Secrets: The CIA's War at Home

Front Cover
University of California Press, Apr 22, 1999 - History - 260 pages
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.
 

Contents

THE CIA AND THE ORIGINS
9
CONSERVATIVES WORRY AND THE COVERUP BEGINS
15
YOU EXPOSE US WE SPY ON
26
THE CIA TRIES TO CENSOR BOOKS
42
FOUR
58
CENSOR OTHERS AS YOU WOULD
73
CONGRESS OUTLAW THIS BOOK?
82
SEVEN
89
NINE
122
HIDING POLITICAL SPYING
147
TWELVE
157
CONTROL OF INFORMATION
168
FOURTEEN
181
THE COLD
189
TARGETS OF DOMESTIC SPYING
203
NOTES
209

EIGHT
103

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