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America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society

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"America's Secret Power" is Loch Johnson's 1989 study of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premier U.S. intelligence agency. Johnson, an academic by trade, had extensive experience working as a staffer in Congress, most notably on the 1974-75 Church Committee investigations of CIA excesses.

The good news is that Johnson has compiled extensive unclassified research on the CIA, based on a variety of sources, and made a meaningful effort to analyze, for the general public, the attributes of an agency which by necessity conducts most of its business out of public view. Johnson discusses the many functions of the CIA, including its controversial responsibility for covert action and its contentious relationships with academia and the media. Johnson is to be commended for having gone the extra mile in trying to provide constructive criticism for the many faults he finds.

The bad news is that Johnson tends to undercut the value of his own work:
First, he is sometimes careless in his fact-checking, ranging from the merely annoying (Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japanese naval aviation, not the Japanese Air Force) to the fairly significant (confusing "counterinsurgency"-a method-with "paramilitary"-a tool).

Second, Johnson places too much credibility in the media accounts he relies upon in his study of CIA actions. An author who implies, for example, that the New York Times is "an organ of unfettered expression of fact" has made a remarkable assertion given the longstanding political activism of that paper.

Third, Johnson is challenged to maintain his objectivity throughout the book. He is prone to characterize various CIA activities as illegal, without actually documenting that any competent authority has found a particular activity to be illegal (as opposed to merely objectionable). Sometimes, he indulges in hyperventilating prose. The Iran-Contra Scandal, an admittedly botched attempt to ransom American hostages out of Lebanon coupled with an illegal diversion of funds to support anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, is characterized as somehow threatening the very existance of American democracy, instead of merely the careers of the individual officials involved. Johnson seems blind to the highly partisan nature of some Congressional criticism of the CIA, rooted as much in policy differences with a President as in real or alleged wrong-doing.

"America's Secret Power" has much value as a textbook on the Central Intelligence Agency for the student who has the background and skepticism to weed through Johnson's occasional failures of objectivity and the limitations of his sources. Johnson has posed many very useful questions about the value of secret intelligence organizations in a democracy. It is to Johnson's credit that he acknowledges that many of these questions have no useful permanent answer.