Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Imperial History of the CIA with Hugh Wilford

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Intelligence scholar Hugh Wilford's excellent new book grapples with the paradox at the heart of America’s covert intelligence agency. Many of the CIA’s founding fathers were staunch anti-imperialists, but during the Cold War, the US took up the mantle of Europe’s colonial projects.Hugh Wilford's book The CIA: an Imperial History is out now.  Hugh Wilford has written numerous books about the CIA and Cold War intelligence history, he made two appearances in our recent Not All Propaganda is Art mini-series. Also the mini-series got a really nice write up in the New Yorker last month!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I read a lot of books about the CIA while working on my recent miniseries, Not All Propaganda is Art. And a lot of the best ones were written by the same guy, the intelligence scholar Hugh Wilford. In fact, I spoke to him about two of the three main characters in my series, Dwight McDonald and Richard Wright. Hugh Wilford did seminal research into the CIA's relationship with both men. Hugh Wilford has just published another book on the CIA. This one is about the early years of the organization. It's a group biography that focuses on some of the agency's most seminal figures, men like Kim Roosevelt,

Edward Lansdale, and James Angleton. The book is called The CIA and Imperial History, and it's about America's paradoxical relationship with empire. Paradox that affects all of the men in this group biography. Like all of his other books, this one is incredible. I can't recommend it enough. And I thought I would invite Hugh Wilford back on to The Theory of Everything to talk about it. Thank you, Benjamin. Yes. Yeah, the CIA was originally founded not to carry out coups or stabilize pro-American regimes. It was originally founded as an intelligence gathering and analyzing organization. But as the Cold War escalated in the years after World War II, and in particular, those parts of the world that had been colonies of European powers and were decolonizing, increasingly in play in the Cold War, the CIA was charged with this mission of carrying out covert action in the former European colonies. And that mission really conflicted profoundly, I think,

with the anti-imperial convictions of a number of the individuals concerned who were idealists, they were anti-imperialists, they wanted to help uplift what they called the Third World, what we prefer to call the global south. But there was this conflict between that impulse and the sort of the kind of covert action mission to promote American power in the world with which the agency was increasingly charged by successive post-war U.S. presidents. You point out that the Cold War moment almost pushed CIA officers,

some of these idealists that you just mentioned, into neocolonial roles. When you look at these stories play out, it almost seems predetermined. If you look at the origin stories of some of the early CIA officers, they shared a heritage and typology with their European counterparts. So,

you know, it might look like someone like Sherman Kent was stepping reluctantly into this role. It is the very role European men like himself had been stepping into for, you know, centuries. In fact, you point out that the men in his intelligence group, to use one example, all came from this sort of elite background, you know, the same schools, same parochial schools, the same Ivy League schools. And they all even grew up on imperialist literature. a missionary impulse within the CIA, which was anti-imperial, sympathetic with the nationalist struggles of colonized peoples. But also, there was this other sort of prehistory to the CIA. Many of its early leaders came from this stratum of American Society, which was not unlike European colonial leadership. They'd been sent to New England prep schools, which taught basically British imperial values. Groton-Groton School in Massachusetts was perhaps the sort of the archetype of this

sort of institution. Its very influential headmaster, Endicott Peabody, had been educated in Britain and absorbed British imperial values like patriotism, service, also a desire for proving oneself in overseas adventures. And that was very much the theme of a lot of the sorts of novels that these young men were reading by the likes of Rudyard Hipling and Ryder Haggard and John Buchan. So they were sort of reared to look overseas and see it as somewhere where they could go and prove themselves and then return home to the acclaim of their fellow citizens. You know, some folks might be familiar with some of the characters in your book. You know, Kermit Kim Roosevelt, you know, is famous for his role in the 1953 coup in Iran. And I must admit, you know, I was very surprised to sort of learn in your book that he saw himself as sort of pro-Arab nationalist and anti-colonialist,

yet his very name connects to Kipling. So he seems like a really great example as a character who this paradox really runs through the blood. He does indeed. You know, if America, right, has produced a great imperialist or sort of one of the presiding personalities of the turn of the 20th century era of new imperialism, it was Teddy Roosevelt. And Kim Roosevelt was a grandson of his. And yes, he's named, as you say, for the Kipling hero, Kim. He's related to the British aristocracy as well through his mother. So he's at Groton. He's a charge of Endicott Peabody. So he's very much absorbed those values in his early life.

