CIA: Secret Wars

The CIA is in charge of counter-espionage outside the United States The organization is not required to reveal its budget, organisational charts, key figures, numbers of employees and salaries or even their names and job descriptions. Its budget has jumped from several thousand dollars to $US28b. Tonight SBS begins the three part series, As it Happened: CIA: Secret Wars (Tonight and next two Saturday nights, SBS, 8.30pm). And, as it happens, every paranoid thought you've had, and every conspiracy theory you've spouted over dinner parties, is probably correct.

Providing a safe haven to senior Nazis post WW2? The CIA did it. Iran in the Fifties? The CIA backed the Shah every step of the way. Chile? They were there too. Guatemala, ditto. Multiple assassination attempts on Fidel Castro? You betcha. And, in a fine tradition carried on to this today, there is the faking, in August 1964, of a North Vietnamese attack against an American warship in the Tonkin Gulf, giving President Johnson the pretext he needs to increase the number of American soldiers in SE Asia and begin bombing North Vietnam. Faked evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction anyone, or shall we move straight to coffee?

The message of this series is clear: we were never paranoid enough. 'Covert action is an extension of foreign policy.' The ONLY event those interviewed seem a bit squeamish about, and keen to distance themselves from, is JFK's assassination.

And just before you start muttering about leftie television station displaying bias, let me list those interviewed in this jaw dropping series: Stansfield Turner, Robert Gates, James Schlesinger, James Woolsey, Frank Carlucci, Richard Helms - former directors and deputies of the CIA all of them. Not to mention eight CIA field officers, two Secretaries of Defence, two Secretaries of State, investigative journalists, and a former head of the KGB.

Watching tonight's episode may leave you feeling ambivalent about watching the next two. It's just plain depressing. But persist if you can. I quote Robert Steele from the CIA's Counter terrorism centre. 'Every time you think the Americans can't do anything dumber, they do something really f*d up.'

Successive Democrat and Republican governments have considered the Russians the enemy while cultivating (well paid) links to Saudi Royalty and Oil companies. Says General Alexander Haig, Secretary of State from 1981 to 1982, "It's been my view that what happened on 9/11 was the product of 30 years of American misjudgement of the Middle East."

The Bush administration ignored several explicit warnings about the hijacking of aircraft for a terrorist attack. Thus, the remarkable final image of these series: the look on George Bush's face on September 11 when he is interrupted while reading to a group of school kids, and told of the attack on the World Trade Centre. Written on the blackboard behind him is the slogan: 'Reading Makes a Country Great.' But anyone who sits through all three hours of this remarkable series will be left in no doubt that it takes a lot more than that. 'Listening' might be closer to the truth.

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