1/03/03
THE MODUS OPERANDI OF THE CIA
By
J. Parnell McCarter
Puritan News Service
In
other Puritan News articles we have
covered the significant Vatican influences over the CIA. We have documented the origins of the CIA
under the Roman Catholic Knight of Malta “Wild Bill” Donovan. So
now we should ask: what is the character of the CIA? Does it operate according to the traditional Romish maxim, “the
end justifies the means”? Does it lie,
cheat, steal, and kill- all in the name of defending such noble good? And we should finally ask: does the Bible
really support such Romish evil in the name of good?
The Character of the C.I.A.
Much
has been written about the CIA’s operations, by insiders and outsiders. One insider who has chronicled what he
witnessed in the CIA is Ralph McGehee.
He worked for the CIA from 1952 until 1977 and now writes about
intelligence matters, notably the
book
Deadly Deceits -- My 25 years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square Press,
1983). He has compiled a computer data base on CIA activities. Persons
interested may write to him at: 422 Arkansas Ave., Herndon, VA 22070.
(See http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_SOP.html .) Here are some excerpts of what he has
written:
“...it
is essential to provide background on the scope and nature of its worldwide
operations. Between 1961 and 1975 the Agency conducted 900 major or sensitive
operations, and thousands of lesser covert actions. The majority of its
operations were propaganda, election or paramilitary. Countries of major concern,
such as Indonesia in the early 1960s, were usually subjected to the CIA's most
concerted attention. Critics of the CIA
have aptly described the mainstays of such attention: "discrediting
political groups... by forged documents that may be attributed to them. . .
," faking "communist weapon shipments,'' capturing communist
documents and then inserting forgeries prepared by the Agency's Technical
Services Division. The CIA's "Mighty Wurlitzer" then emblazoned and
disseminated the details of such "discoveries." The Mighty Wurlitzer
was a worldwide propaganda mechanism consisting of hundreds or even thousands
of media
representatives
and officials including, over a period of years, approximately 400 members of
the American media. The CIA has used the Wurlitzer and its successors to plant
stories and to suppress expository or critical reporting in order to manipulate
domestic and international perceptions. From the early 1980s, many media
operations
formerly
the responsibility of the CIA have been funded somewhat overtly by the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED)… The labor unions the CIA creates and subsidizes,
in their more virulent stages, provide strong-arm goon squads who burn
buildings, threaten and beat up opponents, pose as groups of the opposition to
discredit them, terrorize and control labor meetings, and participate in
coups…After the CIA's overthrow of Arbenz's government in Guatemala in 1954,
the U.S. gave the new government lists of
opponents to be eliminated. In Chile from 1971 through 1973, the CIA
fomented a military coup through forgery and propaganda operations and compiled
arrest lists of thousands, many of whom were later arrested and assassinated.
In Bolivia in 1975, the CIA provided lists of progressive priests and nuns to
the government which planned to harass, arrest and expel them.”
What
is in fact happening is that the right wing of the Romish Church has used the
CIA to fight the left wing of the Romish Church.
Retired
Marine Colonel and ex-CIA operative Philip Roettinger has told of his
involvement with the CIA. Here is an
excerpt of information from
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Guatemala_ITTJun95.html :
“Something
has been missing from the recent press coverage of the ClA's support for a
Guatemalan military that has tortured and killed more than 150,000 people.
The
more enlightened pundits have mentioned that the CIA sponsored coup in 1954
destroyed Guatemala's emerging democracy and initiated a series of brutal
military dictatorships. But few reporters have pointed out that U.S.
acquiescence to the bloodletting that followed has been the rule, not a policy
aberration. Since the '54 coup,
the
Guatemalan military and the US government have worked in tandem-from the '60s
when the Green Berets conducted a Vietnam-style war in Guatemala, to the '80s
and early '90s, when the death squads operated with tacit U.S. encouragement.
One
man who believes that this historical perspective should be filled in is Philip
Roettinger, a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel. Roettinger was among the
handful of CIA operatives who in 1954 planned and executed the Guatemalan coup.
In a remote ClA-built base along the Honduran border with Guatemala, Roettinger
organized
and
trained a group of rebels, who as he has put it, were "driven by the
prospect of power and wealth, not ideology.''
"It
was a classic operation that went off beautifully," says the 80-year old
Roettinger. "There's never been another one like it, and I'm glad."
As
one of the opening salvos of the Cold War, the coup that toppled the
democratically elected government of Jacabo Arbenz was not, as President Dwight
Eisenhower insisted, aimed at "preventing the establishment of a communist
beachhead in the Western Hemisphere." It was a cynical manipulation of
anti communist hysteria to
maintain
the domination of a U.S. multinational, United Fruit, over the Guatemalan
government…In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece Roettinger warned that the United
States was repeating the same mistake it had made in Guatemala. "As a CIA
case officer, I trained Guatemalan exiles in Honduras to invade their own
country and unseat the elected president," he wrote. "The coup that I
helped engineer in 1954 inaugurated an
unprecedented
era of intransigent military rule in Central America. Generals and colonels
acted with impunity to wipe out dissent and garner wealth for themselves and
their cronies."”
The
CIA is also heavily involved in the world’s illegal drug trade. Alfred W.
McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, has written about
it. He is the author of "The
Politics of Heroin: The CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade." Here are excerpts from what he has written:
Throughout
the forty years of the Cold War, the CIA joined with urban gangsters and rural
warlords, many of them major drug dealers, to mount covert operations against
communists around the globe. In one of history's accidents, the Iron Curtain
fell along the border of the Asian opium zone, which stretches across 5,000
miles of mountains
from
Turkey to Thailand. In Burma during the 1950s, in Laos during the 1970s, and in
Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA allied with highland warlords to mobilize
tribal armies against the Soviet Union and China.
In
each of these covert wars, Agency assets-local informants-used their alliance
with the CIA to become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and
shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included. Instead
of stopping this drug dealing, the Agency tolerated it and, when necessary,
blocked investigations. Since ruthless drug lords made effective anti-communist
allies and opium amplified their power, CIA agents mounting delicate operations
on their own, half a world from home, had no reason to complain. For the drug
lords, it was an ideal arrangement. The CIA's major covert operations-often
lasting a decade-provided them with de facto immunity within enforcement-free
zones.
In
Laos in the 1960s, the CIA battled local communists with a secret army of
30,000 Hmong-a tough highland tribe whose only cash crop was opium. A handful
of CIA agents relied on tribal leaders to provide troops and Lao generals to
protect their cover. When Hmong officers loaded opium on the ClA's proprietary
carrier Air America,
the
Agency did nothing. And when the Lao army's commander, General Ouane Rattikone,
opened what was probably the world's largest heroin laboratory, the Agency
again failed to act.
"The
past involvement of many of these officers in drugs is well known," the
ClA's Inspector General said in a still-classified 1972 report, "yet their
goodwill . . . considerably facilitates the military activities of Agency-supported
irregulars."
Indeed,
the CIA had a detailed know ledge of drug trafficking in the Golden
Triangle-that remote, rugged corner of Southeast Asia where Burma, Thailand,
and Laos converge. In June 1971, The New York Times published extracts from an
other CIA report identifying twenty-one opium refineries in the Golden Triangle
and stating that the "most
important
are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in
Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand." Three of these areas were controlled by
CIA allies: Nam Keung by the chief of CIA mercenaries for northwestern Laos;
Ban Houei Sai by the commander of the Royal Lao Army; and Mae Salong by
the
Nationalist Chinese forces who had fought for the Agency in Burma. The CIA
stated that the Ban Houei Sai laboratory, which was owned by General Ouane, was
' believed capable of processing 100 kilos of raw opium per day," or 3.6
tons of heroin a year-a vast output considering the total yearly U.S.
consumption of heroin was then less than ten tons.
By
1971, 34 percent of all U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam were heroin addicts,
according to a White House survey. There
were more American heroin addicts in South Vietnam than in the entire United
States-largely supplied from heroin laboratories operated by CIA allies, though
the White House failed to acknowledge that unpleasant fact. Since there was no indigenous local market,
Asian drug lords started shipping Golden Triangle heroin not consumed by the
GIs to the United States, where it soon won a significant share of the illicit
market.
