Tag Archive for Covert Action

Transcript of 1968 Council on Foreign Relations Secret Meeting on the Theory of CIA Covert Action

A transcript of a private meeting held in 1968 in the New York Pratt House of the Council on Foreign Relations. The meeting was attended by a number of prominent members of the early U.S. intelligence community, including Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles. The transcript was reportedly discovered by Vietnam War protesters who occupied a building in 1971 housing Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. One of the attendees of the secret meeting, William Harris, served as an associate to the Center for International Affairs and this transcript was found in his personal files. The transcript was published in full in the 1974 book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” by Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State. The meeting transcript is described in the book as the “most complete description of the CIA’s covert-action strategy and tactics ever made available to the outside world.”