Many of the security dilemmas the U.S. now faces stem from the CIA's actions abroad — here are a handful you should know about.
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From its founding in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been charged with collecting and analyzing information that foreign organizations and governments would prefer to keep secret. By necessity, most of what the CIA does is strictly secret and not subject to the same standards of accountability as other federal agencies.
Post 9/11, the CIA is accountable to the Department of Homeland Security, meaning that someone is officially keeping an eye on them, but in the Agency’s early days, all bets were off.
Operating for over 50 years in a largely unregulated atmosphere of secrecy and skullduggery, the CIA stood behind some of the most sinister “covert” actions ever recorded. With practically no one around to correct the Agency’s mistakes (and crimes against humanity), the CIA spent decades engendering crisis around the world — many of which have helped shape global security dilemmas we currently face.
Operation Ajax
Flickr/Jahangir Razmi
In 1951, a major power struggle was brewing in Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi, having survived an assassination attempt a few years earlier, was centralizing Iran’s government and operating as a head of state. His prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, headed an opposing coalition of democrats and Islamists who wanted to reduce the Shah to a European-style figurehead.
Central to their plans was an audit of the British national oil company, known as AIOC, which they viewed as an agent of foreign imperialism in Iran.
When AIOC balked at opening its books, Mossadegh seized power and nationalized the company. The British, worried that they would lose critical oil supply as they soldiered on in the Cold War, asked for help from the United States.
In 1953, the new Eisenhower Administration and CIA chief John Foster Dulles were receptive. Despite the fact that the United States had once overthrown a monarch and seized assets belonging to the British Crown, they perceived Mossadegh’s move as the first step in a communist revolution. Something had to be done to “save” Iran from the democratically-elected Mossadegh, and to return a hereditary monarch to his throne.
Wikimedia CommonsAmerican President Jimmy Carter and Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran toast following a formal dinner in the Niavaran Palace in Tehran, Iran.
Thus came Operation Ajax, a British-funded, American-led coup against Mossadegh. AIOC kicked in $25,000 for bribes to Iranian officials and mafia dons, who then staged astroturf protests in major Iranian cities. CIA agents on the ground sent huge amounts of encrypted traffic through portable radios to give the impression that a huge popular army had formed and was converging on Tehran.
Facing what he thought was a civil war, Mossadegh gave up and resigned. His successor returned the Shah to his throne and oil profits to the British. The Shah went on to consolidate his rule with secret police, imprisonment without trial for suspected traitors, and a propaganda effort so obscene that in 1962 author Leonard Binder described the Shah’s public image as “omniscient and a little more than human.”
Whatever else he was, Reza Pahlavi wasn’t omniscient. Under his nose, the communists and Islamists in his country were forming a fatal alliance. After nearly 26 years of absolute rule, riots and mass protests finally drove the Shah out of power. In the chaos that followed, tens of thousands of the Shah’s supporters were massacred.
Once in power, the Ayatollah Khomeini turned on his left-wing supporters and killed or imprisoned tens of thousands more. The American Embassy was overrun and a hostage drama began that would wreck Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Seeing Iran’s weakness, Iraq invaded from the west and initiated a chain of events in Iraq that is still unfolding.
In 2013, the CIA admitted it had organized and overseen the 1953 coup that made the eventual revolution and radicalization of Iran all but inevitable.
The Assassins’ University
Twitter/teleSUR English
Fresh off of its “success” in Iran, the CIA spent much of the 1950s overthrowing governments that displeased American interests all over the world.
In 1954, the CIA engineered the takedown of Guatemala’s government. In 1955, it toppled Cambodia’s government. In 1958, ’59, and ’60 it overthrew a series of governments in Laos. From 1960 to 1963, the target was Ecuador. In 1960, it was Congo. In 1962-64, it was Brazil, then the Dominican Republic, then Bolivia, and then Indonesia.
The template the Agency followed was almost identical everywhere: Local client government loses power to a populist front that has the votes to win power, populists talk about nationalizing foreign assets or renegotiating resource deals, American or European companies bemoan the supposed communist threat, and the CIA swings into action to “restore democracy” and seize profits with varying degrees of violence.
Wikimedia Commons
Around this time, the Agency referred to itself in internal documents by the codename “KUBARK.” In an effort to streamline its terrorizing acts around the world, in 1963 the CIA published what became known as the KUBARK Manual, a 128-page how-to guide for torturing prisoners and extracting information from unwilling captives.
In this environment, where simple espionage had seemingly given way to uncontrolled secret warfare against democratically elected politicians in friendly countries, it’s not surprising that the CIA and Defense Department would collaborate to set up the School of the Americas, a kind of advanced training academy for would-be revolutionaries and assassins on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia.
Students at this school met Green Berets who taught them all about sabotage, close combat, sniping, torture methods, and the various ins and outs of staging coups. Many of the school’s graduates — including Manuel Noriega and Emilio Eduardo Massera — would go on to found Latin American drug cartels and dictators who presided over mass killings and disappearances.
