Organizations set up to promulgate the essence of their nation’s ethos and self-interest forfeit any right to expect those looking on to believe in their rigor regarding to objectivity.
The CIA lost any right to respect for its delivery of objective information many times over the years. It proved itself to be corrupted as a trustworthy medium on the few occasions when it was investigated. During the vast majority of its time in existence it has been able to do its dirty work in secret. Then, when such work came to view through disasters in which it was involved the public at large got to inspect its dirty underwear.
The Bay of Pigs attack upon the sovereignty of Cuba was a case in point. The CIA had its grubby hands deep within the organization of that prospective coup attempt.
Then its attempts to corrupt the entirety of U.S. mass media was revealed. It’s ‘Operation Mockingbird’ had the goal of ensuring that the North American public only received information that supported U.S. state narratives. This involved locating so-called journalists who were already biased in that respect and grooming others they could feed fake news to for channeling forward. In this way through compliant shills and malleable others the CIA could get the appropriate articles written. Sometimes articles were written in-house and seeded far afield within foreign news organizations from where they would return when picked up by U.S. publishing houses and broadcasters. This technique served well to hide the original source in Langley.
Unfortunately for the CIA this scam was outed and the Church Committee was set up to investigate.
Operation Mockingbird is worth looking at in some detail to shine some light into the trustworthiness of the CIA and also U.S./western mainstream media.
The Church Committee investigations looked into government operations and potential abuses by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the IRS.
Its findings showed that the CIA had infiltrated almost all of U.S. mainstream media, virtually all the media that existed in the country at that time.
‘In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), C. D. Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), Walter Winchell (New York Daily Mirror), Drew Pearson, Walter Lippmann, William Allen White, Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Chicago Daily News), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Whitelaw Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles L. Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh, the author of A Very Private Woman, (1998) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.
After 1953 the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Barry Bingham (Louisville Courier-Journal) and James S. Copley (Copley News Services).
According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". Wisner was also able to restrict newspapers from reporting about certain events. For example, the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala.’
(Much more here: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm)
It will not have escaped your notice how very little has changed from those years to this. Mainstream media in the USA channels the narratives of the U.S. state without fail and continues to omit an even-handed rendering of regime change target events, always backing the state narrative on false flag events for instance and never making any comment on military atrocities by the USA except as “mistakes”.
A 1977 article in Rolling Stone, written by Carl Bernstein, was titled “The CIA and the Media.” Bernstein said in the article that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.”
If anyone believes the CIA has changed fundamentally since the time of the these events I would like to see them to arrange the sale of a fifty year old car with zero miles on the clock.
‘The CIA has a way of very publicly blowing their cover—seeming to pop up wherever turmoil, strife, and political unrest materialize. Despite being almost synonymous with dirty tricks, the Agency has essentially been given free rein, permitted to use whatever tactics they see fit to deal with any (real or perceived) threat to American interests.
If there’s one thing we know about absolute power, it’s that it corrupts absolutely; and if there’s one thing we know about the CIA, it’s that the astoundingly unethical and criminal projects highlighted in this list are probably just the tip of the iceberg.
PBSuccess
PBSuccess was the code name for a CIA-backed coup led against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, the President of Guatemala, in 1954. It’s one of the first in a long line of suspected or acknowledged CIA interventions in the governments of foreign countries, and it was indeed a tremendous success from the Agency’s point of view.—the first indication that such a feat could be accomplished relatively smoothly.
Elected in 1950, Arbenz set about instituting reforms aimed at making his country self-sufficient, by giving huge chunks of government land back to citizens. This rubbed the US Government the wrong way, as much of this land was “owned” by the United Fruit Company, a truly evil corporation with which the Eisenhower administration was snugly in bed at the time (CIA director Allen Dulles and his brother John, the Secretary of State, both had strong ties to the company).
The Agency snidely referred to Arbenz policies in internal memoranda as “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.’ ” In other words, non-dependence on the US and its allies was not to be tolerated.
Four hundred and eighty CIA-trained mercenary soldiers, led by exiled Guatemalan military officer Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, forcibly wrested Guatemala from Arbenz’ control. While he and his aides were able to flee the country, CIA documents show that “the option of assassination was still being considered” right up until the day he resigned on June 27, 1954.
