The cultural turn in intelligence studies

ABSTRACT

This article explores an emerging “cultural turn” in intelligence studies, which, if fully realized, could entail the expansion of the discipline to include new methodologies and theories, and a more integrative understanding of historical causality that locates intelligence agencies within the widersocio-cultural domain they inhabit. It has two parts. The firstexpands upon what I mean by a new ‘integrative’ understanding of historical causality. The second explores three areas of interest for intelligence scholars where the “cultural turn” has clear and important implications: the study of secrecy, publicity, and “mentalities”.

In recent years a new wave of scholarship, focusing upon the representation of secret intelligence services in various media, has added new vitality to the discipline of intelligence studies.¹1. Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood; Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow; Boyd Barett, Herrera and Bauman, Hollywood and the CIA; Sbardellati, Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies; McCarthy, Selling of the CIA; Alford and Secker, National Security Cinema; Oldham, Paranoid Visions; Hepburn, Intrigue; Kackman, Citizen Spy; Hitz, The Great Game; Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War; Dover and Goodman eds. Spinning Intelligence; Linder, ed. The James Bond Phenomenon; Chapman, License to Thrill; Chapman, Hitchcock and Spy Film; Moran, Company Confessions; Goodman, British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire; Taylor ed. Spying in Film and Fiction; Peter Marks, Imagining Surveillance.View all notes It is tempting, therefore, to identify this topical interest in the popular mediation of intelligence agencies as the titular ‘cultural turn’ of this article, and leave it at that. But topicality alone cannot constitute a disciplinary ‘turn’. At stake in this expansion of the discipline to include a consideration of ‘culture’ is something much more fundamental than simply a question of what topics are permissible. In this article I will argue that two conditions are necessary for a fully fledged cultural turn in intelligence studies: the first is an openness to new methodologies and theoretical paradigms, often borrowed from other disciplines, and in particular from the fields of cultural studies, literary theory and the philosophy of history. The second is a new understanding of historical causality that is integrative, recognising that intelligence, as with the rest of the political domain, ‘does not constitute itself independent of and external to society – but is a place of almost continuous sociopolitical interaction.’ Intelligence scholars, to borrow Steven Pincus and William Novak’s wording, ‘should not assume that their chosen area of inquiry can be studied abstracted from other elements of historical experience.’²2. Pincus and Novak, “Political History After the Cultural Turn”.View all notes Nor, it should be added, are many of those other elements of historical experience entirely abstracted from the history of secret intelligence.

This article is therefore not intended as a comprehensive literature review of recent cultural studies of intelligence, though it does identify what this author considers some of the more significant works that assume one or both of the conditions described above. Nor is it a purely descriptive account of a ‘cultural turn’ in intelligence studies that has already occurred. Rather, it seeks to extrapolate from an emerging tendency within the field, a nascent cultural turn if you will, still in the making, in order to outline some guiding principles for its future development, as well as explore some of its implications for the study of intelligence. There are two sections to this article. The first expands upon what I mean by a new ‘integrative’ understanding of historical causality, and contrasts it with traditional historical approaches to intelligence studies. The second explores three key areas of interest for intelligence scholars where this new paradigm has clear and important implications: the study of secrecy, publicity, and ‘mentalities’, or the cultural baggage that accompanies and inspires intelligence practitioners. The implications of a fully fledged cultural turn in intelligence studies need not be limited to these domains, but it is in these domains where integrative and methodologically innovative approaches have already begun to emerge.

To avoid the kind of hostile misinterpretation that often accompanies interventions of this nature, I wish to end this introduction with a plea to the reader, particularly those wedded to more ‘traditional’ methodologies. This is not intended as a rejection of politics, or political approaches to the study of intelligence. Indeed, if anything, the opposite is true; the opening up of intelligence studies to new terrains beyond what was traditionally considered ‘political’ (i.e., the state) expands and extends the range of political enquiry. Rather than rejecting traditional approaches to the study of secret intelligence, this article proceeds from the assumption that embracing new methodologies, and adopting a more integrative understanding of historical causality, an understanding that sees intelligence agencies as enmeshed in a complex ecosystem of political, social and cultural phenomena, can only augment the discipline and extend the reach and significance of its conclusions. Perhaps the reason that intelligence studies is sometimes described as a ‘ghetto’ of diplomatic history and international relations is because its practitioners have hitherto not been bold enough in noting the profound impact of their object of study upon wider society, and its momentous political reverberations beyond the corridors of state.³3. Aldrich, ““Grow Your Own””, 138.View all notes

It would, however, be disingenuous to deny the critical intent of this article. The cultural turn in intelligence studies, as I conceive it here, has a sting in the tail, but its implications, if fully grappled with, should prove salutary rather than destructive. As I have described elsewhere, a full reckoning with the range of cultural and critical theory that has parsed the relationship between representation and reality necessitates a rejection of what Hans Kellner has described as the authoritarian discourse of reality.⁴4. Kellner, “Narrativity in History: Post-Structuralism and Since”, 6.View all notes The unavoidable corollary of recognising that the reality of intelligence is always, to an extent, culturally constructed, is a degree of critical introspection on behalf of intelligence scholars who still regard themselves as the arbiters of historical authenticity, standing as bulwarks against the tide of fantasists and conspiracy theorists who have deceived the wider public about the role and function of intelligence services. Such introspection is categorically not a descent into historical relativism, where the narratives of the most crazed internet blogger (or President of the United States) can stand on the same footing as an experienced scholar who has spent decades in the archive. But it is a reckoning nonetheless, and a realisation that just as intelligence services carry their own cultural baggage, so too do intelligence scholars. Recognising the frailty of our own discipline, the inherently vulnerable yet creative enterprise of constructing meaning from an actively distorted and partially concealed archive of documentary material, is the only pathway to a more honest, diverse, and theoretically complex discipline. In this, I share in the opinion of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that robust deliberation and critical self-awareness is the pathway to more effective intelligence agencies, just as it is the key to the vitality of any academic discipline.⁵5. Moynihan, Secrecy.View all notes

Towards an integrative understanding of historical causality in intelligence studies

