One of the most noteworthy failures of the CIA is the Islamic Republic of Iran. When Kermit Roosevelt hired a band of hoodlums to shake up downtown Teheran, and drive Mossadegh out of power, he told his superiors not to get it in their heads that what he had done could be repeated easily, or taken lightly. The Shah's Savak secret police, also, were trained in the fine art of torturing human beings by the CIA; so it was inevitable that a popular resistance would take shape. The CIA took it for granted that people could be tricked into doing anything, because they never took the regional customs of the various national cultures seriously, or the popular leaders of those national cultures, who became literal living icons. The American mentality cannot fathom the tribal arrangement; the advent of mercantilism and the Corporate Age, and industrialization, only hastened the process of tribal dissolution in Western Civilization. The American republic symbolizes the complete abandonment of traditional, tribal values and institutions. The economic factors that controlled the republic, which perpetuated a divided society of slaves and slavemasters, predestined the republic's all-out war against the tribal lifestyle of the native American Indians, whose democratic enclaves offered the slaves the temptation of escape from servitude. This battle of cultures, by World War II, had pretty much been decided in the favor of the republic, so that by the time the Central Intelligence Agency was instituted after the War -- and the great British Empire became a ghost of itself -- the Inner Circle of the intelligence community came to believe that they now inherited that special mission of the "white man's burden" to civilize the world, and preserve the status of the WASPs. They brushed off the Ayatollah Khomeini as a puny nobody. The conventional wisdom held that the Ayatollah was no one to be alarmed about, after all, the U.S. sold the Shah billions of dollars of high tech weapons. The nationalist revolution, of the type the CIA could not see coming in Vietnam either, (where the CIA took the lead in getting the U.S. involved), never crossed the minds of the collective espionage "professionals." They were fully unprepared for the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, when American nationals were taken hostage, and the American national pride was humiliated. Yet even this outrage against America did not stop high-level CIA from selling ARMS to their arch-enemies, the Iranians, when they could see a way to finance their global private wars -- outside of the purview of any process of law -- by in effect embezzling and pocketing the proceeds of the sale of United States Government property.

Senior CIA official Gordon Oehler said recently, "I really don't see... the CIA running around peering into religious groups around the world to see who's naughty and nice." If they had to judge the activities of religious groups, it might interfere with the CIA arming the Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan, who are now free market suppliers of weapons and arms to terrorists around the earth, including the men who blew up the World Trade Center in New York City. It is hard to forget such transgressions against civilized norms as CIA involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo, or Salvador Allende in Chile. The unending civil war in Angola, the bloodbaths which have seen the mass murder of a million people in Indonesia, or another million people in Cambodia, as a result of the CIA undermining Prince Sihanouk, which paved the way for the genocidal Pol Pot. The fact that the CIA singlehandedly started the so-called "Vietnam War," in which almost 60,000 young Americans perished, and during which many hundreds of thousands became permanently emotionally scared from their experiences, should be reason ALONE for the complete and total abolition of the CIA, no questions asked.

Vietnam gave a powerful push to the arms race and the Cold War, the literal extension of World War II, which did not legally conclude until the allied powers signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1989. The arms race bankrupted both the United States as well as the Soviet Union, which was always a junior power in the arms race. But the second bankrupting round of military expenditures -- that won't be paid in full 100 years from now -- came from a systematic campaign of fear conducted by the likes of the "head spook" himself, ex-CIA director George Bush. (A term he called himself). With visions of the "Winnable Nuclear War," and ludicrous stories that Moscow was prepared for an evacuation in 15 minutes, and could survive a nuclear attack, American voters were stampeded into approving measures against a rival that was on the verge of collapse. The appearance of a society that was breaking down was just a clever disguise to cover their evil genius. The entire revival of the so-called conservative movement depended upon the genuine fear raised by the spectres of communism, godless communism that could be rivaled by none other than godless capitalism. Inevitably, the CIA proved that the Soviet Union was a threat as a "superpower" by using the disinformation provided by the KGB, which hoped that the psyche war would be enough to avoid a genuine conflict that the Russians knew that they could not survive.

It turned out that the KGB had thoroughly infiltrated the CIA's Russian spy network. They knew what the CIA chief was going to have for dinner, before the CIA chief knew himself. But they needed each other, the KGB and the CIA. Both "intelligence" agencies had a mutual interest in exaggerating the danger of the enemy; Beltway Insiders call it "threat inflation," as a justification of their own importance. The end result was the waste of tens of billions of dollars on unnecessary weapons systems, like the new F22 fighter, the B2 bomber, and Star Wars. Of course, those of us not in the inner loop cannot appreciate the fun the spooks have when they play their mind control games... After all, the reason they got in the spy biz in the first place was they liked the action, even if their fun and games bankrupt the whole free world.

(CNS 1996)