American History Hit - CIA: The History

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

When the Central Intelligence Agency was created by President Truman in 1947, it was the latest incarnation of an American intelligence-gathering service. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones tells Don about the evolution that led to the creation of the CIA and the often controversial covert operations it has undertaken in the name of US national security.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. On the 19th of September 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoldering from the 9-11 terrorist attacks, CIA officer Gary Shrohn stepped into

his boss's office to receive his latest set of orders. Capture Bin Laden, kill him, and bring his head back in a box on dry ice. Within days, Shron and his team became the first Americans on the ground in Afghanistan. Over the next 10 years, intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts was gathered, and a trail was followed through the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which eventually led to a compound in Abadabad, Pakistan. The hunt for bin Laden, who was finally found and killed in 2011, is one of the CIA's most high-profile missions in the history of the organization,

one of thousands of covert, often controversial assignments, carried out in the name of U.S. national security, since the Central Intelligence Agency's inception in post-World War II America. Hello, I'm Don Wilden, and welcome to American History Hit. Today, we're talking about an entity called the agency, the company. Call it what you will, and some have called it much worse. It is a proud, long-standing, off-times, controversial entity of the U.S. federal government, and it's called the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency has existed under that name since 1947, but its roots reach back for centuries because one adage remains true no matter the times, you always need a good spy. Here to report on this covert world of cloak and dagger is Roder Jeffreys Jones, author of 18 books, many of which are focused on American spycraft. Indeed, he is an expert on U.S. intelligence and espionage, and it also happens to be the president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. Roderie Jeffries Jones, welcome to American History Hip. Hi, hi, Don. Glad to be here. My goodness, this would be a program made for you. I hope so.

Why this fascination with snoops, moles, and double agents, and why the Americans in particular? Well, I had godmother, Lily Pinkers, who was a psychiatrist, and she came up with a great deal of psychological curiosity on the premise that what a historian studies is a mirror of himself, but I won't go too deeply into that. What attracted my attention was my interest earlier on in labor history, United States labor history, And one of the things that really struck me was the prevalence of labor espionage conducted by agencies like the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. And one day a friend of mine said all this stuff you're researching is pretty boring, except for this business about spies. Why don't you look into that in particular?

Then I met another friend who said, look in the Stirling Library in Yale, there's an excellent collection of materials about Somerset Morm, the English novelist, was actually a spy at the time of the American Revolution. Why don't you take a look at that? So I wrote an article about Moorm, who turns out to have been paid by the Americans as well as the British because he fell out of the British on account of the fact that he was homosexual. And just at that point, the great scandal about the CIA erupted in the mid-1970s, and I saw an opportunity to write a book that might actually win the interests of a publisher.

And then many after that. You've done extraordinary work in this regard. The story of the CIA, really you can go back to Washington, as you've mentioned. He was famous in his use for spies against the British. He was indeed, yes. He was very interested in that dimension of fighting the war. And furthermore, saw a need to continue with that kind of activity once he'd become president. And the United States and Britain had been at peace for a while, of course.

And he, in fact, had a contingency fund given to him by Congress. for which he had to make no accounting. It was an unvouchered fund, which he employed for the purpose of employing spies. And the proportion of the national budgets that he spent on spying was far greater than what is spent today on the CIA and all the rest of the intelligence community. It doesn't become a more formalized organization or entity within the government, really until the Civil War times under Lincoln. And he was very deliberate as well in his use of intelligence. he begins to turn to the Pinkerton agency. Who are those people?

Well, Alan Pinkerton was an immigrant from Scotland. He emigrated to Illinois in a little town called Dundee, which is just northwest of Chicago. He began to operate as a private detective. Now, Abraham Lincoln came from Illinois, of course, and they became acquainted. So at the outset of the Civil War, Pinkerton was located in Washington, D.C.,

and took on, responsibility for the inauguration of the presidents and learned, he said, that there was a plot to assassinate Lincoln in the city of Baltimore. And he got Lincoln to dress up as a woman, a very tall woman, because Lincoln was six foot four, and to take an earlier train arriving in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration earlier than expected in order to avoid the attention of the assassins who were waiting for him in the railroad station in Baltimore. Now, whether, in fact, this plot existed has always been debated, but it did help to make Pinkerton rather famous.

