The Life and
Times of the CIA
Wall Street Brokers, Ivy
League Professors, Soldiers of Fortune, Ad Men, Newsmen,
Stunt Men, Second-Story Men, and Con Men on Active Duty
for the United States
By Chalmers Johnson
This essay is a
review of
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim
Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pp., $27.95).
The American people may
not know it but they have some severe problems with one
of their official governmental entities, the Central
Intelligence Agency. Because of the almost total secrecy
surrounding its activities and the lack of cost
accounting on how it spends the money covertly
appropriated for it within the defense budget, it is
impossible for citizens to know what the CIA's
approximately 17,000 employees do with, or for, their
share of the yearly
$44 billion-$48
billion or more spent on "intelligence." This
inability to account for anything at the CIA is,
however, only one problem with the Agency and hardly the
most serious one either.
There are currently at
least two criminal trials underway in Italy and Germany
against several dozen CIA officials for felonies
committed in those countries, including kidnapping
people with a legal right to be in Germany and Italy,
illegally transporting them to countries such as Egypt
and Jordan for torture, and causing them to "disappear"
into secret foreign or CIA-run prisons outside the U.S.
without any form of due process of law.
The possibility that CIA
funds are simply being ripped off by insiders is also
acute. The CIA's former number three official, its
executive director and chief procurement officer, Kyle
"Dusty" Foggo, is now
under
federal indictment in San Diego for corruptly
funneling contracts for water, air services, and armored
vehicles to a lifelong friend and defense contractor,
Brent Wilkes, who was unqualified to perform the
services being sought. In return, Wilkes treated Foggo
to thousands of dollars' worth of vacation trips and
dinners, and promised him a top job at his company when
he retired from the CIA.
Thirty years ago, in a
futile attempt to provide some check on endemic
misbehavior by the CIA, the administration of Gerald
Ford created the President's Intelligence Oversight
Board. It was to be a civilian watchdog over the Agency.
A 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan made
the board permanent and gave it the mission of
identifying CIA violations of the law (while keeping
them secret in order not to endanger national security).
Through five previous administrations, members of the
board -- all civilians not employed by the government --
actively reported on and investigated some of the CIA's
most secret operations that seemed to breach legal
limits.
However, on July 15,
2007, John Solomon of the Washington Post
reported that, for the first five-and-a-half years
of the Bush administration, the Intelligence Oversight
Board did nothing -- no investigations, no reports, no
questioning of CIA officials. It evidently found no
reason to inquire into the interrogation methods Agency
operatives employed at secret prisons or the transfer of
captives to countries that use torture, or domestic
wiretapping not warranted by a federal court.
Who were the members of
this non-oversight board of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil,
speak-no-evil monkeys? The board now in place is led by
former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It
includes Don Evans, a former commerce secretary and
friend of the President, former Admiral David Jeremiah,
and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse. The only thing they
accomplished was to express their contempt for a legal
order by a president of the United States.
Corrupt and undemocratic
practices by the CIA have prevailed since it was created
in 1947. However, as citizens we have now, for the first
time, been given a striking range of critical
information necessary to understand how this situation
came about and why it has been so impossible to remedy.
We have a long, richly documented history of the CIA
from its post-World War II origins to its failure to
supply even the most elementary information about Iraq
before the 2003 invasion of that country.
Declassified CIA
Records
Tim Weiner's book,
Legacy of Ashes, is important for many reasons, but
certainly one is that it brings back from the dead the
possibility that journalism can actually help citizens
perform elementary oversight on our government. Until
Weiner's magnificent effort, I would have agreed with
Seymour Hersh that, in the current crisis of
American governance and foreign policy, the failure of
the press has been almost complete. Our journalists have
generally not even tried to penetrate the layers of
secrecy that the executive branch throws up to ward off
scrutiny of its often illegal and incompetent
activities. This is the first book I've read in a long
time that documents its very important assertions in a
way that goes well beyond asking readers merely to trust
the reporter.
