best of the CIA

[rjv]

that little event known as watergate ? nixon sent a team of burglars to wiretap democratic offices at the watergate hotel. the selected members had extensive CIA backgrounds, including mccord, hunt, and five of the cuban burglars. they work for the committee to reelect the president (CREEP was the achronym-how funny is that ? ), which conducted dirty work like disrupting democratic campaigns and laundering nixon’s illegal campaign contributions. CREEP’s activities were funded and organized by the mullen company, another CIA front.

[rjv]

in 1073, the CIA assassinated salvador allende, who was latin america’s first democratically elected socialist leader. the problems began when allende privatized american-owned firms. ITT offered the CIA $1 million for a coup. the CIA replaced allende with general augusto pinochet, who went on to torture and murder thousands of his own countrymen in a crackdown on labor leaders and the political left. pinochet's regime was so historically brutal that he had to beg countries to offer him asylum in his dying years.

[rjv]

Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA's illegal domestic operations with a front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974 ("Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years"), writing that "a check of the CIA's domestic files ordered last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surrep ious inspection of mail."

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm

the name of the project was operation CHAOS, which we all recall was what rush limbaugh called his effort to keep obama from being elected.

[rjv]

from the book, "inside the company", by former CIA operate philip agee:

Dear Mr Helms,

I respectfully submit my resignation from the Central Intelligence Agency for the following reasons:

I joined the Agency because I thought I would be protecting the security of my country by fighting against communism and Soviet expansion while at the same time helping other countries to preserve their freedom. Six years in Latin America have taught me that the injustices forced by small ruling minorities on the mass of the people cannot be eased sufficiently by reform movements such as the Alliance for Progress. The ruling class will never willingly give up its special privileges and comforts. This is class warfare and is the reason why communism appeals to the masses in the first place. We call this the 'free world'; but the only freedom under these cir stances is the rich people's freedom to exploit the poor.

Economic growth in Latin America might broaden the benefits in some countries but in most places the structural contradictions and population growth preclude meaningful increased income for most of the people. Worse still, the value of private investment and loans and everything else sent by the US into Latin America is far exceeded year after year by what is taken out - profits, interest, royalties, loan repayments - all sent back to the US. The income left over in Latin America is sucked up by the ruling minority who are determined to live by our standards of wealth.

Agency operations cannot be separated from these conditions. Our training and support for police and military forces, particularly the intelligence services, combined with other US support through military assistance missions and Public Safety programmes, give the ruling minorities ever stronger tools to keep themselves in power and to retain their disproportionate share of the national income. Our operations to penetrate and suppress the extreme left also serve to strengthen the ruling minorities by eliminating the main danger to their power.

American business and government are bound up with the ruling minorities in Latin America - with the rural and industrial property holders. Our interests and their interests - stability, return on investment - are the same. Meanwhile the masses of the people keep on suffering because they lack even minimal educational facilities, healthcare, housing, and diet. They could have these benefits of national income were not so unevenly distributed.

To me what is important is to see that what little there is to go around goes around fairly. A communist hospital can cure just like a capitalist hospital and of communism is the likely alternative to what I've seen in Latin America, then it's up to the Latin Americans to decide. Our only alternatives are to continue supporting injustice or to withdraw and let the cards fall by themselves.

[rjv]

this one smacks of problems to come:

in 1979, the CIA failed to predict the fall of the shah, a CIA puppet ruler, and the rise of muslim fundamentalists who are furious at the CIA’s backing of SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police force. in retaliation, muslim extremists take 52 american hostages in the U.S. embassy in tehran

[rjv]

as does this one:

the soviets invaded afghanistan. also in 1979, and the CIA immediately began to supply weapons to any faction willing to fight the USSR army. this indiscriminate support meant that when the soviets left, civil war erupted. also, fanatical muslim extremists came to possess state-of-the-art weapons and one of these fanatics is sheik abdel rahman, who was directly involved in the world trade center bombing.

[TeyshaBlue]

Lots of public CIA failures.


We'll probably never know most of the successes.


, there's probably a fair amount of failures we'll never know about too.

[rjv]

in 1980, archbisop romero of san salvador in el salvador pleaded with president carter to stop aiding the military government slaughtering his people. carter refused. afterwards, right-wing leader d’aubuisson had romero shot while saying mass. el salvador dissolved into civil war, with the peasants in the hills fighting against the military government. the CIA and US armed forces supplied the government with overwhelming military and intelligence superiority. CIA-trained death squads roamed the countryside, committing atrocities like that of el mazote in 1982, where they massacred between 700 and 1000 men, women and children. by 1992, some 63,000 salvadorans had been killed.

