CIA's Influence on Media and History

How many people have read, uh, like, rigorous

analyses of either the history of the CIA or how the Central

Intelligence Agency operates? Just a quick show of hands,

and it's not...

I'm not testing you here. I'm just kinda curious. So one, two,

three. Okay.

How many people have seen either a James Bond movie or a Mission Impossible

movie? Right. Quick show of hands. Little embarrassing, I know.

Okay. Well, my, my point here is that the dominant

understanding of the Central Intelligence Agency is mediated

by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Uh, I have a quick quote he- or quick notes here.

So

one thousand nine hundred and forty-seven screen

products, TV shows, and movies have been

supported by the Department of Defense,

and a hundred and fourteen screen products have been supported by the

OSS, CIA, FBI, including, for one screen product,

these are long-running sh- TV shows like 24, Homeland, et

cetera. So the James Bond film, Mission Impossible.

There's a, there's a lot of great scholarship on

this, but National Security Cinema

is one of the solid books on this. And so what they've done is they've

created the image of themselves so that people are confused about how

they actually operate. This is important because

the Central Intelligence Agency is...

And it came out of the Office of Strategic Services, which was the wartime

intelligence service, and of course a deeper history of MI6

in Great Britain, who they learned from

and then incorporated and, and collaborated

with. The Central Intelligence Agency, w- they, they...

largely two branches that are important.

One branch that has been widely studied and understood, uh, Killing Hope

by, uh, William Blum is one of the best books on the topic,

is the death arm, right? The Central Intelligence Agency has been

responsible for killing a minimum of six million people

worldwide between 1947 and 1987 according

to fourteen former members of the Central Intelligence Agency

who did a study in the late 1980s. So that...

there's that element of all the coup d'état, destabilization efforts,

et cetera,

overthrowing a minimum or attempting to overthrow a m-

fifty foreign governments,

the majority of which were democratically elected,

since World War II alone, right?

But the other element that is unbelievably important

and understudied, and it's one

of the reasons that I got interested in it, is research and analysis.

Goal of the CIA is to internationalize capitalist

social relations. And if they do it through the stick, or

more perhaps appropriately, the gun,

or they do it through the carrot of propaganda and through the

carrot of the mind management of global humanity,

the objective is the same, right? So the CIA is not the

real story. The real story is who they're working for, right?

They work for the capitalist ruling class, and they work for bourgeois states in

order to manage the global population.

Ralph, uh, uh, McGhee, I don't... I'm not sure

exactly how to pronounce his last name, but he was in the CIA for twenty-five

years, and he said that the central function of the,

of the CIA

is global disinformation