Daniel Immerwahr writes:
Of the C.I.A.’s thirty-eight Soviet analysts in 1948, only twelve knew any Russian.
Whaaaaa?
There were a lot of Russian speakers in the U.S. in 1948. From Immerwahr’s article, my impression is that the problem was that the CIA was restricting itself to upper-class Ivy League types—and not many of those people knew Russian.
Assuming the story of the 26 out of 38 non-Russian-speaking analysts is correct (it’s so hard to believe, maybe the reporter got this one wrong?), wow. An amazing example of the narrowness of America’s ruling class.
Can we put a number on it? I did a quick google to see how many students were graduating from the Ivy League at that time. I couldn’t find any convenient table or graph, but I did come across this news article from 1950 saying that Harvard was giving out 1144 undergraduate degrees an that spring. I can’t readily find the numbers from Yale and the others, but let’s just say that there were roughly 5000 Ivy League graduates that year. To compare to the general population . . . 2.2 million Americans were born in 1930. So, roughly (only a rough approx because I’m excluding foreign-born in the denominator), if you restrict your recruiting to the Ivy League, you’re only targeting 0.2%, or 1/440th of the population. And that other 99.8% is where most the Russian-speakers are hanging out.
OK, those 99.8% would’ve included lots of incompetent people. The CIA couldn’t just hire at random; they’d need to do some interviewing. But the 0.2% seems to have contained a fair number of incompetents too! Maybe screening based on social class and grades in school wasn’t such a great idea.
I’m reminded of some procedures in statistics, where researchers screen their results using strict statistical significance thresholding based on noisy data. A big selling point of this approach, beyond its apparent guarantee of rigor, is that it has enough researcher degrees of freedom that you can get whatever result you want out of it. The other selling point is that you can take what you find as having great scientific merit, as it has survived this very difficult selection process.
Kind of like hiring an Ivy League graduate in 1948. He may not speak Russian, but he’s one of nature’s noblemen.
There has been a fairly good spate of articles lately at The Atlantic looking at precisely the issue of the recruitment from the Ivy league. The crux of several of the articles was that it was more about the social club aspect than grades or intellect, and it was exclusively from these groups that white shoe law firms tended to hire. It was usually a short jump from there to a government position if you wanted it, with no hard questions about fitness for the job.
These days, graduates from the Ivies tend to take that expensive education straight to McKinsey or KPMG, so they still end up running public agencies in a roundabout kind of way.
CIA was founded in Sept 1947. So 1948 isn’t likely to be a representative year. I also imagine the job requires a background check.
Perhaps staffing was incomplete, and russian speakers required more extensive investigation.
It really just looks like a cherry picked stat. Why would the author only have data for 1948? And if they had more years, why not describe the timeseries a bit?
Especially in long-form journalism like the New Yorker, but maybe the audience wants to read about the fabric of sone chairs (or whatever) rather than numbers.
Yes, but before the CIA there was the Office of Strategic Services, which must have had a lot of dealings with Russian. Maybe OSS people who worked on Russia were suspected of being sympathizers.
My understanding is there was also competition between agencies for the tasks eventually taken over by the CIA. So there could have been friction when attempting to reassign people to the new agency.
There may have even been attempts to actively torpedo the CIA project early on, eg by withholding certain skill-sets.
I was reading about the cattle mutilations in the 1970s (most likely some form of bio-accumulation/radiation monitoring after nuclear tests, imo), and when the federal gov finally got involved they appointed someone apparently physically-incapable (due to disgust) of witnessing a mutilation site to be in charge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_mutilation#Official_investigations
Jeez, mutilated cows! Back in the late 70s, I went to UC Davis to talk to an early quantitative ecologist about doing a post-doc with him. As I waited outside his door and could hear him talking on the phone about black helicopters and mutilated cows. I got out of the interview as quickly as I could.
Language problem has plagued the CIA (and US government in general) for many decades and still does. It’s not just a “when the Ivies were WASPs” issue.
Congress is quite aware of it and unable to compel change. The budgets, especially after 9-11, have ballooned and the deadwood has increased. The CIA could definitely use an Elon-Twitter-RIF purge.
Cf. https://www.amazon.com/Human-Factor-Dysfunctional-Intelligence-Broadsides/dp/159403382X
My mother was European born and spoke 7 languages and was in the Federal government (not spooky, but in the know) and said that the US was a joke in terms of language requirements for diplomats or spies.
