Rainey and the Russians: Arctic archaeology, ‘Eskimology’ and Cold War cultural diplomacy

Abstract

This article recounts an untold chapter in the life of archaeologist Froelich Rainey, specifically his ambition to collaborate with Soviet scholars and deploy his personal networks to foster mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War. The picaresque and implausible life of Rainey, who entered wartime Vienna in the turret of a B-52 bomber and was a State Department consultant with CIA connections, frantic anti-communist and advisor to Henry Kissinger, reveals just what was at stake for research in the frozen north. Here, I uncover Rainey’s work on ice—from his archaeological explorations in Alaska and his vision for a network of Arctic archaeologists to his internationalist aspirations for world peace. Without doubt, Rainey was a fascinating character, but he also occupied a position from which a wide range of values can be excavated—about politics, security, race and global order in mid-century transitions.

Introduction

Framed as both scientific diplomacy and scientific internationalism in today’s terms, Froelich Rainey developed a number of ambitious and controversial initiatives in his role as Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Post-World War II scientific theories, political–military alliances and American adventurism were all brought together through Rainey’s archaeological programs. In what follows, I underscore the connections between diverse actors and activities, including museums, scientific agencies, private foundations and government offices, coupled with the military and intelligence community. It serves as a prime example of dual-use archaeology during the Cold War, at a time when academic researchers pursued exploratory agendas whilst seamlessly enmeshed in, and benefitting from, the industrial–military–academic partnerships that President Eisenhower dubbed the ‘iron triangle’.

Rainey proposed one of the earliest formal American–Soviet exchanges of archaeologists, the translation of archaeological findings from both sides of the Iron Curtain and an agreement to allow reciprocal fieldwork conducted by Russians and Americans in Alaska and Siberia. At a circumpolar conference he organized in 1958, Rainey succeeded in having multinational resolutions passed amongst Arctic nations. These efforts to mobilize Arctic archaeology dovetailed perfectly with American ambitions for East–West exchanges, exemplified by the 1958 Lacy–Zarubin agreement. I argue that the role of archaeological expertise in these exchanges has remained unexcavated, enmeshed as it was in concerns over territory, security, intelligence-gathering and civilizational pre-eminence. Studies of international cultural relations often elide the Cold War, considering that culture can speak only to soft power diplomacy rather than also to security and politics (Gould-Davies 2003, 196). Yet the Cold War was a ‘war of ideas’, and the superpowers deployed military, economic and cultural means beyond national borders to improve their power and position. Archaeology could also be instrumentalized, and Rainey envisaged academic exchanges as an antidote to world communism. He advised American powerbrokers and policymakers on such topics as well as others which extended far beyond his expertise, including US technical assistance in developing nations, the consequences of colonialism and decolonization for America, and world population.

To advance these scientific and diplomatic agendas, and largely driven by a ‘big picture’ vision for the discipline and his role within it, Rainey drew extensively upon his close personal contacts in government, military and diplomatic circles. He was combining the civilizational potentials of archaeology with the political and military adventurism of fieldwork abroad. At the close of World War II, Lt. Col. Rainey was stationed in Berlin as assistant to Robert Murphy, the man who masterminded the Allied invasion of North Africa. Later, Murphy served as an American ambassador, Deputy Under-Secretary for Political Affairs and adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. Like other powerful contacts for Rainey in the State Department and the CIA, these networks stemmed from wartime service. Murphy facilitated Rainey’s projects abroad and in turn was rewarded with information gleaned from the latter’s international research, travel, contacts and general observations. Links between Philadelphia and Washington were strong, especially where the Soviets were concerned. Rainey’s efforts to bridge archaeology and diplomacy were sometimes underwritten by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where Henry Kissinger was serving as the Director of Special Studies. The two men worked together on Soviet programs, debating policy and security issues at Rockefeller and at the Penn-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. Whilst seemingly cosy with America’s leading Cold War warriors, Rainey’s views rankled some, and he soon found himself on thin ice. Given the fractious Cold War setting, it is no wonder that Rainey’s Dartmouth colleague, anthropologist Elmer Harp, quipped that should these ‘plans work out I think there should one day be erected on the banks of the Neva a large bronze of you with arm outstretched toward the north and a fitting caption beneath, such as: “Come, comrades, and rejoice in the international brotherhood of arctic anthropology!”’. ¹

I can see Russia from my house …

Froelich Rainey, monuments man and master of public relations, is undoubtedly best known as Director of Penn Museum for some thirty years (1947–1977). During his tenure, Rainey (1992) launched dozens of foreign expeditions around the world, with hundreds of field seasons and archaeologists spread across the globe. Yet despite his flirtation with Italian archaeology (Meskell 2022) and brief missions to Thailand, Afghanistan and Guatemala, Rainey’s own expertise was in Arctic archaeology. He conducted years of fieldwork in Alaska, receiving his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1935. That same year, he joined the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as the school’s first anthropology professor (1935–1942). In contrast to the expansive field projects he administered abroad, he was both deeply familiar with, and committed to, Arctic sites, issues and researchers. That commitment resonated, I would argue, with his own frontier upbringing in Montana, spending time as a cowboy in the American West; and his later all-American trajectory as an explorer, soldier, Foreign Service officer, State Department consultant and museum director. That combined experience made him an unusual yet valuable patriotic asset in America’s Cold War cultural adventures, specifically in the sphere of scientific internationalism and diplomacy. In what follows, Froelich Rainey serves as a lens through which to reveal how academic organizations and scientific communities became entwined with governments’ international ambitions and foreign policy concerns (Legrand and Stone 2018, 393).

