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Summer 2002

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Issue 43

Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
London: Yale University Press, 2002, Ł22.50

Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World
Percy Craddock
London: John Murray, 2002, Ł25

Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book's subtitle is misleading: this is really a book about the CIA and its progenitors running back into the 19th century. There is almost nothing here about the NSA, DIA, NRO and all the rest of the alphabet soup of the post WW2 American intelligence community. The early material is the most interesting; and, to me, the least familiar. I knew nothing about the career of Allen Pinkerton, who founded the Pinkerton agency, or U-1, a post-WW1 section of the State Department, or H.O. Yardley. But as he reaches the post WW2 world, ideology begins to dominate. He writes (p 167):

'The essential idea behind U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s was the defence of democracy. But in order to "save" Iran and Guatemala from the tendentious threat of communism, the CIA conspired to over-throw the democratic government in those two countries, condemning local people to decades of autocratic misrule.'

I wonder how long it took him to come up with 'autocratic misrule' as a description of the fate of the peoples of Guatemala and Iran after the Americans installed their puppet regimes. To call what transpired in Iran and Guatemala 'autocratic misrule' goes beyond euphemism to deception. Tens of thousands of people were murdered in Guatemala in the 1970s and 80s by death squads trained and armed by the US. And 'the threat of communism' in Guatemala wasn't 'tendentious': it was an invention to justify overthrowing the government. Would we call the brutality of Iran's SAVAK 'autocratic misrule'? Can't we admit that the US installed and supported a whole parade of nasty right-wing dictators in the post-war world? And if we cannot admit that, then what possible value has such a book?

The claim that the 'essential idea behind US foreign policy.....was the defence of democracy', is a joke. Or a lie. The 'essential idea' was to defend US economic and geopolitical interests and never mind how much (non-white) blood was spilt.

It gets worse. I always look at the assassination of John Kennedy as a touchstone for academics writing about America intelligence. This is Jeffreys-Jones wriggling his way past the subject on p. 194.

'Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas, invites speculation that it was a preemptive strike by the Cuban supporters of Fidel Castro.'

Well gee, Professor, it invites all manner of speculation if you decide not to do any reading; but to my knowledge Jeffreys-Jones is the first person to have come up with this one: not Fidel Castro's government, no sir, we've had that one; supporters of Fidel. What, free-lance supporters? He means Lee Harvey Oswald, presumably, plus others. Almost forty years after the event and a professional historian is still peddling one of the original cover stories, apparently unaware of even the basic facts of the case. He continues:

'But this and an abundance of other conspiracy theories have led to no firm conclusion. Certain facts are now clear: for example, the House Select Committee on Assassination in 1977-8 commissioned a com-puter-generated three-dimensional model indicating that Lee Harvey Oswald did fire the bullet that killed the president.'

This is absurd. A model could not 'indicate' Oswald's presence on the sixth floor; there is no evidence that he was there and no evidence he fired a gun of any kind, let alone the one that killed Kennedy. A model can only reflect its input. With a lot of giggery-pokery such a model, using the 'magic bullet' thesis, could only indicate that the fatal shot came from the sixth floor, in itself an absurd proposition that could be falsified in about five minutes - or as long as it took to dig out the unanimous testimony of all the medical personnel at the Parkland Hospital who treated Kennedy. For five or six surgeons plus nurses all agreed that he had a big hole - an exit wound - in the back of his head resulting from a shot fired from the front. But this is evidence and Jeffreys-Jones has no need of evidence. He continues:

'However, because of evidential difficulties arising from still-unex-plained cover-ups, it remains uncertain whether he acted alone or in concert with others. Whatever the truth is, it seems likely that Kennedy may have contributed, unwittingly, to his own death. Those who mixed in Oswald's demi-monde of KGB agents and Cuban exiles.....'

We've had supporters of Castro and now he gives us KGB agents! Which ones, Professor? The only KGB agent in the story that I can recall is the KGB officer Kostikov who was under diplomatic cover in the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. Oswald - or someone pretending to be Oswald, it still isn't clear which - tried to contact Kostikov. Oswald's 'demi-monde' consisted not of KGB agents but of CIA agents. We have a clear choice: either Jeffreys-Jones knows nothing at all about the subject or he is lying.

