As the JFK files continue spilling the intelligence community’s dark secrets, it is worth recalling why we even have a CIA in the first place.

Let’s be crystal clear: dirty tricks are not part of the CIA’s legal charter. The Agency was created to collect and analyze foreign intelligence—not to blow up nuclear power plants, poison rice fields, or orchestrate coups. Its mission is information gathering, not covert warfare. The so-called “special activities” wing wasn’t in the original blueprint; it grew like a tumor during the Cold War, fed by secrecy and unchecked power. This week’s newly unredacted documents don’t merely reveal rogue operations— they expose a decades-long deviation from lawful authority.

Mission creep became mission metastasis.

While the broader intelligence community includes SIGINT—signals intelligence gathered from electronic communications, which falls under the NSA—the CIA’s original charter was rooted in HUMINT, human intelligence. In other words: people, not pixels. But instead of cultivating sources and analyzing foreign threats, the Agency veered off-course, seduced by covert action and regime manipulation. It didn’t just collect intelligence—it started making history in secret, often disastrously.

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Even if some operations were technically “authorized” by senior military or executive officials, that’s hardly any exoneration. The CIA wasn’t created to serve as a covert war department. Its charter was intelligence—not intervention. The fact that presidents or Pentagon brass may have signed off on operations like staging false flags, sabotaging crops, or assassinating undesired leaders only underscores how far the national security apparatus had drifted from constitutional norms.

In drips of urgent exception and drabs of frightftul necessity, the Republic’s balance of power was quietly and unlawfully redefined.

Worse, the Agency appears to have been aimed inward, at Americans. The tools of foreign espionage—propaganda, psychological manipulation, surveillance—weren’t just deployed overseas. Increasingly, they were turned against the very citizens the Agency was created to protect. That’s not mission drift. That’s betrayal.

That’s treason.

Newly confirmed Director John Ratcliffe has pledged to return the Agency to its HUMINT roots. He has his work cut out for him. But the very fact such a recalibration has become necessary is both a rebuke of the agency’s long, inglorious era of lawless adventurism, as well as an implicit admission: the CIA has spent far too long doing the wrong job.

The CIA was never chartered to police Americans. It wasn’t meant to shape elections, set blackmail honeypots, manipulate narratives, or deploy psychological warfare. It wasn’t supposed to operate on U.S. soil. But when compromised oversight fails, and cancerous secrecy festers, the watchers stop ‘watching’ our enemies— and the tools meant for foreign enemies are turned inward. The Agency’s creeping mission swelled beyond surveillance into influencing, pressuring, blackmailing, and manipulating us.

Fiat veritas, ruat caelum.

Jeff Childers