Tag: cia

The Three Types of US-Led Regime Change

Throughout the long, documented history of the United States illegally overthrowing governments of foreign lands to build a global empire there has emerged three ways Washington broadly carries out “regime change.”

From Above. If the targeted leader has been democratically elected and enjoys popular support, the CIA has worked with elite groups, such as the military, to overthrow him (sometimes through assassination).  Among several examples is the first CIA-backed coup d’état, on March 30, 1949,  just 18 months after the agency’s founding, when Syrian Army Colonel Husni al-Za’im overthrew the elected president, Shukri al-Quwatli. 

The CIA in 1954 toppled the elected President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, who was replaced with a military dictator. In 1961, just three days before the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, who favored his release, Congolese President Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with CIA assistance, bringing military strongman Mobutu Sese Seko to power.  In 1973, the US backed Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow and kill the democratically-elected, socialist President Salvador Allende, setting up a military dictatorship, one of many U.S.-installed military dictatorships of that era in Latin America under Operation Condor. 

From Below. If the targeted government faces genuine popular unrest, the U.S. will foment and organize it to topple the leader, elected or otherwise. 1958-59 anti-communist protests in Kerala, India, locally supported by the Congress Party and the Catholic Church, were funded by the CIA, leading to the removal of the elected communist government. The 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was a combination of bottom-up CIA (and MI-6)-backed street protests, and top-down conservative clergy and military to destroy democracy and return a monarch to the throne. The US-backed Ukrainian coup of 2014 is the latest example of the US working with genuine popular dissent to help organize and steer the overthrow, in this case, of an OSCE-certified elected president. 

Through Military Intervention.  If a coup is not feasible, the US turns to indirect or direct military intervention. One of earliest examples was the US expeditionary force that invaded Russia in 1918 during the civil war in an attempt to help overthrow the new Bolshevik government.  More recently, in 1983 the U.S. military invaded Grenada to overthrow a Marxist president; in 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama to overthrow former CIA asset Manuela Noriega.

Another hybrid operation was the US bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the State Department funding of the opposition group Otpor!, which led to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. The most prominent recent examples of direct military invasion to overthrow governments are the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Indirect military intervention through proxies to overthrow governments happened in the 1980s Contra war against Nicaragua; and the 2011 to present jihadist war to overthrow the Syrian government. 

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Why Does the Media Keep Blaming the Russians for JFK’s Assassination?

In mid-December, the Biden administration released nearly 1,500 documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Out of all the intelligence agencies memoranda, dossiers, and interview transcripts, the media has seized upon one: a CIA memo about Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed in-person meeting with Valery Kostikov, a notorious KGB official, in Mexico City in September 1963.  

There’s nothing new about the memo in question. The same is true for most of the JFK records released in December. But as a round of fresh press coverage indicated, the encounter suggests Oswald was working for the Soviets, and that America’s Cold War nemesis was responsible for Kennedy’s killing — not the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, or the military-industrial complex.  

The theory that Oswald was a KGB asset has persisted for decades, despite a lack of evidence. Even the CIA concluded that any contact Oswald had with KGB-affiliated Russians was a “grim coincidence.” (A man claiming to be Oswald did contact the Soviets in Mexico City — but that man was an impostor.) 

This most recent recycling of the “Oswald and the Russians” story — the JFK assassination’s very own Russiagate — follows a predictable pattern that appears every time there’s a release of JFK records. It happened in 2017 and during the 1990s.

So, what gives? Why does the media gravitate toward the Oswald/KGB “revelation” every few years rather than any of the other more plausible theories? 

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CIA finds most Havana syndrome cases not caused by foreign power

The CIA has determined that most cases of Havana syndrome were not caused by a sustained global campaign by a foreign power against US diplomats and spies, according to a new report.

The majority of 1,000 cases of the mysterious ailment reviewed by US officials show it is unlikely to have been caused by Russia or another foreign adversary, CIA officials told the New York Times about a study’s preliminary findings.

The officials said the symptoms can be explained by environmental causes, undiagnosed medical conditions or stress.

But the CIA is still continuing to investigate some two dozen unexplained cases that may provide clues as to whether a foreign power is responsible for the condition, which has affected US officials and relatives overseas, including in Vienna, Paris, Geneva and Havana, the paper reported, citing agency sources.

In addition to those two dozen cases, a significant number of others are still unexplained, the Times cited a CIA official as saying.  

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The CIA Has Been Training Ukrainian Paramilitaries To ‘Kill Russians’

The CIA has been overseeing a secret training program for Ukrainian special operations forces and intelligence operatives since 2015, Yahoo News reported on Thursday, citing five former intelligence and national security officials.

One former CIA official said the US is “training an insurgency” in Ukraine and that the program teaches the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians,” although other officials downplayed the training and said it was not meant for offensive purposes.

The training has been held at an undisclosed base in the southern United States. It was started by the Obama administration, was expanded by President Trump, and further expanded by President Biden. The program includes training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, and other areas, former officials told Yahoo.

According the report:

The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.

The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.

The program was overseen by the CIA’s Ground Branch, the spy agency’s elite paramilitary unit. The Yahoo report said by 2015, Ground Branch personnel were deployed to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise the Ukrainian forces.

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JFK Assassination: What’s in the Newest Batch of Declassified Documents?

Last month, the Biden administration released a batch of classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The National Archives and Records Administration published the new 1,491 documents, of which 958 are from the CIA.

That means 9 out of 10 of the total number of documents are still being withheld from declassification.

“It’s very little and very late,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s nephew, told The Epoch Times.

“There’s only 10 percent of the documents that legally have to be released in that data dump. But even those documents are clearly showing that the CIA lied outright to the Warren Commission about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The 1992 JFK Records Act, signed by Congress into law, mandated that all the documents be released by Oct. 26, 2017.

However, one person had the power to stop it—the incumbent president.

When the time for total declassification finally came, President Donald Trump put a six-month delay on the final declassification. Then he put a three-year delay on it.

Some documents were declassified, however, and by the time President Joe Biden took office, about 15,000 documents were either being withheld or redacted in part.

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