At Hillsdale’s Constitution Day Celebration, Mike Benz explores the history and evolution of the intelligence state in the United States, detailing its origins, the establishment of covert operations, and the implications of political warfare.
Mike discusses key documents and events that shaped the intelligence community, including the CIA’s role in foreign elections and the transition from hard power to soft power in American foreign policy. The conversation also highlights the ongoing influence of the intelligence state in contemporary politics and its relationship with populism.
Unedited Transcript
Thank you, Hillsdale, for having me and the incredible work that you’re doing. Today’s topic is the history of the intelligence state. And what I’m going to try to describe to you is the shape of the beast that we are up against in this targeted so many people in this room. Hillsdale asked me to speak about this particular topic.
The history of the intelligence state.
Obviously, the intelligence state is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it is somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state. But there is something beyond it that I think beginning with that helps elucidate.
And that may be the octopus that was just referred to. But we’ll we’ll come to meet it towards, as we progress. So I think the best way to understand is to actually start the story in the middle, and then we will go back in time to the founding of the country. We’ll sort of speed run the essential history and then all the way up into the present.
But we’re going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of zero ad of the founding of the intelligence capacity of the US government. And instead of sort of doing the what you’ll learn in an ordinary history book, we’re going to start with a document that I’m curious if anyone has ever seen. It’s called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.
It’s anyone ever seen that document in this room? How many people in this room know the name George Kennan? Okay, 75% of the hands went up. Did you know that George Kennan in 1948 wrote this memo called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare, in which he is famous for for folks who are not familiar. George Canning is sort of known as a sort of godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency.
He was famous for this long telegram. The the chief strategist of the containment strategy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But before all that, when all this was getting started, he he penned this top secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years, was declassified in 2005. That, I think, helps elucidate the story as we’re going to, proceed here.
We’re going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. The inauguration of organized political warfare was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election rigging event. That was, on April 18th, 1948. And this was written just 12 days after that. And the particular focus was what had just happened in Italy, Italy was having its first democratic election after World War Two, and it and it posited a U.S. backed candidate, on the one hand and a Russia backed candidate on the other.
And when the rules based international order was being established in 1948, and we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council, the very first memo I had just on screen here emphasizes how important it is for, for the U.S. to control the the political affairs of Italy. You’ll see national Security Council memo 1-1. It’s titled The Position of the United States with respect to Italy.
Kennan wrote, Italy is obviously the key point. If the communists win there, our whole position would would probably be undermined. Now in what happened in this case was in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to have intelligence focus on gathering and analysis. But because of the the key important is perceived by the US State Department to influence the course of the Italian election, it developed a makeshift ad hoc thrown together at the last minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the candidate that the U.S. government preferred.
And I just have some statistics here and a little bit of context, because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme. So about $250 million were spent of U.S. taxpayer money in order to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off the books sources of funding to finance it. We had bags of money that were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, their campaign expenses for posters, for pamphlets.
We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Our newly created CIA proprietary media organizations, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, set up a vast spawn of Italian network news in order to create a surround sound inside that country to buy U.S. propaganda messaging, we funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to Mafia and Union Street Muscle.
We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country. And the reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will. It will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created just six weeks after this memo was penned, also by George Kennan. But it’s because understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations, which is to say that when the US government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches that they were working with are no longer simply churches.
They are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities. They become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer an independent media. It is an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, organized criminal mafias. And just so you understand the context of this, the predecessor to the CIA, the LSE, together with our War Department, now as it was called at the time, was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini.
And they served as a sort of guerrilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. And so we had that network established. It was unseemly, but seen as necessary in a time of war. But it was simply maintained in times of peace for political war. But then suddenly organized crime becomes not a criminal offense, but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft.
And just to drive that point home, this is Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, in his own book, wrote that had it not been for the Mafia, the communists would by now be in control of Italy. Why was all this necessary? Well, this is necessary because in the eyes of the US State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it, 60% of the vote would have gone to the communists.
