The Not Quite Secret History

March 15, 2018 9:56 AM

“I don’t think Americans have trouble simultaneously believing that stories of the CIA assassinating people are mostly “crazy,” and that they absolutely happened. What emerges from the contradiction is naïveté coated in a candy shell of cynicism, in the form of a trivia game called “Did you know the CIA _____?” Did you know the CIA killed Mossadegh? Did you know they killed Lumumba? Did you know the CIA killed Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Allende? Did you know they made a fake porn movie with a Sukarno lookalike, and they had to take out Noriega because he still had his CIA paystubs in a box in his closet? There’s a whole variant just about Fidel Castro. Some of these stories are urban legends, most are fundamentally true, and yet as individual tidbits they lack a total context. If cold war is the name for the third world war that didn’t happen, what’s the name for what did?” Did you know the CIA _____? (N+1)
posted by The Whelk (17 comments total)

"a wire tainted with cancer" ... ?

Nothing about this post, nor the short bit of the article I read, even remotely makes sense to me.

Maybe I just need more coffee or something.
posted by Grither at 10:10 AM on March 15, 2018

And what's the Culinary Institute of America got to do with it all??
posted by Grither at 10:14 AM on March 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

seemed like a really straightforward accounting of how the CIA spins a bunch of rumors to cover for the creepy shit they actually do and how that allows them to avoid being accountable to the federal republicanism under which we operate as a society, Grither
posted by runt at 10:28 AM on March 15, 2018 [9 favorites]

I really liked this one for pointing out the common ideological move of first saying that something is totally untrue, wildly unlikely, etc etc and then, after it's been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, moving on to "well of course, what did you expect".

IIRC from reading it last week, the article spends a lot of time talking about how the public discourse about CIA activities shifts readily from "of course the CIA would never [do a thing] that would be immoral and bananas!!!" to "well, actually, the CIA [did the thing, or something very similar], what do you expect, they're the CIA, and besides it was necessary, don't be naive".

There's never a middle point where they say, "well, yes, the CIA did this and maybe there should be some accountability because it was in fact immoral and bananas", basically.

It's a pretty common intellectual move, IME more on the right than the left but not actually unique to the right.

Another piece with this article is to point out that in Stage 1, the "that's bananas!" stage, at least some people know they're lying. Useful idiots may in fact believe that the CIA would never destabilize a legitimate regime even if that regime isn't popular with US corporations (or whatever) but at least some of the people saying that know it's a lie.
posted by Frowner at 10:28 AM on March 15, 2018 [22 favorites]

It is particularly interesting in the current context where Putin's actions are presented as a novel postmodern strategy of deliberately sowing confusion that results in a response of paralysis when it is possibly just cold war turnabout.
posted by srboisvert at 10:44 AM on March 15, 2018 [11 favorites]

Nothing about this post, nor the short bit of the article I read, even remotely makes sense to me.
Best as I can tell, they are saying the CIA provided automatic weapons to arm gunmen who then shot up Bob Marley's house, so (transitively) they are saying the CIA shot up Bob Marley's house. Fair enough.

one of the men using two (automatic rifles) at the same time
These guys definitely watched movies as research before their hit.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:48 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I once knew an intelligence contractor who got started in the days before most of the work became electronic.
They told me about a pretty common damage-control tactic when an op's security got blown and there was no way to stop it going public: intentionally leak it to the tabloids before the real news could break the story. Once the Enquirer or Weekly World News printed a story, no mainstream paper would touch it.

I've often thought that the conspiracy theory "community" is the best possible cover that the government has for their despicable shit. How can the victims of ops like MK-Ultra, the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment, various weird COINTELPRO-type operations etc. get legal, psychological, medical redress when the moment they start talking about what happened they are already written off (or literally diagnosed) as paranoid schizophrenics?

Imagine if some high-ranking CIA person retired and went public about the JFK assassination: "I organized the whole op, these are the names of the other people involved, here are several crates of documents proving everything, here are a bunch of photographs, etc." Nobody would listen! They'd have their sect of conspiracy folks who listened, but even OTHER CONSPIRACY THEORISTS would write it off as bunk because it contradicted whatever pet theory they have. People often say that conspiracy theories are impossible because the government is terrible at keeping secrets. But they don't have to keep their most incredible abuses secret, because if they're outrageous enough, people write you off as a UFO nut for even talking about them!

The biggest conspiracy US intelligence ever pulled off is making conspiracy theorists complicit in their crimes.
posted by Krawczak at 11:35 AM on March 15, 2018 [31 favorites]

Fantastic article!

