From Where We Were to Where We Are

1898     Remember the Maine.  Cuba was fighting for independence from Spain; the United States was looking for a pretext to intervene.  The U.S.S. Maine blew up and sank in Havana harbor.  The U.S. blamed Spain and thus began the Spanish-American War.  The U.S. acquired Puerto Rico and, for a time, the Philippines.

1941     The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.  Hawaii commanders General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel are impugned for dereliction of duty but denied courts martial.  Between ‘41 and ‘45, nine investigations follow.  Congress will eventually release a 39-volume compilation of evidence and testimony.

1942     The office of Coordinator of Information becomes the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Early 50s     The C.I.A. begins a heavily funded effort to gain influence in the arts and media.  The program will last nearly 20 years.  In the late 1950s, the Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, the [John] McClellan Committee, investigates the influence of organized crime.  Senator John F. Kennedy sits on the Committee, and Robert F. Kennedy serves as counsel.  In R.F.K.’s subsequent book, The Enemy Within, he describes what he calls the Private Government.

1951     With the help of officer Everette Howard Hunt, Jr., the C.I.A. acquires film rights to George Orwell’s novels, Animal Farm and 1984.

1959     The U.S. begins anti-Cuba plots.  These will lead to Operation Zapata, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and to conspiracies to kill Fidel Castro.

1962     The Joint Chiefs of Staff present Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with a report on Operation Northwoods — proposals for creating pretexts for action against Cuba, including some “Remember the Maine” scenarios.

1964     The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission, issues a report and 26 volumes of evidence and testimony.  The U.S.S. Maddox is apparently attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by the Vietnamese.  The ensuing Gulf of Tonkin Resolution effectively transfers war powers from Congress to the presidency.

1968     Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is killed in Memphis, allegedly by James Ray.  Senator and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy is shot to death in Los Angeles, allegedly by Sirhan Sirhan.

1970     Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. “retires” from the Agency to take a job with the Robert R. Mullen Company.  James McCord also retires to strike out on his own.  Both men will soon figure prominently in the Watergate scandal.

1971     The Pentagon Papers reveal the secret history of the Vietnam war.  The U.S.S. Maddox had been part of Operation Plan 34A.  34A included bombings by Thai pilots flying U.S. planes, coastal raids, and kidnappings; the military denies that provocation was the goal.  The wording of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was prepared by unidentified figures in the administration four months before the “attacks” occurred.

1977     Carl Bernstein reports on intelligence assets in the news media.  The New York Times reports on the Agency’s role in the publication of over 1000 books.

1979     The House Select Committee on Assassinations issues a report and 24 volumes of evidence and testimony in the murders of President Kennedy and Dr. King.  The Committee concludes that conspiracies were behind the crimes but is curiously unable to pin down details.  The Department of Justice remains inert.  Critical documents on the assassinations are classified for 50 years.

The 1980s     American hostages in Iran are released on the day President Ronald Reagan takes office.  Exposure of the Iran-contra-cocaine operation will continue into the 1990s.

1985     Liberty Lobby, the publisher of Spotlight, prevails against a defamation suit brought by Everette Howard Hunt, Jr.  A Spotlight article concerned Hunt’s lack of an alibi for November 22, 1963, and a possible C.I.A. strategy of “limited hang-out” during the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings.  If the Committee learned too much or broke free of control, Hunt could be sacrificed.

1988     The investigative files on the murder of Senator Robert F. Kennedy are opened only to find they have been eviscerated.

The 1990s become the Decade of Disclosure.  New details emerge in the J.F.K. murder, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Operation Zapata, the killing of Malcolm X, and other events.

1991     Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, ignites intense interest in the assassination of President Kennedy.  Congress responds in 1992 with powerful new disclosure legislation.  By the time the Assassinations Records Review Board expires in 1998, they have compiled an archive of over 4.5 million pages, covering a breath-taking range of details.

1993     Elderly and ailing Loyd Jowers confesses his part in the King assassination on A.B.C.’s Prime Time with Sam Donaldson.  Jowers names others involved, some of them Memphis policemen.

