In real life, there are two opposing, but oddly complementary dynamics in play.

First, there is the CIA field operators who have been granted or at least BELIEVE they have been granted a tremendous amount of flexibility to accomplish the assigned task. Left to improvise methods and techniques, they have the opportunity to leave their employers exposed when they overreach.

And CIA field operators being the kinds of individuals they are, when they feel constrained by oversight they perceive as micromanagement, they will find a way to engineer a comms failure or otherwise separate themselves from operational C&C so that they might accomplish the mission in SPITE of the limitations imposed from above.

Either way, if the culture doesn’t encourage and reward successful operations within the operational rule set, you’re going to get rogue operators and a culture that uses their successes to advance it’s position and insulates itself from their failures.

mikey

That the CIA is everything the phrase “rogue elephant” and that abuses stem unavoidably from executive secrecy are not mutually exclusive. In this case I would even say that they are mutually causative. Executive secrecy is one of many concessions Democrats reflexively make to Republican framing, a way of underscoring how hard they are.
I could probably explain this better with a D&D analogy, but I won’t.
Anyway, anyone who tells you that there is only one cause for a state of affairs, or even that there is a single main cause, is talking down to you or stupid.

Your piece, and Hayes’, do two fundamentally different things — I don’t think it’s a question of one surpassing the other, and I think I would understand less about the CIA if I had read either one without the other.

You emphasize — though not, to me, enough — the idea that something like the CIA is concomitant with the project of empire, or hegemony. It’s a good insight, I think, and the timeline of OSS/CIA is a good indicator. But the argument isn’t really made, so much as suggested; if that makes sense.

In any case, thanks for pointing out these two pieces. Hadn’t seen either of them yet, and both are full of good stuff.

Mikey is correct about the field operators. A former agent made that argument to me, matter-of-factly — that he, and the CIA, had the preexisting authority in hand to break any law they needed to. Rogue isn’t an inappropriate term, when an institution believes itself to be unrestrained by the law.

So the bottom line seems to be that in retrospect Church was naive about the true nature of American government. After J. Edgar Hoover’s reign at the FBI this seems hard to believe, but there it is. Most people of good will on the left are still in denial.

A little of off topic, but this is such an infuriating video. This is just another example of why Fox News is not an impartial player in any debate.

Must watch!!!

http://progressnotcongress.org/?p=2700

I imagine if John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were alive today, they would take issue with the proposition the CIA wasn’t a rogue elephant in the early 1960s.

JFK vowed to break the CIA into a thousand pieces.

Gee, I wonder if that had something to do with Dallas.

I just read the Hayes’ piece. The final sentence summed it up nicely:

“The danger now isn’t naïveté but cynicism–that we just come to accept that the government will commit crimes in our name under the cover of secrecy and that such activities are more or less business as usual, about which nothing can be done. But something can be done. Something must be done. And Congress should do it.”

Whether Congress will step up is quite another matter, however.

Wow, we citizens have a lot on our plate now don’t we? Nice work Mr. Ackerman and Mr. Hayes. Yet another important issue that needs to be addressed ASAP.

Having been a close observer, never in the CIA but a very small cog in a different fedgov agency from 1980 to 1998 and in the AF and Army for 13 years before that, I can truthfully say that middle and upper management-what little I know I heard from people out at the sharp end-was that most were incompetent or thought they were James Bond or both. However the bottom feeders who collected and collated the raw intel were quite often unable to sort fact from fiction, those that could faced extreme pressure from above to make the analysis fit the story line that higher wanted. This BTW, was a problem with all the politicals from my first intro to their worldview all the way back in 1970 when I was in Vietnam to 1998 and my medical retirement. I was shocked many times at the isolated and narrowmindedness of those who were supposed to be the “best and the brightest”. The vast ignorance of how the world actually worked was astounding. I can however, from my current position of being far removed from the inner workings of govt, now understand why we lurch from crisis to crisis. It would seem to me that there are only about 2-3% of people in govt management, be they political or career, who actually understand what is happening and why. The other 97% are deadwood. Just part of the idiot nation that is the US.
ART45. that had nothing to do with Dallas because the CIA at no time ever would have been able not only to get a shooter onsite but to keep it all quiet for all these years. If more than 3 people know a secret, it isn’t.

Jane has a post up on the front page: “Where Do Possible Kennedy Successor Stand on the Public Plan?”

The discussion of whether the CIA was a rogue agency has a huge gray area. And that comes from the dynamics of large organizations. Organizations are rife with turf battles and sabotage, with reverse delegation, and with means of frustrating real supervision – ranging from slow-walking going by the book to creating hidden operations. If JFK’s statements of frustration are to be believed, the Bay of Pigs was reverse delegation. It is clear that elements of the intelligence community went out of their way to sandbag the Carter presidency, motivated in part by the Church Commission and by the networking of William Casey and George H. W. Bush, both insiders.

Executives have the illusion that they set policy and can hold people accountable, but anyone who has ever worked in a large organization knows exactly how that really works out. Actions in the field might be exactly 180-degrees from the policy handed down.

One can imagine that the cloak of security and secrecy and compartmentalization only makes it easier to play out these internal games.

It is now crucial that the US national security establishment be reviewed and be restructured as broadly as was done in 1947. Except, in this case, contraction of agencies instead of expansion might be warranted.

One of the bogus arguments floated by Bush loyalists is that public diclosures of covert CIA activities,most especially in relation to IG report abuses, will “demoralize” the agents themselves.

Forthwith a brief excerpt ,regarding the Church committee -from Walter Mondale-one of the Senatorial members who actually sat on the Committee.

….it quickly became apparent that agency personnel called before the Church Committee were thankful for the chance to get the truth out, get a heavy burden off their shoulders, and put the scandal behind them.

More important, the truth that was brought to light made it possible for the country to resolve how several key national security structural and legal issues were to be addressed in the future. Much of that wisdom and many of the legal protections introduced at that time were blithely disregarded by the Bush administration. It is time to get back on the track of legality.

As for the need for holding people to account, Mondale had this to say:

“Holding people responsible in some way for what happened is very important. If the verdict here is that you can do these kinds of things and there are no consequences, then that leaves a precedent. I’ve been around the federal government long enough to know that if there is a bad precedent, it’s like leaving a loaded pistol on the kitchen table. You don’t know who is going to pick it up and pull the trigger. There need to be consequences for violating the law.”

“Closing in on the Torturers”,Ray McGovern 8/26/06 OpEdNews.com

I would agree that an organization like the CIA operates as an adjunct to empire. But I would point out that the increasing militarization of American intelligence shows that we have entered a new phase in the relationship between intelligence and empire. It used to be both political and military with the political component being the predominant one. You would hire the colonels to topple the government and kill the President in order to change the political orientation of a country. Now almost all problems are seen as primarily military in nature. We don’t use other countries’ militaries to accomplish our goals. At most we pay them off so we can run our own military operations through their countries, no questions asked. Perhaps this is a post-Cold War response to a world without ideology, that is where all ideologies including our own are seen as bankrupt (Think of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Bush years for examples). In this world, the military route might seem the only one available. But this is untrue. We could have chosen more open cooperative relations with other governments. We didn’t. Our militarism was not something forced on us by circumstance. It is something we chose. It was not 9/11. We had already made the choice before. I think that just as the rest of the world lost its belief in ideology, we lost ours as well. Democracy went from “We the People” to an empty phrase meant to keep our elites in power. Economic fairness and opportunity went to a doctrinaire form of capitalism meant to make and keep the rich richer at everyone else’s expense. These are ideas that you can sell to other elites but not to ordinary people. They can only be enforced by the barrel of a gun and that is what we are doing.

Hayes article is indeed good overall. I appreciate the review of how the Church and Pike committees helped set up a strategic framework, so to speak, within which (and around which) the various players could interact.

Regarding the existence of a Colby-Helms axis, I happen to have glanced at the Three Days of the Condor (1975) page the other day (the movie ran on cable Sun or Mon) and noticed that Helms served as a personal consultant to Robert Redford, who played the Condor (Joe Turner; I don’t know which name is more resonant). And what was the Condor’s role? He describes it:

I work for the CIA. I’m not a spy.

I just read books.

We read everything that’s published in the world,

and we– we feed the plots–

dirty tricks, codes into a computer,

and the computer…

checks against actual CIA plans and operations.

I look for leaks, new ideas.

We read adventures and novels and… journals.

Thanks Spencer for recommending a great read.

Hayes does an excellent job critiquing Obama’s “look forward not backward” stance:

But presumably the thinking goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation reforms of the American social contract–universal healthcare and cap and trade–or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of the previous administration’s crimes. As morally worthy as the latter might be, it won’t get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from melting; it won’t provide a new foundation for progressive governance.

Then, as Hayes continues in the really sharp part, the inevitable revelations about the bad old backward days get automatically defined as “distractions” when they come out, and therefore the mention of them, not the content of them, becomes the focus of condemnation.

To which I’d add that meanwhile the bad old ways pretty much just go on autopilot, since there’s no way adequately to flush them out, or for Congress to see to it that that has been done, without making some distracting fuss. That is the biggest reason why some people, like maybe me, think that forward-backward stuff is a pile of bullshit, and certainly unworthy of our President.

I’ll stop for now.

The CIA as an entity might not have had anything to do with Dallas but people like David Attlee Phillips, David Morales, and the Cubans who were loyal to E. Howard Hunt most definitely were involved.

I don’t buy into the theory that “someone would have talked.” I remember just how fanatical the anti-communist world view was back then with the Birchers operating openly in government, kind of like the bigots and wingnuts serve in congress, like Bachmann, Kyl, Erbe. Do you really think people like Cheney and Addington with their tunnel vision and their Manichean view of the world would talk about what they are involved in?

And who was brought in to make sure that Congress was stonewalled by the agency? George H. W. Bush, the man who supposedly had no connections with the CIA. We’d be better off in this country if it was the last member of the Bush family who had just passed away instead of Ted Kennedy. I wonder how much champagne was consumed celebrating Kennedy’s death in that circle.