The CIA likes to fashion itself as a heroic agency that helps to protect national security and uphold democracy around the world.
However, Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA: An Imperial History (Basic Books, 2024), shows that the CIA draws directly from British and French colonial precedents, and adopts the same modus operandi as imperial intelligence services.
The latter is evident in the CIA’s support for coercive interrogation techniques and repressive surveillance apparatuses, and its recruitment and manipulation of tribal and minority groups, and refinement of psychological warfare techniques and deception operations.
According to Wilford, a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach who has written two previous books on the CIA[1], individual CIA officers have often been motivated by the same lust for foreign adventure and exotic sexual conquest as their forebears in imperial intelligence services.
Because the U.S. Empire rules more indirectly compared to its European forebears, the CIA has carried out more political skullduggery and coups than past European empires.
The skullduggery has often yielded significant blowback whose origins the domestic population does not largely understand because CIA activities are kept secret.
Hellbound and Down 