Operation Mongoose
After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Agency’s public image was worse than ever. President Kennedy famously proclaimed that he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” (shortly before getting shot, but we digress). But to deal with Cuba, he turned to the only person he knew he could trust: his brother, Robert, who organized Operation Mongoose. This operation was conducted by the Department of Defense in conjunction with the CIA, under Robert Kennedy’s supervision. He told his team at its first briefing that deposing Castro was “the top priority of the US government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”
Among the dozens of extremely silly methods of assassination proposed: infecting Castro’s scuba gear with tuberculosis; planting exploding seashells at a favorite diving site; slipping him a poisoned fountain pen; and even even poisoning or slipping a bomb into one of his cigars. Castro’s bodyguard asserted that there were hundreds of CIA schemes on Castro’s life—and they all ended in failure, a gigantic waste of time and money. Castro was Cuba’s dictator for forty-nine years, stepping down in 2008 due to failing health, and appointing his younger brother as his replacement.
CIA-Produced Pornography
President Sukarno ruled Indonesia from 1959 until 1966, when he was deposed by Suharto, one of his generals. Sukarno had been deemed pro-Communist by the CIA, which meant there would inevitably be an attempt to oust him or at least make him look bad—but the plot they actually came up with was truly laughable.
The CIA produced a porno film starring a Sukarno look-alike, titled “Happy Days”, for distribution in Indonesia. Not that the culture generally frowns upon such things, but as the CIA understood it, “being tricked, deceived, or otherwise outsmarted by one of the creatures God has provided for man’s pleasure cannot be condoned” in Indonesian culture, and “what we were saying was that a woman had gotten the better of Sukarno.” The film went as far as production, and stills were made, but for some reason (perhaps common-sense) it was never deployed.
Bizarrely enough, this idea resurfaced shortly before the Second Gulf War, when the CIA suggested that a fake gay porno featuring Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden be produced in order to discredit these men in the eyes of their followers. This went nowhere—at least one official claiming that nobody would care. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”
Pakistani Vaccine/DNA Collecting Drive
The May 2011 raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was the result of an insane amount of intelligence collecting and planning; regardless of his crimes, conducting a US military operation to kill a foreign national on Pakistani soil was bound to have myriad consequences. A courier had been tracked to an Abbottabad compound, where it was pretty damn certain Bin Laden was hiding. But before conducting the raid, they had to be absolutely sure—and one method of collecting this proof was shady in the extreme.
The CIA recruited a respected Pakistani doctor to organize a fake vaccination drive in the town, and in the process collected thousands of blood samples from children in the area children—among them, as it turned out, Bin Laden’s children. Since theirs was a fairly upscale section of town, the campaign began in a poorer area to make it look more authentic, then moved on to the neighborhood housing the Bin Laden compound a month later—without even following up with the required second or third doses in the poor area. The whole thing worked—with consequences.
For one thing, Dr. Shakil Afridi—the doctor involved—has been convicted of treason by the Pakistani government and given a thirty-three-year prison sentence (“Wouldn’t any country detain people for working for a foreign spy service?” one Iranian official helpfully pointed out). For another, the campaign has caused irreparable damage to organizations that carry out legitimate vaccinations. There are deep-seated suspicions in many Middle Eastern regions about those who provide vaccinations, and this gambit to assist in finding Bin Laden has only bolstered those suspicions—particularly in Nigeria, India and of course Pakistan, where efforts to eradicate polio are ongoing.
Muammar al-Qaddafi
February 2011 saw the beginning of the Libyan Revolution, which would culminate in the August ousting of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, followed by his capture and killing in October. There was little mention at the time of any potential involvement by foreign interests—but about one year later, an incident occurred which shed a curious light on the entire Revolution.
On September 11, 2012, an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi came under attack by armed militants. The response came not from within the mission itself, but from half a dozen CIA agents deployed from a hidden base within the city. More reinforcements arrived from Tripoli, and diplomatic personnel where whisked by convoy to chartered aircraft which carried them out of the country.
This betrayed a CIA presence in the city, which had hitherto been unknown. The Agency was forced to admit that it had maintained a fairly strong presence in Libya since about February 2011—right around the time the Libyan Revolution began. The annex which had housed the secret base was scrubbed clean and abandoned after the incident at the mission.
