April 29, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
Our CIA has a very checkered past. In segment 5 we learned that it was thrown together by Wild Bill Donovan to meet President Roosevelt’s need for foreign intelligence in World War II. In 1941 it was named Coordination of Information (COI) which was described as a seat-of-the-pants, pop-up enterprise. That morphed into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) funded quietly out of a secret presidential budget and was infiltrated by Frankfurt Schools Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse (with cultural Marxism ideology) and highly influenced by the Soviet Union.
As this segment delineates the focus shifted to regime change which seemingly resulted in more failures than successes with some rather significant unintended consequences. Then at the turn of the century their focus was again shifted, this time to Global Terror where they made two catastrophic errors: the Agency’s failure to predict the 9/11 attack and its subsequent mistaken claim that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction, the principal justification for the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in 2003. Global Terror enacted a desire to develop enhanced methods of interrogation to garner intelligence from terrorists. This shifted focus from the unsuccessful development of a “truth serum” to “waterboarding.”
Today’s allegation is that a “deep state” has developed within the intelligence community which is pushing their efforts further to the Left and away from their core mission of foreign intelligence necessary to maintain and enhance our national security. More on this in Segment 17.
Next: Segment 8 is titled “The FBI: 2001 – current.” Following the horrific attack of 9/11, the FBI was transformed from a reactive crime fighting organization into a domestic intelligence and security organization. Some of those changes planted the seeds for numerous problems and challenges that have eroded the FBI’s standing with the American public. These will be analyzed in the segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Our CIA has a very checkered past. In segment 5 we learned that it was thrown together by Wild Bill Donovan to meet President Roosevelt’s need for foreign intelligence in World War II. In 1941 it was named Coordination of Information (COI) which was described as a seat-of-the-pants, pop-up enterprise. That morphed into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) funded quietly out of a secret presidential budget and was infiltrated by Frankfurt Schools Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse (with cultural Marxism ideology) and highly influenced by the Soviet Union.
As this segment delineates the focus shifted to regime change which seemingly resulted in more failures than successes with some rather significant unintended consequences. Then at the turn of the century their focus was again shifted, this time to Global Terror where they made two catastrophic errors: the Agency’s failure to predict the 9/11 attack and its subsequent mistaken claim that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction, the principal justification for the U.S. Invasion of Iraq in 2003. Global Terror enacted a desire to develop enhanced methods of interrogation to garner intelligence from terrorists. This shifted focus from the unsuccessful development of a “truth serum” to “waterboarding.”
Today’s allegation is that a “deep state” has developed within the intelligence community which is pushing their efforts further to the Left and away from their core mission of foreign intelligence necessary to maintain and enhance our national security. More on this in Segment 17.
Next: Segment 8 is titled “The FBI: 2001 – current.” Following the horrific attack of 9/11, the FBI was transformed from a reactive crime fighting organization into a domestic intelligence and security organization. Some of those changes planted the seeds for numerous problems and challenges that have eroded the FBI’s standing with the American public. These will be analyzed in the segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – SEGMENT 7
THE CIA: 1947 to CURRENT – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: It was not until 1947, when the United States embarked on a different kind of war with the Soviet Union a cold one that did not involve direct military engagement with enemy, that the US created a peacetime spy service, the Central Intelligence Agency. After the Cold War ended just over four decades later with the Soviet collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the CIA seemed to lose its raison d’etre – but then rediscovered it after 2001, when the nation entered into a new kind of unconventional war, the Global War on Terror.
In recent years, the CIA has played a leading role in the war on terror, carrying out such crucial secret missions as the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Above all, the Agency is still defined in the popular imagination of the Cold War; spy battles against the Soviet KGB featuring double agent and moles – the superpower conflict at its coldest.
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING: The relationship between the CIA officer and his agent was at the heart of the Agency’s intelligence mission. The CIA had a system for this process: an agent acquisition “cycle” with several distinct steps that the new intelligence officer learned in training. First, the officer “spotted” a local with access to valuable secret information – a junior government minister, perhaps, or an army officer. Next, the CIA operative and Agency headquarters independently “assessed” the potential agent. Third came the most sensitive step, “recruitment,” when the officer pitched the prospective agent, offering money or some other inducement in return for the information.
But why would an agent want to pass secrets – that is, commit treason – in the first place? Again, the CIA had a theory about agent motivation, summed up by a handy mnemonic device: MICE (money, ideology, coercion/compromise, excitement/ego). The most common motive, especially in the poorer parts of the Third World, was a simple desire for money. Other agents, however, were motivated less by money than by ideology, usually a hatred of communism. Under the MICE framework, almost all agent motives were vulnerabilities of one sort or another. The challenge facing the CIA officer was to identify the vulnerability, then exploit it in order to control the agent.
