UNDAUNTED

Former CIA director Brennan gives a fly-on-the-wall view of life in Langley as well as a host of global hot spots.

After the usual autobiographical preliminaries—“While my birth roots are in the urban jungle of Hudson County, I come from 100 percent rural Irish stock”—Brennan recounts a few formational encounters abroad: landing in Indonesia not long after the government had murdered untold numbers of suspected communists, with CIA support; or chasing down bad guys who might wind up in an offshore rendition site being tortured—though, writes the author, “Agency officers who carried out their covert-action responsibilities consistent with…lawful interrogation procedures, by definition, were not involved in the unlawful activity of ‘torture.’ ” Two principal events figure in the text. The first, ably narrated, is the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the subsequent negotiations about what to do with his bullet-riddled body; Brennan reveals that the Saudi leadership, offered the chance to bury him in his homeland, were perfectly fine with dumping him in the Indian Ocean. The second is the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election; here, the author is unsparing, as when he describes an intelligence briefing to high-level members of Congress: “The fact that the Russians attempted to undermine the integrity of the presidential election was well known to all those gathered around the conference table that morning, even if most of the Republicans were following Donald Trump’s lead in publicly downplaying, if not denying, the Russian role.” Brennan goes out of his way to scorn Trump, whose victory in 2016 threw him for a loop: “I could not understand how so many voters thought he was qualified—intellectually, morally, ethically, temperamentally, or experientially—to be president of the United States.” His scorn, of course, was reciprocated when, against all precedent, Trump removed his security clearance after Brennan retired.

Not likely to sway established opinions about Trump but offers plenty of damning evidence.