Old Dog, Same Tricks? The CIA Then and Now

[Joanne98]

Published on Wednesday, September 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Old Dog, Same Tricks? The CIA Then and Now

by Mark Engler and Jeremy Varon

Fifty years ago, in June 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency committed one of the cardinal sins of US foreign policy. That month, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, was deposed in a coup planned and coordinated by CIA operatives. Arbenz, a moderate, had proposed that uncultivated plots held by large landholders like the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) be distributed among poor farmers. Documents declassified in 1997 show that in response to this proposed reform the CIA, acting with the approval of President Eisenhower, led a propaganda campaign against Arbenz, sowed disloyalty in the Guatemalan military, and armed a rebel insurgency.

For Guatemala, the coup would end a democratic "decade of spring," inaugurate 40 years of despotism and civil war, and pave the way for a genocidal assault on the country's indigenous Mayan populations in the1980s. It would have lasting consequences for the United States as well. Although the CIA was only 6 years old, the coup in Guatemala, coming on the heels of the agency's successful installation of the Shah in Iran in 1953, established a pattern of US support for anti-democratic governments during the Cold War. Not only did this support lead to countless violations of human rights, it also bred anti-Americanism and produced, in cases, disastrous long-term consequences for US policy-what the intelligence community calls "blowback." For decades, such misdeeds drew condemnation from human rights and solidarity activists, some of whom argued that the CIA should be abolished altogether.

The fiftieth anniversary of the coup provides an important opportunity both to look back at the CIA's record and to ask, in a world of new and very real dangers, if anything has changed in the agency's behavior. Revelations about the CIA role both in the recent prisoner abuse scandal and in approving the case for war in Iraq raise important questions about the agency's activity in the post-9/11 era. In the wake of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet's recent resignation and the release of the 9/11 Commission report, a new round of discussions about possible reforms of the agency has commenced, making ever more urgent a consideration of what it would take to truly change US intelligence operations for the better.

Cheering US Spies

Several developments regarding the CIA in the past two years have tempted us to applaud the agency. The CIA-famously called a "rogue elephant" by congressional investigators in the 1970s-has often seemed conspicuously absent from the gallery of roguish operatives responsible for the reckless "war on terror" and the deepening catastrophe in Iraq. Indeed, as the Bush administration's case about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has unraveled, many progressives-ourselves included-have found themselves acting as unexpected champions of American spies.


continued>>>
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0915-10.htm

The CIA lies to Congress? DUH

[Joanne98]

1. Of Spies and Lies

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/pdf/v47i1a09p.pdf

The enormous and ever-growing Vietnam War memoir library is more and more dominated by the works of former military and media men, but only a handful of memoirs tell the war stories of civilian intelligence personnel. Sullivan, a former CIA polygraph examiner, adds his unique voice and perspective in this detailed, anecdote-heavy (and CIA-approved) account of his four years of service during the Vietnam War, from 1971 to 1975. Sullivan arrived in Vietnam a war hawk. After 48 months of traversing the war zone administering lie-detector tests to thousands of enemy prisoners and others, he came home a thoroughly disillusioned dove. Sullivan chronicles his change of heart by seemingly sparing few details about his work and social lives during his extended tour of duty. He paints a generally negative picture of the CIA's war against the Vietcong. Sullivan claims that CIA operatives produced "some good information," but that information was misused by those at the top and produced no real progress in undermining the enemy. On the social side, Sullivan readily admits that he lived the good life in Vietnam. He and his wife and child lacked for few creature comforts in the war zone. The book is peppered with references to leisurely brunches, swimming pool parties, daily exercise workouts, two-hour lunches, restaurant dinners, movies in theaters, dinner parties and the services of maids, cooks and chauffeurs. "Partying hardy," Sullivan says, "was another reality of Saigon, and keeping up with Saigon's social life was a challenge." It's safe to say that few others who have written memoirs about their Vietnam War experiences have delved as deeply as Sullivan does into this particular sort of "challenge."

http://www.amazon.com/Spies-Lies-Detector-Remembers-Vietnam/dp/0700611681

[Joanne98]

2. CIA Lies and Stonewalling: The JFK Assassination

In his new book Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA by Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post columnist, Morley delves into an interesting and revealing aspect of the John Kennedy assassination.

Morley points out that the CIA’s official story had long been that the CIA had been unaware of Lee Harvey Oswald’s trip to Mexico City in October 1963 until after the Kennedy assassination. It was during that trip that Oswald purportedly visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies.

