Summary of Douglas Valentine's The CIA as Organized Crime

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, which was a controversial CIA assassination program during the Vietnam War. I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. He was all for it.

#2 I was able to interview the people who created the Phoenix program, and they loved having a journalist who was sympathetic to soldiers listen to them and understand what they were saying.

#3 I interviewed members of the CIA, and they cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. I never asked them if they had killed anyone or done any illegal things, and they were confident I was de-mystifying the program because they trusted me.

#4 There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University, which contains interviews with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669397106

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Insights on Douglas Valentine's The CIA as Organized Crime

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I wanted to write a book that would de-mystify the Phoenix program, which was a controversial CIA assassination program during the Vietnam War. I wrote Colby a letter and sent him my first book, The Hotel Tacloban. He was all for it.

#2

I was able to interview the people who created the Phoenix program, and they loved having a journalist who was sympathetic to soldiers listen to them and understand what they were saying.

#3

I interviewed members of the CIA, and they cooperated because Colby had sent me to them. I never asked them if they had killed anyone or done any illegal things, and they were confident I was de-mystifying the program because they trusted me.

#4

There is a Douglas Valentine Collection at the National Security Archives at George Washington University, which contains interviews with close to 100 CIA officers and military officers involved in the Phoenix program.

#5

The Phoenix program was an extremely successful model for pacification in Vietnam. It was the silver lining in the Vietnam War. Politically, the war was a disaster, but bureaucratically, the Phoenix program succeeded. It became the model for CIA operations in Central America.

#6

Kilcullen, the chief advisor on counterinsurgency operations for General David Petraeus in Iraq, wanted a Phoenix program implemented around the world. He believed that such highly bureaucratized centers would allow the White House to direct the CIA to target the right terrorists.

#7

The CIA is tasked with counter-subversion outside of the United States, and during a counterinsurgency, the CIA pursues a political order of battle, while the US military pursues a military order of battle.

#8

The old boy network exists in Vietnam, and it’s gotten worse since Iran Contra. It’s almost impossible to interview mid-level CIA people on the record and reveal the facts.

#9

The media industry has been reduced to a few huge corporations that control most of the outlets. Control of information has become the key to the oligarchy’s success. Very few independent news organizations are able to compete with the giants, and get information out across the country.

#10

The left takes credit for ending the Vietnam War, and Ellsberg is a central figure in its narrative. But people cannot understand the significance of the Pentagon Papers or the true nature of the Vietnam War without understanding Ellsberg’s work for the CIA.

#11

The CIA has a network of management level people in the information industry who know what books and authors to marginalize. I learned this the hard way when I published The Phoenix Program, which revealed CIA secrets and presented the media as a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists.

#12

The left’s management class, which is invested in celebrity heroes who represent their business interests, focuses on the symbol and ignores any contradictory but essential facts.

#13

The Ellsberg myth serves as a symbol of the American left’s inability to address its own hypocrisies. He leaked the Pentagon Papers and stopped the war, but he suffered for it.

#14

The War on Drugs, as you chronicle in your books, fundamentally changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Bureau of Narcotics was removed from Treasury and recreated as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in the Justice Department in 1968, because it had gathered indisputable evidence that the CIA was running the Golden Triangle narcotics business.

#15

The CIA is the organized crime branch of the US government. It controls international drug networks, and it controls the media to ensure its control.

#16

I learned that there