American History Hit - What If There Were No CIA?

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

The Agency. The Company. Langley.Without the Central Intelligence Agency, would we talk about conspiracy theories as much as we do? Who would be in power in Guatemala? What about Iran? Would the Bourne films ever have been made?Don is joined by Jeffrey Rogg to discuss what would have happened had the CIA never been founded. Jeff is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. His book is The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The hum of machines merges with the drone of human toil. We're deep inside the nerve center of a shadow entity, one built on secrecy and information, torrents of it, procured for analysis. Here inside Langley, headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, the geopolitical world is studied and shaped. Wars are triggered. triggered, regimes toppled, revolutions kindled and extinguished. Every nation decides on what it needs to know and what it doesn't. After World War II, America decided it needed to know just about

everything. And from that fateful decision, the CIA was born. But what if we didn't need to know? What if we lived without the intelligence, the information, the granular detail? Without an eye and ear and satellite trained on what was happening on every square foot of the earth that might affect the world beyond our shores. Would America then have been a freer, safer place, or one that was just blind and far more dangerous? Hello, greetings. You're listening to American history hit. I'm Don Wildman. The 20th century is often called the American century. After victory in World War II, the United States and her allies ushered in a new world order managed by innovative, governmental and military organizations largely of our own design, intended to promote peace and stability among

nations. This new, globally focused leadership required the creation of a new agency, one that would operate in secrecy, investigating, surveilling, even conspiring to advance American interests abroad. For a nation with a deep tradition of transparency, this marked a radical departure. Nonetheless, in 1947, under Harry Truman's administration, the entity was born and named the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. It would become one of the most powerful and controversial institutions in modern history, shaping coups, wars, and foreign policy for decades to come. So what if it hadn't existed? What if America had entered the Cold War without a CIA, without the hidden hand guiding, sometimes misguiding, sometimes misguided? our role in the world? What if the CIA had never been invented? It's a question we'll ask of our

guest today. Jeffrey Rogg, senior research fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, author of a new book, The Spy and the State, The History of American Intelligence, a full history of the American intelligence community back to the Revolutionary War, published this past summer by Oxford University Press. Dr. Rogg, Jeff, nice to meet you. Thanks, Don. It's great to be with you. The what-if question. Can someone sometimes be a gimmick, I admit. But in this case, it's useful, I think. The CIA was built to operate in the shadows. Its work hidden from the public, it was intended to serve. But 80 years down the line, one way we can account for this agency's mission is to imagine if it

hadn't done what it had done. So let's try that today. Sound good? Sounds good. Okay, first let's define exactly what the central intelligence agency is. Obviously, it's the foreign intelligence, counterintelligence organization of the U.S. government. But under what branch of government does this exist? That's the key, actually, Don, is, it's interesting because when the CIA was created, we didn't have an independent intelligence organization. So, you know, we have independent executive departments. You have like the Department of Justice and underneath it you have the FBI. Then we have different military intelligence organizations and they're under Department of Defense. Now the Department of War actually recently. But we didn't have an intelligence organization that existed by itself. And that was a big problem because all these other organizations were reporting directly to a larger department, and then it had to find its way up to the president to the United States. And so how do you get intelligence directly to the person who needs it most, the president of United States? And that was one of the issues the CIA was designed to solve. Interesting. I mean, we're going to get into the, I'm sure, a conversation about expansion of executive power,

which has a lot to do with. But it also has to do with the whole reorganization of the military in general after World War II, right? The Pentagon is a big part of that. Well, that's right. And so one of the issues with the creation of the CIA is it was created as part of the National Security Act of 1947. And the CIA was just one piece of that, a bigger piece of that and arguably the one that was really consuming a lot of the attention of the president and Congress was the creation of the Department of Defense. And so, you know, some intelligence historians look at it and we say, well, the CIA probably needed a bit more attention than Congress was actually able to give it at the time as part of that bigger bill. It's so in the news these days, Department

of Defense now renamed the Department of War. I mean, so much of what these guys had learned in World War II was about the different orientation and really preemption of problems. The whole reorganization had a lot to do with that. And so did the CIA, right? That's right. And if you look at the National Security Act, it was really about coordination, coordinating U.S. national security. So we coordinate defense through the Department of Defense. We brought together the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, which was created as part of that act. Then you brought together the policy apparatus with the National Security Council. The last piece, the missing piece was we had this just absolutely chaotic group of competing intelligence organizations,

and we really needed to coordinate intelligence. So that's where the CIA comes in, a central intelligence agency to coordinate American intelligence. It's not a law enforcement organization, like the FBI. It doesn't go out and arrest people. Who are they watching? What information are they collecting? Well, that's a really, really key piece to the whole debate over the CIA. One of the things that concerned Congress most at the time was, was this going to be, and this what some people called it, an American Gestapo, which in the immediate memory of the Second World War, I mean, that sounds horrible to the American people. And there were even newspaper articles at the time saying that there was this plan to create a super spy agency. And so when Congress creates the CIA,