Rainey was a central figure in the development of Arctic archaeology (Bockstoce 1993), and whilst famous for his global expeditions and scientific partnerships (Meskell and LaPorte 2022), his most significant research was his early work in Alaska (Figure 1). Clark Wissler invited him to the American Museum of Natural History to collaborate in Alaska with Otto Geist (Geist and Rainey 1936), a German naturalist who had excavated a huge midden on St. Lawrence Island. In 1937, Rainey had his first brush with the Red Army, landing at Chukotka in Siberia, the first landing from American shores since shortly after the Russian Revolution (Rainey 1992, 57). That August, the Soviet pioneer of long-range flight, Sigizmund Levanevsky, had disappeared in his bomber over the Arctic Ocean. Penelope Rainey, who learned Russian to support her husband’s fieldwork, acted as translator for the Russian pilots stationed in Fairbanks who were searching for the ill-fated Levanevsky. Over those weeks, hosting Russians in their home, Rainey became convinced that lack of communication between the United States and the USSR constituted the real problem for foreign relations. That winter, Rainey and the Governor of Alaska contacted the US State Department and the Soviet Ambassador to propose a new scientific cooperation. It was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to Soviet exchanges and to his own brand of scientific internationalism and cultural diplomacy. Stalin’s Moscow show trials, however, put an end to any possible collaboration in the Bering Strait. Nevertheless, this did not stop Rainey from travelling to the USSR and working with the archaeologists at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was during those travels that Rainey came to believe that ‘dictatorial, regimental state socialism’ was the real problem—‘and the most brutal was the Soviet Union’ (Rainey 1992, 71).

Fig. 1 Froelich Rainey, Ebrulik Rock and dog team at Cape Thompson, Alaska, 1940. American Museum of Natural History Expedition to Point Hope, Alaska, 1939–1941. Courtesy of Penn Museum.

In 1938, at an international congress in Denmark, Rainey met archaeologist Helge Larsen. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, and the two established a Danish–American expedition to Point Hope, Alaska (Figure 2), a site discovered in the 1920s by the father of Eskimology, Knud Rasmussen (Rainey 1992, 62). Considered an offensive and outdated term today, ‘Eskimology’ referred to disciplines examining the languages, history, literature, folklore, culture and ethnology of (Inuit–Yupik–) Aleut peoples. Arctic archaeology was characterized by excellent preservation of organic materials owing to the cold, along with a rich ethnographic record that was used problematically as a living proxy for prehistoric peoples (Friesen and Mason 2016). In 1939, Larsen and Rainey, joined by J. Louis Giddings, discovered Ipiutak, one of the largest archaeological sites in the Arctic (Rainey 1941). Rainey rashly boasted that its population surpassed that of modern-day Fairbanks (Rainey 1942, 391). Following in the footsteps of anthropologist Franz Boaz, with the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902), and physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, Rainey—along with a great many Danes, Canadians and Americans who had been working on the question for two generations—sought evidence that America was originally settled from Asia via the Bering Strait (see Larsen 1961). His view that the origins of ‘Eskimo culture’ were in the Central Siberian Arctic was to dominate the field of American Arctic/North Pacific research for several decades (Krupnik 1998, 205). At that time, theories in the West were very much at variance with those advanced by Russian archaeologists (Trigger 1989). Resolving these issues would require research, reciprocity and new arenas of scientific cooperation:

After more than twenty years of work in the Arctic I am convinced that these basic problems cannot be solved unless westerners actually work in Siberia with the new generation of Russian scientists and unless Russians are actually shown in the American Arctic what these very ancient sites look like. Moreover, the Russian physical anthropologists working on living races have somewhat different system of measurement than those of us in the west and they will never solve their problems of racial origins unless they measure American natives in their own system. ²

Fig. 2 Froelich Rainey and Helge Larsen at Point Hope, Alaska, 1941. American Museum of Natural History Expedition to Point Hope, Alaska, 1939–1941. Courtesy of Penn Museum.

Archaeology is particularly amenable to the idea of the living laboratory and, by definition, susceptible to origin stories. Given the positivist leanings of American archaeology from the 1950s onwards, it is no surprise that the peopling of the Americas became a preoccupation. Research into origins tied neatly to other ideas of contact and ethnogenesis, and more troublingly to race science, especially involving physiognomy, adaptation and the physical characteristics of indigenous peoples, which is now rightly framed as a legacy of settler colonialism (Lanzarotta 2019, 2020; see also Lyons 2016). The results of cold science on indigenous bodies would later come to have defence and military implications for the United States. Rainey’s colleague at Penn, physical anthropologist and CIA consultant, Carleton Coon (Price 2008, 255), was preparing his volume The Origin of Races (1962). Coon requested comparison photographs of ‘faces or whole bodies of different ethnic types in the USSR’. ³ Rainey too was interested in human remains from the Old Bering Sea, arguing that the culture was more typically Eskimo than Ipiutak and that Ipiutak might be a transplant from Siberia. He believed that, if he could understand Arctic physical typologies, on one hand, and the extent of their relationship with the peoples of more southern regions, on the other, he might resolve the central problem of Arctic anthropology, namely ethnogenesis. This quest captivated scientists both east and west of the Bering Strait.

