Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

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Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 06, 2018 4:26 pm

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018 | DOUGLAS VALENTINE
WHOSE SIDE IS THE CIA ON?

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Vietnam, American advisor, ARVN, soldiers

Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers and an American advisor in Vietnam taken sometime between 1967 and 1975. Photo credit: US Army / Wikimedia

What does it say about the state of the nation that many on both the left and right are banking their hopes for the future of American democracy on the patriotism and competence of cloak-and-dagger spooks?

If you tune in to left-leaning mainstream cable news shows on MSNBC or CNN, you’ll see a steady parade of such stalwarts of the intelligence community as former CIA director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Former FBI director James Comey, once the bane of the left for reopening the Clinton email inquiry two weeks before the 2016 election, is now lauded in Democratic circles for his attacks on President Donald Trump.

The view of many on the left that the president is an existential threat to the safety and security of the country is a sentiment shared with many right-wing #NeverTrumpers.

Meanwhile, to Trump and his loyal followers, this cabal of current and former intelligence figures represents a usually invisible “Deep State” faction, whose intention is to overturn the democratic will as expressed in the Electoral College.

But perhaps there’s an upside to this seismic realignment of public opinion: the American people are coming to terms with the notion that the intelligence community — far from being an above-the-fray servant of a popularly elected government — is in fact inherently political, serving long-term shadowy interests, including its own.

It’s with this in mind that we present an excerpt from Douglas Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, January 15, 2017).

A longtime author and researcher of the US national security state, Valentine is perhaps known best for his book The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which many consider the definitive study of the CIA’s secretive counter-insurgency program during the war in Vietnam.
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The CIA as Organized Crime, Douglas Valentine
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World by Douglas Valentine. Photo credit: Clarity Press

He’s also written several books — The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack — chronicling the US’s history of the war on drugs, its connections to US intelligence agencies, and the rise and fall of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

The CIA as Organized Crime contains excerpts from these works, as well as interviews with the author.

This condensed excerpt from chapter one is a radio interview transcript in which Valentine explains how he researched and connected with many top-level CIA agents (including CIA Director William Colby), learned of the agency’s dark history in Vietnam, and uncovered its undue influence over media, illegal drugs, and more.

How William Colby Gave Me the Keys to the CIA Kingdom
.
[Editor’s note: Valentine’s approach to the mysteries of the CIA is enriched by a personal in-depth study of language and literature — a background which he has weaponized to deconstruct the myth of America’s top spy agency.]

DOUG: It’s complicated, and my experience was different from other writers and researchers I’ve spoken with about it. From the time I started college, my philosophy of life has been based on the study of language and literary criticism. I have a very broad approach, from a variety of different perspectives — psychological, political, anthropological, sociological, historical, philosophical, etc. When I look at a subject, I look at it comprehensively from all those different points of view. More importantly, literary criticism teaches the power of symbolic transformation, of processing experience into ideas, into meaning. To be a Madison Avenue adman, one must understand how to use symbols and myths to sell commodities. Admen use logos and slogans, and so do political propagandists. Left or right; doesn’t matter. The left is as adept at branding as the right. To be a speech writer or public relations consultant one must, above all, understand the archetypal power of the myth of the hero. That way you can transform, through words, Joe the Plumber or Donald Trump into a national hero.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWj0jNl2GdQ

When I decided to research and write about the CIA’s Phoenix program1, that was how I went at it. I went directly to William Colby, who’d been Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Colby was the person most associated with Phoenix, the controversial CIA “assassination” program that resulted in the death of tens of thousands of civilians during the Vietnam War. No one had written a book about it, so I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. I told him I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, and he was all for that. Colby liked my approach — to look at it from all these different points of view — so he got behind me and started introducing me to a lot of senior CIA people. And that gave me access from the inside. After that it was pretty easy. I have good interview skills. I was able to persuade a lot of these CIA people to talk about Phoenix.

“Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a chain of command. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it.”
But I also approached it from an organizational point of view, which is absolutely essential when writing about bureaucracies like the CIA or the DEA. You really have to understand them as a bureaucracy, that they have an historical arc. They begin somewhere, they have a Congressional mandate, they have a purpose, and organizational and management structures. And in that regard I really lucked out. One of the first people I interviewed was the CIA officer, Nelson Brickham, who actually organized the Phoenix program. Brickham graduated magna cum laude from Yale and was something of an organizational genius. He explained to me how he organized Phoenix. He also explained the different divisions and branches of the CIA so I’d be able to understand it.

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Nelson Brickham
Nelson Brickham was the senior CIA officer in charge of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations throughout South Vietnam, 1965-1966. Photo credit: Douglas Valentine

So I lucked out. Through Colby I had access to the people in the CIA who created the Phoenix program, and I was able to find out what was on their minds and why they did what they did. That never would have happened if I had gone to the Columbia School of Journalism, or if I’d been involved with journalism for many years. I’d have had a much narrower way of going at the thing. But the CIA officers I spoke with loved the broad view that I was bringing to the subject. They liked me asking them about their philosophy. It enabled me to understand the subject comprehensively.

TRACY: There’s an associate of William Colby’s whom you discuss and write about, also a CIA officer, Evan Parker. You were able to get a great many names from him and then you asked these people for interviews. The interview subjects, many of whom were CIA personnel, would go back to Colby or Parker and ask if it was okay to speak to you. Correct?

DOUG: That’s right. Once I had Colby’s approbation, many CIA officers thought I was in the CIA. No one had heard of me. I wasn’t Morley Safer or Seymour Hersh or someone who’d been a celebrity reporter in Vietnam. I was a Nobody, in the Eduardo Galeano sense of the word. I’d published a book about my father’s experiences in World War Two which some of these guys would read. Those who did read The Hotel Tacloban tended to like it, because it was sympathetic to soldiers and showed I understood what it means to be a soldier. Most CIA officers consider themselves to be soldiers. The CIA is set up as a military organization with a chain of command. Somebody tells you what to do, and you salute and do it.

