Toby Harnden

Cold War spying had much in common with the colonial era

Influenced by Kipling’s Kim, early CIA officers combined a love of overseas adventure with a whiff of imperial paranoia, says Hugh Wilford

President John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles in 1960. The CIA director was a Kipling devotee who had a copy of Kim on his bedside table when he died, aged 75, in 1969. [Getty Images]
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  • The CIA: An Imperial History

    Hugh Wilford

    John Murray, pp. 368, £25

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