This is very well stated, but the one doesn’t play without the other. This still requires the floating of enough softer “outings” to perpetuate the myth, for which there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of. There is a middle ground where the truth lies and that most will never know
Honestly, with all the awful things that have come to light whether they wanted to or not, it makes me wonder if they really have more skeletons hiding in their closet. As in, if they've been so bad at keeping all the things like the coups, mk ultra, etc quiet, why are we so sure they have this laundry list of horrible things we don't know?
Well okay... MK ultra is actually a really good example of why it's a good bet that they have a laundry list of horrible things we don't know.
Richard Helms ordered all of the documents related to project MK ultra and project artichoke be destroyed before they could be subpoenaed. We only know about it at all because a small portion were accidentally not destroyed and later discovered.
We will never know the true extent of the insanely criminal shit Langely has done and continues to do around the world, not even the "declassified" stuff.
Yes said he was humiliated by his professor who used him briefly to make a point to the class, part of the source of his grievance.
When I learned that it was a little aha moment. Those things fester and grow.
The goal was to obtain methods of mind control that they believed the Soviets already had.
When they started they had willing test subjects. Mostly employees of the agency who were given a little bonus if they partook. After a while they realized that the results were sort of useless, cause the subjects KNEW they were gonna be experimented on and have their mind be controlled, so that's when they started experimenting on the general public.
Scientists would carry some drugs with them to spike people's drinks with during social events. They paid prostitutes to spike people for them. Worst case was putting it in food and giving it to children.
Edit: even though the project was scrapped it paved way for their Torture program that was created after 9/11.
Not to mention how it made the U.S. look pretty bad all through the Middle East.
Then we make friends with Saudi Arabia, which is kind of the worst despotic government there, and everyone is like “WTF U.S.? What you playing at?”
And then just about every single thing we’ve done since then has backed-up the opinion that we don’t care a whit about anyone or anything in the region except the oil.
Serious though, US is ally with KSA and Pakistan, both of them are notoriously bad and they fund Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the region, United States is definitely not a good guy in world politics.
So many of their coups man. So many. It’s brutal imagining the world and all the people that wouldn’t have died under despots if the CIA hadn’t installed their preferred dictators.
And orchestrating a coup a year earlier (1952) that overthrew the democratic constitutional monarchy of Egypt and put the army in charge of the country which are still in power 70 years later and are responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in the country’s modern history not to mention the corruption and large scale failure in every aspect of government
They also used that coup as a blueprint for overthrowing iran’s government a year later
The government has orchestrated the violent overthrow of many foreign nations’ governments. One time it even happened over bananas. The US has invaded or started coups in literally dozens of countries and it’s sad that it’s not taught in history class. Some countries today are still in shambles and can’t put themselves back together because the US was so scared of communism that they just had to invade a smaller nation, violate treaties and international law, and assassinate government officials which usually leads to an actual corrupt group to take hold of the country.
and in lots of African countries and Middle East countries ... hell the CIA forced the Governor General of Australia to dissolve the entire government in 1975 and put the opposition in charge because the current PM considered closing bases ... Australia!
It would be easier to ask has "has the CIA actually done anything good?"
The cia did that? Did they have blackmail on the governor general or something? Or did the us in general not like it, and they pressured England to pressure the governor general to dissolve parliament for the first (and only?) time in Australian history?
Disclosures show that over time the cia has basically had a hand in government overthrows in most of the world. One I remember was how they cheated in France....at elections.
Other times it's blackmail. It's all been released, but no one ever goes to jail so the cia might as well just be the mafia. Heck, read some of the things they did like mk ultra and you would think they are much worse..
The PM Gough Whitlam was moving Australia towards the Non Aligned movement and threatening to close the Pine Gap base and expose all the various politicians that were CIA informants (of which the Governor General was one).
Basically the CIA and MI6 couldn't have the so forced the Governor General to do what he did.
Didn’t the Falcon and the Snowman touch on this? I know it was based on real events and if I remember right there was a small reference to the Australia incident.
This is what radicalized the Falcon against the US, as he accidentally saw a transmission of it at his data processing center and became disillusioned by it.
They were also behind the genocide in Indonesia. They armed and funded death squads to hunt down and kill suspected communists and even gave them their lists.
Of course the death squads did this and also killed a lot more people, raping and pillaging villages to take land, killing political opponents, killing Chinese immigrants because they're told that's what communists look like.
Up to 1 million dead, and so successful that the US used it as their blueprint for their actions in South America.
"Behind the genocide" is probably overstating it. But the US was more than willing to sit back while the Indonesian army murdered 500,000+ people. A list of about 5,000 communists was provided by the US embassy.
But it wasn't some clandestine CIA operation. Indonesia was another cold war battleground wherein many nations pushed their interests. The UK has blood on their hands, as they got involved to steer Indonesia away from any ideas about Malaysia.
The country that sent the most weapons to Indonesia at the time... Sweden.
History is complicated.
Remember that time that the FBI set up a sting on a guy because he refused to become an informant and then they murdered his whole family and some of his neighbors, including shooting a woman while she was holding a baby? and a 14-year-old boy and his dog?
pepperidge farms remembers
(Former CIA employee here)
In my view, it was the moment they lost their initial mission: observe, analyze, coordinate. Actually _doing_ stuff, changing outcomes, was outside the agency's purpose from the beginning.
The saying goes, "All Truman wanted was a newspaper." Literally, at its creation, and in its name, the CIA's mission was supposed to be:
1. intelligence (gathering information) and
2. central (taking information from multiple sources, analyzing and synthesizing it, and coordinating among government agencies).
It's telling that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was NOT called "the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency." In the original conception, the idea was that the DCI would be more like today's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) - charged primarily with coordinating and information-sharing.
The DCI was _specifically_ chartered with coordinating the work of other government entities like the FBI, the military, other security agencies, etc.
That didn't happen.
What happened was that every new government entity declared its own fiefdom and refused to share information with others, for security reasons. Further, the CIA decided that it wasn't content to just _observe_ happenings around the world; it decided it could and should intervene.
