Biting the Hand That Feeds You: Why the “Intelligence Function” of American Foundation Support for Area Studies Remains Hidden in Plain Sight

Abstract

This article argues that in the early Cold War period a symbiotic relationship existed between the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, the Central Intelligence Agency and other American security agencies, and various universities and academics. The information on this relationship is now abundant, but the article argues that most academics do not want to probe into these ties, or even acknowledge them. Part of the reason is the price one pays for openly discussing this history. As a result we still lack grounded histories of these relationships.

Notes

1. Quoted in Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 10.

2. Quoted by Ellen Herman in Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 130, n. 57. Milton said this during the controversy over the CIA's Project Camelot.

3. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

4. See Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 72.

5. David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); David H. Price, Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch, 2011).

6. Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 2–5.

7. Betty Abrahamson Dessants, “The Silent Partner: The Academic Community, Intelligence, and the Development of Cold War Ideology, 1944–1946”, Paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Columbus, OH, 28–31 March 1996. Katz (op. cit., pp. 57–60) argues for a break between the anti-fascist politics of the OSS and the anti-communist politics of the CIA, but his text suggests many personal continuities into the postwar period, through Alex Inkeles, Philip Mosely, W.W. Rostow and others; an alternative reading would be that the anti-fascists, many of them left-liberals, were either weeded out or fell by the wayside, distressed at the turn taken by American Cold War policies after 1947.

8. The letter is dated 28 October 1948. Those who wish to pursue this matter can find additional documentation in the William Donovan Papers, US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, PA, box 73a. Included in this effort were Evron Kirkpatrick, Robert Lovett and Richard Scammon. Christopher Simpson terms this same operation “the Eurasian Institute”, listing it as a special project of Kennan and Davies, in which Kirkpatrick participated. See Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 115n; see also Diamond, op. cit., pp. 103–105. A new biography of Donovan makes no mention of it, however. See Douglas Waller, Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage (New York: The Free Press, 2011).

9. Langer to Mosely, 11 May 1953, Philip Mosely Papers, University of Illinois Special Collections, Urbana-Champaign (hereafter Philip Mosely Papers), box 18.

10. Philip Mosely Papers, box 18, Paul F. Langer to Mosely, Carl Spaeth and Cleon O. Swayze, 17 May 1953.

11. Bundy's 1964 speech at John Hopkins, quoted in Diamond, op. cit., p. 10.

12. Mosely worked with the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins on classified projects in 1949 and had top secret clearance for CIA work in 1951 and 1954. In 1957 he had CIA contracts and was a member of the “National Defense Executive Reserve” assigned to the “Central Intelligence Agency Unit”. He renewed his contracts and status in 1958 and worked on an unnamed project for the Special Operations Research Office of American University in 1958. In 1961 he was cleared for top secret work by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a major academic arm of government security agencies. In the same year he kept Abbot Smith of the CIA informed about his travels to the USSR in connection with ACLS/SSRC academic exchanges with that country. Operations Research Office to Mosely, 28 February 1949 and 2 November 1949 (the latter memo refers to “the optimum use of the social sciences in operations research”); “National Defense Executive Reserve, Statement of Understanding”, signed by Mosely, 19 December 1957 and renewed, 26 June 1958; Mosely to Abbot Smith, 10 March 1961. Smith was an important CIA official and colleague of Ray Cline and William Bundy; Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 138–139. In 1961 Mosely worked with the IDA on a secret project on “Communist China and Nuclear Warfare” (S.F. Giffin, IDA, to Mosely, 24 November 1961 and Mosely to Giffin, 6 December 1961), all in Philip Mosely Papers, box 13.

13. Christopher Simpson (ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. xii, xvii.

14. Ibid., pp. 9, 28, 60–61, 166n. On the Psychological Strategy Board and its ties to the CIA, the Joint Chiefs and other state agencies, see Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2006), pp. 43–44. It was to be “the coordinating body for all nonmilitary Cold War activities, including covert operations”.

15. Irene L. Gendzier, “Play it Again, Sam: The Practice and Apology of Development”, in Simpson, Universities and Empire, op. cit., pp. 86–87, 95.

16. Diamond's book was reviled in Richard Gid Powers, “Graves of Academe,” New York Times Book Review (21 June, 1992) as a concoction of conspiracy theories, a typical way in which its hard evidence could be ignored. It grew out of Diamond's unfortunate encounters as a junior professor with Dean Bundy during the McCarthy period at Harvard, and has unimpeachable declassified information on Harvard and Yale's ties to the CIA and the FBI.

17. Wilford, op. cit., p. 30.

18. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 394.

19. Wilford writes that there is now “indisputable evidence” that the CIA funded this review, and Phillips “ardently wooed the CIA” to fund it, according to Bertram Wolfe. Wilford, op. cit., pp. 103–104; see also pp. 4, 8.

