Covert power: The CIA’s hidden history

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hi there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond. And together we're the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For those of you who might be new to our show, we here at the Global Story dive deep every weekday on one big story at the intersection of where the world and America meet. And you can now watch the Global Story on the iHeart app. Catch every brand new episode every weekday. Just tap into iHeart to start watching. And we hope you enjoy the show.

0:38This week, to mark the United States' 250th birthday, we're looking at all the complicated and surprising ways the United States has shaped the world. There are the ways you can see, and then there are the ways you cannot see. And when it comes to the things you can't see, the Central Intelligence Agency is a big part of the story. A lot of people say a lot of things about the CIA, and some of them are a bit conspiratorial. But now and again, you wonder, because sometimes even the CIA bosses say the quiet part out loud. Here's Bill Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, talking to Fox News a few years ago.

1:18Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections? Oh, probably. But it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over. We don't do that now, though. We don't mess around in other people's elections. Only for a very good thought. When you dig a bit deeper, it turns out that even some of the wilder theories might be based on a kernel of truth. Like, did you know, for example, that the CIA once did secret experiments to control people's minds? Now, Asma, that's not to say that the CIA doesn't do a lot of important work to protect people in the United States.

1:58And often it can't even talk about that work. But the agency does have a reputation for covert ops. And that's perhaps down to one man more than any other. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. And I'm Tristan Redmond in London. And today on The Global Story, Covert Power, the CIA's hidden history.

2:30About six weeks ago here on the show, we told the story of how the CIA masterminded a coup in Iran in 1953 and helped to overthrow its democratically elected leader. And we learned in that episode that the coup turned a lot of Iranians against the United States for decades to come and helped to create the situation that Iran finds itself in now. Now, behind that coup in the 50s, we also learned was this quite colorful man called Alan Dulles, who's one of the founding fathers of the agency. The official purpose of the CIA at its beginning was to collect, analyze and disseminate foreign intelligence vital to US national security.

3:15And originally, there was no mention of anything like covert operations. But when Alan Dulles took over the CIA as its first civilian director, he transformed it from a classic information gathering government agency into a vast covert network that intervened in the running of other countries. And it turns out he created something of a playbook for the way the CIA operates to this day. To understand this all better, we turned to Tim Weiner. He's written two books about the CIA and actually even won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. It has essentially become his life's work. I began covering the CIA full-time for the New York Times way back in 1993, and my interest in it began 20 years earlier.

4:05I am a Watergate biggie. And when I was 18, Richard Nixon became enmeshed in the web of Watergate. The Senate investigated the crimes of Watergate and beyond. And their report, which came out 50 years ago on America's 200th birthday, said, among other things, that the CIA had spied on Americans in violation of its charter, had conducted mind control experiments with LSD and other drugs for 20 years, had opened Americans' mail, and had infamously conspired to assassinate Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, the duly elected leader of Congo, and engaged in crimes which you cannot allow a secret intelligence service to commit in an open democracy.

5:05So my fascination with CIA really begins 50 years ago, and I'm still fascinated. Tim, can you begin by just walking us through when and why the CIA was initially founded? What was its mandate? The United States, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, bestowed the world like a colossus. The sun was setting on the British Empire. And as the great 19th century empires faded, the American Empire rose. A superpower needs an intelligence service to tell the president what is going on in the world and to gather intelligence through espionage. That was the idea at the beginning. But you have to remember this.

5:54The United States had never had a civilian peacetime intelligence service at all. The Russians had been at this since Peter the Great. The British, since Queen Elizabeth I, and the Chinese, since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War 26 centuries ago. We had no idea what we were doing when the CIA was founded. Everything they knew they had learned from the British Special Operations Executive during World War II. Let's remember what was going on at the time. Stalin was heading west, and there was no telling where he would stop.

6:38Before America's Congress, President Truman makes the most momentous speech since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He declares political war on Soviet Russia. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world. And we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation. And the newly formed Department of Defense to stop Stalin from marching westward wanted the CIA to essentially overthrow the Soviet Union. From now on, it means that anti-communist America will make its influence felt in European affairs. Great responsibilities have been placed upon us by the swift movement of events.

