The CIA: from intelligence to covert actions

At the 1983 Epsom Derby (Teenoso by three lengths, US-bred, English-trained, Lester Piggott’s ninth Derby victory) I met a tough, genial character wearing immaculate English racing tweeds, but clearly, from his white crew cut to his leathery tan, an old-fashioned American. During conversation with a mutual friend, I learned he had been CIA station chief in Vientiane during a particularly hairy period in the 1960s. He told a number of amusing anecdotes about his difficulties there, especially the Laotian ability to make large amounts of US aid money disappear. He recalled the tens of millions of dollars provided by the agency for a splendid new military road intended to run hundreds of miles cross country, but which actually stopped in a swamp two miles outside Vientiane. I suggested he should write a book. He shook his head.

“It was a war.  You can’t truthfully describe a war you’ve been part of.” The other member of our party, a British WW2 veteran, nodded in agreement.

This encounter came to mind as I read The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 366 pp, £19.59).

One of Hugh Wilford’s themes is that the agency was founded by Ivy League types who read Kipling, worshipped TE Lawrence and were generally in love with British imperial derring-do. During the war many had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which combined spying with special operations, and was extensively tutored by the British – the real origin of the “special relationship”.  

Although the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947 to gather and analyse intelligence, it was immediately involved in a wide range of covert actions. These included secret war-fighting and the overthrow of unfriendly foreign governments, not to mention influencing public opinion all over the world, including in the US.  The Director of Central Intelligence reported directly to the White House, and successive presidents found it a useful tool.

Some of these initiatives are well known, such as the 1953 coup that removed the Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and ushered in the authoritarian rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi.  This operation was orchestrated by the CIA’s Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt – he was nicknamed Kim as a boy because he adored Kipling’s eponymous boy-spy hero. He was also an erudite Arabist, who was suspicious of Israel and argued that in its Middle East policy the US should foster modern liberal Arab movements.

But there was more to the overthrow of Mosaddeq: MI6 was an active participant, as were the Shah’s adherents. Under Mosaddeq, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP) had lost control of Iranian oil production, and it wanted it back. It did in the end get back 40% of Iranian output, but the remaining 60% went to a consortium of American oil companies. Even in one of Britain’s most important imperial and commercial hubs, the US was now top of the pile – and the CIA had played the pivotal role in getting it there.

The book’s subtitle, “An Imperial History”, refers not only to the character and interests of the CIA’s early heroes, but also to the historically inevitable decline of the European empires and the astonishing rise of US global hegemony. From a diplomatic and intelligence perspective this was a tricky process, and the CIA was at its heart. The agency’s operations and attitudes often mirrored its British and French predecessors to a remarkable degree.

If it is impossible to truthfully describe a war from the inside, how does one tell the 77-year story of a sprawling global intelligence agency, most of whose activities are necessarily secret? Hugh Wilford’s approach, illuminating as well as entertaining, is to divide the CIA’s activities into five headings, each embodied, in the early decades, by a legendary figure:  Intelligence (Sherman Kent), Counterintelligence (James Jesus Angleton), Regime Change (Kim Roosevelt), Regime Maintenance (Edward Lansdale) and Publicity (Cord Meyer). 

Wilford also addresses Unintended Consequences (many of which relate to conspiracy theories, such as the rich field of JFK assassination studies).  And more recently there is the Global War on Terror, or GWOT – the CIA has spawned an extraordinary array of acronyms, including EIT or Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (in plain English, torture). Then there is SOG or Special Operations Group which — in a programme of dubious legality, charmingly code-named CHAOS — investigated possible foreign influence on the anti-Vietnam War movement.

For the first twenty years of its existence, the CIA enjoyed the approval of most Americans who had heard of it. But the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, the radical social changes of the sixties, and the political unrest sparked by the Vietnam War began to alter popular perceptions. Unwelcome publicity emanated from such diverse sources as the Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, Ramparts magazine and the New York Times . Nkrumah’s influential book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism revealed a range of CIA activities in the postcolonial world, as well as details of its often illegal influence operations within the US itself. Ramparts , a San Francisco-based radical magazine, published a series of detailed investigations of the CIA, to which the agency responded, unwisely, by trying to dig dirt on the publication and its staff. The NYT, often through its star investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, also hounded the agency, especially any activities linked to the war.

In the 1970s, the anti-imperialism that had been principally the concern of the radical Left  “entered the American mainstream”. The Pentagon Papers, leaked by the former CIA officer Daniel Ellsberg, were published in the Washington Post in 1971, followed by Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged and prolonged investigation of the Watergate burglary and cover-up. The chief of the Watergate burglars was E. Howard Hunt, a recently retired CIA officer and OSS veteran. Congress started its own Watergate investigation and in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution, which checked the president’s power to wage war. In 1974 an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act required express presidential authorisation of future covert operations. The CIA was under fire.

Despite further well-publicised fiascos such as the Iran-Contra scandal, the 1980s and the Reagan presidency were a period of recovery for the agency. By the end of the decade the Soviet Union was collapsing and the Cold War was over. The CIA, like its “cousins” at MI6, could reasonably claim some of the credit for the victory. It is worth repeating the claim of every spy I’ve ever met, that the public rarely if ever hears about their successes. Their failures, on the other hand, are usually all too obvious.

A colossal failure of US intelligence – for which the CIA must take a large share of the blame – was the 9/11 assault on New York and Washington. Within hours the agency was briefing the media that a Saudi called Osama bin Laden was at the heart of the plot, which suggests they ought to have been more alert to the danger he posed. 9/11 sparked the GWOT, with the agency always in the vanguard. It also led to EIT, not to mention the closely related RDI (Rendition, Detention and Interrogation). But most Americans seemed indifferent to the CIA’s involvement in these cruel practices, so long as they produced results. It took ten years to track down and kill bin Laden, for which the CIA took most of the credit. If anyone doubted it, Hollywood rammed the message home in Zero Dark Thirty.

Another failure was the insistence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, as a precursor to the ultimately disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. But by this stage it was not altogether clear where the blame lay. Once upon a time there had been the CIA (foreign intelligence), the NSA (signals intelligence) and the FBI (domestic security). Under president George W Bush the number of intelligence agencies mushroomed. The media began to talk of the “intelligence community”, a usefully vague term from journalists’ point of view. That phrase now comprehended eighteen different intelligence agencies, all reporting to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who had replaced the director of the CIA as king of the intelligence jungle.

Yet the CIA remains America’s prime bulwark against unfriendly (and some more friendly)  powers. It employed 21,575 people as of 2022. (For comparison, MI6 has 3,644.) Though it tries to focus on intelligence gathering and analysis, the agency remains vulnerable to presidents who enjoy commissioning covert operations. 

But there is a problem even in the realm of pure intelligence, namely that there is so much of the stuff, so widely shared among 18 agencies, their employees, contractors and sub-contractors, and largely stored digitally, that leaks on a disastrous scale are almost inevitable. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were two of the most prominent leakers who did incalculable damage to Western intelligence in 2010 and 2013 respectively. In 2023, Jack Teixera,  Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested for sharing and disseminating secret documents that found their way into Russian hands. Why a 21 year old junior rank in a state national guard unit had access to such material has not been explained, but it was said at the time of his arrest that up to 2 million people had significant access to stored secrets. That’s a colossal “intelligence community”, and one hopes that the Director of National Intelligence is cutting it down to size.

Professor Wilford has written an excellent and very readable history of the CIA, setting the agency in the context of its times, and highlighting the challenges it now faces, including China and emerging technologies. Though it has doubtless learned from its mistakes, it is unlikely that the CIA has shaken off its imperial attitudes.

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