Customarily, this would be the moment at which, as a faithful political scientist, I should bemoan the nebulousness of previous attempts to define the central concept of this article, and instead offer my own, more precise, definition. Unfortunately, ‘culture’, as Raymond Williams famously noted, ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’⁶6. Williams, Keywords, 87.View all notes Its many meanings, and its many applications across a range of academic disciplines, make a concise definition more or less impossible. When we talk about culture, we mean different things in different contexts. Williams noted four core usages of the term in the modern world. The first is the notion of culture as a form of ‘intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development’, which was a metaphoric application of the original medieval usage of the term in relation to agricultural cultivation or husbandry.⁷7. Ibid., 91.View all notes The second usage is basically as synonym for ‘civilisation’, indicating a ‘general process of social development’, with all the Nineteenth-Century baggage of social Darwinism that such a teleological view of human societies entailed. The third ‘denotes the objects of artistic production’: novels, films, paintings, etc.⁸8. Steinmetz, State/Culture, 5.View all notes The fourth relates to the anthropological sense of the term – understanding particular human societies in terms of their shared symbols, behaviours and systems of meaning. For good reason, it is the third and fourth usages of the term, culture as artistic representation and culture as shared behaviours and systems of meaning, that have most interested intelligence studies scholars. More specifically, for the purposes of analytical clarity, we might choose to break-up the ‘cultural’ intelligence studies literature into two camps: the study of media representations of espionage, including the study of spy fiction; and the more anthropological attempt to determine specific intelligence ‘cultures’, usually borrowing the notion of strategic culture from war studies and applying it to an understanding of the specific norms and customs of certain intelligence agencies.

As I have detailed elsewhere, two approaches to spy fiction and the representation of espionage in popular media are pre-eminent within the discipline.⁹9. Willmetts, “Reconceiving Realism”.View all notes The first, what I call the ‘mythbusting’ approach, offers, in its crudest form, a balance sheet of the myths and realities of espionage, setting fictional characters and events against their real-life counterparts, and pointing out the inconsistencies between these two columns in the ledger of historical authenticity. The second dominant approach looks for the ‘real-world impact’ of popular representations upon the work and development of intelligence agencies. I will call this the ‘consequentialist’ approach to the study of representation, borrowing the term from ethical philosophy to reflect the sense in which the practitioners of this approach see the value of culture only in terms of its ‘real world’ effects. For example, numerous articles have noted the influence of early spy novelists such as William Le Queux and Erskine Childers with their German invasion fantasies, upon the early development and expansion of Britain’s intelligence services.¹⁰10. Christopher Andrew offers a detailed insight into Le Queux’s influence on the development of the early British Security Service in the opening chapter of his official history of MI5. See Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 4–53. See also Trotter, “The Politics of Adventure in the Early British Spy Novel”, 30–54; Hiley, “Decoding German Spies”, 55–79.View all notes Likewise, recent studies have also suggested that Ian Fleming’s James Bond had more than just a passing influence upon the early history and culture of the US Central Intelligence Agency.¹¹11. McCrisken and Moran, “James Bond, Ian Fleming and Intelligence”, 804–821.View all notes I have raised objections to both of these approaches on alternative grounds before, but here I want to reflect upon the form of historical causality that is adopted, perhaps unconsciously, by both of these approaches, and indicate some of its limitations.

Both the ‘mythbusting’ and the ‘consequentialist’ approaches to the study of popular representations of espionage adopt a mechanistic or linear understanding of the relationship between culture and intelligence. This is most commonly characterised by the billiard ball analogy, ‘in which homogenous but atomized elements bounce off each other in a linear and unique sequence lacking any general structure beyond the cumulative effects of the series of individual collisions.’¹²12. Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social, 47. See also Dean, “Commentary“, 619. For an innovative discussion on the relationship between agency and structure in the context of the cultural turn in international history see Jackson, “Pierre Bourdieu, the ‘Cultural Turn’ and the Practice of International History”, 155–181.View all notes In the consequentialist approach, this analogy is quite obviously applicable – the value of a particular cultural text is understood in terms of the change it has affected upon the historical development of the espionage services. Sometimes this interaction between the two domains is understood as more enmeshed, in particular, the oft-noted phenomenon of former spies writing fictional novels that reveal guarded truths about their former places of employment.¹³13. West, “Fiction, Faction and Intelligence”, 275–289.View all notes Yet even these types of study tend to establish a linear causal argument, exploring how a novelist’s former career as an intelligence officer might have seeped into their writing.

In the ‘mythbusting’ approach to spy fiction, the causal relationship between culture and ‘real’ intelligence breaks down almost entirely. Here spy fictions are derided by professional historians, and often former or current intelligence officers, precisely because they are regarded as being so far removed from the real world of espionage, a world that only the initiated can accurately describe.¹⁴14. See for example Dujmovic, “Hollywood, Don’t You Go Disrespectin’ My Culture”, 25–41; Hitz, The Great Game; Johnson, “Spies in the American Movies”, 5–24.View all notes Culture here is seen to have little or no value, and is a valid subject of enquiry only in so far as an analysis of these texts allows the intelligence scholar to understand the extent of the misinformation about the world of espionage that a gullible public consumes. Ironically, those same intelligence officers who dismiss the negative fictions of their profession as bunk, are often prepared to utilise more glamorous or positive mythologies to seduce the public. Culture can legitimate as much as it can disparage the work of intelligence agencies, and the decision to dismiss a particular fiction as just that, pure fiction, appears often to have as much to do with one’s politics and attitude towards the intelligence services, rather than a genuine commitment to historical authenticity.¹⁵15. This is discussed in greater detail later in this essay in the section on ‘publicity and public relations’.View all notes

The more ‘anthropological’ attempts to understand different ‘intelligence cultures’ (although in reality approaches to this research problem have tended to be more historical than genuinely anthropological), concern themselves, understandably enough, with the values, attitudes and mores that exist within particular intelligence agencies. Such studies have ranged from the insightful, to, in the words of Philip Davies, ‘self-flattering platitudes of the Vincent Pearl variety’, such as the notion that US intelligence officers demonstrate a ‘can do attitude’.¹⁶16. Davies on Michael Turner in Davies, “Intelligence Culture and Intelligence Failure in Britain and the United States”, 496.View all notes But though some of these studies have identified clear and influential features of particular intelligence agencies, what is more debateable, is whether these features are genuinely ‘cultural’ in nature, or whether they are in fact caused by ‘cultural’ sensibilities.

