Timely memoirs and the ‘British invasion’: two trends in the historiography of the CIA

ABSTRACT

The 9/11 and WMD controversies have encouraged new trends in CIA historiography. The writing of timely leadership memoirs means that in-house viewpoints now tend to precede outside assessment, eliminating one of intelligence historiography’s distinctive quirks. At the same time, former CIA personnel are far more willing to go on the record with journalists and scholars thus ensuring that their version of events reaches the widest possible audience. Finally, an invasion of British scholars into the field comes with the promise of objectivity conferred by distance. It is argued that, because of that distance, there has been a disposition to rely on the kind of source material that lends itself to a cultural approach to CIA history.

KEYWORDS:

• CIA
• memoirs
• historiography
• British invasion
• Cold War
• presidents
• 9/11

Introduction: after the Cold War

Position yourself around 1990. As the Cold War drew to a close, the historiography of the CIA seemed to have a client relationship with the historiography of foreign policy. That foreign policy historiography, whatever the topic in hand, tended to oscillate between official apologetics and revisionism. The revisionism, in turn, could be of the left or of the right. New terminologies emerged to label developing schools of historians: Realist, New Left, Neoconservative, Cultural.

Just like diplomatic historiography or indeed most historiographies in free societies, interpretations of the CIA’s past responded to events, such as the Church inquiry of the 1970s which saw policymakers such as Senator John Tower (R-TX) recognise the prevailing mood when he proclaimed that ‘What is needed most of all – as recent events have made clear – is a responsible, leakproof means of Congressional oversight’.¹ There were, however, some distinctive features of CIA historiography. Because swathes of the reading public were prurient and loved ‘revelations’ that lifted the veil of secrecy, publishers sought books that titillated and sold well, but caused some outsiders to scorn the field of intelligence history. Especially outside academia, there was no shortage of authors who were themselves fascinated, even mesmerized, by ‘realities stranger than fiction’. In addition to this gossip school of historical writing, there was a confusing characteristic. Official CIA histories, as well as memoirs by officials, could appear years after revisionism had set in. The majority of them were far from timely.²

Position yourself thirty years later, and some new trends are in evidence. One is an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of the political context in which the CIA operated. Studies of the 1970s Church inquiry stand out in this respect.³ Another is the arrival of the ‘cultural turn’ in CIA studies.⁴ This article highlights and analyses recent developments in two sub-fields of Intelligence Studies. The first is a flood of CIA memoirs that are now so timely that the confusion caused by delayed official rationales may begin to subside.⁵ The second is the arrival of the so-called ‘British invasion’. Our article raises discussion points about that invasion of US intelligence historiography by UK scholars: was it imperial? Objective? Subservient? Didactic?

Recent memoirs

In his 1995 appraisal of the historiography of American intelligence, John Ferris remarked on the ‘voluminous memoir literature by members of the CIA, more than with any other espionage service in history.’⁶ In the years since his appraisal, there has been an even more pronounced rush of such memoirs – a form that has caused debates across the field of historical enquiry.⁷

It is also possible to discern a subtle change in their impact. Commercially published memoirs by former CIA personnel are security-vetted before release – according to the scholars Richard Aldrich and Jules Gaspard, the CIA’s publication review board ‘now considers thousands of items a year.⁸ There is also a considerable intervention by ghost writers. This is nothing new – for example, the private detective Allan Pinkerton employed several shadows to help him with the numerous books he published in the nineteenth century. Lacking though it may be on novelty, the shadow-writing phenomenon still gives the professional historian food for thought – the modern intelligence memoir may be timely, but is it reliable as a primary source? (for example, Aldrich and Gaspard note that Michael Morell (acting CIA director, 2011 and 2012–3) placed a low value on information gained through torture, but his ghost writer gave the reverse impression.)⁹ Certainly, however, memoirs are qualitatively different from the official histories internally commissioned by the CIA. The memoirists are free to add personal colour and views to their accounts. In recent years and since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq particularly, these views have often given vent to sentiments held in the immediate wake of events. That means that historians can revert to type, expressing their (possibly) revisionist views in reaction to what the actors have already said about their motives and policies. In that sense, the historiography of the CIA can for the first time become normal.

Reviewing the memoir Undaunted, by John Brennan, CIA Director (2013–17) under President Barack Obama, National Public Radio national security correspondent Greg Myre observed:

Gone are the days when national security chiefs quietly retired and perhaps wrote a discreet book a few years later recounting their years of service in understated tones. National security leaders, including former CIA directors, are as outspoken as anyone in the post-Sept. 11 era, and Brennan is the most outspoken of all.

Myre then proceeds to say that Brennan offers no big-picture critique, and is essentially a gossipy veteran of secret service who hates his successor, Gina Haspel. But Myre offers a clue to what galvanized other outspoken intelligence bosses when he says ‘post-Sept. 11.’¹⁰

The George W. Bush administration’s tactic of blaming the CIA for poor intelligence at the back of 9/11 and the Iraq War¹¹ prompted rapid-fire reaction from senior figures like George Tenet (DCIA and DCI, 1998–2004). In his 2007 memoir, Tenet faulted others, for example National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice over her espousal of de-Ba’athification in Iraq,¹² and asserted, ‘I was the guy being burnt at the stake.’¹³ (Rice, for her part, later referred to Tenet’s ‘revisionist narrative’).¹⁴ Michael V. Hayden (DCIA 2006–2009) produced his memoir in 2016, revealing that at one stage he ‘leaned forward and … advised [his successor George Panetta, 2009–11] that he should never again use the word “torture” and “CIA” in the same paragraph.’¹⁵ Panetta in his turn produced a quick memoir, in which he recalled that he ‘fingered his rosary beads’ as the moment of Osama bin Laden’s death approached.¹⁶ The prize for quickest memoir goes to James R. Clapper, whose recollections appeared just one year after he quit as director of national intelligence (2010–17). Recalling the years of his service in the Bush administration, he significantly recalled that John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence not to be head of the CIA, was ‘outgunned’ by Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense between 2001 and 2006. His remark confirms how the CIA had suffered demotion in the wake of 9/11 and the ill-fated Iraq War.¹⁷

The directors of the CIA and the presidency

Chris Whipple’s The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future is an examination of the interaction of personalities in the US national security state. While the relationship between presidents and the CIA has been examined before,¹⁸ Whipple’s book differs in a significant way from other insider accounts. It benefits from an impressive list of interviewees, making it a collective and pluralistic account. Perhaps to a greater extent than other serious investigative books, it is almost a work of oral history.¹⁹ In this sense, it is a distinctive variant of the memoir genre.

