Kipling in Langley

Was the CIA more a product of the 19th-century Great Game than the 20th-century Cold War? Greg Barnhisel reviews “The CIA: An Imperial History” by Hugh Wilford.

By Greg BarnhiselOctober 5, 2024

• Nonfiction

• History

• Politics

FOR AMERICANS who grew up during the Cold War, the superpower rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union felt like the structuring principle through which all world events had to be understood. Thus, the end of the Cold War was literally the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed. The triumph of the West, he wrote, was “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” 

It didn’t take long after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to see that not everyone had boarded the liberal democracy train (sorry you won’t be joining us, Mr.  Milošević, Mr. bin Laden, and Mr. Putin) and that not everything fit into binational logic. It also became clear that even the Cold War might not have been such a singular era. In fact, one might easily read such Cold War events as the Vietnam War and the dirty conflicts in Latin America instead as episodes of decolonization with their roots in the 19th century. 

The drive to reinterpret 1946–89 events in the context of longer-term historical developments provides the germ of Hugh Wilford’s new book The CIA: An Imperial History. In it, Wilford seeks both to refute the conventional understanding of the agency and to reframe its history as part of another longue durée development: the macropractices and microstories of European imperialism. 

As the conventional historiography of the CIA would have it, the United States had two oceans protecting it, plus an allergy to Europe’s power games, so it never needed a foreign-intelligence service in peacetime. But because the Cold War had to remain an indirect conflict, lest the world be destroyed, intelligence gathering and covert actions became essential, and thus a permanent intelligence agency became necessary. After 40-plus years of successes and embarrassments in confronting communism, the CIA lost its way in the 1990s, only to find it again after 9/11 in another unconventional war. But the United States only has a permanent nonmilitary intelligence corps because it has to, not because it wants to. 

Not so fast, cautions Wilford: “[W]ar is not the only key to understanding American intelligence history and the CIA; so, too, is empire.” When we look at actions rather than putative motivations, American intelligence starts to resemble the imperial European powers’ spy agencies and their Great Games. The United States and the USSR may have insisted that the very nature of human flourishing was at stake in their conflict, but what if the Cold War was nothing more than an updated version of Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I, or the Seven Years’ War—just empires expanding their spheres of influence? 

For those people living in the hot theaters of the Cold War, like Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, the conflict “looked a lot like a traditional imperial rivalry, just bigger and with different protagonists,” Wilford observes. The CIA used the same tactics as their European predecessors, such as “covertly working to overthrow governments deemed hostile […] or using counterinsurgency to defend others regarded as friendly.” 

Bookshelves groan, as the cliché has it, with histories, analyses, polemics, memoirs, and ripping yarns about the CIA. Wilford himself has in fact already loaded four straws on that ruminant’s back, one of them, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (2013), boasting a similar if much more focused angle. Another, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008), centers on the agency’s propagandizing. Wilford is an accomplished scholar and archive rat, but this is a trade title, relying almost entirely on published sources and written for a general audience with no previous inner knowledge of the CIA. 

The best and most damning general history of the CIA is Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007), and while Wilford is also sharply critical of the agency, he doesn’t echo Weiner’s comprehensive condemnation. This is a “where does it come from and what is it like” book, not an “is it good or bad” one. Nor does Wilford make any attempt to cover everything, as Weiner does. Rather, Wilford asks two questions: How did the CIA act like European colonial intelligence services abroad? And did the resulting “boomeranging” of the CIA’s overseas intelligence and covert activities resemble the “boomeranging” that occurred in Great Britain and France? 

Wilford’s nuanced excavation of how the imperial style shaped the early CIA is the most provocative and rewarding part of the book. Kim, Rudyard Kipling’s beloved 1901 novel, was a touchstone for many British overseas intelligence agents. The notorious Soviet agent Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, who penetrated deeply into MI6 and the CIA in the 1950s, took his sobriquet from the book, in which the Anglo-Irish orphan Kimball “Kim” O’Hara spies for the British army, exhibiting not just a devotion to his king but also a degree of respect for India and its people. While floridly colonialist, the novel is also critical of the “ignorant, complacent Britons” who posed the greatest danger to the empire. 

Wilford also shows how real-world figures such as T. E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and the French empire-builder Marshal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey became model intelligence avatars, not just embedding themselves among the population but also genuinely advocating for their interests, often to uncomprehending superior officers and Colonial Service bureaucrats. They loved the local culture while at the same time fully believing that rule by the colonial power was in the colonized people’s best interests. Kipling, of course, popularized the term “White Man’s burden.” 

The CIA’s first generation, many educated in the Anglophilic prep schools of the East Coast, shared the English reverence for Kim and Lawrence and adopted their assimilative approach to managing far-flung territories. But while there wasn’t much actual daylight between Britannia’s “benevolence” and US economic paternalism, the Americans refused to see themselves as colonizers. Moreover, the technocratic ethos of Cold War America convinced the CIA that its dealings with local populations and elites should be “scientific” rather than intuitive and cultural. 

Wilford illustrates the balance between these two approaches with vivid portraits of the officers who embodied each: Sherman Kent, chief of the blandly named Office of National Estimates, and Edward Lansdale, an army veteran with an “abhorrence” of European colonialism who successfully stage-managed a Philippine national election in 1953 before moving on to ingratiate himself with President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam. 

Wilford is an excellent profiler, and the book is rich in characters: not just Kent and Lansdale but also the “pleasant and unassuming” Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, who became a passionate Arabist and helped the British overthrow  Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran; James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief and Kim Philby’s drinking partner; and Cord Meyer, the literary prodigy who turned his talents to storytelling for the agency. These men are all familiar to CIA scholars––Angleton has been the subject of numerous full-length biographies––but Wilford deftly sketches their intellectual links to European imperialism in just a few pages. 

In the book’s second half, the lengthy comparisons between the CIA’s domestic footprint and the imperial legacy are less satisfying. “Boomeranging,” or, as the CIA sometimes calls it, “blowback,” didn’t originate with 19th-century European imperialism, as Wilford implies. The Roman Empire got boomeranged repeatedly by warlords like Alaric the Visigoth. Nor is creating front groups and domestic propaganda essentially imperial. The book can feel a bit tendentious here, trying too hard to hook familiar stories like that of the Congress for Cultural Freedom or MKUltra (the LSD experiments) onto a thesis that doesn’t quite fit them. 

More provocative is his claim that boomeranging spurred the demographic transformations of Miami, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, all of which, like London, Paris, Birmingham, and Manchester, experienced dramatic growth after displaced imperial subjects migrated to the mother country. The CIA and its meddling may well have been responsible for the Cuban influence in Miami, the Central American presence in Los Angeles, and the sizable African population in the nation’s capital and the Virginia suburbs surrounding the Langley headquarters. 

While its connections are at times strained, Wilford’s book is a useful corrective to our tendency to see the CIA as a uniquely American Cold War creation, when in fact it has “even more in common with the European intelligence agencies of the previous imperial age.” Most importantly, in this book, he reminds us that the United States’ sphere of influence in the Cold War was itself an empire in all but name.