*****
Within
a few years, the currents of global geopolitics then shifted in ways that
pushed the CIA into new alliances with drug traffickers. In 1979, the Soviets
invaded Afghanistan and the Sandinista revolution seized Nicaragua, prompting
two CIA covert operations with some revealing similarities. During the 1980s,
while the Soviets occupied
Afghanistan,
the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some $2
billion to support the Afghan resistance. When the operation started in 1979,
this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin. Within
two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top
heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the
heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to
1.2 million by 1985-a much steeper rise than in any other nation.
CIA
assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin guerrillas seized
territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a
revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local
syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of
heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or
arrests.
In
May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down, The Washington Post published
a front-page expose charging that Gulbudin Hekmatar, the ClA's favored Afghan
leader, was a major heroin manufacturer. The Post argued, in a manner similar
to the San Jose Mercury News's later report about the contras, that U.S.
officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan
allies "because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated
to the war against Soviet influence there."
In
1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted
the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. "Our
main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't
really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug
trade," he told an Australian television reporter. "I don't think
that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There
was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished.
The Soviets left Afghanistan."
Again,
distance and complexity insulated the CIA from any political fallout. Once the
heroin left Pakistan's laboratories, the Sicilian mafia managed its export to
the United States, and a chain of syndicate-controlled pizza parlors distributed
the drugs to street gangs in American cities, according to reports by the Drug
Enforcement
Agency.
Most ordinary Americans did not see the links between the ClA's alliance with
Afghan drug lords, the pizza parlors, and the heroin on U.S. streets.
In
Central America, proximity simplified the political equation. According to
sections of the San Jose Mercury News story that the mainstream press have not
contested, this "dark alliance" began in the early 1980s when the
contra revolt against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government was failing for
want of funds. In 1981, the CIA
hired
ex-Nicaraguan army Colonel Enrique Bermudez to organize what became the main
contra guerrilla army, the Nicaraguan Democratic Front. Bermudez then accepted
funds from two Nicaraguan exiles active in the crack trade to supplement meager
Agency funding.
In
California, Danilo Blandon, the former director of Nicaragua's farm-marketing
program, used his business skills to open a new drug-distribution network.
Blandon allied with the rising young black drug dealer "Freeway Rick"
Ross to convert tons of cocaine into low-cost crack for a growing market among
the city's poor African Americans.
With
supplies of cheap cocaine from Central America, Ross undercut rival dealers and
built a booming drug business that spread up the California coast and across
the Midwest. Ross and Blandon avoided arrest for years. But in the late 1990s,
the operation lost its contra connection. Both dealers were soon arrested on
drug charges. Freeway Rick started serving a ten-year sentence, while the
Justice Department intervened to free the
contra-connected
Blandon and send him home as a well paid Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
informant.
Other
responsible sources have made similar allegations about contra involvement in
cocaine smuggling to the United States In December 1985, the Associated Press
issued a story about the contra alliance with cocaine smugglers.
"Nicaraguan rebels operating in northern Costa Rica have engaged in
cocaine trafficking," wrote AP reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger,
"in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government,
according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work with the
rebels." As evidence, the reporters cited a CIA intelligence report noting
"the contras in Nicaragua had bought aircraft with drug profits."
After
lengthy investigations, a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by John Kerry, the
Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, issued a report in 1988 concluding that
"individuals associated with the contra movement" were traffickers;
cocaine smugglers had participated in "contra supply operations; and the
U.S. State Department had
made
"payments to drug traffickers . . . for humanitarian assistance to the
contras. in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted . . . on drug
charges."
During
this decade of contra operations from bases in southern Honduras, the region
was effectively closed to narcotics investigations. In 1983, at the height of
the contra war, the DEA suddenly shut down its Honduran office even though the
agent there, Tomas Zepeda, had, in his words, "generated a substantial
amount of useful intelligence" about Honduran military involvement in the
cocaine traffic to the United States. "The Pentagon made it clear that we
were in the way," an anonymous DEA agent explained. "They had more
important business." As host to the main contra bases and the ClA's supply
operation, the Honduran military, like the commander of the Royal Laotian Army
and Pakistani Intelligence, were spared investigation of their involvement in
drug trafficking.”
God’s
word calls such activity as this an abomination. God never authorizes humans or human governments to engage in such
evil. Rather, God calls for obedience
to His Ten Commandments. But that is
something we cannot expect out of the CIA.
(Note:
For more info see http://www.nancymatson.com/CLDWR2.HTM . )