The Central Intelligence Agency has in many ways achieved the opposite of the purpose for which it was founded. Instead of increasing the security of the U.S., it has weakened it. The CIA is a main element of what is known as the Deep State, a permanent government that operates apart from the democratic machinery of the U.S. and conducts a policy characterized by ruthless actions intended to sustain U.S. global hegemony. Along the way, the CIA has poisoned public confidence in the integrity of government institutions by persistently using the tool of plausible deniability to mask its dirty work. Bribery, torture, assassinations, coups, and regional wars have all been carried out under an increasingly flimsy veil of deniability. I will describe how this malignant practice developed.
1947 – The CIA is Born
The CIA was created in the founding document of the U.S. national security state, the National Security Act of 1947. Although originally intended to be an intelligence gathering and coordinating entity, tucked away in its mission definition the CIA was assigned the task of performing “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” On this small foundation, an enormous structure of deceit would be built. These “other functions and duties” were described in 1955 in the NSC 10/2 – Covert Operations Directive. Covert operations were defined as follows:
As used in this directive, “covert operations” are understood to be all activities (except as noted herein) which are conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.
What “plausibly disclaim” means is that the CIA was to leave no evidence leading back to U.S. accountability. While NSC 10/2 avoids explicitly including assassination in the list of covert actions,” the phrase “all activities” and the reference to plausible deniability created a legal gray zone that was subsequently interpreted to include kidnapping, lethal sabotage, support for violent coups, and assassinations. Congress never approved this mandate for covert actions because it had granted the President full authority over the actions of the CIA in the 1947 National Security Act. In subsequent decades, the CIA used this authority to conduct extensive secret campaigns in support of U.S. “national security.” These included overthrowing the governments of many nations.
Many of these clandestine operations produced terrible results, often resulting in the bloody installation of oppressive regimes and creating enduring hostility to the U.S. While CIA participation was usually plausibly deniable in the short term, leaks and subsequent declassified documents showed a consistent pattern of deceptive U.S. actions.
In 1975 Congress investigated the CIA in an effort to curb its covert activities, which had spilled over into spying on U.S. citizens. The Church Committee held hearings that led President Ford to issue an order banning assassinations. Congressional committees were established to oversee the operations of the CIA, although they lacked practical means of curbing CIA activities.
Congressional oversight of the CIA weakened significantly after the 9/11 attacks, particularly in the first decade following 2001. This shift was driven by a mix of national security panic, executive overreach, secrecy expansion, and political deference. The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force permitted drone strikes and covert lethal operations against terrorist targets abroad, effectively overturning the assassination ban. The CIA soon had its own drone force and was regularly killing individuals designated as terrorists. The CIA also engaged in clandestine torture of captives during the “war on terror.”
Today, the CIA continues to rely on plausible deniability to conceal its activities. The classified Presidential action directives that authorize covert operations are inaccessible to the public, and unpersuasive denials continue to be issued. Most recently, President Trump denied any knowledge U.S. support for a Ukrainian drone strike on Russia that destroyed a number of military aircraft. Yet many informed observers have asserted that this strike could not have been conducted without the knowledge of the CIA.
Nord Stream Sabotage
Perhaps the most spectacular recent example of implausible deniability was the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
Here is a Bayesian analysis assessing the likelihood that the United States was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. The analysis is based on prior probabilities and three sets of evidentiary factors: 1) means/motive/opportunity, 2) lack of investigation disclosures, and 3) a whistleblower revelation. Posterior probability is calculated using Bayes’ theorem.
H₁: The U.S. was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines.
H₀: The U.S. was not responsible.
Prior Probability H₁ = 0.4 / 0.6 = 2/3 = 40% (based on no prior U.S. attack on EU infrastructure)
Posterior Odds = (Prior Odds) × Product of Likelihood Ratios
Posterior Odds ≈ (2/3) × 1.8 × 2.67 × 3.5 ≈ 11.23
Posterior Probability H₁ = 11.23 / (1 + 11.23) ≈ 91.8%
The prior probability of U.S. responsibility is low, about 40% based on the unprecedented nature of a U.S. attack on the infrastructure of a European ally. When the additional factors of U.S. means, motives, and opportunity are added to the calculation, the probability increases to 54%. Adding the factor of incomplete and inconclusive investigations of the sabotage raises the probability to 76%. Finally, adding the Seymour Hersh disclosures from an inside source results in a total probability of U.S. responsibility of 91.8%. Although any of these factors can be disputed, collectively they make an overwhelming case. Given the context of this evidence and the official policy of the United States that covert actions must be deniable, U.S. denials of responsibility for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage are worthless.
