Customer Reviews (6)

AMAZON CUSTOMER
AN EXCELLENT BOOK!!!
W. THOMAS SMITH JR. EXPLAINS THE CIA IN EASY TO UNDERSTAND TERMS.
I GIVE IT FIVE STARS BECAUSE AFTER SPENDING SOME TIME WITH THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA I NOW HAVE A VERY GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF OUR CIA AND HOW IT FITS IN THE OVERALL DEFENSE AND SECURITY OF OUR COUNTRY.
THOUGH IT SEEMS BRIEF IN CERTAIN SECTIONS, IT IS WELL WRITTEN AND MUCH NEW LIGHT IS SHED ON THE SUBJECT OF THE CIA. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE AGENCY AND OTHER INTELLIGENCE GROUPS!!!

Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency
Smith's book is the ultimate resource for those fascinated with history and our countries most conroversial governmental agency - the Central Intelligence Agency .....fascinating and long forgotten tales of intrique - finally there is a source, beautifully organized, with the answers to any questions you may have about the CIA....thanks W. Thomas Smith, Jr. your book is well done.

Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency
The ultimate resource for history buffs who want a quick and ready reference book that details the history of the CIA and allows for a quick look up for forgotten names and facts.....a random trip through this fascinating book brings up incredible historic information you may have forgotten.

Great resource book to have on hand. W.Thomas Smith, Jr. brings his experience and talent as a jounalist to this much needed reference book.

Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency
This is a very good reference book and helpful to those of us who want to understand our CIA and how it works.
I also found it interesting that Julia Child was in the CIA.
This book deserves five stars.

A FIVE STAR BOOK
This is one of the best books on the CIA I've read even though its an encyclopdia form with entries. Particularly fascinating are the unknown operations which W. Thos. Smith Jr. has brought to the forefront of history. What makes this book so good is it's objectivity. CIA has its skeletons. But it also has it courageous heroes and patriots most of which we have never heard of.
Smith also does justice to the brave men and women of the OSS of second World War fame.
I highly recommend this to anyone who hopes to have a better understanding of the CIA and its roots. Smith is a journalist from the south, writing articles for USA Today and Wash. Post, proving once again that some of the best American writers continue to come from below Mason-Dixon. ... Read more

Book Description
The Central Intelligence Agency's relative transparency makes it unique among the world's espionage operations. Over the past few decades it has released over 31 million pages of previously classified documents, including, most recently, the so-called Family Jewels, a special collection of records on a series of operations from the 1950s to the 1970s that violated the agency's own legislative charter. Taken together, these papers permit a partial glimpse inside the CIA's clandestine world: how it operates; how it views the outside world; how it gets things right; and, all too often, how it gets them wrong. The documentary selections assembled here, carefully analyzed for content, consistency, and context, guide readers through the CIA's shrouded history and allow readers to sift the evidence for themselves. The principal theme of this new documentary history of the Central Intelligence Agency is the dilemma of maintaining a secret organization in an open society. A democracy rests on accountability, and accountability requires transparency: the people cannot hold their government to account if they do not know what it is doing in their name. At the same time, an intelligence agency lives in a world of shadows. It cannot function if it is not able to keep its sources, its methods, and many of its operations secret. The resulting tension-and the constant temptation to take advantage of the impunity that secrecy allows-has shaped the CIA's history from its beginnings.

Book Description
From its inception more than half a century ago and for decades afterward, the Central Intelligence Agency was deeply shrouded in secrecy, with little or no real oversight by Congress--or so many Americans believe. David M. Barrett reveals, however, that during the agency's first fifteen years, Congress often monitored the CIA's actions and plans, sometimes aggressively.

Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, research at some two dozen archives, and interviews with former officials, Barrett provides an unprecedented and often colorful account of relations between American spymasters and Capitol Hill. He chronicles the CIA's dealings with senior legislators who were haunted by memories of our intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor and yet riddled with fears that such an organization might morph into an American Gestapo. He focuses in particular on the efforts of Congress to monitor, finance, and control the agency's activities from the creation of the national security state in 1947 through the planning for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

Along the way, Barrett highlights how Congress criticized the agency for failing to predict the first Soviet atomic test, the startling appearance of Sputnik over American air space, and the overthrow of Iraq's pro-American government in 1958. He also explores how Congress viewed the CIA's handling of Senator McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration, the crisis created by the downing of a U-2 spy plane, and President Eisenhower's complaint that Congress meddled too much in CIA matters. Ironically, as Barrett shows, Congress itself often pushed the agency to expand its covert operations against other nations.

The CIA and Congress provides a much-needed historical perspective for current debates in Congress and beyond concerning the agency's recent failures and ultimate fate. In our post-9/11 era, it shows that anxieties over the challenges to democracy posed by our intelligence communities have been with us from the very beginning. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Very Insightful and Engaging
The2006 D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress published in
2005 has been awarded to "The CIA and Congress".Don Bacon, a member of
the award committee, says:"David Barrett has given us an engrossing
account of the highly secret, often contentious relationship between
Congress and its post-World War II creation, the Central Intelligence
Agency. Thoroughly researched, rich in fascinating detail, 'The CIA and
Congress' focuses on the spy agency's early years, when the Cold War was
at its peak. The author relies heavily on previously hidden official
records and his own insightful interviews to show that our lawmakers
worried more about the new agency's potential for mischief and kept it
on a shorter leash than has been previously known."

Here's what the "Washington Post" said...
Barrett's /The CIA and Congress/ is a triumph of research. Writing any history of the CIA is problematic because the documentation will never be close to complete; some official and private papers have been destroyed or "misplaced," others remain classified 50 years or more after being written, and many important discussions and decisions were never committed to paper. Faced with such endemic incompleteness, Barrett, a political scientist at Villanova University, persevered, found widely dispersed research materials and displayed sound analytic sense and balance in their use. Having done so much fine detective work, Barrett can present not only a gripping review of leadership dynamics among the CIA, the White House and Congress but also a coherent view of the development and oversight of the CIA's budgets (a notoriously hard target) from 1947 to 1961. His research is made more impressive by his frankness in admitting on several occasions that he cannot tell the whole story because the documents are not available.

Barrett's analysis of the relationship between the long-established Congress and the infant CIA (founded only in 1947) turns not only on documents but also on his superb portraits and assessments of the key players: The thoughts, actions and characters of senators, congressmen, presidents and CIA officials are front and center in the book. The human pageant Barrett presents is not all that different from that which exists today.

A GROUNDBREAKING book on the CIA and CONGRESS
This book is a necessary read if you are into the history and political analysis of the American government from the 1940s through the 60s.It's a fascinating read.Dr. Barrett has gone to incredible lengths of archival research to write a book that is a truly original voice on the period.As someone who came across the book looking for material on Joe McCarthy, I was amazed at how enjoyable the book was to read just in general.Dr. Barrett has found material to support stories that were merely rumors before.For example, letters from a military officer who was "propositioned" by Senator McCarthy and memos supporting the fact that meetings occurred between the CIA Director and a Congressional subcommittee prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion.This is truly a groundbreaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the CIA or Congress. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (3)

Dated But Decidedly Still Worthwhile
Recent archival research has partly superseded "OSS," but it remains a valuable survey of America's main undercover service in World War II.As a pioneering history, some facts inevitably have been supplemented and/or corrected, but the overall outline presented here is quite valid.The OSS collected intelligence and executed some useful operations, along with a few blunders (e.g. Allen Dulles's peace feelers to Nazi Germany, which outraged the USSR and briefly imperiled the alliance).But their efforts were largely peripheral to the major ground, air and sea campaigns.The book's main value now may be to suggest topics and raise questions for future research.It also contains a more subtle message in documenting the idealism and (often) progressive sympathies of citizen-soldiers dedicated to fighting Japanese and German tyrannies.Smith's 1972 publication reflected the backlash against the CIA and US militarism during the Vietnam War era.His vision of a clandestine outfit which actually promoted positive change, and respected expertise, offers hope in our current time of troubles.A CIA that routinely violates the Geneva Conventions with torture and kidnapping, and chickenhawk officials who pervert information-gathering in their rush to disaster overseas, are unworthy heirs of OSS veterans and the leaders of their time.

