This concise history of the Central Intelligence Agency (235 pages before the notes) manages to include nearly all of the agency’s biggest hits and greatest catastrophes, from coups it sponsored in Iran and Guatemala, through its huge covert cultural and political campaigns to defeat communism in western Europe in the 1950s, to its role in the weapons of mass destruction that never existed in Iraq and the torture it conducted during George W Bush’s war on terror.
The author is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor emeritus of American history at the University of Edinburgh, who has written three other histories of the intelligence world. He brings a depth of knowledge that provides innumerable fascinating anecdotes – and supports his very harsh conclusions about the net effects of America’s hugely expensive intelligence apparatus.
It turns out America’s infatuation with expensive espionage goes all the way back to George Washington, who in 1790 cajoled Congress into creating a “Contingent Fund of Foreign Intercourse” so he could pay American spies $40,000. Just three years later this secret fund had exploded to $1m, an astonishing 12% of the federal budget.
The earliest attempt at foreign regime change occurred just two presidents later, when Thomas Jefferson confronted the Barbary pirates who threatened American shipping off the coast of North Africa.
Jefferson financed an attempt to overthrow the ruling pasha in Tripoli, whom he had “identified as a prime instigator of maritime crime”. With the state department carefully staying out of the operation, 10 marines led an army of 400 “insurgents” who “marched 500 miles across the Libyan desert”. Their approach had the desired effect, persuading the pasha to make overtures for peace.
The author traces the bureaucratic origins of the modern CIA back to the Secret Service, created in one of Abraham Lincoln’s final official acts in 1865, through the U1 unit created in the state department to collect peacetime intelligence after the first world war, and J Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, which Franklin Roosevelt tasked with coordinating intelligence in Latin America. “At the peak of its enterprise, the FBI ran 360 agents in the region,” Jeffreys-Jones writes.
America’s modern love affair with the cloak-and-dagger world really took off when the joint chiefs of staff created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to coordinate espionage behind enemy lines from Bulgaria to Scandinavia during the second world war.
In April 1945, a future CIA director, William Colby, led an OSS party that blew up a crucial Norwegian bridge. Hollywood celebrated OSS exploits in movies like Rue Madeleine, starring James Cagney in a heroic role, supporting the French resistance.
The OSS was a “significant classroom for a good number of America’s postwar spies”. But Jeffreys-Jones points out there was a significant downside to such wartime success: it “gave some of those spies false memories of infallibility, entitlement and omnipotence that were out of keeping with the quieter, more thoughtful approach required of the modern intelligence agency”.
Those feelings of entitlement and omnipotence led directly to the two most disastrous CIA operations of the 1950s. The first was the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who aroused Winston Churchill’s fury by announcing his intention to nationalize the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
The British recruited President Eisenhower as a partner and Mosaddegh was quickly deposed, even though he had had “no truck with Soviet overtures”. When the British and Americans installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as a new absolute monarch, “it was like a reverse movie of the American revolution, with George III back in control”.
Next, the CIA targeted Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s’s first democratically elected president. Arbenz announced that he was nationalizing the property of the United Fruit Company so he could distribute it to peasant families. This was a disastrous idea, because the US secretary of state, John Dulles, and his brother Allen, the CIA director, were alumni of United Fruit’s law firm.
The president’s fate was sealed after Joseph Stalin died in March 1953, when Arbenz staged a memorial. The US budgeted $2.7m for regime change. As Jeffreys-Jones puts it: “President Eisenhower’s CIA thus devised what may been the first-ever US program of murder as an official instrument of foreign policy.”
The US-installed dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas, murdered all of his enemies and by 1957 Guatemala was thoroughly destabilized, as it mostly has been ever since.
The role of the CIA in both of these events remained shrouded from the public for many years, and in the late 50s they were still seen as great successes – so much so, the author suggests, that they may have given the CIA false confidence in the prospects for its next great debacle, the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
In 1973, when the CIA participated in the coup that overthrew the Chilean president Salvadore Allende, it was the latest iteration of America’s unspoken policy all over the world after the second world war: “Non-European people were not allowed to chose what so many of them wanted, a little bit of socialism and a little bit of capitalism, together with democracy.”
Jeffreys-Jones points out the irony that this trifecta was actually what the US itself had adopted.
There is a great deal more in these pages, from the CIA’s role in the Vietnam catastrophe to its unwillingness to stand up to Dick Cheney and his hawkish allies when they peddled their phony evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But this is the author’s most important conclusion: the CIA “launched into a program of covert action that proved to be a gradually evolving disaster. It would alienate the majority of the world’s nations, and destroyed America’s claim to moral leadership”.
International policy disasters don’t get any bigger than that.
A Question of Standing: the History of the CIA is published in the US by Oxford University Press USA
