How the Left Views Langley
Whenever I meet journalists who’ve recently acquired the intel beat, I pity them. The conundrum before all journalists covering senior U.S. officials—criticism versus future access—is acutely true for those covering intelligence since the avenues of access are often severely limited. Congress is always the best bet for getting info on sensitive projects because partisan disagreements can produce loose lips. But congressmen on intelligence committees too often don’t know what’s going on because a lot of operations never cross their desks; when they do, congressmen and their staffers don’t always know what they are looking at.
What’s true for journalists is even more true for historians. They inevitably have limited access to primary sources; they usually have no first-hand experience with espionage and covert action. If they can even get access to some personnel and operational files, as is the case with official Central Intelligence Agency historians, they may have no idea whether the authors are telling the truth, exaggerating, or editing to make themselves or their bosses better looking than they actually were.
When I was in the Directorate of Operations, I routinely saw officers write operational cables and intelligence reports that were, to put it politely, at a distance from the truth. Pity the poor historian a hundred years from now who might get access to some of this material—the CIA isn’t obligated under Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13526 to release classified information after 50 years—and try to make sense of it. Big covert-action projects sometimes get declassified; sometimes scandal, real or imaginary, compels congressional investigations, which inevitably dribble, more often spill, into the press. So often historians are just flying blind, trying to stitch together newspaper reports, which is a version of oral history through leaks.
The Cold War years, the baptismal font for Langley, can also still excite a lot of emotions since America was on the cutting edge of turning back the revolutionary left, which had intertwined tightly with the burgeoning, newly minted aspirations of so many people who’d lived under or been deeply touched by European imperialism. Leftists today can feel ashamed about America’s struggle against communism, which often wasn’t pretty. It’s hard for a historian’s preexisting ideological disposition not to intrude. Before an archive is even visited, Vietnam, for example, might be accepted as the greatest post-World War II American debacle, an unnecessary and counterproductive effort to stop communism from taking Southeast Asia; the CIA, accordingly, was a handmaiden of an analytical and operational disaster-cum-crime.
Hugh Wilford, a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, is an established left-wing commentator on the agency, whose earlier books, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East and The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, established the theme and style of his most recent work, The CIA: An Imperial History. One could summarize the sentiments and narratives of all these works: The CIA has rarely been a force for good in this world; individual officers may mean well, but they are all doomed, by temperament, education, and mistaken analysis of the real and imagined threats against the United States, to march through history cocking up, bringing more shame than honor to the nation, sometimes debasing democracy at home while continuously inflicting a lot of misery upon "the Global South."
As a former case officer, I get a certain frisson from these books. Langley, as an institution, actually doesn’t mind them either because, no matter how notorious the depiction, the CIA matters in these stories. They all conjure up an intelligence service with enormous history-shaping agency. The duller, more depressing truth about Langley: In most places throughout the Cold War its influence was far less than what the CIA and Wilford want you to believe. My more talented classmates, who all came into the CIA when Bill Casey was the director, used to have this running joke about finding "Big Brain"—the hidden outposts of the "real" CIA, where first-rate officers did first-rate things. Most of us would have been thrilled to discover even a wicked Big Brain—the type of Third-World-shaking nefariousness that Wilford spends most of his energy on.
Most of Langley’s first-generation "great men"—the preferred targets of Wilford—surely would not look so great after a thorough review of all the operational traffic and field reporting. The second- and third-generation "legends" that I crossed paths with had more a knack for self-promotion and a fierce love of the agency brotherhood than any other virtues. Their operational finesse with foreigners—predatory instincts fueled by curiosity and foreign languages—were rarely evident. Long exposure to one of the officers stationed in Santiago, Chile, before and during the military coup against Salvador Allende strongly suggested to me that the CIA’s role in that country was irrelevant to the designs of General Augusto Pinochet. It’s an excellent guess that if one could review all the Pinochet/Allende files, even for one who had no first-hand knowledge of the officers on the ground, the reader would come away with the same conclusion that I developed after reviewing files surrounding the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 in Iran, an event that the CIA certainly wanted to encourage. To wit: The agency really had no idea of what was transpiring.
With Pinochet, Langley was probably utterly irrelevant; with Mosaddegh, the CIA was a catalyst that drifted into irrelevancy as the local players, through their own motivations and designs, took control. Would Mosaddegh have fallen without the CIA’s intervention? It’s possible given the old aristocrat’s gift of alienating his allies, his growing authoritarian temperament, and the oft-overlooked fact that he served at the pleasure of the shah. To Wilford’s credit on 1953, he admits that there is now a "revisionist" history on the coup that makes Iranians, not Americans, the primary players. But it’s a fleeting reflection: ’53 is just too sweet for Wilford’s imperialist argument—the agency, for anti-communist reasons, implements British designs, effectively becoming an imperial power. For Wilford, Kermit Roosevelt, the supposed maestro of the coup, who made the grandiose self-promoters of my years in the agency (think Dewey Clarridge) look like devotees of self-abnegation, just has too famous a name and too much (dubious) public information not to exploit.
In his retelling of CIA history from its beginning to today, Wilford gets around the fact that he had no evident access to the all-important daily operational traffic, "201" agent and personnel files, and the long field reports written by case officers, especially the more revealing assessments written by chiefs of station and base, by recasting information already in the public domain (memoirs and nonfiction books and some covert-action material) into a psychoanalytic history of the CIA. He dilates upon a few men, who become representative of the whole institution. Through these men, and others, the CIA, intentionally and through the sin of association with more experienced European hands, fell into the wake of empire, becoming and remaining de facto imperialists.
