CIA x VC
This is a more conceptual post, to share the way I am thinking about the interaction of tech and the CIA. This becomes increasingly important as VC alights America and tries to establish sovereignty, seeking “sanctuary” countries in the global south. There is nothing that the CIA loves more than totally fucking up a country. There’s also the extensive build-out of military startups by Founder’s Fund, a16z and the CIA, which is happening in real time.
I think a lot of the past history of tech and the CIA has been pretty well-documented — in this case, we are lucky to have the help and support of the many people who track the CIA and do a lot of research and work to try to get that information out. Suffice to say that the CIA has continuously, from inception, come up alongside tech and specifically, in time, coming up alongside venture capital. The relationship between the CIA and the venture capitalists has been very fruitful.
The CIA operates in Silicon Valley through its personal VC firm, called In-Q-Tel. Often, it takes only one layer of indirection to throw people off the track. If you just called it CIA Venture Capital, that would create more alarm.
The firm started in 1999, and they have been incredibly active in funding Silicon Valley startups. Importantly, In-Q-Tel was founded by a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, Norm Augustine, and Gilman Louie, who bizarrely came out of the video game world. Well, it would be bizarre but actually there’s a major affinity between video games and warfare — from training modules to accelerating battlefield hardware and virtual reality. In fact, Anduril, which is the principle weapons company started by a16z, Founder’s Fund and In-Q-Tel, was founded by the creator of virtual reality legend Oculus… now the basis of Meta’s entire strategic direction.
Close to 100 startups In-Q-Tel has funded have exited: IPOed or acquired. This includes Palantir. Most of their exits are lesser-known names in the mainstream. They stay away from the flashy consumer plays, but industry participants might recognize MongoDB, Cloudera, Cloudant. In general, they’ve been funding infrastructure to handle massive data workloads for their god awful intelligence operation. The CIA has stayed EXTREMELY close to all technologies that involve huge amounts of data and that includes artificial intelligence, which is fundamentally about finding different ways to slice, dice, conceptualize and reason about extremely large date stores. To that end, they have funded over 120 artificial intelligence startups.
We actually don’t know how much money they are actually putting into the market; these numbers are hidden across the VC board, which is disappearing just a huge piece of the data here. We only know the total monetary amount awarded in a funding round — not how that breaks down to how much money each of the participants contributed. That is actually a huge piece of this picture that we are missing and it should not be accepted as standard operating practice. As all parties concur, this is about the future of technology and that necessarily implies transparency into how exactly that future is being calculated.
What we do know is that the CIA hs made 271 investments, and it was the lead investor in 71 of those, which means they are very active in shaping the future of that startup and play the biggest investment role at that time. Again, I need to heavily caveat all of these numbers because, it is the fucking CIA we are talking about, and one thing we can count on the CIA doing is lying and lying and lying, and so we surely are only seeing the very surface, and the public face, of what all this actually is.
In-Q-Tel’s precense in the Valley is very active. The CIA has openly sponsored women in tech events, they are involved in a lot of the deals that go down, so if your startup isn’t funded by it, you definitely know someone who is. Though it is open, it is not much talked about. The first time that I heard anything about all this was when, at my first startup job in 2010/2011, our CEO announced that we had just raised more money (a process workers are not privy to), and mentioned rather offhand that In-Q-Tel was part of the round. And we’re not going to talk about that much, was the message. They would help us get adoption inside of the government and that was that.
A big part of the arrangement here is that the CIA facilitates adoption of the technology to other parts of the security and intelligence and military apparatus. Startups have found it notoriously challenging to get inside of defense and government more generally, in large part because of the amount of regulation that is involved, because you don’t have the mechanisms to manipulate the system, because of how procurement is done, all being very alien from the sales structures Silicon Valley is germane to. Nonetheless, if you could get your technology into something like the military, it was very “sticky”, the industry term for: good luck ripping this shit out buddy. Once you were in, you were in. That’s why startups will often stick with an extremely taxing sales process, for the possibility that it will play out to be a long-term source of revenue and that they can spread out inside the superstructure once they get in. Once you get an initial contract in production you’re immediately looking at internal evangelism to get other projects, departments, etc. to implement and use the technology on the back of that success.
In-Q-Tel plays the role of moving startup technology through the system to get broader adoption within the government. The CIA’s general thinking is that the best incubator for new innovation is within the consumer and enterprise market, essentially just the “open market” where broad-scale, mass adoption is pushing the rate and quality and advancement of technology far beyond what the CIA can do in-house. Especially during peace time, where you aren’t seeing the same dynamism in innovation come out of the military or intelligence in absence of a hot war accelerant, the consumer market thus becomes a bigger focus. This provides motive for the CIA to carefully harness the consumer and enterprise market via venture capital. Venture capital is the CIA’s entry into the technology market just as much as the CIA is the venture capitalist’s entry into the intelligence and defense market.
Playing a role as a lead investor in so many startups, you get a situation where the CIA, through the vehicle of venture capital, is in the driver’s seat and playing a big role in what DOES get made.