Weiner, a New York
Times correspondent, has been working on Legacy
of Ashes for 20 years. He has read over 50,000
government documents, mostly from the CIA, the White
House, and the State Department. He was instrumental in
causing the CIA Records Search Technology (CREST)
program of the National Archives to declassify many of
them, particularly in 2005 and 2006. He has read more
than 2,000 oral histories of American intelligence
officers, soldiers, and diplomats and has himself
conducted more than 300 on-the-record interviews with
current and past CIA officers, including ten former
directors of central intelligence. Truly exceptional
among authors of books on the CIA, he makes the
following claim: "This book is on the record -- no
anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay."
Weiner's history
contains 154 pages of end-notes keyed to comments in the
text. (Numbered notes and standard scholarly citations
would have been preferable, as well as an annotated
bibliography providing information on where documents
could be found; but what he has done is still
light-years ahead of competing works.) These notes
contain extensive verbatim quotations from documents,
interviews, and oral histories. Weiner also observes:
"The CIA has reneged on pledges made by three
consecutive directors of central intelligence –-
[Robert] Gates, [James] Woolsey, and [John] Deutch -- to
declassify records on nine major covert actions: France
and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s; North Korea in the
1950s; Iran in 1953; Indonesia in 1958; Tibet in the
1950s and 1960s; and the Congo, the Dominican Republic,
and Laos in the 1960s." He is nonetheless able to supply
key details on each of these operations from unofficial,
but fully identified, sources.
In May 2003, after a
lengthy delay, the government finally released the
documents on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's engineered
regime change in Guatemala in 1954; most of the records
from the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in which a CIA-created
exile army of Cubans went to their deaths or to prison
in a hapless invasion of that island have been released;
and the
reports on the CIA's 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime
minister Mohammad Mossadeq were leaked. Weiner's efforts
and his resulting book are monuments to serious
historical research in our allegedly "open society."
Still, he warns,
"While I was gathering
and obtaining declassification authorization for
some of the CIA records used in this book at the
National Archives, the agency [the CIA] was engaged
in a secret effort to reclassify many of those same
records, dating back to the 1940s, flouting the law
and breaking its word. Nevertheless, the work of
historians, archivists, and journalists has created
a foundation of documents on which a book can be
built."
Surprise Attacks
As an idea, if not an
actual entity, the Central Intelligence Agency came into
being as a result of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese
attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. It
functionally came to an end, as Weiner makes clear, on
September 11, 2001, when operatives of al-Qaeda flew
hijacked airliners into the World Trade towers in
Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both
assaults were successful surprise attacks.
The Central Intelligence
Agency itself was created during the Truman
administration in order to prevent future surprise
attacks like Pearl Harbor by uncovering planning for
them and so forewarning against them. On September 11th,
2001, the CIA was revealed to be a failure precisely
because it had been unable to discover the al-Qaeda plot
and sound the alarm against a surprise attack that would
prove almost as devastating as Pearl Harbor. After 9/11,
the Agency, having largely discredited itself, went into
a steep decline and finished the job. Weiner concludes:
"Under [CIA Director George Tenet's] leadership, the
agency produced the worst body of work in its long
history: a special national intelligence estimate titled
‘Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass
Destruction.'" It is axiomatic that, as political
leaders lose faith in an intelligence agency and quit
listening to it, its functional life is over, even if
the people working there continue to report to their
offices.
In December 1941, there
was sufficient intelligence on Japanese activities for
the U.S. to have been much better prepared for a
surprise attack. Naval Intelligence had cracked Japanese
diplomatic and military codes; radar stations and patrol
flights had been authorized (but not fully deployed);
and strategic knowledge of Japanese past behaviors and
capabilities (if not of intentions) was adequate. The
FBI had even observed the Japanese consul-general in
Honolulu burning records in his backyard but reported
this information only to Director J. Edgar Hoover, who
did not pass it on.
Lacking was a central
office to collate, analyze, and put in suitable form for
presentation to the president all U.S. government
information on an important issue. In 1941, there were
plenty of signals about what was coming, but the U.S.
government lacked the organization and expertise to
distinguish true signals from the background "noise" of
day-to-day communications. In the 1950s, Roberta
Wohlstetter, a strategist for the Air Force's think
tank, the RAND Corporation, wrote a secret study that
documented the coordination and communications failings
leading up to Pearl Harbor. (Entitled Pearl Harbor:
Warning and Decision, it was declassified and
published by Stanford University Press in 1962.)