And in the wake of that, Pinkerton became the main secret service person for General McClellan, who was in charge of the Union forces at the start of the Civil War. But he didn't cover himself in glory, because like McClellan, he tended to exaggerate the numbers of troops that the Confederates had at their disposal. and you could argue that the civil war would have ended much sooner had McClellan and Lincoln realized that the Confederates could be beaten right there and then with the resources at the disposal of the Union. At this time, under Lincoln, it's really an agency called the United States Secret Service, which we have to this day, which was really created also to trace corruption and counterfeiting of currency, of U.S. currency. Again, the same thing, they are still mandated with that same mission today. But the point I'm making is that intelligence agencies have shifted and shaped and morphed into one thing or another throughout all of American history and around the world, of course.

It's not until really World War I that things start to get more controlled. How does that take place during World War I? Well, by the time World War I comes along, you have the Secret Service which continued to operate, having been set up by Abraham Lincoln. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 had set up an additional organization, the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI. So that was up and running. And at the same time, the State Department took an active interest in espionage matters and set up an organization in the office of the Undersecretary of State, which came to be known as U1. U1. U stood for what?

U1. one meant it was the whole number of numbers, one, two, three, four, five, six. And one was a central intelligence agency of his day, which coordinated everything coming in from two, three, four, five, six, from the FBI, from military intelligence in the field in France, once America entered the war. And that's continued in operation until 1926, when it was disbanded as part of the peacetime reaction against all things clandestine in the United States. Some consider spying to be an impolite thing, even within the government, correct?

I mean, it's not protocol of polite society. Well, that's right. And within the State Department, especially, and the State Department tends to recruit gentlemen from certain types of college or has done traditionally. And the attitude there was that spying is left to people who come from a certain social class and are slightly disreputable. You even have an impression of this in Fenimore Cooper's famous novel, which, some people describe as the first novel in American history, the spy, written in 1821, about a revolutionary American spy. And he says that he comes from the kind of class, which people would generally find despicable. So there's that attitude. And that's why the

U1 was disbanded, and so was the American cold-breaking units, the Black Chamber, after that. And indeed, the State Department continued to take this line. It wants to divorce itself from spying because it feels that it has to operate on the base of trust. And if you want to negotiate with foreign countries, foreign officers in other countries, they have to be able to trust you. And if they think you're doing rather suspect things, they're less likely to trust you. And that's the main reason really why the CIA was established as an independent organization which had nothing to do with the State Department. But interestingly, in the 1990s, when Senator Moynihan introduced a resolution into the Senate.

which would have resulted in the abolition of the CIA if it had been accepted. He wanted intelligence to revert to the State Department. But I don't think that the State Department would have been all that keen on it. Yeah. The operative word, when we're talking about CIA, is central. And that is directly related to the fact that there are so many different entities collecting their own intelligence.

All the military branches are employing their own people to look into things. And I suppose over the time of the 20th century, especially, it became more and more necessary to have an agency that was centralizing that information that was coordinating it. But along the way, we move from the UI, which goes through World War I, and then eventually this morphs into what is called the OSS. And that's a direct result of the total failure of intelligence during Pearl Harbor. Yeah, OSS was established just before Pearl Harbor, in fact, and people were thinking in terms of central intelligence by the late 1930s.

