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  • The CIA as Organized Crime

  • How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World
  • By: Douglas Valentine
  • Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
  • Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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The CIA as Organized Crime

By: Douglas Valentine
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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Publisher's Summary

The author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine began his research into the agency's activities when CIA director William Colby gave him free access to interview agency officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would eventually rescind it and made every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented an elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA's relationship with the federal agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence, and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure the unimpeded flow of drugs to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.

Ultimately, portions of his research materials were archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

This book includes excerpts from the aforementioned titles, along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA's ongoing illegal and extralegal activities. These articles and interviews illustrate how the agency's activities impact social and political movements abroad and at home.

A common theme is the CIA's ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable, government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.

Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis today. Valentine tracks the agency's steady expansion into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people themselves.

©2016 Douglas Valentine (P)2017 Skyboat Media, Inc., and Blackstone Audio, Inc.

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Distributing & informative. Incredible read.

Level of details and understanding of the subject matter was obvious. Have to say it sent chills up my spine.

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Well researched and damming

An incredibly informative account of what the CIA actually does, as opposed to what they'd like you to think they do. Initially the author was giving unprecedented access to former head of the CIA. From there, he does an excellent job of linking the Vietnam war, and the various programs undertaken there, to the war on terror and domestic militarization at home. Investigative research at its greatest.

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preachy and over pollitical

first 18 chapters are inciteful. after that it's a left wing winge. get tired of the personal World view

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good content, obnoxious rhetoric

this book has good content like valentine's work on the Phoenix program but so often pushes the left as the solution. any thesis that frames ethics with cliche left/right paradigms will ultimately be lacking as it fails to transcend rhetoric.

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2 people found this helpful

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