Evil Empire 61of Public Safety’s advisors were experienced law enforcement experts,
many of whom spent the immediate aftermath of World War II in
the occupations in Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan. After observing
authoritarian police and prison systems firsthand, these experts devel-
oped a contrasting commitment to political independence of police and
aimed to achieve it through more decentralized organizational reform,
technical upgrading, and internal discipline. Their goal was to bolster
and educate security forces in “developing countries,” and thanks to the
constant stream of funding NSC 68 inaugurated, police trainees from
other countries quickly learned about “police service under autocratic rule.”
But the effort to reject shadowy secret police—and the subversion
model that U.S. national security experts feared the Soviets were exporting
—was two-faced. The purpose of public safety assistance, advisors in-
sisted, was to enhance democracy. And they aimed to foster respect for
constituted authority among the citizenry by making the police efficient
and technically adept. As the Office of Public Safety developed and
implemented its curriculum, it bequeathed the most modern forms of
U.S. policing to the world. Yet with no trace of irony, these lessons
detailed how Soviet secret police sent advisors to “vassal” countries to
“pull the strings” of the local security apparatus. Moreover, to ensure
the mission stayed on course, a number of authoritarian German and
Korean officers, especially those known for their exquisite anticommu-
nism, became key U.S. assets in bolstering the security forces in other
countries. It was as if the United States thought that to fight creeping
authoritarianism, expert authoritarians had to be on hand.
Public safety officers, for example, consistently claimed to teach
how not to torture suspects during interrogation. And they introduced
new counterterrorism techniques. That meant, by Nixon’s presiden-
cy, showing trainees how improvised bombs were built—to demon-
strate, they claimed, how to disarm them. But in both these examples,