Mention the CIA, and secrets, spies and skullduggery come immediately to mind. Community members wanting to know more about the Central Intelligence Agency and its place in American political life and imagination will get the chance on Wednesday, May 7 when historian and intelligence expert Richard H. Immerman visits Ruston to lecture on his new book, “The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Immerman will make two different presentations: • “Intelligence and National Security in the Cold War and After” at 12:30 p.m. in Louisiana Tech’s University Hall, Room 134; and • “The CIA: Its Origins, its Transformation and its Militarization” at 6 p.m. at the Lincoln Parish Library. Both events are free and open to the public. According to Louisiana Tech assistant professor of history Andrew C. McKevitt, as a longtime student of espionage and foreign relations, as well as a former high-ranking officer in the intelligence community itself, Richard H. Immerman is uniquely qualified to shine light on the CIA. “We are lucky to have a scholar of Immerman’s reputation and accomplishments visit us,” McKevitt said. According to McKevitt, Immerman has devoted “more than three decades to groundbreaking critical scholarship on the CIA and its place in world affairs.”  s a consequence, in 2007 the George W. Bush administration chose him to serve as the nation’s first-ever assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards. One objective of this appointment, McKevitt said, was to seek ways to avoid the sorts of intelligence failure that led to the Iraq War. Jeffery R. Hankins, interim head of Tech’s department of history, stated that Immerman’s visit reflected the department’s ongoing commitment to promoting public awareness of international affairs. “We all stand to learn a great deal from what Professor Immerman has to tell us,” Hankins said. Currently a professor of history and the Marvin Wachman Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University, Immerman is the author of several books on topics related to intelligence and U.S. foreign relations, including “The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention” (1982); “John Foster Dulles, Piety, Pragmatism and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy” (1998); and “Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz” (2012). An editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, Immerman also serves as chair of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, and he holds the Francis W. De Serio Chair in Strategic Intelligence at the Army War College. Immerman’s lecture visit is sponsored by Louisiana Tech’s department of history and American Foreign Policy Center; the Lincoln Parish Library; and Lambda-Rho Chapter, Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society.