it's actually, it was debated because it wasn't originally in the act, but it's written in the act that the CIA wouldn't have domestic police powers. It wouldn't have law enforcement powers. But what we did need is we needed someone to collect foreign intelligence. And especially we mean that espionage, human intelligence. And so we didn't have that at the time, a dedicated foreign intelligence organization to collect human intelligence. So the CIA steps in there with the, you know, really strict restriction that it wouldn't do intelligence collection in the United States on American citizens. Yeah. I mean, this all grows out really of the OSS, isn't it? What they learned running the OSS is what gets applied to the CIA, as I understand it. Sure. And the OSS,

so the Office of Strategic Services is created during the Second World War. But there was a lesser known organization that came right before it. And that was called the Office of the Coordinator of Information. And it pre-existed the OSS, but did a lot of the same things. And both organizations were ran by the same person, William Wild Bill Donovan. He's, you know, a character like out of a comic book, larger than life. But he runs the OSS and he really did want to run the CIA. And he's kind of cut out of it as part of this really bitter bureaucratic dispute that creates the CIA. And that includes a lot of personal rivalries that Donovan had, including with someone that we all know, J. Edgar Hoover, who was leading the FBI at the time. I'm sure we'll mention the names the Dulles's.

Yes. Folks go into D.C. They have no idea what Dulles Airport really is named for, but they are central to the central intelligence agency. Okay. So this is the time we need to pivot. We begin our hypotheticals here. How could the United States have thrust itself upon the world stage without knowing what our adversaries and allies were doing? That's kind of the question we're asking here. There would have been major opposition of U.S. government departments in the 1940s. It's easy to imagine everybody saying, no way, we're not doing this. We're marching off into this future without this. The FBI would have been the focus of things, wouldn't they?

Sure. And so, you know, the great thing about trying to have this hypothetical of what if there was no CIA is, there's plenty of evidence from before there was a CIA. And before there was a CIA, we were sort of looking for our place in the world. If you think about it, before the Second World War, you know, we were. involved in the rest of the world, First World War, you know, it's kind of like, what should the U.S. role be? And we decide after the First World War, well, you know what, that was a little bit too much for us. So let's pull back. But, you know, as Trotsky said, you might not care about war,

but war cares about you. And so immediately before the Second World War, it was clear to FDR, to Franklin Donald Roosevelt, that he didn't really know enough about what was going on in the world. And so he had all these other people collecting intelligence for him. He had like his own private intelligence network of people that he knew from his own class in the Northeast. He also had intelligence organizations. There was the Office of Naval Intelligence. There was the FBI at the time. And there was Army intelligence. But again, there was no dedicated foreign intelligence service. And we were also getting something else, signals intelligence. The problem was, as we know, Pearl Harbor hits us out of nowhere. And it's this major, major intelligence failure. And so

that failure makes it clear to... to everyone and the American people at the time, you really need to have warning. You need to know what's going on in the world. And so this is a big, big piece that alerts everyone in the U.S. that we need a central intelligence organization. It's going to be a question of scale. I mean, that's what's going to happen in the 20th century, never mind. You know, everything gets so big and sprawling and that's really the issue. Because, of course, we're dealing with a major adversary here as the 1950s open up. I mean, we're dealing with Joseph Stalin and the KGB. we need the capability to buy with these guys.

And as you're suggesting, this would have all been picked up by those separate military intelligence agencies in coordination, I suppose, with the FBI and local police, all of what existed before the 1940s, which probably wouldn't have been enough, you know, as far as the collection goes. You nailed it already, Don, and that's what the funny thing is, is, you know, you're kind of sitting here spinning out what would we have done without a CIA and you actually established it. So there was something called the Interdepartmental Intelligence Committee. And who was it made of? The FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence, and Army Intelligence, G2. So you already yourself created what we tried to do before there was a CIA. And the problem was this interdepartmental intelligence committee, as it was called, it tried to coordinate intelligence, but none of those organizations were really doing foreign espionage.

They were kind of dabbling with it with defense attaches. Hoover was mainly focused on domestic subversion, and that includes both communist and fascists. And they had to coordinate with each other. And what we found out is coordinating with competing figureheads doesn't really work out all that well. So, you know, it's kind of funny in this conversation because you're trying to think of what to do. And you came up with what we did before there was a CIA. The KGB wasn't created until 1954. That was surprising to me when I looked into this. That's seven years after the CIA. So what intelligence capabilities did the Soviets have that were threatening us? So the Soviets actually had intelligence

organizations before the really famous one we all know about, the KGB. They had the MGB, they had the OGPU, they had the NKVD, and so they always had intelligence too. And the U.S. knew about it because in some cases, we even worked with them during the Second World War. Now, Hoover and the FBI hated that, but the OSS did. And that's important because it kind of poisons the OSS at a time when we were looking ahead to fighting the Soviets. And that's one reason why the OSS was disbanded, because it had been compromised even by the NKVD. And so, you know, we knew going into the Second World War. The U.S. knew. knew all the policymakers knew that we were going to have this Cold War. And they knew that part of it, a big, big part of it was going to be intelligence. Exactly. There are so many

Cloak and Dagger episodes in the 80-year history that we're talking about here. But let's just take a few particularly unsavory ones and talk about how those events might have transpired without the CIA. We'll start with this one. 1953 to 1973. Long stretch of time there. There was M.K. Ultra, which is a really famous, you know, notorious program. It's the CIA mind control and interrogation program that used drugs and psychological techniques. This is kind of the program that's referred to in the Jason Bourne novels, you know, all those Matt Damon movies.

