The proposed National Museum of Special Intelligence and Special Operations took a step closer to reality earlier this month with a $10 million contribution from a leading foundation
Washington already has one spy museum. Run by former CIA spokesman Peter Earnest, the International Spy Museum presents a glamorized and sanitized portrait of the spy business, geared mostly to tourists. Its exhibits feature ingenious gadgets used by Americans spies over the years, such has hidden cameras, clandestine recording devices, secret communications channels, and encryption devices, In other words, the museum celebrates primitive versions of the apps on your iPhone.
The Spy Museum has a decent bookstore but it mostly avoids the crimes and controversies that have plagued the CIA and U.S. intelligence for the last 70 years.
You don’t go to the Spy Museum to find out about the overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954. You won’t learn much about the CIA-FBI program known as COINTELPRO which targeted Martin Luther King and other political dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. You’lI learn little about the top CIA officials in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. You’ll be mercifully spared any information about the torture regime that disgraced the U.S. government during the Bush years.
The next spy museum, to be located in northern Virginia, promises to be a more forthrightly political in its message, according to creators.
The museum will educate the American public about the importance of strategic intelligence and special operations to the preservation of freedom, honor Americans who have served at the “tip of the spear”, and inspire future generations to serve their country.
The sponsor of the proposed museum is The OSS Society. The Office of Strategic Services was America’s first secret intelligence agency, serving as the tip of the spear against Nazi Germany. As an anti-fascist organization, the OSS had an admirable record.
But as soon as World War II ended President Harry Truman abolished the OSS. He later said he didn’t want to be rushed into the creation of peacetime intelligence agency because “this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason.”
The Gestapo, of course, were the secret police of Nazi Germany, the enforcers of fascism. Truman was rightly worried about the contradictions–and the danger of–between a secret service operating in a democratic political system.
Two years later, as the U.S. conflict with the Soviet Union, blossomed into the Cold War, Truman reversed himself. He signed the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA and the National Security Agency and endowed them with extraordinary powers of clandestinity.
The result was a secret global apparatus that bolstered anti-democratic and fascistic forces around the world for the next 70 years in the name of anti-communism and the “war on terrorism.”
The “special operations’ of U.S. intelligence include coups in Iran and Guatemala; attempted assassinations in Congo, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic; the notorious Phoenix program in Vietnam; various “dirty wars” in Central America in the 1980s; the rendition and torture of completely innocent people after 9/11, and, of course, dozens of campaigns to interfere in the elections of other countries.
To be sure, the U.S. intelligence community has also protected Americans from terror attacks, done valuable counterproliferation work, and given useful policy advice to thirteen presidents from Truman to Trump.
Will the National Museum of Intelligence and Special Operations give an honest account to the American people–and the next generation-about the legacy of service and violence wrought by U.S. intelligence?
It seems unlikely. This museum sounds more like an emporium of propaganda and apologetics, which raises the question why the Starr Foundation is funding it.
The Starr Foundation is chaired by Maurice Greenberg, the insurance mogul whose American International Group (AIG) received a $185 billion bailout during the Crash of 2008. AIG’s reckless investments in the housing market drove it to the brink of bankruptcy. The government took over AIG, restored it to solvency, and even made a profit. AIG’s odyssey is a testimony to the impunity enjoyed by corporate interests that are “too big too fail.”
The new museum looks to be another monument to impunity.
The Starr Foundation’s Web site declares “has concentrated its giving in the area of public policy on international relations and the promotion of the rule of law and democratic institutions around the world.”
In fact, U.S. intelligence operatives abused the rule of law and undermined, if not destroyed, democratic institutions that opposed U.S. foreign policy. A museum celebrating this legacy promises be a temple of propaganda.
