Agencies

This book seems to have been written by an FBI public relations man. He does nothing to expose the fraud in the FBI crime lab, the murdering FBI sniper who killed an unarmed Idaho woman while she was holding her baby, or that burned down a church in Texas, killing 80 people in the process.

This book does a great job of looking into the FBI and discusses major cases in many areas of crime such as organized crime, violent crime, white collar crime, etc. He also gives a look at the FBI training acadamy in Quantico. He describes both sides of the story as he discusses Hoover's FBI and the modern FBI. A great book if you are looking for insight into the greatest law enforcement agency in the world.

Jeffreys does an excellent job describing a complicated and secretive organization. He does not spend as much time on Hoover himself as on the modern Bureau. He is fair, ascribing blame and criticizing policies and efforts when necessary, but also extolling the overall effectiveness of the FBI. The FBI is the most powerful and effective law enforcement agency in the world, and this must not be forgotten, even if one can look at some of its recent past and find fault in its management or political intrigues. The book is dated: its most recent event described is the Waco incident. It would be interesting to read a sequel with the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA disaster, describing the intricacies of the FBI's investigations and the human interest stories of agents unravelling trails of evidence and dealing with tragedy and death. I am glad to have read this book. It has given me insight to an organization I highly value.

Good synopsis of psychiatric abuse in Canada, career of Ewan Cameron and the experiments at the Allan Memorial. Unfortunately not a very in-depth understanding of the historical context, which would mitigate some of the more sensationalist conclusions, and of psychiatry/psychiatric procedures. Written from a journalist's outsider perspective.

I found this a good study of Dr. Ewen Cameron the man, though I was disappointed there was not even a photo of him in the hardcover edition I read. Intriguing exploration of the background to the Allan Memorial horrors too. Feels incomplete in its exploration of what actually happened -- i.e. not enough visceral detail -- and it left me hanging as to what happened with the various victims/patients and their lawsuits. (I know the Cdn govt. set up a fund while Kim Campbell was Justice minister for the victims, but was that all?

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the director of Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute, Dr. Ewen Cameron, exposed his patients to treatment methods now considered barbaric. Attempting to wipe brains clean of "undesirable" behavior and reprogram new behavior, he kept patients in chemical sleep for weeks and months at a time, while they listened to tape recorded messages that repeated endlessly. Furthermore, he exposed them to massive amounts of electroshock that resulted in brain damage in some recipients.

"In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada," by Anne Collins, details some of the stories of Dr. Cameron's patients and how, more recently, they sued the CIA because it partially funded his work. Cameron's work in "psychic driving" (the term he used to call his process) caught the interest of the CIA and it secretly funded the program for a few years. However, Cameron continued his work after this funding stopped. Because it was the CIA that provided some of the money for these experiments, it caused a stir in Canada, regardless of the fact that the Canadian government funded Cameron before, during, and after the CIA chipped in.

"In the Sleep Room" provided a sketch of who Ewen Cameron was and what his ambitions were. I did not find the book overly critical of Cameron or Psychiatry. Historical background was provided on Cameron's treatments, and overall, the book was balanced. This book provides a good starting point for those interested in learning about Dr. Cameron and his infamous treatments. It is also attractive reading for those interested in gaining some insight into the events that placed attention on the ethics of treatments and higher concern for the consent of treatment.

The trouble with Burton Hersh is that he never bothered to read what he wrote. If he had he'd have realized that it is uncomprehensible. This is partly due to the fact that he is a functional illiterate. He doesn't have a basic understanding of what a sentence is.He also has a very poor choice of words. He uses words that he obviously does not know what they mean.

Secondly I am old enough to know that most of his "information" is sheer hogwash. It's either badly distorted or false. It's a figment of his imagination. I am 76 and fought in World War II and knew some of those he writes about. They are mostly bland liveless bureaucrats. Not the bizarre creatures he depicts. I have suffered through 83 pages and can sight any number of lies and distortions.

I was born in 1950, so most of the key players in the story were dead and buried before I even started to learn what a bunch of assholes they were. There is certainly much in this book to support that attitude, a good deal more than I realized even as a screaming anti-Viet war protester in 1969-70. The comprehensive fascist economic,legal and social entanglements - especially the Dulles Boys, in Germany, Italy, England, Rumania, etc. are laid bare, with 64 pages of footnotes! Before, during and after the big bad war. Hersh provides the basis for a rather more realistic appraisal of the early-mid cold war, but only hints at the outrage aroused in the Soviets (not just bad old boy Stalin)when we scooped up all those Nazis- Gehlen and hundreds more, and put them right back to work on our payroll, within months if not weeks after VE Day. However, most of the names dropped by Mr. Hersh mean nothing to me, or to the very large majority of the literate population alive today. I occasionally had a very tough time understanding his repeated but highly variable references to dozens of old Wall Street law firms, German corporations, and the go-betweens and flunkies skittering around in every chapter. A big chart with arrows and color coding would be helpful, and a few lists of the old characters. A glossary would also be good, to define the arcane Brit, Frenchy and German lingo that is tossed in like pepper on your salad. At times even my unabridged dictionary was no help. I suppose that 20 years from now, almost no one will have the motivation to plow through the pointless bric-a-brac to find the fascinating historical data. A pity.

