The Hidden Architecture of Knowledge: Intelligence, Academia, and the Shaping of Power

Summary

This exclusive commentary explains the role that intelligence agencies, philanthropic foundations and state power have played historically in the creation of academic knowledge, especially during the Cold War period. Based on author’s remarkable research on CIA funding networks, it discusses the connection between anthropology and military/intelligence projects, while also highlighting the concept of soft power, dual use social sciences and current threats to academic freedom.

One of the central questions guiding my recent work on intelligence, knowledge production and state power concerns undeclared interests and relationship of research funders. Most of the questions I pursue grew out of my efforts to understand the implications of a mid-1970s finding by the US Senate Church Committee (so named, because it was chaired by Senator Frank Church) that the CIA’s covert funding of US international scholarship was “massive.” The committee established that about half the grants for international research during the 1960s (excluding grants made by Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations—which the report found had their own CIA ties) were secretly funded or influenced by the CIA. This passage got me searching for documents that could substantiate how this system worked.

Part of my work might be thought of as a memory project. Using archives, previously secret documents, oral histories, and published works to consider how the not-always-mentioned interests of the US military industrial complex shaped the development of anthropology and other intellectual inquiries during the Cold War. As I read history of anthropology as a graduate student I was struck by such an obvious lacuna. This work also might be thought of as a fundamental materialist analysis of some of the ways that a society’s base helps shape its superstructure in ways that members of the society don’t always consider.

Covert Infrastructure of Academic Knowledge

The origins of my latest book, Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA, were somewhat accidental. I long ago gave up applying to foundations for most grants or fellowships, having learned that I was not likely to get traditional funds to study the politics of research funding. For many years I received more invitations to give talks at universities in the US and abroad than I could accommodate, but when invited to universities with archival materials I wished to explore, I would add several days to my trip to consult these materials.

When invited to give a public talk at Yale in 2013, I asked if instead of an honorarium, could the university add several more days to the hotel they provided. Among the collections I consulted there were the papers of Robert Blum, the Asia Foundation President during the foundation’s most productive period of CIA engagement. I knew basic facts about the foundation’s CIA ties, which ended after they were exposed in the New York Times in 1967, and years earlier I had explored documents at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives relating to the American Anthropological Association receiving Asia Foundation funds, and association’s reaction following the exposure of CIA ties. At Yale I found a remarkable, but small collection of papers that included a treasure trove of confidential board reports that read like CIA intelligence briefings.

I later made a second trip to Yale and copied more materials, and while knowing a lot about CIA operations during this period, I am not an Asian specialist, and I worried that my lack of regional historical knowledge would limit the sort of analysis I could do, simply because so many local names and historical contexts would be unfamiliar to me. So, I initially looked into trying to organise a conference where I would invite a dozen regional specialists, parceling out regional reports, and having a series of papers analyse what the CIA gained, or hoped to gain from these foundation activities. But after some inquiries to possible funders, I concluded this wasn’t an option. A few years later I learned that the Asia Foundation had deposited a massive collection of its papers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. I received research funds from Hoover and found hundreds of linear feet of material, and I decided it was worth the effort to try and write it up as a book. In many ways it was a book I wished someone else would write, but while it took me a while to get up to speed, this was a rewarding project.

Soft Power, Philanthropy and Cold War Strategy

The relationship between development work, philanthropy and intelligence strategies in the Cold War context deserves careful consideration. There has long been a revolving door of administrative personnel shifting back and forth between governmental positions at the US Department of State, or with intelligence ties, and powerful public and private research funding institutions. Throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries US governmental and private funding streams have frequently aligned with the lopsided goals of development schemes. How this works is laid out pretty clearly in important scholarly books like Inderjeet Parmar’s Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power or Gerard Colby & Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. During the Cold War, this often meant supporting specific regimes while establishing the sort of debt that powered the types of dependent relationships Andre Gunder Frank wrote about, or that John Perkins describes in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, or Bradley Simpson documents in Economists With Guns.

My research explores the role of “soft power” as a vehicle for political and strategic objectives in Asia. One of the ideas I try and develop in Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA is that while it seems obvious to view the most violent CIA operations like military coups, paramilitary actions, assassinations, tortures, or kidnappings as separate from CIA supported soft power operations, in fact, all of these activities are actually part of the same machinery undermining local self-determination and strengthening imperial hegemony. While many US social scientists working on soft power programs conceive of this work as unrelated to these darker operations, or perhaps as in opposition to such activities, historically these have at times both been arms of the same effort to exert external control over local politics.

Anthropology and the Intelligence State

Anthropology’s entanglements with intelligence agencies have evolved in notable ways from the Cold War period to the present. During the Cold War, anthropologists gradually became aware that their work was being harvested and sometimes hijacked by military and intelligence agencies for various uses. When anthropologists found out about Project Camelot’s 1964 efforts to design counterinsurgency plans for the Global South, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) condemned these plans, and when anthropologists in the early 1970s working on counterinsurgency operations in Thailand were exposed, there were similar condemnations, and the AAA’s ethics code was created with language prohibiting such secretive engagements; where were later removed in part to all applied anthropologists to create proprietary reports for sponsors.

