Well, thanks everybody for being here. This is the final lecture in Brief History of the CIA. Been trying to do some deep state theory in a non-paranoid, non-schizophrenic, scholarly, sober kind of way, just looking at things that are fairly well established that we can understand about the ways that the Central Intelligence Agency and the intelligence community within the United States acted.
within the 20th century, especially we're looking at basically, like, Truman to… today we're gonna be looking at some events under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. that's about where I tap out. I'm… I feel like the 70s and the 80s are where I'm starting to, develop a deeper understanding. I've kind of, over the past year, been using the history of the CIA as a way to get into the history of the 20th century, because there's so many details, and there's a lot that I didn't understand. I kind of understood the broad arc of You know, World War I, World War II… Cold War, and then, you know, Clinton in the 90s, and then we have 9-11, and I have a little bit of a grasp of, kind of, 2010s that I lived through and was paying a little bit more attention to.
But there's so much detail in the 20th century and the CIA is actually a great way into the story because 1 it's interesting. But two, it touches every aspect of what was happening in the 20th century. So that's also what has made the seminar really difficult, made me feel like, man, like four lectures are not enough. This needs to be a much longer course.
But today, gonna be looking at… Carter and Reagan, specifically. up to basically the end of the Cold War in 1981. So, briefly, where we left off, we were looking at, We talked about Nixon. Nixon… Nixon ends up resigning. In the wake of Watergate, which we understand was a, as Peter Dale Scott calls it, a structural deep event, which is to say an event that involved The deep state actions that was heavily suppressed and that was surrounded by secrecy, by lies. It was basically conflict between the president and his central intelligence agency that ultimately ended up blowing back in Nixon's face.
Gerald Ford… Becomes the president, He was vice president at the time, and weirdly enough, Gerald Ford I found this out, looking into him more, was the only president who was never elected either as president or as vice president. So Nixon actually lost his vice president partway through his term and appointed Gerald Ford. So Gerald Ford wasn't even on the ticket when Nixon was elected, so that's a very interesting situation.
So, as, it was actually, after, you know. after William Colby leaves, in kind of the wake of the Watergate incident with Nixon, Vernon Walters is briefly the sort of acting director at the CIA. Before. Ford appoints George H. W. Bush to be the Director of Central Intelligence. So from 1976 to 1977, HW serves as DCI under Gerald Ford while he completes his term.
So we do actually have a president who was the Director of Central Intelligence as well for a year. When Jimmy Carter assumes the presidency in January of 1977, he has an acting director for a couple months before he appoints Admiral Stansfield Turner. And Turner serves for all of Carter's administration. Turner is a very interesting figure who came from outside of the intelligence community. He was an admiral in the Navy, and he actually ended up putting a bunch of Navy folks in charge at the CIA. But he… He was known very much for trying to move.
the CIA away from covert action and more towards, data collection and signals intelligence, because he was sort of reacting to, and Carter was too, to basically the insubordinate behavior of the CIA under the… under prior presidents. So actually Turner in October of 1977 does what's called the Halloween Massacre. He fires 800 employees in the clandestine services. So he downsizes the clandestine services significantly and he tries, he's working on trying to pivot the agency away from clandestine actions.
He's not, he's not successful at this. And in fact, this leads us into Probably one of the most important incidents that takes place under Carter. We'll look at Iran next in a moment, but I want to look at Afghanistan for a little bit. So. We're gonna look at Afghanistan and Iran as kind of two key events here during this period of Carter and Reagan, and the reason I picked these is because, one, we know quite a bit about them, but also because we are still living with these… with these problems that we created. So… As you're aware, we were at war in Afghanistan for 20 years, But there's a lot of interesting history be behind what went on in Afghanistan and the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan.
To kind of set things up for you. a… the Communist Party a Communist party in Afghanistan. undertakes a coup in 1978 and successfully establishes a communist government in Afghanistan. They sign a treaty of friendship with the USSR that same year. Immediately turmoil breaks out in Civil War. Breaks out, resisting this new communist regime.
This prompts the Soviets to start to build up troops in the country during 1979. So… What we've got is a communist regime in Afghanistan. That is now being opposed by basically rural Islamic communities in Afghanistan. So in the rural communities away from the capital Kabul, the Mujahideen, an anti-Soviet sort of group, begins to rise up and revolt. And the Mujahideen are, they're both anti-Soviet, but they're also fundamentalist Islamic. So, and although they're not necessarily totally aligned on their religious and ideological goals. They all share this fundamentalist Islam with a strong anti-imperialist bent to it.