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable writer. It caused howls of protest from the CIA and US media elite when first published, but there is no doubt that Hersh has the goods: the book is now on the CIA reading list!
Hersh himself clearly did vast independent primary research and interview work for the book. His anatomy of the Dulles brothers, Frank Wisner, Wild Bill Donovan, Bill Casey,and the creepy but omnipresent Carmel Offie is superb. Wall Street staffed the US intelligence elite, in 1941 as in 2001---and oil and high finance were and still are that world's elixir. Lastly, the index and notes are a boon to future researchers. [Interestingly, none of the Dulles-adoring biographies published of late cites any of Hersh's work. Hmmmm.]
Hersh has a novelist's skill in bringing this cast of real characters to life: the descriptions are unforgettable, but the research, especially to me, a fellow digger in contemporary intelligence history, is awe-inspiring. Hersh has not written a book predicated on others' books: there is a treasure trove here of original research, especially in relation to the Wall Street connections to Nazi business and, critically, to the SAFEHAVEN investigation, rediscovery of which of course broke the Holocaust gold story some years back.
But most of all, this book is hugely entertaining and not a little amusing, told in a confidingly baroque language, it's true, but imagine you're hearing these stories in a clubland chair, from someone Who Knows Stuff, of a long and fascinating evening. Listen carefully: your attention'll be rewarded.
This is nuanced, detailed writing about complicated history: one's reading effort, I found, rewards---this is an important book laying open the defining people and defining events of the US intelligence empire. It's no surprise Hersh is in high demand as an intelligence expert since Sept 11th, as the CIA and its watchers look for answers.

What the Amazon description fails to mention is that this CD is simply a compilation of pages copied off the CIA and NSA's own web sites and saved as PDF files.

You can get everything on the CD and more for free directly from the respective government websites. In addition, the graphics as saved on the CD are low resolution, causing some small items to become nearly impossible to read.

Don't waste [X amount] on this ripoff just go directly to the CIA's website

I am extremely impressed by this great CD-ROM collection of CIA and NSA documents. It is well organized and provides literally thousands of pages of reports and documents that I'd never have the time to get otherwise. The parts dealing with the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union are especially fascinating. The publisher deserves credit for providing a very useful product that is sure to delight anyone interested in intelligence operations, history, or military affairs. The PDF format is ideal for reading at the computer or printing out interesting bits for reference. I highly recommend it!

I had expected this to be an exciting book about spying during the Second World War, and it was about the spies, but not about events, but about the people involved and where they traveled to and the disguises they used in their missions, what colleges they used as fronts, how many books they took with them, etc. - If you are truly interested in the mundane minute documentation about the people this is the book for you; but it's not the book for the general reader. It's too specific and detailed with very little "spy" action. Not reader friendly.

Co-editor Maureen Corrigan book reviewer on NPR Prgram Fresh Air is well worth reading. Lots of valuable info in a very detailed interesting work.

Didn't know Hoover was to blame for all the problems of the world...Thank God for people like President Clinton.

This is an excellent collection of documents that show what Hoover was really up to. He is shown to be the master of bureacracy that helped entrench him as FBI director. This book is a must to understand the director and his interests.

If you are looking for "Spook information, i.e. secret codes, secret drops, secret messages and meetings, forget it, this book is not for you. This is just a discription of the life of a person living in a difficult location.

My wife and I met Dr. Zoya in September 2001. She was a guest lecturer on the ship we were on in Russia. No one fell asleep in her lectures as she would inject some humor into them. If a reader wanted to read about a woman who was an interpeter for President Roosevelt, Winston Churchhill and Stalin during World War II, this is for them. Dr. Zoya led a very colorful life and a very interesting woman to talk with.

This book is less than the sum of its parts. It provides a workmanlike review of the career of William Colby (if one discounts the constant political carping), but it offers no new insights and precious little new information. This deficiency is compounded by the book's lack of adequate sourcing and documentation. As an example, on page 283, discussing the post-1973 Paris Peace Agreement period in South Vietnam, the author writes, "Not even Saigon could hide the fact that a government outpost in the Central Highlands, well-armed, defended by 600 troops with several months' supply of food and ammunition, had surrendered the moment it came under serious threat." There is no footnote to support this claim, no mention of the name of the outpost or the date of the "surrender," etc. I was in Vietnam at that time and have studied that period extensively, and I have never heard of such an incident. It is possible that the author might have been referring to the April 1974 abandonment of Tong Le Chan, but Tong Le Chan was not in the Central Highlands, its defenders had been under constant communist siege for two years without relief or replacements, and there was no surrender - the defenders all made it safely back to South Vietnamese lines. The only major surrender of a South Vietnamese Army unit during the entire war involved elements of the ARVN 56th Regiment, but that was during the spring 1972 communist offensive, before the cease-fire, and it happened on South Vietnam's northern border, not in the Central Highlands. I am at a loss as to what the author was talking about in this quotation.
In many respects, the author seemed more interested in pushing his own political line, which is considerably left of center, than in telling Colby's story. His effort to claim that Colby and CIA provided the Indonesian government with "target lists" for use in Suharto's brutal repression of Indonesian communists (pages 155-156) in spite of the lack of any hard evidence that such lists existed became so convoluted that it gave me a headache.
This book contains an especially egregious allegation that I would be remiss not to point out. On page 245, in his effort to support the discredited claims made in Alfred McCoy's book "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" of CIA collusion in narcotics trafficking, the author writes:
"...McCoy received further support from Tran Van Khiem, a former Saigon security chief who had investigated corruption charges for Diem and had kept up his contacts with Saigon intelligence services: 'My security agents...firmly confirm that a few CIA agents in Indochina are involved in opium trafficking.'"
A footnote (fortunately, one is present for this citation) notes that this quotation was from a letter Khiem wrote that was printed in the Washington Star in 1972.
Even the most basic research by the author would have revealed that the letter writer, Tran Van Khiem, was in fact the criminally insane brother of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. Khiem was NOT a "former Saigon security chief" (although there were some allegations, principally by Khiem himself, that during the last days of the Diem regiment Madame Nhu appointed Khiem the head of a pro-Diem assassination squad). In the early 1990s Khiem brutally murdered his father and mother in Washington D.C. in a lurid crime that made national headlines and of which the author surely should have been aware. Court-appointed psychiatrists found Khiem to be so deranged that even forcible administration of anti-psychotic drugs failed to render him sufficiently mentally competent to stand trial. If the author wishes to use this quote to support an allegation of such a serious nature as involvement in opium smuggling, he owes it to his readers to let them know that the source of the quote is a mentally incompetent paranoid schizophrenic.

Anyone who thinks of Saint Paul, Minnesota as an Irish Catholic stronghold ought to be able to imagine Margaret Egan Colby giving birth to William Egan Colby here on January 4, 1920, (p. 20), only one day after my own mother was born someplace else. LOST CRUSADER/ THE SECRET WARS OF CIA DIRECTOR WILLIAM COLBY by John Prados (Oxford University Press, 2003) is full of such close associations. Prados does not approve of everything that was done, however much Colby might. For example, after Hugh Tovar's service in Jakarta, "What Colby did can only be interpreted to show that he thought highly of the Indonesian affair: Colby dispatched the CIA's man on the scene of the bloodbath to Laos to run the agency's secret war there, probably the Far East Division's most sensitive covert operation." (p. 157). A number of issues are pursued throughout the book, over many chapters and in many settings. References to crusaders (what would Osama say?) might be considered a geopolitical red flag in 2003. Is CIA policy in the Middle East like certain popes who considered the rulers of the Holy Land (long ago) as of the wrong religion to control Jerusalem? This is still a dicey question today.

As an undergraduate at Princeton, starting in the fall of 1936, "Religious Catholic that he was, Bill had a problem with the Princeton rule that first- and second-year students had to attend at least half of Sunday chapel services, as the school was strongly Presbyterian. Colby fulfilled this requirement by becoming an altar boy at the Catholic Chapel." (p. 25). I'm not sure why this would be a problem, unless Presbyterians automatically take attendance, but the priest doesn't look to see who is at mass, wouldn't remember anyway, and only keeps a schedule of who is serving as altar boy. Later, while Colby was working for the CIA in Rome under Ambassador Clare Booth Luce, it is reported that Pope Pius XII had excommunicated all Italian communists in 1949, (p. 55) a sure sign that he didn't want to see them around anymore.

The early part of LOST CRUSADER fills in a lot of information on his OSS activities in France and Norway, where Colby wanted to capture the town of Lierne in Operation "Rype," but was delayed until after the German capitulation in May, 1945, when the Germans "gave up on May 11 without difficulty. Major William E. Colby corralled 10,000 German soldiers." (p. 33). He was not so lucky on his first day in Saigon, where he was assigned as CIA deputy chief of station in February, 1959. Cambodian troops had arrested Cambodian General Dap Chhuon just days after he had been visited by Ed Lansdale and senior U.S. Pacific Theater Commanders who "were traveling on a survey of United States military assistance programs and stopped in Cambodia." (p. 67). Among the items captured by the Cambodian troops on February 21, 1959 was "a CIA radio and its agency operator, Victor M. Matsui." (p. 68). Colby had to explain to the Cambodians what Matsui had been doing there. Richard M. Bissell had ordered some communication with the plotters because "Bissell had wanted to know about Cambodian events as the plot unfolded, perhaps to see how these things worked" (p. 68) purely as a means of gathering intelligence, but Norodom Sihanouk (with Wilfred Burchett) published a book in 1974, MY WAR WITH THE CIA, that bitterly complained, "The CIA was in the forefront (except, when it suited their purposes, to remain concealed) of every plot directed against my life and my country's integrity." (p. 68, see Chapter 6, n. 1, p. 350).

In Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the links that tied CIA activities in those countries to Bill Colby were so similar in nature that one of the few jokes in the book tying them all together came from Army Colonel Charles Wilson, at Pleiku in 1964, who `described the Ho Chi Minh Trail as the "Averell Harriman Memorial Highway," which must have tickled Colby, who had to deal with Harriman during the Laotian negotiations at Geneva.' (p. 133). Considering that Woodrow Wilson and Bill Colby both attended Princeton, an amazing coincidence is how often each of them disagreed with a Henry Cabot Lodge. The Lodge who became an ambassador to South Vietnam in 1962 was the Junior of the two, but he still had a mind of his own.

Buddhists were expected to be the kind of people who would cause little trouble for either side, but just having demonstrations created a weird scene in which `Madame Nhu spoke sarcastically about bonze "barbeques," while Nhu himself demanded a hard line, resisting concessions.' (p. 110). In Vietnam, the French "had created an indigenous elite using Catholicism as a means of ascription." (p. 111). 70 percent of Vietnamese generals were raised as Catholics and "an additional 16 percent of Vietnamese generals converted to Catholicism after Diem's rise to power. Nguyen Van Thieu stood among them. Most telling of all, only four Vietnamese generals would admit to being Buddhists, out of a cohort of almost a hundred." (p. 110). By early 1965 the CIA was seeking "extension of covert support to key Buddhist leaders." (p. 145). Nguyen Khanh, "himself a Buddhist" (p. 142), who had been a Viet Minh in the August Revolution of 1945, (p. 177) became the South Vietnamese leader in 1964, while Henry Cabot Lodge was Ambassador, but Maxwell Taylor took over as Ambassador in the summer of 1964. (p. 142). On August 25, 1964, a CIA cable to Colby complained that Khanh "has in effect put his government entirely in the hands of Tri Quang." (p. 142). In January, 1965, Colby went to Vietnam with McGeorge Bundy on a trip that included an incident in Pleiku "that killed many Americans in their barracks." (p. 145). "Another feature of Mac's Vietnam trip would be a meeting with the Buddhist Tri Quang. He emerged bewildered." (p. 145). Great!

The chapter about the ship, USS Liberty is full of utruths. The authors give no facts, no people to relate back to . The book is based on made up information it is not true.

John Hrankowski USS Liberty Survivor

That some people may find this book objectionable in no way detracts from it. The authors accessed large numbers of official documents and sources which are listed in a lengthy footnote section.

The task that the authors took on was enormous. They investigated highly secretive U.S. government agencies that are the best in the world at what they do. The truth, may in fact, be worse than what appears, due to those secrets that have not been exposed.

It is likely that these unsavory activities continue to this day undiminished. What has transpired since the last edition of this book could provide at least a few more lengthy chapters, possibly another book.

The corporations of the West have turned the governments of Western countries into entities that more resemble ruthless corporate controlled oligarchies than democracies.

And this is the whole point of this book, nevertheless interesting and well written : Interviewed are only CIA former Directors. So it's really the Bosses pont of view rather than the field operative's one. Mislead by the title, I was not that impressed by the book content. Most of the stories are already old news (some interviews have been published at length), about overtold events such as JFK's assassination or the Bay Of Pigs. If you wanna hear it from the guys doing the actual work, stay away.

I wouldn't have bought it if I had seen it on a shelf. But I guess it's one of the risks of online purchasing.

I suppose all I have ever thought of the CIA is the mysterious "wet ops" assassination stuff. This book certainly gave me a LOT more insight!