Peter Grace
Subject: How Academics Shaped the CIA
Bio: New Zealand Based Academic and Author of The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is How Academics Shaped the CIA.
Our speaker is Peter Grace who is a New Zealand based academic who has a recent book entitled The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA.
I want to learn from Peter about how just after World War 2 and at the height of the Cold War, American academics worked inside the CIA’s research and analysis department to forecast enemy activity, and how they set up methods and processes that have been applied by the CIA ever since.
Peter, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Peter Grace:
I would like to start by why you would want to read a book on CIA in the early 1950s. The world’s not a safe place right now. Our political leaders are asking their citizens to fight wars. Until recently, national security decisions have been made behind closed doors. And the intelligence that is provided to political leaders has been classified.
There is a move towards sharing that intelligence with the public that justifies the decision to send people to war. It is incumbent for us to understand the intelligence process, the mechanics of information gathering and analysis to help us become more informed.
My book is about the early Cold War and that the Central Intelligence Agency needed to be reformed in to provide better strategic intelligence. The Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947 with the National Security Act.
The idea of centralizing intelligence in one place became an imperative after Pearl Harbor. There was a belief that had all the jigsaw puzzle pieces been brought together, Pearl Harbor would not have happened. By the late 1940s, the CIA was at risk, its reputation was in tatters after three high profile intelligence failures: China turning communist, the Soviets getting the atom bomb early, and North Korea attacking the South.
In late 1950, the new Director of Central Intelligence General Walter Bedeel Smith set up a new type of strategic intelligence that was informed by the principles of social science: history, geography, economics, political science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. There was hope that this new social science method would see patterns and trends that would help CIA’s analysts provide strategic warning about the intentions and capabilities of the enemy particularly when one side might use the atom bomb preemptively.
Larry Bernstein:
American intelligence took off during World War II under the direction of William Donovan. He had come from Yale and ended up hiring a lot of Yale professors to the OSS. This was the impetus for bringing social scientists into intelligence. Tell us about the role of Donovan.
Peter Grace:
Donovan had a view that to win the war, he needed to employ America’s best and brightest in what he called the research and analysis unit at OSS. The early work that was being done by OSS tended to be basic intelligence, which is getting things together like maps. If you are going to invade North Africa, you need a good map, and they would call on research and analysis to provide that.
They were reading newspapers shipped out of Europe. We had anthropologists and classicists in North Africa who knew the local tribe people and were able to sort things out logistically before the military arrived. This idea that the best and brightest were needed.
Donovan’s a maverick. He’s a man that used to turn up close to the battlefield in his own chartered plane to get firsthand information about what was going on. And the OSS was known as being a hard drinking, hard fighting organization with massive budgets for booze. Not asking for permission but asking for forgiveness afterwards was pioneered by the OSS. You just did things that had to be done.
Larry Bernstein:
What do you make of Britain being the leader? Pre-World War II, the United States was an isolationist country. It had no real offshore presence. You mentioned North Africa as an example. The British had the largest colonial power at the time. They administered Egypt. They were involved in activities all over Africa. It is no surprise that the colonial office had family that were all over the Empire. The interrelationship between the military forces, the colonial office, and academia to be mutually supportive.
This was not the case in the United States. The film Raiders of Lost Ark was more akin to what would be going on in the English Empire, where the relationship between an archeologist and the head of the military would not be uncommon.
How did the English give us a path to follow as it relates to the development of the intelligence agencies?
Peter Grace:
What we’re seeing is America’s role in the world changing after World War II being global. And that is a huge change from the pre-Second World War isolationist period with the Truman doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
To keep the peace, there needed information about the way people lived around the world, the way they thought. And the rising threat from the Soviet Union and what capabilities they had.
Sherman Kent was one of the leading proponents that social science was the window that could bring together different elements: psychological, anthropological, sociological, economic, and technological. America’s only going to keep the peace if they had that information.
Larry Bernstein:
Sherman Kent is the hero of your book. He is a historian, a tenured professor at Yale, who is invited to join the new CIA. His expertise was on the election of 1827 related to Louis Philippe in France. He had written a book on the art of writing history and is interested in process and methods to help decision makers. He believes that academics can add real value in that process and that their training across disciplines can make major contributions. Tell us about Sherman Kent and how it influenced the creation of the research and analysis division at the CIA.
Peter Grace:
I was not looking that social science was fantastic and changed the way we thought about analysis because I’m a social scientist myself and I wouldn’t believe that crap. Social science can make some major inroads. It can be the skeleton that you hang things from because it is so hard to work out why somebody does something.