The Legacy of the OSS
The National Security
Act of 1947 created the CIA with emphasis on the word
"central" in its title. The Agency was supposed to
become the unifying organization that would distill and
write up all available intelligence, and offer it to
political leaders in a manageable form. The Act gave the
CIA five functions, four of them dealing with the
collection, coordination, and dissemination of
intelligence from open sources as well as espionage. It
was the fifth function -- lodged in a vaguely worded
passage that allowed the CIA to "perform such other
functions and duties related to intelligence affecting
the national security as the National Security Council
may from time to time direct" -- that turned the CIA
into the personal, secret, unaccountable army of the
president.
From the very beginning,
the Agency failed to do what President Truman expected
of it, turning at once to "cloak-and-dagger" projects
that were clearly beyond its mandate and only
imperfectly integrated into any grand strategy of the
U.S. government. Weiner stresses that the true author of
the CIA's clandestine functions was George Kennan, the
senior State Department authority on the Soviet Union
and creator of the idea of "containing" the spread of
communism rather than going to war with ("rolling back")
the USSR.
Kennan had been alarmed
by the ease with which the Soviets were setting up
satellites in Eastern Europe and he wanted to "fight
fire with fire." Others joined with him to promote this
agenda, above all the veterans of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), a unit that, under General
William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan during World War II, had
sent saboteurs behind enemy lines, disseminated
disinformation and propaganda to mislead Axis forces,
and tried to recruit resistance fighters in occupied
countries.
On September 20, 1945,
Truman had abolished the OSS -- a bureaucratic victory
for the Pentagon, the State Department, and the FBI, all
of which considered the OSS an upstart organization that
impinged on their respective jurisdictions. Many of the
early leaders of the CIA were OSS veterans and devoted
themselves to consolidating and entrenching their new
vehicle for influence in Washington. They also
passionately believed that they were people with a
self-appointed mission of world-shaking importance and
that, as a result, they were beyond the normal legal
restraints placed on government officials.
From its inception the
CIA has labored under two contradictory conceptions of
what it was supposed to be doing, and no president ever
succeeded in correcting or resolving this situation.
Espionage and intelligence analysis seek to know the
world as it is; covert action seeks to change the world,
whether it understands it or not. The best CIA exemplar
of the intelligence-collecting function was Richard
Helms, director of central intelligence (DCI) from 1966
to 1973 (who died in 2002). The great protagonist of
cloak-and-dagger work was Frank Wisner, the CIA's
director of operations from 1948 until the late 1950s
when he went insane and, in 1965, committed suicide.
Wisner never had any patience for espionage.
Weiner quotes William
Colby, a future DCI (1973-1976), on this subject. The
separation of the scholars of the research and analysis
division from the spies of the clandestine service
created two cultures within the intelligence profession,
he said, "separate, unequal, and contemptuous of each
other." That critique remained true throughout the CIA's
first 60 years.
By 1964, the CIA's
clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of
its budget and 90% of the director's time. The Agency
gathered under one roof Wall Street brokers, Ivy League
professors, soldiers of fortune, ad men, newsmen, stunt
men, second-story men, and con men. They never learned
to work together -- the ultimate result being a series
of failures in both intelligence and covert operations.
In January 1961, on leaving office after two terms,
President Eisenhower had already grasped the situation
fully. "Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor," he told
his director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles. "I
leave a legacy of ashes to my successor." Weiner, of
course, draws his title from Eisenhower's metaphor. It
would only get worse in the years to come.
The historical record is
unequivocal. The United States is ham-handed and brutal
in conceiving and executing clandestine operations, and
it is simply no good at espionage; its operatives never
have enough linguistic and cultural knowledge of target
countries to recruit spies effectively. The CIA also
appears to be one of the most easily penetrated
espionage organizations on the planet. From the
beginning, it repeatedly lost its assets to double
agents.