Sailing along the Seward Peninsula in Alaska in June 1950 with news of the Korean war and fears about Russian responses, Rainey wrote about how ‘the Iron Curtain falls between the two small Diomede Islands lying in the center of the Strait, one Soviet, one U.S.’ (Rainey 1951, 22). At that moment in the Bering Strait, Rainey continued, the Arctic was a highly strategic area, giving rise to long reflections on military strategy and the engrained philosophy of defence that permeated American society. Anxious that the Arctic might become a battleground between East and West, the United States strategically launched research programs during the Cold War, including those supported by the Arctic Institute of North America (Doel et al. 2014, 60). Air travel had brought an end to Arctic isolation. Rainey had travelled by air, dog team, river skiff and on foot over the larger part of Continental Alaska. In contrast, he argued, military strategists had not flown or walked over the ‘wastes’ of Siberia and Alaska, where a small body of water separates the two great land masses and Soviet and American frontiers almost touch. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote, the United States, Canada, and Greenland joined in defence to build the vast network of Arctic air bases, the Alaska Highway and the oil well–pipeline–refinery enterprise known as the Canal Project. There were also the lucrative uranium mines in northwest Canada. Across the water, settlement of the Siberian Arctic was a government-financed project backed by enormous propaganda, religious fervour and millions of political prisoners (Rainey 1951, 25). Rainey had been told about the horrors of the Siberian camps during his visit in 1938. But there were also the possibilities of exploiting vast mineral, coal, steel and oil reserves in Siberia. Rainey wrote with a great sense of foreboding about the Arctic; there was something ominous about this land of mystery, that fear of the unknown and potential attack that he shared with his ‘Eskimo friends’. The Iron Curtain at the Bering Strait, he claimed, was as real as the one in Central Europe (Rainey 1951, 28).

During the Cold War, scientific discovery and technological innovation became central to the American political project, reflective of the economic, political and military strength of the modern post-war state. Scientific research was tethered to notions of American leadership and exceptionalism. Rainey was part of that story, developing scientific knowledge through participation in various practices: archaeological, educational, governmental and policy-oriented (Krige 2019, 2). An early adherent of scientific internationalism in the discipline of archaeology, he believed that a free flow of ideas and people would help forge a better, more peaceful world. Key to this was Rainey’s original idea of a Soviet scholar exchange in 1938, which ultimately took some twenty years to materialize. His vision for Arctic archaeology was a classic world-making, universalizing project of shared understandings, research, museum exchanges and collaborative archaeological field projects (Figure 3). He proposed a uniform lexicon of archaeological terms, taxonomies and even bodily measurements of human remains across the Arctic. This would necessarily entail sharing data and translating key texts from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Whilst there have been studies of scholarly exchanges and expeditions later in the Cold War (Konopatsky, Kuzmin and Bland 2017; see also Kirpichnikov, Uino and Nosov 2016), I would suggest that the early initiatives that Rainey pioneered remain relatively unknown; and, although Froelich Rainey may appear an academic outlier, his ambitious plans and activities offer a window into broader systems of Cold War knowledge and power. Moreover, archaeology as a discipline has not been given due attention in the sphere of Cold War diplomacy (Meskell 2020, 2022; Luke 2019; Luke and Kersel 2013; Luke and Meskell 2020). Yet archaeology’s very operations as an international field science make it particularly amenable to the arenas of international cooperation, foreign relations, espionage and diplomacy. Made famous by the quintessential figure of T.E. Lawrence, archaeologists were often politically connected, well-educated and well-placed experts working in locations around the world that were strategically valued. Archaeological reconnaissance and fieldwork proved the ideal cover.

Fig. 3 Onion Portage, Alaska, 1960s. ‘Coffee break at the dig’. Froelich Rainey and crew. Left to right: Clifford Hickey, Froelich Rainey, Russ Giddings, Bruce Lutz, Nelson Breist and Douglas Anderson. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

Arctic ambition

World War II was a turning point for Rainey, in both his wartime exploits and his military and government appointments that afforded him vital connections for his Arctic ambitions. Rainey advanced across Western Europe and was one of the first Americans to reach Vienna, seated in the turret of a B-52 bomber, watching for flak bursts from Soviet anti-aircraft guns on the approach into the city. Later, he landed at a Copenhagen airfield still controlled by the Luftwaffe, then ‘liberated’ the Danish National Museum, meeting his friend and colleague, the Danish archaeologist Kaj Birket-Smith (Bockstoce 1993, 89). Between 1944 and 1947, Rainey served in the Foreign Service, assigned to Robert Murphy’s staff in Berlin for the planned allied Control Commission for Occupied Germany. As Senior Economic Analyst, Office of the Political Adviser on German Affairs, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, he produced reports, developed policy and was featured in the 1945 Potsdam Conference. ⁴ He was the US representative to the International Rhine Commission in 1949 and consulted for the State Department between 1948 and 1952.

After returning to academia, Rainey continued his international diplomatic work, serving as Chairman of the Committee on International Relations in Anthropology (1951–1956), President of the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (1956) and a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (1954–1970). Throughout his wartime service and post-war activities, Rainey’s commitments can be encapsulated by the strategic definition of science diplomacy: (1) science in diplomacy employs scientific evidence and expertise to inform foreign policy, (2) diplomacy for science encourages diplomatic activities that foster international academic collaborations and (3) science for diplomacy mobilizes international science collaborations to influence the relations between states (Flink 2020, 364; see also Turchetti et al. 2020).

