The Secret Team, L. Fletcher Prouty's expose of the CIA's brutal methods of maintaining national security during the Cold War, was first published in the 1970s. However, virtually all copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, having been purchased en masse by shady "private buyers." Certainly, Prouty's allegations--such as how the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower-Khrushchev talk--cannot have pleased the CIA. The Secret Team appears once more with a new introduction by Jesse Ventura.

Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the former CIA operative known as "X," offers a history-shaking perspective on the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. His theories were the basis for Oliver Stone's controversial movie JFK. Prouty believed that Kennedy's death was a coup d'etat, and he backs this belief up with his knowledge of the security arrangements at Dallas and other tidbits that only a CIA insider would know (for example, that every member of Kennedy's cabinet was abroad at the time of Kennedy's assassination). His discussion of the elite power base he believes controlled the...