Conventional narratives concerning the emergence of sprawling metropolitan areas in the postwar United States stress the role of enabling federal policies favoring suburbanization and automobile travel that intersect with processes of industrial decline as well as white flight from newly desegregated central cities to produce the all-too-familiar pattern in which profound racial and economic inequalities are mediated and reproduced by spatial arrangements.

Both of the books under review seek to expand scholarly understanding of the making and meaning of suburban spaces in the twentieth century through close examination of an often unfancied topic: the worlds of bureaucratic politics. Each book seeks to show how specific growth patterns (in Atlanta) or even specific development projects and buildings (in northern Virginia) reflected the influence of bureaucratic actors, thus unveiling the often opaque process by which policy actually gets made.

There, for the most part, the similarity between these two books ends. Carlton Basmajian’s Atlanta Unbound is in effect a history of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s planning efforts between 1970 and 2002. Basmajian takes as his foil Anthony Downs’s famous 1994 pronouncement that the long-term problems of American metropolitan areas at their root reflect an absence of coherent urban-governance structures capable of tackling inherently regional problems in a regional manner. The book thus sets out to show, using Atlanta as the test case, that regional planning is not necessarily the antidote to suburban sprawl and environmental harm, but sometimes one of its causes.

To this end, Basmajian dives into decades of planning documents, newspaper accounts, letters, and other archival sources to examine the inner workings, decision-making processes, and policy consequences of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), starting with its founding in 1971. His exhaustive research into what he admits is often “boring” material illustrates, on the one hand, the considerable political effort and skill it took to establish any type of meaningful regional planning apparatus in a conservative political climate such as Georgia, and, on the other hand, the utter inability of this regional planning mechanism to challenge received development priorities.

That the professional staff of regional planning agencies are unlikely to venture too far ahead of the elected officials with whom they interact and to whom they are ultimately accountable should not be a surprise. But Basmajian argues that the ARC made a material contribution to the process of sprawling development in Atlanta by fostering a quasi-scientific presumption of certainty of rapid low-density development to accommodate rapid regional population growth, starting in the 1970s. This was accomplished through the use of rarely scrutinized growth models and accompanying maps of future development, which, by guiding elected officials toward sprawl-inducing suburban infrastructure projects, became self-fulfilling prophecies. The author also shows in a close examination of the Chattahoochee (River) Corridor Study in the 1970s that the ARC refused to challenge the presumption that the point of water-related policies should be to facilitate rapid economic development, rather than to prioritize environmental quality and long-term sustainability.

Basmajian demonstrates that the Atlanta Regional Commission’s influence often took the form of shaping and reinforcing the parameters of acceptable policy debate, rather than undertaking actions on its own. Indeed, the formal powers of the ARC in the 1970s and 1980s were notably constrained. Yet while the author is attentive to the severe political and institutional constraints upon the ARC, he also finds fault with regional planning in Georgia for failing to promote an alternative vision of ecologically and socially sensitive population growth (i.e., one favoring compact development and the redress of socioeconomic inequities).

It is not clear, however, why we should expect Georgia to have been on the cutting edge of innovative regional planning during this time period. The limitations of the first generation of regional planning in Georgia probably reflected the overall political environment and the relative absence of powerful groups centrally concerned with environmental issues, promotion of mass transit, and urban infill more than with the internal mechanics of the ARC. Related to this, Basmajian might have better capitalized on his close analysis more fully by posing and fleshing out answers to two counterfactual questions: What needed to be different to have produced a substantially different planning outcome in late-twentieth-century Atlanta? And what would it take in the future for regional planning structures to more effectively challenge default elite priorities?

Covert Capital tackles bureaucratic politics of an entirely different magnitude—the establishment, expansion, and activities of the postwar national security state—in a stunning piece of scholarship that defies both disciplinary boundaries and easy summarization. Andrew Friedman’s primary focus, conveyed through a historical narrative that freely weaves in narrative sources (such as novels) with more conventional historical material, is the complex interaction between the expansion of the Central Intelligence Agency and related covert activities and the built and social environment of the northern Virginia suburbs over the course of the Cold War.

