The CIA

Authors: Hugh Wilford & Hugh Wilford

USA | History of the Americas | Colonialism & imperialism | The Cold War | Espionage & secret services

Published on 5^th June 2025 by John Murray Press (Basic Books) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback / softback | 384 pages, N/A
129mm x 198mm x 27mm | 264g

'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.