“CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,”
Then they've got a long way to go. Everybody already knew that the Shah's coup was planned and backed by the CIA. That was part of a long and ugly history of CIA covert operations that have backfired spectacularly. It's not unreasonable to trace the Sunday's horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.
I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged. But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
> It's not unreasonable to trace the Sunday's horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.
It actually goes back much farther than that to WW1 and the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the fighting that happened amongst the middle eastern states, the new Bolshevik government, and the Triple Entente, and of course the Balfour Decleration.
> But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
There was a time? Because of course they promised 100% that they would totally not do something like that again ever ever, and so of course they aren't doing anything like that anymore.....
> There was a time? Because of course they promised 100% that they would totally not do something like that again ever ever, and so of course they aren't doing anything like that anymore.
Indeed. They've finally found their moral compass and we should forgive them /s
> In it, CIA spokesman and podcast host Walter Trosin cites the claims of agency historians that the majority of the CIA’s clandestine activities in its history “bolstered” popularly elected governments.
This was really just one exception, normally they are the "good" actors /s
Does anyone believe that? After that they were involved in MKUltra, enhanced interrogation torture, toppling governments in South America and other places. Why bother pretending instead of staying quiet.
> It actually goes back much farther than that to WW1 and the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the fighting that happened amongst the middle eastern states, the new Bolshevik government, and the Triple Entente, and of course the Balfour Decleration
I’m pretty sure it goes back much, much, further than that.
What it sees to me is the Ottomans played tribal groups in their empire off against each other. And suppressed the any and all entities that could provide balance against their power.
Compare with Europe which never was unified and where tribal distinctions were slowly replaced with national and religious ones.
The Ottoman Empire fell apart 100 years ago. After which the French and the British tried to colonize it and when that didn't work they just drew lines on a map and installed a tribal chief from a weaker tribe as king.
Which is to say this mess has a deep history that has it's roots in the Muslim conquests, the Mongol conquests, and the Ottoman Conquests. Followed by the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and ham handed foreign meddling since.
> I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking.
Probably because the people who theorized that there had been a conspiracy turned out to be correct, and the usual bromide objections ("someone would have talked," "more than 50 people can never keep a secret," "the government just isn't that competent," etc) were shown to be entirely false.
Except people didnt keep quiet and weren't that compatent that why it shows up in high school us history books and gave us the shit shows in the middle east and Latin America today. So both side were right and wrong it was a conspiracy of blabering incompatents.
Conspiracy theorists can be wrong about 100 things before they're right about one thing. They're useless for understanding the current state of the world.
> I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged. But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
> Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
My goodness, the actual things that the US has done abroad has damaged its reputation in the most affected places around the world.
If you really want to know how evil and down right fucked up the CIA was, I highly recommend The Devil's Chessboard, a biography of Allen Dulles https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24723229
After finishing it, my sense was that the best thing for America and the world would have been to put an end to the CIA.
Yeah the were an agency with basicly no oversite and unlimited budget for much of their existence. Now they supposedly have to answer to Congress at least. Personally I think we ought to start over with clean slate agency with better oversight and legistive limits on their action beyond which they require Congress aproval on a case by case basis, and none of the current decision makers be allowed in. Do the same with the NSA. Also enable the FBI to have constant oversight on them and report if they are hiding anything from Congress from or exceeding their remit
I think just saying the "CIA did it" is also not entirely fair. They carried out the activities, but Eisenhower gave the greenlight after being cajoled by Britain. It wasn't a rogue operation, it was explicit policy of two governments.
I agree with this. There is a lot to be said for leadership through honesty. In some ways I feel like we've entered something like a "Foundation Crisis" (if you have read Asimov's Foundation series) in that a long series of events has lead to a crisis in the world order where the "good guys often seem just as bad as the bad guys.
In the case of "rogue operations", the CIA is responsible.
In the more usual case the Administration signs off on the go-ahead, and POTUS is ultimately responsible. Examples: Kennedy's Bay of Pigs, Bush 43 torture flights ...
> I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged.
> It's not unreasonable to trace the Sunday's horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.
Israel doesn't care if their neighbors are islamic dictatorships, military dictatorships, or democracies, they work hard to keep them all as weak as possible.
There was basically an era in US foreign policy where "communism bad" was the single guiding principle.
If someone wasn't communist, they got our support. It didn't matter if they were bloodthirsty monsters or if they were even more anti-American than the communists.
If someone seemed to even be tilting red, they get undermined and sometimes even overthrown either directly or through us backing one of the previously mentioned anti-communist forces.
There really was no other principle at work beyond "communism bad, USSR bad," and we made a lot of devils' bargains in that era on the theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. It's a great example of monomania and paranoia guiding bad policy.