The thing is that the Soviets. are concerned about is fundamentalist Islam at this time, because they don't want this ideology that's growing in the Middle East to start to penetrate their Soviet satellites in Central Asia. So you'll recall that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, these sort of countries are all a part of the Soviet Union at this time, and they are bordering So the Soviet Union borders on Afghanistan at this time.
And there's this huge threat of Islamic fundamentalism penetrating into, communist, which is essentially secular society. The… Iranian Revolution 1979 only makes this much clearer and even more of a pressing threat, and we'll look at that next, but basically, Soviets and, as well as the Saudis, who are Sunni Muslim, not Shia Muslim.
Shia Muslims tend to be in the, radical, you know, sort of Islamic extremist ideology, so Al-Qaeda is a Shia organization, whereas a lot of… whereas the Saudis are Sunni. So the Saudis have an interest in trying to suppress the spread of Shia Islam as well, both for religious and political reasons. And then next door in Pakistan, you've got And… a American-backed anti-Soviet dictator running Pakistan at this time, so… Afghanistan is quickly staging up to become this new proxy war between Western powers and the USSR, but with this added element of radical Islam mixed into the equation, which is sort of new. It's kind of unique in these interactions.
The CIA completely bungles this situation, like, they did not see the buildup coming from the CIA at all. Or the from the USSR at all. they… They actually told the President that the USSR would be extremely reticent to put troops into Afghanistan. They told… they told the president that a week before the USSR started putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan. So they completely misread and misnursed the situation. And throughout the year, as the Soviets built up troops within the country.
the CIA kept saying. It's not going to be a full scale invasion. We don't think that this build up is ahead of an invasion. And they were completely wrong. And they they never admitted they were wrong about this. They basically were misinforming the president, probably not maliciously. It was probably just a this was an intelligence failure on their this part. And it's on their part. And it's a.
It's a constant theme. For the next 30, 40 years is everything big that happens in the world. The CIA did not see it coming. Including this event. So… what happens once this, like, the Soviets build up, there's now this full-scale outbreak where the communist regime in Afghanistan is fighting these rural rebels, the Mujahideen, with the backing of Soviet troops on the ground in the country. This war goes on for almost 10 years.
And during this time, Admiral Turner launches what's called Operation Cyclone. Operation Cyclone was basically an operation to create a clandestine international network for funding, recruiting, arming, and training anti-Soviet Muslim rebels in Afghanistan. So America, the British, the Saudis, the Pakistanis, they're all working together.
To create this system where they're able to funnel money. to the two rebels, funnel them arms, they get them trained, and they're supporting their battle against the Soviets and the communist regime in Afghanistan. This entire time. this ends up being the most expensive covert operation in history. By the end of 1987, America was officially sending $680 million a year.
towards this network of Mujahideen, struggling against the Soviets. In Afghanistan. And there's actually a really interesting picture of these five Mujahideen sitting in the Oval Office with Ronald Reagan. It's super interesting picture. And. This… This is, you know, and it's not just, like, funneling money directly to them, it's about creating an entire network around them of, like.
There's arms dealers, there's people who are funneling the money, And we know that there's more money than this going on because, Peter Dale Scott gets into this in his book, American War Machine, but the very area where the rebels are most active is one of the highest producing Poppy regions in the world. So… what Tim Veener doesn't talk about very much in his Legacy of Ashes that Peter Dale Scott gets into is that actually a number of these leaders who are getting a lot of money and weapons are also basically drug lords.
They are financing their armies through selling heroin on the black market that they are growing in their fields, essentially. So, it's very likely that there was more money than this $680 million a year flowing through the system, but it was off the books, it was illegal, it's running through Swiss bank accounts, all of this kind of stuff.
So… So… The Soviets fully withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 after fighting. For a long time, they do successfully maintain, they do successfully stave off the rebels, but this is sort of viewed as the USSR's Vietnam. This is their equivalent, where they go in, they fight for 10 plus years, end up leaving. feeling defeated, having spent a bunch of money, and not having really achieved their goal of eradicating the… the, the rebel forces.