Operation CHAOS
Protests against US involvement in Vietnam were proving to be a giant pain in the backside for the government’s plans in the mid 1960s. While Mockingbird was busily using the mainstream to try to shove the necessity of the war down the throat of the public, the “counter-culture” couldn’t be controlled so easily. Ever-mindful of the KGB’s propensity for their own style of dirty tricks, the CIA attempted to weed out any foreign influence on the American anti-war movement by launching Operation CHAOS—and they didn’t even bother to come up with an innocuous-sounding code name.
Since the FBI’s COINTELPRO program of domestic surveillance wasn’t quite producing the desired results, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized the CIA to undertake its own program of spying on US citizens. Their main task was to infiltrate student organizations—both radical and otherwise—in order to gather intelligence on potential foreign influences, and to subvert such groups from within. Famous groups such as “Students For a Democratic Society” and the Black Panthers were targeted; eventually, the program for some reason expanded to include women’s liberation and certain Jewish groups.
There is strong evidence that this type of activity has never ceased, though CHAOS itself was shuttered after the Watergate scandal. In 2011, the Agency came under fire for allegedly working with the New York Police Department to conduct surveillance of Muslim groups in the area, who had not done anything wrong and who are now suing in Federal court.
Phoenix Program
Phoenix was a program headed by the CIA, in conjunction with US Special Forces and Australian and South Vietnamese commandos, during the Vietnam War. Its purpose was simple: assassination. And although this was a military unit, their targets weren’t military, but civilian.
From 1965 to 1972, Phoenix was involved in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of thousands upon thousands of citizens. People deemed critical to the infrastructure of the Viet Cong, or thought to have knowledge of VC activities, were rounded up and taken to regional interrogation centers, were they were subjected to: “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock . . . rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners…”
Phoenix was the subject of 1971 Congressional hearings on abuse. Former members described it as a “sterile depersonalized murder program”, and it was phased out after negative publicity, though the replacement program F-6 was quietly phased in to take its place.
Operation Ajax
The success of Operation Ajax paved the way for all future CIA operations of a similar nature. It resulted in the return to power of the Shah in 1953, after a military coup planned by American and British intelligence.
The first democratically-elected leader of Iran, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, was seen as a potential liability because of his plans to nationalize the oil industry. Fearful of having to compete with the Soviet Union for Iranian oil, the decision was made to install a leader who was partial to US interests. You can probably see a theme developing here.
CIA agents Donald Wilber and Kermit Roosevelt Jr. (the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt) carried out the campaign by bribing everybody who could be bribed in Iran: government officials, business leaders, and even street criminals. These recruits were asked to support the Shah, in various ways, and to oppose Mossadegh.
It worked: an uprising was instigated, Mosaddegh was jailed, and pro-Western Iranian Army General Fazlollah Zahedi was installed in his place. Zahedi had been arrested by the British during World War Two for attempting to establish a Nazi government, and he lived up to that legacy by appointing Bahram Shahrokh—a protege of Joseph Goebbels—as his director of propaganda.
The Mujahideen
In 1978, Afghanistan became mired in civil war as two Communist parties seized control of the country. When it began to look like anti-Communist rebels were gaining a foothold, the Soviet Union invaded the country to lend support. And that’s when the US, of course, decided to get involved.
The CIA set up camps to train the rebels, known as Mujahideen, in the necessary tactics for beating back the Soviets. Advanced weaponry was also part of the deal, including—importantly—Stinger surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles. Soviet airstrikes had driven hundreds of guerrillas out of the cities and into the surrounding hills, and mitigating the effectiveness of those strikes proved to be essential in prolonging the conflict, placing a great strain on Soviet resources.
The Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan almost until its collapse in the early 1990s, but the legacy of the Mujahideen lives on. The CIA are finding their own tactics and training turned against them by Mujahideen veterans who have begun their own training programs, producing highly trained and skilled terrorists who now make up the backbone of Al-Qaeda and other radical groups. The US discovered these ramifications the hard way after invading Afghanistan in 2001. The invasion led to a quagmire of an occupation, which—as of this writing—has dragged on for just as long as that of the Soviets.
