UNCLOAKING THE CIA

The CIA has been having public-relations problems of late, due to spot investigations like J. C. Langguth's Hidden Terrors (p. 416) and the revelations of such Agency drop-outs as Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee. This volume is a sort of ""work in progress"" survey containing the contributions (25 in all) of many of these new CIA-watchers to a conference held at Yale in 1975 on the ""CIA and World Peace."" Most of the articles, originally delivered as oral presentations, are short, insubstantial, and polemical assaults or calls to arms. Predictably, those CIA ventures which have received the most attention elsewhere get the most here as well--two longish pieces focus on Chile (one by Hortensia Bussi de Allende, widow of the slain President), five on Indochina--but, though they provide useful summaries of other studies, none of these presents any new, verifiable information. Mark Lane makes an appearance to run through his Kennedy assassination questions for yet another time, while journalist Kirkpatrick Sale gives the main outlines of CIA domestic activities. Other contributions deal with CIA involvement in international labor groups, Africa, Portugal, and Puerto Rico. The last three suffer from their currency, and often must rely on deductive reasoning to figure out exactly what the CIA is and is not responsible for. The CIA would not be the threat it is if it were easily penetrable, and this volume suffers as a consequence.