Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

The CIA, this fascinating new history notes, is ‘possibly the most infamous organisation on the planet’. Its hidden hand is often presumed to be everywhere, pulling the strings. That’s pretty impressive, given that it only has, by most estimates, around 20,000 employees. (The exact number is, naturally, classified.) At the same time, it’s routinely portrayed as comically inept – a bunch of ‘clowns’ and ‘a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals’, as Richard Nixon put it.

This has led to a dichotomy in CIA histories. On the one hand it is depicted as an all-powerful evil force, responsible for many of the world’s ills since its foundation in 1947. On the other, there are chortles about its blunders and pratfalls – madcap schemes which were not enacted, such as creating exploding cigars to kill Fidel Castro, or a porn film to discredit President Sukarno of Indonesia. Mercifully, Hugh Wilford is in neither camp, nor is he part of that band that tries to have it both ways. A Brit who was educated at Bristol and Exeter universities and taught at Sheffield before heading to California State University in 2006, he is for the most part admirably fair-minded and dispassionate.

His approach is a little like that of Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s podcast The Rest is History, on which Wilford has appeared – entertaining, fact-filled and providing thoughtful context, rather than talking points for the minds-made-up brigade. Wilford also offers a lively and original thesis – that the CIA is essentially a continuation of the tradition of European intelligence services, and that Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era.

He treats the reader to a captivating cast of characters and makes telling connections. He starts with Rudyard Kipling and his great 1901 spy novel Kim, about an Anglo-Indian orphan called Kimball O’Hara.