But for CIA intervention in their assessment. And I’m going to just urge throughout this that when you hear communist or fascist, in terms of the the historical data points, we’re going to go over, understand that in the post 2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. So every time you see communism as much as all of us, you know, abhor that.
I think with all with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the blob will come to me towards the end of this is domestic populism. And this is actually the language that they use. So when you when you see that, say, the communists would have won, many of us would prefer, obviously, that the Communist does not win.
But today they use that exact same language, as you’ll see, to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates. So I want to just go through this since I didn’t see a hand raised. In this room, this key document that was the predecessor to the government linchpin license that created this whole universe. So we’re just going to go through some of these receipts I’ve flagged on screen here.
This is from from George Cannon, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy, and George Kennan and the State Department and the white House were so overwhelmed with the light about the world of possibility. If we could simply scale the Italian operation. But the problem was, is it was very much against everything this country had stood for for a century and a half before that.
So I’m just going to read some of the highlighted items here. So you’ll see. The phrase political warfare dots this in a very deliberate way, organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority, using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques. George Kennan says here we have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, and that our public.
You’ll see he actually crossed out of the draft because, again, this is a top secret memo that was published in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says we’re hamstrung by this basic division, peace and war by our public yearnings. And then that’s crossed out. And it says by national tendency to seek a political cure all in a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations, basically saying, listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this.
They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war, and World War Two is over. It just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and we do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century. And you’ll see here references. This was the Italian elections, right?
That we that we just engaged in this in the Italian elections 12 days from then and that this political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’re going to come back to that, because when you see the shape of the intelligence state, it extends far beyond intelligence and actually is it’s really a tool of statecraft.
So here is a very interesting telling vision into this CIA godfather. It says we cannot afford in the future, and perhaps more serious political crises to scramble into impromptu covert operations, as we did at the time of the Italian elections, saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it on every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, every country on earth where there might be a need for us to protect U.S. national interests or trade interests or financial interests or security interests.
We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from the cultural influencers to the media to the churches, to the charities, to the organized crime networks, even if we don’t use it just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble. If an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a US national interest agenda.
So I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and then sort of go through the whole history of this, because just less than two months after George Kennan wrote that inauguration of organized political warfare, saying since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it.
Just less than two months after that, George Kennan then sponsored the very act which would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our our country works. And this was the National Security Council memo ten to now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council is called the interagency. It coordinates what the what the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, what what everyone is doing so that they are all working in a complementary fashion.
It’s in the white House, and it’s sort of the executive oversight of everything. So you’ll see this memo here in NSC 10 to 2. And just so that you see, it’s right here on the State Department website under state.gov. When I’m about to read here, it’s sanctioned for U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, sabotage, which was sponsored by George Kennan.
He was the one who pushed for this right after he wrote the inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. But he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created, because what NSC ten two did, was it gave the intelligence community this burgeoning, newly created CIA, and the. We now have 17 intelligence agencies plus the DNI.
It not they transform not just from spy organizations, but to lie organizations. So what I mean by that is because of this phrase that is used in NSC ten to I’m going to read it. All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed, so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that, if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.
I’m going to actually just show you the exact language here. This is, again, 1948, all covert operations, all of these sabotage, demolition, controlling the media. They are now legal as long as you it’s they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized person. So you are cast out of Eden effectively if you eat from the if you eat the apple of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you.
Their job is to lie to you, and that if they do get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agents, above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these, these covert links, and they because he was not an official sanctioned U.S. government operation. Something went rogue.
Someone wasn’t authorized. Someone took it into their own hands. And I’m just going to read this. An analysis that I think is a useful summary. That plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which is created the year earlier or year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government and we’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations.
But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s, in the 1950s, to be able to take over the world through diplomacy, through duplicity. But the problem with diplomacy, through duplicity, plausible deniability, is the core doctrine that governs the agency which controls all of our major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests.
Because because you lie to the outside world, you need to also lie to your own citizens to keep the outside from finding out. So while the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies not just abroad, but at home.
Okay, now in 1948, when the founding fathers of the Intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were making. In 1948, they, Congress passed the Smith Act, because again, in 1948 is when all this was getting established. The CIA was brand new NSC ten who had just come out and Congress said, okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here.
