Just Leave CIA Alone

Charts: Last week the S&P 500 bounced up off its 200-day moving average and since then the VIX or fear gauge has fallen sharply. On Friday the broad index was up but the Nasdaq was down, making it unclear if a rally attempt was underway. Today all major indexes are up and the fear gauge keeps going down, so a rally attempt is underway. It may or may not turn into a technical rally.

Fundamentals: On Tuesday the Greek parliament will execute a vote of confidence in the PM's new cabinet. If that goes well, then there will be a vote for a second austerity package. If that goes well, then the Greek crisis will be put on the back burner for the rest of the year and the market will turn its attention back to the global slow down. Economists are debating whether the slow down is just a soft patch or the start of a double dip recession.

Long War: The New York Times claims Obama is going to cut troop levels in Afghanistan quicker and more deeply than expected. That sounds bad but there is a silver lining. The White House has done an analysis that shows the CIA has been more effective than the US Army and USMC in defeating the bad guys. The plan supposedly is for Langley to take over the entire Af/Pak theater eventually.

Assuming the Times is correct, all the CIA needs to win this war and all the other LW wars is to be left alone by Congress, but really left alone, with no Congressional watch dog committees, no oversight at all. It doesn't even need to have its budget increased because if it is truly left alone, the CIA becomes self-funding.

In the first half of the Cold War the CIA ran dozens of profitable companies and used the proceeds to fund operations. That's how it earned the nickname "the Company." If it were really left alone in Afghanistan, it would act like a successful American street gang and take over the heroin trade from the Taliban, which would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for itself and take hundreds of millions away from the bad guys. We know this is true because it is already happening on a small scale in Kandahar with Karzai's brother, who runs a small intelligence network with drug money.

Every Long War hot spot that is run exclusively by the CIA does better than the ones it does not run. Just today the Yemeni Army reported that it is on the verge of taking back a key city that had been overrun by AQAP. It appears that AQAP has bitten off more than it can chew in Yemen. And there are no US Marines or soldiers there, just spooks from Langley.

Not only must Congress leave the CIA alone, the White House also needs to back off. When Obama announced that the CIA had killed OBL, he was interfering. Never before has a CIA assassination been made public. The greatest CIA assassination ever was when Salvadore Allende was killed in Chile during the Cold War. That act may have won the Cold War. As I write the family of Allende is digging up the old Marxist blow-hard and exhuming his body, an attempt to prove he was not assassinated by the CIA but died of natural causes. So even after all these years the CIA's smoke screen around that event is still intact. It is shameful that Obama stuck his nose in Company business.