Covert Action in the Cold War: U.S. Policy, Intelligence, and CIA Operations

Abstract

This book is a critique of covert operations run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its creation in 1947 to the death of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Its author, James Callanan, has taught at a cluster of universities in the northeast of England and dedicates his work to “the pioneers of America's cold war intelligence community.” He describes the CIA’s conservative counterintelligence chief James Angleton as having been “prescient” about the communist menace and sees the agency's early dirty tricks in Italy as both necessary and successful (p. 6). Callanan brings an acute critical mind to the study of his subject. He opens with a discussion of intelligence theory and historiography, and he offers a typography of covert action: defensive (blocking Soviet subversion), offensive (destabilizing unwanted regimes), and preventive (preemptive moves to exclude Soviet influence from the “third world”) (p. 4). He contributes to the debate about whether the CIA ever operated without presidential authorization, offering the idea that the agency may have been on occasion “anticipatory” of presidential policy. He further suggests that difficulties may have arisen in periods of presidential “interregnum” (p. 9). His main example for this argument is the 1961 assassination of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Callanan sees the assassination as a setback to the plans of President-elect Kennedy, which he believes to have been “scuttled by the machinations of the CIA” (p. 148).