We want to make sure that we don’t build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth. And I think many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened, during the Obama administration, which was this essential safeguard which had been with us since the moment this all was created in 1948, was repealed with quite little fanfare.
It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really, I think, only only discovered by the public after the damage had been done, that the Smith was modernized. To get rid of that restriction, it was effectively amended. And, so the headline here is U.S. repeals propaganda ban spreads, government made made news to Americans for decades a this anti propaganda law prevented the US government’s mammoth broadcasting arm, I should say arms from delivering program programing to American audiences and mammoth is not a big enough word after World War II to the world.
It actually at this exact time in 1948, the UN declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. It became against these new international norms and standards, international law. You cannot simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s. And so with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S transitioned to a soft power empire, which would be dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, Democracy Promotion programs at the State Department, later U.S. aid and the whole swarm Army.
We’re about to meet. But even right out the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced. And so I have on screen Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, dozens of others. They were CIA, proprietary media. This is Frank Wisner. Frank Wisner was the spearhead of this early CIA media control apparatus.
The name comes from the Wurlitzer sort of piano like organ, because Wisner would brag that he could play in the international news as if it was a Wurlitzer. He could have any narrative carried in any country on Earth because of the vast sprawl of media control that this newly formed intelligence agency, which had was, was leveraging essentially the Office of War Information, Pentagon media networks created during World War Two to thousands of partnered media outlets on all six populated continents.
At that time, one third of CIA’s budget went just to funding media organizations, and today, that number is paralleled by the web of CIA cutouts that we’ll meet when we get to 1983 and beyond, and how this initial structure changed after the scandals of the 1970s. This is popularly called the Department of Dirty Tricks. This NSC tends to plausible deniability power to essentially play guard around the world.
This is their term department of dirty tricks. And just because it’s somewhat funny, you’ll see. This is, Max boot just a few years ago, calling for us to make a more robust department of dirty tricks. Why the United States needs to sabotage, undermine, expose its enemies. And you’ll see that this is a CIA story. CIA is underlined there on the second one.
But notice that it goes way beyond that. The dirty tricks. It’s the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the Central Intelligence Agency director, and the administrator of U.S. aid, the U.S. agency for International Development, to create political warfare career tracks and attract people who find political warfare rewarding and attractive. So one essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there’s a key distinction between the American homeland and the American empire.
We live in the American homeland, but the American empire is everywhere else. And today, even all the major U.S. national, U.S. domiciled corporations get the lion’s share of their markets, their revenues, their their their supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth. We are actually even though we are a big country, we pale in comparison to the globe.
And the issue is, is when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first, they run up against the Empire managers and therefore against the this this blob apparatus. We’re going to see, therefore, against the at the intelligence state. And what I have here is in this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire thing is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license.
It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department and all things. And we’re going to dive into the structure on that. You’ll see there at the bottom, this whole operation has to be answerable to the Secretary of State, who directs the whole in coordination. While covert political warfare must be controlled by the State Department, the direction should not physically be in the State Department.
This is more true when it’s realized that the considerable funds necessary for such an operation could not be concealed in the department’s budget, so they have to hide what they’re doing from the American people and from foreign countries, who if there was transparency about how our own taxpayer dollars were being spent, they would know that their countries are being targeted for overthrow.
So the State Department can’t conceal it. So we need this web of other government agencies, including the intelligence services, to park the money there. So again, the coordination of covert operations with overt conduct should be accomplished through the office of the Secretary of State and Undersecretary. And our proposal is that this tradition be revised to further American national interests.
So that is the linchpin of this, which is this concept of U.S. national interests. So now let’s go back in time to look at the origin of this. So this is the first meeting of Congress in 1789, when the first meeting of Congress happened, we established only three government agencies. Imagine a world without HUD. Imagine a world without the Department of Education or Labor.