7:21The idea that the CIA could operate behind the Iron Curtain, the way that American and British commandos had operated during World War II was a fatal illusion. Tim, the man who was behind that idea that these covert operations were absolutely vital to the success and future of the CIA was a man that you've written about extensively. And his name is Alan Dulles. And I guess a way to think about him would be a bit like the CIA's answer to J. Edgar Hoover over at the FBI. Neither Dulles nor Hoover would appreciate that comparison. OK, well, tell us who was Dulles? Why was he so important at the outset of the agency?

8:12Alan Dulles was a devious man, a serial adulterer, and a man who did not always tell his superiors up to, including the President of the United States, what he was up to. He had been a junior diplomat and a sort of amateur spy in Switzerland during World War I. And he was back in Switzerland during World War II as an operative of the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's wartime civilian intelligence agency. And in 1947, at the foundation of the CIA, in which he was instrumental because he testified to Congress at a closed-door hearing with armed guards guarding the chamber in Congress, that the CIA would be an organization that a few hundred people could run.

9:10It would be engaged in the gathering and analysis of intelligence. There was no mention of covert operations. There was no mention of overthrowing governments or running paramilitary operations behind the Iron Curtain. But you cannot hang the history of American covert operations around his neck. In 1953, President Eisenhower is elected and decided that an arms race against the Soviets, a conventional arms race, would bankrupt the United States. President Eisenhower decided it's a matter of policy that the United States would project power by building nuclear weapons and running covert operations.

9:58And he elevates Alan Doss to become the CIA director. Let us recall that the fear, in addition to the ignorance of what the other side was up to, and the secrecy that enveloped the CIA. Toxic cocktail of secrecy, ignorance, and fear was not unlike what life was like here in the United States after the September 11th attacks 25 years ago. Tim, this early stage of the CIA, I mean, you can see how some of the conspiracy theories that we now hear about the CIA may have had their roots in this period. I mean, the CIA was trying to drop people behind enemy lines, interfere with the politics and society of adversary nations.

10:47But there is one other thing that you've written about in this era, which I find fascinating, which is this thing, Operation Artichoke, which began in the early 1950s. Dulles was involved in that. It was an attempt to find out if the CIA could work out how to control people's minds by giving them LSD and other drugs. What exactly was Operation Artichoke? And did it launch a thousand conspiracy theories? Well, the reality is much more bizarre and terrifying than any conspiracy theorist could devise. During the Korean War, the CIA realized it, against its will mostly, that it was being played and deceived by double agents.

11:40That is, someone who says, hello, I am a Russian and I would like to defect and work for the CIA and I have all this interesting information to impart. but the guy is controlled by Moscow the entire time. Dulles wanted a system by which you could interrogate people like that and know with a degree of certainty that they were telling the truth. And during the Korean War, Russians, Chinese, and others were taken to secret prisons that were established and controlled by the CIA and tortured and given drugs, heroin, LSD, speed, methamphetamine. And what Dulles was in search of in this program that eventually evolved into a domestic program codenamed MKUltron, he was looking for a truth serum.

12:40something that would loosen the tongue of the suspected double agent. This went on for 20 years.

12:55In one phase of this during the 1950s, federal prisoners in the United States were given LSD for 77 consecutive days. Oh, wow. And at the end of this horrific experiment, they came to a conclusion that there was only one drug that really loosened the tongue, and that was alcohol. Everybody knew that already. And when the jig was up 20 years later in the 70s, in the midst of the Watergate crisis, Richard Helms, then the director, tried to destroy every record pertaining to MKUltra. The secret prison part, that is something that I uncovered. And of course, these places were precursors to the secret prison system that the CIA set up after 9-11.

13:44Even today, you're saying? Oh, yes. Well, in terms of things that resonate down the decades, on the global story, Tim, some of our listeners play a game called Bay of Pigs Bingo, because for some reason, the Bay of Pigs CIA operation is a story which comes up time and time again when we make episodes. And it is a next major moment in the story of the CIA. It was an attempt by the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro by landing Cuban exiles on the island of Cuba. It failed miserably. But why do we hear about it so often? Well, Fidel Castro took Cuba with his guerrilla army and overthrew an immensely corrupt and deeply pro-American regime.