But OSS had only just come into existence and couldn't have been expected to preempt Pearl Harbor in 1941. OSS continued through the war. It had an office of research and analysis, which potentially was very important because it analyzed information coming in from all sources

and it's actually hired some really brilliant people to work for it. But one problem in the Second World War that nobody took much notice of what the OSS was sinking. It is a wartime situation, obviously. What the military said carried much greater weight. But the idea settled into people's minds

that something like OSS was needed even in peacetime. So although President Truman, when he took over from Franklin D. Roosevelt on Roosevelt's death in 1945, disbanded the OSS, there was a realization that something would be needed in its stead. It became, especially with J. Edgar Hoover, running the FBI, which is founded sometime before this, a division between domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence. And as far as the foreign intelligence goes, that came and went with different threats and different military challenges with wars and so forth. Much of the foreign

intelligence, the practice of it in the United States was lifted and heavily influenced by the way the British were conducting themselves. Is that right to say? Well, I think the British did have an influence. The British had a long-standing secret service. They also were involved in World War II more than two years in advance of the United States. So by the time the United States started to think about these things, the British had developed their systems quite well. And you find that the British are offering tuition to Americans in a number of ways. For example, there was a place called Camp X on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada, where American secret agents underwent training from the British in the sphere of COVID operations, you know, dropping behind enemy lines

by parachutes and going about their business there. So there was a British teaching input. But on the other hand, I think that sometimes the British influence is exaggerated for a couple of reasons. First, the early CIA tended to be populated by anglophiles, largely drawn from Ivy League colleges, which feel they have a great deal in common with England. And secondly, people were looking for a convincing narrative to explain why America was suddenly able to run a huge intelligence agency like the CIA, having had very little on those lines in the 1930s. And British tuition was a convenient kind of rationale. In consequence of that, people tended to forget organizations like EU-1.

They forgot that Lincoln and before him George Washington had performed an important role, and that there was a very American tradition of spying. Who was Bill Donovan? Wild Bill Donovan, was a character who first takes control of the OSS. Is that right? That's right. Bill Donovan came from an Irish-American background in Buffalo in New York State.

And he was of Irish Catholic ancestry. In fact, his ancestors were involved in the Fenian movement. There was a Fenian attack on Canada. Absolutely. So you could say that he had the kind of terrorist background there. But clearly he went through a transformation. In the First World War, he was a war hero in charge of the fighting Irish, which is composed largely of Irish Americans from New York State.

Then he married into the Protestant establishment and becomes an acceptable figure from the point of view of the WASP element in American politics. But he's still kind of in the wilderness in the 1920s and 30s, but he emerges in World War II as a charismatic leader of OSS. So after World War II, the OSS, obviously a very successful agency in the war, shifts its identity becomes a new kind of agency. Explain to me this transformation and the new title, CIA. OSS had been disbanded, so there's a break in continuity there.

The CIA came into being for distinct reasons. I think it's dangerous to overemphasize the role of the OSS. For example, the CIA was very much the creation of liberals in American politics, and you could regard it as one of the last agencies of the New Deal. You know, when the new dealers had a problem, they created an agency to deal with it. In Truman's view, Truman was a new dealer, President Truman. So there was a problem with the Soviet Union. What do we do about this?

We must create new agencies, a new Department of Defense, reorganized, and let's have a new intelligence agency. So that was parts of the background. That was one distinct train of advocacy, because Truman very early on saw that the Soviet Union was going to be a real, problem for the United States, and it was a Soviet menace which motivated him. The United States had been allied to the Soviet Union, of course, in the Second World War, so it was a big shift. The second strain that goes into it is Pearl Harbor. Now, if you read

the congressional debates, which led to the creation of the CIA, and this is very, very important because the CIA is the first ever democratically sanctioned intelligence agency anywhere in the world. Nowhere else had this ever happened before. So it is important. It is important. what Congress thought. There's no mention of the Soviet Union at all in the congressional debates. They all emphasize Pearl Harbor. Of course, it's fresh in people's minds. The senators and representatives taking part in the debates, some of them had relatives who'd been killed in Pearl Harbor. Many of them had relatives who'd been engaged in battle in World War II, and Pearl Harbor was in the forefront of their minds. Now, this is extremely important, because had the Soviet threats been the only rationale

for the CIA, then Senator Moynihan would have got his way in the 1990s. You know, the CIA is a Cold War institution. The Cold War ends favorably for the United States. Why do we need the CIA anymore? But if you accept that there was a wider rationale, the prevention of any kind of attack, such as the Pearl Harbor attack, then it becomes logical to continue with the CIA from 1990 on when the Cold War is over. I'll be back with more from Roderie Jeffries Jones in just a moment on American History Hit.