“They trusted me because I didn’t ask them their secrets — so they told me their secrets.”
Evan Parker had that feeling about me — that I would understand him personally, why he did the things he did, because I’d written this sympathetic book about my father as a soldier, and because Colby sent me to him. I had an interesting experience with him. He invited me to his house for an interview and when I arrived, he invited me upstairs to his little den, which was stacked with bookshelves full of Welsh history and poetry books. Parker is a Welsh name. Because of my background in literature, I was able to talk to him about things like The Mabinogion, which is a book about Welsh mythology. I had this broad knowledge that helped me relate to people like him. I put him at ease.

Also, for a year before I started interviewing people, I’d read everything I could find about Vietnam and the CIA. I was knowledgeable, plus I looked like a good Methodist. I wore a suit and a tie. We spoke for an hour and Parker got to like me. I hadn’t asked him anything about the CIA. We were just getting to know each other. But he had a stack of official-looking documents on his coffee table. He glanced at the documents and politely said he was going down to get us some tea and cookies. “It’ll take about fifteen minutes. I’ll be back.” He winked and went downstairs.

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William Colby
William E. Colby, Former Director of Central Intelligence, July 23, 2012. Photo credit: CIA / Wikimedia

I opened the top folder. It was a roster of everybody in the Phoenix Directorate from when Parker started it in the summer of 1967. I started furiously writing their names and ranks and the position they held in the program. Fifteen minutes later as I’m writing the last name, he yells from downstairs: “Doug, the tea is ready. I’m coming up.” I closed the file and put my notebook away. He came up with a tray with tea and cookies on it. He winked, and sat down, and I started to ask him about Phoenix.

We never got to the documents on his desk. But he liked me and he referred me to people. That’s the way it went with most of the CIA people I met. They cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. Like Parker said, “(Colby) was the Director and we still consider him to be the Director. If he says you’re okay, we believe it.”

He didn’t say, “Now I can waive my secrecy oath.” But that’s what they did.

I talked to members of almost every branch of the CIA and I approached my interviews organizationally. What kind of a budget did you have? Who was your boss and how did you report to him? Who worked for you and what jobs did you give them? I had a big organizational chart in my den and I’d fill in names and positions. I never asked anyone, “Did you kill anybody? Did you do this kind of illegal thing?” And because I approached it in that benign way, they were confident I was de-mystifying the program and just sticking to the facts. It had the effect of reverse psychology. They trusted me because I didn’t ask them their secrets — so they told me their secrets.

“The Department of Homeland Security was based on the Phoenix program model Nelson Brickham developed in Vietnam.”
They didn’t like it in the end because I exposed all the secrets. I talked to so many people that eventually they all started thinking that I was CIA. Because the CIA compartmentalizes itself, I ended up knowing more about the program than any individual in the CIA. I got a rat-a-tat going and pitted them against each other. They started telling me secrets about their rivals. They all want to be the hero in their myth.

TRACY: The interviews you conducted and the multitude of conversations you documented were placed alongside actual documentation which you had to acquire through a considerable amount of research.

DOUG: In the interviews, people were giving me original documents to confirm their assertions. Nelson Brickham was the CIA’s head of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations in Saigon (1965-1967). Brickham managed the liaison officers the CIA placed in the provinces to work with the South Vietnamese Police Special Branch, which is an organization like our FBI. The CIA created and funded the Special Police and sent them after the Viet Cong’s civilian leadership, and anyone else trying to undermine the American puppet government. Phoenix is political warfare. He managed the staff that ran all those operations in the provinces.

In late 1966 the CIA station chief in Saigon, John Hart, was working on improving operations against the VC’s leadership with a CIA officer in Washington, Robert Komer. Komer was Lyndon Johnson’s personal aide on pacification in Vietnam, what was called “the other war”. Anyway, Hart gave Brickham the task of creating a general staff for pacification, at which point Brickham went to work for Komer. In creating a general staff for pacification, Brickham cobbled together the Phoenix program. And Brickham gave me, over the course of several interviews, copies of all the original documents he wrote for Komer and Hart. These were the enabling documents of the Phoenix program.

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Lyndon Johnson, Robert Komer
Robert Komer meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 16 1967. Photo credit: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum / Wikimedia

That happened a lot. I’d ask a guy if he had any documents to back up what he was saying and if he did he’d give me copies of what he kept in his library. Everyone thought because Colby had sent me that somehow this was all going to be ok. I wasn’t going to reveal all this stuff or that Colby had decided it was okay to reveal all of it.

The documents Brickham gave me showed in his own words what he was thinking when he created the Phoenix program. I posted all those documents online at Cryptocomb, along with the taped interviews with Brickham, Colby, Parker and several other CIA and military officers. They are part of the collection titled The CIA Speaks. I put them online so my critics can’t challenge me on the facts, other than by making up things, which they do all the time. I just quoted from these documents and my interviews. So it’s accurate reporting.2

“Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror.”
TRACY: There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University.

DOUG: Yes, the collection contains my interview notes with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program. People kept referring me to people, and I made some great connections. I met a guy named Tullius Acampora who recently passed away; he was in his nineties. He’d been an army counterintelligence officer and worked for General Douglas MacArthur in Shanghai after World War Two. When the CIA was formed, Tully, like many army counterintelligence officers, started working with the counterintelligence staff at the CIA. He was detailed to the CIA. Although he kept his military rank, Tully was a CIA officer for many years. He went to Italy in 1958 and met and worked closely with Bureau of Narcotics agents in Rome. In the 50s and 60s, federal narcotic agents spent half their time doing favors for the CIA, and in exchange the CIA gave them intelligence on the mobsters they were going after.

Tully was sent to Vietnam in 1966 and was involved in one of the “anti-infrastructure” programs that Phoenix was based upon. Tully’s program was called Cong Tac IV and, like Phoenix, it targeted civilians who were functioning as secret agents for the Viet Cong. When the CIA and military created Phoenix, Evan Parker moved into Tully’s office. Tully knew the top Vietnamese officials and CIA officers in Vietnam, and he also knew the Italian Americans who were prominent in the Bureau of Narcotics and later the DEA. Tully and I became personal friends and he introduced me to senior people from the Bureau of Narcotics and the DEA.

