Simultaneously sobering and infuriating—essential reading for those who follow the headlines.
Just when you thought the WMD debacle couldn’t get worse, here comes veteran Los Angeles Times national-security correspondent Drogin’s look at just who got the stories going in the first place.
“Clandestine operatives are trained to spread falsehoods as part of their tradecraft,” Drogin admits at the outset. The falsehoods that came from an asylum seeker in Germany may have been deliberate, schooled and carefully scripted. More likely they were the inventions of an alcoholic desperate to be believed long enough not to be deported to a land still run by Saddam Hussein. “Curveball” was recruited out of Baghdad University in 1994 to keep tabs on Hussein’s chemical-weapons program; by 1996, the CIA’s files were full of notes averring that he was developing mobile germ-weaponry labs and other biochemical nasties. Curveball fled Iraq for Germany in 1999, seeking asylum. He apparently passed the tough scrutiny of the German spies, though British intelligence warned that he was untrustworthy. Meanwhile, other informers on the weapons program were feeding back information that had come from American intelligence, eager to supply what they imagined their American handlers wanted. Said weapons inspector Scott Ritter, “most of it just regurgitated what we’d given them. It was crap. Total crap.” So it was, as Drogin demonstrates. Even though some within American intelligence eventually came to doubt Curveball, the higher-ups had too much invested in him—“the CIA analysts seemed so cocksure about the Iraqi, a defector they had never met, that the president was citing him.” The president also used Curveball’s reports to take the country to war, depending on a single source that had never been vetted or substantiated. Curveball, Drogin suggests, may in the end be blameless; he told pleasing stories that comforted the president, while George Tenet and his CIA colleagues “held on to the lies” long after they were shown to be worthless.
Simultaneously sobering and infuriating—essential reading for those who follow the headlines.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6583-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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