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The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA by John Ranelagh (416,000 words, 44 illustrations)
New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
In 2000 the Washington Post listed The Agency as one of the ten best books on Intelligence in the twentieth century, calling it “An encyclopedic and fair-minded overview of the agency into the 1980s.”
A history of the CIA from its intrepid early days to becoming a mature bureaucracy riddled with scandal and scrutiny. During World War II “Wild Bill” Donovan started the Office of Special Services (OSS) and gave the CIA its original image: dashing, Ivy League, and Eastern Establishment. Successive CIA Directors were Allen Dulles who made covert operations — the Bay of Pigs, U-2 flights, assassination plots, and LSD testing — the CIA’s top priority during the Cold War; Richard Helms, a career CIA man and an efficient technocrat, coolly managed intelligence-gathering and analysis; William Colby took over during Watergate and faced public and congressional scrutiny, watching the CIA relinquish some of its respect and influence; William Casey, Reagan’s man, campaigned for CIA activism despite increasing exposure of covert government operations such as “Iranscam”.
“The Agency is the first comprehensive history of the CIA, a book designed, in its author’s words, to get away from ‘contemporary demonology’ and to place the CIA firmly within the context of its time... a dazzling, panoramic overview of the CIA’s history. [Ranelagh] mixes keen insights into the organization and the people who ran it with superb accounts of specific crises and operations. This brilliant book is so rich both in detail and generalization that even a reader unfamiliar with the history of the CIA will find it hard to put down... the book pursues many... themes, such as organizational changes within the agency and shifts in its sense of mission, its relationship with presidents and their advisers and other intelligence agencies, the history of specific projects and operations, and the general mood within both the CIA and the government and nation at large. The result is a complex tapestry, full of new information and fresh generalizations.” — Charles E. Neu, Reviews in American History
“A massive history of the CIA... Ranelagh... has a good feel for the murky world of intelligence, and has constructed quite a readable work... Ranelagh conducted scores of interviews with insiders and studied more than 7,000 pages of classified and formerly classified documents. The author hangs his history on the careers and personalities of the men who have led the Company, many of them remarkable people... Great reading and a valuable reference for students of government bureaucracy and intelligence work.” — Kirkus
“Ranelagh, a British writer, provides here a major overview of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to [1987]. Based largely on hundreds of interviews, the book examines the personality and policies of each director in the context of the times. The agency’s public posture is traced in detail: how, for instance, its agents began the ‘60s as ‘closet heroes,’ emerging as public heroes in the Cuban missile crises only to become public villains as a result of the Vietnam War.” — Publishers Weekly
“[A] comprehensive examination of the Central Intelligence Agency... Unlike most books on the nearly 40-year-old spy organization, The Agency is not a diary of old war stories or a flashy expose; it is a thoughtful analysis of the C.I.A. from gestation to middle age... An important difference between The Agency and many other scholarly treatments of intelligence gathering is the extensive use of quotes from both on-the-record and unattributed sources, as well as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” — James Bamford, The New York Times
“A thoughtful analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency from its beginnings, arguing that dependence on technology has crippled American intelligence.” — The New York Times
“Mr. Ranelagh, a British television producer, has written the best comprehensive history of the CIA. He is in control of the massive secondary literature, has used the Freedom of Information Act effectively, interviewed widely, and mined congressional sources. The tone is critical but detached, devoid of both the muckraking passion of the left and the self-congratulatory approach of the old-boy network. A fine book.” — Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs
“The Agency is without a doubt the finest, best-documented, and most entertainingly written study of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of which I know. It traces the agency from its first gleam in the eye of Wild Bill Donavan through the first term of William Casey on behalf of President Reagan... a genuine literary and stylistic accomplishment.” — John F. Melby, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
“An outstanding, exciting picture of the secret world... He comes as close as anyone can to capturing personalities, thrills, spills, and yes, the true drama.” — William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid
“This is the fairest and most reliable history of the CIA that has ever been written.” — Walter Laqueur, Center for Strategic and International Studies, coauthor of Breaking the Silence
“There has been nothing as comprehensive as Ranelagh’s detailed narration of the CIA story... The documentation is impressively voluminous... strengthened by the wealth of evidence.” — The Washington Post