Saturday, January 6, 2024: 11:10 AM
Cyril Magnin III (Parc 55)
This presentation explores the nexus between intelligence and foreign policy, that “missing dimension” of international history that historians have lamented for more than four decades. Specifically, the paper examines the role of intelligence in shaping American perceptions of its oldest ally—France—as it appeared, to many observers, on the precipice of communist revolution from Liberation in 1944 through a series of debilitating strikes in the Winter of 1947. By bringing together the traditional diplomatic record and undertreated U.S. intelligence and French sources, and by expanding focus beyond the French metropole to consider intertwined conditions and developments in Vietnam and North Africa, the paper carefully reconstructs transnational and transimperial webs of state and private French informants and their American partners and traces the ways in which these sources contested American perceptions of France and sought to influence U.S. policy. Deep archival research in the United States and France shows that the entrenched American perception of France as weak and lurching toward communist revolution in the immediate postwar years was overblown, based upon regular contact with French sources from particular factions. This jaundiced view—flowing in from a myriad of intelligence agents and diplomatic officials—seriously compromised U.S. ability to achieve postwar goals by freezing stereotypes into a permanent filter, with lasting consequences for Franco-American relations. While focused on a particular episode, this paper also suggests ways in which intelligence might be applied more broadly to other cases and more systematically to the study of foreign relations. Likewise, the presentation makes contemporary arguments about the role of intelligence in the policymaking process as well as the importance of dissent, of scrutinizing the agendas and the influence of foreign sources, of resisting groupthink and political pressure.