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Central Intelligence Agency (view source)
Revision as of 18:47, November 27, 2010
, 18:47, November 27, 2010→Revival under Reagan
In 1981 President Reagan appointed his campaign manager [[Bill Casey]] to run the CIA; Casey, a dynamic veteran of O.S.S. espionage, revived the CIA into a powerful instrument of rollback policy. With nuclear deterrence tying the Kremlin's hands, Casey used the CIA to attack the weak links in the Soviet empire. In Afghanistan, it funded and trained Mujahidin guerrillas who deliberately created "another Vietnam" to weaken the Soviet invaders, and indeed finally did defeat the Soviet invasion. Anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and Cambodia received strong support from Congress, but operations in Angola and especially Nicaragua became the focus of intense political controversy. When Congress one year prohibited the CIA from operating in Nicaragua, Reagan's White House exploited a loophole by sending its own staffer, [[Oliver North]], to funnel arms and money to the Contra guerrillas.
In 1981 President Reagan appointed his campaign manager [[Bill Casey]] to run the CIA; Casey, a dynamic veteran of O.S.S. espionage, revived the CIA into a powerful instrument of rollback policy. With nuclear deterrence tying the Kremlin's hands, Casey used the CIA to attack the weak links in the Soviet empire. In Afghanistan, it funded and trained Mujahidin guerrillas who deliberately created "another Vietnam" to weaken the Soviet invaders, and indeed finally did defeat the Soviet invasion. Anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and Cambodia received strong support from Congress, but operations in Angola and especially Nicaragua became the focus of intense political controversy. When Congress one year prohibited the CIA from operating in Nicaragua, Reagan's White House exploited a loophole by sending its own staffer, [[Oliver North]], to funnel arms and money to the Contra guerrillas.
====Afghanistan 1978-89====
From 1950 to 1979, U.S. foreign assistance provided Afghanistan with more than $500 million in loans, grants, and surplus agricultural commodities to develop transportation facilities, increase agricultural production, expand the educational system, stimulate industry, and improve government administration. The [[Peace Corps]] was active in Afghanistan between 1962 and 1979.
After the April 1978 Saur Revolution, relations between the two nations deteriorated. In February 1979, U.S. Ambassador [[Adolph Dubs|Adolph "Spike" Dubs]] was murdered in Kabul after Afghan security forces burst in on his kidnappers. The U.S. then reduced bilateral assistance and terminated a small military training program. All remaining assistance agreements were ended after the [[Soviet invasion of Afghanistan]].
President [[Jimmy Carter|Carter]] reacted with "open-mouthed shock" to the [[Soviet invasion of Afghanistan]], and began promptly arming the Afghan insurgents.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2166661</ref> Vice-President Walter Mondale famously declared: "I cannot understand -- it just baffles me -- why the Soviets these last few years have behaved as they have. Maybe we have made some mistakes with them. Why did they have to build up all these arms? Why did they have to go into Afghanistan? Why can't they relax just a little bit about Eastern Europe? Why do they try every door to see if it is locked?"<ref>http://www.csmonitor.com/1981/0310/031029.html</ref> The Soviets, several times shortly before the invasion, had staged conversations with the Afghan leadership suggesting that they had no desire to intervene, even as the Politburo was—with much hesitation—considering such an intervention. Though some have argued that US financial assistance to Afghan dissidents, including Islamists and other militants, prior to the invasion; along with a Soviet desire to protect the leftist Afghan government, helped convince the Soviets to intervene, the Sovietts ironically brutally murdered the Afghan President and his son, replacing him with a puppet regime, immediately after the invasion for fear that the US had secretly been collaborating with him.
One of the CIA's longest and most expensive covert operations was the supplying of billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan mujahideen militants.<ref>Time Magazine, 13 May 2003, "The Oily Americans," http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-2,00.html</ref> About $3 billion dollars were sent to equip them through the [[Pakistan]]i secret service, the ISI, in a program called ''Operation Cyclone''.
The Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 significantly damaged the already tenuous relationship between Secretary of State [[Cyrus Vance]] and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Vance felt that Brzezinski's linkage of SALT II ratification to other Soviet activities, together with the growing domestic criticisms in the United States of the accord, convinced Brezhnev to decide on military intervention in Afghanistan. Brzezinski, however, later recounted that he repeatedly advanced proposals on how to maintain Afghanistan's "independence" and deter a Soviet invasion but was frustrated by the Department of State's opposition.