But he also absorbs some of the sorts of notions that I was talking earlier that come from this other strand feeding into the Strategic Services, the CIA's World War II era predecessor in Cairo, alongside a number of Arabists, Middle Eastern missionary descended Americans. And from them, he gains this sympathy for, respect for Arabs and Arab nationalism, anti-Zionism as well, along with other officers, first-generation officers joins the CIA in 1949, he actually campaigns for the cause of pro-Arab anti-Zionism. And he carries these values into the agency with him. During the 1950s, he becomes friends with and tries to stabilize the regime of Gamal Nasser after the Egyptian revolution of 1952. Yet at the same time that he's doing that, he is, as you say, working to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected prime minister in Iraq in this fateful, hugely historically consequential coup. So it seems to me that he really illustrates

how this missionary pro-nationalist, anti-colonial impulse in the CIA lost out and then lost out spectacularly to the sort of covert imperial mission with which successive administrations, especially the Eisenhower administration, are charging at. So let's talk about another one of the main characters in your book, the counterinsurgency and psychological warfare expert, Edward Lansdale. On the surface, he, like Kim Roosevelt, seems to be dedicated to anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. But you want us to see him in a new light as well.

Yeah. So Lansdale, Edward Lansdale, he is not as clearly from the sort of the back, the imperial background of other top CIA officers of his generation, like him, Roosevelt. He grows up on the West Coast. He's from a sort of much a much humbler origins. He explicitly says that he's anti-colonial. He doesn't share the anti-Asian attitudes of a number of other members of his generation, especially on the West Coast. He very much bases his approach to his covert missions in Asia, which he undertakes first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam during the late

1940s and 1950s. He bases his whole approach on notions of brotherhood and friendship, even love. Other American officials of the period talk about him as if he's kind of like a latter earlier colonialists, he and his operatives are sort of ready to resort to colonial techniques. the efforts to suppress the communist hucks in the Philippines. Napalm is used there. Violence is used there. He dislikes French colonial officials, really sort of at a deep kind of visceral level, yet he ends up working alongside some in Vietnam in this effort to shore up the anti-communist government there. Even in his personal relations with the Vietnamese and Filipinos, there are echoes of earlier

colonial relationships as well. He has a long affair with a Filipino woman, members of his team in Vietnam, have similar relationships with and marry Vietnamese women. And there were histories of sexual intimacy in prior colonial history as well. So it seems to me that sort of Lansdale is, he is not of this kind of imperial set,

the imperial brotherhood as one historian has called them. He actually rather dislikes, I think, elements of that approach. Yet even he ends up resorting to colonial era scripts when serving in the Philippines and Vietnam. So Lansdale has a connection to Graham Greene's film The Quiet American, which I talked about in my recent series, Not All Propaganda is Art. In fact, I concluded the whole series with an examination of this film. He worked with U.S. filmmakers, Mankiewicz, to turn Graham Greene's anti-American novel into a pro-American film. And this really upset Graham Greene. But it really was a spectacular PR move. But it also really lines up with this idea that men like Lansdale just didn't see

themselves or America, for that matter, as colonialists. Yeah, I think Lansdale really continues sincerely to believe this. There's very, you know, having read through his papers and um that there's and magazine articles that he published uh usually you know under an assumed name or uh anonymously he you know i i there's very little sense that that he is putting on an act here i i think you know he think he really believes in the universality of American values. He thinks that he is a genuine friend of Asians. And I think it's there very much in the doctrine of counterinsurgency. He's identified as the main American architect of a distinctive US counterinsurgency doctrine. And it's very much based on the notion of going in to help peoples, build states, create infrastructure, develop the third world, as that would have been the language in the Cold War era. Yet there is always the possibility of violence if that tactic doesn't

work. And that sort of contradiction, that paradox is present in earlier colonial efforts to strengthen client governments. And it's there again in the 1950s. But Lansdale never really sort of acknowledges that paradox, that contradiction. And I think that's what kind of enables him to keep going. Even later in his life, he eventually marries the Filipino woman. He had been in a marriage to a sort of very long-suffering American woman, and he effectively sort of deserted her and his children to go on these lengthy overseas missions. She passes, and he's eventually able to marry Pat Kelly, his Filipino lover. Ultimately, if he's really good at something, Edward Lansdale, it's psychological warfare.

