Hao Chen Review of Price’s Cold War Deceptions

BOOK REVIEW

Cold War Deceptions:
The Asia Foundation and the CIA

by David H. Price

University of Washington Press
2024. 358 pp.
(paper), ISBN 978-0-295-75224-2

Reviewed by Hao Chen (Dartmouth College)

In his most recent book, Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA, anthropologist and historian David H. Price offers one of the most comprehensive accounts that examines the covert operation and financial maneuvering of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence postcolonial trajectories of Asian countries on behalf of US Cold War objectives, including the expansion of transnational liberal anticommunism, manipulation of knowledge production that catered to Washington’s ideological interests, and interference in the region’s domestic politics. Beyond declassified CIA documents he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Price thoroughly consulted newly available records from multiple archives: the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Hoover Institution, and National Security Archives, to name a few. The book covers much ground regarding the CIA’s involvement, including higher education interchange, research programs, conference conventions, book publication, film production, and intelligence gathering. It was written with impressive academic rigor embedded in a compelling narrative style of investigative journalism.

Cold War Deceptions is an invaluable addition to the existing trilogy Price produced over the past decade and a half. Since the early 2000s, his research has tackled the covert relationships between the American anthropological profession and the intelligence community in the twentieth century. Price’s 2004 Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists studies how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) monitored and intervened in the research activities of academic anthropologists because anthropologists’ social activism drawing on disciplinary expertise had threatened the economic and racial status of traditional American ruling elites. The sequel monograph, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second Cold War (2008), further presents the transformation of the anthropological profession in the United States, which was interwoven with implicit, if not explicit, collaborations with the military and intelligence apparatus throughout the two world wars and thus contributed to the post-1945 rising American imperium. The final volume to this trilogy, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (2016), portrays how the discipline of anthropology itself contributed to shaping the ascendency of the American national security state through the CIA’s reception of patronage from the military and intelligence establishments. Price also emphasizes that after the 1960s some scholars with US federal funding criticized the intelligence community ferociously. Nevertheless, their opposition had marginal counterinfluence to the militarization of the discipline.

In contrast to this trilogy, Cold War Deceptions focuses on a single institution, the Asia Foundation (TAF), from its earliest founding as the Committee on Free Asia (CFA) to its announced termination of financial ties with the CIA. At the center of this development was a program coded DIPILLAR that showed the CIA’s malign political, economic, and ideological schemes in Asia through the TAF’s academic and public affairs. Thus, Cold War Deceptions reveals that the TAF was a deceptive agent of the CIA’s frontline struggle in Asia and a quintessential embodiment of American Cold War interests.

The book makes several significant arguments regarding the TAF’s connection with the CIA. Price first reveals the TAF’s deliberative misinformation about its financial sources. The book summarizes, “For years, the foundation nurtured the fiction that it had only received small amounts of CIA funding and that the agency had not shaped its activities” (p. 255). Price argues that the TAF intentionally misled the public about its institutional nature. It masqueraded as a private and nongovernmental organization that claimed no political participation. In fact, “the CIA used the committee and pre-1968 foundation to try and shape Asian nations’ political self-determination in ways that aligned with CIA interpretations of US interests” (p. 257). This blatant dishonesty provided the CIA with convenient opportunities to use the TAF to benefit some of its more lethal operations. Hence, Price debunks the myth that there were “two CIAs” that conducted peaceful and violent engagements abroad separately (p. 262). In chapter 5, the book refers to the “Rural-Border Tribes” report about the Laotian Kha Katou tribe fearfully perceived by their neighbors to showcase how the TAF’s ethnographic investigation served the CIA’s control of Southeast Asian local groups for counterinsurgency purposes. Also, under the TAF, DIPILLAR effectively helped establish and fund the Tribal Research Centre in Thailand, which carried similar functions. Ironically, after DIPILLAR reduced its financial support later, a substitutive funding program titled Advanced Projects Agency (APPA), “an arm of the US military-intelligence complex,” made the Thai government feel uncomfortable because it was too explicitly linked to the American military even though both Bangkok and Washington shared counterinsurgency goals through many research activities within the Tribal Research Centre (p. 101). According to Price, the CIA thus justified that the TAF was entitled to conceal its true color and pretended to be a “nongovernmental organization” because “when DIPPILAR channeled nongovernment funds for programs, suspicions eased” (p. 102).

