Covert Empire: The Imperial History of the CIA

As the discipline of recent U.S. intelligence history expands, this paper argues for the inclusion of newer developments in the history of American foreign relations such as the imperial (and transimperial) and emotional turns. Borrowing its title “Covert Empire” from Priya Satia’s immensely suggestive 2008 study of Edwardian-era British imperial agents in the Middle East, Spies in Arabia, Wilford locates the history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to the present day in the longer historical arc of western intelligence in the colonial and post-colonial worlds. In the realm of intelligence analysis, for example, the CIA consciously attempted to invent a social scientific methodology different from imperial European spy services’ emphasis on deep area knowledge and cultural intuition. In practice, though, U.S. intelligence-gathering from agents in the Global South tended to reproduce the colonial relationships and forms of knowledge of earlier western imperial agents, including a tendency to chronic intelligence failure. Similarly, in the CIA’s other main area of operation – covert action such as regime change and counterinsurgency – conscious attempts to create new, non-colonial ideas and techniques were undermined by the lingering influence of prior, imperial intelligence cultures. To cite two of the historically most consequential cases, CIA officers involved in the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mosaddeq were clearly influenced by British imperial spy fiction (the operation’s leader, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, was nicknamed for the Kipling hero). Elsewhere, imperial French counterinsurgency doctrine influenced even the fiercely anti-colonial operative Edward Lansdale in his failed attempts to stabilize the anti-communist government of South Vietnam. The paper concludes with the figure of Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s pick as CIA director, noting the multiple echoes of the imperial past in her career and the Agency’s ongoing effort to combat Islamist terrorism.