The civil war then continues after the Western powers have already evacuated, and ostensibly the CIA is said to have no longer been supporting the Mujahideen at this point. However, the Soviets continue to provide aid and support for the regime until the Soviet Union falls in December of 1991. That leaves the communist Afghan regime isolated, which triggers a second phase of the civil war.
And it's during this phase of the war that the Taliban comes to power. So, the Taliban, in 1996, successfully overthrew the communist regime that the Soviets had been backing since 1979. The Taliban are not identical with the Mujahideen. But they come from. the Mujahideen. So the Taliban are more ideologically cohesive and radical, whereas the Mujahideen was a little more diverse, and it was mainly united around anti-Soviet sentiment.
with, like, an Islamic interpretation to that, of, like, you know, there is still this martyrdom philosophy as well, but the Taliban is much more radical and cohesive, and they're looking to impose Islam as a political system in the country. And, They also benefited from all this money. We armed them, we trained them, and it was actually the Pakistanis who ended up backing the Taliban.
And helping them take Kabul. Some complicated history there. One of the drug lords that they were backing ended up not being able to take Kabul, so they basically switched to backing the Taliban instead, because they thought they'd be more successful. long story short, We created a massive network of shadow money. armed and trained rebels, who are Islamic radicals.
All in Afghanistan. And it's the Taliban, when they run the country, they create the milieu where Al Qaeda comes into existence. So they create, they're the ones who are running the country. And their, their radical Islam is what incubates terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. And that's basically what allows, Osama bin Laden to, be able to organize Al-Qaeda and carry out 9-11 successfully.
In short, we funded, armed, and trained a generation of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan who gave birth to the Taliban and subsequently Al-Qaeda. And then… After watching the Soviets waste a decade, 15,000 lives and $20 billion, we also decided to go into Afghanistan to fight the very problem we created. We ended up spending $2.3 trillion, lost 6,000 lives, and fought for 20 years, the longest war in American history.
And the Taliban are now in power again. They retook Kabul in 2021, and they've been consolidating their power ever since. In The Princess Bride, there's a piece of wisdom called, where, that goes, never get into a land war in Asia, and that axiom remains undefeated to this day. The Soviets got their butts kicked in Afghanistan because we were funding the other side, and then we created the problem that we went in to go take out, and we got our butts kicked too.
That all happened. First under Stansfield Turner and then under William Casey. with Ronald Reagan. And that is why we ended up in Afghanistan in the first half, in the first part of the 21st century. Peter Dale Scott tells the heroin drug connection as well, that I think is really interesting, where he basically sees Afghanistan as kind of a redo of the war in Laos, which was also where the CIA was using illegal drug money to fund an off-books war that never got congressional approval.
In order to fight, in order to use hill people to fight communists, it's like the parallels are fascinating. So, Afghanistan… 1979, is a significant year, but 1979 also has two other revolutions that will become very important for the Reagan administration. So… In 1979, we also get a revolution in Iran. And I want to talk about Iran, because we just signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran that's brought an end to the hostilities that have been going on since, shoot, was it the end of February or the end of March? I can't remember. It's been a couple months, but basically, we've been at war with Iran for the past couple months. We just signed And I think the general consensus is that we lost the war against Iran.
Truthfully, it doesn't, you know, America hasn't really won a war since, since World War II. Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait was probably our most successful military operation between World War II and then, but we basically haven't won a war since World War II. I mean, I guess you could… You could argue that we won Iraq in the sense that we executed Saddam Hussein, but we were the ones who set up Saddam Hussein in the first place, and we also didn't really effectively bring democracy to Iraq, and there weren't any.
weapons of mass destruction, so I'm gonna call it a loss. In 1979, we get the Islamic Revolution in Iran. If you'll recall from the lecture two weeks ago, it was under President Eisenhower and DCI Alan Dulles that we manufactured a coup against the democratically elected regime in Iran. Specifically, the Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh.
And we reinstated the pro-Western Shah, and that was in, I believe, 1953. So we reinstated the pro-Western Shah, basically, as our puppet. He scuttled the progressive reforms that were being pursued by Mosaddeq, and then he maintained favorable access for Western corporations to Iranian industry. For the next 25 years, we prop up and support the Shah.
And we maintain a super cozy relationship with him. The… the CIA office in Tehran is basically constantly in conversation with him, and we even directly trained his secret police unit, SAVAK. naturally, the people of Iran think that the CIA directly controls their country. And they're not completely wrong, but they aren't completely right either. We basically just have a lot of influence, but the Shah is essentially this kind of, like.