Typically, in the early
1950s, the Agency dropped millions of dollars worth of
gold bars, arms, two-way radios, and agents into Poland
to support what its top officials believed was a
powerful Polish underground movement against the
Soviets. In fact, Soviet agents had wiped out the
movement years before, turned key people in it into
double agents, and played the CIA for suckers. As Weiner
comments, not only had five years of planning, various
agents, and millions of dollars "gone down the drain,"
but the "unkindest cut might have been [the Agency's]
discovery that the Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA's
money to the Communist Party of Italy." [pp. 67-68]
The story would prove
unending. On February 21, 1994, the Agency finally
discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA's chief of
counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, who had been spying for the USSR for seven years
and had sent innumerable U.S. agents before KGB firing
squads. Weiner comments, "The Ames case revealed an
institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal
negligence." [p. 451]
The Search for
Technological Means
Over the years, in order
to compensate for these serious inadequacies, the CIA
turned increasingly to signals intelligence and other
technological means of spying like U-2 reconnaissance
aircraft and satellites. In 1952, the top leaders of the
CIA created the National Security Agency -- an
eavesdropping and cryptological unit -- to overcome the
Agency's abject failure to place any spies in North
Korea during the Korean War. The Agency debacle at the
Bay of Pigs in Cuba led a frustrated Pentagon to create
its own Defense Intelligence Agency as a check on the
military amateurism of the CIA's clandestine service
officers.
Still, technological
means, whether satellite spying or electronic
eavesdropping, will seldom reveal intentions -- and that
is the raison d'être of intelligence estimates.
As Haviland Smith, who ran operations against the USSR
in the 1960s and 1970s, lamented, "The only thing
missing is -- we don't have anything on Soviet
intentions. And I don't know how you get that. And
that's the charter of the clandestine service
[emphasis in original, pp. 360-61])."
The actual intelligence
collected was just as problematic. On the most important
annual intelligence estimate throughout the Cold War --
that of the Soviet order of battle -- the CIA invariably
overstated its size and menace. Then, to add insult to
injury, under George H. W. Bush's tenure as DCI
(1976-77), the agency tore itself apart over
ill-informed right-wing claims that it was actually
underestimating Soviet military forces. The result
was the appointment of "Team B" during the Ford
presidency, led by Polish exiles and neoconservative
fanatics. It was tasked to "correct" the work of the
Office of National Estimates.
"After the Cold War was
over," writes Weiner, "the agency put Team B's findings
to the test. Every one of them was wrong." [p. 352] But
the problem was not simply one of the CIA succumbing to
political pressure. It was also structural: "[F]or
thirteen years, from Nixon's era to the dying days of
the Cold War, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear
forces overstated [emphasis in original] the rate
at which Moscow was modernizing its weaponry." [p. 297]
From 1967 to 1973, I
served as an outside consultant to the Office of
National Estimates, one of about a dozen specialists
brought in to try to overcome the myopia and
bureaucratism involved in the writing of these national
intelligence estimates. I recall agonized debates over
how the mechanical highlighting of worst-case analyses
of Soviet weapons was helping to promote the arms race.
Some senior intelligence analysts tried to resist the
pressures of the Air Force and the military-industrial
complex. Nonetheless, the late John Huizenga, an erudite
intelligence analyst who headed the Office of National
Estimates from 1971 until the wholesale purge of the
Agency by DCI James Schlesinger in 1973, bluntly said to
the CIA's historians:
"In retrospect.... I
really do not believe that an intelligence
organization in this government is able to deliver
an honest analytical product without facing the risk
of political contention. . . . I think that
intelligence has had relatively little impact on the
policies that we've made over the years. Relatively
none. . . . Ideally, what had been supposed was that
. . . serious intelligence analysis could.... assist
the policy side to reexamine premises, render
policymaking more sophisticated, closer to the
reality of the world. Those were the large ambitions
which I think were never realized." [p. 353]
On the clandestine side,
the human costs were much higher. The CIA's incessant,
almost always misguided, attempts to determine how other
people should govern themselves; its secret support for
fascists (e.g., Greece under George Papadopoulos),
militarists (e.g., Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet),
and murderers (e.g., the Congo under Joseph Mobutu); its
uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and
religious fanatics (Muslim fundamentalists in
Afghanistan) -- all these and more activities combined
to pepper the world with blowback movements against the
United States.
