Denial and Deception : An Insider's View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11

From Publishers Weekly
A former clandestine agent specializing in the Middle East, Mahle begins with September 11th (she was doing intake on prospective applicants), but the bulk of her work recounts the CIA's involvement in such low watermarks of American intelligence as the Iran-Contra and the Ames affairs, and what she says have been their the devastating internal consequences. This is not just a memoir; Mahle joined the agency in 1988, and she pings back and forth in time, covering events and periods with which she was not directly involved. She decries what she characterizes as indiscriminate Congressional investigations, as well as political pressures to tailor conclusions to the biases of superiors. Both have led, she says, to demoralization and to a serious reduction in the CIA's overall capabilities-with the effects being fully felt now, as the U.S. finds itself in dire need of HUMINT (or human intelligence) from the Middle East and elsewhere. Reading the book is like talking to one of Seymour Hersh's sources, but with the relevance filter off; there's tons of information here-with a good deal on pre- and post-September 11th al-Qaeda-but very few readers will find all of it engaging. Nevertheless, as a major debriefing from an insider, one who writes clearly and often wryly, it succeeds. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
A former clandestine agent of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO), the author was posted in the Middle East in the 1990s. In this memoir, Mahle includes autobiographical anecdotes as well as analyses of the CIA's organizational and leadership problems in that decade. According to Mahle, the CIA's biggest problem was figuring out what to do after the cold war. Mahle details reforms proposed by successive directors from Robert Gates to George Tenet, and the extent to which these filtered down the line to the DO. She also imparts the flavor of her career--its operational excitement and sense of participating in history (one startling example: her proposal, eventually denied, to snatch a future 9/11 terrorist, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad). Although Mahle is generally supportive of the CIA, she delivers criticism bound to be pertinent to her core audience--potential CIA applicants--concerning an internal-security system she regards as unaccountable. She ran afoul of that system, which terminated her career. She also criticizes the conditions facing women in the male-dominated DO. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
The recent resignation of CIA boss George Tenet has only highlighted what is for many the greatest political scandal of a generation: the failure of the U.S. intelligence community to combat the threat poised by Islamic fundamentalists and prevent the 9/11 attacks. Melissa Boyle Mahle risked her life working as an undercover CIA field operative in the Middle East until her departure in 2002. She therefore has a unique vantage point from which to view the political and operational culture of the agency in the post-Cold War climate. From Reagan to Bush Jr., Mahle provides a vivid personal and historical narrative on how the CIA became an anorexic organization, lost in the post-Cold War world. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by demonization and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling "to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism." Denial and Deception describes the last generation of the CIA and is a unique contribution to our understanding of the secret world of intelligence.


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A tattler's tales-some censored-from the hidden files of The Agency. Being in the CIA is different from being in just about any other walk of life, writes former case officer Mahle: "We tell 'cover stories,' not lies. We motivate agents to 'collect intelligence on their behalf'; we do not manipulate, trick, or coerce. We 'assess and exploit target candidate's vulnerabilities'; we do not prey upon the weaknesses and entrap people by virtue of these weaknesses. We 'collect intelligence'; we do not steal information." And so on. For all the self-deception and self-congratulation, Mahle suggests, the CIA is now deeply compromised, having been overseen by a succession of directors who prized technology over human intelligence and steadily eliminated agents who, by virtue of speaking various languages and maintaining various networks, could actually turn up useful information. Not that human agents were infallible; as Mahle writes, "in an amazing act of stupidity and bravado," the senior agent in charge of tracking Somalian strongman Mohammed Farah Aideed blew his brains out in a game of Russian roulette, and Aideed went on to Black Hawk Down infamy. A worse blow, by Mahle's account, came when the paramilitary power of the CIA was all but destroyed following the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. "Not only did the CIA no longer have a real capability to wage a secret war," she writes, "it no longer thought in those terms." Which, of course, has made the Agency all but useless in the days following 9/11. There are a few gaps in Mahle's argument-the CIA "requested" that several passages be removed, including at least one that "discussed a lack of accountability for Iraq operations"-and the book isindifferently written. Readers will want to be watchful, too, for sour grapes, inasmuch as Mahle was herself fired for "an operational mistake" that remains classified. Still, a valuable critique of an intelligence unit that is clearly in need of reform-and, one gathers, of more money, power, and people.


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