Patrick G. Eddington

Long Strange Journey: an Intelligence Memoir Patrick G. Eddington

January 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of Operation Desert Storm, as well as two decades of continuous American military involvement in the Persian Gulf region. A number of questions about that first Gulf War and its consequences have never been answered. Why was President George H. W. Bush so surprised that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? Did America?s intelligence community fail to warn him of the threat, or did he ignore their predictions of an invasion? Why did the CIA and the Pentagon deny so vehemently for so long that sick Desert Storm veterans were exposed to Iraq?s chemical agents? Patrick G. Eddington tackles these and other questions in Long Strange Journey: An Intelligence Memoir, which details his career as a military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1988 to 1996. Long Strange Journey is a first-person account of the high-tech, space-based side of the intelligence business. Although President Carter first revealed the existence of our imagery spy satellites nearly 30 years ago, no analyst who has used those systems has written a book on the topic and got it past CIA censors until now. Eddington?s tenure at the CIA spanned the transition from the Cold War to the new era of American interventionism in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. The book draws upon not only his direct experience reporting on these events for senior government policy makers, but also upon thousands of pages of previously classified documents secured through litigation he pursued during the last decade.