While most people don’t formally apply Bayesian logic, the human mind intuitively determines probabilities based on cumulative information. This is why the decision criterion in civil law cases is preponderance of evidence, not the absence of reasonable doubt. The willingness of public officials, media outlets, and ordinary individuals to consider U.S. deniability of the Nord Stream pipeline attack “plausible” in the face of substantial opposing evidence indicates the normalization of acceptance of government lies, and this is an indicator of serious social decay.
When it comes to the clandestine actions of our government, the U.S. has become an empire of lies. Shielded by public acquiescence to false narratives and concealment of its dirty work, the CIA has grown from an intelligence gathering entity advising the President into a rogue agency, conducting bribery, torture, assassinations, and government overthrows with only notional supervision by Congress.
Truman’s Regret
In 1963 President Truman publicly acknowledged that the CIA he created had turned into a monster with a license to kill. He published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he said:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.
. . .
there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
Conclusion
Since 1955, the use of plausible deniability in U.S. covert actions has significantly eroded public trust in government. By shielding decision-makers from accountability through secrecy, deception, and the absence of documented admissions, the United States has repeatedly engaged in operations that, once exposed, contradicted official narratives and violated ethical norms. From the CIA’s role in coups in Iran and Chile to clandestine support for foreign wars to engaging in torture and assassinations, each revelation has contributed to a growing perception that the U.S. government operates with impunity behind a veil of national security. This dynamic fosters cynicism, weakens democratic legitimacy, and deepens the divide between official rhetoric and actual conduct, making it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from strategic manipulation.
Plausible deniability persists not because it is rational or just, but because the institutions that govern U.S. state secrecy were never designed to meet the evidentiary standards of civil justice or the norms of morality. The structure we call the Deep State was designed to concentrate power in the hands of ruthless individuals playing international power games with complete disregard to democracy and the rule of law. The result is a dual-track culture of accountability, where ordinary people face the law, and national security elites manage optics. The people of the Deep State are intoxicated by their power to disregard the norms of society, and this makes them a danger to us all. When this danger becomes intolerable, reform may ensue. Until then, the implausible deniability of ugly U.S. government actions will remain a national disgrace.
Reinhard Gehlen needs a mentioning. Essentially the OSS/CIA wholesale acquired entire components of N-word (not merely Wehrmacht) intelligence services.
Plausible deniability, black box operations, “lies of omissions” to civilian overseers and those higher up in the chain of command—-it all metastasized in occupation Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization
or if you like things visually, a 15 min video overview. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XXu1b_mUs-A
Operation Gladio bears a mention, too. Evidence of past operations like Northwoods abounds.
Also note Otto Skorzeny, another Nazi. /:
I could not follow those Bayesian calculations at all.
1) Where do all the figures for conditional probabilities in the table come from? Out of thin air?
2) This is completely unintelligible:
Prior Probability H₁ = 0.4 / 0.6 = 2/3 = 40% (based on no prior U.S. attack on EU infrastructure)
0.4/0.6 = 2/3 = 67%.
And what do those 0.4 and 0.6 mean anyway?
I understand you want to ground your assessment of the events on a rational basis, but without a thorough justification of all figures used in the exposition, this all seems a bit like mathematical sophistry.
The weights of the compounding factors are estimates. For example, how much does the reporting of Seymour Hersh, a legendary reporter with impeccable credentials, support H1 vs. H0. The assigned weight is 8 to 3. This is not an exact measurement of a physical object, but it is an estimate that reasonable observers could agree on. Make your own estimates, and you will still find that the final probability heavily favors H1: the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.
Defenders of the U.S. claim of innocence use the debating tactic of saying that every factor that is disputable has zero value. How likely is it that someone Seymour Hersh considered a trusted source manufactured a detailed false account of U.S. involvement? The point of the Bayesian exercise is showing that evidence is cumulative in establishing probability, and that the widespread avoidance of this principle in this instance was like the dog that did not bark in the famous mystery story – silent evidence of guilt.
Your verbal argument is convincing, and I agree with your conclusion. However, your maths has an error, as vao pointed out.
You say “2/3 = 40%” which is incorrect.
If you meant to say “Prior probability is 67%”, then this is no longer “low”.
If you meant to say “Prior probability is 40%”, then what do the numbers 0.4 and 0.6 mean? Vao and I both worry that you pulled them out of the air to give you the answer you wanted, i.e. 40%.