It fascinates me because the title, Central Intelligence Agency, speaks to the new role that the United States is playing now in the world. At the end of the World War II, we have suddenly become this gigantic superpower with a far greater reach in the world. Thus, many strands of intelligence coming from all angles. And in order to manage this, one would need a bureaucracy, really, that could sort through all that intelligence. So it seems to me quite obvious that that's the central idea, the central idea of the central. intelligence agency to manage that kind of new role. Well, that's right. Of course, the CIA established intelligence gathering facilities on an extensive scale, basically meaning sending out spies to find out what's going on in the world.

And it is the whole of the world because, as you say, the United States is by now the dominant world of power and needs to find out what's going on literally in every single country in the world. And the CIA had this enormous responsibility to do that. At the same time, the director of the CIA in the period up until 2004 was also the director of the whole of the intelligence community. So his remit was the coordination of information coming in from a vast array of intelligence sources, including military intelligence and including the national security agency, which was set up after the CIA, but the product of code breaking and then of signals intelligence, which the NSA was able to supply, went through the CIO, went through the

CIA as a centralizing channel. And there was a central estimating office run by the CIA called One Office of National Estimates, which is run by very top-notch intellectual people, which analyzed all this information and came up with a coherent set of estimates about what is going on in the world. It's a very interesting agency because they have so many different roles to play. I mean, essentially, they're analysts. They're analyzing enormous amounts of intelligence of information coming from technology as well. as well as human spies. I mean, you have satellite technology coming online in the 60s and all sorts

of new ways of gathering information about your enemies or your allies. And suddenly this group is necessary. That's one aspect of this group. But the other aspect is that it's active. It has this almost military aspect to it. Did they foresee the sort of double role or was that surprise and an evolution in the Central Intelligence Agency? Because it becomes eventually very controversial. It does become controversial, and President Truman, who presided, of course, over the founding of the CIA later on in the 1960s after the Bay of Pigs depart, when the CIA unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba, Truman said, oh, I never intended the CIA to engage in all this skullduggery. It strayed from its original course. But either was getting forgetful or he was being a little bit disingenuous here and trying to cover his tracks as it were, because It was fairly clear from an early stage that the CIA would be engaged in these covert operations as opposed to the covert gathering of intelligence and analysis, which, as you rightly say, is at the core of its activities. But in the drafting of the legislation, they didn't want to specify these covert operations. It just said, and it would perform such other duties as the National Security Council would require it to perform.

And that was kind of catch-all phrase. So the council of the CIA, a guy called Fortimer, said we can come up with the details of that later on. But people like George Kennan, who was very influential in formulating American policy in the early stage of the Cold War, were absolutely convinced that the CIA needed to engage in COVID operations, partly because the other side were doing it. The Soviet Union were doing it. And so there has to be some way of matching this. And that would fall to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was run by ex-OSS guys, such as a William Kobie and so forth. They were used to being active in the field.

That's where they got their reputations. And so they brought that to their leadership. There was a very strong OSS influence on the early CIA, right up until William Casey, Bill Casey, who was President Reagan's director of the Central Intelligence Agency. I think he was the last director of the CIA to have served in OSS. But that's years later, you know, and didn't. In the meantime, lots of OSS guys were there. But I think that's one must remember that they weren't just the activists from OSS, but also the analysts. People like William Langer, who was in charge of the research and analysis units in the OSS,

became the guy who ran ONE at the Office of National Estimates. There were these two sides to OSS, and both ways they had an influence in the CIA. It really is that central fact. I keep using these words that come from the actual title. but it really is that central fact that the identity of this agency has been confusing to the public that has planted the landmines for the agency itself. Let's start with the Bay of Pigs and go on from there because it lasts for my entire lifetime. Bay of Pigs is an interesting problem because they're almost creating the situation for themselves. Here you have all these Cuban exiles who are dying to fight back against Fidel Castro.

