Guess what book I'll be looking for...

Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network

By Joseph J. Trento

Format: Hardcover

Pub. Date: April 2005

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"After two decades of writing about American intelligence and eight years of unprecedented research, Joseph Trento has written the authoritative expose of CIA splinter groups and their private intelligence network. America began to experience the result of this reckless intermingling of intelligence with business and politics on the morning of September 11, 2001, a legacy which continues to play out in today's headlines." "Trento reveals the history of a corrupt group of spymasters - led by Ted Shackley - who were marginalized during Jimmy Carter's presidency, but who maintained their intelligence portfolio, using their contacts to effectively create a private intelligence network. After this rogue group helped engineer Carter's electoral defeat in 1980, they began implementing a further agenda. Allied with William Casey and George H. W. Bush, these former CIA men helped plan and conduct the arms-for-hostages plan that became the Iran-Contra scandal and, through the Saudis, allied the United States with extreme elements in Islam. Trento shows how the CIA's number-one front man, Edwin P. Wilson, was framed by Shackley and his cohorts so that Wilson's operations could be taken over. For the first time the story of how former CIA director George H. W. Bush was recruited into this network, and brought it into the bosom of the Saudi Royal Family, is told in great detail. Most shocking of all is how this group's manipulation of the CIA bureaucracy allowed Osama bin Laden's fundraising to thrive, as al Qaeda flourished under Saudi and CIA protection." The blowback from their reckless actions has been nothing less than 9/11 and the prospect of unending threats of attack our nation now faces.