And the CIA had an elitist, Ivy-League educated, white male heterosexual domestic culture primed to go imperialist. "[T]he whole Agency had a distinctly patrician feel to it, dominated as it was by young WASP men with East Coast origins and Ivy League educations. Males from other backgrounds, including even white ‘ethnics,’ were comparatively scarce. There were some white women officers … but the majority of female CIA employees were clerks and secretaries. Combined with measures to exclude homosexual recruits … these gender dynamics made for a working environment of aggressive male heterosexuality."
Most damning, in Wilford’s recounting, there was just too much Anglophilia among American spooks for them to avoid imperialist predilections. Brits like T.E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling seized their imaginations. On the latter, Wilford writes, "his literary spirit would live on, not only in Britain but also in the United States, where his romantic tales of imperial adventure would beguile later generations of readers, among them many of the young men who would staff the infant Central Intelligence Agency during the first years of a new iteration of the Great Game: the Cold War."
Wilford doesn’t tell us exactly how literary tastes worked themselves into the operational bloodstream of the CIA. I read the Jungle Book, Kim, The Man Who Would Be King, and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom when young, and I don’t recall being overcome with a desire to implement an American variation of the White Man’s Burden even though I admired Lawrence’s audacity—and even more that of the great Victorian travelers, like Richard Burton, whose fearlessness, luck, curiosity, writing, and linguistic accomplishments remain astonishing. Yet Wilford plows ahead with this literature-makes-an-imperialist mindset.
Even one of the more lefty of CIA directors, William Colby, doesn’t escape Wilford’s cultural-imperialist gerrymandering. "After devouring Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, future Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William E. Colby fantasized about ‘becoming, if not exactly a Lawrence of Arabia, then at least Colby of a French Department.’" Colby parachuted into France with the Jedburgh teams of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s WWII forerunner, so he certainly tested his mettle in a French endeavor.
Wilford extends the formative Lawrence influence to Dewey Clarridge, too: "For career CIA officer Duane R. ‘Dewey’ Clarridge, later a central figure in the foreign-policy adventures (and misadventures) of the Reagan-era 1980s, Lawrence was simply, ‘my hero.’ British imperial romance bred in these men a notion of foreign lands as a refuge from smothering domestic routine, a place for masculine self-realization." Only Clarridge, who died in 2016, knew whether his fondness for white capes, a Florida vibe that mixed Little Havana with Boca Raton, and the pronoun "I," stemmed somehow from reading Lawrence; I can think of other possible inspirations. Like a (Edward) Saidian on crack, Wilford sees admiration for famous men of the past as examples of cultural appropriation: admire Lawrence and you, too, are a closet imperialist.
Wilford’s obsession with British influence within the CIA doesn’t preclude him from seeing French imperialism also at work in American actions, especially in Southeast Asia, where the literary and historical gymnastics that Wilford has to deploy, given how much hatred there was between French and American intelligence officers in Southeast Asia in the 1940s and ’50s, is both dizzying and abstract. "Individual CIA officers were not necessarily aware of these imperial parallels and influences; if anything, they tended to be anti-imperialist in their conscious intentions. But the shadow of empire spread over everything they did …"
Wilford spends no time distinguishing what might be neutral European influence on the Office of Strategic Services and the early CIA, for example, an imported intelligence filing system or operational methodologies—from what might be pernicious imperial influence. The two always for Wilford cross-pollinate.
My personal favorite where Wilford sees an espionage tactic as a residue of British imperialism enveloping the CIA like a miasma:
Echoes of the British imperial past could also be heard in other more controversial CIA counterintelligence practices. In 1955 [James Jesus] Angleton took over an operation monitoring a portion of the mail passing through New York between the United States and the Soviet Union. Initiated by the CIA’s Soviet division three years earlier, the program was originally intended to identify possible themes for U.S. propaganda. Angleton reoriented HTLINGUAL, as it was named, toward the detection of communist espionage. All of the Soviet mail flow was now inspected … and a watch list was established based in part on names provided by the domestic intelligence service, the FBI. In return, the Agency sent the Bureau reports about what were regarded as possible internal US security threats. … Mail interception is, of course, a classic technique of espionage with a centuries long history, but [italics added] the similarities between LINGUAL and British imperial security practices were striking all the same. MI5’s mission involved a similar blurring of the boundaries between the homeland and empire, the foreign and domestic.
No, not really: MI5 has always operated under a completely different charter—a constitutional understanding—than has any American agency. The British conception of democratic sovereignty resides in Parliament, not with individual citizens. The British conception of civil liberties—what the state can’t do to you and especially how it can surveil you—is significantly different from the American. MI5 can bug just about anything so long as Parliament [that is, the government] has authorized it. This information isn’t admissible in a court of law, hence the "no harm doctrine" that allows for intrusive domestic-intelligence collection.
That isn’t true in the United States, where the FBI’s early flirtation with "no harm" got obliterated in the courts since the FBI isn’t legally a domestic intelligence service. (It’s one by default, not design.) It wasn’t empire that gave MI5 such power; it was the complex evolution of Britain’s unwritten constitution and customary law. War—not empire—expanded that power, as world wars and the Cold War expanded the reach of the FBI and American intelligence services. We don’t have to blame the British, or Angleton’s Anglophilia, for this postal naughtiness. Angleton was a nosy, ethically fluid man: Reading other people’s mail could have come to him without foreign inspiration.
What Wilford is really driving at in this discursive, ideologically loaded book: He doesn’t like America in the Cold War. The titanic struggle in his eyes fueled U.S. imperialism. That’s sloppy history for oh-so-many reasons; literarily it’s a crime since it robs both Americans and foreigners of all the complexities, the contradictory actions and emotions, that make them interesting.
The CIA: An Imperial History
by Hugh Wilford
Basic Books, 384 pp., $35
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the CIA, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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