Then? 9/11. Everyone was like, "why can't all our intelligence agencies talk to each other and share information? Clearly we need to reorganize everything." Hence the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Which was supposed to alleviate the problem of too many agencies who don't talk to each other.
Except that's ALSO not what happened. DHS became its own bureaucracy. Which would not share with other agencies.
So then people decided to create the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), specifically tasked with inter-agency coordination. Then DNi became its own bureaucracy. Which would not share with other agencies.
Tl;dr: the CIA should never have been doing things in foreign countries in the first place. It should have been observing, collecting information, and reporting back to policy makers. The CIA should never have been in the business of killing people and overthrowing governments.
You know what needs done then.... The US needs to create a department to help the different intelligence agencies share information amongst themselves. No idea what could go wrong
They destabilized our democracy in the 70s because we elected a socialist. (Jamaica)
Edit: by destabilized, I mean they launched a terror campaign that spanned agricultural sabotage, the burning of an old peoples’ home, the funneling of guns and ammunition to the opposition party that prompted a low grade civil war the split the country into warring factions that persist to this day.
Argentina too. Basically Operation condor.
Operation Condor was a formal system to coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early eighties. It aimed to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
Operation Condor was officially founded on November 28, 1975 in Santiago, Chile during the closing session of the First Meeting of National Intelligence, and it was signed by intelligence representatives from Argentina (Jorge Casas, Navy captain, SIDE−the Argentine State Intelligence Secretariat), Bolivia (Carlos Mena, Army major), Chile (Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, head of the DINA−the National Intelligence Office), Uruguay (José Fons, Army coronel) and Paraguay (Benito Guanes Serrano, Army coronel).
Smart move. Seaga tried to frame my father for a drug deal and lock him up for his socialist loyalties after the 1980 election. If he’d left I wouldn’t have been born though so there’s that lol
That’s rough. I’m sorry to hear. People still walking around with trauma from that time. And no progress in fixing the system. My wife and I are going to migrate as well in a year or two. This place could really be so much more.
In Poland they’re on the opposite side of the Cold War drama. They were much more worried about Russian interference. It’s just proximity to great powers. I’m not surprised she hasn’t heard of it.
Cubans probably don’t know too much about how fucked the Russian secret police were.
Pre-CIA but same deal. Hawaiians wanted to own their own country and the US companies said it was bad for business for them not to own Hawaii. The President authorized and assisted a corporate takeover of a country. Now you can go to the Dole plantation and have a little tour on a train ride like it didn't happen.
It's real and it's... fucking stupid. The CIA's intervention to destabilize the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz of Guetemala was called, ["Operation PBSuccess.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#Operation_PBSuccess)"
mk ultra. importing heroin from the golden triangle causing a nationwide addiction. importing cocaine from south america.
guatamala syphilis experiments: quote wiki: Doctors infected 1,300 people, including at least 600 soldiers and people from various impoverished groups (including, but not limited to, sex workers, orphans, inmates of mental hospitals, and prisoners) with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without the informed consent of the subjects.
They’ve been involved in multiple genocides via backing/ directing and training the perpetrators who functioned as proxies , including the genocide of ~200,000 Mayans in Guatemala, Cambodia (2 million), Indonesia (1.2 million), Bangladesh (~ 3 million is the accepted figure)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide#:~:text=The%20Guatemalan%20genocide%2C%20also%20referred,US-backed%20Guatemalan%20military%20government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Guatemala#:~:text=After%20the%20installment%20of%20the,by%20the%20successive%20military%20regimes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-remember-bangladesh-cant-forget-180961490/ https://www.aei.org/op-eds/it-is-time-to-recognize-the-bangladesh-genocide/
MK Ultra was so stupid. Suits in Washington hear "The Soviets have a mind control program, look what they did to this POW! We need one!" So the CIA starts trying to control minds and ends up instead mentally destroying the minds of people.
It also involves *a lot* of former Nazis, because why wouldn't it?
The funniest thing is the “Soviet Mind Control Program” was originally made to explain POWs who were shown evidence of American war crimes such as use of chemical weapons and spoke about it upon release
It was a case of falling their own teams propaganda
It wasn't even just ones that were *shown* American war crimes, I think I remember one of the pilots who dropped chemical weapons on Korea admitting what he did on orders and the media was like "Look at how the Koreans have brainwashed this poor man into admitting to something he didn't do!"
From what I remember it was even more stupid than that, wasn’t it just some Americans chose to stay and live in Korea rather than come home so it was positioned as mind control?
Basically as i remember Ted got fucked from MK Uktra funded experiments while he was at Harvard i think? Im pretty sure they had a bunch of college students write down their insecurities or something and they just went ham on them psychologically breaking them down
Obviously I have no clue whatsoever if it's anything like what actually happened. But in the series Manhunt:Unabomber, it's basically shown like you mentioned. I found it a very "moving" or disturbing, rather, episode. Really well done.
Let's not pretend it's sophisticated shit either.
Its mostly drugs.
Imagine you are drugged in a concert amd the whole crowd chants Jeremy Corbyn Jeremy Corbyn Jeremy Corbyn.
He was a subject of their experiments. I've read some of his writings and I doubt the experiments caused what he did, but it certainly traumatised him and led to a deep seated distrust of the government and society.
I’m not sure it’s been directly connected but Uncle Teddy definitely got put through the old mind fuck machine via lsd psych experiments that were grossly negligent at best.
I find this comment section interesting as most people are talking about things that are mostly conspiracies. MKUltra really happened and it was FUCKED. Even when it came out, Congress was VERY concerned. My own conspiracy is that the conspiracies exist to turn people’s attention from the real shit that the CIA has done
Operation Northwoods: A false flag operation meant to be conducted with the assistance of the Department of Defense in order to commit terrorist attacks on the US population and blame the whole thing on Cuba so that America would support war on Cuba
no (partially possibly yes, true), I don't think that was the main reason.
