William J. Burns, the nominee for CIA director, testifies during his confirmation hearing. /AP Officials from all corners of the government...
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| William J. Burns, the nominee for CIA director, testifies during his confirmation hearing. /AP |
This tone reflected hopes — including from policymakers — that with his background as a diplomat, Burns can advance foreign policy goals by combining the shadowy world of intelligence with diplomacy. Yet history illustrates the danger for the United States in blurring the lines between diplomacy and intelligence.
The contemporary State Department is the scion of America’s first intelligence and diplomatic organization, the Committee of Secret Correspondence. During the Revolutionary War, the committee sent diplomat-spies to Paris to negotiate an alliance with France and conduct intelligence operations against Britain. They were diplomats by day, spies by night. Their intelligence activities, however, almost undermined the far more important diplomatic negotiations taking place with France.
For example, diplomat-spy Silas Deane approved an operation by a British volunteer, James Atkins, also known as “John the Painter,” who burned parts of the British navy yard at Portsmouth, planted bombs in three ships, and set fires to homes in Bristol. The British captured Atkins, and he confessed to acting on behalf of Deane and the Americans.
Next, Deane and Benjamin Franklin organized not-so-secret, covert privateering operations targeting British ships based out of French ports. Both clumsy plots inflamed British public opinion against the American cause. More importantly, they jeopardized the crucial American alliance with France, which hosted the Americans as diplomats, not spies, and faced recriminations from the British government for allowing American spies to operate on French soil.
Failing to learn from this lesson, after independence, Congress created a “Secret Service Fund” that allowed presidents to use diplomat-spies as they saw fit. Importantly, Congress gave itself no oversight of the Secret Service Fund. Combining intelligence and diplomacy allowed presidents to hide U.S. foreign policy from Congress during events like the Congress of Panama organized by Simón Bolivar in 1826, the Turkish Commission to the Ottoman Empire in 1831, and the Hungarian Revolution from 1848-1849.
During the Hungarian Revolution, Zachary Taylor’s administration dispatched Ambrose Dudley Mann to gather intelligence and prepare to recognize Hungary on behalf of the United States should Hungary win its independence from Austria. After witnessing the crushing defeat of the Hungarians in their war for independence and the brutal response by the Austrians, Dudley Mann wrote that the U.S. government should “suspend all diplomatic intercourse with Austria.” Mann added.
“If we desire to be instrumental in redeeming our species from political bondage and misrule, we must rely upon the force of our example made apparent by the peaceful dissemination of the benign practical workings of our doctrines.” Mann, the diplomat-spy, advocated for overt diplomacy rather than covert activity based on American principles, an especially striking position because he was later a diplomat-spy for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The Austrian chargé d’affaires, Chevalier Huselmann, didn’t appreciate this nuance. He protested Mann’s mission and warned that American policymakers “were exposing their emissary to be treated as a spy.” Secretary of State Daniel Webster rejected Huselmann’s attempt to “give this odious name and character to a confidential agent of a neutral Power, bearing the commission of his country, and sent for a purposefully warranted by the law of nations.”
At the same time, Mann had admitted to Webster that he “deemed it prudent to avoid any mention whatever of the nature of [his] mission.” By combining diplomacy and espionage, the U.S. alienated Austria and left other nations with more reason to question whether to trust American diplomats and what the foreign policy of the U.S. government actually was — all in service of a cause that, as Mann recognized, might have been counterproductive.
Throughout the 19th century, the activities of diplomat-spies also caused tensions within the U.S. government. Bitter partisan debates raged in Congress as the opposition political party challenged the president’s shadow foreign policymaking through the work of diplomat-spies. These episodes also prompted questions in Congress over whether it should protect diplomat-spies as “privileged spies” or “secret ministers” in the event of their arrest by foreign governments for espionage.
In 1906, former secretary of state John W. Foster admitted that in the 19th century, the American “standard of diplomacy was very low … it did not hesitate to make use of bribery, espionage and deliberate deceit.” Yet even Foster had greenlighted diplomat John Stevens using intelligence methods to set the conditions for the U.S. annexation of Hawaii, something that created a backlash among native Hawaiians.
Half a century later, Foster’s grandsons, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, again combined intelligence and diplomacy during the 1950s. Their experiences demonstrated that the mixture of the two failed to serve the United States any better in the 20th century than it had in the 19th century.
The Dulles brothers worked together to foster coups in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, which have hamstrung American policymakers to this day. The U.S. support for the Iranian coup (and the brutal Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who assumed power) helped facilitate the rise of the anti-American regime that took power after the Iranian Revolution. And Iran’s leaders continue to use the memory of the coup to unite the Iranian people against the United States and generate support for Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to prevent foreign intervention. Likewise, Guatemala endured a bloody decades-long civil war after the 1954 coup that also destabilized Central America and has not made the United States look like the “good neighbor” it claims to be.
The lessons of more than two centuries of American diplomacy and intelligence are that the two don’t mix well. U.S. foreign policy pursued through aggressive intelligence often results in blowback both at home and abroad. Covert intelligence operations have produced hostile regimes, resentment among foreign publics and mistrust in the American government. Finally, mixing intelligence and diplomacy jeopardizes the position of diplomat-spies themselves, posing problems of legality and hypocrisy.
Burns would be the first career diplomat to lead the CIA, but he would not be America’s first diplomat-spy. Burns should beware the blowback that can result from confusing the roles. Based on U.S. history, diplomacy is best kept in the light and intelligence in the shadows. As director of the CIA, Burns will have to navigate the penumbra between the two.