The British recruited President Eisenhower as a partner and Mosaddegh was quickly deposed, even though he had had “no truck with Soviet overtures”. The first was the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who aroused Winston Churchill’s fury by announcing his intention to nationalize the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Those feelings of entitlement and omnipotence led directly to the two most disastrous CIA operations of the 1950s. But Jeffreys-Jones points out there was a significant downside to such wartime success: it “gave some of those spies false memories of infallibility, entitlement and omnipotence that were out of keeping with the quieter, more thoughtful approach required of the modern intelligence agency”. The OSS was a “significant classroom for a good number of America’s postwar spies”. Hollywood celebrated OSS exploits in movies like Rue Madeleine, starring James Cagney in a heroic role, supporting the French resistance. In April 1945, a future CIA director, William Colby, led an OSS party that blew up a crucial Norwegian bridge. Feelings of entitlement and omnipotence led to the two most disastrous operations of the 1950s, in Iran and GuatemalaĪmerica’s modern love affair with the cloak-and-dagger world really took off when the joint chiefs of staff created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to coordinate espionage behind enemy lines from Bulgaria to Scandinavia during the second world war. “At the peak of its enterprise, the FBI ran 360 agents in the region,” Jeffreys-Jones writes. The author traces the bureaucratic origins of the modern CIA back to the Secret Service, created in one of Abraham Lincoln’s final official acts in 1865, through the U1 unit created in the state department to collect peacetime intelligence after the first world war, and J Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, which Franklin Roosevelt tasked with coordinating intelligence in Latin America. Their approach had the desired effect, persuading the pasha to make overtures for peace. With the state department carefully staying out of the operation, 10 marines led an army of 400 “insurgents” who “marched 500 miles across the Libyan desert”. Jefferson financed an attempt to overthrow the ruling pasha in Tripoli, whom he had “identified as a prime instigator of maritime crime”. The earliest attempt at foreign regime change occurred just two presidents later, when Thomas Jefferson confronted the Barbary pirates who threatened American shipping off the coast of North Africa. Just three years later this secret fund had exploded to $1m, an astonishing 12% of the federal budget. It turns out America’s infatuation with expensive espionage goes all the way back to George Washington, who in 1790 cajoled Congress into creating a “Contingent Fund of Foreign Intercourse” so he could pay American spies $40,000. He brings a depth of knowledge that provides innumerable fascinating anecdotes – and supports his very harsh conclusions about the net effects of America’s hugely expensive intelligence apparatus. The author is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor emeritus of American history at the University of Edinburgh, who has written three other histories of the intelligence world.
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