Continental operatives: US intelligence before hegemony

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.

The American Commission to Negotiate Peace in Paris in 1919. The Versailles conference led to the creation of the League of Nations, which the US ultimately declined to join. Allen Dulles is top left. Military intelligence pioneer Col. Ralph Van Deman is seated second left, immediately below him (Chas. Stern, U.S. Army Signal Corps, public domain).

At a time like this, I can only be glad that I’m not an economist.

It’s difficult to know what to say about a week in which the US Government lost among others an NSC Intelligence Director, an NSA Director, and a likely CIA Director of Operations.

I’ve always taken my focus on intelligence history as a license to write about the long-term context rather than respond to immediate events, but even that is challenging in the face of genuinely unprecedented developments.

The former French Ambassador in Washington, Gérard Araud, suggests that recent happenings can be better understood by examining US history in the 1920s. During that decade, the US was already an imperial great power but not yet a hegemonic one.

A hegemon projects power not to acquire territory, but to guarantee an international order. Successful hegemony usually reflects economic competitiveness, allowing the hegemon to bear the costs of supporting a system of which it is the primary beneficiary, making formal conquest unnecessary.

British enthusiasm for territorial empire peaked in the late nineteenth century, just as Britain’s hegemonic decline began. The refusal of the US to join the League of Nations after the First World War symbolised its rejection of the role of hegemon, which it only assumed after another global conflict. The US was nevertheless strongly interventionist in its own sphere of influence. The 1920s were the era of the ‘Banana Wars’ when the US Marines were repeatedly deployed across Central America and the Caribbean.

Donald Trump’s second term seems to present the world once again with a US which aspires to empire but not hegemony. Fortunately, there is one recent book which looks at the pre-hegemonic roots of the US intelligence community. Hugh Wilford’s The CIA: An Imperial History, published last year, has looked ever more timely in recent weeks.

Wilford seeks to challenge an ‘established narrative’ in which the CIA’s existence largely reflects the exigencies of successive global conflicts, from the Second World War to the War on Terror.

My own book presents a version of the traditional picture, in its account of the state-private networks that linked the Cold War CIA to private organisations like the AFL-CIO or the International Rescue Committee. It traces the story back through the CIA’s wartime precursor the OSS, to Britain’s North American intelligence organisation, BSC, which worked with some of the same groups before Pearl Harbour.

One might consider the thread running from BSC through the OSS to the CIA as a formula for hegemonic transition in the intelligence field.

Although Wilford questions the significance of British influence over the creation of the OSS, he partly reaffirms the traditional narrative, emphasizing the extent to which some early CIA officers absorbed British colonial ideas at establishments like Groton School and Yale University.

However, he complicates this picture by emphasising a distinctly American imperial tradition, rooted in continental expansion and the Latin American and Asian fruits of the Spanish-American War, America’s own contribution to the late nineteenth century colonial scramble.

Thus, he notes that alongside his better-known exploits in the First World War, OSS founder Bill Donovan rode into Mexico with General Pershing in 1916. Another key example is provided by Ralph H. Van Deman who established the US Army’s first field intelligence unit in the Philippines at the turn of the century. After returning to the US, he established a public/private archive on domestic US subversives, which he maintained long after leaving the Army.

In 1940, Van Deman attended a meeting with Hoover and the chief of Army intelligence where it was agreed that the FBI would run counterintelligence in the Americas and the military would largely take over the latter function, which, after the war, would in turn be inherited by the OSS’s peacetime legatee, the Central Intelligence Agency. In other words, it is possible to trace a thread of organizational descent from the US colonial occupation of the Philippines to CIA counterintelligence.¹

The FBI’s Special Intelligence Service was one of two foreign intelligence agencies established in the summer of 1940 to oppose Axis influence in the Americas. The other was the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) under Nelson Rockefeller.

The regional focus of both agencies reflected a moment when hemispheric defence was more politically acceptable than intervention in the Old World. According to former OCIAA employee Paul Kramer, its creation was in line with Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbour’ policy towards Latin America, which aimed to move beyond the era of the Banana Wars.

This special treatment not only contributed to Roosevelt's great personal popularity in the area, but also enjoyed almost universal support in the United States. Isolationists and non-interventionists, 'America firsters', and 'fortress Americans' who opposed favouritism for beleaguered Britain could only support Roosevelt's friendship toward Latin America. 'Most America First spokesmen believed the US should fight if any part of North or South America were attacked.’²

While Wilford highlights the CIA’s inheritance from the the wartime FBI, Kramer’s 1981 account emphasises the discontinuities.

President Truman decided that Hoover should have the US, but the CIA should have all foreign countries. This caused intense feeling and bitterness in the FBI. FBI personnel experienced in Latin America, with few exceptions, refused to work for the CIA. The central records index at FBI headquarters was 'deindexed' and there was an 'auto da fe' of archives and files rather than turn them over to the enemy.³

In Kramer’s view, the Latin American experience not only of the FBI, but also of the OCIAA and the British BSC, was largely lost.

After World War II, an untutored and unpractised CIA in the Latin American field had to start all over again, almost from scratch. From the standpoint of a broad overview, one is bound to wonder if the Bay of Pigs as well as other Latin American fumbles was not derived from this.⁴

Trump’s sabre-rattling towards countries such as Panama imply a willingness to repeat the CIA’s regional misadventures of the 1950s and 1980s. Certainly, the dismissal of Ralph Goff suggests that the reinvigorated Directorate of Operations planned by CIA Director John Ratcliffe may focus less on Eurasian conflicts like the War in Ukraine.

While Trump is actively choosing a post-hegemonic policy, he may leave his successors no other option. If that is the case, the OCIAA period may provide a model for moving beyond a new era of Banana Wars.

1. Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History, Hachette, 2024, prologue.

As well as conceding the Americas to the FBI, the OSS was also excluded from the South-West Pacific. Intriguingly, therefore, its operations tended to be outside the older US sphere of influence. See Clayton D. Laurie, An Exclusionary Position: General MacArthur and the OSS, Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 1, 2001, pp.47-60, archived at CIA.

2. Kramer, Paul. “Nelson Rockefeller and British Security Coordination.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 16, no. 1, 1981, p. 77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/260617. Accessed 5 Apr. 2025.

3. Kramer, p.85.

4. Kramer, p.87.