You’ll recall that initially unpublished portions of the Warren Report were not to be published for 75 years after the assassination. Morley points out that faced with criticisms of his movie JFK, which posited a CIA role in the killing, Stone had a telling response: If the CIA had nothing to hide, why was it still withholding files some 40 years after the assassination? Largely as a result of that pointed question, Congress passed the JFK Records Act of 1992, which ordered the release of all government records relating to the assassination.

Since Oswald visited Mexico City during Scott’s tenure as head of the CIA’s Mexico City office, Morley’s book delves into that aspect of the assassination. Morley’s examination of the documents that were released as a result of the 1992 JFK Records Act revealed that the CIA was fully aware of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City prior to the assassination.

In other words, CIA officials lied about this critical aspect of the assassination investigation and maintained the lie for some 40 years.

As Morley carefully points out, however, the lying doesn’t necessarily establish that the CIA was involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy but it certainly raises an important question: Why did CIA officials lie about this critically important aspect of the Kennedy investigation and why did they believe it necessary to maintain the lie for some 40 years after the assassination?

An interesting aside is that for years Morley has been attempting to secure CIA documents relating to the role that CIA agent George Joannides played in the Kennedy investigation. Despite the 1992 legislation, the CIA has steadfastly refused to comply with the law requiring the release of the Joannides files. Over the vehement objections of the CIA, Morley successfully secured a federal court order ordering the CIA to release its Joannides files.

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2008-05-02.asp

[Joanne98]

3. Secrets and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare

Product Description

Germ warfare? Secret mind control programs? New tell-all to be featured prominently in a National Geographic television special recounts the CIA's dirtiest deeds from insiders who have been there. In the late summer of 2001, prolific and best-selling British author Gordon Thomas received five CD-ROM disks, containing some 22,000 documents relating to secret CIA programs. None has been published...until now. In the shocking new release Secrets and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, author Thomas unleashes horrific accounts of the CIA's sick relationship with physicians and scientists whose aim it was to obtain control over the human mind and perfect the ultimate killing machine: germ microbes. Relying on sources that touch the very top echelon of the CIA, Thomas s methodical reporting concentrates on a triangle of men: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, William "Bill" Buckley, and Frank Olson. Gottlieb, the former chief of the CIA's Technical Services Branch, organized an unprecedented system of medical torture using a team of like-minded staff doctors. Frank Olson was a former CIA scientist whose death sparked his son to find out who killed his father and why. And then there is Buckley, a long-serving CIA officer and an unparalleled source because of his position as a point man for the MK-ULTRA program and special assistant to Bill Casey, director of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan. Secrets and Lies lays out the facts about the CIA s massive stockpiling of biological weapons and tells the entire story of the CIA's mind control experiments, as seen largely through the eyes of Buckley, ending with his death at the hands of Hezhbollah.

About the Author
THE AUTHOR GORDON THOMAS is the author of forty books. Total sales exceed 45 million copies. Several were Main Selections for the US Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild and the Readers Digest Book Club. He has received two Mark Twain Society Awards for Reporting Excellence. Seven of his books are major motion pictures, including the five times Academy Award-nominated Voyage of the Damned. His bestseller, Gideon s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, became a major documentary, which he wrote and narrated for Britain s Channel Four and it was later shown worldwide. This book followed almost three years of research during which he was given unprecedented access to Mossad s key personnel. The book has been published worldwide Gordon Thomas writes on intelligence matters for The Sunday Express (UK), El Mundo (Spain), Welt Am Sonntag and Bild (Germany); Wprost (Poland); and Daily Telegraph (Australia). He is a regular broadcaster on current affairs for the BBC and US networks. He has lectured widely on the secrets of the intelligence world. He is currently at work on his new book Inside British Intelligence to be published next year.

http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Lies-History-Control-Warfare/dp/1568526849

[Joanne98]

