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Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

In Paradise Lost, Satan’s army falls out of heaven for wanting endless power and Satan himself falls out of earth for initiating primal human evil. Both turn to serpents in hell and rush to eat hell’s apples. They find them ashes in the mouth (Book X). That, for the moment, is the end of their dream of power.

At the end of World War II, when we still entertained the dream of endless innocent power, Harry Truman set up the CIA to provide him intelligence about the world — a knowledge-gathering agency without cloak and dagger. Our power was endless, we had all the nukes. It was natural that we thought we needed to know about the world outside our borders. Fourteen years later in 1960, when the organization had become mostly power-seeking covert operations instead of intelligence, Eisenhower told the CIA’s Allen Dulles that the CIA he left behind was “a legacy of ashes.” So it appears to also be in 2007. We got no power and a passel of problems.

Ike was right. Truman’s vision was gone. Little useful information had come from the CIA from 1946-60. The legacy of ashes consisted in the CIA’s worthless, cruel and undemocratic covert actions creating the problems we now face in many areas of the world, especially in South America, Africa, Russia and the Middle East.

Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes tells us how the CIA’s vision of endless power through meddling became the essence of our foreign policy. (The book took 20 years, uses 50,000 government documents, 2,000 oral histories by former intelligence offices. It includes no unattributed quotes, off-therecord interviews or smarmy insinuations. This is the straight poop.)

First: we need to know how Truman’s vision failed — what CIA ‘intelligence’ didn’t know or care to know: We didn’t know:

• What was going on inside the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe before their revolutions and the fall of Communist regimes.

• What went on in the Middle Eastern al-Qaida and the Islamic jihadist movements.

• What happened with weapons development in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or with torture under the Shah’s Iranian regime.

• What went on in Vietnamese popular opinion under a series of American client regimes.

• Where our potential democratic allies were in Iraq, Chile and many other parts of the world.

In fact, the CIA gathered hardly any useful intelligence on any area and culture crucial to the president’s understanding and action (save for what Israeli intelligence used to tell CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton during the height of the Cold War). We were simply dumb. Even today, 80 percent of the CIA’s so-called ‘classified intelligence’ is gleaned from the daily newspapers and mainstream media reports.

Time after time, the book tells the story of how we had no one on the scene, no one competent in the culture, no one who knew the language enough to be able to discover important things… On almost any scene, in any culture, in any language important to our national security. American education in these matters failed us miserably, especially in regard to other than Western European cultures. This level of cultural ignorance will be heightened by “No Child Left Behind” and its obsession with reading and math alone.

What we didn’t know was bad. What we did through our covert operations, as we substituted brutality for knowledge, was worse:

• In 1954 we overthrew the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, elected in the “second-ever universal-suffrage election, marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala’s history” (Wikipedia). Arbenz was a capitalistic reformer, admirer of the Homestead Act and an intellectual. (We overthrew him to protect the United Fruit Company’s investments in Guatemala and unleashed a civil strife that led to a decades- long series of dictatorships and civil wars that in turn led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in that little country.) This was the start of our Central American troubles.

• We overthrew democratic regimes over and over. At one time in the ’60s, most of the South American countries had dictatorships who were CIA clients. The CIA of the ’70s indirectly got rid of Chilean president Salvador Allende and installed the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He and his hands subsequently killed thousands and ordered killed the husband of Allende’s Minister of Defense, Orlando Letelier, the husband of one of NFP’s friends, Isabel Letelier.

• In 1953, we destroyed the democratically elected Iranian governement of Mohammed Mossedegh to protect the British oil company, BP. Our problems in Iran begain there.

• We funded fascist governments in Greece and Chile, murderous dictators like Mobutu in Africa, and Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviets. Osama bin Laden was ours. Our problems in Africa and Central Asia begin with the latter two actions.

• We installed leaders by murdering presidents we didn’t like in the Congo and South Vietnam. We messed with or overthrew established governments in Iran, Indonesia, South Korea and Southeast Asia.

• The CIA hardly ever saw a right-wing government it didn’t like. It funded the elections of all the Christian Democratic legislators in Italy, funneling money through the Vatican’s Catholic Action. It did the same kind of thing for the rightwing Liberal Democrats in Japan.

• The 1950s CIA created secret prisons in the Panama Canal and later in Germany and Japan where it experimented on prisoners with torture, brain control experiments and drugs. Rendition is not a new deal. Presidential defense of it is.

In almost every part of the world where American credibility has gone south — South America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East — the CIA installed or tried to install governments that represented the opposite of American ideals.

All of this is not surprising if one looks at who led the CIA — lazy, feckless, ignorant men like Allen Dulles. An exception is Richard Helms from the 1960s and ’70s, who appears to have been good at the information gathering work of the organization (not so good at controlling covert actions). A more typical leader, the afore-named James Angleton who ran counterintelligence from the ’50s-’70s, was so paranoid he believed almost nothing his agents told him, preferring his own fantasies to reliable information.

Weiner suggests that the CIA supported dictatorships, fascist regimes, and right-wing governments because of whom it hired initially. It took from the U.S. Ivy League men from ‘good families’ who had a stake in American hegemony and business (so much for the great education at Ivy League schools). It hired from Europe, ex- Fascists and Nazis thought to have knowledge of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, through its whole history, the organization has shown contempt for democracy, due process and human rights. So the CIA’s 21st century cooking of the books on Iraq and its “weapons of mass destruction” should be no surprise. The only surprise is that Cheney had to set up a special CIA within the CIA to get what he wanted on Iraq — but that arrangement is now firmly in place. The former head of the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden of the “warrantless wiretaps” fame (who also simultaneously served as a StratCom component commander), is now the head of the CIA.

Looking at the covert operations, the “Agency” has almost never given good information to the president. It has consistently given information that served his vanity, his narrow political purposes and those of the multinationals central to the militaryindustrial complex. And it’s easy, therefore, to see why we are where we are now.

We have used our covert muscle to destroy the aspirations for freedom and human rights of millions of people throughout the world. In the process, we have created circumstances that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people, creating long-term political instability. As we have done so, our government has become the mirror of the CIA tool it has used. Under Cheney and Bush and their lawyers, it is now as undemocratic, contemptuous of human rights and feckless as the CIA that it has used.

But the game of ‘CIA-ifying the world’ is about over. South America is turning away from American client dictatorships to social democratic and socialist regimes. Europe is no longer under our thumb — not even Gordon Brown’s Britain. Middle Eastern regimes remember and resent American coups and interventions. The shining apple of untrammeled power — the “New American Century” — has become ashes in the mouth. About time too. We ourselves may well be the CIA’s last victims as its myth of untrammeled power becomes the mythos of our government.