The Unknown CIA; My Three Decades with the Agency

Washington DC: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense Publishers, Inc, 1989. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good. x, 221, [1] pages. Ink marks to text noted. Ink notations on rep. Foreword by Richard Helms. Includes chapters on Proud Service; Early Years; The Beedle Smith Era; Academic Interlude; The Watch on Asia; Singapore; Back to Headquarters; Back in the Fast Lane; The Raborn Episode; The Golden Helms Years; The Nixon Decline; and Afterthoughts. The Unknown CIA brings readers into the world of the scholars, researchers, and analysts who provide the facts upon which U.S. national security decisions are based, revealing what working for "the Company" is really like. Perhaps the greatest service this book performs is to portray the workaday operations and internal atmosphere of the Agency. It describes with the pride of an intelligence professional the unwavering objectivity and dedication to accuracy of the mostly unknown intelligence analysts. This is indeed "the unknown CIA". Derived from a Kirkus review: Patriotic memoirs from Smith, former Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA. CIA business, Smith suggests, is not transacted by a Blackford Oakes sort of operative or via John le Carre's-style novelistic twists. Rather, it is conducted by dedicated intelligence analysts--"men and women sitting at desks sorting, sifting, and patterning secret evidence into a matrix" that carries conviction. Smith, himself one such desk man, was present at the creation of the CIA in 1947. He quickly went on to work at the higher levels of the CIA through such crises as the U-2 fiasco, the Bay of Pigs episode, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six-Day War in the Mideast, the Vietnam War, and the sinking of the CIA's reputation in the mid-1970's. But in portraying the workaday operations and the internal atmosphere of the agency, Smith manages to restore some of its luster, Recapping the more damning public perceptions, he opines that the "CIA is not like that. Nor, I might add, is the KGB." In fact, he states, "anyone who entertains seriously the notion that CIA could assassinate a leader or topple a foreign government contrary to White House order or permission simply does not understand how power is disposed in Washington." Smith has kind words for his directors (Walter Bedell Smith: "a man of genuine brilliance, great personal force, and organizational genius"; Richard Helms, whose "leadership enabled the CIA to become a unified, cohesive organization"). Smith points an accusing finger at Nixon, whose "mean-spirited, trust-no.one-but-ourselves, us-against-them siege mentality" precipitated the public denigration of the CIA. A solid, fascinatingly inside-look.