The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence — Secrecy, Power, and Systemic Failure
Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world — one book at a time.
This episode explores The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, alongside Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner — a systems-level examination of how secrecy, power, and institutional incentives shape intelligence failures.
By documenting decades of covert operations, censorship, and misjudgment, these works reveal how intelligence agencies can lose epistemic contact with reality. Rather than producing knowledge, the system increasingly rewards secrecy, action, and…
The skinny
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