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“They are us. We are them."
May 30, 2018, "CIA Undermines North Korea Summit By Leaking Report To Media Asset," Disobedient Media, Kenneth Whittle
"Just as it was reported that the summit between the United States and North Korea was back on and that Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea was on his way to New York to meet with officials in preparation for the June 12 summit, the CIA leaked an intelligence assessment concluding that “North Korea does not intend to give up its nuclear weapons any time soon.” The timing of this leak is striking, as it seems to be an effort to undermine negotiations between the two nations and comes just days after ranking members of the Democratic Party and Republican hardliners attacked President Donald Trump over his efforts to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The identity of the reporter who helped break the story also raises serious questions about whether or not a faction within the CIA deliberately attempted to undermine diplomatic efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula. According to NBC News, the report was leaked to none other than NBC national security reporter Ken Dilanian, known as “The CIA’s Mop-Up Man.”
In 2014, The Intercept reported on Ken Dilanian’s correspondence and relationship with the CIA while Dilanian was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
According to The Intercept, “Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a close collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.”
According to the Huffington Post, while writing for the Los Angeles Times, Dilanian also reported a CIA claim as fact by stating that “there was no collateral murder in a 2012 drone strike on Al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi.” Dilanian’s article was directly disputed in an Amnesty International report.
In the aftermath of the revelations about Dilanian’s ties to the CIA, he was disavowed by the Los Angeles Times. The disclosure of Dilanian’s collaboration with the CIA also led his former employer, David Lauter of the Tribune Washington to believe Dilanian could have violated Tribune news policy. Lauter acknowledged that Tribune policy dictates that reporters “not share copies of stories outside the newsroom.” Lauter further stated that he was “disappointed that the emails indicate that Ken may have violated that rule.”
Dilanian has not shied away from pushing articles written by former CIA officials who continue to perpetuate the “Trump-Russia” collusion narrative without any regard to facts, such as Steven Hall’s Washington Post article titled: “I was in the CIA. We wouldn’t trust a country whose leader did what Trump did.”
Wikileaks has also pointed out Dilanian’s agency connection and his pushing of the “Trump-Russia” collusion narrative, tweeting: “CIA’s ‘mop up man’ Ken Dilanian is the NBC ‘reporter’ used to channel claim about president Putin + US election.”Perspective | I was in the CIA. We wouldn't trust a country whose leader did what Trump did. https://t.co/4XG8TmhwKq— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) May 18, 2017
CIA's "mop up man" Ken Dilanian is the NBC 'reporter' used to channel claim about president Putin + US election https://t.co/GOci4EWwdv
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 15, 2016In the aftermath of recent revelations concerning the CIA’s collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 US Presidential Election the fresh leaks continue to show a pattern of rebellion that has long run rampant in the US intelligence community. While the CIA’s apparent violations of ethical considerations concerning surveillance of candidates running for public office was serious enough, their interference drags the reputation of the agency to a new (and in the case of Korean peace negotiations, more dangerous) low amid their conflict with the sitting President of the United States.
However, despite these attacks, preparations between the two countries have continued for the upcoming June 12 summit.
President Trump announced earlier today via Twitter that: “We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!”
We have put a great team together for our talks with North Korea. Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more. Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of North Korea, heading now to New York. Solid response to my letter, thank you!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018""
image from Disobedient Media
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Added: In the 1950s The Dulles brothers shaped the catastrophic US interventionist foreign policy that remains with the US today: Two reviews of 2013 book.
Catastrophic Dulles brothers' failures include Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, and the 1961 Bay of Pigs. Hunting down imagined Moscow Stooges--then known as "Communists"--Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles together with Ike and unlimited US taxpayer dollars popularized US interventionism which has yet to achieve a positive result except for feeding a parasitic Endless War Industry and "Security Industry" into which US taxpayer cash is laundered. (No war, no free money).
11/4/2013, "Book review: ‘The Brothers,’ on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, by Stephen Kinzer," Washington Post, Gordon Goldstein
"Stephen Kinzer’s “The Brothers” tells the story of two siblings who achieved remarkable influence, serving as secretary of state and director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Eisenhower administration. It is a bracing and disturbing study of the exercise of American global power....
With the election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower as president in 1952, [John] Foster [Dulles] finally secured the job he coveted: America’s premier diplomat. [His brother] Allen, who had joined the recently created CIA in 1951, was selected by Eisenhower to be its director....
As commander in chief, Eisenhower “combined the mind-set of a warrior with a sober understanding of the devastation that full-scale warfare brings,” Kinzer writes. “That led him to covert action. With the Dulles brothers as his right and left arms, he led the United States into a secret global conflict that raged throughout his presidency.”
According to Kinzer’s reconstruction of the Eisenhower era, the president [Ike] was an enabler of the Dulles brothers’ obsession with six different nationalist and communist movements around the world that would provide successive case studies in the potential of covert action and its pronounced limitations.
