Book description
Scores of interviews with insiders and more than seven thousand pages of formerly classified documents support this history of the CIA, which focuses on "The Company's" remarkable personalities and leaders from Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey
Why read it?
1 author picked The Agency as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
John Ranelagh’s history of the CIA should be the very first book read on U.S. espionage. At 800 pages, heavily grounded in interviews, it covers the period from before the Second World War to the mid-1980s. It convincingly overturns every misconception about the CIA, including its exaggerated roles in coups, assassinations, and the Phoenix Program.
Actually, the book is a detailed sociological study of the U.S. elite, Presidential governance, and intra-agency biases. Surprisingly, with its foundation in the O.S.S. and recruits from American communists who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, the CIA is a highly professional but liberal…
From Julian's list on national security decision-making.
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