Long Since Superceded by More Complete Works
This work was the first genuinely scholarly work on the OSS. The author, an academician, wrote it way back when most OSS works were memoirs or compilations of tales of derring do or sensationalistic political acreeds concerning intelligence matters; although the still interesting memoirs and tales were fact based, those early books were based solely on memory and not on sound documentation. In addition many sensational critiques of intelligence agencies and the CIA msntioned some OSS activities. The date of 2005 given is that of the reprint, not the original 1972.
The former files of the OSS remained in use by the OSS's two successor agencies: the State Department's Intelligence Bureau (INR) and the War Department's Special Services Unit (SSU), which carried on the OSS's HUMINT clandestine operations. SSU in turn was folded in 1947 into the newly estabished CIA, which continued to use the classified OSS files and added to them. The former OSS files then continued in use for many years; in the eighties, the CIA finally weeded out sll the long since unecessary files concerning operational, organizational and procedural matters and sent them to the Nationsl Archives. Thia action resulted in a huge quantity of memoirs being written by veterans of OSS (c.f. Elizabeth MacIntosh's study of women in the OSS, "Sisterhood of Spies"), in technicals studies (c.f. John Brunner's "OSS Weapons" and in organizational histories (c.f. Yu's "OSS in China"). All of these and many similar recent studies I have reviewed on this site.
This pioneering work by Harris is necessarily sketchy due to lack of sources, being based on a few scattered memoirs and incomplete and undocumented popular publications and interviews, snd riddled with omissions and errors, has been overtaken by events.
The book is best looked at as a curiosity demonstrating the lack of public knowledge in its day, when CIA insiders remaining in the intelligence business were actively discouraged from publishing. Harris, having never been in the OSS, was not constrained by secrecy oaths from publishing what he could glean from no longer serving veterans and other sources.
Why this was reprinted is beyond me. There are enough copies to be found in the used book trade to satisfy the completist collector of OSS related works while to those who are doing current research, it is simply an obsolete curiousity.
Not all works published in the last fifty years are no longer of continuing validity; many first hand accounts and compilations of derring do tales are still valuble, for example "You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger". (c.f reviews on this site.)

A Wild and Crazy Organization
FDR seemed to have a natural interest in spies. Before World War II started he had contacted William 'Wild Bill' Donovan and asked him to set up a foreign intelligence agency along the lines of what the British were doing. He formed just what FDR wanted and it was called the Office of Strategic Services, a non-descript name that could have meant anything. ==The OSS was a crazy agency that grew like crazy, eventually reaching some 10,000 people. All in all, the OSS provided some useful intelligence. They performed some useful operations during the war. They trained some very good people. This book will give you all the details. ==This whole concept was done over the intense opposition of J. Edgar Hoover who fought with every skill he had to prevent what he considered competition with the FBI. ==After FDR died, Truman and Donovan didn't get along all tht well. Truman shut down the OSS, but shortly thereafter realized that the Navy, the Army and the FBI along with all the others didn't play well together so he set up the CIA a few months later. ==Of course 9/11 taught us that none of them play well together now. ... Read more

Book Description
A Look Over My Shoulder, by Richard Helms, begins with President Nixon’s attempt to embroil the Central Intelligence Agency, of which Helms was then the director, in the Watergate cover-up. Helms then recalls his education in Switzerland and Germany and at Williams College; his early career as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, during which he once lunched with Hitler; and his return to newspaper work in the United States. Helms served on the German desk at OSS headquarters in London; subsequently, he was assigned to Allen Dulles’s Berlin office in postwar Germany.

On his return to Washington, Helms assumed responsibility for the OSS carryover operations in Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe. He remained in this post until the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947. At CIA, Helms served as a division chief; as chief of operations for Frank Wisner; as deputy director for plans (operations); as deputy director; and, ultimately, as director, from 1966 to 1973. He was appointed ambassador to Iran later that year, and he retired from government service in January 1977.

