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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 1

N A T

N P . R

W A Y

The Central

Intelligence

Agency

H E G H O

T B I O

G R

H Y

◆

T H E D EF I N I T I V E H I S T O RY O F AM ER I CA’ S M O S T S ECR ET I N S T I T U T I O N

◆

M E R I D I A N P R E S S · N E W Y O R K

◆

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 2

The Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA)

T H E G H O S T B I O G R A P H Y

A Biography of America’s Most Secret Institution,

from the National Security Act to the Digital Age

J O

N A T

H A N P . R I D G E W AY

M E R I D I A N P R E S S

N E W YO R K · 2 0 2 6

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 3

Meridian Press

An imprint of Chartwell House Publishing Group

New York, New York

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the publisher,

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of independent history. It is not an official publication of the Central Intelligence

Agency, the Department of Defense, or any agency of the United States Government. All research

is drawn from the public record.

First Edition: 2026

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ridgeway, Jonathan P., 1974– author.

Title: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) : the ghost biography / Jonathan P. Ridgeway.

Description: First edition. New York : Meridian Press, 2026. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2026940117 | ISBN 978-1-64099-100-8 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Central Intelligence Agency—History. | Intelligence service—United

States—History. | Espionage, American—History. | Cold War—History.

Classification: LCC JK468.I6 R53 2026 | DDC 327.1273—dc23

Jacket design by Clara Whitfield. Typeset in Source Serif 4, with display type in Playfair Display.

Printed in the United States of America.

◆

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T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

T HE G HO S T BIO G RAPHY

“The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is

apparent and need not be further urged.”

G E O RG E WA S H I N G T O N , I N A L E T T E R T O C O L O N E L J O S E P H

RE E D , C A M B RI D G E , J U LY 1775

“The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence.”

O F F I C I A L M O T T O O F T H E C E N T RA L I N T E L L I G E N C E

A G E N C Y

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T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

T HE G HO S T BIO G RAPHY

Contents

F RO NT M A T T E R

Preface — The Pursuit of a Ghost

Introduction — An Institution Without a Face

PA RT I — T H E F O U ND I NG O F T H E S H A D O W , 1 9 4 7 – 1 9 6 0

The Birth of the Shadow

The Long Dawn of the Cold War

PA RT I I — T H E C RU C I B L E , 1 9 6 1 – 1 9 7 5

The Age of Heroic Failure

The Secret War in Indochina

The Years of Reckoning

PA RT I I I — T H E L O NG T W I L I G H T , 1 9 7 6 – 2 0 0 0

Skulduggery and Scandal

The Wilderness Years

PA RT I V — T H E G H O S T I N T H E M A C H I NE , 2 0 0 1 – P RE S E NT

The New War

The Digital Frontier

The Ghost’s Mirror: A Legacy

A P P E ND I C E S

A Chronological Timeline of the Agency

Major Achievements

Honors and Awards

A Note on Sources and a Note on the Design

Acknowledgments · About the Author

5 / 39

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 6

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

PREFAC E

P R E F A C E

The Pursuit of a Ghost

very institution has a biography, but the Central Intelligence Agency has some-

thing closer to a ghost story. It is an institution designed to be invisible: no pub-

lic address, no corporate identity, no shareholders, no constituents, no obligation to

explain itself. And yet no other organ of the American state has haunted the popular

imagination so persistently. The Agency appears in every novel of political intrigue,

in every film about conspiracy, in every argument about presidential power. It is si-

multaneously the most secret and the most mythologized bureaucracy in the world.

This book is an attempt to bring the ghost into focus — to write the biography of an

institution. A biography, like espionage itself, is an act of reconstruction. The subject

wishes to conceal; the biographer wishes to reveal. In the case of the CIA the con-

cealment is not vanity but law, and the revelation is not curiosity but history. Every

biography of the Agency is therefore written against the resistance of its own

subject.

What follows is drawn exclusively from the public record: declassified documents,

congressional hearings, the testimony of former officers, and the writing of genera-

tions of careful historians. Nothing in these pages is classified. Much of it, however,

was secret once, and the journey from secret to record is itself part of the story.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been praised as the indispensable shield of a

free nation and condemned as the hidden hand of an imperial one. It has been both.

It has saved lives and taken them, uncovered truths and manufactured falsehoods,

defended democracy and — at its darkest hours — betrayed it. To write its biography

is to write, in miniature, the story of American power in the twentieth and twenty-

first centuries.

“The ghost is not the Agency. The ghost is the question the

Agency keeps alive: what does a free nation owe to its own

shadows?”

F RO M T H E CL O S I N G O F CH A P T E R T E N

One caution to the reader. The historical record of the CIA is not a straight line but a

palimpsest — each generation writes over the one before, and whole passages re-

main permanently erased. Where the record is incomplete, this biography says so

plainly. It makes no claim to the last word; it aspires only to the honest one.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 7

— J.P.R.

Washington, D.C.

January 2026

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 8

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

INT RO DUC T IO N

I N T

R O D U C T

I O N

An Institution Without a Face

he Central Intelligence Agency is the only major institution of the United States

government that has no front door. Its headquarters sits on a wooded tract in

Langley, Virginia, behind an unmarked gate, on a road that does not appear on most

maps. Visitors are met by a guardhouse that does not say what it guards. The build-

ing itself is a monument of mid-century modernism — a slab of concrete and glass

that might be mistaken for a university library, were it not for the absence of any

sign naming it.

This facelessness is not an accident; it is the institution’s founding condition. For

decades, one sentence of the National Security Act of 1947 exempted the Agency

from every law requiring the public disclosure of its organization, functions, or per-

sonnel. The Agency was born exempt from transparency, and the exemption shaped

its soul.

A biography of such an institution must begin with a paradox: the CIA is at once the

most documented and the least documented organization in American history.

