Through a Glass, Darkly:The CIA and Oral History

This article broaches the thorny issue of how we may study the history of the CIA by utilizing oral history interviews. This article argues that while oral history interviews impose particular demands upon the researcher, they are particularly pronounced in relation to studying the history of intelligence services. This article, nevertheless, also argues that while intelligence history and oral history each harbour their own epistemological perils and biases, pitfalls which may in fact be pronounced when they are conjoined, the relationship between them may nevertheless be a productive one. Indeed, each field may enrich the other provided we have thought carefully about the linkages between them: this article's point of departure. The first part of this article outlines some of the problems encountered in studying the CIA by relating them to the author's own work. This involved researching the CIA's role in US foreign policy towards Afghanistan since a landmark year in the history of the late Cold War, 1979 (i.e. the year the Soviet Union invaded that country). The second part of this article then considers some of the issues historians must confront when applying oral history to the study of the CIA. To bring this within the sphere of cognition of the reader the author recounts some of his own experiences interviewing CIA officers in and around Washington DC. The third part then looks at some of the contributions oral history in particular can make towards a better understanding of the history of intelligence services and the CIA

Influence Operations and the Intelligence/Policy Challenges

This conference report aim to assess influence operations, especially those conducted by Russia, in the context of changing relations between intelligence and policy and the emerging challenges for intelligence. Three key challenges were discussed in regard to influence operations. First, Identify – how to separate state sponsored disinformation from individual rumor mills. Second, Understand – how to understand influence operations, put it into a context for policy makers, and learn to understand the underlying factors and why it happens. Third, Counter – how to vaccinate civil servants and enhance the critical approach within media to create resilience against influence operations. The first part of this conference report lays out on how to identify and understand influence operations in the context of policy. The second part focus on who needs what to counter influence operations. The last part contains concluding themes. Dr. Gregory Treverton is the former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, as well as former Director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Global Risk and Security. Dr. Treverton is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS) at the Swedish Defence University