2w ago

has the cia ever been the goodguys?

Just curious. As far back as I remember I only hear about them destabilizing countries that aren't fully in the pocket of American powerplayers. Sometimes they assassinate people, sometimes instigate coups, subvert media... and the #1 way to encounter them seems to be to try and take back control locally of one's country's oil and other valuable resources.

So my question is, have they ever done anything good?

24 comments

The CIA is a constituent part of the military-propaganda-industrial complex, which works for the capitalist class, not the working class, so whatever “good” it may have done was coincidental.
- I think that's what OP is looking for though.

Not really, no. I'm sure someone can cherry pick one individual instance where a CIA agent saved a puppy or something, but the function of the CIA is to serve as the covert arm of the US Empire and do what would even make the US public question the US's position on the global stage. I recommend everyone listen to Blowback.

Depends on the context. Covert operations and operators usually means that someone is bound to be negatively affected for the positive outcome of someone else.
- There are no good guys or bad guys in geopolitics just interests. Sometimes those interests align with what most people consider good or bad. Read the field manual FM3-24 and learn about shaping and you will see what the CIAs bread and butter of their job entails.
  
  I just read about shaping. It's everything I knew they were doing but given a name.
  Thanks for the tip.

You're asking this in Lemmy.ml 🤣

The precursor to the CIA, the OSS, did some work against nazi germany during ww2. But the CIA has only existed to establish and mantain US hegemony and is explicitly a reactionary institution.

Edward snowden would love to interject this

that dolphin had a bit of fun, tho that didn't end well for him so I guess nope

Wind of change: did the CIA write the cold war’s biggest anthem?
- what's the actual answer to that question tho?
  
  Betteridge's law suggests no

They made a pretty good case through a series of generally ethical experiments to prove that at least some forms of psychic phenomena like remote viewing are almost certainly real, if not exactly reliable or common. I thought that was pretty neat.
Other than that, no, I can't think of much.
- Wow people really want to believe magic is real and random YouTube videos and cia quacks are a good source
  
  I mean, these are all real CIA documents being referenced, you can go read them yourself. It's trustable in as much as you can trust the CIA to be straightforward within their own documentation that wasn't declassified until 20 years later.

They did write this manual on how to resist facism, which went viral recently, so I guess there’s that?
https://www.404media.co/content/files/2025/02/simplesabotage.pdf
Also operation Argo to rescue 6 trapped US diplomats during the Iranian hostage crisis.
Depending on your perspective, operation paperclip, which brought 1,600 German scientists to the US after WW2, might also qualify, though that will depend on:
A. How “forced” you think their Nazi party affiliations were, and how culpable you believe they were for the Nazi’s crimes in general
B. What you think their lives would have been like had they stayed in Germany or, more likely, been “recruited” by Russia in their own competing operation, as indeed many were.
- Von Braun oversaw the construction of missiles in factories that used forced Jewish (and other targeted groups) labour.

Depends on whose side you're on. If you're a genocidal maniac like Kissinger, sure they did.
A better question is: has any nation's intelligence service ever done anything "good" in the history of our species? It's still no, but with less nationalism.
Apparently the mods consider my equating "being pure evil" with there being something wrong with those people as ableism. I disagree, considering they still seem perfectly able to be fucking pure evil and are quite good at it. But if mods view being pure fucking evil as a protected class I rescind my comment.
Just like how mods are perfectly able to be pathetic.