An engrossing history of the early days of the CIA.
A probing history of the CIA’s evolving role from the outset of the Cold War into the 1960s, viewed through the exploits of four American spies.
On the heels of Germany’s defeat in World War II, European leaders and intelligence agents were shifting focus to the Soviet Union’s dominance over Eastern Europe and threatening pursuit of influence in Asia. Under a recently sworn-in President Harry Truman, the American government was slower to gauge early signals but eventually responded with often disastrous covert tactics. Anderson delivers a complex, massively scaled narrative, balancing prodigious research with riveting storytelling skills. He tracks the careers of four agents. In the Philippines, Edward Lansdale was instrumental in combatting the Hukbalahap uprising, lining up Ramon Magsaysay, the secretary of defense, to become president in 1954. Peter Sichel, a German Jew whose family escaped the Nazis, ran the CIA’s Berlin office for more than a decade. Former naval officer Michael Burke headed the paramilitary operations in Albania and elsewhere. Frank Wisner, the CIA’s deputy director of plans, had key roles in the Office of Policy Coordination until its full merging with the CIA in 1950. Though all four men began their careers with the strong desire to defend American freedom, the author engagingly demonstrates how their efforts were undermined by politically motivated power grabs within the U.S. government; poorly planned covert operations; and duplicitous scheming by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who were espousing anti-communist rhetoric to advance their own careers. “By the end of Eisenhower’s second term,” writes Anderson, “the geographical spread of governments that his administration had undertaken to overthrow or otherwise subvert suggested an almost purposeful design, as if it sought to alienate the citizenry of most every region and subregion of the globe.” Over the course of the narrative, the author amply shows how the CIA was increasingly pushed to function as an instrument of politically charged ambitions.
An engrossing history of the early days of the CIA.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54045-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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