Secret Government

The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis is a 1987 Public Broadcasting Service video documentary with Bill Moyers following the Iran-Contra affair – ostensibly, an effort to prevent the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.¹ According to Mr. Moyers,

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution.

The documentary traces the history of the secret government to the National Security Act of 1947 which was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. It “realigned and reorganized the U.S. Armed Forces, foreign policy, and Intelligence Community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II.”²

Although originally intended to be only an “intelligence-gathering” organization, under the auspices of this act the CIA quickly became an “operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.”³ According to the documentary “a secret report [was] prepared for the White House in 1954 by a group of distinguished citizens headed by former president Herbert Hoover”:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered. We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us.

This video provides a unique perspective on the transformation of the United States into a “National Security State” as it recounts the secret government’s activities – and reports on its activities – from the National Security Act to the Iran-Contra affair and references the following:

• Hiring Nazi war criminals such as Klaus Barbie as spies.
• Overthrowing the legitimate rule of Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 in order to redistribute oil profits. Previously, Mr Mosaddeq had nationalized the oil companies.
• Replacing Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president, because he formally recognized the Communist party and nationalized 1 1/2 million acres of land which was redistributed to peasants, upsetting the United Fruit company. The country was then led by military dictators for the next 30 years.
• Creating an Executive Action department which had a “permanent assassination capability.”
• Provoking North Vietnam which led to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the escalation of the Vietnam War.
• Reviewing past secret government activities in 1975 by the Church Committee, set up to review intelligence gathering for illegality by the CIA and FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.⁴
• Keeping the public and other governmental agencies and officials in the dark in order to make “it possible for the president to pose as the sole competent judge of what will best protect our security. Secrecy permits the White House to control what others know, and that’s power.”
• Setting up “the Enterprise”, a “business” organization created to funnel money from arms sales to Iran to fund Nicaraguan contras who were fighting against the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front.

The documentary is a fascinating expose of government endeavors to rid the world of communism via various misguided attempts which thwarted the United States Constitution. The following is the full video of The Secret Government (1 hr. 27 mins).

Sources:

1. See Wolf, Julie. “The Iran-Contra Affair”. PBS. 18 Jan 2010 for background on this event.↩
2. “National Security Act of 1947”. Wikipedia. 17 Jan 2010.↩
3. Truman, Harry S. “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence”. 22 Dec 1963. Washington Post. 17 Jan 2010. See also, McGovern, Ray. “Break the CIA into Two”. Consortium News. 17 Jan 2010.↩
4. See The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities to obtain the Church Committee’s reports in various formats; e.g. PDF, full text, etc.↩

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