[A-List] The CIA and professional anthropology

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

4. The Invention and Reinvention of the Peasant

Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the postcolonial world, "the
peasant" is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction a category of
human being became a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly
journals and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. "What
are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico _really like_?" the
anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the
field. "For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion
of others) have searched for answers [to this question] ... living with
villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior,
describing their findings in books and articles." At first they called their
research the study of "folk" societies, Foster says, but after World War II
scholars "came to realize that 'peasant' is a more appropriate term, and
thus was born the new subfield of 'peasant studies'."

Foster makes these remarks in his foreword to the book "Shahhat: An
Egyptian", by Richard Critchfield, which he recommends for its accurate
portrayal of what peasants everywhere are really like, and which became a
favorite of both hotel bookstores in Cairo and college-level introductions
to the Third World in the United States. The book belongs to a genre of
peasant studies for which scholarship on the Middle East, more than other
parts of the Third World, has provided an important home, a genre I would
call descriptive realism. Critchfield sets before us the peasant's life
"like a series of wonderfully composed photographs," wrote one of the book's
reviewers; "when taken together, they make us see and feel the contours and
the substance of fellah culture." Despite the claims of photographic
realism, however, a careful reading of Critchfield's book reveals his "real
peasant" to be something constructed out of earlier representations, as a
collage of familiar Orientalist images juxtaposed with clippings taken -- in
fact plagiarized -- from earlier writings, in particular from the previous
popular study in a similar genre, "The Egyptian Peasant" by Henry Ayrout.

This chapter examines the genealogy of Critchfield's Egyptian peasant, not
just to bring to light these forms of repetition and borrowing, but to ask
some larger questions. What is the nature of this realist genre in peasant
studies? Why is the Middle East, with its dearth of more critical
examinations of rural society, so well represented? Why are the results so
widely accepted, acquiring so easily the status of classics? Why does the
realism of the peasant's portrayal seem to require not only the borrowings
from earlier writings but also the exclusion from the picture of history, of
the West, and of the presence of the Western author? Overall, what political
processes are at work in the producing and reproducing of all this realism?

<snip>

Richard Critchfield died on December 10, 1994, in Washington, DC. He had
gone there to attend a publication party for his tenth book, "The
Villagers", in which he retold stories from the dozen or more villages he
had described in his earlier works. His obituary in the New York Times
mentioned that he was survived by an elder brother, James Critchfield, of
Delaplane, Virginia. James Critchfield, I subsequently discovered, worked
for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The discovery led to
further questions about the production of Critchfield's portraits of the
Third World peasant.

James Critchfield belonged to the founding generation of the CIA. After
working closely with former Nazi intelligence officers in postwar Germany,
he was appointed the first director of CIA clandestine operations in the
Near East in 1959, and went on to become a senior architect of U.S. policy
in the Middle East for three decades. One of his first actions, in February
1960, according to a later Congressional investigation, was an attempt to
murder the president of Iraq, General 'Abd al-Karim Qasim. Critchfield's
idea was to have the president killed with a poisoned handkerchief prepared
by the CIA's Technical Services Division. (The attempt failed, but Qasim was
killed three years later in a coup welcomed and possibly aided by the CIA,
which brought to power the Ba'th, the party of Saddam Hussein.) The
attempted murder of Qasim was one of the actions for which James
Critchfield's supervisor, Richard Helms, the director of Central
Intelligence from 1966 to 1973, was mildly sanctioned by the U.S. Senate in
1977, for allowing the CIA to function as though it had "a licence to
operate freely outside the dictates of the law."

One cannot assume without further evidence that Richard Critchfield worked
in the same profession as his brother. However, he certainly moved in the
same circles. "The Villagers", his last book, acknowledged the "advice,
suggestions, help and hospitality" he received from Cynthia Helms, the wife
of his brother's former supervisor; from Robert S. McNamara, the former U.S.
secretary of defense; and from a number of other figures associated with the
CIA and the politico-military establishment. These were unusually well
placed associates for a man who insisted in each of his books that he was
just a journalist who wrote about peasants in obscure parts of the world.

One might also notice the way his choice of villages, always portrayed as
out-of-the-way places, followed the changing focus of U.S. imperial
concerns, some of them at the time quite secretive. He was in India and
Nepal in 1959-62, the years coinciding with probably the largest CIA
operation of the time: a secret program based in Nepal to train and arm
Tibetan refugees to fight the Chinese occupation in Tibet. Critchfield's
visits to Nepal were spaced between spells teaching journalism at the
university in Nagpur, the birthplace and headquarters of the rising Hindu
fascist movement. By the mid-1960s, an account of the CIA program in Nepal
reports, "CIA officer James Critchfield described the guerrillas'
achievements inside Tibet as 'minimal.'... In any case, the CIA's attention
was shifting to Indochina." Richard Critchfield followed suit, arriving in
Vietnam in 1964 as a reporter for the Washington Star and writing the book
that promoted the views of British military intelligence ["The Long Charade:
Political Subversion in the Vietnam War", 1968], which the CIA was then
urging Washington to adopt. From Vietnam he took trips to Java, then spent a
year there in 1966-67, just after the CIA had helped the Suharto regime
seize power and carry out the killing of as many as a million political
opponents. He also spent a year in Washington as a White House correspondent
for the Star, which had its own connections with the CIA.

