Evil Empire 25National Security Council, and Forrestal’s own new position of secretary
of defense, these years saw the growth of a national security bureaucracy
that was divorced from meaningful oversight and public accountability
for its actions, including myriad moral failures and calamities. A covert
anti-Soviet destabilization campaign in Eastern Europe, for example,
greenlit by Forrestal and Kennan, enlisted Ukrainian partisans who had
worked with the Nazis. This type of activity would become routine in
Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where Kennan derided respect for the
“delicate fiction of sovereignty” that undeserving, “unprepared peoples”
had been allowed to extend over the resources of the earth.
over the next quarter century, fewer than 400 individuals operated
the national security bureaucracy, with some individuals enjoying de-
cades of influence. That the top tier was dominated by white men who
were Ivy League–educated lawyers, bankers, and corporate executives
(often with ties to armament-related industries) lends irony to official
fearmongering about armed conspiracies mounted by small groups,
let alone the idea that the role of the United States was to defend free
choice against coercion imposed by nonrepresentative minorities. This
fact, perhaps more than any other, suggests that, as much as the Cold
War represented a competition between incompatible, if by no means
coeval or equally powerful systems of rule (i.e., communist and capital-
ist), it was marked by convergences too. The Soviet “empire of justice”
and the U.S. “empire of liberty” engaged in mimetic, cross-national
interventions, clandestine, counter-subversive maneuvers, and forms
of clientelism that were all dictated by elite, ideologically cohesive
national security bureaucracies immune from popular scrutiny and
democratic oversight.