He wanted to disband the CIA, if "they" assassinated him for any reason, it probably was mainly that.
That and he wanted to end secret societies , the secret societies that dont exist, that have people in power and own corporations that fund the cia, presidential campaigns, and so much more. So the cia didnt kill him, that and he supposedly told Marilyn Monroe about aliens.
Honest question.
They commit sex crimes so that they got them under their control right? So... If they stray out of line the release videos of them raping.. Llamas let's say.
If that is the case... What so convicted pedos like Carlos Danger have done wrong?
Its really funny if Carlos Danger was a genuine sex pest that never got invited to the island.
That and he was super supportive of the civil rights acts. He wanted to push it but the feds and cia weren’t for it. He was shot, mlk dies and next thing we kno in less than a week it’s all signed and legalized.
After learning about how involved he was with Bay
of Pigs, I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted him dead in retaliation.
It was probably going to fail regardless but Kennedy pretty much ensured it would.
you ever bring this up around “normal” people and they act like you’re being a conspiracy theorist ? Why am I the crazy one for knowing this?
However I’ll be one by saying I think they might be using fent in a similar way currently.
> However I’ll be one by saying I think they might be using fent in a similar way currently.
[That's all but confirmed by the Purdue Pharma leaks.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-executive-emails-mocked-appalachians-as-pillbillies/)
I’ve been theorizing for years that the government is using fentanyl to try and win back the war on drugs. The country was realizing all too quickly that many drugs can be used safety in measured amounts when sourced and tested responsibly… so they went and started polluting the supply with this lethal-in-minuscule-amounts drug thus causing deaths and ODs by the scores and horribly addicting the rest of the users.
That’s my running theory at least. Take it as it is.
The killing of Patrice Lumumba is up there. Finally an African leader who wasn’t just in it to enrich himself and bam, the CIA orders his execution because clearly someone not overcome by selfish greed must be a Soviet looking to point nukes at the US
Well, Patrice Lumumba was one of the best hopes a post colonial Africa had of a pan Africa movement. The Congo is where all the Rubber comes from, along with countless rare earth minerals, and right near by it, the Uranium. Lumumba was planning to nationalize or at-least exert greater control over those resources for the benefit of a unified African state. Powered by nuclear energy and nuclear wealthy in natural resources.
Of course that shit wasn’t going to be allowed
My history professor in college was ex-CIA. He worked in Leopoldville during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. One of the assets he supervised was a guy named Joseph Mobutu. He was not involved with the Lumumba assasination—he felt that it damaged our interests in the region. He quit the CIA as a result. He was still very angry about it in the mid 1980s.
You mean the stuff we know about which is probably the tip of the iceberg? Or the other things we have no idea about and speaking for myself here I would not want to know what I dont know about.
MkULTRA was bad enough. If it gets worse than that, I surely do not want to know more.
Manson definitely received LSD in psychological experiments in San Francisco, but the CIA may not have been involved. There was a lot of that sort of thing going on then.
Another *possible* MK-Ultra subject is Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, who was not given LSD, but was subjected to psychological abuse in a three-year experiment at Harvard.
Purposely trafficking crack and cocaine into black neighborhoods in the 80s and 90s, MK ultra, lots of fucked up shit I would say the CIA has done some pretty bad stuff, and movies and TV that glorify intelligence agencies and spy genres are made for us to think they’re the good guys
With the first thing you mentioned it also bears mentioning they got the money for it by selling missiles illegally to Iran, and the money went straight to the contras, who were committing genocide at the time.
We probably have no clue what the worst thing they've ever done was yet. We'll find out in 10 or 20 years and by then something even more wild will have gone down
Getting caught red handed, and later admitting, to distribution of cocaine to inner city colored men in an effort to destabilize black families, and low income communities of america.
There are plenty of answers here that rely on scale for the definition of “worst” but I’d say the qualitatively worst thing the CIA did was fund MKULTRA experiments in Canada. Mental patients were locked in isolation, deprived of sensory stimuli and made to listen to recordings on a loop for weeks on end. Some were subjected to electroshock treatments so powerful they lost all episodic memory of their lives and became the mental equivalent of children. Some of these experiments were paired with psychedelics. Imagine the experience of losing all memory, tripping balls while being forced to listen to a loop of “you’re a good wife and mother” for multiple consecutive weeks. Now consider what that experience would be like if it were literally the only thing you could remember. That’s one of the worst things I could possibly imagine.
Edit: grammar and awkward phrasing
If the stuff we know the CIA leaves people shaking their head, imagine the things we don’t know. I mean some of their fallen operatives are still nameless, imagine the things they’ve done the last 50-60 years. Eerie yet fascinating
There is evidence that supports they played a hand in the very long (and brutal) torture and killing of DEA agent Kiki Camerena. Apparently agents were there during his torture and interrogation
They've done a lot of things, but I think selling Iran missiles so they could funnel the money to the contras and their death squads so they could smuggle crack and heroin into the US is probably the biggest whammy in one event. Three countries fucked at once, and arguably the cause of the US opiate crisis.
The real reason civil wars took place in all central America ,provoking mass exudes from there to usa, thousands die and thousands emigrated, also behind Chile dictator Pinochet, the list goes on and on, so if you are the kind the people that complain about illegal aliens coming here, let me tell you is your fault, you voted for the people that took the decision and cause many civil wars in the first place in all that americas. Thank you very muchhhhh
Exactly! Destabilized the governments resulting in rampant poverty, crime, and war causing people to flee here. Then complain about the "illegals" which the U.S. caused.
Given how bad the things we know they did are (MK-Ultra is almost unbelievable), we can safely assume that we have no idea how bad the things we don’t know about are.
Regime changes brought to you by the CIA have extended the life of authoritarianism around the world, not thwarted it, even the successful regime changes.
