scholarly journals Spying on Americans: US Intelligence, Race Protests, and Dissident Movements

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Calder Walton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
White House ◽  
Intelligence Collection ◽  
Contemporary Context ◽  
Collection Program

Abstract Protests against racism erupt in cities across America. A White House, under siege, believes a vast conspiracy is at work, and, to uncover it, instigates a policy to spy on Americans. This is not the United States in 2020, but half a century earlier. Using a wealth of declassified records, this article explores a domestic intelligence collection program (CHAOS) instigated by two successive US administrations and conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By studying this historical chapter, we observe how quickly an agency, equipped with intrusive powers, can infringe on Americans’ civil liberties when tasked by a US president. Applying this case to our contemporary context, this article argues that robust whistleblower procedures, as well as informal oversight, are powerful defenses against such abuses. Understanding why CHAOS occurred is an essential public policy first step to prevent similar abuses happening again.

The Clinton Administration and Africa: White House Involvement and the Foreign Affairs Bureaucracies

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
John F. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
White House ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Both continuity and change capture the evolving role of the Clinton White House in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Elements of continuity are reflected in a familiar pattern of relationships between the White House and the principal foreign policy bureaucracies, most notably the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense (Pentagon), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and more recently the U.S. Department of Commerce. As cogently argued in Peter J. Schraeder’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the Cold War era, the White House has tended to take charge of U.S. African policies only in those relatively rare situations perceived as crises by the president and his closest advisors. In other, more routine situations—the hallmark of the myriad of U.S. African relations—the main foreign policy bureaucracies have been at the forefront of policy formulation, and “bureaucratic dominance” of the policymaking process has prevailed. Much the same pattern is visible in the Clinton administration, with the exception of President Clinton’s trip to Africa in 1998. Until that time, events in Somalia in 1993 served as the only true African crisis of the administration that was capable of focusing the ongoing attention of President Clinton and his closest advisors. Given that the United States is now disengaged from most African crises, Africa has remained a “backwater” for the White House and the wider foreign policymaking establishment.

James Angleton and the Church Committee

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 128-147
Author(s):  
Loch K. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
First Line ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Public Defense ◽  
Intelligence Operations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Church ◽  
Extreme View

James J. Angleton, who served as chief of counterintelligence for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1954 to 1974, was an important figure in the Cold War and, in a sense, the first line of defense against clandestine Soviet intelligence operations directed against the United States and its allies. In 1975 a U.S. Senate investigative committee—informally known as the Church Committee and led by Senator Frank Church—called Angleton to testify in public on his approach to counterintelligence, especially how he had become involved in illegal domestic operations in the United States. His testimony to committee staff investigators preceding the hearing, along with his public statements to senators during the hearing, displayed an extreme view of the global Communist threat. Amid ongoing revelations in the mid-1970s of illegal CIA actions, Angleton proved unable to mount an effective public defense of his approach.

Congo/Zaire-US Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Namikas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Cold War

At the dawn of the 20th century, the region that would become the Democratic Republic of Congo fell to the brutal colonialism of Belgium’s King Leopold. Except for a brief moment when anti-imperialists decried the crimes of plantation slavery, the United States paid little attention to Congo before 1960. But after winning its independence from Belgium in June 1960, Congo suddenly became engulfed in a crisis of decolonization and the Cold War, a time when the United States and the Soviet Union competed for resources and influence. The confrontation in Congo was kept limited by a United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force, which ended the secession of the province of Katanga in 1964. At the same time, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) intervened to help create a pro-Western government and eliminate the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Ironically, the result would be a growing reliance on the dictatorship of Joseph Mobutu throughout the 1980s. In 1997 a rebellion succeeded in toppling Mobutu from power. Since 2001 President Joseph Kabila has ruled Congo. The United States has supported long-term social and economic growth but has kept its distance while watching Kabila fight internal opponents and insurgents in the east. A UN peacekeeping force returned to Congo and helped limit unrest. Despite serving out two full terms that ended in 2016, Kabila was slow to call elections amid rising turmoil.

