The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50
nsarchive.gwu.edu
nsarchive.gwu.edu
One of the earlier times I was reading about underhandedness, it involved a US ambassador raising red flags about grave human rights abuses by the foreign gov't. For whatever reason, that ambassador was replaced by one who would publicly deny what was going on. At the time I read that (long after it happened), I paid attention to the latter, villain ambassador, but not enough attention to the earlier ambassador, who seemed to be on the right side.
A bit like the saying from Mister Rogers lore, "Look for the helpers."[1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/198594-when-i-was-a-boy-and...
The CIA have been cowboys.. and I suspect that the modern CIA still has this going on.
Where did they hear about it, at the time, and what did they hear?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_i...
On the flip side, the US military intervention in Granada saved its democratic government from a coup and in Panama liberated it from a dictatorship. But there is a segment of people who need the US to be a pure villain. Fortunately, there is a lack of evidence that the US is doing worse than any other nation would if it had its power.
They should engrave that on a monument somewhere.
The women of Calama have been searching for decades for their children, brothers, and husbands who disappeared during the dictatorship of Pinochet.
Title is a joke on chigago boys: the Santigo boys
And a decent Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
I was an intelligence officer for ~17 years, served in Iraq and saw first hand how heavy of a hand the US plays globally in a way that is so expansive and embedded there’s no single body (HPSCI, commissions etc…) that can control it.
Yes technically all collection, processing, dissemination etc… activities are still under congressional budget authorities and executive control and subject to judicial review.
However, the fact that title 10 and title 50 authorities are so broad and interchangable, in addition to the reach into industry for any ability to do data collection, that you couldn’t dismantle the US influence system even from the inside at this point. There’s also a million checks internally to ensure OPs are LEGALLY allowed, but that just means you found a loophole or have topcover, or find an OCA that will make your activity SAP
The only way out is through and it is by seizing the means of production, such that the ownership and control is exclusively and explicitly done by labor power
I appreciated DK too, but I think its usage of the word 'seize' (or tyoical attribution to it in any case) may have been counterproductive to its author's motivations.
Perhaps because I don't believe the English language contains precisely the alternative concept I'm looking for in one word, but I'm inclined to think 'saturate & outclass' is both much more palatable to all the parties concerned, in place of 'seize', and better-descriptive of what modus operandi I believe will be more effective. The image I want to convey is of a market producton volume under the co-op context that performs so much betterand is so much more engaged with by its 'customer-stakeholders' that the oligarchic-driven incumbents are rendered irrelevant into insignificance by tbe size, expansion, and caliber of the cooperativrly-owned concerns.
However, that’s not the world we live in and the reality is that existing monopolies don’t remain entrenched accidentally. They remain entrenched because they use state power via the law to entrenche their immoral activities.
In the face of that, you actually have to be - not just passive - because you will be faced with active attack.
So seizing really does a certain point mean at the detriment to existing monopoly power, and more or less whatever that takes to fight
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/TrumanLimitCIA....
[Deserves being quoted in full]:
Limit CIA Role To Intelligence by Harry S. Truman December 22, 1963 The Washington Post, page A11
INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21—I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.
I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.
Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.
But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.
Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department “treatment” or interpretations.
I wanted and needed the information in its “natural raw” state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.
Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about “Yankee imperialism,” “exploitive capitalism,” “war-mongering,” “monopolists,” in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.
I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.
We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Copyright © 1963 by Harry S Truman
If Russia can "poison" Eastern Ukraine for their benefit, if the US can cut the legs from under a democracy for their benefit, if Israel can eradicate the people from a land for their benefit, etc. and live to fully enjoy that benefit, people are going to have these conversations on "ancient" history time and time again.
Reality is extremely messy, mistakes, negligence, or sometimes outright evil behavior does and will happen.
There is the saying - the bigger dog f*ks all other dogs.
TBH such behavior massively feeds pro-russian propaganda and emotions in ie Europe or Middle east. Since they don't really have to invent massive fantasies just spin mildly actual history, if even needed and continue from there. I manage to see easily forest for the trees so to say, but I personally know quite a few smart people fail at that and lean more into anti-american sentiment, and with less educated minds its even easier.