The only thing I can say in defense of people from that era is that everyone thought WWIII was around the corner and we were going to all get nuked anyway. It was a really paranoid time.
I'd love to see a realistic treatment on where the line of 'possible' lies for an intelligence org. They're already one of the most open intelligence orgs in history.
They're not strictly an intelligence organization. They have a large operational detachment. Which is what _allowed_ them to interfere in the operations of foreign governments in the first place.
If they were in fact, _just_ intelligence, there might be a point here. As it is, they're a rogue agency that needs to be completely disbanded. Never in my life have I felt that I owe any part of my safety as an American to these thugs.
The CIA gets unfrair treatment, partly I think because they are held to the same standards by the public as say the FBI. This is what intel agencies do though. They are not there for democracy, political agenda, law enforcement,etc... they are like the military, as you pointed out they do heinous things.
But the part that irks me the most is your incorrect insinuation that they did what they did on their own. They acted on behalf of the american people and their elected leaders. Much like how the US military also did heinous things in times of war (as any military would).
The CIA is partly a paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the american people. Like any such agency they harm civilians and interfere in foreign governments' politics and economy.
Why does the US need to repair our reputation? Unless by repair you mean remind the world who to be afraid of. We do not live in a nice world where everyone gets along. The US government and military (and the CIA) have no obligation to the world, their obligations are entirely to protect the american people and economy.
Look at the unresr and strife in american society today. This is with a good economy! Look at the mass global migration to the US, civil rights changes,etc... they all happened because of post world war 2 prosperity, if you think all these rights and niceties can be kept under a crashed economy I'd have to respectfully disagree. In any other century in history, a country like the US would be inavding and decimating continents by now. When the CIA intervenes, it is because their leaders were hostile towards the US.
My challenge to you is if you are willing to face the chaos of a poor/powerless america and hope the alternative power-vaccum fillers would be nicer. China for example literally has police stations in western countries to crush dissent and I shouldn't need to say much abour Russia's election interference (and China!), if they were in the US's place, how would you think they would react to a hostile Iran in 1953? Even now, Russian mercenaries are toppling African governments left and right!
My point is not to morally justify anything but to plead for perspective here.
> Why does the US need to repair our reputation? Unless by repair you mean remind the world who to be afraid of. We do not live in a nice world where everyone gets along. The US government and military (and the CIA) have no obligation to the world, their obligations are entirely to protect the american people and economy.
I won't try to reason with you using notions of "morality", or "doing the right thing", cause you are clearly not looking at the world like that. So how about repairing the US reputation, cause you don't like terrorists flying airplanes into buildings? The violence of terrorists attacks is not justified, but it is entirely expected for when a country acts like this. Imperialism will always face opposition and struggle, and anybody that supports it is helping to generate violence, both to oppressed people, and to the opressors themselves (or their inocent civilizians) when oppressed people fight back.
> China for example literally has police stations in western countries to crush
> dissent and I shouldn't need to say much abour Russia's election interference
> (and China!), if they were in the US's place, how would you think they would
> react to a hostile Iran in 1953?
If Russian or China had organized that coup you would never hear the end of it. You would hear scalding criticism in every western newspaper and rightly so. Just because other countries do horrible things does not excuse the actions of the CIA.
I generally agree with everything you said, but it seems to me that the biggest criticism of the coup in Iran is that it did not ultimately wind up serving American interests effectively. The coup installed a US-favorable Shah for a few years where oil could be obtained cheaply and then we got decades of a theocratic government actively funding American enemies all over the world.
Oh, and we did this to a country that we had given nuclear power to.
Evaluating the CIA's move on the rubric you've set out does not produce a passing grade!!
They did it all over Latin America and Africa during the entire cold war as well. And, I assume, they still back coups all around, if it is deemed that the dictatorship to be instated will better foster the interests of the government of the United States and the oligarchies behind it...
Of course they do. Democratic societies vote for people who look after their own interested, and often times, the interest of these people are at direct odds to the interests of American companies. When politicians put the interest of their people over the interest of Western powers, they get labelled as "socialists" or "communists" and a dictator gets installed to stop the "contagion".
Dictators will gladly do the dirty work of repressing the population while giving American companies their cut. And if these dictators forget their place, the US government will send a little freedom their way.
It's not a foolproof strategy, but it works well enough.
ALSO: It's ok to criticize US for the past war, for faking evidence in UN and making up excuses to invade a country.
But to critique US involvement in Ukraine which is extinguishing a whole country with their forced mobilization just for the sake of drip buying US arms? That's heresy and punishable with de-platforming.
And please spare us with the excuse that they just hire subject matter experts. You would not accept such logic for Russia or China. Though the NYTimes are far from perfect or impartial, they are at least good at appearing neutral (one has to gather statistics on how they cherry-pick stories to see their well-hidden but strong bias). Their journalist ethics guidelines warn against the appearance of bias, and their reporters aren't allowed to give political donations: https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...
The book All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer is an excellent narration of the time leading up to the coup, and the coup itself. I think it's fair to say that a lot of our problems with terrorism at the present all stemmed from this coup in Iran in 1953.
One of the CIA's in-house historians, who the following year went on to become CIA Chief Historian, David Robarge, wrote this review of All the Shah's Men in 2004: https://www.cia.gov/static/all-the-shahs-men.pdf
> In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times sugests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose
populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and
geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
Nearly 20 years ago already, this was an admission of a coup against a democratically elected government, instituting an "absolutist kingship", with "unintended consequences".
All of this used to be available in HTML before the recent CIA website redesign.
People would do well to read old books, and even watch old television news programs and documentary programs like those from CBS, all the way back to the 60s, before thinking that this wasn't in some sense, common knowledge, at least among those who attempt to be knowledgeable. One great success of the CIA has been that this and a litany of similar events have been hiding in plain sight, and that it is "conspiratorial thinking" just to remember this stuff.
"That complicates the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and as it cracks down on dissent."
The timing of this mea culpa from the CIA is very interesting.
Is the CIA essentially saying "oops, sorry"? And if so, why, and why now, at this moment?
Did it seem like the “right” thing to do at the time, or just the thing that would allow us more access to oil at the expense of everyone in the future
Depends on who's perspective you look from. I'm one of those who believes that geopolitics is a lot more complicated than just one will, one goal, one result. I belive it's more like a lot of different people with a lot of different motivations. And in that mix are maybe certain people who have a knack for understanding the motivations of their peers, and exploiting them to their own ends.
Readit News
Then they've got a long way to go. Everybody already knew that the Shah's coup was planned and backed by the CIA. That was part of a long and ugly history of CIA covert operations that have backfired spectacularly. It's not unreasonable to trace the Sunday's horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.
I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged. But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
It actually goes back much farther than that to WW1 and the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the fighting that happened amongst the middle eastern states, the new Bolshevik government, and the Triple Entente, and of course the Balfour Decleration.
> But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
There was a time? Because of course they promised 100% that they would totally not do something like that again ever ever, and so of course they aren't doing anything like that anymore.....
Indeed. They've finally found their moral compass and we should forgive them /s
> In it, CIA spokesman and podcast host Walter Trosin cites the claims of agency historians that the majority of the CIA’s clandestine activities in its history “bolstered” popularly elected governments.
This was really just one exception, normally they are the "good" actors /s
Does anyone believe that? After that they were involved in MKUltra, enhanced interrogation torture, toppling governments in South America and other places. Why bother pretending instead of staying quiet.
I’m pretty sure it goes back much, much, further than that.
Compare with Europe which never was unified and where tribal distinctions were slowly replaced with national and religious ones.
The Ottoman Empire fell apart 100 years ago. After which the French and the British tried to colonize it and when that didn't work they just drew lines on a map and installed a tribal chief from a weaker tribe as king.
Which is to say this mess has a deep history that has it's roots in the Muslim conquests, the Mongol conquests, and the Ottoman Conquests. Followed by the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and ham handed foreign meddling since.
Probably because the people who theorized that there had been a conspiracy turned out to be correct, and the usual bromide objections ("someone would have talked," "more than 50 people can never keep a secret," "the government just isn't that competent," etc) were shown to be entirely false.
> Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
My goodness, the actual things that the US has done abroad has damaged its reputation in the most affected places around the world.
EDIT: I can't help myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767826
After finishing it, my sense was that the best thing for America and the world would have been to put an end to the CIA.
In the case of "rogue operations", the CIA is responsible.
In the more usual case the Administration signs off on the go-ahead, and POTUS is ultimately responsible. Examples: Kennedy's Bay of Pigs, Bush 43 torture flights ...
It's funny you say that...[0]
[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-memo-1967-cia-coined-weapo...
I guess people in 1953 said the same.
Know knows what will be admitted/acknowledged in 70 years?
Israel doesn't care if their neighbors are islamic dictatorships, military dictatorships, or democracies, they work hard to keep them all as weak as possible.
If someone wasn't communist, they got our support. It didn't matter if they were bloodthirsty monsters or if they were even more anti-American than the communists.
If someone seemed to even be tilting red, they get undermined and sometimes even overthrown either directly or through us backing one of the previously mentioned anti-communist forces.