Why did this become and how such a scandal? Oh, that's a great one. And, you know, when you talk about what if there was no CIA? you know, the first thing that came to my mind is, who would everyone blame for when everything goes wrong in the United States? You know, and I don't mean just mean the conspiracy theorists. I mean presidents, members of Congress, the media, the American people even. And we all, when we think about the CIA, you know, there's certain big ticket items. NK. ULTRA is one of them. One thing that I want to mention for the listeners, so they understand.

So MK.A. Ultra is a kryptonim. The first two letters, the MK, stand for either a region or a CIA division. And then the second part of it is a code word. So when you read CIA documents, you'll see these cryptonyms. And so M.K. Ultra is one of them. M.K. Ultra was born out of our knowledge that the Nazis had experimented on prisoners of war. The Soviets had done it. The Chinese and the North Koreans experimented, including interrogated American prisoners war during the Korean War. And so, you know, you always say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. One of the reasons for M.K. Ultra was we wanted to know how to help our people.

people resist interrogation. But, you know, on the other side of the coin, there's always two sides. It was, and how can we interrogate people better? So the purpose behind MK Ultra was how can, and this is intelligence, you know, at its, I guess, most dangerous level is how do you manipulate people? How do you get them to do what you want? And so kind of what we talk about with MK Ultra is we used drugs. The U.S. was using drugs on people who knew they were test subjects and people who didn't. It involved famous figures and prisoners, actors, students. There were universities involved in it. And so, you know, M.K. Ultra really is a dark chapter because when we look back on it, you know, it's human experimentation. And the idea of, oh, well, can we train someone to assassinate

other people for us? So, you know, this is in our minds, and this is why I said, you know, who would the conspiracy theory is blame it? There was no CIA. This is like the darkest use of intelligence. But I should also mention, you know, the Army had worked on this before, too, at Fort Dietrich. And so even if there was no CIA, and I think this is going to be a common strand in our conversation, a lot of what the CIA does, it either does in combination with other organizations, or it takes over from other organizations, something they were already working on, or more fundamentally than that, it was something that someone in the U.S. government was going to work on one way or another. That's where the intention of this agency

really gets, you know, murky because on one hand, it's invented for an obvious reason, which is we're in this new world with real big adversaries who have equal weaponry, et cetera. We have to watch them. But on the other hand, we start to manipulate events in our realm, you know, at home and abroad. I walked us right into the swamp there with M.K. Ultra, of course. But that's what really gets us in trouble in the 70s or the CIA in trouble in the 70s with

the church committee and so forth. How was that uncovered? So, great question. And you mentioned something important, which is what did we want the CIA to do? And the answer comes before it, which is with the OSS and that other organization I mentioned, the office of the coordinator of information, Donovan's answer to this was we wanted to do everything. One stop shop for all things intelligence. We want to collect foreign intelligence through espionage. We want to do what's called all source intelligence analysis, bring it all together and coordinate it. We also, though, however, want to act. And that's covert action. And so when the. Second World War ended and the OSS was disbanded. Part of the problem with fighting the Soviet Union was, how are we going to fight this shadow war? Who's going to do it?

And so when the CIA is created, the Army and the Navy, Department of Defense, the State Department, they don't have really the capabilities. They don't have the people overseas who are already sort of pre-positioned. And they also don't have the stomach for it. And so this is the interesting part. There's this organization called the Office of Policy Coordination, OPC. And I know that sounds boring, doesn't it? Office of Policy coordination.

That was really the covert action wing. And it was put under the CIA, but it was actually overseen and directed from the State Department. And during war, it would be by Department of Defense. Because the whole idea is the State Department and the Department of Defense wanted to sort of pull the strings on covert action, but they didn't want to be accountable for it. Guess who they wanted to be on the hook for it. The CIA. And so this is, I think, another trend that we need to remember. when it comes to the CIA is the CIA gets almost all the blame always, but there's other

policymakers, there's other departments of government that are involved in this. So to answer the question, though, how did everyone find out? So the church committee hearings and basically this just gigantic expoise of all the misdoings of the CIA comes to light through domestic intelligence that the CIA was not supposed to be doing. We already said it's written in the act. No police powers, state of our business here. Instead, there was a program, another cryptonym called called MH Chaos, and this was a CIA domestic intelligence operation. It involved spying on civil groups. And the idea was originally when it was created, was there a connection between foreign states and domestic subversive groups? That was the concern. Now, the interesting thing is,

even early in that program's history, it couldn't establish a connection. You know, the Soviet Union wasn't pulling the strings of, for example, the Black Panthers. But that was the concern. Things sort of spin out of control, and the CIA is spying on a American citizens, and as we know, we can't really keep a secret in this country. So Seymour Hirsch gets wind of it. And in December 1974, he writes this big exposition in the New York Times saying CIA is doing domestic intelligence. Well, that's when the dam breaks. And so not only do we find out that the CEO is doing domestic intelligence, but there was this dossier, and it was called the family jewels. And it was basically the CIA, the, you know, all the dirty things

