The American Intelligence Services Keep Causing Unintended Consequences
For 70 years, American foreign policy has had to clean up the spies’ messes.
The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest among Athenians because he knew that he knew nothing, and acted and spoke accordingly.
The Central Intelligence Agency and companion members of the intelligence community, in contrast, are intelligence dunces. They uniformly profess or presume to know what they don’t know about the political cultures, power dynamics, or public opinion in foreign countries. Thus, they chronically blunder in intervening or seeking to intervene to replace foreign leaders with our own puppets who invariably prove cures worse than the disease.
The intelligence community is not populated by political philosophers or students of power like Aristotle, James Madison, or Machiavelli. They are clueless about the DNA of political legitimacy or the institutional or cultural bedrocks of authority—especially in foreign countries. They are trained to spy and think in the short run or over the next news cycle, ignorant of the forces they have unleashed to culminate in calamity on someone else’s watch. Not a single one would have been an asset at Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence or the Constitutional Convention. They would not know the difference between a George Washington and an Adolf Hitler. They would have probably backed Benedict Arnold to lead the American Revolution.
Let us begin with the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of the popularly elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to install the reviled and brutal shah of Iran. Then and there were planted the seeds of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, featuring the benighted, bigoted, extremists mullahs who still oppress the Iranian people 47 years later. Today, we are at war with the CIA’s own blunder. Nothing has been learned. According to a May 21 New York Times report, “The Hard-Liner The U.S. Eyed As Iran’s Leader,” the United States aimed to replace the decimated Iranian leadership with the former radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was notorious for denying the Holocaust, insisting Iran had been purged of all gays, and making summons to “wipe Israel off the map.”
But what legitimacy would Ahmadinejad command as an American lackey? He left office 13 years ago. He is no freedom-fighter like the Iranian 2023 Nobel Prize winner Narges Mohammadi. He supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The regime change lark collapsed from its own stupidity.
In 1954, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz in favor of a series of genocidal military dictatorships. General Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013, and a retrial was underway in 2018 when he died.
In 1957, the CIA attempted the overthrow of Indonesia’s Sukarno for non-alignment during the Cold War. It succeeded in a second attempt in 1965 backing the corrupt and brutal General Suharto, responsible for over 1 million murders of alleged communists or Chinese. Watch the 2012 movie The Act of Killing and be convinced.
In 1961, the CIA attempted the overthrow of Cuba’s Fidel Castro on the Bay of Pigs fiasco without a plan for a democratically elected successor. The CIA had backed Castro’s predecessor, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who elicited the quip from the State Department, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch.”
In 1963, the CIA organized the overthrow of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was followed by a revolving door of military juntas, leading to North Vietnam’s victory in April 1975.
In 1973, the CIA supported the overthrow of Chile’s elected president Salvador Allende for General Augusto Pinochet, who delighted in torture and mass murder, including the assassination of the former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier at Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC only minutes from the White House.
The CIA obtusely conceived Ahmad Chalabi as a popular successor to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and Hamid Karzai as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan after the 2001 attack on the Taliban regime. Karzai and his successor, Ashraf Ghani, proved even more reviled than the Taliban, which regained power in 2021.
Most recently, the CIA planned the overthrow of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro last January, ignorant of what might come next. Maduro’s nominal successor, the dictator Delcy Rodríguez, commands little popular support. Rodríguez is no George Washington, She is not even within shouting distance of Abigail Adams.
No elections are planned either by Rodríguez or the United States. The huge Venezuelan diaspora, 8 million strong, is not returning. Most political prisoners remain incarcerated under horrendous conditions. Investment and economic activity are paralyzed because the rule of law has been taken off life support and private property sits under a sword of Damocles.
Among the lessons to be learned by the intelligence community, know what you don’t know and tailor advice accordingly. The wise man readily concedes indeterminacy is the rule, not the exception, in power struggles.
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