Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780520219557

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Contain[s] a wealth of information about our government's ever-increasing tendency to deprive its citizens of information we deserve and need.""--Susie Linfield, ""Los Angeles Times

A muckraking adventure in the violation of First Amendment rights. Although it probably won't come as a surprise to most readers that the federal government is capable of spying on its citizens, Mackenzie professes a certain bewilderment at the lengths to which the CIA went to suppress dissent in the days of Vietnam. The veteran left-wing journalist, who died of brain cancer in 1994, began his career as the publisher of an antiwar rag called the People's Dreadnaught; harassed by campus police, he was forced to suspend publication, although he later won $2,500 in a lawsuit against Beloit College over the matter. At a national level, he writes, similar suppression was the order of the day. Although the CIA is constrained by law from conducting investigations inside the continental limits of the United States and its possessions, in fact, Mackenzie charges, it concocted an elaborate counterintelligence program against various home-grown protest groups in the 19605 and early '705, reasoning that it was taking antiterrorist measures and thus living up to the spirit, if not the letter, of its charter. Among the targets, Mackenzie writes, was Ramparts, a venerable leftist magazine that managed to earn the wrath of the Feds by reporting on that very internal spying. Other targets were the libertarian gum Karl Hess, renegade CIA whistleblowers Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee, and a host of lesser-known dissidents. The CIA emerges as the heavy, naturally, but the real villains in Mackenzie's account are various policymakers from the Johnson administration to the present. Incrementally over the years they expanded a policy of censorship to the point that today it pervades every agency and every department of the federal government, he writes. And, he continues, that change was so gradual that few guardians of the First Amendment noticed. Mackenzie is occasionally over the top, sometimes glib. But his charges ring true, and civil-liberties advocates will find much of interest in his pages. (Kirkus Reviews)

Contain[s] a wealth of information about our government's ever-increasing tendency to deprive its citizens of information we deserve and need. --Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times

Author Information

Angus Mackenzie (1950-1994), an investigative reporter known for his persistence and independence, was one of the nation's foremost experts on freedom of information laws. Known for crusading journalism in defense of the First Amendment, his work appeared in publications ranging from alternative weeklies to the Washington Post and the Columbia Journalism Review. Mackenzie was affiliated with the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco and taught at the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. David Weir was a co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting, where he managed contracts with ""60 Minutes,"" ""20/20,"" CNN, CBS News, ABC News, and many other outlets. He served as editor and writer at a number of publications, including Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Examiner. He has won or shared over two dozen journalism awards, including the National Magazine Award.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available