The Intelligence Agencies Rule the West, Not Elected Governments

Dear Readers,

Since this essay (below) was written, two events have taken place. The first is Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will resume weapons shipments to Ukraine. Mr. Trump apparently believes that the Russians can be persuaded to return territory seized in the war to Ukraine. This move by the Trump administration is profoundly cynical. The return of territory would place NATO right back on Russia’s Western border. And with the Russian Naval base in Sevastopol, the return of Crimea is a non-starter.

While the second event may seem minor by comparison, it reveals that the US is an active participant in the genocide in Gaza. Step one was the removal of a UN-affiliated food service provider in Gaza and its replacement with an American company approved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Step two was the placement of American mercenaries at the ‘cattle pen’ stations that Palestinians in Gaza are being put through. Reports have these American mercenaries murdering Palestinians for sport.

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The Intelligence Agencies Rule the West, Not Elected Governments

Americans tend to project explanations that they are given regarding how the state and commerce ‘work’ onto events to the benefit of malevolent forces. Over the decades, these forces have crafted programs to redirect public outrage against their actions. With respect US foreign policy, the Western intelligence agencies have been running the show since WWII. Through ‘intelligence sharing’ agreements, the ‘Five Eyes’ has grown into a shadow government.

In terms of national intentions, a realized fact of the division of the world into East and West (North and South) has been a merging of the intelligence agencies of the West. The Five Eyes was initially conceived during WWII and was built out through mission creep --- covert action alliances were added. This was partly by design as ‘the West’ was created as a post-war political and trading bloc, and partly through institutional prerogative. As a ruling class institution, the CIA wants to rule.

With respect to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, following the US coup in 2014 that replaced the elected government of Ukraine with one selected by the Obama administration, the CIA moved into Ukraine wholesale. As the New York Times reported, the CIA built a dozen facilities to variously spy on and attack Russia with as it built the ‘Ukrainian’ army. However, as best can be determined, it was MI6 that managed the relationship between the US and the Ukrainian fascists that formed the basis of (at least one of) the CIA’s armies in Ukraine.

In history, this is a problem because the US absorbed a significant proportion of the leadership of the Third Reich into US commerce, the military, and government following WWII (see here, here, here). Former Nazi officer Reinhard Gehlen was put in charge of the CIA’s Berlin Station, which was the European launch pad for Western attacks against the Soviet Union. When the CIA bragged that (Cuban Revolutionary) Che Guevara had been murdered in Bolivia, neither shame nor embarrassment accompanied the fact that Klaus Barbie, the Nazi ‘Butcher of Lyon,’ led the mission.

Graph: US budget appropriations for the IC (intelligence community) started to rise sharply once the CIA began building the ‘Ukrainian’ army following the US-led coup in Ukraine in 2014. The CIA armed, trained and funded Ukraine, focusing on using Ukrainian fascists in the military because they were already formed into fascist militias that hated Russia. Meanwhile, American liberals imagined that they were ‘helping’ Ukraine by getting one million of its citizens killed. That this result was entirely predictable (recall Iraq?) places some blame for the Ukrainian debacle on US supporters of the war. Source: DNI.gov

Here (starts 14:01) is the Director of Mossad, David Barnea, thanking CIA agents, as well as the Director of the CIA, for being Mossad’s partner in the most recent US – Israeli war against Iran. While the establishment press spends its time on the question of when it was that Donald Trump decided to join the Israelis in the attack on Iran, it turns out that the CIA and Mossad had been working together on the attack for months or years. Irrespective of what Donald Trump knew, the CIA was intimately involved in the planning and prosecution of the attacks.

Graph: while US ‘aid’ to Israel began rising around 1960, it spiked higher with the ‘oil shocks’ of the early-mid 1970s, and then exploded higher with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran had been the dominant US outpost in West Asia until the US was booted out of Iran with the Revolution. The US ‘special relationship’ with Israel is an accident of history. Had the US not inflicted an intolerable government on the people of Iran, Israel today would be an afterthought. Source: Jewishvisuallibrary.org.

