The problems in the Intelligence community can all be traced back directly to the culture and attitude of Allan Dulles. Everything the Intelligence community does now is a consequence of his actions and the cultural foundation he laid.
Yup - and the Dulles brothers were both
fantastically corrupt and were, in fact, criminals.
Therefore the attitude is, in a large measure,
criminal - being above the law.
John Foster Dulles connections to Hitler and the Nazi regime are well documented (through the law firm of
Sullivan & Cromwell, where he was a partner, and where is brother Allen also worked) - as are granddaddy Prescott Bush's (as a Director of
Union Banking Corporation) and both benefited financially from said relationships. Some of the documentation relating to this was "classified" until as recently 2002, and the Dulles (either one or both of them) were involved in obscuring the connection, sending at least one investigator on a wild goose chase, away from where the documentation (of their criminality) lay. I believe that at least one person (possibly more, although I would have to recheck) involved in investigating these links turned up dead under what could be described as somewhat mysterious circumstances.
Allen Dulles was responsible for creating
MK-Ultra - the secret mind-control program of the CIA (and the Department of Defense), which involved
experimentation on American civilians with psychotropic drugs (including LSD, heroin, morphine, mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, marijuana, alcohol, and sodium pentathol), and were often conducted without the subjects'
knowledge or consent (in violation of the Nuremburg Code, established by United States Military Tribunal)
These experiments resulted in at least two known deaths (one civilian, one military) and may have ultimately created the individual we now know as the
Unabomber - Theodore Kaczynski. Additionally, the popularization of the hippie drug culture in our society might be partly traced to the fact that Ken Kesey (a Merry Prankster) volunteered to participate in
MK-Ultra and take LSD - and then went on to become a heavy advocate of it's use.
Knowing the complete extent of
criminality involved with
MK-Ultra was complicated by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973.
There is an (arguable) case for the Rev. Jim Jones/Jonestown Tragedy to have been an MK-Ultra experiment, as there is some evidence of US government connections. Jonestown was where Congressman
Leo Ryan, a CIA critic, was assassinated.
Allen Dulles personally oversaw
Operation Mockingbird - which was a subversion of the free press in America, and which involved spying on American citizens (telephone taps on at least two Washington-based news reporters), and
Operation 40 - which was involved in sabotage operations but also had evolved into a team of assassins - which included
Porter Goss (who was later to serve as CIA Director, under Bush the younger),
Frank Sturgis - one of the Watergate burglars,
Luis Posada Carriles, who is currently wanted in Venezuela for his key role in the execution of the
1976 Cubana Flight 455 bombing, and
Orlando Bosch (founder of the counterrevolutionary Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, CORU), which organized the 1976 murder of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier. Operation 40 may have been involved in the 4 March 1960 bombing of the Belgian flagged ship La Coubre (claimed by
Fabian Escalante, G2), and it is estimated that the explosions killed 75 people and injured over 200.
And it was on Dulles' watch that
Operation AJAX occurred (deposing popularly-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953), and
Operation PBSUCCESS - the overthrow of popularly-elected
Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who assumed the Guatemalan presidency,
marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala's history, after Guatemala's second-ever universal-suffrage election.
United Fruit Company (a criminal enterprise) was the largest Guatemalan landowner and employer, and Árbenz's government's land reforms would have included the (compensated) expropriation of 40% of United Fruit Company's landholdings (uncultivated portions only) John Foster Dulles' law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell had represented United Fruit and Allen Dulles was a board member of United Fruit at the time. The actions of United Fruit in Central America single-handedly resulted in a new term being introduced into the political lexicon:
"Banana republic" - a corrupt government which is a servile dictatorship (of corporate interests)
Another aspect of the Guatemalan coup was
Operation WASHTUB, a CIA covert op which planted a
phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua to
"demonstrate" Guatemalan ties to Moscow.
Later, in an effort to do a "CYA", the CIA launched
Operation PBHISTORY, which aimed to document government ties to the Soviets and communist involvement (the false pretext used to justify the coup against Árbenz) The group examined 500,000 documents and came up with over 50,000 documents - ostensibly for the purpose of exploiting and illustrating communist activities within Guatemala. The documents were later examined by an extra-Agency researcher, Ronald M. Schneider, who found
no traces of Soviet control and
substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists
acted alone, without support or guidance from outside the country.
Each of the operations above is a complete story unto itself, often with many more stories branching out from them.