The late 1950s, when Rainey was at the height of his powers, were particularly key years not only for American–Soviet relations but specifically for the military, political and strategic significance of the Arctic. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 helped transform the Cold War into a total war, ushering in a new era of technological fervour (Wang 2008, 3). Nuclear testing in the Pacific (Hirshberg 2022), Alaska (Kohlhoff 2011) and the proximity to Russia—where increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, particularly guided missiles, could be deployed, literally flying over the top of the world to reach American targets—all instilled a sense of urgency. American anxieties further fuelled the need for reliable communications and research into high atmospheric conditions, geomagnetic variations, polar ice sheets and the topography of the sea floor (Doel et al. 2014). This resulted in an expanding network of Arctic field stations, weather stations, military bases and radar posts comprising the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line monitoring missile risk. Arctic research and international collaboration became paramount, as did the institutes, networks and field projects that acted as instruments of geopolitical activity (van der Watt, Roberts and Lajus 2019, 198). Rainey’s specific Alaskan expertise, coupled with his wartime and diplomatic credentials, combined to make this unlikely academic an important asset.

In 1957, the Soviet Academy of Sciences invited Rainey to lecture in Moscow. He quickly informed his old wartime colleague, Robert Murphy, now Undersecretary of State, of the invitation. Here was another hint of promise, Rainey confided, since ‘I know from personal friends in the Academy that the real point of this is to discuss a plan for Soviet–American research in the Arctic precisely the same thing I proposed in Moscow nineteen years ago’. ⁵ Rainey subsequently requested a meeting in Washington and advice on the ‘tack’ he should take. Later that year, academic exchanges between Russian and American archaeologists began. George Debetz, from the Russian Academy of Sciences, arrived at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to study the skeletal collections from Point Hope. In return, Samuel Noah Kramer, a Sumerologist from Penn Museum, shipped off to Leningrad to examine clay tablets from the Hermitage Museum. Security concerns remained paramount. Harry Shapiro, Curator of Physical Anthropology at the AMNH, was soon contacted by the State Department to ‘undertake sponsorship’, which ‘meant keeping tabs on Debetz’ movements and informing Washington every time he leaves the city’. Shapiro complained bitterly that such ‘surveillance would be very difficult, if not impossible, besides being rather distasteful’. ⁶ Rather than engender trust, the sense of suspicion and fear of espionage often worsened during such exchanges (Krasnyak 2020, 401; see also Wolfe 2018; Doel 2015). The CIA and KGB attempted to keep academics, and indeed all academic contact, under intelligence control, whilst other intelligence agents attempted to recruit exchange scholars.

Rainey was ever conscious that his attempts at international cooperation did not cause any ill feeling with his Russian friends. Two years later, Rainey’s colleague, Aleksei Okladnikov, regretted that Russian funds could not cover an exchange, bemoaning the lost opportunity. Indeed, it was an ambitious program for its time, with Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power and ideological optimism about world communism, the long shadow of McCarthyism and disquiet after the Soviet launch of Sputnik all adding to the undercurrent of American anxieties. There were other setbacks. The first to fail was Rainey’s initiative for translation of key Russian scientific information into English. He applied to the National Science Foundation in 1957 for some US $42,000, but the reviewers were unconvinced that ‘research workers would be comfortable dealing with oral material’. ⁷ Though disappointed, Rainey reiterated to the Director of the NSF, Alan Waterman, that nonetheless there was a great urgency to make known in the United States what was happening in Russia. Researchers as well as books must cross the Iron Curtain.

Yet Rainey’s Arctic ambition proved prescient, and on 27 January 1958, ‘The Soviet–American executive agreement on cultural, educational and scientific exchanges’ was signed by Ambassador William Lacy and a Soviet delegation headed by Ambassador Georgy Zarubin. The agreement was designed to facilitate exchanges between the two superpowers and remained uninterrupted until the end of the Cold War (Krasnyak 2020). A confidential document from the newly formed East–West Contracts Office of the State Department confirmed that the US–Soviet agreement provided for

a large number of technical, scientific, and cultural exchanges, including exchange of radio and television broadcasts. The agreement should be soberly portrayed as a mutually advantageous arrangement, reached after long and detailed diplomatic negotiation. In general, US initiative should be emphasized. The agreement may be portrayed as evidence of the possibility of constructive action in certain fields, implicitly bringing out the point that this is most likely to be achieved by unhurried, detailed negotiation through diplomatic channels. ⁸

The East–West Contracts office considered that the agreement demonstrated the Soviet desire for industrial exchanges to access American know-how. Indeed, most Soviet visitors to the United States came from scientific disciplines, whereas those to Russia were primarily from the social sciences and humanities. Soviet diplomacy, furthermore, actively encouraged cooperation with its ideological adversaries (Gould-Davies 2003). The State Department also acknowledged that the ‘principal US objectives were to achieve a significant lowering of the traditional Soviet barriers to the free flow of information, and also, through visits of delegations to the USSR, to acquire knowledge of that country’. ⁹ There were significant ‘benefits to the Free World of opening up the Soviet Union to outside influences’ so that ‘the agreement may be portrayed as evidence of the possibility of constructive action in certain fields’. ¹⁰ Yet Rainey’s plans for co-operation immediately caught the attention of the CIA, who intercepted and deleted part of Rainey’s statement of intent, describing theories about the indigenous origins of the Eskimo people in Siberia. ¹¹ The suggestion that America’s indigenous population had Russian origins likely rankled vigilant American screeners at the agency. Again, Rainey was on thin ice.

