Ted Shackley was appropriately called the "Blond Ghost" by his CIA colleagues, for he quietly ran the show without ever leaving fingerprints. The nickname was not at all intended to flatter. As point man for a generation's worth of agency escapades, from the Cuban missile crisis to Irangate, Shackley earned the reputation of a survivor who had risen rapidly in the ranks by dutifully carrying out orders, no matter how bizarre they might be -- and without ever being tarred with responsibility for the debacle that ensued.
Journalist David Corn, in his fast-paced and provocative book, has managed to get the still tight-lipped crowd that worked with Shackley to talk.
Thanks also to Mr. Corn's skillful combing of long-secret but newly released public records, we finally get inside the head of a man whose career thrived on national disaster.
It was Shackley who managed the huge CIA station in Miami during the Kennedy years and who dispatched Cuban emigres and American Mafiosi alike to assassinate Fidel Castro and burn Cuba's sugar fields. Yet even though Shackley's and the agency's record in attempting to overthrow the Cuban president was marked by ineptitude worthy of the Keystone Kops -- producing results that were always disastrous when they weren't merely humorous -- Shackley was rewarded with the CIA's sensitive Laotian desk after leaving the Caribbean theater.
Historical accountability only caught up with the Blond Ghost when he became a target of a congressional investigation of the Iran-contra affair for his activities soon after retiring from the CIA.
The jobs Shackley performed for the U.S. government throughout his decades of intrigue were repetitious to the point of dullness: laundering illicitly obtained money, trafficking with drug runners, hiring hoodlums and free-lance killers. The sense one is left with is of the quintessential government goon, who could have carried out the orders of the most monstrous of leaders.
Fortunately, the leaders of the CIA and the presidents it pretended to report to were not monsters. Instead, as Peter Grose's excellent and long-needed biography of Allen Dulles, the seminal figure in the agency's history, demonstrates, they were highly intelligent, well-educated, inherently elitist, but almost always immature. Despite Mr. Grose's somewhat gingerly and overly forgiving stance, which at times strains credulity, Dulles and his contemporaries at the top of the agency's hierarchy come across as hyperactive kids who refused to grow up and remained, into ripe old age, hooked on the sugar of intrigue. As a result, men like Dulles and Shackley became "Park Avenue cowboys," overly warming to the agency's covert operations while effectively undermining its crucial information-gathering functions.
"Gentleman Spy" is just right as a title for summarizing Dulles' long career with the CIA, which he directed from 1953 to 1961. (His first name is generally used because Dulles always operated in close proximity to his even more famous brother, John Foster Dulles, U.S. secretary of state from 1953 to 1959.) Educated in the best schools and wined and dined at the finest watering holes, Dulles became a corporate lawyer and partner in the Sullivan & Cromwell firm that represented many top business clients with investments abroad. When he entered government service, he suddenly found himself empowered to act against -- even to order the execution of -- people who dared question the propriety of U.S. foreign investment.
One of Dulles' anti-business targets was Jacobo Arbenz, the elected leader of Guatemala. Arbenz had ruffled the feathers of top executives of the United Fruit Co., who were accustomed to treating Guatemala as an obsequious franchise. In the 1950s there was no politically correct hand-wringing over conflict of interest, so it did not seem to matter that the law firm where Dulles and his brother (by then secretary of state) had been senior partners had represented United Fruit.
It was therefore without qualm, and without any serious criticism in the U.S. media, that Dulles ordered, in Mr. Grose's words, "nothing less than the overthrow of a duly elected government," in an operation he labeled "Operation Success." And it was successful, if success is represented by overthrowing an elected leader who made gestures at redistributing United Fruit land to his mostly poor and landless countrymen. The result is that Guatemala has been ruled almost ever since by ruthless, military-backed dictators, and many thousands have fled the country to escape repression. Any Guatemalans in Los Angeles now struggling to prove legitimacy in the aftermath of Proposition 187 could rightfully list Dulles as the sponsor for their green cards.
Dulles' exploits were endless, from the overthrow of nationalist Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran because he dared to challenge the power of the big oil companies to the bolstering of the U.S. gangster-dominated Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista as a solid American ally and an alternative to radicals clamoring for land reform and other annoyances to U.S. corporate interests. As a direct result of this successful policy of "neutralizing" more moderate reformers, we now have the Ayatollah in Iran and Castro in Cuba.
Mr. Grose, however, makes the important point that these were not rogue efforts on the part of the CIA. Rather, Dulles "was responding to orders from the highest levels of government." But the CIA, with and without Dulles, abetted executive madness by supplying overly optimistic and very simplistic assessments of the risks involved. In much of this, Dulles' great strength lay in the fact that he was an extremely talented charlatan.
He was that also in his personal life, cheating on his wife with great abandon and almost totally neglecting his children. Indeed, Mr. Grose implies that Dulles conducted an affair with Queen Frederika of Greece -- using a changing room off his office when she visited CIA headquarters. His other extramarital affairs, according to Mr. Grose, included the daughter of composer Toscanini and even the pristine Clare Booth Luce. (This from the head of an intelligence agency which, like its counterparts everywhere, argued that homosexuals needed to be drummed out because they were open to blackmail.)
One comes away from these books thinking that the whole covert-action spy business should be folded, since it is difficult to see what it ever accomplished. As even Dulles conceded shortly before his death in 1969, "Perhaps we have already intervened too much in the affairs of other peoples."
These complex but very reasonable portraits of Dulles and Shackley, two very different but crucial figures in the history of the CIA, represent breakthrough insights into the murkiest corner of our national life these past 50 years. Thanks to the release of massive amounts of once highly classified information and the willingness of once-secretive actors in this drama to talk, David Corn and Peter Grose have managed to produce landmark works that together tell us quite a bit about an invisible government that we citizens paid for and that acted in our name free of any serious checks by elected officials.
The authors also have avoided the temptation to bathe in the massive river of once-secret data now undammed by the end of the Cold War; instead they channel the flow though the banks of previously developed historiography.
Unfortunately, Mark Riebling, the author of "Wedge," drowned in the new information river. This tome appears to be a repository for every possible document reference in which the acronyms FBI and CIA appeared together. They are then regurgitated in chronological order to sustain the notion that a battle between the two security agencies drove the contretemps of U.S. Cold War policy. Not a bad concept on which to sell a book to a publisher. But this grand thesis is not supported in the telling here despite overwhelming detail.
World War II brought the United States into a new relationship with the world, and everyone recognized that it would be essential to have a central intelligence agency of some sort. It was to be expected that the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, a man used to having his way with secret data as well as with presidents, would feel threatened by the new sleuths on the block.
But this work strains credulity when it insists rather than proves that the two agencies worked at serious cross-purposes. Yes, there were endless turf battles. But on no major point did the heads of these two agencies disagree regarding the fundamentals of U.S. foreign policy.
Title: "Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades"
Author: David Corn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Length, price: 408 pages, $27.50
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4 Title: "Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles"
Author: Peter Grose
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Length, price: 566 pages, $30
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Title: "Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA"
Author: Mark Riebling
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Length, price: 460 pages, $27.50