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A review by socraticgadfly
Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars Of The CIA by John Prados
5.0
Very good overview of the CIA's history since its official creation, focusing more on its various major operations before that of its various leaders, etc.
By the end of the first couple of chapters of this book, I realized that Ike's railings against the "military-industrial complex" had little to do with morality and not much to do with fears of the country's political future. Rather, he had become enamored of CIA covert operations as being cheap.
And, there were plenty of them!
Iran. Guatemala. A first foray in Iraq. Mainland China (outside of Tibet). Thoughts about Lebanon. Syria. Indonesia. The Philippines. Vietnam. Laos. Making Japan's Liberal Democrats a 40-year powerhouse. Tibet.
And the Bay of Pigs. Yes, the failure was partially Kennedy's, but more Ike's.
Iran and Guatemala were the only real successes in terms of meeting goals. Tibet was the only one that was arguably moral. Add in that we get a few details here of Ike letting down the Hungarians plus his various reasons for blocking Suez, and he definitely falls a few presidential ratings notches.
Anyway, the rest of the book is much the same.
New idiocies in expanding in Laos and Vietnam. Other unwarranted meddling in Guyana, this all in Kennedy-Johnson years.
Then we have Nixon giving us Chile. Ford, taken up by Reagan, giving us Angola. Ronnie also having Nicaragua, and by extension, Iran-Contra.
Prados shows us that
1. Most of these "actions" fell well short of goals;
2. There was a lot of CYA after most of them;
3. Most of them were built on oversold myths of "communist domino theory." In reality, Ho was as much a nationalist as communist; we pushed Fidel to becoming more communist; Allende and the Guatemalans never were communist in the first place. Etc.
This book could be much longer, but for its still large one-volume size, it's very good.
And yet, today, with another retired general running the CIA, who knows what covert action lurks?
By the end of the first couple of chapters of this book, I realized that Ike's railings against the "military-industrial complex" had little to do with morality and not much to do with fears of the country's political future. Rather, he had become enamored of CIA covert operations as being cheap.
And, there were plenty of them!
Iran. Guatemala. A first foray in Iraq. Mainland China (outside of Tibet). Thoughts about Lebanon. Syria. Indonesia. The Philippines. Vietnam. Laos. Making Japan's Liberal Democrats a 40-year powerhouse. Tibet.
And the Bay of Pigs. Yes, the failure was partially Kennedy's, but more Ike's.
Iran and Guatemala were the only real successes in terms of meeting goals. Tibet was the only one that was arguably moral. Add in that we get a few details here of Ike letting down the Hungarians plus his various reasons for blocking Suez, and he definitely falls a few presidential ratings notches.
Anyway, the rest of the book is much the same.
New idiocies in expanding in Laos and Vietnam. Other unwarranted meddling in Guyana, this all in Kennedy-Johnson years.
Then we have Nixon giving us Chile. Ford, taken up by Reagan, giving us Angola. Ronnie also having Nicaragua, and by extension, Iran-Contra.
Prados shows us that
1. Most of these "actions" fell well short of goals;
2. There was a lot of CYA after most of them;
3. Most of them were built on oversold myths of "communist domino theory." In reality, Ho was as much a nationalist as communist; we pushed Fidel to becoming more communist; Allende and the Guatemalans never were communist in the first place. Etc.
This book could be much longer, but for its still large one-volume size, it's very good.
And yet, today, with another retired general running the CIA, who knows what covert action lurks?