At Hillsdale’s Constitution Day Celebration, Mike Benz explores the history and evolution of the intelligence state in the United States, detailing its origins, the establishment of covert operations, and the implications of political warfare.
Mike discusses key documents and events that shaped the intelligence community, including the CIA’s role in foreign elections and the transition from hard power to soft power in American foreign policy. The conversation also highlights the ongoing influence of the intelligence state in contemporary politics and its relationship with populism.
TRANSCRIPT
Thank you Hillsdale for having me and the incredible work that you’re doing. Today’s topic is the history of the intelligence state and what I’m going to try to describe to you is the shape of the beast that we are up against and has targeted so many people in this room. Hillsdale asked me to speak about this particular topic, the history of the intelligence state.
Obviously the intelligence state is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong that intelligence which is supposed to serve the state has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state but there is something beyond it that I think beginning with that helps elucidate and that may be the octopus that was just referred to but we’ll come to meet it as we progress.
I think the best way to understand is to actually start the story in the middle and then we will go back in time to the founding of the country. We’ll sort of speed run the essential history and then all the way up into the present but we’re going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of zero AD of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government and instead of sort of doing what you’ll learn in an ordinary history book, we’re going to start with a document that I’m curious if anyone has ever seen.
It’s called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. Anyone ever seen that document in this room? How many people in this room know the name George Kennan? Okay, 75% of the hands went up. Did you know that George Kennan in 1948 wrote this memo called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare in which he is famous for folks who are not familiar.
George Kennan is sort of known as a sort of godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this long telegram, the chief strategist of the containment strategy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War but before all that, when all this was getting started, he penned this top secret memo which was not declassified for 60 years, it was declassified in 2005, that I think helps elucidate the story as we’re going to proceed here. We’re going to go through this memo but I want to give some context first.
Add comment