Kent understood that implicitly right from the beginning. He said we can use social science to get us halfway there, but when somebody asks “I need this answer on my desk at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Social science says, “Hold on, wait. I need to get all this information together. I need time to think about it.” There were times in the Cold War where you had to go with a gut instinct and Kent talks about that well.
Kent leaves behind this legacy of thinking about the craft. He knows right from the start that what he writes down can be used for the next few generations ahead of him.
He paints a picture of the fragility of the process. That is what makes the analysts of today so respectful of him, that he’s written it down, that he’s worn his heart on his sleeve, and that he’s shown them that there’s an awful lot they can bring to analysis.
Larry Bernstein:
What surprised me was his support of the library as being a place to look for answers, that there were answers in books. If you compare it versus G2 intelligence for the Army in North Africa, there is no library there. I do not know how they gather and apply information, but it is not from books. It is from human intel. The OSS originally had offices at the Library of Congress, and Sherman Kent argues that the CIA should get its own library so that they can have easy access to these books.
Questions that are being asked, will China invade Taiwan, or will the West face an invasion from the Soviet Union? These are not questions that are easily ascertainable from books. How do you think about using source material from the library as his primary method of intelligence?
Peter Grace:
It betrayed the prejudice of the social scientists, which is the peer review system. But what I’m reading has been double checked by leading experts. It’s a collaborative effort. And books were the place where you could have that trust in the source. He’s a historian, so he believes in an historical method. Just because somebody says, “I’ve just arrived from Moscow and here’s what’s happening,” doesn’t mean that you take it at face value. Part of that is this robustness that they were trying to impose, that if somebody said, “How did you get this information?” They could say, “Well, I can trace it through these sources, and it’s not just something that we’ve heard off the street today.”
Larry Bernstein:
There are obviously errors in every method and process, but let’s focus on human intel. Did you ever read the book, Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene?
Peter Grace:
Yes, of course.
Larry Bernstein:
It’s the worst example of human intelligence. The Western Power Intelligence Agency has a man in Havana to get human intel, but the reality is he never leaves his hotel. He gets room service and types up reports and mails it in. And based on those bogus reports, major decisions are being made. And it highlights the frailty of this approach.
Peter Grace:
As does the Steele report in the dossier.
Larry Bernstein:
Now that we have poked a hole at human intel, let me try to defend it. In the mid-1990s, I got a new job as co-head of emerging markets proprietary trading at Salomon Brothers. My partner, Mark Franklin said, “Let’s go to Argentina and find out what’s going on in the ground.”
“Okay, when we land there, what are we going to do?”
“Well, first we probably should meet with the editors of the largest newspapers. We should meet with the heads of the largest banks and investment banks. We should meet with the current head of the Ministry of Finance. We should meet with the former head of the Ministry of Finance, the head of the Central Bank, and the former head of Central Bank.
We probably should meet with a billionaire who runs a large brewing company.”
I said, “Listen, we’re in the relative value bond trading business. Brewing is a sideshow.”
“Larry, do you have any idea how hard it is to make a billion dollars in Argentina? Do you know how plugged in you must be? We’re going to go visit the head of the brewer.”
We would go visit these same individuals every quarter and we would put in a few new people and drop a few each trip.
“Are you sure you want to go visit the same guy?”
He said,” Yes, because it’s not so much his level of concern about the finances of the country I’m interested in, but the changes. If a guy’s always saying it’s the end of the world and he’s saying it’s going to be fantastic, that’s new. And so, we can apply changes and not level as being a more important metric.”
We did this in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Thailand, wherever. We have a process of gathering human intelligence from political scientists, pollsters, journalists, government people, bankers, and traders. We could learn about what the issues of the day were. We could apply it with academic analysis. We could apply that with models, but at the end of the day, we were not getting it from books, we were getting it from people.
Peter Grace:
David Ogilvy says the same thing in Confessions of an Advertising Man.
You pick up something like a car account. The first thing you do is you go down to the car yards and ask the car salesman how the car is selling. They are going to tell you.
“Oh, people don’t like it because it’s not comfortable inside or they don’t like the new transmission system or whatever.” They are going to give you the whole thing. They are even going to tell you the advertising stinks or what could be done to improve the advertising. This idea of getting down to grassroots is a terrific idea.
Larry Bernstein:
Kicking the tires.
Peter Grace:
It is a terrific idea, but you balance it with other information. You do not do the whole thing and come back and say, I’ve solved the problem with the client, or I know which way the economy of Argentina is going just by getting that information. You are getting it with other sources.
A good social scientist, you are testing the value of each source and trying to work out which ones you’ve put more emphasis.
