The Hidden Architecture of Knowledge: Intelligence, Academia and the Shaping of Power

Participants at the International Conference on Modernization in Asia held at Korea University, sponsored by the CIA-linked Asia Foundation in 1965.

One of the central questions guiding my recent work on intelligence, knowledge production and state power concerns undeclared interests and relationship of research funders. Most of the questions I pursue grew out of my efforts to understand the implications of a mid-1970s finding by the US Senate Church Committee (so named, because it was chaired by Senator Frank Church) that the CIA’s covert funding of US international scholarship was “massive.” The committee established that about half the grants for international research during the 1960s (excluding grants made by Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations—which the report found had their own CIA ties) were secretly funded or influenced by the CIA. This passage got me searching for documents that could substantiate how this system worked.

Part of my work might be thought of as a memory project. Using archives, previously secret documents, oral histories, and published works to consider how the not-always-mentioned interests of the US military industrial complex shaped the development of anthropology and other intellectual inquiries during the Cold War. As I read history of anthropology as a graduate student I was struck by such an obvious lacuna. This work also might be thought of as a fundamental materialist analysis of some of the ways that a society’s base helps shape its superstructure in ways that members of the society don’t always consider.

Covert Infrastructure of Academic Knowledge

The origins of my latest book, Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA, were somewhat accidental. I long ago gave up applying to foundations for most grants or fellowships, having learned that I was not likely to get traditional funds to study the politics of research funding. For many years I received more invitations to give talks at universities in the US and abroad than I could accommodate, but when invited to universities with archival materials I wished to explore, I would add several days to my trip to consult these materials.

When invited to give a public talk at Yale in 2013, I asked if, instead of an honorarium, the university could add several more days to the hotel they provided. Among the collections I consulted, there were the papers of Robert Blum, the Asia Foundation President during the foundation’s most productive period of CIA engagement. I knew basic facts about the foundation’s CIA ties, which ended after they were exposed in the New York Times in 1967, and years earlier I had explored documents at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives relating to the American Anthropological Association receiving Asia Foundation funds, and the Association’s reaction following the exposure of CIA ties. At Yale, I found a remarkable, but small collection of papers that included a treasure trove of confidential board reports that read like CIA intelligence briefings.

I later made a second trip to Yale and copied more materials, and while knowing a lot about CIA operations during this period, I am not an Asian specialist, and I worried that my lack of regional historical knowledge would limit the sort of analysis I could do, simply because so many local names and historical contexts would be unfamiliar to me. So, I initially looked into trying to organise a conference where I would invite a dozen regional specialists, parceling out regional reports, and having a series of papers analyse what the CIA gained, or hoped to gain, from these foundation activities.........

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