Abstract
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones has astutely observed American intelligence for decades and helped shape what is now a flourishing academic sub-field. His latest book, A Question of Standing, released to mark 75 years of the CIA, is almost an updated version of his earlier work The CIA and American Democracy (Yale University Press, 1989) with over a third of the book now devoted to the two decades after 9/11. Back at the end of the Cold War, Jeffreys-Jones argued that the CIA had been reasonably successful in intelligence gathering and analysis but lacked ‘proper standing’ (ix) among senior policymakers.
Fast forward three decades and one war on terror, Jeffreys-Jones has not changed his mind. The core argument in A Question of Standing is that the CIA's success is dependent on its standing, especially in the White House, but also in Congress and now amongst the American public. The former seems slightly more self-evident now than it did thirty years ago (largely thanks to the work of people like Jeffreys-Jones), yet foregrounds the timeless question about the relationship between intelligence leaders and policymakers. Standing amongst the public is innovative, and the author might have taken it further by demonstrating how both the interplay between fact and fiction in the public mind and the narration of covert actions affected the evolution of the CIA.
Building on his earlier work, Jeffreys-Jones argues that covert actions have played a disproportionately large—and overwhelmingly negative—role in shaping this standing. Indeed, the book is highly critical of covert action: ‘the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the post-World War II era’ (xi). This is a bold claim. Beneath it, Jeffreys-Jones makes thoughtful observations about the role of myth, self-promotion, and folklore when it comes to covert action. Perceptions of formative experiences in Iran and Guatemala shaped the agency's history ever since. Chile and Iran-Contra feature prominently in the book; so too do the drone strikes and covert paramilitary operations of the post-9/11 era.
Amongst the broad outlines, Jeffreys-Jones rightly recognises the difficulty in judging the impact of covert action. He persuasively claims that ‘it is open to debate whether the CIA swung any election results’ (p. 41), although he risks double standards later on by stating that Russian covert action ‘helped to invent the Trump presidency’ and ‘installed [Putin's] man in the White House’ (p. 208). The impact of Russian covert action is, of course, also open to debate. Similarly, Jeffreys-Jones rightly nuances the idea of CIA sponsorship, breaking it down to range from front shell organisations to entirely unwitting recipients. This is an important point, but it risks undermining the claim that covert action was so damaging; these non-CIA actors, including those operating inside the target state, had agency of their own. In judging both impact and agency, the book might have offered more evidence of targets’ perceptions of US covert action (real or imagined); of the extent to which covert action did increase anti-Americanism; and how that manifested itself (through increased paranoia, conspiracism, distrust of the media etc).
The book is concise and so inevitably focuses on the bigger set play covert actions, especially regime change. It does so well, but risks falling into its own trap by devoting pages to dramatic covert actions rather than to the intelligence analysts working in the background, whom Jeffreys-Jones nobly seeks to defend. Covert action has, in his view, reduced the standing of the agency's analysis, hurting its prime mission of gathering intelligence to support foreign policy. He writes persuasively in defence of intelligence analysts, who are so often underreported in histories (popular and academic) which focus on spies and special operations. It is ironic, then, that much of this book is devoted to covert action.
A Question of Standing is an accessible and well-written book, which makes a persuasive case that covert actions loom large in perceptions of the CIA—perhaps to the detriment of intelligence work. However, it risks overstating the case that these covert actions ‘would alienate the majority of the world's nations’ and ‘[destroy] America's claim to moral leadership’ (p. 33).