William Daugherty Debunks CIA Myths
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We’ve all heard conspiracy theories in which the chief culprit is the Central Intelligence Agency. The more fantastic ones implicate the Agency in the assassination of President Kennedy and the creation and spread of deadly diseases like AIDS, while others allege the hidden (and sometimes not-so-hidden) hand of the CIA behind assassinations and the overthrow of governments around the world, from Iran to Guatemala, Vietnam to Chile. This perception is reinforced by Hollywood and the mainstream media, where the villains are frequently in the employ of a shadow American government, where the good guys end up as the bad guys, where there’s invariably some kind of secret unit going “off the grid.”
Few men are in a better position to challenge such a mythology than William Daugherty, who joined the CIA after Vietnam. Held hostage for over a year in the US embassy in Tehran, Daugherty was released and continued his career in the Directorate of Operations. He oversaw covert action programs in-depth and at a very high level from the 1980s until he retired, about a decade ago.
Daugherty focuses on debunking what he views as “the most pervasive myth,” the idea—promoted in the 1970s by a Democratic senator named Frank Church—that the CIA is a “rogue elephant”—stomping through the world, recklessly and illegally crushing whatever it sees. On the contrary, as Daugherty shows, there has always been oversight of the CIA, especially after the congressional investigations of the 1970s (which concluded that the Agency was not a bunch of renegades). He takes us through the dizzying array of committees, approval mechanisms, executive orders and congressional legislation that have restricted what the CIA can do since its earliest days. This won’t surprise anyone who has experience dealing with government bureaucracy, a land in which “cover your ass” is the rule and streamlining the exception.
The more interesting sections of the book are those that describe covert action programs undertaken in each specific administration. Daugherty provides fascinating summaries of these in chapters devoted to Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon and Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I and Clinton. These details help debunk many allegations made by leftist historians and journalists. In 1954, the president of Guatemala was overthrown; Daugherty disagrees with those who say the CIA acted principally at the behest of a powerful American corporation. In 1973, the president of Chile was overthrown; Daugherty demonstrates that anti-Allende operations began under Kennedy (not Nixon), and that the Agency did not instigate the coup that overthrew him. Look also for summaries of operations in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cuba, and much more.
Daugherty also injects a bit of mystery. At the end of his chapter on the Ford administration, he describes “one other important covert action program” that “involved the removal of a dictatorship and the establishment of a full constitutional democracy that continues to this day.” Lamenting its continued classification, he declares: “Beyond any doubt, this program is one in which the bad guys lost, the good guys won, and a democracy arose out of a dictatorship.” Alas, he does not tell us which country, but history students may be able to guess it.
All in all, William Daugherty has given us a superb history of covert action and how it has been used by American presidents. Those readers interested in delving deeper into the details of specific operations will find his footnotes indispensable and his scholarship impeccable. Academia needs more books like this: readable, engaging, informative, and written by someone who actually knows first-hand what he’s talking about.
Daugherty, William J. Executive Secrets: Covert Action & the Presidency. University of Kentucky Press, 2004 (paperback, 2006), 298 pp.