(https://listverse.com/2013/05/25/10-dirty-secret-cia-operations/)
MK Ultra: Inside the CIA's Mind Control Program
Project MK-Ultra was a series of CIA-led experiments on mind control. The experiments began in 1953 and continued into the late 1960s. CIA researchers subjected thousands of U.S. and Canadian citizens to experimental tests, including electric shock therapy, brain surgery, and LSD dosing, in order to identify methods for controlling human behavior.
The CIA hoped that successful methods could be used as interrogation tactics for alleged criminals or prisoners of war. These experiments were conducted without full consent of the participants, and the federal government was sued and brought to trial multiple times over the resulting deaths and injuries.
The most famous MK-Ultra experiments involved LSD, but the program also tested the effectiveness of hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and brain surgeries. Because the CIA later destroyed documents relating to MK-Ultra, most of what we know about the experiments comes from testimonies provided by experiment subjects.
Farrell Kirk, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the CIA, stated that the experiments with LSD caused him to experience extreme depression and drove him to attempt suicide. After his suicide attempts, he was questioned and studied again, then placed into solitary confinement.
James Knight, who had been incarcerated for liquor smuggling, explained that the experiments gave him violent tendencies and severe memory loss. Before the experiments, all of his arrests were for non-violent offenses, but afterwards, he was arrested multiple times for assault.
One particularly famous subject in the MK-Ultra experiments was Whitey Bulger, a Boston crime boss. Bulger alleges that, while incarcerated in an Atlanta penitentiary, he was a subject in experiments related to schizophrenia. Along with eight or nine other inmates, he was dosed with LSD and asked about crimes he may or may not have committed. Bulger described a rise in his own violent tendencies after the LSD experiments, as well as hallucinations and difficulty sleeping.
Ted Kaczynski—better known as "The Unabomber", who killed three and injured 23 with homemade bombs—was a subject of MK-Ultra tests while a student at Harvard University in 1958. Dr. Henry Murray tested his theories of behavioral modification and mind control on dozens of students like Kaczynski by subjecting them to extreme verbal abuse and then monitoring their reactions.
Associated Deaths
At least two deaths are directly associated with the MK-Ultra experiments: those of Frank Olson and Harold Blauer. Olson, bacteriologist for the CIA's Camp Detrick in Maryland, was unwittingly laced with LSD while at a CIA retreat. Due to his increased paranoia, he was sent to New York to be treated by a CIA psychologist. On November 28, 1953, he died after either falling or jumping out of a 13th-floor window.
Olson’s family was initially told of the suicide but not of the experiments. There is speculation that members of the CIA pushed Olson, but the initial cause of death was ruled a suicide, then changed to an accidental death. The Olson family brought a lawsuit against the U.S. government for the experimentation leading to Frank’s death, but they settled out of court.
Harold Blauer was a patient at New York State Psychiatric Institute who voluntarily admitted himself to be treated for depression. While in treatment, he was unknowingly dosed with mescaline derivatives, one of which turned out to be a fatal dose. The institute identified his cause of death as self-inflicted overdose. Blauer's family sued the hospital for neglecting to monitor his medications. After the MK-Ultra program came to light, the family was informed that Blauer’s death was a result of the experimentation.
After the Watergate scandal led to greater overall scrutiny of government processes, the CIA destroyed many documents related to MK-Ultra. By the time of the trials a few years later, there was not much paper evidence of the illegal experimentation.
In 1974, The New York Times published an article about the CIA directing non-consensual mind control experiments. The report led to the creation of the Church Committee to investigate the nation’s intelligence gathering program and hold Senate hearings. Victims of the experiments filed lawsuits against the federal government for human rights violations and neglect.
(https://www.thoughtco.com/mk-ultra-cia-mind-control-4174691)
These are just some of the CIA’s exploits that we know about. Imagine the extent of those that have never been uncovered.
Yet the CIA and its 16 associated intelligence agencies are being relied upon, primarily by the Democratic Party to create the meme that Russia is interfering in multiple ways across the USA, now joined by China and Iran apparently. This is the essence of Russiagate which is being given as the reason Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump in 2016. And of course the prime tactic in coalescing the anger and focus of U.S. citizens to those “enemies” ‘over there and the usurper Trump who they managed to install as president.
Oh but surely... in light of all related above it must be the most saintly, pure as driven snow, and so very clearly, the epitome of trustworthy sources, no?
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