The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA

The unprecedented willingness of senior decision-makers in the CIA to cooperate with the upcoming television series The Agency provides some measure of the desperation sweeping Langley these days. Under attack in editorials and roasted by members of Congress for shortfalls ranging from botching up political analysis in Iraq during Desert Storm to targeting the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in the midst of the Kosovo campaign, the CIA has again been reduced to exceedingly gingerly public relations. Fallout from the Hanssen case, revealing that this born-again FBI functionary managed to sell out whichever of the CIA's agents in Russia the Agency's own Aldrich Ames didn't compromise, has deeply alarmed the surviving intelligence community.

Across the government, outrage is general. Inside the CIA itself, morale is crumbling fast. How could this happen again? legislators on the Select Committees of the House and Senate keep demanding. A level of scrutiny unapproached since the pyrotechnic Church Committee hearings of 1973 is descending on Langley. Why must they operate like this? Where did it come from, this sometimes brilliant and all too often blunder-ridden appendage across the Potomac? Who put this tortured thing together?

It's time to reissue The Old Boys.

The initial publication of The Old Boys in 1992 raised so much dust that it has taken a decade for the air to clear. Subtitled The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, the work laid out the involvement of the lawyers who founded civilian intelligence in the United States -- 'Wild Bill' Donovan, Allen and Foster Dulles, Frank Wisner -- with several generations of reactionary, even Nazi-lining clients. Abetted by counterparts from the diplomatic side of the sheets, from Bill Bullitt to George Kennan and the notorious Carmel Offie, the founders incorporated both practices and personalities long associated with the Third Reich into their anticommunist crusade, and by so doing undermined almost everything they attempted. Patriotic and well-intentioned men, they played into the hands of forces that threatened us.  (more...)

The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA

On Amazon

Background:

Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile