The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 10 |
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 10 |
WAR CRIMES AS POLICY
In February 2013, the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary
film exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment,
training and initial deployments of the CIA-advised and -funded Special Police
Commandos in Iraq.
The documentary was a departure from mainstream reporting, in that it told how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys. But the Commandos are only one of America’s many weapons of human destruction in Iraq. Along with US military forces that murder indiscriminately, CIA-funded death squads that murdered selectively, and the CIA’s palace guard – the Iraqi Special Operations Forces – the Commandos are part of a genocidal campaign that had killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and driven half of all Sunnis from their homes.
Including economic sanctions and a 50-year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators have visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime. Driven into fanaticism by the brutal invasion and occupation, many thousands of Sunnis then formed the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). After being decimated by US forces, ISI was reinforced by former Ba’athist military and intelligence officers, as well as foreign mercenaries from places like Chechnya. Now known as ISIS, the militant Sunni resistance seized vast stretches of land in Iraq and Syria. Only as recently as June 2016, was it finally driven out of Fallujah.
In the weeks after the documentary, American pundits began cataloguing the horrors that had piled up by 2013. They told how the Bush and Obama regimes killed more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial. The photos that were released of brutality at Abu Ghraib Prison give but an inkling of the terror to which the Iraqis were subjected.
The draconian administrative detention laws, systematic torture and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place in 2016. The prime minister’s office, a position now held by Haider Jawad Kadhim Al-Abad, is where the CIA-managed Counter Terrorism Service is still ensconced. In May 2016, the CTS gained fame for leading the US offensive to take back Fallujah from ISIS forces that had occupied the city since 2014. Iraqi soldiers and the national police forces assisted.
The systematic oppression the Americans imposed upon Iraq meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. But the guilty Americans have gone unpunished for their war crimes, not least of which was falsifying intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. British legal advisors repeatedly warned their government in 2003 that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which they called “one of the most serious offenses under international law.”
For anyone familiar with the CIA, the systematic oppression was predictable. But the US Government, as usual, destroyed and conceals most of the hard evidence of its war crimes, making it harder to prove. And the media is content to revise history and focus public attention on front men like Steele, rather than the institutions – in particular the CIA – for whom they work.
History, however, provides contextual evidence that what happened in Iraq amounts to an official but unstated policy of carefully planned war crimes. Indeed, the CIA modeled the Iraqi Special Police Commandos on the Special Police forces it organized and funded in Vietnam. In November 2000, Counterpunch published an article describing how former Congressman Rob Simmons, while serving as a CIA officer in Vietnam, created the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU) on which the Iraqi Special Police Commandos are very likely modeled. 1
There are other examples. As we were reminded by the Guardian, Steele headed the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador (1984-1986), where USadvised Salvadoran units were responsible for thousands of cases of torture and extra-judicial killing. Operating in both rural and urban areas, they were directed against anyone opposing US policy – always leftists advocating the things most hated by the CIA – land reform and redistribution of wealth from oligarchs to workers.
The CIA’s death squads in El Salvador were periodically moved from one administrative cover to another to confuse investigators. The CIA played this shell game with its Special Police Commandos in Iraq as well, rebranding them as the “National Police” following the exposure of one of their secret torture centers in November 2005. In its finest Madison Avenue marketing traditions, the CIA renamed the Commandos’ predatory Wolf Brigade “the Freedom Brigade”, bringing to mind Reagan’s description of the Contras as “freedom fighters”.
In Vietnam, the CIA built an archipelago of secret torture centers to process the hundreds of thousands of suspects that were kidnapped by its mercenary army of “counter terrorists”. All around the world, CIA officers and their military sidekicks teach modern torture techniques and design the torture centers concealed within the National Security Establishment’s network of military posts. Along with the CIA’s stations, those posts are the secret government’s infrastructure for Full Spectrum Dominance.
Major Joe Blair, the Director of Instruction at the School of the Americas (1986-89), described the training the US gave to Latin American officers as follows: “The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse … false imprisonment … threats to family members … and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or to stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.” 2
In 2000, the School of the Americas was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but, as Blair testified at a trial of SOA Watch protesters in 2002, “There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”
General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980s, defined this type of warfare based on systematic war crimes as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.” 3
Another problem with the official narrative, apart from historical amnesia, is that each new war crime is viewed as an isolated incident; and when the dots are connected, the media’s focus is always on some shadowy character like Steele. To its credit, the Guardian made a feeble attempt to connect Steele to the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But it ignored the overarching reality that the entire National Security Establishment is staffed by the same right-wing ideologues who power the US Government’s unstated policy of waging systematic war crimes for profit.
We know perfectly well who these militants are. The problem is that they regularly have lunch with the reporters whom the American public, in its naiveté, trusts to expose them and their criminal conspiracy.
For example, on 17 March 2013, CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria had Donald Gregg on his show to discuss North Korea. Zakaria introduced Gregg as President George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor in the 1980s. But he did not mention that Gregg, while the senior CIA officer in III Corps in Vietnam, helped to develop the “repugnant” form of warfare described by General Gorman. Nor did Zakaria explain how Gregg oversaw its application in El Salvador through the CIA’s back-channel “counterterror” network. 4
Gregg’s plan, adopted by Steele in El Salvador and then Iraq, requires CIA advisors to coordinate the occupied nation’s civilian security services, like the Iraqi Special Police, with military intelligence and civil affairs units, in order to provide reaction forces units with timely information on the location of guerrillas, whose hideouts are bombed by US warplanes and then ravaged in My Lai-style cordon and search operations in which counterterror death squads hunt enemy cadres in their homes.
In Vietnam, Gregg and his CIA companions – many of whom migrated to El Salvador – put together a chart of VC political cadres from “battered” detainees. The abused detainees were forced to point out on a map where their comrades were hiding. Next, the CIA officers piled the detainees into a helicopter and had them point out the hiding places on the ground. A CT team would then snatch the targeted VC cadres and bring them to the CIA’s secret torture center, run by a CIA-paid and owned Special Police officer, the kind of guy Steele advised in Iraq.
“We brought guys in from the national prison to flesh out the reports,” Gregg said about one particular operation. “We had guys analyzing reports, marking photographs, putting the pictures together on the wall, and then photographing that. That led to 96 people in the organization. Using military intelligence, we took photos of the houses where they lived. Then we took the photos back to the helicopter where we had the 23 people, who were hooded, and they circled the faces of the cadres.”
There’s more historical evidence of CIA tactics, but the “Pink Plan” developed by CIA officers Gregg, Rudy Enders and Felix Rodrigues in Vietnam is the same basic plan the CIA exported to El Salvador, and that Steele applied in Iraq.
After finishing with Gregg, Zakaria took a commercial break and returned with Paul Wolfowitz, President George W. Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and a member of the Bush’s Office of Special Plans, which planned and promoted the terror war on Iraq.
ZAKARIA: “How do you think about, as an American policy maker, the issue of – was it worth the price in American lives and treasure, by some estimates $1 trillion?”
WOLFOWITZ: “I would like as much as anyone to be able to say, let’s forget about the Persian Gulf. Let’s forget about the larger Middle East. But that part of the world isn’t leaving us alone. Al Qaeda isn’t leaving us alone. Pakistan isn’t leaving us alone. I think our interests and our values would be advanced if we stick with it.”
Zakaria did not ask Wolfowitz what he meant by “leaving us alone.”
War Criminals Wave Press Passes
Given the history of America’s genocidal wars in Vietnam and Central America, it is unfortunate that the Guardian limited itself to establishing that Steele and his administrative bosses, General David Petraeus and Donald Rumsfeld, underwrote systematic torture and extrajudicial killing.
What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including unelected political cadres like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access to them like Zakaria, know that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior operates more than a dozen secret prisons. They know what goes on in them, too. As one Iraqi general told the film-makers, “drilling, murder, torture – the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.”
Likewise, the composition and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, “were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings,” and were “common knowledge across Baghdad.”
Common knowledge never shared with the public.
It is a testament to the power of US “information warfare” that this policy of systematic war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public. Such is the power of National Security State insiders like David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turned a policy of calculated war crimes into the “hubris” of a few sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to scandalize, but never prosecute. 5
Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America’s policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, which shamelessly exploits our inclination to believe that our leaders behave morally. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Belligerent nationalism is understood in America as the essence of patriotism, and this veneration for militants is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the sacred Code of Silence. Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training Special Forces assassination squads for deployment in Iraq based on the Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.
But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a “repugnant” and thoroughly intentional form of modern American warfare.
Hersh quoted a former CIA station chief as saying, “We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them” – the insurgents – “out.”
Hold your nose, Seymour, and cheer the war crimes. When insider Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed Hersh about the Phoenix-style murder program, she didn’t ask if it amounted to a policy of war crimes. When insider Zakaria had Wolfowitz on the hot seat, he failed to question him about the war crimes he plotted and committed.
All this media psywar is waged in the name of maintaining morale – to make us feel good about our leaders – Wolfowitz, Perle, Frum and Feith – and the war crimes they commit in our name.
After the CIA death squads eliminated the senior leadership of the Iraqi government in 2003, they targeted “mid-level” Ba’ath Party members – a large portion of Iraq’s middle class. Cover for this needless rampage was provided by Newsweek’s top national security propagandist, John Barry, who quoted an army officer as saying, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.” 6
How did they change the equation? In one case, US forces held a general’s three sons as hostages to persuade him to defect. But instead of releasing his sons as promised, they staged an elaborate mock execution of his youngest son, before torturing the general himself to death.
All of it covered up. Not one victim featured on TV. All you’ll ever see is ISIS beheading people.
If you were to believe The New York Times – America’s newspaper of record – it doesn’t know the names of the CIA officers in Iraq behind these barbaric practices. Publishers may claim that the Intelligence Identity Protection Act prevents them from naming names, but they could describe the jobs and tell us what’s being done. But they don’t even do that, and that self-censorship is what the policy of war crimes depends upon. The Times conceals the criminal conspiracy waged by militant elites that undermines our “democracy.” We will never learn the truth about how the CIA nurtured the exile leadership it installed in Iraq, or how it organized the Ministry of Interior as its private domain, replete with a computerized list of every Iraqi citizen and every detail of their lives.
The Times could at least describe the CIA as “Keeper of the Hit Lists: Blackmail Central.” But it won’t, because it’s a family affair. As we know, the Iraqi National Congress was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA-sponsored source on the myth of weapons of mass destruction, hand-delivered to Times reporter Judy Miller, now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fox News analyst. Chalabi’s lies, and Miller’s dutiful reporting of them, were a major pretext for the war on Iraq.
What is never mentioned is that the Iraqi National Congress was founded and funded by the CIA, and that one of its leaders was the exiled General Hassan alNaqib. The CIA handpicked al-Naqib’s son, Falah al-Naqib, as Interim Interior Minister in Iraq and, in return for the favor, Falah appointed his uncle General Thavit to lead the Special Police Commandos.
Times reporters undoubtedly lunch with Thavit and his CIA case officer, which may be why they never explain the CIA’s systematic methods of dominance: for example, that any American working for the Interior Ministry or Prime Minister’s office is reporting to a publicly acknowledged administrative boss in the military or State Department, while secretly reporting to a CIA case officer, his operational boss.
The Times never explains that every unit in the Special Commandos has a CIA advisor handing out hit lists to its counterpart American “Special Police Transition Team”. Up to 45 US Special Forces soldiers work with each Iraqi unit. These teams are in round-the-clock communication with their CIA bosses via the Special Police Command Center. There is no record of the Special Police or Special Commandos ever conducting operations without US supervision, even as they massacred tens of thousands of people.
Every militia and Iraqi Special Forces unit has a CIA case officer in a similar management position. Every top Iraqi politician and ministry official has a CIA case officer too. And New York Times reporters drink with these advisors inside the Green Zone. It’s the family secret that enables atrocity.
American journalists do not report the truth. Consider their deference to the Interior Ministry’s CIA advisor Steven Casteel after his Special Police Commandos launched their reign of terror in Baghdad. All reports of a Phoenixstyle terror campaign were conveniently forgotten and instead, Knight Ridder reporters regurgitated Casteel’s black propaganda – that all atrocities were either rumor or innuendo or perpetrated by “insurgents in stolen police uniforms.” 7
Forget about “mistakes.” Casteel’s explanation is as ludicrous as General Petraeus claiming that the Iraqis formed the Special Police Commandos on “their own initiative.”
In its profile, Knight Ridder did not mention that Casteel had managed DEA operations in Latin America. It did not say that he’d been the DEA’s Chief of Intelligence before being sent to Iraq or that the CIA has controlled the DEA’s overseas targeting for 40 years. It wasn’t noted that Casteel served as a CIA asset in Latin America, attacking left wing drug traffickers and letting right wing traffickers flourish, supporting the CIA-sponsored Los Pepes-AUC death squads who were responsible for about 75% of civilian deaths in the Colombian civil war over the next ten years.
Knight Ridder did investigate Commando atrocities and might have uncovered the whole story but its Iraqi reporter, Yasser Salihee, was shot and killed by an American sniper in June 2005. Heeding what was an unmistakable warning, Knight Ridder instead blamed the abuses on infiltration of the Commandos by “Shiite militias”.
