I read Tim Weiner's first CIA book and expect something similar. You learn a lot about the obvious and well-known mistakes and crimes.
But I lack the basic sympathy for these organizations, if they were abolished the world would be a better place.
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It's a nash equilibrium, the primary value of spycraft is opposition to hostile spycraft.
It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I like the idea of explaining Mad Magazine's Spy v Spy as a Nash equilibrium. Nash is about strategies, particularly that neither side could do any better with any other strategy. Spying's justification then comes from fact that withdrawal would be a worse strategy.
Well, and being worse than your opponents likely has material negative effects.
The CIA does more than counterespionage. For example, Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator, Pinochet, in its stead.
>Chile would be a much better place if the CIA didn't overthrow its democracy and install a fascist dictator
Empirically that's not a very well-supported statement, if you compare the economy and living conditions of Chile to its neighbours. Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards. It's like if the US hadn't intervened in to help a fascist dictator in South Korea, the whole of South Korea would be as poor as North Korea is now.
> Empirically speaking, electing communist governments almost always leads to reduced living standards.
Almost always leads to a CIA-backed coup or civil war which indirectly indeed reduces living standards. In the other scenarios it often resulted in generally improved living standards via industrialization, increase of literacy and social programs. In yet others gross mismanagement and large scale famines, or fluctuating results depending on the time scale. There is no commonly accepted uniform outcome, and "almost always worse living standards" is clearly not one.
Yeah, with help of KGB. What could possibly go wrong? It could become as democratic as Cuba. In best case. Or take path of other countries with exported communist revolutions, like North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. You just don't know about pervasive and perverted level of informants and delation that was installed by these "democratic" countries
Well you went off the rails. The comment is talking about Chile, which was a democracy before the CIA overthrew the government and installed a dictator. What does that have to do with other countries or the KGB?
The head side of the coin comes with the tail side of the coin.
Saying the "CIA overthrew its democracy and installed a fascist dictator" is a vast oversimplification of what actually happened and ignores the role of other international actors, not to mention the domestic actors themselves.
Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
> Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup" and if you dig into the details, it raises the question if the CIA had done nothing whether the outcome would have changed at all.
Helping a fascist coup is bad, even if the fascist coup didn't need your help.
Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
It's not a choice between democracy and a fascist (Allende was going regardless), it was a choice between a US friendly authoritarian or a USSR friendly authoritarian.
This is a nice summary of the situation in Chile at the time, the actors involved (domestic and international) and the role of the CIA.
https://www.kyleorton.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile
To get a sense of the CIA’s role, they didn’t even think Pinochet had it in him - they had others pegged as the coup leader. They were surprised to find out it was Pinochet.
>Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
Comparing the two is so fatuous I can't believe it.
You know reality is independent from your morals right ?
It's really not complicated. Don't support people who murder, torture, and expel people from their homes.
"The other guy was worse," is factually pretty off base. You can pick and choose sources all you want, but the fact is that Allende was elected as democratically as any US president in the last few decades: the idea that foreign interference invalidates an election is pretty specious. And even if you want to call Allende a dictator, he's definitely a better dictator than Pinochet: he killed far, far fewer innocent people. I give zero fucks about US-friendly vs. USSR-friendly in this case: if the US friendly dictator kills hundreds of thousands of people and the USSR friendly one doesn't, the USSR friendly one is better.
Let me make this clear: if you choose capitalism over preventing mass-murder, your morality is screwed up.
And even if somehow Allende was worse (which again, is not true), that doesn't make supporting Pinochet morally right. Most 5 year olds know two wrongs don't make a right.
> To get a sense of the CIA’s role, they didn’t even think Pinochet had it in him - they had others pegged as the coup leader. They were surprised to find out it was Pinochet.
If your argument is that the CIA was incompetent, that doesn't look much better for them.
>https://www.kyleorton.com/p/myth-1973-american-coup-in-chile
This article is on the level of "the holocaust never happened" cherry-picked argumentations.
Just an example: it doesn't even mention the trucker's strike was directed by the CIA.
Love your attempt at bringing in Holocaust denial to evoke emotions.
The total funding was $7M over 2 years. The strike involved 250,000 trucker drivers, or $28 per striker.
As the source said in a NY Times article..
““The whole point of this is that covert action provides a 1 per cent impetus for something that the people want anyway,” he said.” - CIA source
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to...
> Is it worse if the alternative is another authoritarian?
Yes, the USA shouldn't be meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries to action its proxy cold war against a rival super power.
I acknowledge that the USA determined this was a correct course of action in order to strengthen its hegemony, and the hegemony of global capitalism, however it was still unethical and in opposition to the needs of people in the USA.
But if the USDR is already meddling it’s not longer purely “domestic affairs” is it?
If your take is that it’s unethical, that’s fine, but you need to consider the alternative - giving the USSR free rein to meddle in the domestic politics of the Southern hemisphere. The citizens of those countries end up living under an authoritarian anyways.
I’m not saying it isn’t an ugly business, but I’m not sure the alternative is much better.
