The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA

On 25 June 1950, North Korea’s Korean People Army crossed the 38th parallel launching a full-scale invasion of South Korea. American President Harry S. Truman calls his advisors and military officers into an emergency meeting. What is telling about those who gathered that day was who was not invited to the critical meeting – the Central Intelligence Agency – was excluded from the proceedings. A relative newcomer to the national security world, the invasion was seen as the latest example of the CIA’s failure to anticipate a major global event. Criticism of the agency was widespread and many wondered what value they offered. The problem was while everyone understood what intelligence work involved during wartime, making sense of what intelligence work ought to look like during peace time was a new challenge and the feeling was intelligence had to go beyond collecting information and towards anticipating new threats, trends and how other countries would behave. To take this challenge on, the CIA turned to historians, linguists, economists, sociologists, geographers, archaeologists, political scientists and social scientists to develop its analytical intelligence. Peter C Grace’s The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA charts the rise of the agency’s social scientists and the National Intelligence Estimate reports.

7^th December 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the United States and was seen as a major intelligence blunder. As the smoke plumed, social scientists began thinking about ways they could leave academia and apply their know-how to real world struggles.  Grace explains that the Yale political scientist Harold Lasswell, who helped develop propaganda and psychological warfare for the US government, thought ‘social science would contribute to the larger ideological war of democracy against authoritarianism.’ There were a number of issues that contributed to the intelligence failure, but what was needed to rectify the problem was the development of something different – strategic intelligence. While things like tactical and operational intelligence were well established and enabled militaries to take advantage of specific situations, trying to marry together different bits of information, facts and produce empirically-backed rigorous theories that could predict who an opponent was, how they will behave, what they want and how they will respond is a form of intelligence that did not exist at the start of the Second World War.

As the Central Intelligence Agency was created at the end of the Second World War, one of its tasks was to develop this type of strategic intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, from which the CIA was created, had begun to cultivate academics to produce this type of analysis. As the book points out, the problem for the CIA in the early years, included the fact that something like creating a unit that does this kind of work barely existed before and nobody knew how to run one and make use of it. Much of the agency’s work up until 1950 was hampered by rivalries with older and more established intelligence gathering outfits. Missteps only made the scrutiny worse. In 1948, for example, during an election in Colombia, liberal leader George Gaitan was assassinated and his killing sparked a 3-day riot that led to a 10-year civil war. As the assassination unfolded, US Secretary of State George Marshall was visiting the Latin American country and his safety was at risk. Congress held an inquiry into whether the CIA knew the uprising was coming and if they adequately informed Marshall. While the agency claimed they informed Marshall of the risk, it was widely regarded as a major intelligence failure and media reports about failed CIA operations in other countries began to circulate. ‘By 1948 CIA’s reputation as a warning bell of impending danger was greatly tarnished.’

The agency responded by hiring new people to head its operations, including Harvard historian William Langer, Yale historian Sherman Kent, MIT economist Max Millikan and others who transformed strategic intelligence and key CIA reports including the National Intelligence Estimate. ‘It is inconceivable today to think of power-particularly US military, economic, and political power- without thinking of the accompanying intellectual and informational power that is embodied in the state’s intelligence institutions.’  The Intelligence Intellectuals makes for a fascinating read into a period of time, when social science was considered essential for national security. The book untangles myth from fact about the early workings of the agency, while laying bare the success and failures of the agency’s social scientists.