After the exposure of the al-Jadiriyah torture center, journalists reported that heads would roll. But CIA asset Adnan al-Asadi, the Deputy Interior Minister, maintained command of the National Police and prevented reforms promised by the Interior Minister at the time, Jawad al-Bulani.
Throughout his CIA-sponsored tenure, Asadi’s police forces were implicated in human rights abuses. During demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Baghdad in March 2011, demonstrators spotted Asadi on a rooftop directing snipers as they shot peaceful protesters in the square below. But no war crime goes unrewarded, and Asadi was eventually elected to Parliament, where the big money is to be made. Such are the advantages of working for the CIA.
Today, Iraq’s prisons are still rife with rape, torture, executions and disappearances. The Guardian and the BBC made a good start, but US journalists need to launch an investigation into the full extent of US command and control of the Special Police Commandos, and all the death squads and torture centers the US imposed on Iraq. Such an investigation must honestly examine the roles of the CIA and of US Special Forces, including the secret “Nightstalkers” who worked with the Wolf Brigade in 2005. The investigation must lead to accountability for every war crime committed, all the way to the top.
American journalists were glad to demonize Saddam Hussein for his war crimes – real and imagined. Now they need to identify and humanize the dead bodies that piled up every month in Baghdad. They need to follow up with Iraqi human rights groups like the Organization for Follow-Up and Monitoring, which matched 92% of the bodies of execution victims with names and descriptions of people detained by US-led Interior Ministry forces. 8
America’s ruling National Security Establishment has expanded covert paramilitary operations from 60 nations in 2008, to 120 in 2013. If we are ever to have a whiff of democracy, we need our journalists to reveal the extent to which the CIA commands and controls these operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. We need them to explain on a daily basis how the National Security Establishment corrupts foreign nations, intelligence, and “news” for the same racist, imperial purposes that have defined US foreign policy since its inception 240 years ago.
VALENTINE: I’m well. Thanks for having me on the show.
JIMENEZ: The Phoenix Program has recently been republished by Open Road Media as part of their Forbidden Bookshelves series. Would you mind sharing with us how your book was chosen for the series? What do you make of this new-found interest in Phoenix; what the CIA was up to in Vietnam; and what the CIA is up to generally?
VALENTINE: When the book came out in 1990, it got a terrible review in The New York Times. Morley Safer, who’d been a reporter in Vietnam, wrote the review. Safer and the Times killed the book because in it I said Phoenix never would have succeeded if the reporters in Vietnam hadn’t covered for the CIA.
Several senior CIA officers said the same thing, that “So and so was always in my office. He’d bring a bottle of scotch and I’d tell him what was going on.” The celebrity reporters knew what was going on, but they didn’t report about it in exchange for having access. I said that in the book specifically about The New York Times. So I not only got the CIA angry at me, I also got the Vietnam press corps angry at me too. Between those two things, the book did not get off to an auspicious start.
The Times gave Safer half a page to write his review, which was bizarre. The usual response is just to ignore a book like The Phoenix Program. But The New York Times Book Review serves a larger function; it teaches the media elite and “intelligentsia” what to think and how to say it. So Safer said my book was incoherent, because it unraveled the bureaucratic networks that conceal the contradictions between policy and operational reality. It exposed Colby as a liar. Safer was upset that I didn’t portray his friend and patron, Bill Colby, as a symbol of the elite, as a modern day Odysseus.
Luckily, with the Internet revolution, people aren’t bound by The Times and network news anymore. They can listen to Russia Today and get another side of the story. So Mark Crispin Miller and Philip Rappaport at Open Road chose The Phoenix Program to be the first book they published. And it’s been reborn. Thanks to the advent of the e-book, we’ve reached an audience of concerned and knowledgeable people in a way that wasn’t possible 25 years ago.
It’s also because of these Internet developments that John Brennan, the director of CIA, thought of reorganizing the CIA. All these things are connected. It’s a vastly different world than it was in 1947 when the CIA was created. The nature of the American empire has changed, and what the empire needs from the CIA has changed. The CIA is allocated about $30 billion a year, so the organizational changes are massive undertakings.
If you want to understand the CIA, you have to understand how it’s organized.
JIMENEZ: Exactly, and that’s what I want to talk to you about next. But first I’d like to touch upon the CIA’s infiltration of the US media. I find it curious, because the way that you describe it, it’s not so much a deliberate attempt to censor the media. There’s a lot of self-censorship as a result of that already existing relationship. Is that how you see this?
VALENTINE: Yes. The media organizes itself the way the CIA does. The CIA has case officers running around the world, engaged in murder and mayhem, and the media has reporters covering them. The reporter and the case officer both have bosses, and the higher you get in each organization, the closer the bosses become. The ideological guidelines get more restrictive the higher up you go. To join the CIA, you have to pass a psychological assessment test. They’re not going to hire anybody who is sympathetic towards poor people. These are ruthless people who serve capitalist bosses. They’re very right wing, and the media’s job is to protect them. Editors only hire reporters who are ideologically pure, just like you can’t get into the CIA if you’re a Communist or think the CIA should obey the law.
It’s the same thing in the media. You can’t get a job at CNN if you sympathize with the Palestinians or report how Israel has been stealing their land for 67 years. The minute you say something that is an anathema or upsets the Israelis, you’re out. The people who enforce these ideological restraints are the editors and the publishers. For example, while covering the merciless Israeli bombardment of civilians in Gaza in 2014, Diana Magnay was harassed and threatened by a group of bloodthirsty Israelis who were cheering the slaughter. Disgusted, Magnay later referred to them as “scum” in a tweet. She was forced to apologize, transferred to Moscow, and banished forever from Israel. 1
In a similar case, NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin was playing soccer with four young boys in Gaza when Israel shelled the playing field. Mohyeldin witnessed their murders, which he reported in a series of tweets. Without ever providing a reason, NBC pulled Mohyeldin from Gaza and prevented him from ever returning. NBC replaced Mohyeldin with Israeli sympathizer Richard Engel.
Any dictator would be happy with the way American media is organized. The minute you step out of the box, they fire you or send you off to Siberia. It’s a homogenous system. Not just the media and CIA, but politicians too. As the 2016 primaries proved, you can’t be a candidate for either party unless you pass the ideological test. You must be a freewheeling capitalist. You must support Israel with billions of tax payer dollars. You must give the military whatever weapons it wants. That’s the nature of the American state. These things naturally work together because that is the way it has been structured for 240 years.
JIMENEZ: We’ve seen pseudo alternatives emerge in the Internet posing as adversarial or anti-establishment when they’re anything but. We’ve seen this growing trend, and it’s something to be mindful of as we look for these sources on the Internet.
VALENTINE: The Internet is a free for all, so you have to approach it the way any enlightened person approaches every part of America, which is buyer beware. Capitalism is not designed to protect poor people or make sure people lead healthy, fulfilling lives. It’s designed to make sure the super-rich can steal from the poor. There’s only so much wealth and the rich want it.
The rich want to monopolize information too. Is a particular piece of information on the Internet coming from a reliable source? Who knows? Just because some of it is true doesn’t mean that all of it is true. To be able to discern whether the information is accurate or complete, you must be grounded in the reality that the capitalist system and all its facets are organized to oppress you, keep you in the dark and off balance as much as possible. It’s a game of wits and you’ve got to be smart about it. Buyer beware.
JIMENEZ: Exactly. Now I’d like to talk about the recent organizational changes in the CIA. It stems from an article in The Washington Post by Greg Miller. The headline is “CIA Director John Brennan Considering Sweeping Organizational Changes.” What the article is saying is that Brennan wants to restructure the CIA using the model of their Counterterrorism Center; merging different units and divisions, combining analysts with operatives into hybrid teams that will focus on specific regions of the world. This sounds to me like the organizational changes that were born out of Phoenix and that were exported to other parts of the world over the years. The CIA appears to be applying the same structure to all of its operations. Is that how you read this?
VALENTINE: Yes, and it’s something that, from my perspective, was predictable, which is why The Phoenix Program was re-released now, because what I predicted 25 years ago has happened. And you can only predict if you know the history.
The CIA initially, and for decades, had four directorates under an executive management staff: Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology. Executive management had staff for congressional liaison, legal issues, security, public relations, inspections, etc. Administration is just that: staff for finance, personnel, and support services like interrogators, translators and construction companies. Science and Technology is self-explanatory too, but with a typical CIA twist – science for the CIA means better ways to kill and control people, like the MKULTRA program. And now there’s a fifth directorate, Digital, that keystrokes and hacks foreign governments and corporations.
The Operations people overthrew foreign governments the old fashioned way, through sabotage and subversion. The Operations Directorate is now the National Clandestine Service. The Intelligence Directorate, which is now called Analysis, studied political, economic and social trends around the world so that executive management could mount better operations to control them.
The Operations Directorate was divided into several branches. The Counterintelligence (CI) branch detected foreign spies. Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff “liaison” officers worked with secret policemen and other officials in foreign nations. They collected “positive intelligence” by eavesdropping or by recruiting agents. The Covert Action branch engaged in deniable political action. The Special Operations Division (now the Special Activities Division) supplied paramilitary officers. There was also a Political and Psychological branch that specialized in all forms of propaganda.
These branches and directorates were career paths for operations officers (operators) assigned to geographical divisions. An FI staff officer might spend his or her entire career in the Far East Asia Division. The managers could move people around, but those things, generally speaking, were in place when the CIA began.
The events that led to the formation of the current Counterterrorism Center began in 1967, when US security services began to suspect that the Cubans and the Soviets were infiltrating the anti-war movement. Lyndon Johnson wanted to know the details, so his attorney general, Ramsay Clark, formed the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Department of Justice. The IDIU’s job was to coordinate the elements of the CIA, FBI and military that were investigating dissenters. The White House wanted to control and provide political direction to these investigations.
The Phoenix program was created simultaneously in 1967 and did the same thing in Vietnam; it brought together 25 agencies and aimed them at civilians in the insurgency. It’s political warfare. It’s secret. It’s against the rules of war. It violated the Geneva Conventions. It’s what Homeland Security does in the US: bringing agencies together and focusing them on civilians who look like terrorists.
The goal of this kind of bureaucratic centralization is to improve intelligence collection and analysis so reaction forces can leap into the breach more quickly and effectively. In 1967, the CIA already had computer experts who were traveling around by jet. The world was getting smaller and the CIA, which had all the cutting edge technology, was way out in front. It hired Ivy Leaguers like Nelson Brickham to make the machine run smoothly.
Brickham, as I’ve explained elsewhere, was the Foreign Intelligence staff officer who organized the Phoenix program based on principles Rensis Likert articulated in his book New Patterns of Management. Brickham believed he could use reporting formats as a tool to shape the behavior of CIA officers in the field. In particular, he hoped to correct “the grave problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address.”
Likert organized industries to be adaptable, and the CIA organized itself the same way. It was always reorganizing itself to adapt to new threats. And in 1967, while Brickham was forming Phoenix to neutralize the leaders of the insurgency in South Vietnam, James Angleton and the CIA’s Counter intelligence staff were creating the MHCHAOS program in Langley, Virginia, to spy on members of the anti-war movement, and turn as many of them as possible into double agents.
Chaos was the codename for the Special Operations Group within Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff. The CIA’s current Counterterrorism Center, which was established in 1986, is a direct descendent of Chaos.
Starting in 1967, White House political cadres, through the IDIU in the Justice Department, coordinated the CIA’s Chaos program, the FBI’s COINTELPRO Program, and the military’s domestic spying programs. When Nixon took office in January 1969, he immediately grasped the partisan political potential of the IDIU and these various domestic spying programs. The Nixon White House expanded Chaos and assigned its chief, Richard Ober, a deputy and a case officer. The Chaos staff occupied a vault in the basement at CIA headquarters in Virginia. It had a room where files were kept and where slides of suspects and potential recruits were viewed. A group of female secretaries managed the super-secret files.
Chaos was super-secret because it was illegal for the CIA to engage in domestic operations. Assignment to it was considered a “command performance.” There was a communications system exclusively for Chaos cables and couriers to CIA stations overseas. The Chaos “back-channel” could by-pass the division chiefs and station chiefs and work directly with its unilateral assets in a country. Chaos “traffic” had the highest security classification, was restricted to only those officers involved in the operation, and was inaccessible to everyone but the CIA’s top administrators.
In October 1969, based on names provided by the FBI, the Chaos case officer began recruiting double agents from the Black Power and anti-war movements. I never learned his name, but the case officer only approached people with “radical” credentials. Radicals who passed polygraph and psychological assessment tests were recruited, trained in the clandestine arts, supplied with gadgetry and cash, given a cover, and sent overseas. The case officer called his 40-50 double agents “dangles” because their job was to act like normal radicals and hope that a gullible KGB agent would make an approach.
Chaos dangles also spied and reported on their American colleagues. That’s the illegal domestic part. A folder was created for each dissident. The folder contained the dissident’s 201 “personality” file from the FBI, and included everything from arrest records to report cards to surreptitious photos taken of the person with other radicals. Some 7,000 -10,000 hard files were eventually assembled.
In 1970 the Chaos squad started entering its information on radicals onto IBM cards and compiling it in a data base codenamed HYDRA that ultimately contained the names of some 300,000 people. HYDRA was developed domestically at the same time as the Phoenix information system (PHMIS) in Vietnam, by the same people. Chaos included a mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL.
