Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

David H. Price investigates ho W the C ia tried to influen C e

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with cia goals, from clandestine operations and research to liberal anticommunist programs. While investigative journalists and congressional inquiries exposed many of these fronts, little is known about their daily internal workings.

With a focus on the 1950s and 1960s Asia Foundation, Cold War Deceptions provides a rare view into the bureaucratic functioning of a covert operation in which most employees did not know they were working for the cia. Drawing on the foundation’s surviving archival records and declassified cia documents, David H. Price examines how the foundation, secretly created and funded by the cia, tried to shape Asian political, economic, intellectual, and cultural developments during the early Cold War. Uncovering how unwitting scholars were used to support pro-American and anticommunist positions, Price considers how political forces shaped disciplinary knowledge and how these past events connect to the present.

“Makes an enormous contribution to the literature on the American Cia and its activities. It is certainly among the best studies we have of the Cia and its various fronts.” —Bruce Cumings, author of Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power

“Details how the Cia, by setting up a secretly funded front organization parading as objective and nonpolitical, maneuvered to interfere in sovereign states in Asia and to engineer pro-US regimes.” —Inderjeet Parmar, author of Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power

“This book is doubly important because the history of our government’s secret operations and methods, once the subject of outraged commentary, is today fading from memory.” —Andrew Cockburn, author of The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine

David H. Price is professor of anthropology and sociology at Saint Martin’s University. His previous books include Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology.