"The CIA and the New Dialect of Power"

From American Affairs Journal:

In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency announced a “digital facelift.” The agency’s goal was to attract millennial and Gen Z applicants who might be skeptical of the organization’s mission and to “increase racial, cultural, disability, sexual orientation, and gender diversity so that its workforce is ‘reflective of America.’”¹ The rebrand involved a new minimalist logo, reminiscent of the type of design typically used to promote electronic music (as some online were quick to point out). The models used on its website were conventionally attractive and ethnically ambiguous twenty-somethings, the faces you might see on a college brochure.

The agency’s twin adoption of liberal talking points and Bay-Area-inspired professional class aesthetics suggested that the two might be linked, and—as we shall see—they are. It was not until May, however, when a series of recruitment ads titled “Humans of the CIA” appeared, that the political undertones of the CIA’s rebranding would be made explicit and all hell would break loose. The most notorious of these ads included a Latina woman who begins her monologue, “When I was seventeen, I quoted Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me.’” The video continues,

I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I did not sneak into CIA. My employment is not and was not a fluke or a slip through the cracks. I used to suffer from imposter syndrome, but at 36, I refuse to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired of feeling like I am supposed to apologize for the space that I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my brilliance. I am proud of me, full stop. My parents left everything they knew to expose me to opportunities they never had. Because of them, I stand here today a proud first-generation Latina and officer at the CIA. I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Know your worth. Command your space. Mija, you’re worth it.²

The advertisement was almost universally panned. As one Forbes headline put it, “The Internet Comes Together to Mock the CIA’s New ‘Woke’ Ad.”³ The pushback was so intense that the CIA felt the need to respond, with a spokesman telling Fox News that “2020 was a standout recruitment year for the CIA despite the pandemic. . . . Our 2021 incoming class is the third-largest in a decade.”⁴ Apparently the rebrand was working for its target audience. The broader public may have been repulsed by the unfamiliar, academic language, but it was not directed at the public. This is the language of the professional class, the liberal elite—in short, a new dialect of power.

Dialects of Power, Then and Now

Previous generations of CIA officers spoke an older dialect of power—the genteel, patrician, transatlantic accent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jackie Onassis, Gore Vidal, and Katherine Hepburn. Like the new dialect of power, the transatlantic accent was used to distinguish the speaker from the masses. It was taught in boarding schools modeled on the British system, as the accent itself was modeled after the English. Many of the CIA’s initial recruits were brought up in such boarding schools, where, as Vicent Bevins points out, they inherited the upper-class imperial values of the British.⁵

The way the old elite spoke about the underclass would seem outrageous to our new elite. In Conversations with a Masked Man, John Hadden recounts with horror his CIA agent father’s description of watching a street brawl between union workers and scabs from a limousine window, referring to the brawlers as “these people.” Hadden writes, “The small phrase gives me a chill. The way he says it leaks contempt for the rabble or those brainless clods; he is above the fray, dissociated and indifferent.”⁶ Of course, not all the early CIA officers came from Mayflower-descended, British-boarding-school stock. James Jesus Angleton, a former OSS member and one of the CIA’s earliest recruits, who became its chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, had a Mexican American mother. Yet it is difficult to imagine Angleton uttering “Mijo, you’re worth it.”

He was, however, uniquely transfixed by language and literature—he was a onetime companion of the poet and Mussolini-sympathizer Ezra Pound—particularly the New Criticism. As his biographer Jefferson Morley put it, “He would come to value coded language, textual analysis, ambiguity, and close control as the means to illuminate the amoral arts of spying that became his job. Literary criticism led him to the profession of secret intelligence. Poetry gave birth to a spy.”⁷

Today’s new dialect of power, which has supplanted the old, is radical New Left politics internalized, individualized, and regurgitated by the professional class. It is imparted by the universities just as the previous elite idiom was imbued at British-style boarding schools. This dialect, like the transatlantic accent before it, is a class signifier. But today this class contains both CIA agents and left-wing journalists, to the embarrassment of the latter. This language was not “co-opted” by the professional class, as Natasha Lennard insisted in The Intercept.⁸ Quite the contrary, the CIA has as much claim to the new dialect of power as anyone else in the professional class, having had some hand in creating the New Left intelligentsia from which it sprang.

