The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) loves to drape itself in the red-white-and-blue: defender of democracy, guardian of freedom and all that jazz. Scratch the surface, though, and you find something far older, far grimier, and straight out of the crumbling colonial empires of Britain and France. The CIA didn’t dream up its bag of dirty tricks in some Langley basement. It inherited them — lock, stock, and suitcase full of bribes — from the very imperial powers it pretended to replace.
The Very British History of America’s CIA: Empire’s Old Playbook, Now With Stars and Stripes
Welcome to the Stateless Standard, where we cut through the fog of “national security” myths and expose how the ruling class recycles tools of domination. Today we’re pulling straight from historian Hugh Wilford’s The CIA: An Imperial History. Spoiler: the Agency’s founding fathers weren’t wide-eyed patriots. They were prep-school romantics, rich kids jonesing for Kipling-style adventures in the sand. Empires don’t die. They just swap accents and rearrange the org chart.
American patriots love pointing to Revolutionary War spies who outfoxed the Redcoats. They conveniently skip the scouts who helped “conquer Indian Country” for continental expansion. The real godfather of modern U.S. intel? “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS — the CIA’s wartime daddy. Donovan sharpened his teeth chasing Pancho Villa in 1916, smashing a Mexican who had the nerve to resist Yankee economic muscle. But the deepest roots stretch across the pond.
CIA early leadership came from elite New England boarding schools drenched in “muscular Christianity” and imperial daydreams. These guys grew up devouring Rudyard Kipling’s Kim — the original spy thriller about a plucky Anglo-Indian kid thwarting Russian plots to save the British Raj. Kipling, high priest of the “white man’s burden”, handed them the blueprint: civilized Westerners “guiding” (read: manipulating) exotic natives for their own good.
CIA legends admitted it outright. Vietnam hand Rufus Phillips credited Kipling for his itch for “faraway mysterious places.” Anthony Poshepny — the real-life Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now — called Kim an Agency training manual. Allen Dulles kept a dog-eared copy bedside until his last breath. T.E. Lawrence? He's the original “Lawrence of Arabia” himself. Dulles knew him from the Paris Peace Conference. Future Director William Colby fantasized about becoming “Colby of a French Department” after Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Dewey Clarridge, architect of 1980s Central American mayhem, straight-up named Lawrence his hero.
Cynical? Hell yes. These weren’t liberty-loving idealists. They were LARPing as colonial swashbucklers, horny for exotic conquests both territorial and personal.
World War II sealed the family inheritance. Joint ops like the Jedburgh teams (Allied commandos parachuting behind Nazi lines) forged a cozy Anglo-American bromance. The British taught the green OSS everything: espionage tradecraft, covert action, counterintelligence, even how to file a proper memo. Post-war, the Americans strutted around as anti-imperial champions, “freeing” nationalists from European overlords or Soviet “imperialism.” Noble on paper.
Reality? U.S. policy chased the exact same prizes — oil, bases and markets. Only now it preferred indirect rule: install a puppet, pull the strings from Langley, deny everything. More coups, more skullduggery. In the field, fresh-faced Yanks leaned hard on battle-scarred European handlers for “local knowledge.” Graham Greene nailed the resentment in The Quiet American: naive Yankees barging in to “save the natives,” blind to the corpses they’d leave behind.
And how did these Agency men live overseas? Exactly like the colonials they replaced — exclusive clubs left over from the Raj, polo matches, discreet dalliances with local women. All while preaching democracy from the veranda. The hypocrisy practically writes the op-ed itself.
Nowhere is this inheritance clearer—or more profitable for the cartel—than Operation Ajax, the 1953 coup in Iran.
Democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh committed the ultimate sin against the ruling class: in 1951 he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today’s BP). For decades Britain had sucked Persia’s black gold dry while tossing crumbs to Iranians. To the statists in London and Washington, this wasn’t sovereignty, but an attack on their corporate cronies’ monopoly checks.
Enter Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr. — Teddy’s grandson, MI6-trained, oozing Anglophile swagger. He rolled into Tehran with suitcases stuffed with over a million dollars in cash (tens of millions today). The playbook was pure Rudyard Kipling: bribe generals, clerics, newspaper editors, and bazaar thugs. Stage fake communist rallies to scare the public into begging for order. Hijack radio stations to paint Mosaddegh as a lunatic or secret Red. Pay mobs to riot as “pro-Shah” heroes while they torched opposition offices.
The first attempt flopped. The Shah fled to Rome like the coward he was. Washington and London wanted to abort. Roosevelt doubled down, wired for more cash, and flipped key military units with targeted payoffs. August 19, 1953: pro-Shah tanks rolled, Mosaddegh’s house was shelled, hundreds died in the streets. General Fazlollah Zahedi, a literal ex-Nazi collaborator, took the throne as strongman. Mosaddegh was tried in a show court and spent the rest of his days locked up or under house arrest.
The prize? Iran’s oil fields carved up in a new consortium giving American and British firms 50 percent control. Exxon, Shell, and BP got fatter. The Shah returned as a glittering puppet; his CIA/MI6-trained SAVAK secret police tortured and “disappeared” dissidents for decades. One honest CIA station chief resigned in disgust, calling it “support for Anglo-French colonialism.” He got sidelined. The blowback? A quarter-century of dictatorship that fermented into the 1979 Islamic Revolution — more chaos, more intervention, more power for the very elites who started it.
Operation Ajax wasn’t anti-communism. It was cartel enforcement. The Iranian producers wanted to keep what they produced. The statist alliance — foreign oil giants and local tyrants — said no. America eagerly claimed the imperial baton.
France’s colonial playbook left its own bloody fingerprints. CIA officers studied Algeria’s savage independence war and adopted “coercive interrogation” (torture by any honest name) and repressive surveillance. Divide-and-conquer: recruit tribal minorities as proxies. In Vietnam, Edward Lansdale armed Hmong and Montagnards against the Viet Minh exactly as the French had pitted ethnic groups against nationalists. Psychological warfare, propaganda, fake hearts-and-minds campaigns masking raw coercion. The Phoenix Program? Straight from French counterinsurgency manuals.
The shared mindset was the same thrill of adventure plus the same smug superiority over “the natives.” When empires teach torture and tribal manipulation, the pupil often outdoes the master. America’s indirect empire needed these tools more than the old direct rulers ever did.
Here’s the bitter truth the powerful hope you never notice: the CIA isn’t some pure American innovation. It’s the heir to centuries of colonial domination, repackaged for a superpower that insists it’s not an empire. The methods — torture, psyops, proxy wars, manufactured consent—are hand-me-downs from London and Paris, now polished for the age of “democracy promotion.”
Because the U.S. rules through deniable proxies and classified black budgets, the blowback — revolutions, terrorism, forever wars — lands squarely on the backs of the American people. Blood, treasure, and eroded liberties at home while the architects retire to six-figure memoirs and corporate boards. The stateless pay. The statist class cashes the checks.
Wilford’s book rips the heroic myth to shreds. The Agency’s imperial DNA explains why every “victory” seems to breed the next crisis. Empires don’t fall — they morph. The British taught the game. The French refined the cruelty. America scaled it up and called it democracy.
So, the next time some suit in Langley or D.C. lectures you about “defending democracy,” remember: the accent may have changed, but the boot on the neck of the productive worker stays exactly the same. The powerful don’t invent new ways to dominate. They just regurgitate the old ones and give them shinier branding.
