t r u t h o u t - Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran with Will Pitt

t r u t h o u t - Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran with Will Pitt: " Interview: 27-Year CIA Veteran by Will Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Thursday 26 June 2003

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, serving seven Presidents. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington.

-------

PITT: Could you give me some background regarding who you are and what work you did with the CIA?

McG: I was a graduate student in Russian studies when I got interested in the Central Intelligence Agency. I was very intrigued that there was one central place to prevent what happened at Pearl Harbor from happening again. I had been commissioned in the US Army, so I needed to do my two years service there, but wound up down in Washington DC. I took a job with the CIA in 1963, and it was what it was made out to be.

In other words, I was told that if I were to come on as an analyst of Soviet foreign policy, when I sat down in the morning, in my In-Box would be a bunch of material from open sources, from closed sources, from photography, from intercepts, from agent reports, from embassy reports, you name it. It would be right there, and all I had to do was sift th"