S. Eugene Poteat, President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers
(AFIO) is no fool. A senior CIA official for thirty years, now retired, Poteat
was a scientific intelligence officer and program manager for special
reconnaissance systems for the U-2, SR-71, and other reconnaissance vehicles.
He received the CIA’s Medal of Merit and the NRO’s Meritorious Civilian Award.

As I say, no fool.

So I did a double take when I read Poteat’s words in the current edition of
the Intelligencer, a Journal of U. S. Intelligence Studies. “Thirty years
ago,” he wrote, “the Church and Pike Committees bought into the KGB perception
management campaigns to discredit American intelligence and proceeded to limit
the activities of the intelligence community ...”

Since the Church and Pike Committee hearings are probably not covered in high
school history courses, let me remind younger readers that these were
congressional committees convened to investigate egregious excesses by an
intelligence community that had come to act with little or no external
accountability.

The agency’s excesses included assassinations, coups d’etats, revolutionary
and counter-revolutionary movements, covert action to influence the elections
of friends and enemies alike, mind control experiments that sometimes led to
murder, and other behaviors that caused lots of reasonable people to question
the agency’s unlimited freedom to act without transparency or accountability.
The excesses were not about how they gathered intelligence so policies could
be set. The excesses were about policies devised and executed in a black box.

Poteat is saying that citizens concerned with that unrestrained behavior were
deceived by the KGB.

So let me get my confession on the record:  I was a victim of the KGB.

I naively bought into the notion that the wholesale use of journalists and
media executives by the CIA, for example, written about by Carl Bernstein in
Rolling Stone, was an impediment to a free press. I uncritically accepted the
notion that administering chemicals, electric shocks, and prolonged isolation
illegally to unwitting victims to test theories of behavior modification
suggested that an agency that purportedly existed to “gather intelligence” was
coloring a little outside the lines.

In the current climate of free-floating anxiety I would guess that Poteat’s
revisionist characterization sounds right to a lot of people. Recent polls
indicate that nearly half of those questioned believe the Bill of Rights
should not extend to Moslems and a similar number think “the Bill of Rights
goes too far.” It’s a no-brainer to substitute “terrorist dupe” for “Communist
dupe” to designate people who object to egregious violations of civil and
human rights in the name of fighting terror.

That’s the American mind-set in 2005. But it wasn’t always so. How did we get
here?

During times of crisis or war, when liberties and constitutional rights come
into conflict with the necessities of self-defense, it’s the liberties and
rights that go. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War
and Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during World War
2.

Those wars, however, were clearly defined wars and contrasted with periods
of “peace.”

That distinction no longer applies. War and peace are indistinguishable. We
live in a permanent state of war or preparation for war. As Orwell wrote, war
is peace. Peace is war.

The wartime environment of World War 2 morphed seamlessly into a Cold War
which lasted for 45 years. Levels of secrecy necessary during wartime ("loose
lips sink ships") were applied to a world no longer defined as Axis vs. Allies
but as Communists vs. Free World. The Free World included American allies
whose governments ranged from democratic to fascist. Alignment with American
objectives was more important than ideology or behavior and we sponsored,
trained, and supported death squads and counter-revolutionaries, training our
proxies in assassination, torture, and sabotage.

That’s not speculation. That’s historical fact.

Several generations have now grown up in a bifurcated environment: above the
line, information and media are manipulated to create a consensus, a
reasonably coherent if fabricated narrative, for a population lacking access
to the important facts. Below the line a variety of alternative
interpretations are available in a compartmentalized way on a need-to-know
basis and at various levels of clearance. We accept that multiple streams of
alternative realities flow in layers and consider their flagrant
contradictions a necessary consequence of national security. I’m not referring
simply to secrecy and secrets but to the wholesale creation of varieties of
historical narrative and their dissemination to serve varying interests. This
is Babel squared, Babel at the level of conceptual thought, civil discourse
and systems of belief, not merely different languages.