REGIME CHANGE: By 1948, the CIA was intervening extensively in Western Europe to thwart the possible Soviet gains there, most dramatically in Italy. There were also missions – most, it has to be said, disastrous failures – to infiltrate émigré agents behind the Iron Curtain with the aim of sabotaging the governments there and “rolling back” the Soviet empire. The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in 1950 heralded the spread of CIA rollback operations into Asia, with communist China and North Korea now the targets. For all these interventions in the Cold War heartlands of Europe and Asia, the US government at first proved surprisingly reluctant to employ its new covert capabilities on the geostrategic periphery, in regions historically dominated by the European colonial powers. There was also a widespread view in the Washington foreign policy establishment, including within the CIA itself, that the United States should avoid doing anything that smelled of Old-World colonialism.
Granted, the emphasis on covert action was somewhat novel. The British and the others had not faced the same constraints that bound the Americans after 1945: new international norms against interventionism, the fear of triggering a nuclear world war, and the rise of decolonization.
Washington and London established secret “working groups” of senior officials charged with devising common approaches to pressing security issues, with spies featuring prominently. As in Iran, British leaders were not above massaging American fears of communism or sentimental appeals to the “special relationship” to secure support for UK colonial interests. Harold Macmillan, the new British Prime Minister prided himself on his clever handling of Britain’s transatlantic “cousins.”
The result was a surge of US covert actions in the Global South, starting in 1957 with a regime change operation aimed at the leftist government of Syria. Then in 1960, the CIA set out to remove Patrice Lumumba, the young nationalist leader of the newly independent Belgian Congo. The vast, mineral-rich central African state appeared in danger of collapse, and the Agency actively considered assassination as a mean of eliminating Lumumba. In all of these operations, the Americans received extensive logistical and other support from the old European colonial powers, especially the British. This time, however, neither of the schemes worked as planned.
In 1959, a group of young guerrillas led by Fidel Castro seized power from Cuba’s corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. At first many Americans were charmed by the romantic revolutionary Castro and his bearded followers, but as he began confiscating US property, then requested Soviet aid, the romance soured. At the behest of the Eisenhower administration, the CIA started making plans for his removal. But the covert techniques failed to dislodge Casto. Consequently, in January 1961, the CIA made preparations for a full-scale invasion code-named ZAPATA. President Kennedy wanted to be rid of Castro as much as his predecessor had, but he was more conscious of the need to preserve plausible deniability. Hence when in April 1961 a task force of anti-Castro Cuban emigres ran into trouble trying to land on a beach in the Bay of Pigs, the president refused to order US fighter planes to protect it, effectively abandoning the men to their fates. The Cuba debacle became a national and international story.
The same pattern – of presidents having personal reasons to resent the CIA yet nonetheless continuing to use it as, in effect, a secret army – would carry on into the 1970s. Richard Nixon detested the Agency as “a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals” yet gladly availed himself of its covert capabilities, even as he implemented an overt foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union. In Latin America, the focus of US attention shifted to the so-called Southern Cone, where the CIA carried out influence operations against the Marxist president of Chile. Elsewhere, in the decolonizing world, CIA operations rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Europeans. In Indochina, the Agency intervened constantly in the former French colonies surrounding the war-torn nation of Vietnam in an effort to produce pro-Western governments there.
But it was not until the 1980s, and the arrival in the White House of the unreconstructed Cold War Warrior Ronald Reagan, that presidential support for covert operations reached its zenith. Bill Casey’s CIA oversaw a massive, largely illegal effort to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua by funding anti-government rebels known as the Contras. The Contra supply program proved to be the last big CIA regime-change operation of the Cold War era.
The CIA was able to accomplish important US strategic goals at a fraction of the financial, reputational, and human costs of conventional warfare. But there were many failures as well. Various factors – bureaucratic flaws, the near impossibility of maintaining operational secrecy, and the unpredictability of conditions in the target countries themselves – all meant that the odds were stacked against covert action from the start. One political scientist has concluded that covert methods worked just 39% of the time, as opposed to the 66% success rate of overt interventions.
Over the course of the Cold War, several different CIA directors tried to rein in the covert-action side of the Agency and reprioritize its original mission of intelligence analysis. But they all failed. If the cult of covert action was damaging institutionally for US foreign policy, for the nations at the receiving end it was devastating. CIA-backed coups produced repressive regimes, typically military dictatorships, that guaranteed US interests at the expense of their citizens’ human rights, economic well-being, and in some cases lives.
The combined effect of the widespread devastation and open secrecy made the CIA into possibly the most infamous organization on the planet. Across the postcolonial world, repressive governments installed as a result of CIA regime-change operations engendered profound resentment toward America – and nowhere more so than in the scene of the CIA’s first successful coup plot, Iran.
