by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
Former spy Philip Giraldi recounts how after decades of service he began to see through the lies of the intelligence community.
(Zero Hedge) Americans are by now familiar with a handful of whistleblowers who after spending years employed by the US intelligence community (IC) eventually saw enough to make them angry and throw away the safety of their future government careers by exposing state secrets to the public. Names like Snowden, Manning, Kiriakou or John Stockwell, William Binney and Thomas Drake (both of NSA whistleblower fame) are well-known, especially in independent and alternative media circles.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
But lesser known are the names of those abruptly fired and dismissed from their posts as analysts or as officers for merely questioning and pushing back in real time against what they understood to be disastrous and criminal foreign action and policy. We suspect that this list of names, still largely unknown to the public or media, is much bigger than anyone knows. Such ex-employees of the CIA, NSA, DIA or other alphabet soup agencies typically have their security clearances revoked and are threatened with criminal prosecution should they ever reveal state secrets and classified information. The possibility of future employment even in the civilian world then comes under threat. This means most of them remain unknown.
Typically the American public only finds out about massive covert CIA operations or US war plans long after the fact. For example, the intelligence community knew that the Bush-Cheney White House was gearing up for a ‘shock and awe’ invasion of Iraq for at least many months before it happened. Or for another example, the truth about the CIA’s covert program to overthrow Syria’s Assad (called ‘Timber Sycamore’) finally leaked to The New York Times at least half a decade after it began. Intelligence planners under President Obama understood that the US was arming and training al-Qaeda linked Libyan rebels to overthrow and execute Gaddafi. And all the while, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was getting briefed on these US-backed ‘rebels’ conducting extermination campaigns against ethnic minorities. Such horrific and suppressed truths only typically come out years or decades after they happen.
But again, what of those rare voices who dissent in real time and quietly suffer the full retribution of the national security deep state, far from the public eye? ZeroHedge was able to hear directly from one such rare dissenter in the Washington D.C. area this weekend. Former CIA operations officer Philip Giraldi spent over two decades in the agency, which took him around the world. We heard his fascinating and alarming story of “How I Got Fired From The CIA” during a closed-door session at the Ron Paul Institute’s Liberty Platform conference held in Dulles, Virginia.
Below are ex-CIA Giraldi’s words recounting how his long career led up to a difficult show-down with CIA leadership, and what happened next, as transcribed directly by ZeroHedge [emphasis ours].
* * *
After graduate school and following time in the US Army as an intelligence officer, I joined the CIA. I was an operations officer, which means a spy. I was sent to a lot of nice places to live in, starting with Rome. And then I was in Hamburg and then I was in Istanbul, and then Barcelona. After Barcelona I left the agency for a while and came back as a contractor after 9/11, and I was there for another three years.
How I got in trouble with the agency was… after I came back as a contractor I was sent to Afghanistan – this was after we had overrun it. It didn’t take me long to figure out that we had replaced the Taliban by becoming worse than the Taliban.
Read More @ TheFreeThoughtProject.com