This is a long, long, long issue. You can even read stuff from Lederer and Burdick in the 1950s about it. We are just so powerful and so protected in our continental fortress that we just blunder around and expect everyone else to get out of the way. It’s like asking a fish, how’s the water and the fish says “what’s water”? Often we don’t even know what we don’t know.
I tend to agree with your criticism of US-centricism and I’m constantly impressed by how multilingual Europe is in contrast to the US. But your reference to a needed “Elon-Twitter-RIF purge” seems premature and presumptuous at best. Until we see what that purge entails, I am going to refrain from lauding its virtues. It may indeed get rid of dead wood and unproductive personnel. On the other hand, it may yet prove to be a litmus test for loyalty to particular political persuasions. If the latter, then the purge will not achieve anything like what you are imagining. I don’t think we have any evidence upon which to say which scenario is more likely.
I didn’t jump to conclusions, from Elon. I read that book a while ago. Elon is just fitting into something I already wanted to do. I’m not a Johnny come lately.
Why not buy it and read it. Skim it if you don’t like it. It’s cheaper than buying an average movie. I buy books all the time, without a lot of vacillation.
Oh…and while you’re at it, get the Lederer and Burdick book too. And don’t skim that one. Read it. It’s a classic. You need to actually go through that thing, not just read the Wiki dump on it.
P.s Someone needs to take a blowtorch to the Pentagon as well. It’s crazy how much tail has been added versus tooth, post 9-11. And I’m not a Johnny come lately there either. Served from mid 80s through the mid 00s. Heck, I remember when the Marine Corps was frugal!
I’m more surprised they only had 38 analysts.
In addition to what Anoneuoid says above, I think it’s hard to evaluate that description without knowing what CIA Soviet analysts were actually doing. Depending upon the task, I could easily see why you’d only need 12 out of 38 analysts who spoke Russian (and that’s assuming that the analysts were focussing on Russia and not on other pasts of the Soviet Union). There probably weren’t many people who had skills to perform the wide range of tasks that were needed, so analysts would be specialised. If they hired someone out of university on the basis that they knew Russia, it might mean that they had someone who knew more about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky than about, well, anything that such analysts might be needed to know.
Change
“but I did come across this news article from 1950 saying that Harvard was giving out 1144 undergraduate degrees an that spring.”
to
“but I did come across this news article from 1950 saying that Harvard was giving out 1144 undergraduate degrees in that spring.”
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More to the point, be sure to read Ben Macintyre’s marvelous book,”A Spy Among Friends; Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal”, because the status symbol in Britain was not a degree from a prestigious university, but was, believe it or not, an umbrella! Macintyre refers to The epigraph for the book, “Never Judge a Man by his Umbrella” by Philby’s colleague, Nicholas Elliot,
“Never judge a man by his umbrella. It may not be his.”
I’d define “analyst”. As has already been pointed out, the CIA was founded in 47. The term could be something very different than what you either think it does or what it used to. That is, an analyst could simply be someone who was a physical contact between someone who was in Europe or the Soviet Union and in the US. That is, the job could simply be someone like a middle manager whose job is just to keep book keeping of what was said and what’s happening. In other words, there may have been little analysis.
Also, I’m the founder of a startup tech. company. About once a week, I talk to a media outlet either about a new product or about the company. Consistently, there’s one significant and basic error in the article. One example, an article stated that my company has 560 employees. It has 56. So, dealing with the media has made me realize that time constraints and a lack of editorial oversight means that the likelihood of a basic factual mistake is relatively high.
This might be true, but the source, Immerwahr, is not a reporter, and if you read anything else of his you would have a clear idea of the relationship between knowable facts and what he writes.
He’s a historian. That alone means he has a much closer relationship to the truth than reporters.
Can you give a major example of him being wrong?
Being a “successful” historian, tenured at Northwestern, means that he has to spout ideological nonsense that conforms to his colleagues’ crazy ideas. Just read How to Hide an Empire to see what I mean.
Perhaps there was a day when historians were more reliable than reporters, but that day is long past.
The CIA may have been founded in 1947, but there were predecessor agencies. I knew someone who studied Russian during the Cold War and found her career path blocked by large numbers of native-born Russian expatriates. US intelligence agencies probably had a chance to hire significant numbers of Moscow and Leningrad (in those days) born people willing to work for them. Yes, there was a risk of double agents, but it perhaps outweighed by the intimacy with the language that only a native has and no academically trained person can achieve.
Language is useful for some analytical tasks and not for others. In the context of a bureaucracy that also employs translators/interpreters, it’s never essential.
