I did. This book tells why. The immediate reason the documents went underground was a letter from Admiral Rufus Taylor, the agency’s otherwise kindly deputy director, who intimated that the CIA would be better off without me.“Your suggestion of a board of inquiry,” he wrote, “into what you describe as past failures” would “take the time of busy people in the White House,” and would “seem to be more wasteful of time and effort than may be the very conditions you deplore … I suggest to you,” he concluded, “that if you cannot abide the decision implicit in the above, you cannot continue to consider yourself a helpful member of the intelligence team here at CIA, and should, therefore, submit your resignation.”Well, that was that: no board of inquiry. And after the damnedest set of misdeeds that U.S. intelligence had ever strung together. The letter was Admiral Taylor’s last official act. On the CIA headquarters’ seventh floor that afternoon, he shook hands with well-wishers congratulating him on his final day in the government.