A major data point for any of this analysis is to think about which of the players want what technology to be built. To ask ourselves: what does the CIA want built, or what does Founder’s Fund want to build, and so on. The venture capital role is not about selecting from an organic sea of innovation, but about deciding the direction and future of the industry and creating startups to carry out that larger agenda. The startups come from their ideas and their view of the market and their ambitions.
About 5 months before the PRISM leaks by Edward Snowden, I attended a conference in New York about big data. And watched in no small degree of shock as the CTO of the CIA came on stage to deliver a keynote about the CIA’s technological goals and how those interact with the market and what type of technology is being built.
So I’m looking at the stage like wtf is going on here, are we all acting like it’s just normal for the CIA to be on stage with a motherfucking Powerpoint and a laser pointer in front of an assembly of some pretty influential and reputable folks? And he of course went on to say the most sickening things, the most salient of which, was that the CIA’s driving agenda in technology, was to capture all of the data in the world and store it forever.
Again, I repeat: their goal is to collect all of the data in the world and store it forever.
In the room, everyone was just nodding and smiling, and thinking in their heads how to come up with a pitch for how their product could help the CIA do just that. And mind you, this is happening BEFORE PRISM, so the PRISM “leaks” reflected information that was openly said by top brass of the CIA itself, in front of general tech industry conferences. The gist of PRISM might have been unknown outside of the industry, but within it, everyone “knew” that intelligence and defense was working right alongside of us to get as much data as possible as quickly as possible; to some extent, this pushed the matter of what to do with it aside, something that is now being addressed at a very deep level with artificial intelligence. Which, it should be clear from the CIA’s investments, they are very much on top of and are DEFINITELY seeing a much higher level of AI than what we are seeing as lowly mainstream consumers.
That goal, to collect all of the data and store it forever, is absolutely identical to the goal of venture capital. And indeed if you look at the trajectory of technology over these years, venture capitalists and the CIA are continually working together across hundreds of companies, going into rounds together, building custom installs, gathering and disseminating specs, figuring out portfolio-wide penetration strategies, managing the sales process, doing industry “education”, establishing a revolving door and a consistent leadership and consistent relationships, and so on. And that is a total union and fusing of the venture capitalist goal and the CIA goal, is to have that level of surveillance, that level of information, and that kind of monopoly on information, and all of this being controlled by a very small group of people.
As I will attempt to broach in this piece, the fusion of interests and the constant unity of their interests, suggests that there is a new formation of the CIA happening, where the CIA is acting like a venture capitalist, and the venture capitalist is acting like the CIA. And we end up with a sick and extremely dangerous formation where the CIA interest is now being expressed through the medium and the vehicle of venture capital, and that this has opened up an entirely new world for the CIA and fundamentally transformed how it operates. Of course, these entities repeat the same underlying patterns over and over again, but it is, as always, important to foreground current, active evolutions in conspiracies and not flatten the subject at hand. This tactic serves only to distract and gives people the cheapest, dumbest “drunks” available on the market today: “well yeah, it’s the CIA”. Grow up.
The closest partners to the CIA in the Valley are Founder’s Fund, a16z, and Mark Zuckerberg. This convergence has left a definitive and evident mark on the industry itself. This is an extremely powerful conflagration and its intents, far far away from the people, are about amassing data, power, control and wealth.
Indeed, it is incredibly difficult to sort out the CIA from its crony firms. For example, Marc Andreessen served on a SECRET advisory board for director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo. Is Marc CIA, or venture capitalist, or both? The very existence of In-Q-Tel represents the emergence of the CIA within the venture capital formation and a new body, new vessel. New hybrid, new creature.
To zoom out, as we’ve spoken about in other parts of this blog —- we are in the middle of the active efforts of a16z and Founder’s Fund and other VC cronies, to establish financial, legal, and all other sovereignty. What is playing out in the market is that venture capitalists are openly seeking what they are calling “sanctuary” countries which will recognize the VC fascist state as a sovereign entity, eliminate taxation for them, give them cheap land, freedom from regulation, and so on.
A few candidates have already appeared, including Brazil and El Salvador. A few years ago, two venture capitalists with ties to the PayPal Mafia, began “biz dev colonialism” with the president of El Salvador; from their congress the vision for a “crypto country” was developed. Most recently, a key piece of legislation passed in El Salvador, removing any and all taxation from technology innovation and technology wealth in the country, including capital gains and income tax. This was announced just in the past few weeks.
And then just a few days ago, Amnesty International released a statement on El Salvador, where it has documented a large number of human rights abuses that are taking place in the country:
“Salvadoran authorities have systematically committed grave human rights violations since a state of emergency and numerous legislative amendments were approved in March 2022, supposedly to tackle gangs, said Amnesty International today. This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime. Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency.”
So already I have some questions because you start to see a similarity here where the CIA enters places where there is a lot of civil conflict, arms the military to take over the country, so now you have a CIA-installed regime. This is the playbook and an absolutely phenomenal contribution to the acts of the CIA is the book The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins. Using his excellent reporting and analysis, we understand the CIA pattern of attacking countries and peoples in order to commit violence and amass power and install evil and commit human rights abuses.