According to Brzezinski, a National Security Council working group on Afghanistan wrote several reports on the deteriorating situation in 1979, but President Carter ignored them until the Soviet intervention destroyed his illusions. Brzezinski has stated that the US provided communications equipment and limited financial aid to the mujahideen prior to the "formal" invasion, but only in response to the Soviet deployment of forces to Afghanistan and the 1978 coup, and with the intention of preventing further Soviet encroachment in the region.<ref>{{cite web|author=“” |url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjAsQJh7OM&feature=channel |title=Brzezinski and the Afghan War Pt2 |publisher=YouTube |date= |accessdate=2010-07-10}}</ref> Two declassified documents signed by Carter shortly before the invasion do authorize the provision "unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to the Afghan insurgents either in the form of cash or non-military supplies" and the "worldwide" distribution of "non-attributable propaganda" to "expose" the leftist Afghan government as "despotic and subservient to the Soviet Union" and to "publicize the efforts of the Afghan insurgents to regain their country's sovereignty," but the records also show that the provision of arms to the rebels did not begin until 1980.<ref>http://www.activistmagazine.com/images/stories/government/carter_79-1581.jpg</ref><ref>http://www.activistmagazine.com/images/stories/government/carter_79-1579.jpg</ref> Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading."
The Soviet invasion and occupation killed up to 2 million Afghans.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Afghanistan</ref> Brzezinski defended the arming of the rebels in response, saying that it "was quite important in hastening the end of the conflict," thereby saving the lives of thousands of Afghans, but "not in deciding the conflict, because actually the fact is that even though we helped the mujaheddin, they would have continued fighting without our help, because they were also getting a lot of money from the Persian Gulf and the Arab states, and they weren't going to quit. They didn't decide to fight because we urged them to. They're fighters, and they prefer to be independent. They just happen to have a curious complex: they don't like foreigners with guns in their country. And they were going to fight the Soviets. Giving them weapons was a very important forward step in defeating the Soviets, and that's all to the good as far as I'm concerned." When he was asked if he thought it was the right decision in retrospect (given the Taliban's subsequent rise to power), he said: "Which decision? For the Soviets to go in? The decision was the Soviets', and they went in. The Afghans would have resisted anyway, and they were resisting. I just told you: in my view, the Afghans would have prevailed in the end anyway, 'cause they had access to money, they had access to weapons, and they had the will to fight."<ref>http://www.activistmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1110&Itemid=143</ref>
With US and other funding, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced pursuant to the negotiations that led to the Geneva Accords of 1988,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/co_mission/ungomap/background.html |title=United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Background |publisher=United Nations |date= |accessdate=2008-11-21}}</ref> with the last Soviets leaving on February 15, 1989.
====Cambodia 1979-95====
====Cambodia 1979-95====
The Reagan Administration sought to apply the [[Reagan Doctrine]] of aiding anti-Soviet resistance movements abroad to Cambodia, which was under Vietnamese occupation following the [[Cambodian genocide]] carried out by the Communist [[Khmer Rouge]]. The Vietnamese had installed a Communist dictatorship led by a Khmer Rouge dissident. According to R.J. Rummel; the Vietnamese invasion, occupation, puppet regime, ongoing guerilla warfare, and ensuing famine killed over one million Cambodians in addition to the roughly 2.2 million who had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> Ironically; the largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore; Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew, and Cambodia's Communist regime fell.<ref>[http://www.worldandi.com/specialreport/1988/february/Sa13957.htm "Cambodia at a Crossroads," by Michael Johns, ''The World and I'' magazine, February 1988.]</ref> Later, US troops, in concert with UN forces, invaded Cambodia and held free elections.<ref name="UN_SRES7451992">{{UN document |docid=S-RES-745(1992) |type=Resolution |body=Security Council |year=1992 |resolution_number=745 |accessdate=2008-04-09|date=28 February 1992}}</ref>
The Reagan Administration sought to apply the [[Reagan Doctrine]] of aiding anti-Soviet resistance movements abroad to Cambodia, which was under Vietnamese occupation following the [[Cambodian genocide]] carried out by the Communist [[Khmer Rouge]]. The Vietnamese had installed a Communist dictatorship led by a Khmer Rouge dissident. According to R.J. Rummel; the Vietnamese invasion, occupation, puppet regime, ongoing guerilla warfare, and ensuing famine killed over one million Cambodians in addition to the roughly 2.2 million who had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> Ironically; the largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore; Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew, and Cambodia's Communist regime fell.<ref>[http://www.worldandi.com/specialreport/1988/february/Sa13957.htm "Cambodia at a Crossroads," by Michael Johns, ''The World and I'' magazine, February 1988.]</ref> Later, US troops, in concert with UN forces, invaded Cambodia and held free elections.<ref name="UN_SRES7451992">{{UN document |docid=S-RES-745(1992) |type=Resolution |body=Security Council |year=1992 |resolution_number=745 |accessdate=2008-04-09|date=28 February 1992}}</ref>