The Journey 123. Douglas Valentine: How the CIA is Organized and Operates

Publisher R. A. “Kris” Millegan recently spoke with Douglas Valentine, the author of six books of historical nonfiction. (Click HERE to listen.)

THE HOTEL TACLOBAN
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam
THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs
THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA
THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World,

… and the new TrineDay book, PISCES MOON: The Dark Arts of Empire (which is also a memoir), available at TrineDay dot com and the usual sellers.

Doug has also written a novel and a book of poems and is the editor of the poetry anthology WITH OUR EYES WIDE OPEN: Poems of the New American Century.

Doug: “There’s nothing mystical about the kind of people who run the CIA. They’re the kind of people who just want to kind of grab what you have and take it for themselves. They have for many years hired the best and the brightest, guys from Harvard and Yale who are organizational geniuses, who know how to bureaucratize systems – the kind now in place that determine where we go – yet they also know how to insulate those systems from the rest of us.

“Then they have people who are experts in media who put out the images and words that disguise what they’re doing but also present themselves in such a way that it appears that they’re helping us.

“In my books, I try to show just how they have organized and recruited and indoctrinated [their people] and [show] the CIA’s relationship with the military and the State Department and law enforcement and industry and all the people in civic society that collaborate with them toward advancing the goals of the elite, the one percent of our society that become fabulously rich as a result of America’s empire, and how they can go about and organize this thing in virtual secrecy.”

Kris’s dad got involved with intelligence as an 18-year-old exchange student to China in the 1930s. He was in the COI (Coordinator of Information) and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and then got drafted and put into G2, where he was put on General MacArthur’s staff to report on him and Willoughby because they weren’t trusted. Then he was in the CIA and became Branch Chief Head of all of the East Asia Analysis Office. The CIA was never mentioned in the house when Kris was growing up.

In 1969, Kris’ dad told him, “The Vietnam war is about drugs. There are these secret societies behind it. And communism is all a sham. These secret societies are behind it. It’s all a big game.” And his dad described his intelligence career. He’d been involved in an assessment report to President Eisenhower that said, if America backed the Catholics in Vietnam, certain things would happen. And his dad told Kris, “They’re playing out a ‘lose scenario’” in Vietnam. It didn’t compute for Kris at all. So, Kris started to research things for himself and saw what he came to call “CIA drugs.”

Kris’ dad left the CIA “soft” in 1957 and “hard” in 1959, basically because of the drug-running. They tried to bribe him to stay involved but he left.

William Colby had been Doug’s sort of patron and he made it possible for Doug to write THE PHOENIX PROGRAM by introducing him to very senior CIA officers who ran the Vietnam War and the Phoenix Program (“the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution” —Alfred W. McCoy, author of THE POLITICS OF HEROIN: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade).

Through a book Colby recommended, Doug found Nelson Brickham, the CIA officer who had created the model for the Phoenix Program in 1966.

Doug: “In PISCES MOON I talk about the hard right turn the United States took during the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, which also involved a lot of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. Brickham, the CIA man, compared it to Germany after World War I. In 1985, people were blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on liberal politicians. [And this is what] we’re seeing again today.

“PISCES MOON tracks the history of the CIA going back to the United States’ first secret services, the Coordinator of Information (COI), the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) organizing for World War II, through Vietnam, the Phoenix Program – where counter-terror operations [were] bureaucratized and highly refined in the context of the drug trafficking that [was] going on in Southeast Asia, and how I uncovered facts about that by interviewing CIA officers who were involved and wanted to talk about it and get it off their chests. (Iran-Contra was going on at the time.

“[I move this history] through the 1990s, investigating CIA drug trafficking which bleeds into the human sex-trade trafficking, artifact trafficking, propaganda – all the mechanisms the CIA uses to wage secret wars and to destabilize countries so they can get at their economic wealth and bring it back to the United States, and I tried to bring that up to date to what’s happening now in the United States.

“The ability for critical analysis and literacy, the ability to read books, to think logically, has been diminishing in the United States and has really reached a low point in the country. {Now] any kind of critical analysis is nearly impossible and even it if were [possible], you wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from B.S. because of the way it’s spun by a thousand people in any particular minute, and then another minute later, the next image and the next tweet is in front of you and you’re reacting to that.

“PISCES MOON is a chronicle of how we got to this point and how the CIA is organized and how it operates so people can more precisely analyze what’s happening today rather than simply reacting to everything that’s happening at the moment.

Kris, “Amen. I found PISCES MOON to be brilliant.”

Then Doug described how the CIA used many of our most prestigious universities, concluding that “the higher education system is a foundation stone of the control that the secret services exert over social relationships in the United States and around the world,” even though, officially, the CIA was outlawed from operations inside the United States.

Doug: “The only way you can find out about the CIA is if you go talk to CIA officers. You can’t talk to a journalist. They don’t know anything about it. They get a report. Somebody tells them something. They’re like academics. They read a book.

“So, [William] Colby [former director of the CIA] got me involved with all these people and they gave me the Ph.D. level course on how the CIA is organized and operates. Then they felt bad when THE PHOENIX PROGRAM came out, [feeling] that I betrayed all their secrets, that I turned on them. They actually thought I was going to give them good P.R.

“Then I discovered there’s a price to pay for betraying the CIA and I’ve been paying that price ever since.

“There are people scattered throughout the government, especially in drug law enforcement, who hate the CIA with a purple passion. Because everything the CIA does subverts their Congressional mandate. Drug law enforcement agents really want to get at drug traffickers. But everywhere they go, the CIA is impeding their job.

“When I was doing THE PHOENIX PROGRAM, I had been told that the CIA had infiltrated the Drug Enforcement Administration and taken over its executive management. I wanted to see how that happened. The DEA agents I went to were mostly CIA officers under cover of the DEA, but they still hated the CIA with a purple passion. They started helping me.

“The organization that preceded the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was instrumental in actually creating the CIA. These organizations are intimately related and conduct joint operations around the world. [At that time] my understanding of how the secret government works expanded exponentially.

“I interviewed hundreds of CIA officers in the CIA and spread throughout drug law enforcement and other law enforcement agencies [and] in the military.

“I present that foundation and my credentials in PISCES MOON so people might [see that] I’m telling them things they don’t know, although it’s hard to find anybody nowadays in social media who thinks they can learn anything. Everybody thinks that they already know everything, [as if] they can tell what a real CIA officer is. They think they have some clue as to what’s going on.

“I’m trying to reach people who might be open-minded enough to question their own analysis of what’s going on.”