The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA torrent

The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA - Richard H. Immerman [epub]

The time period covered extends from the CIA's establishment in 1947 to May 2013, four months into President Barack Obama's second term of office. The agency's original function was primarily to research, prepare and present intelligence briefings. Later it got into many nefarious activities of its own, some thoroughly unpleasant, several of which have become notorious. Since 2004, the agency has been operating armed drones. That activity, says Immerman, has put it at the center of secret American paramilitary operations. 'The post-9/11 CIA,' he writes, 'has become a killing machine.'

In general, Immerman is supportive of the CIA. He reports that after the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy awarded it a 'very well done', and he protests on the CIA's behalf that its estimates in Johnson-era Vietnam were good; its problem was that, along with the President, it lost public and congressional support. The fall of the Berlin wall, he asserts, was 'accidental', so the CIA cannot be faulted for failing to anticipate it. As a careful reader at the time of daily newspapers, I cannot agree either that the fall of the wall was accidental, nor that it could not have been anticipated, at least not during the weeks between August and November 1989 in which East Germans had without hindrance been escaping to the West through Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Immerman does, however, heavily condemn the CIA for its part in construction of the false rationale for invading Iraq in 2003. Politicians in the United States and Britain believed what they wanted to believe about Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction, persuading themselves of the weapons' and a nuclear program's existence in the face of evidence that was at best scant and unreliable. Rolling with the flow, the CIA withheld the testimony of the families of Iraqi scientists that Saddam's programs to produce WMD had ceased. Saddam did not in fact restart his nuclear program after its destruction in 1991, and the last Iraqi factory producing illicit weapons was closed in 1996. Furthermore, the CIA dismissed the judgment of both UN and American experts that the aluminum tubes discovered in Iraq were used for conventional rockets, permitted by the UN Security Council, not for centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons.

Immerman believes the lessons of the Iraq fiasco (and of the converse failures of 9/11 and the 'Underpants Bomber' (December 2009), where dots that really did exist were not joined) have been learned, and systems and mindsets changed accordingly. We can certainly hope so.

Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition (April 7, 2014)