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The CIA And The Cult Of Intelligence
Drawing upon their firsthand experiences with the CIA, the authors expose the activities, tactics, and workings of the intelligence agency
398 pages, Hardcover
First published June 24, 1974
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August 24, 2016
Written following Watergate by a former State Dept. employee and a former executive assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA. The federal government sued to stop publication. When that didn't work it sued to have several pages removed. Federal court allowed some of the questionable parts to be printed, while other parts had to be removed. The book is both a brief history of the CIA, including its organizational structure, as well as an analysis of its operation. Some might find the material dry, and possibly dated. I thought it interesting considering where our country is today with the likes of NSA whistle blowing, wikileaks, foreign policy, terrorism, etc. The history part is timeless of course, the analysis portion could be just as relevant today.
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May 9, 2017It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages[citation needed] but they resisted and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored. [source: Wikipedia]
This is the way the CIA sees its mission, the job it was created to do. The CIA is supposed to be involved with everyone. The agency is supposed to have its fingers in every pie, including the Communist one, so that they can all be manipulated in whichever way the U.S. government desires. It is a fact that a good many foreign leaders, including those often seen as "neutral" or even hostile to the United States, have been secretly on the CIA's payroll. The CIA has distorted history in other ways than by outright coverups and suppression of the truth. One method was to produce its own books.
For 14 years Victor Marchetti worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he rose to be executive assistant to the deputy director.
This is the way the CIA sees its mission, the job it was created to do. The CIA is supposed to be involved with everyone. The agency is supposed to have its fingers in every pie, including the Communist one, so that they can all be manipulated in whichever way the U.S. government desires. It is a fact that a good many foreign leaders, including those often seen as "neutral" or even hostile to the United States, have been secretly on the CIA's payroll. The CIA has distorted history in other ways than by outright coverups and suppression of the truth. One method was to produce its own books.
For 14 years Victor Marchetti worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he rose to be executive assistant to the deputy director.
September 24, 2019
fluent and readable, a good read
November 9, 2022
Not the easiest book to get through since it’s a bit dry in places, but it contained enough eye-poppingly crazy stories about the CIA’s various misadventures to keep me turning pages. I found the section about CIA proprietary companies particularly fascinating—I’ve not encountered much about that topic in other books on the agency.
I read this mainly as research for something I want to write about the mid-century CIA, but it’s hard not to think of the Iraq War WMD scandal when reading this Marchetti’s critique of the CIA’s unholy attempt to marry clandestine activity with the production of objective intelligence analysis for policy makers. And it’s hard not to think of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document horde when Marchetti says the government produces too much intelligence and classifies far too much information.
I read this mainly as research for something I want to write about the mid-century CIA, but it’s hard not to think of the Iraq War WMD scandal when reading this Marchetti’s critique of the CIA’s unholy attempt to marry clandestine activity with the production of objective intelligence analysis for policy makers. And it’s hard not to think of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document horde when Marchetti says the government produces too much intelligence and classifies far too much information.
February 22, 2014
The authors were a disgruntled former CIA analyst (Marchetti) and a disgruntled former State Department analyst (Marks), writing in the post-Watergate period of the Church and Pike Committees. The book mainly focuses on the CIA, so my references to the author are, I presume, directed mainly toward Marchetti. Marchetti's biography indicates that he underwent a year of training to be a clandestine officer, then he promptly went into the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence to be an analyst instead, indicating that he either flunked out of his clandestine training or dropped out (though he doesn't happen to mention that part about himself).
The principal thesis of the book is that intelligence functions are necessary and legitimate, but covert action, defined in the book as interfering in other countries' internal affairs, is both counterproductive and illegal.
"There can be no doubt that the gathering of intelligence is a necessary function of modern government. It makes a significant contribution to national security, and it is vital to the conduct of foreign affairs... The proven benefits of intelligence are not in question. Rather, it is the illegal and unethical clandestine operations carried out under the guise of intelligence and the dubious purposes to which they are often put by our government that are questionable--both on moral grounds and in terms of practical benefit to the nation." (p 11)
The authors take the thesis common to the post-Vietnam portion of the 1970s that signals intelligence (SIGINT) was the neat, clean, reliable, valuable intelligence and human intelligence (HUMINT) was of questionable value at best. This thesis seems to have been suffered a significant setback by the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Equally, the authors' characterization of covert action as meddling in the internal politics of other countries seem to be overly narrow in light of the United States' avowed and alleged activities against terrorists (non-state actors) around the world since September 2001.
One can infer to what the authors, particularly Marchetti, had access while working. Some topics they/he discuss vaguely and from a distance, while in other instances they seem to have been the minutes taker for certain meetings. It is this latter category that I think a reader will find most valuable/insightful. For instance, this anecdote for the preparation of intelligence highlights some of the difficulties of bureaucratic life: "...every Thursday morning the USIB [U.S. Intelligence Board] spends an average of about thirty seconds discussing the Watch Report (which actually takes several man-weeks to prepare) before it is forwarded to the White House." (p 85) But whither the Watch Report, "...the Watch Report is forwarded to the nation's top policy-makers, who normally do not even glance at it, since they know that everything in it of any consequence has already been distributed to them in other intelligence reports." (pp 84-85) The authors also make use of (and cite) other sources.
The above anecdote highlights a real problem that the authors also address, namely, the conclusion of the Cunningham report: "The Unites States intelligence community collects too much information." (p 96) The authors outline the literally hundreds of file drawers filled with information that the intelligence community is unable even to look at. This seems to continue to plague the intelligence community, with the NSA's General Keith Alexander having made his infamous statement in response to Edward Snowden's disclosures: "you need the haystack to find the needle." Last time I checked, needles were easier to find without haystacks, so why one would wish for a haystack to bury one's needle is beyond me.
The authors tackle the problem of over classification in various portions. For instance: "Intelligence professionals explain that the sensitivity of the sources and methods involved in collecting this information makes the high degree of secrecy necessary, and they have resisted congressional attempts to create a regular procedure for sharing data with the legislative branch. Yet the professionals do not hesitate to leak the most highly classified intelligence when it serves their departmental interests. Moreover, the intelligence community regularly provides friendly foreign countries with detailed estimates of Soviet military strength, and during the S.A.L.T. talks the nation's negotiators even told their Soviet counterparts how much the United States really knew about Soviet missiles." (p 320) The authors elsewhere discuss how the Soviets knew of the U-2 program within 5 days of the initiation of overflights, while official secrecy about it left Americans in the dark. Given virtually every U.S. President's statements about doing something about over classification since then, one can infer that elements of this problem persist.