At the founding moment of our first meeting of Congress, we established only three government agencies the Department of State to manage the affairs of state, to manage our our relations in the international community, the Department of Defense. And I’m going to asterix that for a second. And the Department of Treasury. So basically money, war and everything else that involves America’s posture, to the to the wider world.
Now, I put an asterisks next to the Department of Defense because it was not actually called the Department of Defense at the time. It was called the Department of War, and it kept that name for 150 years, until 1948, exactly when the CIA was created, exactly when the Smith Man Act came out, exactly when the UN Declaration on Human Rights forbade the military from taking over the world.
And so we simply did something cute and we said, okay, we are no longer the War Department. We are forward defending ourselves. We are we’re we’re about defense. Actually, but we’re just going to do the same things we were doing before. But we’re not allowed to say war anymore because that’s outlawed. I’m just if you want to see receipts on it, okay.
So let’s just speedrun what happened between 1789 and 1948 to establish the American empire? Because we started off as just, you know, this mainland, the homeland that we’re in. And today our reach is on is in every country and on every continent. There is a State Department regional desk, is an assistant secretary whose job is to make sure the right politician wins in every single country on earth.
So the Assistant Secretary for European Eurasian Affairs is going to have a portfolio of 15 different European countries. Every one of those countries has elections every one of those elections has a State Department preference. They will backchannel with all parties. One will be better for U.S. national interests, the other won’t. And that Assistant Secretary’s job is to influence the course of of of political events in that country to conduct organized political warfare using plausible deniability in order to achieve that outcome.
Sometimes they win, sometimes they don’t. But that is their job. But how do we get this empire? So in 1823, we declared the Monroe Doctrine. This was the year before that. The fledgling U.S. Navy was flying out to trip, you know, flying out to Tripoli. And there was a lot of competition with the Spanish and other colonial powers in the Western Hemisphere.
We told Europe, you stay out of of, the Western Hemisphere, we’ll stay out of Europe. And we began to take over the political ecosystems and the, the agriculture, the sugar, the natural resources of almost the entirety of Latin America and South America. These were the famous and the next image here, the famous banana wars, the pineapple wars, the guava wars.
It’s, it’s a funny moment in American history in the late 1800s when we were establishing what are now known as banana republics. These were U.S. private corporations, for profit corporations. Having financial interests in a region outside of our country where the U.S. War Department and State Department would descend on the territory, basically help overthrow that government, provide support, and that in that private corporation would essentially run the government, and it would run in a very dysfunctional way.
But it was protected. This the big business and big government were in league with each other in the sense that the big government had the had the U.S. military had U.S. diplomats had U.S. power projection into the regions, and the big corporations would profit from being able to exploit the resources, the labor. And that that is part of the reason that we had cheap, cheap food.
And this the same relationship is in Bigelow. That’s the reason we had cheap gas. It’s the reason you we’ll kind of come to this, but we may need this apparatus. But the fact is, is it was established very early in the American story, well before seven decades before the actual creation of the intelligence state, the intelligence state just grafted on to that relationship between the War Department, the State Department and private sector stakeholders.
So the next image here I have is remember the main this was in 1898. We, became an international empire when we won the Spanish-American War and not only took Cuba, but we took the Philippines, as well, and then suddenly had to control this, this wide ranging plot of of geography on planet Earth. The next image here is just the FBI.
The FBI was created in 1908. The Justice Department had been around for about 60 years before that. But the FBI was created in the run up to World War One, and its first serious operation was rounding up anti-war protesters to World War One and working to undermine their ability to use the US Postal Service and other means to get their messages out.
The FBI is one of our 17 intelligence agencies. So again, this preceded 1948. This preceded the CIA. We have 17 intelligence agencies. Only two of them face domestically. The other one besides the FBI, that’s domestic, is DHS, which of course was after 911. And then the the final image here I have of a sort of a essential history in the speedrun is, is simply Woodrow Wilson, because he is the sort of spiritual godfather of the, of the doctrine that organized political warfare would be grafted under because his mission to make the world safe for democracy allowed us to pull a very cute trick.