The school still runs to this day. In July of this year, the Democratic Party added the school’s closure to its party platform, writing that:
“Our support of democracies and civilian governments in the Western Hemisphere includes our belief that their military and police forces should never be involved in the political process, and therefore we will reinstate the 2000 Congressional mandate to close the School of the Americas.”
Chile’s Own September 11th
OFF/AFP/Getty ImagesChilean Army troops positioned on a rooftop fire on the La Moneda Palace 11 September 1973 in Santiago, during the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Nowhere was the School of the Americas’ approach to “international cooperation” more clearly on display than in Pinochet’s Chile.
In 1970, the voters in Chile had a choice of five presidential candidates. They chose Salvador Allende, a center-left developmentalist politician who had run on a populist platform. This alarmed then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was recorded at the time as saying: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
Wikimedia CommonsSalvador Allende
Kissinger froze the CIA out of much of his plotting in Chile. The secretary of state never trusted the CIA, and there’s every reason to believe he valued secrecy for its own sake. The Agency still had a role to play, however, in the drama surrounding the Chilean military Commander-in-Chief, General René Schneider Chereau.
Schneider was, above all else, a Chilean patriot. Though he personally disliked Salvador Allende, he was obliged to support the voters’ choice for president and facilitate Allende’s peaceful ascension to office. The CIA had other ideas and approached the general to sound him out about a coup. Schneider refused in no uncertain terms, and was thus classed by the CIA as “a major stumbling block.”
The Agency reached out to another Chilean general, Camilo Valenzuela, and cooked up a plot to smuggle untraceable guns into Chile. The idea was for Valenzuela’s conspirators to assassinate Schneider in public, and then to blame it on Allende supporters as a justification for reversing the election results.
The CIA funneled over $50,000 to one of Valenzuela’s conspirators, General Roberto Viaux, and provided his hit squad with automatic weapons and gas grenades. According to later accounts by the CIA, the team’s instructions were to kidnap Schneider, rather than to kill him.
After several false starts, the “kidnappers” finally caught up with Schneider’s car on October 22, 1970. Using a sledgehammer, they bashed in his rear window and then shot him several times in the abdomen. Three days later, the General died of his wounds. The CIA then paid another $35,000 to members of the hit squad for “humanitarian purposes.”
On September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende was killed in a military coup headed by Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. During his reign, Pinochet secretly (and sometimes publicly) killed perhaps 30,000-50,000 civilians and plunged his country into the deepest economic crisis since the fall of the Inca Empire.
US federal courts refuse to allow criminal or civil lawsuits to proceed against either Kissinger or those responsible at the CIA.
AFP/Getty ImagesGeneral Augusto Pinochet (l), head of the Chilean military junta, waves from the motorcade shortly after his coup that killed President Allende.
Backing The Mujahideen
Wikimedia CommonsOsama bin Laden, who was involved with Mujahideen fighters at a time when the CIA was backing the group.
One of the defining characteristics of CIA operations is its sheer, shortsighted wrongheadedness. Time and again, the Agency has found itself on what history recalls as the wrong side of political struggles.
During the 1950s, the CIA routinely supported monarchies against democracies. During the 1960s, it propped up unpopular dictatorships against groups they perceived to be too friendly to Moscow. In the 1970s, it forged connections with international terrorist groups that would be an unending source of grief for American citizens for decades to come.
If you ask the Agency’s defenders about this tendency, they will usually say that the CIA had to play along with bad guys in order to defeat even worse guys in various conflicts. This excuse rings a little hollow when going over the list of individuals the CIA has worked with over the years.
Starting in 1979, the CIA backed Mujahideen activity against the pro-Soviet government in Kabul. This eventually turned into a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan that ended very poorly for the United States.
Throughout the 1980s, the lion’s share of CIA support fell on Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of Hezb-e-Islami rather than on the pro-Western National Islamic Front, which was almost the only group in the country that didn’t publicly promote global jihad. Eventually, Hekmatyar became Afghanistan’s prime minister before the Taliban lynched his predecessor, the communist Mohammad Najibullah.
BlogspotFormer President Najibullah’s hanging in Kabul in 1996.
The list goes on and on. The CIA backed Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s, and pro-Iran rebels against Hussein in the 1990s. The Agency provoked a revolt in Kurdistan in 1991, then moved on while Iraqi helicopters wiped out the rebels.
The CIA supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, with the chief anti-government agitator and future president Violetta Chamorro actually being an undercover CIA agent. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega would eventually be elected back into power when the CIA-backed government lost virtually all of its public support. The Agency, along with several major newspapers in the United States, backed the 2002 attempted military coup in Venezuela, and so on.
Since the late 1940s, the US government has maintained a secretive agency that has played a leading role in promoting dictatorships, terrorist groups, Third World poverty, and Islamic extremism across the Earth’s surface.
Arguably all of America’s current overseas problems stem directly from what the CIA did in its name starting from the outbreak of the Korean War — and it shows no signs of abating.
Next, read about conspiracy theories that were actually true, and the U.S. government’s secret 30-year radiation testing on its own citizens.
