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.