John D. Marks

John D. Marks is a former officer of the United States Department of State who co-authored the 1974 controversial non-fiction political book "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" with Victor Marchetti.

Marks worked for five years with the State Department as an analyst and staff assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. After leaving the State Department he worked with Marchetti on a book about the need to reform the Central Intelligence Agency. "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" was completed in 1973. CIA officials read the manuscript and told Marchetti and Marks that they had to remove 399 passages, nearly a fifth of the book. After long negotiations the CIA yielded on 171 items. That left 168 censored passages. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, decided to go ahead and publish the book with blanks for those passages, and with the sections that the CIA had originally cut but then restored printed in boldface. The publication of Marchetti's censored book raised concerns about the way the CIA was censoring information. It led to investigative reports by Seymour Hersh in "The New York Times" and the decision by Frank Church to establish the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in 1975. The report, "Foreign and Military Intelligence", was published in 1976.

Marks later became a fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics and an associate of the Harvard Negotiation Project and director of the Nuclear Network in Washington.

Bibliography

*"The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence" (1973)
*"The CIA File" (1976)
*"The Search for the Manchurian Candidate" (1991)
*"Our Context" (2002)