By Jo Nova
We need to understand the Machine
The way Mike Benz explains the world, crazy things seem to make sense, but it is at its core, a dark and deep corruption that for most us, has been operating for our whole lives. It is, though, depressingly easy to believe that people with virtually unaccountable power, even those who start with good intentions, end up at the gates of hell, discussing “heart attack guns”.
For the deep state, the dark art of influencing elections started on foreign governments, but once the CIA and State Department had honed the skills they needed, and broken every rule, what would stop them doing the same thing on domestic politics “to save democracy”? In a sense, it is as if a World War II no-holds-barred mentality has lived on to this day.
If what Mike Benz says is correct, there is no way that those who apparently influence elections all over the world will give up that power easily, especially in the most important election.
Mike Benz: Speedrunning The History Of The Intelligence State
Presented Hillsdale College, transcribed at RealClearPolitics
Something has gone very wrong — that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it.
The CIA was formed in 1947 and the first election they rigged was, allegedly in Italy in 1948. Just 12 days after that election a document was written called “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” by George Kennan. It was kept secret and declassified nearly 60 years later in 2005. In it, Kennan admits the government has been conducting political warfare and says they cannot leave “unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare.” They had begun three months ago “specific projects in the field” and now needed to create a covert political warfare operations directorate.
After World War II the CIA were afraid the communists were going to win in Italy. According to Benz, they spent the equivalent of $250 million US dollars (adjusted for inflation) to swing things in favor of their preferred candidate. They coopted, used, and exploited churches and charities. They beamed the US messages through Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. They assessed that 60% of the voters would have chosen the communists if the CIA hadn’t intervened.
…they set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.
The Voice of America and Radio free Europe were created specifically to be a tool of the CIA. Like a wartime propaganda unit but working in peacetime. The CIA battle in Italy was fundamentally dishonest. Benz claims they even went so far as to enlist the help of the mafia. They may have had noble aims, but they breached every principle the USA is supposed to stand on. It was called Political Warfare. As Benz describes it:
Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, “Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy.”
Once the CIA had tasted the fruit of election rigging, and gotten away with it, he claims they realized they needed a team in every country, just in case an inconvenient candidate looked like winning. Thus since World War II the US Empire has grown, not through conquering countries, but through “soft power”. The Italian election success lit a fire — but also crossed a line the US has not crossed since 1789.
We might wonder if Benz is exaggerating and these operatives are just running amok in Venezuela, Bolivia and Russia? Would they really be so bold as to operate in democratic Western Nations? But then, if they did start in Italy…
Today, he says, they use the exact same language and techniques to stop the rise of domestic populism on the Right.
…
The Spy agency became the Lie agency — they are paid to lie to you
Kennan, the creator of the original Political Warfare doctrine helped craft a memo NSC 10/2 that became a Presidential document that said sabotage, demolition, subversion, and propaganda was fine, as long as the government couldn’t be blamed for it. He later called it the greatest mistake he ever made:
You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.
What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community — this burgeoning, newly created CIA — and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I’m going to read it:
“All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them.”
This is from 1948: “All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons.”
So once the CIA was legally permitted to do “illegal” activities overseas, they had to lie about it to the outside world. And thus, as night follows day, then they also had to lie to the American people. After all, they could hardly tell the American people they were rigging elections in Italy without the rest of the world finding out. Thus do small lies beget bigger lies, and pretty soon everyone forgets they’re lying for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
The people involved knew this breach was a monster, but thought they could contain it with the Smith-Mundt Act:
Wisely the intel agencies were forbidden from using political warfare propaganda at home:
In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, “Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don’t build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth.”
That was until that safeguard was repealed by Barack Obama
Even though the cheating and lies had been going on since WWII, if you have the feeling the world became extra crazy in the last ten years, perhaps there’s a reason:
Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, “U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans.”
For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. “Mammoth” is not a big enough word.
The American hard power of World War II evolved into American domination by soft power in peacetime:
After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.
So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we’re about to meet.
After Italy, the CIA was legion, all over the world. The scope and size of this operation spread like cancer:
What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.
Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960.
Fifty regime changes by 1960! No wonder Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex.
By the 1960s and 1970s the pushback to this was growing. A populist leftist faction arose to oppose the CIA. Left leaning protestors, naturally, were sympathetic to the socialist and communist countries the CIA was controlling. They saw the pain the intelligence agents were inflicting.
Mike Benz refers to the article Seymour Hersh wrote in 1974 in the New York Times exposing the CIA.
By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people’s movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.
The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.
Just to show how dark and malevolent this force had begun, imagine, a heart-attack gun:
Think of a democratic agency working on ways to assassinate world leaders and make it look like a heart attack. That’s not what all the CIA and FBI shows look like on TV:
Heart Attack Gun, US CIA
[32 minutes]: This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous “heart attack gun,” which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.
On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.
According to Benz, the CIA had worked its way into popular culture, the media, music, even churches:
At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. [Mike Benz lists the CIA’s use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations.]
Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.
Jimmy Carter conducted the Halloween massacre, firing 30% of the CIA
I had no idea Jimmy Carter did something so useful:
Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the “Halloween Massacre,” where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.
After this Halloween massacre, Ronald Reagan reinstated the powers of the CIA, but the agency went underground, so to speak, keeping its visibility low.
Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today’s premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.
Despite all this power, the CIA is not running the world though, apparently the State Department is:
When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.
But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.
To listen to Mike Benz is to wonder if the whole world became a defacto part of The American Empire, sold as peace, truth and freedom, but based on quite a few lies and a fiat currency that is at this moment spiraling into uncontrollable debt. It was an arrangement that benefited many people in the US and abroad, but ultimately was not the American Experiment we hoped it was.
It’s easy to believe this shapes the bizarre Uniparty effect where both sides of politics end up looking so similar.
On the plus side, Mike Benz, and so many others still believe in the US Constitution. His sole goal is free speech online.
Mike Benz is Director for the Foundation for Freedom Online. He worked in the cyber section of the State Department under Trump in formulating foreign policy related to IT. He has written some speeches for Donald Trump. His aim is to preserve free speech online.