‘Real Substance, not Just Symbolism’? the CIA and the Representation of Covert Operations in the Foreign Relations of the United States Series

Abstract

In March 1967, the Harvard economist and former US Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, noted wryly in the pages of The Washington Post that recent events had confirmed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be ‘a secret agency … with an excellent instinct for headlines’. A month earlier, to the horror of senior CIA officials, the American west coast magazine Ramparts had disclosed the Agency's long-standing financial connection to a number of international educational and cultural organisations. In a series of damning exposes covered simultaneously in The New York Times , details of covert CIA operations conducted in the United States, Europe and Asia were laid bare. Ever since the blanket press exposure given to CIA indiscretions in the wake of the Ramparts revelations, and the international media circus that developed in the early 1970s around Congressional probes into the American intelligence community, the CIA has fought to keep much of its remaining operational and institutional history secret. Nonetheless, the Agency's association with the surveillance of political groups inside the United States during the Johnson and Nixon administrations (Operation CHAOS), links to the global narcotics trade and, following the events of 11 September 2001, controversial role in prosecuting the United States' ‘War on Terror’ have served as particularly toxic forms of public diplomacy. Until relatively recently, the Agency's most prominent adversaries in the battle for control of CIA history have been former intelligence officers turned memoirists, journalists and historians.