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:
“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn’t have invented The New York Review of Books.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)