Summary of Douglas Valentine's The CIA as Organized Crime

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, which was a controversial CIA assassination program during the Vietnam War. I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. He was all for it.
#2 I was able to interview the people who created the Phoenix program, and they loved having a journalist who was sympathetic to soldiers listen to them and understand what they were saying.
#3 I interviewed members of the CIA, and they cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. I never asked them if they had killed anyone or done any illegal things, and they were confident I was de-mystifying the program because they trusted me.
#4 There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University, which contains interviews with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program.

Sujets

• True Crime
• Organized Crime

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669397106
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Douglas Valentine's The CIA as Organized Crime
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, which was a controversial CIA assassination program during the Vietnam War. I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. He was all for it.

#2

I was able to interview the people who created the Phoenix program, and they loved having a journalist who was sympathetic to soldiers listen to them and understand what they were saying.

#3

I interviewed members of the CIA, and they cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. I never asked them if they had killed anyone or done any illegal things, and they were confident I was de-mystifying the program because they trusted me.

#4

There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University, which contains interviews with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program.

#5

The Phoenix program was an extremely successful model for pacification in Vietnam. It was the silver lining in the Vietnam War. Politically, the war was a disaster, but bureaucratically, the Phoenix program succeeded. It became the model for CIA operations in Central America.

#6

Kilcullen, the chief advisor on counterinsurgency operations for General David Petraeus in Iraq, wanted a Phoenix program implemented around the world. He believed that such highly bureaucratized centers would allow the White House to direct the CIA to target the right terrorists.

#7

The CIA is tasked with counter-subversion outside of the United States, and during a counterinsurgency, the CIA pursues a political order of battle, while the US military pursues a military order of battle.

#8

The old boy network exists in Vietnam, and it’s gotten worse since Iran Contra. It’s almost impossible to interview mid-level CIA people on the record and reveal the facts.

#9

The media industry has been reduced to a few huge corporations that control most of the outlets. Control of information has become the key to the oligarchy’s success. Very few independent news organizations are able to compete with the giants, and get information out across the country.

#10

The left takes credit for ending the Vietnam War, and Ellsberg is a central figure in its narrative. But people cannot understand the significance of the Pentagon Papers or the true nature of the Vietnam War without understanding Ellsberg’s work for the CIA.

#11

The CIA has a network of management level people in the information industry who know what books and authors to marginalize. I learned this the hard way when I published The Phoenix Program, which revealed CIA secrets and presented the media as a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists.

#12

The left’s management class, which is invested in celebrity heroes who represent their business interests, focuses on the symbol and ignores any contradictory but essential facts.

#13

The Ellsberg myth serves as a symbol of the American left’s inability to address its own hypocrisies. He leaked the Pentagon Papers and stopped the war, but he suffered for it.

#14

The War on Drugs, as you chronicle in your books, fundamentally changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Bureau of Narcotics was removed from Treasury and recreated as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the Justice Department in 1968, because it had gathered indisputable evidence that the CIA was running the Golden Triangle narcotics business.

#15

The CIA is the organized crime branch of the US government. It controls international drug networks, and it controls the media to ensure its control.

#16

I learned that there is no line between crime and law enforcement, as everything the police do is in service of crime. I came to realize this as a young person, thanks to my father.

#17

The CIA is populated with the same kind of people. They’re mercenaries who find a socially acceptable way to do these things and get well paid for it. They rarely arrest criminals who aren’t in the Mafia.

#18

I had a very different view of the police and the courts after my father’s experience in a prison camp. I realized how deeply entrenched the corruption is, and I began to observe the forms it takes in our society, including racism.

#19

The CIA had a secret army in Laos under Vang Pao, the leader of the Hmong tribe, who supported themselves by growing opium. The CIA worked with the Hmong and Laotians just like the cops and the Mafia ran that bookie operation in suburban New York.

