Books about the CIA, USA

It's about time that the major media sites speak out courageously against all the dirty and violent tricks of the CIA - the great wound on America's reputation and peacemaking efforts, what's left of them...What other organization works so diligently against human rights and peace? Following are listings of several books that apparently are well-corroborated:Sept/Oct/Nov 2008 This article,
"Twilight of the Spooks", Reviews Two Books which expose the politicized squalor of the CIA By BURTON HERSH Book Forum Autumn 2008

Failure of Intelligence:The Decline and Fall of the CIA by Melvin A. Goodman
$27.95 List Price More information: Amazon • IndieBound

The CIA and the Culture of Failure:
U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq
by John Diamond - $29.95 List Price/ More information: Amazon • IndieBound

OR try Inter-library Loan at your public or academic library

Since the cold war ended, the CIA has become a slow-motion bureaucratic sacrifice within the intelligence community. Like the chinook salmon, it has been shedding body parts every year as it struggles upstream to expire.With New York Times reporter Tim Weiner’s dismissive 2007 study, Legacy of Ashes, the fate of the agency seems sealed—whenever the world changes, the New York Times is traditionally the last to know.

If studies such as Weiner’s supply the sources of the agency’s collapse, a pair of important new titles explore some of the hows and whys. In Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, one of the agency’s prickliest and most highly regarded analysts, Melvin A. Goodman, has given us an insider autopsy. Goodman worked for the CIA for decades and ultimately rose to senior analyst in the Office of Soviet Affairs. Throughout the ’80s, while I was putting together my group portrait of the founders of the CIA, The Old Boys, I kept picking up reverberations of Goodman’s unsettling presence in this brittle bureaucracy, his objections to the directorate’s skewed analytic product, in particular his corridor battles with Director William Casey and Casey’s ambitious, fast-rising deputy, Robert Gates. (When I recently had the opportunity to meet Goodman, to introduce him before a regional Council on Foreign Relations meeting, I discovered that he had not softened his judgments.)

More than anything else, Goodman’s testimony on the agency’s cold-war miscues helped convince Congress that Gates had soft-pedaled evidence that the Soviet Union was falling apart so as to help promote the Reagan administration’s bloated defense spending. As a result, Gates himself was turned down in 1987 on his first pass at the director’s job and waited in the shadows until 1991, when George H. W. Bush moved him up.

If there is a motif to Goodman’s unflinching primer, it is his concern that Harry Truman’s purpose in forming the agency in 1947—to supply policy makers with an accurate, unbiased version of what was happening out there—has been corrupted into a kind of lapdog readiness to bark in any direction the White House prefers. The ultimate and perhaps most tragic performance came in 2002, when a submissive agency supplied Colin Powell and other key policy makers those “slam dunk” assurances that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction and maintained an umbilical relationship with al-Qaeda, charges the CIA’s own experts were well aware were largely trumped up. Goodman takes particular umbrage at the extent to which the agency has been “politicized” to support the fantasies of the regnant neocons.

Goodman’s themes can overlap confusingly. At times, he stresses the agency’s overall politicization; at others, the tenures of successive directors—an approach that frequently leaves him rehashing too many incidents. What is most valuable here is the amassing of insider details—which individuals thought what, who came down where as each crisis developed inside the gray seven-story fastness of Langley. For example, Goodman cites the inspired digging by two analysts, Richard Barlow and Peter Dixon, that alerted the agency during the middle ’80s that the Pakistani physicist A. Q. Khan was buying restricted nuclear technology from sources in the United States and Europe. Khan would subsequently provide atomic secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. Because it was the Reagan administration’s policy just then to coddle Pakistan, elements in our intelligence community suppressed these revelations, and in the end, Pakistan surprised us with its own nuclear arsenal. The intra-agency outcome was predictable: For discoveries that embarrassed the politicians, both analysts got fired.