The TAF emerged during flourishing social science studies and exchanges in the early Cold War. As a result, it heavily subsidized scholars from Asia and the United States regarding their research activities, such as pursuing membership affiliation in various academic associations, attending conferences, and completing fieldwork trips. However, these subsidies came directly from the CIA. The CIA used them to exercise US imperial influences abroad, especially in postcolonial Asia. Nevertheless, driven by research desires, the recipients were “highly malleable” to these funds without any awareness that the agency was their behind-the-door donor with all kinds of political and ideological ambitions (p. 272). In chapter 7, Price delineates a shockingly broad range of academic organizations that received CIA funding through the TAF, including some of the most authoritative ones, such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA), American Philosophical Association (APA), American Political Science Association (APSA), and American Sociological Association (ASA). Given that Price’s primary discipline is anthropology, the book concentrates on the AAA and demonstrates that the TAF used CIA funding to pay graduate students from Asia to meet the foundation staff while participating in academic conferences in the United States. These meetings carried hidden agendas to increase “the possibility of recruitment efforts, or the passive collection of intelligence from these young scholars” (p. 135). When these financial ties received suspicion, TAF employee Patricia Flanagan repeatedly lied in 1968 that all foundation funds for the AAA “were fixed together in a ‘general fund,’ and under these circumstances, it would be impossible to determine the source of the funds for any particular grant made by the foundation” (p. 136)

However, the above lies could not entirely quell the increasing skepticism about the TAF’s collaboration with the CIA. All distrust gradually led to the final exposure of the foundation’s shameful collusion with the agency, culminating in the CIA’s openly declared withdrawal from years of financial support to the TAF. The watershed moment came on March 21, 1967, in Wallace Turner’s article in the New York Times, “Asia Foundation Got CIA Funds—Trustees Deny Influence—Bar Future Hidden Aid,” which initially disclosed the TAF’s persistent dependence on the CIA in terms of funding for academic and humanitarian projects in Asia. As chapters 11 and 12 show, Turner’s article was not unprecedented because it was a part of media chain reactions to the initial Sol Stern’s Ramparts investigation about the agency’s secret funding for the National Student Association (NSA). Neither was it accurate since the piece “failed to state the foundation’s complete reliance on CIA funds” (p. 214). Furthermore, the CIA was able to pick up the partially leaked story and pivoted the narrative to its benefit by continuously playing down the extent to which it pulled the money strings behind the TAF. Nevertheless, the agency presented on June 6, 1967, a proposal titled “Liquidation of CA (Covert Action) Staff Proprietary Project DIPILLAR,” which led to the alleged ending of its relationship with the foundation (p. 233).

In this vein, the CIA managed to stay in the shadow of the TAF or reinvented its presence in the TAF’s post-1968 transformation. In chapter 13, Price concludes that although DIPILLAR was entirely gone, the Cold War warrior-styled “pro-American, pro-capitalism, anticommunist, antisocialist, anti-third-way, anti-neutrality, pro-certain-types-of-democracy soft-power programs that the CIA instituted in the 1950s” continued their existence “even after all CIA ties were cut in 1967” (p. 270). The CIA then appealed to the US State Department for alternative support, guidance, and funding sources for the TAF from 1968. Still, with deep CIA ties, the foundation’s president, Haydn Williams, stayed to lead the institution for another twenty-two years alongside other board and staff members. The book further emphasizes that the funding transition between the CIA and the State Department was utterly puzzling and untransparent. The CIA made its last payment to the TAF with “nontraceable bonds” that could strangely support the TAF’s immediate survival after July 1967, while the newly reported funds from the State Department in 1968 could only “cover about half the annual foundation budget” (p. 245). As Price insinuates, the enigma around this transition makes one wonder to what extent the CIA deceived the American public by consistently funding the TAF even after the officially declared ending of financial support.

There are a few other aspects of the book worth further discussion despite its splendid contribution to the historiographies of the CIA and the TAF. First, the book illustrates the means and consequences of the agency’s clandestine operation and financial maneuvering over Asian elites and intellectuals through the foundation. Yet it paid much less attention to other kinds of actors from the same continent who self-consciously embraced the interconnected CIA-TAF supporting scheme out of more complex concerns. In this case, it would also be overly simplistic to paint these actors as faithful agents of pro-US/Western capitalist imperialism. A good example is the TAF’s funding for the New Asia Research Institute under the New Asia College of Cold War Hong Kong, a higher education institution founded by mainland Chinese scholars in political exile and dedicated to the studies of humanities and social sciences centered on Confucian cultural conservatism. To the members of the New Asia Research Institute, pro-US supremacy was much less in their ideological picture than pursuit of the intellectual revival of Chinese cultural tradition against Marxist-Leninism, which they perceived as a culminating threat of “westernization” to China. In this context, the New Asia Research Institute and New Asia College were not blinded to the CIA’s Cold War agendas while conveniently using them to advance their separate projects.[1] The sense of cultural nationalism behind these institutions also distinguished them from being mere Western neocolonial lackeys who were all about singing the siren songs for American capitalism and had zero interest in postcolonial national development.

