The CIA: An Imperial History

Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History: Basic Books: New York 2024

Reviewed by Ed McNally

In the historiographical field of intelligence studies, ideological blinkers abound. The standard account in the American case is that the democratic mandate which brought the Central Intelligence Agency into being through the 1947 National Security Act was roundly abused by successive us presidents, who commanded the Agency’s operatives to overthrow foreign governments, assassinate political enemies and extract information through torture, despoiling the foundational tasks of intelligence collection and analysis. This is the story retold in the much-reprinted The cia and American Democracy (1989) and other works by the University of Edinburgh’s Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones. The same basic move is reiterated by notionally more critical historians, such as Richard Immerman in The Hidden Hand (2014), or in punchier prose by the New York Times’s Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes (2007).

Hugh Wilford’s starting point in The cia: An Imperial History marks a welcome departure from all this. He argues that, while much has been written on the history of the Agency, and still more on that of the American empire, there has been little attempt to read them in relation to each other. His aim is to bring the two fields together to advance understanding of both. This is Wilford’s fifth study of the Cold War cia and his broadest to date. Like every historian of the American intelligence service, he has been obliged to circumnavigate the fact that the richest source, the cia’s official archives, remain largely under lock and key.

The method that Wilford has developed to compensate for that has entailed intensive reading of memoirs, private papers and documents from the Pentagon and mi5 to produce granular accounts focused on individual figures at the interface of clandestine political power and cultural practice. British-born, he completed a PhD at Exeter on the milieu of the Partisan Review as it pivoted in the postwar period towards anti-communism and engagement with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The resulting monograph appeared in 1995 under the title The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution; soon after, Wilford relocated to California State University, Long Beach, where he still teaches. His second book, The cia, the British Left and the Cold War (2003), examined the Atlanticism of leading figures of the Labour right such as Gaitskell and Crosland. The Mighty Wurlitzer (2008), Wilford’s best-known book, reconstructed the cultural front organizations through which the cia, as one of its top officials boasted, could play any tune. It was followed by America’s Great Game (2013), examining the brief heyday of the cia Arabists in the 1950s before us Middle East policy cleaved to Zionism.

The cia: An Imperial History dispenses with the myth that the us national-security state was merely a defensive reaction to Pearl Harbor or Soviet expansion. Despite the country’s long history of ‘empire denial’, Wilford writes, the origins of American imperial expansion date back to the settler colonialism of the first European immigrants. A homegrown military-intelligence tradition began with the reports of scouts and spies in ‘Indian country’, consolidated by the Army topographers, reconnaissance forces and hired local agents who made possible the huge landgrab of the 1846 Mexican War. Centralized analysis of information extracted during the interrogation of captured Confederate soldiers and escaped slaves was crucial for the Union victories at Gettysburg and Appomattox. But for Wilford, the crystallization of a modern us intelligence bureaucracy begins with the New Imperialism of the 1890s, coinciding with heightened labour militancy at home. His book opens with a panorama of European colonial-intelligence practice of the period, from British India and the Transvaal to French Indochina, Madagascar and the Rif.

When America entered the stage with its 1898 annexation of the Philippines, it was in some respects replicating its conquest of Indian territory, Wilford argues: forcible relocation, interrogation under torture, indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed populations; but the us also took over the existing Spanish-colonial institutions, police and prison networks. Leading the intelligence effort was a Harvard-educated army officer, Ralph van Deman, politicized in the early 1890s as a violent opponent of the us miners’ strike. In Manila, van Deman took over the records of the colonial police to create a vast card-index of the Filipino resistance, constituting America’s first overseas field intelligence unit while laying the basis for what Wilford calls a colonial surveillance state.

Back home in the 1900s, van Deman lobbied his army superiors to set up a centralized intelligence system, such as Britain was establishing with its Secret Service Bureau. In 1917, as the Wilson Administration geared up for war in Europe, Deman was appointed head of the newly formed us Military Intelligence Service, setting in place a series of divisions—intelligence gathering, translation and cryptography, direction of military attachés at us embassies, security screening for German, Irish and African-American subversives among military and government personnel—borrowed from French and British models.

The imperial experience of this earlier generation of overseas intelligence operatives was crucial for their successors in the 1940s, Wilford argues. First the wartime Office of Strategic Services and then, from 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency, as nerve-centre for American power projection, were staffed by elite Anglophile cohorts, typically educated at Groton and Harvard. Warmly anti-colonial, in the American fashion, and still more fiercely anti-communist, these early cia men, reared on Kipling’s Kim and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, were perfectly at home in the colonnaded villas and ritzy watering holes—Beirut’s Hotel St George, Cairo’s Gezira Sporting Club, Saigon’s Hôtel Continentale—barely vacated by the French and British.

At the same time, Wilford argues that there were structural reasons why the cia played a spearhead role in what he calls America’s ‘covert empire’. His central thesis is that, setting out to manage the new states emerging from European colonial rule, Washington was constrained both by fear of provoking a nuclear war with Moscow and by popular American anti-colonialism; the turn to covert action—using the cia to help prop up pro-us regimes and crush left-sovereigntist forces—was part of the solution…

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ed-mcnally-instruments-of-empire

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