THE FAITHFUL AGENT OF A SIMPLE GREAT POWER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605390003-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: July 7, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STnT
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000605390003-9
NEW HAVEN ADVOCATE (CT)
7 July 1986
~~ -
OPINION
fihe Faithful . _ _... _ ,
A end oaf a S~n~
g ple
Great Power ~ - ,
John Ranelagh's belief in the CIA is fundamental
By Jim' MOtavalh ~ book about the C1A?
John Ranelagh does not seem
the most likely man to write a
comprehensive history of the CIA.
He is British, a producer at Chan-
nel 4 Television in England and
the author of two books on the
history of Ireland. Still, this is the
'80s, the CIA has been "rehabili-
tated" by the media, and kiss- .
and-tell tomes by ex=agents like
Victor Marchetti, Frank Snepp
and Phillip Agee are no longer the
fashion.
Ranelagh's 800-page tome gives
Agee, perhaps yhe CIA's most im-
portant author-defector, only a -
few paragraphs, and in those
merely repeats CIA charges of
Agee's complicity-in? the murder-
of the agency's Athens station
chief. Agee's book, Inside the
Company, is dismissed as having
been written "with the help of the
Cuban government."
So it's fair to say that The Agen-
cy: The Rise and Decline of the
CIA, From Wild Bill Donovan to
William Casey (Simon and
Schuster) is a comprehensive but
unflinchingly positive view of
America's overseas intelligence
agency. Ranelagh's tone during
our telephone interview was
respectful and admiring. He thinks
America needs a CIA, and that
undercover operations and "dirty
tricks" are a necessary ingredient
to its success. He denies the
widely-held view of CIA involve-
ment in the overthrow and subse-
quent death of President Allende
in Chile; he calls Latin American
"super agent" David Atlee Phil-
lips, "Dave."
Ranelagh's feelings about the
agency can best'be summed up in
this statement from the epilogue.
The CIA, he says, "was a faithful
instrument of the most decent and
perhaps the simplest of the great
powers, and certainly the one that
even in its darkest passages prac-
ticed most consistently the virtue
of hope. "
Advocate: Tell me how you
got involved with :writing a
Ranelagh: My career is basi-
cally in television in England. We
were working on a history of Ire-
land for the BBC, shown over
here recently on PBS, and we
were thinking about what to do
next when it struck me that one of
the big subjects that hadn't been
covered was the Cold War. When
you think about the Cold War it
really becomes a history of our
times. One night it suddenly hit
me that the CIA was the organiza-
tion of the Cold War-President
Truman described it as the Cold
War arm of the U.S. government.
So it seemed to me that the CIA
was the thing to focus on. And I
discovered that there were no _
books out there that really gave
you a history of the CIA, just au-
tobiographies and memoirs. All of.
them had a particular point to
make.
How do you think the CIA
evolved from the OSS after'
the war? Most people don't
see the OSS as ideologically
involved.
Change is at the center of this
story. The CIA is almost exactly
40 years old-it was founded in
1947. At that time, we all thought
we were going to have a real hot
war, possibly a nuclear war, with
the Soviet Union..And so there
was a very great energy and
concentration-people thought
they were working against the
clock. But now, 40 years later,
we realize we can live in a state
that is neither_wac nor peace. And.
so what we've really got now is a
bureaucracy of intelligence,rather
than an organization that was
preparing the United StaCes for
the prospect of war.
Tell us a little bit about the
CIA today, as you see it oper-
ating under William Casey's
direction. He's displayed con-
siderable enthusiasm for cov-
ert action.
Bill Casey started out as an-
OSS officer in London during
World War II; he ran.espionage
agents in Germany at the end of
the war. ne was paracnuttng guys
in. Then tie went out of intelli-
gence and made hirpself an ex-
tremely wealthy man on the New
York Stock Exchange. He came
back in as a result of being Rea-
gan's campaign manager in 1980.