1995     Critical documents on Pearl Harbor are declassified, including a 1940 action proposal from the Office of Naval Intelligence which laid out an 8-step plan to provoke the attack.  In the next few years, Congress and the military will posthumously exonerate Short and Kimmel without admitting foreknowledge of the attack.

1996     300 surviving Vietnamese commandos, recruited decades ago by the C.I.A., are belatedly compensated for their work in Op Plan 34A, which included the “attacks” in the Gulf of Tonkin.  The legislatively arranged payments prevent a trial.  A second group of commandos is paid for Op Plan 35A.

1998     James Ray dies in prison.     1999 — Loyd Jowers is found guilty in a civil suit brought by the King family, who ask for $100 in damages.     2000 — Jowers dies without ever facing questioning from state or federal authorities.

2001     Vice-President Dick Cheney heads secret meetings on energy.  The committee maps oil fields and drilling sites in Iraq and develops a list of buyers.  Henry Kissinger is named in a suit by the survivors of Chilean General Rene Schneider.  The next day, some planes crash into some buildings.

2002     U.S. survivors of Japan’s attack on the Philippines seek compensation.  They were not evacuated in 1941 so the Japanese would not suspect the U.S. had broken the Japanese codes.  Canada, England, Norway, Singapore, and Australia have already made payments to their citizens captured by Japan.  Congressional investigative documents on the murder of Dr. King remain secret.  In California, where Sirhan Sirhan is imprisoned for the murder of Robert Kennedy, a writ of habeas corpus is inching its way through the courts.  The U.S. and England agree to “fix intelligence” around the coming attack on Iraq.

2004     The aging and ailing Everette Howard Hunt, Jr. makes a written and tape-recorded confession of his knowledge of the conspiracy to kill J.F.K.  Hunt names others involved — Frank Sturgis, David Atlee Philips, Cord Meyer, David Morales, and more — all connected to the C.I.A.  Hunt dies three years later; his son discloses the tape-recording; and Hunt’s confession doesn’t make the evening news. 

2008     Oil industry executive Richard Cheney considers plans to start a war with Iran by having U.S. forces, disguised as Iranians, fire on U.S. forces.  (The J.C.S. had a similar scheme in mind for Cuba in 1962.)  Halliburton moves to Dubai, beyond the reach of U.S. enforcement agencies.  The bank bailouts begin.

2013     45^th anniversary of the murders of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy.  50^th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy.

Hide-and-Seek History

Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations in February 2003 to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. He advanced a number of claims, including statements about Iraq’s nuclear threat, which turned out to be untrue. In September 2005, he expressed regret over the episode, saying that it had damaged his reputation. Though he accepted responsibility for his presentation, he blamed his mistakes on lower-level intelligence personnel.

Now, Powell reportedly contends that he and State Department experts never believed Iraq was a nuclear threat.

On the day of Powell’s U.N. address, a British Defense Intelligence Staff document undermining his account of Iraq and al Qaeda was leaked to the press, reportedly as retaliation from a group within British intelligence who were angered by the selective use of information to support pre-determined decisions. Later, the “Downing Street Memos” emerged, confirming an agreement between England and the U.S. to “fix” intelligence around the decision to attack Iraq.

Why was contradictory information coming out of England? I thought Britain was, if not America’s ally, certainly Bush’s ally. Is there a faction of British intelligence opposed to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s policies? What’s going on?

In this short essay, and in subsequent installments, I hope to convey a sense of what’s going on — the myriad ways in which modern intelligence agencies may function. My focus will be on the C.I.A. because a great deal is known about past Agency operations. But the C.I.A. isn’t the only U.S. agency with covert capabilities. Furthermore, there are other countries in the world — England, for instance — with clandestine agencies.


A surprisingly relevant example comes from Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the C.I.A. provided him with inflated estimates of Soviet military spending to justify Reagan’s military budgets.

