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Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Covert Action and Counterintelligence. By Roy Godson. Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1995. 337p. $24.95.
Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World. By Loch K. Johnson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. 262p. $30.00.
Most political scientists probably understand something of the importance, for better or worse, of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other secretive governmental agencies in the past half-century of U.S. political history. The tremendous secrecy surrounding these organizations, however, has kept most scholars of U.S. government and politics from paying much attention to intelligence agencies. The government claims that it is necessary to shield not just current and recent intelligence activities from public (and scholarly view) but to do the same regarding many such matters from even the early decades of the Cold War. Those few scholars. who have chosen, nonetheless, to examine the CIA and others have taken on a frustrating, if sometimes fascinating, specialty.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, an eminent scholar of this topic was Harry Howe Ransom, who carefully and dispassionately sorted through the available evidence and information and offered a series of books and articles providing intelligent, critical, but fair-minded analyses of the U.S. government's secret agencies. Among his chief interests was the tension between secrecy and democracy, especially the extent to which elected officials in the executive and legislative branches had knowledge of, and gave direction to, intelligence activities. Ransom has continued to give encouragement to successor scholars who have explored these topics in the late years of the Cold War and after. Most prominently among political scientists, Loch Johnson has continued the scholarly and common-sensical tradition of reading everything available on the topic, interviewing scores of current and former...