Leak
Leak

Author: Max Holland

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2017-02-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0700623426

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Through the shadowy persona of "Deep Throat," FBI official Mark Felt became as famous as the Watergate scandal his "leaks" helped uncover. Best known through Hal Holbrook's portrayal in the film version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men, Felt was regarded for decades as a conscientious but highly secretive whistleblower who shunned the limelight. Yet even after he finally revealed his identity in 2005, questions about his true motivations persisted. Max Holland has found the missing piece of that Deep Throat puzzle--one that's been hidden in plain sight all along. He reveals for the first time in detail what truly motivated the FBI's number-two executive to become the most fabled secret source in American history. In the process, he directly challenges Felt's own explanations while also demolishing the legend fostered by Woodward and Bernstein's bestselling account. Holland critiques all the theories of Felt's motivation that have circulated over the years, including notions that Felt had been genuinely upset by White House law-breaking or had tried to defend and insulate the FBI from the machinations of President Nixon and his Watergate henchmen. And, while acknowledging that Woodward finally disowned the "principled whistleblower" image of Felt in The Secret Man, Holland shows why that famed journalist's latest explanation still falls short of the truth. Holland showcases the many twists and turns to Felt's story that are not widely known, revealing not a selfless official acting out of altruistic patriotism, but rather a career bureaucrat with his own very private agenda. Drawing on new interviews and oral histories, old and just-released FBI Watergate files, papers of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, presidential tape recordings, and Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate-related papers, he sheds important new light on both Felt's motivations and the complex and often problematic relationship between the press and government officials. Fast-paced and scrupulously fact-checked, Leak resolves the mystery residing at the heart of Mark Felt's actions. By doing so, it radically revises our understanding of America's most famous presidential scandal.

Dirty Tricks
Dirty Tricks

Author: Shane O'Sullivan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 655

ISBN-13: 1510729593

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The victory of Richard Nixon in the US presidential election of 1968 swung on an “October Surprise”— a treasonous plot engineered by key figures in the Republican Party to keep the South Vietnamese government away from peace talks in Paris, costing thousands of American lives. There is growing evidence that the CIA was deeply involved in illegal domestic operations targeting Daniel Ellsberg, and in the Watergate break-ins during Nixon’s 1972 campaign, which ultimately led to his downfall. CIA Director Richard Helms’ relationship with Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was much closer than previously disclosed and the CIA agent inside the plot was sent on a double agent mission by American intelligence after he got out of prison. Drawing on newly-declassified files and previously-unpublished documents, Dirty Tricks debunks the myths around Watergate and deepens our understanding of the “dirty tricks” that undermined democracy during the Nixon years and destroyed public trust in politics during the seventies. These scandals turn on the covert action of two powerful interest groups—the senior CIA officers around Helms, and the key advisers around Nixon – in this chilling story of political espionage and deception.

The CIA and American Democracy
The CIA and American Democracy

Author: Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9780300099485

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This third edition of Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's engrossing history of the Central Intelligence Agency includes a new prologue that discusses the history of the CIA since the end of the Cold War, focusing in particular on the intelligence dimensions of the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Praise for the earlier editions: "I have read many books on the CIA, but none more searching and still dispassionate. Nor would I have believed that a book of such towering scholarship could still be so lucid and exciting to read."--Daniel Schorr "This is one of the best short histories of the CIA in print, up-to-date and based on a wide range of sources."--Walter Laqueur "Judicious and reasonable. . . . A sophisticated study that should challenge us to take a more serious view about how our democracy formulates its foreign policy."--David P. Calleo, New York Times Book Review A brief, yet subtle and penetrating, account of the Central Intelligence Agency."--Leonard Bushkoff, Christian Science Monitor "Subtle and crisply written. . . . A book remarkable for its clarity and lack of bias."--William W. Powers, Jr., International Herald Tribune, Paris

Secret Agenda
Secret Agenda

Author: Jim Hougan

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1504075277

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The exposé that reveals “a prostitution ring, heavy CIA involvement, spying on the White House as well as on the Democrats, and plots within plots” (The Washington Post) Ten years after the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency, Jim Hougan—then the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine—set out to write a profile of Lou Russell, a boozy private-eye who plied his trade in the vice-driven underbelly of the nation’s capital. Hougan soon discovered that Russell was “the sixth man, the one who got away” when his boss, veteran CIA officer Jim McCord, led a break-in team into a trap at the Watergate. Using the Freedom of Information Act to win the release of the FBI’s Watergate investigation—some thirty-thousand pages of documents that neither the Washington Post nor the Senate had seen—Hougan refuted the orthodox narrative of the affair. Armed with evidence hidden from the public for more than a decade, Hougan proves that McCord deliberately sabotaged the June 17, 1972, burglary. None of the Democrats’ phones had been bugged, and the spy-team’s ostensible leader, Gordon Liddy, was himself a pawn—at once, guilty and oblivious. The power struggle that unfolded saw E. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord using the White House as a cover for an illicit domestic intelligence operation involving call-girls at the nearby Columbia Plaza Apartments. A New York Times Notable Book, Secret Agenda “present[s] some valuable new evidence and explored many murky corners of our recent past . . . The questions [Hougan] has posed here—and some he hasn’t—certainly deserve an answer” (The New York Times Book Review). Kirkus Reviews declared the book “a fascinating series of puzzles—with all the detective work laid out.”

Spycraft
Spycraft

Author: Robert Wallace

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 9780525949800

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An insider's tour of the past half-century's espionage technologies also recounts some of the CIA's most secretive operations and how they have been performed using state-of-the-art spy instruments.

Dark Quadrant
Dark Quadrant

Author: Jonathan Marshall

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-09

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1538142503

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From Truman to Trump, the deep corruption of our political leaders unveiled. Many critiques of the Trump era contrast it with the latter half of the twentieth century, when the United States seemed governed more by statesmen than by special interests. Without denying the extraordinary vigor of President Trump’s assault on traditional ethical and legal norms, Jonathan Marshall challenges the myth of a golden age of American democracy. Drawing on a host of original archival sources, he tells a shocking story of how well-protected criminals systematically organized the corruption of American national politics after World War II. Marshall begins by tracing the extraordinary scandals of President Truman, whose political career was launched by the murderous Pendergast machine in Missouri. He goes on to highlight the role of organized crime in the rise of McCarthyism during the Cold War, the near-derailment of Vice President Johnson’s political career by two mob-related scandals, and Nixon’s career-long association with underworld figures. The book culminates with a discussion of Donald Trump’s unique history of relations with the traditional American Mafia and newer transnational gangs like the Russian mafiya—and how the latter led to his historic impeachment by the House of Representatives.