The history of the CIA has long been riddled with “dichotomies,” says The Spectator’s Toby Harden, with some describing America’s foreign intelligence agency (established by President Truman in 1947) as “an omnipotent force of evil” and others describing it as “comically incompetent.”
The former account emphasizes the CIA’s claim that it was “pulling the strings” everywhere; the latter highlights its “failures” and “reckless schemes,” such as the ill-fated plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and a plan to discredit Indonesian President Sukarno by faking an appearance in a pornographic film. In this fascinating new history, Hugh Wilford “belongs to neither camp.”
Wilford, a British historian who moved to California State University in 2006, is a “commendably fair-minded and dispassionate” reader and presents a “vibrant and original argument” that the CIA is essentially an “imperial” agency, having taken over much of the work carried out by European intelligence services in the colonial era.
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Wilford argues that the CIA’s early actions were all influenced by the “shadow of empire,” writes Theo Zenow of The Sunday Times. CIA agents were raised on “heroic tales of the British Empire,” and many were followers of T. E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. When the agency’s longtime boss, Allen Dulles, died in 1969, he had at his bedside his “absorbed book” Kim, Kipling’s 1901 masterpiece about a British spy in India. Wilford argues that this culture made it natural for the CIA to function as the “secret weapon” of an increasingly imperialistic American state. From Vietnam to Guatemala, the CIA “supported pro-American regimes, toppled anti-American ones, and spread American power.” Written with “clarity and nuance,” the book is a “gripping, comprehensive history.”
Wilford’s account gives “fresh context” to well-known chapters in the CIA’s history, such as the 1953 Iranian coup, the 1954 covert operation in Guatemala, and the “fiasco” of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, said Calder Walton of The Telegraph. But his book is by no means perfect. It’s odd that he pays so little attention to the KGB’s actions “in faraway lands,” which were generally “far ahead of the CIA’s.” And his attempts to view recent U.S. actions, such as the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, through an imperialist lens are not entirely convincing. Still, his book is “important and interesting,” and a must-read for “anyone interested in today’s intelligence and national security issues.”
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