Saddam Hussein was known for many qualities, but subtlety was not among them. An oft-repeated anecdote relates that, during a cabinet meeting, he floated the idea of stepping down as Iraq’s President, and his minister of health agreed too quickly. Saddam calmly stepped out of the room with him to discuss it and then shot him dead. This is, unsurprisingly, a tall tale. In reality, the health minister was sacked, arrested, tortured, and executed by firing squad.
Saddam employed the same direct approach with his neighbors. In 1980, after Shia protesters killed some Iraqi officials, Saddam executed the country’s leading Shia cleric. (The rumor is that he did so personally, hammering a nail into the cleric’s head and setting him on fire.) Saddam then invaded Iran, his Shia-led neighbor, starting an eight-year war that killed hundreds of thousands. To pay for that war, Iraq borrowed billions from Kuwait. Saddam wanted the debt forgiven, but the Emir of Kuwait refused, and then Kuwait accelerated oil production during a period of falling prices, pushing Iraq further in the hole. Once again, Saddam launched an invasion. On its first day, August 2, 1990, Iraq’s Army reached Kuwait’s capital and set the Emir’s palace aflame. Within the month, Iraq had annexed Kuwait. This resolved the matter of the loan, and gave Saddam control of a hefty percentage of the world’s oil supply.
The United States took an occasional interest in oil. And it took a keen interest in Saddam, whose government it had supplied with detailed maps and satellite images during the Iran-Iraq War. Still, U.S. officials were caught flat-footed by the invasion of Kuwait. A few days before it was launched, President George H. W. Bush had sent Saddam a friendly letter that gave no hint that anything was awry.
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That was not how things were supposed to go. The men of the C.I.A. idolized the British spy T. E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence had studied archeology, learned languages (“Speak their dialect of Arabic, not yours,” he advised his fellow-spies), dressed in “Arab kit,” and made powerful friends. The British credited him with guiding the Arab Revolt of 1916-18, which helped to topple the Ottoman Empire, one of Britain’s enemies, during the First World War. Whatever his actual contributions to that uprising, he exemplified the deft politicking that deep knowledge allowed.
Few would accuse U.S. intelligence officers of possessing deep knowledge when it came to Iraq. The C.I.A. had no sources close to Saddam, no Lawrences in Baghdad. The agency’s best asset was King Hussein of Jordan, who had assured Bush that an invasion of Kuwait was “impossible.” Soon afterward came a bigger shock: Saddam had been developing a nuclear arsenal. “Iraq was that close to getting a nuclear weapon,” the national-security expert Richard Clarke reflected, and the C.I.A. “hadn’t a clue.”
It has been tempting to view the C.I.A. as omniscient. Yet “The Achilles Trap” (Penguin Press), Steve Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows that the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee the Kuwait invasion was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives.
Saddam made miscalculations, too. Their gravity became clear once the U.S.-led coalition entered the Gulf War and vanquished Iraq’s military with a thunderous swat. The ground fighting, absurdly one-sided, lasted only a hundred hours. Saddam was cruel, but he was not usually foolish. Couldn’t he see what he was up against?
Actually, he couldn’t. “Like many people in the Middle East and elsewhere, Saddam thought of the C.I.A. as all-knowing,” Coll writes. Saddam assumed that Washington was fully aware of his plans to take Kuwait, and he mistook Bush’s lack of objection for tacit permission. Years later, while imprisoned, he confronted a C.I.A. officer about this. “If you didn’t want me to go in,” the officer recalled Saddam asking, “why didn’t you tell me?”
Stories about the C.I.A. typically take one of two forms. The agency is staffed with either malevolent puppet masters or bumbling idiots—“The Bourne Identity” or “Burn After Reading.” Both understandings are comforting, albeit in different ways. The first pins all ills on an agency so secretive and sinister that average citizens cannot possibly be held responsible for its actions. The second, which suggests that everything’s a farce, offers absolution of another flavor.
