Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Tell me about your first book, Evan Thomas’s The Very Best Men.
This is about the four people who were recruited into the predecessor of the CIA during WWII and how they were brought back in when the organisation was recreated in 1947 to resurrect their wartime successes. The idea was that the CIA would act as a warning signal, as the dog that barked before the attack so that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. They were to use wartime actions in peacetime. What they got up to was fairly murky at times.
Is that murkier than the kinds of things they are up to now?
Who could possibly say. I could not possibly say.
What kinds of people were these four?
Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald all came from privileged backgrounds, upper-class social circles, which was how they got to know each other and how they became involved with the government. During the war one of them was in the Far East and one was with us in London, but they were all trying to swing the course of the war. Now we’d frown upon a lot of what they did – there was a fair amount of corruption and bribery.
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Dr Michael S Goodman is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He teaches on the MA programme Intelligence and International Security, and has published widely in the field of intelligence history and scientific intelligence, including Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2008) and, more recently, Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2009). He is series editor for Intelligence and Security for Hurst/Columbia University Press and is currently on secondment to the Cabinet Office where he is the official historian of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
