The Book
This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated,
and continue to generate, blowback – a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood
that US covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations
against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.
During the first year after its publication, Blowback was largely ignored in the US.
Few of the mainstream book reviews took any notice of it, and the house organ of the
Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, wrote that “Blowback reads like a comic
book.” Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere in the world was somewhat
different. The book was quickly translated into German, Italian, and Japanese, and the
foreign news editor of Der Spiegel even flew to California to interview Johnson.
Domestic lack of interest changed dramatically after September 11, 2001.
The book was reprinted eight times in less than two months and became an
underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to, or at least desperate
to know about, some of the realities of the world in which they lived.
Actions that generate blowback are normally kept totally secret from the American public
and from most of their representatives in Congress. The American people may not know
what is done in their name, but those on the receiving end surely do – including the people
of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964),
Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1961-73),
Greece (1967-74), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to present), El Salvador,
Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to present),
to name only the most obvious cases.
