In 1947, the United States created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence, but within a few years the Agency was engaged in other operations – bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling domestic dissent – before transforming during the Cold War. Drawing on decades of research, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford shows how the Agency created a new Western empire, as successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike.

Even the CIA’s post-9/11 global hunt for terrorists was haunted by the ghosts of empires past. Original, and gripping, The CIA tells how America adopted unaccountable power and created a new imperial order.