INTELLIGENCEThe Inside Story of the CIA v Russia – from Cold War Conspiracy to “Black” Propaganda in Ukraine

By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Published 26 August 2022

The CIA was created with two key goals in mind: thwarting Soviet expansionism, and preventing another surprise attack like that carried out by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor during the second world war. In the 198s and early 1990s, some suggested shutting down the CIA, expressing the widespread perception that the agency was no longer fit for purpose and should be curtailed. But how much does Washington trust the CIA these days?

In the early 1990s, Senator Patrick Moynihan campaigned for the abolition of the CIA. The brilliant campaigner thought the US Department of State should take over its intelligence functions. For him, the age of secrecy was over.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Moynihan wrote: “For 30 years the intelligence community systematically misinformed successive presidents as to the size and growth of the Soviet economy … Somehow our analysts had internalized a Soviet view of the world.”

In the speech introducing his Abolition of the CIA bill in January 1995, Moynihan cited British author John le Carré’s scorn for the idea that the CIA had contributed to victory in the cold war against the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and his successors. “The Soviet Empire did not fall apart because the spooks had bugged the man’s room in the Kremlin or put broken glass in Mrs Brezhnev’s bath,” Le Carré had written.

This was one of the CIA’s lowest points since its establishment in 1947 (my new book marks the agency’s 75th anniversary). It was created with two key goals in mind: thwarting Soviet expansionism, and preventing another surprise attack like that carried out by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor during the second world war. While Moynihan’s campaign to shut down the CIA did not ultimately prevail, there was certainly a widespread perception that the agency was no longer fit for purpose and should be curtailed.

Throughout the cold war, many had regarded fighting communism as the CIA’s raison d’être. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the agency’s role was less clear, and it came under heavy criticism for having distorted intelligence and “blatantly pandered” to one ideological viewpoint: blind anti-communism. Without the cold war, Moynihan predicted, the CIA would become “a kind of retirement program for a cadre of cold warriors not really needed any longer”.