"The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA"

 ""The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA"

 

By Peter C. Grace

 

Georgetown, 306 pages, $39.95

 

Before there was Jack Ryan, there was Ronald Malcolm, the hero of the spy novel "Six Days of the Condor" (1974), later made into a movie starring Robert Redford. Ronald (code name: Condor) is the anti-James Bond: A milquetoast book reader for the CIA, he gets swept up in a murderous conspiracy and survives thanks to his brains, not his brawn. "Condor" is the fantasy of the professional class that they, too, can covertly save the world.

 

According to Peter C. Grace in "The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA," such bookworms did indeed play a role at the height of the Cold War -- if not in saving the world, then in rescuing the CIA from weak leadership and its own incompetence. The Condor's real-life counterparts included Sherman Kent and William Langer, historians at Yale and Harvard, respectively, and Max Millikan, an MIT economist. These "intelligence intellectuals" were drafted in the early 1950s to rationalize and run the CIA's strategic-intelligence assessment on the heels of the institution's failures to predict, among other events, China's fall into communism and the Soviet Union's development of an atomic bomb -- both in 1949 -- as well as the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Policymakers decided that what they needed was not analysis of headlines ("current intelligence") but predictive assessments of high-level issues ("strategic intelligence"). These were to come in the form of National Intelligence Estimates, and the best way to get rigorous NIEs was to rely on social scientists -- or so it was believed.

 

As someone who has occasionally contributed to the intelligence community's "products," as they are called, I can attest that, 75 years after those first social scientists showed up at the CIA, such gatherings often feel like graduate-school reunions. Currently America's 18 intelligence agencies, overseen by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, employ, contract or rely on a multitude of professors, pundits and members of think tanks to give input on intelligence work in progress. How much this expertise actually influences the agency's final decisions is unknowable from the outside. But everyone assumes it was their sparkling insight that swayed the president.

 

Today's doctorate-fest is a far cry from the beleaguered CIA to which Kent and Langer showed up in 1950. Mr. Grace, who teaches politics and international relations at the University of Otago in New Zealand, traces their attempts to use social-science techniques to create analytically rigorous methods for assessing trends, confronting uncertainty and predicting major future events, such as war or economic collapse.

 

While Mr. Grace's discussion is rather academic, it is nonetheless compelling reading for anyone who has thought about how to analyze information. He focuses on the years 1950 to 1953, when Kent and his colleagues struggled to codify processes for making sense of what was already a welter of information (long before today's digital tsunami) and turn it into coherent and defendable assessments. Mr. Grace's institutional history is itself a sociological study.

 

Yet in choosing to end at the beginning, so to speak, and focus on the early Cold War, Mr. Grace avoids having to assess how the new arrangement subsequently performed. Failures to foresee the Iranian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- to mention but a few -- have buffeted America and the world with a generation of strategic surprise, exactly what the NIEs were designed to avoid.

 

More intriguingly, if unintentionally, Mr. Grace's book cuts to the core of the cultural divide that currently wracks the country. In reminding us that the social scientists after World War II sought to "establish authority in intellectual and moral matters" -- to quote another study mentioned in "The Intelligence Intellectuals" -- Mr. Grace is delineating the origins of what is popularly called the deep state, revealing the fracture between populist and elitist views of governance and society. It is James Burnham's managerial revolution -- the idea that a class of permanent professional administrators dominates government, business and other institutions -- brought to the world of cloak and dagger and the commanding heights of government, economics, education and society by an increasingly self-conscious (and self-protecting) professional class.

 

The increasing complexity of government operations since World War I naturally led to the rise of a professionally trained cadre of experts. These experts then furthered the complexity of the systems under their purview, creating a self-sustaining cycle in which ever more expertise was required to deal with ever more complexity. In the case of the CIA, the transition from the derring-do of Ivy League lettermen such as William Colby of the World War II-era OSS (officially the Office of Strategic Services, but mockingly called "Oh So Social") to the professional bookworms and number crunchers of the Directorate of Intelligence simply mirrored what was happening in other government departments. And yet, whether socialite spy or glasses-wearing econometrician, both were drawn from the Ivy League and a handful of other acceptable schools, thereby maintaining a largely closed circle.

 

The degree to which this uniformity in training, thought and professional positions leads to groupthink, institutional capture and an inability (or unwillingness) to consider alternative approaches to intelligence assessments lies at the heart of any critique of the CIA, as well as of government at large. The current "assortative mating" of the Democrats into the party of professional elites and the Republicans into that of nonelite workers may be the culmination of a socioeconomic process given a major boost when the first Ivy League brains showed up at the CIA to save the spooks from themselves.

 

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Mr. Auslin is a historian at Stanford's Hoover Institution. His book "National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America" will be published in May.” [1]

 

1. Brains, Cloak And Dagger. Auslin, Michael.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Feb 2026: A13.