Central Intelligence Agency Quotes

Harmon was one of the nation’s experts on Intelligence. She pointed out that the CIA spent a relatively small portion of its budget on spies, intelligence and analysis relative to the larger proportion that went to their paramilitary covert operations. Since its inception, the CIA professionals have always preferred the glamour, adventure, and machismo of covert operations as opposed to the relative drudgery of intelligence gathering and analysis. This many believe explains the many major intelligence blunders the CIA has made such as missing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the development of nuclear bombs in several countries and the totally mistaken analysis in the Bay of Pigs and The trigger for the Iraq War.

It was unusual for anyone to call for the assassination of a foreign leader, but for a leading Christian cleric, this was a strange way of “turning the other cheek.”

This covert project — PBSUCCESS — to destabilize Guatemala was exposed by the Guatemalan government. To minimize the embarrassment in the U. S., the PBSUCCESS CIA staff asked headquarters to fabricate sensational stories to keep newspapers and the fledgling TV news busy and distracted from covering the Guatemala story that the CIA was trying to destabilize the government in order to bring about regime change. The CIA was prohibited by law from doing this but the agency at that time ignored many laws. It is not known if the phony stories were actually planted at that time.

This was a precursor of the total war views of William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War half a century later.

Dulles was a master of fending off calls for CIA reform. In this case he pretended to look for another agency to take over covert operations, but found in each case that they could not keep secrets well enough. In the 21st century, the CIA was still handling covert operations and have relinquished nothing.

This CIA program MKUltra actually too place. In addition to at least one death, there were a number of people whose unwitting massive exposure to LSD maimed them for life. In addition to shoddy research and junk science, the CIA violated the basic ethical rules of research with human subjects. Most had no idea that they were being given massive doses of dangerous drugs. The CIA kept the program secret when it was ongoing, and later CIA leaders kept it secret to avoid the embarrassment and the greater oversight from Congress that was long overdue.

Lumumba was too socialistic for Dulles. He was not only removed from power by a covert CIA operation but the allies we selected to succeed him, then murdered him as they feared they had no one to match Lumumba’s popularity with the people.

There was a military coup in 1973 which was supported by the United States -- {640618} . Many Chilean left wingers were tortured, murdered or disappeared. Also, two American citizens in Chile were murdered at the time. This case finally brought the murderers of the Americans from the military junta to account. However, it turned out that the murders of the Americans was part of a conspiracy between the Chilean junta and United States military / intelligence officers in Santiago at the time. The American murder victims were fingered by an American Naval Captain, Ray E. Davis, as leftists and they too were killed. Captain Davis had been indicted with the two Chileans, but he died before the trial. The Chilean judge was not able to indicate how high up the decision by the American officers to have the Chileans kill leftist Americans went. One important historical aspect of this case was meaningful because when the trial was finally conducted, there was a major policy debate in the United States over the right of the American government to kill American citizens abroad and under what circumstances with most people thinking that this was a new policy issue brought about by the development of drone technology and the War on Terror. However, this judge’s release of the information showed that Americans had been previously killed before drones. One major difference is that in the War on Terror case the President, Attorney General and other officials were the major decision makers while in the 1973 case in Chile, it may have been limited to a few rabid, over-zealous, mid-level officers, acting on their own. Or perhaps the kill decision went further. The documents relating to the murders are highly classified and the government has not yet released them at the time of this quotation.

This was the directive that gave the CIA authority for its many covert operations.

Magruder and his boss OSS Director Donovan did not believe that the military services, the State Department nor the FBI could or should properly be breaking the laws of foreign nations which would be virtually certain if one was spying in foreign nations. They advocated the formal extension of a the wartime OSS which became the CIA. Magruder convinced Secretary Lovett and this was important in establishing a CIA successor to the OSS.

This is a noteworthy quotation as it shows the nasty side of American intelligence activity in the aftermath of WWII. Mykola Lebed, 1909-1998 was a Ukrainian Nationalist war criminal working with the Nazis who was responsible for the murder and ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, He was convicted, and imprisoned for the murder, in 1936, of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki but was released when the Nazis occupied Poland. However, he was anti-Russian and our CIA enlisd his “services” to spy on the Soviets in the Ukraine. Then in 1949 he emigrated to the United States. As a war criminal, the law required that he be sent back to Europe, but this letter from the CIA Director “persuaded” the immigration authorities to not only allow him into the country, but the CIA paid him and he lived until in New York City until his death. There was no legal basis for his entry into the United States but the arrangements were made in secret. Polish patriots who had greatly assisted the Allies in fighting the Germans in WWII with great losses, did not even know that the war criminal that had tortured and murdered so many Poles was not only alive and well and living in New York, but was being paid by the United States government. The issue of what criteria are used for American intelligence agencies to use agents and what “rewards” can be given has been in controversy ever since. In one case in the late 20th century, the CIA actually employed an agent in South America who murdered and raped American nuns doing humanitarian work. The argument on the other side is that for espionage one wants terrible people with no moral compunctions as they make good agents. The question has always been at what moral cost and does a sociopath really make a good agent. See {633239}.

While that is often true, there have been some cases in American espionage history where the CIA did vouch for and employ and bring into the United States war criminals and even agents who had murdered and tortured innocent Americans. See {633240} for one such example.

Hunt was being questioned about his forgery of a State Department cable linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam:

Hirsh had uncovered CIA illegal surveillance of anti Vietnam war protesters in the late 1960s. They broke two sets of laws. First, the CIA had no authority to investigate and track American Citizens anywhere but particularly American citizens. Second, the FBI which did have the authority to investigate Americans, were not allowed to use the methods that the CIA did. They violated not only Federal Law and Rules, but also violated the 4th Amendment Rights of thousands of citizens.

Dulles was a master at manipulating presidents. Instead of just presenting his Bay of Pigs plan to Kennedy and assuring him of his belief in its likely success, Dulles brought in the comparison with Eisenhower, a great general with extensive foreign policy experience. If Ike would give the go ahead with a lesser success probability plan, then it showed the confidence that Eisenhower had in Dulles and the Central Intelligence Agency staff. If Kennedy were to kill the Bay of Pigs plan, then either he did not have the courage that Ike had or he was substituting his military judgment for Eisenhower’s. Kennedy approved the operation which was a terrible example of military planning. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs Debacle, never again had great confidence in the professional military and espionage. Many political scientists and historians credit this negative experience with the Bay of Pigs with giving Kennedy the confidence to not follow the recommendations of the leading military and intelligence staff when faced with the Cuban Missile Crises—even when members of the Joint Chief’s of Staff (Curtis LeMay was the most forceful) told him unequivocally that his failure to act more forcefully would likely weaken if not destroy the independence of the country. President Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, took a much more proactive role in the Missile Crises than they did in the Bay of Pigs.

The CIA, like most intelligence services, attract some unusual and abnormal people who in many settings might be considered mentally unbalanced or sociopathic. Many intelligence service operatives are often recruited for some of these qualities. This is always a risk for the agency both from the potential scandal such as when the Central Intelligence Agency utilized war criminals at the end of the Second World War and the unbalanced agent going off on his own. Pope flew unopposed Central Intelligence Agency armed planes over communist controlled Northeastern Indonesia, attacking both military and civilian targets. He was captured and although sentenced to death, spent 4 years in jail before his release was negotiated while the United States government denied that we had anything to do with the death and destruction that the CIA planes produced.

This was a time when line CIA officers would make very expansive legal decisions without necessarily consulting attorney’s and selecting specific targets for covert action without getting permission from the National Security Council and/or the President who was not even aware of some of the agency activities.