Washington, eager for results but low on options, tried similar tactics elsewhere—with similar outcomes. “All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic states during the 1950s,” the journalist Tim Weiner wrote in his classic chronicle “Legacy of Ashes.”
From places like Albania, it would be possible to see the C.I.A. as harmlessly ineffectual (or, as Hoxha believed, “completely incompetent”). But intelligence officers quickly shifted their attention to what was then referred to as the Third World, today more often called the Global South. One reason that Wilford sees the C.I.A.’s work as fundamentally imperial is that so much of it took place in former colonies. The stereotype of the Cold War milieu—upturned collars, fog-bathed checkpoints—is misleading on this score. The real action was in warmer climes.
It was the end of colonial empires that made the Global South central. Each newly independent state, from Washington’s vantage, represented a chance to gain (or lose) influence. Of course, countries that had just thrown off empires bristled at outside attempts to guide them. Ironically, Wilford points out, this anti-imperialism empowered the C.I.A. The stronger the norm against meddling, the more U.S. leaders felt a need to hide their work. The C.I.A. thus became a new covert force of empire in an age of decolonization, Wilford argues. And, in that context, its work was of enormous consequence.
To say that the C.I.A. was consequential, however, is not to say that it was in control. The expertise shortage it faced in Eastern Europe was an outright drought in regions elsewhere. The U.S. lacked the generations-deep, place-based colonial knowledge that Britain and France had. Missionaries helped, but only so much. A survey of academic expertise on Japan conducted in 1935—when the United States was edging toward war with the country—found that the sole chair of Japanese studies in the U.S. was held by a professor at Stanford who could neither read nor speak Japanese.
Wilford notes how U.S. intelligence officers initially clung to more experienced Europeans. Stationed in unfamiliar environments, they tended to adopt the life styles of the departing colonizers: educating their children at European schools, staffing their colonial villas with native servants, playing polo. To European eyes, such men were less puppet masters than naïfs. The English novelist Graham Greene channelled that view in “The Quiet American” (1955), in which a world-weary Brit watches an idealistic C.I.A. officer, Alden Pyle, bumble his way through Vietnam.
Many assumed (incorrectly) that Pyle was based on the covert-operations legend Edward Lansdale. Journalists called Lansdale the Lawrence of Asia, but that was a stretch, as Wilford makes clear. Lawrence believed in living somewhere long enough to melt into it, and he was enough of a Method actor that he wore Arab dress among Europeans. Lansdale, in contrast, hopped borders dilettantishly, meddling in Philippine, Cuban, and Vietnamese affairs. He hadn’t been on assignment in Vietnam a month before arriving uninvited at the governmental palace with “some notes on how to be a Prime Minister of Vietnam” for Ngo Dinh Diem (notes derived, hilariously, from Lansdale’s “time out among Vietnamese”). Here was a man who, though he spoke little French and no Vietnamese, was happy to American-splain South Vietnam to its Prime Minister. The absurdity heightened when Lansdale, concerned that Diem wasn’t following, called for a translator.
Diem knew English. In fact, he’d recently worked for the political-science department at Michigan State University (and later returned to East Lansing to collect an honorary doctorate). The Lawrencian fantasy was that U.S. agents would embed themselves in foreign lands. In reality, it went the other way, with ambitious foreigners infiltrating the United States. The list of world leaders who trained Stateside includes South Korea’s Syngman Rhee (Princeton), Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (Lincoln), Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto (Harvard), Japan’s Shinzo Abe (U.S.C.), the U.N. Secretaries-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Columbia) and Kofi Annan (Macalester), and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu (M.I.T., not to mention Cheltenham High School, in Pennsylvania). The leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army during the Second Sudanese Civil War, John Garang, had a bachelor’s from Grinnell and a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State. Even Saddam Hussein was an honorary citizen of Detroit, having been given the key to the city after generously supporting one of its churches, in 1979.
