The CIA likes to fashion itself as a heroic agency that helps to protect national security and uphold democracy around the world.
However, Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 2024), shows that the CIA draws directly from British and French colonial precedents, and adopts the same modus operandi as imperial intelligence services.
The latter is evident in the CIA’s support for coercive interrogation techniques and repressive surveillance apparatuses, and its recruitment and manipulation of tribal and minority groups, and refinement of psychological warfare techniques and deception operations.
According to Wilford, a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach who has written two previous books on the CIA[1], individual CIA officers have often been motivated by the same lust for foreign adventure and exotic sexual conquest as their forebears in imperial intelligence services.
Because the U.S. Empire rules more indirectly compared to its European forebears, the CIA has carried out more political skullduggery and coups than past European empires.
The skullduggery has often yielded significant blowback whose origins the domestic population does not largely understand because CIA activities are kept secret.
Colonial Origins
Wilford writes that, while boosters of the CIA like to talk up its American ancestry, pointing out that spies helped win the Republic’s founding struggle against the British empire, less often trumpeted is the role of scouts and spies in the conquest of Indian Country.
The CIA’s greatest trailblazer, “Wild Bill” Donovan, who directed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the direct precursor to the CIA) during World War II, led cavalry troops in 1916 in the hunt for Pancho Villa who sought to end the pattern of U.S. economic exploitation in Mexico.
According to Wilford, the CIA’s early leadership was drawn overwhelmingly from a social class that shared British imperial values. Many went to New England prep schools, which imbued in them the ideals of imperial manhood such as muscular Christianity and patriotic service.
These boys grew up reading British imperial spy thrillers of the 1900s and imagined themselves emulating the antics of fictional spies featured in Rudyard Kipling’s famous novel Kim (1901).[2]
Kipling was an ardent imperialist who originated the phrase “white man’s burden.”
Considered the first great spy novel, Kim featured an Anglo-Indian orphan, Kimball O’Hara, who spies on behalf of the British while crossing northern India on a spiritual quest.
O’Hara is the hero of the story who, with a handful of loyal native accomplices, is the only thing standing between the Raj and the big bad Russians, who are depicted similarly to Hollywood films during the Cold War.[3]
Rufus Phillips, an undercover Agency operative in Vietnam, said that he spent much of his childhood in rural Virginia reading Kipling and dreaming about “faraway mysterious places.”[4]
Another CIA Asia hand, Anthony Poshepny, the prototype for Lieutenant Kurtz in Apocalypse Now because he went completely to the dark side, described Kim as “one of the Agency’s training manuals.”[5]
Allen Dulles, CIA director in the 1950s, had a copy of Kim on his bedside table when he died in 1969.
An admirer of British intelligence, Dulles had been a personal acquaintance of T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), whom he met at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.[6]
Lawrence had “gone native” in leading Arab nationalist revolts against the Ottoman empire during World War I. Afterwards, those movements were coopted as they ceded their country’s sovereignty to British imperial interests.[7]
CIA Director William Colby (1973-1976) as a youth devoured Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), Lawrence’s account of his desert campaign against the Ottoman Empire, and fantasized about “becoming if not exactly a Lawrence of Arabia, then at least Colby of a French Department.”[8]
Career CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a central figure in the CIA’s misadventures in Central America in the 1980s, called Lawrence “his hero.”[9]
Quiet Americans and the British
According to Wilford, World War II bred a powerful and intimate sense of Anglo-American camaraderie thanks to joint covert operations such as the Jedburghs, commando teams who bravely parachuted behind German lines in occupied Europe.
The British influence on the OSS was manifold, and included training in a range of espionage, covert action, and counterintelligence techniques as well as writing intelligence estimates.[10]
During the Cold War, American covert operatives conceived themselves as anti-imperialists who were against European colonialism. The CIA was intent on supporting nationalists who were neither tainted by association with past colonial powers or with what they conceived as Russian imperialism.
The key paradox was that U.S. foreign policy was guided by the same motivations as traditional colonial powers—namely a desire to exploit countries’ economic resources and to expand the American network of overseas military bases.
The CIA played a crucial role in trying to impose leaders that served larger geo-strategic objectives while helping to suppress left-wing wing and other dissenting groups using tactics familiar to colonial intelligence services and armies.
In many cases, CIA officers adrift in unfamiliar environments found themselves leaning on the local knowledge and contacts of European intelligence officers with whom they cultivated close ties.
The tension inherent in these relationships was captured in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955), which shows how the Europeans resented the appearance in their midst of young, inexperienced and moralistic Americans, who were intent on “saving the natives.”[11]
Romantic Imperial Adventures
Like their European counterparts, CIA officers “lived as colonials,” eating and drinking at clubs left over from the colonial era, enjoying sex with exotic local women, and taking up colonial sports like polo.[12]
The close ties between the CIA and British MI6 were evident in Iran where CIA coup master Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., worked closely with MI6 to coordinate the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had tried to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.
Roosevelt Jr. was an Anglophile whose father had joined with the British to fight the Ottomans in Iraq and befriended T. E. Lawrence.[13]
According to Wilford, Roosevelt Jr. “viewed Iranians through an imperial lens inherited from the British. His impressions of Mohammad Mosaddegh, for example, were classically Orientalist. The ‘wily’ prime minister was like an ill-tempered erratic old peasant…judging all problems from his emotional standpoint.”[14]
Roosevelt’s book Countercoup reflected his view of the Iranian coup as a “romantic imperial adventure in the Kipling and Roosevelt family tradition, with him as its hero.”[15]
This view obscured the horrific human costs that included the CIA installation of a brutal dictatorship in Iran that wiped out the political opposition and triggered an Islamic revolution a quarter-century later.