I’m sure the anthrax scare after 9/11 was a CIA provocation designed to justify a mail intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. All of these things I’m talking about are happening today on a much grander scale within the Muslim American community.
In 1971, the IDIU’s Intelligence Evaluation Committee was managed by Robert Mardian, the Nixon Administration’s assistant attorney general in charge of Internal Security. The Chaos squad was helping the Pentagon track army deserters, as well as foreign nationals who were trying to coax soldiers to desert from US military bases in Germany. Chaos dangles were sent to North Vietnam and Cuba, and one agent, possibly Timothy Leary, was launched against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Another Chaos agent played a critical though undisclosed role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations in Washington. Even Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, monitored Chaos operations in regard to his secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
By 1972, the Chaos squad was working with Nixon’s infamous Plumbers. One Chaos agent may have been involved in the botched Watergate burglary that brought Nixon down. The mastermind of the burglary, Gordon Liddy, sat on Mardian’s Intelligence Evaluation Committee and leveled requirements on CIA officer Richard Ober at Chaos. Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, are known to have directed Ober to spy on members of other government agencies. They also targeted Nixon’s political enemies, including people like Daniel Ellsberg who could in no way be considered terrorists. Which gives you an idea of the prominence of political cadres in these operations, and how they used their power to conduct all manner of dirty tricks.
Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. Ober worked with the National Commission on Civil Disorders, the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the Special Services units (Red Squads) of America’s major metropolitan police departments. The CIA has always recruited cops as contractors to organize and advise foreign police forces, and local police forces certainly helped the CIA amass its Chaos files. As head of the Counterintelligence staff, James Angleton was the CIA’s official contact with all federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Narcotics.
Chaos exemplifies how the White House, through the CIA’s network of law enforcement contacts, could use the Homeland Security apparatus as a cover to conduct all manner of illegal domestic operations. It shows how the CIA could use participating Homeland Security agencies for its own insidious institutional purposes, and that individuals like Hunt and Liddy could exploit it for partisan political purposes.
Hunt and Liddy’s many misadventures resulted in the Watergate scandal, which cast a bright light on CIA’s shenanigans and eventually led to the exposure of the Chaos squad. William Colby was the CIA’s Executive Director at the time. Colby had returned to the United States in 1971 to testify to Congress about Phoenix, and had stayed on to take charge of the CIA’s organizational affairs. After the arrest of the Watergate burglars, Colby worked with the Justice Department to have the IDIU abolished, and he made sure the Chaos “case officer” was reassigned but not disciplined.
After he became Director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, Colby personally minimized the damage by leaking some of the gory Chaos details to Seymour Hersh. Colby also sacrificed his bitter rival James Angleton, who as chief of Counterintelligence was held responsible for Chaos and the mail intercept program. Colby’s “limited hangout” and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a shell game, however, and the Chaos squad continued to track radicals and respond to FBI and military requirements. Everything was the same as before, including the ultra-secure communications system and restricted filing system, except that now, and from then on, it was done under the aegis of counterterrorism.
Colby started the ball rolling in July 1972 when he made Ober chief of the CIA’s International Terrorism Group (ITG). Ober’s new job was to set up and manage a “central program” on international terrorism and airplane hijackings. Building on the Chaos files, the ITG started penetrating terrorist training camps in Algeria and Libya. It kept track of black militants with international connections, and its reports, like Chaos reports, were sent to Kissinger at the National Security Council.
Ober’s appointment as chief of ITG coincided with the establishment of Nixon’s Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, the first US Government entity of its kind.
After the official termination of Chaos in March 1974, the ITG continued to occupy the same space in the CIA’s basement. A new ITG chief was assigned and was assisted by the same female secretaries who kept updating the Chaos files and computer tapes. As of 1975, no Chaos files had been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a “dissident.”
In 1977, veteran CIA officer Howard Bane became the third ITG chief. The notion of state-sponsored terrorism had emerged and was attributed to Libya and Iraq, both of which were said to have Soviet backing. As a result, Jimmy Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, directed Bane to organize the CIA against this new threat.
According to Bane, counterterrorism was a “hot potato” but a “low priority” because of ongoing Congressional investigations into CIA abuses. Bane said Turner was “hung up” on the legal definition of terror. Turner insisted that CIA officers refer to counterinsurgency as “low intensity warfare,” and in his effort to polish the CIA’s image, Turner renamed the ITG the Office of Terrorism.
Again, it was a shell game. Bane moved into the Chaos/ITG space in Langley’s basement. He described it as a windowless room as large as the ground floor of a house, divided into cubicles. “There were ten or twelve little old ladies running around in tennis shoes,” he said. Operations were compartmentalized and there was a “vault mentality.” Little was happening. The acting chief was the former ITG operations officer and his job was following US citizens overseas.
An avid proponent of covert action, Bane had served as chief of the CIA’s North Africa Division and in other top operational posts. He was nearing retirement and approached his new assignment with the fervor of a man seeking to enshrine his legacy. He summoned everyone to a staff meeting and said, “Let’s advertise ourselves to divisions.” He set up a reference system to service each of the CIA’s divisions, and each “little old lady” became an expert on a specific geographical area.
Bane started meeting with his counterparts at State, Treasury, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House and the NSA. As the Office of Terrorism began to serve a visible function, he moved the office to a fourth floor suite with windows. He was given an operations officer and recruited young men to replace the older women as his liaison officers to the divisions. He began working with Jim Glerum, the chief of the CIA’s Special Operations Division, 2 to beef up the paramilitary operational forces at his command.
Meanwhile, the US Army had created Delta Force to respond to the well publicized terrorist incidents that occurred in the 1970s. Delta and later the Navy’s SEAL Team Six served as the CIA’s vanguard in the nascent War on Terror. Within the context of “low intensity warfare”, the Office of Terrorism and its paramilitary units adopted a new lexicon in which “anti-terrorism” was the term for broad policy, and “counterterrorism” applied to specific, immediate actions.
Bane got a bigger budget and high tech gadgets like silenced weapons and bugging equipment for use in hostage rescue operations. He acquired a fleet of black choppers and formed a Crisis Management Training Program team, composed of a psychiatrist and a few case officers, which advised US and foreign law enforcement officers on how to negotiate with terrorists.
Bane set up a two-man intelligence unit at Delta headquarters at Fort Bragg, at which point Delta became a “customer” of CIA intelligence. Bane’s Office of Terrorism sent daily reports profiling known terrorists and their activities to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Very quietly his unit began to coordinate actual counter-terror operations. “Say someone in Frankfurt had access to the Red Army,” Bane explained. “Then Delta would send a team.” Bane’s Office of Terrorism handled each incident on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether it was defined as “international terrorism” (meaning the terrorists crossed borders or had foreign support) or “domestic terrorism” if terrorists were operating within their own country. If the incident related to domestic terrorism, the Office of Terrorism could not get involved, unless authorized through a presidential executive order called a “finding.”
The need for a finding was a stumbling block. Bane cited the time Colombia’s M19 terror group took 20 foreign diplomats, including the US ambassador, hostage at a party at the Dominican Embassy. Thinking the transnational nature of the incident qualified it as “international terror,” Bane, with the approval of the State Department’s terrorism unit, launched a Delta operation in conjunction with the CIA’s new SOD chief, Rudy Enders. Bane provided intelligence on the terrorists, while Enders provided Delta with the equipment it needed to stage a rescue operation. Meanwhile the Crisis Management Team assembled in Florida and prepared to jump into Colombia.
But the operation came to a screeching halt when the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, John Stein, revealed the operation to Turner’s Deputy Director of Operations, John McMahon. As Bane recalled, McMahon asked him, “Are you trying to send us all to jail?” McMahon put the operation on hold and Bane was forced to call his officers back to Langley where they waited while “the lawyers” met with Carter’s National Security Council staff. Only after the lawyers gave their approval did Carter issue the required “finding.”
In another instance, Bane was not allowed to mount an operation to rescue Italy’s Prime Minister Aldo Moro. According to Bane, his superiors determined that Moro’s captors were Italian nationals and thus were deemed to be operating domestically.
Let me stress that all this was happening within the context of the Cold War. The Office of Terrorism was a feature of the broader “low intensity warfare” strategy designed to thwart Soviet “aggression” in Third World countries like El Salvador. Not until 4 November 1979, and the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, did the context start to change. This seminal event marked the emergence of Islamic “fundamentalists” as America’s new bête noire. (And it allowed Ronald Reagan to crush Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.)
In the wake of the Embassy takeover, Carter ordered Bane and the CIA’s Office of Terrorism to work with Delta Force to rescue the 53 hostages. Bane told me the plan was based on a covert action plan to obtain “current intelligence” on the status of the hostages, including Tom Ahern, the CIA’s station chief in Tehran. 3 Bane needed this information to know where to direct what he called “the black and gray propaganda necessary to disguise the CIA’s actual intentions.” There was also a need to quickly train Delta Force to operate in the Iranian desert.
The needed intelligence was obtained, but the government’s first major counterterror operation, the Desert One rescue mission, failed to get off the ground. Several aircraft malfunctioned and one crashed on 25 April 1980, killing eight soldiers. As with the Benghazi tragedy, Republican politicians jumped for joy at the chance to criticize Democrats; the hostage crisis dragged on for six months and enabled Reagan to characterize Jimmy Carter as weak, which means instant death for any American politician.
There was other collateral damage as well. Reagan’s flamboyant Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, fired Bane and replaced him with William Buckley, a veteran CIA officer who had served several tours in Vietnam. From 1969-1971, under his patron Ted Shackley, Buckley had directed the CIA’s national counterterror program in Vietnam.
In April 1981, Casey and Buckley traveled together to Saudi Arabia to pave the way for the construction of an underground network of secret military bases that would be available to US forces. If the remarks attributed to Osama bin Laden are true, the presence of those bases under Saudi soil was one of the reasons he staged the 1998 Embassy bombings and the 9/11 terror attacks.
The War on Terror took its next Great Leap Forward in October 1981 with the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat by his personal bodyguards, whom Buckley had trained. The assassination nullified the Camp David Accords and freed Israel to target PLO bases in Lebanon. In May 1982, Israeli assets in the fascist Christian Phalange militia organized one of the greatest acts of terror of all time – the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
In August 1982 Buckley returned to CIA headquarters to coordinate antiterrorism policy through the Domestic Terrorism Group. Meanwhile, Casey appointed veteran CIA officer David Whipple as the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counterterrorism. A veteran operations officer with extensive service in the Far East, Whipple had been serving as CIA station chief in Switzerland.
Whipple told me that Casey’s executive staff consisted of 16 NIOs; eight handled geographical divisions, while the other eight handled issues like narcotics, nuclear weapons, and in Whipple’s case, terrorism. Under Casey’s direction, every government agency established a counterterror office as part of a secret apparatus. Whipple as NIO coordinated the CT offices and assisted the CIA’s division chiefs, making sure their station chiefs were properly handling counterterror issues in their area of operations.
Whipple ran the Office of Domestic Terrorism (ODT) from 1982 until 1986. His staff included an operations chief, intelligence analysts, photo interpreters, and case officers. 4 Because it had the authority to access any division’s files and co-opt its penetration agents, the ODT was resisted by the divisions – especially the Near East Division, which was on the front lines of the War on Terror.
As you can see, the evolution of “offices” and later “centers” that transcended and coordinated the CIA’s divisions was well underway by 1982. Throughout this early stage of its evolution, the CIA’s terrorism office retained the legal authority to conduct unilateral domestic operations for a specific period of time before being required to notify and involve the FBI. (The guidelines are more honored in the breach than the observance, I’m sure.) The ODT also maintained the super-secret communications system instituted during Chaos that by-passed the CIA’s normal chains of command.
As part of this back-channel “counterterror network”, Casey recruited Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council (NSC). Whipple served as North’s case officer in the monumental political misadventures North embarked upon.
Cut from the same fascist cloth as his ideological forefathers Hunt and Liddy, North formed a crisis management center along with REX 84, “a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.” 5 North’s plan called for “the round-up and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some 26,000) and aliens (3,000 – 4,000), in camps such as the one in Oakdale, Louisiana.” 6
Certain trusted members of Congress were witting (despite that august body’s periodic protestations that the CIA operates as a “rogue elephant”) and Senator Daniel Inouye cut off all debate about North’s plan to suspend the Constitution when the subject was raised during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987.
In April 1984, North created the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG) specifically to rescue several American hostages held in Lebanon, including the aforementioned William Buckley, who had been kidnapped the month before. North became TIWG’s chairman and in October 1985 managed its first successful operation – the capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro.
A few months earlier, after the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 while it was flying from Athens to Beirut, George H. W. Bush had created the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism. As the NSC’s liaison to the Task Force, “North drafted a secret annex for its report which institutionalized and expanded his counterterrorist powers, making himself the NSC coordinator of all counterterrorist actions.” 7
North continued to acquire greater and greater powers, and on 20 January 1986, National Security Decision Directive 207 made him “chief coordinator” of Casey’s secret counterterror network through the Office to Combat Terrorism (OCT). Working through the NSC’s Operations Sub-Group, North coordinated the back-channel CT network with Major General Richard Secord’s “off-the shelf” Enterprise in a series of illegal operations. Among them were Israel’s facilitation of arms sales to Iran; American civilians supplying arms to the Contras; and Contra drug smuggling into America.