The same is true of MI6’s misguided attack on Russian nuclear assets on behalf of the Western consortium supporting it. Outside of three or four members of the Trump administration who have publicly acknowledged the folly of the American effort, the Trump administration has been every bit as ‘Progressive’ as the Biden administration in inflicting retrograde policies abroad while threatening nuclear war. The mask is off of Western imperialism.

This ‘shadow government’ role of the Western intelligence agencies, where domestic intelligence agency scams and grifts like Russiagate are used to manage domestic politics while global scams and grifts like posing the American war against Russia in Ukraine as a battle between authoritarianism and democracy, tastes and smells quite a bit like fascism. Oligarchs using police-state tactics to make rich people richer is at least a partial definition of Germany’s Third Reich.

As far as subterfuge goes, selling ‘capitalist democracy’ seems quite a bit harder with ruling-class institutions like the CIA openly running US domestic and foreign policy. While it has allegedly been trying to diversify away from hiring only from the Ivies (Ivy League universities), the CIA has represented the decision-making core that unites V.I. Lenin’s critique found in The State and Revolution with Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. While this thesis has been contentious since Lenin wrote the books, it is quickly becoming the received wisdom in the US.

One needn’t be Marxist, or even have sympathy for the analytical theories that support it, to recognize that a permanent ruling class institution peopled by members of the ruling class is inconsistent with the advertising slogans of freedom and democracy. These facts obviate most Western theories of rule by principles alleged to define a Constitutional Republic. A ruling class that uses state power to benefit itself is the enemy of freedom and democracy. Once again, it represents a form of liberal fascism.

Donald Trump’s effort to immunize himself from blowback for his possible, alleged, maybe, end of the US war against Russia in Ukraine by calling it ‘Biden’s war’ misses that he (Trump) was recently elected President of the US. While Biden may be gone, ‘his’ war has persisted without him. So, while Mr. Trump’s political instincts may be motivating the effort to shift blame away from himself, when did US wars become the personal possession of Presidents? The point: in geopolitical terms, multiple layers of government have rendered the US ungovernable.

Text: Google AI helpfully compiled exemptions from the CIA’s reporting requirements with respect to the listed categories. Of main interest would be the operational files, as well as ‘Other exemptions under FOIA and the Privacy Act.’ The prior could cover intelligence-sharing agreements which have been difficult to pry from the State Department’s / CIA’s hands, as well as joint covert operations and / or operations sent to other intelligence agencies because the actions would be illegal to carry out under US law.

Evidence of this ungovernability can be found in the recent MI6 attack on Russian nuclear assets. Even though the US and Britain are allegedly sovereign nations. MI6 and the CIA have been working hand-in-glove since WWII. Further, the CIA expanded the sharing arrangement to include covert operations. As the governments of the West turn on each other over the Ukraine war, this creation of a Western shadow government will soon enough look like the bad idea that it is.

Continuing to supply Israel with US arms and funding directly contradicts the ‘Leahy Law’ (and here) that prohibits arms sales and funding to nations carrying out ‘gross violations of human rights’ like Israel has since 1948. Importantly, the Leahy Law does not apply to the CIA. But even without this glaring, and purposeful, omission, the Leahy Law depends on presidential appointees to the state department rendering judgment that it is the sitting president’s foreign policy that is at fault. This is a low probability outcome.

Debate in the US regarding the Israel Lobby began in earnest with the publication of John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby. No issue is taken here with either the thesis of the book or the details. As far as it goes, the book is a valuable addition to understanding how the US ‘works.’ The challenge here is that the Israel Lobby is an effect well before it is a cause. Treating it as a stand-alone entity fits a liberal theory of the state, but not a Marxist one.

This latter point represents an important distinction. Before corruption and cynicism consumed the US, it was widely conceded that there existed interests that went beyond self-interest. The self-interest of Wall Street, and the forces of neoliberalism more broadly, took our collective savings, the national resources of the US that the people had built (voluntarily and involuntarily), and ‘gifted’ it to insiders who don’t believe in a public purpose except inasmuch as it is an opportunity for looting.

