The CIA by Hugh Wilford: 'lively and original' history of America's spy agency

There has long been a "dichotomy" in histories of the CIA, said Toby Harnden in The Spectator. While some have depicted America's foreign spying agency (founded by President Truman in 1947) as an "all-powerful evil force", others have presented it as "comically inept". 

The former accounts emphasise the argument that the CIA is "pulling the strings" everywhere. The latter highlights its "pratfalls" and "madcap schemes" – such as its ill-fated plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars, or its plan to discredit President Sukarno of Indonesia by faking his appearance in a porn film. In this fascinating new history, Hugh Wilford falls into "neither camp". 

A British historian who moved to California State University in 2006, Wilford is an "admirably fair-minded and dispassionate" guide. And he offers up a "lively and original thesis" – that the CIA is essentially an "imperial" body, which carried on much of the work that European intelligence services had done in the colonial era. 

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Wilford argues that the "shadow of empire" informed everything the early CIA did, said Theo Zenou in The Sunday Times. Its agents were raised on "heroic tales of British empire"; many of them were devotees of T.E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. Allen Dulles, the CIA's long-time boss, had a "well-thumbed copy" of "Kim" – Kipling's 1901 masterpiece about a British spy in India – on his bedstand when he died in 1969. Such a culture, Wilford argues, made it natural for the CIA to function as the "secret weapon" of an increasingly imperialistic American state. From Vietnam to Guatemala, the agency "propped up pro-American regimes, toppled anti- American ones and spread American power". Written with "clarity and nuance", this is a "gripping" and comprehensive history. 

Wilford's account gives "fresh context" to such well-known chapters in the CIA's history as the 1953 coup in Iran, its covert action in Guatemala in 1954, and the "fiasco" of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, said Calder Walton in The Telegraph. Yet his book is by no means flawless. It's odd that he pays so little attention to the KGB's actions "in faraway lands", which generally "far outstripped the corresponding CIA activities". And his attempts to view more recent US actions through an imperial lens – such as the war in Afghanistan after 9/11 – are not wholly convincing. Nonetheless, his book is "important and engrossing" – and a must-read for "anyone interested in intelligence and national-security affairs today".