Nick Cullather is a professor of history at the University of Indiana Bloomington and a historian of United States foreign relations, specializing in the history of intelligence, development, and nation-building. The United States uses aid, covert operations, diet, statistics, and technology to reconstruct the social reality of countries around the world, and Cullather is interested in these subtle mechanisms of power. His most recent book, The Hungry World (2010), explores the use of food as a tool of psychological warfare and regime change during the Cold War. Cullather's first book, Illusions of Influence (1994), described the process through which a former American colony negotiated its conditional independence. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency developed a capacity to replace unsuitable governments, elected or otherwise, as he shows in Secret History (2006).
Currently, Cullather is investigating the early history of the CIA, and asking why a country so committed to pluralism and the marketplace of ideas staked its security on the novel notion of central intelligence. Putting vital information under control of a single authority has never fit comfortably with democratic ideals, and in a perennial political ritual, the "intelligence failure," Americans question and reaffirm the CIA compromise. His current project, First Line of Defense, follows this debate from 1947 to the present day.
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