Nemesis or Venona

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Author: Chalmers Johnson

The long-awaited final volume of Chalmers Johnson's bestselling
Blowback trilogy confronts the overreaching of the American empire and the threat it poses to the republic

In his prophetic book Blowback, Chalmers Johnson linked the CIA's clandestine activities abroad to disaster at home. In The Sorrows of Empire, he explored the ways in which the growth of American militarism and the garrisoning of the planet have jeopardized our stability. Now, in Nemesis, he shows how imperial overstretch is undermining the republic itself, both economically and politically.

Delving into new areas—from plans to militarize outer space to Constitution-breaking presidential activities at home and the devastating corruption of a toothless Congress—Nemesis offers a striking description of the trap into which the dreams of America's leaders have taken us. Drawing comparisons to empires past, Johnson explores in vivid detail just what the unintended consequences of our dependence on a permanent war economy are likely to be. What does it mean when a nation's main intelligence organization becomes the president's secret army? Or when the globe's sole “hyperpower,” no longer capable of paying for the vaulting ambitions of its leaders, becomes the greatest hyper-debtor of all times?

In his stunning conclusion, Johnson suggests that financial bankruptcy could herald the breakdown of constitutional government in America—a crisis that may ultimately prove to be the only path to a renewed nation.

Library Journal

The author of Blowback is at it again, here wondering whether massive debt and global overreach will bring down the republic. First serial to Harper's. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A paean-perhaps premature, perhaps overdue-for a republic-turned-empire. For those of a blue-state bent, the midterm election of 2006 may seem to have changed things for the better. But political scientist and liberal commentator Johnson (Blowback, 2000, etc.) isn't biting. "I believe," he writes, "that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led the country into a perilous cul-de-sac, but they did not do it alone and removing them from office will not necessarily solve the problem." The problem, writ large, is the post-World War II transformation of America into a super-state served by client governments around the world whose citizens, for various reasons, may not be happy about the association. (Hence the "blowback" of which Johnson has written at length elsewhere.) Secretively seeking to further America's unacknowledged imperial aims, government officials authorize actions that do not befit a republic supposedly ruled by checks and balances. Take former CIA head William Casey, for instance, who "saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in covert actions against Soviet imperialism." It was Casey, in Johnson's assessment, who was responsible for the United States' strange-bedfellows alliance with the Islamic fundamentalists who morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Talk about blowback-but there's more, the author shows, as he examines imperious American "status of forces agreements" here; the Bush administration's mishandling of international events there; and the eerie resemblances between our time and that of Augustus Caesar. A sobering read, though Johnson offers a solution to America's imperial woes: Follow Britain's lead and jettison both empire and theworld-policeman role. Given the alternatives, it seems an idea worth exploring. Agent: Sandra Dijkstra/Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency

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Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America

Author: John Earl Haynes

This extraordinary book is the first to examine the thousands of documents of the super-secret Venona Project--an American intelligence project that uncovered not only an enormous range of Soviet espionage activities against the United States during World War II but also the Americans who abetted this effort.

Maurice Isserman

...[C]learly establishes the main contours of the previously hidden landscape of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 30s and 40s..."Espionage" is one of those words...[that] make it difficult to draw the distinctions necessary to exploring historical complexities... —The New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Those who were convinced that the Soviets were spying on us during the 1930s and 1940s were right. Haynes and Klehr have provided the most extensive evidence to date that the KGB had operatives at all levels of American society and government. Where Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassilievs The Haunted Wood (LJ 11/15/98) provided a peek at Soviet spying, Haynes and Klehr throw open the door, revealing a level of espionage in this country that only the most paranoid had dreamed of. Building on the research for their earlier books, The Secret World of American Communism (LJ 6/1/95) and The Soviet World of American Communism (Yale Univ., 1998), Haynes and Klehr describe the astonishing dimensions of spying reflected in the cable traffic between the United States and Moscow. Venona is the name of the sophisticated National Security Agency project that in 1946 finally broke the Soviet code. This is better than anything John le Carr could produce, because in this case, truth is really stranger than fiction. Highly recommended.Edward Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

The Washington Monthly - David Ignatius

...[W]hat most of us would regard as the "real" evidence is contained in Venona....Anyone who still has a shred of sentimentality about the Old Left should read their account....It's an appalling story....The authors...think Venona shows the Soviets began the Cold War earlier than anyone had realized...

The New York Times Book Review - Maurice Isserman

...[C]learly establishes the main contours of the previously hidden landscape of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 30s and 40s..."Espionage" is one of those words...[that] make it difficult to draw the distinctions necessary to exploring historical complexities...

WQ: The Wilson Quarterly - Jacob Heilbrunn

...[A]ccording to Haynes and Klehr, the Venona transcripts "expose beyond cavil the American Communist party as an auxiliary of the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union"....The implications of these findings are not trivial.....[Shatters] the fable of communist innocence in America.

Sam Tanenhaus - New Republic

Haynes and Klehr have squeezed the pulp from five thousand pages of deciphered cables that verify the grim picture of the Communist underground given many decades ago by defectors such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.

Maurice Isserman - New York Times Book Review

This book clearly establishes the main contours of the previously hidden landscape of Soviet espionage in the United States in the 30s and 40s.

Michael Barone - U.S. News & World Report

A virtual king's ransom of top-secret bombshells and bangles.

Kirkus Reviews

This first comprehensive analysis of the 3,000 telegrams between Soviet spies in the US and their superiors in Moscow, decoded shortly after WWII, may well, as the authors believe, "change the way we think about twentieth-century American history." The Venona transcripts, while revealed in part to the Soviets by agents like Kim Philby, were one of the most closely guarded US secrets, since the US didn't want the Soviets to understand the full extent of the damage they had sustained. In one of the extraordinary revelations of this book, the authors, Haynes (History/Library of Congress) and Klehr (Politics and History/Emory Univ.) note that Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley denied President Truman direct knowledge of the project for fear of a leak, while informing him of the substance of the messages. Moreover, the information could not be used in prosecutions of those guilty of espionage. The consequence was the growth of the widespread belief that the very existence of the charges were evidence of anti-Communist paranoia. The authors, who have previously written seminal analyses of Soviet activity in the US (The Soviet World of American Communism, 1998, etc.), use the decrypts to show how extensive Soviet espionage actually was. In addition to the nuclear spies and top agents like Alger Hiss, who presided at the first session of the United Nations, and Harry Dexter White, the number two at the Treasury, the transcripts identify 349 US citizens and other residents who had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence. There were 11 well-placed spies in the Treasury, 15 in OSS, many in other key departments. In fact, the authors have changed their view of the Communist Party of the US,which they conclude "was indeed a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War." The reverberations from this cool, balanced, and devastating appraisal will be heard for many years to come. (30 illustrations)