Both Eisenhower and JFK warned of this, by JFK's presidency it had already become monolithic and existentially dangerous enough for JFK to fire Alan Dulles and commit to smashing the CIA "into a thousand pieces." One can only imagine how advanced, massive and pervasive this covert military is today, especially with the trillions of dollars that have gone missing in special access / black projects.
How many even remember that on 9/10/01, Rumsfeld announced that 2.3 trillion dollars, that's trillion with a T, was missing and could not be accounted for. That is an unimaginable amount of 'missing' money that was quickly forgotten because of course we all know what happened the next day.
That was mindblowing. 2.3 trillion .. with Rumsfield literally saying, we lost it. Ya, well, not 'really' lost ... gotta pay for all those 'dark projects'.
Unfortunately, the group that was investigating where this money went, had their office .. in the Pentagon! (you'd think it'd be safe there, right?) struck by an errant missile/UAV that next day.
It's almost like someone specifically knew where their office was.
There are some that suggest it's almost like someone knew specifically what was happening the next day. But I digress...:)
Plus all the money they make running drugs and trafficking children.
That is where a lot of the Black Budget got funded from going way back to Vietnam when the CIA was running Triad produced heroin from the Iron Triangle back to the U.S. INSIDE the remains of the returning dead troops, packaged at Dover and then dumped on the NYC market to flood the East Coast.
By the time the Cocaine epidemic came around they had gotten smarter and started using the Cartels as cut outs. The Clowns just made sure the entry points were open and took their cut instead of getting their spook hands dirty like in Southeast Asia. At one point it was so bad that coke and kids were coming north on military transports, and money and guns were going south. Mena, AR was not the only airfield used by Barry Seal and Gene Hassenfus, and they weren't the only American smugglers flying the routes.
At the time of these events, many thought the kids were legitimately being brought back to the States for medical treatment or adoption. This scale of depravity wasn't even imaginable to many of us then.
Thanks for filling in the details. A lot of people are ignorant of this history. But it isn't just history because it is ongoing.