The 2/3 is confusing because it is intended to show the probability odds, not a fraction. It means H1 is 40% probable and H0 is 60% probable.
Hersh is not a great reporter these days. He’s run flat out Western propaganda repeatedly. I cancelled my subscription to his Substack and am chary about linking to him.
He appears to get stories from spooky types. Some are real finds. Some are using him as a mouthpiece.
hmmmm … i also found his recent writings fail the smell test and cancelled my subscription to his substack. so it’s not just me, then.
I also cancelled my subscription to Hersh’s Substack after he published a preposterous counter-narrative to his initial Nordstream Pipeline story. He appears to have morphed from one of the greats into a useful intelligence idiot which shocks me.
I got the impression that his initial Nordstream Pipeline story was just the bait needed to lure people to his new & shiny Substack. It did work like a charm. Was pushing crap after it the plan all along, is anyone’s guess.
I have also cancelled my subscription. Lately he seems to do little more than regurgitate gossip from said “spooky” types with little critical pushback. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt for quite a while, given his record of great scoops, but enough is enough.
Agreed. This makes no sense whatsoever. As I tried to explain the other week, the likelihood function has two perfectly confounded variables. If Haig had read the notes to any of the limited dependent variable model likelihoods sections in a manual to Stata/SAS etc he’d know you must specify what the underlying mean and variance (or its inverse, lambda) for this equally reasonable observer to justify those probabilities. Likelihoods are not limited to Classical Statistics BTW, unless he means something else, in which case the case looks even worse for misusing basic maths terms.
I most certainly am not going to do any ad hominem but observe that Yves has regularly accused people of making shit up for less than this. You can’t just say “trust Hersh” – if a writer is going to use maths please define terms and demonstrate they understand the models/equations they are using.
I think presenting this simplified calculation was a mistake because it obscured the point I was trying to make rather than illuminating it. The point is that there has been a steady accumulation of circumstantial evidence indicating that the U.S. blew up Nord Stream. There has been NO exculpatory evidence, aside from a ludicrous story about a few Ukrainians on a rented yacht doing the sabotage.
Regarding Hersh, the critics imply that Hersh either dreamed up a detailed, technically feasible account of U.S. destruction of the pipelines or that he uncritically accepted this account from a U.S. source with a motive to discredit the U.S. The one compounding factor I left out of the probability calculation is that the U.S. has an explicit policy of making covert actions plausibly deniable. Hersh is not expected to lie about Nord Stream; U.S. officials are expected to lie about Nord Stream. How would you evaluate those relative probabilities?
Bayesian methods allow one to factor in the veracity of the source, which in environmental toxicology is critical.
You can get a mean and variance, but in Sy’s case it’s a moving target. As Yves says, Hersh is not a great reporter these days. You could time-weight the variance, but that’s another factor, and not necessary to make the point.
In the 2010’s, I was spending too much time reading politics. I spent a couple of months reviewing archives. Naked Capitalism was the only broad source correct better than 80% of the time (about a half-dozen other sources got there, but only in their narrow niche). The fascinating result was that most (Politico comes to mind) were wrong more than 50% of the time. Contraindicators.
Good post with a nice song at the end sweetening it. Thank you Haig.
The whole system of classification ought to be questioned and, imho, abolished. The keeping of secrets is the foundation for the generation of disinformation and the privileged status conferred by “clearance” seduces bureaucrats and politicians with the promise of superior information, which they cannot then discuss publicly, making the system inimical to democratic deliberation.
(The quality of the prose and structured arguments by this writer have caught my eye before.)
I knew such a person — a LRRP in Vietnam, rose in the ranks, more than 2 decades in CIA through Judge Webster, and an evaluator with an Einsteinian IQ. Paranoid.)
He described the CIA in very much the same way. 1947 was when we started the slide into self destruction.
I saw what it did to him, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about his personality was the attempt to perfect his running of all types of machines, especially computers (design), as if they held the solution — but he would have understood the song by Leaonard Cohen.
But I wanted to add this >>
RFK, Jr. said something once in an interview with Mike Tyson (good interview):
“My uncle was an ambassador in Europe — strongly opposed to an American Empire, and the reason was that we would eventually destroy ourselves by employing the same methods and techniques at home that we practiced on other nations.”
John Helmer in Russia wrote the other day that Putin is not going for CIA plausible deniability re Spiderweb: the killing of civilians — an entire village was assassinated, it has come out a few days later — and the drone strikes on the TU 95 planes. Helmer stated that Trump needs to make a public admission of complicity. If he does not, the strike will be “stategic.” If he admits his guilt, it will be less harsh.
