Spooks: The Haunting of America--The Private Use of Secret Agents

POOKS probes the private use of secret agents by multinational corporations, the politically powerful, and the rich. Since the beginnings of the American intelligence community, literally thousands of spies have left federal employment to work for those industries and those individuals that are wealthy enough to afford them. Their impact on the way American business is done and life is lived has been at once profound and largely unseen. In a real sense, America has become 'haunted' by the spooks its government has trained and then turned loose on the public. Private CIAs and Mission Impossible agencies-for-hire have sprung up in virtually every major commercial center, and within most of the 'Fortune 500,' corporations as well. Unlike the CIA, these private apparats are in no way accountable to the public--only to their employers. In effect, the public has been the target of a widespread domestic intelligence operation that has been thirty years in the making and today reaches into every corner of the society. SPOOKS reveals the spooks who haunt this land: who they are, how they work, and what they've done to us. The people in this book--Ivy League bagmen, Mafiosi, mercs, wiremen, counter-intrusion specialists, counter-terrorists, and assassins with perfect manners and private jets at their disposal--are real. As are their coups d'etat organized for private profit, their surveillance 'colleges,' and their assassination devices manufactured in small shops and 'safe houses. ' In a more general way, Spooks presents some startling revelations concerning prominent figures and events This is an unprecedentedly brilliant work of investigative reporting, based on four years of research and interviews with hundreds of mercenary spies, their employers, and their victims.