COUNTERINTELLIGENCE: The first years of the Reagan era witnessed a gradual rolling back of the congressional checks on US intelligence enacted during the 1970s, with Congress providing little opposition. With US journalists as compliant as they had been before the 1960s, the Reagan administration had little difficulty squashing would-be whistleblowers. When a small group of mercenaries tried to expose the White House’s illegal support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press either ignored or denounced them.
PUBLICITY: Although the CIA’s primary purpose was to influence US opinion about the foreign countries in which it was operating, domestic developments such as McCarthyite outbursts in Congress also made it think about its own public image as a taxpayer-funded government agency.
The death blow came when the CIA’s anti-imperial nemesis, the West Coast magazine Ramparts, published a damaging expose of what it called the “Vietnam Lobby.” By now, it was not only publications like Ramparts that were daring to challenge the CIA. Even the mainstream media were joining in, too. As in other areas of Agency operation, the Bay of Pigs was the watershed moment. Coming not long after other missteps to which reporters had turned a blind eye – the abortive attempt to depose the Indonesian president Sukarno, for example -- the failed invasion of Cuba made it impossible for the press corps to continue with its strategy of feigned ignorance.
In 1963, in a move that anticipated the intelligence scandals, the Kennedy White House instructed the CIA to wiretap the National Press Building office and homes of two reporters suspected of receiving classified information, Paul J. Scott and Robert C. Allen. The operation was code-named MOCKINGBIRD, a moniker that later would return to haunt the Agency.
Rampart’s young reporters quickly unraveled the CIA’s front network. Despite last-ditch attempts by the Agency to defuse it, the story came amid a blaze of publicity, followed by a slew of reports by major newspapers confirming the Agency’s secret assistance to a huge range of other apparently private entities. The 1967 “Rampart’s revelations,” as they became known, elicited a variety of responses. Outraged observers in the postcolonial regions targeted by fronts such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation charged the United States with “academic colonialism.” The revelations brought forth widespread condemnation not just, as one would expect, from the left, but also from conservatives who objected to the CIA’s selection of the NCL (Non-Communist Left) as the main beneficiary. There was no escaping the adverse publicity.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The failed regime maintenance operation that led to the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam was followed by a surge of Vietnamese immigration as officials of the fallen government and local employees fled communism; a few years later, in 1979, came another wave of refugees, known in the West as the ‘boat people,” bringing the total number of Vietnamese in the US by 1990 to over half a million.
Then, in 1979, came another regime collapse and a new wave of immigrants from America’s covert empire, totaling over 100,000 by 1986. Like the Vietnamese before them, Iranians fleeing the Islamic Revolution in their homeland made northern Virginia their first port of call in the United States. And so, the pattern repeated itself, as CIA operations overseas stimulated further boomerang flows of immigrants. In the 1980s, it was the turn of Central Americans.
In 1950, the CIA launched BLUEBIRD, a mind-control research project under the charge of a brilliant but eccentric research scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, who soon focused his attention on the consciousness-altering properties of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). BLUEBIRD was later renamed ARTICHOKE and then, in 1954, MKULTRA, because of what Dulles called his “ultra”-sensitive nature. By this point, the CIA’s interest had shifted from defensive to offensive purposes, that is, developing techniques US interrogators could themselves use on communist prisoners. Gottlieb conducted much of his research in-house, at an Army biological weapons unit at Fort Detrick, Maryland, using military personnel as subjects (some of whom later developed depression and epilepsy). From early on, however, the Agency farmed out part of its research program to non-government experts, among them some of the most eminent researchers of the day in the pursuit of a “truth serum.”
Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments involving his CIA-Army teams grew ever more reckless. In 1953, one Fort Detrick scientist fell to his death from a New York hotel window after having unwittingly ingested LSD. By 1960, it had become clear that there was no truth serum, and in 1963, after a damning CIA inspector general’s report, MKULTRA was defunded.
The total effect of these various forces was to produce, in addition of fears about nefarious government plots against Americans, a widespread skepticism about the official version of events, a postmodern blurring between fact and fiction, and a crop of popular stories about the CIA that bore only a tangential relation to reality.
THE GLOBAL WAR on TERROR: In March 2018, Republican president Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Gina Haspel as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first woman tapped to lead the CIA. Quite apart from the obvious merit of her nomination in terms of gender equality and workforce diversity, this was potentially a good thing for an agency whose past blunders could partly be blamed on the masculine behavioral codes of its historically male-dominated leadership cadre, the “imperial brotherhood.”
However, there was one big strike against Haspel’s nomination. In 2002, she had served as chief of a secret CIA prison or “black site” in Thailand where suspected terrorists had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). These included, in addition to sleep deprivation and forced stress position, a practice known as “waterboarding”: strapping prisoners to a board, covering their faces with cloth, and pouring water on them so that they experienced the sensation of drowning. Not only that, in 2005, a year after the publication of photographs depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a US military prison in Iraq, Haspel had participated in the destruction of dozens of videotapes recording of interrogations at Thailand and other locations.
