AASU Professor Publishes Book on Covert Action and the Presidency

Savannah, GA—May 14, 2004—In Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency, William J. Daugherty, a seventeen-year veteran operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, addresses the perceptions about covert action that have seeped into the public consciousness.

Daugherty cites congressional investigations, declassified documents, and his own experiences in covert action policy and oversight to show convincingly that the CIA’s covert programs were conducted specifically at presidential behest from the agency’s founding in 1947. He provides an overview of the nature and proper use of covert action as a tool of presidential statecraft and discusses its role in transforming presidential foreign policy into reality. He concludes by detailing how each president conducted the approval, oversight and review processes for covert action while examining specific instances in which U.S. Presidents have expressly directed CIA covert action programs to suit their policy objectives.
A former Marine Corps aviator with a combat tour in Vietnam, Daugherty’s first tour with the CIA was in Iran, where he was one of 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days during the Carter administration. Daugherty combines unique inside perspectives with sober objectivity in judging the true nature and scope of CIA covert actions during the last half century.

Daugherty holds a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School and is associate professor of government at Armstrong Atlantic State
University. A retired senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, he is the author of In the Shadow of the Ayatollah: A CIA Hostage in Iran.

The book is foreworded by Mark Bowden, an author, journalist, screenwriter, and teacher. He is the author of a number of books, including Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War and Killing Pablo: the Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw. Bowden contributes regularly to major magazines and is an adjunct professor at Loyola College of Maryland.

Available September 2004 at the price of $32.50, the book will be featured in the fall University Press of Kentucky catalog. Additionally, the book will be given its debut during the American Political Science association meeting in September.

 

Courtesy of University Press of Kentucky