In addition, after World War 2 nuclear weapons made it impossible to fight a
war to "total destruction" because of the "blowback" of assured mutual
destruction. Wars like Korea or Viet Nam were fought within limits lest the
confrontation escalate. So covert warfare waged by the CIA and other
intelligence units became a preferred means of executing strategy. The CIA
from the beginning was a covert military branch that helped to overthrow
designated enemies or establish preferred governments in Iran, Greece, Italy,
Guatemala, the Philippines, all early on. There were, of course, more to come.

A national security state predicated on a culture of secrecy, funded
clandestinely and unaccountable to an electorate, inevitably evolved. During
times of “democratic excesses” in the sixties, as the Bilderberg Conference
called social action on behalf of greater equality and justice, a strategy of
managing perception indeed evolved, a private and public partnership that
continues to this day. Eisenhower called it the “military-industrial complex”
when he left office and warned of its growing power.

He had no idea. What Ike feared, a tiny alien bursting out of the gut of the
Cold War, is nothing compared to the monster with which we live.

In those bygone days, the FBI and CIA may not have officially shared
information but they shared parallel strategies and they shared operational
resources in the trenches where everything is murky. Distinctions between
foreign and domestic enemies blurred. The FBI engaged in illegal surveillance
and covert action like COINTELPRO which spied on domestic groups and destroyed
political opponents through blackmail and other illegal means. Foreign
entities that opposed our will were either Communists or allied with
Communists; domestic activists who fought for change were ... well, either
Communists or allied with Communists.

It logically follows that citizens protesting the excesses of the CIA were not
patriots who cared about the Constitution; they were victims of disinformation
by the KGB.

After the Church and Pike Committees convened, congressional oversight of the
intelligence community was allegedly tightened but oversight quickly evolved
into partnership, protecting secrecy, mitigating transparency and
accountability, and subverting any effort to restore a semblance of checks and
balances. Nobody watches the watchers and the watchers and their partners
profit.

Because the terrorist threat is defined vaguely, the conditions that justified
an anti-Communist national security state are now used to justify an anti-
terrorist national security state. Appropriate responses to a nebulous enemy
range from invading nations unilaterally to gloves-off covert warfare that
includes assassination and torture, The “war on drugs” in the nineties failed
as a justification for the military machine so once terrorism was substituted
for Communism it was dropped from propagandistic rhetoric, except when narco-
terrorism is evoked as a subset of the terrorist threat.  The war on drugs
is “really,” we all know now, part of the war on terror.

People in power and authority, fused with the instruments of that power and
authority, leveraging mass media concentrated in a dozen hands as a means of
social control, can make terrorists of us all. It is simply a matter of naming
and shaming, defining those who protest illegal and unconstitutional action as
aiding or abetting terrorism or being terrorists themselves.

Unlike the seventies, however, new technologies serve as force multipliers for
both state and non-state actors and amplify the power of the authorities to an
exponential degree. The media filter continues to determine what is real for
the American public and masks much of what happens away from our shores. As a
CIA report said in October,1991:

The PAO (Public Affairs Office) [of the CIA] has relationships with reporters
from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network ... this
has helped turn some "intelligence failure" stories into "intelligence
success" stories, and it has contributed to ... countless others. In many
instances we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap
stories.

I said in a recent interview with the Linux Journal, "The convergence of
enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach, combined
with a sense of urgency about doing counter-terror and a clear mandate from
the White House to do everything possible and seek forgiveness afterward
rather than permission in advance has created a dire but often invisible set
of threatening conditions.”

The enemy can be a splash of rhetoric on a blank page,  a cloud of power
obscuring morphing borders, anyone who colors outside the lines of a global
military and economic network. The enemy must have significant organizational
power; individuals and groups that are fragmented, weak or diffused are not a
real threat. As during the Cold War, alignment distinguishes friend from foe,
not ideology or behavior.

When assassination like outsourced torture is just another tool and trans-
global supra-national entities and new technologies obliterate meaningful
distinctions between foreign and domestic, then inevitably assassination will
be used at home too when other strategies fail because “home” is not a place,
home is where the heart is, wherever we find ourselves with a commitment, an
investment, an interest. Although a presidential directive (PD 12333)
officially prohibits assassination, it remained a viable option before 9/11
when, a reliable source tells me, the elimination of Saddam Hussein was
officially authorized.

