A fascinating though somewhat censored memoir that also serves as an organizational critique of the CIA.
In his debut, a CIA veteran recounts his challenges and frustrations working for the intelligence agency from 1966 to 1991.
Following college and a stint in the Marines, Costanzo, son of an American Foreign Service worker, signed on to work for the CIA in the 1960s. So began his tale of dealing with a rather Kafkaesque bureaucracy for the next 25 years. Costanzo enjoyed his espionage training and has respect for nonnalluring procedures—e.g., ensuring consistent language in surveillance summaries—but the pettiness of senior officers, many of them holdovers from World War II, almost made him quit several times. Instead, he persevered, often by circumventing the system, especially after he realized that the CIA rarely fires anyone since such departures could pose a security risk. He got deployed overseas and held jobs at cover organizations while also conducting clandestine operations, ultimately reaching the position of chief of station in an unnamed country. Costanzo provides some fascinating peeks into the mechanics of cultivating recruits and using disguises and safe houses, but alas, he must remain mum about the actual places where he served, as mandated by his CIA manuscript reviewers for reasons of national security. Still, Costanzo has some fun within this directive, christening countries with such Orwellian monikers as Latrinia, Effluvia and Rattalia. He also manages to sneak in some assessments of CIA leaders, including James Jesus Angleton (“a real operational genius, but later he grew irrational”), Dick Helms (“cronyism abounded”), James R. Schlesinger (“myopia and incomprehension of the service’s problems”), Bill Colby (“some good reforms”) and Bob Gates (“his policies fully embodied the prejudices toward the perceived elitism of the clandestine service”). Costanzo provides some pithy takes on political events as well, usually casting the blame squarely on outside parties—blaming émigrés for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example—rather than on bad informants. Elsewhere, he skims over his personal life—his wife and daughter are only briefly mentioned—and comes off a bit cranky with his relentless workplace complaints. Overall, however, Costanzo files a commendable report on agency life.
A fascinating though somewhat censored memoir that also serves as an organizational critique of the CIA.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490498430
Page Count: 430
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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