The focus on the individual allows Whipple to describe and analyse the influence such persons have over the US Intelligence Community. Although many academic historians decry the focus on agents in favour of structures,²⁰ Intelligence Studies (which is arguably an offspring of the discipline of international history) often seeks to focus on the individual to illuminate the generality.²¹ Whipple’s book focusses on notable personalities in order to seek to understand the history of the CIA by chronicling the actions of the directors of the agency.

Whipple stresses that the CIA is divided into two camps: analysts and operatives. While these terms, and this organisational breakdown, is familiar to any student of intelligence, this is crucial to the narrative of The Spymasters. Analysts, of course, collect information, and present it to their political paymasters in the form of finished intelligence. On occasion, this is achieved by covert means (such as through agents). More often it done by means of open-source intelligence (OSINT). This distinction of often lost on the wider public. Dynamic intelligence figures such as Tom Clancy’s fictional/filmic Jack Ryan are what they imagine CIA to derive its information from. The truth is rather more mundane. President Richard Nixon infamously told DCI James R. Schlesinger to ‘Get rid of the clowns’ employed by the CIA. After all: ‘What use are they? They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.’²²

Naturally, analysts can get things wrong. And even when they are right, policymakers are not obliged to take their advice. Although their information is usually accurate (especially as most of it comes from OSINT), policymakers often neglect to take the advice of their intelligence professionals. Usually, this is because of the dictates of political necessity, and although many commentators talk as if the politicisation of intelligence began with the Iraq War of 2003, Whipple reminds us that is hardly the case. DCI Richard Helms, for example, was driven to distraction by President Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Johnson was supposed to have told Helms: ‘Dick, I need a paper on Vietnam, and I’ll tell you what I want included in it.’²³ By the time we reach the Trump administration we see not so much a politicisation of intelligence, more the attempt to utilise the National Security State for political ends. Whipple’s book postulates that the Trump administration makes the machinations of the Nixon White House look like the work of rank amateurs.

Whipple maintains that the other main wing of the CIA, the operatives, are ‘brash and outgoing, [and] practice deception and seduction, enticing strangers to betray their countries.’²⁴ Many of the operatives regard the analysts with a somewhat dismissive attitude. One operative, Cofer Black,²⁵ describes an analyst as being akin to ‘a weatherman in the [US] Navy. There’s a difference between being a pilot that flies an F-14 off an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic in the winter with snow blowing across it, and the ship is going up and down – and a guy that runs the Officer’s Club in Idaho. They are not the same.’²⁶

Whipple makes the point that Directors of Central Intelligence are a motley crew. Some of them are experienced intelligence officers, whilst others are ignorant political appointments. clueless politicos, technocrats, and ruthless zealots. Allen Dulles, the longest-serving DCI, was at the helm during what has been described as the CIA’s ‘Golden Age’.²⁷ (Indeed, Dulles was recently described by one author as ‘the creator of America’s sprawling intelligence empire’).²⁸ Dulles undoubtedly greatly pleased Eisenhower by quick professional operations – overthrowing governments deemed hostile in Iran and Guatemala – that according to Whipple served the national interest to the maximum. Dulles was undone by the Bay of Pigs, effectively scapegoated by Kennedy for failing to strike down an opponent deemed – by the president himself – to represent the greatest danger to the United States.²⁹ The Bay of Pigs was a signal moment in the history of the CIA. For Dulles it was, in his own words, ‘the blackest day of my life.’³⁰ On the eve of the débacle of 1961, the CIA (and Dulles) could have been accused of having suffered that old ailment – ‘victory disease’.³¹

Whipple believes that the CIA, wrongly assumed to have never suffered a defeat before the Bay of Pigs, now suffered from intensified public scrutiny and the determination of the executive branch to retain as much of the notion of ‘plausible deniability’ as possible. It suited the occupants of the White House to retain the spectre of the agency as a ‘rogue elephant’ (which Whipple asserts that it has never been).³² ‘Plausible deniability’, the informal mechanism by which senior US policy makers were able to make extensive use of covert action, and yet evade responsibility for those operations revealed publicly³³ was, as Thomas Powers noted, ‘while routinely accepted, … rarely plausible’.³⁴ (Noam Chomsky, a staunch critic of the agency, having ‘been through masses of declassified material’ states categorically that the ‘CIA is an agency of the White House, offering “plausible deniability”. Sometimes it goes off a little on its own, but rarely. It’s not a rogue elephant, and has very little role in planning’).³⁵

At first sight, Whipple notes, Helms seems an admirable figure. He told Johnson and Nixon what the CIA saw as the truth about Vietnam – that the war was not being won, despite the massive resources the United States has committed to South East Asia. (Helms, says Whipple, blotted his copybook by accepting the notion that the anti-war movement in the United States had to be targeted as the American wing of the Viet Cong – although he did refuse to obstruct the FBI investigation into Watergate). Ronald Reagan’s DCI, William Casey, acted on the anti-communism of the crusading ex-actor president to create an aggressive global platform for covert actions. This, almost inevitably in hindsight, led to a repetition of the constitutional violations of the Nixon presidency. The Iran-Contra affair (‘a harebrained plot’) nearly caused Reagan’s resignation and occasioned a scandal of immense proportions. Casey died of a brain tumour at the height of the scandal. Whipple notes that he was ‘so famously devious’ that one suspicious senator requested to see the body as proof that Casey was actually dead.³⁶

