SECRETS
The CIA's War at Home
by Angus Mackenzie
Foreword by David Weir
This eye-opening expose, the result of 15 years of investigative work, uncovers the CIA's systematic efforts over several decades to suppress and censor information. Author Angus Mackenzie, an award-winning journalist, filed and won a lawsuit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, and in the process became an expert on government censorship and domestic spying.
Mackenzie lays bare a complex narrative of intrigue among federal agencies and their senior staffs, including the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and the CIA. From cover-ups and secrecy oaths, to scandals over leaks and exposures, to the government's often-insidious attempts to monitor and control public access to information, Mackenzie tracks the evolution of a policy of suppression, repression, spying, and harassment.
Secrecy operations originated during the Cold War, when the CIA instituted programs of domestic surveillance and deployed agents provocateurs, and they gained momentum during the Vietnam era. As antiwar newspapers flourished, the CIA set up an "underground newspaper" desk, staffed with ten officers and devoted to various counterintelligence activities ¾ from infiltrating organizations to setting up CIA-front student groups. As information about these enterprises became public, efforts were made to suppress the disclosures. Mackenzie traces the evolution of what became, under Ronald Reagan's administration, a policy requiring secrecy contracts for all federal employees, ensuring governmental review of any of their writings after leaving government employ.
Drawing from documents and scores of interviews, many of which required intense diligence and investigative guesswork to obtain, and amassing story after story of CIA malfeasance, Mackenzie gives us the best account we have of the government's present security apparatus. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the inside secrets of governmental spying, censorship, and the abrogation of First Amendment rights.
(Angus Mackenzie [1950-1994] was affiliated with the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, California, and taught at the School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. David Weir is a cofounder of the Center for Investigative Reporting and producer of The Netizen.)
"If anything is more corrupting than power, it is power exercised in secret. Angus Mackenzie's magnificently researched, lucidly written study of the CIA's outrageous threats to freedom in America over the years is a summons to vigilance to protect our democratic institutions."
¾ Daniel Schorr
"This courageous, uncompromising book belongs on the bookshelf of every serious student of journalism and the First Amendment."
¾ Tom Goldstein, Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
"The late Angus Mackenzie has left an appropriate legacy in Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, a fitting capstone to his long career of exposing government secrecy and manipulation of public information. Secrets is a detailed, fascinating, and chilling account of the agency's program of disinformation and concealment of public information against its citizens."
¾ Ben H. Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly
1997, 6¼ x 9½, 241 pp, illustrated, indexed, hard cover.
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