Those administering the Program of Exchange of Information and Persons with the Soviet Bloc stated that regarding ‘the people we sent to the USSR, we, of course, select our representatives very carefully for this exchange program, in order not to send people who might be unduly influenced by Soviet propaganda’. ¹² A dispatch from the American embassy in Russia affirmed that ‘the delegations’ visits have been very successful from both an intelligence and public relations point of view’. ¹³ High-profile tours featuring artists, musicians and sports stars were all part of the cultural Cold War. For example, American authorities sent the musical My Fair Lady to Moscow plus the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, whilst the Soviets sent the Bolshoi Ballet (Saunders 2013; Wilford 2009). On the Soviet side, their State Security officials (KGB) made use of international exchanges for their disinformation programs, for logistical support and to enhance their reservoir of human resources for recruitment (Gould-Davies 2003, 208). In theory, East–West exchanges were intended to build trust through interpersonal relationships between scientists of one country and their foreign colleagues. This early form of science diplomacy was intended to enhance the prospects for peace, considering an increased level of Soviet faith in US trustworthiness in the late 1950s (Krasnyak 2020, 400).

The timing of the East–West Contracts Office was perfect for Rainey, and he seized upon the opportunity not only for the furtherance of Arctic archaeology but also to contribute to American political agendas abroad through cultural diplomatic channels. Writing directly to Ambassador Lacy, he shared his proposal to the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow regarding the scholar exchange between the United States and the USSR. ¹⁴ In 1956, Rainey had been President of the International Congress of Anthropologists, held in Philadelphia, where he hosted a Soviet delegation. There he claimed that Russian anthropologists proposed that the time was ripe for combined Soviet and American research in Alaska and Siberia. ¹⁵ Writing to Admiral L.O. Colbert of the Arctic Institute, he indicated that combined work in Siberia was now possible since the ‘Russians claim that the Concentration Camps, in Northeastern Siberia, have been liquidated’. ¹⁶ The East–West Contracts Office mediated exactly how Rainey would present the ‘reciprocal exchange of persons between Siberia and Alaska’. ¹⁷ The Contracts Office brokered logistical support and Rainey requested assistance from the Defence Department, the Coast Guard or other paramilitary organizations operating in the Far North. Any travel in the far north of Canada would be carried out through the Arctic Institute and by means of military aircraft.

A diplomatic impasse soon arose: the State Department charged Rainey with securing a first invitation from the Russians, whilst the Russians also tasked Rainey with making the first overture. Each country wanted to save face and to preclude the political embarrassment of refusal. The Danes were selected to be the neutral party, or proxy, making the invitations to both sides, plus other circumpolar nations. ¹⁸ For each of the Arctic nations, there were multiple economic, military, political and strategic factors that motivated archaeological activities and scientific programs. Here, Rainey was effectively instrumentalizing archaeology in three strategic spheres: science in diplomacy, diplomacy for science and science for diplomacy.

External assistance was also needed to finance archaeological cooperation across the Iron Curtain, and Rainey appealed to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Henry Kissinger directed its Special Studies unit, a role that propelled him from political science professor to his subsequent career in matters of state and national security. Kissinger was looking for individuals recognized as leaders in their fields who could supply thought-provoking papers to develop the conceptual framework on which US policy might be based (Andrew 1998). Rainey proved a suitable candidate for Kissinger’s think tank not only because of his professional standing but specifically because of the opportunities afforded by his international fieldwork and Russian connections. Rainey underlined the political gains in his Arctic enterprise for America in the Cold War context: ‘the new privileged class, the engineers, scientists, managers, professors and other educated people who are essential to run the complex, industrial, new Russia are now bringing very great pressure upon the Communist Government to relax the Iron Curtain and to make contact with the West…’ in one ‘specific trial balloon in one of the hottest areas, from the standpoint of military strategy’. ¹⁹ Rainey undoubtedly shared the sentiment of Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller to ‘pull peoples behind the Iron Curtain to encourage them to “break away from Sino-Soviet Communist domination” and join an international system directed by the United States’. ²⁰

Coming in from the cold

In May 1958, Rainey successfully held his landmark conference in Copenhagen, bringing together Arctic experts, some 15 men from Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada and Denmark. In attendance for America were Henry Collins, J. Louis Giddings, Elmer Harp, Ivar Skarländ, and Rainey, whilst George Debetz, Maxim Levin, Aleksei Okladnikov and Sergey Tolstov represented the USSR (Levin and Okladnikov 1950). The conference was pitched as evidence of the peaceful co-operation between East and West. The archaeologists were there to discuss potential field work in Siberia and the American Arctic, thus traversing the Iron Curtain. Rainey believed that the US Government would happily trade American researchers in Siberia for Russians in Alaska. Reporting back to the State Department, he described his efforts with Russian anthropologists ‘to work out combined research in Alaska and Siberia and this conference was called to get certain international resolutions which could be useful to the Russians and ourselves. All four of the Russians, at the meeting, were old friends’, he continued, but the Russian government had blocked any invitation of Americans to north-eastern Siberia because of tensions between the United States and the USSR in the Security Council concerning the Arctic. Rainey was undaunted: he ‘worked out privately with the Russians a series of resolutions which they presented, so that they could be transmitted through the Danish Foreign Office to the Russian Government’. ²¹ As host, Dr. Kaj Birket-Smith from the Danish National Museum, ventured that ‘Eskimology’ could teach us all about the necessity of a close and peaceful co-operation between East and West.

Using Rainey’s considerable diplomatic skills and the Danes as proxies, the conference agenda was designed around future exchanges of persons, publications and collections regarding Arctic research across Russia, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada and the United States. The Soviet Arctic had, till then, been closed to Western researchers for some thirty years. By the mid-1950s, Soviet archaeologists had been captivated by the search for ethnic origins, and the number of field expeditions had grown to 500 (Klejn 2017, 78). Soviet archaeologists were deeply committed to defending the antiquity of their people and their inhabitation of present-day territories since time immemorial. Thus, an array of different ancient cultures, including those in Siberia, were considered stages in Russia’s cultural development and henceforth constituted an historical right. Constructing indigenous histories could serve to legitimize the organization of Siberian indigenous groups, positioning them on the Marxist path of development (see Frachetti 2011) and legitimizing Soviet modernization programs and broader social-engineering efforts. Archaeology and material culture can be conveniently co-opted into claims to origins, lineage and territory.