For example, is the oft-cited technophilia of the US intelligence services genuinely a cultural trait?¹⁷17. Mackrakis, “Technophilic Hubris and Espionage Styles During the Cold War”, 378–385.View all notes Or is the explanation more economic in nature – i.e., expensive technical projects lead to bigger budgets, and the bigger budgets of the US intelligence community (relative to other intelligence services around the world) allowed it to invest more heavily in technology? This is not to rule out the idea that, for example, CIA officials are genuine technology enthusiasts, but without a focus upon mentalities and attitudes that undergird key decisions, it is impossible to know. This is in part because of the tendency of intelligence historians working in this sub-field to focus upon outcomes rather than motives, leading at times to post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacies. To return to our example, simply because the CIA invested in satellite technology, it does not necessarily follow that their motives for doing so were driven by cultural technophilia. It could follow, but the motives cannot be assumed by the outcomes.

Another limitation of such studies is they tend to assume that intelligence cultures spring like Minerva from the intelligence services themselves. Mark Stout, for example, traces contemporary US intelligence culture to US intelligence activities during the First World War.¹⁸18. Stout, “World War I and the Birth of American Intelligence Culture”, 378–394.View all notes But what about the received values and predilections that intelligence officers bring with them from the world beyond the shadowy realm? New recruits might well be inculcated into a particular organisational culture, but values, attitudes and belief-systems, in-short, mentalities, run much deeper, and are forged out of what Raymond Williams described as ‘structures of feeling’, whose sources are broad and drawn from a wide variety of influences. Simply put, we are much more complex creatures than the work we do.

As with the two dominant approaches to cultural representations of espionage, the mechanistic billiard ball notion of causality applies – intelligence is portrayed as a hermetically sealed world with little or no structural relationship to wider society and culture. It is conceived as a domain apart, quite understandable given that official secrecy actively seeks to seal if off from the outside world. But no intelligence agency is an island. Their activities are shaped and suffused by extrinsic cultural values, just as those same cultural values can be warped by the activities of intelligence agencies. I will provide more substantive examples of this enmeshing of intelligence with the outside world in the next section, but before doing so I want to propose a different model of historical causality that accounts for this entanglement.

There are many implements in the toolbox of cultural theory that could be utilised here to overcome the disciplinary inclination to separate what is considered the properly political from other domains of human experience. Clifford Geertz, perhaps the singularly most influential figure upon the cultural interpretation of social practice, developed a reciprocal hermeneutics in which rituals, ‘deep games’ or ‘collectively sustained symbolic structures’ both embody and shape social and political practices.¹⁹19. Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”, 56–86.View all notes Claude Lévis-Strauss, Northrop Frye, Hayden White and many others have argued, in different ways, for the unavoidably political implications of narrative structures, which are taken, in the words of Fredric Jameson, to be ‘the central function or instance of the human mind’, and sole means by which meaning is constructed out of the otherwise unintelligible salmagundi of historical experience.²⁰20. Jameson, The Political, 13.View all notes Raymond Williams noted the perpetual ‘ordinariness’ of culture as an everyday practice. To transpose Williams’ idea to our own field, we might say that the seemingly pedestrian work of intelligence analysis requires creative acts just as the penning of a spy novel out of historical experience involves leaps of imagination.²¹21. Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”, 5–14. See also Williams, The Long Revolution, 41–71.View all notes Stuart Hall regarded culture as the ‘arena of consent and resistance’, where hegemonic ideologies are secured, but also the site from which forms of ideational opposition can emerge.²²22. Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”, 227–239.View all notes We could continue this roll-call of canonical cultural theorists for many pages, suffice to say, all have grappled with the question of the relationship, or more precisely, the interrelationship, between the cultural, the social, and the political – indeed this is the defining feature of cultural studies as opposed to other forms of aesthetic interpretive practice that privilege the text as a site of meaning in itself.

For the purposes of this argument, I will choose to focus upon Louis Althusser’s articulation of Marx’s untranslatable concept of ‘Darstellung’ in terms of what he calls ‘structural causality’, or ‘the concept whose object is precisely to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects’. In other words, Althusser conceives a structural unity between the apparently separate domains of human activity (the cultural, the political, the economic). This ‘totality’, as Marxists are inclined to describe it, ‘is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, (and) is nothing outside (of) its effects.’²³23. Althusser,Balibar, and Brewster, Reading Capital, 186–189.View all notes Of course for Althusser, as well as for Fredric Jameson, whose book The Political Unconscious offers the fullest and most significant elaboration of Althusser’s concept, that structural unity of effects (totality) is nothing less than dialectical materialism itself. But one needn’t subscribe to a Marxist teleology to find significance in Jameson’s Althusserian theoretical underpinning.²⁴24. Jameson, The Political Unconscious.View all notes For Jameson, as for Althusser, there was no such thing as an independent variable – if political structures change, so to do cultural forms, and vice versa. It is not a case of reading culture as an interpretation of political reality, or politics as the consequence of cultural values, rather, it is to see historical events and periods for what they are – multifarious and polysemous – or comprised of many different elements, and thus capable of conveying many different forms of meaning. Imagine, for example, attempting to give a full account of the 9/11 terrorist attacks without one of the following elements: the political history of US foreign policy in the Middle East; the development of terrorist tactics over time; the imagination of disaster in Hollywood films and television shows which the spectacle of the attacks so directly and deliberately emulated; the emotions of fear, anger and revenge that dictated the US response to the attacks; the political rituals and forms of memorialisation that have emerged since; the relative degree of preparedness of the US intelligence community for this kind of attack, etc. The answer is that the event we call 9/11 was comprised of all of these things, to ignore one of these aspects would be to offer an incomplete account. 9/11 is the sum of all of these things.

Just as it is at the level of the event, so too with historical periodisation. The periods that most interest Jameson, Althusser and other Marxist cultural critics, of course, are the different modes of production that ultimately unify these disparate elements. But for our purposes, we could choose to adopt this periodising approach on a less grand scale. For example, what about periods of time in which intelligence agencies find themselves the subject of particular scepticism – let’s take the mid-1970s US intelligence community as an example, and in particular the so-called ‘Year of Intelligence’ in 1975. What form did this period of political scepticism towards intelligence take? Was it political? Certainly, with politicians castigating the CIA as the ‘Rogue Elephant’ of US foreign policy from the floor of the Senate, leading to new laws and political mechanisms to hold the US intelligence community to account. Was it cultural? Of course! It’s no coincidence that the year of intelligence was both preceded and followed by Hollywood films that, for the first time, condemned the Agency as murderously amoral.²⁵25. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government, 100–102; Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow, 222–271; Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film, 119–123.View all notes Was it social? A quick glance at the Pew Research Center’s long-standing study of US public trust in government, and what the results were in the mid-1970s will offer an answer to that.²⁶26. See Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2017”.View all notes Does it make sense to try to disentangle these elements in order to understand the ‘year of intelligence’ as purely the result of political manoeuvring, or purely the consequence of a misinformed and misguided cultural interpretation of the secret state? Not at all. An integrative understanding is the only one that we can begin to offer a full picture of why 1975 happened the way it happened, and how the impact of that year of revelations about the secret state has had an influence that can be found in the pages of a Don DeLillo novel, as much as in the corridors of state. In what follows I want to elaborate upon a few key thematic areas of interest for intelligence studies scholars, for which an integrative approach is changing, or could change, our understanding of them.