North also planned for the repression of domestic dissent and criticism. As P. D. Scott has noted, “the Office to Combat Terrorism became the means whereby North could coordinate the propaganda activities of Carl “Spitz” Channel and Richard Miller (and) the closing of potential embarrassing investigations by other government agencies.” 8
The evolution climaxed in 1986 with the creation of the Counter-Terror Center under Duane Clarridge. Yet another right wing ideologue, Clarridge had been chief of the CIA’s station in Turkey in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the fascist Grey Wolves went on a terror rampage, bombing and killing thousands of public officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social democrats, left-wing activists and Kurds. Since then, Turkey’s military has been one of America’s strongest allies, despite the recent coup attempt staged by the America-based, CIA-connected exile, Fethullah Gülen.
A body-builder and scion of the old boy clique that runs the CIA, Clarridge was chief of Latin America Division from 1981 until 1984, when Nicaraguan harbors were mined and the CIA’s “murder manual” was distributed to the Contras. Clarridge helped Secord’s off-the-shelf Enterprise move PLO weapons captured by Israeli forces during their bloody invasion of Lebanon, through Manuel Noriega in Panama, to the Contras. That’s the kind of stuff the CT Center still does today; moving weapons from chaotic places like Benghazi in Libya, to deniable terrorist surrogates in Syria.
As chief of the Europe Division, Clarridge had also provided the back channel in Lisbon that Secord’s Enterprise used to sell HAWK and TOW missiles to the Iranians, in exchange for the release of American hostages. According to Scott, “The intrigues of North, Secord, Clarridge and (Robert) Oakley (at the State Department) at this point showed a concern for politics rather than security.” 9
When I interviewed him, Clarridge described the CT Center, which has coordinated CIA back-channel activities since 1986, as a central unit with members from the directorates operating under a committee at the National Security Council. With input from the division chiefs, the CT Center “divines” (as he put it) anti-terrorism policy and then “constructs entities” that conduct operations. It is not a function of US Special Forces, as often portrayed in the media, but of CIA “action teams” trained to capture suspected terrorists and bring them to the United States to stand trial.
During his tenure as CT Center chief from 1986 to 1988, Clarridge worked directly with George H. W. Bush. He was lucky in that regard; Clarridge was indicted on seven counts of lying to Congress, but his case never went to trial, thanks to a last minute pardon Bush issued on 24 December 1992.
When called to task about his crimes, North blamed the peaceniks who lost the Vietnam War. If liberal politicians hadn’t investigated the CIA, he argued, then fascists like him wouldn’t have had to resort to dirty tricks. North’s hatred of the peace movement was palpable. North believed that “the most pressing problem is not in the Third World, but here at home in the struggle for the minds of the people.” 10
North was out of control; when Jack Terrell told the Justice Department that North was involved in Contra drug smuggling, North labeled Terrell a terrorist and sicced the FBI on him. But neither North nor any of the other Iran-Contra criminals were ever punished, because, as Michael McClintock noted at the time, “the very notion of counter-terror as terrorism was forbidden, while circumlocution was the norm.” 11
That’s how the CIA’s CT Center evolved from the Chaos domestic spying mechanism into the nerve center of the CIA’s clandestine staff. Same thing happened with the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center at the same time. Both are modeled on Phoenix, and both are wonderful tools for White House cadres to exercise political control over the bureaucracies they coordinate. These “centers” are the perfect means for policing and expanding the empire; they make it easier than ever for the CIA to track people and events in every corner of the world. The need for the old-fashioned directorates is fading away. You don’t need an entire directorate to understand the political, social and economic movements around the world anymore, because the United States is controlling them all.
The US has color revolutions going everywhere. It’s got the World Bank and the IMF strangling countries with debt, like the banks are strangling college students and home owners here. The War on Terror is the best thing that ever happened to US capitalists and their secret police force, the CIA. Terrorism is the pretext that allows the CIA to coordinate and transcend every government agency and civic institution, including the media, to the extent that we don’t even see its wars anymore. Its control is so pervasive, so ubiquitous; the CIA has actually become the Phoenix.
JIMENEZ: Right.
VALENTINE: It’s the eye of god in the sky; it’s able to determine what’s going to happen next because it’s controlling all of these political, social and economic movements. It pits the Sunnis against the Shiites. It doesn’t need slow and outdated directorates. These Phoenix centers enable it to determine events instantaneously anywhere. There are now Counterterror Intelligence Centers all over the world. In Phoenix they were called Intelligence Operations Coordinating Centers. So it’s basically exactly the same thing.
It’s been evolving that way and everybody on the inside was gearing themselves for this glorious moment for 30 years. They even have a new staff position called Targeting Officers. You can Google this.
JIMENEZ: Right, right, exactly.
VALENTINE: The centers represent the unification of military, intelligence and media operations under political control. White House political appointees oversee them, but the determinant force is the CIA careerists who slither into private industry when their careers are over. They form the consulting firms that direct the corporations that drive the empire. Through their informal “old boy” network, the CIA guys and gals keep America at war so they can make a million dollars when their civil service career is over.
JIMENEZ: The Washington Post and subsequent articles frame it as if these changes are drastic. But to hear you, it’s a natural progression. So what does this announcement mean? Is the CIA putting out their own press release through the Washington Post just to give everyone the heads up?
VALENTINE: Well, everybody in the CIA was worried that if the directorates were reorganized, it would negatively affect their careers. But executive management usually does what its political bosses tell them to do, and Brennan reorganized in 2015. He created a fifth directorate, the Directorate for Digital Innovation (DDI) ostensibly as the CIA’s “mantelpiece”. But, as the Washington Times reported, “it is the formation of the new ‘mission’ centers – including ones for counterintelligence, weapons and counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism – that is most likely to shake up the agency’s personnel around the world.” 12
The CIA’s “ten new Mission Centers” are designed to “serve as locations to integrate capabilities and bring the full range of CIA’s operational, analytic, support, technical and digital skill sets to bear against the nation’s most pressing national security problems.” 13
This modernization means the CIA is better able to control people politically, starting with its own officers, then everyone else. That’s the ultimate goal. Politicians, speaking in a unified voice, create the illusion of a crime-fighting CIA and an America with a responsibility to protect benighted foreigners from themselves. But they can’t tell you what the CIA does, because it’s all illegal.
Well, it’s all a lie. In order for the politicians to hold office, they have to cover for the CIA. Their concern is how to explain the reorganization and exploit it. They squabble among themselves and cut the best deals possible.
JIMENEZ: That makes complete sense. Talking about all the illegal activity the CIA is involved in, I couldn’t help but think of the drug running. I’d like to point out to our listeners the article you wrote, which offers everything they ought to know as far as the history of the CIA in drugs. It’s entitled, “The CIA and Drugs: A Covert History” (Counterpunch, 7 November 2014).
Meanwhile, I’d like to hear your opinion on the influence of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics in local law enforcement. Local police departments are adopting many of the same tactics. We’re seeing the US government use counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics against its own people. Perhaps one of the most vivid examples is what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. Is that too a natural progression of Phoenix?
VALENTINE: Absolutely. The very last paragraph in my book The Phoenix Program says you’ll know the Phoenix has arrived when you start seeing police forces advancing on protestors in paramilitary formations, and driving around in armored vehicles.
That’s what the CIA does in foreign nations; it militarizes police forces so it can control that country’s political, economic and social movements. The CIA’s influence is pervasive here, too; it advises all the major police departments in the US. The Phoenix model of coordinating agencies happens under the “cognizance” of the CIA, because the premier threat is a terrorist infiltrating the US with nukes. It goes back to Chaos thinking: maybe ISIS is recruiting black radicals in Ferguson. If so, we need paramilitary police forces and administrative detention laws to neutralize them. The Missouri governor can say a protester in Ferguson is violating national security laws and hold him indefinitely.
The media loves it. FOX News said the Black Lives protesters were holding “us” (meaning white people) hostage. If it’s a hostage situation, they’re terrorists. Tucker Carlson said (I paraphrase), “You can talk about race all you want. It’s a hostage situation and race doesn’t matter.”
So the racists in government and law enforcement are elated. Now they can send in provocateurs (maybe an Afghanistan veteran like Dallas shooter Micah Johnson, who got wiped out by a robot carrying a Claymore mine) and start riots and crush the protestors because they’re terrorists. And that’s how, over the last 40 years, dissent has come to equal terrorism. It’s how the one percent wants us to see non-violent protest. They want the public to believe that anybody who resists law enforcement is a terrorist. All the pieces have been put in place, through the corporate media, to make the lies seem true. These Counterterror Intelligence Centers are already operating in the United States through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers, which do the same thing.
JIMENEZ: Exactly.
VALENTINE: The American empire consists of hundreds of military bases and a CIA station in every country. It’s Pepsi being sold in Vietnam. “We are the world.” It’s not just 50 states and a few protectorates. It’s crazy for average Americans to think their fate is not directly connected to the fate of every other person in the world, or that the one percent considers them higher-class peasants than the other worker bees elsewhere around the world. There are diminishing resources and other strategic problems that the CIA is forecasting 20 years into the future. It’s planning stratospheric aerosol injections to cure climate change. The reorganization of the CIA is another incremental step in anticipation of America reaching that tipping point. Gated communities are the future; the centers replicate them.
JIMENEZ: Indeed. Something you said just now really struck me. And that’s the way that Americans separate themselves from the Other. It reminds me of these arguments we hear in the media regarding the use of militarized police. It’s okay in Afghanistan, but not in Ferguson. The use of Predator drones to kill somebody in Yemen is okey, but not in Montana. It’s murder either way, but most of the American public doesn’t see it that way. We can discuss this, but unless the American people do something to change this, then we run the risk of these things just becoming normal and accepted. For example, the CIA’s drug running now we see in feature films, in Hollywood productions.
VALENTINE: They think, “Well, that’s what the CIA does, everybody knows it.” If you watch a pro football game, you know the US military owns the NFL. There’s F-14s flying over the stadiums. Every spectator has to stand and salute and plant a big wet kiss on the military’s fat bloated butt.
In my opinion, what it will take is for the men and women in the military to realize they’re part of a self-defeating enterprise. Before you can change the CIA, you have to change some other things. You have to shrink the military establishment and end the war on drugs, which can be done. When given the chance in state referendums, people are voting for medical marijuana and adult recreational use.
When given a chance to vote, people express common sense. Marijuana is not going to make you go out and massacre school kids or abortion providers. That happens because we live in a country that glorifies the god of violence and his sacred warriors.
Demilitarizing American society is a start, like decriminalizing marijuana is a first step in ending the war on drugs. It’s easier than challenging an arcane thing like the CIA that’s covered with grey and black propaganda. It’s hard for people to understand how huge bureaucratic systems work together. They get frustrated and vote to leave the European Union, or they cling to Trump or Clinton, thinking things will change.
Maybe next year all the students will default on their loans and bring the system down. Maybe they’ll say to hell with the bankers for mortgaging my future. We’re taking it back. If something like that can happen, if that kind of consciousness can spread among young people being held in economic bondage and groomed to administer the empire, then there’s hope. If they see they have nothing to lose, they’ll come together and start making a fuss.
JIMENEZ: That would be something to behold.
VALENTINE: You have to use your imagination.
next Part 2
HOW THE CIA CO-OPTED AND MANAGES THE WAR ON DRUGS....
CREATING A CRIME: HOW THE CIA COMMANDEERED THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION
notes
Chapter 10
1 Douglas Valentine, “The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman”, Counterpunch.
2 Interview in documentary film: The War on Democracy (2007), directed by John Pilger. View online at: <http://johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy>
3 “SWORD deals in ‘Repugnant’ Warfare”, The Toledo Blade, 1 January 1987, p. 27.
4 See The Phoenix Program for my complete interview with Gregg.
5 David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.
6 Barry, “The Pentagon may put Special Forces led assassination tearms”,
7 January 2005. 7 Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee, “Sunni men in Baghdad targeted by attackers in police uniforms”, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 27 June 2005.
8 <http://brusselstribunal.org/IraqUNHRC.htm>
Chapter 11
1 Michael Calderone, “CNN Removes Reporter Diana Magnay From Israel-Gaza After ‘Scum’ Tweet, The Huffington Post, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/cnn-diana-magnayisraelgaza_n_5598866.html>
2 The SOD is now known as the Special Activities Division.
3 Ahern was working undercover as the Embassy’s Narcotics Control Officer.
4 Interview with David Whipple
5 Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 21 February 2011, citing a quote from the 5 July 1987 Miami Herald. Scott originally published the article in 1989 as “Northwards without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power.” <http://apjjf.org/2011/9/8/Peter-Dale-Scott/3491/article.html>
6 Ibid. Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, CounterTerrorism, 1940-1990, p 306.
12 Guy Taylor, “CIA goes live with new cyber directorate, massive internal reorganization” Washington Times, 1 October 2015.
13 Ibid.
The documentary was a departure from mainstream reporting, in that it told how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys. But the Commandos are only one of America’s many weapons of human destruction in Iraq. Along with US military forces that murder indiscriminately, CIA-funded death squads that murdered selectively, and the CIA’s palace guard – the Iraqi Special Operations Forces – the Commandos are part of a genocidal campaign that had killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and driven half of all Sunnis from their homes.