Some of their specific criticisms, particularly concerning Congress' willful lack of oversight, were at least mitigated by the Church-Pike changes, though the proper degree and level of intelligence oversight remains a legitimate topic of debate in a democratic society.
The authors were litigating with the government over how much of their book would be redacted when this version was published. There are some bold sections that indicate initially redacted portions that the authors and their publisher successfully appealed to include, while other portions are missing and left blank with "DELETED" holding the place of the missing text. The authors note that a forthcoming edition will contain more of the redacted information.
As is typically the case with this type of "tell-all" book, once the authors get going, they really get going. The authors claim to reveal the location and nature of a wide variety of alleged intelligence facilities, including those that have little or nothing to do with covert action or anything to which the authors claim to have an objection. Indeed, the authors go to great pains at multiple points to indicate their approval of intelligence, including in some of the sections I have already cited. In this they join the august company of Snowden and many others, who not only "blow the whistle" on whatever they are grinding their axe on, but everything including the kitchen sink as well, never mind the consequences to the national security they purport to support.
The authors overall conclusions are summed up as such: "The U.S. intelligence community performs a vital service in keeping track of and analyzing the military capability and strengths of the Soviet Union and China, but its other functions--the CIA's dirty tricks and classical espionage--are, on the whole, a liability for the country, on both practical and moral grounds." (p 374) "As for the CIA's paramilitary tasks, they have no place in an intelligence agency, no place in a democratic society... The other forms of covert action--propaganda, subversion, manipulation of governments--should simply be discontinued. These are more often than not counterproductive and, even when successful, contrary to the most basic American ideals." (p 377)
I found their case underwhelming, especially given the failure of the Church-Pike architecture to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks, and given the need for the CIA's paramilitary capabilities to respond to the attacks and conduct later counterterrorism operations. Debate rages today as to the proper role of the Department of Defense and CIA in these matters, but the authors' broad-brush condemnation of covert action seems naive not only in theory, but in the light of subsequent history. Nonetheless, the book provides an articulation of common arguments about intelligence, especially the SIGINT-is-better-than-HUMINT and the case against covert action, both of which remain part of the debate today. Further, the authors' specific anecdotes are enlightening for anyone interested in the topic. Therefore, a serious student of intelligence affairs would do well to include this book on a reading list, though perhaps not at its top.
The principal thesis of the book is that intelligence functions are necessary and legitimate, but covert action, defined in the book as interfering in other countries' internal affairs, is both counterproductive and illegal.
"There can be no doubt that the gathering of intelligence is a necessary function of modern government. It makes a significant contribution to national security, and it is vital to the conduct of foreign affairs... The proven benefits of intelligence are not in question. Rather, it is the illegal and unethical clandestine operations carried out under the guise of intelligence and the dubious purposes to which they are often put by our government that are questionable--both on moral grounds and in terms of practical benefit to the nation." (p 11)
The authors take the thesis common to the post-Vietnam portion of the 1970s that signals intelligence (SIGINT) was the neat, clean, reliable, valuable intelligence and human intelligence (HUMINT) was of questionable value at best. This thesis seems to have been suffered a significant setback by the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Equally, the authors' characterization of covert action as meddling in the internal politics of other countries seem to be overly narrow in light of the United States' avowed and alleged activities against terrorists (non-state actors) around the world since September 2001.
One can infer to what the authors, particularly Marchetti, had access while working. Some topics they/he discuss vaguely and from a distance, while in other instances they seem to have been the minutes taker for certain meetings. It is this latter category that I think a reader will find most valuable/insightful. For instance, this anecdote for the preparation of intelligence highlights some of the difficulties of bureaucratic life: "...every Thursday morning the USIB [U.S. Intelligence Board] spends an average of about thirty seconds discussing the Watch Report (which actually takes several man-weeks to prepare) before it is forwarded to the White House." (p 85) But whither the Watch Report, "...the Watch Report is forwarded to the nation's top policy-makers, who normally do not even glance at it, since they know that everything in it of any consequence has already been distributed to them in other intelligence reports." (pp 84-85) The authors also make use of (and cite) other sources.
The above anecdote highlights a real problem that the authors also address, namely, the conclusion of the Cunningham report: "The Unites States intelligence community collects too much information." (p 96) The authors outline the literally hundreds of file drawers filled with information that the intelligence community is unable even to look at. This seems to continue to plague the intelligence community, with the NSA's General Keith Alexander having made his infamous statement in response to Edward Snowden's disclosures: "you need the haystack to find the needle." Last time I checked, needles were easier to find without haystacks, so why one would wish for a haystack to bury one's needle is beyond me.
The authors tackle the problem of over classification in various portions. For instance: "Intelligence professionals explain that the sensitivity of the sources and methods involved in collecting this information makes the high degree of secrecy necessary, and they have resisted congressional attempts to create a regular procedure for sharing data with the legislative branch. Yet the professionals do not hesitate to leak the most highly classified intelligence when it serves their departmental interests. Moreover, the intelligence community regularly provides friendly foreign countries with detailed estimates of Soviet military strength, and during the S.A.L.T. talks the nation's negotiators even told their Soviet counterparts how much the United States really knew about Soviet missiles." (p 320) The authors elsewhere discuss how the Soviets knew of the U-2 program within 5 days of the initiation of overflights, while official secrecy about it left Americans in the dark. Given virtually every U.S. President's statements about doing something about over classification since then, one can infer that elements of this problem persist.
Some of their specific criticisms, particularly concerning Congress' willful lack of oversight, were at least mitigated by the Church-Pike changes, though the proper degree and level of intelligence oversight remains a legitimate topic of debate in a democratic society.
The authors were litigating with the government over how much of their book would be redacted when this version was published. There are some bold sections that indicate initially redacted portions that the authors and their publisher successfully appealed to include, while other portions are missing and left blank with "DELETED" holding the place of the missing text. The authors note that a forthcoming edition will contain more of the redacted information.
As is typically the case with this type of "tell-all" book, once the authors get going, they really get going. The authors claim to reveal the location and nature of a wide variety of alleged intelligence facilities, including those that have little or nothing to do with covert action or anything to which the authors claim to have an objection. Indeed, the authors go to great pains at multiple points to indicate their approval of intelligence, including in some of the sections I have already cited. In this they join the august company of Snowden and many others, who not only "blow the whistle" on whatever they are grinding their axe on, but everything including the kitchen sink as well, never mind the consequences to the national security they purport to support.
