Second Rate [Part 1 of 2]

It is often said of the CIA that there are two words that aptly describe it: mendacity and mediocrity. And this is from the time Harry Truman initiated the agency to the present. It has never gotten any better.

If you are an incompetent liar in intelligence work, you can create a crisis and failure. If you have no patience for espionage (it takes too long for results) or dissimulation then an agent has to rely on covert operations e.g. military coups, assassinations, surveillance of dissidents or secret interventions in internal affairs of governments. Many CIA covert operations were essentially failures because of incompetence or inexperience resulting sometimes in the death of 100 to 1000 innocent individuals. CIA operatives who worked in the Middle East and knew no Arabic and had no familiarity with the culture discovered over time that the Moslems were very effective liars, much better at it than the CIA. After all, the Moslems had been lying to each other for centuries. To them “deception was the essence of survival”. In fact there is an actual Arabic word derived from Islamic texts. It is “taqiya” and it means “the necessary lie” or the lie to get what you want. The Shiites habitually lied to the Sunnis in order to survive. But when the CIA operative lied, for example, to an individual Moslem who was a likely candidate for a source of information, the CIA agent frequently was caught in his lies and his potential informer ended up dead. Moslem surveillance was so good that the agent had no clue as to how he was found out. The Moslem agents knew that the informer had been recruited by the Americans and so they killed him. And what was the lie that got him murdered? The CIA agent promised to bring him to the US, give him money and a safe place to live. The informer believed the promises because that was his dream.

In 1967 a Greek junta known as “the colonels” seized power in Greece led by a Greek undercover CIA agent recruited 20 years before by Allen Dulles, former head of the CIA.
The “colonels” and their friends had been slipping hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Nixon campaign as a gift. The money came through the Greek intelligence service which was linked to the CIA. The colonels were well known fascists, i.e. the classic fascists- Mussolini style. The trains ran on time. So here we have a bunch of fascist militants paying off the Nixon administration and at the same time planning a coup that the CIA knew nothing about despite their close relationship. In short, they had been conned by the colonels. To top it off the US sold military hardware to the junta and the CIA justified the sales with the laughable lie that it would return democracy to Greece. The CIA would not allow anything critical to be said about the junta. It was a well known fact that the junta tortured its enemies and when the question of human rights was raised, the CIA denied it by belittling the protestors.

At this point the colonels decided they would overthrow the leader of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, whom they hated. The US warned them not to do this because if they attacked, the Turks, who were only 40 miles off the coast of the island, would invade. And that was not in the plan. The colonels ignored our warning and attacked anyway. The end result was a war between the Turks and the Greeks who were both “trained and armed” by the US. The slaughter was horrendous and once again the CIA failed to warn Washington that the war was about to begin because of inept intelligence. The horror of maintaining an intimate relationship with a repressive dictatorship is readily apparent. Something we tend to do all over the world because it is good for business. In the end a popular uprising deposed the junta. However, the American Embassy was surrounded and the American Ambassador was fatally shot. Later a new CIA station chief was brought in and he also was assassinated. With this kind of history is it any wonder why we are hated throughout the world? Obviously it is not a wise choice to allow the CIA a free hand in foreign policy.


References:

Ignatius, David. Body of Lies. W.W. Norton, 2007.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes. Doubleday, 2007.
Wikipedia