Quadrillion 1999 (UK)
ISBN 1-84100-139-2
Hardback edition

Paranoid nonsense, perhaps, but it's the sort of conspiracy theory that breeds like a foot-and-mouth outbreak in the dark, clammy atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion that has surrounded the Central Intelligence Agency since its inception in 1947. The fact that some of the more bizarre stories about the CIA have turned out to be substantially true is only grist to the rumour mill.

The CIA Files: Secrets Of "The Company" is a glossy, large-format trawl through CIA misdeeds over the years, its profuse illustrations and occasionally lighthearted tone enhancing, rather than masking, the author's fundamentally serious intent. The book is short on supporting documentation, and could do with a decent bibliography (see the Parascope site for further reading), but as a primer on CIA skullduggery it's an entertaining and disturbing read.

The stories are bundled into various general themes. "The Shadow Government", for example, details various ways in which the CIA has at times operated so far beyond the pale of US and international law as to have effectively functioned as a sovereign body in its own right. Its rabid and institutional anti-communist justification for its policies, coupled with its ability to secure "hands-off" treatment from various US administrations, has prompted the CIA to overthrow governments in Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile and Panama (although not Cuba, heh heh heh!), interfere in the governance of US allies such as Australia and the UK, and drag America into wars, all without any reference to democratic controls. "The CIA's Greatest Hits", meanwhile, is a list of assassinations, including that of JFK, allegedly carried out by, or with the active assistance of, the Agency. "Through The Looking Glass" and "The Heart Of Darkness" wrap up the book with an exploration of CIA interest and initiatives in various forms of mind control.

As a veteran 60s radical, Mick Farren takes evident delight in the delicious irony that it was the CIA's own MKULTRA experiments in the early 50s with the then little-known d-LSD-25 that gave rise to the freewheeling, chaotic drug culture and antiwar movement of the 60s. Less amusing are some of the other unintended effects arising out of Company involvement in drugs. CIA support for the Afghan Mujaheddin in their war against the USSR during the 80s may have resulted in the major anti-Communist coup of the century – a Red Army withdrawal, contributing to the breakup of the Soviet Union – but it also handed the country over to a group of people with no qualm whatsoever about turning Afghanistan into the world's major supplier of opiates to Western countries. Hence the flood of smack on Western streets in the 80s and 90s.  (And the Taliban's recent condemnation of opium cultivation as "anti-Islamic", a statement normally calculated to send a chill of dread through its target audience, should be taken with a huge pinch of salt: smack's the only cash crop Afghanistan has left to sell.)

Then there are the revelations, published in a US newspaper in 1997, which accused the CIA of allowing the Contras in Nicaragua to raise funds by exporting cocaine to the US. This story has brought forth strenuous denials from the Agency's own director, no less, plus detailed rebuttals on the CIA's own website. You can even believe them if you want.

What the CIA doesn't attempt to deny is its own collusion in the overthrow of Salvador Allende's leftist government in Chile in 1973. A report on the CIA site, while denying any involvement in, or encouragement of, the actual murder of Allende, is quite matter-of-fact in its admission that the CIA's role was to destabilize the Allende regime and promote a takeover by right-wing elements – some of whom the Agency knew at the time to be ferocious abusers of human rights. These, remember, are findings which the CIA has found it impossible to avoid or excuse, beyond the lame promise that "lessons have been learned." What went on, and still goes on, in the shadows is anybody's guess.

And the one about the aliens running Earth via the New World Order? Worryingly, the CIA have refused to rebut this story on their website. I leave you with Mick Farren's disclaimer:

"The story is, of course, fantastic. The problem with immediately dismissing it as laughable is that it's set in a world where the fantastic has been proved, over and over again, to be no laughing matter."

New and second-hand copies easy to find.

Available online from Amazon.co.uk

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