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Evan Parker
Senior CIA officer Evan Parker, director of the Phoenix Program (1967-1969) and senior CIA officer John Mason, his replacement, with US and Vietnamese Phung Hoang officers. Photo credit: Quora

The same way I had entrée through Colby into the CIA, I had an entrée through Tully into federal drug law enforcement at a high level. I met historically important people and got historically important documents, most of it new history. I haven’t gotten around to digitizing the tapes of the federal drug law enforcement officers I interviewed, but there are separate collections at the National Security Archive, for both my CIA/Phoenix program materials and my federal drug law enforcement materials.

“By the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies.”
TRACY: I’m wondering how the former governor of Pennsylvania and Bush administration officer, Tom Ridge, fits into all this. Was he not involved in Operation Phoenix?

DOUG: I’m not sure about Ridge. He was in an infantry unit in Vietnam from late 1969 into 1970. He worked in a team with four Americans and seven Vietnamese soldiers going after insurgents, not North Vietnamese regulars. So he was part of the pacification program. He got a bronze star for killing a young man carrying a sack of potatoes. He may have been a sniper and he may have been involved in one of the programs Phoenix coordinated, but it doesn’t seem like he was a Phoenix adviser.

Ridge had been a governor and had executive management experience when he was appointed to run the Office of Homeland Security and later the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He was a political cadre who could be trusted to implement Republican Party policy.

At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security was based on the Phoenix program model Nelson Brickham developed in Vietnam. Ridge may have had some related pacification experience, which is what homeland security is; but he certainly understood how to manage organizations. The key word is coordination. When the National Security Establishment wanted to centralize the war on terror here in the United States, through the DHS, they copied how Phoenix had coordinated multiple agencies in order to streamline and bureaucratize the war against the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI).

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Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge
Homeland Security’s first Secretary, Tom Ridge, speaks with employees during the first days of the Agency. Photo credit: U.S. Customs and Border Protection / Flickr

Phoenix proved an incredibly successful model for pacification in South Vietnam. It was the silver lining in the Vietnam War. Politically the war was a disaster, but bureaucratically the Phoenix program succeeded. It became the model for CIA operations in Central America — the Salvador Option.

The Phoenix program established Intelligence Operations and Coordinating Centers in the provinces and districts (PIOCCs and DIOCCs) of South Vietnam. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has created “fusion centers” in every state and major city across the country. The fusion centers coordinate all the agencies in an area exactly like IOCCs did in Vietnam; systematized and computerized, they coordinate contributing intelligence analysts and operating units. It’s the same highly bureaucratized system for dispensing with anything and anyone who can’t be assimilated.

TRACY: That’s an ominous set of observations for someone who has studied the Phoenix program in such great depth. You are saying the Phoenix template is something that has been grafted onto the American homeland.

“Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistleblowers.”
DOUG: Absolutely. And I’m not the only one that talks about it. David Kilcullen was a counter insurgency adviser to the Bush and Obama administrations and in 2004 he called for a global Phoenix operation.3

Tom Hayden described Kilcullen as the “chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations” to General David Petraeus “in planning the 2007 US troop surge (in Iraq). He also served as chief strategist in the State Department’s counterterrorism office in 2005 and 2006, and has been employed in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia. In the section titled ‘A Global Phoenix Program’ in his 2004 article, Kilcullen describes the Vietnam Phoenix program as ‘unfairly maligned’ and ‘highly effective.’ Dismissing CIA sponsorship and torture allegations as ‘popular mythology,’ Kilcullen calls Phoenix a misunderstood ‘civilian aid and development program’ that was supported by ‘pacification’ operations to disrupt the Vietcong, whose infrastructure ruled vast swaths of rural South Vietnam. A ‘global Phoenix program,’ he wrote, would provide a starting point for dismantling the worldwide jihadist infrastructure today.”4

TRACY: How did Kilcullen want to see a Phoenix program imposed upon the world?

DOUG: If he understood it correctly, he’d know that the strength of the Phoenix program was in the IOCC centers, which allowed for political control. Through a network of Phoenix centers, management is able to control targeting and messaging. I imagine Kilcullen wanted such highly bureaucratized centers set up in or near nations in which the CIA and military are hunting terrorists. Such centers would allow the White House to direct the CIA to direct the military to target the right terrorists. Leave ours alone.

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Iraqi playing cards
Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards.
Photo credit: Brakeet / Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)

Seymour Hersh is always looked to for insight into the CIA. In December 2003 he wrote an article in The New Yorker in which he said the Special Operations people in the military were going to use Phoenix as a model in Iraq.5 True to his high-toned style, Hersh focused on the sensational “death squad” aspect of Phoenix, not the revealing organizational aspect. He keeps the focus narrow.

Phoenix is greater than the sum of its parts because it has symbolic meaning. But its lurid aspects — like the death squads Hersh emphasizes — grab everyone’s attention. In Iraq, the CIA handed out decks of “playing” cards featuring pictures of “High Value” Sunni officials in the Saddam Hussein government. That psywar gimmick and jargon was right out of the Phoenix program.

The purpose of the Phoenix program was to “neutralize” the civilian members of the underground revolutionary government in South Vietnam. Neutralize was a broad term that included a number of measures. The first step was to identity a suspected subversive. After that, Nelson Brickham, the CIA officer who created Phoenix in 1967, explained the process to me as follows: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them. That was my attitude toward high-level VCI.”

“The pressures the CIA imposes on the media amounts to political warfare directed against the American public. It’s no different than how the CIA mounts counter-subversion operations overseas.”
VCI was the acronym for Viet Cong Infrastructure — the name the CIA gave to the members of the revolutionaries’ underground government and guerrilla support system.

As part of its Congressional mandate, the CIA has the job of counter-subversion outside the United States. Thus, when the US is waging a counter-insurgency in a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan, the CIA pursues a political order of battle, while the US armed forces pursue a military order of battle. In practice, however, counter-subversion during a counter-insurgency is a paramilitary police function. Thus, in South Vietnam, the US military supported the CIA’s Phoenix program with troops and equipment.

In 1969, the CIA ostensibly turned the Phoenix program over to the US military, at which point soldiers first began to pursue a political order of battle and conduct systematic counter-subversive operations against foreign civilians. The creation of Phoenix was a watershed. Prior to it, military people were only allowed to target civilians if they were secret agents or guerillas attacking military bases or personnel. But in its fanatical pursuit of victory in Vietnam, the military deliberately blurred the lines between subversives and innocent civilians, and killed anyone who got in the way, including children, like it did at My Lai and a thousand other places.