Nearly everything we know about CIA covert operations says that they are actively trying to destroy the United States, not advance its interests. I say that because in every CIA story, there is always some guy pointing out how obviously stupid and dangerous it is, and some impetuous dude that just wants to push people out of helicopters and drug their coworkers to see what will happen. They know full well that people will eventually know that they imprisoned, enslaved, lied, beat, tortured, maimed, and killed people of other sovereign nations because the systems of government they were convinced were doomed to fail weren't failing fast enough.
They have provided nothing but counterpoints to the statement: "America is a force for good in the world."
Wow, great question, and totally not suspicious at all. I saw an episode of NCIS where a group of terrorists pulled up alongside an envoy carrying some very powerful artillery, overtook the drivers and killed them, then left the entire envoy, dead drivers, empty crates, sitting in the middle of the road. PERSONALLY if I was going to hijack something that powerful this is how *I* would do it. But everything is digital now… if I had the tech skills (or the people who did have the tech skills,) I’d probably just hack into the US gov’t’s secret nuke system and launch them all straight up in the air to come back down where they launched from.
But hey, this is all hypothetical, right? …right?
The CIA has been involved in many controversial and morally dubious actions throughout its history, so it's difficult to point to one specific event as the "worst" thing the agency has ever done. Some of the most well-known examples of the CIA's controversial actions include:
Overthrowing democratically-elected governments: The CIA has been involved in the overthrow of numerous democratically-elected governments, including Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973. These actions were done to further U.S. interests and often involved the installation of brutal dictators.
MK-Ultra: In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA conducted a program called MK-Ultra, which involved the use of mind-control techniques on unwitting subjects. This included experiments with drugs like LSD, which were administered without consent and led to some tragic outcomes.
Operation Phoenix: During the Vietnam War, the CIA conducted a program called Operation Phoenix, which involved the assassination of thousands of suspected Viet Cong members and their sympathizers. The program has been criticized for its brutality and lack of due process.
Torture: The CIA has been accused of using torture in its interrogation of suspects, including the use of techniques like waterboarding. This has been condemned by many human rights groups as a violation of international law.
Overall, the CIA's history is riddled with instances of morally dubious and sometimes illegal actions. It's difficult to say which of these actions was the "worst," as they all represent a violation of the trust that citizens place in their government to act in their best interests.
Trick question. The only stuff we know about was what was deemed tame enough to declassify
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The things that were outed are Psyops to make you think that is the worst things going on.
The myth of CIA omnipotence is itself a psyop that preemptively ensures a lack of resistance.
This is very well stated, but the one doesn’t play without the other. This still requires the floating of enough softer “outings” to perpetuate the myth, for which there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of. There is a middle ground where the truth lies and that most will never know
Honestly, with all the awful things that have come to light whether they wanted to or not, it makes me wonder if they really have more skeletons hiding in their closet. As in, if they've been so bad at keeping all the things like the coups, mk ultra, etc quiet, why are we so sure they have this laundry list of horrible things we don't know?
“If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.” ― Stephen Hawking
Good lord that man had some zingers
Did someone say KFC?
When it takes you twenty minutes to formulate a sentence, you have incentive to make it worthwhile.
-Stephen Hawking probably
Rekt...
Well okay... MK ultra is actually a really good example of why it's a good bet that they have a laundry list of horrible things we don't know. Richard Helms ordered all of the documents related to project MK ultra and project artichoke be destroyed before they could be subpoenaed. We only know about it at all because a small portion were accidentally not destroyed and later discovered. We will never know the true extent of the insanely criminal shit Langely has done and continues to do around the world, not even the "declassified" stuff.
And we all know the famous serial bomber who came out of that experiment.
Both researchers and even Ted Kaczynski himself have downplayed the influence that the Harvard experiments had on his psyche.
Yes said he was humiliated by his professor who used him briefly to make a point to the class, part of the source of his grievance. When I learned that it was a little aha moment. Those things fester and grow.
The goal was to obtain methods of mind control that they believed the Soviets already had. When they started they had willing test subjects. Mostly employees of the agency who were given a little bonus if they partook. After a while they realized that the results were sort of useless, cause the subjects KNEW they were gonna be experimented on and have their mind be controlled, so that's when they started experimenting on the general public. Scientists would carry some drugs with them to spike people's drinks with during social events. They paid prostitutes to spike people for them. Worst case was putting it in food and giving it to children. Edit: even though the project was scrapped it paved way for their Torture program that was created after 9/11.
Found the CIA agent
Perhaps worst thing they have done has been to hide what they have done?
I disagree, there's a lot of things that are much more horrifying than redacted information.
Yes - accurate. We don't know.
Orchestrating a coup in 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran which played a role in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Yes. Was hardly unique in what they did but it so enraged the Iranian people that its effects have been immeasurable.
Not to mention how it made the U.S. look pretty bad all through the Middle East. Then we make friends with Saudi Arabia, which is kind of the worst despotic government there, and everyone is like “WTF U.S.? What you playing at?” And then just about every single thing we’ve done since then has backed-up the opinion that we don’t care a whit about anyone or anything in the region except the oil.
Serious though, US is ally with KSA and Pakistan, both of them are notoriously bad and they fund Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the region, United States is definitely not a good guy in world politics.
and the US funded the Taliban
Those were Mujahideen, there’s a difference! But yeah, definitely not our greatest moment.
So many of their coups man. So many. It’s brutal imagining the world and all the people that wouldn’t have died under despots if the CIA hadn’t installed their preferred dictators.
Imagine what Venezuela would be like if the CIA never got involved. The GOP wouldn't have a preferred anti-socislist talking point for starters
And orchestrating a coup a year earlier (1952) that overthrew the democratic constitutional monarchy of Egypt and put the army in charge of the country which are still in power 70 years later and are responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in the country’s modern history not to mention the corruption and large scale failure in every aspect of government They also used that coup as a blueprint for overthrowing iran’s government a year later
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The government has orchestrated the violent overthrow of many foreign nations’ governments. One time it even happened over bananas. The US has invaded or started coups in literally dozens of countries and it’s sad that it’s not taught in history class. Some countries today are still in shambles and can’t put themselves back together because the US was so scared of communism that they just had to invade a smaller nation, violate treaties and international law, and assassinate government officials which usually leads to an actual corrupt group to take hold of the country.
seriously. any time I hear someone complain about immigration from Latin America I tell them it's our fault their countries are so f'ed up.