Bobby and Trump seem to be close — and Bobby’s father and uncle took (CIA?) shots to the head. One can only imagine some of the talks they’ve had.
David Atlee Philips, according to my friend above, a deep insider, was responsible for the JFK murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Atlee_Phillips
Dear Valerian
Phillips was no doubt involved, but not the top man in the JFK assassination plan. Think Allen Dulles, ex head of CIA, and the Pentagon general smoking a cigar who controlled the president’s autopsy.
But who were they taking orders from?
Truman’s anti-CIA op-ed was published a month to the day after the assassination.
Interesting. Thank you.
I am slowly working my way through Aaron Good’s American Exception. One important thing he adds in his description of the deep state is that it’s not just the CIA, rather it’s the CIA as an arm of the over world of private wealth. He leans a lot on the Safari Club, the private organisation of form future CIA officers that continued during Carter’s reforms and then returned to CIA under Reagan.
It’s a good book, though dense. Bring a pen, the margins are there for the scribbling!
A very interesting, though depressing, book.
Good introductory post! As you are likely aware, the CIA was the peacetime successor to the Office of Operational Services (OSS), run by ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan, which carried out covert ops during WWII. The CIA was involved in attempts at regime change and covert criminal actions, and had connections to organized crime, gun and drug running, and close ties to Wall Street from the very beginning. CIA head Alan Dulles was a partner with his brother John Foster Dulles (Truman’s Secretary of State) at a major Wall Street brokerage firm. Former Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott wrote many books and papers on these subjects, and The American Deep State is pertinent.
So what were the Dulles brothers all about?
“While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in [Zurich] Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother Foster was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property.
Some of Fosnjection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.
But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justiter’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials—such as diesel-fuel ice Department under President Jimmy Carter.
If their powerful enemy in the White House [FDR] had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.
But with Franklin Roosevelt gone from the arena, as of April 1945, there was not enough political will to challenge two such imposing pillars of the American establishment. Allen was acutely aware that knowledge was power, and he would use his control of the country’s rapidly expanding postwar intelligence apparatus [CIA] to carefully manage the flow of information about him and his brother.”
David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 2015
At the end of the war they should ave been put up against a wall.
Instead, there is a major airport named after one of them.
And John Foster Dulles was on a 1960 US postage stamp.
But this is the USA, where an airport can be named for a war advocating WWII draft dodger, John Wayne.
The nefarious impact of Allen Dulles cannot be overestimated. He personally redirected the legislative charge that the agency be limited to intelligence gathering and analysis only to include covert covert operations as well. From David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chess Board:
According to Stephen Kinzer in The Brothers, during the Eisenhower administration Allen and his brother John Foster never went into a national security meeting without touching base beforehand to unite their front. They almost always got their way. Allen was undoubtedly the brain’s of this duo. As the late British Prime Minister Harold Mcmillan put it regarding his brother, “His words come slowly. But they easily keep pace with its thoughts.”
“Today, the CIA continues to rely on plausible deniability to conceal its activities. … Most recently, President Trump denied any knowledge U.S. support for a Ukrainian drone strike on Russia that destroyed a number of military aircraft. Yet many informed observers have asserted that this strike could not have been conducted without the knowledge of the CIA.”
Has anyone looked at the US nuclear threat alert actions around the time of the Ukrainian attacks on the Russian nuclear air fleet? If there was a shift in the days/weeks/(months?) leading up to the attacks to a higher alert level, it should prove that the USA knew the attacks were coming and were prepared for a counter attack response, which could have been nuclear.
The operational arm of the CIA was quite active during the latter years of Truman so he must have had a few thoughts about what they were doing. Methinks he doth protest too much.
He also claimed that when he accompanied Churchill to Missouri and Iron Curtain speech he was just a bystander. See above.
Now we have Trump saying, per Sgt Schulz, he knows “nothink, nothink” about any attack on strategic bombers. See the two preceding paras. Perhaps the presidents should simply admit that they love the spooks and playing James Bond. Ian Fleming was JFK’s favorite author.
We are the ones who should object.
Thanks much for this, Haig. And here’s an excellent post by Lambert that appeared here at NC a few years back:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/term-deep-state-focus-usage-examples-definition-phrasebook.html
The comments include a good reading list, as well.