Whipple makes any number of judgements in his book and this includes the ranking of DCIs. Whipple’s book is unapologetic in its opinions and he makes it clear who exactly he regards as the best directors. These are William Webster (‘who personified devotion to the rule of law’)³⁷; Leon Panetta (who ‘combined a common touch at Langley, with political finesse in the corridors of power’)³⁸; and John Brennan (he ‘commanded all the particulars and nuance’).³⁹

The view from below

Turning to the CIA proletariat, there are examples of quick reactions that match the speed of some of the more senior memoirists. Sam Adams exposed the mid-1960s order of battle fallacies that lay behind US strategy in the Vietnam War in 1975, the very year that the last Americans departed Saigon. Philip Agee wrote his exposé of CIA activities in South America so soon after the time of their occurrence that it was a problem for the many agents and front organizations that he named in his book. Both writers left the CIA and accepted the consequences of their rapid actions, which in Agee’s case meant permanent exile.⁴⁰ In the case of Agee this was hardly surprising. In a draft resignation letter to Helms, he wrote that his work for the agency had taught him that:

[T]he injustices forced by small ruling minorities on the mass of the people cannot be eased sufficiently by reform movements … The ruling class will never willingly give up its special privileges and comforts. This is class warfare and is the reason why communism appeals to the masses in the first place. We call this the ‘free world’; but the only freedom under these circumstances is the rich people’s freedom to exploit the poor.⁴¹

Most lower-level CIA memoirists are not, however, apostates. They publish for conventional reasons – to educate, to undergo self-therapy by re-living stressful events, and to explain themselves to their friends and families, and to themselves. They may feel the necessity of (partially) righting wrongs by exposing them.⁴² They may have grievances against the political hierarchy, but they are less acute than those of the apostates.⁴³ They accept that their texts will have to undergo security vetting. Their output may receive less urgent attention from security vetters than that of top officials, contributing to delay. Compared with the CIA’s hierarchy, they may be less scrupulous about keeping diaries of their activities to help them justify their actions later on, meaning they have to devote time to researching their own past and its contexts. Almost certainly, they are less able to draw on the help of shadow writers and other professional assistance.

The CIA memoirs by Barry M. Broman⁴⁴ and Sam Faddis⁴⁵ appeared some years after the events they describe and seek to analyse. Unlike Adams and Agee, Broman and Faddis do not criticise the CIA. Instead, they turn their fire on the very same politicians that their bosses excoriated. In this sense, they are conventional. Barry Broman, the author of Risk Taker, Spy Maker, joined the CIA after serving with the Marines in the Vietnam War. He put in chief-of-station stints but sees himself primarily as a ‘headhunter’ who recruited agents in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. He worked with minority groups such as Myanmar’s Karen. He recites the conventional CIA mantra that Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were disasters for the Agency and thus for America, and that Bill Casey did a great job of reviving the Agency’s fortunes.⁴⁶ His text has interesting local details, and students of Southeast Asia will find Risk Taker to be colourful in a helpful way.

Broman’s narrative is sometimes disjointed, and in a narcissistic way he is the centre of every story, but he does deliver some honest judgments. In Cambodia, he participated in clandestine efforts to resist the Vietnam invasion and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It was his ‘favorite posting in the CIA,’ but ‘We encouraged the small, poorly led army to take on the North Vietnamese invaders, supported them half-heartedly, and then deserted them.’⁴⁷

Sam Faddis touches on a similar theme in criticizing US policy toward the Kurds. In The CIA War in Kurdistan, he states his claim to be a maverick: he ‘made a profession of proposing ops that my bosses dismissed as being too risky’.⁴⁸ A CIA officer with experience in South Asia as well as the Middle East, Faddis like Broman shows signs of having ‘gone native’, and hates the way in which the United States blew hot and cold on issues dear to the Kurds. He is severely critical of the Pentagon, and especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for pressurizing the CIA into validating the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ claims, and for interfering with the CIA’s relationship with the Kurds in a crudely military manner.⁴⁹ He thus voices a conventional CIA complaint, but with a local flavor that contributes to our understanding of events in northern Iraq.

The British invasion

In his 1995 appraisal John Ferris, the Canadian historian later entrusted with the writing of the authorised history of GCHQ, wrote that the ‘largest groups’ engaged in ‘the academic study of intelligence’ are ‘American-trained political scientists and British-trained historians.’⁵⁰ He echoed the observation seven years earlier by the Scottish international relations historian Donald Cameron Watt, who wrote of ‘the emergence of the British school’ of intelligence studies. In his scan of exemplary works, Watt cited only one historian, Richard Popplewell, who wrote about American subject matter.⁵¹ Yet twenty years later Richard Immerman, an American author of books on the CIA, referred to ‘the British Invasion, a bounty of British historians’ who have overcome the impediment of restricted intelligence-history archives to bolster the efforts of their counterparts across the water.⁵² As a survey of scholarly work demonstrates, there has been a considerable UK contribution, since the end of the last century in particular, to the study of US intelligence history.⁵³

Why has the study of US intelligence history been so popular in Britain? One reason is the popularity of American history in general. The reasons for this, in turn, range from generous US subsidisation giving rise to better teaching resources (an aspect of American ‘soft’ diplomacy), antipathy (‘truth or otherwise in American myths’), love for particular aspects of American life, such as music and Hollywood movies, concern for the impact of the CIA in Britain, and the magnetic effect of the rise of American power.⁵⁴ The British historian of the United States, Michael Heale, has further suggested that there was a shared Anglo-American enjoyment of a ‘liberal moment’ in post-Second World War history that attracted Brits to study the USA.⁵⁵

