{"id":5612,"date":"2013-06-02T10:19:20","date_gmt":"2013-06-02T10:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5612"},"modified":"2013-06-02T10:19:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-02T10:19:20","slug":"cia-and-sachs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/cia-and-sachs\/","title":{"rendered":"CIA and Sachs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been arguing against the ideas of wunderkind economist Jeffrey Sachs since his ruthless shock therapy advice in Latin America a quarter-century ago.\u00a0 Now he has written some JFK hagiography<\/a> which contains both errors of fact and interpretation.\u00a0 We read:<\/p>\n

Worse still, tensions intensified in the months between JFK’s election victory in November 1960 and his assumption of office on 20 January 1961. A long-awaited Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit failed when a CIA\u00a0spy-plane was shot down in Soviet\u00a0airspace just weeks before the\u00a0scheduled meeting. This was par for\u00a0the course: no agency did more damage more consistently to the cause\u00a0of peace than the malign and bungling CIA. But Eisenhower compounded the CIA’s damage by brazenly denying the spy mission, only\u00a0to have the Soviets produce both the plane’s wreckage and\u00a0the captured US pilot for a global\u00a0audience.
\nKennedy came into office in 1961 hoping to reach a series of arms-control\u00a0treaties with the Soviet Union, specifically a ban on nuclear arms testing to be followed by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Yet as an initially inexperienced leader, JFK drifted with events instead of leading them. The CIA reprised its spy plane bungling in a far larger and more dangerous debacle, by staging an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles. When the attempt immediately collapsed on the beach of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy repeated Eisenhower’s blunder by brazenly (and ridiculously) lying to Khrushchev about the US role in the attempted invasion.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although planning for the Bay of Pigs operation began before Kennedy became President, he had had plently of time to cancel it.\u00a0 Moreover, the White House – and he, JFK!, himself personally – interfered in its planning right up to the actual event.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, the specific site in Cuba of the invasion was changed \u2013 at JFK\u2019s order, and despite CIA\u2019s\u00a0great reluctance \u2013 just 4 days before the scheduled date.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Afterwards, JFK knew that he was the one ultimately responsible for its failure – responsible not merely in a hierarchical or legal sense, but actually, morally and operationally, responsible, and to his credit he took public responsibility for the operation.\u00a0\u00a0 He did still later sack the leadership of\u00a0CIA, though, since somebody needed to be punished\u00a0for his failure.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But his hagiographers and those who wish to attack CIA continue to\u00a0put all the blame on “CIA bungling”, while the anti-Kennedy right usually blame the failure of the operation on Kennedy’s repeated refusal\u00a0to provide USAF air cover \u00a0for the invaders as they fought on the beach.
\nThe chief problem of the Bay of Pigs, as I have remarked before (here<\/a> and here<\/a>), was not poor planning or ineffective operations or betrayal by JFK, but was existential:\u00a0 the operation’s aim was to convince the Castro regime\u00a0that Cuba was being invaded by the full overhwelming might of the USA military and to thus scare them into running away, without actual US forces\u00a0invading anything.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To have used actual US military forces (including USAF airplanes) would have risked the operation escalating into a major conflagration with the USSR, Cuba’s supporters.\u00a0\u00a0 A similar bluffing game had worked for CIA in Guatamela in 1954, but Fidel Castro was made of sterner stuff than Jacobo Arbenz, and he called the US’s bluff.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To say the failure was merely due to “bungling” by CIA betrays both a lack of knowledge of the facts of the operation, and a lack of understanding of its Cold War context, when small events in far-away places often had global ramifications.
\nAnd the shooting-down of the U2 spy plane?\u00a0\u00a0 Another bungle?\u00a0 “no agency did more damage more consistently to the cause\u00a0of peace than the malign and bungling CIA”?\u00a0 <\/em>I’ve not done a survey of the activities US Government agencies in the Cold War period, so I could not possibly argue that there were not other US government agencies\u00a0with worse records of damage to peace than that of CIA.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, I’m sure Sachs hasn’t done a survey either, so I will take this statement as exaggerated for rhetorical effect.\u00a0\u00a0 But even\u00a0excluding the comparison, did CIA’s activies\u00a0consistently damage the cause of peace?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In a war, it is vital for each side to understand the enemy’s plans and intentions.\u00a0\u00a0 This is even more so in a cold war, when much offensive and defensive activity may be undertaken indirectly or through proxies or be part of some long-term game of influence.\u00a0\u00a0 For the West, spy agencies such as CIA played the major part in understanding the enemy’s motivating beliefs and their plans and intentions.\u00a0\u00a0 (The same role was played by KGB and its sister agencies for the Eastern bloc.)\u00a0 The U2 plane shot down was part of a long-term, high-altitude espionage program that\u00a0 provided the West with valuable information about Soviet activities not otherwise obtainable.\u00a0 U2 spy planes run by CIA, for instance, first told the US Government in September and October 1962 that there were Soviet long-range missiles being installed in Cuba.\u00a0\u00a0
\nAgain, to\u00a0ignore or overlook this\u00a0function\u00a0betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of the Cold War context, when knowledge about the enemy and their actual, true,\u00a0beliefs and intentions was hard to come by\u00a0– for both sides.\u00a0\u00a0 Arguably, no agencies did more to advance the cause of peace, and to prevent the Cold War escalating into a hot one, than CIA and KGB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been arguing against the ideas of wunderkind economist Jeffrey Sachs since his ruthless shock therapy advice in Latin America a quarter-century ago.\u00a0 Now he has written some JFK hagiography which contains both errors of fact and interpretation.\u00a0 We read: Worse still, tensions intensified in the months between JFK’s election victory in November 1960 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,38,64,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-politics","category-project-management","p1","y2013","m06","d02","h10"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}