{"id":101080,"date":"2013-12-25T10:53:15","date_gmt":"2013-12-25T10:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-cia\/"},"modified":"2013-12-25T16:39:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-25T16:39:16","slug":"the-only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-cia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-only-thing-we-have-to-fear-is-cia\/","title":{"rendered":"The only thing we have to fear is CIA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled \u00c5\u201cLimit CIA Role to Intelligence.\u201d The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, \u00c5\u201cI think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate US intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.<\/p>\n

Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed \u201d that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster \u201d are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.<\/p>\n

Truman began his article by underscoring \u00c5\u201cthe original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency \u2026 and what I expected it to do.\u201d It would be \u00c5\u201ccharged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department \u00cb\u0153treatment\u00e2\u201e\u00a2 or interpretations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote \u00c5\u201cthe most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending US forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of US air and ground support.<\/p>\n

Wallowing in the Bay of Pigs<\/p>\n

Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles had been offended when young President Kennedy had the temerity to ask questions about CIA plans before the Bay of Pigs debacle, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of US combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to mousetrap the President.<\/p>\n

Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of US combat forces. In his notes, Dulles explained that, \u00c5\u201cwhen the chips were down,\u201d Kennedy would be forced by \u00c5\u201cthe realities of the situation\u201d to give whatever military support was necessary \u00c5\u201crather than permit the enterprise to fail.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u00c5\u201centerprise\u201d which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how the Russians might react. The reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a \u00c5\u201csewer of deceit,\u201d relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye.<\/p>\n

But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to \u00c5\u201csplinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.\u201d The outrage was very obviously mutual.<\/p>\n

When Kennedy himself was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman \u201c as it did to many others \u201c that the disgraced Dulles and his unrepentant associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a president they felt was soft on Communism and get even for their Bay of Pigs fiasco.<\/p>\n

\u00cb\u0153Cloak and Dagger\u00e2\u201e\u00a2<\/p>\n

While Truman saw CIA\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s attempted mousetrapping of President Kennedy as a particular outrage, his more general complaint is seen in his broader lament that the CIA had become \u00c5\u201cso removed from its intended role \u2026 I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. \u2026 It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.\u201d Not only shaping policy through its control of intelligence, but also \u00c5\u201ccloak and dagger\u201d operations, presumably including assassinations.<\/p>\n

Truman concluded the op-ed with an admonition that was as clear as the syntax was clumsy: \u00c5\u201cI would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field \u201c and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.\u201d The importance and prescient nature of that admonition are even clearer today, a half-century later.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled \u00c5\u201cLimit CIA Role to Intelligence.\u201d The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, \u00c5\u201cI think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.\u201d It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-101080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}