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BOOK REVIEW: The Secret History of the CIA
The Secret History of the CIA
Joseph J. Trento, 2001, Prima Publishing
Ok spy guys, we’ve got a good one here. Almost TOO good.
Using interviews with the participants (all the way up to and including James Jesus Angleton) and a canny sense of just exactly how things really fit together, JJT has painted an extraordinary picture of the inner workings of the CIA from WWII days prior to it’s creation, down to the Regan administration.
Footnotes galore. Lotsa backup.
And the picture that gets painted is HORRENDOUS.
Not horrendous in the sense of evil incarnate (although THAT was definitely on the agenda, too), but horrendous in the IDIOCY of the arrogant bunch of deep cover dimwits that thought they were the best of the best. And while we’re at it here, the cover wasn’t very deep at all. The Soviets, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and god knows who else easily penetrated and MANIPULATED dorfs in the CIA for DECADES!
Literally thousands of innocent and not so innocent people died over the years as a direct result of the incompetence of CIA operatives. And the hubris that pervaded the entire organization was such that nobody seemed capable of learning the least lesson from botched operation after endlessly botched operation.
The Kennedy brothers were so pesty, and so incompetent, and so everlastingly persistent in their keystone kop attempts to use the CIA to kill Castro that Castro finally got sick of the entire goddamned thing and killed JFK. With the help of the Russians, natch. It didn’t help anyone that the CIA idiotically involved organized crime SUPPORTERS of Castro in their doomed attempts on his life. Castro was in the loop from the beginning, and was not amused.
In Berlin, Russian spies not only penetrated the CIA operation there, they actually helped set CIA policy! The tale of a certain Igor Orlov will curl your hair. The CIA was so stupid in this affair that for YEARS they attempted to make use of the services of a SOVIET AGENT (no, the dumb fucks didn’t figure out who he was till decades too late) in order to track down and recruit other Soviet agents. The gray immanences in the Kremlin and the KGB must have cracked up into highly uncharacteristic gales of laughter when presented with some of the tail-chasing activities embarked upon by the CIA.
The incompetence of the CIA throughout the Vietnam debacle is just stupefying in its scope and grandeur. Ditto Latin America.
Oh hell, I could go on and on about this stuff, but I’m not going to. The book’s already been written.
Get The Secret History of the CIA and give it a good close read.
HIGHLY recommended.
A lifetime resident (despite having travelled all over the damn place at one time or another) of Central Florida, James MacLaren took a four-year degree in death thrills riding giant waves on the North Shore back in the 70's. Wound up in the inconvenience store following a lay off from the Cape, where he was involved with the construction of the Space Shuttle launch pads, among other things. Father of best son in the world.
