Page 220 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 220 of 237

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- A CONCLUSION

THE PRIMARY CONCERN of the men who drafted the Declaration of Independence was the consent of the
governed. By the mid-twentieth century, under the pressures of the Cold War, the primary concern of the nation's
leaders had become the survival of the governed.

The Invisible Government emerged in the aftermath of World War II as one of the instruments designed to
insure national survival. But because it was hidden, because it operated outside of the normal
Constitutional checks and balances, it posed a potential threat to the very system it was designed to protect.

President Truman created the nucleus of the Invisible Government when he signed the National Security Act of
1947, giving birth to the CIA. He has asserted that he conceived of the CIA primarily as a coordinating and
intelligence-gathering aid to a modern President who needed concise, centralized information on which to base
national policy. But by 1963 the intelligence apparatus had taken on dimensions which Truman said he had never
anticipated.

"With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda ... in their name-calling assault on the West," he wrote,
"the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the
affairs of other people ...

"There are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I ... would like to see the CIA be restored to
its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that
special field -- and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

"We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open
society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic
position and I feel that we need to correct it." [1]

In effect, Truman was lamenting the damage to national prestige caused by such special operations as the U-2
affair of 1960, the Bay of Pigs, and the episodes in Indonesia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Yet the Plans Division, which conducts the CIA's special operations, was established in 1951 under President
Truman. And it was under Truman that Allen Dulles came to Washington to be the first director of that division.
Since Truman could not have been unaware of these events, the real question is whether the operational activities
of the CIA have grown to a size and shape that Truman had not intended when he signed the 1947 Act.

Has the dagger, in short, become more important than the cloak? Certainly, in the years since 1951, secret
operations have grown greatly in size and number. When they have gone awry -- and some have gone
sensationally awry -- they have brought notoriety to the CIA.

Nevertheless, CIA officials have insisted that the majority of these operations have been successful. However,
there have been a large number of known failures. There is only one logical conclusion, if one is to accept the
CIA's claim to a high percentage of success: that the total number of secret operations has been much greater than
is supposed even in knowledgeable circles.

As in the case of the Bay of Pigs, some of these operations have become so big that they cannot be
practicably concealed or plausibly denied. In other instances, clandestine activity has turned loose forces
which have proved uncontrollable. Around the world, the CIA has trained and supported elite corps
designed to maintain internal security in pro-Western countries. But these police units have sometimes