In a recent segment, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited former CIA director James Woolsey to talk about Russian intervention in the American election. After chatting about China and Russia’s comparative cyber capabilities, Ingraham goes off script: “Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Woolsey answers quickly: “Oh, probably, but it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid communists taking over. For example, in Europe, in ’47, ’48,’49 . . . the Greeks and the Italians . . . we, the CIA . . . ” Ingraham cuts him off, “We don’t do that now though?” She is ready to deny it to herself and the audience, but here Woolsey makes a horrible, inane sound with his mouth. The closest analog I can think of is the sound you make when you’re playing with a toddler and you pretend to eat a piece of plastic watermelon, something like: “Myum myum myum myum.” He and Ingraham both burst into laughter. “Only for a very good cause. In the interests of democracy,” he chuckles. In the late ‘40s, rigged Greek elections triggered a civil war in which over 150,000 people died. It is worth noting that Woolsey is a lifelong Democrat, while Ingraham gave a Nazi salute from the podium at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

The author's criticism of Morris's recent work, Wormwood and Fog of War, is interesting. Maybe too dismissive though.
posted by Chuckles at 11:39 AM on March 15, 2018 [12 favorites]

Imagine if some high-ranking CIA person retired and went public about the JFK assassination: "I organized the whole op, these are the names of the other people involved, here are several crates of documents proving everything, here are a bunch of photographs, etc." Nobody would listen!

That seems like magical thinking. The thing that conspiracies lack is legitimate proof. I'm not sure you can declare that no-one would believe while also throwing out " MK-Ultra, the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment" instead of nonsense like weather and mind control. Facts still matter.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:19 PM on March 15, 2018 [6 favorites]

Exactly, The_Vegetables. Filtering out everything is a problem, but so is completely turning off the filter. I unfortunately knew people in the early 2000s who went down that road, where reading about actually proven activities like MK-ULTRA led them to conclude that attempts to label anything as a "conspiracy" was just counter-intelligence FUD and so of course 9/11 was an inside job.

But they don't have to keep their most incredible abuses secret, because if they're outrageous enough, people write you off as a UFO nut for even talking about them!

As they should, without evidence.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:51 PM on March 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

I was using "nobody" in a hyperbolic, figurative sense, as is made clear by my subsequent sentence. The point I'm making is that your average person on the street, upon being told about things like MK-ULTRA or Tuskeegee, even with cited sources, is likely to dismiss them as "conspiracy theories" and ignore their sources as suspect.

To this day, surviving victims of MK-ULTRA have difficulty getting the psychiatric care that they need -- let alone emotional support from other people in their lives -- because the truth of their actual history sounds like the symptoms of a stigmatized illness.

I want to make it clear that I am not advocating uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories, I am BLAMING conspiracy theorists' irresponsible advocacy of baseless claims for putting enough noise into the system that "reasonable" people don't pay attention to news of the most egregious abuses.
posted by Krawczak at 1:06 PM on March 15, 2018 [8 favorites]

As they should, without evidence.
This sounds a little glib considering intelligence agencies' propensity to literally destroy and obscure the evidence of their operations, as well as conspiracy theorists' tendency to OVER cite. Any serious conspiracy nut can overwhelm any doubter with documents, links, testimonies, photographs, people who claim insider knowledge, etc. as "evidence" of their claims. But if you're suspicious of their claims prima facie, you're not going to waste your time evaluating that evidence. Lord knows I don't.
There isn't a clean "has evidence/doesn't have evidence" binary in these matters, and that confusion is actively fostered by intelligence agencies and their eager conspiracy theorist dupes to limit the penetration of real evidence into public discourse.
posted by Krawczak at 1:14 PM on March 15, 2018 [7 favorites]

And this conclusion seems itself completely naive:

If a million Americans saw that story reenacted in its full relevant context (which is how James, who was born in Jamaica and lives in the US, writes it), it could change the way this nation understands its history, its present, and maybe even its future.

And perhaps once that dam is broken, more American writers and filmmakers will take up what is among the most important tasks available to them: to rewrite the history of the 20th century before the ink is done drying and the stories disappear, before every copy of the December 1977 issue of Penthouse in which “Murder as Usual” appears crumbles to dust. The Woolsey/Ingraham dialectic of naivete and cynicism about the CIA is premised on Americans being unwilling to learn the gruesome, ludicrous web of specifics through which planetary Americanism has really played out.

There seems to be this bedrock belief on the left that if only people could be shown The Truth, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would change. I strongly suspect that what would happen is what has happened in the past over and over again: the predictable forces on the left would scream in outrage, the predictable forces on the right would shrug their shoulders or even applaud what happened. I personally know people who already do the latter.