“The CIA: An Imperial History” (Basic), an adroit new overview by the historian Hugh Wilford, accepts neither of these characterizations. After the Second World War, the United States set out to direct politics on a global scale. This mission was unpopular, hence the cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and difficult, hence the regular fiascoes. The puppets rarely performed as intended, yet that didn’t stop the puppeteers from violently yanking the strings. Many of the C.I.A.’s actions, in Wilford’s telling, can be understood as desperate and often destructive attempts to control processes that lay beyond the agency’s grasp.
Certainly, the beginning was bumpy. “We knew nothing,” the onetime C.I.A. director Richard Helms remembered. Whereas other powerful countries had long invested in foreign espionage—the French can trace their service’s origins (with interruptions) to at least Cardinal Richelieu, in the early seventeenth century—America’s spying before the Second World War had been sparse and sporadic. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services to coördinate intelligence, but three years later Harry Truman shuttered it. Then he reconsidered and established the C.I.A., in 1947. The United States was in the strange position of towering over other countries while knowing little about them. “If you came up with a telephone book or a map of an airfield, that was pretty hot stuff,” Helms recalled.
To shed light, the C.I.A. sought the brightest bulbs. Ivy League professors were tasked with steering top students toward intelligence careers. Robin Winks, who taught at Yale for many decades, describes the “laying on of hands, quietly and effectively, in the college and in the classroom, at the master’s tea and in the seminar, over a cup at Mory’s and during a break in crew practice.” Interestingly, those hands were often laid on literature students. The agency’s longtime director of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, founded two surprisingly good literary journals while at Yale—one featured original work by Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams in its first issue. Something about sorting through ambiguity, paradox, and hidden meanings equipped students for espionage.
But to interpret a text you first must have a text, and that is where the Yale crew team was less helpful. When it came to Washington’s chief adversary, the Soviet Union, inside information was scant and experts were few. The Cold War strategist George F. Kennan was a fluent Russian speaker who had lived in the U.S.S.R. and was well versed in the culture, but he was a rarity. (Kennan acknowledged that he’d “hit the jackpot as a ‘Russian expert.’ ”) Of the C.I.A.’s thirty-eight Soviet analysts in 1948, only twelve knew any Russian.
The C.I.A.’s adventures in Albania, starting in 1949, were a sad illustration of the agency’s unsteady footing. Albania was poor, on the edge of the Soviet bloc, and led by a Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha. If any socialist state could be toppled, this seemed to be it. The agency’s man in charge of covert action, Frank Wisner, envisaged Albania as a “clinical experiment” in rolling back Communism. With the British, the C.I.A. identified figures who might lead a new government, mainly exiled politicians who’d collaborated with the Axis powers and monarchist dead-enders pining for the return of King Zog.
But orchestrating events in an inaccessible, poorly understood country was, it turned out, hard. Written propaganda foundered in a country that was eighty per cent illiterate, and broadcast propaganda had to contend with a general lack of radios and electricity. The main tactic was to insert dissidents into the country—“pixies,” they were called—who would spur revolts like so many Lawrences of Albania. With its strengths in aviation, the C.I.A. thought it wise to air-drop many by parachute.
“They came and we were waiting for them,” Hoxha recalled. The C.I.A.’s hastily recruited assets included several informants (joined by the K.G.B. mole Kim Philby, who passed secrets east from a high position within British intelligence), and nearly every airdrop ended catastrophically. In July, 1951, the C.I.A. parachuted in three pixie units: one was wiped out upon landing; the second fled into a house where the members were surrounded and burned alive; and everyone in the last group was either killed or captured and tried. Hoxha’s men not only knew of many operations in advance but also forced captured pixies to radio for reinforcements. The C.I.A. “dropped us whatever we dictated to their agents,” Hoxha bragged, and the pixies kept coming, for years, “like lambs to the slaughter.”
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.
In 1975, an investigation led by Senator Frank Church exposed this and many of the C.I.A.’s other machinations. “Fear blinds us,” Church had warned. “Fear of a future that we cannot shape with our own hands.” As if to underscore how far into the murky depths this fear had driven the country, three of the Church Committee’s witnesses turned up dead—one shot right before his testimony, one killed by a car bomb, and one found dismembered in a barrel.