The first test came in Iran, where nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister in 1951 and swiftly moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry, seizing control of the country’s petroleum wealth from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a primarily British enterprise. Operation Ajax, designed to oust Mossadegh, initially floundered. But the CIA paid street mobs to terrorize Tehran and recruited dissident military units that converged on Mossadegh’s home on Aug. 19, 1953.
After a battle that killed hundreds, the Mossadegh government was overthrown. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was installed, “ruled with increasing repression for a quarter century, and then was overthrown in a revolution that brought fanatically anti-Western clerics to power.”
The CIA next, in 1954, deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, a former defense minister and leftist political reformer who expropriated nearly 400,000 acres of land owned by the powerful United Fruit Company."...
[Ed. note: "Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it [United Fruit] tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism. And the Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among their close friends.
It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his coalition. Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level jobs in his administration. But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later." 6/3/2011, "Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past," NY Times op-ed, Stephen Schlesinger]
(continuing): "Arbenz [in Guatemala] represented a potent threat comparable to Mossadegh and his seizure of Iran’s oil assets. “Their crackdown on corporate power led Foster and Allen to presume that they were serving Soviet ends,” Kinzer writes. “Two reasons for striking them — defending corporate power and resisting Communism — blended into one.”
These early victories in covert action were followed by a series of failed or unnecessary interventions that the author attributes to the brothers’ hubris and incompetence. In Vietnam, the communist and nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh proved to be as resilient and relentless an adversary as the United States ever confronted. In Indonesia, the American effort to unseat neutralist President Sukarno constituted one of the largest covert operations of the 1950s but also ended in failure.
In the African nation of Congo, a charismatic former postal clerk named Patrice Lumumba became leader after the end of Belgian colonial rule. The CIA perceived him as sympathetic to Moscow ["a Moscow stooge" in 2018 parlance] and in 1960 helped the Congolese military depose him. Lumumba was then abducted, beaten and murdered by his political rivals and Belgian police. Only 200 days separated his inauguration and his death.
The Bay of Pigs operation remains among the greatest debacles in CIA history, an epic mess for which Allen Dulles was eventually fired. By the time 1,400 American-sponsored Cuban exiles blundered ashore in April 1961 in an effort to spark a spontaneous revolution, their mission had already been exposed. Months before, a New York Times headline had blared: “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Air-Ground Base.”
Allen had a pattern of delegating operational responsibilities to a dangerous degree, in this instance entrusting the fate of the invasion to his deputy, Richard Bissell. Both men were mired in abject denial about the operation’s prospects. A Marine Corps amphibious-war expert advised them that the United States would “be courting disaster” if it did not neutralize Cuban air and naval assets by providing “adequate tactical air support.” Yet Allen and Bissell knew that a newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy had ruled out any intervention by U.S. forces, the precise condition upon which the invasion’s success depended.
Allen Dulles’s “mind was undisciplined,” Kinzer concludes. “A senior British agent who worked with him for years recalled being ‘seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences.’ ” Kinzer is similarly blunt in his assessment of Foster’s intellect, quoting Winston Churchill’s disparaging verdict that the secretary of state was “dull, unimaginative, uncomprehending.”
The author asserts that the Dulles brothers suffered from a form of sibling groupthink. “Their worldviews and operational codes were identical,” Kinzer writes. “Deeply intimate since childhood, they turned the State Department and the CIA into a reverberating echo chamber for their shared certainties.”
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Allen Dulles ran the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961. His brother, John Foster Dulles, served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959. "President Johnson privately complained that the C.I.A. had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”"
Nov. 8, 2013, "Overt and Covert,‘The Brothers,’ by Stephen Kinzer," NY Times, Adam LeBor
"Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.
John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, were scions of the American establishment. Their grandfather John Watson Foster served as secretary of state, as had their uncle Robert Lansing. Both brothers were lawyers, partners in the immensely powerful firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, whose New York offices were for decades an important link between big business and American policy making.
John Foster Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959; his brother ran the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961. But their influence was felt long before these official appointments. In his detailed, well-constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for The Guardian, shows how the brothers drove America’s interventionist foreign policy....
Eventually, the United States government tired of Allen Dulles’s schemes. President Johnson privately complained that the C.I.A. had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” an entirely accurate assessment— except the beneficiaries were American corporations rather than organized crime. Nowadays, the Dulles brothers have faded from America’s collective memory. The bust of John Foster, once on view at the airport west of Washington that bears his name, has been relocated to a private conference room. Outside the world of intelligence aficionados, Allen Dulles is little known. Yet both these men shaped our modern world and America’s sense of its “exceptionalism.”
They should be remembered, Kinzer argues, precisely because of their failures: “They are us. We are them.”"
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