CIA Less Than Helpful to Historians Seeking to Analyze Covert Operations

George Orwell once wrote that “whoever controls the past controls the future.” That seems to be the principle that the Central Intelligence Agency is applying to its covert operations during the early days of the Cold War.

For years now, the CIA has been resisting and delaying the attempts of independent historians--and sometimes even the State Department’s own government historians--to describe and analyze intelligence operations during the Cold War. The CIA’s approach to history has often been to pretend that intelligence operations didn’t exist, or that they had little impact on American foreign policy.

The efforts to censor history reached the point of absurdity a few years ago, when the U.S. government published an official history of American diplomacy in Iran during the tumultuous era of the early 1950s. In the book, the CIA was, in effect, airbrushed out of the picture.

Since the days of Abraham Lincoln, the State Department has published a series of volumes called “Foreign Relations of the United States,” the leading documentary history of American foreign policy. These books attempt to describe, two or three decades after events occurred, exactly how American presidents and their top aides dealt with the rest of the world--and the background and reasoning for their decisions.

These works are one of the main ways we know about what has taken place in the past and how we will find out, someday, what is happening in American foreign policy right now. In a couple of decades, we may learn the full history of America’s careful courtship of Saddam Hussein in the decade before the Persian Gulf War. Or, to take a current example, we may find out the extent to which the Clinton administration’s foreign policy early this year may have been motivated by a desire to help the election campaigns of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Nowhere in the State Department’s volume on Iran was it mentioned that the CIA had engineered and stage-managed the return of the shah to his throne, even though the American intelligence operation already had been made public. Indeed, Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s main agent, had already given a detailed account of the covert operation in his memoirs. The reader of the official history was supposed to think that the shah came back to power through miracles, while American diplomats in Tehran merely stood by, cabling the good news back to Washington.

After that unseemly episode, Congress passed a law requiring the CIA to begin cooperating with historians publishing the record of American foreign policy.

The CIA responded by assigning new personnel and resources to the business of opening its files. A CIA unit called the Center for the Study of Intelligence has been set up to work with historians and to help in the publication of the State Department’s official histories.

A couple of years ago, then-CIA Director R. James Woolsey promised Congress that the agency would eventually declassify and open the records of some of the main covert intelligence operations of the Cold War. For example, the CIA has agreed to publish, someday, information about operations against North Korea and the former North Vietnam, as well as its clandestine activities in the 1950s in support of the Tibetan uprising against China.

Yet virtually no information about these covert operations has been released. CIA officials have developed what might be called the “Oliver Stone excuse.” After the release of Stone’s movie “JFK,” the CIA agreed to declassify its records relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. Since then, CIA officials have said that their work in releasing information about other areas of American foreign policy has been delayed by the need to finish work on the Kennedy records.

A brief Washington ceremony two weeks ago underscored just how limited the CIA’s commitment to history is and how far it has to go in its efforts to declassify information about its covert operations.

The CIA, along with the State Department and the National Archives, convened historians and journalists to mark the publication of a new book called “Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment.” The book, which will be part of the Foreign Relations series, describes the events during the Truman administration leading up to the creation of the CIA and its decision to launch covert intelligence operations overseas.

It is the first official history of American foreign policy devoted exclusively to the subject of intelligence. The CIA clearly views the publication of this book as a symbol of its willingness to begin cooperating with historians.

Yet in this new work, the CIA seems to be almost as secretive and selective as it ever was.

You can learn, for instance, that there were huge bureaucratic battles over the creation of the CIA. You can discover that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover fought tenaciously against the formation of a new intelligence apparatus. The FBI already had set up its own spying system in Latin America, and Hoover wanted his own empire to be expanded throughout the world. We can be thankful that the Truman administration turned him down.

You also can read some of the memos in which the CIA decided to embark upon covert operations, which U.S. officials at first called “political warfare.” But you can’t find out what events overseas prompted the United States to start down this road. There is virtually nothing in the book, for example, about U.S. activities in Greece and Italy, where the Truman administration feared communist takeovers and launched intelligence operations to prevent this from happening.

University of Virginia historian Melvyn P. Leffler asserted that the CIA’s current approach to releasing information about its history is to focus on narrow, abstract questions of organization and procedure. “Historians and the public want to know more about the substance” of American intelligence operations, said Leffler, speaking at a panel discussion during the ceremonies for the new book at the National Archives.

This is not some obscure dispute about events long ago. The history of American intelligence operations has important implications in the real world today. In Japan, for example, the record of CIA activities in support of the Liberal Democratic Party in the 1950s could affect the way the Japanese public thinks of the party today.

More important, the history of U.S. intelligence operations affects this country’s perceptions of its leaders and of American foreign policy. During the next five years, the State Department is supposed to publish the official records of the foreign policies of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. It would be nice to know the full record of the Nixon administration’s covert intelligence operation to destabilize President Salvador Allende in Chile--and to find out whether this was an isolated event or whether there were any similar, undisclosed operations elsewhere.

The prospects are uncertain. At the recent ceremonies, Brian Latell, head of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, said intelligence officials have agreed to improve the quality, scope and timeliness of their work with historians. This is certainly a step forward.

However, Latell cautioned that the CIA will not disclose information about past covert operations if doing so would undermine current American foreign policy. That’s such a broad, vague standard that it could conceivably be used to withhold information about almost anything.

In fairness to the CIA, the rest of the U.S. government deserves some of the blame too. In some instances, the CIA has been willing to release information about its past covert operations but has been held up from doing so by the White House or the State Department, which worry about the impact on foreign governments.

The ultimate irony is that, the way things are going, Americans could eventually know nearly as much about the KGB’s activities during the Cold War as about the CIA’s. It was recently announced that some of the KGB files will be available for sale on CD-ROM.

The KGB, of course, was the loser in the intelligence battles of the Cold War. The CIA won. Now it’s time for the record of its clandestine activities decades ago to be declassified and made public. Whose American history is it, anyway?