In the seventies, civil rights activists were disrupted, undermined and
assassinated because they threatened the civil order with social revolution.
Kennedy, Kennedy, King, Medgar Evers and Malcolm X all went down. The
leadership of the viable left was decimated and the center shifted radically
to the right, where it remains today.

Who on the right was assassinated? No one. After the leadership of the left
was slaughtered, how did the world tilt? To the right. Yet even to suggest a
pattern to those assassinations instead of believing them a collection of
random acts as decreed by the thought police gets one branded a “conspiracy
theorist,” a “fringe thinker,” or worse. It is not reaching a conclusion about
conspiracy that gets one branded—merely raising the question in the face of
suggestive evidence is sufficient.

COINTELPRO was not executed in isolation. J. Edgar Hoover’s hatred of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and his rabid campaign to destroy him using FBI resources
made Hoover at the least complicit in creating conditions that resulted in
King’s murder.

Enabling communication and information technologies are today linked and mined
to a degree unimaginable in the seventies. We don’t even have to intercept it
all; we can make the information come to us. But those technologies are the
platform of social control, not its ultimate end. They allow those in
partnership with the state to focus their intentions more efficiently and at
the same time conceal the lethality of their strategies.

A man like Gene Poteat certainly understands the consequences of habitual
lying. He once told me how, as a radar expert at CIA, he was asked by John
McCone, then CIA Director, to respond to Lyndon Johnson’s request for
evaluation of an alleged attack in the Tonkin Gulf on American ships by North
Vietnam. Poteat told McCone they could give him an answer in 48 hours but
Johnson insisted on the next morning. Poteat said that was impossible. The
next morning, without corroborating evidence, Johnson announced the attack and
in effect declared war on North Vietnam. Subsequent analysis indicated that no
attack took place.

Poteat asked McCone why Johnson did not let them do their job. “We could have
discovered the truth,” he said.

Because the president didn’t want the truth, McCone said. He wanted to go to
war.

So Poteat knows that secret action in a context that lacks accountability can
lead to millions of deaths ­ without the KGB even getting involved.

In our time, the designated enemy is anyone who raises questions about the
American Empire ­ its dynamics, its behaviors, its actions ­ and whose speech
is likely to become actionable. Freedom of speech is a genius-level bleeder
valve, restoring equilibrium to the body politic like a thermostat, tolerated
so long as it is not a threat to those in power. If speech threatens to move
people to action, however, people get whacked, both metaphorically and
literally. In the 21st century, neutralization has a thousand means at its
disposable.

Am I merely a victim of the KGB in the seventies and a global Islamist cabal
today? I don’t think so. I fear I am a real victim, but of a state that has
become its own god. And we are all victims of campaigns of disinformation.

“In many parts of the world,” Poteat concludes, “there is still a serious
struggle to secure democracy and the rights of man.”

Amen, brother. Amen. But you seem unaware of the irony of those words in a
world gone liquid and difficult to challenge, one in which it takes energy not
to dismiss the cascading consequences of decades of covert extra-legal action,
unilateral expansion, and empire building as if the world has no moral order,
justice is one thing eating another, and words mean exclusively what we say
they mean.

Those consequences in a moebius strip world where everything folds back into
our own lives are not just “out there” but “in here,” in our souls, where the
corrosive acid of self-deceit challenges the American belief that we are good
or better or different. The cognitive dissonance increases and all the sex,
scandals, and media events in the world may not be sufficient to distract the
masses forever.

If our real history in all its many layers reveals who we are and how the
world works in its ultimate reaches, let’s just say so. Then we can speak to
ourselves as well as others with authenticity and integrity. We can stop
pretending.

Yet ... after such knowledge, what forgiveness? And what will we bequeath to
our children if not a receipt for deceit, a model of habitual lying and might
making right, democracy nothing but a cover story for doing what we do ...
because we can?

****************************** *********************
Islands in the Clickstream is an intermittent column written
by Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions of
technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives. Comments welcome.

Richard Thieme is an author and professional speaker focused on effective
responses to technology-driven change, creativity, and strategies for living
on the edges of a rapidly changing world.  A collection of his work, Islands
in the Clickstream, was published by Syngress Publishing in 2004.

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