Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones was born in Wales and grew up in the ancient town of Harlech. He attended the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, then the Universities of Michigan, Harvard, and Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD. He was active in anti-apartheid, anti-Bomb, anti-Vietnam War, and pro-civil liberties campaigns and aimed at a career in politics, but then settled down to family life and scholarly pursuits. He was a Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now emeritus. He played rugby in Wales, England, and America, and remains a keen fan, his other interests being opera, vegetable gardening, and snooker.
Books in order of publication:
American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA (New York: Free Press, 1977)
Violence and Reform in American History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978)
The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995)
Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)
The FBI: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
The American Left: Its Impact on Politics and Society since 1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Ring of Spies: How MI5 and the FBI Brought Down the Nazis in America (Cheltenham: The History Press, 2020)
The Nazi Spy Ring in America: Hitler’s Agents, the FBI, and the Case that Stirred a Nation (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2020)
A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
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