BOOK REVIEW: The Secret History of the CIA
by James MacLaren
The Secret History of the CIA
Joseph J. Trento, 2001, Prima Publishing</b>
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.