Second, the book extensively discusses how the TAF, under CIA funding, used DIPILLAR to meddle with the internal affairs of postcolonial Asian countries. As Price puts it, “DIPILLAR’s pro-capitalism mission was not just a pro-American propaganda mission. It was part of larger CIA operations rejecting Asians’ rights to choose their own political and economic systems freely” (p. 261). This argument is validated by many cases, especially in chapter 6, where Price demonstrates that the Committee of Free Asia (CFA, the TAF’s predecessor) financially supported the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) that was established in 1951 and designed to unjustly swing the presidential election in the Philippines effectively to the candidate Ramon Magsaysay who aligned himself explicitly to US geopolitical interests. Nevertheless, the book is generally unclear about what “political and economic systems” the Asian countries aspired to adopt and cultivate. Therefore, the criticism of the TAF and CIA’s disruption against collective political and economic freedom in postcolonial Asia in the book could have been empirically strengthened by providing a concrete analysis of what the Asian leaders initially conceived of and envisioned about the developmental models for their processes of nation-building and state-building.

Even some postcolonial Asian leaders who the CIA seriously backed had clashing visions with the Americans regarding the adaptation of “political and economic systems” to the anticommunist cause. In Cold War Deceptions, Price highlights the TAF’s role in facilitating the studies of the US counterinsurgency strategy, which later became the Strategic Hamlet Program that engineered “the forced relocation of highland villagers en masse to lowland farmlands” to “weaken the support for North Vietnamese forces” in Vietnam (pp. 115-16). As historian Edward Miller analyzes in his book Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (2014), the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) government under Ngo Dinh Diem had severe ideological conflicts with the American ally throughout the implementation of the Strategic Hamlet Program. Diem emphasized disproportionately the relocation of people rather than other aspects of South Vietnamese rural development, like land redistribution, due to the feverish belief that relocation of people under a top-down imposed policy could ultimately nurture the ethos of “communal solidarity” and “self-sufficiency” in his imagination as influenced by Confucian and French personalist philosophies.[2] Diem’s stubborn insistence on certain directions of the Strategic Hamlet Program made him unwilling to concede to the incompatible American designs with the CIA’s financial backing included. These tensions arguably sowed the seeds of “misalliance” between Saigon and Washington. Hence, South Vietnam demonstrated that the CIA and thus the United States were not sufficiently unconstrained in invalidating the Asian choice of their postcolonial trajectories, even in the case of its anticommunist partners.

Third, the book skillfully compares the CIA’s use of the TAF for its Cold War warrior purposes with “goals and methods of Soviet cultural and propaganda programs” (p. 47). The symbiotic relationship between American and Russian intelligence over social and cultural operations under their respective supervisions is, in this way, intriguingly illuminated. Readers can benefit more from understanding this relationship if future work can analyze further the Cold War’s political, economic, and cultural conditions that created the rationale, motivation, and interests at stake for the CIA to employ the TAF and allowed it to accomplish tasks excessively. Amid the global Cold War, the TAF and the CIA were hardly alone in this game. Future academic works may find abundant interest in inquiries regarding structural and conceptual similarities on the side of the Soviet Union and even from the Global South. Price’s Cold War Deceptions builds an essential cornerstone for scholarship of similar concerns to flourish in the forthcoming years.

Notes

[1]. Harry H. Pierson’s essay discusses the TAF’s financial support to the New Asia Research Institute. See Harry H. Pierson, “Asia Foundation Aid to Education,” Phi Delta Kappan 39, no. 3 (1957): 158-60. Grace Ai-ling Chou published one of the definitive accounts of the New Asia College, including its ties to the Asia Foundation. See Grace Ai-ling Chou, Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War: Chinese Cultural Education at Hong Kong’s New Asia College, 1949-1963 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 255.

[2]. Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 164.

(The Reviewer: Hao Chen received his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. He is currently the E. John E Rosenwald, Jr. ’52 TU’53 Postdoctoral Fellow in the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. Before joining Dartmouth, he was the Henry Chuancey ’57 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles and book reviews in International History Review, Cold War History, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. He is now revising his first monograph under Cornell University Press, titled “Representing an Anti-Imperial China: The Chinese Rivalries for Legitimacy in Cold War Afro-Asia.”)

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