Secrets: The CIA's War at Home Book

This eye-opening expos, the result of fifteen years of investigative work, uncovers the CIA's systematic efforts to suppress and censor information over several decades. An award-winning journalist, Angus Mackenzie waged and won a lawsuit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and became a leading expert on questions concerning government censorship and domestic spying. In Secrets, he reveals how federal agenciesincluding the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and the CIAhave monitored and controlled public access to information. Mackenzie lays bare the behind- the- scenes evolution of a policy of suppression, repression, spying, and harassment. Secrecy operations originated during the Cold War as the CIA instituted programs of domestic surveillance and agent provocateur activities. As antiwar newspapers flourished, the CIA set up an "underground newspaper" desk devoted, as Mackenzie reports, to various counterintelligence activitiesfrom infiltrating organizations to setting up CIA-front student groups. Mackenzie also tracks the policy of requiring secrecy contracts for all federal employees who have contact with sensitive information, insuring governmental review of all their writings after leaving government employ. Drawing from government documents and scores of interviews, many of which required intense persistence 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 government spying, censorship, and the abrogation of First Amendment rights. FROM THE BOOK:"The major villains of the censorship story are a succession of policymakers from the Johnson administration through the Bush administration and on into the Clinton years, including several presidents themselves. In a sense, theirs is a spy storynot an action-packed one like in the movies but one about sleight-of-hand and subterfuge far truer to reality."Read More