In their manner and dress the two men were polar opposites. (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.) 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. 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. Helms personified the CIA, rising through the ranks of the agency to become Lyndon Johnson’s director for the previous two years. It would be hard to imagine a partnership less likely to end well, more riven with intrigue and mutual suspicion, than Helms and Nixon. 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 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. Nixon was preparing to become president of the United States. Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard NixonĪt 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. Including eye-opening interviews with George Tenet, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus, as well as those who’ve recently departed the agency, this is a timely, essential, and important contribution to current events.Ĭhapter 1: “Stay the hell away from the whole damned thing.” CHAPTER ONE “Stay the hell away from the whole damned thing.” 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.Ī revelatory, well-researched history, 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. 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. 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. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a counterforce against rogue presidents, starting in the mid-seventies with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality and through the Trump presidency when a CIA whistleblower ignited impeachment proceedings and armed insurrectionists assaulted the US Capitol.
With unprecedented access to more than a dozen individuals who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service, 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. “The best book about the CIA I’ve ever read…one hell of a story” (Christopher Buckley). From the New York Times bestselling author of The Gatekeepers, an “engaging…richly textured” ( The New York Times), behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run the world’s most powerful intelligence agency.
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