Government Agencies Books

The 2006 D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress published in
2005 has been awarded to "The CIA and Congress". Don Bacon, a member of
the award committee, says: "David Barrett has given us an engrossing
account of the highly secret, often contentious relationship between
Congress and its post-World War II creation, the Central Intelligence
Agency. Thoroughly researched, rich in fascinating detail, 'The CIA and
Congress' focuses on the spy agency's early years, when the Cold War was
at its peak. The author relies heavily on previously hidden official
records and his own insightful interviews to show that our lawmakers
worried more about the new agency's potential for mischief and kept it
on a shorter leash than has been previously known."

This book is a necessary read if you are into the history and political analysis of the American government from the 1940s through the 60s. It's a fascinating read. Dr. Barrett has gone to incredible lengths of archival research to write a book that is a truly original voice on the period. As someone who came across the book looking for material on Joe McCarthy, I was amazed at how enjoyable the book was to read just in general. Dr. Barrett has found material to support stories that were merely rumors before. For example, letters from a military officer who was "propositioned" by Senator McCarthy and memos supporting the fact that meetings occurred between the CIA Director and a Congressional subcommittee prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. This is truly a groundbreaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in the CIA or Congress.

Barrett's /The CIA and Congress/ is a triumph of research. Writing any history of the CIA is problematic because the documentation will never be close to complete; some official and private papers have been destroyed or "misplaced," others remain classified 50 years or more after being written, and many important discussions and decisions were never committed to paper. Faced with such endemic incompleteness, Barrett, a political scientist at Villanova University, persevered, found widely dispersed research materials and displayed sound analytic sense and balance in their use. Having done so much fine detective work, Barrett can present not only a gripping review of leadership dynamics among the CIA, the White House and Congress but also a coherent view of the development and oversight of the CIA's budgets (a notoriously hard target) from 1947 to 1961. His research is made more impressive by his frankness in admitting on several occasions that he cannot tell the whole story because the documents are not available.

Barrett's analysis of the relationship between the long-established Congress and the infant CIA (founded only in 1947) turns not only on documents but also on his superb portraits and assessments of the key players: The thoughts, actions and characters of senators, congressmen, presidents and CIA officials are front and center in the book. The human pageant Barrett presents is not all that different from that which exists today.

Simply put, a fantastic piece of analysis. Given this book by a friend, I expected a relatively vague and basic description of the KGB's operations, but was pleasantly surprised. Amazingly thorough, covering all aspects of the KGB's domestic and foreign activities. Includes a well-balanced mix of straight analysis and explanatory anecdotes. Might be a bit too heavy reading for those not seriously interested in the topic. The extent of the KGB's reach willdispel any illusions that the USSR was simply the typical authoritarian state.

Should be noted that the book was actually co-authored by Bagley alongside a former Soviet intelligence officer, a general, who defected in the 1950s.

This book provides a detailed insight into how Soviet leaders used their internal intelligence agency as an instrument of ultimate oppression. Lots of well-documented detail. The present tense only gets in the way for a bit (remember it was published while this was still going on -- before the fall of the USSR) and does not alter the facts as they were under the Soviet system. There is no other book which gives one quite the depth and insight this one does. Definitely a MUST for anyone interested in how things really worked in the USSR. Its a lesson to all of us. You want this book.

The book reveals the unique qualifications and inside knowledge of the two authors. There is no better description of the systematic repression of a modern population. Its appearance just before the fall of the Soviet Union invalidated its present tense, nevertheless, for anyone interested in how Soviet power survived for 70 years, this is the definitive work. A must for students of this subject.

"A brilliant book. Outstanding research and superlative presentation of the dramatis personae. An anecdotal and extremely well written account -- as informative as any treatise and as entertaining as the best espionage novels." -- Kirkus Reviews.