For the American archaeologists, even travelling to the Arctic conference revealed the underlying machinations of the military–industrial–academic complex. Admiral Colbert promised some US $3,000 or equivalent in military transport to get the American archaeologists plus one Canadian to the conference. ²² However, each participant had to first either have a security clearance or pass a national agency clearance check and submit fingerprints, a security questionnaire and a certificate of non-affiliation with ‘certain organizations’. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund supplied US $5,000 to cover the expenses of the scientists, but only those from North America. In correspondence with the Fund, Rainey hinted that the primary objective of the conference was to make detailed recommendations to the governments of Arctic nations about future programs, rather than simply to scholars, especially in light of the dramatic changes within the Russian system since 1956 and recent US–USSR agreements. Rainey also grasped the political import of the conference and considered that the ‘whole maneuver was peculiarly interesting’ because an exchange would give ‘a glimpse of a what is now happening in Russia’. ²³ Rainey asserted that the Russians were more concerned with internal developments than external threats and that the regime was liberalizing. Such opportunities, meetings and exchanges offered a channel between the United States and the USSR to move their governments towards a peaceful ending of the Cold War (Krasnyak 2020, 406), something that would take another three decades to achieve.

At the Circumpolar Conference, national representatives agreed upon 20 resolutions that reflected their desires for access to information, exchanges and new fieldwork opportunities. Rainey shared that information with Samuel Reed at the CIA and Lawrence Mitchell in the State Department. The resolutions included establishing an international committee for the anthropological, archaeological and ethnological study of the Arctic; scientific and museum exchanges; unification of terminology and chronology; excavations on both sides of Bering Strait and efforts to ‘correlate racial, linguistic and cultural facts in the study of ethnogenesis’. ²⁴ While aspiring to a one-world archaeology model of shared knowledge and networks, American archaeologists were, albeit indirectly, condoning insidious biomedical studies that had devastating effects on indigenous peoples and positioned Arctic territory as a testing ground and model for the ‘Third World’, instrumentalizing it as both resource and a laboratory (Lanzarotta 2019; see also Radin 2017).

Scientific cooperation and diplomacy were purposefully being deployed as part of bilateral relations, primarily in the furtherance of national interests (Kaltofen and Acuto 2018, 6). For example, after Copenhagen, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Garry Norton wanted ‘to exchange ideas with [Rainey] on these matters and kindred subjects. We need more people like your good self to pry up the lid and give us a whiff of what’s brewing’. ²⁵ Norton and Rainey had been colleagues in the State Department, and Norton stressed that the presence of missile bases in northeast Siberia would preclude American archaeological expeditions. Rainey concurred that the ‘sticky problem’ of Russian invitations for Westerners to Siberia remained, despite all his back-stage negotiations. He was advised to consult with Vladimir Petrov, the famous Soviet political prisoner (and survivor of the Siberian gulag in Kolyma) turned Yale academic. Robert Murphy had also been kept informed of the conference and Rainey’s assessment of the Soviet situation. Officials in the State Department agreed that he should wait to see if there was any reaction from the Russians, and if not forthcoming, they could jointly determine what steps to take to implement the resolutions. Rainey’s expertise and experience was feeding back directly into American intelligence at the highest levels while planning his archaeological expeditions, exchanges and conferences.

The international gathering of Arctic representatives in Copenhagen revealed more than just a willingness to cooperate. It afforded grander opportunities. Rainey had invited Rockefeller’s Montgomery Bradley, since the organization ‘should feel the pulse of the new relations with Russia, just as a little antidote to Henry Kissinger’s theories. Henry is one of our Foreign Policy Institute group, but is quite unimpressed with my theory that he is out of date’. ²⁶ He reported back to Bradley that the meeting was congenial and the Soviets were relaxed and cooperative, but complained that their complex bureaucracy disempowered the position of Soviet scientists. The latter, like their American counterparts, were eager for these reciprocal research relationships, especially on foreign soil. ²⁷ Significantly, Rockefeller did not ‘want any receipts or bills and they have forgotten all about my conversations with them. Officially the question has never been raised. Hence, everything is on my conscience and I am Irish, so I think we can both stop worrying. Thank God this is not the Government’. ²⁸ Foundations such as Rockefeller exerted considerable power during the Cold War to deflect any movement towards socialism at home or abroad. Nelson Rockefeller, for instance, served as American Vice President (1974–1977). The new millionaires of robber baron infamy viewed foundations as a way to exercise considerable social control through philanthropy (Roelofs 2015). Moreover, it is well documented how the CIA used foundations as conduits for their international operations (Parmar 2012). The private foundations that sponsored anthropology during this period often had close ties to military and intelligence agencies; and Rainey regularly worked with and received funds from the three most powerful—Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller—which were hand-in-glove with the State Department. Academics and agencies were both planning and developing research that collapsed the needs of scholarship and those of the state (Price 2011, 349).

