You have no basis for saying this.Without thr CIA the cold War would have ended differently
How? No crack or other drugs epidemic? No heavy migration of my fellow Latinos because they wouldn't have propped up dictatorships, which also resulted in the guerrillas that attempted to overthrow them which lead to refugees, human trafficking and the drug trade?The US would most likely have been worse off by then as well.
I am pretty sure the SR71 has been considered overrated if not considered outright junk by many in the US military itself.The CIA is the reason we were invested in long range deep recon aircraft like rhe U2 and SR71.
thw CIA is responsible for a lot of aspects.
You could argue that...if the margin of the 1948 election was actual close call, but there was 48% per cent for Christian Democrats (one single party mind you not counting their allies in the PLI, PRI, others and the Italian Social Movement) and 31% of the Democratic Front (a coalition of the leftist parties which only a part of it was the Italian Communist Party and they would soon split) so "NO CIA EQUALS COMMIE ITALY" is fallacious.Without the CIA, we would have most likely had a commie Italy...
You could argue they follow a brand of socialism yes, but two out of three haven't been credible threat to anyone since the Wall fell and I would argue even during the Cold War they were at best annoying. China on the other hand as @King Arts put it is at best aesthetically communist but that's about it and let's not forget that Tricky Dick and that mummified parasite of Kissinger they still exist, your own country's leaders and politicos changed the legitimacy of the Republic of China for a subversive realpolitik, which also we are paying the consequences today just like the American interventions in LATAM.*looks at DPRK and China and Cuba*
Ah yes, look how they no longer exist
@Abhorsen as long as you don't get the narc types...but it STILL depends. I have know one too many Latinos that came here just to cause problems they did in their homelands...and met also one Cuban (who surprise surprise, didn't grew in Cuba OR has any relative left there as far as I know) who was explicitly and unapolageticly a Castrist and "affably" so.Europeans
No. We don't get rid of them, they'll just do the same shit again.On the one hand, the CIA is a critical component of US defence. Love 'em or hate 'em (and I agree with the hate 'em camp), they're vital. They need to be reformed/cleaned out, yeah, but unlike the FBI they're actually needed.
On the other hand... it's the CIA. I don't need to summarize all the stupid shit they've done, including the whole "drugs thing".
They're a double-edged sword that randomly cuts its wielder.
I seem to recall that said infiltrations happened before the end of WW2 when the USA and USSR were allies and before there was even a CIA.CIA wasn't very effective early in the Cold War, so the Soviet Union would be even more effective in the early years. Keep in mind they were able to reliably secure Eastern Europe (Romania and Czechoslovakia) despite the CIA's middling efforts and were completely flatfooted by both North Korean aggression and Chinese aggression in the Korean War. They also weren't able to prevent infiltration of the State Department and Manhattan Project and so on.
Financing the commies would be more easier but as you said it would difficult to say if it was tangible. In Italy the ICP made significant gains when Enrico Berlinguer opened up to have a constitutional, open discourse with the Christian Democrats of Aldo Moro.They did advance US Intelligence in cryptanalysis so that expertise just not being advanced would have knock on effects later as cryptography and signals intelligence and tangible technical things like that were just as valuable as any Bond style Human Intelligence type of stories or events that arose from the CIA efforts. Human Intelligence wise, the CIA became key for specialists (ie language or regional or cultural specialists etc) and those working in an advistory capacity were rather invaluable assets. So that would be diffused to wherever as well.
Special Operations and paramilitary operations I suppose would be shifted to the Defense Department so that's not as big a deal. And I guess foreign intelligence would be parceled out to a bunch of random places like the War/Defense Department, the FBI and other National Police/Law Enforcement Organizations and maybe the State Department setting up something more neutered.
I think that Communist or Red aligned parties in Europe would likely be more successful and Soviet backed intelligence operations more successful in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere) but I'm not sure if that would translate to something particularly tangible. Like bereft of cash and bribes and other assets, would the Red aligned parties in Italy and Greece and France or whatever gain more power early in the Cold War?
Ehhhhhhhh... that's a long stretch of saying it would gone theocratic sooner. To this day Iranian society has one thing in common with Israeli society : you enter a room with two people and you might have seven different opinions that only share the common denominator of "we want to change things", not to mention Khomeini or fellow travellers wouldn't have the clout, the legitimacy or the savor fair to make the same actions they pulled in 1979.Iran would shift to Mossadeq and probably fall to Islamists soonafter since it was a far weaker government than the Shah's rule would've been and the Islamists were able to dumpster them in spite of all of the monies and military gear invested in them.
Guatemala for its own sake didn't want to align with the USSR, unless the civilian government wouldn't be overthrown and they thought the Commies were the only tangible option left out of desperation since they certainly can't ask their neighbors or the allies of the United States (unless France is pissed off earlier than the Algerian War).Guatemala would've adopted a Soviet-aligned government, it'd probably be mild at first but it'd probably spread through Central America and the Caribbean. Socialism is far more lucrative a sell than American capitalism, especially with Authoritarian style governments. And that'd go through Cuba (obviously) and the Central American Crisis of the 70's could happen earlier as the various strongmen get knocked off without American support in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and probably Latin American countries too though I'm not as knowledgeable on it off the top of my head.
Indochina was partially lost first with the battle Die Ben Phu, then when the American government overthrew the government of his own puppet because they thought it would make the situation better it was definitely lost.French Indochina would be lost more quickly than OTL. Indonesia and Philippines would probably be okay though. The Congo would be under Lumumba and he was Soviet aligned so there could be knock on effects there as most of the post-colonial governments were more aligned towards Socialism and the Soviet Union. Decolonization might come more rapidly to holdouts like the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and maybe the regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa would fall quicker.
I seem to recall that said infiltrations happened before the end of WW2 when the USA and USSR were allies and before there was even a CIA.
Ehhhhhhhh... that's a long stretch of saying it would gone theocratic sooner. To this day Iranian society has one thing in common with Israeli society : you enter a room with two people and you might have seven different opinions that only share the common denominator of "we want to change things", not to mention Khomeini or fellow travellers wouldn't have the clout, the legitimacy or the savor fair to make the same actions they pulled in 1979.
Guatemala for its own sake didn't want to align with the USSR, unless the civilian government wouldn't be overthrown and they thought the Commies were the only tangible option left out of desperation since they certainly can't ask their neighbors or the allies of the United States (unless France is pissed off earlier than the Algerian War).
Indochina was partially lost first with the battle Die Ben Phu, then when the American government overthrew the government of his own puppet because they thought it would make the situation better it was definitely lost.
The FBI or the CIA?No. We don't get rid of them, they'll just do the same shit again.
YesThe FBI or the CIA?
Agree on this.Maybe you should open a thread on it.