Wilford stresses the “boomerang effects” of the C.I.A.’s work: the violence brought home. But that was only a taste of the mayhem wrought abroad. The coup that killed Diem was followed by four more in South Vietnam over the next two years. This was not unusual, O’Rourke found in surveying the aftermath of U.S. Cold War interventions. More than half the leaders covertly installed were subsequently either assassinated or ousted in a revolution or a coup. A regime-change attempt, moreover, raised the odds that the targeted state would clash with the U.S., experience a civil war, or stage a mass killing. Washington’s interference was not only counterproductive, O’Rourke writes; it also had “disastrous consequences” for the people caught in its wake.
Catastrophic regime changes didn’t end with the Cold War. As the nineties wore on, U.S. leaders grew increasingly alarmed about Saddam’s continued military capacities. But intelligence was wanting. (“Zero, nada, in terms of agents on the ground,” one C.I.A. officer recalled.) The combination of scant knowledge and overweening concern created demand, and Chalabi mobilized his network to arrange the supply. He promoted sources who claimed that Saddam was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and had kept working toward nuclear ones.
Saddam, in fact, had destroyed his chemical and biological arsenals and ended his nuclear program after the Gulf War. Yet “he assumed that an all-powerful C.I.A. already knew that he had no nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons,” Steve Coll writes, and so he concluded that foreign inspections must be part of a coup plot. Washington, meanwhile, listened intently to Chalabi’s warnings. “In a capital where knowledge of Baathist Iraq ran very thin,” Coll continues, “Chalabi got away with his posturing, even though he had no demonstrated following inside Iraq” and “no experience in Iraq’s military or government.”
“The U.S.A. is the strongest state,” Saddam reflected. “But it is not the most capable.”
Saddam saw spies around every corner. This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.’s history, but Coll shows that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S. intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.A. knew but what it didn’t.
Decrying Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the United States invaded in 2003. It chased out Saddam and established a new governing council, to which it appointed Chalabi. Yet in early 2004 a poll in Iraq revealed that Washington’s favorite Iraqi was the country’s least trusted public figure—trusted even less than Saddam. The next year, in the first post-Saddam election, Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress won a pitiful 0.25 per cent of the vote.
U.S. planners had banked on a “Wizard of Oz moment,” as one occupation official put it: the Wicked Witch vanquished, order restored. No such luck. Estimates of how many Iraqis died in the ensuing turmoil vary, but it was certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Iraq was strategically important to the United States, yet from 1990 on U.S. leaders had been essentially clueless about it.
Would more information have helped? No doubt, and Coll’s book illustrates the costs of ignorance magnificently. It may be consoling, then, that the twenty-first century has been a golden age of data mining. Intelligence officers, who once subsisted on trickles of information, are now drinking from the fire hose. The C.I.A. today is only a piece of what Wilford calls “the sprawling intelligence-industrial complex”; roughly two million individuals have access to classified information.
Wilford struggles to see this as an improvement, however. The C.I.A.’s trail of havoc, he feels, stems not from the ineptitude of its officers but from the audacity of its mission. Superintending global politics is a vast undertaking, requiring both a deep understanding of many places and the sort of hubris that makes that deep understanding difficult. And, because Washington has been insulated from the worst consequences of its mistakes, it has rarely been forced to learn from them. In the end, the C.I.A. has the power to break things, but not the skill to build them.
A reformed C.I.A. (slogan: “Coup Better”) wouldn’t solve the problem that Wilford raises. The heart of the issue is the United States’ determination to control global affairs. This is not a secret desire but a point of pride. Joe Biden has spoken of the need for the U.S. to remain at the “head of the table.” One can argue about whether the United States has led well, or whether others would do worse. But a clear-eyed reckoning must acknowledge that “leadership” never meant just bold ideas and stern resolve. It also meant scheming generals, poison vials, and Albanians parachuting to certain death.
In December, 2006, it meant guards in black ski masks, marching Saddam Hussein into a foul-smelling room with a noose attached to the ceiling. Men chanted the name Moqtada al-Sadr, an influential cleric and militia leader who had staged attacks on U.S. forces. “Go to Hell,” they told Saddam. “The Hell that is Iraq?” he asked. With the noose on, Saddam started praying. Midway through, a trapdoor opened beneath him, and his neck snapped. ♦