That's rich and fertile ground for this kind of effort, for the CIA to come in and recruit from that group, from that population and create its own sort of mini army. And that becomes this effort, this mission to attack Cuba and ultimately fails. The failure of the Bay of Pigs is enormously consequential to the rest of the 1960s and onward for the CIA. Why was that such a debacle? The CIA, you can consider it to be a department in two respects. First, it failed as an operation, and that was a huge shock to the agency, and the director of the CIA Dulles was fired by President Kennedy, as was Richard Bissell, who was one of the most brilliant guys in the CIA,

who was unfortunate enough to be in charge of the bear of pigs' operation, and he got the sack. He was fired as well. So it was a big shock in that regard, and it awoke people's people became aware in the United States that the CIA did this kind of thing. I don't think there's been an awareness amongst the American public previously. But I would point out, you're a young man done,

and your conscience may start with the pay of pigs. I'm a little bit older. There were earlier incidents in Iran and Guatemala, in 53 and 504, when the CIA had overthrown democratically elected governments in these cases. The phrase I'd like to use in relation to those is that it was a case of failure masquerading as success. because within administration circles, oh, that's great, you know, we change these governments, which are left-leaning, we don't like that kind of government, and it's a triumph for American foreign policy. But actually, it is a failure because it alienated the world opinion. I mean, the degree to which the world was alienated is quite drastic. If you take the United Nations, for example, this was a United States creation set up in a conference in San Francisco, headquarters of the UN is in New York.

but by the end of the 1950s, the US had lost its command of a majority in the General Assembly of the United Nations. And the role of CIA operations was considerable in changing opinion. In fact, an American journalist, a man called Thomas Morgan in the 1960s, toured the world and asked people why they were anti-American. And the answer one would expect, and I think he expected it at the time, was what America was doing in Vietnam, because that was pretty unpopular. But no, no, the prime reason that people didn't like the United States was because of the covert operations of the CIA. So what happens in Cuba then is this becomes unstuck and people begin to think, you know, is this a good idea at all?

And subsequently there were other revelations about Chile, for example, the operations of the CIA in Nicaragua leading up to the Iran-Contra, a scandal in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. So, you know, from then on, it's pretty controversial. And I'd say that the COVID operational side of the CIA has had two deleterious effects. One is it's affected the standing of the United States worldwide. And I think that's a tragedy because the United States should hold a winning hand in present circumstances. It's faced by two autocracies, which historically were able to offer an alternative ideology, or way of organizing things, socialism, but both Russia and China have abandoned that, essentially.

China has a name, but not in reality. So United States should have a winning hand, and to engage in irresponsible operations which calumify the name of the United States and therefore of democracy, I think is not a great thing. And secondly, I think the deleterious effect has been on the CIA itself because these operations have become controversial

in the United States, a lot of people have kind of begun to distrust the CIA, and the CIA really needs the backing of the American people. That's why it became so potent in 1947, because it was created by democratic mandates. If it loses the confidence of the American people, begin to say, well, should we listen to the analysts? You know, so the misdeeds of the covert operators

make the position of the analysts much more difficult in persuading the White House that they're correct in their interpretation of how things run. It's safe to say that that distrust lasted all the way throughout the 70s and into the 80s, certainly with the Iran-Contra affair. But it all changes when the Cold War ends and suddenly a new enemy arises, which is the war on terror. How completely did the CIA shift its focus? I mean, was it able to make that jump effectively, do you think? Well, I think that was clearly a big change in focus, but the CIA was already

alert to the fact that it would have to have alternative missions following the collapse of communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War. So the path was open for it to develop a capacity against another threat to the United States. In terms of what it achieved, it had set up a special unit by the end of the 1990s under the direction of a man called Shoya to look into the activities of Al-Qaeda. And they were already focusing on Osama bin Laden, Of course, one of the masterminds behind the 9-11 attack. So the CIA was, I think, operating on the right channels. The problem is that people like Shoya were not being listened to.

