Dissertation Defense: Margaret Dervan Hughes
Candidate: Margaret Dervan Hughes
Major: History
Advisor: Toshihiro Higuchi, Ph.D.
The Korean War: A Study of the Ideological Origins of the U.S. Intelligence Community
This dissertation examines the American intelligence failures during the Korean War through a lens of ideology. It argues that the U.S. Intelligence Community failed to abstract enemy intentions from ominous changes in North Korean military capabilities due to two complementary ideologies that impaired effective analysis. The first of these was an ideological consensus of a monolithic communist movement that was purportedly directed, coordinated, and controlled by the Soviet Union. The second was a belief that—in order to prevent a general war with the United States—the Soviet Union and its satellites would rely almost exclusively on psychological warfare to obtain its foreign policy ends. The study demonstrates that ideological consensus prevented the formulation of a more nuanced contextual understanding of rising nationalist ambitions in East Asia during the post-colonial age. Moreover, ideological consensus not only obscured the Intelligence Community’s understanding of enemy intentions, interests, and aspirations, but it also shaped its organizational culture and structure for decades.
This study contributes to the body of literature on strategic surprise by exploring the construction and dissemination of ideological consensus within the U.S. Intelligence Community over the course of first half of the 20th century. In underscores the impact of ideology on intelligence estimation and argues that ideological construction and organizational development were dialectical processes that must be examined congruently. The dissertation therefore examines the evolution of the U.S. Intelligence Community within the formation of the broader national security state, demonstrating that the bureaucratization of the U.S. Intelligence Community was entangled within the construction and dissemination of ideological consensus.
The study employs a “Trans-War” approach in order to provide greater insight into the longstanding international and domestic pressures faced by intelligence professionals in 1950. The Trans-War approach traces the interwar periods from the Spanish American War to the Cold War, highlighting the institutional continuities of formal and informal intelligence networks that were nurtured between the ruptures of global warfare. The study incorporates a biographical template that synthesizes the often conflicting and paradoxical motivations that guided individuals as they navigated the complex challenges of organizational formation.