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H. Bradford Westerfield, ed., Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 19551992. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. 489. $35.00, hardcover.
The CIA is in trouble. Ever since the unmasking of turncoat Aldrich Ames it seems that only bad news has come out of the agency. During the last half of 1995 the CIA knowingly passed faulty intelligence to the White House and the Pentagon, there were allegations of sexual misconduct, and there was an admission that psychics were employed to divine information when more traditional methods failed. Not surprisingly, these revelations fueled calls for a reexamination of the CIA's place in America's national security hierarchy.
But if all this sounds like the end of the CIA, nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is that none of the criticisms from outside the CIA and none of the soul-searching inside Langley is new. In fact, the CIA's stock has risen and fallen throughout its history with numbing regularity.
When the agency was formed in 1947 it was done despite President Harry Truman's misgivings about keeping a standing covert intelligence organization in peacetime. During the 1950s, the CIA became a favorite of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw covert action as a cheap way to fight communism, an opinion bolstered by successes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954. But the honeymoon could not last forever. During congressional hearings in 1975, revelations of CIA involvement in assassinations in Latin America, Africa, and Vietnam painted the agency as a "rogue...