Gina Haspel did face some intense questioning about her role in the EIT program during her Senate confirmation hearing, most notably from future vice president Kamala Harris. But, in the end, senators accepted Haspel’s assurances that, with her as its director, the CIA would not revive enhance interrogations no matter how much pressure it might come under from the Trump administration to do so. Still, the episode had reminded the US public or a chapter in the CIA’s history the Agency itself would probably rather forget: the early years of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the name given to the international campaign against Islamist terrorist carried out by the US in the wake of al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001.
The GWOT had an ambiguous impact on the CIA. One the one hand, it helped restore a clear sense of mission to an agency that had been adrift since the end of the Cold War, placing it, once again, at the cutting edge of American power in the world. Roughly a decade later, the Agency succeeded in hunting down as-Qaeda leader, the Saudi Osama bin Laden, in a hideout in Pakistan, where he had fled from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, other leading Islamist terrorists died in “targeted Killings” by unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones” in a program entrusted to the CIA.
But the GWOT era also witnessed some of the darkest days in the CIA’s existence. Looming over the period were two catastrophic intelligence errors: the Agency’s failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, and its subsequent mistaken claim that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the principal justification for the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following the publication of devastating reports about 9/11 and the WMD debacle in 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, effectively demoting the director of the CIA by creating the Office of Director of National Intelligence to oversee the entire intelligence community.
Determined to prevent further terrorist attacks on their watch, successive post-9/11 administrations plowed staggeringly huge sums of federal dollars into the sprawling intelligence-industrial complex. Some estimates of George Bush’s total expenditure on the intelligence community pegged it at almost $500 billion. The spending continued, to the tune of $80 billion a year, under President Barack Obama. The Agency itself, despite having lost its institutional primacy in the intelligence community to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saw its funding surge massively under Obama, who prized it efficiency as, in the words of one national security reporter, a terrorist “killing machine.”
The concept of the “deep state” was taken up by supporters of Donald Trump in retaliation against the CIA and FBI for their part in uncovering evidence of Soviet interference in the 2016 presidential election. But the concept’s extraordinary popularity – according to the findings of a 2018 Monmouth University poll, 74% of Americans believed that “a group of unelected government and military officials” was “manipulating or directing” national politics.
The irony was that, against the backdrop of the Trump presidency, the rise of a conservative, populist conspiracy theory about the CIA actually aided the Agency’s cause in the eyes of liberals who had previously been critical of it. John Brennan, for instance, the outgoing director of the CIA, became something of a darling of the liberal news media thanks to his readiness to defend the Agency against Donald Trump’s attacks.
CONCLUSION: US and European imperial intelligence – British especially but French as well – appear fundamentally similar, despite exceptionalist American claims to the contrary. Both engaged in covert struggles for influence with Russian/Soviet power in the colonial, then postcolonial world, while at the same time trying to contain and curb local anti-colonial, nationalist movements. Both struggled to collect reliable intelligence on non-Western societies and were therefore prone to intelligence failures. Both employed population-centric counterinsurgency to defend friendly regimes against nationalist uprisings and Russian meddling while working to overthrow undesirable governments by a variety of means, including covertly instigated coups. Finally, in keeping with the concept of the imperial boomerang, both left deep imprints on their host societies, some intentional (domestic surveillance and influence operations) and others unintentional (boomeranging population flows and conspiracism).
To be sure, there were also some contrasts between US and European spy services. American intelligence officers placed a greater premium on science and technology than their European counterparts, while the peculiar circumstances of the US post-World War II moment in the imperial sun – decolonization and superpower nuclear rivalry – necessitated a greater American reliance on covert as opposed to overt action. At the same time, the greater democratic accountability of US intelligence and relative strength of American anti-imperialism made the CIA more vulnerable to domestic media and parliamentary scrutiny than its European counterparts. This helps explain the Agency’s characteristic combination of hyper secrecy on the one hand and preoccupation with its public image on the other. In other words, if the CIA was not exceptional, it was at least distinctive. In summary, the CIA possessed several distinctive traits reflecting its national heritage and the specific international setting in which it came into existence – but it had even more in common with the European intelligence agencies of the previous imperial age.
For those contemplating the use of the CIA as an instrument of covert action in this new international environment – say, in the Southeast Asian nations surrounding China—the history of the Agency presented here suggests a few lessons. First, covert regime-change operations fail more often than they succeed and, even when successful, have unforeseen consequences. Similarly, covert efforts to reinforce or coup-proof client states often have the opposite of their intended effect, undermining the legitimacy of the governments in question and necessitating a resort to even more repressive forms of counterinsurgency. Where US observers perceive regime change and counterinsurgency as “democracy promotion”and “nation-building,” those at the receiving end in the Global South see them instead as acts of Western imperialism.
