Not Exactly the CIA: A Revised History of Modern American Disasters

by Roger Phelps

Overview

This book is a vigorous effort to answer the question, "How did we get here?"—a question that troubles virtually every American over the age of fourteen. How did America lose power in the world? How did American democracy become undermined? The press industry, who once would have been charged with answering this question, is not—according to Phelps—currently capable of doing so. Closely read, this book allows an answer to emerge to this compelling American question. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781634242592
Publisher:	Trine Day
Publication date:	02/12/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Roger Phelps is a career news reporter with an MA in Philosophy who currently does contract writing and research for law firms. His work has been published in the Sacramento Bee and the Porterville Recorder, where he was awarded an Associated Press award.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Introduction 3

Planning Years

1 The Devil's Workshop - Cabazon Indian Reservation 7

2 Shackley and the Perfect Terrorist Plan 12

3 Wackenhut and Mustard Gas 14

4 Promis 19

5 Fuel-Air Explosives 22

6 The Strategy of Terror 25

7 The Queens Accident, 1983 29

Attacks pre-911

8 Gander, 1985 34

9 Lockerbie, 1988 39

10 World Trade Center, 1993 47

11 Oklahoma City, 1995 52

12 TWA Flight 800, 1996 59

911

13 Al Qaeda, ISI, CIA 65

14 Massachusetts: Hanscom Air Force Base and MITRE 70

15 New York City and Baltimore: Deutsche Bank 77

16 Anthrax 85

Weaponized Information: A Strategy of Terror for the 21st Century

17 Against the Clintons 88

18 War on WikiLeaks 93

19 The Enablers: Kallstrom, Giuliani 98

20 Lineage of Concealment 101

21 Russian Players 107

22 Alfa Bank-Trump Towers-Spectrum Health: The Computer Connections 114

23 Marshalling the Anti-Immigration Vote 116

24 What is Arrayed Against Future US Elections? 119

Index 141

Editorial Reviews

2021-12-06
In this nonfiction book, a journalist challenges prevailing historical narratives on terrorism inside the United States.

After conducting his own independent research on U.S. campaigns against communism and terrorism from the 1950s through 2016, Phelps was “struck” by the recurring presence of “a narrow slate of actors” at the center of major events in the American psyche since World War II. In this volume, he suggests that “clandestine” acts of domestic terrorism have been performed by rogue government operatives throughout the last 40 years “for the purpose of scaring Americans into seeking security without questioning the circumstances.” Many of these individuals had past affiliations with the CIA, including men like Ted Shackley, and were purged by President Jimmy Carter in an effort to clean up the agency, but they continued to operate as an “unofficial” unit. This group, characterized as the titular “Not Exactly the CIA” (abbreviated in these pages as NE-CIA), had its hands in Iran-Contra, the Oklahoma City bombing (which it pinned on “a closely groomed fall guy,” Timothy McVeigh), TWA Flight 800, and even the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which supposedly were first conceptualized by Shackley in the 1970s. Taking Hillary Clinton’s claim of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” to its extreme, the book even argues that Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp were “assets” in an NE-CIA operation to take down the president. In more recent years, NE-CIA operations included “the War on WikiLeaks” and a plot to “manipulate immigration” to affect future elections in battleground states. Written in short, almost staccato chapters, this concise book of under 140 pages is written in a gripping style that is accompanied by ample historical photographs. But the work’s bold claims, declared as definitive truths with the passion characteristic of a devout conspiracy theorist, are backed by a relatively flimsy network of footnotes that draw on only a handful of viable sources. More historical and social contextualization, in addition to more robust research of the events detailed in the volume, would lay bare a myriad of alternative possibilities beyond the NE-CIA hypothesis.

An engaging, if unconvincing, conspiratorial take on the last half-century.

Kirkus Reviews