Hugh Wilford

Hugh Wilford is Professor of U.S. History at California State University, Long Beach. He is author of, among other books, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008), a history of covert CIA funding of apparently private American citizen groups in the Cold War. His most recent book, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Basic Books, 2013), was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and won the Washington Institute Gold Medal Book Prize, 2014. Hugh is currently at work on a general history of the CIA for The Great Courses, the prestigious U.S. series of video lectures.

Dr. Wilford published his latest book, The CIA: An Imperial History, in June 2024 with Basic Books. Building on the idea of “covert empire” conceptualized by Priya Satia in her 2008 Spies in Arabia, the book explores how generations of CIA officers tried but ultimately failed to transcend the gravitational pull of western imperial history.