A Look Over My Shoulder focuses on subjects such as intelligence collection, covert action, the uses and misuses of intelligence, and the problems secret intelligence encounters in an open society. Helms discusses

• working with Allen Dulles in Berlin in the early days of the Cold War.
• the amazing results of CIA’s Berlin tunnel operation, code name GOLD: “[Soviet officers’] unvarnished comments on the quality of Soviet military equipment, the intellectual capacity of fellow officers, and the wisdom of Moscow’s military policies were in more than one sense priceless.”
• the remarkable progress of high-altitude spying: “[The U-2 photographs] permitted resolution to some thirty inches—not quite enough to limn a football, as some press accounts have suggested, but quite good enough to spot a Soviet soldier perched on an open privy a discreet two hundred yards from [a guided missile] site in Cuba.”
• his relationship with presidents and other key figures of the Cold War: After an Air Force briefing on the destruction of the electric grid in North Vietnam, LBJ’s only question to Helms was “Are the lights on in Hanoi?”; J. Edgar Hoover once offered Helms “a forty-five-minute uninterrupted history of the FBI in peace and war.”
• how President Nixon attempted to embroil CIA in the Watergate cover-up: “The telephone call that set in motion the events that would eventually end my intelligence career came as I was preparing for bed, Saturday, June 17, 1972. . . . ‘I’ve just learned that the District police have picked up five men in a break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters at the Watergate.’”

It was often thought that Richard Helms, who served longer in the Central Intelligence Agency than anyone else, would never tell his story, but here it is—revealing, news-making, and with candid assessments of the controversies and triumphs of a remarkable career. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Revealing:politics is personal, too
This book is not afraid to look at fundamental problems in the area of intelligence, which America today is finding amazingly similar to the problems that Richard Helms observed in Germany immediately after World War Two.Helms was uniquely qualified to see the big picture, having been a newspaper reporter who had lunch with Adolf Hitler (Chapter 2 is called `Lunch with Adolf') the day of a big rally in Nuremberg in 1936, a privilege that Americans willing to spend a thousand dollars a plate to attend a fundraiser with American presidents more recently might be jealous of, if being a millionaire is not enough to make them happy.Henry Kissinger was happy to report in the Foreword that Helms was even invited to lunch with President Nixon after an early NSC meeting.(p. xi).There is even a picture of the famous Tuesday lunch group with LBJ, Rusk, Clark Clifford, General Wheeler, Walt Rostow, George Cushman and Walt Johnson.There is even a picture of a lunch with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush with the caption, "At lunch in the Vice President's office.Aside from George Washington, the elder George Bush is the only President who had firsthand knowledge of the intelligence world."

The Preface reports that February 2, 1973, was the day James Schlesinger was sworn in as head of CIA and Richard Helms lost the position which was his main claim to fame.Richard Nixon had something to do with it, and Chapter 1, `A Smoking Gun' reports enough about the Watergate break-in to give the CIA perspective from the top, and ends with "Five months later, and a few days after his reelection, President Nixon called me to Camp David.It was the last time we spoke while he was in office."(p. 13).The Preface even claims "President Nixon had ended my intelligence career with a handshake at Camp David."(p. vi).If Helms is right about that, there was no personal contact between the Director of the CIA and the President of the United States in December 1972 and January 1973, when the Vietnam ceasefire was being hammered into place and a record number of B-52 bombers were being shot down by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns and SAMs.That figures.

The German spies are most fascinating in the beginning of the book.Helms calls Martha Dodd an American, as she was the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1938, but she was also girlfriend of Boris Vinogradov, the press secretary at the Soviet embassy in Berlin.After being charged with spying in 1957, she fled to Czechoslovakia."Martha was seventy when she died in Prague in 1990."(p. 20).Spies and Richard Nixon have an acute sense of which side someone is on, and Helms seems to be particularly sensitive to the issues that Nixon would be prone to notice.Other major personalities are easy to locate in the index:Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, and Frank Wisner.

