H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 16-26 on Wilford, _The CIA_
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-26
Hugh Wilford. The CIA: An Imperial History. Basic Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781541645912.
3 March 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-26 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Contents
Introduction by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, University of Edinburgh. 2
Review by Paul Thomas Chamberlin, Columbia University. 7
Review by Thomas C. Field Jr., Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. 11
Review by Molly Geidel, Dartmouth College. 14
Review by Stuart Schrader, Johns Hopkins University. 19
Review by Simon Willmetts, Leiden University. 25
Response by Hugh Wilford, California State University, Long Beach. 35
Introduction by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, University of Edinburgh
In his latest book, The CIA: An Imperial History, Hugh Wilford recognizes the impossibility of being comprehensive. Because the life-span of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was founded in 1947 and is still functioning today, coincides with the period of America’s status as a great power, it would be an unachievable task to cram between two covers an exhaustive account that would need to double as a history of the contemporary world.[1] Wilford wisely chooses a more selective approach. Thematically, he concentrates on the proposition that the CIA was an imperial agency. Methodologically, he employs a biographical approach that in the nineteenth century was associated with the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881).[2] He by no means entirely goes along with Carlyle's working proposition that great men made history. But his narrative does operate on the principle that history can be better understood by taking the human approach, in this case the study of representative leading figures.
The five reviewers see the book as well written, not just stylistically, but also in the way in which Wilford synthesizes a complex argument: appropriately both Thomas F. Field, Jr. and Stuart Schrader use the word “elegant” to describe the author’s achievement. Also unanimously, the reviewers see the book as thought-provoking. All of them agree with Wilford’s contention that the CIA’s mentalities and actions were a manifestation of imperialism. All five of them see this as regrettable.[3] At the same time, each of the reviewers has distinctive emphases and perspectives that enrich their collective dialogue.
Paul Thomas Chamberlin shows how Wilford challenges the “foundational myth” that the CIA was established in response to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. Rather, it was a response to Washington’s determination to enact an imperial role in the post-World War II era. He notes Wilford’s further point that prominent figures in the early CIA, such as Kermit Roosevelt, had private education and Ivy League backgrounds that made them similar to their UK counterparts, and susceptible to the absorption of British imperial ideology articulated by writers such as Rudyard Kipling and T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”).[4] Chamberlin wonders whether there were further “structural and institutional dimensions of the CIA's imperialism” and reflects that the agency was just one of several utensils in “America's imperial toolbox,” but still finds Wilford's argument to be “compelling.”
Like Chamberlin, Thomas C. Field, Jr., is impressed by Wilford’s genius in arguing that the leading CIA men were at heart anti-imperialists who found that operating in secret was a way of circumventing the inconvenience of having principles.[5] Though crediting British influence, he describes the reliance of the United States on CIA-style covert operations, one of the book’s “throughlines,” as distinctively American. He notes that the biographical methodology “tends to depict a rather episodic history of CIA operations, jumping from highlight (Iran) to highlight (Vietnam).” Field concludes by considering the final section of the book, and Wilford’s view of what happened to the CIA and the mentalities behind it after the damaging revelations and congressional investigations of 1975.[6] He argues that some of Wilford’s earlier findings on voluntarism, or the recruitment of the private sector for intelligence work, may have a continuing applicability in the twenty-first century.[7]
Molly Geidel highlights Wilford’s account of CIA leaders’ storytelling, the importance of which is his “most important argument.” Imperialism is the “defining feature” of that storytelling and an “attendant orientalism” its unsavory embellishment. At the same time, she applauds Wilford’s account of the “homosocial ties” that bound influential CIA actors like Edward Lansdale to their neocolonial collaborators. She illustrates the harm done by CIA covert operations, offering mortality numbers in support of her point (here, it would be interesting to see some comparisons with other countries’ imperial violence, and with the global history of the statistics of deadly quarrels).[8] She argues that Wilford accepts CIA leaders’ professed anti-imperialism “a bit too credulously,” and points to the imperial-style elitist indoctrination of students “which persists to this day in the United States,” which helps explain the response of some campus leaders to recent student unrest, and which is, in fact, foreshadowed in the narrative of The CIA: An Imperial History (252).
(…)
Read the RoundTable review here:
https://www.academia.edu/128011959/H_Diplo_Wilford_The_CIA_History_roundtable_Book_Review