None of these theories fully explain the contributions of UK scholars, some of whom never studied American history, and instead came to the subject matter laterally, having previously researched British intelligence history.⁵⁶ Nor do the foregoing theories account for the acceleration of interest in the present century. Here, the liberal moment no longer applies, but perhaps there has been a dichotomous spur. On the one hand, 9/11 has spurred interest in better intelligence solutions, including improved international cooperation and revived curiosity about the special intelligence relationship.⁵⁷ On the other hand, the manipulation of intelligence leading to the Iraq War has stimulated more critical thinking, in the UK as much as in the USA. There has also been a serendipity of sources. The proliferation of memoirs and the multiplication of digital assets like the CIA’s CREST⁵⁸ and the National Security Archive (NSA)⁵⁹ have been great equalisers, meaning that is does not matter which side of the Atlantic your digital device is located when you study the CIA. The cultural turn has also helped, as its artifacts tend to be internationally available.

Two developments have encouraged as well as reflected British input. One is the editorial participation of British scholars in the management of the serials Intelligence and National Security the Journal of Intelligence History. The second is the emergence of two UK-based book series addressing intelligence studies. These series encouraged British authors to propose volumes on US intelligence history and editors to accept those proposals in anticipation of selling to the lucrative American market.⁶⁰

Finally, there is a feeling that, in the words of British scholar Kaeten Mistry, ‘intelligence continues to lack academic weight in the US scholarly mainstream,’ especially in historical circles.⁶¹ The marginalisation of the subject used to be a complaint in the UK and the complaints are still heard, but it is relatively unproblematic, and those who lodge the complaints are sometimes distinctly unmarginalized full professors. It may now be a factor that British scholars are able to step into a relative American vacuum.

When the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians encouraged scholars in the UK and other countries to write about the United States, it was not just about soft power. There was genuine curiosity about what distinctive contributions the British and other might bring to the study of America. There were certain fields in which the contributions should have been obvious, for example the history of migration to the United States. But what special gifts might UK historians of US intelligence history be expected to bestow? Given the long British tradition of secret intelligence, might they bring informed intuition? A residual understanding of parts of the world that used to be in the British Empire? Expertise on the British side of the ‘special intelligence relationship’? Objectivity conferred by distance? Or just a different set of subjectivities given that there is no such thing as academic neutrality?

The overview, or survey, has been one of the characteristic British contributions to CIA history.⁶² Overviews can more readily be written at a distance, because their authors rely, more heavily than the writers of specialist monographs, on the accessible work of others. Moreover, it is an advantage to scholars resident abroad that research for general works does not require years spent in specialist archives and tracking down dozens of temperamental actors for the purpose of oral history interviews.

A documentary history of the CIA

In the last few years, a number of books about intelligence archives have been published.⁶³ (This demonstrates both the greater availability of archives and the institutionalisation of Intelligence Studies as an accepted branch of traditional archive-based scholarship). A recent compilation of such documents has appeared in a volume entitled The CIA and the Pursuit of Security: History, Documents and Contexts, published by a British press. Two of its authors, Huw Dylan and Michael Goodman, are British. (The third author, David V. Gioe, has been an intelligence practitioner, and is a scholar at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY).⁶⁴ The book has 25 chapters ranging chronologically from the creation of the CIA to the Trump presidency.⁶⁵ At the end of every chapter there is primary evidence throwing light on the chapter’s theme, ranging between one and three documents. The documents can run to several pages, or can be brief. The document ‘Intelligence Warning of the TET offensive in South Vietnam’ takes up twenty-one pages (pp. 133–53), but the document appended to the chapter on President Trump is a five-line tweet, dated 11 January 2017, in which the White House incumbent asks, ‘Are we living in Nazi Germany?’ (p. 501).

To a certain degree, The CIA and the Pursuit of Security is self-consciously British. The name of the Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew appears in the text and notes on 70 occasions (a reflection of Andrew’s contribution to book and journal editing, and to Ph.D. supervision, as well as to his writings). The authors pay greater heed than the generality of US historians to Anglo-American intelligence relations – with, for example, a chapter on ‘Anglo-American Intelligence Liaison and the Korean War’ (pp. 77–99). However, they do not fall into the too-familiar trap of supposing that the OSS and CIA were somehow the result of British tuition.

The style of The CIA and the Pursuit of Security is bibliographic. Each chapter is an erudite guide to further reading in both the secondary and the primary literature, while at the same time offering a clear narrative. The focus is very much on intelligence history, without linkage to external events and the historiography of American history. Thus, it would be a useful volume to accompany advanced courses on foreign policy taken by students who are already aware of context. In the case of more intelligence-history focused courses, it would need to sit beside other texts that supply the wider picture.

When teaching US intelligence history, one of the current authors used a volume that was comparable in intention to The CIA and the Pursuit of Security. This was William M. Leary’s 1984 edited volume, The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents. This contained the history of the Agency prepared for the Church committee by Ann Karalekas, and ten documents spanning the years 1944–1981. The CIA and the Pursuit of Security now clearly supersedes the Leary volume. Another comparison might be made with Hugh Wilford’s guidebook written with exceptional clarity and erudition to accompany his audio lectures in the Great Courses series: The Agency: A History of the CIA. The books by Wilford and by Dylan and his colleagues are complementary in that Wilford aims at the high school/freshperson level, while The CIA and the Pursuit of Security, with its array of documents, is aimed at higher levels. Because The CIA and the Pursuit of Security is a teaching tool, Edinburgh University Press should lower its price in order that students can afford to buy it.

