“This is an invaluable book, a breathtaking investigative account of America’s vast new secret world…. It offers an indispensable guide to anyone who worries about the explosive growth of what the authors call America’s terrorism-industrial complex since September 11…. Priest and Arkin explain better than Congress ever has the staggering waste and ineptitude that inevitably have followed.”
—Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times
“Ambitious… Top Secret America makes the team’s investigations available in detail to those of us who live beyond the Beltway…. Since Priest and Arkin themselves lack security clearances, part of the interest of their book is how they acquired so much secret information.”
—Richard Rhodes, Washington Post
“The authors’ report is mind-boggling… necessary and impressively thorough.”
—Ronald Goldfarb, Washington Lawyer
“One of the many strengths of Top Secret America is that Priest and Arkin take nothing for granted. They ask basic, even faux-naïve questions about the purpose, accountability, and effectiveness of the acronym soup of covert programs, companies, and Pentagon commands created or expanded after September 11. Their analysis is neither naïve about the threat posed by al-Qaeda and similar groups, nor credulous about the generals, spies, and bureaucrats who have so dramatically expanded the country’s defenses in response to September 11.”
—Steve Coll, New York Review of Books
“Priest and Arkin fully flesh out how the Byzantine security maze actually works, breaking down its components…. The authors’ arguments are compelling.”
“Despite the sobering subject matter, Top Secret America makes for lively reading. It is full of the authors’ remarkable insights, anecdotes and encounters.”
—Steven Aftergood, Secrecy Blog of the Federation of American Scientists
“An important book…. Priest and Arkin… blow the whistle on how, since 9/11 and the adoption of the Patriot Act, the government and its contractors use classification and security screens to conceal expenditures that have failed to enhance national security.”
—Publishers Weekly
“As carefully documented by Priest and Arkin in their new book…. no one—not even the government itself—has any real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; and worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.”
—Chip Pitts, Madison.com