The CIA's "True Confessions" and what to make of it

Via Powerline, we're pointed to this op-ed by Angelo M. Codevilla:

July 2, 2007 -- THE CIA last week released a heavily redacted version of a 1973 report what it considers its fathers' sins. There was nothing new: In the '70s and '80s, agency employees on all sides of the quarrels over what the CIA should do shopped their versions of the report to whoever would listen on the congressional Intelligence Committees (including myself) as well as to the press.

These quarrels were rooted in the deep political, social and personal animosities that split the CIA's founding generation. Riding the post-Vietnam/Watergate wave of U.S. politics, one CIA faction wrote the report to discredit and oust their bureaucratic rivals.

(New York Post)

The piece obviously underscores Powerline's thesis about factions within the executive branch acting to influence policy, including the undermining of the current president (as by giving the OK to Joe Wilson to publish a little piece about his trip to Niger).

Give it a read--it's not particularly long, and it's got some tidbits like this in it:

It is not sufficiently remembered that in the 1950s the CIA helped arm Castro (against the U.S. embassy's wishes) and acted to destabilize the regime he was trying to overthrow. The released report says nothing of this, for the same reason that it mentions nothing about the CIA's sponsorship of Iraq's Ba'ath party, and of its 1959 hiring of a young thug named Saddam Hussein, or of its romance with the PLO. The CIA retains illusions and affections.