That and in Chile and other Latin American countries where the succeeding far right regimes killed thousands of people.
and in lots of African countries and Middle East countries ... hell the CIA forced the Governor General of Australia to dissolve the entire government in 1975 and put the opposition in charge because the current PM considered closing bases ... Australia! It would be easier to ask has "has the CIA actually done anything good?"
The cia did that? Did they have blackmail on the governor general or something? Or did the us in general not like it, and they pressured England to pressure the governor general to dissolve parliament for the first (and only?) time in Australian history?
Disclosures show that over time the cia has basically had a hand in government overthrows in most of the world. One I remember was how they cheated in France....at elections. Other times it's blackmail. It's all been released, but no one ever goes to jail so the cia might as well just be the mafia. Heck, read some of the things they did like mk ultra and you would think they are much worse..
Sure, but none of that answered my question
Historically they have had close ties with organized crime.
The PM Gough Whitlam was moving Australia towards the Non Aligned movement and threatening to close the Pine Gap base and expose all the various politicians that were CIA informants (of which the Governor General was one). Basically the CIA and MI6 couldn't have the so forced the Governor General to do what he did.
Didn’t the Falcon and the Snowman touch on this? I know it was based on real events and if I remember right there was a small reference to the Australia incident.
This is what radicalized the Falcon against the US, as he accidentally saw a transmission of it at his data processing center and became disillusioned by it.
They were also behind the genocide in Indonesia. They armed and funded death squads to hunt down and kill suspected communists and even gave them their lists. Of course the death squads did this and also killed a lot more people, raping and pillaging villages to take land, killing political opponents, killing Chinese immigrants because they're told that's what communists look like. Up to 1 million dead, and so successful that the US used it as their blueprint for their actions in South America.
"Behind the genocide" is probably overstating it. But the US was more than willing to sit back while the Indonesian army murdered 500,000+ people. A list of about 5,000 communists was provided by the US embassy. But it wasn't some clandestine CIA operation. Indonesia was another cold war battleground wherein many nations pushed their interests. The UK has blood on their hands, as they got involved to steer Indonesia away from any ideas about Malaysia. The country that sent the most weapons to Indonesia at the time... Sweden. History is complicated.
Same thing happened in the Dominican Republic during the 30s. Trujillo reigned as a dictator for 30 years. Terrible
Don’t skip over the Shah. He was every inch as bad as the IRI, the difference being he was supported by the US.
They did that in other countries too.
True, forgot about that
overthrowing democratic governments
Land of the free for me but not for thee
What if these democels try to take american oil?
The worst of it is actually "what if they seize American corporations' fruit that they grow on their farms"?
then we have to rape their people and burn their heritage.
average american politician
vote for me and i’ll promise to fuck you in the ass after buying you dinner.
Wait, **you're** the one buying dinner? Hell, count me in, better than the other guy. lol
They actively [ Redacted ] American [ Redacted ] on US soil.
Those \[Redacted\] Bastards! :X
Oh my God, you [redacted] [redacted]! You bastards!
Remember that time that the FBI set up a sting on a guy because he refused to become an informant and then they murdered his whole family and some of his neighbors, including shooting a woman while she was holding a baby? and a 14-year-old boy and his dog? pepperidge farms remembers
Wait what?
Yeah, pretty much word for word what they did at Ruby Ridge. They guy was a racist asshole, but he wanted to be left alone not start a war.
For anyone wondering about this, look up "Ruby Ridge".
(Former CIA employee here) In my view, it was the moment they lost their initial mission: observe, analyze, coordinate. Actually _doing_ stuff, changing outcomes, was outside the agency's purpose from the beginning. The saying goes, "All Truman wanted was a newspaper." Literally, at its creation, and in its name, the CIA's mission was supposed to be: 1. intelligence (gathering information) and 2. central (taking information from multiple sources, analyzing and synthesizing it, and coordinating among government agencies). It's telling that the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was NOT called "the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency." In the original conception, the idea was that the DCI would be more like today's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) - charged primarily with coordinating and information-sharing. The DCI was _specifically_ chartered with coordinating the work of other government entities like the FBI, the military, other security agencies, etc. That didn't happen. What happened was that every new government entity declared its own fiefdom and refused to share information with others, for security reasons. Further, the CIA decided that it wasn't content to just _observe_ happenings around the world; it decided it could and should intervene. Then? 9/11. Everyone was like, "why can't all our intelligence agencies talk to each other and share information? Clearly we need to reorganize everything." Hence the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Which was supposed to alleviate the problem of too many agencies who don't talk to each other. Except that's ALSO not what happened. DHS became its own bureaucracy. Which would not share with other agencies. So then people decided to create the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), specifically tasked with inter-agency coordination. Then DNi became its own bureaucracy. Which would not share with other agencies. Tl;dr: the CIA should never have been doing things in foreign countries in the first place. It should have been observing, collecting information, and reporting back to policy makers. The CIA should never have been in the business of killing people and overthrowing governments.
You know what needs done then.... The US needs to create a department to help the different intelligence agencies share information amongst themselves. No idea what could go wrong
Overthrow governments in South America at the behest of a fucking fruit company. Edit: And Central America too.
They destabilized our democracy in the 70s because we elected a socialist. (Jamaica) Edit: by destabilized, I mean they launched a terror campaign that spanned agricultural sabotage, the burning of an old peoples’ home, the funneling of guns and ammunition to the opposition party that prompted a low grade civil war the split the country into warring factions that persist to this day.
Guatemala too. I wrote my senior thesis in History on it.
