.

In fact, Turner's move was probably the decisive step in the consolidation and subsequent dominance of what Trento calls "the Rogue CIA" and what I sometimes refer to as "the Bush mob," also the Enterprise model (privatized CIA) or extended Iran/Contra brotherhood.

Those 800 were fired, but they were not exposed. In an atmosphere of reaction and resentment with regard to the recent cultural rebellions and exposures of CIA crime, and with the late 1970s alliance of neoliberal ideologists and the cultural right wing ramping up to take open power in the imminent "Reagan Revolution," firing the men who were presumably responsible for a long series of assassinations, massacres and coups like "the Bay of Pigs thing," Chile in 1973 and the six-nation Condor atrocity initiative just prior to Carter's election amounted to an invitation and challenge to them, to collectively enter the private sector and reorganize to seize power. As their figurehead they chose Bush, who had just acted as their champion while in office at Langley, and with the October Surprise operation they stormed back into Washington as the hidden rider on the Reagan horse. (Reagan was shot six weeks after his inauguration.)

This was a metastasis of the long-running trend at CIA, which always prided itself on keeping its work hidden and deniable thanks to proprietaries and false-front corporations and contractors for dirty work, and where the operators had always rewarded themselves with side business. Now, however, the bulk of the former covert operations wing had been thrown straight into a new center in the private sector, operating with the same cover as before, understanding themselves as the permanent secret government and with their people or friends in the key positions in official government, but without need to report to the government at all; and with sufficient anger and feelings of betrayal to justify anything they chose to do. (Watch out, America haters and crypto-commies and hippie feminist druggie academics and Soviet-loving liberal reformers, it's payback time!)

The Iran-Contra revelations of the "Enterprise" exposed a small portion of the resulting new culture and metastasized structure of covert power. I believe a mere list of these 800 would turn up a lot of familiar names and tell us much about the history of the last three decades, and no doubt blaze trails to Afghanistan, 9/11 and Iraq. Of course, there's no need to overdo it as something completely new, and of course most of the systemic realities and pressures of capitalist development and of a state in perpetual low-intensity crisis would have been similar without Turner's move, which only catalyzed the particular mob who took over the upper-middle levels of a cryptocracy. This was the same generation that was forged in "the Bay of Pigs thing," but now in the post-Sixties, post-Nixon, post-Carter reaction, a time of consolidation and triumphalism...