Tag Archives: cia

KGB Operations Against The US

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Last week, I blogged Douglas Valentine on the secret history of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, a long history that involved revolutions, coups, torture, assassinations, and subversion. Today, the CIA is probably far larger than any other spy agency, but until 1991, the Soviet Union’s KGB was a good match.  The excerpt that follows is from a face-off between former CIA counter-intelligence chief Paul J. Redmond and former major-general of the Soviet KGB, Oleg Danilov Kalugin, and was hosted by the University of Delaware on March 12, 2003.

(Note: The KGB was disbanded in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by the Russia security force, the FSB).

“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he [Kalugin] said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”

Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.

Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.

“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.

Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.

“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”

The Demonic Style: Valentine On Military Historians, Avatars, and the CIA

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Insight into why the revisionist media never ‘gets’ it:

“The extent to which this practice existed was revealed in 1975, when William Colby informed a congressional committee that more than 500 CIA officers were operating under cover as corporate executives and that 40 CIA officers were posing as journalists.

“When it comes to the CIA and the press, one hand washes the other. In order to have access to informed officials, reporters frequently suppress or distort stories. In return, officials leak stories to reporters to whom they owe favors. Continue reading →

Time To Talk About the Elephant

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Crazy terrorist or method to his madness? When will the media start providing context?

From Mondoweiss:

“He [Balawi’s brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians…. Continue reading →

Wikipedia Scanner and Deletionpedia

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This Wired article by John Borland from August 2007 references a handy tool – the wikipedia scanner – for anyone interested in finding out what sorts of edits are being made at wikipedia. The author argues that while most edits, even from interested parties, seem relatively minor and informational, it´s also true that corporations like Diebold (the maker of the Diebold voting machine), Walmart (among many corporations), and the CIA have all been involved in altering information.

“Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses……

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their username, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.”

Though it´s nice to see a mainstream publication like Wired, take up this topic, I wonder if it´s only touching the tip of the iceberg.

It´s not the suppression of so-called “conspiracy theory” type articles or their authors that I worry about. It´s the skewing of mainstream topics  and the tarring of perfectly respectable publications that are well-sourced and written by well-educated and informed people, and that have broken or explored important stories, often long before and far better than the mainstream media.  By removing those sources and sending researchers to so-called mainstream media sources the establishment keeps a tight control of whose voice gets heard, and more importantly, whose voices are annointed with authority.  Since many of the alternative voices are those of foreigners, working class or disenfranchised people, immigrants, or political dissidents, this skewing is both censorship as well as a form of cultural imperialism, with a distinct racial, religious, and linguistic bias, i.e. in effect,  the skewing tends to promote Anglo-European, state-centric, non-religious or anti-religious, English-language  perspectives over others.

If you want to search for articles that have been deleted that you think should be put back on wikipedia, check out deletionpedia. You need to look in the deletionpedia archive, and even then, not all deleted articles end up there.

Doug Valentine On The Empire of The Lie

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Douglas Valentine, author of several masterful books on national security and the CIA, talks to Susan Mazur about Tim Weiner´s new book on the CIA (“Legacy of Ashes”), the nexus of finance and espionage, and the propaganda campaign that lets Americans think the CIA is a force for good.

Here´s a snippet:

“Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.”

And that´s precisely what I´d say about exposes that appear in establishment outlets, even if they seem to be literary and anti-establishment (Vanity Fair, New York Times, even,  perhaps Rolling Stone, although much less so). They are less about exposing as about controlling the terms of the discourse, that is, the boundaries within which discussion can take place.

Another insight from Valentine:

“Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.”

(Colby, by the way, died in a ‘boating accident’ in Maryland, on the day that a prosecutor got permission to set up a grand jury to probe the death of Frank Olson, who was involved in chemical warfare research and had been one of the subjects of the CIA´s mind control experiments. The CIA claimed Olson jumped to his death from a hotel window, although his injuries, according to the autopsy, could as well have been inflicted by a blunt instrument. I should note that at the time of his death in 1996 Colby´s name was being used on the letter head of Strategic Investments, a publication of Agora Inc. (co-owned by my co-author), according to several reports, although I can´t confirm to my satisfaction the exact status of that association. Several unconfirmed reports also link Colby to knowledge about the death (or killing, according to some) of White House deputy counsel, Vincent Foster, a preoccupation at the time, of Agora co-founder James Davidson)

More from Douglas Valentine:

“The CIA gets oodles of money from the arms business. Most of their income comes from criminal activity.

The Russian Mafia operates with a sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia. And one of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.

And I think a lot of CIA money is capital investments. They’re like movie producers. They want to overthrow the Iraqi government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq. And like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to ante-up some cash. Telling them, don’t worry about it, the government contracts you get in return will cover your investment. Plus they have the old boy network – which now is so far flung.

Suzan Mazur: Plus some of the military contractors are organized crime and have had contracts since the 50s.

Doug Valentine: Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra). Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some explosives into Mexico. What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the bombs came from.

Suzan Mazur: And some of these arms merchants also had security clearance during the McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense Department. They make weapons for the US government and some for whoever they feel like.

Doug Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the American empire is built. The United States has a military budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is like $50 billion – that’s a year. Together that’s bigger than the gross national product of any country in the world. And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys in Al-Qaeda.

[Lila: This statement is inaccurate, as both GDP and GNP in most developed countries were near or over a trillion in 2007. See current figures here. I think the author might have been misquoted on this and might have meant “many countries,”  for example, in the developing world. However, projections for 2010 place US military spending in excess of 1 trillion, if all military-related expenditures are included).

Continuing with the interview:

“Suzan Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its founding fathers molested two of his own children – and a reason why the CIA should have been dismantled years ago?

Doug Valentine: Your readers don’t want to know that answer. The most dastardly thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. Where the American people don’t see the CIA for a bunch of basically American KGB agents who are conducting criminal activities around the world. There’s a movie called The Usual Suspects with a much feared criminal named Keyser Soze. And Keyser is talking to a cop and he says the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

And this is what people like Weiner are doing with books about the CIA that don’t explain it for what it really is. They’re part of a propaganda machine that’s making the American people see the CIA in mythological terms as good guys, crusaders, as Lawrence of Arabia – when, in fact, they’re criminals. They’re part of THE GRAND LIE.”

My Comment

The piece is long and, for an intelligence aficionado, packed with illuminating detail. Among other things, Valentine touches on James Jesus Angleton, the most compelling of the spy masters (since he was chief of counter intelligence, I should call him chief spy hunter), the extensive role of private intelligence (which I touched on in my Abu Ghraib book), as well as the manipulation of Wikipedia, which Valentine regards as considerably influenced by the CIA.  This confirms my own long-standing observations about Wikipedia.  On crucial topics, it stays within the bounds of  debate allowed by  Western establishment interests and is very far from being an objective or quasi-scholarly affair. (I use the term Western because despite a substantial component of foreigners, the predominant interests served are the interests of the state and the military-industrial and financial industries), the most influential and powerful of which are Western. I do not use the terms capitalist, because I see the establishment as essentially a technocrat or money-managing class, working against capital formation in many respects.

And a final word, from the lips of Bill Colby himself:

“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” [Researching the sources of this phrase, I find several sites like this claiming that it is “fake” and to be found unsourced only in a 2000 book by David McGowan, from whence it’s been repeated endlessly on the web. I’ll check up on this but for now am leaving the quote up.]

Was this tongue-in-cheek, or meant to be taken literally? You decide..

War Without End, Amen..

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Marjorie Cohn:

“Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.

When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the “right” to wage wars “unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense…….

…In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.

Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.“