The CIA by Hugh Wilford

Author:Hugh Wilford [Wilford, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Other forces were in play, too, of course, but the story of CIA counterintelligence is in many ways a story of empire. Its principal designer owed many of his values and methods—and, possibly, his tendency toward paranoia—to the imperial past. Thanks to the imperial boomerang, what should have been an exclusively foreign effort morphed into a campaign of surveillance aimed at domestic radicals. The latter belonged, partly at least, within the long tradition of American anti-imperialism, and they too were influenced by a boomerang effect, in their case, the inspirational example of anti-colonialism in the Cold War Third World. In the ensuing battles between the forces of imperialism and anti-imperialism, the latter enjoyed several stirring victories, the result in part of the United States’ lack of official secrecy relative to older imperial powers such as Britain. By the end of the Cold War, however, the imperial party was on top, having fashioned an American version of the British Official Secrets Act. The earlier vision of counterintelligence too had reasserted itself at the CIA, having temporarily been overwhelmed by the anti-imperial currents of the era.

Moreover, the domestic reverberations of covert empire were not confined to counterintelligence. As in other imperial societies, they also extended into the realm of US popular opinion, and government attempts to manage it: in America, another job for the CIA.

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