Second, the consequences of covert overseas interventions do not necessarily stay overseas. In the US case, some of the boomerang effects are obvious: retaliatory acts of terror that, while different in their points of origin and scale, invite comparison with earlier terrorist attacks upon other imperial metropoles.
This is not to deny the legitimacy and value of the CIA’s other main function, indeed, its founding purpose: the analysis of foreign intelligence. In short, it is high time the Agency reprioritized its original mission as an intelligence agency. Then, perhaps, it can properly reckon with security threats facing not just the US, but the whole world today: global inequality, population movements, pandemics, and climate change.
How likely these lessons are to be heeded by the nation’s foreign policy establishment is far from obvious. On the one hand, there are welcome indications that the CIA is pivoting away from counterterrorism, with the creation in 2021 of two new Agency mission centers, one devoted to China. China might represent a formidable challenge to US national security in the realm of espionage (the proper business of the CIA).
As long as America continues to behave like an empire while denying it is one, it will carry on reaching for covert action as an instrument of its foreign relations, with the same baleful foreign and domestic consequence as during the Cold War and War on Terror. Put another way, the imperial history of the CIA is likely not over yet.
Source: The CIA: An Imperial History by Hugh Wilford (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE CIA: 1947 to CURRENT – EXCERPTS
INTRODUCTION: It was not until 1947, when the United States embarked on a different kind of war with the Soviet Union a cold one that did not involve direct military engagement with enemy, that the US created a peacetime spy service, the Central Intelligence Agency. After the Cold War ended just over four decades later with the Soviet collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the CIA seemed to lose its raison d’etre – but then rediscovered it after 2001, when the nation entered into a new kind of unconventional war, the Global War on Terror.
In recent years, the CIA has played a leading role in the war on terror, carrying out such crucial secret missions as the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Above all, the Agency is still defined in the popular imagination of the Cold War; spy battles against the Soviet KGB featuring double agent and moles – the superpower conflict at its coldest.
INTELLIGENCE GATHERING: The relationship between the CIA officer and his agent was at the heart of the Agency’s intelligence mission. The CIA had a system for this process: an agent acquisition “cycle” with several distinct steps that the new intelligence officer learned in training. First, the officer “spotted” a local with access to valuable secret information – a junior government minister, perhaps, or an army officer. Next, the CIA operative and Agency headquarters independently “assessed” the potential agent. Third came the most sensitive step, “recruitment,” when the officer pitched the prospective agent, offering money or some other inducement in return for the information.
But why would an agent want to pass secrets – that is, commit treason – in the first place? Again, the CIA had a theory about agent motivation, summed up by a handy mnemonic device: MICE (money, ideology, coercion/compromise, excitement/ego). The most common motive, especially in the poorer parts of the Third World, was a simple desire for money. Other agents, however, were motivated less by money than by ideology, usually a hatred of communism. Under the MICE framework, almost all agent motives were vulnerabilities of one sort or another. The challenge facing the CIA officer was to identify the vulnerability, then exploit it in order to control the agent.
REGIME CHANGE: By 1948, the CIA was intervening extensively in Western Europe to thwart the possible Soviet gains there, most dramatically in Italy. There were also missions – most, it has to be said, disastrous failures – to infiltrate émigré agents behind the Iron Curtain with the aim of sabotaging the governments there and “rolling back” the Soviet empire. The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in 1950 heralded the spread of CIA rollback operations into Asia, with communist China and North Korea now the targets. For all these interventions in the Cold War heartlands of Europe and Asia, the US government at first proved surprisingly reluctant to employ its new covert capabilities on the geostrategic periphery, in regions historically dominated by the European colonial powers. There was also a widespread view in the Washington foreign policy establishment, including within the CIA itself, that the United States should avoid doing anything that smelled of Old-World colonialism.
Granted, the emphasis on covert action was somewhat novel. The British and the others had not faced the same constraints that bound the Americans after 1945: new international norms against interventionism, the fear of triggering a nuclear world war, and the rise of decolonization.
Washington and London established secret “working groups” of senior officials charged with devising common approaches to pressing security issues, with spies featuring prominently. As in Iran, British leaders were not above massaging American fears of communism or sentimental appeals to the “special relationship” to secure support for UK colonial interests. Harold Macmillan, the new British Prime Minister prided himself on his clever handling of Britain’s transatlantic “cousins.”
