p Any analysis of Western secret services is bound to be difficult. It is like hewing one’s way through a dark jungle of confusing, sometimes totally confounding, facts. The difficulty is both conceptual and functional, relating to search and selection of information. Though the subject is unquestionably autonomous, and, at times, has its own motive forces, the work of secret services is ultimately no more than a continuation by other means of the policy of the governments concerned. In many cases, however, it is work that the governments will officially and vigorously disavow. That reason alone, to say nothing of the secrecy that shrouds the subject, makes the researcher literally gasp for air—for aren’t facts the air the researcher breathes. What he often gets instead is poison vapour, because no other sphere of Western governmental activity resorts so freely to misinformation.

p Yet, knowing the subject is vitally important. For to understand the modern world we must also understand the work of the secret services, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S.A., whose far-flung and varied activity draws in all of mankind.

p Allen Dulles, that classic figure of U.S. espionage (yes, the field has grown so much that it also has its classics), ended his book, The Craft of Intelligence, on the following note:

p ‘The military threat in the nuclear missile age is well understood, and we are rightly spending billions to counter it. We must similarly deal with all aspects of the invisible war... The last thing we can afford to do today is to put our intelligence in chains. Its protective and informative role is indispensable in an era of unique and continuing danger.’^^1^^

p There is a lot here that attracts the eye—like the reference to the cost of the invisible war (as high as the 6 cost of ICBMs and nuclear bombs), and like the semantics of Dulles’s pronouncement.

p F. Prouty—a man who ought to know for he was once the Pentagon’s liaison officer with the CIA—commented in a rare moment of truth, in the mid-1970s (at the close of the Vietnam war and shortly before Watergate) that the above final and summary paragraph of the old master is the best sample of the intelligence team’s view of how to live in the modern nuclear age. They would have us establish the most extensive and expensive intelligence network possible and then develop a feedback capability that would automatically counter every threat they saw.

p ‘Although Allen Dulles does not say it in his book, his concept of Intelligence is about 10 percent real Intelligence and 90 percent clandestine operations. In other words he would have us busy all around the world all of the time countering “all aspects of the invisible war”. By this he means intervening in the internal affairs of other nations with or without their knowledge and permission. . . It is what the United States has been doing in an increasing crescendo of events, beginning with such actions as the involvements in Berlin and Iran in the 1940s and culminating in the terrible disaster of Vietnam that began as a major intelligence operation, went on into the clandestine operations stage, then got out of hand and had to become an overt activity during the Johnson era.’^^2^^

p Why these revelations came when they did is understandable. Prouty’s piece was written in 1973 when people in the United States were totalling up the damages of the Vietnam war. There were all sorts of estimates in those days, of which R. Sigford said in an unpublished paper, ‘The Rhetoric of the Vietnam War: Presidents Johnson and Nixon’, for the University of Minnesota: ‘Estimates vary, but the direct and indirect cost of the Vietnam War in terms of dollars and cents to the United States comes to about 350 billion dollars.’^^3^^ That’s high. What’s more, as usual in the ultra-pragmatic United States, it left out the cost in human lives, especially those of the Vietnamese.

p In 1978, when the dust had settled, former CIA Director William Colby let it be known that in the seventies the 7 spending on covert actions was ‘rapidly diminishing’. He amplified: ‘The Agency had cut back on political action and paramilitary operations to the extent that funding for Covert Action had plummeted from more than 50 percent of the over-all CIA budget in the 1950s and 1960s to something well under 5 percent.’ Did this mean the funding had really plummeted? No, covert action was being financed out of other budgets. Colby admitted it. ’The Agency,’ he said, ’had turned over virtually all its political-action and paramilitary operations ... to Pentagon.’ As for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Asia Foundation, Colby added, their financing was left ’for the State Department and Congress to work out.’^^4^^ This from Colby’s long and inarticulate memoirs, Honorable Men. My Life in the CIA.

