How the CIA Invented "Conspiracy Theories"
A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar,
and although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite
amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future
claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick
aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless
space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was
accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed
that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally
ridiculed as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic
portrayal of human nature to me.
Obviously,
a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or
presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers—from the 9/11
attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban
corruption—could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory” but
such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded
phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful,
that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian
approval.
Put
another way, there are good “conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy
theories,” with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on
mainstream television shows and hence never described as such. I’ve
sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our
television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the
new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted
effort to totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in
the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen
Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded
our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble
would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous
“conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic books into
the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone
gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Even
without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public
beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis
of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the
2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and
vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our
greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on
television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable
faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and its key media
allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers
were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator
Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time
we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public
believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our
World Trade Center. By that date I don’t doubt that many millions of
patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and
vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the temerity to
suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple
of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book
published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.
Based
on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was
that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction
of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having
orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing
public opinion.
During
the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the
Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had
been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and
growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been
involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret
memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media
assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational
supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly
appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of
the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those
CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of
the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the
residual impact continueing right down to the present day. Thus, there
is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy
theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy
theories” in the public media.
But
although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion
in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful
weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the
necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of
decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important
shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of
any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard,
whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of
various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of
the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the
earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into
WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical
events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them
did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a
perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However,
Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World
War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to
his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent
also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and
denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the
totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper,
the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical
objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever
existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to
implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a
conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow
aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an
extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the
rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own
background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in
1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these
philosophical matters.
Meanwhile,
Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was
equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for
polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely
necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or
totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping
them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main
problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false,
but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially
disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of
self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut
the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even
for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and
Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks,
and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of
Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is
hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders
of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically
influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers
who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative
Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas
back to Strauss.
So,
through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional
American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful
aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or
politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from
respectable discourse.
By
1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as
indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article
by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid style” in American politics,
which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief
in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he
seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most
outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that
had been proven correct. For example, he described how some of the
more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red
Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego,
while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had
indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the
most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged
conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most
of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I
was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather
conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my
entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called
“conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that
any of them might possibly be true.
To
the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was
simple and based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any
conspiracy responsible for some important public event must surely have
many separate “moving parts” to it, whether actors or actions taken, let
us say numbering at least 100 or more. Now given the imperfect nature
of all attempts at concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of
these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a conspiracy were
initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would
still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once the
buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of
conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic
investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more
pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely
collapsed. Even if not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at
least the simple conclusion that there had indeed been some sort of
conspiracy would quickly become established.
However,
there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since
decided was entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies
either involve powerful governmental officials or situations in which
their disclosure would represent a source of considerable embarrassment
to such individuals. But I had always assumed that even if government
failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the
Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly seeking truth,
ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began realizing that
the media was merely “Our American Pravda”
and perhaps had been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in
my logic. If those five—or ten or twenty or fifty—initial clues were
simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness, incompetence, or
much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent
successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected,
perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In
fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial
control of the media is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any
successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of control the better. So
when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to
investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let
us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these
days, the entire American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia,
certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet
Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would argue that the
likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the
operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we are
constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that
appear to be “false positives,” dire allegations seemingly having little
factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even
the crudest sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This
argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point
in America’s renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the
2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly
corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal
persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American
hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings. However, there’s
actually quite a bit of evidence
that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and
beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was
planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life
for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a
single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might
amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine,
have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly
surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating
these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects
regularly condemned as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream
media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of
considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long
relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their
serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several
years ago a senior Obama Administration official
argued that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the
Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be
recruited to “cognitively infiltrate” and disrupt them, essentially
proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century American intellectual life.
But the more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and
disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the
more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps
Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of
“conspiracy theories,” and we should return to his traditional American
way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda
campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss
such notions without any serious consideration.