they were doing, including documents like MK Ultra that were supposed to have been destroyed. And, you know, again, this is the U.S. government, so not everything's destroyed. And this is when it comes to light that the CIA had done domestic intelligence, mind control experiments, engaged in coups, assassination plots, all of it. It's really the birth of what becomes so cynical in the 70s, isn't it? All that time when we realize, you know, I'm a young guy at that point and one's worldview is being shaped. And you realize this is a superpower country you live in that has to operate on a level that other countries might not have to and therefore have these agencies and these agencies and these. behavior, governmental behaviors that are actually necessary. That's where cynicism comes in. Are they necessary or not? You compare this to a time when we weren't being so, you know, shadowy, and you

sort of hanker for that kind of feeling of a country that's more transparent. But this is the new age, and here we go. So this whole thing gets mixed up with the domino theory of communism taking over the world. And this is certainly very important in our own hemisphere. This is where the CIA really gets active versus observational. We'll start and talk about two places, Guatemala and Iran, which are so far apart in so many ways, but very similar in terms of the activist role that CIA begins to play in staging coups. Let's start with Iran. In 1953, it's called Operation Ajax. What was that intended to do and how would the result have been different without the CIA? You know, both Guatemala and Iran, you see sort of related pieces. And you mentioned already the domino theory. That's what

going on through people's minds. The Cold War is a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, not a hot war or a cold one, but it's also a war between those competing ideas, communism, and American-style democracy. And so in Iran and Guatemala, you have two leaders, Mohamed Osadok in Iran and Jakobo Arbens in Guatemala, and both of them are nationalizing major sectors of the economy. Now, remember, this is also the post-colonial period. And so these states that had existed with colonial powers or authorities or foreign states that sort of preyed upon their economies, now they have the ability to sort of take back their economies. But in nationalizing these sectors, you have two very important things happening. First of all, it all looks a little bit socialist.

Secondly, though, it's affecting other economies, including the U.S. economy. And so in Iran, the threat of nationalizing oil really irks the British and the Americans. And so the idea is we need to get rid of Mossadegh. And there had been a communist party in Iran, the two-day party, but Mossadegh wasn't really working in them, but we were really worried if we get rid of Mossadek, then is the Communist Party going to take over? Now, you know, the interesting thing is there's a debate now among historians. How much did the CIA actually do? And when you look back on it, the CIA did train anti-communist forces and prepare them, make agreements, you know, just so the two-day party wouldn't get in charge of it after Mossadegh was thrown out. But it also didn't really

do much. It kind of agitated. The will was kind of already there in the Iranian parliament. And the other big pieces, if the CIA didn't exist, MI6, this is the British Secret Intelligence Service, and I'm speaking to from London, but they had already planned to do this anyways. And so they kind to get the CIA on board. But you know how we talked about like if the CIA didn't do it, someone else would? It was already in the works really for the British and the Americans, you know, it's something that we kind of pick up and run with. And in both cases, when you look back, on it, they didn't really do all that much to make things happen. This is a good moment of digression because the Americans envy MI6, don't they?

At the beginning of all this, they want to be like these guys. And you see the dullest, you know, with a pipe in his mouth and all that stuff. And it reminds you of these sort of patrician guys in MI6 who throughout World War II were creating this model, which then, of course, gets parodied with James Bond and all that. But it really was a model for the Americans, wasn't it? That's right. And so going back to those earlier organizations, the OSS and the COI, Donovan actually, Wild Bill Donovan went on two tours of Britain before the Second World War. Now, the Brits were already fighting the Second World War, but he comes over in 1940 and goes on a tour and the British roll at the red carpet for him. And one of the reasons why is the British knew that American intelligence wasn't up to the task. And so they sort of steered Donovan. And Donovan, I mean, he liked what he was seeing. He watched the commandos. He spoke to the heads of British intelligence. And that's why he wants to do everything when he comes back. But, you know, in a lot of ways, the influence of the British on American intelligence,

now they didn't create our system for us, but there were influences there. And especially when it came to the creation of the CIA, you know, this idea that we're going to pull together special intelligence operations like, you know, collection, foreign espionage, propaganda. We're going to do commando activities and covert action. We're going to have a counterintelligence component. Yeah, There's a British influence there certainly. Yeah, there's a chess game in your head at that point. And that's why you get, you know, smiley's people and all that John LeCarran novels because there's such a head element to this, which is, you know, frightening, but scary and important.

The fact is the British could not act alone in this situation. They lacked the military resources that the United States obviously had after World War II. This was key. And taking action in, say, Iran was necessary to have the Americans involved. And the other piece that the British had, then this is the legacy, and, you know, sometimes this is where the CIA gets brought in with the British and smeared is, you know, the British were a colonial power. And the idea is when they left their intelligence assets in place, it kind of seemed like it was like post-colonial still trying to tinker under the table where, you know, in some cases, and I can think of, for instance, Thailand, for example, the ties rather worked with the Americans because they were worried about what the British would do after the Second World War. They were worried. They were worried about colonialism. And so, you know, America, it's funny because the thing we had going for us is we weren't a colonial power, we were anti-colonial even. But at the same time, by sort of picking up the pieces where the British left off, now the U.S. and specifically the CIA gets branded as this like post-colonial secret intelligence organization that's going to sort of like make America an empire too.