I mean, Shaya would be the first person to tell you this. And he published two influential books. One was the biography of Bin Laden. And the other came out anonymously in 2004. It was called Imperial Hubris. And he argued that nobody's listening. His analysis was this, that terrorism gains a sustenance. from injustice. And the United States should be addressing that injustice and what's happening

to Muslims in the world and what's happening to Arabs in the world, rather than simply emphasizing kind of quasi-military retribution and policies of that kind. And he pointed, for example, to the United States' alliance with the Saudi regime in Saudi Arabia to the inactivity of the United States in helping the Palestinian cause. He said issues like this make Arabs and more widely make Muslims. a little world very angry, and that's why these terrorists are able to draw support and sustenance. Roger, your book, your new book, is called A Question of Standing, History of the CIA. Explain that title, because I think it figures centrally into the story. Well, I think that I see a problem with the standing of the CIA.

As I mentioned, the problem of COVID operations has a bearing on this. What do people think of the CIA? How much weight does its opinion carry? and this is especially important where the analysts are concerned, because the analysts can give good advice, as in the case of Michael Shire that I just mentioned, but if nobody listens to you, then that's all gone to waste. But it's not just COVID operations that have a bearing on standing. There is, for example, the disposition of the President of the United States.

So President Trump, for example, was simply not disposed to listen to things that the CIA was saying. there's the capability of the president. The president may be willing to try to listen to what the CIA is saying, but if you can't understand it, then that's not much good. There are the political priorities of the president. Is he always going to take the easier political course of action, even if he knows that the CIA is giving him good advice? Another way in which standing is important is that CIA needs to be in good standing

with the American people, partly because he needs their political support. support, but also because the CIA needs to recruit the best people and it needs to command the support, for example, of women and minorities in order that it can recruit from those people, not just from the point of view of getting the best talents, but also the people best suited to the job, for example. At the time of 9-11, there were 100,000 Arab speakers in the country, mainly Christian Arabs, but they weren't properly exploited as translators, and that was one of the problems. Another aspect of that is when you send people into the field as spies, I mean, it's no good. I mean, this has actually happened in the 50s and 60s. You send a white man to a black country

in Africa and you try to get them to pass as an Angolan or a Congolese and it's just not going to work. If you get someone who looks like people there, preferably speaks the same language, understand the same culture, then that is helpful as well. And of course, you need to command the support of Congress for reasons of budgets. And in these days of congressional oversights, you must be in good standing in the sense of being able to persuade them that you're doing the right thing. But the primary duty of the CIA is to answer to the president directly. Am I right? That's the line of command, yes. Yeah. And so their effectiveness depends on how that president views their intelligence or needs their intelligence and then puts it to good

use or bad. It really depends on how the president uses the CIA. That's correct, yes. So we can look at the mishaps. We can now call them. That's a gentle word for it, of course, over my lifetime for certain. I'm thinking of the newsreel that I used to watch when I was a kid of Aende being ousted from Chile and the jet fighters coming in, all of which was coordinated by the CIA. Where's the chicken and the egg? You know, with what they have been known to do historically, were they the egg that was laid by the president? Yeah, that's a good question. And in the aftermath of the Aienti episode that you just mentioned, it became a hot topic. CIA came under investigation at the time when there was a Republican president, Richard Nixon,

who was rapidly becoming unpopular because of Watergate and all the rest of it. And the Democrats were being accused by the Republicans of making a party political points. in pointing out to the misdeeds of the CIA under a Republican president. So the Republicans very astutely said, well, let's take the story back to an earlier time when we had Democratic presidents. And let's have a look at Kennedy and the way in which he authorized the assassination of President Lumumba in the Congo and Trujillo and Castro. Perfidiousness is not the monopoly of Republicans. Now, Senator Church, who was in charge of the major Senate investigation into the CIA, had decided that he had a solution which should take the party political sting out of that.