According to the Washington Post, Israel began planning its most recent attack on Iran last year (early 2024). The answer to the question of ‘when the US knew about it’ was therefore when the CIA and Mossad planned the attack together last year (link up a few), and not when Donald Trump put his cheeseburger down and turned up the volume on Fox News. A major challenge for the Israeli ‘surprise’ meme is that the CIA helped to plan the attacks.

The question then: is US foreign policy the product of the Israel Lobby, or is the Israel Lobby the product of US foreign policy? The question can be broken into two pieces for clarity. The first is: does the Israel Lobby actually exist? The answer is yes, pretty much as John Mearsheimer lays out is his book entitled The Israel Lobby (link above). The second question: does the Israel Lobby control US foreign policy? The answer here: Israel is a colony of the US. The US controls its own foreign policy.

With Donald Trump openly taking orders from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu with respect to the US – Israeli assault on Iran, this would seemingly lend credence to the Israel Lobby thesis. That Israel would have no foreign policy without US funding, US weapons, US intelligence and Zionism having been well sold to WWII era Americans, detracts from the thesis. Were Israel funding and arming its own foreign policy, the control relationship might be more plausible.

But pointing to the money flows alone leaves out both history and sociology. If money were the only explanation for the Israel Lobby’s success, why couldn’t any nation with the money buy US foreign policy much as Israel is claimed to do? As Mearsheimer explains, the Israel Lobby is deeply embedded into the US foreign policy establishment. Israeli Intelligence is today an honorary member of the Five Eyes Alliance.

The question of why Mossad is the main agency charged with spying (and here, here) on Americans inside the US might be a mystery if the CIA hadn’t spent its energy since the Church Committee hearings trying to find ways to spy on Americans without a legal basis for doing so. Much as the Brits, MI6, appear to have formed close ties with Ukrainian fascists for those times when the West needs fascists to do its bidding, Mossad was given the formal role of doing what the CIA legally can’t in terms of domestic spying inside the US.

The Five Eyes Alliance (now up to ‘Ten Eyes’) is explained (links at top) as an intelligence sharing organization, which is at least a partial explanation. It is an alliance between Anglosphere nations--- Canada, US, Brits, Australia and New Zealand, in which Mossad was granted a role. Less considered regarding Five Eyes is that it allows the member nations to outsource acts that are illegal in one country to another where the act is legal, or more deeply hidden. This is how the CIA came to rely on MI6 to manage the relationship with Ukrainian fascists from 1943 or thereabouts to February 24, 2022.

Moreover, as stated above, through the Office of Policy Coordination, and written into the 1947 Charter of the CIA, the CIA has special units intended to carry out US foreign policy clandestinely. Here is a discussion of the legal framework in which the CIA is assumed to operate by the US military.

Note that according to the author (US military), the CIA does not agree with the legal limitations claimed over its actions. Question: given the CIA’s power, who is going to enforce the law when the CIA breaks it? Answer: the last time that Congress tried, over torture charges in the Iraq War, the CIA hacked the computers of the Intelligence Committee to blackmail it into submission.

Although the Five Eyes was established during WWII, little information was released on these matters until 1958. Following passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), more information has been released in dribs and drabs.

The point was made in the introduction that evidence now exists that the US is directly and actively participating in genocide in Gaza in league with the IDF. While this has been the case since October, 2023, it has been well-enough hidden by the Western media to provide plausible deniability for most Americans. No more. Recall, Joe Biden tried similar misdirection with an army ‘pier’ that managed to forestall negative public reaction to US participation in starving Palestinians to death in Gaza.

As Genocide Joe Biden should have learned, and Genocide Donald Trump may wish to consider, it helps in politics to have convenient scapegoats. Biden claimed that he had no control over the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The Israelis later claimed that he never, not once, asked for control over it. The same will be revealed of Mr. Trump. If neither Biden nor Trump wanted the genocide, why did they both rush new US munitions to Israel to be used in it? The Israel Lobby exists as cover. It made them do it.