Following its ignoble defeat in Vietnam, America was driven by a reactionary impulse to reassert its global dominance. The justifications used to rationalize Phoenix were institutionalized as policy, as became evident after 9/11 and the initiation of the War on Terror. Since then the CIA and US military have been conducting joint Phoenix-style operations worldwide without any compunctions, most prominently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Phoenix Program, patch
Original unissued patch for the Phoenix Program. Photo credit: Tuxxmeister / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Also evolving was the relationship between the CIA, the military and the media. In Vietnam, there was more press freedom and the carnage was filmed and shown on TV every night. But the CIA and military felt those images turned the public against the war, so by the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies. The public was denied access to the truth of what its government was actually doing, and when Chelsea Manning leaked the Collateral Murder video to Wikileaks, she was summarily tried and imprisoned.6

When I was doing my interviews for The Phoenix Program, certain CIA people would tell me how a particular correspondent from CBS or The New York Times would come into their offices and ask about the programs they managed. The CIA officers would talk openly about their operations, but the Vietnam-era correspondents wouldn’t publish the details, because their editors had a gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA not to reveal the secrets. They could know the secrets and as long as they didn’t reveal them, they could continue to have access.

“As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it’s functioning as their public relations arm. It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line.”
While I was researching Phoenix, I went to people like Seymour Hersh and Gloria Emerson but they wouldn’t talk to me. I had a harder time getting reporters to talk to me than I did CIA people, because as soon as they expressed any knowledge about Phoenix, the follow up question was: Why weren’t you writing about it? Then they’d have to reveal this gentlemen’s agreement with the CIA.

The “old boy” network existed in Vietnam but it’s gotten a lot worse; it’s impossible now for anyone to interview mid-level CIA people on the record and reveal the facts. Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who are then vilified, imprisoned, and/or chased into exile.

TRACY: We see what, for example, happened to Gary Webb in the mid-1990s. He had some people who had divulged significant information to him and yet the CIA denied it, and that more or less cost him his career. He had no one, no colleagues of his, who actually went to bat for him to any significant degree to keep him in the industry because what he was doing is what investigative journalists and historians, such as you, should be doing.

DOUG: Yes. Gary Webb was an investigative journalist whose “Dark Alliance” series in 1996 exposed the link between the CIA’s “Contras” in Central America and a crack cocaine dealer in Los Angeles. The story rattled the CIA. Members of the black community were up in arms. Then the CIA’s old boy network sprang into action and Webb was nitpicked to death by fellow journalists for minor inaccuracies in his work. But his real sin was revealing the CIA’s criminal involvement in systematic racial oppression through the war on drugs.

Webb committed suicide in 2004. But he wasn’t the first American citizen to be attacked for telling the truth about the CIA’s central role in drug trafficking. In his 1972 book The Politics in Heroin in Southeast Asia, Al McCoy detailed much of the CIA’s drug network in Vietnam and the Golden Triangle region of Laos, Burma and Thailand. When the CIA found out what McCoy was doing, one of its most senior executives, Cord Meyer, tried to get McCoy’s publisher to suppress the book. When that didn’t work, the CIA tapped McCoy’s phone and the IRS audited his income tax. Behind the scenes, the CIA forced McCoy’s sources to recant. The famous Church Committee, which exposed a lot of the CIA’s secrets, investigated McCoy’s allegations and found the CIA innocent of any involvement in drug trafficking. McCoy moved to Australia and didn’t return to America for eleven years.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6dHqP9wc3k

The CIA’s control of international drug trafficking is America’s darkest secret, and after the Webb scandal, the old boy network imposed even more restrictions on the media. The pressures the CIA imposes on the media amounts to political warfare directed against the American public. It’s no different than how the CIA mounts counter-subversion operations overseas.

Nowadays, the only way you can discern what’s going on is by studying and understanding the historical arc of these bureaucracies. Where did the CIA come from? Where is it going? If you look at it historically, you can see beyond the spin and it becomes de-mystified. And that is not a happy story. As power gets more concentrated in the security services, the media is no longer simply compliant, it’s functioning as their public relations arm. It simply ignores anything that contradicts the official line.

TRACY: There is almost a complete blackout of Jade Helm in the mainstream media. It is only getting coverage and discussion and analysis in the alternative media.

DOUG: Yes. Jade Helm was a military training exercise in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Utah. Military and local officials set up Phoenix-style coordination centers, as a way of giving Special Operations and “Civil Affairs” personnel experience working with para-militarized police forces in what was called a realistic “war experience” in domestic counter-insurgency operations. The media blackout was an essential part of the plan. The censorship was symbolic of how, as a function of the concentration of capital, the communications/media industry has been centralized and is now part of the political warfare apparatus. The media industry has been reduced to a few huge corporations that control most of the outlets. Control of information has become the key to the oligarchy’s success. Very few independent news organizations are able to compete with the giants, or get information out across the country, so people really have to search for facts on the Internet.

TRACY: Even some of the alternative progressive left media that were good twenty or so years ago are increasingly dependent upon foundation money that comes with strings attached, and they’re not as inclined to push the envelope as I think they once were.

DOUG: Sure. As a person who is interested in how the CIA uses language and mythology to control political and social movements, I see this development as ominous. People like Glenn Greenwald who take money from billionaires insist it has no editorial influence on them. But media people who are taking money from billionaires and CIA-connected foundations must realize that their sugar daddies can sink their operations in a moment because of something they write, and that knowledge surely impacts what they are willing to do and say.

Taking money from a billionaire also has tremendous symbolic meaning. It means the person taking the money approves of one person having eight billion dollars when three billion people barely survive. Through their example, celebrity media figures like Greenwald are telling their followers that they support the exploitation and imperialism their benefactors engage in.

