The Company's Wars: The CIA's Secret Coups, Plots, and Cold War Operations

When the CIA was created in 1947, it was designed to gather intelligence. Within a year, it was overthrowing governments. Over the next forty years, the Central Intelligence Agency — known inside the intelligence community simply as 'The Company' — would conduct operations of breathtaking ambition and moral complexity across the globe: toppling the elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala, training the Cuban exile brigade that failed at the Bay of Pigs, plotting the assassinations of foreign leaders, running a secret army in Laos, funding the Contras in Nicaragua, and arming the Afghan mujahideen whose successors would attack the World Trade Center. The Company's Wars: The CIA's Secret Coups, Plots, and Cold War Operations is the definitive account of the Agency's covert action program during the Cold War. Drawing on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and the memoirs of participants, this book reconstructs the full sweep of the CIA's secret history: the successes, the disasters, the moral compromises, and the blowback that American foreign policy is still managing today. Authoritative, gripping, and essential, this is the story of what America did in secret — and what it cost.