Tense memoir of a CIA analyst’s pursuit of terrorists in the post–9/11 era.
In her debut, Bakos shares her insider’s view of analytical tradecraft, set against the unraveling of civil order in Iraq. In her position, she “focused on whether there was a connection between Iraq and al Qaida,” especially regarding “the movement sparked by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” the “godfather of terrorism in Iraq.” Her unusual background underscores the unique qualities of intelligence officers, who “worked in quiet obscurity” to guard against the mass-casualty attacks that al-Zarqawi popularized in Iraq. Growing up in rural Montana, where “self-reliance was less an ethos than an expectation,” Bakos joined the CIA’s human resources division and then transitioned into the Career Analyst Program after 9/11. Following the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, she spent time in Baghdad, observing the insurgency’s beginnings. She realized that al-Zarqawi’s hybrid terror group al-Qaida in Iraq could potentially destabilize the country, so he remained her focus once back at Langley, where her briefings routinely reached the White House. Frustrated by the disconnect between their meticulous analysis and the flawed military actions that followed, she recalls her unit’s camaraderie: “We were on a misfit island of targeters within a larger Agency that didn’t understand how to embrace our work.” Still, she notes that the team dynamic could not survive the grueling pace and increasingly uncertain goals of the occupation. She left the unit in 2006 yet remained haunted by her targeting experience. In an epilogue, she describes coming to terms with PTSD and unwelcome publicity from a congressional report on the CIA’s treatment of detainees. Ultimately, she writes, the terrorist leader’s death “did not signal an immediate downturn in violence.” Bakos writes with the careful discretion of CIA retirees, but her revelations are relevant and unsettling given the continued menace of mass-casualty terrorism and political overreaction.
An exciting tale of cutting-edge espionage and a rueful account of how political exigencies can blunt tradecraft’s effectiveness.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-26047-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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