And that's been written about. It's the militarization of the CIA, isn't it? ostensibly was not invented for this, but that's under Truman. And then it switches to Eisenhower, who of course is a military man. And therefore, it starts to get used in that regard, right? Yeah, the paramilitarization, maybe we might say. And, you know, again, that's one of the interesting things. When the CIA was debated, one of the conversations was, would the director of central

intelligence be a military officer or not? And there was a debate over whether he should or shouldn't. And it turns out that they did have military officers, even up to the present, military officers can be the director of central intelligence. But you know, you mentioned Eisenhower, and Eisenhower looks at what he did during the Second World War. And, you know, he was briefed on everything. And so when he is the president, he knows we need to figure out ways to counter the Soviet Union. And one of the things that he's promising the American people also at the time is, you know, this is also after the Korean War.

We need to build back our economy. we still need to confront the Soviet Union. How are we going to do that? We don't necessarily want to do it with, you know, a massive conventional war in Europe. And so that's a good thing for the CIA to do. Fight the shadow cold war. And then we'll then we'll fight war on the cheap. That problem of doing things on the cheap keeps getting the CIA in trouble with covert action because different presidents come into office and think, I'm going to use the CIA. I'm going to use covert action and I'm going to accomplish all my policy goals on the cheap. staging coups, you know, they didn't invent that idea. But with the resources at hand, they think they can perfect it. I think that's kind of my take on this. I mean, just putting the nail in Operation Ajax. Without the CIA, Musa stays in power longer, for sure. Iran's oil dispute might have been resolved through negotiation, one can imagine. The State Department much more involved, economic pressure, sanctions, whatever. But essentially, you know, we don't have the Shah taking over. We don't have all these things. that happen as cleanly as they do historically anyway throughout the 50s. It's a whole different thing. I mean, you can play that right out to 1979, you know, all the way through to the Iranian Revolution. One of the important things about Iran, and this is why intelligence history really, there's a famous British diplomat, Brits are always good for a quote. So Sir Alexander Cadigan called intelligence the missing dimension of diplomatic history. When it comes to Iran, this is again an area where what the CIA does with the coup sort of overshadows what we got out of. it. And one of the most important things that Iran was providing in terms of intelligence was we had collection sites that were reporting on Soviet ICBMs. So during the Cold War, if you think about it, what's one of the biggest threats to global annihilation, nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles?

And so our listening stations in Iran provided the bulk of intelligence on that. And so, you know, when you think about the legacy, again, this is very difficult history to grapple with. would the American people, today included, be more supportive if they understood just how important Iran was to stabilizing the Cold War because we were able to collect on Soviet ICBMs? That's a key piece that I want to emphasize. Stability. Some of the things the CIA did and the intelligence it collected helped stabilize the Cold War. Well, there's a cultural aspect of this that once you've created this agency, you create a culture of secrecy, which self-sustains. and therefore you end up with people's careers being wrapped up in secrecy.

Instead of the transparency that we expect from our government, it becomes this sort of, oh, you don't deserve to know this, the American people. And here we are. But inevitably, in a culture with freedom of expression, you're going to get these secrets coming out, like in the church committee and so forth. It just always seems to go wrong for the CIA in this regard. I mean, it's really amazing. But your point is really well taken, which is if we knew what was going on,

If we understood the strategy behind some of these moves, it was just spoken more publicly. We might understand this agency a lot differently than we do now. That's right. And here's where it's tough. I mean, it's hard being an intelligence organization. You have to look at it from both sides. So John F. Kennedy said it best, and he's quoting probably his speechwriter, Arthur Schlesinger, saying the CIA's failures are trumpeted. They go all over.

We know about the failures. The successes are what we hear least about. And, you know, one of the issues there is in some ways. the CIA understood, or at least policymakers when they created it, that it was going to get the blame when presidential policies went wrong. It was sort of supposed to fall on the president's sword for the president. And so, you know, policymakers, another thing to emphasize for people is the CIA, in my reading of CIA history, didn't do things without top authorization, not necessarily top cover, but top authorization. So this wasn't like CIA people sitting around coming up with their own half-cook plots. They were trying to execute policies developed by different presidential administrations during the Cold War. And, you know, we focus on the covert action. And I alluded to this with Iran. What we don't focus as much on is the CIA also helped develop the U2 spy plane, which came in early and under budget.

Imagine that for a U.S. government program early and under budget. And also the Corona's program satellite imagery. So satellites and space technology. The CIA was involved in that. And like I said, that helped stabilize the Cold War. And so, you know, when it comes to the CIA, you have to take the good with the bad. You know, people like me whining about stuff we just don't understand, you know, would be their response. Guatemala, 1954, this is another one of these acronyms.

It's P.B. Success, which is very strange. Operation P.B. Success. This removes the big blonde, Jacobo Arbenz, who's a questionable asset for the United States at this time. Take us through this because this is such a model for what happens throughout Central America in the, in the, the subsequent decades and South America for that matter. That's right. And so, you know, again, looking at the policies that Arbenz was putting in place, it was land reform was a big piece. Socialism.

Yeah, well, certainly looks socialist. But at the same time, you have a disenfranchised population who don't own their own land as a product of the United Fruit Company. The United Fruit Company. And the United Fruit Company. Oh, you beat me to it. And you know what the problem is. So this is where the Dulles brothers come back into it.