The authors overall conclusions are summed up as such: "The U.S. intelligence community performs a vital service in keeping track of and analyzing the military capability and strengths of the Soviet Union and China, but its other functions--the CIA's dirty tricks and classical espionage--are, on the whole, a liability for the country, on both practical and moral grounds." (p 374) "As for the CIA's paramilitary tasks, they have no place in an intelligence agency, no place in a democratic society... The other forms of covert action--propaganda, subversion, manipulation of governments--should simply be discontinued. These are more often than not counterproductive and, even when successful, contrary to the most basic American ideals." (p 377)
I found their case underwhelming, especially given the failure of the Church-Pike architecture to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks, and given the need for the CIA's paramilitary capabilities to respond to the attacks and conduct later counterterrorism operations. Debate rages today as to the proper role of the Department of Defense and CIA in these matters, but the authors' broad-brush condemnation of covert action seems naive not only in theory, but in the light of subsequent history. Nonetheless, the book provides an articulation of common arguments about intelligence, especially the SIGINT-is-better-than-HUMINT and the case against covert action, both of which remain part of the debate today. Further, the authors' specific anecdotes are enlightening for anyone interested in the topic. Therefore, a serious student of intelligence affairs would do well to include this book on a reading list, though perhaps not at its top.
August 27, 2011
Here's a book I've had for quite a long while without getting around to reading it. The hesitation was that it was dated, censored and authored by two who were to me unknowns. However, being reminded through GoodReads as to how impressed I was by Marks when I finally read him got me to pull it off the shelf.
This book is a classic in CIA exposure literature. It's not so much a history of the agency, though enough of that is mentioned to serve as background, as it is a description of how it works. With the description comes critique. Some of it is simply ethical. Marchetti and Marks are offended by all the killing. Some of it is pragmatic. In sum, the authors believe that the agency is too invested in black operations and that these and their self-justifying ways distort the gathering and dissemination of intelligence, prevent effective oversight and give the USA a bad international reputation. Those parts of the book which are most censored seem to consist primarily of instances demonstrating the authors' critique of covert operations.
All in all, an intelligent and not entirely unsympathetic look at one of the nastiest agencies of government.
This book is a classic in CIA exposure literature. It's not so much a history of the agency, though enough of that is mentioned to serve as background, as it is a description of how it works. With the description comes critique. Some of it is simply ethical. Marchetti and Marks are offended by all the killing. Some of it is pragmatic. In sum, the authors believe that the agency is too invested in black operations and that these and their self-justifying ways distort the gathering and dissemination of intelligence, prevent effective oversight and give the USA a bad international reputation. Those parts of the book which are most censored seem to consist primarily of instances demonstrating the authors' critique of covert operations.
All in all, an intelligent and not entirely unsympathetic look at one of the nastiest agencies of government.
April 13, 2009
This book stood in for the mia culpa we never got from Washington about the black bag jobs and anti-American to the core covert operations that we were running all over the world. Even though we know all this so well that we're almost jaded to it (so much so that we let it happen all over again) it's a great read and still unbelievable how wild and out of control these agents of a supposedly just, democratic society were out there doing.
October 3, 2018
I read the original 1975 paperback edition "Published with spaces and indicating the exact location and length of the 168 deletions demanded by the CIA." (Later editions were able to return some of the expurgated passages.) The authors argue that the CIA has a “profound determinative effect on the formulation and carrying out of American foreign policy." And that is the problem they seek to expose. Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a prominent paleoconservative critic of the United States Intelligence Community and the Israel lobby in the United States, is sort of a whistleblower here. The authors detail how the CIA works (in a level of granularity that veers between fascinating if dated and overly microscopic) and how its original purpose (i.e. collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers) has, according to the author, been subverted by its obsession with clandestine operations. It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they resisted and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored. Some of the sections are so rife with deletions, it is onerous to read. However, this is rare and mostly seeing the bold-faced sections about Camp Peary, Air America, etc. are interesting.
Some historical details I find fascinating here, such as details on one of the purported Watergate triggers ITT (Hal Hendrix, control of Cuban phone system, South America, etc.) and how Oleg Penkovsky so wanted to serve the CIA, but went to the Birtish by default when the CIA was not convinced. This casts a light on The Penkovsky Papers as its development and publishing with other CIA-rleated books is explored and suggests it is a bit of a pastiche.
Other things I found fascinating are some operational details like the psywar operation that
and that
and also how unions secretly funneled money from the Central Intelligence Agency to anti-Communist unionists overseas, often without concern for any other value. Victor Reuther confirmed that he was himself the dispenser of $50,000 in C.I.A. funds to French and Italian unions not long after VE Day.
Written and published post-Watergate, post-Pentagon Papers and after embarassing CIA exposes in Ramparts etc. it feels like a bit of a feeding frenzy on an evil CIA being revealed after its war in Laos and having been found penetrating American campuses especially through penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association.
During those turbulent years, students in 1971, stormed and occupied a Harvard building. Certain documents went missing in that raid. One was a remarkable report of a 1968 meeting by CIA staffer William R. Harris, about whom little is known. Thought now easy to find, these minutes of the “The third meeting of the Discussion Group on Intelligence and Foreign Policy,” known as the “Bissell Meeting” makes up the afterwrod here. Interestingly, Bissell then predicted the rise of electronic surveillance over human operatives.
Some historical details I find fascinating here, such as details on one of the purported Watergate triggers ITT (Hal Hendrix, control of Cuban phone system, South America, etc.) and how Oleg Penkovsky so wanted to serve the CIA, but went to the Birtish by default when the CIA was not convinced. This casts a light on The Penkovsky Papers as its development and publishing with other CIA-rleated books is explored and suggests it is a bit of a pastiche.
Other things I found fascinating are some operational details like the psywar operation that
played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered an area, and planted rumors that an asuang lived on where the Communists were based. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, hung his body until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. As superstitious as any other Filipinos, the insurgents fled from the region.
and that
that for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, The Daily Worker. In fairness to the Worker's staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was indeed real.
and also how unions secretly funneled money from the Central Intelligence Agency to anti-Communist unionists overseas, often without concern for any other value. Victor Reuther confirmed that he was himself the dispenser of $50,000 in C.I.A. funds to French and Italian unions not long after VE Day.
Written and published post-Watergate, post-Pentagon Papers and after embarassing CIA exposes in Ramparts etc. it feels like a bit of a feeding frenzy on an evil CIA being revealed after its war in Laos and having been found penetrating American campuses especially through penetration and manipulation of the National Student Association.
During those turbulent years, students in 1971, stormed and occupied a Harvard building. Certain documents went missing in that raid. One was a remarkable report of a 1968 meeting by CIA staffer William R. Harris, about whom little is known. Thought now easy to find, these minutes of the “The third meeting of the Discussion Group on Intelligence and Foreign Policy,” known as the “Bissell Meeting” makes up the afterwrod here. Interestingly, Bissell then predicted the rise of electronic surveillance over human operatives.