And he said the CIA was a rogue elephant, but it was rampaging out of control. That is, that when it did extreme things, such as toppling the government of Chile, resulting in the deaths of the president of Chile, then this was the CIA doing bad things on its own initiative and nothing to do with the White House. And some cynical people said, well, that's because he wants to increase his chances in the presidential run.

He wants to appear to be above politics, so that may be a little bit unkind to Senate's Church. But when we look at this more carefully, I think that historians are agreed that that was just untrue when Senator Church had to withdraw that remark in the end. You will find a very small number of cases where the CIA exceeded its authority.

For example, It was ordered to destroy its case of poisons in the 1970s, put together by its health alteration committee, a name straight out of George Oral. So under congressional pressure, it agreed to destroy these poisons, but in fact it did not do so. That, however, is an exception. And when you look at episodes such as the undermining of the Chilean government, that's orders straight from the White House. Now, there are still many cases where you can't really prove what happens because the president is protected at all times from apparent liability for misdeeds. In the case, for example, of torture, which is a big controversy in the earliest of the current century, where does the responsibility lie? I think it didn't lie with the CIA, that's for sure.

The CIA was involved in the process, as were private firms like Blackwater and also the military. But the order for that kind of thing would normally be expected to come from the White House, but nobody can prove that President Bush gave that order. And that's because there's always a circuit-breaking mechanism, as they call it, in operation. These operations have to be non-attributable to the American presidents. The reputation of the CIA undergoes the same phenomenon as that which affects the military. It's a rubber band effect, political and public perception of their effectiveness and their goodwill. or bad will, it all sort of changes over time, goes back and forth. The war on terror, triggered,

of course, by 9-11, employs, you know, suddenly there's incredible unity around that national effort and that military effort to react to that and therefore goodwill in all directions. However, that ends up being an enormously difficult situation. Roder, tell me about the weapons of mass destruction controversy in the misuse of the information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Well, here was the accusation against Saddam Hussein, who was the leader of Iraq at the time, and was widely regarded as a kind of mini-Hittler of the Middle East, a very unsavory character. And he was known to have had plans earlier on to develop both chemical weapons, which one form of mass destruction weapon and nuclear weapons, also a mass destruction kind of weapon. So WMD is short for that. When

the Bush administration was under pressure in the wake of 9-11, and they wanted to do something to end the threat of terrorism. They saw a particular threat coming from Iraq, and they decided they want to institute regime change in Iraq. They thought that Hussein was behind some of the terrorist episodes, and they decided that they needed the case for invading Iraq, which would be pretty strong with the American public. And clearly, it would have a huge influence on opinion in America if it could be shown that Iraq was actually threatening Americans with a nuclear strike.

I think the logic in the administration was that simply to say that he has a bad guy and he's a mini-Hittler operating locally wouldn't have washed, you know, the American people wouldn't have thought that was a good justification of going to war. So they wanted this kind of exaggerated rationale for doing so and they turned to the CIA and asked them to find out evidence to show that he had weapons of mass destruction. But in the meantime, the United Nations had a mission on the ground,

and they were concluding that while he may have had a program in the past to develop nuclear weapons, he'd seen the foolishness of that ambition and had given up that program. The CIA, however, was put under so much pressure that in the end it sanctioned the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the invasion of Iraq went ahead with some fairly disastrous consequences. One can only picture the craziness in those offices of analysts who have collected information they may or may not be sure of, and administration personnel bargaining with them about the meaning of this information. The reputation improves enormously in the war on terror and the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Was that a CIA operation?