The United States and the Soviet-Afghan War, 1979–1989

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conor Tobin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Post Cold War

In December 1979, Soviet troops entered the small, poor, landlocked, Islamic nation of Afghanistan, assassinated the communist president, Hafizullah Amin, and installed a more compliant Afghan leader. For almost ten years, Soviet troops remained entrenched in Afghanistan before finally withdrawing in February 1989. During this period, the United States undertook a covert program to assist the anti-communist Afghan insurgents—the mujahideen—to resist the Soviet occupation. Beginning with President Jimmy Carter’s small-scale authorization in July 1979, the secret war became the largest in history under President Ronald Reagan, running up to $700 million per year. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) acted as the war’s quartermaster, arranging supplies of weapons for the mujahideen, which were funneled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), in coordination with Saudi Arabia, China, Egypt, and others. No Americans were directly involved in the fighting, and the overall cost to the American taxpayer was in the region of $2 billion. The Afghan cost was much higher. Over a million Afghans were killed, a further two million wounded, and over six million refugees fled to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. For the Soviet Union, the ten-year war constituted its largest military action in the postwar era, and the long and protracted nature of the conflict and the failure of the Red Army to subdue the Afghans is partially responsible for the internal turmoil that contributed to the eventual breakup of the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s. The defeat of the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan proved to be the final major superpower battle of the Cold War, but it also marked the beginning of a new era. The devastation and radicalization of Afghan society resulted in the subsequent decades of continued conflict and warfare and the rise of militant Islamic fundamentalism that has shaped the post-Cold War world.

scholarly journals Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan in the Documents of J. Carter Administration

2020 ◽  
pp. 88-100
Author(s):  
Olexandr Koval ́kov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Carter Administration ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
The U.S

The article examines the documents of Jimmy Carter Administration (1977-1981) published in «Foreign Relations of the United States» series that represent the U.S. position on the Soviet intervention in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in December 1979. The author argues that the growing Soviet presence and finally a military intervention in Afghanistan was taken seriously in the United States and made Washington watch the developments in this country closely. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan became one of the major themes in the U.S. foreign policy. It was presented in a large array of documents of various origins, such as the Department of State correspondence with the U.S. Embassies in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union; analytical reports of the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Bureau of Intelligence and Research; exchanges of memorandums between National Security Council officers and other officials; memos from National Security Adviser Z. Brzezinski to J. Carter, and others. They represented the preconditions, preparations and implementation of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The authors of the documents discussed in details the possible motives of the Soviet leaders, and predicted the short-term consequences of the USSR’s intervention for the region and the whole world. Due to the clear understanding of the developments in Afghanistan in December 1979 by the J. Carter administration, it completely rejected the Soviet official version of them that adversely affected the bilateral Soviet-U.S. relations and international relations in general. Due to the lack of accessible Soviet sources on the USSR’s intervention in Afghanistan, the documents of Jimmy Carter’s administration fill this gap and constitute a valuable source for a researcher.

Do U.S. Drone Strikes Cause Blowback? Evidence from Pakistan and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 47-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aqil Shah
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
The Social ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Muslim Communities

Many analysts argue that U.S. drone strikes generate blowback: by killing innocent civilians, such strikes radicalize Muslim populations at the local, national, and even transnational levels. This claim, however, is based primarily on anecdotal evidence, unreliable media reports, and advocacy-driven research by human rights groups. Interview and survey data from Pakistan, where, since 2004, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has launched more than 430 drone strikes, show little or no evidence that drone strikes have a significant impact on militant Islamist recruitment either locally or nationally. Rather, the data reveal the importance of factors such as political and economic grievances, the Pakistani state's selective counterterrorism policies, its indiscriminate repression of the local population, and forced recruitment of youth by militant groups. Similarly, trial testimony and accounts of terrorists convicted in the United States, as well as the social science scholarship on Muslim radicalization in the United States and Europe, provide scant evidence that drone strikes are the main cause of militant Islamism. Instead, factors that matter include a transnational Islamic identity's appeal to young immigrants with conflicted identities, state immigration and integration policies that marginalize Muslim communities, the influence of peers and social networks, and online exposure to violent jihadist ideologies within the overall context of U.S. military interventions in Muslim countries.

From the Cold War to the Cruelty of Violence: Jean Franco's Critical Trajectory from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City to Cruel Modernity

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Lettered City ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

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