Larry Bernstein:
In reading your book, what surprised me was the breadth, depth, and quantity of academics working for the CIA in research and analysis. And they were not random guys. It was like the Sterling Professor at Yale, which is their top guy. One of the economists on staff is Charles Kindelberger. He wrote a fabulous book on the role of tariffs causing the Great Depression. I also read one of his books about European economics and what I didn’t appreciate was that he had worked at the CIA on the European economies. Now that makes total sense that he would write that book. I was baffled why he had written it previously, but now I know.
Our great social scientists working for the CIA would be untrue today. I do not know any social science community academics who freelance or work for or take a sabbatical to go work at the CIA. Since maybe the Vietnam War, academics have pushed away from the military and the intelligence community as being on the dark side and not a partner. Tell us about this inclusivity of academy and the CIA, and then if there has been a divorce.
Peter Grace:
I talked to somebody at Yale recently to this professor of history, “Would you have worked for CIA?” And he did not hesitate. He said, “It was an option. I would quite happily have gone to work at CIA if I hadn’t stayed in academia.”
So, there is something about service which seems to trump some of the question marks, particularly after Vietnam War, about whether you’d worked for CIA or not. This is a recognition of the greater good, that there are things that we can bring to promote peace in the world.
One of the reasons why I wrote the book. I had done Russian foreign policies since 2014 as my master’s. I asked my supervisor at the time, “What do you think the impact of social sciences is on foreign policy making?” And he said, “Well, I was trained in America.” He said, “I went to Columbia for my PhD. I went to Johns Hopkins for my master’s and my undergraduate was at the University of California.” And he said, “All of my professors at some stage had something to do with CIA.” And most of them, he said, were consulting.
Ernest May is one of those people who crops up a lot. And if you start to Google CIA documents, and people like Neustadt, Kenneth Arrow, Thomas Schelling, Robert Jervis come up again and again.
There is a link between academia and intelligence that has never gone away. And that is why I called my book The Intelligence Intellectuals, because it’s an uninterrupted link that starts at the Second World War and continues right up until the present day.
Larry Bernstein:
I had Ernest May speak at my book club years ago. He’s passed away now, and the topic was the 9/11 report. I asked him why he drafted the 9/11 report the way he did. He said, “Well, I broke it up into parts and the first part is history. What happened here? Why did these terrorists behave in this manner? How did this happen? And then I’ll explain what they did and what we can do about it. “ Ernest May was a Harvard historian. I thought his approach made an effective commission report.
I would have thought that if you went today to Harvard’s history department and said, “Would you consult for the CIA?” I think the answer would have been no. And if my colleagues found out, I would have been ostracized. It is also possible that the nature of historical study has changed. There are not military historians at Harvard like Ernest May. I read one of his books Strange Victory on the failures on why France lost in World War II. Military history as a discipline has collapsed among the major history departments in the United States and historians now study other topics like the history of Chinese Americans and their relationship to civil rights. It is less applicable to the questions that the CIA is interested in.
What do you think of the nature of study and its applicability, as well as the leftward leaning nature of the academy, which is opposed to military defense and the Central Intelligence Agency?
Peter Grace:
Why do they bring historians in? Because historians can give you an interpretation of what happened using the facts. They can show you also the psychic nature of history that history often repeats itself and they can use analogies to help you see that more clearly. Why would CIA want to use historians? What is happening now on the ground? Is there an historical comparison that we can make?
When I started writing this book, most of the books that were available that were of a similar nature to mine were left wing perspectives. And the view tended to be that anybody that worked for CIA, and particularly the people like Kent, were either deluded or wrong, imperialist, evil. I did want to present a more impartial view of that.
We need people who are interested in the challenges of democracy. We need people who have an ethical view on waterboarding. Without that picture that the left brings, we would be probably in serious trouble. If you went to Harvard today and asked somebody if they wanted to work for CIA, there would be a resounding closing of doors, but one or two doors would still be open.
Larry Bernstein:
I took a class in the History of American Foreign Policy at Penn, and one of the assigned books was The Best and The Brightest by David Halberstam. The underlying thesis of the book is that the best and the brightest contribution was negative, that they were overconfident in their philosophy and in their application…
Peter Grace:
Worldviews
Larry Bernstein:
Yeah, the whole thing. There were many people involved: the Rostow Brothers, McGeorge Bundy, and they had been advising Kennedy and then Johnson as it relates to policy and that their advice turned out to be poor. I think Kennedy fell in love with the best and the brightest as it related to their successes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that same team that applied it to Vietnam resulted in a catastrophe and Halberstam lets these guys have it.
