Talbot's book is top notch, if you've read it you have a huge head start. I haven't read "The Mighty Wurlitzer", so thank you for the addition to the "to read"

Talbot's book is top notch, if you've read it you have a huge head start. I haven't read "The Mighty Wurlitzer", so thank you for the addition to the "to read" list. I would probably suggest Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World". Another more superficial but still useful one is "The Brothers". To understand the OSS-MI6 connection, I like to suggest Carrol Quigleys "The Anglo-American Establishment", and for particulars about things you devolve into certain authors, the list is long, but an example would be Doug Valentine's work about Operation Phoenix. For a more unorthodox look into the Bush connection, the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush by Webster Tarpley is quite illuminating about the Brown Brothers Harriman stuff. The point I made previously still stands though. Some of these are really good books (and we just barely scratched the surface) but I have found that there is no "one great book" that explains the history or current state of things. I tend to lean these days towards thinking much of the abuses are due to the 1947 NatSec act. For the other commenter, I would like to specify that my point is that the compartmentalization is abused just to that purpose (so that the middle men who have good intentions can be used in ways beyond their understanding that they would not like if they understood), combined with a top down series of compromise operations... that's the main weakness in such a compartmentalized but centralized structure.