Book review - The CIA: An Imperial History, by Hugh Wilford

Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History, Basic Books, 2024.

Hugh Wilford has long been a leading scholar of the CIA, but his history of the agency is more of an extended essay than a dry academic tome, despite a comprehensive set of endnotes.

This style has a certain congruence with the subject, as literature and writers feature heavily in the imperial tradition which is at the centre of Wilford’s argument.

His thesis posits an essential continuity between the CIA and the intelligence practices of colonial powers like Britain and France, a heritage which complicates the usual picture of the US intelligence community as a product of wartime exigencies.

Perhaps for this reason, Wilford downplays the genealogy which could be traced from British Security Co-ordination to the Office of Strategic Services, instead focusing on the deeper cultural background of the anglophile East Coast elite which provided the CIA’s early leadership.

Ivy League education exposed many from this generation to writers of empire like Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan and T.E. Lawrence, shaping their assumptions about the role of intelligence.

At the same time, Wilford traces a more purely American lineage of imperial intelligence, running from early continental expansion to Latin America and East Asia, particularly the Philippines. This tradition was in some tension with a rival conception of America as an anti-colonial power, rooted in the War of Independence.

In a series of thematic chapters Wilford traces this conflict through the various spheres of CIA activity, symbolised by a series of representative men. Kermit Roosevelt, the representative of regime change, provides the starkest example. An Arabist who backed Nasser against the old colonial powers, Roosevelt became infamous for his role in the Anglo-American coup against the Iranian government in 1953.

There is only one representative figure who Wilford regards as unconflicted about the CIA’s imperial side, James Angleton, who inevitably stars in the chapter on counterintelligence. Here Wilford cites some of my own work, in tracing Angleton’s second act as a grey eminence of the Reagan-era intelligence lobby.

An epilogue taking the story up to the War on Terror, provides the first opportunity for a representative woman, former CIA director Gina Haspel. The controversy over Haspel’s role in waterboarding provides another imperial thread, as Wilford traces the practice back to the Philippine-American War a century earlier.

If anything the War on Terror brought imperial traditions to the surface more clearly than the Cold War, as the US embraced colonial counter-insurgency theorists.

Wilford’s conclusion brings the story up to the 2020s. The rise of conspiracy theory is examined as one aspect of the ‘imperial boomerang’ that has often resulted from the CIA’s global role, a mission whose covert nature is in part rooted in America’s contradictory attitude to empire.

Writing some months before the 2024 presidential election, Wilford notes both the rise of ‘America First’ foreign policy across the US political spectrum, and the return of great power competition to the centre of international relations.

In the face of the doubtful record of past covert actions, Wilford calls for the CIA to focus instead on intelligence analysis. He is not, however, optimistic that this argument to be heeded as by a US increasingly preoccupied with the challenge of China.

The return of Trump seems unlikely to change that calculus. If it represents a shift away from the European strand in America’s imperial heritage, that may mean a turn towards the continental/Pacific strand, rather than the anti-colonial tradition.