Since then, there has not been this group of the best and the brightest held up by any administration as being critical to decision making. Tell us about the demise of the academic generalist as it applies to policymaking and why the best and the brightest are no longer at the center of power.
Peter Grace:
Ernest May and Richard Neustadt talked about presidential styles of decision making. And they mentioned that in Kennedy’s case, it was collegial. Kennedy liked to do a round-robin of opinion before he decided. There is also another story of Isaiah Berlin, the English philosopher who was in Washington during the war, he’s at a cocktail party and Kennedy asks him what to do about the missile crisis. The best and the brightest are an example of the collegial system that Kennedy was using.
There is a danger in believing that you have recruited the best and the brightest, because if your recruitment process is to say to get the A+ students from the best universities with the best degrees, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be able to think on their feet when in a crisis situation.
Larry Bernstein:
There is a large literature on the CIA. I remember the first one I read when I was in high school, A Man called Intrepid by William Stevenson that begins with the story of the OSS. And then I read Alan Dulles’s book The Craft of Intelligence, which gave you background of Alan’s work originally working for the OSS out of Switzerland and then how he developed his own operation. And then Richard Helms book A Look Over My Shoulder, Director of the CIA. from an intelligence and operational standpoint.
And then most recently, Tim Weiner of the New York Times, who covers the FBI and the CIA, gave a behind the scenes of the success and the failures of the CIA. Mostly failures, frankly, comes out of that book Legacy of Ashes. And yours is a completely different approach. You’re not trying to defend the existence of the agency or slap it down because of its failures. You’re more interested in process. Explain how your book fits in and what it contributes to that discussion.
Peter Grace:
It’s not an overview of the history of CIA. It’s only a snapshot in time. It’s 1950 to 1953 where the professors are brought into CIA away from the universities to affect change and put down rules about the way analysis should work. We can learn about the history of the organizations, but what we want to know is how do they arrive at the conclusions? And are those processes good processes? If I sat down with somebody from CIA, would they explain it to me in a way that was credible? And that’s increasingly important because decisions are being made around the world that either ignore the input of intelligence agencies or twist it. And we are expected as citizens to take at face value these conclusions.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. Peter, what are you optimistic as it relates to the gathering of intelligence?
Peter Grace:
Well, AI is the big question, and most of the intelligence analysts that I spoke to in the UK and in America recently said this was the thing that was worrying them the most.
Larry Bernstein:
When I was thinking about the questions that Sherman Kent highlighted in his book, Strategies of Intelligence, they were questions that AI would have a very easy time answering. Example, can we move wide trains with military equipment through Bulgaria? AI would be able to figure that out in seconds. You want maps of North Africa? No problem. You want to understand what languages are spoken on the coast of Algeria and in areas of Iran, no sweat. Interpret the newspapers in Casablanca for the last three months as it relates to American foreign policy, and give me an analysis, boom, done. And then when you ask follow-up questions, would you be interested in hearing more about this? The feedback loop that the decision makers can get it in a rapid formula.
If anything, if you believe in Sherman Kent’s view that if all I really need is a library, AI can read the entire library and get you the essence of what you want. And if you want more detail like what sources, no problem, AI can do those things.
Peter Grace:
40 years ago, we did not have the internet, so the ability to get information required driving to the library. We’re not talking about speed up, we’re talking about the ability to judge it and to critique it. AI is getting better at doing that, but there is a problem, and if you don’t know the process of how you got there, then it’s hard to know whether the quality of information is good or not.
If AI takes that process out so that it’s not transparent, then how can you trust that information has been good? The questions that you were asking were the basic intelligence questions, but they’re not the ones that Kent moved on to, which was, will the Soviet Union invade Western Europe and when and how? At what point should we have our armies prepared for that invasion? Will they attempt a preemptive strike using nuclear weapons to knock us out before we even start? And at the moment, AI can’t deliver that.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Peter for joining us.
I am doing a series of podcasts on the war in Iran. If you missed our last podcast the topic was Why Did We Attack Iran Now. Our speaker was Eitan Shamir who previously was the head of the National Security Doctrine Department for Israel’s Prime Minister.
Our prior podcast was Why Does the Press Think We Lost the War? Our speaker was Mark Penn who was a senior advisor to President Clinton and was Hillary’s chief strategist for her senate and presidential campaigns.
Also Iran’s Rope-a-Dope Strategy with Anthony King, a Professor of War at Exeter University.
Previous to that, we had a podcast Allies Fighting Together with Yaakov Katz and a podcast on the Opening of the Strait of Hormuz with James Holmes from the US Naval War College.
We started the series with former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton about what steps we need to take to win the war.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Why Did We Attack Iran Now, here.