4. The CIA and drugs dot com

This site, the books referred to, the related documents, can provide the you with evidence constituting case studies revealing the following:
Understanding the mentality and culture within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government entities that have inflicted catastrophic harm throughout the world, with tragic consequences upon the men, women, and families of the United States. Two of the most prominent areas in which the CIA's conduct has had catastrophic consequences for Americans have been in its 50-year history of drug smuggling into the United States, and its role in generating hatred for the United States throughout the world.
As it relates to the role of terrorism against the United States, the books, Drugging America and Defrauding America, contains sections showing how the CIA aided the acts of terrorists. Several sections in Defrauding America relate to the role of a CIA-DEA drug smuggling operation to terrorism.
Most of the current media and public attention is focused on the matter of terrorism. However, the harm to national security, the harm to the people of the United States from then arrogant and corrupt war on drugs by America's "leaders" constitutes a greater threat, and the source of far greater harm to the people, than the threat of terrorism. The terrorism threat has been a fortuitous event for the people in key government positions that were close to being exposed for their direct or cover-up involvement in drug smuggling by people acting under cover of government positions. Those people for whom all hope is lost, sentenced to life in prison or long prison terms, can get relief if enough good people would become aware of the evidence detailed in this and related Internet sites, in lawsuits, and in the print books, Drugging America, Defrauding America, and strange as it may seem, Unfriendly Skies. In addition, if the subsequent editions in E-book format (for downloading) are read, the ties between the corrupt war on drugs and the events of September 11, 2001, will become easier to understand.

http://www.ciadrugs.com/

[Joanne98]

5. Dark Alliance by Gary Webb

http://books.google.com/books?id=CwijfdYbkC0C&dq=CIA%2Bdrugs&printsec=frontcover&source=in&hl=en&ei=nG8NSraTG9uMtgfC8qz5Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13

[Joanne98]

6. CIA, Drugs and The US Economy.. VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Bd6lmpIFI

[Joanne98]

7. CIA Torture Jet crashed with 4 Tons of COCAINE... VIDEO

Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in late September bearing a load of nearly four tons of cocaine. This particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay — home to the infamous "terrorist" prison camp — according to a number of press reports

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oszATUJ4IRE&feature=related

[Joanne98]

8. The CIA America's Premier Terrorist Organization....

The CIA's Drug-Trafficking Activities
The CIA, Cocaine Smuggling at Mena and the Train Deaths
Mind Control and the CIA's Use of LSD
Ralph McGehee and CIABASE
The CIA and Torture
More about the CIA
Links to Further Documents Concerning the CIA


CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment.
So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination.

These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator's security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists" but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

— Steve Kangas: Timeline of CIA Atrocities



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Alongside and underneath these visible structures is a veritable menagerie of secret planning cabals and "operational units" that try to put the contending strategies of different power centers of capital into effect. This is, broadly speaking, the principal charge of the CIA, the biggest snake in the pit. The "Agency" is precisely that; it is the active force that puts the plans and schemes of the most powerful Wall Street, armaments and oil interests into operation. Within the CIA the lines between the state and private, corporate power are totally blurred, in fact have melded into one.
— Max Kollskeg: 9/11 In Context: Plans and Counterplans

http://www.serendipity.li/cia.html

[Joanne98]

9. God Bless Daniel Hopsicker!!!!!!!

EU Officials: Investigate CIA Plane Used
in Renditions Caught with 4 Tons of Cocaine

How did 100 drug planes escape U.S. scrutiny?


The CIA Drug Plane Scandal grew exponentially last week when European Union officials broke an official 40-year-long silence on the previously-taboo subject of the CIA’s worldwide involvement in drug trafficking.

Last week Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported that The European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation has begun an investigation one of the planes, the cocaine-laden Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.

The plane crash-landed after running out of fuel in the jungle near the small town of Tixkokob, 40 miles outside the Yucatan capital of Merida on September 24th of last year.

The downed aircraft’s ties had already been conclusively demonstrated months ago in investigative reporting by this reporter, as well as by Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, who first broke news of the Gulfstream II jet's longstanding use by the CIA and the DEA in operations in Colombia.


How Did Fleet of 100 Drug planes Escape U.S. Scrutiny?
Both planes, earlier stories in our current investigation revealed, were connected to American covert intelligence and Homeland Security Agencies, as well as to senior Republican Party officials, including several figures closely associated with the successful Presidential campaigns of President George W. Bush.

We dubbed the affair the “One Hundred Drug Plane Scandal” after an announcement by the Mexican Attorney General stating that as many as 100 American aircraft were purchased by Mexican Drug Lords using the same funding mechanism, supposedly discovered only after the two American-registered drug planes were caught in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying a cumulative 10 tons of cocaine.

While the Gulfstream busted last year has now been definitively linked to CIA renditions, the DC9 airliner busted 18 months earlier flew painted with a bogus but official-looking Seal designed to impersonate aircraft from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.

This was done without any protest from the U.S. Coast Guard, also part of the Dept of Homeland Security, although their major air facility for the Caribbean Basin was located a scant hundred yards away.