September 25, 2023
This 1974 book by a former long-time CIA officer (Marchetti) was a straightforward expose of the agency - more like a realistic call for reform than an impassioned denunciation of the agency, since the author admits it is a given that any country will need to have some sort of intelligence capability.
The book describes agency operations, successes as well as failures, such as the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion - and is most interesting since it was written in the immediate post-Watergate era, when the CIA was implicated in Nixon's "plumbers" crimes, and its leaders subjected to grueling sessions before Congressional oversight committees, promising to reform itself (which, it never really will, according to Marchetti). It goes into detail about the CIA's bureaucratic inability to change, how (at the time at least) its personnel mostly consisted mostly of "old boys" from elite schools, how each succeeding administration relies on the covert arm of the agency to pursue national security goals, that would be inadvisable to pursue openly. Unfortunately, America's tendency since WWII to interfere in the affairs of other countries (contradicting even the UN charter) has led to not only blow-back over specific agency initiatives, but also has poisoned trust and created a negative impression of the US in many countries of the world, which is exactly what the US would not want. Thus, tactical victories (here and there) led eventually to strategic failure - an example of the potentially dire effect of this contradiction is the present waning of the West with the rise of many other former colonial countries as rather major powers in and of themselves, such as China and even India, that may not necessarily always align themselves with the West in every instance. The world may now know better or may have other options, and so, with the current war in Ukraine, which may at first seem like a cut and dried case of Russian aggression vs. Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of countries do not support US/NATO sanctions vs Russia, prefer to remain neutral while many continue to trade with Russia despite Western pressure to stop. I think this falling away of Western influence is the result of Western interference in the affairs of other countries on a more or less continual basis for decades - even after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s - for whatever reason, it has led to a reduction in trust or willingness to align with the West. This has serious consequences in the long-term - what we once took for granted, that the world was our oyster, may not be so in years to come. This can't all be blamed on CIA machinations worldwide since WWII - but the high-profile "exploits" - successes as well as failures - certainly did not help build up trust in the US. What the CIA regarded as successes, such as helping to topple democratically-elected Allende in Chile, others may see as a shameful betrayal of democracy by the very country that purports to be the beacon of democracy.
The US ramped up its intelligence capability in the post WWII years because of the threat of Soviet/communist expansion, and eventually the intelligence community (military intelligence, CIA, and many other branches of intelligence, even to some extent, FBI) grew to many thousands of employees, at a cost of billions of dollars (and that was in 1974, the growth of the intelligence community must be even greater by now). In order to prevent the spread of communism (or contain it) the agency was active globally, including sponsoring secret wars in SE Asia during the time of the war in Vietnam, and interfering in the politics of many countries - including in France, the UK, and Italy in the post WWII era.
Any country which has a leadership that is unfriendly to the US, for whatever reason, may eventually be in the cross-hairs of the agency, slated for destabilization via any number of dirty tricks, or possibly even a secret war (as with the Contras) or sponsorship of a coup (as with the coup in Chile that toppled Allende). Although Marchetti's book doesn't give a day to day view of the activities of an agent and as such is not as exciting or gripping as Philip Agee's book "CIA Diary" which described his activities in detail during his time in the CIA, it does offer an overview of the agency's functions and is a critique of the agency in general. From the perspective of the approximately 50 years since the book was written, it is interesting as a time capsule of another era which was quite fraught (post Vietnam, post Watergate) and in which the CIA was deeply implicated in some of the darker chapters of American history both at home and abroad.
The book was obviously quite controversial when it was published in the mid-1970s and it was heavily censored by the CIA before publication; after a series of court cases, some of the censored portions were restored while others remained censored. The volume shows the position of both the censored portions and restored portions of text, which is interesting in itself - invites a kind of guessing-game on the part of the reader who may try to guess or reconstruct what it was that the CIA deemed so damaging that it had to be edited out.
Here are the quotes:
From the Preface by co-author John D. Marks:
"In the high councils of the intelligence community, there was no sense that intervention in the internal affairs of other countries was not the inherent right of the United States."
From Chapter 1 - The Cult of Intelligence:
"...these men who ask that they be regarded as honorable men, true patriots, will, when caught in their own webs of deceit, even assert that the government has an inherent right to lie to its people."
"...[in 1947] ...veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services [such as Donovan and Dulles] ...believed that the mantle of world leadership had been passed by the British to the Americans, and that their worn secret service must take up where the British left off."
"...in the late 1940s and in the 1950s... it did perform successfully, if questionably, in the effort to contain the spread of communism..."
From Chapter 2 - The Clandestine Theory:
"...the burglarizing of the Chilean embassy in Washington in May 1972 by some of the same men who the next month staged the break-in at the Watergate. ...the U.S. admittedly worked to undercut the Allende government by cutting off most economic assistance, discouraging private lines of credit, and blocking loans by international organizations. State Department officials testifying before Congress after the coup explained it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism."
"The United Sates began engaging in covert-action operations ...during World War II. Taking lessons from the more experienced British secret services, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) learned to use covert action as an offensive weapon against Germany and Japan."
"In the immediate postwar years, CIA covert-action programs [were]...concentrated in Europe, as communist expansion into Western Europe seemed a real threat."
"...secret intervention in the internal affairs of countries ...susceptible to socialist movements, either democratic or revolutionary."
"Kermit Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, master-minded the 1953 putsch that overthrew Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh."
"When the U.S. government secretly decides to provoke a coup in a particular country.... ...if the case officers have been performing their jobs well, they will have ...built up a network of agents in that country's government, military forces, press, labor unions, and other important groups; thus there is...a standing force in scores of countries ready to serve the CIA when the need arises."
"Although ....analysts clearly indicated that the wars in Laos and Vietnam were not winnable, the ...leadership of the CIA never ceased to devise and launch new programs in support of the local regimes ... in the hope of somehow bringing about victory over the enemy."
"America's leaders have not yet reached the point where they are willing to forsake intervention in the internal affairs of other countries..."
From Chapter 3 - The CIA and the Intelligence Community:
"Today the vast majority of those in the spy business are faceless, desk-bound bureaucrats, far removed from the world of the secret agent."
From Chapter 4 - Special Operations:
"In ... areas of the world not under communist domination..the CIA's clandestine paramilitary operations fared somewhat better, at least during the early 1950s."
"...the CIA ...gradually drifted into a posture whereby its paramilitary operations were in support of the status quo. The agency, in pursuit of "stability" and "orderly change," increasingly associated itself with protecting vested interests. In the view of much of the world, it had become a symbol of repression rather than freedom."
"Although the CIA officers led their Tibetan trainees to believe that they were being readied for the reconquering of their homeland, even within the agency few saw any real chance that this could happen."