Conclusion: 2021 and after

The directors of CIA that are most lauded by Christopher Whipple are those who were close to presidents without becoming partisan. This has proved very difficult under certain administrations – and was well-nigh impossible under commander-in-chief Trump. Indeed, Whipple notes that a worldwide threat briefing on COVID-19 was cancelled in February 2020 because it would not have suited Trump’s worldview. Alarmingly, this was met with silence by the leadership of the CIA. Michael Morell opined that ‘I find it dangerous that Trump has so intimidated the leadership of his intelligence community that they don’t want to speak publicly … This worldwide threat briefing is a key part of oversight of intelligence activities in democratic society.’⁶⁶ Naturally, a great deal of future scholarship about the CIA will focus on debates on the relationship between the CIA and President Donald Trump. If, as seems likely, Trump’s reputation post-office is poor, then the agency will be fortunate in the fact that its relations with the president were so indifferent.⁶⁷ (Indeed, for example, it is now a matter of public record that the CIA repeatedly tried to warn Trump about the danger of Covid-19).⁶⁸

As things stand, Joe Biden’s reputation for having a good relationship with the CIA⁶⁹ has seemingly led the new president to indulge the agency to a degree that has dismayed some liberal observers.⁷⁰ The arrival of Joe Biden in the White House seems to have restored the CIA to a position akin to that it occupied under the presidency of Barack Obama. It will still be called upon to undertake some of the more unpleasant and difficult tasks within the realm of US global policy. On the plus side a great deal has changed since the days of the Bay of Pigs and the watershed Year of Intelligence (1975).⁷¹

Greater accountability, a prominent outcome of the 1975 inquiries, has had the effect that the CIA has been able to speak for itself through more timely memoirs of different types, a development greatly facilitated by the Internet and through the plethora of modern social media devices. One notable example here was the manner in which the CIA sought to distance itself from the mastermind behind 9/11, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In 2007, the CIA web page directly answered what it saw as disinformation on this sensitive subject. In answering the question ‘Has the CIA ever provided funding, training, or other support to Usama Bin Laden?’, the CIA stated: ‘No. Numerous comments in the media recently have reiterated a widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship with Usama bin Laden. For the record, you should know that the CIA never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever with Bin Laden’.⁷² In recent years, those senior CIA personnel disillusioned with Trump have found it easier to go public than was the case for Allen Dulles, for example, after his sacking in 1961.⁷³

Surveying the spate of recent literature on the CIA, we can be confident that the informed view taken of the history of the agency by both serving and former officers will yield further scholarship of a high quality. As Michael Morell (acting director of the CIA, 2011 and 2012–3) recently wrote:

Intelligence matters. Good intelligence keeps us safe; it helps us understand our place in the world, and it fosters sound decisions. Inaccurate information matters too. It corrodes our ability to understand reality and stunts our progress towards a better, safer world. This push and pull – between truth and fiction, trust and distrust – shapes not only our understanding of the present but also our understanding of history. […] Any accounting of the history of the Central Intelligence Agency is particularly challenging because this constant churn continuously adds nuance to our understanding, sometimes even uprooting nuance entirely.’⁷⁴

As for British scholars, they will continue to look across the Atlantic in search of what they see as universal truths about the world of intelligence, and they may exert a moderating influence. It is not too much to speak of a community of scholars that represents a new and distinct variant of the ‘Special Intelligence Relationship’.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a native of Harlech, has written several books on US history, including The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society, winner of the American Politics Group’s Neustadt Prize for the best UK volume published on US politics in 2013. His latest book is Ring of Spies: How MI5 and the FBI Brought Down the Nazis in America (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2020), published in the United States as The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI, and the Case that Stirred the Nation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020). His latest book is A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

R. Gerald Hughes

R. Gerald Hughes, from Rhosneigr, Ynys Môn, is Reader in Military History and Director of the Centre for Intelligence and International Security Studies at Aberystwyth University. His publications include ‘Carl von Clausewitz and his Philosophy of War: The Evolution of a Reputation, 1831-2021’, History, 105/368 (2020): 773-805; ‘Journeys back along the roads to Mandalay, Imphal and Kohima: recent contributions to the history of the Burma theatre in the Second World War’, Intelligence and National Security, 37/1 (2022), 126-144 (with Stephen Hanna); Germany and the Cold War: The Search for a European Détente, 1949–1967 (2007/2014); and The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (2014). His edited books include: The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (2016); Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries into the Secret State (2008); and Intelligence, Crises and Security: Prospects and Retrospects (2008). R. Gerald Hughes is a member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

Notes

¹ J.R. Johannes, “Toward Responsible Oversight,” in A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation, review of Loch K. Johnson (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985). The Review of Politics, 49/1 (1987), 143-5

² See, for example, Tom Troy’s history of the founding of the CIA, a work completed in 1974 and published in 1981: Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA. Examples of delayed intelligence memoirs about the Vietnam War are Allen, None So Blind; and Colby, Lost Victory.

³ See, for example, L.K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America’s Spy Agencies (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015); K.S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and B. Durbin, The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On a different type of inquiry see Hadley, Rising Clamor.

⁴ See S. Willmetts, “The Cultural Turn in Intelligence Studies,” Intelligence and National Security 34, no. 6 (2019): 800-817.

⁵ Ex-post facto official accounts have not, however, disappeared from the scene. For example, Jack Pfeiffer’s account of the Bay of Pigs blaming John F. Kennedy and reversing the 1960s anti-CIA whitewash of the president was declassified only in 2016, long after the academic historians had had their say: J. Pfeiffer, “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation,” 5 vols. (CIA, 18 April 1984; released in 2016).. For reflections on the recent flurry of memoirs, see C.R. Moran, Company Confessions: Revealing CIA Secrets (London: Biteback, 2015).

