Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA
In 1975, the author, a lawyer working for the U.S. Customs Service, applied—pretty much on a whim—to join the CIA. This fascinating memoir takes us through Rizzo’s three-decade-long career as a CIA lawyer, a career that has included being the liaison between Congress and the CIA during the Iran-Contra affair and becoming an international celebrity—not that he sought such notoriety—through his involvement with the so-called torture tapes, recordings of the alleged torture of an al-Qaeda operative, which were destroyed amid great controversy by the agency. Rizzo’s intimate knowledge of the company’s post-9/11 activities makes his book must reading for today’s political junkies, but he had been with the agency more than 25 years before the 2001 terror attacks, and his portrait of the CIA from the 1970s through the ’90s is fascinating on its own terms, portraying an intelligence organization that was dealing with internal strife and trying to decide how to adapt to stricter new regulations, even as the world was growing into a darker, more frightening place. As insider looks go, this one is about as close-up as you can get. --David Pitt