Including economic sanctions and a 50-year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators have visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist regime. Driven into fanaticism by the brutal invasion and occupation, many thousands of Sunnis then formed the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). After being decimated by US forces, ISI was reinforced by former Ba’athist military and intelligence officers, as well as foreign mercenaries from places like Chechnya. Now known as ISIS, the militant Sunni resistance seized vast stretches of land in Iraq and Syria. Only as recently as June 2016, was it finally driven out of Fallujah.
In the weeks after the documentary, American pundits began cataloguing the horrors that had piled up by 2013. They told how the Bush and Obama regimes killed more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial. The photos that were released of brutality at Abu Ghraib Prison give but an inkling of the terror to which the Iraqis were subjected.
The draconian administrative detention laws, systematic torture and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place in 2016. The prime minister’s office, a position now held by Haider Jawad Kadhim Al-Abad, is where the CIA-managed Counter Terrorism Service is still ensconced. In May 2016, the CTS gained fame for leading the US offensive to take back Fallujah from ISIS forces that had occupied the city since 2014. Iraqi soldiers and the national police forces assisted.
The systematic oppression the Americans imposed upon Iraq meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. But the guilty Americans have gone unpunished for their war crimes, not least of which was falsifying intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. British legal advisors repeatedly warned their government in 2003 that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which they called “one of the most serious offenses under international law.”
For anyone familiar with the CIA, the systematic oppression was predictable. But the US Government, as usual, destroyed and conceals most of the hard evidence of its war crimes, making it harder to prove. And the media is content to revise history and focus public attention on front men like Steele, rather than the institutions – in particular the CIA – for whom they work.
History, however, provides contextual evidence that what happened in Iraq amounts to an official but unstated policy of carefully planned war crimes. Indeed, the CIA modeled the Iraqi Special Police Commandos on the Special Police forces it organized and funded in Vietnam. In November 2000, Counterpunch published an article describing how former Congressman Rob Simmons, while serving as a CIA officer in Vietnam, created the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU) on which the Iraqi Special Police Commandos are very likely modeled. 1
There are other examples. As we were reminded by the Guardian, Steele headed the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador (1984-1986), where USadvised Salvadoran units were responsible for thousands of cases of torture and extra-judicial killing. Operating in both rural and urban areas, they were directed against anyone opposing US policy – always leftists advocating the things most hated by the CIA – land reform and redistribution of wealth from oligarchs to workers.
The CIA’s death squads in El Salvador were periodically moved from one administrative cover to another to confuse investigators. The CIA played this shell game with its Special Police Commandos in Iraq as well, rebranding them as the “National Police” following the exposure of one of their secret torture centers in November 2005. In its finest Madison Avenue marketing traditions, the CIA renamed the Commandos’ predatory Wolf Brigade “the Freedom Brigade”, bringing to mind Reagan’s description of the Contras as “freedom fighters”.
In Vietnam, the CIA built an archipelago of secret torture centers to process the hundreds of thousands of suspects that were kidnapped by its mercenary army of “counter terrorists”. All around the world, CIA officers and their military sidekicks teach modern torture techniques and design the torture centers concealed within the National Security Establishment’s network of military posts. Along with the CIA’s stations, those posts are the secret government’s infrastructure for Full Spectrum Dominance.
Major Joe Blair, the Director of Instruction at the School of the Americas (1986-89), described the training the US gave to Latin American officers as follows: “The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse … false imprisonment … threats to family members … and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or to stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.” 2
In 2000, the School of the Americas was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but, as Blair testified at a trial of SOA Watch protesters in 2002, “There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”
General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980s, defined this type of warfare based on systematic war crimes as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.” 3
Another problem with the official narrative, apart from historical amnesia, is that each new war crime is viewed as an isolated incident; and when the dots are connected, the media’s focus is always on some shadowy character like Steele. To its credit, the Guardian made a feeble attempt to connect Steele to the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Petraeus, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But it ignored the overarching reality that the entire National Security Establishment is staffed by the same right-wing ideologues who power the US Government’s unstated policy of waging systematic war crimes for profit.
We know perfectly well who these militants are. The problem is that they regularly have lunch with the reporters whom the American public, in its naiveté, trusts to expose them and their criminal conspiracy.
For example, on 17 March 2013, CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria had Donald Gregg on his show to discuss North Korea. Zakaria introduced Gregg as President George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor in the 1980s. But he did not mention that Gregg, while the senior CIA officer in III Corps in Vietnam, helped to develop the “repugnant” form of warfare described by General Gorman. Nor did Zakaria explain how Gregg oversaw its application in El Salvador through the CIA’s back-channel “counterterror” network. 4
Gregg’s plan, adopted by Steele in El Salvador and then Iraq, requires CIA advisors to coordinate the occupied nation’s civilian security services, like the Iraqi Special Police, with military intelligence and civil affairs units, in order to provide reaction forces units with timely information on the location of guerrillas, whose hideouts are bombed by US warplanes and then ravaged in My Lai-style cordon and search operations in which counterterror death squads hunt enemy cadres in their homes.
In Vietnam, Gregg and his CIA companions – many of whom migrated to El Salvador – put together a chart of VC political cadres from “battered” detainees. The abused detainees were forced to point out on a map where their comrades were hiding. Next, the CIA officers piled the detainees into a helicopter and had them point out the hiding places on the ground. A CT team would then snatch the targeted VC cadres and bring them to the CIA’s secret torture center, run by a CIA-paid and owned Special Police officer, the kind of guy Steele advised in Iraq.
“We brought guys in from the national prison to flesh out the reports,” Gregg said about one particular operation. “We had guys analyzing reports, marking photographs, putting the pictures together on the wall, and then photographing that. That led to 96 people in the organization. Using military intelligence, we took photos of the houses where they lived. Then we took the photos back to the helicopter where we had the 23 people, who were hooded, and they circled the faces of the cadres.”
There’s more historical evidence of CIA tactics, but the “Pink Plan” developed by CIA officers Gregg, Rudy Enders and Felix Rodrigues in Vietnam is the same basic plan the CIA exported to El Salvador, and that Steele applied in Iraq.
After finishing with Gregg, Zakaria took a commercial break and returned with Paul Wolfowitz, President George W. Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and a member of the Bush’s Office of Special Plans, which planned and promoted the terror war on Iraq.
ZAKARIA: “How do you think about, as an American policy maker, the issue of – was it worth the price in American lives and treasure, by some estimates $1 trillion?”
WOLFOWITZ: “I would like as much as anyone to be able to say, let’s forget about the Persian Gulf. Let’s forget about the larger Middle East. But that part of the world isn’t leaving us alone. Al Qaeda isn’t leaving us alone. Pakistan isn’t leaving us alone. I think our interests and our values would be advanced if we stick with it.”
Zakaria did not ask Wolfowitz what he meant by “leaving us alone.”
War Criminals Wave Press Passes
Given the history of America’s genocidal wars in Vietnam and Central America, it is unfortunate that the Guardian limited itself to establishing that Steele and his administrative bosses, General David Petraeus and Donald Rumsfeld, underwrote systematic torture and extrajudicial killing.
What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including unelected political cadres like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access to them like Zakaria, know that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior operates more than a dozen secret prisons. They know what goes on in them, too. As one Iraqi general told the film-makers, “drilling, murder, torture – the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.”
Likewise, the composition and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, “were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings,” and were “common knowledge across Baghdad.”
Common knowledge never shared with the public.
It is a testament to the power of US “information warfare” that this policy of systematic war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public. Such is the power of National Security State insiders like David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turned a policy of calculated war crimes into the “hubris” of a few sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to scandalize, but never prosecute. 5
Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America’s policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, which shamelessly exploits our inclination to believe that our leaders behave morally. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Belligerent nationalism is understood in America as the essence of patriotism, and this veneration for militants is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the sacred Code of Silence. Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training Special Forces assassination squads for deployment in Iraq based on the Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.
But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a “repugnant” and thoroughly intentional form of modern American warfare.
Hersh quoted a former CIA station chief as saying, “We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them” – the insurgents – “out.”
Hold your nose, Seymour, and cheer the war crimes. When insider Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed Hersh about the Phoenix-style murder program, she didn’t ask if it amounted to a policy of war crimes. When insider Zakaria had Wolfowitz on the hot seat, he failed to question him about the war crimes he plotted and committed.
All this media psywar is waged in the name of maintaining morale – to make us feel good about our leaders – Wolfowitz, Perle, Frum and Feith – and the war crimes they commit in our name.
After the CIA death squads eliminated the senior leadership of the Iraqi government in 2003, they targeted “mid-level” Ba’ath Party members – a large portion of Iraq’s middle class. Cover for this needless rampage was provided by Newsweek’s top national security propagandist, John Barry, who quoted an army officer as saying, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.” 6
How did they change the equation? In one case, US forces held a general’s three sons as hostages to persuade him to defect. But instead of releasing his sons as promised, they staged an elaborate mock execution of his youngest son, before torturing the general himself to death.
All of it covered up. Not one victim featured on TV. All you’ll ever see is ISIS beheading people.
If you were to believe The New York Times – America’s newspaper of record – it doesn’t know the names of the CIA officers in Iraq behind these barbaric practices. Publishers may claim that the Intelligence Identity Protection Act prevents them from naming names, but they could describe the jobs and tell us what’s being done. But they don’t even do that, and that self-censorship is what the policy of war crimes depends upon. The Times conceals the criminal conspiracy waged by militant elites that undermines our “democracy.” We will never learn the truth about how the CIA nurtured the exile leadership it installed in Iraq, or how it organized the Ministry of Interior as its private domain, replete with a computerized list of every Iraqi citizen and every detail of their lives.
The Times could at least describe the CIA as “Keeper of the Hit Lists: Blackmail Central.” But it won’t, because it’s a family affair. As we know, the Iraqi National Congress was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA-sponsored source on the myth of weapons of mass destruction, hand-delivered to Times reporter Judy Miller, now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fox News analyst. Chalabi’s lies, and Miller’s dutiful reporting of them, were a major pretext for the war on Iraq.
What is never mentioned is that the Iraqi National Congress was founded and funded by the CIA, and that one of its leaders was the exiled General Hassan alNaqib. The CIA handpicked al-Naqib’s son, Falah al-Naqib, as Interim Interior Minister in Iraq and, in return for the favor, Falah appointed his uncle General Thavit to lead the Special Police Commandos.
Times reporters undoubtedly lunch with Thavit and his CIA case officer, which may be why they never explain the CIA’s systematic methods of dominance: for example, that any American working for the Interior Ministry or Prime Minister’s office is reporting to a publicly acknowledged administrative boss in the military or State Department, while secretly reporting to a CIA case officer, his operational boss.
The Times never explains that every unit in the Special Commandos has a CIA advisor handing out hit lists to its counterpart American “Special Police Transition Team”. Up to 45 US Special Forces soldiers work with each Iraqi unit. These teams are in round-the-clock communication with their CIA bosses via the Special Police Command Center. There is no record of the Special Police or Special Commandos ever conducting operations without US supervision, even as they massacred tens of thousands of people.
Every militia and Iraqi Special Forces unit has a CIA case officer in a similar management position. Every top Iraqi politician and ministry official has a CIA case officer too. And New York Times reporters drink with these advisors inside the Green Zone. It’s the family secret that enables atrocity.
American journalists do not report the truth. Consider their deference to the Interior Ministry’s CIA advisor Steven Casteel after his Special Police Commandos launched their reign of terror in Baghdad. All reports of a Phoenixstyle terror campaign were conveniently forgotten and instead, Knight Ridder reporters regurgitated Casteel’s black propaganda – that all atrocities were either rumor or innuendo or perpetrated by “insurgents in stolen police uniforms.” 7
Forget about “mistakes.” Casteel’s explanation is as ludicrous as General Petraeus claiming that the Iraqis formed the Special Police Commandos on “their own initiative.”
In its profile, Knight Ridder did not mention that Casteel had managed DEA operations in Latin America. It did not say that he’d been the DEA’s Chief of Intelligence before being sent to Iraq or that the CIA has controlled the DEA’s overseas targeting for 40 years. It wasn’t noted that Casteel served as a CIA asset in Latin America, attacking left wing drug traffickers and letting right wing traffickers flourish, supporting the CIA-sponsored Los Pepes-AUC death squads who were responsible for about 75% of civilian deaths in the Colombian civil war over the next ten years.
Knight Ridder did investigate Commando atrocities and might have uncovered the whole story but its Iraqi reporter, Yasser Salihee, was shot and killed by an American sniper in June 2005. Heeding what was an unmistakable warning, Knight Ridder instead blamed the abuses on infiltration of the Commandos by “Shiite militias”.
After the exposure of the al-Jadiriyah torture center, journalists reported that heads would roll. But CIA asset Adnan al-Asadi, the Deputy Interior Minister, maintained command of the National Police and prevented reforms promised by the Interior Minister at the time, Jawad al-Bulani.