"From the beginning of the Tibetan operation, ti was clear that its only value would be one of harassment."
"The Tibetan operation was soon overshadowed and succeeded by the CIA involvement in the Congo."
"...one such CIA raiding party was operating in that part of the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 where two U.S. destroyers allegedly came under attack by North Vietnamese ships. These CIA raids may well have specifically provoked the North Vietnamese action against the destroyers, which in turn led to the passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution by the U.S. Congress in 1964, thus setting the stage for large-scale American military involvement in Indochina."
"The only reason for the failure [of the Bay of Pigs Invasion], the CIA's operators believed, was that President Kennedy had lost his nerve at the last minute, refusing more air support for the invasion and withholding or reducing other possible assistance by U.S. forces. Consequently, the agency continued its relationships with its "penetrations" of Cuban exile groups..."
From Chapter 5 - Proprietary Organizations:
"[those in the Clandestine Services] ... know all too well that if the CIA never intervened [in the internal affairs of other countries], there would be little justification for their existence."
From Chapter 6 - Propaganda and Disinformation:
"Over the years, the agency has provided direct subsides to a number of magazines and publishing houses, ranging from Eastern European emigre organs to such reputable firms as Frederick A. Praeger, of New York--which admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request."
"...for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, 'The Daily Worker.' In fairness to [its] ... staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was ...real."
"...on occasion, outright lies ("black" propaganda) are used although usually accompanied for credibility's sake by some truths and half-truths. "Black" propaganda on the one hand and "disinformation" on the other are virtually indistinguishable. Both refer to the spreading of false information in order to influence people's opinions or actions. Disinformation actually is a special type of "black" propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents; originally, it was something of a Soviet specialty and the Russian word for it, 'dezinformatsiya,' is virtually a direct analog of our own. Within the KGB there is even a Department of Disinformation."
From Chapter 8 - Espionage and Counterespionage:
"Technical collection systems were virtually unknown before World War II, but the same technological explosion which has affected nearly every other aspect of modern life...has also drastically changed the intelligence trade. Since the war, the United Sates has poured tens of billions of dollars into developing ever more advanced machines to keep track of what other countries--especially communist countries--are doing."
"In addition to the foreign and defense ministries, the CIA operators usually try to penetrate the target nation's communications systems - a task which is on occasion aided by American companies, particularly the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Postal services also are subverted for espionage purposes."
"...[CIA Director] Richard Helms had been 'most cooperative and helpful" in helping to organize the top-secret White House plan for domestic surveillance and intelligence collection; that the CIA had provided "technical" assistance to the White House plumbers in their 1971 burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; that the agency maintained "safe houses' in the heart of Washington where E. Howard Hunt was clandestinely provided with CIA-manufactured false documents, a disguise, a speech-altering device, and a camera fitted into a tobacco pouch; that five of the seven Watergate burglars were ex-CIA employees, and one was still on the payroll and regularly reporting to an agency case officer; that in the week after the break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters, high White House officials tried to involve the agency directly in the Watergate cover-up; and, perhaps most significantly, that top CIA officials remained silent, even in secret testimony before congressional committees, about the illegal activities they knew had taken place."
From Chapter - The Clandestine Mentality:
"...the clandestine mentality: a separation of personal morality and conduct from actions, no matter how debased, which are taken in the name of the United States government and, more specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency."
"One of the lessons learned from the Watergate experience is the scope of this amorality and its influence on the clandestine mentality."
"Yet the feeling remains strong among the nation's top officials...that America is responsible for what happens in other countries and that it has an inherent right--a sort of modern Manifest Destiny--to intervene in other countries' internal affairs."
"Over the last decade the attitudes of the young...who in earlier times would have followed their fathers or their fathers' college roommates into the CIA, have changed drastically. With ... Vietnam... as a catalyst, the agency has become, to a large extent, discredited in the traditional Eastern schools and colleges."
From Chapter 9 - Intelligence and Policy:
"The intelligence function, when properly performed, is strictly an informational service."
"International law and the United Nations charter clearly prohibit one country from interfering in the internal affairs of another, but if the interference is done by a clandestine agency whose operations cannot readily be traced back to the United States, then a President has a much freer hand."
"...to the less developed countries, the presence of an American [intelligence] installation is both a threat and an opportunity. The threat comes from domestic opposition forces who look on the base as an example of "neocolonialism" and use it as a weapon against those in power. The opportunity arises [from] ...the fact that the United States will pay dearly for the right to install its eavesdropping equipment and keep it place..."
From Chapter 10 - Controlling the CIA:
"The Eisenhower administration...issued a secret directive exempting he CIA from [the ambassador's] ... supervision. President Kennedy, shortly after taking office, reiterated that the ambassador should supervise all the agencies and then sent out a secret letter which said the CIA was not to be excluded. The Kennedy letter remains in effect today, but its application varies from country to country."
"...much of what the American people have learned--or have not learned--about the agency has been filtered through an "old-boy network" of journalists friendly to the CIA."
"The CIA's principal technique for fending off the press has been to wrap itself in the mantle of "national security."
"Thus, the public did not learn what the U.S. government and ITT were up to in Chile until the spring of 1972, when columnist Jack Anderson published scores of ITT internal documents concerning Chile."
From Chapter 11 - Conclusions:
"...the CIA played some role in forestalling a communist takeover of Western Europe, but the agency's record in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere in the world left much to be desired."
"...the country has not had a chief executive since the agency's inception who has not believed in the fundamental need and rightness of CIA intervention in the internal affairs of other nations."
"Intelligence should not be presented to the nation's policy-makers by the same men who are trying to justify clandestine operations."
"As for the CIA's paramilitary tasks, they have no place in an intelligence agency, no place in a democratic society. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and the United States should never again become involved in armed conflict without full congressional approval and public knowledge."
"The other counties of the world have a fundamental right not to have any outside power interfere in their internal affairs. The United States, which solemnly pledged to uphold this right when it ratified the United Nations charter, should now honor it."
