Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, is the co-author of "Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana."

In the aftermath of the failed C.I.A.-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, John F. Kennedy angrily told his top aides that he wanted to “splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” For a brief period, the president considered a State Department recommendation to strip the agency of its covert functions, reorganize and even rename it.

C.I.A. covert actions have repeatedly done damage to U.S. values and laws – as well as to our international foreign policy interests, not to mention America’s reputation.

If Kennedy had shuttered the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operations in 1961, the United States might have been spared an unending cycle of illegal, immoral and criminal C.I.A.-related scandals, among them: the infamous assassination plots against foreign leaders; the Phoenix program in Vietnam; the secret program to bring hundreds of Hitler’s henchmen to America; the regime change operations against elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile and elsewhere; the domestic spying effort known as Operation Chaos; the illegal Iran-Contra operations; and now the rendition, secret detention and sadistic torture programs, which constitute nothing less than crimes against humanity.

Undertaken by the C.I.A.’s directorate of operations, these covert actions have been conducted in the ostensible defense of our democratic institutions. Yet they have repeatedly done damage to U.S. values and laws -- as well as to our international foreign policy interests, not to mention America’s reputation, which is now permanently stained by C.I.A.-conducted torture.

Almost 40 years ago when the U.S. Senate did its first comprehensive evaluation of C.I.A. covert action, the committee headed by Senator Frank Church recognized the need for strict supervision and control over this dark side of the agency. If policy and legislative procedures could not be instituted to ensure that clandestine operations adhered to the principles of U.S. democracy, the Church committee recommended, then "covert action should be abandoned as an instrument of foreign policy."

In the post-9/11 world, it is unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will forgo a covert action capability. Yet, as the torture scandal proves once again, the C.I.A.’s covert operators are immune to all efforts of accountability and reform. They have tortured, destroyed evidence and lied about their human rights atrocities. There is no alternative but to remove the C.I.A.’s covert capacities once and for all, and redistribute those functions to other more responsible agencies such as the F.B.I. and the Pentagon, leaving the C.I.A. purely as an intelligence agency.

“We must remain a people who confront our mistakes and resolve not to repeat them,” concluded the final paragraph of the Church committee report in 1975. Unless the C.I.A.'s covert action capacity is "scattered to the winds," those “mistakes” will assuredly be repeated, again and again.



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