14:35And the CIA at first were impressed by Castro and his promises of democracy. Fidel famously came to the United States after the Cuban Revolution. Bearded Fidel Castro, visiting the big town and ignoring police security warnings by mingling freely with the crowd. Got something of a hero's welcome. They managed to get him into a motorcade for a short ride to his hotel, but the welcomers are eager to see him, to touch him. But then decided that, no, they were wrong about that. And he was a dedicated communist who was working hand in glove with the Soviets. Alan Dulles first convinced President Eisenhower, whose eight years in office were coming to an end.

15:19And then the newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961. that this would be child's play. The CIA recruited several thousand Cuban exiles, trained them up in Guatemala, and launched a military attack. Cuban revolutionary troops such as these have invaded Castro's leftist island fortress, reportedly rallied by a mysterious coded radio message. Alert, alert, look well at the rainbow. The fish will be running very soon. Eisenhower assured President Kennedy, who was then less than three months in office, that he had an 80 % chance of success. Well, he had a 0 % chance of success because the planning of this was penetrated by Cuban intelligence service.

16:16Meanwhile, in Havana, acting foreign minister Olivares shows foreign envoys and newsmen scorched fragments of what may have been rockets fired during the B-26 raids. As might be expected, he points an accusing finger at the U.S. The same line is followed at a dramatic meeting of the United Nations General Assembly's political committee by Cuban Foreign Minister Raul Roa, charging his nation has been invaded by what he terms mercenaries from Guatemala and Florida. Quickly, forcefully, the charges are denied by Chief U.S. Delegate Adley E. Stevenson. These charges are totally false, and I deny them categorically.

16:57The United States has committed no aggression against Cuba, and no offensive has been launched from Florida or from any other part of the United States. In fact, the New York Times got wind that it was happening weeks before it did happen, and Alan Doss leaned on the publisher of the New York Times to suppress that story.

17:28Hi there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond. And together we're the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For those of you who might be new to our show, we here at the Global Story dive deep every weekday on one big story at the intersection of where the world and America meet. And you can now watch the Global Story on the iHeart app. Catch every brand new episode every weekday. Just tap into iHeart to start watching. and we hope you enjoy the show.

18:00The Bay of Pigs, Tim, was the end of Alan Dulles. Yes, it broke him. Yeah, so he, by the end of the Bay of Pigs, was no longer in charge of the CIA. And the picture that you're painting here is of an agency which sounds inept, incompetent and largely unsuccessful. Nonetheless, the United States goes on to win the Cold War. Are you saying that by the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, that the United States and the West won the Cold War because of the CIA or in spite of the CIA? Well, I think neither really, to be honest. the Soviet Union collapsed because Soviet communism was a rotten, corrupt, vicious political and economic system.

18:52The CIA did score several impressive successes. For example, in Poland with the Wynn operation, secret CIA support for democracy in Poland. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the CIA was bereft. How are you going to be a great intelligence service without a great enemy. People were asking aloud. They were asking me, as a reporter for the New York Times, you know, what are we supposed to do now? Well, then in August of 1998, Al-Qaeda exploded powerful truck bombs at two American embassies in East Africa, one in Nairobi, Kenya, one in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Car bombs exploded minutes apart outside the embassies in Kenya and in neighboring Tanzania.

19:43And right now, no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Kenyan television is reporting that a van packed with explosives caused that blast. There are unconfirmed reports that an Arab-speaking suspect has now been taken into custody. Glass and debris cut through a long line of people waiting to get into a bank on the same street, turning the sidewalk red with blood. I flew out to Nairobi, saw the damage. 224 Kenyans dead. 12 Americans, including two CIA officers at the U.S. Embassy, dead. The idea that an obscure terrorist organization could pull off two simultaneous bombings 3 ,000 miles from its base, this was something new.

