Who Runs The CIA-- And To What Effect?

Although more Americans say they believe the CIA lied to Pelosi than believe, like Newt Gingrich and the entire Hate Talk Radio/Fox TV propaganda effort, that Pelosi is making it up, the CIA itself has surprisingly positive ratings among Americans. According to Rasmussen, not the most trustworthy polling company, only 24% of Americans view the CIA unfavorably. You can count me in the 24%. I hope you read Dr. Kirk Murphy's brief look-back on the history of the CIA, a history that has informed that unfavorability rating among the 24% of Americans aware of how the organization does its job-- or, more to the point, decides what its job is.

I'll tell you how distrustful I am about the CIA. Even when they appeared to be working against the Bush Regime, I was aghast that they would be interfering in domestic politics. And that was interfering for good! Assassinations and coups, whether abroad (proven and admitted) or domestically (neatly covered up) should never be the realm of the CIA. We're a democracy and they have evolved-- like within 30 seconds of their founding-- into a supremely anti-democratic organization acting independently of any legitimate constitutional restraints.

Did they engineer Watergate to get rid of Nixon? My guess is that not even 24% of the 24% of Americans who distrust the CIA believe that. Russ Baker makes a good case, in his book Family of Secrets, that they did. He summarized some of his findings last year for Raw Story:

One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years-- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein-- made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.

Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?

Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects-- this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.

In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.

Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.

Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.

I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.

And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:

• Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.

• Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.

• Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)

• Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?

• After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.

• John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.

• There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?

• The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.

• A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued-- or in some cases, misleadingly edited-- by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew-- and of how culpable he was.

• Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush-- and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.

• Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.

• Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.

In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.

This morning my friend Gort in Pennsylvania reminded me that I hadn't covered an important post by Marcy Wheeler at FDL. What both are trying to get out is that Nancy Pelosi is hardly the only member of Congress who the CIA routinely lies to. While the clownish GOP can think of nothing beyond exploiting anything they can find to exploit to build up their wrecked image-- and is now clamoring for an investigation... of Pelosi!-- many government officials are coming forward and talking about how the CIA has lied and manipulated members of Congress. The posts linked above from Gort and Marcy are about how the CIA persuaded conservative Democrat Paul Kanjorski to support an attack on Iraq by showing him doctored photos taken in Arizona that they claimed were of drones in Iraq that could be used to destroy American cities. John Boehner, who has been leading the Republican Party exploitation efforts, inadvertently admited that the CIA also lied to the ranking Repug on the Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, a dedicated CIA-apologist and shill. Arlen Specter brought up the CIA's "bad record" of honesty when he came to Pelosi's defense this week. And not even ex-CIA chief and GOP hack, Porter Goss, will give a straight answer about the CIA's meeting with Pelosi (which he was also at).

There, I got through a whole post on the CIA without once mentioning they also killed JFK or infected thousands of Cubans with swine flu. It sure would be nice if someone talked about scrapping the whole outfit and starting over again fresh. It sure won't be the Republicans. Now that the GOP is on a partisan jihad to smear Pelosi, they are ignoring their own experiences with the spy agency. The other day Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party's biggest hypocrite-- think about that scale-- demanded Pelosi step down. He seems to have forgotten what he said about the CIA and their work, in a far rght magazine, Human Events. “[The National Intelligence Estimate] is so professionally unworthy, so intellectually indefensible and so fundamentally misleading that it is damaging to our national security.”

The House overwhelmingly defeated a resolution by deceitful Mormon Representative Rob Bishop to launch a partisan witch-hunt against Nancy Pelosi. Bishop's hypocritical resolution failed 252-172. Only two Republicans were honest enough to vote "no," Ron Paul and Walter Jones. The rest couldn't wait to show their contempt for truth and democracy. Not even the worst or most craven Blue Dog joined them. California pipsqueak hack, Kevin McCarthy, a junior whip, stomped his feet and hissed, "It's not over," promising to interrupt House business in the future with this same kind of political stunt.

UPDATE: The Speeches Today

CNN, always the pathetic hucksters for hemorrhoid creams and shammies, billed it as "the dueling speeches." I started writing about it but then got a reaction from Senator Russ Feingold, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and decided to use his take instead:

The two speeches offered a stark and revealing contrast-- the president wants to protect the country while upholding and strengthening our time-tested constitutional principles, while the former vice president offered the same misleading scare tactics and flawed approach to national security that Americans repudiated in the last election.  I welcome the president’s emphasis on congressional oversight and the need for collaboration with Congress, for which the Bush Administration held such contempt.  The president’s remark on reforming the way the state secrets privilege is used also seems to indicate he is moving in the right direction.  And I am also pleased that the president echoed the same point I recently made regarding claims by the former vice president:  that I had seen nothing to indicate that the torture techniques authorized by the last administration were necessary or the most effective way to get information from detainees. 
 
The president has taken some important steps in his first four months.  He has banned torture, increased transparency, and focused on the crucial threat to our national security emanating from al Qaeda’s safe haven in Pakistan.  And he has pledged to close Guantanamo, which is being used as a recruiting tool by our enemies. But nobody expected the president would be able to undo the eight year assault on the rule of law by the last administration in just four months.  So I look forward to continuing to work with him to restore the rule of law and put in place policies that will keep America safe and reduce the threats to our country that have grown more challenging because of the missteps of the last administration.