The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future - Hardcover

Whipple, Chris

 
9781982106409: The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982106409 ISBN 13: 9781982106409
Verlag: Scribner, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers, a remarkable, behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run the world’s most powerful intelligence agency, and how the CIA is often a crucial counterforce against presidents threatening to overstep the powers of their office.

Only eleven men and one woman are alive today who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service. With unprecedented, deep access to nearly all these individuals plus several of their predecessors, Chris Whipple tells the story of an agency that answers to the United States president alone, but whose activities—spying, espionage, and covert action—take place on every continent. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a brake on rogue presidents, starting in the mid-seventies with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality and continuing to the present as the actions of a CIA whistleblower have ignited impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.

Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a powerful player on the world stage, operating largely in the shadows to protect American interests. For The Spymasters, Whipple conducted extensive, exclusive interviews with nearly every living CIA director, pulling back the curtain on the world’s elite spy agencies and showing how the CIA partners—or clashes—with counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Topics covered in the book include attempts by presidents to use the agency for their own ends; simmering problems in the Middle East and Asia; rogue nuclear threats; and cyberwarfare.

A revelatory, behind-the-scenes look, The Spymasters recounts seven decades of CIA activity and elicits predictions about the issues--and threats—that will engage the attention of future operatives and analysts. Including eye-opening interviews with George Tenet, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus, as well as those who’ve just recently departed the agency, this is a timely, essential, and important contribution to current events.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Whipple is an author, political analyst, and Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR, and has contributed essays to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair. His first book, The Gatekeepers, an analysis of the position of White House Chief of Staff, was a New York Times bestseller. His follow-up, The Spymasters, was based on interviews with nearly every living CIA Director and was critically acclaimed. Whipple lives in New York City with his wife Cary. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: “Stay the hell away from the whole damned thing.” CHAPTER ONE “Stay the hell away from the whole damned thing.”
Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon

At his transition headquarters on the thirty-ninth floor of New York City’s Pierre Hotel, in a suite with a panoramic view of Central Park, Richard M. Nixon was preparing to become president of the United States. It was Friday, November 15, 1968, and Nixon had been huddling with his closest advisers, meeting with candidates for his cabinet, plotting to bend the Washington establishment to his will. The president-elect was “in the mood of a general about to occupy an enemy town,” wrote author Thomas Powers, “bringing with him a visceral dislike and suspicion of the federal bureaucracy… because it was in his character to see himself always as surrounded by enemies, obstructionists and saboteurs.” Oddly enough, in Nixon’s mind, no one exemplified the Washington elite—those enemies, obstructionists, and saboteurs—more than the man he’d summoned to meet with him, CIA director Richard Helms.

It would be hard to imagine a partnership less likely to end well, more riven with intrigue and mutual suspicion, than Helms and Nixon. Helms personified the CIA, rising through the ranks of the agency to become Lyndon Johnson’s director for the previous two years. Nixon was still seething about the CIA’s role in his 1960 election loss, convinced the agency had helped JFK invent a Soviet-American “missile gap.” He wasn’t about to let Helms forget it. Worse, in Nixon’s mind, Helms was a member of the “Georgetown set,” a tony cabal that spent its evenings sipping martinis and making fun of the president-elect. (Helms did frequent the living rooms of Washington’s high-society doyennes, but he was quick to point out that he’d never lived in Georgetown.)

In their manner and dress the two men were polar opposites. Helms wore Savile Row suits with kerchiefs and was an avid tennis player and ballroom dancer. (Born with nine toes, Helms had shoes specially designed for him in London when he lived there in the 1930s.) Nixon was fumbling and socially inept, and so sartorially clueless he wore dress shoes while walking on the beach.

Helms arrived at the hotel and was shown into Nixon’s suite. He was greeted there by the president-elect and John Mitchell. Jowly and overweight, Mitchell, who’d been Nixon’s law partner and was most recently serving as the president-elect’s confidant, was about to become attorney general—and would later go to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. After some pleasantries, the president-elect told Helms he wanted him to stay on as CIA director. Helms thanked him and left, promising not to tell anyone until the decision was made public. A month later, on December 18, 1968, Richard Nixon announced Helms’s reappointment as director of Central Intelligence.

Nixon must have had his reasons. Possibly, he’d been swayed by LBJ’s urging him to keep Helms around as an honest broker. “I’ve no idea how he voted in any election and I have never asked him what his political views are,” Johnson told the president-elect. “He’s always been correct with me and has done a good job as director. I commend him to you.” But beyond Helms’s bona fides, other considerations were undoubtedly at work in Nixon’s conspiratorial mind. It was a mind that Helms could never fathom. “He couldn’t figure out Nixon,” recalled his widow, and second wife, Cynthia Helms. “He just could never figure out what Nixon was up to.” What Nixon was up to, it does not seem far-fetched to conclude, was choosing a CIA director who could be blackmailed into doing his bidding.

Surely, anyone who’d been in the spy business as long as Helms must have something to hide, must be malleable, or vulnerable to exposure. “We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon would say later, as the White House tapes rolled, implying that he’d kept damaging information from coming to light, that Helms owed him, and it was time to collect the debt. Did Nixon and his henchmen have something on Helms, a secret that would make him do their dirty work on Watergate? The fate of Nixon’s presidency would hinge on the answer to that question.

Richard Helms hadn’t set out to become a spy. Born on Philadelphia’s Main Line, he was sent to a Swiss boarding school and then attended college at Williams. In 1936, as a twenty-three-year-old reporter for United Press, speaking passable French and German, Helms found himself at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, standing next to the German führer, Adolf Hitler. “At arm’s length, Hitler appeared shorter and less impressive than at a distance,” Helms reported in his UP dispatch. “Fine, dark brown hair, rusty in front, slightly graying along the crown; bright blue eyes, coarse skin, with a pinkish tinge.” Helms was appalled by Hitler’s demagogic narcissism. By contrast he was impressed by the quiet modesty of American track star Jesse Owens, whom he met while crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary after his dominant performance at the Olympic Games.

After Pearl Harbor, Helms joined the Naval Reserve. Then, two years before the Nazi surrender, he was summoned to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, D.C. The wartime intelligence service, precursor to the CIA, wanted someone who spoke French and German, had lived in Europe, and worked as a journalist.

The OSS was the creation of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a dashing figure who led an eclectic band of intellectuals and paramilitary adventurers, running spies and saboteurs behind Nazi lines from its headquarters in London. Helms was sent to Maryland for training (knife fighting, hand-to-hand combat, maintaining a cover)—and finally dispatched to London. There, he reported to a rumpled Navy lieutenant named William J. Casey, the chief for secret intelligence collection in Europe.

Restless, indefatigable, and brilliant, Casey, who would later become Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, was as rough around the edges as Helms was silky smooth; he was so excitable during meals, and his table manners such an afterthought, that he often ended up chewing on his tie. The two young OSS recruits became roommates and sent spies into occupied Europe right up until the Nazi surrender.

By 1943 Helms had given up his journalistic ambitions (he’d wanted to own a newspaper) in favor of a career as a spy. “I now realized that I was hooked on intelligence,” Helms wrote years later in his memoir, A Look over My Shoulder. And he intuited that the OSS, or something like it, would still be necessary after the war: “The need for an effective intelligence service in the turbulent and anything but benign postwar world seemed obvious.” But Helms wasn’t done with Hitler yet. At war’s end, as the Third Reich lay in ruins, while he was on a reconnaissance mission in Berlin, Helms seized a chance to sneak into Hitler’s chancellery. He helped himself to the few pieces of crockery that hadn’t been shattered—and Hitler’s personal note cards. On one, Helms penned a note to his toddler son, back in Virginia.

Dear...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982106409
ISBN 13 
9781982106409
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781982106416: The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1982106417 ISBN 13:  9781982106416
Verlag: Scribner, 2021
Softcover