Nice guy face, who just keeps things under very tight order. Eventually, there's this Islamic cleric named Ruhollah Khamenei, who emerges as a popular and controversial figure. He preaches against the West and its control of the government. He's calling for revolt and martyrdom. He is a well-respected jurist in the Shia Islamic tradition. I mean, he becomes this kind of like… Mystical spiritual figurehead for the movement.
Unrest continues to build, there's a lot of, there's a lot of economic turmoil through the 1970s in Iran. It was actually a time of immense wealth. In, in Iran, but what that did was it caused a ton of inflation. the people didn't get to enjoy that wealth. A lot of it ended up going to the Shah and kind of his network and Iranian elites. And so what you have is massive inequality due to a huge economic boom in the 70s around oil and all these kinds of things.
In 1978, there begins a period of struggle where opposition groups of Islamic clerics, students, and workers engage in a long series of protests and are violently suppressed at the hands of the Shah and his secret police. I have a friend who studied this history closely in his PhD at UMich, so he knows a lot more about it than I do, especially the students' movement is what he was studying, but The situation was extremely tense and violent for a long time. There was various periods of martial law. There was acts of terrorism on both sides. The government would blame one group for terrorism that it carried out, that kind of thing.
There was a final attempt at a solution made in January of 79, where the Shah agrees to leave the country, but he cedes power to a new prime minister. Shapur Bhaktiyar. who basically tries to carry on the government in kind of a secular, pro-Western way without the Shah as the figurehead that everybody hates. Bakhtir invites Khamenei back to the country in February, because Khamenei actually left the country, and was living in Iraq for a long time.
Western forces basically pressured Iraq to ask him to leave, and he went to France and actually lived in Paris for a while, where he actually became very popular, and that provided a big platform for his views, and a lot of people became aware of him in the West. He gets invited back to the country, and basically the people rally around him, and this creates a situation where there's now sort of two competing governments. There's the people and basically like a private military, the Revolutionary Guard supporting Khomeini, and then there's the official government and the military.
A period of fighting ensues for about a month. With Khomeini's groups actually attacking military installations. And on February 11th, Bakhtiar's government cedes these military sites to the Revolutionary Guards, which clears the way for Khomeini to establish a new Islamic government. And that is the government that we went to war with just recently.
the… the government in Iran still sort of ostensibly has a parliament, but is essentially run by, a… a council of Islamic religious leaders who train at these elite seminaries in Qom, which is sort of a holy city in Iran. And… Khomeini is the first of these spiritual leaders who wields pretty near absolute power, both at, like, a religious and political level. There is diversity within the government, but my sense is that it has been Gradually purged out, especially after the, especially with how many people we've been killing.
in the past couple months through targeted strikes. I think the general consensus is that the Iranian government has gotten more radical over time, especially as we have attempted to, especially as we've attacked them. Okay. So. Basically, the timeline is that we do a… we… we effect a coup in the 50s. This creates civil unrest, which, which brings an even, which brings an even more radical government into power in Iran.
And this is the government that we have basically been sanctioning ever since, and recently we're at war with. Now, there's two other episodes relating to Iran that are interesting. One is related to Carter, and one is related to Reagan. The first that's related to Carter is the Iranian hostage situation. There's a pretty cool movie called Argo that dramatizes some of this. It's got, Ben Affleck in it, and it's essentially about We extracted some Hostages who managed to escape the embassy and hide out in the Canadian embassy, movie's pretty enjoyable, I recommend watching it if you're looking for kind of, like, a thriller that's got kind of a historical bent to it. But basically, November of 79, the year of the revolution.
A bunch of Muslim students storm the American embassy in Tehran and occupy the building and take 66 Americans hostage. And this event becomes one of the most significant moments for Carter's presidency. It hangs over the final year of his presidency, so… They're, it basically becomes a constant source of pain and frustration is Americans want to know when are we going to get these folks home.
52 of the hostages are not released until Reagan takes office on January 20th in 1981. So Carter pretty much fails to bring them home. However, the CIA is involved in this. There's basically the problem… The Reagan campaign working with the future DCI William Casey that Reagan is going to appoint. They essentially work through intermediaries to ensure that the hostages are not released until after Jimmy Carter has lost the 1980 election.