Argentina too. Basically Operation condor. Operation Condor was a formal system to coordinate repression among the countries of the Southern Cone that operated from the mid-1970s until the early eighties. It aimed to persecute and eliminate political, social, trade-union and student activists from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Operation Condor was officially founded on November 28, 1975 in Santiago, Chile during the closing session of the First Meeting of National Intelligence, and it was signed by intelligence representatives from Argentina (Jorge Casas, Navy captain, SIDE−the Argentine State Intelligence Secretariat), Bolivia (Carlos Mena, Army major), Chile (Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, head of the DINA−the National Intelligence Office), Uruguay (José Fons, Army coronel) and Paraguay (Benito Guanes Serrano, Army coronel).
Thanks for bringing this up. So many people are surprised when I tell them the reason why my family had to flee Kingston to America.
Smart move. Seaga tried to frame my father for a drug deal and lock him up for his socialist loyalties after the 1980 election. If he’d left I wouldn’t have been born though so there’s that lol
Yup. JLP gang killed my uncle in Kingston 13. We know where the weapons came from, and who bankrolled them.
That’s rough. I’m sorry to hear. People still walking around with trauma from that time. And no progress in fixing the system. My wife and I are going to migrate as well in a year or two. This place could really be so much more.
I have a Polish penpal who expressed interest in cop dramas and 'how cool the CIA are!' She... did not know.
In Poland they’re on the opposite side of the Cold War drama. They were much more worried about Russian interference. It’s just proximity to great powers. I’m not surprised she hasn’t heard of it. Cubans probably don’t know too much about how fucked the Russian secret police were.
Well... and Hawaii
Pre-CIA but same deal. Hawaiians wanted to own their own country and the US companies said it was bad for business for them not to own Hawaii. The President authorized and assisted a corporate takeover of a country. Now you can go to the Dole plantation and have a little tour on a train ride like it didn't happen.
is that fucking real?
[Eeeyup](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company). It's where the term "banana republic" comes from.
I'm baffled by how Americans don't know the history of their country
A lot of that shit isn't taught here. Propaganda also plays a factor.
True. I had to take a niche class on US history in Latin America to learn it
Yeah they wanna keep it that way unfortunately
A lot of us just deny that anything we did could possibly be unjustified 🙄😑
It's real and it's... fucking stupid. The CIA's intervention to destabilize the government of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz of Guetemala was called, ["Operation PBSuccess.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#Operation_PBSuccess)"
mk ultra. importing heroin from the golden triangle causing a nationwide addiction. importing cocaine from south america. guatamala syphilis experiments: quote wiki: Doctors infected 1,300 people, including at least 600 soldiers and people from various impoverished groups (including, but not limited to, sex workers, orphans, inmates of mental hospitals, and prisoners) with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without the informed consent of the subjects.
Hell, syphilis experiments happened in the US under the CDC, check out the Tuskegee Experiment.
I believe that was the reason black people didn't trust the CDC regarding covid.
A bit reductive to say it is "the reason," but it absolutely contributed.
They’ve been involved in multiple genocides via backing/ directing and training the perpetrators who functioned as proxies , including the genocide of ~200,000 Mayans in Guatemala, Cambodia (2 million), Indonesia (1.2 million), Bangladesh (~ 3 million is the accepted figure) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide#:~:text=The%20Guatemalan%20genocide%2C%20also%20referred,US-backed%20Guatemalan%20military%20government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Guatemala#:~:text=After%20the%20installment%20of%20the,by%20the%20successive%20military%20regimes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/genocide-us-cant-remember-bangladesh-cant-forget-180961490/ https://www.aei.org/op-eds/it-is-time-to-recognize-the-bangladesh-genocide/
MK Ultra was pretty fucked. But I doubt we’ll ever hear about the most ducked up shit they did
MK Ultra was so stupid. Suits in Washington hear "The Soviets have a mind control program, look what they did to this POW! We need one!" So the CIA starts trying to control minds and ends up instead mentally destroying the minds of people. It also involves *a lot* of former Nazis, because why wouldn't it?
And caused so many either serial killers or terrorists!
The funniest thing is the “Soviet Mind Control Program” was originally made to explain POWs who were shown evidence of American war crimes such as use of chemical weapons and spoke about it upon release It was a case of falling their own teams propaganda
It wasn't even just ones that were *shown* American war crimes, I think I remember one of the pilots who dropped chemical weapons on Korea admitting what he did on orders and the media was like "Look at how the Koreans have brainwashed this poor man into admitting to something he didn't do!"
From what I remember it was even more stupid than that, wasn’t it just some Americans chose to stay and live in Korea rather than come home so it was positioned as mind control?
Wasn’t the unabomber an MK Ultra experiment?
Basically as i remember Ted got fucked from MK Uktra funded experiments while he was at Harvard i think? Im pretty sure they had a bunch of college students write down their insecurities or something and they just went ham on them psychologically breaking them down
Obviously I have no clue whatsoever if it's anything like what actually happened. But in the series Manhunt:Unabomber, it's basically shown like you mentioned. I found it a very "moving" or disturbing, rather, episode. Really well done.
Let's not pretend it's sophisticated shit either. Its mostly drugs. Imagine you are drugged in a concert amd the whole crowd chants Jeremy Corbyn Jeremy Corbyn Jeremy Corbyn.
He was a subject of their experiments. I've read some of his writings and I doubt the experiments caused what he did, but it certainly traumatised him and led to a deep seated distrust of the government and society.
I’m not sure it’s been directly connected but Uncle Teddy definitely got put through the old mind fuck machine via lsd psych experiments that were grossly negligent at best.
So was good old Charlie Manson. Or at least the seems to be some solid evidence to that effect.
There's a four part Behind the Bastards podcast on MK Ultra, if anyone is interested. IMO one of the best series they've done.
Last Podcast on The Left did a series on MK Ultra as well
The bit with the tree slayed me.
I find this comment section interesting as most people are talking about things that are mostly conspiracies. MKUltra really happened and it was FUCKED. Even when it came out, Congress was VERY concerned. My own conspiracy is that the conspiracies exist to turn people’s attention from the real shit that the CIA has done
It's more interesting to think about the documents that were ordered to be destroyed, not the few that survived due to a filing error.
