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IS THE CIA SECRETLY AWESOME?

Most people are on the fence about cops until something happens like they get a parking ticket or four of them get shot to death by a pardoned felon. Then all the "our boys in blue" and "all cops are bastards" shit starts rolling out. One group of folk most people are generally NOT on the fence about, however, are the men and ladies of the CIA.

Fussy NYT types like Tim Weiner hate the CIA because it's a boys' club for spoiled Yalees who've spent trillions of dollars over the last 60 years accomplishing nothing in the way of useful intelligence-gathering. Libby William Blum types hate them because they've tried to kill basically every world leader to the left of Nixon. Hard-right types like Pat Buchanan hate them because they helped start the Taliban and fucked up Bin Laden's capture at Tora Bora, in addition to putting our American fingers in just about every foreign pie possible. The Sun City Girls hate them because they can shove a contra up your ass and are good at football, which is an odd rationale granted, but whatcha gonna do.

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It's pretty hard to argue in favor spending $49 billion a year on an agency that's picked the wrong side of almost every geopolitical conflict in the last half a century and whose intelligence on the Soviet Union was so shoddy that they had to be told by someone else when the Cold War was over, but, at the same time, you cannot deny the fact that the CIA has pulled some of the greatest pranks of all time in the service of fucking with other people's countries.

Really, if there's one thing every one of the above criticisms smacks of (except possibly Buchanan's) it is seething jealousy. While its critics are stressing out over fair elections and releasing their budgets, the CIA gets to sit inside its expensive headquarters all day, smoking indoors and cooking up increasingly quick and zany ways of undermining their opponents' years and years of hard work. Morally it's pretty indefensible, but do you really think in a few hundred years anybody's going to give a shit about a couple million senseless deaths and torture sessions in light of all the madcap high jinx? Time always favors the funny. Look at how we treat pirates. Shit, look at how we treat Charles Manson.

Besides, do you know who else were a bunch of morally indefensible rich kids who just wanted to have a good time for as long as possible and used hairbrained schemes to recast their stilted environment to suit their imaginings, and were hated for it from all sides? That's right, the boys of Animal House. The CIA are basically the Delta Taus smashing their tankcar through the world political stage while Kevin Bacon screams from the sidewalk for everyone to calm down.

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If you don't think the comparison is apt, take a look at this little list of my favorite CIA psyops tricks, or as I like to call them, "brain ticklers," from the last 61 years of American national intelligence.

-In the late 40s, CIA agents in the Philippines drained all the blood from the body of guerilla soldiers, stabbed little teeth-shaped wounds into their necks, and left them in the trails to the local watering hole so that illiterate villagers would think that a vampire was preying on the area's commies and refuse to help them. And it worked. They also flew around in helicopters on cloudy nights and claimed to be the voice of God over the loudspeaker, which is totally Animal House if you imagine Boon and Otter in the cabin trying not to crack up and "Louie, Louie" going in the background.

-During a failed invasion of Guatemala by a CIA-backed rebel group, agents cut the phone lines then took over all the national radio stations and convinced the capital that the rest of the country had been captured. The lead generals flipped out and couped the president, which is what the CIA was going for in the first place. This is basically the part at the end where the float crashes into the car dealership and the mayor starts choking Dean Wormer.

-The CIA helped the Italian Christian Democrat party beat the Communists in post-war elections by getting Frank Sinatra and his buddies to do a Roman tour. Not exactly a "toga tour" but close enough.

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-When Indonesian president Sukarno started causing trouble for them, the Agency hired a lookalike to shoot an embarrassing porno of him (came too soon). More of a Revenge of Nerds vibe there, but still works.

-I'm sure you already know about all the crap the CIA tried to pull on Castro like the exploding cigars and the beard-loss cream and the LSD on his scuba mask, but what about this juicy little number? In 1962, a Soviet-bound ship filled with Cuban sugar had to stop in Puerto Rico for repairs, at which point CIA operatives raided the stash and laced it with a flavorless barfing powder. This event could either be the food fight or Donald Sutherland smoking the joint, your call.

Anyways, I've got a few more of these little tidbits if you're interested, but you see what I'm saying here, right? Lay off the hatin' and loosen up for a change. The CIA rules.

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