Secrecy

Until quite recently, official secrecy was a remarkably under-theorised aspect of governance and international relations.²⁷27. Some notable exceptions include Moynihan, Secrecy; Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998; Bok, Secrets; Shils, The Torment of Secrecy.View all notes Max Weber made the case for secrecy as a necessary precondition for effective bureaucratic deliberation. Jeremy Bentham argued the opposite – that publicity was the ideal to which all enlightened democracies should strive. And Georg Simmel noted the importance of secrecy in regulating the flow and control of information, and therefore as a means to power. But these theories, though seminal, formed only a small part of each of these author’s overarching philosophical projects, no more than a single article in the case of Bentham and Simmel, and only a few sketches in the service of a much wider argument in the case of Weber. Up until quite recently, few have taken up the task of elaborating upon these ideas, or bringing new ways of thinking about secrecy to the table. This is surprising, given the far-reaching implications of secrecy for numerous disciplines, and especially when compared to the substantial body of work that has emerged over many decades on the attendant concept of privacy.²⁸28. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, for example, contains entries for both ‘Publicity’ and ‘Privacy’, but no entry for ‘Secrecy’.View all notes

Perhaps as a result of the renewed interest in covert affairs in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the last decade, however, has witnessed the publication of a number of major studies on secrecy from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Intelligence historians have offered book-length accounts of the emergence of official secrecy in Britain and America, and how governments have dealt with unwelcome disclosures.²⁹29. Moran, Classified; Frost, Classified.View all notes Political philosophers have tried to overcome the seemingly fundamental contradiction of keeping secrets in an open society.³⁰30. Thompson, “Democratic Secrecy”, 181–193.View all notes And cultural and literary theorists have noted the impact of government secrecy, particularly in the US, upon narratives of incredulity and suspicion towards government institutions.³¹31. Olmsted, Real Enemies; Fenster, Conspiracy Theories; Knight, Conspiracy; Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow.View all notes Thanks to this multidisciplinary, and at times genuinely interdisciplinary, interest in secrecy, a new academic journal was recently launched, dedicated to the study of secrecy and society. In the first issue, two of its contributors proclaimed the inauguration of a new discipline, Secrecy Studies, noteworthy for its interdisciplinarity and methodological innovation that provide a ‘foundation for the investigation of secrecy across the very fabric of society.’³²32. Maret, “The Charm of Secrecy”,7. See also Birchall, “Six Answers to the Question: “What is Secrecy Studies?””.View all notes

This urge to study secrecy as a phenomenon that cuts across the different domains of human experience is not a purely theoretical concern. It is also a practical impediment. For as David Vincent noted, in one of the few studies that predated this new wave of secrecy scholarship: ‘Secrecy is a profoundly volatile compound’, the maintenance of which requires the subjective commitment to systems of values and beliefs that cannot be fully comprehended by ‘legal and procedural histories of the subject’.³³33. Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy, 14.View all notes Moreover, as Vincent goes on to note, secrecy stands in a symbiotic relationship with the issue of public trust. Thus, though the formal creation of government secrets can be understood in terms of those laws and procedures, their consequences are most profoundly felt in culture and society at large.

One of the more developed literature on the socio-cultural implications of secrecy is the study of conspiracy theories. For if distrust is the natural corollary of secrecy, then conspiracy theories, or ‘the paranoid style’, as the historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed it, should be understood as the condition that emerges when trust has all but evaporated. This is no longer the study of anomalous political curiosities – Hofstadter regarded the paranoid style as a significant but fringe phenomenon in American political life. Rather, political paranoia could now be regarded as one of the fundamental issues of our times – it helped, in no small measure, to sweep Donald Trump into office. It undergirds the discourse of populist parties across the globe on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum, though the right, as in the aftermath of Watergate, have been more successful in capitalising on this widespread distrust of government. It is the reason Donald Trump and his ideological state apparatus in Breitbart News and other sources of popular suspicion have so fiercely attacked the US intelligence community as the ‘Deep State’, gaining political capital in the process.³⁴34. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, 121–176.View all notes And it is why Trump has been able to so blithely dismiss intelligence reports of Russian intercession in the 2016 election in support of his campaign – ‘These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.’³⁵35. Kessler, “The Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq”.View all notes If Trump’s use of the CIA and FBI as political footballs in the service of his paranoid politics suggests anything, it is that the decline of trust in the intelligence services has consequences far beyond the affairs of the intelligence services themselves.

What role does secrecy play in all of this? For Hofstadter, among others, conspiracy theories were the product of ‘uncommonly angry minds’, and this psychological explanation stuck in the popular conception of conspiracy theorists as political demagogues or jaded cynics. But there is nothing uncommon about conspiracy theories these days, nor does Hofstadter’s focus upon individual psychology help us to grasp the material causes of conspiracy theories; such theories might often be proven wrong, but they are theories about something and are usually responding to real historical events or processes. More recent scholarship on conspiracy theories have stressed the real causes of conspiracy theories in various iterations of the ‘no smoke without fire’ argument. Kathryn Olmsted is perhaps the most forceful exponent of this perspective:

For Olmsted, the antidote is simple: ‘more government openness. When Americans believe that their government is truthful, open, and accountable, they are more willing to trust it.’³⁷37. Olmsted, “Government Secrecy and Conspiracy Theories”, 98.View all notes Unfortunately for those of us who believe greater openness is a good in itself, the correlation between transparency and trust might not be so straightforward. US public trust in government was at an all-time high during the Second World War, and the decade and a half that followed, a period of rapidly expanding government secrecy with almost no formal accountability mechanisms for overseeing the intelligence community. It was also a period defined by a particularly deferent media, who acquiesced to the CIA and FBI’s sanctification of secrecy.³⁸38. For example, in 1951 the film producer Eugene Rodney approached his friend, Walter Bedell Smith, then Director of Central Intelligence, about featuring the CIA in a Hollywood movie. Smith demurred, replying that ‘we [at the CIA] deliberately cherish anonymity as an aid to effectiveness in this trade.’ It was good enough for Rodney, and the film was never made. When the CIA launched a covert action against Mosaddegh’s Iran, and a year later in Arbenz’s Guatemala, they were likewise buttressed by a wall of silence from the American media. See Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow, 121–169.View all notes When the US intelligence community has opened up, or been forced to open up by a more combative press, such as in the mid-1970s, public trust slumped. One of the few upswings in trust in the last fifty years, as Olmsted notes, was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a period of time marked by what James Der Derian has described as a global in terrorem, a moment in which critical enquiry, particularly amongst the very journalists tasked with encouraging greater openness, succumbed to the flag-waving and wagon-circling that followed the event.³⁹39. Der Derien, In Terrorem, 101–117.View all notes

Conspiracy theories have themselves often paved the way to increased openness, acting as a form of populist accountability on the secret state. But the declassification of, for example, millions of records in relation to the Kennedy assassination following the provocations of Oliver Stone in the early 1990s has failed to sate the appetite for conspiracy theories.⁴⁰40. President John, Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.View all notes Indeed, arguably the opposite has taken place. ‘[T]he sheer volume of Kennedy assassination materials’, argues Peter Knight, ‘…threatens to plunge the case into an infinite abyss of suspicion, into what Jean Baudrillard has termed “a vertigo of interpretations.”’⁴¹41. Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 99.View all notes

The causal link between official secrecy and conspiracy theories seems relatively clear. However, perhaps the rot of distrust that has set in since the end of the 1960s in American society and culture runs too deep for the occasional programme of declassification to reverse the seemingly inexorable trend towards suspicion. This is the underlying premise of one of the most remarkable books on secrecy in recent years: Timothy Melley’s The Covert Sphere. Its theoretical and methodological ingenuity and its meditation on the interwoven nature of fiction and fact in relation to secrecy, as well as its far-reaching conclusions, certainly meet the two defining criteria of the cultural turn that I listed in my introduction. Melley argues:

Melley proposes the existence of a ‘covert sphere’, ‘a cultural imaginary shaped by both institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state.’⁴³43. Ibid., 5.View all notes Unlike Jurgen Habermas’ notion of the public sphere – a space of rational-critical debate where ‘the princely authority [of] state secrets’ is kept in check by ideas and policies that emerge from the cut and thrust of open deliberation – the covert sphere is ‘marked by a structural irrationality’, because secrecy undermines the traditional epistemologies of factual discourses, destabilising their empirical basis by actively distorting the historical record, and outlawing disclosures of fact.⁴⁴44. Ibid., 10.View all notes Into this empirical void flood ‘narrative fictions, such as novels, films, television series, and electronic games’ that offer speculative fantasies about the workings of the secret state. Unlike numerous intelligence historians, Melley’s purpose here is not to discredit these fictions as so much misleading bunk, but to recognise their profound agency in shaping political discourses about state secrecy in lieu of non-fictional alternatives. This occurs on both sides of the debate. Supreme Court Justices (among other political actors) have cited 24’s Jack Bauer in defence of the CIA’s secret programme of ‘enhanced interrogation’.⁴⁵45. Zegart, “’Spytainment’: The Real Influence of Fake Spies”, 599–622.View all notes Likewise, Orwell and Kafka have become symbolic touchstones for the political opposition to the state secrecy that enshrouds the mass surveillance activities revealed by Edward Snowden.⁴⁶46. Willmetts, “Digital Dystopia”, 267–289.View all notes

But there is an even more far-reaching conclusion that can be drawn from this observation of the impact of increasing secrecy upon the relative epistemologies of fictional vs. non-fictional discourses about the secret state. Namely, that the growth of the national security state in the decades after the Second World War, and its attendant secrets, was ‘the crucible of postmodernism’.⁴⁷47. Melley, The Covert Sphere, 35.View all notes Ann Douglas makes this case succinctly:

Could it be that official secrecy, the bread and butter of intelligence studies, is responsible for such an epochal shift? As Melley notes, ‘[c]hronologically, the answer is yes. Postmodernism arose as the Cold War consensus of the 1950s disintegrated…’⁴⁹49. Melley, The Covert Sphere, 35.View all notes What caused that disintegration of the Cold War consensus? Historians have offered numerous answers to this question: the rise of the baby boomers, the flourishing of the counterculture, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the death of President Kennedy, an increasingly recalcitrant media.⁵⁰50. Rodgers, Age of Fracture; Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture; Gitlin, The Sixties; O’Neill, Coming Apart.View all notes But perhaps the single most significant explanation is that as Americans began to learn, in the words of Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, that their government ‘would lie to them’, through mounting disclosures about the activities of the secret state (the Bay of Pigs, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the 1975 ‘year of intelligence’), Americans stopped trusting their government.⁵¹51. Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 113.View all notes

This mounting distrust was the inevitable consequence of the rapid expansion of the secret state in the post-war decades, and it is a sentiment that can be found across the fabric of American society in the late-1960s and beyond. It can be found in the proclamations by anti-war activists, in speeches on the floor of the Senate, in New York Times editorials, in the movies, and in the pages of Don DeLillo, Joan Didion or Thomas Pynchon novels. Whether one identifies this culture of suspicion in the pages of a fictional novel, or in major political speeches of the period, one is discovering the same integrated phenomenon. To try to disentangle the culture of suspicion from the politics of suspicion is counter-productive, for the culture of suspicion is the politics of suspicion and vice versa. This is where a structural understanding of causality can help us to account for the implications of state secrecy, implications that permeated far beyond the corridors of state.