In my mind, we are looking at the venture capital “floating state”, set up to follow the exact same playbook. What happens in cases like El Salvador where you have venture capital that can come in, bringing with it a number of tools of subduing and controlling the people and achieving wealth extraction from the land, which they already have done in Oakland and San Francisco — two centers of civil rights in America?
The VCs, like the CIA, are prepared to offer a wide array of resources, bribes, weaponry, cash and crypto, surveillance centers and drones, control over social networks, to country governments. There is also the alluring prospect of having tech money flowing into the country presumably through the growth of a tech industry and through things like real estate crime. With many countries in the global south being relatively small and with a small, damaged economy, you find a situation where singular VC firms or small collections of them eclipse a country’s GDP or at least represent a sizable force, the level of money that VCs are bringing with them will be amounts of money that people would kill for in a conflict state. To these countries, venture capital looks like a business development deal, when in reality it is everything that … the CIA is known for doing.
How much money have venture capitalists been funneling into what is widely agreed to be a dictatorship in El Salvador, which is violating human rights to the level of being a global emergency? To what degree are venture capitalists already in a position to dictate and influence the future of this entire country, where they openly negotiate with a dictator to get appealing terms for VCs fleeing America to establish their own fascist, sovereign state?
While El Salvador has not been “armed” by tech to date that we know of, I would really love to know what “gifts” have been exchanged in the name of these diplomatic relations between venture capital and El Salvador’s president. Indeed, there is an entire fleet of weapons startups that have been developed by In-Q-Tel, Founder’s Fund and a16z, that are already in use in conflict zones including the US/Mexico border and in Ukraine, which, regardless of how you feel about the war, saw immediate deployment of VC-funded startups into war zones; both Palantir and Anduril (a16z, CIA and Founder’s Fund joint projects) were on the ground immediately and in Palantir’s case, they didn’t even take money up front.
So, this really puts many, many countries who have been devastated by American imperialism and have been devastated by colonialism, and who are in bad financial straits, have stagnant development and are having active conflict either within its borders, at them, or beyond them, at risk from predation by the emerging venture capital state. Which has a lot of experience in dealing with social unrest and managing borders, as it turns out.
You see again that the VC operating model for this next stage of sovereignty, is the CIA operating model, just in a different economic formation that we have seen. Again, we are left wondering where does the VC end and where does the CIA begin? This is a massive collaboration of some extremely odious parties, and through one way of looking at things, you might come to feel that venture capital is the new form factor of the CIA and the new form factor of its historical pattern and its existence. Perhaps this is what the CIA actually looks like in the digital age and the technological age: venture capital. Slipping into these new formations and new bodies, has been a source of vitality to the CIA itself.
What is the size of the CIA as an economic entity? Of course, the government doesn’t release the exact numbers for how much the CIA itself gets, bucketing agencies together and just releasing a total. The CIA falls under the National Intelligence Program, which boasts the CIA, the FBI, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State. In 2022, the entire budget of the National Intelligence program was $65.7 billion. So, let’s say that half of that is going to the CIA just for a quick sketch — I’m sure buffs will have more accurate numbers and it is very likely larger than half — but it will at least start us reasoning about these numbers. So, let’s say you’re looking at a bit over $35 billion in annual budget.
Now, it’s a lot of money… but for context, a16z’s assets under management are about $35 billion… last year a16z alone was involved in deals totaling $21 billion dollars. In the world of technology, $30 billion and even $65.7 billion — the total NIP budget — just… aren’t a lot of money in the technology world, where we have multiple billionaires whose personal net worth engulfs the CIA budget. Though to be fair, that is money that is going to them every year; for a like comparison, VCs deployed $238 billion into the startup market last year. And importantly, that is all money that is going directly into growing assets.
Listen, the CIA is a formidable force, absolutely, and a formidable financial force, on its own. However, its engagement with venture capital gives it an access point into that technology money that is flowing through the system. The industry will only grow more. The CIA sees that the returns are there. I would definitely have to talk to someone with more of a specialty in the CIA, as far as how it interacts with markets, but it’s clear this is a boon to CIA in more ways than one.
So while venture capital has been eying the CIA as a source of resources, the CIA perhaps sees an opportunity itself to expand and grow through the venture capital system. As much as the CIA was incubating technology, technology has been incubating the CIA, and changing what it looks like, its new mythologies and strategies for a changed world.
This partnership will continue and as venture capital moves into a global invasion of “sanctuary” countries, they will be able to collaborate on the process of installing favorable politicians, military juntas, suppression of the people, human rights abuses, psyops and propaganda campaigns, and so on.
It does make me wonder if the CIA will follow along with VC in building the new state. The CIA seems has historically viewed itself as its own entity and fought for independence from the intelligence superstructure, has often felt stymied by the government bureaucracy, and enjoys almost no popular support, and is constantly at the behest of a budget created by some other department. There are strong affinities here that have already been playing out successfully since 1999. Is venture capital the only one trying to leave America? Is this a way out for the CIA, too?
We may never know.
Lol.