It's he has a background in advertising. He was an advertising executive before he joined the OSS and then the CIA. And I think to the extent that he has successes, and he does undoubtedly, he helped secure the election of Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines in 1953, which is a pro-American, truly popular Filipino leader, just the sort that the US was hoping to find in the third world. And that is a successful Lansdale. But it's really about his he helps Magsaysay to the Filipino presidency, I think really because of his skills at advertising and psychological warfare, he writing Magsaysay speeches and even recording this election jingo,

the Magsaysay Mambo, which is still really catchy, actually. That was a sort of CIA psychological warfare project. The real secret of his success, such as it was, was his skill at psychological warfare. Yeah. And that's what I find so provocative about that story, about what he does with the quiet American, because it's almost really gets at so many of the themes from this period. And in your book, this sort of America taking over from the colonial project, and he's able to take this book that, you know, really had a strong anti-American statement to it, Graham Greene's novel, and flip the script. So it was very much a pro-American story. And while that is an amazing example of psychological warfare,

just because you're able to do that doesn't make it true. And it's just, I love it. It's such a, it feels like it really gets to so much about him and this moment and about what needed to be done and how to advertise or publicize the America we wanted to project into the world. No, it's super clever. You know, he was good at this sort of thing, right? He takes this anti-American novel and he is, there's so many ironies around this. He is often identified wrongly, actually, as the real-life inspiration for the character Olden Pyle, this kind of bumbling, naive CIA officer in Vietnam at the heart of the narrative, and then sort of stands it on its head to become this kind of pro-American, anti-communist cinematic treatise,

which is the 1958 movie, and in the process, really angering Graham Greene, understandably. Another character in your book is the man who basically built the CIA's counterintelligence operation, James Angleton, a man very famous for his paranoia. And I was so fascinated to learn how central paranoia was or played in the imperial project itself. And for me, this is one of, I find, one of the most interesting arguments in your book, sort of tracing the connections between our own paranoia or their roots, perhaps

is a better word, in the Imperial project itself. Yes. He's often described as paranoid, James Angleton, because he's the guy who he established basically CIA counterintelligence. He has this reputation as this counterintelligence genius. And he is very accomplished. He does many impressive things. But later in his career, he becomes obsessed with this notion that the CIA has been penetrated by a Soviet mole and that the hunt for the mole becomes increasingly disruptive and destructive. It forces a number of people to resign. You shouldn't have had to have resigned.

It spreads overseas. It affects intelligence organizations in Canada and Britain as well. And people have tried to explain why Angleton took this kind of paranoid turn. And some people have speculated that he was psychiatrically a clinical case of paranoia. I wondered if it wasn't, again, something to do with this prehistory of imperialism that I think is an important part of the CIA's context. Angleton is a sort of archetypal member of this kind of quasi-imperial set that's running the CIA in its early days. He's actually been educated in Britain at a

British private school or public school, of course, as they're known, Malvern College. And he very much, I think, absorbs British values. And among those are this thing that historians, apart from me, have called imperial paranoia. It's this condition of empires, really. You're trying to exercise power over these vast foreign territories, trying to gather intelligence about them. It's an extremely difficult assignment. And it makes you overly sensitive to some threats, usually foreign manipulation. The British were, this is going back again to the great game and the rivalry with czarist Russia in Afghanistan and India. The British were constantly paranoid about Russian meddling and tended to blame local nationalist movements on Russian meddling, when in fact, of course, often anti-colonial nationalism had genuine local roots. right? So there is this hypersensitivity to communist intervention in particular. And I think, which isn't to say, of course, there is communist meddling, but there is also

this tendency to exaggerate it and blame all sort of adverse local events on it. And I think Angleton inherits that tendency from his days in Britain. And I think that it's that that then sort of explains the descent into this kind of mania about communist penetration of the CIA, which affects him in his later years. So all this paranoia that comes with or from America's paradoxical relationship with empire leads to what you call a number of unintended consequences. And I think maybe we could conclude by talking about some of those. Yeah. And I think if you look at Angleton and the history of American counterintelligence and its involvement in various domestic operations in which it really shouldn't have engaged, you're monitoring, surveilling the new of doing the work of American empire overseas. this long American historical tradition of anti-imperialism. And that is, I think, the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s, I think, is in many ways, it's possible to read

