John D. Marks

John D. Marks is the founder and President of Search for Common Ground, a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that focuses on international conflict management programming.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Marks#cite_note-1">[1]</a> He is also a former Foreign Service Officer of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_State" title="United States Department of State">United States Department of State</a> who co-authored the 1974 controversial non-fiction book <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_CIA_and_the_Cult_of_Intelligence" title="The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence">The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence</a> with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Marchetti" title="Victor Marchetti">Victor Marchetti</a>.

Marks worked for five years with the State Department, first in Vietnam and then as an analyst and staff assistant to the Director of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Intelligence_and_Research" title="Bureau of Intelligence and Research">Bureau of Intelligence and Research</a>. After leaving the State Department, he became Executive Assistant for foreign policy to US Senator Clifford Case (R-NJ), responsible within the Senator's office for passage of the Case-Church amendment, which eventually cut off funding for the Vietnam War.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D.Marks#cite_note-2">[2]</a> He also worked with Marchetti on a book about the need to reform the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency" title="Central Intelligence Agency">Central Intelligence Agency</a>. 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 339 passages, nearly a fifth of the book. After long negotiations the CIA yielded on 171 items. That left 168 censored passages. The publisher, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_A.Knopf" title="Alfred A. Knopf">Alfred A. Knopf</a>, decided to go ahead and publish the book with blanks for those passages, and with the sections that the CIA had originally cut then restored printed in boldface.

John D. Marks

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