Under this general thematic, Friedman presents compelling narratives about the culture of 1950s CIA operatives in suburban Virginia, the role of these northern Virginia residents in the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and the role of this built environment in facilitating the Iran-Contra Affair and what Friedman terms the “War on Central America.” These narratives in turn inform numerous claims made by the author concerning the relationship between domestic suburban space and the nature of the American imperial project. Crucially, many of these claims are not obvious and might even seem counterintuitive in the absence of the vivid narratives he supplies.

For instance, it seems fairly straightforward to observe that the creation of the CIA campus in Langley, outside of the District of Columbia and virtually hidden from the view of passing vehicles (to say nothing of pedestrians) fit a programmatic goal of Allen Dulles and other security-state leaders: to develop a capacity for covert warfare that would be literally out of view of existing democratic spaces and democratic institutions, and would take advantage of suburban landscapes’ capacity for facilitating privacy and secrecy.

Friedman shows this to be the case, but also shows that the culture of covert, transnational operations based in northern Virginia relied on the establishment of spaces of sociability as well as a commitment to active participation in building new communities. Through depictions of the lives (domestic and abroad, political and personal) of specific operatives as well as elite leaders (such as the Kennedy clan), the author argues that the building of McLean and nearby suburban towns was inextricably intertwined with the political project of projecting U.S. power (i.e., “build democratic institutions”) abroad, a project characterized by the metaphor of “development.” To facilitate these projections, various suburban sites became venues for high-level covert action planning (the Kennedys at their Hickory Hill mansion in Virginia), discreet meetings with foreign visitors in hotels, and frequent (male-oriented) social gatherings among operatives in local watering holes.

Covert Capital is at its most interesting and most persuasive when it reaches down the human level of the imperial project. Virginia-based advisers in Vietnam, for instance, not only came to see Vietnam as a second home but also strove to make suburban Virginia and imperial lifestyles abroad virtual mirrors of one another. For instance, Friedman depicts how Vietnam operative Edward Lansdale, a close advisor to pro-American South Vietnamese leaders, practiced a politics of personal intimacy based on close friendships as well as regular social gatherings (hootenannies) in Saigon to forward geopolitical ends—a strategy that required a literal investment of the self, an investment that could not easily be discarded once it was time to return to Virginia. These portraits of American operators are intertwined with extensive treatments of the experiences of the thousands Vietnamese refugees who resettled in the Dulles Corridor in the 1970s, joined later after the events of the 1980s by significant Central American and Iranian communities. The author thus attempts to uncover the way that the grand imperial designs played out in the actual lives of those charged with implementing them as well as (some of) those impacted, and to show the codependence of transnational covert action and the specific landscapes of Northern Virginia.

Friedman’s sharp critique of America’s roles in Vietnam and Central America motivates and permeates the entire project. At times, this critique leads to statements that some readers might find slightly overwrought: Did American “postwar abundance” really depend on U.S. covert activities abroad, as Friedman writes at the end of his “Saigon Road” chapter (p. 162)?

Such overstatements are minor flaws, however, laid next to the magnitude of what Friedman attempts and largely achieves in this book: illustrating the operations of America’s covert security state, demonstrating the symbiosis between what he convincingly establishes as the “covert capital” and its suburban landscape, exploring the interactions between imperial spaces abroad and imperial spaces at home, and examining the lived experiences of the Americans and others who traversed both spatial worlds and to some extent experienced them as “contiguous” rather than separate. Readers will both learn a great deal about American covert operations in the twentieth century and be forced to think about the geography of the national capital as well as its surrounding suburbs in an entirely new way—and to come to terms with Friedman’s central claim that the Dulles Corridor was and is a self-perpetuating incubator for covert yet normalized projections of American imperial power.

These two books thus aim to expand the terrain of urban scholarship by paying attention to the role of bureaucratic politics, albeit bureaucratic politics of very different flavors. Friedman’s subject matter and the rich characters he depicts (from Oliver North to a CIA wife who writes flamboyant, insightful national security novels under a male pen name) are inherently more memorable subjects than the more conventional politicians and public officials who populate Basmajian’s book, and the interdisciplinary approach employed by Friedman is more adventurous (and rewarding) intellectually. But each book illustrates the value and future potential of meticulously researched explorations of activities of state and quasi-state institutions in illuminating spatial processes and policymaking, whether the activities in question are covert or merely opaque.