Mark Perry
William Morrow and Co, New York, 1992
I’m not even sure if this has actually been published in the U.K.: I’d never heard of it until this copy turned up in my local library with a UK price stuck over the dollar price, suggesting a few were imported. This should have been sub-titled ‘The Politics of the CIA in the 1980s’. I’ve read this twice, the second time to check that my initial perception that this was a very remarkable book was correct. It was. This is centrally an account of some of the bureaucratic struggles inside the CIA during the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘intelligence’ to support their conspiracy theories about the ‘communist menace’.
The very idea of attempting ‘the politics of the CIA’, let alone getting as close as Perry has done to actually bringing it off, is a measure of the extraordinary distance we have come since, say, Marchetti and Marks’ 1974 landmark The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. No wonder the likes of Brian Crozier and the other conspiracy theorists within the NATO intelligence services think that this must all be the work of a KGB plot. (And how frustrating it must be for them to find so little evidence! Crozier et al, suffer from acute, possibly terminal cases of projection. Since they were broadcasting the stuff given to them by their buddies in the intelligence services, they assume everybody else is, too.)
Marchetti and Marks named some of the basic parts. In this book we are getting close to transcripts of debates inside the machine itself. I can think of nothing which has got this close to Agency politics.
Rivetting.