[rjv]

Lots of public CIA failures.


We'll probably never know most of the successes.


, there's probably a fair amount of failures we'll never know about too.

good point.

[rjv]

the CIA handed honduran military officers the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual – 1983, which teaches how to torture people. Honduras’ notorious "Battalion 316" then uses these techniques, with the CIA’s full knowledge, on thousands of leftist dissidents. at least 184 are murdered.

[Winehole23]

The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission do ents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney.

Among the highlights of today’s posting:

• White House officials of the Ford administration attempted to keep a presidential review panel—the Rockefeller Commission—from investigating reports of CIA planning for assassinations abroad.

• Ford administration officials suppressed the Rockefeller Commission’s actual report on CIA assassination plots.

• Richard Cheney, then the deputy assistant to the president, edited the report of the Rockefeller Commission from inside the Ford White House, stripping the report of its independent character.

• The Rockefeller Commission remained silent on this manipulation.

• Rockefeller Commission lawyers and public relations officials warned of the damage that would be done to the credibility of the entire investigation by avoiding the subject of assassinations.

• President Ford passed investigative materials concerning assassinations along to the Church Committee of the United States Senate and then attempted—but failed—to suppress the Church Committee’s report as well.

• The White House markup of the Rockefeller Commission report used the secrecy of the CIA budget as an example of excesses and recommended Congress consider making agency spending public to some degree.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAE...ission-Report/

[Winehole23]

Project MKULTRA



Declassified MKULTRA do ents


Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects.[1][2][3] The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surrep ious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.
Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of do ents that survived Helms' destruction order.[4]
Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a "cover story."[5][6]
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and ins utions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.[7]

To this day most specific information regarding Project MKULTRA remains highly classified.[citation needed]
Contents




Dr. Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKULTRA subproject on LSD in this June 9, 1953 letter.


The project's intentionally oblique CIA cryptonym is made up of the digraph MK, meaning that the project was sponsored by the agency's Technical Services Division, followed by the word ULTRA (which had previously been used to designate the most secret classification of World War II intelligence). Other related cryptonyms include MK-NAOMI and MK-DELTA.
A precursor of the MK-ULTRA program began in 1945 when the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip. Operation Paperclip was a program to recruit former Nazi scientists. Some of these scientists studied torture and brainwashing, and several had just been identified and prosecuted as war criminals during the Nuremberg Trials.[8][9]
Several secret U.S. government projects grew out of Operation Paperclip. These projects included Project CHATTER (established 1947), and Project BLUEBIRD (established 1950), which was later renamed to Project ARTICHOKE in 1951. Their purpose was to study mind-control, interrogation, behavior modification and related topics.
Headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the MK-ULTRA project was started on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953,[10] largely in response to Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.[11] The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques,[12] and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.
Experiments were often conducted without the subjects' knowledge or consent.[13] In some cases, academic researchers being funded through grants from CIA front organizations were unaware that their work was being used for these purposes.[14]
In 1964, the project was renamed MK-SEARCH. The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control.
Another MK-ULTRA effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy's top secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which used sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory.[15]
Because most MK-ULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA Director Richard Helms, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MK-ULTRA and related CIA programs.[16]

[edit] Goals

The Agency poured millions of dollars into studies probing dozens of methods of influencing and controlling the mind. One 1955 MK-ULTRA do ent gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; this do ent refers to the study of an assortment of mind-altering substances described as follows:[17]

1. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
2. Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
3. Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
4. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
5. Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
6. Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
7. Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
8. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
9. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surrep ious use.
10. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
11. Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down.
12. Substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
13. A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type that the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
15. Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
16. A knockout pill which can surrep iously be administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
17. A material which can be surrep iously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.

Historians have asserted that creating a "Manchurian Candidate" subject through "mind control" techniques was a goal of MK-ULTRA and related CIA projects

new do ents dropped

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-b...-new-scholarly

[Winehole23]

straightforward descriptions of what our government actually did sound bonkers

Eli Lilly providing LSD at scale for MKULTRA is one of the toplines here

The challenges facing this do entation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the ins utional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences.