Historiographical Problem: Assessing the Hidden Hand's Impact on the Postcolonial World
Many of the records that historians need to evaluate Cold War events remain classified. Information detailed in exposés and leaked cables are difficult to verify. Freedom of Information requests have sometimes unsealed records, but they are often heavily redacted. Lack of access to sources about KGB ‘active measures’ or corporate bribery provides, or conscious destruction of records implicating Junta leaders in human rights abuses leaves an uneven record. The problem of assessing the impact of this shadow war is magnified relative to the ‘Third World,’ where the superpower rivalry not only burned most hot, but where clandestine subversion took multiple forms, inflicted long-lasting damage and where the public face of Western policy sharply diverged from the mischief wreaked by its hidden hand.
Recent research has established that the war in the shadows was never a two-horse race between superpowers. On the contrary, the global periphery was awash with clandestine agents of all sorts, ranging from assassins to propagandists and economic hitmen that warned postcolonial leaders against nationalization measures. Spies not only entrapped foreign dignitaries in honey traps, but blackmailed journalists and cultivated close ties with ambitious junior officers. Corporate bribery targeted key ministers, bankers manipulated foreign currencies, journalists unconsciously peddled disinformation and both superpowers covertly financed and armed the political opposition of hostile regimes. The fifth estate also directed considerable attention towards manipulating Western public opinion, often in ways that not only benefitted national security but also boosted private profit. In cataloguing the war in the shadows, we not only suffer from a lack of records to reveal the depth of its influence, but the deeper epistemic problem that we cannot know what we don’t know. Given that the secret campaign to subvert postcolonial states and profit from non-Western resources did not end with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, powerful interests have good reason to keep their clandestine influence shrouded in darkness. Critical scholars argue that the ‘manufacture of consent’ remains a staple of democratic societies. This contributes to a systematic policy of burying records that might reveal the hidden hand at work in events that transpired over 50 years ago and where the principal protagonists are long dead. In those cases where we do have significant evidence, like the Congo Crisis 1960-1965, we not only see the weight of the hidden hand, but how the first generation of official histories reliant upon available records often misrepresented the unfolding of events. To what extent can we trace back the roots of ‘failed states’ today back to the war in the shadows?