So John Foster and Alan Dulles had worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, big white shoe law firm in New York, and they represented United Fruit Company. And United Fruit Company was, I believe, the largest landholder in Guatemala at the time. And so imagine being United Fruit Company and hearing that you have this president who is going to start appropriating land, nationalizing the land, you know, their own land and redistributing it. And so there goes your profits. And again, what happens, like you said, this becomes a model is the U.S. works with the military. And so the coup that puts Carlos Casillo Armas in charge, this is a military dictatorship. And it doesn't necessarily sit well. This is another problem with the Cold War with some of the local population.

And so what we actually have happened is, you know, P.B. Success, pretty interesting name because it's sort of a successful, but it's a successful failure. you have a civil war and you know this killed hundreds of thousands of people over decades. And again, the problem is, is when you look at it, all conspiracy theories have some basis in the truth. And one of the problems was the United Fruit Company. You know, it's kind of the flying the ointment. The Dulles brothers association with it because Alan Dulles is the director of central intelligence when this happens. And then the former director of central intelligence, Walter Biddle, Beetle Smith, he's a World War II general. He had been the director of central intelligence.

and guess where he goes after this, he becomes a member of the board of directors of the United Fruit Company. There you go. So how it looks is actually important with a lot of CIA history. And this is what's tough for me as a CIA historian because sometimes it's, you know, I'm defending the agency in a lot of cases against what I would consider to be selective history. I'm defending against selective history.

The problem, though, is the agency doesn't really help me a lot there when you have senior leadership that is related to the United Fruit Company. So that's one of the issues with CIA history is sometimes. it just doesn't look good and it becomes very hard to defend. Well, let's say they hadn't done anything. What would have happened interestingly, very generally, is the testing of the domino theory. If you hadn't had us go in in the early 50s and take control of this situation and stage a coup, essentially, we would have seen this play out economically within this country. And that's what the CIA kind of gets in the way of, right? Again, this is the good news of having other history that we can use to sort of build a picture.

So look at Vietnam. That was one of the biggest justifications. And the Soviets were involved in North Vietnam. And so were the Chinese. And what happens afterwards is you find that, and even before then, countries have their own interests too. And so Vietnam had its own interest apart from the Soviet Union and China. So look, one of the issues that you have to be realistic about, and this is, I think, what motivated policymakers, what motivates CIA action is we know the Soviets are involved in these countries as well. They're propping up the communist parties in these countries. And so are these countries going to be able to stand on their own two feet or not? Well, as you mentioned, Don, and I think this is important to look at is in some cases, these countries also have their own competing interests apart from the Soviet Union. And that certainly was the case in Vietnam. And we found out, you know, the domino didn't exactly fall the way we thought it would because it is possible to lose the war and win the peace. It's also possible to win the war and lose the peace, just as important. So, you know, that's an interesting hypothetical with what would have happened if in some of these countries we kind of let them tinker with socialism.

Would they become failed states like Venezuela today? Or would they sort of be like Vietnam and go their own direction and in some ways liberalize their economies and work with the U.S. and surprise us. But, you know, the irony is we're trying to create, you know, freedom abroad. We're trying to, you know, spread American interests and values. And we are also tripping up the process of an organic development, an economic stability coming out of mistakes made and fixed. And that's what's happened. You know, that's why the United States is what it is. We've had the ability to do this with our two oceans and all the rest over time. But we get involved in these Central American countries, certainly, and stall that whole process. And the instability created ends up coming back and biting us, isn't it, down the road?

All the immigration problem. with today. You know, there's a funny term for this in intelligence. It's called blowback. And it means the unintended consequences of covert action gone awry. The term blowback, and again, another twist of history is it's actually used in a CIA report on Iran at the time in the 50s to talk about what could go wrong. The U.S. was still doing covert action before the CIA. And this involved overthrowing elected or otherwise popular leadership. And when you talk about fruit, the example that I always use is Hawaii. It was a covert action type operation by the U.S. in the 1890s that helped overthrow the Hawaiian, the constitutional monarchy of Hawaii, and put in place this pro-American

leadership that eventually leads to annexation. So, you know, I tell people all the time that American intelligence history shaped American history, and literally that means even shaped the United States because one of the ways we got Hawaii was through covert action. There you go, exactly. Rose-colored glasses on. Here's what happens. Guatemala becomes, without the CIA intervention, Guatemala becomes a model for peaceful, reform-minded democracy in Latin America. I've written this down in my notes. One proving that independence from U.S. corporate interests did not equal communism. I mean, oh my God, in the middle of the 1950s, that's very, very weird. But what I take away from this conversation, aside from my notes, is that these dullest type guys,

are dealing with short-term problems and short-term situations in their mind. They're playing a game of chess and I'll take your piece and I'll take this piece. Instead of looking down the road. And this becomes its own self-serving governmental mechanism, doesn't it? This way of playing with the world, like it's a chessboard. That's right. And I think you're alluding also, there's a famous book called The Devil's Chess Board about the Dulles Brothers. And you mentioned something important, which is, you know, short-term solutions to problems.