Looking at the actual relations between, say, the Soviets and Korea or China or Vietnam and the picture of every state as a vassal of a larger state doesn't seem to hold- there are a lot of reasons the USSR was not as interventionist in various people in the US would like to believe. And there are a lot of reasons China and Iran are both viewed as monstrous threats by folks in the US (and their vassals) and thought of as benign (compared to the US) by much of the wider world: if you're not part of a multi-century colonialist project then "establishing world dominance" doesn't make sense.
If you see yourself as "the big dog" and you view a "dog-eat-dog world" as a historical necessity, then if you have enough resources you can create that reality.
You are claiming at once that deepening our understanding of historic CIA misdeeds misses the forest for the trees, and then ignoring the trees to project current CIA misdeeds out 50+ years.
It's like the coastline paradox and the gambler's fallacy had a baby.
On the off chance that this was not written by some bad LLM that will miss the point again... I'm claiming that some countries with power are in a never ending cycle of pulling some appalling, odious crap that furthers their interest and keep that crap buried for a generation or so, then after enough time passes the crap surfaces and the new generation who also benefited from that offers some weak platitudes about how the appalling, odious crap "was not a very nice thing to do" while pulling their generation's version of odious, appalling crap to further their interest and keep that crap buried for a generation or so. And so on.
In the chorus of voices that say today "wow, what the CIA was doing back then was pretty not ok" are people who benefit from what the CIA did and is still doing as we speak. People who vote, support, subsidize these acts, or take part in committing them even without knowing.
If you just read to answer you'll never get the point. And big words can only take you so far in hiding it.
I'll do my best not to sound glib or combative, or judgmental; but I genuinely would love to know:
How did people working as 'intelligence officers' manage to make informed decisions without the fundamental knowledge that Iraq (and Afghanistan and Syria and Yemen etc) was basically a murderous, internationally illegal money laundering operation?
Or, to try and put it another way, what processes are used to make sure that people have enough information to be effective in their jobs, while also making sure they don't know/care about the unspeakable evil they're enabling? ... Is it just effective compartmentalization? Camaraderie? Nationalism?
Did you guys know, but just sort of not look at the elephant in the room? I'm probably failing at sounding non-judgmental... Apologies if so, but I've wondered this for a long time.
Ultimately you decide whether or not you’re going to put blinders on, try to fix the system or exit the system.
I tried my best to Fix the system, but ultimately it was clear that I was going to be more effective outside of it and so I left it.
I wish you the very best of luck in your endeavors, which seem remarkably admirable in both intention and execution.
It gets lonely out there and nice to see people who understand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham
Those who are familiar with that period of English history know full well that the 'realm' was engulfed in internal conflicts and that the 'system' devised to "protect the realm" viewed the "subjects of the Crown" as potential adversaries. There you will find the 'DNA' of CIA. [So r/1960s/1947 ..]
America won "World War 2" but lost its soul.
Rome had the Frumentarii, and there are examples from Persia, China, and Sparta.
These were overt empires run by emperors. What we've had since the end of WWII is a covert empire directed by an informal pseudo-government of oligarchs, hidden under a veneer of democracy.
In the UK the Crown never changed its mind about internal adversaries, as the recent "spycops" inquiry shows.
People forget that George Washington was a traitor of the British crown directly - Which, of course I support however, Washington did not actually dismantle such power structures, simply transferring ownership of them
War for independence, yes. Revolution? Eh, not really.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/noam-chomsky-responsib...
Remembered on this very day as "La Diada" in Catalunya.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/pinochets-economic-policy-...
"Pinochet's economic policy is vastly overrated"
> Mining a bunch of copper, helping your cronies get rich, and pumping up land prices is not a "miracle".
We never got to look at Allende's economic system and how it compares.
Politically Allende was freedom minded to a fault in the sense that the coup would have been a lot harder if he'd accepted violence. Economic freedom doesn't mean anything.
By economic freedom I mean the measure of freedom from coercion to spend your money. All governments must collect taxes, but the more you are forced to pay in taxes the less economic freedom you have. If you can spend your money how you like, and if you want to save it to fund your own or other's political activity, you are more able to campaign for your political freedoms. This seems to be how Pinochet was removed from power.
