Recent revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) global wiretapping efforts add topical urgency to this study of America's culture and infrastructure of secrecy. Timothy Melley only refers to the introduction of warrantless surveillance after 9/11 in passing, but his monograph lucidly analyzes the nation's ambivalent relationship with an ever-expanding security apparatus. At present, sixteen intelligence agencies receive $75 billion annually in funding, more than any domestic budget item bar health. About 850,000 US citizens hold a “top secret” clearance – in itself sufficient illustration why Edward Snowden's decision to leak details of Obama's spy programme will surely be repeated in the future. However, the media focus on WikiLeaks and Snowden hides a more complex interplay between clandestine intelligence and public knowledge, in which the safeguarding of operational secrets is only one puzzle piece. From its beginnings in the early Cold War, the national security state has been characterized by a paradoxical form of “open secrecy,” a combination of propaganda and concealment brilliantly captured by Dick Cheney's television announcement in September 2001 that “a lot of what needs to be done will have to be done quietly, without any discussion” (2).

Despite the latest criticism, Cheney's demand for silent acquiescence on the part of his fellow citizens proved a resounding success. This should not really come as a surprise: the copresence of state secrecy and self-aggrandizement not only provides reassurance but offers “the public the opportunity to proclaim its official ignorance – then to be shocked when the details of secret programs leak” (75). A government desire not to tell, or to reveal only part of the truth and to lie when necessary, meets with a public wish not to know too much. Melley investigates the first part of this equation in his account of “brainwashing” – from its invention by CIA associate Edward Hunter in 1950 to its recent resurfacing as the Bush administration's “enhanced interrogation techniques” – and the second in his reading of post-9/11 conspiracy thrillers as “geopolitical melodramas” (202). Both of these chapters, as well as the case studies of Robert Coover, Joan Didion and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (2007) that are sandwiched between them, powerfully illustrate the author's claim that the rise of the intelligence apparatus proved “a major stimulus of postmodern epistemological skepticism” (10).

The book is somewhat less successful at establishing its more far-reaching claims. Melley's contention that the growth of the national security state functioned as “the crucible of postmodernism” (35) would demand the sort of cultural history which only the first and final chapter furnish. Similarly, the study's key term, the “covert sphere,” suffers from historical and conceptual overstretch. The author positions this “covert sphere” in opposition to Jürgen Habermas's conception of a rational public sphere, emphasizing the former's irrationality and the preponderance of cultural fictions over the supposedly more factual inquiries of journalism, historiography and jurisprudence. This might not only overestimate the extent to which discussions of the US intelligence apparatus are dominated by conspiracy theories, the subject of Melley's first monograph. There is now a vast literature on covert operations and, occasionally at least, healthy public debate in the national and international media. More importantly, it would seem that the imagination of any state politics is shaped by powerful myths that infuse both popular and more rarefied academic discourses. Melley wants to argue that Cold War secrecy dramatically shifted the conditions of public knowledge, according a central place to its fictional imagination. I agree with him to a point but would urge more historical caution. After all, the American public took similar recourse to cultural fictions when picturing its political leaders at work in the nineteenth century.

Ultimately, a more modest understanding of the “covert sphere” might have better served the author's aims. His study impressively documents how state secrecy became a privileged topos for reflecting on power and knowledge in late twentieth-century American literature and culture. This insight proves all the more pertinent if we not so much understand the “covert sphere” in opposition to the public sphere but rather attend to what the former reveals about US politics at large. Snowden's exposure of NSA wiretapping and subsequent odyssey thus highlight not only the need for public accountability but also America's increasingly hapless management of its global empire.