Never much of an enthusiast when it came to the covert-warfare (operations) side of the agency, Goodman is fair enough to itemize what successes there are on the human-intelligence side, from the softening up of Poland by way of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity union to the tracking of insurgents such as Che Guevera and Carlos the Jackal. What haunts Goodman is the prevalence of blowbacks after purportedly successful operations—the extent to which our interference in Iran in 1953, for example, undermined the rule of the parliament and set up the ayatollahs, or the way our opportunistic support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the ’80s created Osama bin Laden.
A kind of nostalgia crops up as Goodman roves across the decades. He himself joined the agency in 1966, just as the first generation of analytic pioneers was nearing retirement. OSS veterans Sherman Kent of Yale and William Langer of Harvard were old-fashioned enough to insist on the integrity of the intelligence-gathering process and helped create autonomous entities like the Office of National Estimates, which produced the original and highly respected National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), attempts at completely objective, politically—and, more significant, economically—unbiased treatments of important concerns of the White House. But too often, these analyses turned out too unbiased for the agency’s political masters; historical context and the long-term implications of agency directives gradually disappeared from the NIEs. By the Clinton years, the President’s Daily Brief from the CIA lagged behind CNN reporting in accuracy and regional insight.

By Goodman’s lights, prospects for the agency are bleak. During the late ’70s, revelations by the Church Committee highlighting agency abuses—from assassination planning to a long list of regime replacements in third world countries—led to the appointment of select committees in both houses of Congress to thwart, or at least anticipate, future mischief. Major covert operations required the issuance of a presidential “finding.” In some cases, the interference—and leaks—by Congress headed off the worst blunders, such as the Iran-Contra travesty, sufficiently to keep the fallout from utterly poisoning our foreign affairs. But behind the scenes, agency lawyers were hard at work. A new category of information, “compartmented intelligence,” was created for classified material too sensitive to be entrusted to mere lawmakers. Complaints to the chief executive by the Pentagon after 1991 led to the extraction from the CIA of perhaps its most successful and innovative programs, the interpretation of U-2 and satellite surveillance technology, which since the ’50s had provided uncorrupted order-of-battle information about the Soviet bloc. Entire new bureaucracies—the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the National Reconnaissance Office—now joined the National Security Agency among the unpublicized technological workshops tucked in solidly beneath the eagle’s wing inside the Pentagon’s vast budget.Soon after taking office, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld launched within his own department the Office of Special Plans, an unembarrassed attempt to co-opt the CIA’s Operations Directorate—which promptly found itself depopulated, marginalized, and renamed the National Clandestine Service. More than half of the supersensitive work in operations would now be contracted to private firms. As Goodman specifies, as early as 2002, “Rumsfeld’s . . . Office of Special Plans produced disinformation to support the case for war.” In 2004, a new, supreme supervisory entity, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was granted authority to institute a level of management above the CIA, whose leader since 1947 had technically functioned as the DCI—director of Central Intelligence—the overseer of all sixteen intelligence services. The newly constituted DNI would even come up with its own competing counterterrorism center. Senior generals currently oversee both the CIA and the DNI. The utter militarization of intelligence in America that Goodman feared all along has evidently come to pass.

Entropy inside the agency also preoccupies John Diamond in The CIA and the Culture of Failure. An assiduous young reporter who broke in with the Associated Press and moved on to defense and intelligence affairs with the Chicago Tribune and USA Today, Diamond has put together a sequence of long, trenchant, truly eclectic essays on the CIA’s internal workings, consistently stressing its tendency to outsmart itself. He has astutely canvassed active and recently retired agency personnel, cultivated top personalities in the congressional-oversight committees, combed through the documents and professional literature, and emerged with fine-grained, fair-minded analyses. The result is a collection of riveting specific case studies, with sharp and frequently surprising judgments...

"Spooks" CONTINUED at here

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Here's a third book to consider:

-State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration By James Risen published 2006 by Free Press a Division of Simon & Schuster, INC. Risen covers national security for The New York Times. He was a member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2002 for coverage of Sept. 11 and terrorism. He is the coauthor of -Wrath of Angels- and -The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB.

From the back cover: In the 1960s and '70s, it was the abuse of power in domestic politics...In the 1980s, it was lawbreaking in covert foreign affairs...Now we are at war -- and domestic spying and covert lawbreaking are just the tip of the iceberg.
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