With the ‘revelation’ that the so-called Havana Syndrome is most likely a normal neuro-physiological ailment and not, in fact, part of an ongoing campaign of terror by one of America’s curiously plentiful foreign enemies, it may be time to revisit some first principles when it comes to our country’s intelligence apparatus and how it operates.
The pretense that the United States is a democracy and not a plutocracy necessitates the telling of all kinds of lies: that freedom is synonymous with capitalism, that the Constitution is an infallible document, that our elections represent the will of the people, and that our elected officials govern by mandate (or, for that matter, govern at all), to name but a few. But in the post-World War II era, in which nearly every aspect of American life is geared towards the twin goals of enriching the already-wealthy and suppressing any attempt to interrupt that process, the necessity of lying to the public has become paramount and all-consuming.
If you are an authoritarian state masquerading as a republic that governs by popular consent, it is of paramount importance that you convince the public that the instruments and institutions of its oppression are, in fact, heroic and noble. The police are there to “serve and protect”, not to brutalize and terrify. The military exists to combat threats to global freedom, not to impose economic imperialism by force. These ideas must be reinforced not just through traditional propaganda and the media, but through popular entertainment as well.
Luckily for the oligarchs, this is easily accomplished. The job is simplest for the military, which, thanks to our historically unprecedented defense spending, has deep pockets filled with money to burn; they also have the advantage of being large enough that most people have military members in their families, or know someone who does. Police are less popular; they enforce laws that most people rightly think of as unjust or frustrating to their personal happiness, and the average American is more likely to run afoul of a cop than they are a soldier. The militarization of local police departments has helped enormously in this regard, however.
The endgame of all of this is an entertainment industry that valorizes cops and the armed forces, even as the police become more brutal and violent and as the military becomes more of a pawn in the great game of geopolitics and resource extraction. Only one pillar of the U.S. security state is left out in the cold: the intelligence community, or ‘national security’ apparatus. Despite the enjoyment the public takes from tales of superspies and CIA agents, we have always been more standoffish about our spooks than we have tales of or brave men and women in uniform.
Part of this problem is a practical one. The police, after all, actually do fight crime on occasion, even if they aren’t very good at it. And the military, rightly or wrongly, is generally perceived as a force for good that keeps nefarious foreigners, terrorists, and dictators from working their evil wills on the country they hate for some inexplicable reason. But because intelligence agents operate in secret, and because the things they do are of necessity largely invisible and undefinable, their role – often perceived as something between an out-of-uniform super-soldier and a cop without jurisdiction – often seems murky and hard to pin down.
But another part is that, far more than their brothers and sisters in law enforcement and the armed forces, national security operatives have suffered under the burden of popular distrust. We don’t know who they are, and we don’t know what they do, but until very recently, there was also a pervasive sense that they may not be acting in the public interest. We would often hear about spooks only when they fouled up: the Church Committee in the 1970s showed the CIA’s hand in all kinds of bad juju; the ‘80s and ‘90s saw a large number of high-profile turncoats and double agents; the CIA is widely believed to have dropped the ball on 9/11; and even Americans with only a perfunctory understanding of international affairs would often hear the names of the NSA and CIA brought up in the most unsavory of contexts.
Attempts to remedy this state of affairs have been surprisingly successful. At a time when Americans’ faith in their institutions is at an all-time low, the reputation of our national security apparatus has only increased. This is partly due to the polarization of politics; in an interesting reversal, liberal Democrats, who once (correctly) perceived the CIA as a group of unanswerable meddlers paid to sabotage popular movements, now see it as a hard-working agency of underappreciated truth-tellers who alone can save us from the rising tide of native fascist groups. At the same time, conservative Republicans, who once saw the CIA as passionate and skillful foes of international communism, now talk of them as a sinister member of the ‘deep state’, a shadow cabal of illuminati scuttling the will of the people.
But we should never discount the power of propaganda. The intelligence community has become one of the foremost social media practitioners of what is often referred to as ‘rainbow capitalism’, or the attempt to cover up material wrongdoing through the promotion of progressive-sounding identitarian values. Revisionist histories of these nefarious agencies have also been written, placing the blame for their ceaselessly bloody deeds on the Cold War, out-of-touch government officials who are conveniently too dead to argue the point, or run-of-the-mill partisanship. The result is a climate in which the CIA and NSA are perceived as at least theoretically good, and in which their murderous meddling is a thing of the past, as if the agency did not oversee the slaughter of over a million people in Indonesia during their lifetimes, or as if noted liberal Hillary Clinton did not oversee the killing of a Honduran environmental activist by agents of her State Department only five years ago.
Let us speak plainly and without decoration: the Central Intelligence Agency is a malevolent and dangerous force in human affairs. It is arguably responsible for more death and misery than any other organization since the fall of the Third Reich. Its sole responsibility is defending and expanding the hegemony of American power, and anything it happens to do to protect the lives or livelihoods of normal American citizens is entirely a secondary side effect of that work. Though the police and the military routinely lie about practically everything, the work of the national security apparatus is entirely predicated upon lying, and it cannot exist without doing it. Absolutely nothing it says through its agents, spokespeople, or advocates in government should ever be taken at face value, under any circumstances. Even when it tells the truth, it is by accident, or in service of a greater lie.
The intelligence community lies as a matter of course. It lies every single day on every single subject. It lies because lying is its raison d’etre. It will keep lying until its lies are exposed, and then it will lie by promising not to lie anymore. It lies because it is part of a foreign policy establishment that sees other countries as barriers to its rapacious desire for economic superiority, and the people in those countries as abstractions and obstructions. Even more so than in any other field of journalism, the idea of a ‘national security reporter’ is a bad joke, because reporting requires an adversarial, or at least neutral, position to one’s subject and their claims; the kind of article that results from unquestioningly repeating the unverified claims of an organization built entirely on self-serving lies is not journalism, but (at best) advertising and (at worst) propaganda.
Why does it matter? Why should we care? All governments engage in propaganda, after all. Everyone lies. And we all ‘know’, in the same way we ‘know’ other things that we understand to be harmful but are unwilling to do anything about, that the state security agencies of our foreign policy establishment are serially untruthful. Here’s why it matters: the propaganda of the weak is mere self-aggrandizement, public relations for an audience of none. The propaganda of the strong is a screen spread in front of a massacre. It has killed before and it will kill again.
Every lie told about Russia by the national security agencies to their gullible pawns in national media – from bogus claims of election fraud to absurd stories about Russian bounties on U.S. troops to false links to so-called ‘Havana Syndrome’ – has been preparation for an endgame whose shape we are finally starting to see. It should be no more necessary to defend Vladimir Putin’s Russia than it was to whitewash Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to understand that going to war against them would be ruinous, catastrophic, and horrific, and would only benefit the unimaginably rich who own the corporations who profit from the fallout of such wars. Little lies have little consequences, but Big Lies are used to build the biggest calamities.