Every decade produces a river of books, hearings, and memoranda — and yet the

records of whole operations remain sealed in vaults at Langley, some for fifty years,

some forever. The historian of the Agency works in a room in which the lights are

on but half the room is dark.

The Agency is neither the rumor of the conspiracy theorist nor the savior of the na-

tional-security romantic. It is a bureaucracy — an American bureaucracy, with all

the virtues and vices that implies. It is staffed by analysts who read, officers who re-

cruit, technicians who build, and accountants who audit. It makes heroic choices

and petty ones. It has been brilliant at knowing the world and dangerously confused

about itself.

This introduction proceeds from a simple conviction: the history of the CIA matters

to every citizen who has ever wondered what the government does in their name,

and a great power’s secret institution, studied over the long arc of its life, reveals

more about the nation than any of its public ones. Nations are known by their se-

crets. This is the biography of the secrets.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 9

P A

R T I

The Founding

of the Shadow

1 9 4 7 –

1 9 6 0

◆

An institution born of a war that had ended and a war

that had not yet begun.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 10

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER O NE

C H A P T

E R O N E

The Birth of the Shadow

n July 26, 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act

into law, and with that signature the American intelligence community en-

tered a new age. The Act created a National Security Council to coordinate the

nation’s defense and foreign policy — and it created the Central Intelligence Agency,

an organization with a mandate so carefully vague that it would take four decades of

argument to discover what it meant.

The Agency did not spring from nothing. On January 22, 1946, Truman had estab-

lished the Central Intelligence Group, a small coordinating body housed in the

Pentagon, led by an unlikely succession of military officers — first Rear Admiral

Sidney W. Souers, then Lieutenant General Hoyt Vandenberg, then Rear Admiral

Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter. The Group was never intended to be permanent. It had no

independent budget, no overseas stations, and no authority to collect intelligence it-

self. Its task was to coordinate the reports of the departments that did — State, Army,

Navy, Air Force.

What reached President Truman in those first years was a torrent of contradiction.

Each service jealously guarded its own reports; the State Department considered for-

eign reporting its hereditary right; and no one was responsible for the whole. The

memory of Pearl Harbor — the great national failure to connect the dots — hung

over every argument. The lesson drawn in Washington was not that intelligence had

been absent but that it had been fragmented. The cure, the reformers insisted, was a

single institution charged with the entire picture.

When the Central Intelligence Agency opened its doors on September 18, 1947, its

first Director was Hillenkoetter, a career naval officer with a sober view of his new

command. The early staff was small — a few hundred officers drawn from the dis-

banded Office of Strategic Services, the wartime service of General William J.

Donovan, which Truman had dissolved in September 1945. The OSS was the ghost

that walked the corridors of the new Agency. Donovan had argued, with a persis-

tence that exhausted the patience of the Pentagon, that the United States needed a

standing foreign intelligence service. It took a second world war to make the case

unanswerable.

The Agency’s charter was written into the National Security Act in one brief section.

It was to advise the National Security Council on intelligence matters, recommend

the coordination of intelligence activities, correlate and evaluate intelligence, and

perform “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the na-

tional security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” That

final phrase — “such other functions” — was a door left ajar, and through it, in June

1948, walked the Agency’s second identity: covert action. Under NSC 10/2, a new of-

fice was established to conduct political warfare, sabotage, and paramilitary opera-

tions that the State Department could never acknowledge. In 1952 it was folded into

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 11

the Agency’s new Directorate of Plans, and the CIA became, in one stroke, both the

nation’s librarian and its hidden hand.

The first test came in Korea. On the morning of June 25, 1950, the North Korean army

crossed the 38th parallel, and the Agency — like the rest of Washington — was caught

unprepared. Months later, when the Chinese People’s Volunteers crossed the Yalu in

enormous force, the CIA was stunned a second time. The Korean War taught the

young institution its first great lesson: surprise is the price of inexperience, and in-

experience is the price of youth. The Agency that emerged from the Korean crucible

was humbled, hardened, and ready to be rebuilt. The man chosen to rebuild it was

Walter Bedell Smith — “Beetle” Smith, Eisenhower’s blunt chief of staff — who took

command in 1950 and turned a staff of clerks into an instrument of state.

The stage was set for the longest dawn of the Cold War.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 12

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER T WO

C H A P T

E R T

W O

The Long Dawn of the Cold War

n 1953, command of the Agency passed to Allen Welsh Dulles, the patrician

lawyer, wartime OSS station chief, and brother of the Secretary of State. Under

Dulles, under a president who believed in the utility of secrets, the Agency’s golden

age of covert action began.

The operations of the 1950s now read like the plot of an espionage novel — because,

in a sense, they wrote the genre. In August 1953, working with the British Secret

Intelligence Service, the Agency organized the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister,

Mohammad Mossadegh, whose nationalization of the oil industry had alarmed the

West. The operation, codenamed TPAJAX, was political warfare in its purest form:

propaganda, payoffs, orchestrated street unrest, and a counter-coup that restored

the Shah. A year later, in Guatemala, the Agency staged PBSUCCESS, deposing the

left-leaning government of Jacobo Árbenz with a small invasion force, a handful of

aircraft, and an elaborate radio war of nerves. The operations were cheap, fast, and —

from the American vantage at the time — almost bloodless. Their long conse-

quences, in Tehran and in Latin America, would return to haunt the nation decades

later. But in the 1950s the lesson seemed plain: the Agency could do what armies

could not, at a fraction of the cost, with the president’s blessing and the public’s

ignorance.

Not all of the decade’s work was covert. The Agency’s most enduring contribution

was technical — the marriage of espionage to engineering. In 1954, in cooperation

with the British, the Agency dug a tunnel into the Soviet sector of Berlin and tapped

the landlines of the Soviet command. Operation GOLD listened for nearly a year be-

fore it was discovered by an astonished Red Army patrol — and, as the Agency would

learn decades later, its secrets had been betrayed from the start by a Soviet mole in-

side British intelligence, George Blake. The tunnel had been a magnificent, doomed

gesture, and it belonged to a new kind of espionage: audacity measured in pickaxes

and patience.

