E203 - The CIA’s Imperial History, Pt 1 w/ Hugh Wilford

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8 • 705 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hugh Wilford, professor of history at California State University, Long Beach, is on the program for the first of two episodes on his book The CIA: An Imperial History. In this first part, they explore the historiography of intelligence today, how the CIA fits into an imperial lens of US history, whether the CIA is a liberal way of managing the world, the agency’s origins and shift from intelligence gathering to covert actions, gender relations among officers, their families, and agency partners, individuals like Kim Roosevelt, and whether CIA personnel truly believed in the threat of communism. Subscribe now for an ad-free experience and much more content! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to American Prestige. To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com. Find the link in our show notes.
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0:35.4	Head to vanta.com slash Spotify to learn more. Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to.
1:03.9	I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.
1:08.7	And we are extremely excited to welcome to the podcast today.
1:12.2	Hugh Wilford, you is a professor at California State University Long Beach, and the author of many
1:18.0	great books, the one that I first read of his was the Mighty Wurlitzer on the CIA. And he's the author
1:23.5	of the new, the CIA and Imperial History. So Hugh, thank you so much for joining us.
1:28.8	Oh, thank you for having me.
1:30.5	So one of the things that I always have, that I always ask when I have an intelligence historian
1:35.0	on here is how would you characterize the historiography of intelligence in the middle of the
1:41.1	2020s? And the reason that I ask is I myself wanted to do intelligence
1:46.1	history when I entered graduate school. I imagine that is a relatively common experience,
1:50.9	you know, a lay person familiar with the CIA and it's daring due, as it were, around the
1:55.7	world. But then when you come into graduate school, people are like, oh, it's a little bit not
1:58.8	serious. You know, it's a little bit like to the side. I used to joke there are more books about Amnesty International than the CIA.
2:06.4	That might not be true any longer, but for a time in the historiography, it was kind of true. So,
2:13.4	what is the state of the intelligence history today, in your opinion? Right. I think you're
2:19.3	absolutely right. I think a lot of academic historians shy away from it because it did sort of
2:24.2	seen as, you know, the stuff of popular culture and it also, of course, you know, a lot of it is
	...

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