⁶ J. Ferris, “Coming in from the Cold War: The Historiography of American Intelligence, 1945-1990,” Diplomatic History 19, no. 1 (1995): 87-115.

⁷ On this, see Aurell, J. Aurell, “Making history by contextualizing oneself: Autobiography as historiographical intervention,” History and Theory 54, no. 2 (2015): 244-68.

⁸ R. Aldrich and J. Gaspard, “Secrecy, Spooks and Ghosts: Memoirs and Contested memory at the CIA,” Journal of American Studies 55, no. 3 (July 2021): 551-75..

⁹ Aldrich and Gaspard, “Secrecy,” 87.

¹⁰ G. Myre, “After Chasing Threats Abroad, Former CIA Chief John Brennan Says the Risk is At Home,” NPR 5 October 2020: https://text.npr.org/918667854 (accessed 4 December 2020)..

¹¹ On the evolution of debates in the decade after 9/11, see M. Ryan, “Inventing the ‘axis of evil’: the myth and reality of US intelligence and policy-making after 9/11,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (2002): 55-76; J. Davis, “Intelligence analysts and policymakers: Benefits and dangers of tensions in the relationship,” Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 6 (2006): 999-1021.; and S. Lucas, “Recognising Politicization: The CIA and the Path to the 2003 War in Iraq,” Intelligence and National Security 26, no. 2-3 (2011): 203-227.

¹² For Rice’s defence of this policy, see C. Rice, No Higher Honour: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011). In this later assessment she observed, however, that the new Iraqi government pushed de-Baathification too far and this destabilised the country by threatening the jobs of a sizable number of people (p. 635).

¹³ G. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

¹⁴ Rice, No Higher Honour, 576.

¹⁵ M. V. Hayden, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (New York: Penguin, 2016).

¹⁶ L. Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2014).

¹⁷ J.R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence (New York: Viking, 2018).

¹⁸ See, for example, M.I. Handel, “The Politics of Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security 2, no. 4 (1987): 5-46.; and C. Andrew, “American Presidents and their Intelligence Communities,” Intelligence and National Security 10, no. 4 (1995): 95–112..

¹⁹ On this, see A. Hammond, “Through a Glass, Darkly: The CIA and Oral History,” History 100, no. 340 (2015): 311-26.

²⁰ For some relevant points on this, see A.E. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 4, no. 3 (1987): 335-370.

²¹ On this, see P. Pomper, “Historians and Individual Agency,” History and Theory 35, no. 3 (1996): 281-308.

²² T.R. Smith, “James R. Schlesinger, CIA chief and Cabinet member, dies,” Washington Post, 27 March 2014..

²³ Quoted in R. Jervis, “Why Intelligence and Policymakers Clash,” Political Science Quarterly 125, no. 2 (2010): 185-204.

²⁴ C. Whipple, The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future (London: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

²⁵ Black served in the CIA Directorate of Operations before appointed director of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in 1999 by DCI George Tenet. Coll, Ghost Wars, p. 456. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Black Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism and head of the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism. He resigned from this post in 2004.

²⁶ Whipple, The Spymasters, 15.

²⁷ As Loch Johnson has observed: Dulles’ tenure as DCI represented ‘a time of growth and maturation for America’s intelligence agencies … as Dulles assiduously nurtured the development of the CIA and defended it against rival bureaucrats.’ L.K. Johnson, “The Golden Age of the CIA,” Review of Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles by Peter Grose. Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (1996): 675-680.

²⁸ D. Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

²⁹ According to Whipple, this indicated the end of the ‘Golden Age’ for the CIA. On this, see S. Willmetts, “The Burgeoning Fissures of Dissent: Allen Dulles and the Selling of the CIA in the Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs,” History 100, no. 340 (2015): 167-188.

³⁰ Quoted in Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 2.

³¹ This term is often traced to Japan’s Rear Admiral Hara. Perrett, Why the Japanese Lost, p. 111. The term refers to a concept as old as human conflict. Barry Struss, for example, suggests Spartacus was a victim of it. B. Strauss, The Spartacus War. London: Phoenix, 2009.

³² Whipple, The Spymasters, 11.

³³ Noam Chomsky defined it thus: ‘if something goes wrong, we don’t want it to look like we did it, those guys in the C.I.A. did it, and we can throw some of them to the wolves if we need to’. He adds ‘That’s basically the role of the C.I.A., along with mostly just collection of information’. Chomsky, N. Understanding Chomsky: The Indispensible Chomsky (London: Vintage 2003).

³⁴ Powers, “Preface,” Intelligence Wars, xiv.

³⁵ Noam Chomsky: informal e-mail conversation with R. Gerald Hughes, 14 April 2008. On the notion of the CIA as a ‘rogue elephant’, see K.S. Olmsted, “Lapdog or Rogue Elephant? CIA Controversies from 1947 to 2004,” in The Central Intelligence Agency: Security Under Scrutiny, ed. Athan Theoharis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 189-229.; T. Stiefler, “CIA’s Leadership and Major Covert Operations: Rogue Elephant or Risk-Averse Bureaucrats?” Intelligence and National Security 19, no. 4 (2004): 632–54; L.K. Johnson, Spy Watching: Intelligence Accountability in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and J. H. Johnston, Murder, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy (Lincoln, NE: Potomac/University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

³⁶ Whipple, The Spymasters, 5.

³⁷ Ibid., 139.

³⁸ Ibid., 6.

³⁹ Ibid., 273.

⁴⁰ S. Adams, “Vietnam Cover-up: Playing War with Numbers,” Harper’s (May 1975): 41-44, 62-73; and P. Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

⁴¹ Agee, Inside the Company, 503–4.

⁴² See, for example, John Stockwell’s exposé of CIA operations in Angola. J. Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978).