The U-2 was the decade’s crowning achievement. A glider-winged aircraft built by

Kelly Johnson’s “Skunk Works” at Lockheed, it could fly at seventy thousand feet,

above the reach of Soviet fighters and surface-to-air missiles of the day. Beginning

in July 1956, the Agency’s U-2 pilots overflew the Soviet Union, photographing

bomber bases, missile sites, and factories with a new camera built for the purpose.

The photographs transformed American intelligence. They revealed, among other

things, that the dreaded “bomber gap” did not exist — a gift of truth to a president

who had entered office on the fear of it.

On May 1, 1960, a U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers was brought down over the

Soviet Union — the first time a Soviet missile had reached such an altitude. Powers

survived, was tried as a spy, and served years in prison before being exchanged on

the Glienicke Bridge for a captured Soviet agent. The shootdown collapsed the Paris

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 13

Summit and ended overflights of Soviet territory. But the U-2 era had already trans-

formed the Agency — and the world — proving that the ghost could see from the

edge of space. The Agency had learned to look over the horizon. What it did not yet

know was how easily looking could become stumbling.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 14

P A

R T I

The Crucible

1 9 6 1 –

1 9 7 5

◆

After the age of heroes came the age of consequences.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 15

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER T HREE

C H A P T

E R T

H R E E

The Age of Heroic Failure

pril 1961. The Bay of Pigs. The operation had been planned with every flaw a se-

cret enterprise can possess: an assumption that a landing would ignite a gen-

eral uprising, a reliance on air cover that a new president would cancel, an overcon-

fidence in the Agency’s upper ranks that had survived every warning. On the night of

April 16, 1961, some fourteen hundred Cuban exiles of Brigade 2506 went ashore at

the Bahía de Cochinos on the southern coast of Cuba. Within seventy-two hours the

landing had been contained and destroyed. More than a hundred invaders were

dead; nearly twelve hundred were captured and would spend eighteen months in

Cuban prisons before ransom was paid.

The Agency’s chiefs had assured the new president that the operation could not fail.

Its planners had confused hope with analysis. President Kennedy accepted responsi-

bility publicly and privately resolved to dismantle the CIA’s leadership. On November

28, 1961, Allen Dulles resigned. His deputy and the architect of the operation,

Richard Bissell, followed. The golden age of covert action was over, and a new, chas-

tened age had begun.

The Agency’s redemption came within a year, in the most dangerous moment of the

nuclear age. On October 14, 1962, a U-2 flying over western Cuba returned with pho-

tographs of medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction at San

Cristóbal. The new Director, John McCone, had suspected from the first that Soviet

defensive claims concealed offensive missiles — a suspicion his own analysts had

discounted. The photographs proved him right. For thirteen days the world held its

breath while President Kennedy and his advisers debated quarantine, invasion, and

airstrike. The Agency’s contribution was precise, sober, and decisive: it located the

missiles, estimated their readiness, and correctly judged that Nikita Khrushchev

would not go to war over Cuba. When the crisis ended, with the missiles removed in

exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and the quiet withdrawal of

Jupiter missiles from Turkey, the Agency had earned a moment of genuine triumph.

“The same machinery that had misjudged Cuba in April had

read it perfectly by October. The difference was not

intelligence; it was patience.”

The lesson of those two Cubas — failure in April, vindication in October — defined

the Agency’s character for a generation. It could be reckless in action and brilliant in

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 16

understanding. The tragedy was that its brilliance was easiest to see after its reck-

lessness had already done its damage.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 17

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER FO UR

C H A P T

E R F O U R

The Secret War in Indochina

he Agency’s first presence in Vietnam was modest — a small station in Saigon, a

few officers in the provinces, reports that passed upward into a widening

stream of American involvement. As the war deepened, so did the Agency. Its air-

lines flew supplies over Laos; its officers built armies among the Hmong and the

Montagnards; its stations in the highlands waged a shadow war against the Ho Chi

Minh Trail. By the mid-1960s the CIA had become, without public debate, the man-

ager of the largest secret war in American history.

The darkest chapter is the Phoenix Program. Between 1967 and 1972, the Agency and

its South Vietnamese allies sought to dismantle the Viet Cong’s shadow government

— the “Viet Cong Infrastructure” — through a campaign of intelligence, capture,

and, too often, killing. The program’s official statistics claimed thousands of “neu-

tralizations”; its critics alleged that innocent villagers died in the process. The truth

lies somewhere in the contested middle, and it is a truth the Agency has never fully

owned. Phoenix remains the most bitterly debated operation in the Agency’s

Vietnamese record, and it is studied today in every counterinsurgency curriculum

as a warning of what the machinery of intelligence can become when it is pointed at

a population.

In January 1968, the Tet Offensive exploded across South Vietnam. The Agency’s ana-

lysts had warned that an enemy offensive was coming; the scale and fury of the as-

sault nevertheless overwhelmed every expectation, and the psychological mathe-

matics of the war shifted irretrievably. The Tet Offensive was a military defeat for the

Viet Cong and a political catastrophe for the United States — and it was, in the judg-

ment of many historians, the moment the American public began to turn against

the war.

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, released the

Pentagon Papers — the classified history of American decision-making in Vietnam.

