USA: AFIO – Association of Former Intelligence Officers – And the Books they wrote…

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This is an interesting organisation that I came across years ago when I was running AfricanCrisis. The book of interest and the author of interest is Dr Richard Cummings: The Pied Piper. AFIO has about 5,000 members who were intelligence officers in the various US services.

Here is the full write up from wikipedia about them:

The Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), formerly known as the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers is a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization founded in 1975 by David Atlee Phillips to counter widespread criticism of the United States intelligence community coming from the media and the U.S. Congress. It is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity and sees its primary mission as educational. The AFIO has 5,000 members in 24 active chapters. Full membership is limited to current and former professional intelligence officers who served within the United States intelligence community. AFIO also offers an “associate” membership to the general public if one supports its principles and abides by its code of ethics.

Here is the link to the AFIO website: https://www.afio.com/

AFIO store: https://www.afio.com/26_store.htm

Books by AFIO Authors is here: https://www.afio.com/25_bookreviews.htm

Near the bottom it has this. Take special note of the claim: The Untold story of the CIA’s role in defeating Apartheid. Dr Cummings is a member of AFIO, and I think at the time that I was interested in his book, he headed this organisation. So he had to have been an Intelligence Officer in the past. This is a very important point we will return to.

The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream

by Richard Cummings, Publisher: InPrint.com 2000 ISBN 0-9673514-1-3. The story of Allard Lowenstein’s life, both in intelligence and in American politics and social movements, deals with the impact of the Cold War on American liberalism and it relationship to the CIA. The untold story of the CIA’s role in defeating apartheid in South Africa while preventing a Communist takeover, shows Lowenstein in a new light; a hero of freedom and democracy.