From fiascos to disasters to imbroglios to quagmires, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a study in moral defeat and martial failure. Its certainty matches its ineptitude: a consequence we continue to pay for information—for intelligence—whose value is a matter of deception, of deceiving the American people not with complexity but through the simplicity of a stamp marked CLASSIFIED. That word is as meaningless as the terms CONFIDENTIAL and TOP SECRET. Each is an excuse in lieu of an explanation, denying us the chance to see or read what we were told was true, because the truth is: Never were so many so wrong about so much—for so long—as were the agents and analysts of the CIA.
With its endorsement of the allegations against President Trump, that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, the CIA vandalized its own Memorial Wall. The agency blasphemed the dead—it desecrated the 129 stars on that wall—for a cause as partisan as it was pointless. Like a religious order too corrupt to change and too defiant to want to change, the agency operates at a distance—across the Potomac River—where it issues encyclicals about world history.
To read these letters is to see years of repose, worsened by years of sabbatical, where the overthrow of Fidel Castro was always near but the end of the Soviet Union was inconceivable, the collapse of the Berlin Wall improbable, the reunification of Germany impossible. To see Europe permanently divided—to see half the Continent painted red—is to see the stupefaction not of the American people but of an agency charged with the work of a nation; the work of our nation against many nations, but one in particular, Russia, whose relative weakness is a mystery to an agency that sees nothing enigmatic about an enemy it believes is as strong as the United States.
To restore history, we must first abolish the CIA.