The CIA
An Imperial History
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In this “superb” (Kathryn Olmsted) new history of American intelligence, a celebrated historian uncovers how the CIA became the foremost defender of America’s covert global empire
As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyze foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters at home.
The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation—but not the only one. In The CIA, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike. Even the CIA’s post-9/11 global hunt for terrorists was haunted by the ghosts of empires past.
Comprehensive, original, and gripping, The CIA is the story of the birth of a new imperial order in the shadows. It offers the most complete account yet of how America adopted unaccountable power and secrecy abroad and at home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Wilford (America's Great Game) argues in this vibrant account that the CIA came into being as a continuation of European imperial ambition. The CIA's early, Ivy League–educated leadership "shared British values," Wilford writes, and fancied themselves adventurers in the mold of T.E. Lawrence and Kim, Rudyard Kipling's romantic portrait of the British Raj. (A bizarre number of early CIA agents were nicknamed "Kim.") Founded in 1947 and freed from the wartime goals of its predecessor the OSS, the CIA latched onto fighting communism as its raison d'être—a so-called anti-imperialist effort that was carried out with supreme imperialist flair, Wilford contends, as the agency sought to prove America was "the rightful heir to European modernity." Wilford structures his argument around profiles of prominent agents, including Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, architect of the CIA's 1953 Iranian coup, who constantly played "Luck Be a Lady Tonight" from Guys and Dolls in the lead-up to the operation, and James Angleton, an obsessive orchid-growing loner and modernist literary scholar who went nearly insane trying to shake out the agency's communist moles. The book is full of such striking character portraits, as Wilford evocatively suggests that the CIA's tendency to overthrow foreign governments emerged from paranoia and personality defects among its leadership. This eye-opening slice of American history should not be missed.