So this theory has some evidence to substantiate it, but has not been completely confirmed. It's called the October Surprise, if you want to do some more research into it. But there's strong indicators pointing in the direction that. the Reagan campaign was working with intelligence community at the time. to basically withhold the release of the hostages, and to prevent it, in order to make Jimmy Carter look even worse, and not to, like, help him right before the campaign… right before the election in November.
So Carter never successfully gets the Iranian hostages released. And there's definitely a deep state element that actually worked to scuttle Carter's election and help to bring Reagan into power. So, looking at 1979, there's a third revolution that's interesting, and that is the Communist Revolution in Nicaragua. So in 1979, there's the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and the Marxist-Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua with the Contras.
As a group rises up, an anti-Soviet group called the Contras. very similar to, sort of, these guerrilla movements in other countries, rises up to carry out acts of terrorism and engage in guerrilla warfare to oppose the Marxist The new Marxist government. Does Contras end up fighting from basically 79 until 90? And early on, the United States is funneling money and weapons to the Contras.
Until Congress actually passes an amendment in 1982 forbidding U.S. financial support for the Contras. Nonetheless, the CIA continues to provide funds and clandestine support for the Contras in Nicaragua, even though Congress has explicitly passed a law outlawing it. The thing is. The president himself who signed this law is also involved in trying to get money to the Contras.
Move… now move your mind's eye… to Beirut in Lebanon. There's this. There's this revolution in Nicaragua. And then things start to happen over in Beirut. And this is all happening under Reagan. In 1984 saw a string of high-profile kidnappings carried out by Hezbollah. And Hezbollah… In Lebanon at this time is being directly supported by this new radical Islamic government in Iran.
Which they are still today. Part of the MOU that we just signed with Iran was also that Israel would stop fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon. So there was multiple fronts to this war that just sort of came to a standstill. There's a string of high-profile kidnappings, including the CIA station chief Bill Buckley himself is kidnapped off the street.
Reagan and William Casey, the DCI under Reagan, are hell bent on getting these folks back, and their families are clamoring for the US to do something. So we've got, there was a Presbyterian minister who was abducted. A number of high profile Americans are just taken off the streets by Hezbollah. Enter the notorious Iranian swindler, Manicher Gorbanifar.
Now, Grabanifar is a past CIA intelligence asset and collaborator who had shown himself to be a notorious liar. He would undergo lie detector tests where he would fail every question except his name and nationality. This guy is… he's comp… he… at one point, the CIA basically blacklisted and said, do not trust this guy. We… we literally will not work with this guy anymore.
He operates a company, a trading firm, called Starline, which he actually co-runs with the Israeli Intelligence Service. Gurbanifar approaches the ex-CIA officer, Ted Shackley. Ted Shackley's interesting, we don't have time to go into his history. He's involved with a bunch of… basically, like, working with drug lords, essentially, to achieve CIA objectives.
Shackley's not working for the CIA anymore. He's basically just a free contractor who is an intelligence broker. So he just uses the relationships he built in the CIA, talks to people, tries to make deals, sells intelligence to the US. Gorbanovar gets his ear, and he basically has this idea. Gurbanifer says, hey, I'll use Starline, my trading firm, as the go-between to sell weapons to the new Islamic regime in Tehran, which is bankrolling Hezbollah, to create goodwill, and we'll generate cash to pay ransoms To get back the kidnapped Americans in Beirut.
Oh, and some of us might make a nice profit along the way. So, what you have… is a convergence of situations where Gurbanifar is offering to use himself and the Israeli intelligence service as a go-between to sell funds, or to sell weapons to the new Islamic regime to generate cash. off the books. And Reagan needs cash to fund the Contras illegally because he cannot legally fund them because Congress said it was against the law.
So you… and they also want to get these, hostages back. So you end up with a situation where these things converge together, and that's… this is exactly what happens, so… Also… It is also illegal to sell things to Iran, because the United States had put the new Iranian government under embargo. And they were actually actively at war with Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who was basically propped up by the US government.
Literally everything about this is illegal and stupid. Nonetheless. Gurbanifar and the Israelis act as go-betweens with the US government, and they, there's a shipment of 504 TOW missiles to the Iranian military for about $2,000 apiece. And after the second shipment arrives, the kidnapped Presbyterian missionary is released.