that as a kind of another expression of this longer history of American anti-imperialism. So for me, that's kind of the background to some of the more questionable activities that the CIA becomes involved in and that Angleton's counterintelligence unit within the CIA kind of is particularly involved in during the 1960s and 1970s. It's kind of, it's this longer struggle in American life going on between the forces of empire and anti-imperialism, right? For me, that helps explain events like MH chaos in sort of larger historical terms. And then finally, it seems to me that a lot of sort of America's recent tendency toward conspiracy theory is down to the growth of organizations

like the CIA, this kind of massive expansion of secret government machinery during the years of the Cold War, and now more recently, the war on terror. know, generated, to some extent, understandable, popular anxiety about and suspicion of what the government is doing. Yeah, this is one of my favorite arguments in the book. And I think it's important to distinguish this conspiracyism that you're talking about from, you know, what other historians have called, say, the paranoid style of American politics. You really seem to be drawing a through line from the conspiracy embedded in imperialism that you just talked about with Angleton. Sort of that sort of boomeranging back or say, to put it in your words, the post-colonial conspiracism didn't stay in

the post-colonial world? Yes. Local populations in countries that have once been colonies and then become sites of the Cold War struggle for supremacy, they are prone to conspiracism as well, you know, suspicion of foreign spies pulling the strings of all local events. In India, there's a lot of conspiracism in modern Indian political culture. I think some of this bleeds back into US culture via the anti-imperial left within the US,

which is very sort of open to the influence of post-colonial leaders. So it was very noticeable for me that all my sort of main characters that I'd written about in earlier chapters about US counterinsurgency overseas and cooperation such as Roosevelt's in Iran. Almost all of those characters then later became the focus of CIA conspiracy theories. Edward Lansdale, he has been fingered by many Kennedy conspiracy theorists as behind JFK's assassination. Who else? James Angleton, of course. He is also suspected of playing a role in Kennedy's death. Also, the murder, the unsolved murder a year later of Mary Pinchot Meyer, who has also, there's been a lot of, the wife of another top CIA operative,

Corb Meyer, who headed the CIA's domestic and other publicity or propaganda campaigns. And that is her death, this unsolved murder on a Georgetown canal path in 1964 is also wrapped up in, and she was having an affair with JFK. So often with conspiracy theories, there is enough basis, in fact, for people to be able to sort of spin grand conspiratorial theories out of it. All you really need is kind of like to some extent this kind of this bleeding of, I think, foreign conspiracism back into American culture and the paranoid style as well. You know, America's historic tendency toward conspiracy theory just to sort of add fuel to the to the fire. But this is it's a very problematic sort of quicksand because, you know, you just brought up Cord Meyer. I had the pleasure of getting to talk to you about two of the characters in my recent series, Not All Propaganda is Art series,

both Dwight McDonald and Richard Wright. And Cord Myers, kind of the man who ties them together in that he was the CIA officer responsible for propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And one of the things I took away from working on this story, something that, you know, is very strengthened in your new book, is that when you look at all these operations in total, you can't help but be amazed at how impactful and influential they were. In other words, yes, we can laugh at, you know, what, you know, possibly could have been accomplished by an abstract expressionism exhibit in Paris or a free jazz concert in Nigeria. But, you know, possibly could have been accomplished by an abstract expressionism exhibit in Paris or a free jazz concert in Nigeria.

But, you know, when you add everything up that Cord Meyer was sort of responsible for in this period, it's quite impressive. And in a way, you know, it's quite fair to say that these conspiracy theories come out of this. Yes, it is it's a huge intervention in uh domestic american life that's that's going on you know many millions of dollars involved in um as as we discussed before as you say in the arts in particular you know a a part of american culture which often is starved of funding so So this sudden injection of huge amounts of cash is bound to have a huge impact. And I think it does contribute undoubtedly to American popular support for interventions in foreign countries during the Cold War. Yet at the same time, partly because

of American anti-imperialism, because of American democracy, it's difficult, I think, being a secret organization in America, right? People are always trying to find out what you're doing. The CIA doesn't always achieve what it actually sets out to do. Sometimes, actually, I think the opposite of what it sets out to do. Well, let's leave it at that for now. Once again, thanks, Hugh Wilford, for coming on the show to talk with us about your new book. It's been a pleasure, Benjamin. Thank you for inviting me. Hugh Wilford is the author of The CIA, An Imperial History, out now from Basic Books. The Theory of Everything is produced by me, Benjamin Walker. You can find links to Hugh Wilford's book, as well as Not All Propaganda is Art, the nine-plus-hour miniseries that we just put out a few months ago,

on the website, theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. Radiotopia from PRX