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The CIA was founded in the wake of the 1947 National Security Act. The Act foresaw no need for the Courts and Congress to oversee a simple information-aggregation facility, and therefore subordinated it exclusively to the President, through the National Security Council he controls.
Within a year, the young agency had already slipped the leash of its intended role of intelligence collection and analysis to establish a covert operations division. Within a decade, the CIA was
directing the coverage of American news organizations,
overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely
to benefit a favored corporation), establishing
propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects (purportedly
contributing to the creation of the Unabomber), and—
gasp—
interfering with foreign elections. From there, it was a short hop to
wiretapping journalists and compiling files on
Americans who opposed its wars.
In 1963, no less than former President Harry Truman
confessed that the very agency he personally signed into law had transformed into something altogether different than he intended, writing:"
The CIA is not your friend
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