Chapter 8, "The Gehlen Organization," deals with the group most responsible for allowing German intelligence after World War Two to maintain some continuity with the information that had been accumulating while Hitler was in power.As the only employer in West Germany that was not averse to employing the upper echelons of the previous regime, it had no trouble recruiting four thousand former Nazis, but Helms did not find them reliable." . . . the American officers working with Gehlen in Washington neglected to insist upon being given the names of and biographical data on the RUSTY staff personnel. . . . Even in the confusion of the immediate post-war intelligence picture, this oversight violated one of the fundamental rules of secret intelligence, and helped to set the stage for the security disasters that in time all but destroyed the entire effort."(p. 86).A lot of people have been jumping to this conclusion without having the kind of in-depth knowledge of the situation which Helms observed.

On "fundamental rules of secret intelligence," (p. 86), Helms seems most upset that he received a felony conviction for denying something in testimony to Congress that he felt compelled to deny.Helms was bitter that in his confirmation hearings to be appointed ambassador to Iran, he was asked questions by people who knew that the answer was officially secret, so he was being forced to lie to maintain a cover story that was maintaining dubious deniability.This is the area of books on intelligence that I find most interesting.Nosenko was not allowed to participate in a free debate in America over the nature of KGB activities regarding Lee Harvey Oswald because the entire nature of the KGB was a matter of exclusive CIA jurisdiction within the American system, and holding Nosenko a prisoner for years was the perfect symbol of the amount of control that the CIA believed it was entitled to maintain over such information.Convicting Helms of a felony for lying to Congress was a matter of attempting to establish the principle that laws have a higher function than rules, and any individual within the American system is subject to the possibility of being hauled into court to be a patsy for whatever law the administration of justice intends to glorify in its present incarnation.

Helms doesn't exactly vilify Richard M. Nixon in this book, but just honestly stating "It has long been clear to me that President Nixon himself called the shots in the Watergate cover-up," (p. 13) is damn close.On our most recent impeachment, I think the movie "Candy" (1969, DVD 2001) with Enrico Maria Salerno as Jonathan J. John provides a better joke, when the police ask, "Did you see what happened to the girl in the blue dress?"Film buff J.J.J. responded, "I don't know.Who directed it?"That is the way most Presidents feel about the CIA.

Murder of the crew of the USS Liberty by Israel- 6/8/1967
Pages 300/301 of the Helms book:

One of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war between Israel and
the surrounding Arab states] came on the morning of June 8[, 1967] when the
Pentagon flashed(urgent top-priority precedence) a message that the U.S.S.
Liberty, an unarmed U.S. Navy communications(spy) ship, was under attack in
the Mediterranean, and that American fighters had been scrambled to defend
the ship....

.... The following urgent reports showed that Israeli jet fighters and
torpedo boats had launched the attack. The seriously damaged Liberty
remained afloat, with thirty-four dead and more than a hundred wounded
members of the crew.

Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in
Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an
American naval vessel. Later, an interim intelligence memorandum concluded
that the attack was a mistake and "not made in malice against the U.S."....

.... When additional evidence was available, more doubt was raised. This prompted my
[D]eputy [Director of Central Intelligence], Admiral Rufus Taylor, to write
me his view of the incident. "To me, the picture thus far presents the
distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that the Liberty might be their
target and attacked anyway, either through confusion in Command and Control
or through deliberate disregard of instructions on the part of
subordinates."

The day after the attack, President Johnson, bristling with irritation, said
to me, "The New York Times" put that attack on the Liberty on an inside
page. It should have been on the front page!"

I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed, or theboard's finding
that there could be no doubt that the Israeli's knew exactly what they were
doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt
necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.

(299 words in a 452 page book)

Murder... they KNEW they were murdering defenseless American kids barely in their twenties so that they could complete WHATtwo Israeli Prime Ministers(Menachim Begin and Moshe Dayan) have since admitted was a "land grab"....

...to get more land, ....more land than they had already grabbed by the fourth day of the Six-Day War-they left 34 American families without their sons, brothers, dads... and sent a good subset of the 171 injured home to THEIR families in the US maimed for life.

and the kids burned and maimed for life who are standing up for their 34 fallen comrades unable to rise from the dead to defend their own memories and blameless conduct... now the Israeliscall them "liars" and "anti-Semites"...

