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The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades With the Agency
The Unknown CIA brings readers into the world of the scholars, researchers, and analysts who provide the facts upon which U.S. national security decisions are based, revealing what working for "the Company" is really like.
231 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1989
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April 4, 2008
The first half of this book is part biography and part travelogue, and is only occasionally interesting. The last half has much more to say about the CIA and its interaction with presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon. It is a short book at about 250 pages.
The opening pages that describe the impetus for creating the CIA are very familiar: various agencies within the US government all knew fragments of information that together could have shown that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor, but due to lack of authority or information sharing it was not all pulled together in time. Later, Smith mentions how the few experts on the Soviet Union there were initially in the CIA.
Smith goes to great lengths to portray the analytical side of the CIA as being completely opposite what is shown in popular media- but then the cover image is one of a silhouetted man in a trench-coat holding a pistol.
There are six or seven irritating instances of the author describing the attractiveness of various women he comes into passing contact with. A better writer could have pulled it off in a classier way, but for someone trying seriously to establish a positive image of his former employer he would be better to leave out entirely mentions of a 'beautiful negress' or a 'handsome bosom'.
The opening pages that describe the impetus for creating the CIA are very familiar: various agencies within the US government all knew fragments of information that together could have shown that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor, but due to lack of authority or information sharing it was not all pulled together in time. Later, Smith mentions how the few experts on the Soviet Union there were initially in the CIA.
Smith goes to great lengths to portray the analytical side of the CIA as being completely opposite what is shown in popular media- but then the cover image is one of a silhouetted man in a trench-coat holding a pistol.
There are six or seven irritating instances of the author describing the attractiveness of various women he comes into passing contact with. A better writer could have pulled it off in a classier way, but for someone trying seriously to establish a positive image of his former employer he would be better to leave out entirely mentions of a 'beautiful negress' or a 'handsome bosom'.
Displaying 1 of 1 review