There really was no other principle at work beyond "communism bad, USSR bad," and we made a lot of devils' bargains in that era on the theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. It's a great example of monomania and paranoia guiding bad policy.
The only thing I can say in defense of people from that era is that everyone thought WWIII was around the corner and we were going to all get nuked anyway. It was a really paranoid time.
I think it would be a very bad intelligence service if this was true.
I'd love to see a realistic treatment on where the line of 'possible' lies for an intelligence org. They're already one of the most open intelligence orgs in history.
If they were in fact, _just_ intelligence, there might be a point here. As it is, they're a rogue agency that needs to be completely disbanded. Never in my life have I felt that I owe any part of my safety as an American to these thugs.
But the part that irks me the most is your incorrect insinuation that they did what they did on their own. They acted on behalf of the american people and their elected leaders. Much like how the US military also did heinous things in times of war (as any military would).
The CIA is partly a paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the american people. Like any such agency they harm civilians and interfere in foreign governments' politics and economy.
Why does the US need to repair our reputation? Unless by repair you mean remind the world who to be afraid of. We do not live in a nice world where everyone gets along. The US government and military (and the CIA) have no obligation to the world, their obligations are entirely to protect the american people and economy.
Look at the unresr and strife in american society today. This is with a good economy! Look at the mass global migration to the US, civil rights changes,etc... they all happened because of post world war 2 prosperity, if you think all these rights and niceties can be kept under a crashed economy I'd have to respectfully disagree. In any other century in history, a country like the US would be inavding and decimating continents by now. When the CIA intervenes, it is because their leaders were hostile towards the US.
My challenge to you is if you are willing to face the chaos of a poor/powerless america and hope the alternative power-vaccum fillers would be nicer. China for example literally has police stations in western countries to crush dissent and I shouldn't need to say much abour Russia's election interference (and China!), if they were in the US's place, how would you think they would react to a hostile Iran in 1953? Even now, Russian mercenaries are toppling African governments left and right!
My point is not to morally justify anything but to plead for perspective here.
I won't try to reason with you using notions of "morality", or "doing the right thing", cause you are clearly not looking at the world like that. So how about repairing the US reputation, cause you don't like terrorists flying airplanes into buildings? The violence of terrorists attacks is not justified, but it is entirely expected for when a country acts like this. Imperialism will always face opposition and struggle, and anybody that supports it is helping to generate violence, both to oppressed people, and to the opressors themselves (or their inocent civilizians) when oppressed people fight back.
If Russian or China had organized that coup you would never hear the end of it. You would hear scalding criticism in every western newspaper and rightly so. Just because other countries do horrible things does not excuse the actions of the CIA.
Oh, and we did this to a country that we had given nuclear power to.
Evaluating the CIA's move on the rubric you've set out does not produce a passing grade!!
Dictators will gladly do the dirty work of repressing the population while giving American companies their cut. And if these dictators forget their place, the US government will send a little freedom their way.
It's not a foolproof strategy, but it works well enough.
Past things, yes. But never the current thing.
But to critique US involvement in Ukraine which is extinguishing a whole country with their forced mobilization just for the sake of drip buying US arms? That's heresy and punishable with de-platforming.
Dead Comment
And please spare us with the excuse that they just hire subject matter experts. You would not accept such logic for Russia or China. Though the NYTimes are far from perfect or impartial, they are at least good at appearing neutral (one has to gather statistics on how they cherry-pick stories to see their well-hidden but strong bias). Their journalist ethics guidelines warn against the appearance of bias, and their reporters aren't allowed to give political donations: https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...
> In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times sugests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
Nearly 20 years ago already, this was an admission of a coup against a democratically elected government, instituting an "absolutist kingship", with "unintended consequences".
All of this used to be available in HTML before the recent CIA website redesign.
People would do well to read old books, and even watch old television news programs and documentary programs like those from CBS, all the way back to the 60s, before thinking that this wasn't in some sense, common knowledge, at least among those who attempt to be knowledgeable. One great success of the CIA has been that this and a litany of similar events have been hiding in plain sight, and that it is "conspiratorial thinking" just to remember this stuff.
"That complicates the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and as it cracks down on dissent."
The timing of this mea culpa from the CIA is very interesting.
Is the CIA essentially saying "oops, sorry"? And if so, why, and why now, at this moment?
But these new eyes will do similar things that seem like the right thing to do at the time, to them. It's just a cycle.
Just like everything, it seemed like a good idea to some people, and a bad idea to others.
The notion that "it seemed like the right idea at the time" ignores all of the people in government who thought it was a terrible idea.
Oftentimes it's very much historical accident who happens to be making the final decision and who they happen to be listening to.