The Godfather USA
The CIA was to be much, much more than an intelligence-gathering agency. The CIA was given the authority to initiate and conduct its own military operations, and also to establish fully-functioning businesses of whatever kind it chose, legal or illegal, throughout the world. Furthermore, the CIA was to be answerable only to the President and to the National Security Council. Those freedoms placed the CIA largely ‘outside the law,’ and prepared the way for the CIA’s eventual domination of the entire US government. The CIA-engineered assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 was a military coup that effectively marked the death of real democracy in the USA.
Many people within the ranks of the CIA, the US military, and the US government resented President Kennedy because Kennedy refused to authorize direct US military support for the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Castro’s Cuba, support that might have prevented the Invasion’s costly failure. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired the top three men at the CIA: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and General Cabell, whose brother was the mayor of Dallas, Texas, where Kennedy was later to be assassinated. Kennedy also announced his intention to withdraw US forces from South Viet Nam, which was another one of the CIA’s pet projects. After Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, met with the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House, where Johnson made his first Presidential decision: to escalate the involvement of US troops in the Viet Nam War.
In 1977 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that a lone gunman did not kill President Kennedy, but instead that Kennedy was shot by at least two snipers, one of whom delivered the final, fatal shot to Kennedy’s right temple from the famous ‘grassy knoll’ in Dealey Plaza. Marita Lorenz testified to the HSCA that in November 1963 she had accompanied CIA agent Frank Sturgis, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a couple of Cuban immigrants with a small arsenal of firearms on a road trip from Miami, Florida to Dallas, Texas, where they met with CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and Jack Ruby at a Dallas motel. In 1994 James Files (also known as James Sutton) confessed that he had served with a team of snipers working under orders from US government agents to assassinate Kennedy, and that he personally had fired the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy from a hidden position behind a fence on the grassy knoll.
In addition to the assassination of President Kennedy, there is considerable evidence of CIA and/or FBI involvement in the political assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., and others.
In support of the success of the USA’s international business interests, the CIA has subverted and disrupted the democratic process in Italy, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, Ecuador, Zaire, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Cambodia, Bolivia, Australia, Angola, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and many other countries. Using propaganda, rigged elections, extortion, blackmail, sabotage, assassination, death squads, and torture, the CIA has deposed democratically-elected leaders and governments throughout the world and replaced them with ruthless right-wing dictators who were more accommodating to US business interests.
Saddam Hussein was twenty-two years old when he was hired by the CIA to serve on a six-man team that tried to assassinate Iraq’s Prime Minister Qasim, who had stated his intention to nationalize Iraq’s oil industry and to decriminalize Iraq’s Communist Party. When the assassination attempt failed, Saddam escaped to Egypt, where he remained in frequent contact with the US Embassy and the CIA. In 1963, after Baath Party agents, supported by the CIA, succeeded in killing Qasim, Saddam returned to Iraq. In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran, starting the Iran/Iraq War, during which the USA openly sold arms and provided logistic support to Iraq, while the CIA secretly sold arms to Iran, using Israel as a go-between. More than one million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers were killed in the Iran/Iraq War, which also took a heavy economic toll on both countries. The Iran/Iraq War, one of the longest and deadliest wars of the 20th Century, served the purpose of weakening and punishing two of the USA’s major rivals for the control of the Middle East and its massive oil reserves.
On July 29th, 1991 the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam Hussein at his Presidential Palace in Baghdad, where Glaspie assured Saddam that the USA would not interfere or intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait, which many Iraqis considered to historically be a part of Iraq. Four days later the Iraqi Army invaded and occupied Kuwait. In January and February of 1991 a US-led military coalition representing the United Nations assaulted the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, and in the desert borderland of northern Kuwait and southern Iraq the US-led force slaughtered more than 100,000 Iraqi troops with only minimal losses to the coalition forces.
Osama bin Laden is another ‘enemy’ of the USA who began his career as a CIA ‘asset,’ brokering the exchange of arms and heroin between the Afghani Mujahideen and the CIA during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. During the 1990s bin Laden provided financial support and recruited fighters for the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization that smuggles heroin and cocaine into Europe. The KLA also receives protection and support from the CIA and the US government.