Archaeology versus the nuclear deterrent

Perhaps the most remarkable and unlikely diplomatic setting Froelich Rainey found himself in was back in Philadelphia. As Penn Museum Director and an international archaeologist, he seamlessly began advising more formally on national policy and international relations. Since the 1940s, Rainey had been a member of the Philadelphia Committee on Foreign Relations and later the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). The latter, a kind of gentleman’s club, discussed many high-level topics of interest to Rainey and pertinent to his experience and expertise, from German industry in the Ruhr and the distribution of Marshall Funds in Europe to the peaceful use of atomic energy (Meskell 2022; Rainey 1963, 1966). In 1951, he penned ‘The Coming American Offensive’ and shared it with FPRI. In it he warned against America’s defensive philosophy, its imputed role as the defender of the free world and the looming threat of nuclear war. World communism was the principal enemy; and what was needed was a resistance movement behind the Iron Curtain and a new diplomatic strategy—an arena in which the Russians happen to excel. Rainey argued that the ‘U. S. Government has compounded national defense, government philanthropy, international trade, cold-war tactics, and political propaganda into a theory of foreign policy which does not serve the national interest and, sometimes, increases the very antagonisms it purports to alleviate’. ²⁹ America had placed its faith in technology and money, and guaranteed its national security through advanced weaponry. This resulted in another study on protracted warfare for the FPRI. However improbable it may seem that an archaeologist was engaged in these strategic discussions, Rainey’s political interventions and policy recommendations fed back into the Department of State and the White House.

The State Department considered the archaeologist a reliable source and sent him on a year-long fact-finding mission across the globe. He travelled ‘to India and southeast Asia with Colonel Kintner and Robert Strausz-Hupe’. ³⁰ To do so, Rainey needed to renew his security clearance. William R. Kintner, a decorated soldier with a Ph.D. on the Soviet Communist Party, was employed by the Office of International Security, Department of Defense. Strausz-Hupé was FPRI’s founder, a political scientist at Penn, and a government advisor on war and foreign policy. That journey resulted in a report on US foreign aid in the so-called under-developed regions of North Africa, the Near East, and South and Southeast Asia. Critical of the American programs, Rainey citied major infrastructural projects that benefitted American contractors and private firms, rather than local economies. Officials in the countries he visited regarded US aid as noble and generous, but ultimately naive. Instead, American aid had to ‘reach down to the masses so that there will be less danger of communism, and it must win friends for the west in the struggle with the Communist bloc. This is precisely what it did not do’. ³¹ As a result, the United States was becoming unpopular and was perpetuating new forms of colonialism; nations were turning to Russia as an alternative. In many ways, Rainey was an early critic of technical assistance schemes, the onslaught of foreign intervention and technology employed in modernization projects that archaeologists and others have documented (Mitchell 2002; Meskell 2018; Luke and Meskell 2020; Meskell and Luke 2021). Such observations only galvanized his views on cultural diplomacy, academic exchange and the value of scholarly initiatives. Agencies such as Rockefeller and Ford were more effective than the government in advancing international relations through education.

Writing from Istanbul, Rainey reported the astonishing changes he witnessed upon returning to Russia after twenty years: industrialization, urbanization, construction, skyscrapers, traffic, consumer goods and post-war reconstruction impressed him. Social and political changes were also profound, as were feelings of national pride and liberation. Gone was ‘that peculiar small, dark, neurotic, intellectual, party member who was always at the elbow of the Russians’. ³² He wanted to shift the perception of the ‘Russian menace’ that infused American debates. Unsurprisingly, his views on Russia were frequently rebuffed by the likes of political heavyweights such as Robert Strausz-Hupé and Henry Kissinger. What remains striking, however, is that, despite the fact that Rainey’s views (not to mention qualifications) were not aligned with Kissinger’s, the latter continued to solicit his opinions.

Whilst directing the Special Studies unit for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Kissinger had solicited from Rainey a policy paper about colonialism on ‘just what constitutes a nation; how nationalism defines itself; and what role the United States can play in the political and economic development of emerging peoples’. ³³ Kissinger was displeased and asked for a rewrite. He pushed Rainey to predict the problems anti-colonialism might pose for the United States. How might this impact trade and international organization? It may seem puzzling that Kissinger sought answers from the archaeologist, but it underscores the level of embedded access and the circuits of power and knowledge that Rainey commanded. Nevertheless, Rainey struggled to make the shift from anthropological perspectives to future political predictions. Still dissatisfied, Kissinger mused that it would be ‘illuminating to speculate on the possibility that the US, like Athens, might convert its Delian League into something more closely approaching an impirium’. ³⁴ Rainey attempted another revision, but admitted he was running out of ideas and ‘going rather stale on this colonial problem’. ³⁵ As he confided to a State Department friend, ‘I suppose I have no business messing around with Foreign Affairs.’ ³⁶

Scientific internationalism and diplomacy came together once more in 1959 when Rainey was an energetic participant in the National Science Planning Board for the International Science Exposition in Seattle in 1961. He confessed to Russian colleagues that, since he had talked so much, they had appointed him Chairman. In those meetings, Rainey insisted that America could not explain science to the public on a purely national basis. Rather, it must be international, otherwise the United States might find itself in a very embarrassing position. Rainey wrote to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, urging them to cooperate in the planning phase. Now more than ever, it was vital to expand cultural cooperation with Russia. These efforts further coincided with the World’s Fair in New York, where Rainey hoped his colleague Maxim Levin, from the Institute of Ethnography, could participate: ‘I hope you can get involved in the Man exhibition so that we can get you over here for the Fair in 1961’. ³⁷ Russian participation was paramount not only because of the Arctic but also owing to Soviet technological sophistication. There was the ‘World of Man in which many different folk cultures are represented and then also the Man section in the Science Division where we hope to show how man’s increasing utilization of energy through the ages has altered human ideas and human organisation. This will tie into the World of Tomorrow and the Nuclear Age’. ³⁸ Thus, heritage and culture would sit alongside atomic advancements, something Rainey had no difficulty in reconciling (Meskell 2022). He remained ‘determined to have Russian collaboration in this Exposition. It would seem rather silly to do such a Science Show without the Russians’. ³⁹ At the World’s Fair in 1939, the Soviet Pavilion was firmly future-focused and eschewed any reference to Russia’s past and cultural heritage, but that all changed in the post-Stalin era. Pre-Soviet cultural and artistic heritage now assumed greater visibility, all in the service of foreign policy (Gould-Davies 2003).

