An insightful and disturbing history of an American institution with a mixed track record.
An organization whose histories would fill a library gets another, but it’s a good one.
Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes remains the standard history of the CIA, but it could use an update. In this critical account, Jeffreys-Jones provides just that. The author notes that the CIA was not founded solely in response to threats from the Soviet Union. Overwhelmingly, Congress and other government officials emphasized preventing another disaster like Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the CIA has been unable to predict numerous significant international events, from the Soviet atomic test in 1949 to the Vietnam Tet Offensive to 9/11 and beyond. Although CIA founders proclaimed its purpose was gathering intelligence, they were obsessed with covert actions, a policy beloved of most presidents down to the present day. Jeffreys-Jones devotes much of the book to painful accounts of a wide variety of fiascos, including the Bay of Pigs, the futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the proliferation of a torture program, and the frequent attempts to overthrow purportedly communist or terrorist-sympathizing governments, often accompanied by the murders of their leaders. As the author shows, the CIA has always “embraced the principle of ‘intelligence to please’ and showed itself vulnerable to manipulation.” Out of loyalty, the CIA helped Presidents Johnson and Nixon—and, later, both Bushes—prosecute wars in which it did not believe. Intelligence evaluations of the progress in the Vietnam and Iraq wars were consistently skeptical, but little was done to change courses. In the end, Jeffreys-Jones lets the CIA partly off the hook by spreading blame to the presidents. Thus, CIA intelligence quickly detected Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections, but since it benefited the winner, investigations were sidelined as the incoming administration denied the veracity of the intelligence and “turned on the agency.”
An insightful and disturbing history of an American institution with a mixed track record.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-284796-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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