If you’re, say, looking at aerial photographs of Soviet military installations, the language skills are useless. You do need some very specialized skills, though. An analyst of the Soviet economy needs a lot of economic expertise, but there’s no reason they need to personally read the primary sources in Russian, rather than having them translated.
And so on. Of course, the CIA needs *some* people with linguistic and cultural competence but they have just as great a need for many other forms of expertise..
FWIW: An uncle of mine, due to his exceptional typing skills, was assigned to the staff of a general during WWII who was then posted to Moscow. My uncle, who did not have an elite education, took advantage of the opportunity to learn Russian fluently, and after the war he made a career in US intelligence. He seems to have risen fairly steadily through the ranks of the CIA, occupying a clear leadership position during the Vietnam War. (Stationed in Thailand.) There was no doubt about his employment, but his lips were sealed until the day he died about anything he or his colleagues did. The relevance here is that it was his language skills that sent him on his way, not Ivy connections. Of course, he might have been the only example of someone who followed this path — it’s pretty hard to know.
Totally unrelated but interesting: When I was 13 I began subscribing to a Russian chess magazine, Shakhmatny Bulletin, since I was very into chess, but all the good stuff was in Russia. I taught myself enough “chess Russian” to read it. Well, my uncle pulled me aside at a family event and said, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but there’s a mail cover on you. Don’t worry about it. Just chess, it’s OK.
It’s good to have a spook in the family.
From the same article:
“A survey of academic expertise on Japan conducted in 1935—when the United States was edging toward war with the country—found that the sole chair of Japanese studies in the U.S. was held by a professor at Stanford who could neither read nor speak Japanese.”
I can’t tell what article you are referring to (please try to place your comments where they belong or explain better). I also couldn’t tell what book you referring to regarding your Musk comment. Nor do I get your reference to “Johnny come lately” above in response to my comment. Regarding the point about ignorance of Japan in US intelligence, it looks to me like much of the early history of the CIA (its predecessors) was in response to the intelligence failures leading up to Pearl Harbor. You may find the development and operation of the CIA lacking (or even deplorable), and I don’t have enough information to question that, but the reference to lack of Japanese expertise in 1935 doesn’t seen pertinent to the asserted lack of Russian expertise in 1947.
Dale:
This is a different anonymous. I haven’t followed what he’s on about with an article. (Take that up with him.) But presumably he is referring the the New Yorker article, which is linked to at the top of the head post.
Also, please pay attention to the threading of comments. You have now newbie-muddled two separate conversations.
I will answer your other comments separately.
Forgive me for getting confused. That’s what happens when you are anonymous.
I’m a different anonymous and you’re mixing up conversations, see the reply from the other one. The article I’m referring to is the same one that Andrew is referring to, the other anon also said this.
“but the reference to lack of Japanese expertise in 1935 doesn’t seen pertinent to the asserted lack of Russian expertise in 1947.”
The common thread here is a lack of expertise. This holds up to the present day; see e.g. the shock at how fast the forces in Afghanistan collapsed, and the predictions by the intelligence community that Russia would take over Ukraine in 3 days.
I think you have an extremely unrealistic idea about what’s possible. US intelligence were actually remarkably accurate in predicting not only that Russia would invade but when they would do so. Europeans (and if remember Ukrainians themselves) thought Russia wouldn’t. Obviously, they initially overestimated Russian and underestimated Ukrainian forces. But I doubt whether any expert would be able to predict the outcome of most wars with 100% accuracy. There’s two many chance events that in retrospect turn out to decisive, or things no one could have known until they are actually in that scenario.
I think there’s a connection here will critique of polling. Sure, there’s lot of room for improvement, and it’s crucial to learn from mistakes. Experts are often wrong and often disagree with one another. But the problem is that lots of people have unrealistic ideas about what experts can and cannot tell you, or the selectively subject one group to the most exacting standards while accepting at face value claims made by others.
(I just have my doubts there were any *Japanese* studies programs in the 30s. Even today it’s niche. More than likely, there were only a handful of *East Asian* programmes, and if the chair didn’t speak Japanese, it’s probably because they did research on classical Chinese. Academic programs born like Athena from the head of Zeus, so realistically to have a chair in the 30s, you’d need a programme in the 20s or earlier).
In case it wasn’t obvious, I meant to say that academic programmes *aren’t* born like Athena from the head of Zeus).
Off hand, the idea that there probably weren’t any Japanese Studies programs in academia pre-1940 or so sounds about right; the people I remember being mentioned as oldest in the field were all being academics post-war. And most were still around when I was doing my MA in East Asian Studies (1981/82).