"There are few books that adequately cover this subject. Much of what passes for 'the literature' is overblown, conspiracy-addled and fragmented. But Mark Riebling, a historian, has made a valiant effort to piece it all together in WEDGE.... The fact that he has taken great pains to avoid using anonymous sources is just one of a number of reasons why serious students of this nation's haywire-rigged counterintelligence effort should read WEDGE.... Refreshingly unlike most spy literature.... the cumulative effect of his tales is staggering." -- John Fialka, The Wall Street Journal.

"Any illusions that the two organizations simply mirror each other are thoroughly shattered. Riebling meticulously traces the continuing conflict and its consequences, which sometimes took the form of Keystone Cop episodes but more often were deadly serious." -- Houston Chronicle.

"A surprisingly fresh, coherent, well-written and persuasive analysis. Striking conclusions, a succession of colorful adventurers, and highly provocative speculations which have the unsettling ring of plausibility." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"A lively and engaging narrative of interagency bungling, infighting, malfeasance and nonfeasance, providing fresh and well-rounded portraits of well-known (and ought-to-be-well-known) agents -- drawing on scores of original and rewarding interviews." -- Richard Gid Powers, front page, Washington Post Book World.

"Riebling successfully re-creates the life-or-death atmosphere of the half-century of American confrontation with the Soviet Union. Mr. Riebling succeeds as well in persuading the reader that the FBI-CIA conflict was a more important piece of the cold war mosaic than heretofore noted by historians." -- Michael R. Beschloss, New York Times Book Review.

"Incisive.... Riebling shows how personalities shaped the struggle between the agencies, and how the struggle hampered intelligence. There's much here to stimulate discussion." -- Tampa Tribune.

"Riebling brings forth many new angles, thanks to his entree to a web of retired agents. A well organized, engaging account." -- Booklist.

"Serves up some juicy insights. The book is full of colorful and strong characters as well as entertaining description and lucid writing." -- Toledo Blade.

"Meticulously researched yet entertaining... Persuasively identifies Woodward and Bernstein's mysterious informant Deep Throat." -- San Francisco Chronicle.

"An exceptionally readable and coherent account, exhaustively sourced. Riebling meticulously but engagingly takes his readers through CIA's operations [and] presents a most intriguing hypothesis as to the identity of the long-silent Deep Throat. True Watergate buffs will be titillated. I'd put my money on the one the author suspects most." -- John Robbins, former CIA officer, The Palm Beach Post.

"Riebling's impressive documentation is chilling, sobering, and thought provoking." -- Virginia Quarterly Review.
"Riebling's writing is articulate and reflective. He explains the Angleton view so competently that it finally makes sense on its own terms." -- BookBase Online.

"In WEDGE, Mark Riebling's compelling and exhaustively researched history of the two intelligence giants, the depth of [the] inter-agency animus -- and its pernicious effects -- becomes distressingly clear. ... Riebling has avoided tarring the late FBI boss [J. Edgar Hoover] with the kind of sensationalist touches common to recent biographies. ... He is respectful of those he believes played the both wisely and well. If a heroic figure emerges from WEDGE it is the late James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's controversial director of counterintelligence for more than 20 years. Riebling partially rehabilitates Angleton from the drubbing he's taken in recent books such as David Wise's "Molehunt," in which he is depicted as disrupting his own agency in a futile, paranoid search for a nonexistent mole.... Riebling has crafted a thorough history of the fatally flawed CIA-FBI marriage through interviews with many of the key players and reams of internal documents, many of them recently declassified. WEDGE also is the beneficiary of extraordinary timing. Its releases coincides with a renewed furor in Washington over the CIA and its mandate.... WEDGE accords the current crisis an appropriate historical context." -- Scott Ladd, Newsday.

"Well researched, wittily written, full of good judgments. In a large and growing field, WEDGE will join the shelf of those few books which meet both standards of scholarship and expectations for insight and entertainment at a high level." -- Robin Winks, Professor of History, Yale University.

