Customer Reviews

Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA

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The CIA has been a symbol for the mysterious and given almost omnipotent power in the imaginations of those predisposed to paranoia. This very good book should set a number of these notions to rest. John Prados gives us a very detailed of the CIA from its founding out of the WWII OSS.

He shows us its role in engaging in alternative warfare and in undermining regimes that were hostile to America, its allies, and their mutual interests. Prados is not pro-CIA. Nor is he nakedly anti-CIA. It is pretty good reporting. I can't imagine how much digging he had to do to provide the information that is here. I enjoyed one footnote that after he got some information from some declassified files in a Presidential library that planes and agents were sent to collect those documents and others after he published his findings.

Prados points up the embarrassing failures that have become public knowledge. And when there are successes, he points up the transitory nature of such clandestine efforts. He is plainly unconvinced that the long term problems created by those efforts are worth the various kinds of costs incurred in pulling them off. In his concluding chapter he points out that the CIA and intelligence gathering should not be viewed only by the ends they claim to support, but evaluated as to whether their means are compatible with our Democracy and its professed ideals. I will leave this for each reader to judge.

I will say that Prados does not go out of his way, this is already a long book, to set the chessboard up and discuss what the Soviets were doing. In doing so, he makes the United States to out to be the aggressor, instigator, and fumbler of so many global events. In my view, this is a distortion. It isn't that Prados is wrong (he may well be, but I am not competent to say so), it is that he is only showing us one part of the stage. The actors that he show us look quite silly at times, however, if we saw what they were reacting to, with, or against on the unlit art of the stage, our perception of the story might well be different.

Still, this is a very valuable and comprehensive telling of this history and until we get something even more complete or authoritative or more information is declassified, this is a must have text for those interested in the history of the CIA.

These days I find myself taking the side of the CIA more and more in their wars with the Bush Administration, such the Valerie Plame affair, and the administrations manipulation of intelligence leading to the Iraq war. Amongst those scandals I was starting to forget about past misdeeds of the CIA. Thankfully, John Prados has written a history of the CIA's secret wars, some familiar, such as Cuba, Iran, and Laos, and others more obscure and in danger of being almost forgotten, such as Guyana and Tibet. It is a history of the CIA told from the perspective of its covert operations. And from this perspective we get a further glimpse of the familiar spooks and their deeds, like Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Ted Shackley, Richard Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald, William Harvey, and Bill Casey.

Multiple conclusions can be drawn from each of the operations. A recurring theme in of these operations is that the CIA is not the "rogue" agency that does whatever it wishes without the knowledge of the president. In each of these secret wars the president often provided the initiative for the operation, was aware what was occurring, and had the full capability of stopping it at least some point in the operation. A prime example given is Kissinger and Nixon pursuing a more aggressive meddling in Chilean politics against Allende.

Another recurring theme in the operations is often the targeted administrations plotted against were often moderate, independent regimes, who neither wanted to be in the Soviet camp or in the U.S. camp. But, dare they nationalize industries, and suddenly, with our obsessive paranoia of communism, the president and CIA would plot their overthrow, support the shadiest paramilitary insurgents and turn a blind eye to their misdeeds, including drug dealing. Often this led left leaning politicians of the targeted countries straight into the arms of the Soviets.

In Cuba, the rebels created a "disposal" problem. What do you do with armed and trained rebels eager to dispose of Castro, and knowledge of assassination plots? Apparently some believed the answer was to keep the pot boiling. The plots against Castro continued well after Bay of Pigs. In Tibet, Hungary, and Indonesia, the CIA stirred things up and promised support, but for various reasons, such as the need for secrecy or fear of full confrontation, full support to finish the job never arrived. That left rebels dangling, and caused bitterness towards the U.S. Often these operations were fueled by bad, incomplete or ignored intelligence.

Safe for Democracy is an important addition to any CIA history bookshelf. It is a well documented, objective and balanced history of CIA clandestine operations. Our foreign policy hubris is not new, something recently invented by Bush Jr. Though covert operations weren't as brazen as invading and toppling a regime by brute force, the results were destructive for the targeted nations, and did not make the world safe for democracy. The CIA, though it may not be the sole impetus for these operations, was the cat's paw for bad policy, and often a careless one too.

This is a broad and lengthy review of CIA covert operations from the earliest days to the impacts of the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act; essentially an update of a similar book Prados wrote in the mid-'80s.

The book is fatally flawed by the author's clear determination to put all forms of covert ops in a negative perspective, and the narrative reflects his strong bias as he relates different operations throughout the decades. Not that all he relates was in reality sunshine and butterflies, but even considering harsh realities there are key parts missing in many stories, and others are consciously worded in the most negative manner possible.

A narrative already weakened by bias is further undercut by the author's ignorance of military SOF, which is evident in the several areas where he discusses military SOF support to Agency operations. The book is also weakly sourced, with the notes section poorly structured and only partially covering the discussion in each chapter.

However, I don't know of any other book as comprehensive in its attempted scope that deals with this subject matter. But, due the issues I've mentioned with this book, I'd recommend reading a number of other books focused on specific operations rather than this fatally flawed broad overview.

If you're studying the CIA's operations and routines you can't be without Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. It covers all the CIA's covert and political operations and also considers these actions in relation to America's quest for global democracy, using three decades of research to detail techniques, events, major personalities and more. While general-interest public library holdings may consider this, it's a special pick for college-level or military collections also strong in democratic politics.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This book betrays a problem common to CIA literature: It focuses heavily on the administrative and bureaucratic side of the CIA, made possible by the various freedoms afforded to any American researcher. There are plenty of books written by former CIA operatives that explains their work in depth, and they are more interesting.

For politics junkies and fellow Washingtonians who charge through nevertheless, I'd recommend skipping the last few chapters altogether and reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars instead. It's more intelligent and better researched.

This is not a history book. This work drips with political taint; by that I mean that the author has a view in mind and sets out to persuade you the reader of that view, ignoring or minimizing events and information that might lead you to a different conclusion. As an intelligence professional, I couldn't stomach it past the first hundred pages.

If you read only this book about the CIA, you will believe it to be a corrupt and ineffective apparatus of clumsy power. While a popular view, it's not correct. But if you already believe that the CIA is a bastion of evil stupidity, prepare to have your belief system validated.

It gets two stars because it does actually include correct facts; it's missing three because they are only select facts, separated by manipulation.