Knowledge Bank

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," reads the inscription in the lobby of CIA headquarters in Langley. But how does one produce truth, what constitutes knowing, and who, exactly, is Ye? These questions preoccupied early theorists of "central intelligence," an idea that gave rise to an agency. This talk will examine the mid-century modernist ambition for a streamlined, rationalized flow of information that would remove the guesswork from foreign policy. The CIA is often seen as culminating an espionage tradition going back to Nathan Hale, but its intellectual origins have a closer kinship to Esperanto, IR theory, University Microfilms International, and other utopian schemes for comprehending a complex and violent world.