Baer joined the CIA in 1976 and resigned in 1997 having served in a number of dangerous places, notably Beirut in the 1980s. Obviously as a first-hand account of life in a powerful secret service the material in the book deserves attention, though it is written in a Clint Eastwood style that makes you think you have already seen much of it at the pictures. The SAS-style training that he went through in the 1970s, when the Second World War-OSS ethos of the agency was still a potent force, was formidable.

The problem is that it lacks any historical context and at bottom is an elaborate exercise in special pleading for a cause that would chill most of us to the bone. For Baer the world started to cave in after Watergate in 1972 at the point when Congress decided that sanctioning ‘covert operations’ as a plank of official foreign policy was dangerous not simply for the citizens of foreign countries but for Americans as well.

For Baer that decision was a huge mistake because it stopped the agency from 'going after the bad guys' in much the same way as John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen went after them in the 1950s, starting with the overthrow of the elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and quickly moving on to the coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954, when the elected social democratic leader, Jacobo Arbenz, was ousted. You can fill in the rest for yourself: Vietnam, the Belgian Congo, Cuba, the Dominican republic, El Salvador, Chile and so on and so forth. But for Baer the gloom of increasing paperwork and bureaucracy (he means vestigial civilian audit) was only slightly lifted during the 1980s under Iran-Contra Ronald Reagan (Oliver North is a hero), especially as he could see that people like himself were neglected in the promotion race in favour of others who had little or no experience of the spy game. His account of how the agency was flooded out with FBI agents after the revelation that Rick Ames had been supplying the Russians with deadly information for years merely confirmed his mordant view that the CIA was 'circling the drain'.

In a funny sort of way Baer does have a point: why create a tiger (the CIA) and then anaesthetise it? Just the sort of point that Lavrenty Beria must have put to the Troika after Stalin’s death in 1953. The disturbing thing now is that Baer has powerful allies: in the wake of 9/11 and the criticism of the CIA, the Rumsfeld-Chaney axis was keen to go back to the Dulles days by making the secret service totally off-limits as a military operation inside the Pentagon, away from any prying eyes. The saga of 'extraordinary rendition' (grabbing suspects off the street, flying them to foreign countries to torture them and then dumping them in Albania if you make a mistake) is a sight to behold even though the British press finds it of no interest whatsoever. Watch your back, Hugo Chavez.

–  Michael Wagstaff