Book Review
The
Way of the Knife: The CIA, a secret army, and a war at the ends of the earth, by Mark Mazzetti
“Good
intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a
kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They
weren´t gradual and they weren´t gentle either…”
With this very quote, from John le Carré´s
brilliant Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,
Mr Mazzetti has fittingly chosen to headline the introduction. The Way of the Knife makes it painfully
obvious that if one were to go by Controls definition of good intelligence
work, the CIA has rather failed to do their job. In fact, the Central Scalp
Hunting Agency might be a more fitting name, since gentleness and caution seems
to be suspiciously absent from the CIA´s activities. Venture past le Carré and
you will be presented with a Dickensian gallery of madcap rouges on the CIA
payroll firing from the hip and a plethora of crackpot schemes so mad that you
would find them unrealistic if they featured in an airport novel.
This wasn´t always the case, however. Like
the tides of the ocean, the US intelligence services are forever being thrown
hither and dither by capricious political winds and external pressure. Once
upon a time the CIA was really about analysts doing their job of delivering
intelligence with the utmost accuracy and truthfulness. The watershed moment
that enabled this happy state of affairs, according to Mazzetti, were the so
called Church hearings of 1975. Democratic senator Frank Church led a team
investigating the covert activities of the CIA following information gleaned
from the Watergate affair. The necessity of doing this was amply illustrated by
a picture of Church holding up a poison dart gun the CIA had built, presumably
because they thought microfilms and secret rendezvous in murky East Berlin pubs
were a dull way to carry out the Cold War. When the CIA´s activities during
this period became known, President Gerald Ford effectively banned the CIA from
carrying out targeted assassinations abroad. This worked reasonably well,
Mazzetti tells us, and for many years the corporate culture at the CIA was one
that abhorred murder by poisoned dart. Unfortunately this state of affairs was
not to last forever. The CIA, I feel compelled to add, has always played some
part in clandestine operations abroad, but it wasn´t until after 9/11 that they
started to morph into a secret army waging a shadowy war across the globe, in many
cases without congressional approval or oversight.
The seeds of this gung ho approach to
intelligence were sown during the William Casey era of the 1980s. When I
reviewed The Untold History of The United
States on this blog, I didn´t have time to delve into the actions and
motives of the former head of the CIA, but here goes a quick summary. Casey, a
staunch conservative who hated communism with every fibre of his being, was
given free reign by President Reagan to pursue a global war against a perceived
threat from the Soviets. Indeed, one could say that Casey was appointed almost
solely for that purpose and not for the task of improving intelligence
gathering. If an analyst uncovered with information that didn´t fit Casey´s own
preferences then that person could look forward to a very brief career at the
CIA. It was during the eighties that one of the abovementioned madcap rouges
climbed through the ranks of the CIA. Duane “Dewey” Claridge was a man who
fitted perfectly into the CIA of the Casey-Reagan era. A dapper gin drinking
rogue with a penchant for pinstripe suits and pocket squares, he soon acquired
something of a cult following among the organization’s younger members. Dewey
threw himself into the job of sponsoring various right wing guerillas in Latin
America and the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan with undisguised enthusiasm. Often
traveling under fanciful codenames and pretending to be an international
businessman, Dewey set up a network of slush funds to supply the Contras in
Nicaragua with weapons and ammunition that often ended up being used against
the civilian population. His days of gun running for Uncle Sam only came to an
end when congress got wind of a plan he´d hatched to mine Nicaragua’s harbors.
This daring plot, that Dewey later claimed he´d dreamt up over a glass of gin
and a cigar, led to him being relieved of his duties in South America. Although
Dewey was just one cog in a larger clandestine machine, his Nicaraguan story
highlights perfectly how the CIA managed to forget the lessons from the Church
hearings (or buckled under political
pressure, a case can surely be made for that conclusion as well) and started to
lurch back into being a motley band of cloak and dagger men.
The cataclysmic events of September 11,
2001, fundamentally changed the way the CIA worked. If Bin Laden´s terrorist
plot hadn´t been carried out, the odds are high that there wouldn´t even have
been any The Way of the Knife for me
to review. The need to respond and strike back at an enemy hiding in the
shadows highlighted the malfunctioning relationship between the Pentagon and
The CIA, as well as the blurred lines that were the limits of their authority.
When I say The Pentagon I am referring to the United States Department of
Defense, the name originating from the pentagon-shaped building that is their
headquarters. These both agencies had often been at each other’s throats in the
past and in the eyes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Pentagon´s
authority and capability to carry out clandestine operations around the globe
had to rapidly scaled up. Astute readers will no doubt think that this sounds
very much like what the CIA is doing these days, and they would be right. Even
after reading the book and doing some quick research, deciding where the CIA
ends and the Pentagon begins is as bafflingly complex as a game of cricket.
Suffice it is to say for the sake of this book review that those two agencies
have both carried out secret operations and conducted drone strikes in faraway
lands.