p For his title he borrowed the pronouncement of an equal—his predecessor in the office of CIA director, Helms, who in the early seventies publicly reassured those who had lost faith in the virtues of the Agency: ’Take it on faith that we too are honorable men’. It so happened that some time later Helms was caught in an act of perjury before Congress, which would ordinarily—for any plain American—mean certain imprisonment. But when ’honorable man’ Helms was summoned into court, he and his lawyer begged for leniency on the grounds that he would carry ’the scar of a conviction for the rest of his days’. The court responded by imposing a fine of 2,000 dollars in November 1977, but not for perjury. It concocted a misdemeanor that isn’t in any law book: failing to testify ’fully, completely and accurately’ before Congress.

p The Nation observed in its November 19, 1977 issue that ’the quid the government got for the quo of Helms’s agreement to enter a nolo plea to a misdemeanor was the avoidance of a trial to which the former CIA chief could have brought a heavy load of dirty linen for judicial laundering. Among others, Henry Kissinger’s splattered shirts would have been revealed for all to see.’ Outside the court, the journal went on, as Helms, sentenced to a fine incommensurable with the magnitude of his act, and his lawyer ’talked to reporters, that “scar” had been miraculously changed into “a badge of honor”, even a “ banner”, as the wily attorney put it.’^^5^^ Indeed, confounding attempts, whoever they come from, at sounding out 8 the essence of the U.S. system of government, is for the CIA a matter of honour, no less. That, among other things, is what it’s there for.

p There is no greater delusion than to picture the CIA as purely an agency of intelligence and counter- intelligence. Whatever corrections Colby may have made, Prouty’s estimate, based on the authority of Allen Dulles, is much more convincing: real intelligence is 10 or slightly more per cent of the CIA concerns. If this weren’t so, there’d have been no need to have the CIA. For as we will see the United States has no dearth in intelligence services, of which, by a rough estimate, there are at least ten. George Kennan, diplomat and political thinker, a parttime expert on covert operations, observes rightly that secret intelligence ’was a normal feature of the policies of national states long before either the Soviet Union or even the United States came into existence; and it would be Utopian to hope for its total disappearance. But there are limits. .. I myself have had occasion to see instance after instance in which American intelligence authorities have mounted, or have attempted to mount, operations which have constituted, or would have constituted, a direct abuse not just of Soviet-American diplomatic relations in the formal sense but of the very possibilities for reaching a better understanding between the two governments’. ^^6^^

p The above is an understatement as concerns the policy Washington pursues through the CIA. But it is better than nothing. And it is a reflection of Kennan’s recently surfacing realism at very mature age.

p Certainly, the CIA is not intelligence alone. It is the conductor and orchestrator of the so-called psychological warfare. To this it devotes some 90 per cent of its resources. The definition of ’psychological warfare’ given in instructions to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in 1942 ran as follows: ’The coordination and use of all means, including moral and physical, by which the end is to be attained—other than those of recognized military operations, but including the psychological exploitation of the result of those recognized military actions—which tend to destroy the will of the enemy to achieve victory and to damage his political or economic capacity to do so; which tend to deprive the enemy of the support, 9 assistance, or sympathy of his allies or associates or of neutrals, or to prevent his acquisition of such support, assistance, or sympathy; or which tend to create, maintain, or increase the will to victory of our own people and allies and to acquire, maintain, or increase the support, assistance and sympathy of neutrals.’^^7^^

p These methods are equivalent to attempts at disrupting the political system of the target state, and at ultimately overthrowing it. Espionage is a subsidiary tool of that aim. The spearhead of the CIA ’psychological warfare’ is directed against the Soviet Union. That, indeed, had been the purpose for the establishment and maintenance of the CIA, a type of organisation without precedent in history.

p On a broader plane, the CIA is one of the most important and probably the sharpest tool of the U.S. ruling elite for retailoring the world to suit Washington’s likings.

p Irrespective of the tone and tenor of the official rhetoric, the ruling American political tradition is intolerance. It dates to the days when the Pilgrim Fathers, who hadn’t got on with the Old World, crossed the ocean to set up a state fitting their views. That was when the we-they outlook took shape. And any careful observer will see that the U.S. statesmen who speak for political pluralism are really intolerant of it, for they worship the form of government in the United States as the only possible and in every way superior form. For reasons rooted in this American political tradition, the permanent conflict between the U.S.A. and the rest of the world is in fact inevitable. The functional role of the CIA is to do what it can to settle the conflict in America’s favour.

