WORK BY DAVID PRICE

"Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State"

The Central Intelligence Agency has long-developed clandestine relationships with the American academic community, which range from academics making introductions for intelligence purposes to intelligence collection while abroad, to academic research and writing where CIA sponsorship is hidden - Final Report of the Church Committee (1976 1:181).

Logically enough, anthropologists are frequently taken as spies because of the inquisitive nature of their work, their concern with local affairs in the remote places to which they go, their tendency to fade into the background of local custom in living up to the canons of participant observation. They have, also, a certain limited academic immunity; they travel freely, and what better cover could a secret agent desire. A logical case can be constructed, and often has been, against anthropologists in the field almost anywhere in this era of inescapable crises. Of course anthropologists are spiritual double agents. That is, they are marginal to the commercial-industrial society that created them, but they eagerly explore the areas opened up to them by colonialism - Stanley Diamond (1974: 89).¹

THE COLD WAR SETTING

Anthropology during the Cold War period, whether practiced as a science, art, or humanity, developed in an infrastructural milieu embedded in the overbearing - though seldom mentioned - National Security State. The National Security State can simply be defined as the economic and political strategies and actions undertaken by a variety of governmental and business policy makers that matured in the Cold War United States for the purpose of protecting and expanding US elites' economic interests. The legalistic roots of the National Security State are to be found in the seminal document known simply as NSC-68 (for commentaries see Gaddis 1992, 1993; ER. May 1993). NSC-68 was enacted in January 1950, and became the US's standardized game-plan for much of the Cold War - essentially codifying rules of engagement, outlining the strategy of the arms race, and dividing the world into friendly and hostile patrons and clients.

The National Security State is a structural bi-product of the US's role in the global-military-capitalist economy. The ideological components of the US's Cold War National Security State have functioned as a battle cry for a collection of forces devoted to protecting vital markets (and protecting the prospects of unorganized labor pools) on both national and international levels. These ideological components include a diverse mixture of patriotic and nationalistic programs ranging from McCarthyistic witch hunts, to the xenophobic dumbing-down of history and social sciences as taught in public schools, to the formation and propagation of modernization theory by academicians. In this paper I can only address a few of the known instances of covertly sponsored research, collaboration with the National Security State, and the political suppression and punishment of researchers who opposed the activities and goals of this form of state. Another pressing task is to try to reach an understanding of the ways in which the Cold War has influenced US anthropology.

First a word of caution before proceeding. Discussing this topic in an historical context risks the danger of compartmentalizing the processes by which the National Security State rewarded and repressed scholars in the US military-university-complex as simply being an historic curiosity of the past. As discussed elsewhere (Price nd), these same processes of rewards and punishments for anthropologists whose labor produces commodities of interest or threat to the National Security State are still at work today-though many of the interfaces between the academy and the state have changed. Certainly the economic costs of being identified as a scholar with Socialist or Communist affiliations have not ceased to damage the careers of American anthropologists, whereas American anthropologists are increasingly becoming more dependent on military-intelligence funding programs such as the National Security Education Program. If anything, this view of history illustrates some of the historical events leading up to the current state of affairs.

This paper also examines some developments of US Cold War anthropology without discussing similar or divergent developments in other nation states. The reasons for focusing on US anthropology are simply that US public and private institutions have played a preeminent role in the funding of international social science research, as well as significantly defining the methods and means of international Cold War policy and engagement.

US anthropology has developed in tandem with the National Security State in two ways: one, an open secret seeming to be hardly worth mentioning, the second, a more concealed secret that has influenced the field of anthropology in ways rarely stated. The "open secret" is simply that, since the earliest days of the Cold War, universities, colleges, and research facilities have been afloat in a sea of direct and indirect military-industrial dollars. There has been little hidden about all this. Though many have assumed that the "applied" disciplines of engineering, chemistry, and whatever applicable science is within striking distance have been the primary beneficiaries of this relationship, the fact of the matter is that these moneys have been cast far and wide, landing on the fertile grounds of computer science laboratories and English departments alike (see Price n.d.).

