Acerbic memoir of a truncated career at the CIA.
While he was pursuing a masters’ degree at George Washington University, a knowledgeable professor steered Kiriakou toward “the Company.” He joined the CIA in 1990 as a “leadership analyst” in the Directorate of Intelligence. After a few years he transferred into the Directorate of Operations, which necessitated a hair-raising training course at “the Farm.” Along the way, his marriage dissolved, resulting in many unpleasant disputes over the custody of his children. As the author notes, the trickiest part of being an operative is not the weapons training, nor the cloak-and-dagger tricks, but the subtle qualities that allow them to recruit and “run” agents in other countries. Kiriakou spent the first part of his clandestine career in Greece, where the radical group 17 November was still occasionally committing assassinations. He then became involved in training “officials and military officers of certain foreign countries in counterterror operations,” working at Langley. The author recounts a chilling anecdote from June 2001, when agency counterterrorism leader Cofer Black implored a visiting group of Middle Eastern military men, asking, “If you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please work them now because whatever it is, we have to do everything we can to stop it.” Following 9/11, writes the author, many Agency personnel were clamoring for posts overseas. Due to his training in Arabic, he was sent to oversee counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan. He writes in detail about one of his crucial operations, the capture of notorious al-Qaeda chief Abu Zubaydah. Later he was given the opportunity to participate in the “enhanced interrogation” program, under which Zubaydah and many others were waterboarded. The author declined, and he writes forcefully that the United States must always avoid torture, no matter how demanding the circumstances.
Like most books on the CIA and other covert organizations, this one has been rigorously edited to avoid revealing sensitive details. But Kiriakou offers an original, boots-on-the-ground perspective on the war on terror.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80737-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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