As all advertising people know, symbolic messages don’t have to be articulated, they’re understood subliminally. Greenwald’s followers like it that way. It means they don’t have to consciously confront their tacit support for an unjust system. That self-censorship allows celebrity journalists like Greenwald and his sidekick Jeremy Scahill to promote themselves as heroic adversaries of the system. And they’ll continue to get away with the double game until their followers start challenging their own basic assumptions. The system will never change until people climb out of their comfortable darkness and start rejecting the system’s inequalities, instead of just feeding off of them.

Endnotes

1. Phoenix is Phụng Hoàng in Vietnamese.

2. <http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20Tapes.html>

3. See David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency”, Small Wars Journal, September-November 2004.

4. Tom Hayden, “Reviving Vietnam War Tactics”, The Nation, 13 March

5. Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?”, The New Yorker, 15 December 2003. Hersh said, “According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the US counted more than twenty thousand in the same time Span.”

6.<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0>

https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/09/06/whose ... he-cia-on/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby cptmarginal » Fri May 03, 2019 9:25 pm

I am halfway through this book now and it is absolutely dynamite! Was going to start a new thread on it if there wasn't one already...

(search DuckDuckGo for libgen if you just want to check it out)
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby cptmarginal » Sat Jun 08, 2019 3:39 pm

This book is just unrelenting. Highly recommended.

From chapter 18:

Hersh never says anything about the CIA or Special Forces as instruments of an unstated but intentional policy of systematic and sustained war crimes. There is always, in his reporting, a justification for what Americans do. They can be misled. And sometimes they mislead. But only when the nation’s survival is at stake.


In a final apologetics tour de force, Hersh exonerated his American sources for any mistakes that were made. “In choosing targets,” he said in regard to Phoenix, “the Americans relied on information supplied by South Vietnamese Army officers and village chiefs. The operation got out of control.”


Even for a craftsman like Hersh, this generalization was a nifty piece of disinformation. As Milberg noted above, the CIA excluded its Vietnamese counterparts from Phoenix planning, but the operations failed anyway – and not because the Communists had coerced the people, as Milberg claimed, but because the people supported them.


Hersh failed to note that the Americans were fully aware much of the incriminating information they were fed was false. But, as this book has shown, their system was geared to work that way. The CIA deliberately jerry-rigged the Phoenix program so it would overflow with false confessions and accusations, precisely so it could get away with mass murder and terrorizing the population.


What a writer doesn’t say is often more important than what he or she does say. In this regard, Hersh did not mention that as soon as American soldiers started fighting and dying in Iraq, they cultivated grievances against the Iraqis who hated them for kicking down their doors, invading their homes, and carting off their men to torture chambers. American war managers always factor this inevitability into their schemes. Why don’t journalists acknowledge it?


William Calley and his men blamed every Vietnamese man, woman and child for the deaths of their comrades, which is why the majority of Americans refused to condemn them for massacring hundreds of civilians in My Lai. This is what makes America exceptional: our lives have value, others’ don’t. It’s that double standard that enables the American war machine to cut a swath of righteous savagery across the Muslim world, and for the media to characterize it as “protecting the American people from terror.”


This places me among those who say it: some of America’s top leaders do have evil intentions. Those who planned the war on Iraq knew that war crimes like the My Lai massacre would proliferate in Iraq just as they had in Vietnam, and for all the same reasons. The CIA is their increasingly not-so-secret instrument for carrying out many of those evil plans, including a long and well documented history of well concealed programs that result from the mass murdering of civilians whose beliefs the war managers hate and whose wealth they covet. And over the course of the CIA’s criminal career, it has relied on journalists like Hersh to never tell that part of the story. In their corrupt world of anonymous sources and quid pro quos, Americans never have evil intentions.
The new way of thinking is precisely delineated by what it is not.
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby Elvis » Sat Jun 08, 2019 9:16 pm

Thanks to all, must get this book.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jun 10, 2019 10:39 am

Agreed on how Hersh's stuff can always be functionalized in the way Valentine critiques. But I don't think Hersh's exposures end up defending the CIA at all. They can be abused, exactly as Valentine describes. I think what Valentine did is greater than what Hersh does. But without over-defending him, Hersh frames questions of intent so as to maintain his inside sources, so that he can keep getting stories. Valentine burned those bridges so that he could speak the higher truth. That makes him more courageous and heroic and important (no irony). In the absence of a broader understanding of imperialism among Americans and a revolutionary force in their society, both of these approaches have a purpose.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Mon Jun 10, 2019 7:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby cptmarginal » Mon Jun 10, 2019 11:12 am

I agree with all of that, and it occurred to me right after posting that extract that it was important to note that it was written in 2003.
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby Grizzly » Tue Jun 11, 2019 3:06 pm

Image
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jun 17, 2019 1:24 pm

bump... this needs more attention or sustained attention
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jun 05, 2020 3:02 am

Here are interviews with Valentine that merit sustained attention!!!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP15Ehx1yvI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYvvEn_N1sE
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby Grizzly » Fri Jun 05, 2020 2:32 pm

^^^

Excellent. Thanks for that JR...

I suspect DV wont touch the 911 stuff because, it's still in progress?
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Re: Valentine’s The CIA as Organized Crime

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jun 05, 2020 2:45 pm

Grizzly » Fri Jun 05, 2020 1:32 pm wrote:^^^

Excellent. Thanks for that JR...

I suspect DV wont touch the 911 stuff because, it's still in progress?


I suspect his view on it is self-evident and will remain radically unspoken.

Meanwhile here's a find from another usual suspect, Max B with a bit on the soft-power regime-change interventions by the Alt-CIA, NED.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzIJ25ob1aA
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Marcie Smith on Gene Sharp and CIA at Harvard

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jun 10, 2020 7:55 am

If CIA is organized crime then the career of Gene Sharp and the turn to institutions like NED and color revolutions is like Michael's efforts to go legitimate in Godfather II-III.

It's fascinating how many levels & dimensions develop when your empire has such a head start over most of the world and invests that kind of money and energy and brings so many institutions into the effort.

