List of CIA Controversies

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been the subject of a number of controversies, both in and outside the United States. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner accuses the CIA of covert actions and human rights abuses.[1] Jeffrey T. Richelson of the National Security Archive has been critical of its claims.[2] Intelligence expert David Wise faulted Weiner for portraying Allen Dulles as "a doddering old man" rather than the "shrewd professional spy" he knew and for refusing "to concede that the agency's leaders may have acted from patriotic motives or that the CIA ever did anything right", but concluded: "Legacy of Ashes succeeds as both journalism and history, and it is must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II."[3] The CIA itself has responded to the claims made in Weiner's book, and has described it as "a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as serious history."[4]

Project MKUltra was a CIA human experimentation program (1953–1973) aimed at developing techniques and drugs for interrogation, brainwashing, and psychological torture. The program, conducted without consent, used methods like administering high doses of LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and other forms of abuse.[5][6] It violated individual rights and has been widely condemned as a grave abuse of power.[7]

Operating through the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence and front organizations, MKUltra involved over 80 institutions, including universities, hospitals, and prisons, often using unwitting subjects in the U.S. and Canada.[8][9][10] It was revealed in 1975 by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, though investigations were hindered by the destruction of most records in 1973. A 1977 FOIA request uncovered 20,000 documents, leading to Senate hearings. Some details were declassified in 2001.[11][12]

In 1969, at the height of the antiwar movement in the US, CIA Director Helms received a message from Henry Kissinger ordering him to spy on the leaders of the groups requesting a moratorium on Vietnam. "Since 1962, three successive presidents had ordered the director of central intelligence to spy on Americans".[13]

During the early 1950s, the CIA operative Edward Lansdale and the U.S. military advisers supported the Philippine government's fight against the communist Hukbalahap (Huk) insurgency.[14] According to Lansdale's own writings and subsequent historical reports, part of the CIA effort involved psychological operations exploiting local superstitions, notably, the Filipino belief in the aswang, a vampire-like creature.

In one incident, the operatives spread rumors that an aswang was living on a hill where the Huks were stationed.[15] Two nights later, special forces ambushed a Huk guerrilla, punctured his neck with two holes to simulate a vampire bite, drained his blood, and displayed his corpse to suggest he was killed by an aswang.[16] This operation spread fear among Huk fighters and their supporters, causing some to leave the area.

Extraordinary rendition is the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.[17]

The term "torture by proxy" is used by some critics to describe situations in which the CIA[18][19][20][21] and other US agencies have transferred suspected terrorists to countries known to employ torture, whether they meant to enable torture or not. It has been claimed, though, that torture has been employed with the knowledge or acquiescence of US agencies (a transfer of anyone to anywhere for the purpose of torture is a violation of US law), although Condoleezza Rice (then the United States Secretary of State) stated that:

the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured.[22]

Whilst the Obama administration has tried to distance itself from some of the harshest counterterrorism techniques, it has also said that at least some forms of renditions will continue.[23] The administration continued to allow rendition only "to a country with jurisdiction over that individual (for prosecution of that individual)" when there is a diplomatic assurance "that they will not be treated inhumanely".[24][25]

The US program has also prompted several official investigations in Europe into alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states. A June 2006 report from the Council of Europe estimated 100 people had been kidnapped by the CIA on EU territory (with the cooperation of Council of Europe members), and rendered to other countries, often after having transited through secret detention centres ("black sites") used by the CIA, some located in Europe. According to the separate European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.[26]

Following the September 11 attacks the United States, in particular the CIA, has been accused of rendering hundreds of people suspected by the government of being terrorists—or of aiding and abetting terrorist organisations—to third-party states such as Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. Such "ghost detainees" are kept outside judicial oversight, often without ever entering US territory, and may or may not ultimately be devolved to the custody of the United States.[27]

On October 4, 2001, a secret arrangement was made in Brussels, by all members of NATO. Lord George Robertson, British defence secretary and later NATO's secretary-general, would later explain that NATO members agree to provide "blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies' aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism."[28]

On December 30, 2009, a suicide attack occurred in the Forward Operating Base Chapman attack in the province of Khost, Afghanistan. Seven CIA officers, including the chief of the base, were killed and six others seriously wounded in the attack.[29]

