Christopher Wright of Columbia University wrote that the book argues "that to a significant extent major policies of the United States in the cold war [sic] are established and implemented with the help of government mechanisms and procedures that are invisible to the public and seem to lack the usual political and budgetary constraints on their activities and personnel.
"[1] The New York Times described the book as "a journalistic, dramatic narrative that may move us toward a fundamental reappraisal of where secret operations fit into a democratic nation.
Although there were rare exceptions, such as that of Richard and Gladys Harkness's pieces in the Saturday Evening Post in 1954 detailing that the CIA was involved in coups in Iran nd Guatemala, these were framed as defensive and reacting to Soviet plots.
Another book on the CIA in this time period, which the agency acquired a manuscript of, was a history of the Bay of Pigs by Haynes Johnson after interviewing Cuban exiles who fought in the invasion and freed by Castro for food and medical supplies; in spite of its criticism of the handling of the Bay of Pigs, the manuscript still overall supported the CIA's role in US national security.
[7] Historian Simon Willmetts would later argue that The Invisible Government was "one of the two or three most important books ever written about the CIA", stating that the book was released at a time that let it help shape attitudes about the agency and US foreign policy while booming a "key text" for students protesters and the nascent anti-war movement; later, he argued, the book helped influence later conspiracy theorists as "a foundational text in the evolution of a narrative about US government secrecy that would eventually metastasize into the ‘deep state’ narrative of unaccountable federal bureaucracies run amok", but also, Willmetts states, that was a situation where "[p]ropagandists, politicians and conspiracy theorists exaggerated The Invisible Government’s eponymous thesis for their own purposes.