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CIA: Beyond Redemption

CIA: Beyond Redemption image
Parent Issue
Day
1
Month
October
Year
1975
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
OCR Text

The apparently endless wave of revelations in recent weeks concerning the multitudinous illegal activities, both foreign and domestic, of the Central Intelligence Agency is surprising only from the liberal viewpoint, which naively expects "accountability" from an organization whose mission has always been to do the dirty work of American economic and political interestsin secret, with an enormous budget, and effectively outside any legal controls or political restraints.

Of all the CIA honchos dragged pale and trembling before investigators recently, only former counterintelligence chief James Angleton, in an unguarded and later regretted moment, has given expression to the naked reality of the CIA in a truly historic utterance:

"It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of government has to comply with all the overt rules of the government."

His interrogators may have been appalled, but Angleton is right. Why, indeed, should we expect anything the super-agency does to conform to anybody's definition of legality? Why should a mere President's "orders" restrain it? How can such a monolith be "reformed" or "made accountable" in any meaningful way?

The business of the CIA, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the economic blockade of Cuba, the destruction of the Allende government in Chile, and now the dismantling of the progressive regime in Portugal, is the protection of American economic interestsincluding the maintenance of a political climate conducive to capitalist investment and profit. Governments which move too far to the left, whether democratically elected or not, will be subject to subversion by any possible meanssophisticated economic sabotage, the careful cultivation of "moderate" anti-communist political forces, and manipulation of the media through propaganda campaigns.

The recent disclosures that the CIA, despite denials by Secretary of State Kissinger and agency officials, has been funneling tens of millions to Portuguese anti-communists through friendly western European political parties in order to arrest the leftward progress of the Armed Forces Movement should come as no shock to those who read ex-agent Philip Agee's warning in our last issue. By now, of course, we know that Agee was too late and that the CIA once again managed to create political and economic chaos and force out of power those elements presenting an immediate threat to capitalist interests in western Europe.

We can expect this pattern of interference and manipulation of other nations' affairs to continue unabated as long as we keep deluding ourselves with the notion that we can somehow '"restore" this super-agency to something resembling a "legitimate" governmental functionsomething it has never had, and never will.