The revelations, and the trial that followed, hardened the national suspicion of se-

cret government. For the Agency, the war years ended in a different kind of account-

ing. In 1973, James Schlesinger, the new Director, ordered a survey of the Agency’s

questionable activities; the resulting document, known as the “Family Jewels,” was a

self-incriminating catalogue of mail-opening, drug experiments, and domestic sur-

veillance. Richard Helms, the skilled and loyal spymaster who had led the Agency

through the war, was gone; William Colby, his successor, decided to share the jewels

with Congress. The decision opened the greatest crisis in the Agency’s history.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 18

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER FIVE

C H A P T

E R F I V E

The Years of Reckoning

he storm broke in 1975. Watergate had already cast a cruel light on the Agency:

two of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the Bay of Pigs; a former Agency

officer had coordinated the break-in; and a president had tried, briefly, to use the CIA

as a shield. The Agency had refused — it was, in that ugly season, one of the few insti-

tutions to decline Richard Nixon’s demands — but the scars were deep, and Helms

had paid for his defiance with his job.

In December 1974, Seymour Hersh’s reporting in the New York Times revealed that

the Agency had conducted domestic surveillance of American citizens — Operation

CHAOS — and had opened mail in the United States for two decades. The revelations

ignited a national inquiry. The Senate established the Select Committee to Study

Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, under Senator

Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s hearings in 1975 — the “Year of

Intelligence” — laid the Agency’s darkest secrets before the world: assassination

plots against Fidel Castro, abetted by organized crime; experiments with LSD under

MK-ULTRA that left unwitting subjects damaged; the file cabinets of Americans who

had committed no crime.

The reforms that followed reshaped the Agency. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment of

1974 required the president to authorize each covert action and to report it to

Congress. Permanent oversight committees were established in the House and the

Senate. Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford in 1976, prohibited political

assassination and created the Intelligence Oversight Board; Carter’s Executive Order

12036 and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 extended the framework.

The Agency also suffered the year’s greatest intelligence shock — the surprise that

opened the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. The Agency had not foreseen the

Egyptian and Syrian attack, and the costs of that blindness were measured in lives on

both sides. The lesson was the same lesson Korea had taught a generation earlier:

the Agency must not only collect but understand.

The mid-decade recovery owed much to two very different leaders. George H. W.

Bush, appointed Director in 1976, restored morale, opened the Agency’s doors to

Congress, and ordered the first unclassified description of its mission. His succes-

sor, Stansfield Turner, a cerebral admiral, cut the clandestine service by hundreds of

positions — the “Halloween Massacre” — in a wrenching reorganization that still di-

vides veterans of the era. The Agency had been weighed, measured, and found want-

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 19

ing; now it would be rebuilt by men who disagreed about what it was for. The argu-

ment over that question has never ended.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 20

P A

R T I

The Long Twilight

1 9 7 6 –

2 0 0 0

◆

The Agency spent twenty years learning what it could

not do — and discovering what it had failed to do.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 21

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER S IX

C H A P T

E R S I X

Skulduggery and Scandal

illiam J. Casey returned the Agency to the shadow warfare of an earlier age.

An old OSS hand, a campaign manager, a lawyer with a genius for improvisa-

tion and a contempt for institutional caution, Casey took command in 1981 under a

president who had campaigned on restoring American strength. Covert action ex-

panded dramatically: in Angola, in Cambodia, in Central America. In Nicaragua, the

Agency organized and directed the Contras, the insurgent army opposing the

Sandinista government. When Congress moved to restrict the war, the Agency —

with the blessing of the White House — found its way around the restrictions.

The discoveries of 1984 were a public-relations disaster: the mining of Nicaraguan

harbors, revealed to a startled Senate; the Agency’s field manual for the Contras,

which contained passages on “neutralizing” Sandinista officials. Congress re-

sponded with the Boland Amendment, cutting off funds for the Contra war. The

White House, unwilling to abandon the fight, built its own covert apparatus in the

basement of the National Security Council — and the most damaging scandal in the

Agency’s history followed.

The Iran-Contra affair is a story told elsewhere in depth; its essentials belong here. In

1985 and 1986, senior officials sold antitank missiles to Iran in exchange for help

freeing American hostages in Lebanon, and diverted the proceeds to the Contras —

precisely what Congress had forbidden. The scheme was exposed by a Lebanese

magazine in November 1986. Casey, whose health was failing, never testified fully;

he died in May 1987. The Tower Commission, the Independent Counsel, and years of

hearings followed. The Agency’s officers, many of whom had objected to the scheme,

were tarred by it.

The same years contained the Agency’s largest covert operation ever. In Afghanistan,

from 1979 to 1989, the CIA armed the mujahideen resisting the Soviet occupation —

at its peak, the operation channeled hundreds of millions of dollars a year through

Pakistan. From 1986, the supply of shoulder-fired Stinger missiles turned the war.

The Soviet army withdrew in February 1989, an outcome that deserves to be counted

among the great achievements of covert action. And yet Afghanistan also planted

the seeds of a later harvest: the weapons, the networks, the veterans, and the training

camps that would one day host an enemy the Agency had not yet met.

The judge who came to clean the house was William Webster, appointed in 1987 after

the scandal consumed Casey’s successor. Webster restored order, rebuilt relations

with Congress, and led the Agency into the decade in which the world itself changed.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 22

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER S EVEN

C H A P T

E R S E V E N

The Wilderness Years

he greatest surprise in the Agency’s institutional biography was the end of the

Cold War. As the Soviet imperium crumbled between 1989 and 1991, the CIA —

like almost everyone else — was caught unprepared. Its formal estimates, produced

only months before the Berlin Wall fell, described a Soviet system that was troubled

but durable. The Agency’s leaders argued, with some justice, that the collapse was

driven by forces no intelligence service had reliably predicted; its critics answered

that the Agency had been so invested in the Soviet Union’s permanence that it could

not imagine the alternative. Both were true.

The aftermath was humiliating. In February 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich Ames, a

CIA counterintelligence officer who had sold the names of the Agency’s Soviet agents

to Moscow for nearly a decade — for cash that bought a Jaguar and a suburban

house. Ames’s betrayal had led to the deaths of American assets; the Agency’s inter-

nal security had failed to catch him for years, and its “mole hunt” had consumed in-

nocent careers. The Ames case was the single most damaging counterintelligence

failure in Agency history.

The decade’s record was otherwise uneven. The Agency did not foresee India’s nu-

clear tests in 1998. It was blamed for not softening the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in

October 2000. Budgets shrank with the “peace dividend”; morale sank; the clandes-

tine service aged. For a time, the Agency seemed to be an institution in search of a

mission, devoting itself to targets that mattered less and less.

Yet the wilderness years were not empty. The Counterterrorism Center, created in

1986, had begun to assemble the fragments of a new danger: a network of veterans of

the Afghan war, financed by a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden, who had de-

clared war on the United States. In December 1999, tipped by intelligence from coop-

erating services, the Agency watched the millennium arrive — and an alert border

inspector in Washington State arrested Ahmed Ressam as he drove off a ferry with a

trunk full of explosives. The millennium plot had been stopped. It was one of the

Agency’s quietest and most genuine triumphs.

George Tenet, who took office in 1997, insisted that the Agency was “back.” By the

summer of 2001, the Counterterrorism Center was reporting that the threat was ur-

gent. The center’s chief sent a message to headquarters in July that the system was

blinking red. The warning was real. The system was not ready.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 23

P A

R T I

The Ghost

in the Machine

2 0 0 1 –

P R E S E N T

◆

A new war, a new shape, the same shadow.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 24

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER EIG HT

C H A P T

E R E I G H T

The New War

here are moments in the biography of an institution when its future is fixed in

a single morning. For the Central Intelligence Agency, that morning was

September 11, 2001. Nearly three thousand people died. The Agency knew the name

al-Qaeda; its analysts had tracked the network for years; the idea of an aircraft-as-

missile had appeared in its reporting. And still the attacks succeeded. The failure

was not absence of intelligence; it was absence of imagination, absence of coordina-

tion, absence of urgency at the top of the machine.

The Agency’s response was immediate and, for a time, nearly invisible. Within

weeks, CIA paramilitary officers — the first Americans into Afghanistan — were on

horseback alongside the Northern Alliance, with suitcases of cash and the addresses

of warlords. By December the Taliban had fallen from Kabul. But at Tora Bora, in the

mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden slipped away. The pursuit that

followed would last a decade.

The war expanded to Iraq. In 2002 the Agency produced a National Intelligence

Estimate concluding that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — a judgment

delivered with a confidence the evidence did not support. The reported phrase of the

Director, George Tenet, that the case was a “slam dunk,” has become the emblem of

the failure. No stockpiles were found. The invasion that the estimate helped justify

cost thousands of lives and reshaped the Middle East. The Senate Intelligence

Committee’s post-mortems were brutal; the Agency’s analytic leadership was rebuilt

in their wake.

The Agency’s detention and interrogation program became the most morally con-

tested chapter of the new war. Captured operatives were rendered to secret facilities;

“enhanced techniques” were used and videotaped; the tapes were destroyed in 2005;

and in 2014 the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the program had not

been an effective means of gathering intelligence. The debate over who ordered

what, and who bears responsibility, remains open. The Agency’s defenders note that

some of the most dangerous figures of the war were captured and turned; its critics

answer that the price was the nation’s moral standing. Both accounts are true, and

they cannot be reconciled.

The redemption, when it came, was extraordinary. For years, Agency analysts had

pursued a single thread: the courier who might be bin Laden’s last messenger. In

2010, they identified a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On the night of May 1,

2011, Navy SEALs — guided by intelligence the Agency had assembled — killed

Osama bin Laden. For the men and women who had spent a decade hunting him, it

was the vindication of a generation. The Director, Leon Panetta, stood beside the

President in the Situation Room. It was the Agency’s finest hour since the Cuban

Missile Crisis, and it was recognized as such across the political spectrum.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 25

The Agency that fought the new war was unrecognizable from the institution of

1947: armed drones in its operational arsenal, a paramilitary capacity larger than at

any time since Vietnam, a global network of bases and partners. Its critics called it a

killing machine; its defenders called it the indispensable shield. The truth, again,

was both — and the ghost had learned to walk in daylight.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 26

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER NINE

C H A P T

E R N I N E

The Digital Frontier

he second decade of the twenty-first century carried the Agency onto a new

battlefield: the electromagnetic spectrum. The most consequential demon-

stration was Stuxnet, the computer worm that in 2010 quietly destroyed hundreds of

Iranian centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility. The operation, publicly attrib-

uted to American and Israeli engineers, was later acknowledged in broad terms by

American officials. It was the first great use of cyber weapons to achieve a strategic

objective — a slow-motion act of sabotage that set Iran’s nuclear program back by

years without a single aircraft crossing a border.

The digital age also brought exposure. In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor

to the intelligence community, disclosed a vast archive of surveillance programs to

journalists. The revelations damaged alliances, inflamed the global debate over pri-

vacy, and deepened the suspicion in which the “black world” was held. The Agency

itself was less directly exposed than the signals agencies, but the atmosphere dark-

ened; the ghost could no longer pretend the lights were out.

The same years saw the drone become the emblem of American counterterrorism.

The Agency’s armed unmanned aircraft campaign across the tribal regions of

Pakistan — and later in Yemen and Somalia — killed thousands of suspected mili-

tants, and hundreds of civilians. The program’s legality and morality were contested

in courts, in Congress, and in the consciences of the officers who ran it. The Agency,

an intelligence service, had become the operator of an armed force. No other intelli-

gence service in the world held that responsibility, and the debate over whether it

should has never been settled.

Institutionally, the era brought the Agency full circle. In 2018, Gina Haspel was con-

firmed as Director — the first woman to lead the CIA, a thirty-three-year veteran of

the clandestine service, her confirmation shadowed by her long-ago role in the in-

terrogation program. Haspel promised an Agency guided by “the rule of law, the

protection of civil liberties, and the principles that make this nation great.” Under

her leadership, and that of her successor, William J. Burns — a career diplomat who

became Director in 2021 — the Agency turned back toward the great-power competi-

tion that had shaped its founding.

The return to great power was announced in dramatic fashion. In the autumn of

2021, the American intelligence community began declassifying its own judgments

and warning publicly that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. The warnings

were repeated through the winter, with extraordinary specificity: the order of battle,

the axis of advance, the timing. When Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, the intel-

ligence community was vindicated — and the world watched an espionage agency

testify in open court, publishing its secrets in its own defense. It was a new kind of

twilight for the ghost: the age when intelligence would be revealed, deliberately, as

an instrument of statecraft.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 27

The digital frontier is where the Agency’s future will be written — and where its

ghost will learn to walk in the light of data. The enemy now includes encrypted net-

works, algorithmic disinformation, and the weaponized use of information itself.

The CIA’s founders could not have imagined a battlefield in which the most valuable

secret is the algorithm, nor an adversary that steals not documents but reality. The

Agency is adapting, as it must. A ghost, after all, is defined by its ability to change

shape.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 28

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

C HAPT ER T EN

C H A P T

E R T

E N

The Ghost’s Mirror: A Legacy

he biography of the Central Intelligence Agency is, in the end, a mirror of

American power — its nerve and its self-doubt, its reach and its limits, its will-

ingness to act in shadow and its need to answer in light. Seventy-five years is a long

life for an institution built on secrets. The Agency has outlived the Soviet Union that

gave it purpose, the wars that consumed it, and the scandals that nearly destroyed it.

It has been trusted by presidents of every party and suspected by citizens of every

persuasion. It has been right when everyone else was wrong, and wrong when ev-

eryone else was right.

The Agency’s paradox is constitutional. A democracy requires accountability; an in-

telligence service requires secrecy. Every generation must renegotiate the bound-

ary between them, and the negotiation is never finished. The Church Committee

asked whether the Agency had become “a rogue elephant.” The years since have

shown that the Agency is rarely rogue and never tame. It is an instrument — an

exquisitely sharp one — and the question is always in whose hand, and toward what

end.

The record contains achievements that deserve the gratitude of the nation: the re-

connaissance that prevented surprise, the analysis that calmed crises, the hunt that

ended in the compound at Abbottabad. It contains failures that deserve the nation’s

shame: the plots against leaders, the programs that tortured, the estimates that justi-

fied a war. The Agency’s legacy is not one or the other; it is the whole — an account-

ing that no lesson, no apology, and no victory can erase.

A Legacy in Three Paradoxes

Secrecy and liberty.

The Agency exists to protect an open society, and its exis-

tence tests that society’s openness. The tension is not a defect; it is the design, and

the price of freedom is eternal vigilance over the guardians.

Knowledge and action.

The Agency’s greatest triumphs were acts of understand-

ing; its greatest disasters, acts of unthinking action. The lesson of a lifetime: know

first, act second, and never confuse the two.

Memory and erasure.

The stars on the Memorial Wall at Langley include names

that will never be spoken. The Agency’s history is a record of what can be known,

surrounded by a country of what cannot. Biographers must learn to live in both

territories.

The legacy of the Central Intelligence Agency is thus not a verdict but a question —

the question of what a free nation may do in the dark to protect itself in the light. The

ghost is not the Agency. The ghost is the question the Agency keeps alive, unanswer-

able, permanent, and necessary. So long as the nation endures, so will the shadow it

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 29

casts. “The Work of a Nation,” runs the motto, “the Center of Intelligence.” The future

will decide whether the shadow served the light. History, as always, is the judge.

◆

I N

I S

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 30

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

APPENDIX A

A P P E N D I X A

A Chronological Timeline of the Agency

Dates of record from the public archives of the Agency, the Congress, and the presidency.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 31

Y E A R

E V E N T

1 9 4 0 S — T HE F O U N D IN G

1946

The Central Intelligence Group is established (January 22) under the

National Intelligence Authority.

1947

The National Security Act is signed (July 26); the Central Intelligence

Agency is formally established (September 18).

1948

NSC 10/2 creates a covert-action arm; the Agency becomes a hidden

hand as well as an intelligence service (June 18).

1950

The Korean War erupts; the Agency suffers its first major surprise and

begins its first great rebuilding.

1 9 5 0 S — T HE SE C R E T D E C A D E

1953

TPAJAX: with British intelligence, the Agency supports the overthrow of

Iran’s Prime Minister Mossadegh (August).

1954

PBSUCCESS in Guatemala; Operation GOLD — the Berlin Tunnel —

commences with the British SIS.

1956

First U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union (July 4); the aerial espionage

revolution begins.

1960

Francis Gary Powers is shot down over the Soviet Union (May 1);

CORONA, the first satellite reconnaissance system, returns its first

imagery (August).

1 9 6 0 S — HE R O ISM A N D HU BR IS

1961

The Bay of Pigs invasion fails (April); Allen Dulles departs; the era of

heroic covert action ends.

1962

The Cuban Missile Crisis (October): U-2 photography and Agency

analysis prove decisive in the world’s most dangerous thirteen days.

1967

The Phoenix Program begins in Vietnam; the secret war in Indochina

deepens.

1968

The Tet Offensive (January 30) shocks the United States and transforms

the politics of the war.

1971

The Pentagon Papers are published; public suspicion of secret

government hardens.

1 9 7 0 S — R E C K O N IN G

1973

The “Family Jewels” are compiled; William Colby succeeds Richard

Helms; the Yom Kippur surprise deepens the lesson of vigilance.

1974

The Hughes-Ryan Amendment requires presidential authorization and

congressional reporting for covert actions.

1975

The Church Committee convenes; the “Year of Intelligence” exposes

assassination plots, MK-ULTRA, and Operation CHAOS.

1976

Executive Order 11905 prohibits political assassination; George H. W.

