It is a stereotype to depict the CIA as evil or malevolent. When did this start? Who started it? Do any other Western countries depict their CIA-equivalent as evil? (e.g. MI5/MI6 are seldom so depicted in the UK).
Could it be <evil cackle> a Commie plot? 
The turned evil March 6th, 1952 around 3:42 EST.
Who said there ain’t no easy answers?
How is Rap like Porn? Both are better with the sound turned off.
They turned evil March 6th, 1952 around 3:42 EST.
Who said there ain’t no easy answers?
How is Rap like Porn? Both are better with the sound turned off.
But are there any easy answers, that’s the question…
It probably started, at least in a major way, in the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, with revelations about CIA assassination plots against Castro and other foreign leaders.
This article on the career of CIA Director Richard Helms gives some info on the kinds of activities that helped damage the CIA’s reputation.
The suggestion that the Kennedy assassination might have been a product, either indirectly (as retaliation for attempts against Castro) or directly, of CIA activities certainly didn’t help either.
Who does this to the CIA? The KGB’s always been evil or malevolent, from speaking as an American.
I know that’s not much of an answer, and that Kissenger never worked directly for the CIA, but his attitude certainly played a role in some of the fiascos the US got involved in.
1947, when Truman signed the National Security Act, thus creating the C.I.A.
Of course, Evil is relative… :dubious:
The senate’s 1975 report (Church committee) detailing the CIA’s Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders caused many people to feel that the CIA had overstepped the bounds of “goodness.” The revelations resulted in calls to rein in the agency’s worst excesses, and congress obliged.
I can never remember a time when the CIA wasn’t viewed as a bunch of scary, out-of-control, doing-more-harm-than-good whackos. And I’m pretty old.
dinoboy nailed it.
I guess my question appeared naive. I guess I interpret “malevolent” and “evil” as meaning as it pertains to us. So while they may not do saintly deeds, what they do is for our nation’s benefit and I have a hard time as perceiving this as evil.
On the other hand, Hitler was evil, and I imagine there were those Germans that didn’t perceive this as so.
Also, it’s widely rumored that the CIA got into drug smuggling in the 80’s.
First of all, what the CIA does isn’t supposed to “pertain to us”, if what you mean is act against American citizens or be involved in domestic spying. They have violated this many times, though.
Plus, it’s quite debatable whether what they do benefits us (think of the blowback), plus the means by which they achieved these ends has been, in some cases, reprehensible to many Americans and quite deadly for leaders of supposedly sovereign nations who happened to not be extreme right wingers. The CIA worldview was stuck in a fanatical fixation on the supposed evils of communism. Not sure why so much blood had to be shed over a difference of economic models…
Like other posters have mentioned, the CIA have always been rather Machiavellian, since the old OSS days…
The OP also asked about portrayal of security services in other countries.
For a long time the British secret services have been widely portrayed as if not evil certainly shady and disreputable. Partly this is due to the large number of moles and spies (Burgess, Philby, Maclean, Blunt, etc) unmasked around the 1950s. And most fiction about the intelligence services - John le Carre, Len Deighton and the films and TV of the their work - portrays it as far from glamorous work, but rather as the domain of a bunch of (generally upper-class) people busy betraying each other (see e.g. Alan Bennett’s plays about Burgess and Blunt.)
This perception worsened in the 1980s as the security forces became more prominent. Ex-spy Peter Wright claimed in his book Spycatcher that the intelligence services were riddled with both incompetence and traitors, and alleged that they were involved in trying to destabilise Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1970s.
They were also involved (mainly army intelligence and MI5, as well as military special forces) in the fight against the IRA, running informants, gathering intelligence, and possibly involved in a program of deliberate assassinations of terrorists and people they saw as terrorist sympathisers (e.g. lawyer Pat Finucane). This has been documented in films like Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990).
