A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA

by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

A Question of Standing deals with recognizable events that have shaped the history of the first 75 years of the CIA. Unsparing in its accounts of dirty tricks and their consequences, it values the agency's intelligence and analysis work to offer balanced judgements that avoid both celebration
and condemnation of the CIA.

The mission of the CIA, derived from U-1 in World War I more than from World War II's OSS, has always been intelligence. Seventy-five years ago, in the year of its creation, the National Security Act gave the agency, uniquely in world history up to that point, a democratic mandate to pursue that
mission of intelligence. It gave the CIA a special standing in the conduct of US foreign relations. That standing diminished when successive American presidents ordered the CIA to exceed its original mission. When they tasked the agency secretly to overthrow democratic governments, the United States lost its international standing, and its command of a majority in the United Nations General Assembly. Such dubious operations, even the government's embrace of assassination and torture, did not diminish the standing of the CIA in US public opinion. However, domestic interventions did. CIA spying on domestic protesters led to tighter congressional oversight from the 1970s on.

The chapters in A Question of Standing offer a balanced narrative and perspective on recognizable episodes in the CIA's history. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the War on Terror, 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction deception, the Iran estimate of 2007, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and Fake News. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 diminished the CIA and is construed as having been the right solution undertaken for the wrong reasons, reasons that grew out of political opportunism. The book also defends the CIA's exposure of foreign meddling in US elections.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Espionage, American History, Historical

304 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2022

About the author

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones was born in Wales and grew up in the ancient town of Harlech. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, then the Universities of Michigan, Harvard and Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD. He was active in anti-apartheid, anti-Bomb, anti-Vietnam War and pro-civil liberties campaigns and aimed at a career in politics, but then settled down to family life and scholarly pursuits. He was a Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now emeritus. He played rugby in Wales, England and America, and remains a keen fan, his other interests being opera, vegetable gardening, and snooker.
Rhodri’s latest book, published in different formats in the United States and the UK, tells the story of how FBI detective Leon Turrou hunted down a German spy ring in 1938 and then conducted an effective propaganda campaign against the Nazis. He is currently writing a history of the CIA, and researching the Glasgow background of the private detective Allan Pinkerton.
For further information:
“Learning the Scholar’s Craft" (2020): https://hdiplo.org/to/E221
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodri_...

Reviews

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about the history of the CIA, and it is also my first book in this field. There’s also another famous book, Legacy of Ashes, of the same theme, and I also have read a few chapters of it. I think this book is more serious and laconic.
As this book might be the latest one that I have ever read, it includes many events that we are familiar with these years. For example, I was surprised when it mentioned COVID-19. For a history book, especially for an organization like the CIA, this can be an advantage because it is able to cover the latest events and include some documents that were classified in the past. As opposed to Legacy of Ashes (from some comments and reviews I collected), the author is more objective when judging CIA, as he gives enough positive opinions.
As the title suggests, the author focuses on the standing of the CIA and intelligence in American history. In fact, as early as it was founded, there were records of espionage activities. The existence of the CIA also faced criticism from both at home and abroad. Different from other intelligence organizations I have known in regimes like Nazi Germany, the CIA is rooted in a democratic and open society. This can pose some disadvantages when facing a regime like the Soviet Union. For instance, it was easier for Russians to get into the USA than Americans to the Soviet Union. Although the author does not give a general summary of the standing of the CIA in America, I think this can be justified because this is strongly influenced by the current political condition.

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Jeffreys-Jones states upfront, this is less a conventional history of the CIA than a set of essays on major moments in his history. If you want an in-depth examination of why the Guatemala coup or Bay of Pigs or whatever happened, it won't be here. There'll be a short discussion of each one and how it relates to a theme of Jeffreys-Jones': the broad executive and Congressional support the agency had until the '70s, the continuity with Monroe Doctrine attitudes toward Latin America, etc.

In some ways the 1990s section was the most interesting, because of the extended discussion of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposal to abolish the CIA entirely. Insofar as the agency was created to counter the Soviet Union, the idea made a lot of sense. It had fulfilled its mandate, or at least lived to see its enemy fall by other means. But Jeffreys-Jones makes a lot of Pearl Harbor as the real founding point of the agency: the goal is to avoid another surprise like that. That makes the agency untethered to any one geopolitical adversary, and also made 9/11 such a devastating blow to its credibility.

While obviously a good researcher, I will say Jeffreys-Jones sometimes expresses understandings of American culture that I can only describe as "extremely British." He, a creature of a columnist-obsessed press culture, treats Maureen Dowd as the Walter Lippmann of her age, quoting frequently as though ~anyone cared what she thought about the CIA. He thinks it's very important that the WASP Porter Goss was replaced with Catholics Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta. It's like a PG Wodehouse character came over and assumed that Americans had the same hangups about the Papists.

[Evan Brumbaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a lot of good information. I have 2 main complaints thought. The first is that it is written more like a collection of essays rather than a book. I found it difficult to stay engaged with the way that it is written. The second complaint is that it speeds through events that happened a long time ago that I am less familiar with while also spending a lot of time on recent events that I know quite well. This left me wanting more information about events early in the book while the back part of the book dragged. I still thought it was a good book though.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth a read just to understand the Church hearings and what has led to the modern day CIA.