Product details
- ISBN 9781399816861
- Weight: 267g
- Dimensions: 130 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jun 2025
- Publisher: John Murray Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'Gripping history that also informs the present' Sunday Times
'Fascinating . . . Wilford writes engagingly with a telling eye for colourful detail' The Spectator
'A spectacular achievement . . . I loved it' Dominic Sandbrook
How the CIA became an instrument of a new covert empire both in America and overseas.
In 1947, the United States created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence, but within a few years the Agency was engaged in other operations - bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling domestic dissent - before transforming during the Cold War.
Drawing on decades of research, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford shows how the Agency created a new Western empire, as 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.
Original, and gripping, The CIA tells how America adopted unaccountable power and created a new imperial order.
