America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps

by Ian Sayer, Douglas Botting

Describes the activities of the Army's spycatching unit from the early days of World War II to the Cold War era, when it was merged with the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps

Genres: Military Fiction, Nonfiction, History

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Sayer

Reviews

[Wizzard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense military history that gets repetitive at times. I'd like the book better if it were perhaps 2/3d the length, you can get the gist of the role of the CIC by the time you've read the first two chapters. Nonetheless, in light of the controversy at Guantanamo Bay and given the current occupation of Iraq, the book's covering of US occupation and intelligence policies puts today's current events in context. This telling of military history focuses on the institution of the CIC, so people and places and identities zoom by in a blur. Still, You learn a lot from the patriotic perspective of world war two and subsequent events.

[Nog · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not exactly a book many people would be interested in. I was, because my father was pressed into CIC service after commanding an anti-aircraft battery in the U.S. Ninth Army in early 1945. Just before the German surrender in May, he was tasked with maintaining a DP (displaced persons) camp of 600 people, tracking down Gestapo and SD agents, and governing 3 villages in central Germany. He never talked much about it, so I read this book to get a better feel for what it was like. Basically, the book is rather poorly written and depends on the authors' cobbling together CIC agent accounts and information from the National Archives. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of alternative histories on the subject.