Tag Archives: cia

yes, the CIA is still meddling in other countries’ affairs (and also, because we appear to need it, a reminder that the word “peace” means NON-violence)

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If we need some confirmation that the CIA played a role in the January 2026 Iran street protests, here is Fox News journalist Trey Yingst seemingly quoting an interview with Donald Trump. The quote is ‘ “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them,” President Trump told me. “And I think the Kurds took the guns.” ‘

Now, this is an X video of a Fox News segment where an informal conversation with Trump is quoted. It’s Fox News, which of course is known to spin. But (1) it is a major news outlet that doesn’t usually lie outright, even if it spins and (2) this seems to be a respected professional journalist, not an opinion piece. So I give it some weight as having a significant probability of truth.

The CIA messing in other countries’ elections and opposition movements is not a new thing, of course, and it is not only the US that does this. European countries, Russia, and China certainly do it. In fact, the US did it in Iran in the 1950s, and that event is seen as a significant reason Iran and the Iran-US relationship are where they are today.

Maybe the invasion was intended to back up the protests, as Trump blustered at the time that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded”. So it makes me wonder if the protests broke out earlier than they were supposed to, when the US military was not ready, or if they broke out when they were supposed to but the US military was just not ready, or Trump just failed to pull the trigger at the planned moment. Nothing I am saying here justifies the illegal, unprovoked war of aggression on the sovereign nation of Iran. I am just saying it appears to be an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression that was also 100% incompetently handled. We are ruled by evil fools, not evil geniuses.

This also causes me to give more weight to the Russian claim that the CIA meddled in Ukraine’s affairs in 2014, stirring up an opposition movement that deposed a possibly fairly elected pro-Russian government. The back story on this is that first, a pro-Russian government was forced out by the street protests. But then there was an election, which brought a pro-Europe/US/NATO government to power, and was certified as free and fair by impartial international bodies. So far so good, but the pro-Russian parts of Ukraine largely did not participate because they were either under Russian occupation – Crimea – or occupied by pro-Russian local militia types – Donbas. So there was meddling on all sides, and much more direct and openly violent meddling by the Russian side. Then later, these events were used to justify the Russian invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine, which can have no legal or moral justification.

So if cooler heads ever prevail, we need to re-establish the idea of respect for soveignty. And the US could even go so far as to say it is not going to meddle in the affairs of other countries any more, other than through open diplomatic means and through international bodies. Doing this unilaterally might seem naive, since other countries would almost certainly continue their meddling – the classic prisoner’s dilemma, which also derails so many attempts at rational arms control. But when you consider that the meddling seems to lead to undesirable outcomes more often than not, maybe it would not be naive after all. We can cite any number of conflicts from the overthrow of the elected Iranian government in the 1950s, the mostly forgotten Indonesian genocide also in the 1950s which killed half a million people, support for the Taliban in the 1980s which led to 9/11, and name pretty much any country in Latin America. So my modest proposal is we just stop. Recommit to peace (but now thanks to the fool in the White House we have to actually state that this means NON-violence) and support for democracy and human rights through diplomacy and participation in legitimate international bodies.

Well, that turned into a rant I didn’t necessarily see coming. If you got this far, whether you agree or disagree, thanks for hearing me out!

yes, the CIA mucks about in other countries’ elections

The CIA has always mucked around in other countries’ elections. This is from Monthly Review, a self-described Marxist magazine based in New York, so you be the judge of its credibility. But anyway, this is about Mexico around the late 1970s or so.

The documents, most of which are related to a CIA probe into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, contains a memo from a meeting of CIA agents held on November 29, 1976. In said meeting, U.S. intelligence official Bill Sturbitts said to his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years…”

López Portillo was not the only former president of Mexico to have been on the payroll of the CIA. Three other presidents who preceded him, namely, Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), and Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) were also revealed to be CIA assets in earlier declassification of official U.S. documents. All these former presidents committed acts of grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity against the people of their own country, but that did not stop the United States, the self-proclaimed champion of “human rights,” from cultivating close relations with them.

Cultivating national leaders was not the only interventionist act that the CIA did in Mexico. Declassified documents over the years have revealed a range of illegal activities of U.S. intelligence in Mexico, including spying on Soviet and Chinese embassies in Mexico City; financing extreme right groups; supporting and coordinating the Mexican armed forces; and infiltrating and subverting left-wing students’ organizations and social movements all over Mexico, in COINTELPRO style, often with fatal consequences for the Mexican people.

Monthly Review

That was quite awhile ago, but fast forward to Russia claiming that the 2014 election in Ukraine was a “coup” orchestrated by the United States. It is certainly not implausible to ask if politicians in Ukraine were CIA “assets” at the time (I am not making claims or claiming to have evidence about specific people), if the CIA was spying on say the Russian and Chinese embassies, financing Ukrainian-nationalist anti-Russian groups without asking too many questions about their politics, training and supporting the armed forces (completely in the open on this one). These are dirty tricks, and Russia is certainly not above engaging in any of these dirty tricks itself. I am not claiming any of these dirty tricks would justify Russia invading its sovereign neighbor, but I can put myself in Russian shoes and consider why they might feel a bit paranoid.