Bush becomes Director.

1980

The Intelligence Oversight Act establishes the modern congressional

oversight framework.

1 9 8 0 S — T WIL IG HT O F T HE C O L D WA R

1981

William Casey becomes Director; covert action expands across three

continents.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 32

Y E A R

E V E N T

1984

The mining of Nicaraguan harbors is revealed; the Boland Amendment

restricts the Contra war.

1986

The Counterterrorism Center is established; the Iran-Contra affair

becomes public (November); Stingers begin reaching Afghanistan.

1989

The Soviet Union withdraws from Afghanistan; the Berlin Wall falls; the

Agency is caught — like the world — by surprise.

1 9 9 0 S — T HE WIL D E R N E SS Y E A R S

1991

The Soviet Union dissolves; Robert Gates is confirmed as Director amid

the Iran-Contra residue.

1994

Aldrich Ames is arrested (February 21); the most damaging

counterintelligence failure in Agency history.

1998

East Africa embassy bombings; India’s nuclear test goes undetected;

the Agency’s analytic capacity is questioned.

1999

The millennium plot is disrupted; an alert border inspector arrests

Ahmed Ressam (December 14).

2000

The U.S.S. Cole is attacked (October 12); the Counterterrorism Center’s

warnings grow urgent.

2 0 0 1 – 2 0 1 1 — T HE N E W WA R

2001

September 11 attacks; CIA paramilitary officers enter Afghanistan

within weeks of the fall of the Twin Towers.

2003

The Iraq invasion; the WMD estimate collapses; the Agency enters its

most painful decade of public accounting.

2005

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is created; the

interrogation tapes are destroyed.

2011

Operation Neptune Spear: Osama bin Laden is killed in Abbottabad

(May 1–2), ending a decade-long hunt.

2 0 1 1 – P R E SE N T — T HE D IG ITA L F R O N T IE R

2013

The Snowden disclosures begin (June); the global debate over

surveillance and secrecy is reignited.

2014

The Senate Intelligence Committee releases its study of the detention

and interrogation program (December 9).

2018

Gina Haspel is confirmed as the first female Director of the Central

Intelligence Agency (May 17).

2021

William J. Burns, a career diplomat, becomes Director (March 19); the

Agency returns to great-power competition.

2022

Russia invades Ukraine (February 24); publicly declassified American

intelligence warnings are vindicated in the eyes of the world.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 33

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

APPENDIX B

A P P E N D I X B

Major Achievements

A catalog of the Agency’s most consequential contributions to American security, drawn from the

public record.

Strategic Reconnaissance: The U-2 and CORONA

Between 1956 and the end of the century, the Agency’s air and space programs rendered the

Soviet Union transparent. The U-2 photographed the bomber and missile programs that

shaped American strategy; CORONA, the world’s first series of reconnaissance satellites,

returned millions of images from orbit. These systems dispelled the “bomber gap” myth,

gave presidents the facts of Soviet power, and made possible the arms-control agreements

of the 1970s. The Agency’s technical directorate was, for two generations, the greatest aerial

reconnaissance organization in history.

Reading the Cuban Missile Crisis

In October 1962, the Agency’s photography and analysis located the Soviet missiles in Cuba,

estimated their readiness, and informed a president under unimaginable pressure. The

judgment that Khrushchev would not go to war over Cuba was correct, and the crisis ended

in withdrawal and détente. It was the Agency’s finest analytical hour.

Winning the Secret War in Afghanistan

Operation Cyclone, the largest covert action in Agency history, armed and resourced the

Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation. From 1979 to 1989 the operation channeled arms,

funds, and training through Pakistan; the arrival of the Stinger missile in 1986 changed the

battlefield. The Soviet Army withdrew in 1989 — one of the few unambiguous victories of

covert action in the modern era.

The Counterterrorism Counteroffensive

From the Counterterrorism Center’s founding in 1986 through the decades after September

11, the Agency systematically dismantled the plotting of al-Qaeda and its successors. The

millennium plot was stopped; successive waves of attacks were disrupted; the leadership

ranks of terrorist organizations were steadily depleted. The campaign was not without

moral cost — but its operational record is among the most sustained in the history of

espionage.

The Hunt for Osama bin Laden

The ten-year pursuit that ended in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the early hours of May 2, 2011, is

a masterclass in patient intelligence work: the identification of a courier, the tracking of a

compound, the building of a case, and the presentation of a target to the President of the

United States. The raid that killed bin Laden was the Agency’s greatest covert achievement

— the culmination of a generation’s obsession.

The Cyber Operation Against Iran’s Nuclear Program

Stuxnet — developed with American and Israeli cyber and intelligence expertise —

attacked the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz facility in a campaign of precision sabotage

conducted in the electromagnetic spectrum. Publicly revealed in 2010 and later

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 34

acknowledged in broad terms, the operation set Iran’s program back by years and

established the template for cyber warfare as an instrument of statecraft.

Open-Source Statecraft: The Ukraine Warnings

In late 2021 and early 2022, the American intelligence community did something

unprecedented: it declassified and published its own assessments, warning that Russia

planned to invade Ukraine. The warnings were detailed, accurate, and widely credited with

denying the Kremlin the cover of surprise — and with galvanizing Western unity. The ghost

had testified in open court, and the world listened.

The Alliance of Intelligence Services

From the wartime Anglo-American partnership through the Five Eyes alliance and the

intelligence networks of NATO, the Agency’s cooperative relationships have been a force

multiplier of incalculable value. The sharing of sources, methods, and operations among

allies is one of the least visible — and most decisive — dimensions of American power.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 35

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

APPENDIX C

A P P E N D I X C

Honors and Awards

The Agency’s decorations are among the most closely held in government; the descriptions below

reflect the public record.

The Medals of the Agency

Distinguished

Intelligence

Cross

The Agency’s highest award, bestowed for extraordinary heroism in action. It

is awarded rarely, and far more often posthumously. The identities of most

recipients have never been disclosed.

