The Third Arm

CIA’s Secret Operations By Harry Rositzke Reader’s Digest Press, 296 pp., $12.95 Under normal circumstances, a book jacket blurb by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a warning signal: Beware of Contents. However, in the case of Harry Rositzke’s CIA’s Secret Operations, one may safely and happily ignore the warning, for it is by far the best written and most authentic book on the CIA I have ever read.

Rositzke and I were CIA colleagues for more than two decades. I remember him as a provocative lecturer and conversationalist, a man of broad academic knowledge coupled with deep, current awareness of the world conditions against which CIA was required to operate. So I confess to a predisposition to accept his version of events that occurred during his career. In fact, many of the incidents he describes in detail I knew of either first-hand or collaterally, and as I read his book I found myself nodding like a veritable codger and muttering, “Uh-huh, just so. That’s the way I remember it. That’s how it was.” For the book is—like Rositzke’s own long and dedicated professional career—a felicitous blend of intelligence-philosophy and intelligence operations, and the author has not refrained from describing CIA failures as well as some mitigating successes.

EH

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E. Howard Hunt

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CIA’s Secret Operations By Harry Rositzke Reader’s Digest Press, 296 pp., $12.95 Under normal circumstances, a book jacket blurb by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is a warning signal: Beware of Contents. However, in the case of Harry Rositzke’s CIA’s Secret Operations, one may safely and happily ignore the warning, for it is by far the best written and most authentic book on the CIA I have ever read.

Rositzke and I were CIA colleagues for more than two decades. I remember him as a provocative lecturer and conversationalist, a man of broad academic knowledge coupled with deep, current awareness of the world conditions against which CIA was required to operate. So I confess to a predisposition to accept his version of events that occurred during his career. In fact, many of the incidents he describes in detail I knew of either first-hand or collaterally, and as I read his book I found myself nodding like a veritable codger and muttering, “Uh-huh, just so. That’s the way I remember it. That’s how it was.” For the book is—like Rositzke’s own long and dedicated professional career—a felicitous blend of intelligence-philosophy and intelligence operations, and the author has not refrained from describing CIA failures as well as some mitigating successes.