Creation under the National Security Act of 1947
The Central Intelligence Agency enters these episodes as a product of the post–World War II reorganization of American defense. Christopher Preble, describing how the United States moved from a country he characterizes as genetically opposed to war to one permanently at war, says that after World War II the country created the National Security Act of 1947, which among other things created an Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and things like that. In Preble’s account the same act renamed the Department of War the Department of Defense; previously there had been a Department of War and a Department of the Navy On Foreign Policy, will Trump heed the Restraining Constituency or John Bolton? (2019).
Preble ties that reorganization to a larger shift in what defense was understood to require. Defense after World War II, he says, was redefined not as primarily defending the United States and the approaches to it at sea but as defending an idea that had to be defended forward, mostly in Europe and Asia — which is why U.S. forces remained in or were sent to those regions during the Cold War. He adds that it is relatively easy for the United States to wage war because it has a large military deployed in many places and staffed by professionals, which in effect lets the President use the military and dare Congress to cut off funds, something that almost never happened. He also notes that the Constitution makes it hard to do things, requiring a large public groundswell and alignment of the branches, whereas war is the easiest of all things the President can do.
Paid journalists and the Church committee
Ted Galen Carpenter supplies the most concrete charge involving the agency. He says one example of press misbehavior was uncovered by the Senate Investigative Committee in the 1970s led by Senator Frank Church, which discovered that over 250 prominent journalists in the United States were on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. Carpenter emphasizes that these were not merely journalists sympathetic to the agency or cooperating with it but paid shills of it, many of them among the most prominent journalists in the United States and the world at that time. He calls this a complete dereliction of duty Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
That finding sits inside Carpenter’s broader argument about the press and national security. He says journalists proclaim a self-declared duty to watch policymakers and report on what they define as the public interest, and that by that standard their performance on defense and foreign policy does not come close — the press, he says, has been constantly allies and obedient servants of government institutions acquiring ever more power, engaging in ever more secret behavior, and abusing basic civil liberties. Bob Zadek frames the companion question: media is at its core a business with only a duty to obey the law, and he asks whether the press receives special benefits under law in exchange for behaving differently.
Twitter, classification, and the Espionage Act
Carpenter returns to the agency in describing what he calls a dangerous collusion. He states that the U.S. government — specifically the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency — were paying $3.4 million a year to Twitter just so they could meet with Twitter officials and push to exclude certain individuals and certain points of view. In his words, that is a corruption; the entity is no longer acting purely as a private entity. He offers this as an instance of the broader change he identifies, in which media outlets are not just private entities but receive subsidies and inputs from government and face threats from government if they do not cooperate Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
The agency also figures in Carpenter’s enumeration of reforms. Asked whether any statute should be repealed, he says Congress can and should repeal the Espionage Act of 1917, along with the related 1918 Sedition Act, which he says criminalizes any criticism of U.S. policy during a period of national emergency and lets the government classify any document it wishes, so that disclosure is a violation. He states that over one billion documents have now been classified, including the luncheon menu at the Central Intelligence Agency, and that classifying over a billion documents is designed to conceal all government activity from media and public scrutiny. He adds two further wishes: a Supreme Court decision explicitly overruling Korematsu v. United States, which he describes as approving Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order imprisoning Japanese and Japanese-American citizens on the basis that they might pose a security threat on the West Coast states; and Congress again following the constitutional process for war Taking the Lapdog Press to Task on Foreign Policy Reporting (2023).
Across episodes
Two episodes touch the Central Intelligence Agency, and they do not show development of a single question so much as two different uses of the agency. In the earlier episode Christopher Preble names it as one institutional product of the National Security Act of 1947 and the redefinition of defense. In the later episode Ted Galen Carpenter names it twice, first as the payer of more than 250 prominent journalists identified by the Church committee, then as a party, with the Justice Department, to the $3.4 million annual arrangement with Twitter. The later treatment is the only one that makes the agency the subject of a substantive charge rather than an item in a list, and it advances that charge through Carpenter rather than through any reconsideration of Preble’s account.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about the agency’s internal structure, director, budget, or operations beyond the Church committee finding, the Twitter arrangement, the classified luncheon menu, and the agency’s creation in the National Security Act of 1947. They give no account of any statute the agency is charged with administering, no case in which it was a party, and no year for the Church committee’s work beyond the 1970s. Nothing in these episodes describes the agency’s founding date, its statutory mission, or how its personnel are selected. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence, as Bob Zadek’s turns at several section breaks do, no position or claim beyond what is stated is attributed to him.