The September 11 attacks have been viewed by some as an example of shortcomings for the United States' various intelligence agencies. George W Bush's administration has openly stated they did not foresee the possibility of airliners being used as weapons, despite regular briefings from intelligence agencies and prior incidents of airliners being hijacked domestically and abroad.[30][31]

Perhaps the most disruptive incident involving counterintelligence was CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton's search for a mole or moles,[32] based on GRU Colonel Pyotr Popov's allegedly having told his Russia-born CIA handler, George Kisevalter in April 1958 that he had recently heard a drunken GRU colonel brag that the Kremlin knew all about the Lockheed U-2 spy plane,[33] and the December 1961-on statements of a Soviet defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn. A second defector, putative KGB officer Yuri Nosenko, who contacted the CIA in Geneva six months after Golitsyn's defection, challenged Golitsyn's claims, with the two calling one another Soviet double agents.[34] Many CIA officers fell under career-ending suspicion; the details of the relative truths and untruths from Nosenko and Golitsyn may never be released, or, in fact, may not be fully understood. The accusations also crossed the Atlantic to the British intelligence services, which also were damaged by molehunts.[35]

Edward Lee Howard, David Henry Barnett, both field operations officers, sold secrets to Russia. William Kampiles, a low-level worker in the CIA 24-hour Operations Center, sold the Soviets a detailed operational manual for the KH-11 reconnaissance satellite.[36]

The CIA has been called into question for, at times, using torture, funding and training of groups and organizations that would later participate in killing of civilians and other non-combatants and would try or succeed in overthrowing democratically elected governments, human experimentation, and targeted killings and assassinations. The CIA has also been accused of a lack of financial and whistleblower controls which has led to waste and fraud.[37]

During Bush's year in charge of the CIA, the U.S. national security apparatus actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.[38][39] According to John Dinges, author of The Condor Years (The New Press 2003), documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978 that showed the agency by then had knowledge, based on Armandro Fernández Larios's testimony, that the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading political opponent living in exile in the United States.[40]

In 1978, after taking over as director of the newly created National Information Center, General Odlanier Mena established a body to investigate the DINA’s involvement in the assassination of Orlando Letelier. According to a report in El Mercurio from April 2, 2000, based on Mena’s testimony, Manuel Contreras denied knowing Michael Townley or having employed him as a DINA agent. Mena, who had received information from the FBI regarding purchases of electronic equipment made by Townley on behalf of the DINA, didn't believe him cast doubt on those claims and brought the matter before the Military Junta, which met with the former head of the DINA. In the meeting Pinochet asked Contreras if he knew Townley, something he denied three times, then he claimed that Townley had never worked for the Chilean intelligence and that, in the worst-case scenario, he might have acted as an informant. Based on those assurances, he was handed over to the U.S.[41]

Following the meeting, the Junta authorized Townley's expulsion or handover to the United States, where he was interrogated and prosecuted for his participation in the bombing.[41] Townley's departure from Chile did not take place through a conventional extradition process and was considered an expulsion.[42] In addition, Townley also sought protection from Manuel Contreras and Pedro Espinoza.[43] He arrived in the United States on April 8, 1978,[44] and there he negotiated to accept responsibility for building and planting the bomb, and received a reduced sentence and future immunity in exchange for testifying against his assistants, five Cuban exiles. The formal indictment filed by U.S. authorities in 1978 did not include Augusto Pinochet; it targeted Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, Armando Fernández Larios and Cuban collaborators linked to the bombing, based on the testimony provided by Townley.[45][46] Townley was also linked by later investigations to the bombings against Carlos Prats and Bernardo Leighton.[47] After serving part of his sentence, he was released under the federal witness protection program.[48]

Chilean officers Raúl Iturriaga Neumann and Manuel Contreras later claimed that Townley had received his assassination orders from the CIA rather than DINA, accusing him of lying to implicate Pinochet and the Chilean government—a claim Townley had anticipated and denied in his own confessions.[49][50][45]

The Institute on Medicine as a Profession and the non-profit organization Open Society Foundations reviewed public records into the medical professions alleging complicity in the abuse of prisoners suspected of terrorism who were held in U.S. custody during the years after 9/11.[51][52] The reports found that health professionals "Aided cruel and degrading interrogations; Helped devise and implement practices designed to maximize disorientation and anxiety so as to make detainees more malleable for interrogation; and Participated in the application of excruciatingly painful methods of force-feeding of mentally competent detainees carrying out hunger str