In his latest book, The CIA: An Imperial History, Hugh Wilford recognizes the impossibility of being comprehensive. Because the life-span of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was founded in 1947 and is still functioning today, coincides with the period of America’s status as a great power, it would be an unachievable task to cram…
Tag: CIA
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-18 on Mundy, The Sisterhood
As many women scholars can and do attest, the path to academia can be full of discrimination, both open and institutional. I am part of that cohort, as one of the few female historians, in Canada or the United States, doing the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Even today, this field continues to…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-16 on Walton, Spies
Spies! What a great title! I could feel the ground shift within the first few pages of Calder Walton’s blockbuster accounting of the twentieth century “epic intelligence war between east and west.” Cold War historiography is again on the move and Walton, who is the assistant director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, at…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-50 on Macrakis, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach
This is, admittedly, a difficult introduction to write. It is difficult not only because Kristie Macrakis’s final work, Nothing is Beyond Our Reach: America’s Techno-Spy Empire elicited complicated responses from the reviewers in this roundtable. No, this introduction is particularly difficult because I find myself unable to divorce from the discussion my own personal experiences…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Policy Roundtable III-1: The Future of Intelligence
In January 2023, a year and a month after Robert Jervis passed away, the advisory board of the International Security Studies Forum (ISSF), under the aegis of Keren Yarhi-Milo, Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies and Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, along with its senior…
Roundtable 3-6 on “The CIA and U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1947: Reforms, Reflections and Reappraisals”
The special issue of Intelligence and National Security, Volume 26, April-June 2011 continues the process of bringing intelligence in from the cold. It is to be hoped that the reviews here contribute to the parallel process of familiarizing diplomatic historians with what is known about intelligence and bringing in two fields closer together. We are…