Goodman - Whistleblower at the CIA: a path of dissent

City Lights Books | San Francisco

Copyright 2017 by Melvin A. Goodman

All Rights Reserved

Cover design: Herb Thornby

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goodman, Melvin A. (Melvin Allan), 1938- author.

Title: Whistleblower at the CIA : an insiders account of the politics of intelligence / Melvin A. Goodman.

Other titles: Whistleblower at the Central Intelligence Agency

Description: San Francisco : City Lights Publishers, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047282 (print) | LCCN 2017000887 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867307 (paperback) | ISBN 9780872867314 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Goodman, Melvin A. (Melvin Allan), 1938- | United States. Central Intelligence AgencyOfficials and employeesBiography. | United States. Central Intelligence AgencyManagement. | United States. Central Intelligence AgencyHistory. | Intelligence servicePolitical aspectsUnited States. | Whistle blowingUnited States. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Intelligence. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / International Security. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / General.

Classification: LCC JK468.I6 G6633 2017 (print) | LCC JK468.I6 (ebook) | DDC

327.12730092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047282

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To my mentors who were models of courage and integrity: the late Professor Amin Banani, professor emeritus at UCLA; the late professors Owen Lattimore and Robert Slusser of Johns Hopkins University; the late ambassador Robert White, who heroically exposed the crimes of the Reagan administration in Central America; the late Professor Alvin Z. Rubinstein of the University of Pennsylvania; Professor Robert Ferrell of Indiana University; and once again my wife, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, who made sure that the crimes of the George W. Bush administration and the CIA could not be forgotten.

INTRODUCTION

THE PATH TO DISSENT: A WHISTLEBLOWER AT THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

This is the story of an unreasonable man at the Central Intelligence Agency. There will be insights about the CIA and the forces of top-down corruption within the intelligence process, some settling of old scores within the Agency, and introspection about a 42-year career spent serving my country in the military and intelligence communities during the height of the Cold War. I joined the agency in the 1960s, a decade of radical change and upheaval in American culture. My closest friends questioned the decision of a self-confessed progressive to join one of the most secretive agencies in the government when the U.S. war against Vietnam was becoming increasingly ugly and divisive. Ironically, I found a more spirited and intelligent debate over the war in CIA corridors than I experienced in graduate school at Indiana University where I participated in the teach-in movement against the war.

There has been a great decline in the stature and influence of the CIA over the past two decades. The CIAs failure to anticipate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which ended the Cold War that fostered the CIA, deeply damaged the credibility of the entire intelligence community. The manipulation of intelligence for political endspoliticizationwas responsible for these failures, and two decades later this process of corruption helped the Bush administration make the catastrophic decision to invade and occupy Iraq without any evidence of a threat or provocation. The insistence of Vice President Dick Cheney to conjure phony intelligence in order to go to war against Iraq in 2003 was particularly criminal. With the end of the CIAs anti-communism mission, the Agency had to come up with other missions; the ethical and operational failures in these missions further damaged its reputation. The CIAs role in the Terror Wars has included extrajudicial killings, assassinations, secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions that have violated the U.S. Constitution and international law.