Doc99,

The CIA’s problem is that it tends to hire people from the same universities where the indoctrination takes place. I was an undergrad from 1978-82, not at one of these elite schools, and I can recall that during that later part of the Cold War the poly sci, economics, and history professors where I went to school were mostly rather smitten by how “progressive” the socialist bloc was. Thus, they and their students seemed a bit inoculated from experiencing cognitive dissonance.

I think what has pretty much crippled our CIA was the Church Hearings of the mid to late seventies, with the result that greater legislative committee oversight has been slapped on Langley. It has politicized the CIA much more than people realize, to the point where leaks, whether from CIA employees or from the Hill, seem to be a fact of life now. How can one run an effective intel agency when the worst enemy may be the domestic not the foreign one?

It was the Left which animated Kennedy and Church to make the CIA walk the gang plank. The Leftist takeover of academia, I think, was no accident. Sure, there was institutional sloth and cheap careerism involved, but Prof. Kors leaves out the conscious Gramscian strategy involved. And it is a strategy, because the nation’s public schools are also infested with these indoctrinizers.