he pretty much rubber stamps their projects. A young, inexperienced President
must always be mindful of that other young President whose head was half blown
off in the streets of Dallas. Moreover, there are some shady areas in Obama’s
background around drugs and perhaps other matters which could be politically
compromising. The CIA is perfectly capable of using anything of that nature for
political exposure while making it look as though it came from elsewhere.
So, when people write of America’s secret government or of
its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It
is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone’s being elected
President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to
resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is
kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to
change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose
any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but
she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence
would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President’s case, it would be
either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end.
