Can you have a CIA and a Democracy?

Can you have a massive, massively-funded, SECRET organization
with secret-tentacles twisting into all kinds of places, AND have a ‘democracy’ ?

I dont think you can. I dont think you can have both. I dont think you can have a CIA and a Democracy.

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wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion

“….A front organization organized in 1959 was the Independent Service for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna. Among those sponsored were Gloria Steinem who had just spent a year and half in India, where she befriended Indira Gandhi and the widow of the “revolutionary humanist” M. N. Roy, and had met a researcher who seems to have been a C.I.A. agent or contact. Steinem was hired to run the I.S.I. and to recruit knowledgeable young Americans who could debate effectively with the Communist organizers of the festival, defending the United States against Communist criticism.[4]
Disclosures
Planted news

Senior CIA officer Ralph McGehee stated that the CIA often placed news stories anonymously in news publications to spread false ideas favorable to CIA goals. Stories that CIA planted might be picked up and further spread by additional newspapers and other third parties, in a slightly altered form, or even picked up as news and then rewritten by a journalist.[8]

Propaganda thus planted by the CIA to shape public opinion could circle back and contaminate the CIA’s own information files. An example given by McGehee based on his own experience is the CIA fabrication in 1965 of a story about weapon shipments sent by sea to the Viet Cong in a CIA effort to “prove” foreign support for the Viet Cong. The CIA “took tons of Communist-made weapons from its own warehouses, loaded them on a Vietnamese coastal vessel, faked a firefight, and then called in Western reporters…to ‘prove’ North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong.”[9] The story got picked up by other news sources, so much so that the Marines later began to patrol the coast to intercept reported contraband of the type earlier “found.”[10]

CIA secret funding for “cutouts”

In February 1967, Ramparts magazine reported that the CIA had been funding the National Student Association through a series of foundation cutouts. Resulting journalistic and other investigations led to the cessation of most CIA subsidies.[citation needed]

After reading of the disclosures, Tom Braden wrote about looking at “a creased and faded yellow paper. It bears the following inscription in pencil:

Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000. (signed) Norris A. Grambo.” For I was Warren G. Haskins. Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the piece of yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation whose death has been brought about by small-minded and resentful men.[5]

Relationships with organized labor are not surprising, given the World War II activity of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Labor Branch under Arthur Goldberg. European labor groups often provided OSS with volunteers to penetrate occupied Europe, and, with greatest danger, into Nazi Germany.[11]

[Arthur] Goldberg, head of the Labor Division of the OSS clandestine intelligence unit, later appointed to the US Supreme Court by President John F. Kennedy—was known at the time for his defense of the Chicago Newspaper Guild during its 1938 strike against the Hearst Corporation. Joining OSS/London in 1943, Goldberg convinced colleagues and OSS director, Gen. William J. Donovan, of the need to establish contact with underground labor groups in occupied and Axis countries. … Because such groups were already major forces of internal resistance behind enemy lines, they constituted a ready made source of valuable military and political intelligence.

CIA and mass media…..see link…”