CIA Front Companies:

How much of the economy is owned by The Company?

Welcome, this is James Corbett of The Corbett Report with your Eyeopener report
forBoilingFrogsPost.com.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence announced last month that Americas civilian
intelligence agencies appropriated a combined 54.6 billion dollars for classified operations
this year.
The admission came in the form of a blithe news release, which noted only the total figure
and explicitly refused to provide any details of how the figure was divided up between
Americas 16 non-uniformed intelligence agencies or what the money was appropriated for.

Any and all subsidiary information concerning the NIP budget, whether the information
concerns particular intelligence agencies or particular intelligence programs, will not be
disclosed, DNI James Clapper wrote in the release, citing the fact that such a disclosure
would jeopardize national security.
What has often been called into question is the functioning of the oversights that are
supposed to exist to insure that such monies are not misappropriated or used for illegal or
immoral activities. What is not called into question nearly as often is how we can trust these
figures at all to come to a true understanding of the amount of money at the disposal of these
covert agencies.

The amount of funds that the CIA has to use for its so-called black operations, or covert
actions, for example, is not a question for idle speculation. As we saw in the Iran-Contra
scandal, the CIA can hide behind its own officially-sanctioned secrecy to commit illegal actions
in order to fund other, illegal operations.
So what, then, is the size of the CIAs budget, and where is this money parked?
The question is even more difficult to answer than it first appears. Not only is there the issue
of the funds that they receive in secret from the Congress, and not only is there the everpresent question of how black operations use illegal methods to finance further illegal covert
operations, there is also the question of the CIA literally setting up businesses, front
companies, and shells, that function, from the outside, like any other business. Behind the

scenes, however, these businesses are merely a place for the CIA to nest its covert
operatives, and, potentially, to make and funnel money for their own purposes.

Perhaps the best-known example of this is Air America, which the CIA set up to run heroin out
of Laos for its military accomplices in the region.
In recent years, the CIA has again become embroiled in a scandal involving its ownership
ofairline front companies, which were used to cover its role in covert, and highly
illegal,operations.
Worryingly, given the documented history of CIA involvement in such illegal activities, the
agency has also been active in setting up front companies in the nuclear technology industry,
ostensibly to monitor and disrupt nuclear smuggling network. But given the monumental
failure of such admitted CIA fronts as Brewster Jennings in the case of the A.Q. Khan
network, what faith can the public have that the companies, too, are not being used to in fact
foster the proliferation of the weapons they are ostensibly seeking to control?
Egregious as all of these activities undoubtedly are, and as contrary as they may be to the
very founding principles of a supposedly democratic republic, they have been well
documented and exposed in the past.
Much less examined, however, is the CIAs connections to the murky world of money
laundering and the shady financial institutions that have undergirded its operations and made
the funding of the types of illegal activities it routinely engages in feasible.