cover image The Boys from Berlin: The Secret History of the CIA

The Boys from Berlin: The Secret History of the CIA

Joseph J. Trento. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $29.95 (416pp) ISBN 978-1-57098-315-3

A damning indictment of the CIA, Trento's book is based largely on conversations he had with the widely criticized James Jesus Angleton, the former CIA counterintelligence maven who has been reviled for ruining many innocent lives in his zeal to root out Soviet moles. Angleton was right--or so argues Trento in a book that by his own account ""contains Angleton's version of what happened and the evidence he had to reach those conclusions."" In the 1950s and '60s, the CIA used an operations base in Berlin as its primary training facility. The Berlin Operating Base was a prestige assignment for those anointed to form the backbone of U.S. intelligence. According to Trento (Widows, etc.), however, the German base was fatally corrupted, ruined by arrogance and infiltrated by Soviet spies. It left a legacy of venality and incompetence that spread throughout the entire agency, ultimately affecting specific operations and more sweeping errors of analysis, notably the CIA's failure to detect the imminent fall of the Soviet Union. Incompetence led to immorality, according to Trento, as the CIA developed a preference for risky, unproductive and flat-out illegal covert operations. In addition, Trento makes a case that agency blunders made possible the ascent to power of such future U.S. headaches as Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Trento writes well, and his fluid prose may lure readers into overlooking his tendency to blame every foreign policy failure of the past 50 years on the CIA. Still, this is a well-researched Molotov cocktail of a book, sure to raise hackles at Langley and to provoke spirited replies. Photos not seen by PW. (Oct.)