With Harry Truman’s approval of directive NSC 10/2, he effectively authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions anywhere in the world, specifically including “propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” By 1951, according to Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA covert operations had already “far exceeded” this. The National Security Act of 1947 did not explicitly authorize …
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