In August 1953, a CIA officer with a shrinking budget and a paid crowd of Tehran street toughs brought down the government of Iran in a single afternoon. A year later, in Guatemala, the agency did it again — not with an army, but with a fake radio station broadcasting a war that was mostly fiction. Within a decade, the CIA had also tapped Soviet communication cables from a tunnel dug beneath East Berlin, flown reconnaissance aircraft over Soviet territory from an altitude no missile could reach, and launched a full-scale invasion of Cuba that collapsed within three days.
THE DECLASSIFIED FILES, Vol lII: CIA Cold War Operations traces five covert operations — Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Berlin Tunnel (1954-56), the U-2 program, and the Bay of Pigs (1961) — using only declassified government records, congressional investigations, and documented historical scholarship. Each chapter follows the same structure: the scene on the ground, the political context that made the operation possible, what actually happened, what the declassified evidence shows, the outcome, and — critically — where the popular version of events departs from the documented one.
This volume is for readers who want the real history behind the spy novels: sourced, endnoted, and built entirely from the public record.