The result was a surge of US covert actions in the Global South, starting in 1957 with a regime change operation aimed at the leftist government of Syria. Then in 1960, the CIA set out to remove Patrice Lumumba, the young nationalist leader of the newly independent Belgian Congo. The vast, mineral-rich central African state appeared in danger of collapse, and the Agency actively considered assassination as a mean of eliminating Lumumba. In all of these operations, the Americans received extensive logistical and other support from the old European colonial powers, especially the British. This time, however, neither of the schemes worked as planned.
In 1959, a group of young guerrillas led by Fidel Castro seized power from Cuba’s corrupt dictator, Fulgencio Batista. At first many Americans were charmed by the romantic revolutionary Castro and his bearded followers, but as he began confiscating US property, then requested Soviet aid, the romance soured. At the behest of the Eisenhower administration, the CIA started making plans for his removal. But the covert techniques failed to dislodge Casto. Consequently, in January 1961, the CIA made preparations for a full-scale invasion code-named ZAPATA. President Kennedy wanted to be rid of Castro as much as his predecessor had, but he was more conscious of the need to preserve plausible deniability. Hence when in April 1961 a task force of anti-Castro Cuban emigres ran into trouble trying to land on a beach in the Bay of Pigs, the president refused to order US fighter planes to protect it, effectively abandoning the men to their fates. The Cuba debacle became a national and international story.
The same pattern – of presidents having personal reasons to resent the CIA yet nonetheless continuing to use it as, in effect, a secret army – would carry on into the 1970s. Richard Nixon detested the Agency as “a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals” yet gladly availed himself of its covert capabilities, even as he implemented an overt foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union. In Latin America, the focus of US attention shifted to the so-called Southern Cone, where the CIA carried out influence operations against the Marxist president of Chile. Elsewhere, in the decolonizing world, CIA operations rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the departing Europeans. In Indochina, the Agency intervened constantly in the former French colonies surrounding the war-torn nation of Vietnam in an effort to produce pro-Western governments there.
But it was not until the 1980s, and the arrival in the White House of the unreconstructed Cold War Warrior Ronald Reagan, that presidential support for covert operations reached its zenith. Bill Casey’s CIA oversaw a massive, largely illegal effort to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua by funding anti-government rebels known as the Contras. The Contra supply program proved to be the last big CIA regime-change operation of the Cold War era.
The CIA was able to accomplish important US strategic goals at a fraction of the financial, reputational, and human costs of conventional warfare. But there were many failures as well. Various factors – bureaucratic flaws, the near impossibility of maintaining operational secrecy, and the unpredictability of conditions in the target countries themselves – all meant that the odds were stacked against covert action from the start. One political scientist has concluded that covert methods worked just 39% of the time, as opposed to the 66% success rate of overt interventions.
Over the course of the Cold War, several different CIA directors tried to rein in the covert-action side of the Agency and reprioritize its original mission of intelligence analysis. But they all failed. If the cult of covert action was damaging institutionally for US foreign policy, for the nations at the receiving end it was devastating. CIA-backed coups produced repressive regimes, typically military dictatorships, that guaranteed US interests at the expense of their citizens’ human rights, economic well-being, and in some cases lives.
The combined effect of the widespread devastation and open secrecy made the CIA into possibly the most infamous organization on the planet. Across the postcolonial world, repressive governments installed as a result of CIA regime-change operations engendered profound resentment toward America – and nowhere more so than in the scene of the CIA’s first successful coup plot, Iran.
COUNTERINTELLIGENCE: The first years of the Reagan era witnessed a gradual rolling back of the congressional checks on US intelligence enacted during the 1970s, with Congress providing little opposition. With US journalists as compliant as they had been before the 1960s, the Reagan administration had little difficulty squashing would-be whistleblowers. When a small group of mercenaries tried to expose the White House’s illegal support of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the press either ignored or denounced them.
PUBLICITY: Although the CIA’s primary purpose was to influence US opinion about the foreign countries in which it was operating, domestic developments such as McCarthyite outbursts in Congress also made it think about its own public image as a taxpayer-funded government agency.
The death blow came when the CIA’s anti-imperial nemesis, the West Coast magazine Ramparts, published a damaging expose of what it called the “Vietnam Lobby.” By now, it was not only publications like Ramparts that were daring to challenge the CIA. Even the mainstream media were joining in, too. As in other areas of Agency operation, the Bay of Pigs was the watershed moment. Coming not long after other missteps to which reporters had turned a blind eye – the abortive attempt to depose the Indonesian president Sukarno, for example -- the failed invasion of Cuba made it impossible for the press corps to continue with its strategy of feigned ignorance.
In 1963, in a move that anticipated the intelligence scandals, the Kennedy White House instructed the CIA to wiretap the National Press Building office and homes of two reporters suspected of receiving classified information, Paul J. Scott and Robert C. Allen. The operation was code-named MOCKINGBIRD, a moniker that later would return to haunt the Agency.