Well-written, thoroughly researched account, from Pearl Harbor to the present. Highlights: World War II, Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Aldrich Ames. What made Cold War counterintelligence officers "tick"? Myths about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and CIA spycatcher James Jesus Angleton are corrected. Special focus: 94% accuracy of predictions by ex-KGB officer Anatoily Golitsyn, who in 1984 foresaw the rise of Gorbachev, fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. Author Riebling is former editor at Random House, Inc

I cannot do this book justice, other than to say that I had never understood the depth and stupidity of the bureaucratic hostility between the FBI and the CIA-mostly the fault of the CIA these days but certainly inspired in part by Hoover in the early days-until I read this book; and that it should be required reading for every senior CIA manager. From the FBI's failure to communicate its very early knowledge of Japanese collection requirement on Pearl Harbor via the Germans, to the assassination of President Kennedy, the World Trade Center bombing and the Aldrich Ames case, this book makes me ashamed and angry about how bureaucracy and secrecy subvert loyalty, integrity, and common professional sense on both sides of this "wedgie" contest.

This book is one of the most important books that I have read on the JFK assassination - and I have read over a dozen since 1964. It is the "final chapter" as it provides the "big picture" answer.

It uses the information that came out since the 1970s. The Congressional Investigation in 1977 resulted in a number of books afterwards.

If you read Curt Gentry's "J. Edgar Hoover, The Man and the Myth" you would know that Hoover had been filing false expense reports for decades, and built up a small fortune. (He stayed at hotels and ate at restaurants for free, then collected expenses as if he had paid.) If he ever left office, he would have been convicted for fraud, and died in jail. He had no other option but to die in office, since he could not (or would not) get a "get out of jail free" card. (The Watergate Burglary came apart when one of the burglars did not get this, as promised.)

You should know that this GOOJF card is not just an invented scene in the movie "Clear and Present Danger". Back in the 1940s the four-star General who headed the CIA went to President Truman with a complaint about an assignment: it clearly crossed the line into a felony. But Harry just wrote out a signed but undated full Presidential Pardon! Read the biography of Allen Dulles, "Gentleman Spy" for more details.

And LBJ's crony was implicated in various frauds, some of which were said to be in complicity with organized crime. LBJ was likely to be dumped as vice-president, and would also face prosecution, disgrace, and jail.

Mark North has collected a number of letters that passed between LBJ and JEH. Surely no one would expect either of them to put their plans in writing?

Mark North's "Act Of Treason" is a great, albeit dry, book on Hoover (and JFK/ RFK), making great use of contemporary news accounts and so forth. This is a nice companion volume to R. Andrew Kiel's outstanding book on Hoover, along with Anthony Summer's masterpiece "Official and Confidential." Get this!
P.S. Who he thinks may be J. Edgar Hoover in his photo section is actually Secret Service agent Stewart G. "Stu" Stout, Jr.
Vince Palamara
Secret Service expert, History Channel, author of 2 books, in over 30 other author's books, etc.

The book was well-researched with 176 endnotes and 14 pages of bibliography, but you will not want to put this book down! My only complaint is the outrageous price, $60 for a paperback. Damn Cyr, give those graduate students a break. Don't be a bunghole.

Arthur Cyr, who is the former President of the World Trade Center in Chicago, puts his years of experience and perspective to good use in this book. Dr. Cyr's views on the influence and impact of Ronald Reagan in shaping the post cold war world is a topic that is often overlooked by political writers. Although I do not fully agree with Dr. Cyr's views on the utility of multinational organizations and NATO expansion, he is correct on these type of organizations playing an important role in the future. My only real critisism of the book is that the book is somewhat dry. This is a good book to assign to a graduate level academic class but it is above much of the general population.

