In January 1976 the Pike committee of the U.S. House of Representatives filed reports on CIA and FBI. These reports supplemented a flood of information from Court cases and other sources. An analysis of this material gives a revealing insight into the role of secret agencies at home and abroad as well as the post-WWII evolution of US domestic and foreign policy.

The documents reveal that the CIA and the FBI have long been engaged in subversion, terror, instigation of violence and disruption of democratic processes at home and abroad. Furthermore these programs are not sporadic and “out of control”. Rather they are systematic, relatively independent of political changes and in general organized at the highest levels of state.

What were these CIA activities? One primary function of the CIA from its beginning has been to disrupt democracy in allied or subject counties. From 1948 to 1968 the CIA and “related organizations” expended over $65 million in Italy alone to subvert Italian democracy in fear of Communist electoral success.

From 1965 to date, 32 percent of Forty Committee approved covert action projects involved providing some form of financial election support to foreign parties and individuals. The Forty Committee is the review and approval mechanism for covert actions directly controlled by President. These efforts to subvert democracy constitute the largest covert action category of the CIA and are directed primarily against the third world (including government related corporate efforts of other sorts to undermine democratic processes as in Chile or more recently in Thailand).

Some of the CIA activities are remarkable in their cynicism. To cite one case, the CIA supported the rebellion of the Kurds in Iraq while the US acted to prevent a political settlement that might have preserved a degree of Kurdish autonomy. Kissinger, Nixon, and the Shah also insisted on a “no win” policy so that the revolt would persist, undermining both Iraq and the Kurdish movement. With a shift in international politics, the Kurds were sold out.

Nothing is said about the CIA’s secret war in Laos or the Phoenix programme in Vietnam, which, according to the Saigon government, claimed over 40,000; indiscriminately massacred. The Church Committee presents evidence concerning FBI attempts to incite gang warfare in black ghettos but gives no adequate account of such atrocities and the campaign to destroy the Black Panther Party.

Nor does it explore FBI directed violence, arming and financing of secret terrorist armies, concealing of criminal activities and the like in San Diego and other cities. Nevertheless, the investigations suffice to give a revealing picture of the activities of the US government to control domestic and international society, by means ranging from subversion to force and violence.

By the mid-1960s the subversive activities of the executive secret agencies had been regularly adjusted on a scale conforming with the perceived threat to state policy. Every ‘free university” was under FBI investigation. Throughout the country, FBI agents, infiltrators, and clandestine terrorist groups went on rampage, with bombings, assassination attempts, kidnapping, beatings, disruption, robbery, and so on. The pattern was no different abroad.

The Pike report sheds lights on the serious consequences of the general incompetence of the intelligence agencies.