IT is impossible to read a book about the supreme power of the CIA and not feel a deep turmoil stirring in your mind. You suddenly know exactly why David Cornwell, who wrote spy thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré, said after the end of the Cold War against the Soviet bloc: “The right side lost but the wrong side won."
Cornwell's unease stemmed from the greatest Western power's short-sightedness about what the West had to do after the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that it represented. Historian Hugh Wilford explains in The CIA: An Imperial History that the US intelligence agency has two major problems: incompetent guidance and the outrageous notion that it can help the US influence world politics in such a way that everything will run Washington's way.
Wilford depicts the CIA as the intelligence apparatus of a Western empire with Langley, Virginia as its capital. Everything has happened in the strictest secrecy since the beginning of the Cold War — for political, economic and military reasons, certainly, but above all to ensure that no one knows exactly who is manipulating the course of history.
Unfortunately, the CIA's manual was not written by Robert Ludlum, and the people who have led the way in crises over the years are neither Jason Bourne nor the cross-dressers at Langley who abused Ludlum's protagonist. The CIA sent losers like Ed Lansdale to help sort out the mess in South Vietnam, or Frank Wisner to Albania in 1949, with catastrophic consequences. If one wants to get the best idea of the CIA's ineptitude, one should read Graham Greene's The Quiet American, writes Wilford.
One could certainly argue that the moon landing in the late Sixties was made possible by the development of a technology that was soon refined and employed on a large scale by the CIA. All digital developments can be traced back there. Similarly, so many of the CIA's actions can be traced to the US's preoccupation with oil and the extent to which it wants to raid the global economy for its own gain.
George W Bush's war in Iraq was the subcontractor's golden age. The CIA knew how to destabilise countries with weapons and money but its lack of insight into any culture other than its own unmasked its stupidity from Vietnam to Panama, Cambodia to Venezuela, Iraq to Iran and Egypt to Saudi Arabia. The CIA's nose is so deep into Middle East affairs that one can hardly believe it is only the pious Benjamin Netanyahu who is seen to have Palestinian blood on his hands.
My problem with Wilford's book is not that it contains any inaccuracies or demonstrable untruths, but that he spells out so many things that leave one alarmed about the future. In reading about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, for example, you see that the CIA is more interested in establishing puppet governments in problematic political arenas than in gathering information that will allow the US government to make wise decisions. The CIA makes the wise decisions, the government follows them.
Of course, this is an oversimplification. The CIA should, in theory, be held accountable and receive orders from the Oval Office.
One of the biggest mistakes one can make is to think the CIA is the institution we see in TV shows and films. Wilford says the organisation has a split personality. Like the Russians, it believes that gathering information can be done via technology, but the way it then uses the information is via the outdated style of interference by the primordial fathers of colonialism, Britain and France. But it is so unwieldy that anyone in the US can see it arriving a mile away.
I have a feeling Wilford is sitting anxiously waiting for the boaster with the tattered right ear to take over the White House again. Each change of power brings its own form of idiocy.
The irony underlying a book like The CIA: An Imperial History is that the entertainment industry (music, TV, movies, computer games) has had far greater success exporting the American empire's culture since the advent of talking films than the CIA. Certainly, it has to do with the difference between overt and covert propaganda and information dissemination, but somewhere in the background there will always be an American businessman who sees an opportunity to get richer. What are you doing tonight? Netflix?
Wilford's book ends with these words: “As long as America continues to act like an empire while denying that it is one, it will continue to strive for covert action as an instrument of its foreign relations, with the same adverse foreign and domestic consequences as during the Cold War and War on Terror." Put another way, the imperial history of the CIA is probably not yet over.
Will Kaiser Trump privatise the CIA? Nothing is impossible. Isn't he the Svengali of subcontractors?
The CIA: An Imperial History by Hugh Wilford was published by John Murray Press and costs R470 at Exclusive Books.
Freida McFadden, a brain surgeon from Boston, is the most successful suspense writer of our time. Her three Housemaid novels (The Housemaid, The Housemaid's Secret and The Housemaid is Watching) have collectively sold more than a million copies since the first title was published in August 2022.
Perhaps you have already become acquainted with Millie, the housemaid, in the first two novels of the trilogy. Now she's older, she and her family are getting nice and cosy in the suburbs. If you haven't allowed Millie into your life yet, maybe you should first read The Housemaid and The Housemaid's Secret. Then you will understand how life in the suburbs made Millie calmer. But when the pawpaw hits the fan, she is still the same old lightning bolt on a broom. She still notices everything. And this time there is a lot of trouble with the neighbours. But enough now. Some secrets one has to sniff out for oneself. What a treat!
The Housemaid is Watching by Freida McFadden is published by Sourcebooks and costs R265 at Exclusive Books.
Kirsten Miller's books have been geared towards the young adult market segment to date. Now, with Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books, she's turning to people with a sense of humour, of all ages. And I guess we South Africans who suffered the censorship of the old apartheid regime will probably be the book's most appreciative readers. All of this sounds so familiar.
Miller's book is surely inspired by the Florida and Georgia hotheads who are so keen to ban books from school libraries. Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books is a satire about a village, Troy, where Dean manifests her spiritual poverty with a massive campaign against books that she considers unfit for public consumption. But then a hard-baked lesbian and a dropout who is high on shrooms turn up to put a spanner in the works. A total of 304 pages of undiluted pleasure, with characters who might as well have been Lamie Snyman and Action Moral Standards. Thank heavens we are not like this any more.
Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller was published by William Morrow and costs R351 at Graffiti.
♦ VWB ♦
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