What are the implications of this? First, it requires us to move away from the study of representations, or culture as a detached and passive reflection of society, towards an understanding of culture as active and integrated into political and social phenomena. It is in this way, in the words of Clifford Geertz, ‘coloring experience in the light they cast it in’, that cultural texts reciprocate the political agency that is inflicted upon them by the world they represent. The mounting suspicion that secrecy wrought, in this way, can be regarded as an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ during the second half of the twentieth century, one that cannot be properly understood in a disintegrated way.⁵²52. Geertz, “Deep Play”, 84; Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128–135.View all notes

On a practical note, a full recognition of the far-reaching effects of secrecy might entail a reappraisal of classification and declassification procedures. For if the spread of conspiracy theories and suspicion in response to official secrecy represents a fundamental threat to liberal democracy, as many theorists believe they do, then the keeping of secrets that generates excessive suspicion in the cultural and social domains might need to be re-evaluated to consider whether the national security interests that they seek to protect are outweighed by the national security threat of undermining public confidence in the institutions that undergird liberal democracy.⁵³53. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 165–168; Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.View all notes In this way, secrecy is a double-edged sword that oftentimes threatens the very social fabric that it seeks to protect. Though greater openness might not be an immediate panacea for the widespread cultural suspicion that has set in since the end of the 1960s, the limiting of unnecessary secrecy might avoid compounding public distrust. In this way the cultural turn in intelligence studies is both a theoretical and deeply practical imperative.

Publicity and public relations

If further confirmation were needed of the significance of the cultural sphere upon the intelligence services, one need look no further than the mounting efforts of the intelligence community, and in particular the CIA, to shape popular discourses about their activities.⁵⁴54. The emerging literature on CIA public relations is related to, but distinct from, the literature on the CIA’s so-called ‘Cultural Cold War’, in which the Agency sponsored various cultural producers and institutions to promote American culture around the world. See for example Stonor-Saunders, Who Paid the Piper; Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom.View all notes The end of the Cold War entailed a renewed need for intelligence services to make the public case for their continued existence.⁵⁵55. See McCarthy, The Selling of the CIA, 166–213; Glickman, “Intelligence After the Cold War”, 142–147.View all notes This was not the first time the CIA were forced to ‘go public’ in order to face down their critics. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, General William Donovan launched a major public relations offensive to make the case for a permanent peacetime civilian intelligence agency. The creation of the CIA just a few years later is testament to the success of that campaign, with Hollywood movies, newspaper articles and several memoirs extolling (and usually exaggerating) the Office of Strategic Service’s (OSS) wartime role, and in the process answering critics in the American press who warned against the creation of ‘An American Gestapo’.⁵⁶56. Valero, “’We Need Our New OSS, Our New General Donovan, Now…’”, 91–118.View all notes In the mid-1970s, in response to the ‘Family Jewels’ revelations and the season of investigation that followed, a series of DCIs shifted the CIA’s approach from blanket secrecy to one of information management. Under Admiral Stansfield Turner’s directorship (1977–1981), CIA public affairs was formalised for the first time, only for it to be curtailed by a renewed culture of secrecy during the Reagan years.⁵⁷57. See McCarthy, The Selling of the CIA, 120–164.View all notes

Today CIA public relations activities are more extensive than ever before, perhaps in recognition of the fact, as David Shamus McCarthy argues in his authoritative history of CIA public relations, that secrecy in the age of mass media depends, paradoxically, on effective PR.⁵⁸58. Ibid. See also CIA Public Affairs, Accessed October 11, 2018. https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/public-affairs.View all notes But the CIA were actually relative latecomers to the public relations game, believing as they did in the early Cold War that blanket secrecy could be maintained. J. Edgar Hoover was a master public relations expert, and crafted the ‘G-Man’ image of the FBI from the very earliest days of the bureau’s history.⁵⁹59. Gid Powers, Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture; Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies.View all notes The US military, likewise, have maintained close relations with Hollywood and the wider American media since the beginning of the twentieth century.⁶⁰60. Suid, Guts and Glory.View all notes More recently, in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, the NSA and GCHQ have also notably increased their public relations activities.⁶¹61. James, “For Your PRs Only”; Gerstein, “Snowden-Stung NSA Seeking PR Guru”; Fung, “The NSA’s PR Team Finally Gets Its Own Twitter Account”.View all notes

As with secrecy, the history of intelligence agencies’ public relations activities was a neglected field until quite recently. But a wave of studies published in the last five years have transformed the subject into a substantial sub-field of intelligence studies.⁶²62. McCarthy, The Selling of the CIA; Jenkins, The CIA and Hollywood; Moran, Company Confessions; Willmetts, In Secrecy’s Shadow; Alford and Secker, National Security Cinema; Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies; Aldrich, “American Journalism and the Landscape of Secrecy”, 189–209; Schou, Spooked; Dover and Goodman, eds. Spinning Intelligence.View all notes What general conclusions can we draw from these studies, and how does this relate to the cultural turn in intelligence studies? One of the key implications, following McCarthy’s arguments about public relations as the Janus face of secrecy, is that modern intelligence agencies are engaged in a dynamic process of information management. Defining what is made public, and how it is made public, has become as important as defining what is kept secret. Secrecy, as Simmel noted, is a means of controlling the flow of information, but equally important for intelligence agencies today is shaping the context, timing and reception of the information that does get into the public domain. As the scandals surrounding the CIA, NSA and FBI in recent memory demonstrate, the intelligence services have not always succeeded in this. But they have certainly stepped up their efforts in this regard. The CIA managed to get their narrative of enhanced interrogation into the public domain via a Hollywood movie before the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA torture roundly rejected both the ethics and the efficacy of their notorious ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods. The FBI’s continued support of numerous Hollywood productions about their work, as well as their use of celebrities to boost their recruitment, shows that the Bureau’s adeptness for PR did not disappear with Hoover’s death.⁶³63. Lange and Leopold, “How the FBI Shapes Its Images Through Movies”. A list of all movies that received assistance from the FBI, obtained by Ariane Lange and Jason Leopold under the Freedom of Information Act, is available online here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4066264-FBI-Movies-Leopold-FOIA.html, accessed 11/10/2018. See also Gilian Anderson (Dana Scully in popular television show The X Files) in this recruitment video for the FBI: “Gillian Anderson Thanks FBI’s Women Agents for Service”, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Accessed September 13, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 6Fjf6w-OL_g.View all notes Likewise, as already mentioned, the NSA and GCHQ seem to have begun the process of adjustment to their newfound celebrity by enhancing their public relations activities.

