Quote:In this lecture, Ralph McGehee states, "The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers.

"In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting 'intelligence' justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence to support presidential policy.

"Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies."

Now this is one CIA covert operation, and it's interesting to note that the Senate Report said that the Agency conducted over a 14-year period, 900 major covert operations and several thousand minor covert operations, including domestic operations. The CIA, by its charter, is explicitly prohibited from being involved in domestic covert operations. Of course, President Reagan has changed all that with Executive Order 12333. But until that time, this had been explicitly prohibited.

An All-American football player at Notre Dame, Ralph McGehee worked for the CIA from 1952 to 1977. He is the author of Deadly Deceits. Alexander Cockburn called it "one of the outstanding books written by a former CIA agent."

The CIA's Deadly Deceits and the Vietnam War w/ Ralph McGehee (1986)

Quote:How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

(06-21-2023, 08:57 PM)xuenchen Wrote: Amazing how Reagan got all this done with The U.S. House being Democrat controlled for his entire 8 years