Well, I think the CIA deserves a huge amount of credit for pinpointing the whereabouts of bin Laden. And so the answer is yes, it was a operation. There are a couple of controversies here. One is the role that torture may have played, did they get information leading to the determination of his whereabouts in Abbottabad and Pakistan by torturing people? And the jury's out on that one. I think the balance of evidence is no, torture didn't play a part. Anyway, that's one controversy. Now, the operation itself was actually kinded out by seals.

These are specialists, naval commandos. but they have to be sheep-dipped and before the operation that is given CIA identities because America wasn't at war with Pakistan and had not informed the leaders of Pakistan the operation was going to take place

so if anything went wrong that people involved would have to be portrayed as some kind of irresponsible civilian group and nothing to do with the American military so there was a strong military elements in the episode another controversy rises is over

where the Pindaten should have been taken alive Roder, tell me about the phenomenon of extraordinary rendition. What is the factor of torture in the CIA story? Yeah. Extraordinary rendition is a polite word for kidnapping. And the problem was that – and it was aimed at terrorists or suspected terrorists. Of course, not all of them turn out to be guilty, but it was aimed at people who were strongly suspected of terrorist activities who lived in countries where extradition wouldn't have worked. So what do you do in a case like this?

You simply kidnap them, take them off the streets, even in the country like Italy. One suspect was placed under the apprehension and pushed off to a dark site as it was called in Cairo in Egypt. And Italy was, of course, a friendly country, but there was some doubt as to whether they would have agreed to extradite by legal means, this particular suspect. So it's of its nature a controversial procedure. America likes to protect an image of being a legal country which abides by the principles of international law but when you're faced with an extraordinary situation and you're faced also with an enemy in al-Qaeda

and fundamentalist extremism which is not actually tied to an individual country. So the normal procedures that you have about extradition that is extraditing someone from one country to another don't seem to apply. So that's the logic behind it. So these people were extradited But the trouble was if you extradited them to the United States, then American civil liberties would apply.

And probably they would have been released straight away on procedural grounds. Lack of evidence. Lack of evidence because the CIA has to keep secret the kind of evidence at its disposal. So the alternative was to incarcerate them in what we're called black sites, black because they're secrets, located in various countries like Egypt, Poland and so on. And there they were subjected to what is called enhanced interrogation. Now, in the eyes of many people, enhanced interrogation which involved things like waterboarding was a form of torture.

That is, of course, debated by its defenders. Another place they were expedited too, of course, was Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It's an incredibly enduring organization that has been on such a roller coaster ride throughout the 20th and 21st century. Where do you think it will land? Do you think that this organization will sustain or continue to change? It will continue to change. for sure. And any organization like that needs to change in order to survive. For example,

under President Obama, there was a director of the CIA called John Brennan, and he introduced a complete new division within the CIA, which is the first time for many years. This kind of reform had been taking place. It was a digital division to take care of counter-espionage against cyber warfare and all rest of it. I mean, you have to make these changes. And in recent years, the necessity to be on the watch against Moscow and the dealings in the Kremlin has again become important. That kind of capability was run down in the aftermath of 9-11, especially, but it's undergoing a revival, of course. So there has to be change all the time. But as to the durability of the CIA, I personally think that's guaranteed. I mean, think of the alternatives, that is,

think of the alternative, which is not having the CIA, and think about the durability of the CIA, and think of all the perils that the world faces, even if you have your reservations about some of the ways in which the CIA has operated in the past, I think given that stark choice of having the CIA and not having a CIA, you'd have to take leave of your senses, really, to say that we don't need it. Roderoy Jeffrey Jones, the author of Question of Standing, History of the CIA being released on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the CIA. This is a timely book.

It's an incredibly readable book that will take you from the... surprising origins to our present day, including some of the questions that we all have and wonder about the CIA's identity and its role in our society. Thank you so much, Roder. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.