Another general conclusion that can be drawn from this new literature is that the history of intelligence agencies, and the way in which the general public understand their work, is, to a significant extent, culturally constructed. The intelligence agencies themselves recognise this as much as the academic literature, otherwise why would they invest resources into liaising with filmmakers, television producers, writers, memoirists and members of the press? The intelligence agencies echo the dubious claim of the Pentagon, that their relationship with the media is intended solely to ensure the historical accuracy of the cultural products made about them. The assistance the Pentagon has lent to such Hollywood fantasies as Iron Man and Transformers, or the CIA to Patriot Games, Meet the Parents, and even an episode of the popular television programme Top Chef, filmed at the Agency’s Langley headquarters, suggests that they are involved in a process of their own mythmaking as much as the fantastical spy features they condemn for playing fast and loose with historical accuracy. Indeed, when evaluating the relative merits of spy fictions that depict the Agency in a sympathetic light, CIA public affairs staff appear much more tolerant of historical inaccuracies than when dealing, often scathingly, with more critical fictions.⁶⁴64. A good roundup of CIA officers’ views on various spy fictions can be found in Studies in Intelligence: Special Review Supplement (Summer 2009). https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/special-review-supplement/U-%20Special%20Reviews%20Supplement%20-July%202009.pdf.View all notes In an oft-cited 1991 report on greater CIA openness (which was ironically classified as secret), a task force set out six core principles that should underline the Agency’s public messaging going forwards; principle six was ‘preserve the mystique’.⁶⁵65. Task Force Report on Greater CIA Openness. David Shamus McCarthy argues that the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness is consistent with a long Agency tradition, established since the 1975 ‘Year of Intelligence’, of viewing ‘openness in terms of self-preservation rather than the public’s right to know.’ The Task Force’s commitment to ‘preserving the [CIA’s] mystique’ was adopted on the suggestion of future DCI George Tenet, then Staff Director for the Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), who urged the Task Force not to demystify the Agency so as to make it appear like any other government bureaucracy. See McCarthy, Selling the CIA, 171.View all notes

An integrated understanding of historical causality, central to the cultural turn, sees cultural texts as important actors in the dynamic and continuously politically contested historical identity of the intelligence agencies. The significance of fictional texts is therefore not determined by their relative historical accuracy – ‘[y]ou wouldn’t go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland’ – but by the ways in which they have constructed meaning, and in turn shaped our understanding, of the world beyond the page.⁶⁶66. Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination, 64.View all notes A world, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, that is ‘always already reproduced’.⁶⁷67. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p. 94.View all notes Understanding intelligence history as this dynamic, culturally constructed, and highly politicised battleground, comprised of a multitude of texts, enables us to account for the CIA’s support for positive fantasies about their work, as well as the role of popular perceptions of intelligence agencies.

Mentalities

Another area in which a ‘turn to culture’ might illuminate our discipline, is the study of the way in which intelligence products are influenced by cultural attitudes, beliefs and worldviews. This is related to, but methodologically distinct from, the extant scholarly interest in the politicisation of intelligence.⁶⁸68. See, for example Rovner, “Is Politicization Ever a Good Thing?” 55–67; Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 66–103.View all notes Policymakers undoubtedly (and unavoidably) exert a profound influence upon the intelligence cycle, but what about less tangible but no less real influences from beyond the world of statecraft? Despite their professional commitment to ‘objectivity and integrity of judgment’, intelligence officers are not immune to prejudices and unconscious biases that afflict all epistemic communities.⁶⁹69. Kent, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, 180. On the concept of ‘epistemic communities’ see Cross, “Rethinking Epistemic Communities Twenty Years Later”, 137–160.View all notes But the study of ‘mentalities’ involves something more than examining whether this or that assessment was distorted by prevailing attitudes (although it can involve that too). Mechanistic explanations for the impact of a given cultural text upon a real-world outcome are notoriously difficult to come by. When they are found, such as the impact of the 1983 blockbuster War Games on the development of Ronald Reagan’s nascent cyber-security strategy, or the impact of Ian Fleming’s wild fantasies upon CIA covert operations in Cuba, they tend towards the anecdotal.⁷⁰70. Moran, “Ian Fleming and the Public Profile of the CIA”, 119–146.View all notes Culture is powerful precisely because its influence is diffuse, subtle, and accretive. Attitudes and beliefs are not forged from attendance at a single play, or the reading of one novel, rather, they emerge from a complex accumulation of discourses, both fictional and non-fictional, which shape our behaviour, and the way we view the world. For that reason, they are all the more pervasive, and their influence is that much harder to prove.

But the study of mentalities concerns itself not only with what is said but also what is not said. Here again, there is a distinction from the study of politicisation. The Annales School, who first conceptualised the history of mentalities, saw their task as the assemblage of an ‘inventory of mental equipment’ in a given age in order to determine what was, or was not, discursively possible at a certain moment. Lucien Febvre, for example, famously argued that atheism was so ‘beyond the ken of sixteenth-century man’ that even radical sceptics like François Rabeleis could not conceive unbelief.⁷¹71. Hutton, “The History of Mentalities”, 241.View all notes ‘Secular thought would become possible only as man created an autonomous secular world.’⁷²72. Ibid., 242.View all notes

What was the ‘inventory of mental equipment’ that intelligence analysts possessed during the Second World War, the Cold War, or today’s War on Terror? What was ‘beyond the ken’ of Allen Dulles, Tom Braden or James Jesus Angleton? Are different conclusions discursively available today that might not have been sixty years ago? Was it possible for American intelligence analysts to think outside of the framework of anti-communism in their intelligence assessments of foreign threats and the motives of enemy leaders? In the broader fields of international history and Cold War historiography, these kinds of questions have been pursued with alacrity in recent decades by post-revisionist scholars. The Cold War is now regarded as ‘a conflict that was more than geopolitics, military deployments, more than Presidents and General Secretaries, summits and treaties, economic competition and the Bomb.’⁷³73. Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control, Beyond the Cold War”, 53.View all notes A renewed focus on ideology, not just Soviet ideology, but American and Western ideology as well, has mounted a significant challenge to the realist paradigm that understands the Cold War in terms of rational actors making calculated decisions to maximise strategic interest.⁷⁴74. See, for example, Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” 501–524; Westad, ed. Reviewing the Cold War.View all notes