Mum's the word from Bush Administration
Neither of the federal agencies with apparent jurisdiction—the DEA and FAA—has so far offered answers about how two American-registered jets with extremely politically well-connected owners, could have wound up carrying so much Colombian coke. But then, no mainstream American journalists have bothered to ask.

Mexican journalists have not been that timid:

“A plane supposedly once used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to transport prisoners to Guantanamo ended up in the hands of Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, Mexican newspapers have reported.”

The Gulfstream jet (N987SA) conducted clandestine flights for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, and subsequently for drug trafficker Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.”

The reason the story has not been picked up in the mainstream American press becomes painfully obvious in the story’s first paragraphs, quoted above.

“How had a CIA plane somehow “ended up” flying for the Sinaloa Cartel?” The question has no easy answer.


More U.S. "Blowback?"

Continued>>>
http://www.madcowprod.com/09102008.html

[Joanne98]

10. The CIA gets caught editing Wikipedia

Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.
Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.

It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The tool, developed by a US researcher, trawls a list of 34m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopaedia that can be created and edited by anyone.

Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites.

Mistaken identity

On the profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tool indicates that a worker on the CIA network reportedly added the exclamation "Wahhhhhh!" before a section on the leader's plans for his presidency.

A warning on the profile of the anonymous editor reads: "You have recently vandalised a Wikipedia article, and you are now being asked to stop this type of behaviour."


Other changes that have been made are more innocuous, and include tweaks to the profile of former CIA chief Porter Goss and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm

[Joanne98]

11. MKULTRA

"MKULTRA" redirects here. For other uses, see MKULTRA (disambiguation).

Declassified MKULTRA documentsProject MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects.<1><2><3> The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.<4>

Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order. <5>

Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a "cover story."<6><7>

On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.<8>

To this day most specific information regarding Project MKULTRA remains highly classified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKULTRA

[Joanne98]

12. MKULTRA The Movie........

CIA Brainwashing Experiments - MKULTRA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suS5BitLqvU


This story is hard to believe and really disturbing. It involves drugs, brainwashing, and the CIA.

It's about a Montreal woman, named Janine Huard, her lawyers plan to go to federal court tomorrow, to try to get a class-action lawsuit approved. Huard says she was subjected to CIA brainwashing experiments more than 50 years ago.

And she ended up completely broken. Now, she wants to be compensation.

[Joanne98]

13. The Sleep Room

MORE than 30 years after its horrors ceased, the notorious "sleep room" of Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute will once again be opened — this time through a four-hour CBC miniseries that starts tomorrow night. But does the series highlight the important issues in a medical scandal that is as complex as it is horrific?

The Sleep Room, directed by Anne Wheeler, recalls a series of barbaric experiments conducted on mental patients over a nine-year period beginning in 1955. Although these began as a well-meaning if desperate attempt to cure schizophrenia, the "psychic driving" technique invented by psychiatrist Ewen Cameron took on a science-fiction quality when it was revealed in 1977 that the Central Intelligence Agency had helped finance the work. The CIA thought it had potential as a brainwashing technique to be used on "enemies" of the United States during the Cold War.

The story is fascinating on many levels. There is the gut-level drama of seeing unknowing mental patients subjected to "modern" torture involving massive electroshock therapy, drug injections, and chemically-induced, month-long comas meant to destroy their memories of themselves and their families — a human catastrophe that stripped more than 300 people of their identities.

There's the tragedy of Ewen Cameron, a gifted and compassionate psychiatrist who somehow crossed a line and convinced himself that he had the right to destroy ill people's personalities because he, with the godlike powers he attributed to himself, would then endow them with "new" and healthy personalities. It is a story which touches the same primeval fears as the Frankenstein and Jekyll/Hyde myths.

Then there is the tawdry political drama in which both the CIA and the Canadian government — which financed Cameron's experiments after the CIA abandoned him — have refused to the present day to admit wrongdoing (although they have paid out some money). The approximately 150 surviving victims, most still in mental hospitals, have waited in vain for an apology. Series producer Bernie Zukerman has said that he hopes the miniseries will finally force Ottawa to do the right thing.

"There's a whole nest of relationships and assumptions around science and doctors that is embedded in this story," says Anne Collins, whose 1988 book In The Sleep Room inspired the miniseries.

Although she collaborated on the TV series, she is concerned that turning a documentary into a drama distracts viewers from the real-world issues of power and responsibility that let the mess happen in the first place. "A lot of the questions the story raises about psychiatry are still valid," she said. "I hope people won't just think that Cameron was a monster and the CIA is depraved."

