Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, "CIA: A Question of Standing"

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NASIH members will be familiar with the CIA’s history and may wonder why I embarked on this project, with good studies by Richard Immerman and Hugh Wilford already in print. I thought there was a need for an overview of CIA history that brings the story right up to the present day. The book’s coverage is slightly weighted on favor of very recent history. Nobody will ever write a ‘comprehensive’ history of the agency, as that would need to be world history given the global-power reach of the United States. In deciding how to be selective I plumped for recognizable topics insofar as that was possible. This was because students often have time to read chapters but not whole books, and because members of the public at large might also want to pursue certain topics. Thus, there are chapters titled, for example, ‘Bay of Pigs’, ‘Vietnam’, ‘Iran and Iran-Contra’, ‘Fateful Terror and 9/11’, ‘Obama’s CIA and the Death of Bin Laden’, and ‘Fake News Comes Home’.”

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh. He has published books on subjects on a range of subjects ranging from labor violence to women and foreign policy, but his main focus had been on intelligence history. His current writing project is a look at the life and legacy of the Scottish-American private detective, Allan Pinkerton.

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