https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/03...
https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/03...
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Knife-Secret-Army-Earth/dp/B00QSF...
and "Legacy of ashes"
https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/03...
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I downloaded the ebook to WoTK -- reviews of it are good, but I haven't started reading it just yet.
I recently read Legacy of Ashes[0], which I thought would be a sort of thrilling history of the spy game in America, but turned out to be a chronicle of blunder after blunder by the CIA. Fascinating stuff.
Having read that, I'm not naive enough to believe the cause of "most" global instability is due to the CIA; that's giving them far too much credit.
[0]http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/030...
No need to imagine. This happens. Covert areas of defense spending have always been conducted in the dark, often with blank checks.
The military, NSA, CIA, etc. are in the game of accumulating hidden capabilities. This is the job the American people have given them, and yes, it is a constant arbitrage at odds with, among other things, their own privacy and fiscal responsibilities.
A fascinating read on this topic, regardless of accuracy: http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-The-History-CIA/dp/030738...
No, I'm arguing that Mossad's claims about when Iran will have a weapon tell us nothing about the effectiveness of Stuxnet. This is a matter of logic.
I also don't know where this perception comes from
Reading books about intelligence services...like Legacy of Ashes http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038...
Beyond that, this is really basic systems theory. Intelligence service oversight, at least in the US, is very lax. The people doing oversight know a lot less about operations than the people being overseen. So when they screw up, they can spin their nominal bosses so that no one gets fired or goes to jail. It is really hard to keep secret and highly compartmentalized organizations honest. The principal agent problem is a big deal.
Yeah, it setup and ran both equally.
> The most crucial interaction between the CIA and the Liberal Democratic Party was the exchange of information for money. It was used to support the party and to recruit informers within it. The Americans established paid relationships with promising young men who became, a generation later, members of parliament, ministers, and elder statesmen. Together they promoted the LDP and subverted Japan's Socialist Party and labor unions. […]
> The Japanese came to describe the political system created with the CIA's support as kozo oshoku—"structural corruption." The CIA's payoffs went on into the 1970s. The structural corruption of the political life of Japan continued long thereafter.
> "We ran Japan during the occupation, and we ran it a different way in these years after the occupation," said the CIA's Horace Feldman, who served as station chief in Tokyo. "General MacArthur had his ways. We had ours."
From the book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/03...).