The CIA and the New Left

The CIA was heavily invested in mid-twentieth-century art and cultural production through the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), and was involved in the noncommunist Left more broadly, much to the chagrin of conservatives at the time.⁹ The CCF’s tendrils were seemingly endless, even reaching the preeminent postcolonial writer Derek Walcott.¹⁰ The CIA was consistent in its anti-communism, but it was never conservative. The feminist Gloria Steinem went so far as to characterize the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”¹¹ Steinem would know—she freely admitted to working with the CIA through a front organization called the Independent Research Service.¹² The CIA’s Harry Lun encouraged her to become the face of the organization, sending her to lead a group which would disrupt proceedings at the Marxist Vienna Youth Festival in 1959, and later to Helsinki in 1962.¹³ These affiliations were hardly a problem for Steinem on the left; she long served as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America until such positions were abolished in 2017.¹⁴ The DSA officially condemned Steinem a year later in 2018 in its magazine—not for being a CIA agent, but rather for her insinuation that young women supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton because “the boys are with Bernie.”¹⁵

Of course, the CIA’s flirtation with the New Left soon became untenable, as leftist groups like the Weather Underground began picking up arms and setting bombs. The most radical elements of the New Left would be arrested or killed. Some, like the former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, would later help launch the political career of one Barack Hussein Obama.¹⁶ Many others retreated to academia, the site of professional class reproduction, and there cultivated a form of radical liberalism from which the new dialect of power arose. In addition to education and law, many new academics, who placed a premium on diversity, would find work in various “area studies”—which, as Bruce Cumings points out, were a pet project of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s immediate predecessor.¹⁷

The CIA: Vanguard of Liberalism

Another Humans of the CIA advertisement features a gay CIA librarian who expresses his “shock” at seeing a rainbow flag on former CIA director John Brennan’s lanyard upon swearing-in. He later learned that it had been designed by angle, the CIA’s LGBT resource group.¹⁸ The septum-ring-wearing protagonist of this video would be delighted to know that the CIA’s position on homosexuality has always been liberal for its time—even amid the Lavender Scare, when homosexuals were seen as potential blackmail targets or communist sympathizers, Soviet spies in waiting. Much to the annoyance of Joseph McCarthy and other conservatives, Angleton employed openly gay men in the CIA, including hiring Carmel Offie shortly after he had been fired from the State Department for propositioning an Army officer.¹⁹ Angleton also befriended an openly and flamboyantly gay British diplomat named Guy Burgess, a friend (and possible lover) of Angleton’s close confidant, a British spy named Kim Philby. Unfortunately for Angleton, both men in fact turned out to be Soviet spies.²⁰

In 1985, at the height of the Moral Majority’s power, and decades before a thirty-something CIA agent would call herself a “cisgender millennial” in a recruitment video, an internal CIA report expressed great hope in France’s “New Philosophers.” Their ideas, particularly Michel Foucault’s, would help form the basis of an emerging academic field called queer theory, which pioneered concepts and terms like “cisgender.”²¹

On April 24, 2006, Judith Butler, who became the most famous living queer theorist by taking Foucault’s idea of sexuality as a social construct and applying it to gender, spoke at a “teach-in” at UC Santa Cruz against the Iraq War.²² Calling it a “teach-in” was a deliberate choice, an homage to the New Left radicalism of the Vietnam protests. But something had changed. During the Vietnam War, it had been the students who led the teach-ins; now, it was the professionals, professors like Butler, as well as politicians, lawyers, and in this case, a former diplomat named Joseph Wilson. Wilson had worked in the Iraqi embassy before it closed during the first Gulf War and was the last diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. The CIA had previously sent him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to investigate whether Saddam had purchased yellow-cake uranium from that country. The dictator of Iraq had not, and Wilson wrote as much in the New York Times.

But Wilson was not there because of an op-ed in the Times nor because he was a former diplomat; he was there because the Bush administration had outed his wife as an undercover CIA operative. It is difficult to imagine the student radicals of the Vietnam War era inviting a man who had openly worked for the CIA to speak at one of their teach-ins. Gloria Steinem had at least bothered to keep her affiliation with the agency a secret. But the world had changed, and so had the former college radicals at UC Santa Cruz. Wilson was one of them: a professional concerned with the particulars of his work, in his case, intelligence, in the wake of 9/11, and an expert ignored by conservative politicians and the impulsive, vengeful rubes they represented. The Bush administration’s retaliation against Wilson and his wife turned them into the ultimate professional-class martyrs. Her name, Valerie Plame, was all over the news, and the liberal intelligentsia would never forget it.

Thirteen years later, Valerie Plame drove a speeding Chevrolet Camaro through the New Mexican desert, recounting the story of her betrayal. Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been convicted of leaking her identity and Trump had just granted him a full pardon. “You might have heard my name,” she said, as valerie plame appeared in bold letters on the screen, each word accompanied by a metallic clicking sound. Then, stepping out of the Camaro, Plame took off her sunglasses, “And Mr. President, I have some scores to settle.”²³

This campaign advertisement garnered almost two million views, and small-dollar donations began flooding into New Mexico’s Third Congressional District. “She hid where 90% of her campaign contributions came from by not listing them,” one rival campaign manager said, implying that most of her donors were from out of state. The Plame campaign responded only that “the number of campaign contributors is evidence of broad political support from everyday people.”²⁴....

....MUCH MORE