Episode 73: Bombs and Bombast

Conservatives hold Nancy Pelosi in the same regard as Geezer does Darth Cheney and Lizard Gingrich, so it was no surprise when they covered her in projectile sleaze when she declared that the C.I.A. lied to Congress about the use of torture, specifically that she was not told about waterboarding in a September 2002 briefing by agency officials.

Leon Panetta, a former Clinton supporter and fresh new appointee to run the Agency, immediately denied that the C.I.A. ever withheld information from Congress. This, despite the fact that he wasn't anywhere near the Agency seven years ago.

Republicans jumped on Panetta's denial like maggots on rotting meat, declaring Pelosi all but traitorous for even hinting that such a thing could ever happen. House Minority Leader John "Boner" Boehner, who hasn't had a kind word for anything or anyone since November, actually brought himself to utter the remark that it was "hard to imagine that anyone in our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress." It is not recorded whether he kept a straight face while divesting himself of that opinion.

A month later, Panetta admitted that his agency had, in fact, failed for eight years to inform the Intelligence Committees of at least one covert assassination program. Turns out Cheney ordered them not to.

The larger point, though, is that the C.I.A. is in the lying business. Has been since it evolved from the wartime O.S.S. and jumped into the Cold War. Disinformation, distortion, misdirection, and lies of both omission and commission, all under ever-deeper layers of secrecy, comprise the most basic skill set of its officers and operatives, just the thing for those members of Skull & Bones who formed much of the early cadre.

Since its inception, its members have been divided between those who believed their responsibility was gathering intelligence and the cowboys and adrenaline junkies who craved the excitement of black ops. Mostly, the cowboys won. They raised secret armies in countries around the world, dropped operatives and weapons into places deemed hostile to the U.S., assassinated politicians and diplomats, and engineered coups - all at the cost of untold hundreds of millions of tax dollars over the sixty years of its existence.

All of that might be at least marginally acceptable, morality aside, if the Company's record of successes reached even 50% of its operations. Instead, positive results of any real importance can be counted on the fingers of one hand with the thumb and forefinger left over to make an "O". Let's go to the tape:

* On September 20, 1948, the C.I.A. told President Truman that the Soviet Union wouldn't have an atomic bomb for at least four more years. Three days later, Truman announced that Stalin had his bomb.

* Throughout the 1950s, the C.I.A. sent hundreds of foreign agents to their capture, torture, and death in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations.

* On October 28, 1950, the Agency advised Truman that the Chinese would not enter the war in Korea in significant numbers. Two days later, 300,00 Chinese soldiers crossed the Yalu River and nearly pushed MacArthur's army off the peninsula.

* The British were detested in Iran for an abundance of good historical reasons. When the leftist nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq became Iran's prime minister in 1951, the official policy of the U.S. supported him. Nevertheless, the C.I.A. conspired with British intelligence to depose him. With a campaign of bribes, propoganda, and hired thugs, Mossadeq was captured and thrown in jail. The equally hated Shah, himself destined to be overthrown in 1979, was installed. The Iranians haven't forgotten.

* At the same time, the Agency was plotting a coup against Jacobo Árbenz, the leftist president of Guatemala. In the minds of its leaders in the era of McCarthy, "leftist" eqalled "commie". Using the same techniques as in Iran, plus a few judicious bombing runs on an army base, Arbenz was ousted and forty years of juntas, death squads, and repression commenced. In that small country, over 200,000 civilians were put to death.

* In 1960, the Agency informed Eisenhower that the Soviet Union had five hundred nuclear missles aimed at the U.S. As was later revealed, it had four (4).

* Long before the recent imposition of the Patriot Act, the C.I.A. had been opening mail entering or leaving the U.S. since 1952, in strict violation of its charter.

* The new president Jack Kennedy was assured by the C.I.A. that the planned invasion of Cuba by a brigade of paid Cuban exiles would result in the overthrow of Castro. This assurance was based in part upon a map of the Bay of Pigs drawn in 1859. Disaster ensued. We needn't dwell on the agency's subsequent efforts to kill Castro with poison and exploding cigars administered by Mafia gangsters.

* Frank Wisner was one of the founders of the C.I.A. He was mad, frequently delusional, hearing voices, and in and out of sanitariums for fifteen years. Yet his influence in the Company did not end until he blew his head off in 1965.

* The Agency created an international police academy in Panama and trained over 770,000 officers from twentyfive nations in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Among its grads were subsequent honchos of Central American death squads.

* In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, a democracy since 1932. He was a leftist, possibly even a Marxist. The C.I.A. couldn't have that. It spent $10 million and the next three years plotting his overthrow. Recognizing that he was about to be captured by the gunmen of a military junta, Allende shot himself to death. General Pinochet took over, murdering 3,200 people and jailing and torturing tens of thousands more in his brutal reign.

* Director Richard Helms denied that the C.I.A. aided the coup in Chile. That was proven false, and he was convicted of lying to Congress in 1977. Before that career-ender, he ordered the destruction of records of C.I.A.-funded research exploring the possibilities of mind control.

* And who among us can forget that the then-director George Tenet assured Baby Bush in December 2002 that the information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk."

* Throughout its history, the C.I.A. has pursued a right-wing agenda, regardless of which party dominated Congress or the White House. Hardly new phenomena, the war-against-terrorism techniques of rendition and torture were long preceded by the Agency's secret interrogation centers in the 1950s in Germany, Japan, and Panama and in the 1960s in Vietnam. Who knows how many still exist at this very moment. Given the history of the Company, it is a virtual certainty that men and women are being imprisoned and tortured by its agents even as I write these words.

No doubt there are decent people in the C.I.A., those who serve in good faith and struggle to preserve their honor and that of the United States. That doesn't matter. They feed a malignancy that festers in the darkest depths of pure evil. It is past time to raze the institution, plow it under, and pour salt on the farrows.

For a comprehensive, highly readable history of the C.I.A., check out Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, the source of much of the above material.

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Speaking of cruel and inhumane, I am listening as I write to the statements of the nineteen members of the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the nomination of Judge Sottomayor to the Supreme Court. To be required to maintain an expression of calm attention to these droning, repetitious, bloviating gasbags is surely a trial beyond justification.

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