The Spooks Next Door:How suburbia emerged alongside America’s covert foreign interventions.
Culture » November 20, 2013
The Spooks Next Door
How suburbia emerged alongside America’s covert foreign interventions.
BY Maggie Garb
In the early 1950s, Eleanor Dulles built a windowed, modernist house in McLean, Va. Dulles, a Harvard-trained economist who worked at the State Department was the sister of both a Secretary of State and a CIA director, and her home quickly became a cozy cocktail lounger where the Dulles brothers could down martinis and rye whiskey while planning American interventions in Guatemala, the Congo, Iran, Cuba and Vietnam, to name a few.
The house was not just a suburban bungalow; it was an example of the new architecture that suggested both the transparency and the privacy of suburban housing. It was also a lynchpin for a new community of Washington insiders growing in Northern Virgina, just across the border from D.C. Eleanor Dulles' residence there was one reason Allen Dulles determined in 1954 to build the new CIA headquarters in Langley, a wooded section of McLean along the Potomac River (and the former site of the Robert E. Lee family plantation). The Dulles Corridor, as the area would come to be known, ran between the CIA building, which opened in 1961, and the airport named for Allen's brother, John Foster Dulles. It had also become a kind of covert landscape linking the internalized world of suburban culture to the covert world of American imperial activities abroad.
In the years following World War II, America became a global empire, presenting itself as a beacon of democracy while engaging in covert warfare to overthrow despots and democrats around the globe. At the same time, white professionals and striving working-class families were fleeing urban neighborhoods, moving to newly built suburbs and creating a landscape of single-family houses on tidy yards. The neighborhoods surrounding Eleanor Dulles' home were double-edged worlds, with the hidden activities of thuggish spooks and unhappy nuclear families shadowed by popular images of contented white bourgeois domesticity.
That suburbia—or at least the suburbs of northern Virginia—emerged alongside America's covert foreign interventions is no coincidence, writes Andrew Friedman in Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia, an innovative study of post-war American foreign policy on the home front. The covert capital, the northern Virginian analogue to the overt capital in D.C. proper, produced the human and material capital that made for efficient, methodical, secretive and bloody operations abroad. The purity and ostensible simplicity of suburban family life, Friedman says, nurtured the violent activities of so many of McLean's residents. “The geography of empire,” he writes, “reproduced itself at home in architecture and spatial relations” just as the home front “incubated the empire.”
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15836/the_spooks_next_door/