Readers may remember my July 7 post questioning hyper-blogger Spencer Ackerman's calling Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, as "the greatest ever written about the CIA."
In any event, it got me to thinking about whether there might actually be a "best" book about the CIA. So I invited some veteran Washington national security writers to put forth their own nominations.
[UPDATE: On July 23 Marie Arana, the longtime books editor of The Washington Post, blogged on our list and added some of her own. "I have to confess: I'm fascinated by spy books, intelligence histories, CIA memoirs, KGB confessionals," she writes. "I'm not sure why."]
Best Ever CIA Book? The Envelopes, please ...
My own off-hand nomination for "best" had been The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms & the CIA, by Thomas Powers. Maybe I just had Powers on my brain, but I also recommended the anthology of Powers' clear-eyed essays on the CIA, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, which I'd just re-read last summer.
But many of the other books put forth by my scribbling pals could have been finalists in the "best ever" category.
One that immediately rang a bell with me was Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents, by the longtime CBS Pentagon correspondent, David C. Martin.
That riveting tale of legendary CIA officials James Jesus Angleton and William Harvey was nominated by my CQ blogging colleague, David Corn, whose day job is Washington editor of the crusading liberal monthly Mother Jones.
Corn is no slouch in the CIA books category, either, having authored Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades, another great tale of a major agency figure, as well as co-written Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, with Newsweek national security correspondent Michael Isikoff.
But many of the other books put forth by my scribbling pals could have been finalists in the "best ever" category.
One that immediately rang a bell with me was Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War's Most Important Agents, by the longtime CBS Pentagon correspondent, David C. Martin.
That riveting tale of legendary CIA officials James Jesus Angleton and William Harvey was nominated by my CQ blogging colleague, David Corn, whose day job is Washington editor of the crusading liberal monthly Mother Jones.
Corn is no slouch in the CIA books category, either, having authored Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades, another great tale of a major agency figure, as well as co-written Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, with Newsweek national security correspondent Michael Isikoff.
(Before leaving Shackley, I hope it's not egregiously immodest to mention that the late CIA man played an important role in one of my own books, as the CIA station chief in A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story that Changed the Course of the Vietnam War.)
Another great Angleton book, meanwhile, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter, by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, was recommended by Dan Moldea, a longtime Washington-based investigative reporter. It has always been at the top of the list for serious intelligence afficionados.
Another of the big-sweep books, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by John Marks and Victor Marchetti, was published 33 years ago but still deserves a "best" ranking, says my pal John Dinges, the highly respected author of three books dealing with CIA involvement in Latin America.
Marchetti had recently quit the CIA, where he had been executive assistant to the deputy director. John Marks was a former State Department officer who had quit after returning from a tour in Vietnam.
"It is still my favorite as a tour de force on the CIA," says Dinges, also a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. "It was written when the secrets were still secrets and was the first and best revelation of how the agency actually worked, with some great first-time exposures. I keep the battered paperback on my desk bookshelf and have used it in all my book research. It's the one published with deletions ordered by the CIA."
Prolific national security reporter Laura Rozen, also at Mother Jones, recommended another John Marks book that I heartily endorse, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, which just coincidentally happens to be the subject of this week's SpyTalk column.
Speaking of big books that have been around for awhile, three-time Pulitzer winner Knut Royce, Newsday's former investigative ace, picked The Second Oldest Profession, by the veteran British writer Phillip Knightley.
"It's a little dated now but ... it was a very good read and raised numerous red flags that have come to pass," Royce e-mailed me.
"Knightley's book... covers CIA and European intelligence (especially British) in the 20th Century. But he wrote it with a sense of humor and stripped much of the heroics and glamor associated with the trade found in so many books on the subject," Royce said.
"He fleshed out real characters, detailed numerous operations--most of them screwups--and concluded that we would be as safe, and considerably richer in our public treasuries, if we trimmed our massive intelligence organizations."
Last year Royce and Peter Eisner, a former Newsday and Washington Post editor, co-authored a celebrated book on the Niger uranium con job. The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, is a terrific inside look at a sad chapter of the CIA.
Other "best CIA book" recommendations wandered into specific chapters in the agency's history, such as Stephen Kinzer's riveting All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (which I called "as good as Grisham" in The Washington Post when it came out in 2003).
Corn also flagged The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, by venerable military historian Trumbull Higgins, as "the best Bay of Pigs book I've read"
Rozen also loved, as I did, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times, by the late 60 Minutes producer George Crile. Read the book, then see the movie.
Another reader favorite was In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story by disillusioned agency officer John Stockwell, who was handed the CIA's baton, a cold war death rattle, in Angola in the 1970s.
But for my money, Frank Snepp's Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End, Told by the Cia's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam, is as good as it gets.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Jump forward three decades and we have another disillusioned CIA officer, Robert Baer, ripping aside the curtains on the agency's lame pre-9/11 performance in See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism,
I thought George Clooney perfectly caught my friend Baer in the movie adaptation, Syriana.
But folks, you can't make this stuff up.
Unless you're John Le Carre, of course, and a very few others.
Next, "best ever" CIA novels?
UPDATE: John Ayers over at the Underbelly blog has some very amusing comments and his own very good book selections to offer.
UPDATE: John Ayers over at the Underbelly blog has some very amusing comments and his own very good book selections to offer.
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sorry, best ever cia book, a novel, was david ignatius's agents of innocence. plenty of great books listed here but nothing else even compares.
Posted by: kensilverstein
| July 15, 2008 10:22 AM
I think you should remember a great book by Steve Coll: "Ghost Wars: the Secret history of the Cia, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 ". Compelling and exhaustive book, very close to the times we are living now!
Leo Sisti
Posted by: leo sisti
| July 15, 2008 10:35 AM
Along the lines of case studies, I think you should check out William Hood's "Mole" about the first GRU officer ever recruited by the CIA.
Posted by: Kel McClanahan
| July 15, 2008 2:42 PM
Great suggestions (or oversights)! Keep 'em coming, please. It'll be a great resource for readers new to the intelligence literature.-js
Posted by: Jeff Stein
| July 15, 2008 3:04 PM
In terms of novels, I second kensilverstein's mention of David Ignatius' "Agents of Innocence." An excellent book! I am reading "Body of Lies" (also being made into a movie due to be released this fall) right now and am throughly enjoying it.
Another novel I greatly enjoyed was "The Company" by Robert Littell. A CIA lit classic in my opinion.
Posted by: psitoxin
| July 15, 2008 10:44 PM
Great suggestions. Glad to know you liked "The Company." I'd add Littell's superb first novel, "The Defection of A.J. Lewinter: A Novel of Duplicity" (subject to the caveats mentioned below). It was first published in 1973 and reissued in 2002 following the success of "The Company." Patrick Anderson reviewed "Defection" in the Post's Style section 11-25-02 (p. 2) and called it "a dazzling work, literature of a high order that happens to address the madness of the Cold War." (The above republication info about "Defection" comes from Anderson's review.)
Fans of the intel lit may be particularly amused by one of "Defection's" subplots: intense rivalry between the CIA and DoD intel communities. Some things never change.
To a much greater extent than the "mole" subplot of "The Company," the complex main story line of "Defection" takes you into the intel analyst's hall of disinformation mirrors, with its conundrums of the proverbial riddles wrapped in mysteries, inside enigmas. There, of course, "what do we know?" is an egregiously naive question. Rather, the simplest meaningful question is "what do we *think* we know?" which in turn leads to the second-order question, "what do *they* think we think we know," etc.
Even the very last sentence of "Defection" raises the possibility of yet another duplicitous plot twist -- a literary touch that I don't recall seeing in even LeCarre's and Deighton's Cold War thrillers, not that I'd put Lewinter quite in their league.
My one caveat about "Defection" is the distracting number of typos, at least in the reissued version. In a few places, these were significant enough to cause at least momentary confusion about what Littel meant to say (e.g., misspelling a character's name, so it appeared a new one had been introduced). The plot is complex enough without needlessly being misled by proofreading errors. The typos became so irritating that I started keeping track of them and sent a list to both Littel and Overlook Press, a name that thus took on ironic significance.
(As I recall, the book averaged a typo every 5 pages or so -- unprecedented in any book I've ever seen. Such poor quality control was especially galling because the book had unusually large print and widely spaced lines -- 4 lines per inch instead of the more typical 6, as in "The Company," from the same publisher. I suspect this was to stretch the page count of "Defection" to just under 300, when it would have been under 200 using typical font size and line spacing, in an attempt to make its $25 list price seem justified! "The Company" also had a noticeable number of typos or printing errors, including completely mislabeling one of the B&W photos used to divide the book's sections, but there were many fewer than in the much shorter "Defection.")
Sorry for the rant, but I didn't want anyone to be unpleasantly surprised by what is otherwise a great read.
Posted by: Keynes
| July 27, 2008 5:11 PM
Two early favorites for me, since I read them well before reading most other intel literature were
Thomas Powers' "The Man Who Kept the Secrets"
(which I have re-read a number of times)
and Loch Johnson's memoir of serving on the Church Committee, "A Season of Inquiry". I think the best fairly recent book is Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars."
I still think very highly of Christopher Andrew's "For the President's Eyes Only" (though I think it has some scattered mistakes) and the elegantly written "Gentleman Spy," a biography of Allen Dulles by Peter Grose.
David M. Barrett (author, "The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy" [yeah, that's one of my "favorites", too])
Posted by: david barrett
| July 29, 2008 4:00 PM
Folks, I am really enjoying your comments, especially as they're reminding me of terrific books I'd forgotten or overlooked. One thing comes through: You're not just all good, serious readers, but discerning consumers of news from the intelligence wars. Thanks to all (and keep 'em coming). -- Jeff Stein
Posted by: Jeff Stein
| July 29, 2008 10:01 PM
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