The question of the extent to which US Cold War ideology, and in particular, the domestic anti-communist hysteria of the period, permeated the intelligence community, and therefore their assessments of foreign threats, is a complex one. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI is the most obvious example of a leader and an organisation whose entire outlook on the world was significantly shaped by their vehement anti-communism. As Ellen Schrecker famously put it, had ‘observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau’s files, “McCarthyism” would probably be called “Hooverism.”’⁷⁵75. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 203.View all notes But in the case of the CIA, the question is more complex. During the height of McCarthyism, early CIA leaders like Allen Dulles and Walter Bedell Smith were certainly anti-communists, but their views were more nuanced than Hoover’s, and their perceived liberal elitism put them in McCarthy’s crosshairs.⁷⁶76. Jeffreys-Jones urges caution when adopting the conventional view that the early CIA was comprised of New Deal liberals. ‘It should be noted’, he writes, ‘that Smith, Angleton, and other leading CIA officials never were anything but right-wing.’ Dulles, despite his elitism and some liberal sentiments, was not a New Deal democrat, and was ‘above all, a pragmatic patriot.’ See Jeffrey-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, 72–73.View all notes Moreover, as Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones argues, the CIA were adept at exploiting Cold War anxieties to their advantage, suggesting a degree of ideological self-awareness that made them something more than passive converts.⁷⁷77. Jeffrey-Jones, Cloak and Dollar.View all notes Nevertheless, given the pervasiveness of Cold War anxieties that permeated every level of government and society, it seems reasonable to ask to what extent did irrational fears colour the CIA’s intelligence assessments of Soviet intentions during the Cold War? ⁷⁸78. For more on the impact of anti-communism on the early CIA see Jeffrey-Jones, “Why Was the CIA Established in 1947?”, 25; Gaddis, “Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins”, 200. On the influence of non-rational ‘belief systems’ upon intelligence analysis, and their role in intelligence failure, see Wirtz, The Tet Offensive.View all notes

The Annales School, along with contemporaries such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, all shared the conviction that seemingly rational discourses were often significantly shaped by ‘irrational’ subjective cultural perceptions. This flies in the face of the US intelligence community’s commitment to objectivism. As Mark Stout has noted, one of the defining features of American intelligence ‘culture’ is ‘the idea that truth is accessible and that “analysis” to discover that truth is an essential intelligence function.’⁷⁹79. Stout, “World War I and the Birth of American Intelligence Culture”, 387.View all notes But were intelligence officers really able to completely detach themselves from dominant cultural perceptions and anxieties that circulated at the time they performed their analysis?

Another exciting new field of enquiry in intelligence studies that confounds the positivist epistemology of the intelligence community are recent studies of the way in which orientalist discourses shaped the American and British IC’s assessments of the Middle East. Edward Said, father of the concept of Orientalism, or the idea that Western discourses (both scientific and literary) of the Middle East cast it as an exotic and primitive ‘other’, against which notions of Western ‘civilisation’ defined itself, thus legitimating imperial intervention in the region, is a key proponent of an integrated approach to culture, politics and society: ‘[Culture] is a historical force possessing its own configurations, ones that intertwine with those in the socio-economic sphere.’⁸⁰80. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, 2.View all notes In an important article, Dina Rezk demonstrates how ‘a history of intelligence can also be a history of culture, ideas and mentalité’, by demonstrating the way in which key CIA assessments during the Cold War constructed ‘The Arab’ personality as a monolithic other, devoid of social conscience, apathetic, quixotic, and prone to violent paroxysms.⁸¹81. Rezk, “Orientalism and Intelligence Analysis”, 224–245. See also Rezk, The Arab World and Western Intelligence.View all notes In a similar vein, Hugh Wilford has shown how Kermit Roosevelt, a key actor in the CIA-instigated overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, was significantly influenced by British imperialist and orientalist discourses of the Middle East, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and the writings of T.E. Lawrence. Tantalisingly, Wilford points to other possible cultural frameworks, in particular prescribed notions of masculinity, that may have shaped Kermit Roosevelt’s, and the CIA’s, thinking and conduct in the region.⁸²82. Wilford, “’Essentially a Work of Fiction’”, 922–947.View all notes

Cold War orthodoxy cast the Soviets as irrational and dogmatically ideological, which they contrasted with American pragmatism and intellectual freedom. Our understanding of the respective intelligence communities during the Cold War has largely followed this framework – the KGB were straightjacketed into reaching conclusions that fit Soviet dogma, whilst the CIA were free to pursue objective truth, and at times speak truth to power.⁸³83. The biblical verse ‘And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free’ is carved into the wall of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Lobby, and today has been adopted as the Agency’s motto.View all notes But the new wave of post-revisionist scholarship since the fall of the Berlin Wall has argued, convincingly, that US foreign policy was often also dictated by ideology, not pragmatism.⁸⁴84. See, for example, Lucas, Freedom’s War; Stonor-Saunders, Who Paid the Piper; Foursek, To Lead the Free World.View all notes Were intelligence officials guided by ideology too? What else shaped their vision of the world? As Odd Arne Westad writes in relation to Soviet dogma, ‘it is necessary to establish a wider and more useful definition of ideology, encompassing not only a written tradition of authoritative texts and their exegesis but also credenda formed by personal and historical experience.’⁸⁵85. Westad, “Russian Archives and Cold War History”, 254–266.View all notes How did notions of race, class, and gender, especially during the early Cold War when the CIA were comprised from a relatively homogenous white, male and elite demographic, impact their conclusions? The time has come to consider western intelligence officials not as cloistered scientists, objectively interpreting fixed truths about the world, but as cultural and social beings, profoundly shaped by their ‘inventories of mental equipment.’

Conclusion

The elevation of ‘culture’ in intelligence studies and the cognate fields of international history, and Cold War historiography has generated important new lines of enquiry in recent decades. But as Scott Lucas warns, there is a paradoxical danger that whilst we elevate certain kinds of study, we simultaneously limit our lines of enquiry to an ‘anodyne focus’ on the official, i.e., cultural diplomacy as an instrument of the state; or to the anecdotal, i.e., the oftentimes apocryphal tales of spy fiction being directly translated into spy fact; or the remedial, i.e., pointing out where spy fiction deviates from spy fact, or the banal conclusion that the real world of espionage is stranger than fiction.⁸⁶86. Lucas, “Beyond Freedom, Beyond Control”, 53.View all notes All of the above approaches, though valuable in their own terms, treat ‘the cultural’ as a separate sphere of human activity, distinct from the more consequential domain of politics. To see culture as merely a reflection of politics, or a domain that occasionally bumps into the properly political world, is to misunderstand the complex interplay that exists between statecraft and the highly mediated world that we all inhabit. As Melvyn Leffler put it:

If the recent proliferation of cultural approaches to intelligence studies is to constitute a fully fledged ‘cultural turn’, then we must recognise the expansive possibilities that are available to us when we see intelligence agencies, and intelligence agents, as inhabitants of the world they seek to analyse. It is time for the ‘ghetto’ of international relations to reintegrate itself back into the community. For in reality, it never was, and never could be, apart.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.