As the post-9/11 terror wars developed, there were new pushes to incorporate anthropological knowledge for counterinsurgency operations. The AAA was less firm in its opposition to such activities, but many in the association pushed against such engagements. I was part of an activist group known as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists who organised opposition to anthropologists assisting the US terror wars, and I served on an AAA committee that tried to develop guidelines for anthropologists considering engaging with military or intelligence apparatus.

While it is difficult to determine how indicative the current Trump moment is of things to come, it appears we are now in moments where the US military-intelligence complex mostly doesn’t care not only about social science, but about any science telling them things they don’t want to hear. During the current anti-intellectual anti-science moment, and it is difficult to tell exactly what is going on or what comes next.

The concept of “dual-use” social science remains highly relevant in the era of data-driven governance and digital surveillance. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence we appear to be entering an era where not only our writings but the mundane digital artifacts of living our daily lives become fodder for dual use abuses. The analytical tools being harnessed to analyse this data grow directly from decades of social science research; research conducted by groups and individuals who mostly never intended their work be used for the forms of monitoring and control that their work will now be applied in essentially dual use ways.

Academic Freedom under Pressure

Significant ongoing tensions persist between national security practices and academic freedom today. The US university system appears to be on the edge of some sort of state of collapse. Multiple forces contribute to this: since Reagan there has been an ongoing neoliberal withdrawal of public funds for education, the rise of the managerial deanlet class of worthless administrators, the strangling culture of endless meaningless assessment, artificial intelligence making everyone dumber, and increasingly academic administrations at both public and private universities are dominated by anti-intellectual nabobs who understand little of what they are overseeing, much less principles of academic shared governance.

While not directly related to the national security apparatus, under Trump, there appears to be very little governmental interest in any sort of social science research, so funds for basic research or even studying foreign languages has been slashed. Most academic departments have become so used to chasing funding opportunities that this current state of free fall has many colleagues afraid to do the sort of critical work that needs to be done, and many don’t know how to do un-funded research, in part because the normal academic political economy has always focused on chasing funding.

I attended the annual American Anthropological Association meetings this year and was saddened to see sessions where powerful people at funding agencies instructed scholars how to write funding applications that would not get targeted for using critical analytical terms like “inequality” or “democracy” never mind any sort of critical Marxist terminology. In other sessions I heard a tenured scholar from a rich university, misunderstanding a key lesson of McCarthyism, describe how they now depoliticised their analysis, instead of using their position to confront what is happening. Decades ago I used tens of thousands of FBI files to write a history of McCarthyism’s impact on American anthropology in the 1950s (Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists), and one thing I learned was that it only took a small number of attacks to get most anthropologists to cowardly surrender their academic freedom, and we’re seeing the same thing today. Most academics have never really used their academic freedom, so it hasn’t been that difficult to limit it.

There are serious ethical and political issues embedded in military and intelligence agency uses of social scientists’ work. The fundamental ethical issues are generally not unique to these engagements and are linked to things like being honest, not betraying research participants, getting voluntary informed consent, not harming research participants, producing an honest analysis, protecting research participants, and not writing secret reports that studied populations cannot access. These sorts of ethical principles are relatively easily identified in various disciplines professional ethics codes, but equally important, and far less commonly addressed by professional associations are political concerns that need to be addressed by social scientists working in these (and other) settings.

In the early 2000s, I was appointed to several committees within the American Anthropological Association trying to develop policies relating to anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies. One committee wrote two reports identifying key issues and making policy recommendations, the second wrote a new code of ethics which included language prohibiting secret reports. While I advocated including statements moving beyond standard ethical dimensions and also addressing the political dimensions of our research, I was unsuccessful in these efforts.

A lot rides on what happens next. There are ongoing attacks on higher education in the United States. One recent attack on anthropology and the liberal arts, the Vanderbilt Report, is getting a lot of press, and these sorts of attacks on anthropology and other critical disciplines follow the same patterns I saw in my research on McCarthyism. The entire thesis of my book Threatening Anthropology was that anti-racist anthropologist activists were the primary disciplinary victims of McCarthyism. Whether or not they actually had ties to communism or did Marxist analysis didn’t make them targets nearly as much as their activism did. And just as anthropologists demonstrating the social construction of race and racism were subjected to McCarthyism’s attacks, today scholars complicating our understanding of race, sex, gender, class, and other topics central to our understanding of inequality are under attack.

As we need to learn from the McCarthy period, we all need to speak out and fight back, not alter our research to try and slip by these would be censors. Some strands of what might have been critical activist anthropology lost its way under McCarthyism, we shouldn’t let the same thing happen today.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.