Publication Review and Controversies
CIA employees and contractors do sign an agreement to submit their works for pre-publication review. In some cases, there was no major problem, but other security review took litigation to resolve. It has been argued that some of the deletions requested by CIA were more to cover embarrassments than actual sources and methods, but various disclosures or subsequent declassifications, in other cases, might have been judgment calls, but the proposed deletion made some sense.
Such review, of course, does not apply to books written by people who have left the country and declared enmity against the Agency, such as Philip Agee and the book Inside the Company. Sam Adams' book War of Numbers was published posthumously, based on notes he had hidden while a Vietnam analyst.
One book that wound up in court was The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John Marks.
Read more about this topic: CIA Influence On Public Opinion
Famous quotes containing the words publication and/or review:
“An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)