Secrets: The CIA's War at Home [Paperback]

Angus MacKenzie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 1999

This eye-opening exposé, 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 agencies--including the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and the CIA--have 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 activities--from 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This book tells three stories: the federal intelligence agencies' undercover and perhaps illegal war with the press organs of left-wing domestic political organizations, the author's efforts to track down and publish information on these programs, and the government's efforts to enforce and increase its secrecy restrictions. It is an expansion of Mackenzie's earlier Sabotaging the Dissident Press (Ctr. for Investigative Reporting, 1983), which makes the title somewhat misleading because other agencies are also involved. There is much recounting of how the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), at which Mackenzie became an expert, can be used to access information. The book ends with a list of political organizations and a sketch of the FBI's responses to their FOIA requests for information regarding FBI files on them. This story of government paranoia and heavy-handedness is at once interesting and worrisome. It complements James K. Davis's Spying on America (LJ 5/15/92) and covers some of the same ground as Athan G. Theoharis's Spying on Americans (LJ 2/1/79). The author, who died of brain cancer in 1994, taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. For all libraries. (Notes, index, bibliography, and illustrations not seen.)?Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A muckraking adventure in the violation of First Amendment rights. Although it probably won't come as a surprise to most readers that the federal government is capable of spying on its citizens, Mackenzie professes a certain bewilderment at the lengths to which the CIA went to suppress dissent in the days of Vietnam. The veteran left-wing journalist, who died of brain cancer in 1994, began his career as the publisher of an antiwar rag called the People's Dreadnaught; harassed by campus police, he was forced to suspend publication, although he later won $2,500 in a lawsuit against Beloit College over the matter. At a national level, he writes, similar suppression was the order of the day. Although the CIA is constrained by law from conducting investigations ``inside the continental limits of the United States and its possessions,'' in fact, Mackenzie charges, it concocted an elaborate counterintelligence program against various home-grown protest groups in the 1960s and early '70s, reasoning that it was taking antiterrorist measures and thus living up to the spirit, if not the letter, of its charter. Among the targets, Mackenzie writes, was Ramparts, a venerable leftist magazine that managed to earn the wrath of the Feds by reporting on that very internal spying. Other targets were the libertarian guru Karl Hess, renegade CIA whistleblowers Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, and a host of lesser-known dissidents. The CIA emerges as the heavy, naturally, but the real villains in Mackenzie's account are various policymakers from the Johnson administration to the present. ``Incrementally over the years they expanded a policy of censorship to the point that today it pervades every agency and every department of the federal government,'' he writes. And, he continues, that change was so gradual that few guardians of the First Amendment noticed. Mackenzie is occasionally over the top, sometimes glib. But his charges ring true, and civil-liberties advocates will find much of interest in his pages. (11 b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520219554
• ISBN-13: 978-0520219557
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,054,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The saddest part is why they did it, January 14, 2002

By 

C. Colt "It Just Doesn't Matter" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Secrets: The CIA's War at Home (Paperback)

"Secrets: The CIA's War at Home" might strike a lot of people as whacked out conspiracy theory or anti-government propaganda but it is neither of those things. Using his own well-documented historical and journalistic research, Angus McKenzie demonstrates that for decades the CIA, FBI, DOD (Department of Defense) and other American intelligence organizations targeted American citizens for espionage, harassment, and slander in a manner that eroded their First Amendment rights but had practically nothing to do with national security.

American intelligence organizations frequently spied on and subverted their own people to prevent political opposition to the Vietnam War, to conceal illegal activities such as the Iran/Contra scandal, or simply to hide corruption and bureaucratic waste from the legislative branch of government and the American people. In one appalling example, a government appointed efficiency expert was not allowed to report wasteful Pentagon expenditures to his supervisors in congress because this information was considered classified. American intelligence agencies in fact retain the power to determine that any information is classified and they can use this mandate to fire or prosecute employees even for reporting trivial facts to the public such as the contents of a White House menu. Sadly enough America's intelligence agencies could not have made such a drastic legal and illegal assault on the First Amendment without the cooperation of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), the media, and the legislative branch of government, all of whom were either duped or cowed into acquiescence.

The most frightening part of this book is its revelation that when American intelligence agencies ran out of excuses to justify their anti-First Amendment activities they raised the specter of terrorism. One can only imagine the further corruption, illegal activity, and constitutional abuses that American intelligence agencies will perpetuation against their own people now that terrorism is a legitimate threat. If history repeats it self, then these abuses will stem from the need to conceal corruption and criminal activity but will have little to do with combating terrorism.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Primer on importance of the Bill of Rights, June 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Secrets: The CIA's War at Home (Paperback)

Anyone who is willing to give some of the Bill of Rights to gain percieved security needs to read this book. It will help you to understand that the KGB wasn't the only organization to spy on and intimidate (or worse) it's own citizens. Not a quick read as Mr. Mackenzie wasn't a polished author. It does drag a little in some spots.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The People vs. the government, Again, March 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Secrets: The CIA's War at Home (Hardcover)

Yes, it is an age old struggle that is documented in these pages, but it should frighten the hell out of you! Sometimes, we are lulled into complacency by the ubiquitous images of malevolent governmental abuse of power portrayed throughout the fiction industry (books and movies). Of course, as a book like this reminds us, it ain't fiction! So, if you enjoy reading political science, current events, espionage thrillers, fiction or horror, you will enjoy this book.