Marchetti's expose of the CIA was published on the eve of the Church Commission, at a moment when domestic outrage at the culture of duplicity and domestic interference had reached its peak. Since that time, successful public relations have greatly enhanced the image of intelligence services.
Marchetti's thesis is that, contrary to widespread public belief, the USA was not locked in an existential struggle with Soviet or Chinese subversion, and never really was. Soviet intelligence utterly surpassed the CIA in effectiveness, initiative, and recruitment of allied agents abroad. In fact, the CIA was effective only against 3rd world intelligence organizations, and there, spectacularly so. This extreme Soviet edge in espionage was more than offset by the superior resources of the conventional Western militaries and the impossibility of waging a direct confrontation owing to the nuclear stalemate. Worse, this advantage was not seriously mitigated by the abundance of high-tech gadgets, such as satellites; such tools merely facilitated the collection of large amounts of raw data, with virtually no practical usefulness.
Far from rendering the US intelligence community harmless, however, it made the agency focus on a campaign against 3rd world allies, and ultimately, against the US population. The CIA tried its hand at waging secret wars in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa; it developed a vast group of businesses to serve as cover for illicit shipping and arms supplies; and it became utterly habituated to corrupting legislators in the Free World. The CIA became an eager tool for an unaccountable executive branch, provided that the executive had a flair for covert action; and it tended to create an echo chamber of self-deception that threatened the entire national security establishment. At the very top of its list of priorities was the urgent need to defend its mission publicly, and validate its immense budget.
Marchetti spends a modest amount of time discussing the inability of the CIA to confront the Soviet KGB. When he mentions it, he avers the KGB and its allied bureaux are indeed odious, but also defensive--by necessity. He dwells in somewhat greater detail on the CIA's structure and specialized fields of performance. He includes a broad-brush description of the overall US intelligence community, before turning to an analysis of the separate divisions and their respective behavior. This included covert operations (such as the Bay of Pigs invasion), proprietaries (such as Interarmco and Air America), propaganda and disinformation, and espionage/counterespionage. In all of these enterprises, the same motivation prevails: the CIA seeks self-perpetuation and influence WITHIN the Western world, but lacks will or ability to seriously combat the Soviets. Towards the end, he discusses the increasing tendency of the CIA to interfere in regular US politics, chiefly to ingratiate itself with the president.
Marchetti's criticisms of the intelligence community were surprisingly mild. I should mention in passing that his book had about 170 or so passages deleted by court order; the CIA had earlier demanded well in excess of 300, and the court awarded it half of what it demanded. Some of the deletions are downright silly (as where it refers to a base in [DELETED] granted by Haile Selassie!), and elsewhere I was amused to observe the most numerous deletions in the part dealing with funding appropriations. The extreme secrecy of the intelligence community with respect to funding has greatly intensified since this book was published, and usually the motivation is quite obviously to conceal how much money these agencies actually waste. However, Marchetti concludes that the CIA is essentially past reform, useless, and so incompetent at its mission as to have become narrowly focused on extorting billions from the nation.