Rampart’s young reporters quickly unraveled the CIA’s front network. Despite last-ditch attempts by the Agency to defuse it, the story came amid a blaze of publicity, followed by a slew of reports by major newspapers confirming the Agency’s secret assistance to a huge range of other apparently private entities. The 1967 “Rampart’s revelations,” as they became known, elicited a variety of responses. Outraged observers in the postcolonial regions targeted by fronts such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation charged the United States with “academic colonialism.” The revelations brought forth widespread condemnation not just, as one would expect, from the left, but also from conservatives who objected to the CIA’s selection of the NCL (Non-Communist Left) as the main beneficiary. There was no escaping the adverse publicity.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The failed regime maintenance operation that led to the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam was followed by a surge of Vietnamese immigration as officials of the fallen government and local employees fled communism; a few years later, in 1979, came another wave of refugees, known in the West as the ‘boat people,” bringing the total number of Vietnamese in the US by 1990 to over half a million.
Then, in 1979, came another regime collapse and a new wave of immigrants from America’s covert empire, totaling over 100,000 by 1986. Like the Vietnamese before them, Iranians fleeing the Islamic Revolution in their homeland made northern Virginia their first port of call in the United States. And so, the pattern repeated itself, as CIA operations overseas stimulated further boomerang flows of immigrants. In the 1980s, it was the turn of Central Americans.
In 1950, the CIA launched BLUEBIRD, a mind-control research project under the charge of a brilliant but eccentric research scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, who soon focused his attention on the consciousness-altering properties of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). BLUEBIRD was later renamed ARTICHOKE and then, in 1954, MKULTRA, because of what Dulles called his “ultra”-sensitive nature. By this point, the CIA’s interest had shifted from defensive to offensive purposes, that is, developing techniques US interrogators could themselves use on communist prisoners. Gottlieb conducted much of his research in-house, at an Army biological weapons unit at Fort Detrick, Maryland, using military personnel as subjects (some of whom later developed depression and epilepsy). From early on, however, the Agency farmed out part of its research program to non-government experts, among them some of the most eminent researchers of the day in the pursuit of a “truth serum.”
Sidney Gottlieb’s experiments involving his CIA-Army teams grew ever more reckless. In 1953, one Fort Detrick scientist fell to his death from a New York hotel window after having unwittingly ingested LSD. By 1960, it had become clear that there was no truth serum, and in 1963, after a damning CIA inspector general’s report, MKULTRA was defunded.
The total effect of these various forces was to produce, in addition of fears about nefarious government plots against Americans, a widespread skepticism about the official version of events, a postmodern blurring between fact and fiction, and a crop of popular stories about the CIA that bore only a tangential relation to reality.
THE GLOBAL WAR on TERROR: In March 2018, Republican president Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Gina Haspel as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first woman tapped to lead the CIA. Quite apart from the obvious merit of her nomination in terms of gender equality and workforce diversity, this was potentially a good thing for an agency whose past blunders could partly be blamed on the masculine behavioral codes of its historically male-dominated leadership cadre, the “imperial brotherhood.”
However, there was one big strike against Haspel’s nomination. In 2002, she had served as chief of a secret CIA prison or “black site” in Thailand where suspected terrorists had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). These included, in addition to sleep deprivation and forced stress position, a practice known as “waterboarding”: strapping prisoners to a board, covering their faces with cloth, and pouring water on them so that they experienced the sensation of drowning. Not only that, in 2005, a year after the publication of photographs depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a US military prison in Iraq, Haspel had participated in the destruction of dozens of videotapes recording of interrogations at Thailand and other locations.
Gina Haspel did face some intense questioning about her role in the EIT program during her Senate confirmation hearing, most notably from future vice president Kamala Harris. But, in the end, senators accepted Haspel’s assurances that, with her as its director, the CIA would not revive enhance interrogations no matter how much pressure it might come under from the Trump administration to do so. Still, the episode had reminded the US public or a chapter in the CIA’s history the Agency itself would probably rather forget: the early years of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the name given to the international campaign against Islamist terrorist carried out by the US in the wake of al-Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001.
The GWOT had an ambiguous impact on the CIA. One the one hand, it helped restore a clear sense of mission to an agency that had been adrift since the end of the Cold War, placing it, once again, at the cutting edge of American power in the world. Roughly a decade later, the Agency succeeded in hunting down as-Qaeda leader, the Saudi Osama bin Laden, in a hideout in Pakistan, where he had fled from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, other leading Islamist terrorists died in “targeted Killings” by unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones” in a program entrusted to the CIA.
But the GWOT era also witnessed some of the darkest days in the CIA’s existence. Looming over the period were two catastrophic intelligence errors: the Agency’s failure to predict the 9/11 attacks, and its subsequent mistaken claim that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the principal justification for the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following the publication of devastating reports about 9/11 and the WMD debacle in 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, effectively demoting the director of the CIA by creating the Office of Director of National Intelligence to oversee the entire intelligence community.