Nothing has done more to
undercut the reputation of the United States than the
CIA's "clandestine" (only in terms of the American
people) murders of the presidents of South Vietnam and
the Congo, its ravishing of the governments of Iran,
Indonesia (three times), South Korea (twice), all of the
Indochinese states, virtually every government in Latin
America, and Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The deaths
from these armed assaults run into the millions. After
9/11, President Bush asked "Why do they hate us?" From
Iran (1953) to Iraq (2003), the better question would
be, "Who does not?"
The Cash Nexus
There is a major
exception to this portrait of long-term Agency
incompetence. "One weapon the CIA used with surpassing
skill," Weiner writes, "was cold cash. The agency
excelled at buying the services of foreign politicians."
[p. 116] It started with the Italian elections of April
1948. The CIA did not yet have a secure source of
clandestine money and had to raise it secretly from Wall
Street operators, rich Italian-Americans, and others.
"The millions were
delivered to Italian politicians and the priests of
Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican.
Suitcases filed with cash changed hands in the
four-star Hassler Hotel. . . . Italy's Christian
Democrats won by a comfortable margin and formed a
government that excluded communists. A long romance
between the [Christian Democratic] party and the
agency began. The CIA's practice of purchasing
elections and politicians with bags of cash was
repeated in Italy -- and in many other countries --
for the next twenty-five years." [p. 27]
The CIA ultimately spent
at least $65 million on Italy's politicians -- including
"every Christian Democrat who ever won a national
election in Italy." [p. 298] As the Marshall Plan to
reconstruct Europe got up to speed in the late 1940s,
the CIA secretly skimmed the money it needed from
Marshall Plan accounts. After the Plan ended, secret
funds buried in the annual Defense appropriation bill
continued to finance the CIA's operations.
After Italy, the CIA
moved on to Japan, paying to bring Nobusuke Kishi to
power as Japan's prime minister (in office 1957-1960),
the country's World War II minister of munitions. It
ultimately used its financial muscle to entrench the
(conservative) Liberal Democratic Party in power and to
turn Japan into a single-party state, which it remains
to this day. The cynicism with which the CIA continued
to subsidize "democratic" elections in Western Europe,
Latin America, and East Asia, starting in the late
1950s, led to disillusionment with the United States and
a distinct blunting of the idealism with which it had
waged the early Cold War.
Another major use for
its money was a campaign to bankroll alternatives in
Western Europe to Soviet-influenced newspapers and
books. Attempting to influence the attitudes of students
and intellectuals, the CIA sponsored literary magazines
in Germany (Der Monat) and Britain (Encounter),
promoted abstract expressionism in art as a radical
alternative to the Soviet Union's socialist realism, and
secretly funded the publication and distribution of over
two and a half million books and periodicals. Weiner
treats these activities rather cursorily. He should have
consulted Frances Stonor Saunders' indispensable
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and
Letters.
Hiding Incompetence
Despite all this, the
CIA was protected from criticism by its impenetrable
secrecy and by the tireless propaganda efforts of such
leaders as Allen W. Dulles, director of the Agency under
President Eisenhower, and Richard Bissell, chief of the
clandestine service after Wisner. Even when the CIA
seemed to fail at everything it undertook, writes
Weiner, "The ability to represent failure as success was
becoming a CIA tradition." [p. 58]
After the Chinese
intervention in the Korean War, the CIA dropped 212
foreign agents into Manchuria. Within a matter of days,
101 had been killed and the other 111 captured -- but
this information was effectively suppressed. The CIA's
station chief in Seoul, Albert R. Haney, an incompetent
army colonel and intelligence fabricator, never
suspected that the hundreds of agents he claimed to have
working for him all reported to North Korean control
officers.