The truth of the matter is that throughout the Cold War little of substance or scale in the West has budged without the assistance of the National Security State in one form or another. Sources of funding may in some instances determine the slant of research carried out, but in examining the role of the State in influencing research during the Cold War, results rather than funding are the key. Without this distinction it becomes difficult to distinguish the work of Chomsky from that of Moerman, Piker, Phillips, Sharp and others engaged in counter-insurgency work during the Vietnam War.

Noam Chomsky's work is an interesting case in point. Though some have speculated that the principles of generative or transformational grammar have somehow been co-opted from the den of one of America's most famous and prolific radical minds and put to direct use by the National Security State, Chomsky himself discounts this possibility. As Chomsky put it,

I was funded by the military in the same sense that the music department was. It's a perfectly well-understood bookkeeping trick. Unless MIT has funds for the core departments like Electronic Engineering they don't have "soft funds" for the music department or theoretical linguistics. How the source of funds is designated is decided at a clerical level. As for the military, they hardly cared what they were funding. (Chomsky Jan. 30, 1995, personal communication).

The "concealed secret" of Cold War anthropology is more troubling. Essentially this repressed fact is that various branches of the US Intelligence community - principally, though not confined to, the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and OSS - have at times ridden piggy back along with, and fostered the development of anthropology and other social sciences during the Cold War period. The methods and means by which this occurred are not widely known - a few of those for which I have documentary evidence are discussed in this paper, many more are discussed in an upcoming book - but the effects of this relationship are even less understood. This has occurred with both the witting and unwitting assistance of a variety of anthropologists and research projects.

American anthropologists have sporadically commented on the existence or influences of the Cold War. Specific geo-political events have at times brought cogent discussion of Cold War and National Security issues from a variety of political perspectives. There have been discussions and public motions within (and outside of) the American Anthropological Association on post WWII-employment issues, the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War; the Thailand affair, the Gulf War, and a great variety of other military actions around the world.

However, as a group, American anthropologists have never been very clear concerning how they feel about knowledge gathered from a people being turned back and used against them during times of war. The discussions of a quarter-century ago surrounding the AAA's position on the American involvement in southeast Asia may have galvanized some (though not all) into opposing the use of anthropologists in an unjust war. But ethical discussions concerning action in an unjust war are far removed from those involving a war widely perceived as just, such as World War II. Clearly, some of the opposition to the AAA's taking a stance against the US involvement in the Vietnam war was related to the experiences of some US anthropologists in this previous "good" war. Many who lived and fought through this "war against evil" were reticent to establish (much less enforce) principles condemning the use of anthropological knowledge to bring harm to others.

At the same time, most anthropologists have been conspicuously silent about all the covert operations that have been carried out in their theaters of fieldwork. It is a bit astounding when one considers that anthropologists' acknowledgments of non-declared US policy abroad are all but absent from ethnographies produced from fieldwork conducted in Cold War Iran, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Syria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Greece, Egypt, Angola, Zaire, Nicaragua, Panama, and Chile - nations where the CIA fought long and hard covertly to subvert political processes. In part this is due to the inevitable consequence that such activities more often than not become known at later dates, making their presence understandable primarily in historical terms. In this sense it is understandable that contemporary field workers would not comment on what are essentially undetectable phenomena, but this is not the case when one looks back at these political settings with the greater access to documentary sources that is available at a later date. When one considers some of the activities of anthropologists during the Cold War from the distance of a more historical perspective it becomes possible to discern and analyze these less- than-overt behaviors and the consequences of these actions.

. . . .

1. While Stanley Diamond's observations are succinct, his commitment to the political application of such a stance is muddled and brings to light a number of the problems anthropologists face when wading into Cold War praxis. Just a few pages earlier while discussing some "fieldwork" he had conducted in occupied territories in Israel, Stanley Diamond writes that:

I, a Jew, had earned my role as an observer, even to the point of taking my turn at patrolling the Jordan border whch the kibbutz at that time, impinged upon, a job agreed to because the defense of my family and necessarily that of the community in which I chose to study[emphasis in original] by living there, seemed to me a moral necessity - although my action in no way implied ideological agreement with either Zionism or kibbutz collectivism (Stanley Diamond 1974: 77 emphasis added).