20:31These acts of terrorist violence are abhorrent. They are inhuman. We will use all the means at our disposal. to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes. And then the CIA mission became counterterrorism. And you see resurfacing some of the most brutal Cold War tactics, including secret prisons, including torture. And you see the CIA being converted from an intelligence organization that conducts espionage and analysis into a paramilitary organization which kills people. For 10 years after 9-11, the point of the secret prisons and the torture and brutal interrogation that went on inside them was to see if anybody knew about a second or third or fourth wave of attacks that was going to follow on after 9-11 and two to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

21:40Now, there is a mass of circumstantial evidence, and I've been told this by no less than the man who served as deputy director and acting director of the CIA, that the path that was blazed to bin Laden's door was blazed by the recruitment through espionage of al-Qaeda soldiers who pointed the way for the CIA to bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The raid, when it happened, there were officers inside CIA headquarters on that date, whom I've interviewed, who were watching the television and saw a crowd gathering outside the White House as President Obama announced the success of the operation to get bin Laden.

22:31The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda. And they were chanting, USA, USA, as crowds often do. And they started chanting, CIA, CIA. CIA, and one CIA officer at headquarters turned to another and said, well, this will never happen again. It was a high point for the reputation of the CIA, and justly so. I remember I was, you know, I lived here. I worked for NPR at the time, working in D.C. There were cheers outside of the White House for USA. I will also say, though, Tim, I was part of our team at NPR. It was the first team flown into Pakistan to report on the aftermath of bin Laden.

23:15and people thought my own colleagues were CIA agents. I mean, there is massive distrust of, let's say, a white foreigner operating around Pakistan at that time. And it did make me wonder about the reverberations that the CIA had as to how it operated throughout the war on terror days in many parts of the world. Well, I think that the secret prisons and the torture conducted inside them is a stain on the honor of the United States will never wash away. President George W. Bush, after 9-11, said that the United States is on a crusade, his word, and a word that has a certain resonance. And I believe that people around the world remember that with equal clarity as they remember the killing of Osama bin Laden.

24:06What's the future of the agency, Tim? I mean, Donald Trump has sacked some 1 ,200 CIA staff. He has said he wants to concentrate more on domestic affairs, but it's not to say that US covert ops have not continued. I mean, we saw a successful operation recently in Venezuela. There have been strikes on boats in the Gulf of Mexico. There have been the operations in Iran, threats of intervention in Cuba. Do these kinds of foreign adventures by the United States, could they continue without the backing of the CIA? Or will something else just rise up in the agency's place? The CIA is providing intelligence support for these strikes against boats.

24:57You speak of the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro as a success. Well, daring and bold operation conducted with crucial intelligence support from the CIA. Operationally a success, politically is a different question. That depends on your point of view, doesn't it? Tactical success. The CIA was instrumental in the assassination of the Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, by pinpointing his location. Again, a tactical success. But the CIA depends on the recruitment of foreigners to provide it with secret intelligence. It depends on the willingness of Russians, Iranians, Chinese to come to an American intelligence officer and agree to commit treason against their own countries.

25:50Do you think the word of the United States will be trusted in years to come?

25:58Today, the CIA is in a real fix in the recruitment of foreign agents. And the CIA is seen as the hidden hand of everything nefarious that happens in the world. Secrecy does not fit well in an open democratic society. And this tension between secrecy and democracy will always be with us. It will never go away.

26:35Tim, thank you for taking the time to speak with us and for sharing all your expertise. We really appreciate it. Yeah, Tim, it was really fantastic to talk this through with somebody who knows the CIA like maybe nobody else. Thank you. You're more than welcome.

26:57That was Tim Weiner, author of the books Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA and The Mission, the CIA in the 21st Century. A big thank you to him. We'll be continuing our week of special episodes to mark America in the world at 250 tomorrow with a look at the phenomenon of made in China and how the United States helped the rise of a rival superpower. Anything you can imagine has the label made in China on it, right? What we're talking about is the world's largest communist nation is at the beating heart of the capitalist system. And so your question is, how did we get there? That's it for our show today.

27:36Our episode was produced by Hannah Moore and edited by James Shield. Our technical producers were Ben Andrews and Mike Regard. Our show today was mixed by Travis Evans. Our senior news editor is China Collins. And I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And we'll be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening. Cheerio.

28:01Hi there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond. And together we're the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For those of you who might be new to our show, we here at the Global Story dive deep every weekday on one big story at the intersection of where the world and America meet. And you can now watch the Global Story on the iHeart app. Catch every brand new episode every weekday. Just tap into iHeart to start watching. And we hope you enjoy the show.