Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is presented as an institution whose influence reaches beyond formal domestic government: the book links it to the training of foreign military allies in torture and to political interests surrounding the Dalai Lama’s 1959 departure from Tibet. Together, these episodes illustrate the author’s argument that coercive and ideological work can be shifted across borders or concealed within apparently independent forms of authority.

Training and the Displacement of Torture

In a discussion of torture outsourcing, the book compares subcontracted production—which lets a company distance itself from harmful practices carried out by another firm—with the transfer of torture to allies of the United States. It recalls a public argument for sending suspects to less squeamish allies, then complicates that arrangement: the allies were not simply trusted to act on their own. The Central Intelligence Agency had taught military allies in Latin America and other parts of the Third World the practice of torture for decades.

The passage uses this history to sharpen its account of outsourcing. The disavowed partner is not always an external state; it can be a hidden part of the government whose public values appear to rule out the practice. The agency’s role in training allies therefore figures in an argument about how a state can maintain a democratic self-image while coercive practices are assigned elsewhere, then return as an implication of its own institutional history.

The Dalai Lama’s Departure from Tibet

A separate example concerns the Dalai Lama’s decision to leave Tibet in 1959. When he considered emigration, the account says, he sought advice from an official prophet who entered a mystic trance and spoke confusingly. The apparent religious guidance had a political connection: the prophet was on the Central Intelligence Agency’s payroll and followed its guidelines in advising him.

The Dalai Lama’s escape, as described in the passage, suited the agency’s purposes in its struggle against the Chinese Communists. The episode thus places a religious decision within a political contest, without treating the prophet’s counsel as independent of the interests behind it. In the book’s discussion of religion’s comic reversals, the disclosure also punctures the expectation that the advice came from an exclusively mystical source.

Institutional Significance

Across these examples, the Central Intelligence Agency is associated with two forms of indirect influence: the transmission of coercive expertise to allied militaries and the shaping of advice that helped produce an outcome useful to United States policy. The contexts differ—one concerns the externalization of torture, the other the political uses of religious authority—but both unsettle a clean division between official values and actions pursued through concealed or delegated channels.

The book offers these episodes as polemical illustrations rather than a comprehensive account of the agency’s structure or history. Their force lies in the contrast between visible justification and less visible political function: outsourcing can relocate responsibility without erasing institutional involvement, while religious counsel can appear autonomous even when it follows an external power’s guidelines.