Dismantling the Empire

The American people may not know it, but they have some severe problems with one of their official governmental entities, the Central Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy surrounding its activities and the lack of cost accounting on how it spends the money covertly appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is impossible for citizens to know what the CIA’s approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their share of the yearly $44 to $48 billion or more spent on “intelligence.” This inability to account for anything at the CIA is, however, only one problem with the agency, and hardly the most serious one either.

There have been two criminal trials in Italy and Germany against several dozen CIA officials for felonies committed in those countries, including kidnapping people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy, illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt and Jordan for torture, and causing them to “disappear” into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the United States without any form of due process of law.^*

The possibility that CIA funds were simply being ripped off by insiders was also acute. The CIA’s former number three official, its executive director and chief procurement officer, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, was indicted in San Diego for corruptly funneling contracts for water, air services, and armored vehicles to a lifelong friend and defense contractor, Brent Wilkes, who was unqualified to perform the services being sought. In return, Wilkes treated Foggo to thousands of dollars’ worth of vacation trips and dinners, and promised him a top job at his company when he retired from the CIA.^**

Thirty years ago, in a futile attempt to provide some check on endemic misbehavior by the CIA, the administration of Gerald Ford created the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. It was to be a civilian watchdog over the agency. A 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan made the board permanent and gave it the mission of identifying CIA violations of the law (while keeping them secret in order not to endanger national security). Through five previous administrations, members of the board—all civilians not employed by the government—actively reported on and investigated some of the CIA’s most secret operations that seemed to breach legal limits.

However, on July 15, 2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that for the first five and a half years of the Bush administration, the Intelligence Oversight Board did nothing—no investigations, no reports, no questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no reason to inquire into the interrogation methods agency operatives employed at secret prisons, or the transfer of captives to countries that use torture, or domestic wiretapping not warranted by a federal court.

Who were the members of this nonoversight board of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys? The board was led by former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It included Don Evans, a former commerce secretary and friend of the president, former admiral David Jeremiah, and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse. The only thing they accomplished was to express their contempt for a legal order by a former president of the United States.

Corrupt and undemocratic practices by the CIA have prevailed since it was created in 1947. However, as citizens, we have now, for the first time, been given a striking range of critical information necessary to understand how this situation came about and why it has been impossible to remedy. We have a long, richly documented history of the CIA from its post–World War II origins to its failure to supply even the most elementary information about Iraq before the 2003 invasion of that country.

DECLASSIFIED CIA RECORDS

Tim Weiner’s book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is important for many reasons, but certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the possibility that journalism can actually help citizens perform elementary oversight on our government. Until Weiner’s magnificent effort, I would have agreed with Seymour Hersh that in the current crisis of American governance and foreign policy, the failure of the press has been almost complete. Our journalists have generally not even tried to penetrate the layers of secrecy that the executive branch throws up to ward off scrutiny of its often illegal and incompetent activities. This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that documents its very important assertions in a way that goes well beyond asking readers merely to trust the reporter.