Title: Why Abolishing The CIA Won't Change Anything
Show: Kim Iversen
Date: 2025-01-25
URL: https://youtu.be/J_GA5Wj3-94
Duration: 12:00

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[00:00] what do you think of the CIA I mean do we NE do we still do we need it do we need the CIA no I don't think so there's so much redundancy in intelligence well I'm gonna give you a two-part answer first of all there's so much redundancy in in intelligence we really don't need a CIA the Pentagon has an organization called defense hum Services hum meaning human intelligence they recruit spies to steal secrets well guess what that's exactly what the CIA does so you've got DOD doing the same thing you've got the

[00:30] state Department's Bureau of intelligence and research and the defense Department's defense intelligence agency doing um analysis exactly what the cia's directorate of intelligence does so there's redundancy there you have NSA that's doing all of the the intercepts you've got DARPA that's doing all the futuristic cool scientific inventions and stuff like that you have Myriad organizations that are doing simpler things like bugs or disguises or forgeries or you know any

[01:03] of the stuff that a CIA officer needs to do on a day-to-day basis so when you've got multiple organizations all doing exactly the same thing isn't that kind of a waste of money and Manpower and secondly and this is more important the CIA has gotten literally every major Global development wrong since 1947 from the creation of the Bur wall through the Suz crisis through the

[01:33] Vietnam War and and the fall of the Iranian government and and the loss of the Sha of Iran through you know Iran Contra and missing 911 and everything in between they just got it wrong so why would we even want to keep going this gigantic multi-billion dollar organization that doesn't really provide anything to the National Security I worked for uh I worked for

[02:06] Ambassador John negranti when I was at the United Nations in New York uh more than 20 years ago he later went on to become the Director of National Intelligence and as the ambassador to the UN he was in a quasi cabinet level position and so he was allowed to receive a pdb briefing every day and he once told me that not one single time did the president's Daily Brief tell him something that the Washington Post and the New York Times didn't tell him an

[02:38] hour earlier do we really need it right yeah yeah it's so interesting so interesting so so that's kind of an well the the interesting I think the most interesting part of what you just said is I think a lot of people would be cheering and saying all right the CIA is gone let's say Trump comes out and says Ah we're gonna get rid of this we don't need it we're gonna get rid of the CIA people would be cheering saying all right you know it's a new day it's a new dawn and really it's like no they' just now this the spies are everywhere else

[03:08] they just move around just divide them up divide them up and send them someplace else that's it yeah so it wouldn't actually end anything I mean nothing would change if we got rid of the CIA is what you're saying you know George Washington once said that gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail and so we didn't have an intelligence organization in our country until the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and even then it was almost blocked because it was

[03:39] opposed by Jay Edgar Hoover it was only because President Truman lied to Hoover and said to Hoover no no you need to support this passage because the CIA is going to be a division of the FBI it was a clear lie but Hoover believed it and he said oh okay well if I'm going to be the director of both the FBI and the CIA then okay I I'll lift my objection and it passed and then trumman was like ha fooled you and the CIA and the FBI have been at War ever

[04:10] since yeah and what was the whole point of the CIA it was to spy on the Russians right is that what the initial that's exactly right it was to spy on the Russians you know Jim Jim pavit he was the deputy director for operations um for whom I worked when I was a briefer and uh he used to say the same very simple thing all the the time and I repeat it all the time now in interviews because it's so true the job of the CIA is to recruit spies to steal secrets and to analyze those secrets to provide the policy maker with the best informed

[04:43] analysis now they often fail at that but that's the whole reason at at its root to have a CIA so the CIA the the spies themselves are not actual spies they're recruiting other spies in other countries to do the spying is that yeah you know yeah we all have these wonderful stories that we like to tell once we leave about the cool stuff we've done but the truth of the matter is if if you've got blonde hair and blue eyes you're not going to