This has happened before, even. In the 70s the Church Committee uncovered many of the CIA's abuses up to that point, some of which this very article discusses. Its reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. What happened? The committee was roundly denounced by conservatives and led to some changes which were swiftly undone or ignored by the Reagan administration. America certainly wasn't shocked into reevaluating itself or its intelligence agencies then, and there's even less reason to believe it would be now.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:17 PM on March 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

"There is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy, between singling out those conspiratorial acts that do on occasion occur and weaving a vast fabric of social explanation out of nothing but skeins of evil plots." (Richard Hofstadter)

To me, this article crosses that line. "The lack of a smoking gun for any particular accusation shouldn’t be a stumbling block." "In isolation each individual claim sounds crazy. The circumstantial evidence, however, is harder to dismiss." What is this if not, in Hofstadter's words, weaving together skeins of evil plots into a vast fabric of explanation?

Notice how the article fails to organise its evidence into any sort of historical timeline. Instead, we have: "the second half of the 20th century", "seventy years of world history", "the second half of the 20th century". Why does this matter? Well, for a better sense of history, and a sense of why it matters now, try Clive Stafford Smith's 'Kill Lists', from last June:

The CIA’s dabbling in assassination caused so many problems that, in 1975, a Church Committee Report declared assassination “incompatible with American principle, international order and morality”. Among the reasons to reject the practice, the Report identified the danger of political instability following a leader’s death; the inability of a democratic government to ensure that such covert activities remain secret; and the inevitable fact that the use of assassination would invite reciprocal or retaliatory action against American leaders. One result was Executive Order 11905, signed by President Gerald Ford on February 18, 1976, which officially banned political assassinations. Subsequently, between 1978 and 1981, President Jimmy Carter and then President Ronald Reagan broadened the prohibition: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination”.

The gradual evolution of the rule against assassination came to a head at almost the same time as the 1984 Convention Against Torture; both principles would be cast aside after 9/11 without debate. Naturally, since bad cases make for unwise practices, the US began by trying to target Osama bin Laden, who was seen as responsible for the outrages in New York and Washington. Jane Mayer, in her article “The Predator War” published in the New Yorker in 2009, describes how, in February 2002, “along the mountainous eastern border of Afghanistan, a Predator reportedly followed and killed three suspicious Afghans, including a tall man in robes who was thought to be bin Laden. The victims turned out to be innocent villagers, gathering scrap metal”. Thus began America’s unravelling of the law.

Disregarding this timeline is, effectively, to say "it's always been like this". Not only is this bad history, it prevents us from seeing that there was ever any alternative. We desperately need to find that alternative. But retreating into conspiratorial thinking is not the way to do it.
posted by verstegan at 1:31 PM on March 15, 2018 [12 favorites]

"There is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy [...] Disregarding this timeline is, effectively, to say "it's always been like this".

an assumed point of the article is that the CIA is an institution that sees itself as outside of the rule of law. your example of the US military's ignorance and subversion of the same seems like more proof to a culture of casually dismissing the legal when you believe your illegal activities are practical and/or important to your mission. the same can provably be said about other law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the NSA, along with the long sordid history of many, many similar endeavors that are now declassified which led to human rights abuse
posted by runt at 1:41 PM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

I am one of those people who thinks conspiracy theorists belabor complex, mysterious, counterintuitive and labyrinthine plots while ignoring the mostly-inept and banal but nonetheless quite damaging actual conspiracies going on all around them.

FFS a bunch of people in the actual government right now are publicly conspiring to get rid of Dodd-Frank.

Also they misuse the word 'theory.'
posted by aspersioncast at 5:06 AM on March 16, 2018 [5 favorites]

I've often thought that the conspiracy theory "community" is the best possible cover that the government has for their despicable shit.

I think about this a lot. What separates what I consider to be crazy conspiracy theory from what I consider to be true? I have a friend who got politicized via participating in Occupy (cool!), and from there slid into a weird, often right-wing conspiracy place where now she frequently posts Holocaust denialism stuff, accusations of school shootings being false flag operations, chem-trails stuff, government poisoning the water stuff (really Not Cool). And I don't believe any of that stuff; I think she's gone down a bad place and I worry about her mental health.

But then I turn around and I do believe the CIA basically deposed foreign leaders they deemed not aligned with the US's/US corporate interests, I believe the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment happened, I believe Japanese internment camps happened, I believe in plenty of things that could easily also seem out-there and conspiracy-minded. What makes me so sure about the things I believe and so dismissive of her beliefs? Some of it is the sourcing, sure, but some of it is the general feeling of "no way, that's too crazy" that I attach to some things and the general feeling of "Yeah, duh, don't be naive, of course the CIA orchestrated overthrows in Latin America" that I attach to others.

I do pay attention to sources and I have a (often kind of subconscious, unexamined) rubric for assessing how legit something is, but it's not like I'm exhaustively sourcing and researching everything I believe. There's a lot of shortcuts I take in creating my worldview. I'm always really interested in how I created my worldview and how my friend created hers. We ended up in really different places, but I don't think our ways of getting there are as definitively, starkly different as I'd like to believe.
posted by aka burlap at 7:20 AM on March 16, 2018 [2 favorites]