COUNTERINTELLIGENCE LITERATURE: COLD WAR AMERICAN ESPIONAGE AND POSTMODERN FICITON by Kylie Regan A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English West Lafayette, Indiana May 2020 THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL Dr. John Duvall, Chair Department of English Dr. Nancy Peterson Department of English Dr. Derek Pacheco Department of English Dr. Bill Mullen Department of American Studies Approved by: Dr. Manushag Powell 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful for the support of Purdue’s English Department and the College of Liberal Arts. The funding from the year-long Excellence in English Dissertation Fellowship and CLA’s Promise Grant program enabled me to travel for archival research and conferences to develop these ideas. Thanks in particular to my project chair, John Duvall, whose feedback on many iterations of this project was invaluable, and to Nancy Peterson, Derek Pacheco, Bill Mullen, and Manushag Powell. This project also could not have been completed without the love and support of my husband and my parents, and the companionship of my cats. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 6 ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... 7 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 8 A Concise History of the American Intelligence Community ................................................... 14 The Wilderness of Mirrors: Counterintelligence and Postmodernism in Postwar America ...... 19 American (Counter)Intelligence Literature ................................................................................ 24 CHAPTER 1: POPULAR AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE NARRATIVES ............................... 31 Influences: The Bond Craze and Preexisting American Genres ................................................ 36 Patriotic Intelligence Fiction ...................................................................................................... 43 Individualist Intelligence Fiction ............................................................................................... 52 Establishing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Fiction) ......................................... 57 Intelligence Fiction after the 1970s Scandals ............................................................................ 62 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 73 CHAPTER 2: REINTERPRETING PARANOIA IN PYNCHON AND DELILLO ................... 75 Operational Paranoia: Pynchon’s Failed Detectives and Analysts ............................................ 79 “The Jolly Coverts”: Layering Genre Tropes in DeLillo’s Libra .............................................. 96 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 114 CHAPTER 3: SECURING THE HOME FRONT: DOMESTIC COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IN ELLISON, GREENLEE, AND DOCTOROW .......................................................................... 116 Domestic Surveillance of the American Left and American Literature .................................. 118 Ambivalent Leftism in Invisible Man ...................................................................................... 125 The Spook Who Sat by the Door .............................................................................................. 138 The Book of Daniel .................................................................................................................. 145 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 154 CHAPTER 4: OPERATING AT THE FRINGES: DECENTERED INTELLIGENCE IN JOAN DIDION AND MARGARET ATWOOD .................................................................................. 158 Mid-Cold War Counterintelligence ......................................................................................... 163 Novels as Dossiers: Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy ............................ 166 “There was much to be said for trivia”: Atwood’s Bodily Harm ............................................ 188 4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 198 CHAPTER 5: UNAUTHORIZED HISTORIES OF THE CIA: BARTH, MAILER, AND THE INTELLIGENCE MEMOIR ...................................................................................................... 200 The American Intelligence Memoir ......................................................................................... 204 “The truth is more postmodern than fiction”: Sabbatical and The Tidewater Tales ............... 217 Superior Histories made of Serendipitous Facts: Harlot’s Ghost ............................................ 229 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 238 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 241 5 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Spy vs. Spy strip from Mad Magazine Issue 67, December 1961. ............................... 76 Figure 2. Pages from a deleted scene from Invisible Man, held at the Library of Congress. “New York Arrival.” Box 145, Folder 13. Ralph Ellison Papers, Part I: Writings File, 1935-1995. ... 130 Figure 3. Pages from The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, showing representative CIA redactions. The full paragraph on the left is bold, indicating that it was initially redacted, but added back into the manuscript after Marchetti won the right to publish the material in a lengthy legal battle. .................................................................................................................................. 209 6 ABSTRACT This project examines the rise of narratives about the American intelligence community in the mid- to late-twentieth century. In particular, I define a genre that I term counterintelligence literature, works of fiction by postmodernist authors that seek to interrupt the exchange of ideas between the burgeoning intelligence community and the body of popular narratives celebrating its policies. By tracing how canonical authors like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, and John Barth manipulate the tropes of popular narratives to critique midcentury interventionist foreign policy and the developing national security state, this project reveals the role that popular fiction plays in influencing public opinion and the potential for literature to pose timely political challenges. 7 INTRODUCTION Every visitor to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency passes a marble wall bearing a simple inscription, a line that the CIA sometimes calls its unofficial motto: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The inscription, taken from the Gospel of John, was chosen by Allen Dulles, one of the men most responsible for shaping the early CIA, and it says much about his influential vision of an American intelligence community. The motto declared that the new American intelligence community was exceptionally equipped to uncover the absolute Truth of any matter, following a long tradition of American institutions using Biblical language to justify their vision of their place in the world. The freedom the CIA promised through this motto was of course not just an abstract concept, but an articulation of the fundamental rights that the United States took it upon itself to defend internationally—opposition to totalitarian governments of any kind, particularly to Soviet communism. If the United States were the good guys, the ones with the divine commitment to truth, then any enemy of freedom was figured as not just a threat to Americans, but fundamentally evil. This binary division and the Agency’s ultimate inability to live up to its heroic self-image encapsulate the CIA’s ultimate failure to present itself as a force for good throughout the cold war decades. In order to give the truth to the world that would make all people free, the American intelligence community necessarily had to engage in secret, often extralegal activity. But it would take time for the Agency, which excelled in early years at promoting Dulles’s romantic portrait, to come under enough scrutiny for this irony to become widely recognized. This project undertakes the first comprehensive study of American cold war fiction about intelligence work, emphasizing the relationship between the massive body of popular tales produced and consumed across all media and the major authors of the literary postmodernist 8 canon. Popular intelligence narratives, as I term them, typically follow the exploits of American operatives as they successfully carry out missions to thwart enemies of the country, reassuring the reader or viewer that intelligence work is necessary and effective. Popular American intelligence narratives both echo governmental rhetoric about the intelligence community’s purpose and provide new arguments for its