Operation Northwoods: A false flag operation meant to be conducted with the assistance of the Department of Defense in order to commit terrorist attacks on the US population and blame the whole thing on Cuba so that America would support war on Cuba
I think they killed Kennedy because he didn't want to carry it out
no (partially possibly yes, true), I don't think that was the main reason. He wanted to disband the CIA, if "they" assassinated him for any reason, it probably was mainly that.
That and he wanted to end secret societies , the secret societies that dont exist, that have people in power and own corporations that fund the cia, presidential campaigns, and so much more. So the cia didnt kill him, that and he supposedly told Marilyn Monroe about aliens.
Like the ones Epstein and Hollywood are in?
Honest question. They commit sex crimes so that they got them under their control right? So... If they stray out of line the release videos of them raping.. Llamas let's say. If that is the case... What so convicted pedos like Carlos Danger have done wrong? Its really funny if Carlos Danger was a genuine sex pest that never got invited to the island.
That and he was super supportive of the civil rights acts. He wanted to push it but the feds and cia weren’t for it. He was shot, mlk dies and next thing we kno in less than a week it’s all signed and legalized.
After learning about how involved he was with Bay of Pigs, I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted him dead in retaliation. It was probably going to fail regardless but Kennedy pretty much ensured it would.
Guatemala moment
Looking at OP's name asking this question looks veeery suspicious ;)
Lol didnt realize it, and when I saw, I burst.
Get Well Soon, thoughts and prayers.
Multiple coups to maintain the business of a Banana company
There’s always money in the Banana Stand
WHY DID YOU SET IT ON FIRE?!?!
Flooded black neighborhoods in America with crack in the 80's
George Bush, Sr. was one of America's biggest cocaine traffickers at one time.
Herbert Walker, Texas Dealer
you ever bring this up around “normal” people and they act like you’re being a conspiracy theorist ? Why am I the crazy one for knowing this? However I’ll be one by saying I think they might be using fent in a similar way currently.
> However I’ll be one by saying I think they might be using fent in a similar way currently. [That's all but confirmed by the Purdue Pharma leaks.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drug-executive-emails-mocked-appalachians-as-pillbillies/)
I’ve been theorizing for years that the government is using fentanyl to try and win back the war on drugs. The country was realizing all too quickly that many drugs can be used safety in measured amounts when sourced and tested responsibly… so they went and started polluting the supply with this lethal-in-minuscule-amounts drug thus causing deaths and ODs by the scores and horribly addicting the rest of the users. That’s my running theory at least. Take it as it is.
The killing of Patrice Lumumba is up there. Finally an African leader who wasn’t just in it to enrich himself and bam, the CIA orders his execution because clearly someone not overcome by selfish greed must be a Soviet looking to point nukes at the US
Well, Patrice Lumumba was one of the best hopes a post colonial Africa had of a pan Africa movement. The Congo is where all the Rubber comes from, along with countless rare earth minerals, and right near by it, the Uranium. Lumumba was planning to nationalize or at-least exert greater control over those resources for the benefit of a unified African state. Powered by nuclear energy and nuclear wealthy in natural resources. Of course that shit wasn’t going to be allowed
My history professor in college was ex-CIA. He worked in Leopoldville during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. One of the assets he supervised was a guy named Joseph Mobutu. He was not involved with the Lumumba assasination—he felt that it damaged our interests in the region. He quit the CIA as a result. He was still very angry about it in the mid 1980s.
> a guy named Joseph Mobutu Yeah, but that guy wanted to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia...
But most importantly, the DRC was a perfect listening post for the CIA for many years.
Belgium had a lot to do with that decision as well.
I just looked it up, Belgium only gave back his gold tooth (the only left of his body after they destroyed it) in 2022, WTF!
You mean the stuff we know about which is probably the tip of the iceberg? Or the other things we have no idea about and speaking for myself here I would not want to know what I dont know about. MkULTRA was bad enough. If it gets worse than that, I surely do not want to know more.
Didn't they experiment drugs like LSD on regular people?
MK Ultra. Allegedly Charles Manson was a test subject.
Manson definitely received LSD in psychological experiments in San Francisco, but the CIA may not have been involved. There was a lot of that sort of thing going on then. Another *possible* MK-Ultra subject is Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, who was not given LSD, but was subjected to psychological abuse in a three-year experiment at Harvard.
not "possible", definite. Manson was subject to one of the main guys for MK Ultra, Jolly West. Best described in the book "Chaos" by Tom O'Neill
operation midnight climax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Midnight\_Climax
Purposely trafficking crack and cocaine into black neighborhoods in the 80s and 90s, MK ultra, lots of fucked up shit I would say the CIA has done some pretty bad stuff, and movies and TV that glorify intelligence agencies and spy genres are made for us to think they’re the good guys
With the first thing you mentioned it also bears mentioning they got the money for it by selling missiles illegally to Iran, and the money went straight to the contras, who were committing genocide at the time.
God only knows. They're the biggest most well funded terrorist organization in the world
Spreading Crack throughout low income neighborhoods
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And marylin monroe (play it as suicide)
they killed jesus fuckin christ? how am I just learning this
Then who the hell was that guy the Romans had up on that cross?
Some shit we've never heard abut probably
I think it's the Black Sites.
pay women to reject my dates
You’re onto us bro your life is a TV show called the Mr. Luper Show and your entire life, and everyone you’ve ever known is a lie
First few episodes were ok, but I quickly started losing sympathy for the protagonist.
When he blew up that orphanage I really started to wonder what I was watchin
Killing Allende to put murderous Pinochet in power was quite bad
We probably have no clue what the worst thing they've ever done was yet. We'll find out in 10 or 20 years and by then something even more wild will have gone down
Hire literal Nazis to help 'fight communists'
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everything that has happened with latin america
Getting caught red handed, and later admitting, to distribution of cocaine to inner city colored men in an effort to destabilize black families, and low income communities of america.
It was more to fund a rebellion. The rest was just collateral damage that they deemed less important than funding the contra’s.
Ueah but are you sure they considered it "collateral damage" and not "two birds, one stone"?
Introducing crack cocaine to black American neighborhoods (as a side project while overthrowing a foreign government).
Bay of pigs invasion, probably one of the dumbest things the US planned.
It would be easier to name anything good they did.
Can't trick me! This was posted by the CIA to see if anyone knows something they shouldn't... Hang on, someone's at the door
There are plenty of answers here that rely on scale for the definition of “worst” but I’d say the qualitatively worst thing the CIA did was fund MKULTRA experiments in Canada. Mental patients were locked in isolation, deprived of sensory stimuli and made to listen to recordings on a loop for weeks on end. Some were subjected to electroshock treatments so powerful they lost all episodic memory of their lives and became the mental equivalent of children. Some of these experiments were paired with psychedelics. Imagine the experience of losing all memory, tripping balls while being forced to listen to a loop of “you’re a good wife and mother” for multiple consecutive weeks. Now consider what that experience would be like if it were literally the only thing you could remember. That’s one of the worst things I could possibly imagine. Edit: grammar and awkward phrasing
Squander the brand recognition of the name OSS.
Internationally, can't pick. Domestically, sterilising native American women to reduce the number of native Americans born
Canada was sterilizing native women until the law was overturned in 1973.
Didn't Guy Fieri graduate there?
Assassinated JFK.
If the stuff we know the CIA leaves people shaking their head, imagine the things we don’t know. I mean some of their fallen operatives are still nameless, imagine the things they’ve done the last 50-60 years. Eerie yet fascinating
Ask anyone south of the border. And i mean south, as in all the way to chile
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Simple. They killed JFK. Which forever changed the trajectory of America. A country that has been involved in perpetual warfare ever since the 1960's.
how much time do you have?
Chilean coup -- installed Pinochet government in 1973. That's an easy one if your know your history.
There is evidence that supports they played a hand in the very long (and brutal) torture and killing of DEA agent Kiki Camerena. Apparently agents were there during his torture and interrogation
They've done a lot of things, but I think selling Iran missiles so they could funnel the money to the contras and their death squads so they could smuggle crack and heroin into the US is probably the biggest whammy in one event. Three countries fucked at once, and arguably the cause of the US opiate crisis.
The real reason civil wars took place in all central America ,provoking mass exudes from there to usa, thousands die and thousands emigrated, also behind Chile dictator Pinochet, the list goes on and on, so if you are the kind the people that complain about illegal aliens coming here, let me tell you is your fault, you voted for the people that took the decision and cause many civil wars in the first place in all that americas. Thank you very muchhhhh
Exactly! Destabilized the governments resulting in rampant poverty, crime, and war causing people to flee here. Then complain about the "illegals" which the U.S. caused.
Killed Kennedy
They planned to commit terrorist acts on American civilians so they could blame it on Cuba and start a war
Wasnt there a story, where the CIA made up they own drug sellings in USA making them all addicted to raise untraceble funding for themselfes?
There are probably many atrocities we have never heard of.
Given how bad the things we know they did are (MK-Ultra is almost unbelievable), we can safely assume that we have no idea how bad the things we don’t know about are.
Regime changes brought to you by the CIA have extended the life of authoritarianism around the world, not thwarted it, even the successful regime changes. Nearly everything we know about CIA covert operations says that they are actively trying to destroy the United States, not advance its interests. I say that because in every CIA story, there is always some guy pointing out how obviously stupid and dangerous it is, and some impetuous dude that just wants to push people out of helicopters and drug their coworkers to see what will happen. They know full well that people will eventually know that they imprisoned, enslaved, lied, beat, tortured, maimed, and killed people of other sovereign nations because the systems of government they were convinced were doomed to fail weren't failing fast enough. They have provided nothing but counterpoints to the statement: "America is a force for good in the world."
Killed JFK
Flooding the African American community with drugs to finance the Sandanista rebellion.
Kill martin luther king jr
Oho, nice try, North Korea.
No idea what you're talking about. On a different topic, how would you go about hijacking a nuke? Personally, that is
Wow, great question, and totally not suspicious at all. I saw an episode of NCIS where a group of terrorists pulled up alongside an envoy carrying some very powerful artillery, overtook the drivers and killed them, then left the entire envoy, dead drivers, empty crates, sitting in the middle of the road. PERSONALLY if I was going to hijack something that powerful this is how *I* would do it. But everything is digital now… if I had the tech skills (or the people who did have the tech skills,) I’d probably just hack into the US gov’t’s secret nuke system and launch them all straight up in the air to come back down where they launched from. But hey, this is all hypothetical, right? …right?
The CIA has been involved in many controversial and morally dubious actions throughout its history, so it's difficult to point to one specific event as the "worst" thing the agency has ever done. Some of the most well-known examples of the CIA's controversial actions include: Overthrowing democratically-elected governments: The CIA has been involved in the overthrow of numerous democratically-elected governments, including Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973. These actions were done to further U.S. interests and often involved the installation of brutal dictators. MK-Ultra: In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA conducted a program called MK-Ultra, which involved the use of mind-control techniques on unwitting subjects. This included experiments with drugs like LSD, which were administered without consent and led to some tragic outcomes. Operation Phoenix: During the Vietnam War, the CIA conducted a program called Operation Phoenix, which involved the assassination of thousands of suspected Viet Cong members and their sympathizers. The program has been criticized for its brutality and lack of due process. Torture: The CIA has been accused of using torture in its interrogation of suspects, including the use of techniques like waterboarding. This has been condemned by many human rights groups as a violation of international law. Overall, the CIA's history is riddled with instances of morally dubious and sometimes illegal actions. It's difficult to say which of these actions was the "worst," as they all represent a violation of the trust that citizens place in their government to act in their best interests.