The book describes agency operations, successes as well as failures, such as the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion - and is most interesting since it was written in the immediate post-Watergate era, when the CIA was implicated in Nixon's "plumbers" crimes, and its leaders subjected to grueling sessions before Congressional oversight committees, promising to reform itself (which, it never really will, according to Marchetti). It goes into detail about the CIA's bureaucratic inability to change, how (at the time at least) its personnel mostly consisted mostly of "old boys" from elite schools, how each succeeding administration relies on the covert arm of the agency to pursue national security goals, that would be inadvisable to pursue openly. Unfortunately, America's tendency since WWII to interfere in the affairs of other countries (contradicting even the UN charter) has led to not only blow-back over specific agency initiatives, but also has poisoned trust and created a negative impression of the US in many countries of the world, which is exactly what the US would not want. Thus, tactical victories (here and there) led eventually to strategic failure - an example of the potentially dire effect of this contradiction is the present waning of the West with the rise of many other former colonial countries as rather major powers in and of themselves, such as China and even India, that may not necessarily always align themselves with the West in every instance. The world may now know better or may have other options, and so, with the current war in Ukraine, which may at first seem like a cut and dried case of Russian aggression vs. Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of countries do not support US/NATO sanctions vs Russia, prefer to remain neutral while many continue to trade with Russia despite Western pressure to stop. I think this falling away of Western influence is the result of Western interference in the affairs of other countries on a more or less continual basis for decades - even after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s - for whatever reason, it has led to a reduction in trust or willingness to align with the West. This has serious consequences in the long-term - what we once took for granted, that the world was our oyster, may not be so in years to come. This can't all be blamed on CIA machinations worldwide since WWII - but the high-profile "exploits" - successes as well as failures - certainly did not help build up trust in the US. What the CIA regarded as successes, such as helping to topple democratically-elected Allende in Chile, others may see as a shameful betrayal of democracy by the very country that purports to be the beacon of democracy.
The US ramped up its intelligence capability in the post WWII years because of the threat of Soviet/communist expansion, and eventually the intelligence community (military intelligence, CIA, and many other branches of intelligence, even to some extent, FBI) grew to many thousands of employees, at a cost of billions of dollars (and that was in 1974, the growth of the intelligence community must be even greater by now). In order to prevent the spread of communism (or contain it) the agency was active globally, including sponsoring secret wars in SE Asia during the time of the war in Vietnam, and interfering in the politics of many countries - including in France, the UK, and Italy in the post WWII era.
Any country which has a leadership that is unfriendly to the US, for whatever reason, may eventually be in the cross-hairs of the agency, slated for destabilization via any number of dirty tricks, or possibly even a secret war (as with the Contras) or sponsorship of a coup (as with the coup in Chile that toppled Allende). Although Marchetti's book doesn't give a day to day view of the activities of an agent and as such is not as exciting or gripping as Philip Agee's book "CIA Diary" which described his activities in detail during his time in the CIA, it does offer an overview of the agency's functions and is a critique of the agency in general. From the perspective of the approximately 50 years since the book was written, it is interesting as a time capsule of another era which was quite fraught (post Vietnam, post Watergate) and in which the CIA was deeply implicated in some of the darker chapters of American history both at home and abroad.
The book was obviously quite controversial when it was published in the mid-1970s and it was heavily censored by the CIA before publication; after a series of court cases, some of the censored portions were restored while others remained censored. The volume shows the position of both the censored portions and restored portions of text, which is interesting in itself - invites a kind of guessing-game on the part of the reader who may try to guess or reconstruct what it was that the CIA deemed so damaging that it had to be edited out.
Here are the quotes:
From the Preface by co-author John D. Marks:
"In the high councils of the intelligence community, there was no sense that intervention in the internal affairs of other countries was not the inherent right of the United States."
From Chapter 1 - The Cult of Intelligence:
"...these men who ask that they be regarded as honorable men, true patriots, will, when caught in their own webs of deceit, even assert that the government has an inherent right to lie to its people."
"...[in 1947] ...veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services [such as Donovan and Dulles] ...believed that the mantle of world leadership had been passed by the British to the Americans, and that their worn secret service must take up where the British left off."
"...in the late 1940s and in the 1950s... it did perform successfully, if questionably, in the effort to contain the spread of communism..."
From Chapter 2 - The Clandestine Theory:
"...the burglarizing of the Chilean embassy in Washington in May 1972 by some of the same men who the next month staged the break-in at the Watergate. ...the U.S. admittedly worked to undercut the Allende government by cutting off most economic assistance, discouraging private lines of credit, and blocking loans by international organizations. State Department officials testifying before Congress after the coup explained it was the Nixon administration's wish that the Allende regime collapse economically, thereby discrediting socialism."
"The United Sates began engaging in covert-action operations ...during World War II. Taking lessons from the more experienced British secret services, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) learned to use covert action as an offensive weapon against Germany and Japan."
"In the immediate postwar years, CIA covert-action programs [were]...concentrated in Europe, as communist expansion into Western Europe seemed a real threat."
"...secret intervention in the internal affairs of countries ...susceptible to socialist movements, either democratic or revolutionary."
"Kermit Roosevelt, of the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, master-minded the 1953 putsch that overthrew Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh."
"When the U.S. government secretly decides to provoke a coup in a particular country.... ...if the case officers have been performing their jobs well, they will have ...built up a network of agents in that country's government, military forces, press, labor unions, and other important groups; thus there is...a standing force in scores of countries ready to serve the CIA when the need arises."
"Although ....analysts clearly indicated that the wars in Laos and Vietnam were not winnable, the ...leadership of the CIA never ceased to devise and launch new programs in support of the local regimes ... in the hope of somehow bringing about victory over the enemy."
"America's leaders have not yet reached the point where they are willing to forsake intervention in the internal affairs of other countries..."
From Chapter 3 - The CIA and the Intelligence Community:
"Today the vast majority of those in the spy business are faceless, desk-bound bureaucrats, far removed from the world of the secret agent."
From Chapter 4 - Special Operations:
"In ... areas of the world not under communist domination..the CIA's clandestine paramilitary operations fared somewhat better, at least during the early 1950s."
"...the CIA ...gradually drifted into a posture whereby its paramilitary operations were in support of the status quo. The agency, in pursuit of "stability" and "orderly change," increasingly associated itself with protecting vested interests. In the view of much of the world, it had become a symbol of repression rather than freedom."
"Although the CIA officers led their Tibetan trainees to believe that they were being readied for the reconquering of their homeland, even within the agency few saw any real chance that this could happen."
"From the beginning of the Tibetan operation, ti was clear that its only value would be one of harassment."
"The Tibetan operation was soon overshadowed and succeeded by the CIA involvement in the Congo."
"...one such CIA raiding party was operating in that part of the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 where two U.S. destroyers allegedly came under attack by North Vietnamese ships. These CIA raids may well have specifically provoked the North Vietnamese action against the destroyers, which in turn led to the passage of the Tonkin Gulf resolution by the U.S. Congress in 1964, thus setting the stage for large-scale American military involvement in Indochina."
"The only reason for the failure [of the Bay of Pigs Invasion], the CIA's operators believed, was that President Kennedy had lost his nerve at the last minute, refusing more air support for the invasion and withholding or reducing other possible assistance by U.S. forces. Consequently, the agency continued its relationships with its "penetrations" of Cuban exile groups..."
