Ray McGovern on the CIA, Tulsi Gabbard and Iran

Ray McGovern, our most senior intelligence non-officer and the founder of VIPS, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, many of whose members, like Larry Johnson, Douglas MacGregor and Scott Ritter, are frequently posted here. Here he goes over the lamentable history of the CIA since its founding, which starts with the National Security Act of 1947 under President Truman, which should have been just about giving “untreated”, that is unbiased information to the President. However, the 1947 law, had a clause that permitted covert activities other than spying. The Act granted the CIA broad authority to perform “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This was followed by the National Security Council (NSC) issue of NSC 10/2, which directed the CIA to carry out covert operations such as propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage and demolition, support for resistance movements and guerillas and political subversion. This list of authorized activities covers pretty much everything the CIA has done ever since the overthrow of Iran’s democratic Mossadegh government in 1953 to fomenting riots in Iran last week.

This law created an agency, the CIA, that was broken down into two divisions, the Intelligence Division and the Operations Division, and the intelligence division lost access to the President, to people who had political motivations for ordering such activities and ignored the honest intelligence given to them when telling the President what they planned to do.

This led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Alan Dulles was the chief of the operations division and he wanted to invade Cuba. He and his operations people cooked up a destabilization operation involving the use of counter-revolutionaries in Florida that was never going to work without US troops, and they told the President it would be a piece of cake. Still, Kennedy told them he would not send US troops, but they went ahead and did it anyway, figuring Kennedy would have to go along with it even though he told them he would not. Kennedy stood by what he told them and did not allow US troops to be involved, and so the operation failed miserably. Soon after Kennedy fired Dulles. Dulles never forgave Kennedy, which led to the assassination of Kennedy.

Ray McGovern joined the CIA analysis division that same year, in 1963, and left in 1990 after 27 years during which he became the analysis division’s main expert on Russia and wrote Bush Sr.’s and Reagan’s Presidential Daily Brief (PDB). But he was always aware that presidents were not listening to his unbiased advice but rather to people with political motivations, and that presidents were being manipulated rather than informed by the advice they were getting from the operations division. This finally led to his resignation from the CIA in 1990, and his formation of VIPS to try to stop the Iraq war in 2003. He says in this interview that he believes there are still honest analysts in the CIA, and that Tulsi Gabbard, our current director of the Office of National Intelligence, theoretically the CIA’s boss, is one of them.

Tulsi was seen last week swimming and doing yoga in Hawaii. Larry Johnson says Tulsi is a “disgrace” because she does not resign. Ray McGovern, who never indulges in such moral condemnation because it prevents objective analysis (just like political motives) is more understanding. He says Tulsi’s appearance in Hawaii was deliberate public relations intended to distance herself from what the Trump administration was doing in Iran. She did not resign, however, which wouldn’t’ve  been very appropriate, because she may be starting to get Trump’s ear. He previously said that “I don’t care what she thinks”, but Tulsi was patient and did not resign then. Since then, events have been moving very rapidly and so has the pressure on Trump from American citizens to stop putting Israel instead of his own country first. Trump has been wearing a “Make Iran Great Again” (MIGA) hat to confuse them into thinking “MIGA” does not mean “Make Israel Great Again”, which is what a lot of his opponents (including me) have been saying.