BLOND GHOST: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades

by David Corn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

Nation Washington editor Corn delves thoroughly and with gusto into the career of Ted Shackley, one of the more shadowy CIA agents of the Cold War period. Shackley was the child of a broken home; his mother sent him to live with an older woman -- probably his grandmother -- who bequeathed him his fluent Polish, a skill that landed him his first counterintelligence job in postwar Berlin. An intense but informed and intelligent patriot, he entered the CIA in 1951, only four years after the agency's inception. His career, therefore, mirrors the development and fortunes of the agency itself. Shackley ran the CIA station in Miami, providing intelligence to higher-ups in Washington who were orchestrating assassination attempts on Castro (Shackley claims he was unaware of the assassination operation); he was in Laos to organize the covert war against the Pathet Lao; he was in Vietnam, where he served as CIA station chief in Saigon, earning the nickname ""Blond Ghost."" (In 1975, back in the States, as he watched TV images of the embassy evacuation, his 11-year-old daughter found him weeping -- a rare moment of emotion for a man portrayed here as cold, balanced, and ruthless.) Corn sounds a note of recrimination throughout this biography, which somewhat unfairly lays at Shackley's door such fiascos as the posting by an agency employee of a CIA-forged letter from a Thai Communist rebel to the Thai government in an attempt to foster divisions within that country's left (it was traced back to the CIA and caused a storm of anti-American protest in Thailand). The book might have benefited from more of the perspective of Shackley himself, who consented only to one grudging and unreflective three-hour interview. By his own admission, Corn has used Shackley's career to open a window into the world of intelligence, and his fairly absorbing book succeeds more as an account of the CIA's workings in general than as a portrait of one agent.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994

Categories: NONFICTION