...except a couple of the crew members of the USS Liberty were Jewish themselves... so they're not called "liars" and "anti-semites"... no, the Israeli attackers and Government of Israel call them "liars" and "self-hating jews"...

THE OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE CIA IS THAT THIS WAS A "TRAGIC MISTAKE".... BUT HERE IS WHAT THE OFFICIALS AT THE NSA HAD TO SAY TO UNITED STATES NAVAL INSTITUTE'S, DAVID C WALSH:Former NSA Officials Agree
David C. Walsh
The jamming of unique U.S. frequencies during the Liberty incident seems to establish deliberate intent. And in exclusive interviews with this author, several former high-level National Security Agency (NSA) officials agree.

On 14 February 2003, the "godfather" of the NSA's Auxiliary General Technical Research program, Oliver Kirby, noted that the Liberty was "my baby." Within weeks of the calamity, Kirby, deputy director for operations/production, read U.S. signals intelligence (SigInt)-generated transcripts and "staff reports" at NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters. They were of Israeli pilots' conversations, recorded during the attack. The intercepts made it "absolutely certain" they knew it was a U.S. ship, he said. Kirby's is the first public disclosure by a top-level NSA senior of deliberate intent based on personal analyses of SigInt material.

In an interview on 24 February 2003, retired Air Force Major General John Morrison, the agency's then-second-in-command (and Kirby's successor), said he had been informed at the time of Kirby's findings and endorsed them. Former NSA Director retired Army Lieutenant General William Odom said on 3 March 2003 said that, on the strength of such data, the attack's deliberateness "just wasn't a disputed issue" within the agency. On 5 March 2003, retired Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, NSA director from 1977-1981, said he "flatly rejected" the Cristol/Israeli thesis. "It is just exceedingly difficult to believe that [the Liberty] was not correctly identified." He said this was based on his talks with NSA seniors at the time having direct knowledge. All four were unaware of any agency official at that time or later who dissented from the "deliberate" conclusion.

Interesting To Read, But Helms Struggles To Keep Things Nice
This is a biography we have been waiting for a long time. In fact, few even thought Richard Helms would even write his memoirs when one considers he spent his life working within the world of secrets, assassinations, political underdealings. Indeed, this can be a fascinating book for a realistic view of the world stuff like the Bond movies paint in more cartoonish terms. Helms takes us on a historical journey through World War 2 and his meeting with Hitler (where he describes the power of the Hitler aura upon the German people), he goes on into the years of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon during which he was director of the CIA. But...should we take Helms' version of history as official? Probably not. Consider he makes an attempt to bash any theory that tries to show uptight men like him as anything other than squeaky clean. He especially tries to brush off the idea that the CIA might have been involved in the JFK assassination. He goes out of his way to especially criticise New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison who first brought the assassination conspiracy theories to the public and the Oliver Stone film based on the investigation and evidence of conspiracy, "JFK." He calls the idea of a conspiracy hogwash and tries to support the idea of Oswald acting alone with evidence that has already been shredded apart by investigators. Helms even tries to defend the image of FBI head J.Edgar Hoover, he confirms that Hoover kept certain files on people, but he attempts to deny the idea brought about by overwhelming evidence and testimony that Hoover lived a homosexual lifestyle. Helms presents a good story but also tries too hard to clean-up the image of a government that runs wild in some areas, something that has been long ago proven. It is a good read, well-written and detailed, but like any open-minded reader, read but carefully tread the waters because are we to believe Helms would honestly reveal secrets that even today would awaken rage from the general populace? Helms tells a good story, how much of it is true we will never know.

Sometimes Bland, But Priceless Collection of Gems


Richard Helms is, after Allen Dulles, arguably the most significant US spymaster and intelligence manager in history.It is a fortunate circumstance that he overcame his reluctance to publish anything at all, and worked with the trusted William Hood, whose own books are remarkable, to put before the public a most useful memoire.

