Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2024. US$32.00, paper; US$105.00, cloth. ISBN 9780295752242.
Established in 1954, the Asia Foundation (TAF) masqueraded as an NGO funded by private donations. With field offices in 1965 in 13 Asian countries and nearly 400 American and foreign employees, TAF underwrote academic research in and about Asia, sponsored scholarly conferences, distributed books and magazines, and supported artists, musicians, and film makers. Deploying “soft power” before the term existed, TAF aimed at influencing Asian intellectual and political elites to eschew communism and radical nationalism and align with Washington and its Cold War allies in Asia. In 1967, TAF’s facade was initially, if only partially, exposed. TAF was founded, funded, and controlled by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Aware that many Asian elites abhorred official Washington’s support of European colonial powers, the CIA calculated that what pretended to be an American NGO could better advance US interests in Asia.
Employing declassified CIA documents, TAF archives, and additional sources, anthropologist David H. Price provides a well-researched, thought-provoking history of TAF, focusing on the high Cold War years of 1951 to 1967. His caustic exposé of TAF’s foundational myth has the prosecutorial vigour of a gotcha book. Like many academics, including this reviewer, Price is a radical critic of the CIA. The ultimate target of his righteous wrath, however, is neither TAF, the CIA, nor even the US government. Rather it is the American capitalist system itself, Price asserts, whose global interests were served through Washington’s anticommunist Cold War crusade. True or not, this is a heavy crown to burden what presents itself as a scholarly monograph about a second-tier foundation. In 13 chapters, Price discusses the organizational structure and leadership of TAF, its substantive soft power programs, and the uses to which its CIA puppet master put TAF’s connections with Asian scholars, government, and civil society leaders. Despite recurrent suspicions, the recipients of its largesse were as unwitting of TAF’s CIA connection as the foreign nationals in its employ.
The most important of the issues Price raises, for which he supplies partial and debatable answers, is the fraught relationship between academic knowledge on one hand and state power and policy on the other within an ostensibly open and democratic society. Unless explicitly identified as policy-oriented or classified research, academic social science is directed in the first instance toward expanding empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding. How that knowledge, published in publicly accessible form, is used or abused is beyond the control of individual or collective authors. One scholar’s field research findings may be a CIA operative’s actionable intelligence. Price cites approvingly Inderjeet Parma’s critique of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations’ support of scholarly research that facilitated the establishment of US global hegemony (Foundations of the American Century, Columbia University Press, 2015). Yet it is hardly surprising that major foundations in a democratic capitalist society would align themselves with the mainstream values and interests of the society from which they sprung. What this study reveals is that intelligence agencies like the CIA, the mainstream foundation world, and academia were not silo institutions, but rather more or less loosely interconnected. Personal as well as institutional ties flourished among those involved—almost exclusively male in this period—who were themselves members of an overwhelmingly white, well-educated elite of decision makers and facilitators. They shared a common, anticommunist Cold War faith and circulated within and among the component institutions of the system as a whole. Mutatis mutandis they still do. In such an open democratic society, however, many smaller foundations support critical scholarship and journalism that opposes official policy. As a matter of principle, Price seems to favour an adversarial relationship between social scientists and government.
To accuse the CIA of engaging in deception, as Price does in high dudgeon, is a bit ludicrous. After all, it is a spy agency. Its operational tool box includes not only deception, but also skulduggery, sleight-of-hand, dirty tricks, disinformation, and violence, in addition to the analytic tool box of quotidian reports by desk-bound analysts and subcontractors. In both statecraft and warfare, deception has a long and distinguished lineage, continuing into the present. Moreover, deception is part of daily life: cosmetics, toupees, elevator shoes, advertisement, not to mention politics, where it is rife. In spy agencies, deception is a way of life. Price’s indignation at TAF and its CIA parent is either disingenuous, which I doubt, or merely naive.
Be that as it may, how does he assess the record of the Asia Foundation? And how should we evaluate his assessment of a foundation which, only slightly chastened by its partial exposure in 1967 as a CIA front, continued thereafter to pursue its mission with undisguised State Department funding? Price notes that on balance the CIA was pleased with the achievements of its progeny. Like all foundation projects, of course, there were both successes and failures. Give it a B+. Beyond Price’s refrain that TAF was a living lie, his main indictment is that the CIA/TAF employed both hard and soft power “to successfully attack Asian sovereignty… [and] opposed the self-determination of Asian nations during this crucial post-world-war, postcolonial period” (262). This suggests that absent US interference in the politics of postwar, postcolonial Asian nations, they would have been free to chart their own future in accordance with the popular will. In the real world, however, Asian nations contended with a welter of international and domestic forces, notably including Soviet and Chinese inspired and/or directed communist movements, radical and moderate nationalists, ethnic and religious minorities, autonomous militarists, and others, all participating in the struggle for power. That is the high-stakes game in which the United States participated, a game in which the Asia Foundation was at most a bit player.
Steven I. Levine
The University of Montana, Missoula