When the world transitioned from hard power to soft power is the primary means to run an empire, which was that you no longer had to have a national security threat to use the national security state, you could simply promote democracy. And and under the banner of promoting democracy, you could do the dirtiest of deeds. You could do demolition, sabotage, black propaganda.
You could work with the criminal underworld. Again, as I mentioned, in Italy and Iran and dozens of countries, you could, you could rig elections, you could stuff ballot boxes. But it’s all to promote democracy, even if there is no threat to the American people. And even if it only benefits a small coterie of financial and, and corporate stakeholders working with the U.S. State Department.
So what happened after 1948? There’s an image here on the left, which is just a list of of CIA regime change operations after Italy don’t need to blow it up on screen or anything. But essentially, the 85 countries that the CIA orchestrated coups in on the back of this Italy operation, that George Kennan and the rest of the State Department officials were so inspired by, they did, in fact, achieve the goal that they set out to, which was to broaden this to virtually every country, every country, continent and region on Earth, and to capacity build these networks whether we needed them or not.
50 of those, by the way, happened just during the Eisenhower administration between 19 in 1952, in 1960. Just write out right off, you know, right out the gate in the 1950s and by the early 1960s, this began to come home and caused the first real what led to the chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the way the intelligence state works, and this was the intelligence state was doing to the New Left at the time, what they are currently doing to the populist right.
The, there was this new faction within the Democrat Party that was not necessarily all limousine liberals. A lot of them were, anti-war protesters or they because of the Third World people’s movements popularity at the time. And, and a lot of the civil rights struggles and ethnic identity struggles that were happening at the time. Many people in the Democrat Party were positioning themselves both socially, politically and informationally aligned with countries that were being targeted by the Central Intelligence Agency.
It was being seen, it was seen as a right wing force because it was targeting socialist and communist governments primarily, actually just to sort of privatize the assets the state industries held. But the CIA began to do more and more the same things against the left than they’re doing against the populist right now. So just have a few images on screen.
Huge CIA operation reported in U.S against antiwar forces. The CIA was actually bribing the National Association of Students. They launched something called Operation Chaos, basically designed that permanently shaping the composition of the Democrat Party to purge this new but very popular populist leftist faction out. And tell me if that sounds familiar in terms of the intelligence not targeting George Bush or Mitt Romney or John McCain, it is only targeting one faction of the of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.
The next thing which I have here on screen is Co Intel Pro. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The Co Intel refers to counter intelligence, which is which is basically when when the FBI is dealing with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. Well, I’ll get to that a little bit more in a second.
Here. Now, the first thing that forced the the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and also culminated in what was called the the Church Committee hearing. Also, there’s a Pipe committee. Yeah. On the left here is Frank church. He was the Democrat senator who spearheaded those hearings.
It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight. There was no accountability. There was no hey, let me look at that. There’s no Gang of Eight. It was only, with the church committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to have, a select handful of members of the House be able to do oversight.
It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same. On the Senate side. And this is Frank church here on the left, holding up the famous heart attack gun, which was, in the CIA assassination guide and in their in their, research and development, they, were assassinating world leaders. They were assassinating political dissidents all over the world.
And they were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it in order to adhere to their government license, to plausible deniability. And so the heart attack gun was the. And there’s you can look this up on YouTube. It’s a fascinating congressional clip. This was done in open and open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying and explaining this heart attack gun, which was that it would be it would fire essentially a kind of dart, so that the cause of death, it would induce a heart attack so that the cause of death would look like it came from a heart attack rather than
a murder on the right here. This is Christopher Pyle. Christopher Pyle was one of the first people to to get this ball rolling. Not from the from the CIA side or from the U.S. Army at that time. He was a whistleblower who had provided very damning evidence that, in his words, any public meeting that happens in the United States with 20 or more people, the U.S. military wants to know what they’re talking about and and has active operations to survey and infiltrate any mass gathering of any political group.
Right, left mothers, knitting groups, religious groups. And he came forward with troves of documents around this that the U.S perceived that it was necessary that the U.S. military perceived that it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian class in order to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda.