Throughout his CIA-sponsored tenure, Asadi’s police forces were implicated in human rights abuses. During demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Baghdad in March 2011, demonstrators spotted Asadi on a rooftop directing snipers as they shot peaceful protesters in the square below. But no war crime goes unrewarded, and Asadi was eventually elected to Parliament, where the big money is to be made. Such are the advantages of working for the CIA.
Today, Iraq’s prisons are still rife with rape, torture, executions and disappearances. The Guardian and the BBC made a good start, but US journalists need to launch an investigation into the full extent of US command and control of the Special Police Commandos, and all the death squads and torture centers the US imposed on Iraq. Such an investigation must honestly examine the roles of the CIA and of US Special Forces, including the secret “Nightstalkers” who worked with the Wolf Brigade in 2005. The investigation must lead to accountability for every war crime committed, all the way to the top.
American journalists were glad to demonize Saddam Hussein for his war crimes – real and imagined. Now they need to identify and humanize the dead bodies that piled up every month in Baghdad. They need to follow up with Iraqi human rights groups like the Organization for Follow-Up and Monitoring, which matched 92% of the bodies of execution victims with names and descriptions of people detained by US-led Interior Ministry forces. 8
America’s ruling National Security Establishment has expanded covert paramilitary operations from 60 nations in 2008, to 120 in 2013. If we are ever to have a whiff of democracy, we need our journalists to reveal the extent to which the CIA commands and controls these operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. We need them to explain on a daily basis how the National Security Establishment corrupts foreign nations, intelligence, and “news” for the same racist, imperial purposes that have defined US foreign policy since its inception 240 years ago.
| Chapter 11 |
NEW GAMES, SAME AIMS:
CIA
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES
GUILLERMO JIMENEZ: Welcome to De-Manufacturing Consent. I am your
host, Guillermo Jimenez. Our guest today is Douglas Valentine. How are you
today? VALENTINE: I’m well. Thanks for having me on the show.
JIMENEZ: The Phoenix Program has recently been republished by Open Road Media as part of their Forbidden Bookshelves series. Would you mind sharing with us how your book was chosen for the series? What do you make of this new-found interest in Phoenix; what the CIA was up to in Vietnam; and what the CIA is up to generally?
VALENTINE: When the book came out in 1990, it got a terrible review in The New York Times. Morley Safer, who’d been a reporter in Vietnam, wrote the review. Safer and the Times killed the book because in it I said Phoenix never would have succeeded if the reporters in Vietnam hadn’t covered for the CIA.
Several senior CIA officers said the same thing, that “So and so was always in my office. He’d bring a bottle of scotch and I’d tell him what was going on.” The celebrity reporters knew what was going on, but they didn’t report about it in exchange for having access. I said that in the book specifically about The New York Times. So I not only got the CIA angry at me, I also got the Vietnam press corps angry at me too. Between those two things, the book did not get off to an auspicious start.
The Times gave Safer half a page to write his review, which was bizarre. The usual response is just to ignore a book like The Phoenix Program. But The New York Times Book Review serves a larger function; it teaches the media elite and “intelligentsia” what to think and how to say it. So Safer said my book was incoherent, because it unraveled the bureaucratic networks that conceal the contradictions between policy and operational reality. It exposed Colby as a liar. Safer was upset that I didn’t portray his friend and patron, Bill Colby, as a symbol of the elite, as a modern day Odysseus.
Luckily, with the Internet revolution, people aren’t bound by The Times and network news anymore. They can listen to Russia Today and get another side of the story. So Mark Crispin Miller and Philip Rappaport at Open Road chose The Phoenix Program to be the first book they published. And it’s been reborn. Thanks to the advent of the e-book, we’ve reached an audience of concerned and knowledgeable people in a way that wasn’t possible 25 years ago.
It’s also because of these Internet developments that John Brennan, the director of CIA, thought of reorganizing the CIA. All these things are connected. It’s a vastly different world than it was in 1947 when the CIA was created. The nature of the American empire has changed, and what the empire needs from the CIA has changed. The CIA is allocated about $30 billion a year, so the organizational changes are massive undertakings.
If you want to understand the CIA, you have to understand how it’s organized.
JIMENEZ: Exactly, and that’s what I want to talk to you about next. But first I’d like to touch upon the CIA’s infiltration of the US media. I find it curious, because the way that you describe it, it’s not so much a deliberate attempt to censor the media. There’s a lot of self-censorship as a result of that already existing relationship. Is that how you see this?
VALENTINE: Yes. The media organizes itself the way the CIA does. The CIA has case officers running around the world, engaged in murder and mayhem, and the media has reporters covering them. The reporter and the case officer both have bosses, and the higher you get in each organization, the closer the bosses become. The ideological guidelines get more restrictive the higher up you go. To join the CIA, you have to pass a psychological assessment test. They’re not going to hire anybody who is sympathetic towards poor people. These are ruthless people who serve capitalist bosses. They’re very right wing, and the media’s job is to protect them. Editors only hire reporters who are ideologically pure, just like you can’t get into the CIA if you’re a Communist or think the CIA should obey the law.
It’s the same thing in the media. You can’t get a job at CNN if you sympathize with the Palestinians or report how Israel has been stealing their land for 67 years. The minute you say something that is an anathema or upsets the Israelis, you’re out. The people who enforce these ideological restraints are the editors and the publishers. For example, while covering the merciless Israeli bombardment of civilians in Gaza in 2014, Diana Magnay was harassed and threatened by a group of bloodthirsty Israelis who were cheering the slaughter. Disgusted, Magnay later referred to them as “scum” in a tweet. She was forced to apologize, transferred to Moscow, and banished forever from Israel. 1
In a similar case, NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin was playing soccer with four young boys in Gaza when Israel shelled the playing field. Mohyeldin witnessed their murders, which he reported in a series of tweets. Without ever providing a reason, NBC pulled Mohyeldin from Gaza and prevented him from ever returning. NBC replaced Mohyeldin with Israeli sympathizer Richard Engel.
Any dictator would be happy with the way American media is organized. The minute you step out of the box, they fire you or send you off to Siberia. It’s a homogenous system. Not just the media and CIA, but politicians too. As the 2016 primaries proved, you can’t be a candidate for either party unless you pass the ideological test. You must be a freewheeling capitalist. You must support Israel with billions of tax payer dollars. You must give the military whatever weapons it wants. That’s the nature of the American state. These things naturally work together because that is the way it has been structured for 240 years.
JIMENEZ: We’ve seen pseudo alternatives emerge in the Internet posing as adversarial or anti-establishment when they’re anything but. We’ve seen this growing trend, and it’s something to be mindful of as we look for these sources on the Internet.
VALENTINE: The Internet is a free for all, so you have to approach it the way any enlightened person approaches every part of America, which is buyer beware. Capitalism is not designed to protect poor people or make sure people lead healthy, fulfilling lives. It’s designed to make sure the super-rich can steal from the poor. There’s only so much wealth and the rich want it.
The rich want to monopolize information too. Is a particular piece of information on the Internet coming from a reliable source? Who knows? Just because some of it is true doesn’t mean that all of it is true. To be able to discern whether the information is accurate or complete, you must be grounded in the reality that the capitalist system and all its facets are organized to oppress you, keep you in the dark and off balance as much as possible. It’s a game of wits and you’ve got to be smart about it. Buyer beware.
JIMENEZ: Exactly. Now I’d like to talk about the recent organizational changes in the CIA. It stems from an article in The Washington Post by Greg Miller. The headline is “CIA Director John Brennan Considering Sweeping Organizational Changes.” What the article is saying is that Brennan wants to restructure the CIA using the model of their Counterterrorism Center; merging different units and divisions, combining analysts with operatives into hybrid teams that will focus on specific regions of the world. This sounds to me like the organizational changes that were born out of Phoenix and that were exported to other parts of the world over the years. The CIA appears to be applying the same structure to all of its operations. Is that how you read this?
VALENTINE: Yes, and it’s something that, from my perspective, was predictable, which is why The Phoenix Program was re-released now, because what I predicted 25 years ago has happened. And you can only predict if you know the history.
The CIA initially, and for decades, had four directorates under an executive management staff: Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology. Executive management had staff for congressional liaison, legal issues, security, public relations, inspections, etc. Administration is just that: staff for finance, personnel, and support services like interrogators, translators and construction companies. Science and Technology is self-explanatory too, but with a typical CIA twist – science for the CIA means better ways to kill and control people, like the MKULTRA program. And now there’s a fifth directorate, Digital, that keystrokes and hacks foreign governments and corporations.
The Operations people overthrew foreign governments the old fashioned way, through sabotage and subversion. The Operations Directorate is now the National Clandestine Service. The Intelligence Directorate, which is now called Analysis, studied political, economic and social trends around the world so that executive management could mount better operations to control them.
The Operations Directorate was divided into several branches. The Counterintelligence (CI) branch detected foreign spies. Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff “liaison” officers worked with secret policemen and other officials in foreign nations. They collected “positive intelligence” by eavesdropping or by recruiting agents. The Covert Action branch engaged in deniable political action. The Special Operations Division (now the Special Activities Division) supplied paramilitary officers. There was also a Political and Psychological branch that specialized in all forms of propaganda.
These branches and directorates were career paths for operations officers (operators) assigned to geographical divisions. An FI staff officer might spend his or her entire career in the Far East Asia Division. The managers could move people around, but those things, generally speaking, were in place when the CIA began.
The events that led to the formation of the current Counterterrorism Center began in 1967, when US security services began to suspect that the Cubans and the Soviets were infiltrating the anti-war movement. Lyndon Johnson wanted to know the details, so his attorney general, Ramsay Clark, formed the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Department of Justice. The IDIU’s job was to coordinate the elements of the CIA, FBI and military that were investigating dissenters. The White House wanted to control and provide political direction to these investigations.
The Phoenix program was created simultaneously in 1967 and did the same thing in Vietnam; it brought together 25 agencies and aimed them at civilians in the insurgency. It’s political warfare. It’s secret. It’s against the rules of war. It violated the Geneva Conventions. It’s what Homeland Security does in the US: bringing agencies together and focusing them on civilians who look like terrorists.
The goal of this kind of bureaucratic centralization is to improve intelligence collection and analysis so reaction forces can leap into the breach more quickly and effectively. In 1967, the CIA already had computer experts who were traveling around by jet. The world was getting smaller and the CIA, which had all the cutting edge technology, was way out in front. It hired Ivy Leaguers like Nelson Brickham to make the machine run smoothly.
Brickham, as I’ve explained elsewhere, was the Foreign Intelligence staff officer who organized the Phoenix program based on principles Rensis Likert articulated in his book New Patterns of Management. Brickham believed he could use reporting formats as a tool to shape the behavior of CIA officers in the field. In particular, he hoped to correct “the grave problem of distortion and cover-up which a reporting system must address.”
Likert organized industries to be adaptable, and the CIA organized itself the same way. It was always reorganizing itself to adapt to new threats. And in 1967, while Brickham was forming Phoenix to neutralize the leaders of the insurgency in South Vietnam, James Angleton and the CIA’s Counter intelligence staff were creating the MHCHAOS program in Langley, Virginia, to spy on members of the anti-war movement, and turn as many of them as possible into double agents.
Chaos was the codename for the Special Operations Group within Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff. The CIA’s current Counterterrorism Center, which was established in 1986, is a direct descendent of Chaos.
Starting in 1967, White House political cadres, through the IDIU in the Justice Department, coordinated the CIA’s Chaos program, the FBI’s COINTELPRO Program, and the military’s domestic spying programs. When Nixon took office in January 1969, he immediately grasped the partisan political potential of the IDIU and these various domestic spying programs. The Nixon White House expanded Chaos and assigned its chief, Richard Ober, a deputy and a case officer. The Chaos staff occupied a vault in the basement at CIA headquarters in Virginia. It had a room where files were kept and where slides of suspects and potential recruits were viewed. A group of female secretaries managed the super-secret files.
Chaos was super-secret because it was illegal for the CIA to engage in domestic operations. Assignment to it was considered a “command performance.” There was a communications system exclusively for Chaos cables and couriers to CIA stations overseas. The Chaos “back-channel” could by-pass the division chiefs and station chiefs and work directly with its unilateral assets in a country. Chaos “traffic” had the highest security classification, was restricted to only those officers involved in the operation, and was inaccessible to everyone but the CIA’s top administrators.
In October 1969, based on names provided by the FBI, the Chaos case officer began recruiting double agents from the Black Power and anti-war movements. I never learned his name, but the case officer only approached people with “radical” credentials. Radicals who passed polygraph and psychological assessment tests were recruited, trained in the clandestine arts, supplied with gadgetry and cash, given a cover, and sent overseas. The case officer called his 40-50 double agents “dangles” because their job was to act like normal radicals and hope that a gullible KGB agent would make an approach.
Chaos dangles also spied and reported on their American colleagues. That’s the illegal domestic part. A folder was created for each dissident. The folder contained the dissident’s 201 “personality” file from the FBI, and included everything from arrest records to report cards to surreptitious photos taken of the person with other radicals. Some 7,000 -10,000 hard files were eventually assembled.
In 1970 the Chaos squad started entering its information on radicals onto IBM cards and compiling it in a data base codenamed HYDRA that ultimately contained the names of some 300,000 people. HYDRA was developed domestically at the same time as the Phoenix information system (PHMIS) in Vietnam, by the same people. Chaos included a mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL.