And that's really, when you talk about covert action and the CIA, that's something where, again, policymakers look to the CIA. And this is why understanding intelligence is so important to understand the uses and limits of it. Policymakers don't walk into office. And I mean presidents of the United States knowing a lot about the CIA or knowing a lot about intelligence or intelligence history. They might have popular misconceptions about intelligence. And one of them is probably, oh, they do really sneaky cool. stuff. And if I have control of that, I'm an enlightened president. I'll be able to order the world as I see fit. And then, you know, the president gets hit with all these problems. And so short-term solution, go to the CIA. Solve it, do it quietly. Don't let people know you're doing it. I would say that that is a misconception over the truest and best purposes of the CIA, let's call it. And so again, where does the fault lie? Well, certainly, you know, to some extent, you have planners at the CIA who probably need to be able to tell politics. policymakers, we don't think this is a good idea. But then remember, you have presidents and you have

these large executive departments and administrations and they're pushing policies and they need answers and the American people need answers and they're responsive to their constituents. And so imagine like you said, Don, if you're sitting there in the 1950s and you're hearing that there's a new socialist president or prime minister of this country, never mind one in the Western Hemisphere and the Soviets are helping that country out, what are you? going to do in that situation? Bottom line is Guatemala, this covert regime changing idea, you know, plays out in Cuba, of course, Chile, Congo, beyond that. I mean, it's, it's decades ahead and arguably still in play.

It's this idea that we can do this thing from, you know, 36,000 feet when in fact this is really creating as many problems as you're trying to fix. That's the issue I also teach and work on national security. and what I tell students in professional military education settings as well is, remember that generally speaking, you tell yourself, I have this problem. How am I going to fix it? But you have to remember that in fixing it, you are creating new problems. You might not foresee all of them, but you're creating new problems. And you alluded to a great one, which is Cuba in the Bay of Pigs, because remember, you can also become a victim of your own success. And I would say that that's what happens to the CIA in the

50s and the eyes and higher administration is it looks in the short term, like Iran went our way, Guatemala goes our way. Why won't on Cuba go our way too? So let's try it out there. Yeah. Well, look, these are brilliant people we're talking about, the Dulles and all these guys. They know way more than I do looking back on this. And so you have to understand or you have to wonder whether they understand the instability

of what they're doing and the way that they're sort of playing only so far ahead all the time. Creating chaos is maybe part of the strategy, which leads me to my next question, In 1967 to 74, our last on the list, M.H. Chaos, we've already wandered into this territory. This is the 60s. We're talking Lyndon Johnson going into Richard Nixon. And the idea was that there was this growing anti-Vietnam movement going on. They were wondering if this is being funded by foreign powers, especially the Soviets, obviously. It becomes a very dark program. Can you explain it? Sure. And so again, you know, best intentions, the Soviets have. had recruited agents in the United States during the 1930s and 40s.

We know Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who obtained nuclear secrets to help the Soviets develop a bomb, were Soviet agents. So you already know in some ways that the Soviets are involved in the United States. One of the concerns about communism and socialism is the popularity of the ideas, they were popular with segments of the American people. And this goes even back to the first World War period. Socialism competed with American democracy. Even today, you know, this is a political issue. So the concern was, what are the Soviets doing to stoke domestic dissent in this country, to recruit people for communism?

Again, at the time, I think that probably sounds like something that a policymaker would think is a reasonable concern. And when you look at America in the 1960s, by the way, what were you seeing? You were seeing a tremendous amount of civil unrest. Now, for very good reasons, the civil rights movement, but at the same time, if we're unstable and we're trying to fight a Cold War, and we know the Soviets are recruiting agents here, you know, why won't they do things to destabilize us? And so that was kind of the motivation behind MH chaos is, you know, are the Soviets, the Chinese? Are there these bad actors getting involved domestically? Now, doesn't that sound really familiar to where we are today? So what are we doing today? And I should mention too, MH chaos and the CIA carries some of the blame, but the FBI also had a counterintellite. It was called Cointel Pro, counterintelligence program. They had a domestic surveillance program going on at the exact same time.

Yep, yep. Over 7,000 U.S. citizens and 1,000 groups are infiltrated. They collect information. It's a sprawling, a sprawling program. And obviously, it leans into what we later hear of as the plumber organization. It directly violates the CIA charter, which is important to note, right? Absolutely. And, you know, that's probably why.

it resonated the way it did is we not only we tell you not to do this, we put it into the law. I mean, this goes against your charter. You know, why didn't you know better? You know, as I mentioned, the FBI was doing unconstitutional search and seizure. And you know who also escapes a lot of the blame when you look back at this period, the NSA. So they had two projects that involved obtaining the names and then using signals intelligence and looking at American citizens' telecommunications, not much different than we have today. And so, you know, the CIA, again, this is the key.

The CIA gets a lot of the blame for these things. And one of the reasons why is because they're an independent organization. They're an independent intelligence organization. Everyone knows who to blame. With the NSA, with the FBI, they get top cover, the NSA from the DOD, the FBI from the DOJ. And they just don't also have the same sort of conspirarial ring to it that CIA does. You know, who's doing all this sneaky stuff? that one independent intelligence organization out there by itself, the CIA. And so we have to keep that in mind, too, is the CIA and MH chaos was only one, now albeit a very egregious one, but one piece out of a larger domestic intelligence program being run across the U.S. intelligence community at the time. Yeah, but it's fair to say without MH chaos. I mean, this to me is where you cross the line. You know, everything people were worried about the CIA or this sort of big brother aspect of these intelligence communities.