Haney survived his
incredible performance in the Korean War because, at the
end of his tour in November 1952, he helped to arrange
for the transportation of a grievously wounded Marine
lieutenant back to the United States. That Marine turned
out to be the son of Allen Dulles, who repaid his debt
of gratitude by putting Haney in charge of the covert
operation that -- despite a largely bungled, badly
directed secret campaign -- did succeed in overthrowing
the Guatemalan government of President Jacobo Arbenz in
1954. The CIA's handiwork in Guatemala ultimately led to
the deaths of 200,000 civilians during the 40 years of
bloodshed and civil war that followed the sabotage of an
elected government for the sake of the United Fruit
Company.
Weiner has made
innumerable contributions to many hidden issues of
postwar foreign policy, some of them still on-going. For
example, during the debate over America's invasion of
Iraq after 2003, one of the constant laments was that
the CIA did not have access to a single agent inside
Saddam Hussein's inner circle. That was not true.
Ironically, the intelligence service of France -- a
country U.S. politicians publicly lambasted for its
failure to support us -- had cultivated Naji Sabri,
Iraq's foreign minister. Sabri told the French agency,
and through it the American government, that Saddam
Hussein did not have an active nuclear or biological
weapons program, but the CIA ignored him. Weiner
comments ruefully, "The CIA had almost no ability to
analyze accurately what little intelligence it had."
[pp. 666-67, n. 487]
Perhaps the most comical
of all CIA clandestine activities -- unfortunately all
too typical of its covert operations over the last 60
years -- was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly
appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn
McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human rights
and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous
Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her
bedroom and picked up sounds that led their agents to
conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love
affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station
chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The
agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal
ambassador was a lesbian without realizing that "Murphy"
was also the name of her two-year-old black standard
poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting
her dog. She was actually a married woman from a
conservative family. [p. 459]
Back in August 1945,
General William Donovan, the head of the OSS, said to
President Truman, "Prior to the present war, the United
States had no foreign intelligence service. It never has
had and does not now have a coordinated intelligence
system." Weiner adds, "Tragically, it still does not
have one." I agree with Weiner's assessment, but based
on his truly exemplary analysis of the Central
Intelligence Agency in Legacy of Ashes, I do not
think that this is a tragedy. Given his evidence, it is
hard to believe that the United States would not have
been better off if it had left intelligence collection
and analysis to the State Department and had assigned
infrequent covert actions to the Pentagon.
I believe that this is
where we stand today: The CIA has failed badly, and it
would be an important step toward a restoration of the
checks and balances within our political system simply
to abolish it. Some observers argue that this would be
an inadequate remedy because what the government now
ostentatiously calls the "intelligence community" --
complete with
its
own website -- is composed of 16 discrete and
competitive intelligence organizations ready to step
into the CIA's shoes. This, however, is a
misunderstanding. Most of the members of the so-called
intelligence community are bureaucratic appendages of
well-established departments or belong to extremely
technical units whose functions have nothing at all to
do with either espionage or cloak-and-dagger adventures.
The sixteen entities
include the intelligence organizations of each military
service -- the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine
Corps, Navy, and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- and
reflect inter-service rivalries more than national needs
or interests; the departments of Energy, Homeland
Security, State, Treasury, and Drug Enforcement
Administration, as well as the FBI and the National
Security Agency; and the units devoted to satellites and
reconnaissance (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency,
National Reconnaissance Office). The only one of these
units that could conceivably compete with the CIA is the
one that I recommend to replace it -- namely, the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
Interestingly enough, it had by far the best record of
any U.S. intelligence entity in analyzing Iraq under
Saddam Hussein and estimating what was likely to happen
if we pursued the Bush administration's misconceived
scheme of invading his country. Its work was, of course,
largely ignored by the Bush-Cheney White House.
Weiner does not cover
every single aspect of the record of the CIA, but his
book is one of the best possible places for a serious
citizen to begin to understand the depths to which our
government has sunk. It also brings home the lesson that
an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can
be as great a threat to national security as not having
one at all.
Chalmers Johnson's
latest book is
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
(Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the third volume of
his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes
Blowback and
The Sorrows of Empire. A retired professor of
international relations from the University of
California (Berkeley and San Diego campuses) and the
author of some seventeen books primarily on the politics
and economics of East Asia,
Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research
Institute.