CIA Station Chief Roger Goiran had quit his post just before the 1953 coup because he regarded the plot against Mosaddegh as “putting U.S. support behind Anglo-French colonialism.”[16]
Helping to Preserve the White Man’s Rule in Asia
Psy-op expert Edward Lansdale was another legendary CIA operative profiled by Wilford with a colonialist attitude. Lansdale’s affair with a Filipino woman whom he later married, Patrocinio Yapcinco Kelly, “evoked the colonial tradition of Western men seeking erotic adventure overseas,” according to Wilford.[17]
Lansdale’s greatest moment of glory was his engineering the defeat of the left-wing Huk rebels in the Philippines.
The Huks considered themselves to be heirs of the Filipino revolutionaries who fought the U.S. colonial occupation at the turn of the 20th century.
Lansdale extolled the colonial education efforts of the Thomasites, American teachers who had arrived in the Philippines during the governorship of William Howard Taft (later to become U.S. president) to civilize and uplift their “little brown brothers.”[18]
Lansdale worked in the same tradition while borrowing sadistic population control and counterinsurgency measures from the Philippines constabulary that had pacified the revolutionary movement in the wake of the Spanish-American-Philippines War.
These methods included use of home-made substitutes for napalm, water torture, and deliberate “losing” of sabotage rifle cartridges near Huk encampments that would blow up in the hands of any Huk who tried to use them.[19]
While in the Philippines, Lansdale groomed as a protégé Ramon Magsaysay, a car salesman and outstanding Huk killer who was elevated from Defense Secretary to the presidency before dying in a plane crash in 1957.
Wilford wrote that Lansdale’s close relationship with Magsaysay conjured the “classic U.S. narrative of white and non-white men forming fiercely loyal friendships in an American frontier setting—Tom Sawyer and Jim, or the Lone Ranger and Tonto—except here transposed to the undeveloped Philippines.”[20]
Fittingly, Lansdale wrote to CIA headquarters after Magsaysay’s victory in the 1953 election that “it was a privilege…to give the lie to the current adage that the white man is through in Asia. Hellsfire, we’re just starting.”[21]
After his heroics in the Philippines, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam, where he adopted many of the same brutal methods to try to pacify nationalist rebels loyal to Ho Chi Minh, who had led Vietnam’s liberation war against France.
However, Lansdale could not work the same magic in South Vietnam with U.S. client ruler Ngo Dinh Diem, who was favored only by the minority Catholic population.
Lansdale became a hated figure among the anti-war movement after his secret operations were exposed in the Pentagon Papers. However, his advice was sought by a new generation of counterinsurgency warriors fighting covertly in Central America in the 1980s.
Big Brother Is Watching
The CIA’s support for repressive surveillance techniques reminiscent of the British Empire was evident in police training programs that operated under the cover of the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Public Safety (OPS).
OPS operatives trained local protégés in psychological torture methods and riot-control techniques to suppress opposition elements. The same techniques were used domestically as OPS veterans came home to advise police forces in suppressing urban riots and the left-wing upsurge of the 1960s.[22]
The CIA enhanced its illegal domestic surveillance operations under Operation CHAOS, which was overseen by James J. Angleton, yet another Anglophile who had developed abiding friendships with several MI6 officers.
An obsessive compulsive, Angleton became paranoid about Soviet moles in the Agency and was a neo-conservative hardliner who was behind the CIA’s efforts to quell détente during the early 1970s. He was an embodiment of the fascistic ideals within the Agency, which was synonymous with its colonial roots.
Patterns of History Repeating
Wilford’s last chapter explores the CIA’s vast propaganda operations—now carried forward by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—and cooptation of writers and intellectuals under the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which borrowed on past colonial practices.
The CIA’s establishment of a liaison office in Hollywood and cultivation of a romantic image of Agency operatives was synonymous with the British government’s efforts to glorify Lawrence of Arabia and promote Rudyard Kipling’s yarns that influenced so many in the CIA’s founding generation.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the excesses of the Vietnam War and birth of the counter-culture had led a generation of youth to repudiate the legacy of colonialism and to support political figures like Frank Church who tried to establish greater congressional control over the CIA.
Sons and daughters of Agency officials were among those to view the CIA as an embodiment of the imperialistic character of U.S. foreign policy, and to celebrate those who fought back against it—from Geronimo and Crazy Horse to the Vietcong.
But the Reagan era restored a more conservative culture as the 1960s movements dissipated, and the CIA made a comeback.
Wilford emphasizes at the end of his book that the Agency’s budget skyrocketed under the Bush and Obama presidencies, as colonial methods were restored, including use of water torture and roboticized drone killings in some of the same regions that had been bombed a hundred years earlier by British colonialists.
The CIA today is at the forefront of efforts to revitalize the Cold War, which Wilford rightfully sees as an extension of the 19th century “Great Game.” In that era, too, the Russian threat was constantly exaggerated to justify imperialistic foreign policies, with the patterns of history continuing to repeat.[23]
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine.