Author does not fully address that the CIA effectively funds and directs the rest of the IC. They gate all infrastructure - from networks to satellites to drones. When Congress tried to limit their operations with heavy oversight, they spun out a brand new intelligence agency, classified its very existence, and spun out operations on that side for years before CBO caught on.
Not just CIA. Whenever military industrial complex or bankers want a make over, defers litigation risks or just conceal ownership, they just create a subsidiary, spun it off with another name and/or hide the everything behind client attorney privileges.
It also gives the public a memory wipe. Very clever technique indeed.
The Campus operates under the cover of Hendley Associates, a financial
trading institution. Hendley Associates is a trader in stocks, bonds, and
international currencies, though, it does little in the way of public
business and is not known to have any clients. . . . By intercepting
communications between the CIA and NSA, the Campus is able to take advantage
of SIGINT they gather and cross-deck to the CIA. This gives The Campus
currency-trading troops the best sort of insider information, which enables
the organization to make a ton of long-term money without anybody really
noticing. . . .
It's called Treadstone, there are a few movies about it.
Would also mention the last two DNI were CIA directors. The two before that were NSA directors during a time where the NSA was largely controlled by the CIA and its leadership largely shared positions on the CIA’s senior leadership team.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/gabbard-c...
"Oh no! A missile is hitting Kiev!" (puppeteer makes sound of explosion like BKSHSH!)
Also really happy to see a living legend hanging out here with us.
instead of each branch of the US military having their own codebreaking and SIGINT group the DoD decided to merge them and members of all services work at Ft Meade.
Today, NSA SIGINT still flows directly to the CIA. They are also the only agency without an independent mission, and must rely on the CIA or CYBERCOM to actually do anything with SIGINT (they are only allowed to gather)
Also an open secret that the FBI and CIA often collude and any operation that they can’t get a warrant for just gets performed by the CIA. The FBI’s threat matrix is coordinated by the CIA and despite the Church probes their collusion has only incentivized and even been codified (eg NCTC)
And what do you mean by can only do anything with SIGINT? SIGINT is a broad term that includes COMINT and ELINT, which many other agencies do quite a lot with.
In the same way you might say a lot of the NSA's technical accesses are gated by the CIA (due to being HUMINT derived), the inverse is also true where the SIGINT collected by those accesses is gated by the NSA. This isnt strictly true though, since the NSA also has plenty of other non-CIA derived sources.
I also think in a lot of ways it like saying the Army and Navy control the entire military because all the other branches broke off from them and if you need eg aquatic support then the Navy has to provide it.
If one state’s borders were controlled by another’s, its operations reliant on another’s, and its leadership largely coming from or connected to the other’s, we would not consider that state sovereign. In the same way, my point is that the NSA cannot be considered independent of the CIA.
While other agencies can use SIGINT, all of it goes to the CIA by default and access to the NSA’s network is still gated by the CIA. The converse is not true - the NSA does not oversee most broader intelligence networks (shockingly neither does CYBERCOM), and the CIA also operates siloed networks and operations.
The military example you gave is a great way of thinking about it. The Army and Navy gather resources and maintain readiness, but operations and control of resources is afforded to component commands. All of these are technically separate and roll up directly to JCS/JTFs or DepSecDef. Similarly each intelligence agency is technically separate and oversees gathering/maintaining intelligence under its mission, but is still practically under the CIA’s influence.
what has saved americans is the CIA has been focused on foreign issues. once that might is turned internally there's hell to pay.
America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?
Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.
It's been used in Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries as well.
(while I'm happy to condemn the CIA, the existence of one bad actor does not disprove the existence of other bad actors out there)
But that has been deemed unfit by the CIA and somehow Pinochet coup d'etat succeeded.
Backing from the US helped a lot there.
US support for the ‘64 Military coup in Brazil? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%...]
and Bolivia.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...]
Not to mention all the drug war meddling in Columbia, etc.
Or the really crazy Operation Condor [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor]. Which included Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru.
You’d have to be willfully ignorant to not know this history.
Screwing with South America has to be one of the CIA’s favorite hobbies.
You mean in Ukraine, right? It's quite normal to not see something that's been carefully designed to be invisible.
> It sounds like a kind of American provincialism to think that everything revolves around them.
Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing, similar to the Russian side. In the meantime the dead keep piling up... Quo bono?
No.
> Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing,
Hardly. Pinning all recent human history on the CIA seems like a "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" kind of thing. The world is far more complex than stale Usenet copypastas suggest, and the CIA is entirely outclassed by a number intelligence organizations in Eastern Europe purely it lacks an understanding of local history and culture. For the longest time, Eastern Europe has been academically taught through a Russian-centric lens. It's like learning the history of Africa through the perspective of colonial empires rather than the natives; gives barely any understanding what's going on between the different peoples of Africa. This has led to major intelligence failures, such as the failure to accurately predict the collapse of the USSR, which took CIA analysts by surprise. This, in turn, left everyone in Eastern Europe stunned: how could they be so completely oblivious to the facts on the ground?! That gave a lifelong immunity to the whole category of "almighty CIA" conspiracy theories.
I clearly sense that you cannot relate to issues of life and death, which puts your non-botness into serious question. Besides, I've never argued about who is doing the siccing, you're simply following your old context which happens to be wrong.
