The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee
Wednesday August 16, 2023
On Jan. 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all these years later as a murmur amid silence. “Choice or Chance” was a blunt worry about what the CIA, 5 years old at this time, was getting up to. Was the agency to analyze information it gathered or that had come to it — a matter of chance — or was it actively and covertly to execute interventions of its own choosing?
The agency hardly invented clandestine operations, coups, assassinations, disinformation campaigns, election fixing, bribery in high places, false flags and the like. But it was elaborating and institutionalizing such intrigues, and they were coming to define America’s Cold War conduct.
The Washington Post stood with the objectors — at least it did on page 20 of that winter Friday’s editions. The agency’s activities were “incompatible with a democracy,” Washington’s local paper protested. They risked an unwanted war. Reform was in order. Once again to be noted: The conflict the Post aired concerned method. The Cold War’s taxonomy and Washington’s division of the world into adversarial blocs lay beyond question.
As interesting as the Post’s editorial was the dead quiet that followed. Nothing more was published on the topic. Eight months later, the Post obfuscated the CIA’s role in the coup that toppled the Mossadegh government in Iran; a year after that came the coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, and the CIA’s role in it was once again illegible.
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