Jeffreys-Jones's ridiculous and/or dis-honest treatment of the JFK assassination is about par for the course. Academic historians of America in the sixties, let alone historians of American intelli-gence, always do something like this. For the assassination - and the other related assassinations of the sixties - are impossible to accommodate within a safe academic perspective. Kennedy's assassination in particular is the one event in post-war American history for which historians of American have been given the dispensation: thou need not bother with this. (15)

Another touchstone for academics in this field in this field is Indonesia. It has been demonstrated now for over decade that the CIA (and other American agencies) were involved in the slaughter of around a million Indonesians - 'communists' of course - in 1965/6. More 'autocratic misrule'. The Americans supplied the Indonesian military with lists of people to kill. These days there are even official, declassified American documents on this; we don't even need to rely on the detective work of people like Peter Dale Scott. (16) Of this event there is not a word in Jeffreys-Jones's book. He briefly mentions the CIA's role in Indonesia in 1958 and moves on. When I came across this I looked at his bibliography: there is no Philip Agee, no L. Fletcher Prouty, no Victor Marchetti, no John Stockwell. He has written a history of the CIA ignoring all the Agency's main defectors and whistle-blowers. Yet in his previous book on this subject, American Espionage: from Secret Service to CIA (London: Collier, Macmillan, 1977) his bibliography contains both Marchetti and Agee and he cites both of them. But that was 1977 and attacking the Agency was tolerated; and he was then a junior academic and now he's a professor.

All the way through Jeffreys-Jones' book the question arises: is he lying or is he just ignorant? Has he managed not to notice the material on the CIA in Indonesia? Or is he suppressing it because it's too ugly?

The same question arises with the Craddock book. Craddock was a British ambassador and chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Despite its title, the book is Craddock's version of the Cold War interspersed with selections from JIC documents; and Craddock's version of the Cold War takes us back to the 1950s' view that there was just the Evil Empire threatening the West. Almost completely missing from this book is the post-war America empire; and where it appears briefly, we are offered - here's that question again - ignorance or deception.

We get this, for example, in the section on Vietnam:

'On the Laos analogy, Kennedy could conceivably have decided to disengage from Vietnam as well about this time [1962] and might have been able to do so without too much political damage. But this is no means certain; his advisers were bullish; the costs of the Vietnam operation were as yet not crippling; and Laos, and above all the Bay of Pigs fiasco, had left him even more determined to show his public that he was ready to stand up to communism in what he saw as the main theatre. In any event, no such move could have preceded the presidential elections in November 1964. By then Kennedy was dead and his successor, understandably, felt bound to press continuity of policy.'

Not a word here about Kennedy's documented intention to begin withdrawal - and the attempt, via the suppression and distortion of Kennedy's NASM 273, to conceal this fact from history and create the illusion of 'continuity of policy'. Is Craddock unaware of this?

Or take his account of the slaughter in Indonesia.

'The bodies of the murdered generals were found in a well near the air force base of Halim (the air force had been a centre of communist influence among the military). A gruesome pogrom followed through the country as opponents of the PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] took their revenge.'

The crude attempt to imply that the 'communists' murdered the generals is followed by attributing the pogrom to unidentified 'opponents of the PKI'. Not a word about American involvement in the affair.

Of course I have laboured this. Who would expect a chair of the JIC or an academic historian of the CIA published by the Yale University Press to tell us the truth about American foreign policy?

It's not that the books are valueless: Jeffreys-Jones has an interesting chapter on the politics around the Church Committee inquiry into the CIA in the wake of Watergate; and Craddock gives the reader a nice guided tour through the Whitehall view of the Cold War and a number of other incidents which involved the UK, for example Rhodesia. It's just that having noticed that they are not telling the truth about some incidents, how much credence should we attach to the rest of their accounts?

Notes
15 For a detailed treatment of this see David W. Mantik, 'Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Silence of the Historians' at http://www.harrison-e-livingstone.com/jfk/mantik.htm

16 See for example Peter Dale Scott in Lobster 20.

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