UPDATE - The author plead guilty to several charges and will do hard time. It's distrubing that Kerry, now up for nomination as secy of state would have employed him on the committee.
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The first two thirds of the book was on its way to being a 4 or 5 star rating. Interesting, informative and dramatic. However, along the way it became more of a story about John seen through some politically colored glasses. It was all very unfortunate.
By way of background I have had the privilege of knowing a number of CIA people from station chiefs to field agents who are some of the brightest, most intelligent, creative and bravest folks around. It's possibly the greatest collection of broad based, raw intellect in the US government. It's not an accident that the CIA inspired U-2 is still flying valuable intelligence missions, piloted by the grandsons of those who first flew it, the apparently retired SR-71 still holds many records and other CIA funded and managed operations have gone far beyond the line of what's possible from the depths of the ocean to outer space. More importantly, around the globe CIA employees and contractors are providing both intelligence and,when needed, implementation of actions to protect us.
I thank the author for pointing his readers towards the incredible stories told in First In and in accounts of Billy Waugh (Hunting the Jackal) in Afghanistan, fighting alongside Special Forces guys who could have been his grandsons or great grandsons.
Reluctant Spy chronicles the author's path from analyst and linguist to agent. It's an interesting transition which he apparently made. In the right place at the right time he apparently played an important role in a number of operations. It's an interesting read. Along the way his life begins to spin out of control as his wife apparently is more interested in the houseboy than her husband.
Where the book starts to drift is when his venomous attitude towards Bush becomes apparent. When he was in Pakistan taking down a major alQaeda operative the fact that the FBI locked the operative's still ringing cell phone in an evidence bag, neglected to review or share the truckload of information from another raid is simply dismissed. There's no notation that this was the crippling policy of the Clinton years and Jamie Gorlick. It was also the time of the politicization of the FBI through their participation in the collection of information on Clinton enemies and the sharing of confidential files with whitehouse staffers who had fleeted up from jobs as bar bouncers. It was also an FBI who promoted senior agents who had filed false reports and destroyed evidence regarding operations in which innocents were killed.
There is a poignant scene where Coffer Black meets with some of the foreign intelligence officers the author is briefing. Coffer if blunt that the US is expecting an attack on US assets but has no idea of where or how the attack will occur. The author fails to note that the FBI operating under the shadow of Gore/Clinton leadership has the information from its field officers. The terrorists are receiving flight training. The FBI field agents want access to the computer of one of the lead terrorists but Clinton holdovers stonewalled the request.
It was not until after I finished the book and read that at the time he was charged with criminal violation of various laws that the author was working for John Kerry. The pieces started to fit together. Either the book is a deliberate attempt to rewrite history or the author is simply hopelessly biased.
Kiriakou spends a lot of time discussing the use of waterboarding on high value prisoners. He dismisses the fact that US Naval aviators experience waterboarding as part of an extremely intense course in dealing with the challenges of captivity with the notation that they know they will survive. I think the terrorists share the same knowledge.
I don't pretend to have the perfect answer to the handling of captives in unconventional warfare in an era of weapons of mass casualty. However I do know that a critical element of the discussion has been omitted. If we are going to let the terrorists lawyer up like good mobsters then they will be of little or no value as prisoners. Hence, there is no good reason to risk the lives of our warriors to take high value prisoners. We either treat them like Bin Laden with two shots or withdraw our guys to a safe distance and let an LGB do the job at a much lower risk.
To his credit the author notes that he supports waterboarding high value prisoners.
I think the American public would be outraged to know that apparently some of the information shared by the author went directly to the defense attorneys for the terrorists. It's reasonable to assume that it also went to the terrorists in the field. Throughout the "war on terrorism" small leaks have meant big losses.
The public would be further outraged to know that our Marine guards are not allowed to touch the Quran with their bare hands. The infidels are required to wear white gloves out of respect for terrorists. Our press has betrayed us in not noting that the Qurans that were destroyed had been marked by the terrorists in their efforts to exchange notes. Thus, in the Muslim world the books were already soiled and needed to be destroyed.
The author "zones out" over the critical events surrounding the "scandal" over the outing of the so called CIA agent by Scooter Libby. What he neglects to mention is that it was not Libby who identified the agent to the press, but rather Colin Powell's chief deputy at the State Department. Powell knew that the whole story was a fabricated lie and that the real source was his deputy (a Clinton insider) . Yet with his Commander In Chief under fire, Powell abandoned him for political reasons. At the time I was a great Powell fan and used his presentation on leadership in my classes. Somehow it seemed tarnished after the events.
In the author's defense, he attempted to put Eric Holder's feet to the fire regarding the prosecution of CIA agents who used "advanced interrogation techniques" based on doj opinions that they were legal. It's therefore ironic that a John Kerry staffer, Bush hater and Obama lover is now under federal indictment over information he released outside of the book.
Just as the author argues that the President is not free to make is own rules, so too is Kiriakou not free to make his own rules on disclosure of information which in this case is apparently treasured by the terrorists. Kiriakou neglects to mention in his back flap bio that he was working for John Kerry, the press continued the head in the sand mode after he was charged and neglected to note his connection to Kerry.
I found First In, Hunting The Jackal and a number of other books on the CIA informative and inspiring. Reluctant Spy is informative without being inspiring. In some ways an out of control Kiriakou reminds me of others, unable to control their impulses, who have also betrayed the nation's trust. I am glad I read it but would put it far behind other recommendations.
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