Thanks to Hollywood and TV dramas, we often have a rather unrealistically glamorous and exciting vision of the CIA, though there have also been many tales of its dodgy practices and rogue operations.
The CIA: An Imperial History by British-born history professor Hugh Wilford takes us through the formation and development of the US spy agency, focusing on the individuals and ideas that underpinned its creation.
The central thesis is that the CIA’s founders borrowed much from the age of imperialism, while the US itself has become a quasi-imperial power.
“A variety of social and cultural influences shaped the early CIA — but the imperial impulse was the dominant one,” Wilford writes.
“World War 2 witnessed the culmination of a long-standing interest in British intelligence among elite American men that was part natural, and part manufactured. This ensured that [the CIA] would bear a strong resemblance to the British secret services — which, lest it be forgotten, had been largely created in the first place to defend the British Empire.”
The US was not a visibly strong imperial power, apart from 48 years of colonisation of the Philippines, but its influence — often through the activities of the CIA — has been apparent in its often covert interference in countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
“I place the CIA in the context of modern imperial history, comparing, contrasting, and connecting it with prior colonial intelligence services. In doing so, I hope not only to show the CIA in a different and revealing light but also to say something new about America in the world as a form of covert empire,” Wilford writes.
There is little doubt that the British Empire was strongly influenced by Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling, most notably in his novel Kim, a spy-themed book set in India. Another important influence came through the writings and heroism of TE Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.
However, CIA: An Imperial History notes the very important influence both of these British legends have had on the US as well.
“Kipling, by helping invent a new literary genre, the spy thriller, also contributed to the creation of the actual British secret services. Nor was Kipling’s real-world influence confined to Britain. He was immensely popular in the US as well.
“[Kipling’s] 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,” argues Wilford.
Meanwhile, Lawrence’s military and strategic tactics “would exert a powerful hold on later generations of Western spies, even those who espoused less intuitive, more scientific methods of intelligence gathering and analysis.”
The development of the CIA is told in this book by examining the characters and careers of several key players, starting with the very white, very male Ivy Leaguers, who were there from the start, with a painfully slow progression to a more representative CIA workforce.
This humanises the organisation, but the excess of biographical detail disrupts the narrative flow and makes it a chore to read at times.
We see the CIA’s prominence when the Kennedy administration was grappling with the threats from Cuba’s Fidel Castro — not always with great success.
“JFK nursed a boyish fascination for spies — he loved Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, for example — and his administration continued to reach for the CIA as its preferred weapon in what was now becoming a personal vendetta against Fidel Castro,” we read.
Without providing a definitive answer, Wilford discusses the different theories surrounding Kennedy’s assassination.
He notes: “Many professional historians now acknowledge that the official account of the events leading up to Kennedy’s November 1963 murder, the 1964 Warren Commission Report, was deeply flawed. All the main parties assisting the inquiry — the FBI, CIA, and White House — had reason to withhold potentially vital information. Kennedy administration members feared exposure of the dead president’s chronic illnesses and sex addiction.”
However, there is no conclusion on what role the CIA, or Cuba or anyone else had in the plot against the president. Just a suspicion that the theory of a lone gunman might be inadequate.
Other, less plausible conspiracy theories involving the CIA were that the agency faked the moon landings, and was behind the Watergate break-in.
Africa features, but not prominently, in this tome. There is a discussion of CIA activities in the Congo and of the agency’s influence in Angola.
“Also involved in the Angola conflict was another recipient of covert American backing, South Africa. Although CIA analysts voiced doubts about supporting the apartheid regime, and new US president Jimmy Carter tried to use the agency to force change on South Africa, the CIA tended to work with the white supremacist government in Pretoria and against the anti-apartheid movement. The tip-off that led to the 1962 arrest and 27-year imprisonment of Nelson Mandela came from an undercover CIA officer who suspected the African National Congress leader of being a Soviet agent,” notes Wilford.
He discusses the “boomerang effect” through which the impact of the CIA’s activities overseas bounced back to the US itself, for instance, with the backlash of a student protests against the agency.
On the domestic front, the CIA and the other US intelligence agencies spectacularly failed to predict and prevent the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001.
Its flawed intelligence suggesting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, triggering a war, was another massive bungle.
The global war on terror, a response to the 9/11 attacks, once again placed the CIA “at the cutting edge of American power in the world”.
“Using operational authorities of the sort it had been denied since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s, such as licence to use ‘lethal force’, CIA operatives, in just a little over two months, pursued Al-Qaeda to its hiding place in Afghanistan and helped overthrow the Taliban government that had given it sanctuary.
“Roughly a decade later, the agency also succeeded in hunting down Al-Qaeda’s leader, the Saudi Osama bin Laden, in a hideout in Pakistan, where he had fled from Afghanistan.”
One has to assume that with the conflict in Gaza, the war in Ukraine and — watch this space — the potential Chinese annexation of Taiwan, the world will continue to be infested with trouble spots. If so, the US will continue to need its shadowy operatives — its spies and saboteurs. There may be no actual US empire in the historic sense, but the self-styled leader of the free world will continue to exert its influence.
As Wilford concludes: “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 consequences as during the Cold War and the war on terror.
“Put another way, the imperial history of the CIA is likely not over yet.”
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