[05:14] infiltrate alqaeda right you're gonna have to recruit you're gonna have to recruit some guy from Yemen or from Egypt to do it for you yeah that's that's really how it works you recruit the spies to steal the secrets for you my favorite family member he's passed away now but he was my great uncle and uh my my grandmother's uh brother and he was in the CIA he was one of the very earliest first guys in the CIA he never said he wasn't you know we

[05:46] we all we found out uh especially later after he died you know that it was it I think then it's like no longer it's kind of like this family secret that's not really that secret sort of a thing like we all know Uncle Alton was in the CIA kind of a thing and he would just disappear for weeks on end and then come back with like random Russian people oh yeah oh yeah you can say I mean it's a little bit of an exaggeration but it was it was it was like that I mean it was he would disappear for weeks on end and uh

[06:18] and my grandma's like oh he's off Russia again or something the CIA and he's involved in all that stuff and oh I can't tell you how many times how many times I went on on missions and I was instructed to throw away all of my money before I left the country because I couldn't risk anybody seeing like whoa where you got money from XYZ country what were you doing there H you can't risk that so at the airport just as I was getting ready to you know board the plane which was oftentimes in a fake

[06:49] passport from some other country so that there's literally no record of me having been in that country I'd have to throw away all my money and all my receipts yeah wow were you able to tell people you were in the CIA when you were in it no so what do you guys say I mean he said his cover was always that he worked for NASA I think is what he said that's a good cover I think that's a good cover yeah he's like I work in I work for NASA yeah mine was the state department I would just say state department and uh if people pressed I would say ah it's

[07:22] really boring I'm involved in Fr that's what he would say sometimes are you guys trained to say that cuz that's literally what he would say it's really boring I just do paperwork I that's it you want to make the response yeah you want to make the response so boring that people don't follow up I'll tell you what I was on a plane once from Milan to Sophia Bulgaria and I never talk to people on planes I just listen to music or read a book or whatever and I'm sitting next to this this enormous guy and he would not shut his mouth for the whole dog on

[07:53] flight and he kept talking and talking and finally says so what do you do for a living I said uh I'm a businessman oh what kind of business are you in I said i' import export you know oh what do you Import and Export ah whatever was GNA make me some money I said I whatever it is I can get a deal on oh like what he says and he just wouldn't stop so I said look I smuggle women in cigarettes from Eastern Europe you happy now and he says and that was actually

[08:25] true because yeah right it pretty much no it wasn't true I and he goes I don't approve I said well I didn't ask your approval did I how about shut the [ __ ] up and then he didn't say a word the rest of the flight oh so sometimes that's what you have to do now I know if somebody starts giving me vague answers I'll be like oh CIA okay got it yeah yeah that's right yeah training and imports and and yeah we do a lot of exactly yeah yeah interesting

[08:57] interesting but it so yeah I guess that's that's um unfortunate to know that if we got rid of it it doesn't really go away it just shifts it just it just morphs into a different agency I think that that's right because a lot of us want to see that power that kind of clandestine power um we somehow we've got to bring the power back to the people we've got to yeah and it's we've got to and you know how we do that we we do that with with real oversight committees you know we've got the Senate select committee on intelligence and the house permanent select committee on

[09:27] intelligence which for a brief period from 1975 to about 1986 were actual real oversight committees telling the CIA no you can't do that that's a violation of international law and now the Committees really are are little more than cheerleaders for the CIA and I'll give you an example um I went to prison for 23 months after blowing the whistle on the cia's torture program and when I got out

[09:58] of prison I was in invited to a dinner at the Greek ambassador's residence and Senator Ron weiden of Oregon the Democrat of Oregon was at the dinner and um and he came up to me and he said hey welcome home so glad to hear that you're out you know blah blah blah you did this Brave thing and I said Senator with all due respect I gotta tell you I actually expected a little bit more support from you and he got

[10:29] angry and he said look it took all my energy just to not lose my security clearance and I thought oh you're afraid of them you're not overseeing them you're afraid of them well if he's the only one on the Senate intelligence committee who's viewed by the the media as you know the one guy who's going to stand up to the agency what does that say about all the other members of the Senate intelligence committee not to