And it begins to happen. And you get U.S. citizens affected by what is going on. So without the CIA in that era, maybe we don't get so cynical. Maybe we don't, maybe politicians don't have those levers to pull, but probably not. They'd find them anyway. That's right. And they did find them. They found them with the FBI doing counterintelligence. They found it with the NSA. Even Army and maybe the military intelligence organizations were doing domestic intelligence operations. So you'd find it kind of where you want it. And I should mention that. that when you read the documents, CIA employees at the time did have reservations about MH chaos. And they self-reported. One of the reasons for that big dossier called, I mentioned the family jewels, it was self-reported by CIA employees who were saying, ah, you know, we did this thing and I'm not too sure about it. And so, you know, the other thing that we have to remember is that the CIA is the organization, but there's people who work for the CIA.

And they all have different conceptions of right and wrong, what's ethical. and ethical, what's legal and not legal, constitutional and not constitutional. And it's fed into this big bureaucratic machine anyways, too. So, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if we were still, it doesn't only surprise me, it happened. We were doing other things with other organizations at the time that also really don't resonate well with the public. You know, it's funny. We talk so historically and, and, you know, reflectively about all this. Of course, it's all going on right now. It's like It's talking about nuclear, you know, warfare. Those nukes are still there.

They're all pointed at each other. It could happen any day now. All of this is happening even as we speak at these programs. I don't know that these programs are going on, but things like this are being discussed and how we work this. It's happening in present time. But we're left wondering with this conversation and your book, which I will plug again in a moment, if the creation and these covert operations contributed to the general conspiracy culture of our present-day society. That's kind of where we're at at this moment.

Everything has tipped so far into that world thanks to social media, primarily, not the CIA, or maybe the CIA. Everything is about division and polarization. You wonder how much these operations that were outed contributed to this. This sort of cynicism and darkness to our society was traceable back to the creation of this, you know, deep, deep community fronted by the CIA. They absolutely did. And I think that is the big takeaway, too.

You know, there was a CIA officer who he was formerly in the OSS. He wrote a book in the 70s, I believe it was, Harry Rizitsky. And, you know, he said that the usefulness of covert action will be determined by an enlightened or unenlightened American foreign policy. And that no matter what, this is a byproduct. This is democracy in action. And we're accountable. We're all accountable for it, too.

Now, the problem with the CIA is it seems like it's the least accountable, most secretive. area of government. But, you know, what I try and remind people of is that it's one organization as part of a larger national security establishment with elected officials and oversight from Congress. So it's not just the CIA that's accountable for its failures too. And sometimes those failures involve the American people because what I would remind the public and the people who are listening is look at public polling and look at polling at the time and what the American people were willing to support. You know, we were anti-communist in the 50s when the CIA was doing some of its most egregious counter communist operations. We were very, very strongly

anti-terrorist in the early 2000s and even supported things like enhanced interrogation. As long as it would keep us safe from a terrorist attack, the majority of the public was in favor of it. So we have to be careful what we ask the CIA to do. And I mean the we collectively. What are we asking the CIA to do? What are we asking presidents to do? What are we asking Congress, who we elect to do? Because that's what they're thinking about is how do I do. How do I keep the American people safe. And unfortunately, sometimes the CIA does things that in retrospect look like it goes against the grain of what it is to be an American, but they're doing it for the American people. Well, the difference seems to be, they become self-sustaining. And this seems to be

a question of public service. You know, are you an organization that has that front and center in your mandate and actions versus this sort of self-sustaining culture? I mean, it's kind of inevitable that it does because it's such a massive thing that just continues to move along like its own machinery. But that's always the question and so much of it is traceable to that, you know, question, that role that they are or are not playing. You're right. And what I try and remind people, you know, this is an interesting thing about being an intelligence historian. So I never served in the intelligence community, served in the military briefly.

But I'm a historian. And I also, though, because of what I do and because of former connections, no intelligence officers, including CIA officers. And as I always tell my friends who aren't CIA officers or when I speak to public audiences, I don't know a single one of my friends who either serves in or has served in the CIA who wakes up in the morning and says,

oh good, you know, how can I overthrow a foreign country government or how can I do something to violate my fellow citizens' rights today? The problem, again, is there are one piece of this larger machine. And as you already mentioned, Don, and you're exactly right, it becomes extremely complicated when you're trying to keep the American people safe. And that gets misconstrued. It gets abused by policymakers, who we elect, by the way, and should hold accountable.

And so when we look at the CIA, we should hold it accountable for what it does wrong. We should also remember what it does right and well. And then we need to think of our role, our role in that as a democracy. The book that we've been talking about is called The Spy and the State, the History of American Intelligence. It goes way back before the subjects we were talking about and really finds the roots of everything. It was written by this man, Jeffrey Rog, senior research. research fellow at the Global and National Security Institute of the University of South Florida. You're on a book tour now, I imagine. Is there a way people can know about what you're doing here and keep track of you? Sure, absolutely. I, you know, have social media that I use on LinkedIn. Jeffrey Rod can find me there. Or I sometimes go on exit at the spy, the state, you know, after the book title and the book's on Amazon. There you go. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you very much, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and

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