It’s hardly news that after 1945, the United States of America became an empire in all but name. Speak to anyone in the “global South” today, and that view will be quickly confirmed. But it is news that the American government’s foreign intelligence agency, the CIA, founded in 1947 by US president Harry S Truman, also became an imperial agency.
That is the central contention of Hugh Wilford’s well-researched and fresh new history of the CIA. Wilford, a British-trained scholar who teaches at California State University, is a skilful historian, who has previously written about the CIA and the cultural Cold War, and though I began this book somewhat sceptical of its thesis – that the CIA should be understood as similar to European colonial security and intelligence services – it’s evident that Wilford knew that his readers would have their doubts. He introduces his story with that in mind, and as he proceeded, I became more and more convinced.
The narrative that Wilford weaves together, drawing on archival records and memoirs, reveals that CIA officers were cut from similar cloth to that of their Old World contemporaries, particularly the British. The early Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, apparently died with a copy of Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s classic work on empire and intelligence, on his bedside table.
This, as Wilford shows, was no aberration. A significant number of founding CIA officers came from waspy New England preparatory schools, modelled on their English counterparts, and Ivy League colleges. These bastions of preppy culture indoctrinated into their students a belief in public service – and yes, empire – much as public schools and Oxbridge did for British intelligence. The CIA’s principal counter-intelligence officer in the 1960s, James Angleton, was a thorough Anglophile who never really got over his English boarding-school experience at Malvern. There was much truth to the quip that CIA officers in the 1950s, like Angleton, were “pale, male and from Yale”.
Wilford’s social and cultural history of CIA officers casts new light on the Agency’s well-known overseas operations: its involvement, with MI6, in a coup in Iran in 1953; its covert action in Guatemala the following year; its endless escapades in Cuba against Fidel Castro; and Vietnam. Pride of place in Wilford’s story goes to the CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, who was a principal actor in the Anglo-American 1953 coup in Iran that saw the Western-friendly Shah returned to the throne. Roosevelt, grandson of president Teddy Roosevelt, was known as “Kim” – another nod to an imperial past that he was himself recreating. Over in Cuba, Wilford also describes in detail the CIA’s efforts to depose Fidel Castro, from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to assassination plots that involved rigging seashells with explosives on Castro’s favourite diving-beach. Many of these chapters of CIA history are well known, but Wilford’s book gives them strong, fresh context.
The CIA: An Imperial History, however, is not without its problems. Even for a sympathetic reader, one notices omissions whose inclusion would have made it a better book. Two decades ago, the doyen of intelligence history, Christopher Andrew, laid down a challenge: he warned that books that describe CIA covert actions in faraway lands – coups, election rigging and such acts – but fail to mention the KGB’s corresponding covert actions – “active measures”, in Kremlin terminology – constitute the historical equivalent of one-hand clapping.
Wilford sometimes claps with one such hand. The phrase “active measures” appears just once in The CIA: An Imperial History, and does so in relation to US domestic affairs. In reality, it was in the “Third World”, which is central to Wilford’s book, where Soviet intelligence threw most resources at active measures. And it was there where KGB and CIA covert actions alike did the most damage. In some cases, the KGB’s active measures to influence Third World governments far outstripped the corresponding CIA activities.
Both sides, for instance, recruited agents of influence with the aim of swaying governments in the Non-Aligned Movement, in the global South, to their respective sides; but when it came to disinformation, the KGB invested far more resources. The most “successful” such Soviet operation was the grotesque fabrication, in the 1980s, of a conspiracy theory that the Aids virus was a US-manufactured bioweapon. This lie found receptive audiences in sub-Saharan Africa, all too ready to believe in Washington’s hidden hand, and the public-health consequences are still being felt in the region today.
At times, I also fear that Wilford overstates, or doesn’t quite substantiate, his case. I was left unconvinced, for instance, that the culture of empire was as important to Angleton’s counter-intelligence activities as Wilford suggests. Viewing the US-led war in Afghanistan after 9/11 as an imperial war, as Wilford does in the epilogue, is certainly enticing: US officials, including CIA officers, were, after all, treading on the same grounds as empires past, whether British, Russian or Soviet. The historical baggage of empire helped to make books by authors such as William Dalrymple, about the British in Afghanistan in the 19th century, highly popular among US decision-makers after 9/11.
Yet, as enticing as Wilford’s portrayal of Afghanistan through an imperial prism is, it doesn’t cast new light on how the US conducted its operations there, about which I, for one, wanted to read more. (For that, I would instead recommend reading Steve Coll’s recent The Achilles Trap.) Some of the language, too, could have been tightened by a diligent editor: I counted the phrase “in other words” 15 times. Nonetheless, these criticisms don’t detract too much from what is otherwise an important and engrossing new book – one that must be read by anyone interested in intelligence and national-security affairs today.
Calder Walton’s books include Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West. The CIA: An Imperial History is published by John Murray at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