When the C.I.A. sought to oust the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, its preferred replacement—the man whose picture hung on the wall of the Iran Division accompanied by the words “The Hope of Democracy of Iran”—was Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. Conveniently, he had studied at Williams College and trained at Reese Air Force Base, in Lubbock, Texas. (“They adopted me as one of their own,” he recalled.) Even more conveniently, Pahlavi lived in a McMansion near Great Falls, Virginia, some ten minutes from the C.I.A.’s headquarters, in Langley.
Langley latched on to such men, even more than it latched on to seasoned European officials. These obliging foreigners—with their church donations and U.S. diplomas—offered a tidy solution to the problem of managing a complex world. The quest for control could be the search for “our man”: that luminous being who would set everything right. The C.I.A. interfered constantly in foreign politics, but its typical mode wasn’t micromanaging; it was subcontracting.
In a narrow sense, this worked. The agency made little headway in politically frozen (and nuclearly defended) Eastern Europe, but in the fluid Third World it was on a streak. The political scientist Lindsey A. O’Rourke, in her 2018 book, “Covert Regime Change,” conservatively tallies fifty-four Cold War campaigns to oust a government or tilt an election outside Europe, twenty-four of which succeeded. One might ask whether the C.I.A. deserved credit or merely backed the sides that would have won regardless. Either way, the map was sprinkled with tiny blue stars—Iran, Guatemala, Chile—marking U.S. victories.
It was in pursuit of another such star that U.S. politicians and intelligence officers fastened on to an Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi. He was an archetypal “our man”: British boarding school, time at M.I.T., a mathematics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and yet plausible as Iraq’s next leader. To Republicans hungry for regime change, he was irresistible. At George W. Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address, Chalabi was seated directly behind the First Lady.
But who was zooming who? “I saw them as an asset,” he later explained, “that I could use to promote my program.”
Washington promoted Chalabi’s program vigorously. Between 1992 and 2003, his opposition group took in more than a hundred million dollars from the C.I.A. and other agencies. Suitcases of cash—at times accompanied by weapons and training—meant much in the resource-starved Third World. Political aspirants who received the agency’s blessing got help in seizing control and, equally important, help in holding it. Winning the C.I.A.’s primary was a crucial step on the road to power.
But candidates who won the C.I.A.’s primary often struggled in the general election. Diem may have been the “miracle man of Vietnam,” as Life called him, but he was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, and the things that helped him in Washington hurt him in Saigon.
The C.I.A.’s aims were rarely popular, and its meddling was detested. The politicians who got the agency’s support suffered politically for their association with it. Many squared the circle by ruling as dictators. Washington tolerated this, perhaps even preferred it. “It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by communists,” Kennan counselled about Latin America. For all the heady talk of promoting democracy, more than two-thirds of U.S. covert interventions during the Cold War were in support of authoritarian regimes, O’Rourke has found.
The strongmen walked a fine line. Defer to Washington and they’d face revolts; defy it and they’d be cut off or, worse, cut down. Diem held on, vexing both his patrons and his constituents, until 1963, when he was killed in a coup. The plotters had reviewed their plans (though seemingly not the “murdering Diem” part) with the Kennedy Administration, and they acted securely in the knowledge that U.S. aid would keep flowing. To Washington, if one subcontractor didn’t suit, another might. “Nothing succeeds like successors,” the diplomat and economist John Kenneth Galbraith remarked.
It was sorely tempting to clear those successors’ paths with assassinations. U.S. agents never directly killed a head of state. But Luca Trenta’s new history, “The President’s Kill List” (Edinburgh), identifies at least five countries whose leaders U.S. officials schemed to kill (the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq) and at least two others where Washington’s local allies carried out the act (the Dominican Republic, South Vietnam). Trenta also describes a nebulous plot to “biologically immobilise” Indonesia’s President, whatever that meant. On November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated—and at nearly the precise moment—a C.I.A. officer was passing a disaffected Cuban official a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle, for use in murdering Fidel Castro.