Presidents’ Secret Wars
John Prados
480 pages including index
published in 1986
One of the things I’ve been kicking my head against in my other blog is the idea that George Bush and the Republicans are the fount of all evil and if only the Democrats come into power, the United States will once again become a force for good. Anybody with any knowledge of post-WW2 American history knows how wrong that idea is, yet far too many intelligent people still are found of this myth, which manifests itself in things like the idea that John F. Kennedy would’ve stopped the War on Vietnam if he hadn’t been killed. All of this is why more people should read books like this, Presidents’ Secret Wars, which traces the history of America’s CIA initiated secret wars since 1945, up to the eve of the Iran-Contra Scandal. (An updated version has been published since, but the local library only had the original version.) It shows that liberal presidents have been just as guilty as conservative ones in unleashing dirty wars on other countries.
The CIA was created in 1947, as a succesor to the wartime OSS, with its main task being espionage. From the start however it also had a covert action function; not surprising as many of the early CIA officers came from the OSS, which had a long and largely succesful history of covert action against nazi Germany during WW2. 1947 was the year the Cold War officially got started, when it became clear that the enforced wartime alliance of Soviet Russia and the western powers was definately at an end.