Distinguished

Intelligence

Medal

Awarded for exceptionally outstanding service or achievement of marked

national importance. The medal is the Agency’s highest peacetime

recognition of a career.

Intelligence

Star

Awarded for courage in the face of danger while performing intelligence

duties. The Star recognizes the operational officers who walk the streets, not

the corridors.

Intelligence

Medal of

Merit

Awarded for distinguished service in the performance of duty. It is the

workhorse decoration of the senior grades.

Intelligence

Commendation

Medal

Awarded for meritorious service or significant achievement below the level

of the Medal of Merit.

Agency Seal

Medal

Awarded on retirement for a career of faithful service. Every officer who

leaves the Agency after decades of silence receives one — an emblem of a life

spent under the seal.

Unit Awards

The Agency’s collective decorations recognize directorates and teams for

achievements of the whole. The specifics of most unit citations remain sealed.

The Honor Roll

In the marble lobby of the Original Headquarters Building at Langley stands the Memorial

Wall — a row of carved stars, each marking an officer who died in the line of duty. At the most

recent public accounting, the wall holds more than one hundred and thirty stars; the

majority of the names beside them have never been disclosed. The accompanying Book of

Honor records their names — one hundred and forty-one of them, more than half still

classified. Stars without names are carved, in the Agency’s phrasing, for “those who cannot

yet be recognized.”

Beside the wall stands Kryptos, the encrypted sculpture by James Sanborn, four panels of

inscribed stone whose final message remains undecrypted to this day — a fitting monument

for an institution that has always reserved the right to a final secret. The Agency’s

headquarters itself was named the George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence in 1999, in

honor of the only American president who had also served as its Director.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 36

The greatest honors of the Agency are the ones the public will never know. Its officers have

received — in secret, and in silence — recognitions that will not appear in any record this

book can cite. That is the nature of the service. The wall is the testimony: star after star,

without names, honored without ceremony, remembered without end.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 37

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

APPENDIX D

A P P E N D I X D

A Note on Sources

This biography draws exclusively on the public record. The principal sources are listed below.

Central Intelligence Agency,

FOIA Electronic Reading Room

, cia.gov/readingroom — declassified

documents, including the “Family Jewels” and intercepted Cable Traffic.

U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence

Activities (Church Committee),

Final Report

, 94th Cong., 2d Sess., 1976.

U.S. Senate, Select Committee on Intelligence,

Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and

Interrogation Program

, 113th Cong., 2d Sess., December 2014.

National Security Act of 1947, Public Law 80-253, 61 Stat. 495.

The 9/11 Commission,

The 9/11 Commission Report

, Washington, D.C., 2004.

Dulles, Allen W.,

The Craft of Intelligence

, New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Helms, Richard, with William Hood,

A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency

, New

York: Random House, 2003.

Colby, William, and Peter Forbath,

Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA

, New York: Simon & Schuster,

1978.

Weiner, Tim,

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

, New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Powers, Thomas,

The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA

, New York: Knopf, 1979.

Thomas, Evan,

The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared — The Early Years of the CIA

, New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1995.

Richelson, Jeffrey T.,

The U.S. Intelligence Community

, 7th ed., Boulder: Westview Press, 2016.

Wise, David, and Thomas B. Ross,

The Espionage Establishment

, New York: Random House, 1967.

Coll, Steve,

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden

, New York: Penguin, 2004.

Tenet, George, with Bill Harlow,

At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA

, New York: HarperCollins,

2007.

Brennan, John O.,

Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, At Home and Abroad

, New York:

Celadon Books, 2020.

National Security Archive, George Washington University,

The Intelligence Community and the Cold War

document collections, nsarchive.gwu.edu.

◆

A N O

E O

N T

H E D E S

I G N

The Jacket of This Volume

The design of this book follows the visual idiom of the great American biography, and

acknowledges its debt to

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

by David W. Blight (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 2018) — the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography whose engraved-portrait

jacket provided the direct inspiration for the cover of this edition. The body text is set in

Source Serif 4; the display type is Playfair Display. The cover emblem is an original

engraving-inspired rendering, created for this volume.

Independent publications of the sort represented here are exercises in the oldest tradition

of the republic: the citizen’s inquiry into the conduct of the government. The Central

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 38

Intelligence Agency neither authorized nor reviewed this work. It is offered in the

conviction that a free people can bear the truth about its secrets.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography — page 39

T HE C ENT RAL INT ELLIG ENC E AG ENC Y

AC KNO WLEDG MENT S

A C

K N O

W L E D G M E N T

The Debt of the Living to the Dead

A book about secrecy accumulates, over its writing, an unusual number of debts

that cannot be acknowledged in detail — because the creditors are themselves

invisible. To the archivists of the National Archives, the librarians of the Manuscript

Division, and the patient officers of the Agency’s own History Staff who prepared the

declassified record: thank you. To the generations of congressional investigators

who pried the secrets loose on the people’s behalf: thank you. To the historians

named in the bibliography, whose work made mine possible: thank you.

I am grateful to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for a

fellowship year; to Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign

Service for a forum in which to test these arguments; and to the colleagues who read

portions of the manuscript and improved it beyond my own capacity. Any errors of

fact or judgment that remain are mine alone.

Finally, a word for the officers whose names will never appear in any

acknowledgement: those who died in service, who kept faith with their oaths, who

stayed silent when silence was required, and who died — some of them — without

the nation ever knowing their names. The stars on the wall at Langley are for them.

This book is for them too.

◆

A B O

U T T

H E A U T

H O

Jonathan P. Ridgeway is a historian of American foreign relations and intelligence. He has

taught at Georgetown University, served as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International

Center for Scholars, and written widely on the intersection of secrecy and statecraft. He

lives in Washington, D.C. This is his third book.

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Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) The Ghost Biography

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