⁴³ In 2016, Ronald S. Patrick, deputy director of talent development at the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that: ‘We expect you to have lived a life, to have exercised bad judgment, to have gone through adolescence and made mistakes.’ M. Wollan, “How to Pass a C.I.A. Background Check,” New York Times Magazine, 19 August 2016.

⁴⁴ B.M. Broman, Risk Taker, Spy Maker: Tales of a CIA Case Officer, foreword by Daniel C. Arnold (Philadelphia, PA: Casemate, 2020).

⁴⁵ S. Faddis, The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War, by Sam Faddis (Philadelphia, PA: Casemate, 2020).

⁴⁶ Broman, Risk Taker, Spy Maker, 184, 198–9.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 118.

⁴⁸ Faddis, The CIA War in Kurdistan, 16–7.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 92, 150, 190.

⁵⁰ Ferris, “Coming in from the Cold War,” 89.

⁵¹ D.C. Watt, “Intelligence Studies: The Emergence of the British School,” Intelligence and National Security 3, no. 2 (1988): 338-341.. Watt’s reference was to Richard Popplewell’s essay on the operations of British intelligence against Indian ‘seditionists’ in North America, 1914–17, later incorporated in R. J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904-1924 (London: Routledge, 2016).

⁵² R.H. Immerman, “Intelligence Studies: The British Invasion,” History 100, no. 340 (2015): 163-166.

⁵³ What follows is a list, by no means comprehensive, of British authors of selected indicative publications. R. Aldrich, “CIA History as a Cold War Battleground: The Forgotten First Wave of Agency Narratives,” in Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945, eds. C.R. Moran and C.J. Murphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 19-46; R. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001); idem, “OSS, CIA and European Unity: The Committee on United Europe, 1945-56,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 8, no. 1 (1997): 184-227; C. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins, 1995); A.C. Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (London: Joseph, 1982); J. Callanan, Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); P.H.J. Davies, Intelligence and Government in Britain and the United States, 2 vols., I: Evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012); B. Durbin, The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); B. Edwards, A Study of a Master Spy, Allen Dulles (London: Housmans and Chemical Workers’ Union, 1961); C.B. Fletcher, “Evolution of the Modern American Spy Novel,” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 2 (1987): 319-31; L. Freedman, US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat (London: Macmillan, 1977); C.J. Fuller, See It/ Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); M.J. Heale, “Writings in Great Britain on United States History: Some Reflections on a Liberal Moment,” in Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945-1980, 5 vols., eds. Lewis Hanke (White Plains, NY: Kraus International for American Historical Association, 1985), 363-441, II.; Hughes, Jackson and Scott (eds), Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries into the Secret State, contains contributions on the CIA by L. Scott, A. Priest, R.G. Hughes, and P. Maddrell; Hughes and Scott (eds), The Cuban Missiles Crisis; R. Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); idem, “The Historiography of the CIA,” The Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (1980): 489-96; idem, “The Teaching of United States History in British Institutions of Higher Learning,” in Guide to the Study of United States History outside the U.S., 1945-1980, 5 vols., eds. Lewis Hanke (White Plains, NY: Kraus International for American Historical Association, 1985), II, 305-62; M. Jones, “Journalism, Intelligence and the New York Times: Cyrus L. Sulzinger, Harrison E. Salisbury and the CIA,” History 100, no. 240 (2015): 229-50; idem, “‘Real Substance, Not Just Symbolism’? The CIA and the Representation of Covert Operations in the Foreign Relations of the United States Series,” in Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945, eds. C.R. Moran and C.J. Murphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 65-89; P. Maddrell, Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945-1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); idem, “What we have discovered about the Cold War is what we already knew: Julius Mader and the Western secret services during the Cold War,” Cold War History 5, no. 2 (2005): 235-58; P.M. McGarr, “‘Do We Still Need the CIA?’ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Central Intelligence Agency and US Foreign Policy,” History 100, no. 240 (2015): 275-92; idem, “‘Quiet Americans in India’: The CIA and the Politics of Intelligence in Cold War South Asia,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 5 (2014): 1046-82; K. Mistry, “Approaches to Understanding the Inaugural Covert Operation in Italy: Exploding Useful Myths,” Intelligence and National Security 26, no. 2-3 (2011): 246-68; idem, “Narrating Covert Action: The CIA, Historiography and the Cold War,” in Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945, eds. C.R. Moran and C.J. Murphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 111-28; idem, “A Transnational Protest against the National Security State: Whistle-Blowing, Philip Agee, and Networks of Dissent,” Journal of American History 106, no. 2 (2019): 362-89; K. Mistry and Hannah Gurman, Whistle-Blowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Moran, Company Confessions; Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence; J. Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986); D. Rezk, The Arab World and Western Intelligence: Analysing the Middle East 1956-1981 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); F.S. Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); L. Scott, Macmillan, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile crisis: Political, Military and Intelligence Aspects (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); G. Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002); B. Sewell, “The Pragmatic Face of the Covert Idealist: The Role of Allen Dulles in US Policy Discussions on Latin America, 1953-61,” Intelligence and National Security 26, no. 2-3 (2011): 269-290; D. Stafford, The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991); D. Townley, “Too Responsible to Run for President: Frank Church and the 1976 Presidential Nomination,” Journal of Intelligence History (2020), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/16161262.2020.1826813 (accessed 1 January 2021); Watt, “Intelligence Studies”; H. Wilford, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic, 2013); idem, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003); idem, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); S. Willmetts, “The CIA and the Invention of Tradition,” Journal of Intelligence History 14, no. 2 (2015): 112-128; idem, “The Cultural Turn in Intelligence Studies,” Intelligence and National Security 34, no. 6 (2019): 800-817; idem, In Secrecy’s Shadow: The OSS and CIA in Hollywood Cinema, 1941-1979 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). There are certain individuals that it is difficult to categorise. For example, because he is an American, Scott Lucas’s name does not appear here. As he is a long-serving professor at the University of Birmingham, England, he and others like him fall into a distinct category. He has written about Anglo-American topics like the Suez crisis. Do members of the Lucas genre ‘go native’, or fall between the US and UK categories?

