Quotes from Stephen Kinzer

The Bedford Street complex was about to become something unique: a CIA "safe house" in the heart of New York to which unsuspecting citizens would be lured and surreptitiously drugged, with the goal of finding ways to fight Communism.

Some CIA officers thought of the FBI as a haven for dumb cops and ham-fisted thugs. FBI agents, returning the favor, considered CIA men amateurish prima donnas and, as one put it, "mostly rich boys, trust fund snobs who thought they were God's answer to all the world's ills.

The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.

For God's sake," one secular Afghan warned the Americans during this period, "you're financing your own assassins!

because he had such an ingrained and perhaps exaggerated faith in democracy, he did nothing to repress it.

General Federico Tinoco

Exceptionalism"—the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations—was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.

Diem complained about "all these soldiers I never asked to come here.

In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—because they were Americans.

Americans have always been idealists. They want their country to act for pure motives

From the vantage point of history, however, it is clear that most of these operations actually weakened American security. They cast whole regions of the world into upheaval, creating whirlpools of instability from which undreamed-of threats arose years later.

Nixon pressed him relentlessly, and also because the anti-Allende project fit perfectly with his view of the world and of America's place in it.

Caught up in the all-encompassing idea of their country's "manifest destiny," they convinced themselves that American influence abroad could only be positive and that anyone who rejected it must be bad.

He projected American power through regional allies like Iran, Zaire, and Indonesia, and turned a blind eye as dictators in those countries oppressed and looted with abandon.

All that this country desires is that the other republics on this continent shall be happy and prosperous," Theodore Roosevelt declared, "and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain order within their boundaries and behave with a just regard for their obligations toward outsiders.

We used to be the fucker," one of Anaconda's lawyers lamented. "Now we're the fuckee.

As Allende was trying to withstand the American campaign, he also faced intense pressure from groups of workers and peasants whose revolutionary passion he had helped to awaken.

I will not resign. I will not do it. I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own life. . . . Foreign capital—imperialism united with reaction—created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. . . . Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it will be at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.

McKinley was known above all for his inscrutability. He gave almost all the people he met the impression that he agreed with them, and rarely allowed even his closest advisers to know what he was thinking.

the idea of using the Roman Catholic clergy to turn Guatemalans against Arbenz. Catholic priests and bishops in Guatemala, as in other Latin American countries, were closely aligned with the ruling class, and they loathed reformers like Arbenz.

To resort to this action confesses the bankruptcy of our political policy vis-à-vis that country

CIA officers had already visited a mushroom-producing region of Pennsylvania and told a couple of growers that they might be asking for help producing a rare fungus. Gottlieb cautioned, however, that research into the psychoactive properties of mushrooms must "remain an Agency secret.

The image of CIA men traipsing through Mexican villages in search of a fungus that would help them defeat Communism seems outlandish in retrospect. Gottlieb, however, saw the "magic mushroom" the same way he saw LSD and every other substance he was investigating. All were potential weapons of covert war.

Munich was also the base for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, CIA-connected broadcast services that beamed news and anti-Soviet propaganda into Communist countries. Germany's foreign intelligence service, headed by the former Nazi officer Reinhard Gehlen, had its headquarters in the outlying district of Pullach.