So much work by Marcie Smith. More than I've ever managed in such a sustained form. Part I is a long article but worthwhile. Too long to archive here so follow the link!
https://nonsite.org/article/change-agen ... e-part-one

Part II came out in December, haven't read it yet.
https://nonsite.org/feature/change-agen ... e-part-two

Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One)
By Marcie Smith (CUNY)


nonsite.org
article, issue #28
May 10, 2019
https://nonsite.org/article/change-agen ... e-part-one

Gene Sharp, the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” has been fairly described as “the most influential American political figure you’ve never heard of.”1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet “mysterious” intellectual giant of nonviolent protest movements, the “father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action.”2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest movements around the world. In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major protest movement in the last forty years.3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi, and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left.4

Gene Sharp’s influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly inherent violence of the “centralized State,” and a quiet but vital counselor to anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.

In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, bastion of the high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called “CIA at Harvard” were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against the Soviet Union.

Sharp’s ideas about nonviolent action are generally billed as apolitical, post-ideological, common sense activist strategy and tactics. But they actually flowed from a clear worldview. Sharp saw “centralized government” as the key vector of violence in the modern world. He supported “decentralizing” state functions to “independent,” “non-State” institutions—a prescription that sounds a lot like privatization. Importantly, he argued nonviolent action itself was the most strategic way to bring about this state transformation.

With the rise of the Reagan-era foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp began promoting “strategic nonviolence” internationally through his Albert Einstein Institution (AEI). Sharp co-founded AEI with his former student Peter Ackerman, who was simultaneously right hand man to the notorious corporate raiding “junk bond king” Michael Milken. Later, Ackerman was a Cato Institute board member and advocate of disemboweling social security. AEI spent the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s training activists, policymakers, and defense leaders around the world in Sharp’s nonviolent methods, supporting numerous “color revolutions”—again and again in state socialist countries whose administrations were attempting to oppose the privatization, austerity policies, and deregulation being pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S. Treasury-led “Washington Consensus.” Sharp’s “people-powered” nonviolent “ju-jitsu” would prove surprisingly effective, distinguishing itself as a powerful weapons system in the U.S. regime change arsenal. While AEI was an independent non-profit, it had significant connections to the U.S. defense and intelligence community. One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular funders included U.S. government pass-throughs like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

As Part Two of this article will explore, parallel to his efforts abroad, Sharp was also having a significant impact on the domestic activist left. Still today, his legacy is felt in profound ways within U.S. protest movements. In 2013, Mark Engler, an American activist trainer and promoter of Sharp’s work, asked in Dissent: “Can Sharp’s ideas about nonviolent conflict, which have proven potent in challenging dictators abroad, be used to oppose the corporate takeover of democracy at home?”5 Perhaps—but only if we properly contextualize the man and understand the hard limits of his ideas. Doing so offers a clearer view not only of Sharp, but also of recent history, modern imperial strategy, the limits of liberalism, and the ongoing uses and abuses of nonviolent protest.

Origins: Gene Sharp at the CIA at Harvard

In 1957, Gene Sharp was a 29-year-old editor at the London-based newsletter Peace News. The son of an Ohio minister, he had previously earned a Masters for research on Gandhi, worked for famous pacifist activist A.J. Muste in New York City, and in 1953, been arrested and imprisoned for refusing to fight in the Korean War. His work caught the attention of University of Oslo philosophy chair Arne Naess, a giant in the Norwegian social sciences and father of “deep ecology.”6 Naess, sharing Sharp’s interest in nonviolence, invited Sharp to Oslo to analyze the Norwegian nonviolent resistance to the Nazi occupation of Norway. The topic was likely of particular interest to Naess because during World War II, he had been a member of XU, the Norwegian intelligence network serving Norway’s London-based government in exile.7

From 1957 through the early 1960s, Sharp was in and out of Norway, while also beginning graduate work at Oxford.8 As a NATO member with a Soviet border, Norway was a critical front in the Cold War. It provided the Central Intelligence Agency and the nuclear-equipped Strategic Air Command with support, maintenance, and staging facilities for ariel spy missions into Soviet airspace.9 For example, the American U2 spy plane shot down by the Soviets in 1960 had taken off from Norway.

During one trip to Oslo, Sharp was introduced to Dr. Thomas Schelling.10 Schelling was an economist, described by the New York Times as a “master theorist of nuclear strategy.”11 The Washington Post called him the man who “made the Cold War what it was,” and “perhaps the most important economist and social scientist of his generation.”12 “The consummate establishment insider,” Shelling had worked on the Marshall Plan, advised President Truman, and in the early 1960s was at the RAND Corporation theorizing how to win an atomic war.13 Schelling would bring game theory to the Cold War, and was credited with making key contributions to President Nixon’s “madman” theory of nuclear strategy, a policy wherein “the foe would believe in your self-destructive threats…because it believed you just might be lunatic enough to go over the edge deliberately.”14 He would later win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Impressed by Sharp’s dissertation draft, Schelling recruited the young graduate student to finish his research on nonviolent action at an elite new interdisciplinary research outfit back in the U.S.: the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Known colloquially as “the CIA at Harvard,” the center was indeed a spooky place. Founded in 1958, it was a major node in the emerging post-war national security state, with research priorities focused on cutting edge defense-related questions like understanding “the role and control of force” in the postcolonial, Cold War world.15 Sharp accepted the invitation and joined in 1965.16

The CIA at Harvard’s founders, directors, staff, and scholars were a long list of first-string U.S. Cold War intellectuals.17 Boston Brahmin and Skull and Bones inductee McGeorge “Mac” Bundy got the center going, at the invitation of the Ford Foundation.18 During World War II, Bundy had been a key State Department advocate of using the atomic bomb in Japan—a move both Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur opposed as unnecessary and even genocidal.19 Bundy would serve as national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, where he would press for a secret policy of “sustained reprisal”—i.e. carpet-bombing North Vietnam—as would be exposed by the Pentagon Papers.20 From 1966 to 1979, Bundy would direct the Ford Foundation.21

Dean Rusk was also intimately involved in the Center’s formulation.22 He was then president of the Rockefeller Foundation and would later serve as secretary of state under both Kennedy and Johnson. So too was James Perkins, leader at the Carnegie Corporation, president of Cornell University, and director of Chase Manhattan Bank. Funding for the CIA at Harvard came from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Dillon family, Standard Oil, and IBM.23