When the estimates finally came into question, the Agency reviewed the process by which such estimates are generated. A string of former Directors, including George Herbert Walker Bush, Sr., provided information and somewhat disturbing conclusions. The C.I.A., they said, is so secretive and compartmented that it is not possible for a Director to know everything the Agency is doing.

Obviously, that assessment could be viewed as self-serving because it smacks of plausible deniability: All of them could claim that they never wittingly passed false information to the President.

On the other hand, the assessment is plainly true, which leads to an unpleasant thought. It is an admission that, to an uncertain degree, intelligence is out of control. Or to put it another way, control doesn’t reside where one might think.

It is commonly assumed that the C.I.A. works for the President. The interaction, however, is vastly more complicated than that. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is more accurate to say that the intelligence community works for shifting alliances within the ruling elite. If a President enjoys the support of a significant faction of the elite, then the C.I.A. will generally work for him. If a President is opposed by the powers that be, the C.I.A. will oppose him, too.

Within those parameters, there is a broad range of possibilities. Consider a recent controversy, George Bush, Jr.’s apparent declassification of portions of a national intelligence estimate (N.I.E.) to rebut critics of the invasion of Iraq. Supposedly, Bush did not authorize the information to be leaked to reporters, though it is difficult to see how he expected to influence public opinion if the public could not learn about the estimate. In any case, the debate over his power to selectively declassify material overshadowed a much larger issue. The leaked information was inaccurate, and intentionally so, to justify the planned invasion. Several key administration claims — the Niger uranium story, the aluminum tubes story, the mobile laboratories story and more — were known to be suspect before Powell’s U.N. address and before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address. And of course, the related exposure of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame is still under investigation.


The federal intelligence apparatus is not a monolithic entity. A number of agencies generate intelligence, and loyalties can be split in many ways. The entire “weapons of mass destruction” story looks very much like an example of agencies in conflict, and the bad guys won. The administration demanded falsified evidence. C.I.A. Director George Tenet assured Bush that the case against Iraq was a slam-dunk while Agency analysts were reaching the opposite conclusion. Once it became clear to the public that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, what happened? The administration blamed the C.I.A. for faulty intelligence; and Bush gave Tenet a medal!

The U.S. intelligence apparatus went through similar gyrations over the Tonkin Gulf incidents in 1964, when Vietnamese P.T. boats supposedly attacked a U.S. ship on the high seas. The cover-up of that hoax continues to this day, as evidenced by last year’s disclosure of a National Security Agency report on the Gulf of Tonkin intelligence.*

And in the mid-1990s, the U.S. declassified material on Pearl Harbor that proved beyond doubt the “surprise attack” was no surprise.**


In the examples related above, prevailing intelligence coalitions supported executive agendas; but that hasn’t always been the case. Sometimes, in service to narrow interests, elements of the intelligence community have attacked sitting Presidents. And sometimes, Presidents have used intelligence coalitions to manipulate the people.

Our government is composed of three branches regulated by various checks and balances because our founders understood that every one of us lives every day with an internal system of checks and balances which cannot be relied upon to produce right behavior.

Since our revolution, and particularly since World War II, intelligence entities have grown so numerous and capable that they constitute a fourth branch of government. We live in a grey world of half-heroes and half-villains, a world of deniable decisions based on debatable information from anonymous sources. Time after time after time, hidden forces dramatically affect events in ways the public never learns — or learns only when it was much too late. We can’t “vote the bastards out” thirty years after the fact. And most of them aren’t elected officials anyway.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote about the growing centralization of government functions and the risk of drastic change in the political processes of the country. It was not an idle concern. The need for an informed citizenry, able to balance trust and skepticism, has never been greater — because today, as ordinary citizens, we simply cannot know who the intelligence community is serving at any given moment.

Overestimating the power of secrecy is an error, but underestimating it is a danger. Secrecy may be required from time to time, but it always presents a threat to democracy. It defeats citizen participation by turning us into spectators at a shadow play.



* “Operation Plan 34-A,” The Chair-Herding Pictures, 12/8/2005
** “A Small Price to Pay,” The Chair-Herding Pictures, 8/29/2005
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