HIST 269
The CIA and American Foreign Policy
Last Offered n/a
Division II
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

Despite an American aversion to espionage captured by Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s oft-cited (yet unsubstantiated) remark, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail,” intelligence history in the United States dates back to the Revolutionary War. Still, it took the shock of Pearl Harbor for the United States to establish a permanent peacetime civilian intelligence service independent of another federal department–the Central Intelligence Agency. Since then, the agency and others which comprise the loose entity called the Intelligence Community (IC) have played a pivotal albeit intensely controversial role in US foreign and national security policies. Yet their roles and missions remain largely misunderstood and divisive, as attested to by recent debates surrounding the multiple investigations of the 9/11 tragedy, the flawed pre-war estimates of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) capabilities, the reporting on Benghazi, the Snowden revelations, and much more. This course seeks to provide greater understanding of the relationship between intelligence and US foreign and national security policy by examining the CIA’s and IC’s roles and responsibilities, illuminating their history alongside the history of America and the World, assessing their successes and failures, evaluating their reforms, and correlating their behavior and capabilities with US values and institutions. Despite an American aversion to espionage captured by Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s oft-cited (yet unsubstantiated) remark, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail,” intelligence history in the United States dates back to the Revolutionary War. Still, it took the shock of Pearl Harbor for the United States to establish a permanent peacetime civilian intelligence service independent of another federal department–the Central Intelligence Agency. Since then, the agency and others which comprise the loose entity called the Intelligence Community (IC) have played a pivotal albeit intensely controversial role in US foreign and national security policies. Yet their roles and missions remain largely misunderstood and divisive, as attested to by recent debates surrounding the multiple investigations of the 9/11 tragedy, the flawed pre-war estimates of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) capabilities, the reporting on Benghazi, the Snowden revelations, and much more. This course seeks to provide greater understanding of the relationship between intelligence and US foreign and national security policy by examining the CIA’s and IC’s roles and responsibilities, illuminating their history alongside the history of America and the World, assessing their successes and failures, evaluating their reforms, and correlating their behavior and capabilities with US values and institutions.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 14
Class#: 0
Grading:
Requirements/Evaluation: Active class participation, lengthy research paper, in-class presentations.
Prerequisites: Prior coursework in international relations or American foreign policy.
Enrollment Preferences: Political Science or History Majors
Distributions: Division II
Attributes: PSCI International Relations Courses

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