People from there do say those things just as well. Unless one only hears the expats that say what he wants to hear and/or have adopted their host countries politics, or only taks to people who share his own lifestyle, which are usually hardly representative, there's even a name for this phenomenon in journalism, because it's often how things are told in western media.
The "genuine demands for freedom for those countries" range from actual ones, to orange "revolutions", to astroturfed bullshit, to grooming the political establishment and civic society with tons of imperial money.
The constitutional crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was between President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian Parliament, which is actually the sovereign institution. In a constitutional sense it wasn't even really a revolution because the sovereign institution was never overthrown. It pressured Yanukovych into resigning, backed by massive public support.
Why, are we in 1930s Germany when those things were incompatible? It's 2025, get on with the times:
https://jacobin.com/2025/04/orban-netanyahu-israel-war-crime...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/le-pen-as-frenc...
Supporting Jews and Israel especially is a great way for modern far-right to get allies on its anti-immigrant and anti-muslim campaigns. The same is increasingly true for LGBT+ rights (take Geert Wilders as an example).
I would be shocked if the CIA hadn't registered what was happening, isolated its would-be minder, and gone totally dark. If they hadn't been running an American imperialist plot to conquer their Cold War enemy, by now they've got no choice but to do that. And we won't be hearing about it unless they had a complete collapse of opsec.
They don't have operational control of the ICE camps, though maybe they'd rather take them over than take them down.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops to the crazed Trumpers who think that USAID is a waste of money.
It's a jobs program for midwestern farmers to grow unprofitable legacy crops and then it morphs into an intelligence operation by giving those crops to the poorest of the poor as food donations in some resource rich but economically poor and geopolitically strategic areas, all while creating tremendous goodwill and ground-level intel.
And somehow, this combo deal that puts money in poor farmers' pockets AND creates tremendous political goodwill AND serves as a fountain of continuous strategic information in vital localities is seen as a bad thing by Trump fans.
I don't get it. It's probably one of the most economically beneficial operations the CIA has ever taken part of outside of trafficking cocaine.
As a matter of principle it just isn't possible to run a democracy where the government, in its official capacity, is working to shape the narrative. I can't deny that is what has been happening for decades, but the result is a toxic soup of lies and would explain a lot about why the journalist community seems to have been slowly unmooring from reality - they're attached to the money printing pipe. People shouldn't be paying for political propaganda with their taxes; particularly not in the US where it is probably leaking into domestic politics. Those NGO networks USAID was pushing money towards appear to be hostile in the main to the Trump voter base and their political objectives.
[0] https://rsf.org/en/usa-trump-s-foreign-aid-freeze-throws-jou... - I note they put in an erratum, although given that the US is almost certainly trying to obscure where its propaganda funding there are still a lot of questions. Their source in imi.org.ua was quoting some eyebrow-raising numbers.
You're not that naive...come on.
Of course it's possible to run a democracy when the government is working to shape the narrative. Every government regardless of their type tries to control narratives. That's sort of their whole thing....
1. USAID – Frequently used by the CIA for covert operations and as cover for agents abroad. (Washington Post [1])
2. Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) – CIA-founded and funded anti-communist intellectual network during the Cold War. [2]
3. Air America – CIA-owned airline used heavily during the Vietnam War and Laos operations. PBS [3]
4. Blockstream - CIA backed "non-profitable" company that controls the Bitcoin GitHub repository and guides development founded by useful idiots like Gregory Maxwell, "Blue Hair Matt," and a handful of other internet trolls with no real software credentials.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/usaid...
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1263191.The_Cultural_Col...
Citation #2 is a link a good reads page for "The Lincoln Lawyer" - confused on how this is relevant to "air america"
Citation #3 is not a specific link to any particular article, just the miamiherald's home page.
And someone previously mentioned there is no citation for claim 4
Kind of feels like astroturfing or a bot of some sort. Mind clarifying any of this?
If it was a swamp/intel front I don't think it could've gotten burned down. I think the CIA laughed the whole time "this is what those idiots get for not doing their stuff under our umbrella and letting us take our cut".
And yes, they've been operating domestically as well with the same color revolution tactics. Particularly to try to keep Trump out of office.
Trying to project this onto ICE is cute.
As the latest release of docs from the DNI shows, the CIA certainly tried to do this with Obama instigated Russian collusion hoax.
That doesn't really fit with "answers to no one", which can be understood as "it can focus on whatever it pleases".
It is extremely likely but not proven that they have done so at least one time in the past.
Some agencies are more influential than others but that waxes and wanes over time. There is always some agency in ascendency and another in decline. I've seen the centers of influence shift between agencies more than once.
Your conspiracy theory is a bit overwrought.
Today's Congress entirely failing to regulate the executive branch and seemingly... uninterested? in doing so is troubling for the stability of the republic.
You say uninterested, yet it seems more like complicit. Both chambers of Congress are led by the same party as POTUS. They are quite happy with how things are going, and actively work to enable POTUS and his agenda. There are some things where previous Congress has put limits on POTUS that this POTUS is ignoring. If this Congress was really effective, they'd repeal those regulations so POTUS' actions would not run afoul of legislation. Instead, they are just ignoring the flagrant violations, and letting SCOTUS (also led by the same party) get involved with their decisions that POTUS has flagrantly pushed back against as well.
And if you were the NSA, how could you pass up on using some of that ‘accidentally’ collected intel to help avoid distractions while you ‘protect the nation’ eh?