So a basic, basic total usurpation of the concept that we have a democracy with a civilian run government at that time, people who are thought leaders in this targeted section of the Democrat Party became to be aware because of these disclosures that basically everything in the world around them was not real. Their media, their culture, their, their music, all of these things were actually being used as instruments of statecraft in, and in many cases against them directly.
So what I have here on the left is from the Senate Intelligence Committee notes from the from the church, a memo from the Church Committee hearing CIA’s use of journalists and clergy and intelligence operations. So, again, working with religious groups, the center picture is something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was a which was a giant network of CIA funded and directed cultural and and media institutions, primarily in Europe, but would come to extend effectively all over the world where the CIA, basically co-opted not just thought leaders in leading magazines, but also musicians, poets, they would even host musical events to attract people in dozens of countries.
And then, essentially use that as a way to get them aligned like a magnet with the U.S. State Department agenda. And very, very famous senior folks were involved in this, including many in spaces that you might not expect. Gloria Steinem, for example, the famous feminist was was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is at the time when, our, our State Department was beginning to project that as a means to, to win the Cold War by getting people in central and Eastern Europe to become, more feminist in order to, oppose and angry them up against the patriarchal, substructures of society in, in everywhere east of Germany.
And. Oh, no. Okay. Wait, wait, I, we we just get started. Okay. Oh, shoot. Okay. So 1980 19. Okay. All right, well, look on the left here is again, all of this involves lying to the American people. Even in the 1960s, this labyrinthian money laundering and hiding it from public accountability was already very robust. So. Okay, I’ll just I’ll speed run it further.
So basically what ends up happening the church committee pops off. Jimmy Carter wins in 1976, coasting off of this popular resentment against the intelligence state that they existed at that time. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state, and he conducted what was came to be called the Halloween massacre, where he fired 30% of the CIA operations division in a single night.
It dramatically cut the agency’s budget. And when and and there was this brief moment when there was actually accountability and a and a peel back of these plausibly deniable octopus yarn of, of operations against American people. But Ronald Reagan then came to power, and in 1983, he, embarked on this structural change to the way the intelligence state works in order to get back the powers that that the CIA had lost during the Jimmy Carter administration, including him signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for democracy, which is now today’s premiere CIA cut out.
But basically what happened was the CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals, and it diffused itself into a liaison role of a public facing network of publicly captured institutions. And we simply moved the intelligence state into the whole the society, the instruments of statecraft that we had capacity built previously. Okay, I guess, I’m fine.
So. Flash forward to to 2016 and then I’ll wrap as as our NGO sphere and university centers and media organizations and union groups and cultural groups, all, all developed. This favors a favors relationship. This this mutual. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll I’ll do what you want on this thing. And I’ll get a grant from the State Department or aid or the National Science Foundation.
As what we are up against here is actually this, this network, this, this blob, this, this congealed shape that where you have the intelligence state is actually serving the public facing functions of government. It is simply the CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and the Pentagon on national security grounds. And so when you see the CIA do something or the intelligence state, do something, understand that this is this is to serve a State Department official or a Pentagon official, were or the or the stakeholders around that.
It’s really not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department, and it does the dirty work. And maybe I’ll I’ll close with a, I guess our close with a Sopranos reference since my, my mother and father here. And I think the best way I understand it is if you’re familiar, Tony Soprano is running the you guys running this mafia outlet, the, outfit in new Jersey.
And he’s got these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable, dirty work so that it doesn’t. It’s not doesn’t the FBI, who’s tracing Tony Soprano’s calls? Can’t say that Tony did it. And so there’s this character, Furio. Who is this? The sort of brawn. And he breaks into people’s homes and beats them up and undermines their democracy, if you will.
And it’s very natural to look at that if you are in that home and it is your democracy being destroyed, is your friends and family being arrest and say, you know, the CIA did that. Look, I’m sorry, you know, Furio did that, but they are what’s, what’s gone rogue is actually something much deeper than just the intelligence state.
It’s it’s actually the entrenched forces in diplomacy and in, in, in defense that the CIA is tasked with to do this dirty work. So I’ll, I guess I’ll stop there for questions or if we have time for Q&A.
