US Intelligence and African History
Welcome! I’m a historian who mainly focuses on the history of post-colonial Franco-African relations. I wrote a book called France’s Wars in Chad which I think is a pretty good read if that sort of thing interests you.
As part of a project I’m working on looking at US intelligence community analyses of the Chadian-Libyan conflict in the 1980s, I’ve come across a variety of interesting material covering other countries as well. I thought I’d use this space to share documents I’ve found, as well as my own commentary.
The public availability of tens of thousands of historical Cold War-era US intelligence records (albeit in problematic forms), should pique the interest of any historian or global citizen interested in relevant times and places covered by the material. As a global superpower, no region of the world escaped Washington’s interest. For those readers interested in getting a better grasp of Washington’s imperial meddling across the globe, these records furnish often fascinating insights into how US policymakers constructed knowledge about the world during the Cold War.
However, with the exception of sporadic Cold War crises and more recently, jihadist activity, most of Africa has rarely been more than of tertiary strategic interest for policymakers in Washington (I’d argue this is a good thing—the US does damage enough to places it thinks more about). At least historically, this has been reflected in the level of intelligence resources allocated to following Africa.
A look at the division of labor within the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence gives a good sense of this resource constraint. While in 1984 some 400 analysts worked in the Office of Soviet Analysis and 150 in the Office of European Analysis, only 30 analysts covered Sub-Saharan Africa. These worked alongside 100 other analysts covering Latin America within an Office of African and Latin American Analysis (a lumping together suggestive of both regions’ relative interest to Washington).
From: Draft Directorate of Intelligence Handbook, November 15, 1984
Now, these were not the only analysts working on Africa. Some of the 100 analysts working in the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis covered North Africa, and their coverage of the Chad-Libyan conflict, for instance, was important. Also, a number of thematic offices or specialists covering economics, terrorism, strategic arms, imagery analysis and others also weighed in on African analysis from time to time. But overall, Africa was consistently at the margins of the global US intelligence effort.
Although my overall focus will be on historical US intelligence on Africa, I may also look at questions connected to US intelligence analysis from the time periods under discussion. These relate to sources and methods (often difficult to uncover and nearly always redacted from declassified documents) to more epistemic questions of how analysts thought about the world and their regions of focus. These of course include questions related to how power, prejudice, and policies affected analytic production and thinking. I may also branch out to discuss other issues of interest related to foreign interventions, African politics, and international history.