Prof. Scott Lucas
Five years ago, the freelance historian Frances Stonor Saunders caused a flurry of press comment with the publication of her Who Paid the Piper?, published in the US under the more prosaic title The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Edward Said proclaimed, “The energy and determination of her research, to say nothing of the scepticism that nurtured it, are important signs of stirring intellectual restlessness and even of a kind of incitement, which is what is needed most of all.”[i]
Saunders moved on to a much different project, the study of the 14thcentury mercentary Sir John Hawkwood,[ii] but beyond narrating a new Cold War for the general reader, she had made a unique contribution to scholarship. She had carried out a dual recovery of the “missing dimensions” of post-1945 history. The conflict was no longer defined through the manoeuvres of Presidents, State Departments, and the military but also through the strategies and operations of their covert colleagues.