The CIA's Secret Operations; Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action

New York, New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1977. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xxx, [2], 286, [2] pages. Introduction. Author's Preface, Occasional footnotes. Index. A few ink marks to text noted. Some edge soiling. Harry Rositzke was an author, teacher, scholar and spy who for 25 years ran Central Intelligence Agency covert operations against the Soviet Union from Munich, New Delhi, New York and Washington. Mr. Rositzke wrote books about the CIA and the KGB, taught at Harvard University, and, during the Cold War, directed the parachuting of espionage agents into the Ukraine region of the Soviet Union. His books include "The CIA's Secret Operations" (1977) and "The KGB: The Eyes of Russia" (1981). Mr. Rositzke was a veteran of World War II duty with the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor in espionage to the CIA. He volunteered in 1946 to monitor the intelligence operations of the Soviet Union, a major wartime ally against Nazi Germany. In the OSS, he had been chief of military intelligence in London and Paris, and later chief of the steering division in Germany, where he operated out of a former sparkling-wine factory near Wiesbaden. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who became an aide to President John F. Kennedy and a presidential scholar, was one of Mr. Rositzke's OSS colleagues. It came to him as no surprise that Mr. Rositzke opted for a career in intelligence after the war. He wrote "War had made him a professional. Peace evidently offered him a scope for analysis and action on questions more urgent... " This book lets readers see for themselves what the CIA has been doing to detect and to counter Soviet intentions during the Cold War and in the years of detente. As the CIA station chief in New Delhi from 1957 to 1962, Mr. Rositzke's espionage targets were Soviets, Chinese and Tibetans. He lunched monthly with his resident counterpart from the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence arm, and he also developed a working relationship with John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's ambassador to India, who was deeply suspicious of the CIA.
Later in the 1960s, he worked on the recruitment by the CIA of Soviet diplomats in Washington and New York and began to focus on terrorism and wars of national liberation. He retired from the CIA in 1970 as chief of the international communism unit. Espionage, he would argue, had a useful role in the maintenance of political order. In all, Mr. Rositzke wrote five books about Soviet affairs, the CIA and the KGB, most of which were intended to supply information for the 1970s public debate that accompanied disclosure of such covert CIA operations as assassination plots and the drugging of people without their knowledge or consent. By this time, Mr. Rositzke's thinking was at variance with the standard political posture of the Cold Warriors of earlier times. Schlesinger described this in his preface to "Secret Operations," as "his skeptical portrait of the 'Cold War mentality,' his conviction that Moscow's postwar strategy was basically defensive, his observations about 'the myth of a communist monolith' and his unsparing critique of the 'military mindedness' of the containment policy." Derived from a Kirkus Review: A series of judgments on the CIA, interspersed with anecdotes, by a 1946-1970 Agency official involved in espionage, counterespionage, and covert operations. Rositzke writes that the CIA became "overstretched" during the Cold War. First the agency allegedly concentrated on developing a warning capability against Soviet military attack, but it soon turned into "an all-purpose action instrument for secretly executing presidential policies" when, in the early 1950s, the USSR launched an "open and covert offensive against the US and Europe." Rositzke and his agents had considerable success recruiting spies, planting and "turning" Eastern diplomats and Communist Party functionaries, and redeploying double agents. But the paramilitary side was an "almost uniform failure": this includes an attempt to overthrow the Albanian government as well as the agency's involvement in lndochina. Rositzke dismisses the recent charges against the CIA as an "exercise in absurdity" which could only aid the Soviet KGB; he also insists that, since the CIA always follows executive orders, it is being made a "fall guy." His recommendations: end our "defensive strategy" of "containment," use "economic power," divide intelligence work from a new, small "secret service," and remember, this is "not a moral world." Rositzke was an important participant and is this an important book.