UNPAYWALLED: CIA GETS CAUGHT Spying on the Senate During Torture Investigation | Useful Idiots

For nearly 40 years, journalist Tim Weiner has closely covered the CIA, speaking with retired officials and gaining the trust of people with classified information. And his latest book, The Mission, does something we’ve never seen before:

It gives an in-depth history of the CIA without any anonymous sources. Everyone’s on the record. We don’t know how Tim did it, but he joins Useful Idiots to share what he’s learned from 40 years of digging.

Useful Idiots: You spoke to former CIA Director Richard Helms, and you wrote: “He wanted me to understand that the agency hadn't dreamed up the idea of overthrowing Iran or killing Fidel Castro. Every president since Truman had commanded the CIA to intervene with guns and money to control the fate of nations when sending in the Marines was not an option.” Did you get the sense that the CIA was always just unquestioningly following orders?

Tim Weiner: It took me a while to understand this simple but important point: the CIA is an executor of American foreign policy. It doesn't dream up coups and plots and other nefarious covert activities. With rare exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do.

It's not like a couple of CI officers were sitting around drinking martinis in 1960 saying, ‘Hey, I got a good idea. Let's go kill Fidel Castro.’ Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and President Kennedy's brother, Bobby, wanted Castro gone.

When it came time to investigate the first twenty five years of the CIA, the Church Committee in the 1970s dove deep into this: Frank Church, the senator who ran them, wondered aloud if “the CIA has become a rogue elephant trampling people and nations.”

But, we later find out, after the hearings, Church amended his statement: “When the elephant tramples people and nations, it's not the elephant's fault. It is the fault of the mahout, the elephant driver.” And that was the President of the United States.

The Church Committee, and even the torture report about CIA secret prisons that the Senate finally released ten years ago, really tiptoes around this question of presidential authority for violations of the laws of God and man and the Geneva Convention by the CIA. It's the president's outfit. And it is a unique expression of presidential power to order the CIA to go and kill people or torture them or throw them in secret prisons for the rest of their lives, never to see the light of day.

Useful Idiots: Your book tells the story of the great lengths to which the CIA went to cover up for torture. You have this controversy over an attempt to destroy videotapes of torture at a CIA secret prison in Thailand. And then you also have the CIA spying on the Senate as the Senate is investigating the CIA's torture program.

Tim Weiner: Two unhappy stories. The first is rather dramatic.

The CIA set up this base in Thailand where two of its first so-called high value prisoners were taken and tortured. Present at the base for one of those prisoner tortures was Gina Haspel, who later became the CIA Director in the first Trump Administration.

An order is written. Haspel transmits the orders. The videotapes are destroyed.

And they are actually under a judge's subpoena to preserve all evidence concerning these matters. When Gina Haspel becomes the CIA Director ten years later under Trump, all anything anybody knows about Gina Haspel is that she was at the CIA base when the torture was conducted and she transmitted an order from her boss to destroy the tapes.

Well, it turns out Gina Haspel, when she became the CIA director for the last three years of Trump, was pretty effective at defending the CIA from Trump. Trump hates and fears the CIA. He sees it as the capital of the deep state.

Your second question about the torture report. It is a fact that the CIA launched a counterintelligence investigation into the Senate staff during the final year of the publication, before the publication of the torture report.

Useful Idiots: Let me stop you there. Is that legal for the CIA to launch an investigation of Americans, especially American politicians?

Listen to or watch the episode for our full chat with Tim Weiner. Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Bill Maher Goes FULL PROPAGANDA Bot For Israel

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