Truman's CIA op-ed
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Truman's CIA op-ed is the 1963 Washington Post piece in which former President Harry Truman, who had signed the CIA into existence under the National Security Act of 1947, insisting on bans against domestic law enforcement and spying, repudiated it. Kiriakou raised the op-ed as a follow-on to his claim that the CIA and FBI had officers embedded at social-media firms, tying both to what he sees as the agency's long departure from Truman's original restrictions against domestic spying. John Kiriakou says the op-ed declared the CIA "a damn fool mistake" that should be disbanded, and that it appeared in the newspaper's morning edition but was gone from the evening one. In another telling, Kiriakou says Truman called himself a "damn fool" specifically because he believed the CIA had killed John Kennedy. Kiriakou adds that Truman came to believe the CIA was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and that even Eisenhower, one of its greatest supporters, concluded it was "out of control", before congressional oversight committees existed in 1976. Kiriakou cites Truman's op-ed in making his own case to abolish the CIA, arguing its functions are already duplicated across the other 17 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Kiriakou traces the op-ed further back to its origin: Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law, creating both the CIA and the National Security Council, and Kiriakou says the CIA "almost immediately" spun out of Truman's control. He says the CIA demanded the Washington Post remove the op-ed from its afternoon edition, and the paper did.

See also

- Abolish the CIA
- JFK assassination