#20

The CIA does not do anything unless it meets two criteria. The first is intelligence potential, which means it benefits the CIA. The second is that it can be denied. If they can’t find a way to set it up so they can deny it, they won’t do it.

#21

As the Vietnam War was winding down, the CIA started funneling officers into the BNDD and DEA. These recycled CIA officers had been involved in Phoenix and associated programs, and I wondered who they were really working for.

#22

I learned that the CIA was involved in drug trafficking, and that the FBN was responsible for corruption in law enforcement. The media loves to talk about corruption in foreign countries, but if you want to understand corruption, you have to study the relationship between crime and law enforcement in New York City.

#23

The Harrison Narcotic Act was a tax revenue measure that was passed in 1914. It explained how the Bureau of Narcotics was first set up in the Treasury Department. The Act was a way of giving doctors, drug manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies a monopoly and sending anyone else who used or sold regulated drugs to jail.

#24

The Mafia also controlled many unions the ruling class wanted to subvert and use for their own purposes. The most egregious crime the Mafia committed was the systematic falsification of history, which started as an agent padding reports but became the myth of the cop or soldier as hero.

#25

The most important fiction is the need for secrecy to preserve our national security, but officials use secrecy to conceal their corruption and crimes.

#26

The FBN was created to clean up corruption, but Anslinger instead limited the number of inspectors. Narcotics agents are agent provocateurs, setting up undercover buys that they would largely conduct through informants.

#27

The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was formed in 1968, and was headed by John Ingersoll, a former police chief in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was tasked with eliminating corruption within the agency. However, most of the senior managers were former agents from the FBN, and they were still up to their eyeballs in corruption.

#28

The CIA had infiltrated the BNDD, and was using it for its own nefarious purposes. It took over the BNDD’s foreign operations and executive management staffs, and it still runs them today within the DEA.

#29

The media’s job is to bury stories about corruption, whether it’s in Congress, law enforcement, or the CIA. They do so by telling the story in a certain way, just like Frankie Waters described how the FBN group leaders wrote reports.

#30

The CIA’s Phoenix program in South Vietnam was created in 1967 to neutralize the leaders and supporters of the Communist-led insurgency. It was a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated.

#31

The Phoenix program was designed to be mismanaged, to open the door to and incentivize bribery, corruption, and terror as an unstated policy lever for ensuring domination over the Vietnamese population.

#32

Censorship of opposing narratives is one of the main mechanisms for controlling information in the American media. Americans rarely get to hear the other side of the story, especially during a war.

#33

The Americans used the Vietnamese government officials they were keeping as straw dogs to pass the buck and blame them for the problems they created. This allowed the CIA to maintain the illusion that it cared about the Vietnamese people, while still extorting them through massive corruption.

#34

The CIA spent billions of dollars on covert operations in Vietnam, and used Phoenix to covertly buy information from the VCI. They were always looking for ways to extend the war, even if it meant many lives would be lost.

#35

The Phoenix program in Vietnam was created to be a model for policing the American empire, and it has been used in many countries since. It was always understood as the silver lining in the Vietnam debacle, but it has now been adopted as the standard for policing the American empire.

#36

The success of the Phoenix doctrine is best demonstrated by the fact that it has already corrupted Congress and forced the government to spend massive amounts of money on militarizing foreign and domestic policy.

#37

The Family Census program was the brainchild of Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert hired by the CIA in 1961 to advise them on population control in South Vietnam. The program compiled a dossier on every family in South Vietnam, along with everyone’s name and a portrait.

#38

The CIA uses psychological tests to recruit secret police forces as assets in every country it operates in.

#39

The CIA also formed secret police units to identify, capture, interrogate, and kill secret Communist cadres and their sympathizers in GVN-controlled villages. They were also developing paramilitary counterterror teams to locate, capture, and kill cadres in rural areas.

#40

The CIA’s Province Interrogation Center program in Vietnam was run by John Patrick Muldoon, the first director of the program. It was locat