Blowback: Exposing the CIA's Secrecy and Censorship

From the coups that ousted Mohammed Mossadeq, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende in the Cold War to the waterboarding of suspected terrorists in the Global War on Terror, the CIA has built a solid reputation as an extralegal agent of international sabotage and murder. Since the agency’s creation in 1947, successive U.S. presidents and their national security advisors have furthered this reputation, using the CIA for dirty work and then denying any wrongdoing in public, while the truth waits for decades until files are declassified. The agency did not declassify the documentary proof of its involvement in the 1973 assassination of Allende until 2003, and its internal analysis of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion was not released until August 2, 2011, more than 50 years after the event. There is an age-old tradition of push and pull between the national security establishment, which insists on secrecy, and transparency advocates and the public, which has a right to hold its leaders accountable for their use and abuse of executive power in matters of foreign policy.

In recent months, the Obama administration appears to be tinkering with the established script, although not fundamentally departing from it. Since the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May, it has increasingly put the CIA into the public spotlight, underscoring the agency’s central role in the administration’s evolving counter-terror strategy. Killing a member of al-Qaeda is far more palatable to most Americans than killing a democratically elected leader of a country that posed no threat to U.S. security. Thus, recent news of the CIA’s unmanned “precision strikes” against top al-Qaeda operatives might appeal to the sizeable segment of the U.S. public that no longer supports the idea of a large-scale ground war but still believes in a militarized approach to the Global War on Terror.

At the same time, however, the CIA continues to engage in its established tradition of suppressing information that would damage it or the administration’s reputation. This information deserves public attention, precisely because it points to a link between the agency’s activities and the proliferation of al-Qaeda, directly undermining the argument being advanced by the Obama administration.

Obama is not the first president to enlist the CIA in attempts to justify his policies in the War on Terror. In January 2003, George W. Bush gave his now infamous State of the Union address in which he claimed that British intelligence had found evidence that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from Africa. We all know how that story turned out. By 2004, the Valerie Plame scandal had become engrained in the public imagination, and Bush could no longer use the CIA to gain public support for his policies in Iraq or, for that matter, in Afghanistan. As the years went by and bin Laden remained at large, interviews with former CIA agents, including Michael Scheuer, who headed intelligence operations aimed at capturing the al Qaeda leader, lambasted the administration’s systematic failure to heed the advice of intelligence experts. Bush’s brief attempt to publicly exploit the CIA collapsed under the weight of mutual distrust and the realities of the CIA’s marginalization.

Obama’s emphasis on the central role of the CIA in his counter-terror strategy is intended in part to underscore the difference between his approach and that of his predecessor. The president’s May 1 speech announcing the death of bin Laden linked the success of the mission to the centrality of the CIA, suggesting a direct contrast with the Bush administration: “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda.” Obama made a point of crediting the intelligence community, along with the Special Forces that carried out the operation: “Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who’ve worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome. The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice.”