p Intolerance outside the country, as well as at home. A truly sectarian ethic. Whatever the White House says is to be taken as gospel. We need no examples from the remote past. Here’s a recent one. The criterion for nominees to top offices in the administration, according to Lyndon Johnson, is loyalty: ’I don’t want loyalty. I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.’^^8^^ But what about the mass media, the press? They write from all angles, don’t they? They do. But White House accreditation is something an American journalist doesn’t sneeze at. And there, to take the word of a newsman who didn’t 10 make it, one H. Thompson, ’guys like Mears (Walter Mears, Associated Press) and Semple (Bob Semple, The New York Times) go whimpering around—kissing Ron Ziegler’s (President Nixon’s press secretary) ass.’^^9^^

p What else could one expect? The psychological warfare is directed inward, too, with the object of maintaining extreme conformism. Still, the CIA is being extensively discussed in the press. There had even been an investigation. Let’s see what came of it.

p The outcry that had set in motion various CIA and FBI investigations in the mid-seventies has been almost completely cushioned by the ramified American political system. Now that the dust has settled, the sediment it had brought to the light of day can be examined at greater ease. The first thing that strikes the eye is that the ‘investigators’ tackled not what they wanted or what was suspect, but only those facts, as a rule, which the leaders of the country and of its intelligence services thought fit for public consumption. These were a motley array of facts, some of an intimidating nature, but facts that had been filtered by a finicky political censorship.

p Over these facts Western, notably American, mass media have broken many lances. Now, within limits, all Americans know, and are mildly outraged by the carefully selected facts about the punitive system in the U.S.A., the U.S. espionage, and the experiments that robbed people of their will power. The due censure has been pronounced. But the end purpose of the campaign is still a puzzle to many. It will be no exaggeration to say, however, that this fairly close examination (save some sinister omissions) of the attempts, say, to put people’s minds under control is, in fact, an essential part of the effort to establish such control on the widest possible scale. The dissidents, at least, have been warned of what awaits them if they don’t mend their ways. It will be no exaggeration to say, too, that the purpose of the whole thing was to show the world, especially outside the orbit of U.S. ‘democracy’, who exactly is standing guard over capitalism and how.

p The Progressive, an American journal that gives vent to judgements suiting its title, remarked about the investigations on Capitol Hill as follows: ’The records were excessively censored. . . The Senate committee was blunt 11 enough about the illegalities and outrages of the FBI, but it was almost sycophantic in some of its assessments of the CIA... “The best thing about this is that it’s over,” Senator Howard H. Baker, Tennessee Republican, declared of the fifteen-month investigation that preceded the big moment. “We’re finished (and) we’ve done it, I believe, without doing any damage, or injury, to the agencies".’^^10^^ No damage at all. And plenty of publicity, of a kind that will make Americans think twice before they venture to go against the established law and order.

p The circumspect citizen of that overpraised civilisation seeks escape in spiritual escapism. Catch 22 has become a fact of life. Some are trying to leave the country. A deplorable example is the thousand Americans, described as a sect, who had sought refuge in the jungles of Guyana in the seventies. The reason for their withdrawal into the tropical forest is obvious: the wretches were looking for freedom. Some may, admittedly, have had a warped idea of that priceless treasure, and fell under the influence of Jeff Jones, who is said to have been a religious fanatic and mystic. But this could not be true of all the thousand. Though they hadn’t committed any crimes or misdemeanors, they felt the tentacles of the secret services reaching out to them in the jungle. In the eyes of the exponents of American ‘democracy’ their collective protest and departure from the U.S.A. was a ‘ conspiracy’. And no sooner did the prospect of being shipped home, into the maw of ’law and order’, loom big for the unfortunates in November 1978 than most of them preferred to commit suicide. They were victims of the psychological warfare.

p The CIA practises subversion in many different fields. At present, not minimising other areas, it applies special efforts in the field of ideology against the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. The choice was made for a number of reasons, partly beyond the control of the CIA chiefs.

p Let’s look at that particular aspect of CIA activity. But since it is not possible to detach it completely from the general picture of Western subversion, we will therefore have to touch on other issues.

The first question: why was the CIA established in 1947, not before and not after?