The US, unlike many other superpowers in history, realised that culture was a powerful propaganda weapon, especially in the Cold War years. It was a particularly important one, too, at a time when Communism still had a strong attraction for Western intellectuals, most of whom had been spared the disillusionment of living under it. Those who assume that the CIA, like most undercover bodies, must largely be populated by rather dim-witted people or the rejects from other branches of public service, seemingly are wrong. In carrying out a carefully mapped and sometimes unscrupulous campaign of cultural imperialism, it got a lot of things right, and it helped to push the new American art abroad at a time when it was fighting for its life at home. Huge research must have gone into this book, which covers many fields and is reassuring proof that Americans, in spite of their present neo-imperialist stances, have not lost the faculty of self-criticism.