This concise history of the Central Intelligence Agency (235 pages before the notes) manages to include nearly all of the agency’s biggest hits and greatest catastrophes, from coups it sponsored in Iran and Guatemala, through its huge covert cultural and political campaigns to defeat communism in western Europe in the 1950s, to its role in the weapons of mass destruction that never existed in Iraq and the torture it conducted during George W Bush’s war on terror.
The author is Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a professor emeritus of American history at the University of Edinburgh, who has written three other histories of the intelligence world. He brings a depth of knowledge that provides innumerable fascinating anecdotes – and supports his very harsh conclusions about the net effects of America’s hugely expensive intelligence apparatus.
