The most recommended books about the CIA

Who picked these books? Meet our 156 experts.

156 authors created a book list connected to the CIA, and here are their favorite CIA books.
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Book cover of The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service

Tom Gething Author Of Under a False Flag

From my list on covert ops in Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m always delighted when a reader asks, “Did you work for the CIA?” It tells me I achieved the verisimilitude I was striving for in Under a False Flag. I’m also proud that my novel has been included in a university-level Latin American history curriculum. That tells me I got the history right. No aspect of modern history is more intriguing or controversial than the role covert action played, for better or worse, in the Cold War. With the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took us to the brink of nuclear disaster, the Cold War in Latin America was mostly fought in the shadows with markedly ambivalent achievements.

Tom's book list on covert ops in Latin America

Tom Gething Why did Tom love this book?

David Atlee Phillips played such a major role in covert ops in Latin America I had to make sure he appeared in my novel. After a long and successful CIA career, Phillips wrote this memoir of undercover derring-do. It reads like recruiting propaganda for the agency but what fascinated me was his frankness about the missions he ran and the methods he used. He was publisher of an English-language newspaper in Chile when the CIA recruited him in 1950. A natural storyteller, Phillips describes his undercover shenanigans in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Brazil. By the 1970s he was at Langley HQ, in charge of all Western Hemisphere covert ops, including the actions (discreetly omitted in his memoir) leading to the coup in Chile.

By David Atlee Phillips,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Night Watch as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For 25 years David Atlee Phillips stood "the night watch" for the CIA. He directed Western Hemisphere Operations when the Chilean government was overthrown (with CIA help) in 1973.

Phillips details his experiences in 18 countries. Along the way, we learn much about "the company," certainly one of the least understood and most controversial pillars of our defense ever to have been invented.

"Phillips is as skilled a writer as he was a spook, and his astonishingly readable book makes a convincing case for the necessity of an intelligence service such as the CIA." --Joseph C. Goulden.


Book cover of Inside the Company: CIA Diary

Tom Gething Author Of Under a False Flag

From my list on covert ops in Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m always delighted when a reader asks, “Did you work for the CIA?” It tells me I achieved the verisimilitude I was striving for in Under a False Flag. I’m also proud that my novel has been included in a university-level Latin American history curriculum. That tells me I got the history right. No aspect of modern history is more intriguing or controversial than the role covert action played, for better or worse, in the Cold War. With the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took us to the brink of nuclear disaster, the Cold War in Latin America was mostly fought in the shadows with markedly ambivalent achievements.

Tom's book list on covert ops in Latin America

Tom Gething Why did Tom love this book?

Long before Edward Snowden there was Phillip Agee. A former CIA officer, Agee turned whistleblower, publishing this unauthorized account of his life undercover and exposing many of the “Company’s” operations in the process. Agee worked for the CIA in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He claimed the turning point came in Uruguay where he listened to the beating of a political prisoner (whose name he had provided to the police) while the police chief turned up the volume of a soccer game on the radio. His matter-of-fact diary included a controversial appendix of agent and officer names and cryptonyms. Incensed at the endangerment of its assets, the CIA sued and pursued Agee, who fled the country and spent the rest of his life denouncing the tactics of his former employer.

By Philip Agee,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Inside the Company as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The former CIA secret operations officer reconstucts his own and the intelligence agency's clandestine and subversive activities in Third World nations during his twelve-year stint with the world's largest spy organization


Book cover of The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service
Book cover of Inside the Company: CIA Diary

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