It is insane that this is downvoted. You have to be wrong in the head to think that a country helping a coup that clearly damaged another country is a good thing.
>Like most "CIA coups", the role the CIA played in Chile is more of a "hey let's help this guy who is already planning a coup"
Absolutely wrong, to the point of negationism. Amongst many things, the CIA trained South American militaries and police in torture through the School of the Americas.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2246205
If "this guy" wasn't already planning a coup, the CIA would have done it themselves anyway. Overthrowing Allende by any means was a core mission for them. The CIA was directly responsible for killing a general, René Schneider, who stood against any attempt at a coup.
And then they collaborated with Argentina's (and other South Amrican dictatorships') Operation Condor:
-mass abduction
-death squads
-torture of anyone suspected of being even vaguely leftist (electric shocks, prolonged immersion in water, cigarette burns, sexual abuse, rape, removal of teeth and fingernails, castration, and burning with boiling water, oil and acid)
-throwing them alive fron planes into the sea, hands and feet bound
-kidnapping newborns from their "leftist" mothers (subsequenly killed) to give them to conservative families
Sources rather than “trust me bro” would be nice.
“ In the best traditions of the CIA, catastrophe ensued. Viaux ignored the explicit U.S. instructions to cease-and-desist; two abduction efforts against Schneider, on 19 and 20 October, failed; the third attempt, on 22 October, ended with Schneider being mortally wounded (he died on 25 October);”
Your whole article is a giant "trust me bro" based on some unclassified testimonies coming from the most guilty, and ends with the insane and unsupported assertion that Allende was going to set up gulags (which doesn't address the fact that the CIA, before and after the coup, trained the juntas of all South America how to disappear and torture opponents on the French model of the Battle of Algiers).
The article provides more than 50 references to sources. It has has links to previously classified CIA documents.
Your rebuttal consists of one source completely unrelated to what happened in Chile. Well done.
And what the CIA was doing in other countries is irrelevant to whether what was article describes as happening in Chile is accurate.
If you're going to claim the article isn't true, then an actual rebuttal of the article arguments would be a helpful place to start.
> It's like wishing militaries didn't exist.
I'm convinced that the evolution of the internet will bring this as well.
I think the internet is making this problem worse, actually.
In the short-term, the wheat and chaff are very mixed for sure.
But I don't think nation-states are likely to survive for more than 500 or so more years. And the capacity for collaboration, innovation, and even perhaps transcendence into something like a distinct and more peaceful species seems to only grow.
> if they were abolished the world would be a better place
I'm not so sure about that; some actions of the CIA are questionable at best, but the Soviet Union or KGB were not the good guys by any means, nor is Al Qaeda or Putin's Russia.
The failures are far more publicised than the successes. How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero. How does that balance against the mistakes and crimes? Unclear.
And look, obviously the world would be far better off without the CIA, or KGB/FSB, or Al Qaeda, or any of these assholes. But I can't control what Russia or Al Qaeda does and neither can anyone else, and obviously we need to do something to counter these people. It seems to me what we need is a way to have a secret service that doesn't go to the dark side.
>How many $bad_things has the CIA prevented? I don't have a clear answer for that
Well that's the problem for your steelman on a position being an unfalsifiable hypothesis, isn't it? We DON'T know - and neither you or I know if it's actually non-zero either. We can probably list 20 main atrocities committed by the CIA together, and with a few hours of research we can probably get it up to a few hundred. But we can't find the inverse, so why introduce is as support in your argument?
> I don't have a clear answer for that but it's obviously non-zero.
This isn't obvious to me. Can you help me understand?
The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.
Going public with that was a bold call - CIA put its reputation on the line. But Ukraine was more prepared because of it - and so were its allies.
A lot of Ukrainian officials didn't believe that the war was about to start up until the moment it did. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been without US beating the drum.
That's intelligence gathering. I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations. That's what the voters were sold on when it was set up. Gathering accurate information for our democratically elected officials to use to make their decisions can only be a good thing, assuming they follow the rules and leave Americans and America alone (which they of course don't).
The entire issue I and most people have with the CIA is that it isn't just a bunch of guys having coded conversations on park benches in foreign capitals and writing thick reports. Yes, those guys are there, but mainly its an unaccountable army that ignores the rules of war and does tons of illegal assassinations, blackmail, etc. These are the lowest of the low. These are people that, in any just society, should be tried and publicly executed while the citizenry packs a picnic lunch and lights off fireworks to celebrate.
We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
>I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations.
That's magnanimous of you.
>We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
People say that, but is it true? Any examples? I feel like these "fake-mustache guys" are always getting themselves into something. That's why they have the fake-mustaches, after all.
> People say that, but is it true? Any examples?
MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency, doesn't have a covert action arm. Which is not to say that our government hasn't done any fuckery with other countries' politics (we're also a former imperial power) but it does lessen the temptation and the capability.