Ostensibly looks like, okay. this could work. There is a tense moment where another shipment of weapons is en route over the Atlantic, but they realize that they don't actually have approval to land at their destination in Lisbon yet. And so they have to figure out a way to get to to get approval for this illegal shipment to land legally without people knowing what it's containing.
Nonetheless, There ends up… they end up doing another deal where Gobanafar acts as a go-between. And. This one's interesting because the Department of Defense is actually involved in one of the later deals. So what happens is actually the head of the Department of Defense but orders a thousand TOW missiles to be sold to the CIA at an extremely deep discount. Then Gorbanifar buys those missiles at full price from the CIA, and then sells them at a big markup to the Iranians.
The CIA then gets paid back by Gurbanifar in checks totaling $999,999.99, so that the million dollar payments that require oversight by Congress never show up on the books. All this money ends up. In basically a Swiss bank account that's earmarked for the Contras. Now… This creates a classic moral hazard problem, because if you are paying if you're paying foreign terrorist groups for to release their hostages.
You have created a very profitable business of taking hostages. I don't know, what is the meme? It sounds to me like you're just feeding money to a hostage machine, like, it's a really, really bad idea. But Reagan's willing to do it. Reagan is willing to Cut illegal deals with terrorists to get hostages back. So this entire operation is kept under wraps for a while until it begins to unravel when the funds flow back to Central America. Because once the CIA is using the money and getting and working on getting things to the Contras.
That's where all of the operational contingencies start to take place. So we've got the CIA gets caught smuggling West weapons using a Costa Rican airstrip. after the Costa Rican president has said. You will not use our airstrips. for, supporting the Contras. He was furious when he found out, obviously, but basically we did exactly what he told us not to do. So there's this sort of little bit of a revelation there.
And then… Another plane is transferring weapons is shot down by a Nicaraguan soldier. And the sole survivor, an American cargo handler, reveals to reporters that he was actually contracted with the CIA. Finally, we have Gurbanifar, who has found himself in hot water with his creditors. And he begins to threaten to blow up the whole operation if we don't help him out, basically, of his credit mess that he's gotten himself into.
So, on November 13th, Reagan goes on television and blatantly lies to the American people, says, we did not, repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages. And yet, that's exactly what they did. And no one believed them. Basically. This operation ends up being a massive embarrassment for the Reagan administration, and it basically takes 5 more years before all the hostages are returned.
Two of them never actually returned. The CIA station chief actually died after months of torture and interrogation. So, it's extremely dark history, an example of A good example of the CIA undertaking illegal action. The involvement of private actors seeking to enrich themselves and complicity with the president and then lying to the American people.
All of which ends up… Basically not working out and backfiring. So in December of 1991, the Soviet Union falls. And surprise, surprise, the CIA didn't see that coming either. They were not aware that the Soviet Union was in such bad straits. They basically believed the Soviet Union's own sort of posturing about how well they were doing because near the end.
Basically. The the bureaucracy was creating like a false sense of flourishing to the higher ups. The higher ups did not have an accurate understanding of how badly things were going with the economy. And so things unraveled extremely quickly in the Soviet Union. So they fall in 1991, And up to this point in 20th century history, but basically post 1945, all of history has been about the battle of the ideology of the Cold War, and how… and the frame of U.S.-Soviet relations, and now that's gone.
91 let's see, we've got… in December of 91. I think that Clinton was would Clint. I think Clinton would have been getting elected the next year, or So we're heading into kind of like the roaring 90s, the Clinton administration, where it kind of seems like the US is on top of the world. But the problem for the CIA is that their entire structuring ideology is now gone.
This total emergency of the Cold War and battling Communism everywhere has evaporated overnight. And so what you get is after a series of failures. You now have your entire frame and raison d'etre just evaporates. What do you do? There's a time of drift essentially in the nineties for the CIA, where it's not clear what they're doing. Their intelligence is very subpar. They struggle institutionally. They're not very helpful.
This changes in the wake of 9-11. And again, 9-11 is something that the CIA never saw coming. They also did not see this coming. However, and I don't have a lot of time to get into this. Peter Dale Scott goes into this in, American War Machine and in a Actually, he's got a couple other books where he focuses much more closely on 9-11.
