123. Douglas Valentine: How the CIA is Organized and Operates

TrineDay: The Journey Podcast

Publisher R. A. “Kris” Millegan recently spoke with Douglas Valentine, the author of six books of historical nonfiction.

THE HOTEL TACLOBAN
THE PHOENIX PROGRAM: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam
THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs
THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA
THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World,

… and the new TrineDay book, PISCES MOON: The Dark Arts of Empire (which is also a memoir), available at TrineDay dot com and the usual sellers.

Doug has also written a novel and a book of poems and is the editor of the poetry anthology WITH OUR EYES WIDE OPEN: Poems of the New American Century.

Doug: “There’s nothing mystical about the kind of people who run the CIA. They’re the kind of people who just want to kind of grab what you have and take it for themselves. They have for many years hired the best and the brightest, guys from Harvard and Yale who are organizational geniuses, who know how to bureaucratize systems – the kind now in place that determine where we go – yet they also know how to insulate those systems from the rest of us.”