In 1969 Critchfield abandoned the Star to become a full-time "reporter from
villages," with a grant from the Alicia Patterson Fund. For his first long
stay in a single village he chose the seemingly out-of-the-way island of
Mauritius, in the southern Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean, however, was then
at the center of another U.S. military expansion. Mauritius had just
acquired its independence from Britain and was offering naval facilities to
the Soviet Union. The United States was building its own Indian Ocean naval
and intelligence base on the island of Diego Garcia, previously attached to
Mauritius but retained by Britain and leased to the United States. To ensure
the secrecy of the new base, Critchfield's friend McNamara demanded that the
entire population of the archipelago to which Diego Garcia belonged, the
Chagos Islands, be removed. Britain agreed to secretly round up the
inhabitants, against their will and in violation of international law, and
ship them to Mauritius. As Critchfield arrived on the island, Britain and
the United States were paying the Mauritian government £650,000 to help
settle the Chagos Islanders, in the hope that news of their illegal
deportation would not reach the West.

Building the base on Diego Garcia was part of an expansion of U.S. power in
the Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean, an expansion that involved new
relations with the two leading non-Western military powers in the region,
Iran and Egypt. Critchfield's village studies over the ensuing years
followed these shifting concerns. He lived in a village on the border
between Iran and Iraq in 1971, just as his brother had helped persuade
President Nixon to start building Iran into a heavily armed ally of the
United States and begin secretly establishing the Ba'thist government in
Iraq. In 1974 he arrived in Egypt, within weeks of Washington reestablishing
diplomatic ties with Cairo. Although most of rural Egypt was still
off-limits to visiting Westerners, by choosing a village on the edge of the
tourist area near Luxor Critchfield was able to spend time in the Egyptian
countryside during this critical period of renewed U.S. involvement in the
country.

So was Critchfield an American spy? I do not know and do not think this is
the interesting question. A few years after Critchfield's book appeared a
leading Egyptian journal published a series of articles warning about the
"penetration" of Egypt by American scholars and development experts, whose
research posed a threat to the country's "national security." One article
reported the views of the sociologist Sa'd Eddin Ibrahim, who gave the
example of an American study that had collected data on local leadership in
four hundred Egyptian villages, warning that such information could be used
in ways detrimental to Egypt. This seems unlikely. Given the evidence of
Critchfield's writings, it is hard to imagine him gathering anything in the
way of useful information, just as there is very little one could learn from
a survey of "leadership" in four hundred, or even forty, Egyptian villages.
As I explain in later chapters, it would be difficult to point to any
American research on Egyptian rural development that gathered information
reliable enough to threaten the country's security. If there was any threat
it lay in the danger of invoking the shibboleth of "national security," an
invocation aiding those forces of repression for whom this is always a usefu
l term. Sa'd Eddin Ibrahim himself became a victim of this repression when
he was sentenced a decade later to seven years in prison for alleged
activities threatening national security.

The importance of Critchfield's connections with America's "national
security" regime, whether direct or indirect, lies elsewhere, in unravelling
the political genealogy of such expertise on the Middle East, and on the
question of "the peasant" in particular. Only recently has it been
understood how pervasively the CIA influenced the production of academic and
intellectual culture around the world in the second half of the twentieth
century. The story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, established by the
CIA in Paris, is now well known, including its funding of the British
magazine Encounter. The CIA's efforts extended well beyond this, to include
the funding of art exhibits, in particular those promoting abstract
expressionism; concerts featuring the work of avant-garde American
composers; academic and cultural congresses; and books, translations, and a
wide variety of journals willing to criticize Marxism or the Soviet Union
and to support, or at least remain silent on, American violence in Vietnam
and other parts of the world. Among the journals the agency funded overseas
was an Arab counterpart to Encounter magazine, al-Hiwar, established in
Beirut in 1962 under the editorship of a distinguished Palestinian writer,
Tawfiq Sayyigh. Al-Hiwar ceased publication in 1967 after the CIA funding of
the Congress for Cultural Freedom was revealed.

These connections with the clandestine U.S. production of cultural and
academic expertise may have extended not only to work like Critchfield's,
but also to the U.S. publication of [Henry Habib] Ayrout's "Egyptian
Peasant". The book was published in the United States, as I noted, a quarter
of a century after it was first written, but coinciding with a renewed
American interest in domestic Egyptian affairs. Its publication was arranged
by Morroe Berger, who had played a role in the creation of the National
Defense Education Act in 1958 and, as I mentioned earlier, was the first
chair of the Near and Middle East Committee of the Social Science Research
Council and the founding president of the Middle East Studies Association of
North America. As a student in New York in the late 1930s, Berger had been a
member of the New York Trotskyist movement, with others like Irving Howe,
Seymour Martin Lipset, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, many of whom became active
anticommunists after the war and in several cases moved far to the right.
Some of them, including the journalist Irving Kristol, the N.Y.U.
philosopher Sidney Hook, and the editor of Encounter, Melvin Lasky, were
later funded and promoted by the CIA. Like many other scholars who came to
area studies after World War II, Berger had worked in intelligence during
the war, and he, too, had connections with the CIA. He was a member of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom and was the scholar who recruited the editor
for the Arab counterpart to Encounter magazine, al-Hiwar. The generous
amount of CIA money that he offered the prospective editor carried with it
one stipulation: that the journal publish articles dealing with the
unfavorable position of Muslim communities in the Soviet Union.

The most serious questions raised by this story are neither Critchfield's
plagiarisms of Ayrout, nor the possible connections with the activities of
U.S. intelligence work and the clandestine political funding of American
journalism and scholarship. The most important issue is the structure of
academic expertise that enabled these forms of prejudice, ignorance, and
misrepresentation to flourish and gave such dubious books their circulation
and acceptance.

-- Timothy Mitchell, "Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity",
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 123-124,
148-152