A CIA apologia

...Meyer's overview of these troubles is uncritical...

...Meyer got into a free-wheeling bureaucracy that gave him the challenge and full play for his energies that the peace movement had earlier...

...Some suggest that calamity darkened him, making him susceptible to paranoia...

...Meyer spent his early career at CIA funding largely leftist student and other organizations abroad and directing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty...

...And in such a bureaucracy hate paid...

...Robert W. Smith (Robert W. Smith, a Washington freelance writer, was a CIA researcher for almost twenty-five years...

...Edward Thomas, the fine British poet killed in 1917, once warned a friend: "As you get older, don't go cozy...

...His book, Facing Reality, is partly autobiography and partly an analysis of the CIA's role in the world today...

...His short story of the incident, "Waves of Darkness," published in The Atlantic, is fine on foxhole, night, and fear and even better on its love and pity at man's stupidity when faced with war...

...In looking into the Soviet abyss he neglected the Zennist advice, "Be careful what you hate, because you become what you hate...

...the CIA is served up roseate...

...Such projects probably didn't test his liberalism much, but as he moved up to become deputy in the CIA directorate of plans in 1967 he was forced to jettison old beliefs...

...True, tragedy tailed him (one of his sons was killed in an automobile accident in 1956, and his first wife was murdered while hiking in 1964), but tragedy can as easily turn a person the other way...

...Facing Reality shows how Meyer changed from a starry-eyed one-world idealist to a neo-Cold War warrior, but it doesn't tell us why...

...Presidents, who order devious actions such as Chile, Meyer believes, are at fault, not CIA directors who merely follow orders...

...Popularly known as the "department of dirty tricks," the directorate of plans was the controversial element charged with the conduct of covert actions abroad and the cause of many of the CIA's recent problems...

...abused on assassination charges, and its antiwar activity neither massive nor not clearly illegal at the time it was done...

...When he was a young Marine officer on Guam in 1944, Cord Meyer was blinded in one eye and almost killed by a Japanese grenade...

...Since retirement from the CIA in 1977, Meyer has become a syndicated columnist, retailing in graceless prose (he has lost the sense of style evident in "Waves of Darkness") a paranoid view of international affairs...

...If you try to explain sex to a bright seven-year-old boy he will understand the procedures, but he will still wonder why...

...After some success, the Federalists foundered, and a worsening Cold War took Meyer along with many liberals into the CIA in 1951...

...He finds the agency clean on Watergate...

...Gifted and intelligent, he competed well and was rewarded...

...He argues that these efforts benefited all parties concerned except the communists and were more effectively performed under CIA aegis than they would have been if operated by the slower-moving normal Government bureaucracy...

...After helping to write the charter of the United Nations, he became president of the United World Federalists...

...Goaded by his own experience and the subsequent death of his twin brother on Okinawa, after discharge Meyer went the whole lamb for pacifism...

...He omits unpleasant facts like the Frank Snepp case in which the Supreme Court divested Snepp of more than $100,000 in royalties for not clearing with the agency his unclassified book critical of the CIA role in Vietnam, and he fails to mention the Phoenix assassination programs and other monsters...

...But he got cozy...

...Two years later he was almost fired because of McCarthyist allegations but managed to hang on...