My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Basic Books for an advanced copy of this history of the Central Intelligence Agency that is told through the careers of some of its most famous and sometimes infamous players highlighting the mindset and attitudes that colored many of the actions and activities, activities that are still reverberating today.

There is a phrase that started appearing in American media during the 90's probably said by military sources to friendly journalists, a phrase that was used to describe why certain actions seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. Mission creep. Where a certain program or military operations seems to just get larger, a six month operation becomes a year, than a decade, more forces are needed, more, more and more. Mission creep is a good phrase for the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. Formed after the war as a organization to gather and analyze intelligence, soon the Agency was arming various groups, working to overthrow or prop up governments, and spying on people inside America for dangerous thinking. The Red Scare and the paranoia of the era explains some of it, but much of the mission creep can be explained on the people brought into the Agency, and their attitudes and thoughts about the world. Even people who once thought that the idea of a one world government was the only solution, soon began to see the threat of communism in everything, and these lofty ideas went to the wayside. Hugh Wilford, a Professor at California State University, Long Beach and writer of many books on espionage has in The CIA: An Imperial History, written about the ideas, attitudes, mistakes and even a few successes that the agency has had, while furthering the dreams of an American empire, dreams that are still haunting us today.

The book is broken into six chapters, with one person being the focus and explaining different actions that the Central Intelligence Agency has undertaken. Many of the names. James Jesus Angelton, Kermit Roosevelt, and even recent former Director Gina Haspel will be familiar, some are a little deeper cut, but their actions might be known. Wilford looks at these people and there backgrounds, the Eastern aristocracy, clubs and schools they shared, with a mix of Old World we know better than most ideas. In the case of Edward Lansdale the missionary zeal he took in bringing people into line with the American ideal. Each chapter has a theme Regime change, or bolstering, publicity of propaganda, counter intelligence, and even the gathering of intelligence. Wilford uses this to show how the simple act of gathering intelligence as planned led to targeted assassinations, an industrial complex based on keeping secrets, failures and blow backs and much more.

I have read a lot of books on espionage, fiction, fictional histories, and nonfiction, but this one of the better ones that I have read as Wilford, is not afraid to point out internal logic problems in people's thinking, and why certain actions were allowed. One can see the world changing as Wilford writes, leading to the rise of conspiracies, Kennedy and the all-powerful threat of the CIA, and even the rise of the police state that is modern America. Wilford is a very good writer who knows his stuff, and though a lot of what is presented is not new, Wilford uses this information to back up his claims of America making a world not in our image, but as one that America could lord over.

Recommended for history fans, especially espionage fans. I can see a lot of people being upset by the conclusions that Wilford comes to, but it is very hard to argue with facts, and one only has to look out the window at the world right now and see that maybe if these guys with their great ideas hadn't been able to muck about the world, things might not be as bad.