⁵⁴ This summary of motives draws on a survey of motivations expressed by 600 students at the University of Edinburgh, 1967–80. See Jeffreys-Jones, “Teaching of United States History,” 330–31.

⁵⁵ Heale, “Writings in Great Britain,” 363–4.

⁵⁶ Two examples are Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only; and Moran, Company Confessions.

⁵⁷ A.D.M. Svendsen, Intelligence Cooperation and the War on Terror: Anglo-American Security Relations after 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2009).

⁵⁸ CIA, “CREST: 25-Year Program Archive,” https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive (accessed 20 January 2021).

⁵⁹ National Security Archive. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/ (accessed 20 January 2021).

⁶⁰ The Studies in Intelligence book series started in 1987 as a Frank Cass exercise (now published by Routledge), with over 70 scholarly volumes published so far. Edinburgh University Press launched its Perspectives in Intelligence History series in 1991. It ceased publication on the untimely death of the Press’s secretary Martin Spencer two year later, but in 2019 a team of four British editors launched the new Edinburgh University Press series ‘Intelligence, Surveillance and Secret Warfare’, with ten books in print at the time of writing.

⁶¹ Mistry email to Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, 30 November 2020. Complaints about this have been prominent for some years now. See, for example, A.B. Zegart, “Universities Must Not Ignore Intelligence Research,” Chronicle of Higher Education 53, no. 45 (July 2007): 9.

⁶² Examples are Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, Davies, Intelligence, Wilford, Agency, Jeffreys-Jones, CIA and American Democracy, and Ranelagh, Agency.

⁶³ See, for example, Hughes, Jackson and Scott (eds), Exploring Intelligence Archives (2008); and Aldrich, Cormac, and Goodman (eds), Spying on the World (2014).

⁶⁴ Dylan, Gioe, and Goodman (ed.), The CIA and the Pursuit of Security.

⁶⁵ The volume comprises the following: Chapter 1. “Intelligence for an American Century: Creating the CIA”; 2. ‘The Berlin Tunnel: A “Gangster Act”’; 3. “The development of CIA covert action”; 4. “The CIA and the USSR: The Challenge of Understanding the Soviet Threat”; 5. “Anglo-American Intelligence Liaison and the Outbreak of the Korean War”; 6. “CIA and the Bomber and Missile Gap”; 7. “The CIA and Cuba: The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis”; 8. “The CIA in Vietnam”; 9. “The CIA and Arms Control”; 10. “Counter-Intelligence and Yuri Nosenko”; 11. “1975: The Year of the “Intelligence Wars””; 12. “Watching Khomeini”; 13. “The CIA and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan”; 14. “Martial Law in Poland”; 15. “Able Archer and the NATO War Scare”; 16. “The Soviet Leadership and Kremlinology in the 1980s”; 17. “The CIA and the Persian Gulf War of 1991”; 18. “Aldrich Ames”; 19. “The System was Blinking Red: The Peace Dividend and the Road to 9/11”; 20. “Reckoning and Redemption: The 9/11 Commission, the Director of National Intelligence, and CIA at War”; 21. “Iraq and WMD”; 22. “The Terrorist Hunters Become Political Quarry: The CIA and Rendition, Detention and Interrogation”; 23. “Innovation at CIA: From Sputnik to Silicon Valley and VENONA to Vault 7”; 24. “Entering the Electoral Fray: CIA and Russian Meddling in the 2016 Election”; 25. “Flying Blind? CIA and the Trump Administration.”

⁶⁶ Quoted in Whipple, The Spymasters, 328.

⁶⁷ T. McCarthy, “Why is Donald Trump attacking the US intelligence community?” The Guardian (London), 19 August 2018; M.L. Kelly, “How the relationship between Trump and his Spy Chiefs soured,” NPR, 29 October 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/773127809/how-the-relationship-between-trump-and-his-spy-chiefs-soured (accessed 20 January 2020);E. Lutz, “CIA: Please ignore Trump’s medical advice on Coronavirus,” Vanity Fair, 14 April 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/cia-please-ignore-trumps-medical-advice-on-coronavirus (accessed 20 January 2020).

⁶⁸ ANI, ‘Donald Trump ignored 12 warnings issued by CIA about coronavirus’, Times of India, 29 April 2020.

⁶⁹ ‘The CIA and its assemblage of operatives, directors, and informants are easy targets for the ire of anyone with even a dim awareness of the terror and harm they have caused. But none of these crimes could have come to pass without the combination of tacit and explicit approval from politicians like Joe Biden, charged with regulating an arm of government defined by its will to crush democracy at home and abroad.’ D. Boguslaw, “Joe Biden’s Love Affair With the CIA,” The American Prospect, 10 October 2019. https://prospect.org/power/joe-bidens-love-affair-with-the-cia-william-casey/ (accessed 17 September 2021).

⁷⁰ Staff and agencies in Washington DC, “Biden administration fights to keep details of CIA torture of detainee secret,” The Guardian (London), 6 October 2021.

⁷¹ On this, see Johnson, A Season of Inquiry Revisited.

⁷² CIA web page, “Terrorism FAQs”, 6 April 2007. Quoted in R.G. Hughes, “Of Revelatory Histories and Hatchet Jobs: Propaganda and Method in Intelligence History,” Intelligence and National Security 23, no. 6 (2008): 842-877 (n.161). Emphasis in the original.

⁷³ Dulles nevertheless published The Craft of Intelligence -which contained some veiled references of US policymakers – in 1963. He then served as a member of the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dulles died in 1969.

⁷⁴ Morell, ‘Foreword’ in Dylan, Gioe, and Goodman, The CIA and the Pursuit of Security, xi.