After leaving the CIA, Marchetti began a writing career. His first work was a novel,
The Rope-Dancer, published in 1971. The plot involves an officer in the "National Intelligence Agency" who becomes a spy for the
Soviet Union. In a 2004 article for
American Intelligence Journal, Jon Wiant, career member of the Department of State's
Senior Executive Service and a faculty member of the Joint Military Intelligence College, reported a 1991 conversation with retired KGB General
Oleg Kalugin in which the latter told him that
Rope Dancer is assigned as required reading for every KGB officer assigned to the United States. Kalugin believed the novel was an excellent primer in American counterintelligence doctrine. Marchetti continued work on his book with a co-author,
John D. Marks, and signed a book contract with publisher
Alfred A. Knopf. In August 1973, they submitted their manuscript to the CIA. After reviewing the manuscript, the Agency responded with a list of 339 passages which it claimed contained classified information and demanded their deletion. Marchetti and Marks rejected the demand and indicated they would go to court in order to print the manuscript as written. The CIA then withdrew its objections to 171 of the items but stood firm on the remaining 168. The trial was held again before Judge Bryan. This time, however, he rejected all but 26 of the deletions requested by the CIA on the grounds that the information in them was not properly or provably classified. The CIA appealed Bryan's ruling, and ultimately the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld all 168 of the deletions. The book was published by Knopf in 1974 as
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. It was printed with blanks for deleted passages and boldface type for the 171 deletions which CIA originally requested and later withdrew.
Later writing In 1978, Marchetti published an article about the
JFK assassination in the far-right newspaper of the
antisemitic Liberty Lobby,
The Spotlight. Marchetti, a proponent of the
organized crime and the CIA conspiracy theory, claimed that the
House Select Committee on Assassinations revealed a CIA memo from 1966 that named
E. Howard Hunt,
Frank Sturgis and
Gerry Patrick Hemming in the JFK assassination. Marchetti also claimed that
Marita Lorenz offered sworn testimony to confirm this. The HSCA reported that it had not received such a memo and rejected theories that Hunt was involved in a plot to kill Kennedy. In 1981, Hunt sued the Liberty Lobby and Marchetti for
defamation and won $650,000 in damages. Liberty Lobby, represented by attorney
Mark Lane, appealed the verdict. On February 1, 1985, Marchetti stated that key parts of his articles were based upon rumors that he heard from
Penthouse columnist Bill Corson and that he had no corroboration of Corson's story. Commenting afterward, two jurors rejected that the conspiracy theories offered by Lane influenced the verdict. In 1989, Marchetti presented a paper on the CIA at the Ninth International Revisionist Conference held by the
Institute for Historical Review (IHR). which described its aim as to "document for patriotic Americans... the excess of pro-Israelism, which warps the news we see and hear from our media, cows our Congress into submission, and has already cost us hundreds of innocent, young Americans in Lebanon and elsewhere." ==Personal life and death==