Plus ça change...
From a HN commentator in 2054:
> I think Russia was very concerned at the time that Ukraine under Zelensky would become a client state or a vassal of the US. Russia still upholds the "No outsiders" Doctrine which states that any intervention in the politics of the Russian World by foreign powers is a threat to Russia. Russia does not want any foreign interference or potential military bases in its 'backyard'.
There is no morality in geopolitics. In the anarchic international system, there is no global enforcement mechanism, so states will always try to maximize their security at the expense of others. In short, might makes right in this system.
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." - Thucydides
Yeah, I guess it's a thin line between "providing neutral historical context and reasoning" and "implicitly suggesting that the reasoning makes the actions acceptable or understandable". I'll trust what you're saying though and assume you're not actually trying to justifying it.
> states will always try to maximize their security at the expense of others
I don't think this is true for every single country in the world, especially those more concerned with their own well-being above their "global security status". That's the kind of black and white view that leads to more division and separation rather than humans trying to work together.
For some countries, maximizing their security simply means trying to survive and not get taken over. These are typically smaller countries such as Armenia. They can't afford to focus on their economic well-being or working with other nations if their existence is threatened. For other countries that are established powers, maximizing security can mean anything from securing the territory it currently holds (India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Korea) to expanding its territory (Russia, Azerbaijan) to getting or maintaining a sphere of influence (US, Russia, China).
So, they are saying they're okay with killing in order to improve their economic prospects.
But more importantly, from a "realpolitik" International Relations perspective, the biggest problem with the invasion of Ukraine is that Russia couldn't win it as swiftly as it believed it could. If they were not a paper tiger and had in fact succeeded in taking Kyiv shortly after the start of the conflict, the rest of the world would have had to accept it. Because they failed, they get the US and other Western allies supporting a resistance for the stated goal of defending Ukraine's sovereignty but for the true goal of not allowing Russia to grow stronger.
Not at all true.
Downvoting me and saying "not true" doesn't make it less true.
The actual internal political communication within Russia makes it clear that they don't consider Ukraine and the Ukrainian identity as legitimate. That is why they want to annex Ukraine. Putin launched the invasion in a speech where called Ukraine a fake nation that shouldn't exist.
The stated reasons for starting a war are rarely the true reasons. Although Putin did, among other "reasons", say NATO expansion is a critical factor.
The short of it is "the US (like all powers which can afford to, but more) will do whatever it needs to do for its benefit while crucifying the same actions from anyone else".
The US, at least since WW2, are the bad guys. Look at what happened to the perpetrators of Unit 731. Or all the Nazis that ended up in positions of power in the West. I mean, look at the resume of Adolf Heusinger [1]. The US were the bad guys in the Cuban missile crisis, almost precipitating WW3. The USSR putting missiles in Cuba was a direct response to the US putting Jupiter MRBMs in Turkey. It's for the restraint of one man (Vasili Arkhopov [2]) that we didn't have a nuclear war.
In the 1950s, we started overthrowing governments at the behest of the interests of Western companies (eg Guatemala [3], Iran [4]).
Anytime any country has even hinted that they'd nationalize extraction industries of someone who was left-leaning won an election, that country would have a coup and the CIA's fingerprints would be all over it. Pinochet is just one of dozens of examples.
Now we largely exact vengeance for defying US interests by starving people to death (aka "economic sanctions"), a policy that has also killed millions.
None of this is principled. People may point to the Monroe doctrine or the Truman doctrine or defending democracy but we've overthrown too many democracies for that claim to have any credibility.
If this were Star Wars, we we would be the Empire.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
The so-called War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq persisted through 4 presidents, 2 from each party. Both parties are neoliberals.
Abrahm Lincoln [1]:
> Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.
sounds an awful lot like Karl Marx and the Labor Theory of Value [2]. So what happened? The two world wars massively increased US wealth, power and influence [3] and there was also the Red Scare, particularly after WW2 (although there were concerns about communists prior to that). The Red Scare (and Reagan in particular) destroyed the labor movement in the US. Now we people who champion tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. That's how successful the propaganda has been.
What's clear is the capitalists will side with fascists to destroy socialists and communists. Every time. Fascism is capitalism in crisis.
