Book Review | The CIA At War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2004

The CIA At War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror

Ronald Kessler. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 313 pages, endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

With a view to the post 9/11 era and the role of the CIA, journalist Ronald Kessler writes in his most recent book that "never in human history had a country relied so much on intelligence." But: "Could the CIA be trusted... was the Agency capable of winning the war on terror?" An important question, but Kessler never answers it directly. That task is left to the reader. The material on which to base an answer comes mainly from interviews with senior Agency officers, several of the DCIs, including George Tenet, and other members of the Intelligence Community, all cited by name. Kessler was also given a tour of the Headquarters compound, and he describes what he found in some detail. The arrangement of the book is a bit awkward—it does not have a table of contents and the 25 chapters are not titled.

The first three chapters are mostly about directors George Tenet, James Woolsey, and John Deutch. We learn what happened to Woolsey because of the Ames case and to Deutch when he tried to do a job he didn't want in the first place. The details on Tenet come later. The next 10 chapters provide background, with attention to Agency life and operations under directors from Richard Helms to Robert Gates, with flashbacks along the way to Allen Dulles and even William Donovan and the OSS. Kessler reviews much familiar Agency activity—the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation MONGOOSE (the "get" Castro program run by the Kennedy White House) the Cuban missile crisis and the Penkovskiy case, the defections of Vitali Yurchenko and Edward Howard, the establishment of the Counterterrorism Center, and the Aldrich Ames case, to give just a few examples—and included interesting commentary from those who participated in the events. While the book is not a history, those unfamiliar with the Agency will get a good overview of its pre-9/11 activity.

The balance of the book looks at the Agency under George Tenet and relies heavily on interviews with him, his executive director, Alvin "Buzzy" Krongard, Deputy Director for Intelligence John McLaughlin, plus former inspectors general, deputy directors, and case officers. There is also the view from the FBI that comes from interviews and Kesslers's two previous books on the Bureau.

The treatment is balanced, though not always accurate, and there are a few surprises. In the latter category falls the statement attributed to a senior deputy general counsel, John Rizzo, that "a few waivers" were granted to allow use of journalists as sources. Another example is the inclusion of the Douglas Groat case that illustrates the potential problems of dissatisfied employees with secret knowledge. Finally, he tells the story of how the CIA employee picked the building in Belgrade that turned out to be the Chinese embassy the United States would bomb. It is a lesson in accountability.

Inaccuracies include the statement that Richard Stolz was the first station chief in Moscow; that honor belongs to Paul Garbler; that Bill Hood was Peter Popov's case officer (it was George Kisevalter), and the statement that the CIA rejected Penkovskiy at first because they thought he was a plant (never happened).3 And for many, the comments attributed to the FBI about ineffective CIA analysis and weak polygraph policies associated with the Ames case will seem ironic at best.

The final chapters of The CIA At War describe some of the counterterrorist successes after 9/11, the intense interagency multi-source approach to collection, the search for weapons of mass destruction in a less risk-averse atmosphere, and the value of judicious interrogation. Kessler leaves the impression that the CIA under Tenet has rebounded from the over-cautious days of his predecessor and that the outlook for the future is positive.