During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s came what Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones describes as “the defining moment and acme of the ‘special intelligence relationship’” between the United States and the United Kingdom. Never before (or since) were the two great Anglo-Saxon democracies more firmly wedded. “To mutual fear, mutual social structures, and mutual culture was added mutual benefit.” The author traces the separate origins of U.S. and British intelligence, the shift from mistrust to “an alliance that would impose a world order to the advantage and moral satisfaction of both countries,” to post-9/11 American unilateralism and the 21st-century “pivot to the Pacific.” In Spies We Trust may not read like Ian Fleming but its tales of intrigue are fascinating and altogether more absorbing because they’re true.