(E.g. “Edward George Seidensticker (February 11, 1921 – August 26, 2007) was a noted post-World War II American scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature.”
And “Donald Lawrence Keene (June 18, 1922 – February 24, 2019)”)
But: Note that both learned Japanese at the US Navy Japanese Language School around 1942 or so.
Also, memory has it that the US military language schools are really good, and that between the above blokes and the code breakers, we knew what the Japanese were up to, while the Japanese were convinced that the Japanese language would function as another level of encription. (FWIW, except for the enormous vocabulary and the enormous number of Chinese characters, Japanese is a really lovely language. Nowhere near as painful as say, Latin or German. And the linguists tell me that native Slavic language speakers don’t have full control of their language until their late teens.
Inversely, though, I have the impression that Russian literature was respected and translated much earlier. So there should have been some Russian academic expertise around. Maybe.
Failures of US intelligence in the Middle East are truly amazing: the basic outlines of who’s who and what they’re thinking were available in places like the CIA Fact Book, Encyclopedia Brit., and early Wikipedia*. A twat reporter ran around Washington D.C. interviewing every politician he could find asking the simple question “Who and what and where are the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam”. No one knew. And I’d guess that that’s the situation today as well. (Quiz: name 3 Shia-majority countries. Two correct answers gets you full credit, since the other two are relatively minor.)
*: Interestingly, Wiki articles on the middle east and Islam have become so much more thorough, that it’s way harder to figure out what’s going on. Too many leaves to see the forest. Sheesh.
Dale:
The Human Factor, by Ishmael Jones, 2010. Note, that I hyperlinked to the Amazon site, showing that book, within the VERY same post where I referred to it.
Also, have you figured out the Lederer and Burdick reference?
You (and I think I have the right “you” now) are ignoring my comment on the Musk/Twitter/RIF (I’m not even sure what RIF is, but I was thinking you were referring to Kennedy) purge. I don’t disagree about the many failures of US intelligence, although I am not well informed. But I do disagree with assuming that the “purge” will rid bureaucracy of what needs to be ridded. It may do that, but it may also just replace some bureaucrats (perhaps even competent ones) with others with their own private agendas. I’m no admirer of Musk – he strikes me as a spoiled immature geek. Sure, he’s brilliant, but he also acts like a 5 year old. I didn’t vote for him and I don’t think he is the best person to be in charge of a “purge.” Likewise for most of the other unelected choices. Shaking things up is one thing (and perhaps long overdue), but this looks more like a shakedown.
RIF – Reduction in force. I think you will also find that many of the people who talk budget cuts are all for it as long as it is not in their state or district. federal departments with facilities spread throughout the US tend to do better just because of this.
Also just don’t look too hard at the budget. You can completely abolish most departments and you would hardly put a dent in the deficit, let alone the budget. Defense, deficit payments, and basic social payments like social security are a whopping percentage of the federal budget.
Maybe the remaining analysts knew other languages from the USSR like Ukranian, Chechen or Tartar.
+1
Larry Johnson, a retired CIA analyst, claims he was a member of a 7 (?) person group covering El Salvador in the 1980’s. He was the only Spanish speaker and the only one who had been n Central America,
Trivia: Daniel Immerwahr, to whom we owe the subject of this blog post, is ‘the first cousin twice removed of Clara Immerwahr, the pioneering chemist and first wife of Fritz Haber’. (Wikipedia) Clara Immerwahr was a trailblazing chemist, the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry in Germany. I know her better for her fierce anti-war stance during the First World War. Her husband is known for the Haber-Bosch process, which is (or was, I am not sure) essential for the synthesis of fertilisers. And explosives, too. Haber also contributed to the use of poison gas in trench warfare. What a family.
Anyway, I only looked it up because the name rang a bell and I admire Clara Immerwahr for her anti-militarist stance at a time when militarism was all the rage under a mentally challenged emperor with delusions of grandeur.
I recall le Carré saying something about the Americans following the British example of recruiting for the intelligence services from the upper classes and how it was a huge mistakes for both countries.
This is part of a broader issue of lack of knowledge of foreign languages and foreign cultures in the US and lack of demand for people who do know them. Journalists (to the extent there are any, these days) regularly cover foreign countries, whose languages they do not know. Ditto State Department personnel assigned to countries, where they do not know local language or culture. Ditto international business. To the extent that any expertise is required, it is much easier to hire native-speakers, which has a whole series of its own problems, generally ignored.