Ranelagh, in a massive and engaging tome, brings alive the characters and story of the CIA in a fair and balanced way. My graduate class on National Security Affairs and the Intelligence Community used this book as one of the primary texts. From Julia Childs to James Jesus Angelton to Richard Colby to William Casey, this wonderful story tells the history of the Agency, its people and their interaction with presidents, Congress, the Soviet Union (KGB) and the foreign policy process. It covers the assasination attempts of Castro and various other figures as well as such bizarre episodes such as the attempt to rig up a cat as an assasin. I couldn't put the book down once I got started, however, because of the depth and breadth of its coverage. Make no mistake, this is a serious, meticulously researched and encompassing historical work. The book is as good a history of the Cold War as it is of the CIA, and covers high level decisionmaking at the presidential and Congressional level from WWII through the Reagan Administration. Not a diatribe for or against the CIA or US foreign poilicy, Agency is a first rate account of the actual events and people behind them at all the critical moments in the CIA's history. Ranelagh does a superb job at explaining the context behind the decsions that were made. For example, he gives the reader an awesome sense of the fear of Communism that lead to extreme measures being taken at various junctures without being an apologist. This book is absolutely essential reading for those in the intelligence, foreign policy and defense communities, and highly recommended for anyone interested in Cold War history. Perhaps more importantly, its a terrific read!

John Ranelagh's book, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, is the definitive text on the CIA. It is comprehensive yet concise; moreover, Mr. Ranelagh took on a major project in creating this masterpiece, with so much information, and so much history, it would be nearly impossible to write an accurate history of the CIA. Yet Ranelagh accomplishes this feat marvelously. I, personally, would liked to have seen more on the scientific branch of the CIA in this book; however, it would have made the text to long and cumbersome. A much needed third edition would be relative, seeing as that the book does end with the Iran-Contra scandal, and the CIA's history has grown and transformed over the last decade with the appointment of George Tenet as its Director.

This is an admirable and unusual work, of doctoral-level quality in its sources and methods, while also reflecting the professional intelligence career status of the author. It complements Amy Zegart's broader book, Flawed By Design, in an excellent manner. This book, focusing as it does on the CIA alone, and on internal sources not readily available to Zegart, fills a major gap in our understanding of the CIA's origins. The author excels at demonstrating both the actual as opposed to the mythical origins of the agency, and pays particular heed to the role of the Bureau of the Budget and that Bureau's biases and intentions. At the end of it all, the author notes that the agency was moving in controversial directions within four years of its birth, quickly disturbing Harry Truman, who is quoted as saying, twenty-years after the fact (in 1963), "For some time I have been distributed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of Government....I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations." The author himself goes on to conclude that "the nature of the new threats and the revolution in information acquisition and dissemination have thrown traditional ways of intelligence organization, collection, evaluation, and distribution into question. ... CIA has entered the second half-century of its existence striving to avoid the fate of its OSS parent. In the process, it is groping for new missions and purposes while blighted by the legacy of its past derelictions, and while operating amid a rapidly changing global environment and technological revolution that are rendering its sources, methods, organizations, and mystique obsolete." I would hasten to add, as my own book documents, that we will always have hidden evil in the world and will always needs spies and secret methods to some extent, but this book, combining academic rigor with insider access, must surely give the most intelligent of our policy, legislative, and intelligence managers pause, for it very carefully documents the possibility that 75% of what we are doing today with secret sources and methods need not and should not be done. This book has much to offer those who would learn from history.

This is a well balanced, well documented, and definitive book on the beginnings of the current U.S. intelligence system. It also provides an interesting smaller window on the development of the entire post WWII U.S. National Security Establishment. For all its merits, this book is not for the general reader because it deals with a very small and specialized slice of modern American history. A more general and equally important book, "Flawed by Design" by Amy Zugert (Amazon.com) would be a better choice for individuals who don't wish to deal with the impressive amount of detail that this book provides. Nonetheless this book is indispensable to any anyone wishing to understand the process by which the current U.S. Intelligence System and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created.

As the author makes clear, the intelligence system that was established was very much the product of the disinterest that senior policy makers and the U.S. Congress had in intelligence matters in the wake of WWII. Excepting for intelligence professionals and some far seeing bureaucrats there were no strong constituencies or lobbying groups who cared about a national intelligence system. The author demonstrates that the CIA in particular was very much a creature of good and bad compromises that were imposed by the legitimate concerns of the military intelligence establishments, the FBI and State Department. Reading this book one is impressed with intelligence and dedication of the military and civilians who ultimately still ended up creating the dysfunctional intelligence system that we have today.