Why do I bring all this up? Because when you make a materialist analysis of historical events, you see the US acting in the interests of capital owners every time. So after WW2, with the red Scare, who was good at fighting communists? Nazis obviously. So is it any surprise that Nazis ended up in the command structure of NATO? Not in the slightest.
So there's no reforming the CIA in the current system. The entire system is corrupt. And the only antidote is class consciousness and class solidarity. Any polarization you see in modern politics is merely a tool to prevent class solidarity by workers. Racism was fanned in Reconstruction to avoid unity between freed slaves and poor white people. Race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, the middle class (as distinct from the "lower class"), whatever it is. There's always some manufactured culture war nonsense to keep people divided.
Until people realize they have more in common with their fellow worker than they do the guy who owns the warehouse they work in, nothing will change.
[1]:https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on...
I really just can't see how this ever changes. You are right that the Dems and Republicans are two cheeks of the same arse - but worse, they don't even play fair within their own rules; just look at the shenanigans they've been undertaking to keep Jill Stein's Green party underfunded and off the ballot!
I'll go with "the US has been bad".
But to say that they were simply "the bad guys", in a world bursting full of bad guys in practically every corner, is simplistic and naive.
It also (ironically) denies these other societies any respect for their own agency, and their own salient capacity to be corrupt, incompetent, genocidal and warmongering, and run themselves into the ground in countless other ways without any help at all from the US. In that sense, it's actually quite a myopic and hegemonic way of looking at things.
The British Empire is described as the first drug dealer empire. First tobacco then opium. Well the US is the arms dealer empire. Eisenhower's farewell address warned of the increasing threat and power of the "military industrial complex" [1].
But in virtually every conflict post-WW2 we've been on the wrong side. Take the defining moment of 9/11, a terrorist attack perpetrated by Saudis, funded by members of the Saudi royal family. What did we do? We turned around and invaded Afghanistan (who offered to hand over bin Laden [2]) and Iraq (who had absolutely nothing to do with it), killing millions.
[1]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
This amounts to "other people are bad too".
It's also not whataboutism. To suggest that it is amounts to, well, an "either/or" response.
All I'm saying is: it seems you're trying to essentialize the woe and evil the world in a way I don't find valid or useful.
There is a saying, attributed to Stalin during the Yalta conference (but it's most definitely apocryphal): "I always thought that 'democracy' means the rule of the people but comrade Roosevelt here quite clearly explained to me that 'democracy' actually means the rule of the U.S. people". It's funny because apparently the top US diplomats and leaders genuinely do believe that.
Why should they? Who is doing full constant oversight of whole CIA that has always upper hand above them to make it happen? Sorry but this is just a pipe dream, just look how that agency behaved when SHTF. Boeing kills whistleblowers despite literally whole world seeing what a shitshow that company is now. That's just effin Boeing, not folks who can kill almost anybody anywhere and not caring about consequences.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/23/trum...
Except for the Cold War aspects of regime change in South America, and we know a lot of it had very little to do with geostrategic concerns and a lot to do with US private sector economic interests, the South American dictators they installed have done a lot that harms US interests in addition to the obvious harm to the people living there.
The CIA is capable of both and a lot more.
Their leaders even cultivate that view as a means to stay in power. And there is an endless queue of commenters to percolate it forever.
Greatest psyop ever. The CIA could have gone out of business decades back and it wouldn't change anything.
Director William Casey Quote: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything they believe is false!"
It appears CIA has stared into the abyss a bit too long and have turned their tactics against americans though. First with mk-ultra, then with the crack epidemic, and then with tolerating the fentanyl crisis by picking winners in the cartels and literally training the Zeta cartel at WHINSEC, along with abetting a refugee crisis to secure electoral influence for whoever the anti-populist party is.
The rationale appears to be they think they come out on top as the central committee if they orchestrate 20th century totalitarian playbooks in the west and become, as Karl Rove famously said, "history's actors." Nations needed their intelligence services, but in a post-national framework, many parts of them have become malignant. People should take heed of what is done on their behalf as after decades of dealing with devils to fight totalitarian communism, their chickens appear to be coming home to roost.