As long as the agency carries out needlessly covert operations, the public will suspect the worst.

October 11:The possibility of another Donald Trump presidency has sparked profound anxiety in the U.S. intelligence community—and especially the CIA. It is not just the recent talk among Trump advisors of giving the bear-bothering conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. an “oversight” role over the agency. Trump has also vowed to destroy what he and his supporters call the “deep state,” an alleged cabal of unelected officials—largely in the intelligence services—who want to keep him out of the White House and thereby thwart the democratic will of the people.

Yet the deep state theory is nothing new. It partly has roots in the Watergate era, when associates of President Richard Nixon claimed that he was the victim of a CIA effort to frame him. The Nixon loyalist and political provocateur Roger Stone helped carry the notion of a silent coup by shadowy state actors into the 21st century. In recent tweets and videos, Stone has even linked the attempted assassination of Trump in July to Watergate.

Of course, the deep state is not the only conspiracy theory to have featured the CIA. Others have alleged that the agency—a foreign intelligence unit expressly forbidden from domestic operations—turned its secret powers on the U.S. anti-Vietnam War movement and even assassinated John Lennon; that it carried out “mind control” experiments that resulted in other killings on U.S. soil, including that of RFK Jr.’s father and those carried out by Charles Manson’s “family”; and that during the 1980s it trafficked crack cocaine in U.S. inner cities with the intention of decimating Black communities.

Above all, there is the mother of modern American conspiracy theories: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Over the years, JFK buffs have named many suspects, but the CIA has always been near the top of the list. Some accounts emphasize Kennedy’s refusal to provide military back-up for the agency’s abortive 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs as a possible motive. Others point to his supposed intention to clip the wings of the military-intelligence complex by withdrawing from Vietnam. Those are only the two most common theories, and many more abound.

All this begs the question: Why have CIA conspiracy theories been so numerous and persistent?

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One reason is that the United States has always been prone to conspiracy theory—what historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.” Once, Americans believed that it was outsider groups undermining the republic: Catholics, Mormons, Jews, or communists. In the years after World War II, however, when much of the modern national security establishment was created—the CIA, for example, was founded in 1947—conspiracy theories began to focus on covert compartments of the government itself.

This homegrown impulse was exacerbated by foreign influence. In the 1960s, the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, probably planted stories about the JFK assassination in the European press that then worked their way back to the United States. Peace protestors needed little encouragement to believe the misinformation, as they were already listening to so-called Third World leaders—such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro—who claimed (accurately) that the CIA was conspiring against them. In this sense, post-World War II conspiracism was a boomerang effect of U.S. interventionism overseas. More recently, during the Trump presidency, Russian operatives launched campaigns to spread the deep state theory online.

Finally, the CIA itself is to blame. For one thing, the agency’s historic tendency to overclassify its records and reluctance to comply with freedom of information laws has encouraged U.S. citizens to imagine that it protects even greater secrets than it really does. Even an inside-office joke report from 1974 about a plot by the “Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge” to sabotage a “courier flight of the Government of the North Pole” was marked confidential and not declassified until 1999.

For another, the CIA really has engaged in unethical and illegal activities within the United States. During the 1950s, in an operation codenamed MKULTRA, it sponsored research into interrogation methods using psychotropic drugs and traumatizing behavioral techniques that involved unwitting human subjects. In one experiment, it set up safe houses in New York and San Francisco to observe what happened when prostitutes spiked their clients’ drinks with LSD.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the CIA spied on U.S. peace protestors and Black activists in a program called MHCHAOS, acting on instructions from Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who suspected a foreign hand in the era’s anti-war movement. And during the 1980s, it worked with anticommunist drug smugglers who helped supply the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government while trafficking cocaine in U.S. cities such as Los Angeles.

When journalists or whistleblowers tried to expose such activities, media friendly to the CIA dismissed them as either foreign agents or “pathological” conspiracy theorists. During the 1980s, the conservative Washington Times denigrated investigations of the Contra affair. Even the Washington Post joined with several other leading newspapers in assailing Gary Webb, the Bay Area reporter who exposed the CIA connections of Contra-linked drug smugglers.

These twin behaviors—excessive secrecy and operational overreach—were particularly evident in the JFK era. During the early 1960s, the CIA (acting, ironically, at the direction of the Kennedy administration) carried out increasingly reckless attempts to eliminate Castro—involving not just Cubans but, as viewers of the Paramount Plus docuseries Mafia Spies will already know, American mobsters as well. The Warren Commission, appointed by the Johnson administration to investigate the assassination, disregarded these operations and their possible relevance to JFK’s death, leaving holes in its final report that invited skeptical readers to form their own conspiracy theories.

This does not mean that those theories were right. Despite the best efforts of thousands of JFK researchers, no proof has ever emerged conclusively tying the CIA to the president’s assassination. Other theories, such as those implicating the agency in Lennon’s death or the Manson murders, will probably never be proven because there is very little likelihood that they are true.

The CIA has not taken such allegations lying down. During the 1960s, it worked behind the scenes to combat skepticism about the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in JFK’s assassination. In the wake of the damaging “Family Jewels” leak of 1974 and the high-profile congressional investigations that followed in 1975, the CIA launched a public relations effort to mend its image led by the craggily handsome retired intelligence officer David Atlee Phillips. And, since the 1990s, it has routinely reached out to Hollywood to assist productions that show it in a good light, such as the 2012 movie portrayal of its hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. In 2022, the CIA even launched a podcast, The Langley Files, depicting its headquarters as a place of quiet professionalism, diversity, and mindfulness. One episode even featured an interview with the agency’s chief wellbeing officer.

But it is far from clear how much good these PR campaigns have done the CIA. The Langley Files has attracted conservative allegations of “wokeness”; revelations about the agency’s involvement in the making of Zero Dark Thirtyadded to the negative publicity surrounding its use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on suspected terrorists such as waterboarding; and Phillips’ high public profile in the late 1970s led to his becoming a prime suspect in JFK conspiracy theories, an experience he privately likened to the ordeal of a character in a Franz Kafka novel.

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As long as the CIA carries out covert operations that impinge on the U.S. domestic sphere and conceals its activities in impenetrable layers of official secrecy, members of the American public will suspect the worst.

Moving forward, the CIA must make greater efforts to comply with freedom of information laws governing declassification. In addition to helping dispel the state of enforced public ignorance in which conspiracy theory thrives, such a move would improve information-sharing with other government agencies and disincentivize data leaks by disaffected employees.

At same time, the CIA must avoid taking on the questionable covert operations that helped give rise to conspiracy theories in the first place, focusing instead on its original mission: intelligence analysis. Much like the Cold War, the so-called war on terror encouraged mission creep in the realm of covert action, as successive presidents resorted to using the CIA’s secret powers to detain, interrogate, and kill terrorists. With that conflict winding down, there are encouraging signs that the agency is indeed refocusing. In 2021, for instance, it created two new mission centers, one devoted to China and the other to emerging technologies, the climate, and global health. Furthermore, the agency’s correct prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, strategically declassified by the Biden administration, has boosted public confidence in its intelligence capabilities.

Whether such steps will be enough to prevent the further spread of deep-state-style conspiracy theories is far from certain. Defusing suspicion of the CIA (and the other 17 intelligence agencies) in a society historically suspicious of secret powers may be an impossible task. But the attempt must be made. In the era of Trump, the agency’s survival could depend on it.

This article is adapted from Hugh Wilford’s The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 384 pp., $35, June 2024). 

Excerpts: Foreign Policy