How the CIA Undermines American National Security

The day before the 2010 mid-term election, the Associated Press released a story about 16 CIA officers receiving administrative punishment for their role in Peru's 2001 shoot down of a plane that killed American missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter. Although it was later found that the plane was not carrying drugs, as it was suspected of doing, the killing of two innocent American citizens on flawed information supplied by the CIA is another chilling illustration of the almost habitually incompetence of an agency entrusted to protect American citizens. Perhaps former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson in Dismantling the Empire, best sums up the decades of failures by the Central Intelligence Agency by declaring, “an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all”.

The analysis submitted by Chalmers Johnson is persuasive when considering the numerous failures the Central Intelligence Agency has had over the last 60 years. As systematically detailed by Chalmers Johnson in the chapter entitled Agency of Rogues in the aforementioned book, and aided a great deal by the research done by New York Times correspondent Tim Wiener is his book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, the historical record of CIA failure is unequivocal.

Beginning with Korean War where the CIA dropped 212 foreign agents into Manchuria, and within a short period of time, over a hundred agents were killed or captured, the CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that it is no good at executing clandestine operations, and its operatives never have enough linguistic or cultural knowledge of target countries. This was particularly evident shortly following the Korean War when the CIA was played for suckers by Soviet KGB agents, who had wiped out a Polish underground movement the CIA thought still existed and turned the former Polish underground supporters into double agents. After five years of planning, millions of dollars’ worth of gold bars, arms, and two-way radios, did the CIA begin to find out that they were played. Adding salt to the proverbial wound, it would later be discovered that a good portion of the CIA’s money was sent to the Communist Party in Italy.

Johnson makes a powerful statement against the incompetence of the CIA when he writes:

The story (of incompetence) would prove unending. On February 21, 1994, the agency finally discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe, who had been spying for the USSR for seven years and had sent innumerable U.S. agents before the KGB firing squads. Wiener, the author of Legacy of Ashes comments, “The Ames case revealed an institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence”.

Although the CIA continued to fail in almost every operation it undertook ranging from the 1961 Bay of Pigs Operation to the failure to prevent the surprise attack on 9/11 by al-Qaeda operatives , when it did marginally succeed in operations such as the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran or the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile, the few successful CIA operations produced negative long term consequences for American national security. Perhaps no greater example of the abject and miserable failure of the CIA was the inability to prevent al-Qaeda operatives from launching a surprise attack within the United States on September 11, 2001.

Following the total failure of the CIA in 2001, the CIA further discredited itself during the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the CIA failed to correctly analyze if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear or biological weapons. Although the French intelligence service had cultivated a source within the Iraqi government, Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, who had passed on information to French intelligence that Saddam Hussein had no active WMD programs and this information was passed onto the CIA, the CIA still had no ability to analyze accurately what little intelligence it had. As recounted by Tim Wiener in Legacy of Ashes, “

Under [CIA Director George Tenat’s] leadership, the agency produced the worst body of work in its long history: a special national intelligence estimate titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

The flawed CIA assessment of Iraq pursuing and continuing programs for weapons of mass destruction, contributed President Bush’s decision to launch a preemptive military attack on Iraq, with the sole aim of instituted a change of regime. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the latest tragic example of America’s abysmally record of trying to determine how other people should govern themselves. Chalmers Johnson in the chapter Agency of Rogues writes,

The CIA’s secret support for fascists (e.g. Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g. Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g. the Congo under Mabuto Sese Seko); its uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and religious fanatics (Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) - all these and more activities combined to pepper the world with blowback movements against the United States.

Most Americans remain oblivious to the corrupt and undemocratic practices of the CIA or know what the approximately 17,000 employees do with the yearly $ 44 to $ 48 billion spent on “intelligence”. In a time of trillion dollar deficits and anti big government rhetoric increasing from both ends of the political spectrum, it is time more Americans become more educated and aware to how having an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all.