The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA by Thomas Powers

 

I may have believed I read this before, and certainly did read the footnote that references my father, who served as an aide to Richard Helms, and who gave to agent Victor Marchetti a copy of FESTIVAL OF SPIES, written by David St. John, a pseudonym for infamous Watergate participant Howard Hunt, as Helms had a box of those sort of CIA-friendly spy novels in his office and liked to hand them out.

But this time I really did read every word of it - and though it is dry and acronym-laden, and hard to follow, its reputation precedes it as THE best CIA book ever published when it appeared in 1979. (Have no idea whether that is still true, as a tide of revelations and books have appeared since then.)

This book came at the end of a massive tide of post-Watergate bloodletting and scapegoating of the national intelligence community that Helm's CIA (and the first 30 years of a national intelligence service) never quite got over. Intelligence (in Powers' words, the only way during the Cold War of "waging peace) has always been mandatory for any country. 

p. 43 "Analysts deduce what spies have failed to learn."