Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary

editor-intern, and this week my guest is the academic Roderie Jeffreys Jones, whose new book is

called A Question of Standing, The History of the CIA. Roger, welcome.

Thank you, Sam. Can you stop me tell me? I mean, isn't the history of the CIA. Roder, welcome. Thank you, Sam.

Can you stop at me, I mean, isn't the history of the CIA, one would think?

It's a sort of secret intelligence service.

Is it not difficult to find out the material you need?

How open is the CIA?

How available is the stuff you want?

Well, I think that if you're looking for material on current operations, very sensitive matters, it's extremely difficult. But one of the

problems with writing about the CIA is the sheer volume of evidence, which is at your disposal,

because it was formed as a in a democratic

manner in a democracy and an open society and there's always been an emphasis on open debate and

open access to information and this has increased dramatically since the 1970s with the Freedom of Information Acts.

So the main problem is marshalling the information and winnowing it down to what you actually

want to work with.

Well, I mean, that's one of the sort of, I mean, probably not to the Connoisseur,

but to the likes of me whose ideas about the CIA probably formed in part by Hollywood,

one thinks of it as a sort of, you know, quite a secret organisation that works.

That this was the world's first, if you like, open intelligence service democratically elected.

Is that?

Well, that's right.

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