I would have to disagree with the view that this book is an introduction. As someone who knows very little about the CIA, I almost felt like an outsider peeking into stories that had already begun or were told by someone who was intimately familiar with the agency. As the reviewer Wittmann’s Revenge put it, “I bought this book thinking I (sic) would get a good overall view of the CIA and some of the good and the bad,” or L. Troy Beals, “One would need to read deeper into the historiography to get a better picture of the history of the CIA.”Publishers Weekly does a good and thorough review of this book, but you may also be interested in reading the review from Donald Mitchell, C. Matthew Curtin, roland A. Alum, Jr., and though it seemed a bit overly harsh, you may find the comments by Sam Clemens worth reading as well. However, some of the criticisms of Sam Clemens are countered by at least one other reviewer.Reading the comments of these reviewers made me think of my own experience with reading the book. For starters, many claim that Joseph Trento portrays everyone in the CIA as an alcoholic, a philanderer, or an idiot. It’s been a while since I read this book and though I do vaguely remember that some of the details were rather scandalous, in a way, that was actually part of the appeal to this book. Nevertheless, I do think some of the claims those reviewers have made about that aspect are a bit exaggerated.On a more critical note, and one that nobody seems to have brought up directly are hints of a bias against the military. This first caught my attention when I read, “The Pentagon refuses to give up control of billions of dollars in intelligence money.”Another aspect I want to share with you (that I haven’t seen in other comments) is the tone of the writing. The book contains 57 chapters and though I don’t know much about the author, Joseph Trento, at least once I questioned whether or not he had written them all himself. For example, the chapter, “Blood and Judgment” seems to be a bit of a departure from the other chapters in terms of the tone.I agree with other reviewers that the time period was not always clear to me as I read this. One sentence begins, “Several years later, …” leaving me to wonder “several years later” from what? The book also has other instances that left me wondering what was meant. Some examples include “This had a profound effect on Angleton” (p. 324), “Of all the local opponents, the Binh Xuyen was the most dangerous to Diem“ (p. 331), “… Korry turned him down” (p. 370), and “James Schlesinger, Helms’s replacement as director, was one of the most disliked men in the history of the CIA” (p. 408). To all of these, I asked myself, “Why?” or “How so?”Focusing on just the content of the book itself, I found it surprising that some CIA personnel were treated so indispensably and others so inconsequentially with nothing overwhelmingly supportive for the logic behind either.Apart from that, the book has many interesting sections. The chapter “A Missed Chance” includes some perspective on the more “interesting” aspects of collection versus the importance of more mundane types of collection and how each was rewarded (or not) in the early days of the CIA. The chapter “Igor and the Ladies” and its description of the attempts to blackmail the Russians was somewhat amusing. And the chapter, “Losing Vietnam” ends with what I would call an account of poetic INjustice.One last thing might be beneficial for you to know. The description of the book that you find on Amazon (not the book jacket for the version of the book I own) mentions that numerous photos are included. My version only had 26 photos and while they were great photos that are not likely to be found elsewhere, many of them are of the Orlov family [as in the Soviet double agent Igor Orlov (a.k.a. Alexsander Kopatzky)], the Weisz family (as in George Weisz, the Hungarian who recruited Nazi scientists while working for the Soviets), and photos related to them. For someone not familiar with the CIA or the more than 600 names mentioned in this book of 598 pages, it would have been helpful to have just a few more photos. So, I took it upon myself to put together a presentation with some of the more frequently mentioned names in the book. If you’re interested in buying this book, but, like me, haven’t spent a great deal of time reading about the history of the CIA, it may be of benefit to you prior to reading the book. You can link to the slide show presentation here: [...]