Annie Jacobsen: recommendation

Transcript context

…The placebo concept, but a lot of the sort of scientific investigations. Listen, I have such mixed feelings about the CIA, as one should. I think you should have mixed feelings about anything that you cover as a reporter or as a human, and maybe change that from mixed to conflicting, because there are really positive elements of every organization within the federal government. I mean, my first learning about the CIA came from the work I did on the Area 51 book about their aerial reconnaissance programs, which were set up again to prevent World War III, nuclear World War III. It was this idea that information was king. The U-2 spy pane was developed out at Area 51. I interviewed Hervey Stockman, the first man to fly over the Soviet Union in a U-2, gathered all this intelligence, prevented wars. Later, I wrote a book about the CIA’s paramilitary, Surprise, Kill, Vanish. Just when I was thinking, “Wow, the CIA is doing all this amazing non-kinetic activity with aerial reconnaissance, then you learn about their kill programs,” and that’s a whole different set of issues. It turns out, as you write in that book, that the CIA assassinates people sometimes, and we’ll talk about it. But anyway, like you said, conflicting feelings.…

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