Right now the Chinese have a monster military and you can thank the CIA for that one. It was small for a long time as the Chinese were concentrating on building up their economy. But then a CIA air mission bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade back in the 90s – the only CIA-commissioned attack in that aerial bombing campaign. The Chinese were bitter about this but could not do much about it – which Clinton knew. So since then they built up their military so something like this would never happen again.
It’s not just bombing of the Chinese Embassy. Third Taiwan Strait Crisis also happened back in the 90s, and made Chinese invest heavily in their anti-ship missiles, so something like that would never happen again.
Great article Haig.
You’re welcome part of an apostate site like NC, which continues to add to the knowledge of a deep state, where the CIA is the prime actor
The deep state of a nation is a mostly unelected cadre of administrators and functionaries within the state apparatus. However, given that we are de facto an empire, our deep state will include such a cadre within the US state apparatus, but also may well include the functionaries of other states, the UK and Israel being the two most obvious candidates. The Empire serves the economic and political needs of the obvious US plutocrats, but also members of the old European aristocracy and the big organized crime syndicates, so its deep state spans continents, governments, and entities on different organization charts. It is also almost certainly factionalized and riddled with different groups of power players that mostly cooperate with each other but at the same time look for opportunities to one up rival groups and stake a claim to increased power and prestige. The default loyalty of this imperial deep state is to the ruling class of the nations within the Empire, but that won’t prevent it from terminating with extreme prejudice any ruling class family members who go off the reservation and follow some undesired path (JFK, for example). And in fact the deep state of the Empire is killing its host countries now, as it concentrates power and money into fewer and fewer ruling class hands and impoverishes all of its other citizens. Empire is like cancer, it doesn’t know, or care to know, how to back down and allow its host to survive.
Kash, Bongino and Blondie have already “told” / confirmed to me everything I already knew about JFK, 9/11 and Epstein. (Dan: blink once for ‘yes’, twice for ‘no’)
Excellent summary, Haig, pleasingly concise and I like the handy regime change table.
In the conclusion “The people of the Deep State are intoxicated by their power to disregard the norms of society, and this makes them a danger to us all. When this danger becomes intolerable, reform may ensue.” That’s possible but it’s also possible that what ensues is nuclear war.
Since I am sifting through MoA commentariat of b´s latest entry:
When Will Russia Attack NATO?
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/06/when-will-russia-attack-nato/comments/page/2/?cid=6a00d8341c640e53ef02e860ec5d9c200b#comment-form
There was this reminder of Larry Johnson´s short item on the deep state in January:
Defining the Deep State
by Larry C. Johnson
10 January 2025
https://sonar21.com/defining-the-deep-state/
Over 200 comments. I didn´t check if there is useful info there too.
Now we’re getting somewhere. It’s interesting that Harry Truman’s WaPo op-ed appeared on 12/22/1963, merely a month after JFK was assassinated.
While the msm cooperates with the CIA/deep state, it’s long overdue to consider Truman’s warning that, “It has become… a policy-making arm of government.”
Moreover, Truman states, “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.” I guess forever wars makes that a moot point.
It would also be nice to know if the deep state is defending neoliberalism, hegemony, and its own power rather than democracy which it wants us to believe, as well as Russia and China are threats to democracy. The deep state might well be a greater threat to democracy than Russia and China combined.
Seemingly unrelated, but ultimately not, is the emergence of an all-powerful National Security State nearly simultaneous with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, passed partially in response to the huge, and largely forgotten,1946 strike wave. Loyalty oaths contained in Taft-Hartley accelerated the purging of the Left from the unions; other components – the banning of secondary boycotts, the opening to right to work legislation in the states, etc. – led to the bleeding out of working class power over the decades.
It is mistakenly thought that the CPUSA reached its high point of influence/membership in the 1930’s. In fact, the CP – a powerful, and sometimes dominating force in the industrial CIO unions – reached its apogee during the war, when Party Chair Earl Browder (ironically, grandfather of Magnitsky Act instigator and Yeltsin-era pillager William Browder) gave his famous “Communism Is 20th Century Americanism” speech, and Communist rallies filled Yankee Stadium. New York City had two city council members, Benjamin Davis of Harlem and Pete Cacchione of Brownsville, who ran and won on the Communist ticket during this period, and Congressman Vito Marcantonio of East Harlem, who was closely associated with the Party, was re-elected throughout this era.
Fear-mongering of the Soviet Union and Commies in organized went hand in hand, and with the exception of outlier unions like the independent United Electrical Workers (UE), the unions were happy to support the Cold War policies that helped bring us to our current miserable moment.