World’s fairs, science expositions, museum exhibits and archaeological missions could all harness the power of propaganda and the media, Rainey argued, but had previously been overlooked. The US government could utilize training programs, technological institutes, cultural programs and philanthropic agencies such as Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie, which Rainey deemed more effective at correcting Marxist stereotypes and instilling American values. Writing to Robert Murphy, he enquired:

If there is any way you can think I can be of assistance through the Department of State as a private citizen I shall be very happy to contribute whatever service I can… I am sure that you know how conservative I am politically and that I have never been a soft touch for Russian propaganda or for compromise. It just seems to me that we now have a wonderful opportunity with the relaxation taking place in Russia and I’m afraid that there are not so very many of us in the US who realize the opportunity. ⁴⁰

It must be remembered that there was an intense American dislike of the Russians during the 1950s (Smith 1983). Having Russian friends could prove parlous, so Rainey’s personal network and attachments were conspicuous. His offer piqued Murphy’s interest, and he responded swiftly:

Ambassador Lacy and his staff are much interested in the news that you have asked the Soviet Academy of Sciences to cooperate…Properly handled, Soviet participation in the International Science Exposition could afford the United States an excellent opportunity to bring a message to the Soviet people through an American exhibit at some place in the Soviet Union. ⁴¹

Rainey, with his particular commitment to scientific internationalism, proved an effective conduit for American government interests regarding Soviet institutions, and academic and cultural initiatives offered non-threatening venues for superpower diplomacy. At one point, the State Department had considered inviting 10,000 Russian students to study at American universities, yet the possibilities and potentials were outweighed by security risks and concerns over indoctrination. The total Cold War had dawned, where science, technology, education and culture ranked with military and economic strengths as vital forces (Wang 2008, 13).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rainey and his State Department contacts were increasingly pursuing cultural options, from field research to museum exhibits, as avenues for mutual benefit. Dealing with the Soviet and East European Office at the Institute of International Education, Rainey expounded upon the ‘very great public interest in museums in Russia’, suggesting ‘that an exchange in this field would have no political overtones, and should be a most acceptable way of cultural exchange … The three things which occurred to me are new education techniques, exhibition techniques and a direct exchange of exhibitions, which could be worked out in exchange of scholars’. ⁴² Officials at the Soviet and East European Office agreed that ‘museology, conservation, restoration, and art history are fields in which an exchange of experts might benefit both countries without at the same time involving elements of propaganda that often impede exchanges in the creative arts’. ⁴³ Rainey attempted to use his personal contacts, including Boris Piotrovsky, the Director of the Hermitage Museum, to secure gold artefacts from that museum for an American tour. The Soviets had previously turned down such an appeal, but Scythian gold remained high on the agenda, finally leaving Russia in 1970 and again in 1979.

Cultural detente? Concluding thoughts

In tracing Rainey’s intellectual itinerary across the archives, what I uncovered had less to do with archaeological discoveries and methods in Arctic archaeology and more to do with advancing international diplomacy, knowledge-sharing, trust and mutual understanding across the ice. Archaeology was effectively instrumentalized in the Cold War theatre, where the trappings of science rather than the content took a backseat to the interpersonal bonds, wartime networks and exhibitionary complex that staged and fortified international relations. Whilst much attention has focused upon how the intellectual content of science was ‘served’ by Cold War politics, less has detailed how diplomatic practices and political goals were canalized into scientific fieldwork.

The Arctic was a critical Cold War staging ground, and Rainey was a skilled Cold War operator who persuaded his colleagues from academia, government, security and philanthropy that national goals could be achieved through archaeology and science. Scientific knowledge could potentially propel American agendas, but, more importantly, national goals could be realized and enacted through scientific connections, conferences, field sites, exchanges and exhibitions. Whilst shared archaeological findings across Arctic nations were salient, from origins and migrations to the racial technics of physical anthropology, the real proving ground was the exchange of scholars and research, the Cold War collegiality that might fulfil the dream of world peace. Rainey was a master at cutting the ice. Brokering that peace through science and archaeology across the Iron Curtain at a time of heightened nuclear threat was somewhat ironic for Rainey, who had promoted atomic applications in archaeology and sought alliances with the Atomic Energy Commission (Meskell 2022). Such paradoxes characterized Rainey’s time as Director of Penn Museum: he capitalized upon post-war scientific developments and excelled in industrial–military–academic partnerships.

Archaeological knowledge mattered and, no matter how incongruous, Rainey’s expertise was solicited from Henry Kissinger and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to the State Department and CIA, to influential think tanks such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His efforts to galvanize Arctic archaeology intercalated with American ambitions for East–West exchanges that were further entangled with territory, security, intelligence-gathering and civilizational pre-eminence. Furthermore, the archaeological field site served as a testing ground where innumerable institutional, national, social and ideological forces intersected, facilitated by a suite of techniques easily amenable to exploratory agendas and political–military knowledge. Capitalizing on these disciplinary potentials, and clearly enamoured with his high-profile position, Rainey genuinely hoped to hasten the thaw: to use archaeology for American agendas, for international diplomacy and to help his colleagues come in from the cold.