Three days after George W. Bush, a former
baseball team owner and Texan oilman, was elected, air force engineers carried
out the first successful weapons test of a Predator drone. The technology was
now in place to meet the terrorist threat head on. We may laugh at how President
Obama joked during the White House Correspondent´s Dinner in 2010 that he would
kill the attending Jonas Brothers with a Predator drone if they took any
liberties with his daughters, but to the people of Pakistan the drone threat is
deadly serious. The only thing more complicated in this book than the
Pentagon-CIA rivalry are the uneasy relations between long-time frenemies
America and Pakistan. As one CIA agent quoted in the book famously said: “Every
day you wake up in Pakistan you know a little less than you did the day
before.”
The Americans were so desperate for any
intelligence on Pakistan that our old friend Dewey was let in from the cold.
After being dismissed from the CIA after the Iran-Contra affair, Dewey was now
working off the books with a close knit cadre of
retired special operations officers to set up a private intelligence network in
the region. Presumably he´d come up with the idea for this covert business
while sipping a G&T and smoking a small cigar. Naturally this volatile arrangement
couldn´t be in place for long, and patience was running thin after a plot by
Dewey was uncovered to smear the president of Afghanistan. The lunatic plan
consisted of infiltrating the presidential palace in Kabul and gather beard
trimmings from the president which would then be tested for drugs to prove that
he was a heroin addict. The plan was unceremoniously dropped after a,
presumably rather venomous, telling off from the Obama administration. When
Dewey´s handler, an unscrupulous and now disgraced CIA officer, was told by his
superiors that it was time to pull the plug, he even kept his spy ring going
with his own private funds and some of his cronies reported his findings to the
Fox News Channel. If you ever thought that gathering intelligence is something
done with caution by professionals under a watchful governmental eye, and that
you have to be sane in order to operate inside a nuclear capable hostile
country, it seems you were wrong.
Everything that is good and everything that
is bad about the drone policies and the signature strikes carried out under
Bush and Obama can be found in Pakistan, Mazzetti argues. Originally it was
seen as necessary to combat terrorists and insurgents in the isolated mountain
regions of Pakistan and to stem the tide of Al Qaeda fighters fleeing from the
war in Afghanistan. Then Pakistani president Musharraf did authorize the use of
drones in certain regions of his country and under certain conditions. This
went hand in hand with an uneasy cooperation between US intelligence and the
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. Like the many layers of a
matryoskha-doll, the motives of Pakistan and the ISI were myriad and impossible
to discern even from the beginning. Some factions wanted to help Islamic
extremists because they viewed them a possible counterweight to Indian
interests, while some wanted to bring the remote tribal areas to heel.
Everyone, however, were happy to accept suitcases full of US dollars. Although
drone strikes managed to take out several dangerous terrorists without risking
the lives of any US servicemen in the process and goodwill-strikes were
occasionally carried out against Pakistan’s enemies, the drone strikes were not
without some serious problems. Anger and resentment against the US, both among
Pakistani government officials and their subjects, grew steadily. Chief among
their concerns were the so called signature strikes, which meant that any
activity that could be interpreted as being linked to terrorism could become
the target of a drone strike. Any gathering of “military aged” males in
Pakistan´s tribal regions could, and still can, justify a drone strike without
the identities of those targeted being known. Needless to say this has resulted
in the deaths of many innocent civilians and infuriated a country armed with
nuclear weapons as well as large parts of the Middle East.
Being a journalist from The New York Times,
Mazzetti is naturally something of an establishment insider, working for a
magazine that has always upheld the status quo. Despite this I feel that
Mazzetti has done an exceptionally thorough job investigating this new kind of
warfare and you don´t get the feeling that he is pulling his punches to protect
the CIA. There have been both successes and failures attributed to this type of
warfare and he doesn´t underplay the dangers of the latter. Naturally when it
comes to these types of books I am forced to leave interesting portions out, in
this case a glamorous heiress from Kentucky who ends up negotiating the release
of hostages from Somali pirates and the operation to capture Bin Laden, but
it´s all in there if you read the novel in its entirety. Mazzetti manages to
keep the pace high and the reader interested, something that can be difficult
with books like these, and I would definitely recommend The Way of the Knife to anyone interested in history or
international affairs. The final chapter in this story, however, remains to be
written. Only yesterday I heard about a new generation of anti-drone weapons
nearing completion, a futuristic looking laser cannon among them. Perhaps if
the people they keep going after would get their hands on hardware like that,
the CIA and the Pentagon might at long last be forced to find a way to coexist
and work together out of necessity.
What about Dewey, then? The former CIA
operator is now a man in his twilight years comfortably living in an upmarket
retirement village outside Washington. He tells Mazzetti in their final
interview that he is determined to preserve some of his spy network, albeit on
a shoestring. As he leaves the Italian restaurant where the interview has taken
place, Dewey stays to finish his cigar. When Mazzetti walks away into the
night, he spies Dewey sitting alone at their table and staring wishfully out of
the windows while smoking his cigar.
