Huh?
The CIA are an intelligence-gathering body. If they provide poor intelligence, that constitutes a failure.
Brought peace?
I am not convinced that the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was a horrible mistake.
One major event that caught the CIA by surprise was the collapse of the Soviet Union. You’d think that, since the Soviet Union was the no. 1 enemy of the US during the Cold War, they’d be keeping their fingers on the pulse there. But they seemed to have no idea that, after an attempted coup, there would not just be a change of government: the largest country in the world (by area) would simply cease to exist as a functioning country in the course of a few days in 1991.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol51no3/legacy-of-ashes-the-history-of-cia.html agrees with you. This may well be right, I have little way of telling.
+1 The reason why we all can go home tonight watch TV, play on the internet, and enjoy our happy homes is testament to thousands of CIA successes that we will never know about…
So how do you know they happened?
I think the CIA often gets an unfair rap, but crediting the agency with thousands of successes that nobody knows anything about, without which we would not be as safe as we are today, is like crediting the Flying Spaghetti Monster with keeping invisible space aliens away from our feeble planet.
The CIA has no authority to order a bombing, the military is in an entirely separate chain of command.
**Ex-**agents sometimes do. E.g., Ralph McGehee. I heard him speak at a college event once, making the point that in his experience the CIA’s actual mission was not intelligence-gathering but supporting the foreign policy of the current administration. During the Vietnam War he was in an operation in Thailand, rooting out Communist cells in rural villages, and he managed to get a lot of Commies to break down and confess, and then the plug was pulled on the operation – because the offical line at the moment was that there were no Communists to speak of in Thailand, it was a hopeless fringe movement.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes:
It is true. The military chain of command ultimately runs from the president, through the Secretary of Defense, and down the line. The CIA doesn’t report to the Secretary of Defense.
Yes, I know the CIA doesn’t have the authority to order a bombing. That does not mean it doesn’t have the power.
Then why did you eyeroll a statement saying the CIA didn’t have the authority?
Because the authority question is irrelevant to Altair33’s assertion in post #10.
Since it is not possible prove a negative - is it not possible that their sucesses will never be known, since they prevented something from happening ?
There’s a very real argument to be made for the concept of Pax Americana, for which the CIA is at least partially responsible. As for myself, the CIA World Factbook is one of their major achievements. Encyclopedic style and up-to-date summaries of every modern nation. I found it invaluable for studying foreign relations and understanding politics.
Enjoy,
Steven
^
And often dead wrong.
How so?
I would imagine the Glomar Explorer with Howard Hughes was pretty good. There are many I would have no clue about.
This is the sort of comment that indicates a completely misguided impression of what the CIA does, or is even chartered to do. By watching movies and the televisor you’d probably come to the conclusion that the primary mission of the CIA is to infiltrate terrorist cells and kill the leader just as he’s on the cusp of unleashing an attack, kill KGB snipers before they assassinate the President, or track jet-setting villains across three continents, enter their underground lairs, and activate the auto-destruct device to foil their plans. Something vaguely resembling the Hollywood view might occur once in a blue moon, but the original charter of the CIA was to fight Communism by a) collecting intelligence information, b) train and equip insurgents, and c) directly or indirectly support regime changes to governments unfriendly to the spread of Communism. Since Communism went belly up the CIA has been at somewhat loose ends in defining a new mission in life, but while the Agency does maintain some paramilitary capability (albeit greatly scaled down after the Church Committee hearings and USSCI) its primary function is not direct intervention but the collection, interpretation, and dissemination of data to the relevant parties, i.e. the DoD, DoE, FBI, et cetera. In this regard the CIA has been notoriously remiss in having assets on the ground to collect data, correctly interpreting what data they receive, and effectively communicating the data to anyone else.
The data has often been a pastiche of expert opinion, guesswork, public sources, and suitably declassified intelligence. Although there have been notable errors, I don’t find it to be any worse than other factbooks like those from Jane’s Information Group (from which it often draws heavily). Of course, pointing to the Factbook as one of the CIA’s main achievements brings the question of why it is funded to the tune of several billions of dollars a year to essentially provide the same service as a political think tank and boutique publishing house.
Um, have you actually read up on Project Jennifer? Because several hundred million dollars were expended in order to pull part of an obsolete Soviet submarine off the ocean floor, significantly damaging the vessel in the process, and recovering little of any practical value. It would have been more productive to use the Glomar Explorer to actually collect manganese modules from the ocean floor instead of using that as the cover story.
I’m just waiting for someone to mention Operation Gold.
Stranger