I’m sure the anthrax scare after 9/11 was a CIA provocation designed to justify a mail intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. All of these things I’m talking about are happening today on a much grander scale within the Muslim American community.
In 1971, the IDIU’s Intelligence Evaluation Committee was managed by Robert Mardian, the Nixon Administration’s assistant attorney general in charge of Internal Security. The Chaos squad was helping the Pentagon track army deserters, as well as foreign nationals who were trying to coax soldiers to desert from US military bases in Germany. Chaos dangles were sent to North Vietnam and Cuba, and one agent, possibly Timothy Leary, was launched against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Another Chaos agent played a critical though undisclosed role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations in Washington. Even Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, monitored Chaos operations in regard to his secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
By 1972, the Chaos squad was working with Nixon’s infamous Plumbers. One Chaos agent may have been involved in the botched Watergate burglary that brought Nixon down. The mastermind of the burglary, Gordon Liddy, sat on Mardian’s Intelligence Evaluation Committee and leveled requirements on CIA officer Richard Ober at Chaos. Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, are known to have directed Ober to spy on members of other government agencies. They also targeted Nixon’s political enemies, including people like Daniel Ellsberg who could in no way be considered terrorists. Which gives you an idea of the prominence of political cadres in these operations, and how they used their power to conduct all manner of dirty tricks.
Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. Ober worked with the National Commission on Civil Disorders, the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the Special Services units (Red Squads) of America’s major metropolitan police departments. The CIA has always recruited cops as contractors to organize and advise foreign police forces, and local police forces certainly helped the CIA amass its Chaos files. As head of the Counterintelligence staff, James Angleton was the CIA’s official contact with all federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Narcotics.
Chaos exemplifies how the White House, through the CIA’s network of law enforcement contacts, could use the Homeland Security apparatus as a cover to conduct all manner of illegal domestic operations. It shows how the CIA could use participating Homeland Security agencies for its own insidious institutional purposes, and that individuals like Hunt and Liddy could exploit it for partisan political purposes.
Hunt and Liddy’s many misadventures resulted in the Watergate scandal, which cast a bright light on CIA’s shenanigans and eventually led to the exposure of the Chaos squad. William Colby was the CIA’s Executive Director at the time. Colby had returned to the United States in 1971 to testify to Congress about Phoenix, and had stayed on to take charge of the CIA’s organizational affairs. After the arrest of the Watergate burglars, Colby worked with the Justice Department to have the IDIU abolished, and he made sure the Chaos “case officer” was reassigned but not disciplined.
After he became Director of Central Intelligence in September 1973, Colby personally minimized the damage by leaking some of the gory Chaos details to Seymour Hersh. Colby also sacrificed his bitter rival James Angleton, who as chief of Counterintelligence was held responsible for Chaos and the mail intercept program. Colby’s “limited hangout” and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a shell game, however, and the Chaos squad continued to track radicals and respond to FBI and military requirements. Everything was the same as before, including the ultra-secure communications system and restricted filing system, except that now, and from then on, it was done under the aegis of counterterrorism.
Colby started the ball rolling in July 1972 when he made Ober chief of the CIA’s International Terrorism Group (ITG). Ober’s new job was to set up and manage a “central program” on international terrorism and airplane hijackings. Building on the Chaos files, the ITG started penetrating terrorist training camps in Algeria and Libya. It kept track of black militants with international connections, and its reports, like Chaos reports, were sent to Kissinger at the National Security Council.
Ober’s appointment as chief of ITG coincided with the establishment of Nixon’s Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, the first US Government entity of its kind.
After the official termination of Chaos in March 1974, the ITG continued to occupy the same space in the CIA’s basement. A new ITG chief was assigned and was assisted by the same female secretaries who kept updating the Chaos files and computer tapes. As of 1975, no Chaos files had been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a “dissident.”
In 1977, veteran CIA officer Howard Bane became the third ITG chief. The notion of state-sponsored terrorism had emerged and was attributed to Libya and Iraq, both of which were said to have Soviet backing. As a result, Jimmy Carter’s DCI, Stansfield Turner, directed Bane to organize the CIA against this new threat.
According to Bane, counterterrorism was a “hot potato” but a “low priority” because of ongoing Congressional investigations into CIA abuses. Bane said Turner was “hung up” on the legal definition of terror. Turner insisted that CIA officers refer to counterinsurgency as “low intensity warfare,” and in his effort to polish the CIA’s image, Turner renamed the ITG the Office of Terrorism.
Again, it was a shell game. Bane moved into the Chaos/ITG space in Langley’s basement. He described it as a windowless room as large as the ground floor of a house, divided into cubicles. “There were ten or twelve little old ladies running around in tennis shoes,” he said. Operations were compartmentalized and there was a “vault mentality.” Little was happening. The acting chief was the former ITG operations officer and his job was following US citizens overseas.
An avid proponent of covert action, Bane had served as chief of the CIA’s North Africa Division and in other top operational posts. He was nearing retirement and approached his new assignment with the fervor of a man seeking to enshrine his legacy. He summoned everyone to a staff meeting and said, “Let’s advertise ourselves to divisions.” He set up a reference system to service each of the CIA’s divisions, and each “little old lady” became an expert on a specific geographical area.
Bane started meeting with his counterparts at State, Treasury, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House and the NSA. As the Office of Terrorism began to serve a visible function, he moved the office to a fourth floor suite with windows. He was given an operations officer and recruited young men to replace the older women as his liaison officers to the divisions. He began working with Jim Glerum, the chief of the CIA’s Special Operations Division, 2 to beef up the paramilitary operational forces at his command.
Meanwhile, the US Army had created Delta Force to respond to the well publicized terrorist incidents that occurred in the 1970s. Delta and later the Navy’s SEAL Team Six served as the CIA’s vanguard in the nascent War on Terror. Within the context of “low intensity warfare”, the Office of Terrorism and its paramilitary units adopted a new lexicon in which “anti-terrorism” was the term for broad policy, and “counterterrorism” applied to specific, immediate actions.
Bane got a bigger budget and high tech gadgets like silenced weapons and bugging equipment for use in hostage rescue operations. He acquired a fleet of black choppers and formed a Crisis Management Training Program team, composed of a psychiatrist and a few case officers, which advised US and foreign law enforcement officers on how to negotiate with terrorists.
Bane set up a two-man intelligence unit at Delta headquarters at Fort Bragg, at which point Delta became a “customer” of CIA intelligence. Bane’s Office of Terrorism sent daily reports profiling known terrorists and their activities to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Very quietly his unit began to coordinate actual counter-terror operations. “Say someone in Frankfurt had access to the Red Army,” Bane explained. “Then Delta would send a team.” Bane’s Office of Terrorism handled each incident on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether it was defined as “international terrorism” (meaning the terrorists crossed borders or had foreign support) or “domestic terrorism” if terrorists were operating within their own country. If the incident related to domestic terrorism, the Office of Terrorism could not get involved, unless authorized through a presidential executive order called a “finding.”
The need for a finding was a stumbling block. Bane cited the time Colombia’s M19 terror group took 20 foreign diplomats, including the US ambassador, hostage at a party at the Dominican Embassy. Thinking the transnational nature of the incident qualified it as “international terror,” Bane, with the approval of the State Department’s terrorism unit, launched a Delta operation in conjunction with the CIA’s new SOD chief, Rudy Enders. Bane provided intelligence on the terrorists, while Enders provided Delta with the equipment it needed to stage a rescue operation. Meanwhile the Crisis Management Team assembled in Florida and prepared to jump into Colombia.
But the operation came to a screeching halt when the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, John Stein, revealed the operation to Turner’s Deputy Director of Operations, John McMahon. As Bane recalled, McMahon asked him, “Are you trying to send us all to jail?” McMahon put the operation on hold and Bane was forced to call his officers back to Langley where they waited while “the lawyers” met with Carter’s National Security Council staff. Only after the lawyers gave their approval did Carter issue the required “finding.”
In another instance, Bane was not allowed to mount an operation to rescue Italy’s Prime Minister Aldo Moro. According to Bane, his superiors determined that Moro’s captors were Italian nationals and thus were deemed to be operating domestically.
Let me stress that all this was happening within the context of the Cold War. The Office of Terrorism was a feature of the broader “low intensity warfare” strategy designed to thwart Soviet “aggression” in Third World countries like El Salvador. Not until 4 November 1979, and the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, did the context start to change. This seminal event marked the emergence of Islamic “fundamentalists” as America’s new bête noire. (And it allowed Ronald Reagan to crush Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.)
In the wake of the Embassy takeover, Carter ordered Bane and the CIA’s Office of Terrorism to work with Delta Force to rescue the 53 hostages. Bane told me the plan was based on a covert action plan to obtain “current intelligence” on the status of the hostages, including Tom Ahern, the CIA’s station chief in Tehran. 3 Bane needed this information to know where to direct what he called “the black and gray propaganda necessary to disguise the CIA’s actual intentions.” There was also a need to quickly train Delta Force to operate in the Iranian desert.
The needed intelligence was obtained, but the government’s first major counterterror operation, the Desert One rescue mission, failed to get off the ground. Several aircraft malfunctioned and one crashed on 25 April 1980, killing eight soldiers. As with the Benghazi tragedy, Republican politicians jumped for joy at the chance to criticize Democrats; the hostage crisis dragged on for six months and enabled Reagan to characterize Jimmy Carter as weak, which means instant death for any American politician.
There was other collateral damage as well. Reagan’s flamboyant Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, fired Bane and replaced him with William Buckley, a veteran CIA officer who had served several tours in Vietnam. From 1969-1971, under his patron Ted Shackley, Buckley had directed the CIA’s national counterterror program in Vietnam.
In April 1981, Casey and Buckley traveled together to Saudi Arabia to pave the way for the construction of an underground network of secret military bases that would be available to US forces. If the remarks attributed to Osama bin Laden are true, the presence of those bases under Saudi soil was one of the reasons he staged the 1998 Embassy bombings and the 9/11 terror attacks.
The War on Terror took its next Great Leap Forward in October 1981 with the assassination of Egyptian President Sadat by his personal bodyguards, whom Buckley had trained. The assassination nullified the Camp David Accords and freed Israel to target PLO bases in Lebanon. In May 1982, Israeli assets in the fascist Christian Phalange militia organized one of the greatest acts of terror of all time – the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
In August 1982 Buckley returned to CIA headquarters to coordinate antiterrorism policy through the Domestic Terrorism Group. Meanwhile, Casey appointed veteran CIA officer David Whipple as the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counterterrorism. A veteran operations officer with extensive service in the Far East, Whipple had been serving as CIA station chief in Switzerland.
Whipple told me that Casey’s executive staff consisted of 16 NIOs; eight handled geographical divisions, while the other eight handled issues like narcotics, nuclear weapons, and in Whipple’s case, terrorism. Under Casey’s direction, every government agency established a counterterror office as part of a secret apparatus. Whipple as NIO coordinated the CT offices and assisted the CIA’s division chiefs, making sure their station chiefs were properly handling counterterror issues in their area of operations.
Whipple ran the Office of Domestic Terrorism (ODT) from 1982 until 1986. His staff included an operations chief, intelligence analysts, photo interpreters, and case officers. 4 Because it had the authority to access any division’s files and co-opt its penetration agents, the ODT was resisted by the divisions – especially the Near East Division, which was on the front lines of the War on Terror.
As you can see, the evolution of “offices” and later “centers” that transcended and coordinated the CIA’s divisions was well underway by 1982. Throughout this early stage of its evolution, the CIA’s terrorism office retained the legal authority to conduct unilateral domestic operations for a specific period of time before being required to notify and involve the FBI. (The guidelines are more honored in the breach than the observance, I’m sure.) The ODT also maintained the super-secret communications system instituted during Chaos that by-passed the CIA’s normal chains of command.
As part of this back-channel “counterterror network”, Casey recruited Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council (NSC). Whipple served as North’s case officer in the monumental political misadventures North embarked upon.
Cut from the same fascist cloth as his ideological forefathers Hunt and Liddy, North formed a crisis management center along with REX 84, “a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.” 5 North’s plan called for “the round-up and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some 26,000) and aliens (3,000 – 4,000), in camps such as the one in Oakdale, Louisiana.” 6
Certain trusted members of Congress were witting (despite that august body’s periodic protestations that the CIA operates as a “rogue elephant”) and Senator Daniel Inouye cut off all debate about North’s plan to suspend the Constitution when the subject was raised during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987.
In April 1984, North created the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG) specifically to rescue several American hostages held in Lebanon, including the aforementioned William Buckley, who had been kidnapped the month before. North became TIWG’s chairman and in October 1985 managed its first successful operation – the capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro.
A few months earlier, after the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 while it was flying from Athens to Beirut, George H. W. Bush had created the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism. As the NSC’s liaison to the Task Force, “North drafted a secret annex for its report which institutionalized and expanded his counterterrorist powers, making himself the NSC coordinator of all counterterrorist actions.” 7
North continued to acquire greater and greater powers, and on 20 January 1986, National Security Decision Directive 207 made him “chief coordinator” of Casey’s secret counterterror network through the Office to Combat Terrorism (OCT). Working through the NSC’s Operations Sub-Group, North coordinated the back-channel CT network with Major General Richard Secord’s “off-the shelf” Enterprise in a series of illegal operations. Among them were Israel’s facilitation of arms sales to Iran; American civilians supplying arms to the Contras; and Contra drug smuggling into America.
