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Sour Belly. While he was working with community organizations, he recalls, "Eagle Scouts came around with their long hair telling me they were not going to Viet Nam. I had a hard time arguing with them. It seemed to me that the world was changing quite a bit, and neither the CIA nor the Government was changing along with it."
Disillusioned, he quit the CIA in
1969, but stayed quiet. "I didn't feel free to speak at the time," he says. "I was too well trained." Instead, he wrote a veiled expose, a novel called The Rope— Dancer, in which the head of an American intelligence agency turns out to be working for the Russians. The book was not widely noticed, but the agency communicated its displeasure to the author. Undeterred, Marchetti decided in the spring of 1972 to tell all—or almost all. An enterprising literary agent, David Obst, who is also the agent for Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (see THE PRESS) and Daniel Ellsberg, held an auction for the rights to Marchetti's book. Alfred A. Knopf
Inc. was the winner. One of the losers leaked the outline to the CIA, which considered Marchetti to be a turncoat who had developed a "sour belly" over U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.
A month later, two federal agents, whom Marchetti dubbed Marshal Dillon and Chester, appeared at his door with a temporary restraining order forbidding him to show the manuscript to the publisher until the CIA had examined it. The agency based its position on the contract restricting present or past employees from revealing anything about agency operations without first getting its consent. Marchetti phoned the American Civil Liberties Union, which went to trial on his behalf. It argued that the CIA was exercising prior restraint—preventing publication—and thereby violating the First Amendment. But the U.S. District Court Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr. ruled that the First Amendment did not apply in the case of contractual obligations. Marchetti lost on appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Almost ready to abandon his project, Marchetti met John Marks, who was working as an aide to Senator Clifford Case. Together, Marchetti and Marks revised the manuscript, with Marks contributing a section on relations between the press and the CIA. They submitted the manuscript to the agency in August 1973. It was returned with 339 deletions indicated. Some of the excisions were baffling or perhaps simply inexpertly done. Chapter 2, for example, begins with a deleted remark by Henry Kissinger. Yet another passage makes clear that he was discussing a CIA project to prevent the 1970 election of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens.