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DC Reade's avatar

analyses of the CIA in the Cold War era suffer from a common flaw: they view the CIA as a monolithic enterprise, instead of a massive compartmentalized bureaucracy. Compartmentalization and cross-purposes are common in bureaucracies. But they're nowhere more of a factor than CIA, where people don't know what their co-workers down the hall are doing, by design. If you read In Search Of Enemies by John Stockwell, a disillusioned ex-CIA officer formerly assigned to Angola in the 1970s, and you'll see what a mess it often is. And all the 10%ers, the middle operators. Milking Uncle Sam's cow, just like Afghanistan. https://archive.org/details/in-search-of-enemies-a-cia-story-john-stockwell/page/n55/mode/2up?view=theater&q=arms

It's bizarre to claim that the CIA was running some monolithic Left-Liberal project in Cold War era. The support for non-Communist pro-Western liberal cultural projects in the 1960s was primarily directed at Europe, particularly the Eastern bloc and USSR. It was their least cloak and dagger effort, and the one of the most effective at undermining the rigidly narrow ideological control of the Soviets, by providing a pluralist alternative to Socialist Realism, where all art was forced to conform to Marxist-Leninist ideological dictates. The CIA having already failed spectacularly in the 1950s with the hard line of paramilitary covert ops, trying to put together armed subversive groups behind the Iron Curtain and getting owned every time--because Kim Philby was giving advance notice on every CIA infiltration attempt to the KGB. The real story of the Cold War is not that the CIA was run from the top by a bunch of bien pensant liberals; it's that KGB was scarily successful at doubling so many Americans who ended up maneuvering themselves into key nodes of US national security: Aldrich Ames, CIA. Robert Hanssen, FBI counterintelligence. The Walker spy ring, ONI. The Americans just got outplayed.

CIA in Latin America ran a much more right-wing oriented game in the Cold War era. Read Cry Of The People and In Banks We Trust, by Penny Lernoux. Or They Will Be Done, by Gerard Colby. Inside The League, by John Lee Anderson. The Real Terror Network, by Bernard Herman. Iran-Contra Connection, by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. The US, Argentina, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Latin America, by Ariel Armony. The CIA funded and nurtured international neofascist extremist groups--including a lot of operatives from European countries like Italy and France--throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.

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Terje Kåsbøl's avatar

one needs to remember Hans Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy - The god that got fucked in the ass, to understand the 20th century. there was a hostile takeover both in the USA and in Russia in the 1910s. all monarchies in Europe was overthrown after WW1.. the world bank was created in the 50’s so one doesn’t necessarily have to look for evil forces in iPhone to understand the motives behind the operations in Africa. sorry BAP.

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