The activities that it carries out are quite commonly efforts to
undermine democracy, as in Chile through the 1960s into the early
1970s. That’s far from the only example. By the way, although most
people focus on Nixon’s and Kissinger’s involvement with the CIA,
Kennedy and Johnson carried out similar policies.
Is the CIA an instrument of state policy, or does it formulate policy
on its own?
You can’t be certain, but my own view is that the CIA is very
much under the control of executive power. I’ve studied those
records fairly extensively in many cases, and it’s very rare for the
CIA to undertake initiatives on its own.
It often looks as though it does, but that’s because the executive
wants to preserve deniability. The executive branch doesn’t want to
have documents lying around that say, I told you to murder
Lumumba, or to overthrow the government of Brazil, or to
assassinate Castro.
So the executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible
deniability, which means that messages are given to the CIA to do
things but without a paper trail, without a record. When the story
comes out later, it looks as if the CIA is doing things on their own.
But if you really trace it through, I think this almost never happens.
The media
Let’s talk about the media and democracy. In your view, what are
the communications requirements of a democratic society?
I agree with Adam Smith on this—we’d like to see a tendency
toward equality. Not just equality of opportunity, but actual equality
—the ability, at every stage of one’s existence, to access
information and make decisions on the basis of it. So a democratic
communications system would be one that involves large-scale
public participation, and that reflects both public interests and real
values like truth, integrity and discovery.