Victor Marchetti, ex-CIA author, 88
Victor Marchetti, a high-ranking CIA officer who grew disillusioned and co-wrote a best-selling book in the 1970s about the agency’s inner workings, resulting in a legal battle over wether the CIA could censor the writings of its past employees, died Oct. 19 at his home in Ashburn, Va. He was 88.
He had complications from dementia, his son Chris Marchetti said.
Mr. Marchetti joined the CIA in 1955, after a college interview with a mysterious figure who had two missing fingers. Mr. Marchetti thought he had found his spiritual and professional home.
“I was going to be a mysterious person — adventurous, romantic, living in foreign countries,” he told The Washington Post in 1971.
He rose in the agency’s ranks, with laudatory performance evaluations. He became an intelligence analyst who specialized in Soviet military affairs and by 1968 was executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, Rufus Taylor.
A year later, Mr. Marchetti resigned for “personal reasons.”
“Sitting up there I began to see how it’s all pulled together, the interplay with the rest of the executive branch of the government,” he told The Post. “The agency is the most romantic segment of the intelligence community, but I began to lose faith in it and its purpose, in intelligence in general.”
In 1971, he published a novel, “The Rope-Dancer,” which portrayed an inept “National Intelligence Agency” whose director was a spy for the Soviet Union. The CIA grew concerned that Mr. Marchetti had gone rogue.
At the time, revelations were emerging about clandestine wars, secret airlines and CIA manipulation of international rebellions and coups. With his inside knowledge, Mr. Marchetti wrote a nonfiction manuscript, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” with former State Department intelligence officer John Marks. They described what they considered an agency that had too much money and not enough supervision.
CIA officers are required to sign an agreement that any books or articles they write about espionage, whether fact or fiction, must be cleared by the agency beforehand. When Mr. Marchetti and Marks submitted their book to the CIA for review, it came back with demands that 339 passages be removed for compromising national security.
The authors and their publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, supported by the legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit. They charged that the CIA was improperly imposing “prior restraint” before publication and therefore violating the First Amendment right of freedom of the press.
Over time, the CIA’s lawyers relented on about half of their suggested changes. When the book was published in 1974, it contained 168 blank sections marked with the word “Deleted.”