North also planned for the repression of domestic dissent and criticism. As P. D. Scott has noted, “the Office to Combat Terrorism became the means whereby North could coordinate the propaganda activities of Carl “Spitz” Channel and Richard Miller (and) the closing of potential embarrassing investigations by other government agencies.” 8
The evolution climaxed in 1986 with the creation of the Counter-Terror Center under Duane Clarridge. Yet another right wing ideologue, Clarridge had been chief of the CIA’s station in Turkey in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the fascist Grey Wolves went on a terror rampage, bombing and killing thousands of public officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social democrats, left-wing activists and Kurds. Since then, Turkey’s military has been one of America’s strongest allies, despite the recent coup attempt staged by the America-based, CIA-connected exile, Fethullah Gülen.
A body-builder and scion of the old boy clique that runs the CIA, Clarridge was chief of Latin America Division from 1981 until 1984, when Nicaraguan harbors were mined and the CIA’s “murder manual” was distributed to the Contras. Clarridge helped Secord’s off-the-shelf Enterprise move PLO weapons captured by Israeli forces during their bloody invasion of Lebanon, through Manuel Noriega in Panama, to the Contras. That’s the kind of stuff the CT Center still does today; moving weapons from chaotic places like Benghazi in Libya, to deniable terrorist surrogates in Syria.
As chief of the Europe Division, Clarridge had also provided the back channel in Lisbon that Secord’s Enterprise used to sell HAWK and TOW missiles to the Iranians, in exchange for the release of American hostages. According to Scott, “The intrigues of North, Secord, Clarridge and (Robert) Oakley (at the State Department) at this point showed a concern for politics rather than security.” 9
When I interviewed him, Clarridge described the CT Center, which has coordinated CIA back-channel activities since 1986, as a central unit with members from the directorates operating under a committee at the National Security Council. With input from the division chiefs, the CT Center “divines” (as he put it) anti-terrorism policy and then “constructs entities” that conduct operations. It is not a function of US Special Forces, as often portrayed in the media, but of CIA “action teams” trained to capture suspected terrorists and bring them to the United States to stand trial.
During his tenure as CT Center chief from 1986 to 1988, Clarridge worked directly with George H. W. Bush. He was lucky in that regard; Clarridge was indicted on seven counts of lying to Congress, but his case never went to trial, thanks to a last minute pardon Bush issued on 24 December 1992.
When called to task about his crimes, North blamed the peaceniks who lost the Vietnam War. If liberal politicians hadn’t investigated the CIA, he argued, then fascists like him wouldn’t have had to resort to dirty tricks. North’s hatred of the peace movement was palpable. North believed that “the most pressing problem is not in the Third World, but here at home in the struggle for the minds of the people.” 10
North was out of control; when Jack Terrell told the Justice Department that North was involved in Contra drug smuggling, North labeled Terrell a terrorist and sicced the FBI on him. But neither North nor any of the other Iran-Contra criminals were ever punished, because, as Michael McClintock noted at the time, “the very notion of counter-terror as terrorism was forbidden, while circumlocution was the norm.” 11
That’s how the CIA’s CT Center evolved from the Chaos domestic spying mechanism into the nerve center of the CIA’s clandestine staff. Same thing happened with the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center at the same time. Both are modeled on Phoenix, and both are wonderful tools for White House cadres to exercise political control over the bureaucracies they coordinate. These “centers” are the perfect means for policing and expanding the empire; they make it easier than ever for the CIA to track people and events in every corner of the world. The need for the old-fashioned directorates is fading away. You don’t need an entire directorate to understand the political, social and economic movements around the world anymore, because the United States is controlling them all.
The US has color revolutions going everywhere. It’s got the World Bank and the IMF strangling countries with debt, like the banks are strangling college students and home owners here. The War on Terror is the best thing that ever happened to US capitalists and their secret police force, the CIA. Terrorism is the pretext that allows the CIA to coordinate and transcend every government agency and civic institution, including the media, to the extent that we don’t even see its wars anymore. Its control is so pervasive, so ubiquitous; the CIA has actually become the Phoenix.
JIMENEZ: Right.
VALENTINE: It’s the eye of god in the sky; it’s able to determine what’s going to happen next because it’s controlling all of these political, social and economic movements. It pits the Sunnis against the Shiites. It doesn’t need slow and outdated directorates. These Phoenix centers enable it to determine events instantaneously anywhere. There are now Counterterror Intelligence Centers all over the world. In Phoenix they were called Intelligence Operations Coordinating Centers. So it’s basically exactly the same thing.
It’s been evolving that way and everybody on the inside was gearing themselves for this glorious moment for 30 years. They even have a new staff position called Targeting Officers. You can Google this.
JIMENEZ: Right, right, exactly.
VALENTINE: The centers represent the unification of military, intelligence and media operations under political control. White House political appointees oversee them, but the determinant force is the CIA careerists who slither into private industry when their careers are over. They form the consulting firms that direct the corporations that drive the empire. Through their informal “old boy” network, the CIA guys and gals keep America at war so they can make a million dollars when their civil service career is over.
JIMENEZ: The Washington Post and subsequent articles frame it as if these changes are drastic. But to hear you, it’s a natural progression. So what does this announcement mean? Is the CIA putting out their own press release through the Washington Post just to give everyone the heads up?
VALENTINE: Well, everybody in the CIA was worried that if the directorates were reorganized, it would negatively affect their careers. But executive management usually does what its political bosses tell them to do, and Brennan reorganized in 2015. He created a fifth directorate, the Directorate for Digital Innovation (DDI) ostensibly as the CIA’s “mantelpiece”. But, as the Washington Times reported, “it is the formation of the new ‘mission’ centers – including ones for counterintelligence, weapons and counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism – that is most likely to shake up the agency’s personnel around the world.” 12
The CIA’s “ten new Mission Centers” are designed to “serve as locations to integrate capabilities and bring the full range of CIA’s operational, analytic, support, technical and digital skill sets to bear against the nation’s most pressing national security problems.” 13
This modernization means the CIA is better able to control people politically, starting with its own officers, then everyone else. That’s the ultimate goal. Politicians, speaking in a unified voice, create the illusion of a crime-fighting CIA and an America with a responsibility to protect benighted foreigners from themselves. But they can’t tell you what the CIA does, because it’s all illegal.
Well, it’s all a lie. In order for the politicians to hold office, they have to cover for the CIA. Their concern is how to explain the reorganization and exploit it. They squabble among themselves and cut the best deals possible.
JIMENEZ: That makes complete sense. Talking about all the illegal activity the CIA is involved in, I couldn’t help but think of the drug running. I’d like to point out to our listeners the article you wrote, which offers everything they ought to know as far as the history of the CIA in drugs. It’s entitled, “The CIA and Drugs: A Covert History” (Counterpunch, 7 November 2014).
Meanwhile, I’d like to hear your opinion on the influence of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics in local law enforcement. Local police departments are adopting many of the same tactics. We’re seeing the US government use counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics against its own people. Perhaps one of the most vivid examples is what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. Is that too a natural progression of Phoenix?
VALENTINE: Absolutely. The very last paragraph in my book The Phoenix Program says you’ll know the Phoenix has arrived when you start seeing police forces advancing on protestors in paramilitary formations, and driving around in armored vehicles.
That’s what the CIA does in foreign nations; it militarizes police forces so it can control that country’s political, economic and social movements. The CIA’s influence is pervasive here, too; it advises all the major police departments in the US. The Phoenix model of coordinating agencies happens under the “cognizance” of the CIA, because the premier threat is a terrorist infiltrating the US with nukes. It goes back to Chaos thinking: maybe ISIS is recruiting black radicals in Ferguson. If so, we need paramilitary police forces and administrative detention laws to neutralize them. The Missouri governor can say a protester in Ferguson is violating national security laws and hold him indefinitely.
The media loves it. FOX News said the Black Lives protesters were holding “us” (meaning white people) hostage. If it’s a hostage situation, they’re terrorists. Tucker Carlson said (I paraphrase), “You can talk about race all you want. It’s a hostage situation and race doesn’t matter.”
So the racists in government and law enforcement are elated. Now they can send in provocateurs (maybe an Afghanistan veteran like Dallas shooter Micah Johnson, who got wiped out by a robot carrying a Claymore mine) and start riots and crush the protestors because they’re terrorists. And that’s how, over the last 40 years, dissent has come to equal terrorism. It’s how the one percent wants us to see non-violent protest. They want the public to believe that anybody who resists law enforcement is a terrorist. All the pieces have been put in place, through the corporate media, to make the lies seem true. These Counterterror Intelligence Centers are already operating in the United States through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers, which do the same thing.
JIMENEZ: Exactly.
VALENTINE: The American empire consists of hundreds of military bases and a CIA station in every country. It’s Pepsi being sold in Vietnam. “We are the world.” It’s not just 50 states and a few protectorates. It’s crazy for average Americans to think their fate is not directly connected to the fate of every other person in the world, or that the one percent considers them higher-class peasants than the other worker bees elsewhere around the world. There are diminishing resources and other strategic problems that the CIA is forecasting 20 years into the future. It’s planning stratospheric aerosol injections to cure climate change. The reorganization of the CIA is another incremental step in anticipation of America reaching that tipping point. Gated communities are the future; the centers replicate them.
JIMENEZ: Indeed. Something you said just now really struck me. And that’s the way that Americans separate themselves from the Other. It reminds me of these arguments we hear in the media regarding the use of militarized police. It’s okay in Afghanistan, but not in Ferguson. The use of Predator drones to kill somebody in Yemen is okey, but not in Montana. It’s murder either way, but most of the American public doesn’t see it that way. We can discuss this, but unless the American people do something to change this, then we run the risk of these things just becoming normal and accepted. For example, the CIA’s drug running now we see in feature films, in Hollywood productions.
VALENTINE: They think, “Well, that’s what the CIA does, everybody knows it.” If you watch a pro football game, you know the US military owns the NFL. There’s F-14s flying over the stadiums. Every spectator has to stand and salute and plant a big wet kiss on the military’s fat bloated butt.
In my opinion, what it will take is for the men and women in the military to realize they’re part of a self-defeating enterprise. Before you can change the CIA, you have to change some other things. You have to shrink the military establishment and end the war on drugs, which can be done. When given the chance in state referendums, people are voting for medical marijuana and adult recreational use.
When given a chance to vote, people express common sense. Marijuana is not going to make you go out and massacre school kids or abortion providers. That happens because we live in a country that glorifies the god of violence and his sacred warriors.
Demilitarizing American society is a start, like decriminalizing marijuana is a first step in ending the war on drugs. It’s easier than challenging an arcane thing like the CIA that’s covered with grey and black propaganda. It’s hard for people to understand how huge bureaucratic systems work together. They get frustrated and vote to leave the European Union, or they cling to Trump or Clinton, thinking things will change.
Maybe next year all the students will default on their loans and bring the system down. Maybe they’ll say to hell with the bankers for mortgaging my future. We’re taking it back. If something like that can happen, if that kind of consciousness can spread among young people being held in economic bondage and groomed to administer the empire, then there’s hope. If they see they have nothing to lose, they’ll come together and start making a fuss.
JIMENEZ: That would be something to behold.
VALENTINE: You have to use your imagination.
next Part 2
HOW THE CIA CO-OPTED AND MANAGES THE WAR ON DRUGS....
CREATING A CRIME: HOW THE CIA COMMANDEERED THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION
notes
Chapter 10
1 Douglas Valentine, “The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman”, Counterpunch.
2 Interview in documentary film: The War on Democracy (2007), directed by John Pilger. View online at: <http://johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy>
3 “SWORD deals in ‘Repugnant’ Warfare”, The Toledo Blade, 1 January 1987, p. 27.
4 See The Phoenix Program for my complete interview with Gregg.
5 David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.
6 Barry, “The Pentagon may put Special Forces led assassination tearms”,
7 January 2005. 7 Tom Lasseter and Yasser Salihee, “Sunni men in Baghdad targeted by attackers in police uniforms”, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 27 June 2005.
8 <http://brusselstribunal.org/IraqUNHRC.htm>
Chapter 11
1 Michael Calderone, “CNN Removes Reporter Diana Magnay From Israel-Gaza After ‘Scum’ Tweet, The Huffington Post, <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/18/cnn-diana-magnayisraelgaza_n_5598866.html>
2 The SOD is now known as the Special Activities Division.
3 Ahern was working undercover as the Embassy’s Narcotics Control Officer.
4 Interview with David Whipple
5 Peter Dale Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 21 February 2011, citing a quote from the 5 July 1987 Miami Herald. Scott originally published the article in 1989 as “Northwards without North: Bush, Counterterrorism, and the Continuation of Secret Power.” <http://apjjf.org/2011/9/8/Peter-Dale-Scott/3491/article.html>
6 Ibid. Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, CounterTerrorism, 1940-1990, p 306.
12 Guy Taylor, “CIA goes live with new cyber directorate, massive internal reorganization” Washington Times, 1 October 2015.
13 Ibid.
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do no harm spirits travel the universe, do harm spirits are tortured.
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