Below are a few of the gems that I find worth noting, and for which I recommend the book as a unique record:

1)Puts forward elegant argument for permissive & necessary secrecy in the best interests of the public
2)Defends the CIA culture as highly disciplined--he is persuasive in stating that only Presidents can order covert actions, and that CIA does only the President's direct bidding.
3)Makes it clear in passing, not intentionally, that his experience as both a journalist and businessman were essential to his ultimate success as a spymaster and manager of complex intelligence endeavors--this suggests that one reason there is "no bench" at CIA today is because all the senior managers have been raised as cattle destined to be veal: as young entry on duty people, brought up within the bureaucracy, not knowing how to scrounge sources or meet payroll...
4)Compellingly discusses the fact that intelligence without counterintelligence is almost irrelevant if not counterproductive, but then glosses over some of the most glaring counterintelligence failures in the history of the CIA--interestingly, he defends James Angleton and places the blame for mistreating Nosenko squarterly on the Soviet Division leadership in the Directorate of Operations.
5)Points out that it was Human Intelligence (HUMINT), not Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), that first found the Soviet missiles in Cuba.
6)He confirms the Directorate of Intelligence and the analysis it does, as the "essence" of intelligence, relegating clandestine and technical intelligence to support functions rather than driving functions.This is most important, in that neither clandestine nor technical collectors are truly responsive to the needs of all-source analysts, in part because systems are designed, and agents are recruited, without regard to what is actually needed.
7)He tells a great story on Laos, essentially noting that 200 CIA paramilitary officers, and money, and the indigenous population, where able to keep 5 North Vietnamese divisions bogged down, and kept Laos more or less free for a decade
8)In the same story on Laos, he explains U.S. Department of Defense incapacity in unconventional or behind the lines war by noting that their officers kept arriving "with knapsacks full of doctrine".
9)In recounting some of CIA's technical successes, he notes casually that persistence is a virtue--there were *thirteen* satellite failures before the 14th CORONA effort finally achieved its objectives.
10)He gives Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) much higher marks at a user and leader of intelligence, such that we wondered why Christopher Andrew, the noted author on US Presidents and intelligence, did not include LBJ is his "four who got it" (Washington, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Bush Senior).
11) He confirms, carefully and directly, that the Israeli attacks on the USS Liberty were deliberate and with fore-knowledge that the USS Liberty was a US vessel flying the US flag on US official business.
12)He expresses concern, in recounting the mistakes in Chile, over the lack of understanding by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger (who writes the Foreword to this book) of the time lags involved in clandestine operations and covert actions.
13)In summary, he ends with pride, noting that all that CIA did not only reduced fear, it saved tens of billions of dollars in defense expenditures that would have been either defeated by the Soviets, or were unnecessary.There can be no question, in light of this account, but that CIA has more than "paid the rent", and for all its trials and tribulations, provides the US taxpayer with a better return on investment than they get from any other part of the US Government, and certainly vastly more bang for the buck that they get from the US Department of Defense.

Richard Helms is a one-of-a-kind, and this memoire should be read by every intellience professional, and anyone who wishes to understand how honorable men can thrive in the black world of clandestine and covert operations.RIP. ... Read more

Book Description
This unique history offers the most detailed and best documented account of the early years of the CIA currently available. It reveals the political and bureaucratic struggles that accompanied the creation of the modern U.S. intelligence community. In addition, it proposes a theory of effective intelligence organization, applied both to the movement to create the CIA and to the form it eventually took.The period covered by this study was crucially important because it was during this time that the main battles over the establishment, responsibilities, and turf of the agency were fought. Many of these disputes framed the forty years, such as the relationship of the CIA to other government agency intelligence operations, the role of covert action, and Congressional oversight of the intelligence community.The sources upon which Darling drew for this study include the files of the National Security Council, the wartime files of the OSS, and interviews and correspondence with many of the principal players. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Weekly Standard, published by News America Incorporated on May 16, 2005. The length of the article is 5196 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Against rendition: why the CIA shouldn't outsource interrogations to countries that torture.(Central Intelligence Agency)
Author: Reuel Marc Gerecht
Publication: The Weekly Standard (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 16, 2005
Publisher: News America Incorporated
Volume: 10Issue: 33Page: 21(6)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more