MI5 were also active in the 1980s in gathering intelligence on industrial disputes (notably the miner’s strike of 1984-85) and on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and they have been blamed with varying degrees of credibility for burglaries and murder of peace activists, for planting false rumors about trades unionists (e.g. linking NUM head Arthur Scargill to the Libyan government), and there are claims that a senior official in the National Union of Mineworkers was an MI5 agent. This inevitably didn’t endear MI5 to those on the left.
1980s films and TV series like Defence of the Realm and paranoid nuclear thriller Edge of Darkness reinforced the impression of untrustworthiness and overzealousness, as more comically did Alan Plater’s Biederbecke Tapes.
More recently David Shayler has followed Wright in complaining about inefficiencies in the service. There have also been complaints over the very expensive new headquarters buildings of MI5 and MI6. And it has emerged that in the 1970s MI5 kept vast files on many people simply because of their left-of-centre politics, including members of Tony Blair’s government.
Recently, TV show Spooks has tried to portray MI5 as a happening modern law enforcement agency. Apparently it has caused a dramatic rise in job applications.
As for the rest of the world, the French secret service is probably still best known for blowing up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985, killing a crewperson. Although those with long memories may remember French paratroopers using torture and other incredibly brutal anti-insurgency techniques in Algeria.
Ever since they got involved in them 1920s style de… ah never mind.
Keep in mind that pretty much anytime we hear about the CIA’s activities, it’s because they screwed up. A successful operation, pretty much by definition, does not end up on the front page.
“Supposed” evils?
It wasn’t the economics, it was the politics. Those weren’t “economic models” rolling down the street of Budapest, they were tanks.
Yeah, and those folks who pulled coup d’etats in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, etc. were just friendly American dogooder patriots, showing the world tha Our Way is the (only) Right Way.
I’m not defending the USSR, the brutality of Stalin alone would preclude me from ever doing so.
But the CIA (the subject of the OP) has done many cold, brutal and utterly sleazy things that are beyond the bounds of decency as well. And their efforts against the spread of communism weren’t ONLY in the name of fighting TOTALITARIANISM. See Guatemala; United Fruit Co., 1954. The CIA-led invasion overthrew the most democratic government Guatemala had ever had and installed a military dictatorship. Repeat with, Iran, Chile, Lebanon…So much for the white hats…
No cite (Google turns up a large number of socialist websites pooh-poohing this but no independent one) to hand but I do not believe the link between the miners and Libya was invented. A senior NUM official visited Libya.
I don’t doubt that, but there were far more serious allegations which now seem to have been entirely fabricated. Specifically, there were false claims that the Libyan government gave large amounts of money to the NUM, which NUM leader Arthur Scargill used to pay off the mortgage on his house.
Here is an article by Roy Greenslade, who published the allegations as editor of the Mirror, in which he admits he was wrong to say Scargill misappropriated any money. It also mentions rumours that Roger Windsor, chief executive of the NUM and source of the story, was an MI5 agent, although Greenslade rejects this claim.
The proper question may not be when did Americans first come to regard the CIA as evil and inept, but when did it become pretty much the norm to suspect this.
There were always people critical and suspicious of the CIA, but really widespread distaste for the organization, so nearly as I can recall, grew out of the Vietnam and Watergate eras. A previous poster made reference to the hearings chaired by Senator Church in the mid 1970s. I would say that these greatly expanded the popular impression that the CIA is both malevolent and inept, but that the hearings had been prompted by the fact that the impression was already becoming widespread.
I recall a Mike Peters cartoon from around 1975 which showed the arsenal of a CIA agent concealed in a briefcase. There was some pretty impressive stuff, such as a seemingly ordinary wrist watch which was actually a cleverly disguised bugging device. All you had to do was slip it into somebody’s drink…
While this is, of course, absurd, it should be considered that in a previous Congressional hearing it was revealed that the CIA had developed a transmitter disguised as a cocktail olive; the antenna was in the toothpick. And when someone ate the olive?
As for opposition to Communism, let it be noted that throughout the Cold War a great many people in the U. S. government used the word “Communist” in a “general” sense; it included all different sorts of Socialists, as well as some Capitalists we didn’t like.