Surprise, Kill, Vanish

July 8, 2019
Journalist Jacobsen (Phenomena) delivers an admiring general history of the Central Intelligence Agency and the special forces units involved in clandestine maneuvers in the past 80 years, while highlighting the careers of individual operatives, particularly Billy Waugh. Waugh, who Jacobsen interviewed at length, is introduced as a 12-year-old Texas kid when the Pearl Harbor attack occurs; he reappears throughout, often gathering intelligence via photography, until his final mission to Libya when he is in his 80s. Some chapters focus on individual operations, as when Waugh’s friend and CIA colleague Lew Merletti arranged a training exercise in which Delta Force soldiers parachuted onto the White House lawn, sparking changes in security there; others follow presidents and cabinet members reacting to events, giving orders, and deciding policy—for example, the formation of the concept of “preemptive neutralization” of suspected terrorists during Reagan’s presidency. Jacobsen frequently refers to such covert action as the “third option” or the “president’s hidden hand.” The tone is more dramatic storytelling than sober history (“The Taliban government... left behind in its wake one of the most immoral, corrupt, criminal, debauched societies the modern world has ever known”). But, for those seeking an action-packed tour of special ops, this book delivers.

May 15, 2019
Counterterrorism and Special Forces missions have become a staple of Hollywood action movies that do well at the box office but often give a misleading picture of how these units really operate. Having already demonstrated her remarkable aptitude for unearthing government secrets in books like Area 51 (2011) and The Pentagon's Brain (2015), Jacobsen pulls back the curtain on the history of covert warfare and state-sanctioned assassinations from WWII to the present. Unlocking a treasure chest of information from many undisclosed yet reliable sources, Jacobsen provides little-known details about such paramilitary operations as those targeting Nazi officers in Germany, several disastrous missions in North Korea, and CIA-backed plots against foreign dictators in countries ranging from Guatemala to Libya. She also catalogues black-ops tools, such as poisons and close-quarters knife fighting. One highlight involves the amazing story of Billy Waugh, a CIA contractor charged with tracking Osama bin Laden's whereabouts years before 9/11. Jacobsen's work revealing a poorly understood but essential slice of warfare history belongs in every library collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2019
A behind-the-scenes look at the most shadowy corners of the American intelligence community. It's no secret that intelligence agents operate covertly around the world. As Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency, 2015, etc.) notes, this so-called "third option" is used "when the first option, diplomacy, is inadequate and the second, war, is a terrible idea." The underlying idea is that getting up close and killing a single opponent or small batch of them is preferable to bombing an entire city or region to achieve the same goal. So it was that, as Jacobsen writes, a weathered and fearless contractor named Billy Waugh entered Khartoum to track a well-protected Osama bin Laden, who was enraged after having been rebuffed by the Saudi royals to lead a war against Saddam Hussein. When the Saudis decided to allow infidels in the form of a vast American army to do the job, bin Laden "began plotting jihad against the United States." Waugh saw what he needed to see and developed a plan to eliminate his target that might have kept 9/11 from happening--but it never happened, nixed somewhere between his handlers and the president's desk. Waugh and other operatives hatched other plots, and they were just right for the job. As Jacobsen writes, one CIA officer "was an expert in parachute insertion, scuba exfiltration, evasive driving, knife fighting, and a host of other close-quarters combat skills," and his credentials seem light compared to some of the other agents she profiles. Some of the operations failed, but some were successful, as when Waugh scouted a Hezbollah higher-up in Riyadh and passed the ball to Mossad, which planted a car bomb that caught up with its target in Damascus, incinerating him in one of the book's critical moments. Assassination may be frowned on but it's used more often than you might think. Well-sourced and well-paced, this book is full of surprises.

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May 1, 2019

Responsible for hostage rescues, sabotage, and assassinations, the CIA's Special Activities Division flies under the radar but gets a thoroughgoing history from Pulitzer Prize finalist Jacobsen, author of New York Times best sellers such as Area 51. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019

Similar to her previous treatments of the Pentagon's research division (The Pentagon's Brain) and paranormal activity (Phenomena), Jacobsen here presents a tour de force exploring the CIA's paramilitary activities. This subject requires a thoroughness to break through secrecy in order to create a masterful history. Using interviews and research, Jacobsen reveals little-known paramilitary operations and also does a brilliant job of describing how these operations fall under the law and how the executive branch can claim plausible deniability. The scope of these missions span the globe and eras, yet there are a couple of drawbacks. For example, Jacobsen follows the career of one of the former agents into the Secret Service, a tangential narrative that could have been pulled into its own book. The second drawback is the omission of the CIA's operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, which is nicely detailed in Joshua Kurlantzick's A Good Place To Have a War. Overall, though, this excellent work feels like uncovering the tip of the iceberg. VERDICT Highly recommended for those seeking a better understanding of American foreign policy in action.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2018

Responsible for hostage rescues, sabotage, and assassinations, the CIA's Special Activities Division flies under the radar but gets a thoroughgoing history from Pulitzer Prize finalist Jacobsen, author of New York Times best sellers such as Area 51. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.