Determined to prevent further terrorist attacks on their watch, successive post-9/11 administrations plowed staggeringly huge sums of federal dollars into the sprawling intelligence-industrial complex. Some estimates of George Bush’s total expenditure on the intelligence community pegged it at almost $500 billion. The spending continued, to the tune of $80 billion a year, under President Barack Obama. The Agency itself, despite having lost its institutional primacy in the intelligence community to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, saw its funding surge massively under Obama, who prized it efficiency as, in the words of one national security reporter, a terrorist “killing machine.”
The concept of the “deep state” was taken up by supporters of Donald Trump in retaliation against the CIA and FBI for their part in uncovering evidence of Soviet interference in the 2016 presidential election. But the concept’s extraordinary popularity – according to the findings of a 2018 Monmouth University poll, 74% of Americans believed that “a group of unelected government and military officials” was “manipulating or directing” national politics.
The irony was that, against the backdrop of the Trump presidency, the rise of a conservative, populist conspiracy theory about the CIA actually aided the Agency’s cause in the eyes of liberals who had previously been critical of it. John Brennan, for instance, the outgoing director of the CIA, became something of a darling of the liberal news media thanks to his readiness to defend the Agency against Donald Trump’s attacks.
CONCLUSION: US and European imperial intelligence – British especially but French as well – appear fundamentally similar, despite exceptionalist American claims to the contrary. Both engaged in covert struggles for influence with Russian/Soviet power in the colonial, then postcolonial world, while at the same time trying to contain and curb local anti-colonial, nationalist movements. Both struggled to collect reliable intelligence on non-Western societies and were therefore prone to intelligence failures. Both employed population-centric counterinsurgency to defend friendly regimes against nationalist uprisings and Russian meddling while working to overthrow undesirable governments by a variety of means, including covertly instigated coups. Finally, in keeping with the concept of the imperial boomerang, both left deep imprints on their host societies, some intentional (domestic surveillance and influence operations) and others unintentional (boomeranging population flows and conspiracism).
To be sure, there were also some contrasts between US and European spy services. American intelligence officers placed a greater premium on science and technology than their European counterparts, while the peculiar circumstances of the US post-World War II moment in the imperial sun – decolonization and superpower nuclear rivalry – necessitated a greater American reliance on covert as opposed to overt action. At the same time, the greater democratic accountability of US intelligence and relative strength of American anti-imperialism made the CIA more vulnerable to domestic media and parliamentary scrutiny than its European counterparts. This helps explain the Agency’s characteristic combination of hyper secrecy on the one hand and preoccupation with its public image on the other. In other words, if the CIA was not exceptional, it was at least distinctive. In summary, the CIA possessed several distinctive traits reflecting its national heritage and the specific international setting in which it came into existence – but it had even more in common with the European intelligence agencies of the previous imperial age.
For those contemplating the use of the CIA as an instrument of covert action in this new international environment – say, in the Southeast Asian nations surrounding China—the history of the Agency presented here suggests a few lessons. First, covert regime-change operations fail more often than they succeed and, even when successful, have unforeseen consequences. Similarly, covert efforts to reinforce or coup-proof client states often have the opposite of their intended effect, undermining the legitimacy of the governments in question and necessitating a resort to even more repressive forms of counterinsurgency. Where US observers perceive regime change and counterinsurgency as “democracy promotion”and “nation-building,” those at the receiving end in the Global South see them instead as acts of Western imperialism.
Second, the consequences of covert overseas interventions do not necessarily stay overseas. In the US case, some of the boomerang effects are obvious: retaliatory acts of terror that, while different in their points of origin and scale, invite comparison with earlier terrorist attacks upon other imperial metropoles.
This is not to deny the legitimacy and value of the CIA’s other main function, indeed, its founding purpose: the analysis of foreign intelligence. In short, it is high time the Agency reprioritized its original mission as an intelligence agency. Then, perhaps, it can properly reckon with security threats facing not just the US, but the whole world today: global inequality, population movements, pandemics, and climate change.
How likely these lessons are to be heeded by the nation’s foreign policy establishment is far from obvious. On the one hand, there are welcome indications that the CIA is pivoting away from counterterrorism, with the creation in 2021 of two new Agency mission centers, one devoted to China. China might represent a formidable challenge to US national security in the realm of espionage (the proper business of the CIA).
As long as America continues to behave like an empire while denying it is one, it will carry on reaching for covert action as an instrument of its foreign relations, with the same baleful foreign and domestic consequence as during the Cold War and War on Terror. Put another way, the imperial history of the CIA is likely not over yet.
Source: The CIA: An Imperial History by Hugh Wilford (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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