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/slprm.html

[Joanne98]

14. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

"Covertly recruited by the United States National Security Agency and on the payroll of an international consulting firm, he traveled the world—to Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other strategically important countries...Perkins reveals the hidden mechanics of imperial control behind some of the most dramatic events in recent history, such as the fall of the Shah of Iran, the death of Panamanian president Omar Torrijos, and the U.S. invasions of Panama and Iraq."<1>

According to his book, Perkins' function was to convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with huge debts they could not hope to pay, these countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run. In this capacity Perkins recounts his meetings with some prominent individuals, including Graham Greene and Omar Torrijos. Perkins describes the role of an EHM as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

The epilogue to the 2006 edition provides a rebuttal to the current move by the G8 nations to forgive Third World debt. Perkins charges that the proposed conditions for this debt forgiveness require countries to sell their health, education, electric, water and other public services to corporations. Those countries would also have to discontinue subsidies and trade restrictions that support local business, but accept the continued subsidization of certain G8 businesses by the US and other G8 countries, and the erection of trade barriers on imports that threaten G8 industries.

In the book, Perkins repeatedly denies the existence of a "conspiracy." Instead, Perkins carefully discusses the role of corporatocracy.

“ "I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950’s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.<2> - Nov 4 '04 interview ”

Perkins began writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in the 1980s. "Threats or bribes always convinced me to stop" he says in the book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

[Joanne98]

15. The CIA and Hollywood

But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."

There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.

Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.

The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.

The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.

So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.

The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons reaching the Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside the notion that because we did that , we had 9/11".

Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.

Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect content - EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the matter further.

So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/14/thriller-ridley-scott

[RaleighNCDUer]

16. I wonder what would happen if Obama were to order US Marshals

to go to Langley, clear the building and lock the doors, then go through all CIA documents for violations of US and international law.

(Other than the normal response to a president taking on the CIA.)

[Joanne98]

18. They'd treat him like Kennedy

[LiberalFighter]

20. The CIA needs to be purged of anyone that accepts the superiority of the Bushes, Cheneys or Goss.

And by purged I mean exterminate.

Poppy Bush probably made sure that his idiot son was elected by using the CIA to help out.

[Joanne98]

21. True

[Joanne98]

17. Operation Articoke

Family Statement on the
Murder of Frank Olson

Eight years earlier our father had died—vanished really—and it has taken all the years since then to figure out what happened to him. Our search for the truth about what happened to our father has been a lot like that bike trip to California. All one had to do was to keep following the thread represented by his disappearance. Eventually one would come to the answer.

In both cases one reached the goal by small continuous increments of motion along a single strand. Nevertheless, the final destination did not look anything like the place from which one started out. Little by little one entered unknown terrain. But the destination, whether it was San Francisco or the truth about what happened to Frank Olson, was still on the same map. Incredible as it sometimes seemed, in both cases, the place one finally got to was still part of America.

Today we want want to try to give you some idea of what this journey has been like, and tell you something about the unfamiliar American territory we have discovered.


Our purpose in inviting you here today is to explain why—49 years after his death, 27 years after the government claimed to have told us the truth about his death, and 8 years after we had his body exhumed and a forensic investigation performed—we are going to rebury our father’s remains tomorrow.

The reason we have waited so long to do this is that we wanted to be certain that when we reburied our father’s remains we would not be reburying the truth at the same time.

The gist of what we want to say can be compressed into three headlines:


1. The death of Frank Olson on November 28, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.

2. This is not an LSD drug-experiment story, as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a “bad trip.” He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

3. The truth concerning the death of Frank Olson was concealed from the Olson family as well as from the public in 1953. In 1975 a cover story regarding Frank Olson’s death was disseminated. At the same time a renewed coverup of the truth concerning this story was being carried out at the highest levels of government, including the White House. The new coverup involved the participation of persons serving in the current Administration.


We will make available materials to amplify all these points, and provide copies of a definitive new one-hour documentary film on the Frank Olson case called “Code Name ARTICHOKE” that will air on public TV in Germany (the ARD network) next week, on Monday, August 12.


http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Statements/FamilyStatement2002.html

[Joanne98]

19. The CIA is so evil I could spend all day doing this. I can't so feel free

to add to this LONG list of Satanic activies. I haven't done Paperclip or Chaos yet.

[crickets]

22. Thank you, Joanne. -nt

[Joanne98]

23. You're welcome crickets.