Read the full transcript of David N. Gibbs’ interview on Greater Eurasia Podcast, August 17, 2026.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this interview, historian and University of Arizona professor David N. Gibbs joins host Glenn Diesen to explore how intelligence services, particularly the CIA, have historically and currently shaped academia and journalism. Drawing on Cold War-era revelations, Senate investigations, and modern examples, Gibbs examines the role of secret funding, undisclosed contracts, and media ties in aligning these institutions with state narratives and propaganda. The discussion highlights ethical concerns, suppressed independent analysis, and the broader consequences for public understanding of foreign policy and conflicts.

GLENN DIESEN: Welcome back. David Gibbs is currently a professor of history at the University of Arizona, and he joins us today to discuss how academia as well as journalism often becomes instruments of the state and also a reliable advocate for war. So thank you for coming back on the program.

DAVID N. GIBBS: Thank you for having me, Glenn.

GLENN DIESEN: Twenty-five years ago, you started a big debate about biases within academia. And your title was “Social Science as Propaganda.” I feel this isn’t just a question of academia these days. We recognize that academics as well as journalists align themselves very closely with government narratives. But I guess the problem goes much deeper than this. I was wondering if you could flesh out your argument perhaps.

DAVID N. GIBBS: Well, let me say that this is somewhat personal in the sense that I got my doctorate in 1989, not in history, but political science, at MIT. MIT’s political science department was closely connected to the Center for International Studies, which was founded, in a sense, by the Central Intelligence Agency to link MIT to the agency. And it continued to exist when I was there, and I was very fascinated by these extraordinary links between an academic institution, MIT, on the one hand, and the CIA on the other.

It did seem very questionable, because one of the complaints, and rightly so, against the Soviet Union — and again, this was during the Cold War, when I went to graduate school — was that there’s no differentiation between academia, which is not independent, and the government. It’s closely linked to government agencies. It’s an expression of government propaganda. It was true.

And supposedly, with differentiated free societies — we liked to call them back then “the free world” — academia was independent. Academics were supposed to be independent agents, not agents of government propaganda. But it seemed really problematic if one of the leading institutions in the country, MIT, is so closely tied to the Central Intelligence Agency.

So that got me very interested in the topic, and I began reading about it. One of the things that was very clear was that, certainly in the earlier period, in the ’50s and ’60s, one of the major funders of overseas research in the social sciences — not just political science, but the whole social sciences — was the CIA and military intelligence. Bruce Cumings at the University of Chicago said that it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that either you worked for the CIA, or, if you didn’t work for the CIA, you’d get a knock on the door from the FBI — which of course is very threatening in the early period of the Cold War.

So you had this sort of one-two punch, shall we say, that linked the academic fields, particularly at the prestige institutions, to the leading intelligence service of the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency. This posed many problems, as I would see it. One of them was secrecy. The CIA was created — one of the reasons it was created, in 1947 — was to create a super-secret agency, one that was much more secretive than the State Department or the regular military, to undertake ethically and legally questionable actions like overthrowing governments and engaging in assassination and so on. And the CIA was highly secretive, and academics who worked for the CIA had to do it in secret. Well, I can go into more detail on this, but do you want to ask me any questions? Do you want to interject with anything?

GLENN DIESEN: No, no, no, please go ahead on what you said. But I did want to ask, how are the different ways they intervene into academia as well as journalism? Because I find, well, the intelligence agencies began early on to get their influence into NGOs, for example. And NGOs were supposed to — well, I like the idea of NGOs, because you need to institutionalize and structure civil society in a way that allows the public to influence the democratic process besides just showing up for an election every four years. But there’s a great deal of power in this if you can manipulate civil society to do what you want. So, you know, the intelligence community went in there, but you also have NGOs, you have the think tanks. There’s a lot of areas where people think there’s independence where indeed there’s not.

But I thought it was interesting because, in my mind, the university was supposed to be the last bastion of independent thought, independent from the state. But it never has been. You disagree?

DAVID N. GIBBS: I disagree, yes.

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah.

DAVID N. GIBBS: Well, I’ll be very specific. What are the connections between the CIA and academia? The best record on this is a 1975 investigation by the US Senate under Senator Frank Church, the Church Committee, as it was called. They issued a huge number of reports. It was a serious investigation. It wasn’t a whitewash, at least not mostly. They touched lightly on this issue of academia — for some reason they did not go into that in detail.

One of the things they did go into, however, was secret consulting that many academics — I think the most prestigious academics, they went for the best, naturally, at the most prestigious institutions, why not — had contracts with the CIA.