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“Google – one of the largest and most influential organizations in the modern world – is filled with ex-CIA agents,” Alan MacLeod reported for MintPress News in July 2022. “An inordinate number of these recruits work in highly politically sensitive fields, wielding considerable control over how its products work and what the world sees on its screens and in its search results.”
“Chief amongst these is the trust and safety department, whose staff, in the words of the Google trust and safety vice president Kristie Canegallo, ‘[d]ecide what content is allowed on our platform’ – in other words, setting the rules of the internet, determining what billions see and what they do not see.”
And more broadly, “a former CIA employee is working in almost every department at Google,” Project Censored noted.
But Google isn’t alone. Nor is the CIA. “Former employees of U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies now hold senior positions at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech giants,” Project Censored wrote.
A second report focused on employees from Israel’s Unit 8200, its equivalent of the CIA, which is “infamous for surveilling the indigenous Palestinian population,” MacLeod wrote. Using LinkedIn, he identified hundreds of such individuals from both agencies, providing specific information about dozens of them.
“The problem with former CIA agents becoming the arbiters of what is true and what is false and what should be promoted and what should be deleted is that they cut their teeth at a notorious organization whose job it was to inject lies and false information into the public discourse to further the goals of the national security state,” MacLeod wrote, citing the 1983 testimony of former CIA task force head John Stockwell, author of In Search of Enemies, in which he described the dissemination of propaganda as a “major function” of the agency.
“I had propagandists all over the world,” Stockwell wrote, adding: “We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media] ... We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country ... We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”
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“None of this means that all or even any of the individuals are moles – or even anything but model employees today,” MacLeod noted later. But the sheer number of them “certainly causes concern.”
Reinforcing that concern is big tech’s history. “As journalist Nafeez Ahmed’s investigation found, the CIA and the NSA were bankrolling Stanford Ph.D. student Sergey Brin’s research—work that would later produce Google,” MacLeod wrote. “Not only that but, in Ahmed’s words, “senior U.S. intelligence representatives, including a CIA official, oversaw the evolution of
Google in this pre-launch phase, all the way until the company was ready to be officially founded.”
This fits neatly within the larger framework of Silicon Valley’s origin as a supplier of Defense Department technology. “A May 2022 review found no major newspaper coverage of Big Tech companies hiring former U.S. or Israeli intelligence officers as employees,” Project Censored noted. “The most prominent U.S. newspapers have not covered Google, Meta, Microsoft and other Big Tech companies hiring former US and Israeli intelligence officers.” Individual cases may make the news. But the overall systemic pattern remains a story censored by mainstream silence.