In the course of recounting this story, the author quotes an all but forgotten bureaucrat of the immediate post war era, named John Ohly, who, after reviewing the proposals for a CIA, pointed out that there was a lack, "of an intelligence concept which has been carefully thought out and which serves as a clear guide to the various collection and sources and which permits and requires the establishment of priorities as to areas and subjects." This reviewer knows of no more succinct statement on what is presently wrong with the U.S. Intelligence System.

A Death in Washington is a genuine page turner: Gary Kern manages to not only give the relevent facts of Krivitsky`s perilous and dangerous journey from believer in the great experiment to defector (where he gave early warning to the west of Stalin`s agenda), but best of all, it is written with great stylistic aplomb. This is a rare book which in its critical detail can satisfy the professional but is also completely accessible to the general reader; you will recognize many of the players, and the connections between them are clearly sustained. It is the general reader who will be most astonished by the sheer criminality of Stalin and the terrible code of the spy`s world. One of the great pleasures in this book is the psychological and methodological analysis inherent in the character of Krivitsky which enabled his survival until the very end. I think the book a very important addition to the literature which is becoming more available on the Stalin period, and I think that a thoughtful consideration of Kern`s invaluable and dramatic presentation will help us better understand the Russia which is emerging today on the world stage. I highly recommend the book. I had read it as slowly as I could so as to prolong the pleasure and thrill it gave to me.

Kern has done a remarkable job with this very difficult subject. I have read many books about Soviet spies, but this is by far the best one, in terms of the depth of understanding of the political system in the Soviet Union at the time. The portrait of American leftists and bureaucrats is priceless. This author has brought rigorous logic and impeccable scholarship to this field. All this, and it reads like a mystery.

Jan Goldman has assembled a compendium of short articles which explore all aspects of the intelligence trade. The book is a definitely useful tool to anyone who wishes to understand the dilemmas which confront the intelligence professional as he plies his trade.

Especially useful are the case studies which allow the reader to put himself in the place of an intelligence professional at a time of crisis and ponder how he or she might act in a similar situation.

Ethics Of Spying: A Reader For The Intelligence Professional, deftly edited by Jan Goldman (ethics and intelligence teacher at the Joint Military Intelligence College in Washington, D.C.) is a knowledgeably written collection of literature and military espionage that creates what may be understood as the ultimate guideline to ethical spying. Ethics Of Spying may act as an informative reference for identifying the proper tactics necessary to go about assessing a particular situation, aside from being an incredibly elaborate and intriguing read. Ethics Of Spying is very strongly recommended to all policy makers, managers, supervisors, and employees involved in intelligence operations as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in espionage and spy history, ethics and tactics.

Compiled and edited by Peggy Garvin, and featuring an informative introduction by Greg R. Noteness, this newly updated sixth edition of Government Information On The Internet is a superbly organized and presented guidebook to informationally enriched sites on the World Wide Web which offer complete and accurate data on law enforcement, health and science matters, white house information, state-specific information, information specific to nations other than America and much, much more. Government Information On The Internet is recommended for political science students, government employees, lobbyists and activists, and the non-specialist general public as an excellent, easy-reference resource that describes each offered website in detail is perfect for skimming through options at a faster speed than search engines can cough up or web browsers can download.

Now in a newly updated and expanded fifth edition, Government Information On The Internet is a solid, thorough, accessibly organized reference book of World Wide Web sites corresponding to countless institutions of the American Government, as well as state and local government information, and a special section of government information for numerous nations around the world from Albania to Zimbabwe. Solid, detailed descriptions of what each governmental web site has to offer as well as an index for quick and easy reference make Government Information On The Internet a first-class reference for anyone who has to look up specific facts relatively quickly. Government Information On The Internet is specially recommended as a resource for college and community libraries that offer public Internet access.