MI6 doesn’t have a covert action arm? Are you kidding me? lulz [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MI6]
“ SIS activities included a range of covert political actions, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état (in collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency).[85]”
“ During the Soviet–Afghan War, SIS supported the Islamic resistance group commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud and he became a key ally in the fight against the Soviets. An annual mission of two SIS officers, as well as military instructors, were sent to Massoud and his fighters. Through them, weapons and supplies, radios and vital intelligence on Soviet battle plans were all sent to the Afghan resistance. SIS also helped to retrieve crashed Soviet helicopters from Afghanistan.[90]/
“Some of SIS's actions since the 2000s have attracted significant controversy, such as its alleged complicity in acts of torture and extraordinary rendition.[10][11]”
“ The stated priority roles of SIS are counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, providing intelligence in support of cyber security, and supporting stability overseas to disrupt terrorism and other criminal activities.[8]”
“ In March 2016, it was reported that MI6 had been involved in the Libyan Civil War since January of that year, having been escorted by the SAS to meet with Libyan officials to discuss the supplying of weapons and training for the Syrian Army and the militias fighting against ISIS.[113] In April 2016, it was revealed that MI6 teams with members of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment seconded to them had been deployed to Yemen to train Yemeni forces fighting AQAP, as well as identifying targets for drone strikes.[114] In November 2016, The Independent reported that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ supplied the SAS and other British special forces a list of 200 British jihadists to kill or capture before they attempt to return to the UK. The jihadists are senior members of ISIS who pose a direct threat to the UK. Sources said SAS soldiers have been told that the mission could be the most important in the regiment's 75-year history.[115]”
“ E Squadron is the sole paramilitary group within SIS.[132] There is limited information about the squadron in the public domain, and it was not until the 1990s that it was officially recognised by the British government. Although the Government has declassified some information about the squadron, details about its operations generally remain secret. Before the 1990s, the group was known mainly by pseudonym The Increment.[133] Out of all the British special forces units, E Squadron is a branch of the wider UKSF and many of its combatants are hand-picked to work with the SIS. The group is available for undertaking any task at the requirement of the both UKSF Directorate and SIS. It is manned by operators from the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS) and the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).[133]”
They definitely have guns, and aren’t afraid to use them. And they’re fundamentally covert.
The CIA was the successor to the OSS in WW2. Which was very much the ‘dirty tricks’ department.
> The last major intelligence coup CIA had (that we know of) was when the agency called the Russia's invasion of Ukraine months in advance.
If you have invented the disease, then surely you can warn in advance that a cure will be needed.
What kind of tin foil hat conspiracy land did I stumble into?
How would you estimate the probabilities of the organization having never prevented a single bad thing from happening vs having prevented one or more?
It feels ridiculous even writing that out. Can you help me understand your perspective?
It's worth noting that the CIA effectively created Al-Qaeda, and also likely had some hands in Putins rise to power (https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/how-america-helped-mak...).
However, the big issue is that you can't argue the values of liberal democracy, the rule of law, elections, freedom of speech, but at the same time overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments and keep people believing you.
I believe that the CIA has done more to destroy the trust in democracy and promote the rise of totalitarian regimes that we are seeing now, than any other single entity. Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO.
>"Even if they prevented some terror attacks (and as we know they failed spectacularly to prevente several), that's not a price worth paying IMO."
What's always been funny to me about the CIA is if they didn't even do these things:
>"overthrow democratically elected leaders, torture innocents, run vile ph psychological experiments"
There probably would have been less - if any - of those terror attacks to worry about in the first place.
It always existed to provoke and to force varying degrees of military response from nations we antagonized. It was ALWAYS to justify a status quo propped by a military industrial complex - and to overstay the luxuries given to us by Pax Americana. We could have pulled off a peaceful era without bullying, I'm sure of it.
I don't know that much about Putin, but "some hands in Putins rise to power" is not really substantiated by your article. It just claims that the US knew some things and didn't act on them, and provides some weak evidence for it. In general I think the hope was always that Russia would see the benefits of liberal democracy and would slowly shift in that direction. Jumping on every incident wasn't really worth it, so they were willing to forgive them. That shift to liberal democracy obviously didn't happen.
"Created Al-Qaeda" is certainly far too simplistic. There are unforeseen consequences to everything you do (or don't do). The alternative of leaving Afghanistan to their fate after the Soviet invasion also wasn't appealing. If you want to blame someone for Al Qaeda, then start with the Soviet Union and Pakistan.
These two examples also conflict by the way: in one instance they had to do more, and in the other less. It's easy to sit here in judgement decades after the fact, but at the time a lot of this was less clear.
They did knowingly supply weapons, not just to any random mujahideen groups, but specifically to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar predominantly, with full knowledge of what the guy and his forces are doing with that money, on the basis that it was the most efficient way to hurt the Soviets. I don't think this can be chalked down to "unforeseen consequences". More a case of "the ends justify the means".
The reason it’s a secret service is fundamentally because it has to operate on the dark side.
If it could be transparent and ‘clean’ it would be able to operate in the open.