A Question of Standing deals with recognizable events that have shaped the history of the first 75 years of the CIA. Unsparing in its accounts of dirty tricks and their consequences, it values the agency's intelligence and analysis work to offer balanced judgements that avoid both celebration and condemnation of the CIA.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is an Emeritus Professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh. He studied at the Universities of Wales, Michigan, Harvard, and Cambridge, and is the honorary president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships in Harvard, Berlin, and Toronto. He is the author of a prize-winning book on the American left, and of sixteen other books published in eleven languages, mainly on US intelligence history, including The CIA and American Democracy (1989), The FBI: A History (2007), In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (2012), and We Know All About You (2017).

• Preface and Acknowledgements


• 1: The Road to U-1


• 2: The OSS Model


• 3: The Founding of the CIA, 1947


• 4: Covert Action in the 1950s


• 5: Intelligence in the 1950s


• 6: Bay of Pigs, 1961


• 7: Vietnam: The Roles of the CIA


• 8: From Reformation to Counter Reformation in the 1970s


• 9: The Collapse of Soviet Communism in the 1980s


• 10: Iran and Iran-Contra


• 11: Existential Issues, 1990-97


• 12: Fateful Terror and 9/11


• 13: The Great Diminishing Reform Act of 2004


• 14: Estimating Anew and a Military Turn


• 15: Battling Al Qaeda with Assassination and Torture


• 16: Obama's CIA and the Death of bin Laden


• 17: Fake News Comes Home


• 18: Back to Work


• 19: Conclusion


• Appendix: CIA Directors 1947-2022


• Abbreviations in Notes


• Bibliography