This Ain't Your Momma's CIA.

• Author: THOMPSON, NICHOLAS
• Position: Participation of Central Intelligence Agency in ousting of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic

The Agency didn't play a lead role in ousting Milosevic. Thank God

AT A PRESS CONFERENCE IN EARLY 1999, three of Slobodan Milosevic's ministers breathlessly announced that they had discovered a secret CIA plot to overthrow the government of Yugoslavia. Waving a document marked "Top Secret," they revealed a sinister scheme to funnel money to "traitors" like resistance groups, intellectuals, and even journalists. Defense minister Ratko Mladic said Americans "think that everything is for sale, and everything, even democracy, can be bought"

Mladic was trying to invoke the ghosts of the swashbuckling, sinister CIA of the past that might have plotted to finish Milosevic off with an exploding cigar or sent Stinger missiles to his political opponents. But Mladic didn't have a lot to go on. The nefarious plan consisted of congressional testimony prepared by a fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, a government think tank and grant-giving organization. Mladic and his fellow whistleblowers had simply downloaded the document from www.usip.org, changed the letterhead, and stamped "Top Secret" on top.

There were, no doubt, a couple of spies in Belgrade with sunglasses, boxes of secrets, and secure satellite phones connected to CIA headquarters. But the campaign to oust Milosevic was organized mostly by guys in blue blazers carting around boxes of campaign stickers. From the end of the war in Kosovo until last October, when the Serbian people stormed parliament and booted out Milosevic, the Central Intelligence Agency seems to have spent its time, of all things, centralizing intelligence. That's why Mladic had to stretch so far to pin the blame on the Agency. It's also one major reason why the operation to remove Milosevic worked so well.

Cloak and Dagger

The CIA has always supported democracy in hostile countries with a goal, as Eisenhower put it, "to get the world, by peaceful means, to believe the truth" But when peaceful means have failed, or seemed inconvenient, the CIA has also run subversive cloak and dagger campaigns to give the world that truth, good and hard. A Cold War CIA report on covert action stated: "There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply"

Both peaceful democratic support and dark operations have existed since the Agency's beginning. Created out of our World War II intelligence operations, the CIA's first major operation was to provide money and technical training to Italy's Christian Democratic party as it successfully headed off the Communists in the 1948 elections, helping to stall the leftist movement growing amidst the rubble of Europe. Only a few years later, the Agency removed Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala by dropping Coke bottles filled with gasoline to simulate bombing, spreading disinformation over the airwaves--"It is not true that the waters of Lake Atitlan have been poisoned"--and creating the false impression that the left-leaning government was under siege. Arbenz fled the country in fear and a CIA man was soon propping up a hungover Elfegio Monzon in the shower as Monzon prepared to be sworn in as president.

For the next 15 years, the CIA played both dark and peaceful roles aggressively. The Agency sent men to the beaches of Cuba, trained Tibetans in Colorado for an invasion of China, and organized a war from the hills and swamps of Laos. At the same time, it served as an international endowment for the arts, trying to spread democracy by funding everything from Jackson Pollock's splatter painting to the magazine Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. The cover for this arts funding was blown in 1967, though, and as a result of the ensuing outcry, the Agency shut down large-scale peaceful support for democracy for 15 years.

Ronald Reagan loved subversion, and he empowered CIA director William Casey to covertly organize a war in Nicaragua. But Reagan's more lasting legacy comes from his recognition that the weakness of communism could be exploited by international institution building. Reagan proclaimed in 1982 that "The march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history," and set in motion a major movement that led to the creation of a number of QUANGOs (quasi-nongovernmental organizations) like the National...