He's come back, exactly as you
say, an enthusiast for covert oper-
ations because that's what he
knew best. And it's probably a
very good thing that he did be-
cause the CIA, like the National
Security Agency and others, has
become very technologically de-
pendent; it's been moving away
from the human touch. Casey is
reintroducing a balance. He's us-
ing people to interpret what all the
microphones? and satellites are giv-
ing us back.
The New York Times re-
cently revealed that the CIA
may have been involved in at-
tempting to murder General
Manuel Antonio Noriega, for-
merly the head of the
Panamanian secret service,
now the head of its armed
forces, for his role in drug-
running. Did your research ,
show that this kind of thing
happens often. How often do
these plans get carried'out?
This has been a subject of great
controversy. But the real point is
that assassination is always an op-
tion. We sit back and think about
whether the world would be bet-
? ter off if we'd gotten rid of Hitler,
or Ktiaddafy or Khomeini, whom-
ever it might be. What do we ex-
pect asecret agency to do. It's a
fair assuchption that it's always an
option, .but the real question is
whether or not it is used. And the
Church Committee (chaired by
Frank Church), which investigated
CIA abuses in the early 1970s,
demonstrated that they have the
plans but they don't actually use
them. The only one they came
close to implementing was against
Castro in Cuba. _
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000605390003-9
 Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000605390003-9
I knew they tried to make
his beard fall out and his ci-
gars explode. - .
Well, they tried to kill him too,
and they were doing it because
President Kennedy wanted them
to do it. If the CIA had actually
murdered people it would get out.
In America everything gets out
sooner or later. We'd know about
it. _
Your book talks about CIA
mind control experiments us-
ing LSD.
Well, you have to keep in mind
that this was in the 1950s, before
a lot of these substances were
banned. They were experimenting
with all kinds of drugs; including .
LSD, to see if it was possible to
turn people into human robots
who could be programmed to do
things at"great distances? as in
The Manchurian Candidate. That
was the idea, and in the course of
the experiment they kept a lot of
people tripping on LSD for 77
days. We don't really know what
-happened to those people. I would
suspect their minds were
blown-they would have had to
be. But these people were drug
offenders and drug abusers al-
ready, although it isn't at all clear
that these people knew they were
being used as guinea pigs.
Do you think the agency
has changed much since Rea-
gan has been in office?
I don't think it really has. I think
that the thing .we need to remem-
ber is that when the Church Com-
mittee was going ori, there was no
great flood of telegrams and let-
ters fo Washington one way or an-
other. It was very much an
internal affair in the capital. This
shows that; to the average per-
son, there is a place for secrecy in
government. There is a place for
covert information.
Suppose we actually had
murdered Castro? Do you
think people would have been
upset then? '
I don't think they would..Sup-
pose. we murdered Khaddafy? Do
you think people would have been
pissed off? I think a lot of people
would be cheering. Or if we'd got-
ten Khomeini during the Iranian
hostage crisis.
Well, a lot of people think
we were responsible for kill-
ing Salvador Allende in Chile.
Yes, but there is som8 evidence
That Allende commited suicide.
But there's?a (ot of logic to the
thought that. it's better the devil
you know than. the devil you
don't. In those terms, you only
assassinate someone if you have a
clear view of who's going to suc-
ceed him or her. If we'd gotten
rid of Khaddafy, do we know
who'd succeed him? It might have
been an even crazier fellow.
Did your own views of the
so-called "Company"~ change
during the writing of this
book?
No, they haven't. I came to it
with the simple idea that all great
states need an intelligence serv-
ice, so I'm not somebody who's
ever questioned that. I think we
need it. What I was surprised to
find was the high caliber of people
and the brainpower it has. That
was a revelation.
I think there has been a real
change in people's attitudes as
well. People no longer question
the need for the agency-it's been
accepted. And that's reflected in
the quality of the people who are
aPPlymg? Bill Casey told me per-
sonally that he was terribly im-
pressed with the caliber of good,
college-educated people who want
to work for the CIA.
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000605390003-9