From Chapter 5 - Proprietary Organizations:
"[those in the Clandestine Services] ... know all too well that if the CIA never intervened [in the internal affairs of other countries], there would be little justification for their existence."
From Chapter 6 - Propaganda and Disinformation:
"Over the years, the agency has provided direct subsides to a number of magazines and publishing houses, ranging from Eastern European emigre organs to such reputable firms as Frederick A. Praeger, of New York--which admitted in 1967 that it had published "fifteen or sixteen books" at the CIA's request."
"...for several years the agency subsidized the New York communist paper, 'The Daily Worker.' In fairness to [its] ... staff, it must be noted that they were unaware of the CIA's assistance, which came in the form of several thousand secretly purchased prepaid subscriptions. The CIA apparently hoped to demonstrate by this means to the American public that the threat of communism in this country was ...real."
"...on occasion, outright lies ("black" propaganda) are used although usually accompanied for credibility's sake by some truths and half-truths. "Black" propaganda on the one hand and "disinformation" on the other are virtually indistinguishable. Both refer to the spreading of false information in order to influence people's opinions or actions. Disinformation actually is a special type of "black" propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents; originally, it was something of a Soviet specialty and the Russian word for it, 'dezinformatsiya,' is virtually a direct analog of our own. Within the KGB there is even a Department of Disinformation."
From Chapter 8 - Espionage and Counterespionage:
"Technical collection systems were virtually unknown before World War II, but the same technological explosion which has affected nearly every other aspect of modern life...has also drastically changed the intelligence trade. Since the war, the United Sates has poured tens of billions of dollars into developing ever more advanced machines to keep track of what other countries--especially communist countries--are doing."
"In addition to the foreign and defense ministries, the CIA operators usually try to penetrate the target nation's communications systems - a task which is on occasion aided by American companies, particularly the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. Postal services also are subverted for espionage purposes."
"...[CIA Director] Richard Helms had been 'most cooperative and helpful" in helping to organize the top-secret White House plan for domestic surveillance and intelligence collection; that the CIA had provided "technical" assistance to the White House plumbers in their 1971 burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist; that the agency maintained "safe houses' in the heart of Washington where E. Howard Hunt was clandestinely provided with CIA-manufactured false documents, a disguise, a speech-altering device, and a camera fitted into a tobacco pouch; that five of the seven Watergate burglars were ex-CIA employees, and one was still on the payroll and regularly reporting to an agency case officer; that in the week after the break-in at the Democratic Party's headquarters, high White House officials tried to involve the agency directly in the Watergate cover-up; and, perhaps most significantly, that top CIA officials remained silent, even in secret testimony before congressional committees, about the illegal activities they knew had taken place."
From Chapter - The Clandestine Mentality:
"...the clandestine mentality: a separation of personal morality and conduct from actions, no matter how debased, which are taken in the name of the United States government and, more specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency."
"One of the lessons learned from the Watergate experience is the scope of this amorality and its influence on the clandestine mentality."
"Yet the feeling remains strong among the nation's top officials...that America is responsible for what happens in other countries and that it has an inherent right--a sort of modern Manifest Destiny--to intervene in other countries' internal affairs."
"Over the last decade the attitudes of the young...who in earlier times would have followed their fathers or their fathers' college roommates into the CIA, have changed drastically. With ... Vietnam... as a catalyst, the agency has become, to a large extent, discredited in the traditional Eastern schools and colleges."
From Chapter 9 - Intelligence and Policy:
"The intelligence function, when properly performed, is strictly an informational service."
"International law and the United Nations charter clearly prohibit one country from interfering in the internal affairs of another, but if the interference is done by a clandestine agency whose operations cannot readily be traced back to the United States, then a President has a much freer hand."
"...to the less developed countries, the presence of an American [intelligence] installation is both a threat and an opportunity. The threat comes from domestic opposition forces who look on the base as an example of "neocolonialism" and use it as a weapon against those in power. The opportunity arises [from] ...the fact that the United States will pay dearly for the right to install its eavesdropping equipment and keep it place..."
From Chapter 10 - Controlling the CIA:
"The Eisenhower administration...issued a secret directive exempting he CIA from [the ambassador's] ... supervision. President Kennedy, shortly after taking office, reiterated that the ambassador should supervise all the agencies and then sent out a secret letter which said the CIA was not to be excluded. The Kennedy letter remains in effect today, but its application varies from country to country."
"...much of what the American people have learned--or have not learned--about the agency has been filtered through an "old-boy network" of journalists friendly to the CIA."
"The CIA's principal technique for fending off the press has been to wrap itself in the mantle of "national security."
"Thus, the public did not learn what the U.S. government and ITT were up to in Chile until the spring of 1972, when columnist Jack Anderson published scores of ITT internal documents concerning Chile."
From Chapter 11 - Conclusions:
"...the CIA played some role in forestalling a communist takeover of Western Europe, but the agency's record in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere in the world left much to be desired."
"...the country has not had a chief executive since the agency's inception who has not believed in the fundamental need and rightness of CIA intervention in the internal affairs of other nations."
"Intelligence should not be presented to the nation's policy-makers by the same men who are trying to justify clandestine operations."
"As for the CIA's paramilitary tasks, they have no place in an intelligence agency, no place in a democratic society. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and the United States should never again become involved in armed conflict without full congressional approval and public knowledge."
"The other counties of the world have a fundamental right not to have any outside power interfere in their internal affairs. The United States, which solemnly pledged to uphold this right when it ratified the United Nations charter, should now honor it."
April 14, 2023
Interesting, but kinda dull
October 20, 2016
I had never heard of this book but saw it in a used book store and had to check it out. I'd highly recommend it. Very readable, very disturbing. I tried getting through Phillip Agee's Inside the Company a while back but got bogged down in all the operational details - CIA exposes should never be such a snooze fest. This book didn't suffer from that problem. I really appreciated the broad scope of the book, and seeing all the bold and italic sections (that the CIA tried to have excised and were kept in after successful lawsuits) made it feel like I was breaking a taboo. Good stuff.
February 29, 2016
Dalai Lama is cia
July 26, 2024
I really like books like this, about the unfettered evils and repugnancy of the US intelligence community and the CIA in particular. Marchetti and Marks lay out the roles, history, and overreach of the CIA as well as the manner in which they conduct illegal forays into the third world while making themselves invaluable to the presidency.