20. Saunders, op. cit., p. 411; on Braden see also Wilford, op. cit., pp. 62–65.

21. Saunders, op. cit., pp. 394–395, 398, 410.

22. Ibid., p. 245. The full list of secretly subsidised books has never been declassified, despite many requests.

23. Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

24. Simpson, Blowback, op. cit., pp. 48n, 118–122; Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 363–364. On Taylor's introduction to Mandel, see Diamond, op. cit., p. 308.

25. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (St. Petersburg, FL: Tree Farm Books, 1999), p. 251.

26. Allan A. Needell, “Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences”, in Simpson, Universities and Empire, op. cit., p. 23.

27. Ibid., p. 13.

28.Guide to the Max Millikan Papers, MIT Archives, Cambridge, MA.

29. This transcript, from which all quotations in the text are taken, was provided to me by Kai Bird, who obtained it from David Armstrong. The first few pages of the original document are missing, so some of the participants are hard to identify; furthermore, their statements were truncated and paraphrased. The meeting was held on 18 May 1959.

30. W.W. Rostow, The Dynamics of Soviet Society (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1952).

31. Ibid.

32. Anthony F. Czajkowski, “Techniques of Domestic Intelligence Collection”, in H. Bradford Westerfield (ed.), Inside CIA's Private World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 58–59.

33. Saunders, op. cit., p. 139.

34. Hersh, op. cit., p. 258, citing John Loftus, The Belarus Secret (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 107.

35. Saunders, op. cit., pp. 139–141.

36. Ibid., pp. 139–145.

37. Transcripts of these talks are available in the Dean Acheson Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale, New Haven, box 17.

38. Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 36–37.

39. Katz, op. cit., p. 160.

40. Ibid.; see also Richard Lambert et al., Beyond Growth: The Next Stage in Language and Area Studies (Washington, DC: Association of American Universities, 1984), pp. 8–9.

41. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 

42. Noam Chomsky was among the first to point this out, in an influential article in that turning-point year, 1966: “The Responsibility of the Intellectuals”, New York Review of Books (December 1966).

43. The primary volume is Edward S. Mason, Mahn Je Kim, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim and David C. Cole, The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1980).

44. Ibid., p. v. On the next page the authors laud “the development of Korean entrepreneurship”, refer to “an industrious and disciplined labor force” and call the interconnection of government and private initiative in Korea “remarkably productive”. In the only reference to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the most repressive and anti-democratic institution in South Korean life until the democratisation of the 1990s, the authors argue that this organisation played a positive role in keeping the president well informed (pp. 260, 488).

45. Chris Mooney, “For Your Eyes Only: The CIA Will Let You See Classified Documents—But at What Price?”, Lingua Franca, November 2000. See also Mark Clayton, “Higher Espionage”, Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 2003; and David Gibbs, “Academics and Spies: The Silence that Roars”, Los Angeles Times, Sunday Opinion Section, 28 January 2001.

46. Steve Horn and Allen Ruff, “How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities”, Truth-Out, 28 November 2011, available: <http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/4905:how-private-warmongers-and-the-us-military-infiltrated-american-universities> (accessed 23 May 2013). I am indebted to David Gibbs for bringing this article to my attention.

47. John Markoff, “Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’”, New York Times, 11 October 2011.

48. George R. Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), pp. 7–8 (emphasis in original).

49. Ibid., p. 64 (emphasis in original).

50. Ibid., p. 180.

51. Ibid, pp. 177–178. A more thoughtful presentation on “work[ing] for change from the inside” comes from Kerry Fosher, an anthropologist working for the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity: “Yes, Both, Absolutely: A Personal and Professional Commentary on Anthropological Engagement with Military and Intelligence Operations”, in John B. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell and Jeremy Walton (eds.), Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 261–271.

52. Robert Burnett Hall, Area Studies: With Special Reference to their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1947).

53. David Szanton (ed.), The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 9, 340n.

54. Jim Peck, “The Roots of Rhetoric: The Professional Ideology of America's China Watchers”, in Ed Friedman and Mark Selden (eds.), America's Asia (New York: Vintage, 1971), published in an earlier version in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.

55. Most easily accessible in Cumings, Parallax Visions, op. cit.

56. I have been told that Dr. Mosely deposited his papers at the University of Illinois because he became angry with Columbia in the late 1960s. I do not know if that is true, but I think the unexpurgated nature of his papers might suggest a desire either to let the whole CIA mess see the light of day, and/or to let the truth out about what had been going on at Columbia for two decades. Incidentally, I heard from his daughter, also an academic, who found just about everything I said about her father to be astonishing news and asked me if I was sure about what I wrote. I suggested that she visit her father's collection of papers in Urbana-Champaign.

57. “Scientists as Spies”, letter to The Nation, 20 December 1919, reproduced in Simpson, Universities and Empire, op. cit., pp. 1–2.