The center’s original managing co-directors were the infamous Henry Kissinger, who simultaneously held a post at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Robert Bowie, future deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.24 One of the first two permanent faculty positions was awarded to Sharp’s mentor Thomas Schelling, the other to Edward Mason, previously chief economist for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency.25 Other Cold War luminaries included: Alex Inkeles, OSS member, famed modernization theorist, and head of the Central Intelligence Agency-funded Munich Institute26 ; Raymond Vernon, an economist who helped set up the IMF and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, called by some the “father of globalization”27 ; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to Carter and mentor to Madeleine Albright28 ; Samuel Huntington, who advocated carpet-bombing and defoliating the Vietnamese jungles to undermine the Viet Cong’s base of support, formulated the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, and later, was a member of Carter’s National Security Council29 ; and Seymour Martin Lipset, development scholar and “the leading theorist” of American exceptionalism.30

The milieu also included Cold War luminaries from the nearby MIT Center for International Studies: Walt Rostow, development scholar and security advisor to Johnson; Lucian Pye, a China expert, advisor to several Kennedys, and later doctoral advisor to the notorious Charles Murray; and Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist who came under criticism for his research “analyzing enemy motivation,” using “interrogation records of captured Viet Cong suspects.”31 Even Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND nuclear strategist before turning left whistleblower, gave seminars at the Center.32

Strangely, given his acceptance and influence on the U.S. activist left, Sharp would remain at the CIA at Harvard, among these leading establishment intellectuals of the Cold War, for thirty years.33 The CIA at Harvard was, in Sharp’s own words, an “academic home” for his research and writing.34 Indeed, Sharp was no mere wallflower, but an important member of the CIA at Harvard community. David C. Atkinson, official historian of the CIA at Harvard, describes Sharp as one of “the generation’s most influential theorists,” and praises his work as “pioneering and enduring.”35 The Center would come to house a special research outfit for Sharp, the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense. When Sharp’s appointment was in jeopardy, then-director Samuel Huntington defended it.36 Perhaps most significantly, from 1965 to 1970, Sharp participated in the intimate and highly significant Harvard-MIT Joint Arms Control Seminar, a discussion group convened by Kissinger, Bundy, Shelling, Bowie, Pool, and Rostow, among others, whose policy recommendations constituted one of the CIA at Harvard’s “most important and durable contributions to international relations.”37

The majority of mainstream accounts do not mention, much less interrogate, Sharp’s long and fruitful connection to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, insider bulwark of Cold War defense and security policy development.38 Instead, they cast Sharp as an intellectual outsider and gadfly, a “lonely” underdog long “labor[ing] in obscurity,” “toil[ing] in isolation,” a dark horse who throughout his career “sought recognition of his ideas from scholars and policy-makers, but received very little.”39 The CIA at Harvard doesn’t come up at all in Mark and Paul Engler’s 2016 book This Is An Uprising, which outlines a theory of nonviolent social movements based substantially on Sharp’s work, and discusses Sharp’s life at length. Instead the Englers, major U.S. activist trainers, describe Sharp as an anonymous outsider who “followed a somewhat lonely path.”40 The only reference to the CIA at Harvard in Ruaridh Arrow’s 2011 BAFTA-award winning documentary about Sharp, How to Start a Revolution, is the flash of a black and white photo showing Sharp standing in front of a sign that reads, in small script, “Program on Nonviolent Sanctions in Conflict and Defense, Center for International Affairs.”41 The film was an “underground hit with the Occupy movement.”42 Arrow, a senior producer at the BBC, is currently writing Sharp’s official biography.

At the CIA at Harvard, Schelling helped Sharp secure research funding from the U.S. Department of Defense.43 Social scientist Brian Martin writes that Sharp’s interest in nonviolent action “was highly radical at the time, going against dominant thinking…”44 But that’s not exactly correct. Nonviolent action was of great interest to the defense community in the 1960s. Shortly before Sharp joined the CIA at Harvard, Schelling had been appointed a consultant to a multiyear, $50 million Department of Defense counterinsurgency study, known by the sobriquet Project Camelot, “one of the most infamous Cold War social science projects.”45 Sometimes called the “Manhattan Project of social science,” Camelot’s formal title was “Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential.” Its mission was “to find nonmilitary and nonviolent solutions to international projects” and make breakthroughs in “peace research.”46 Critics said Camelot was actually “the most conspicuous of several military-funded efforts to comprehend, contain, and combat political insurgency in the volatile new nations of the Cold War world,” and emblematic of the militarization of the American academy during this era.47 At the helm of Camelot was the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, that division of the army “responsible for psychological, political, guerrilla, and ideological combat.”48 More specifically, Camelot was the charge of the Special Operations Research Office (SORO), a Psychological Warfare unit whose particular work “centered on ideas and doctrine.” Its mission was to “manage global politics and usher in gradual, stable change toward an American-led world order” through research on “communist-threatened countries.”

In spring 1965, news of Project Camelot was leaked.49 This led to international outrage, embarrassment for the American academy, a Congressional investigation, and eventually, Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara calling off the Project under pressure from Secretary of State Rusk and President Johnson himself.50

In reality, the Department of Defense simply reorganized and continued the massive “peace research” initiative under a new name: “Measurement of Predisposing Factors for Communist Inspired Insurgency.”51

1968

Insurgency, protest, and revolution were not confined to the decolonizing world. It was the 1960s, and mass social movements were roiling America. The Civil Rights and student movement had yielded smaller, more militant formations like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. From 1964 onward, massive violent riots rocked multiple American cities every summer. And as the decade wore on, this domestic wave of social rebellion became increasingly inspired by socialism and Marxism. If in 1964 Mario Savio had urged students to “throw their bodies on the gears of the machine” to make it stop, by 1969 Fred Hampton was talking about expropriation, owning the means of production, and black and white joining together for class revolution. As the war in Vietnam kept grinding on, communist national liberation struggles and their Marxist worldview seemed more and more understandable, even attractive, to average Americans.

Especially explosive was the year 1968. It opened with the disastrous Tet Offensive in January. In April, Martin Luther King Jr., who was taking an increasingly explicit anti-war and class-conscious line, was assassinated. In May, Paris erupted in a general strike. Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in June. In August, Chicago police “rioted” against leftists protesting the Democratic National Convention.52 In October, Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the black power salute at the Olympics.