My only problem with this book is that for some reason Marchetti and Marks are too optimistic about the US and the presidency as a whole; just the CIA is evil. They seem unwilling to engage with the idea that the presidency continuously allow the CIA to overreach because they are attaining goals the US foreign policy has without the hassle of diplomacy. Or that the US' systems of foreign policy are designed to work like this: the Monroe Doctrine was overreach; the imperialism in Japan, The Philippines, and Cuba in the late nineteenth century was overreach; and the colonization of Hawaii was overreach and all of those precede the CIA's founding in the late 40s. So why would they think that only the CIA is leaking evil into an otherwise pure, idealistic US government? It's very strange to me
My only problem with this book is that for some reason Marchetti and Marks are too optimistic about the US and the presidency as a whole; just the CIA is evil. They seem unwilling to engage with the idea that the presidency continuously allow the CIA to overreach because they are attaining goals the US foreign policy has without the hassle of diplomacy. Or that the US' systems of foreign policy are designed to work like this: the Monroe Doctrine was overreach; the imperialism in Japan, The Philippines, and Cuba in the late nineteenth century was overreach; and the colonization of Hawaii was overreach and all of those precede the CIA's founding in the late 40s. So why would they think that only the CIA is leaking evil into an otherwise pure, idealistic US government? It's very strange to me
July 14, 2024
¡Ay los Estados Unidos y su gusto por la libertad! Lo que queda claro es que esa libertad tan cacareada a lo largo y ancho del mundo durante siglos, no es más que otra mentira de ese país que no es más que mentira, que nos lo vende como una película de Hollywood con gente rica, feliz, todos blancos, patriotas pero engañados. La CIA, el verdadero gobierno de los Estados Unidos, que trata a sus propios ciudadanos como criminales y les extorsiona, les espía, les miente, les manipula, etc, pero por su bien, porque ellos no lo saben pero el enemigo no es la CIA sino el comunismo, o los defensores de la paz, o los defensores de la igualdad, de la ética, de la moral, todos malos menos ellos que te van a salvar de ser comunista que es lo peor del mundo. Si esto lo hace con sus ciudadanos imagínense con el resto del mundo, que son escoria para ellos, y hay que reconducirles hacia el capitalismo más deshumanizado que es lo que los hará libres y que no quieran conquistar el "maravilloso" país que es Estados Unidos.
Vamos, que vivimos en una pura mentira.
Vamos, que vivimos en una pura mentira.
May 30, 2020
Marchetti was an ex-CIA man who left the agency to write this book. The book was heavily censored in the US. Moscow published it in full. Among other things, it mentions American support to Naga hostiles and about clandestine airline companies run by the CIA to supply militias financed by the US in the third world countries. Supplies included prostitutes apart from arms and ammunition.
Marchetti was severely punished by the CIA for writing the book. (The US intelligence "community" foiled all his attempts at obtaining a job after leaving the CIA. Finally, he had to work for a courier company that was not dependent on government contracts. Later, he joined the Cato Institute.) The book was heavily redacted.
Marchetti was severely punished by the CIA for writing the book. (The US intelligence "community" foiled all his attempts at obtaining a job after leaving the CIA. Finally, he had to work for a courier company that was not dependent on government contracts. Later, he joined the Cato Institute.) The book was heavily redacted.
February 20, 2024
Full of extremely dull segments going over the various organization charts of the 70s CIA, which isn't exactly relevant now as I'm sure most are dead. But in between those boring parts you get to learn that there is no evidence any of US spying on the Soviets ever yielded anything of importance, like all our spying was basically counterbalanced by Soviet spying on us. The only thing the CIA ever learned was when Soviet citizens defected, which had nothing to do with the spies. There's plenty of anecdotes (with documented proof) of all the various failures of the CIA. It's a pretty depressing book!
November 30, 2023
The books and easy read which is a rarity for nonfiction but holds little to no information for a modern reader.
It is an overview of how the CIA operates in the time before Watergate and goes into very little detail of historical events.
It is an overview of how the CIA operates in the time before Watergate and goes into very little detail of historical events.
June 14, 2021
I hate the CIA.
May 11, 2023
While a dry read what makes this book interesting is that the authors and publishers and publishers left the space blank wherever the content was redacted.
April 27, 2024
Very interesting, a classic it helped the public to open their eyes toward the CIA. Many strange operations.
June 21, 2024
as a DC native, the mentions of Tyson’s Corner/Old Town were fascinating.
January 23, 2026
Incredibly boring if you’re not interested in this topic.
August 16, 2025
The first book in American history to be redacted under court order before publication. Those of us who read THE CIA AND THE CULT OF INTELLIGENCE when it came out in 1974 were most thrilled by those passages that had been blacked out at the insistence of the Agency. It was like reading espionage porn. Marchetti, a former high-ranking officer, focused on recruiting methods (Hint, The Company only is interested in graduate students from top schools; they used to come to UCLA at least once a year) and after recruitment the candidate will be submitted to a rigorous polygraph exam, called "fluttering" in Company talk, to make sure they haven't recruited a Russian or Chinese spy by mistake. Marchetti was the first to detail crazy CIA plots against Castro, such as slipping him a powder that would make his beard fall out, and plans to back up the toilets at the annual conferences of the World Democratic Youth---deemed a Communist front by the U.S. government. The Commies would not be able to use the bathroom! A non-expurgated version of this book finally saw the light some twenty years later, but by then the blacked-out sections, referring to the CIA's use of mercenary armies in Indochina or Air America being a CIA front airline company, had passed into history. Marchetti also revealed the Agency's budget is kept secret and that it may never be cut.
January 22, 2014
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wanted more information about the CIA, especially in the Cold War era. A lot of the info still seems relevant to how American national security works today, but I found the style of writing made certain sections of the book difficult to get through. For example, a lot of information was just stated without attempting to summarize or explain why it was being given.
Unfortunately, I read the first edition of the book (published 1974) which was published with all 168 passages censored. I'd like to try and find a copy that has fewer deletions.
Unfortunately, I read the first edition of the book (published 1974) which was published with all 168 passages censored. I'd like to try and find a copy that has fewer deletions.
October 27, 2009
This is one of the first critical books on the CIA. It was also pre-censored, with lots of blank spaces that the CIA edited out. Most of the blank spaces have to do with exposing the misconduct of the agency rather than national security
June 22, 2013
An amazing book! This was the first book ever subjected to pre-publication censorship in American history. It was heavily redacted so as to keep secret many pieces of intelligence. Still, the book is a must read for every American. This book exposes the secret government like no other.
September 13, 2007
You gotta love a book that publishes the redacted passages. The publisher must've spent a fortune printing all that black ink.
October 20, 2014
stormtrooper blows whistle on empire. oddity insofar as author is something of an Old Rightist and therefore largely in sympathy with US national objectives vis-à-vis the soviet union.
December 7, 2014
The definitional work on the CIA. The only book that even comes close to it in terms of authenticity is Spycatcher (about MI5).
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