Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA - Paperback

by Eric Thomas Chester (Author)

This is the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organisation founded by democratic socialists in the 1930s to help the victims of Facism in the post-World War II years, and its connections with the US intelligence community.

Back Jacket

This book tells the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest nonsectarian refugee relief agency in the world. Founded in the 1930s by socialist militants, the IRC attracted the support of renowned progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. But by the 1950s it had been absorbed into the American foreign policy establishment. Throughout the Cold War, the IRC was deeply involved in the volatile confrontations between the two superpowers and participated in an array of sensitive clandestine operations. The IRC thus evolved from a small organization of committed activists to a global operation functioning as one link in the CIA's covert network.