John D. Marks

John D. Marks is the founder and former president of Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that focuses on international conflict management programming. Marks now acts as a Senior Adviser to SFCG. He is also a former Foreign Service Officer of the U.S. Department of State and co-authored the 1974 controversial non-fiction book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence with Victor Marchetti.

Marks is a graduate of Cornell University. He worked for five years with the State Department, first in Vietnam and then as an analyst and staff assistant to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. 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. He also worked with Marchetti on a book about the need to reform the Central Intelligence Agency.

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, Alfred A. Knopf, 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.

The publication of Marchetti and Marks' censored book, which became a bestseller, raised concerns about the way the CIA was censoring information. It contributed to investigative reports by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times and the decision by Frank Church to establish the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities in 1975. The report, Foreign and Military Intelligence, was published in 1976.

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