The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one government agency that remains largely hidden from the American public. It operates with a secret federal budget and appears to run independent activities, even having the means to generate its own revenue.
By now most people who follow politics understand how the CIA and State Department operate collaboratively in most foreign endeavors. Many CIA operatives have State Department covers. The CIA also works jointly with the State Dept on influence operations through USAID, which makes some recent events a little uncomfortable.
Against revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) funding violent domestic extremist groups, consider this graphic:
It is hard to argue against the possibility that behind some of the domestic violent extremists (what the FBI calls DVEs) is a network of finance that traces back to the CIA. It is a fact that USAID is -in part- a CIA influence operation. If the SPLC is funded by USAID, then who was ultimately funding the SPLC influence operations? It is an uncomfortable question.
As we researched several serious issues in the past two decades one thing always surfaces, the intelligence community is often at the heart of the matter. As a historic example, during research into the Benghazi, Libya chaos that ultimately led to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens it became almost impossible to distinguish the CIA operatives from the State Dept objective.
In fact, we said the same thing about the CIA and the Qatar officials who were part of that background Libya story. It was almost impossible to tell a difference between the CIA operatives and the Qatari facilitators. The money was fungible and the Libya operation was an enmeshed network of mutually aligned government interests.
