Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and Making of U.S. Empire in Suburbs of Northern Virginia Andrew Friedman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.Covert Capital is a fascinating transnational history of postwar period that juxtaposes local American middle-class suburban landscape and architecture with international space and empire in decolonizing world. With Covert Capital, historian Andrew Friedman decenters nation-state through landscape. Suburban Northern Virginia is center for this innovative transnational history of US activities in Vietnam, Iran, and Central America. In shadow of Washington, overt capital, Dulles corridor of Northern Virginia established a capital of US imperialism and transnational connections. The government edifices of CIA and Pentagon, private contractor office buildings, agents' homes, and Dulles International Airport constitute fixed personal and geopolitical space of nation-state's capital. Friedman grounds US foreign policy domestically by exploring its human agents and their imperial repatriation to capital: US spies, co conspirator Vietnamese refuge etumed immigrants, Iranian exile immigrants, and Salvadorian migrants. According to Friedman, the United States did not have just an empire. It had imperialists. They lived in covert capital (4). Thus, Dulles corridor, a built space and an extension of US national security state, is locus for US empire-home and abroad-and its transnational state and nonactors.In Covert Capital, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism is tangible, not imagined. For example, Eleanor Dulles's house and swimming pool served as social space for covert missions (35-39). Friedman states, Eleanor.. .designed a house that explored her vision of a geopolitical social sphere that served as an anchor for a series of transnational power relationships that stretched far beyond it (46). However, agents of covert empire brought home foreign culture and their co-conspirators. For example, agents returned with a desire for authentic Asian cuisine (101,181-82). Furthermore, Friedman explains, many decorated their pine-paneled living rooms and additions with gifts and booty acquired in their foreign posts-Korean dolls, extensive collections of Canton porcelain, [and] African sculptures (89). Lastly, agents transported their associates back to Dulles corridor. The US evacuated over 45,125 Vietnamese (173) and brought back their domestic help from Central America (263) and their Iranian wives (270). Paradoxically, agents from Northern Virginia imprinted empire abroad but also brought empire home. …