Also in October, at the CIA at Harvard, the excrement hit the fan when radicals invaded.53 That month, protesters from campus and the Cambridge area stormed the Center for International Affairs’ office building, demanding that it be shut down on grounds that it was “imperialist,” “a front for the CIA,” and home to the “intellectual architects” of the Vietnam War and the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic.54 Activists charged Development Advisory Services, the Center’s development assistance program, with “propping up right-wing dictators in Pakistan, Indonesia, and elsewhere.”55 They alleged that the CIA at Harvard’s Fellows Program “constituted a ‘fifth column’ of intellectuals and officials who would do U.S. foreign policy bidding.” Even a sympathetic historian of the Center had to concede that the accusations “sometimes hit uncomfortably close to home.”56

In reaction, the Center changed its acronym to include the previously missing F. This seemed to have little effect. In 1969, forty Weathermen again stormed the offices of the newly re-acronymed CFIA, overturning bookcases, stealing, and destroying files, breaking windows, covering the walls with rude graffiti, and even beating up some of the Center’s staff and scholars.57 The director of the Fellows program, Benjamin Brown, had to get stiches. Three Weathermen were indicted. Leaflets in their defense were circulated around campus, calling the CFIA a “gold plated pig sty.” One leaflet read: “The people who run the CFIA are hired killers. They write reports for the government on how to keep a few Americans rich and fat by keeping most people poor and starving. You might think these vicious pimps would rush off to Vietnam to fight since they dig the war so much. But these are smart pigs. They prefer to stay at Harvard while Black people from Roxbury and white working kids from Dorchester and Jamaica Plains are sent off to die.”

Needing something more than a new acronym, the leadership of the CFIA put forward none other than Gene Sharp and his peace research as proof of the Center’s virtue.58 Unimpressed, the Women’s Brigade of the Weather Underground detonated a bomb inside the CFIA offices one night in the fall of 1970.59 No one was ever caught.

The real crescendo, however, came in 1971, when students occupied the CFIA again and seized a particularly damning cache of documents.60 It included confidential minutes from the “Bissell Meeting,” a private convening of U.S. leaders held in January 1968 at the Council of Foreign Relations’ mansion on Park Avenue. A CFIA representative served as the assembly’s rapporteur.61 The event’s main interlocutor was Richard Bissell, who ran the Central Intelligence Agency’s Deputy Directorate of Plans, or DDP, under Alan Dulles. The DDP managed covert operations—including the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.62

The topic of discussion was new Central Intelligence Agency strategy. The Agency had recently suffered a spate of bad press, triggered by the 1967 Ramparts expose of their clandestine funding of the National Student Association.63 Bissell explained to those assembled: in order to recover, “the Central Intelligence Agency will have to make use of private institutions on an expanding scale, though those relations which have been ‘blown’ cannot be resurrected. We need to operate under deeper cover, with increased attention to the use of ‘cut-outs’ [i.e. intermediaries]. CIA’s interface with the rest of the world needs to be better protected.”64

In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks describe these stolen notes as “the most complete description of the CIA’s covert-action strategy and tactics ever made available to the outside world.”65 And indeed, the effect of the stolen documents was profound. Student demonstrations at the CFIA continued on nearly a daily basis until the end of the Vietnam War.66 The protests seemed to have gotten to Robert Bowie who resigned in 1972. And perhaps the pressure had something to do with Thomas Schelling and Seymour Martin Lipset turning against the Vietnam War. Both publicly traveled to Washington “to deliver their protests personally . . . to their former colleague Henry Kissinger.”67

Amidst all this commotion, Gene Sharp quietly carried on, finishing his massive, 1,428-page, DOD-funded doctoral thesis. Completed in 1968, the dissertation was published in 1973 as Sharp’s three-volume magnum opus: The Politics of Nonviolent Action.68

The Politics of Nonviolent Action


CONTINUE
https://nonsite.org/article/change-agen ... e-part-one

About the Author
Marcie Smith teaches in the department of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She has a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law.





Part II, Teaser
Gene Sharp also made a dramatic impact closer to home: on the U.S. protest left. Within the protest left, Gene Sharp and his “politics of nonviolent action,” even when unknown by name, serve as political bedrock. By “protest left,” I am talking about that milieu of relatively recent origin that focuses on fomenting, training, and growing nonviolent social movements. The protest left spans numerous issues, but is unified by a passionate belief in the unique power of “nonviolent direct action” or “strategic nonviolence,” as it is sometimes called—a strategy culled from Sharp’s pages. The power of such actions lies generally in their public symbolism and ability to capture media attention, rather than in any disruption to production. There is often a desire for radical decentralization of movement organization, and consensus is a common decision-making method. Its politics tend (though this is changing) to be concerned with “good” and “bad,” rather than interests. Though it has a revolutionary élan and invokes “people-power,” the protest left has a middle-class character and tends to be grounded in institutions like nonprofits (and the foundations that finance them), rather than, for example, labor unions.

Sharp’s ubiquity on the protest left is thanks, above all, to the efforts of a little-known activist network from the 1970s: the Movement for a New Society (MNS). Though Sharp was never a member, he was a mentor to MNS founder George Lakey, and his theory of nonviolent action was essential to MNS’s political strategy. In the 1970s and 1980s, MNS widely promoted Sharpian strategic nonviolence throughout the anti-nuclear, anti-war, environmental, feminist, LGBT, and Central American solidarity movements, using then-novel mass activist “training” programs. MNS alumni and trainees in turn trained activists of the 1990s and 2000s, notably those of the anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle,” the movement against the Iraq War, and Occupy Wall Street. Mass training in Sharpian strategic nonviolence continues into the present.

https://nonsite.org/feature/change-agen ... e-part-two

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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The "Intelligence Community" released its own "Consumer's Gu

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Jun 12, 2020 12:58 pm

in 2011.

Already the first line includes a truthful possessive form

In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, a U.S. military raid on an al-Qa’ida compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killed America’s most-wanted terrorist, Usama Bin Ladin.


Interesting catalogues, glossaries, and attempts to coopt Harriet Tubman for the CIA...
http://cryptocomb.org/IC_Consumers_Guide_2011.pdf
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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