But He basically argues that the CIA created the conditions for 9/11 to happen. Even if they did not plan it directly. What you have is that the CIA was actually closely monitoring a lot of these individuals that were involved in the planning and execution of 9-11, and in fact, there's some weird events that he documents where attempts to, investigate these individuals by other federal agencies get blocked by the CIA, and there's, like.
Also… strange… Strange moments, but… where special exceptions are made for these individuals to get them passports, or all these kinds of things. And so. Scott tries to argue that 9-11 was, in some sense, abetted. The conditions were created by the CIA. And we know that in the wake of 9/11, and I'm not going to go into a ton of this because this is getting into area that I need to study more closely, although there is a lot more information about this now. We get the passing of the Patriot Act.
Which massively expands surveillance over the American public. It gives, it gives the US government the ability to detain without trial, immigrants. You know, we get Guantanamo Bay, all of this kind of stuff. We get the creation of the Transportation Security Agency. Which now controls… flight, all these sort of things. And the Department of Homeland Security is created in 2003. So, an entirely new department, and the Department of Homeland Security is actually now the third largest federal agency after the Department of Defense and the VA.
So this massively important agency was actually only created within the past less than 25 years. And they were all created in the wake of and in response to 9/11. So what sort of emerges is that after the Soviet Union falls, there's this period of drift, and we see that the CIA kind of creates the conditions for radical Islam.
to arise as an opposing ideology. And the new war on terror that emerges becomes the new Cold War ideology that justifies a state of constant emergency. which is used by the government, by government agencies which are not accountable to the people, to expand their powers in exceptional ways in response to this permanent emergency. And this permanent emergency is Similar, but different in the sense of, You know, anybody could be a Marxist sympathizer.
But… the primary focus was outwards towards the world. Now the movement of terrorists and Islamic radicals moves in towards the country itself. It provides the ability for Increased surveillance of every American because every American could potentially be involved in the process of radicalization. Now, we didn't go into the way that the CIA and the FBI heavily infiltrated and investigated unions and seminaries and academic departments and nonprofits within the Us. To try to root out Marxist sympathizers.
However, The scale that takes place in the wake of the war on terror is completely unprecedented. What's connected with this, too, is this idea of continuity of government that, again, Peter Dale Scott talks about this more, but the idea of continuity of government was already being developed by figures like Dick Cheney before he took up a position in the Bush administration and before 9-11 happened.
Continuity of government is… Basically, what happens… In the event of an emergency when the government is under threat. So, every organization has what's called a continuity of operations plan, a COOP plan, which is basically… I… the company I worked at last actually used… did a… provided a software that allowed organizations to build and execute their COOP plans, which is… A plan where you.
build out All of the essential functions within a department and a team in an agency, and you also articulate. Who is going to handle all of the essential functions in the case of an emergency? What are the key activities that every organization has to be able to execute in the event of an emergency? Power going out or a terrorist attack or a shooter, all of these, like, if there is some sort of an external.
event that affects an organization's ability to operate, they have a plan in place for how they were going to continue to operate and execute their essential functions in that situation. And so continuity of government is the process where the federal government was developing its own continuity of operations plan that was going to be executed.
In the case of emergency. And what happens is this cog planning gets accelerated by 9 11, and the state, the state of emergency. becomes the opportunity to begin to test these new expanded powers that individuals are afforded under continuity of government operations. And in fact, if you look it up. the federal government has actually been under a declared state of emergency since sometime in the Carter administration. So, strictly speaking, the US government has actually been under emergency for the past, like, 50 years, essentially.
This continuity of government was expanded in the wake of 9/11, and in many ways these emergency powers still remain. Now, the Patriot… the Patriot Act was not renewed, I think, back in 2020, so some of those powers have been curtailed. But overall, what we're living in is… Federal government… that is operating under a legal state of emergency constantly due to First the Cold War, and then the War on Terror.
And this is what facilitates, Human rights abuses, it's what facilitates surveillance, and it's also what facilitates constant secrecy, lying, and censorship around government activity. Of this topic. So that's kind of that, like, that is the post… reagan, and that's the kind of the… my gloss on the post-Reagan era, basically since 91, on what's been going on with the CIA. There's a lot more work to be done there, but I think that that gloss is enough, basically, drift and then renewed vigor in light of the war on terror.
And, expanded federal power in response to 9/11. And that kind of thing, so… Not sure how valuable, like, a recap would be here, but I, there are some key things that stand out to me that I want to just talk about a little bit from.