An engaging update to Allen Dulles’s Craft of Intelligence.
Just who came up with the idea to dust Fidel Castro with a chemical that would burn off his beloved beard? Turner, retired spook-in-chief, knows—and if he’s not telling all, he’s telling lots.
Turner served as director of national intelligence—not just of the CIA, but of “the fifteen agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community” under the benighted Carter administration. In this cleared-by-CIA account of how the modern U.S. intelligence apparatus came about, he is refreshingly open in admitting failures, along with successes. He opens with an unorthodox look at canonical founder William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Intelligence had hitherto been the province of the military and a few club-like organizations of private citizens, such as one “that met in New York to discuss gossip in the guise of foreign intelligence, aided by heavy drinking.” Donovan helped organize and professionalize the service; Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, kept Donovan in the dark about information he had received from other intelligence sources and, in the end, kept the OSS under military control rather than create a strong Cabinet-level director of intelligence, at least in part, Turner guesses, because “there was strong opposition from the military (something that has never abated).” The author recounts a decidedly checkered history as subsequent intelligence directors tried to coordinate their activities with the agenda of chief executives—which has a surprisingly personal dimension, for the CIA head who wins is the one whom the president likes, and such individuals are rare indeed. Along the way, Turner drops anecdotes about Castro’s beard (the proposed assault on which was the brainchild of spy novelist Ian Fleming), the little-known but successful rescue of six Americans during the Iranian hostage crisis, the military’s jealousy when the CIA developed neat toys and the character of certain directors such as Reagan advisor William Casey, who “serves as a warning of what can happen if the DCI is given too much power.”
An engaging update to Allen Dulles’s Craft of Intelligence.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7868-6782-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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