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State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration
 | State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration James Risen Date: 03 January, 2006 — $17.16 — Book Rating: |
I was a little disappointed in this book because it's not much of a "History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," as the subtitle proclaims. It's more of a disjointed set of spy tales from the last five or six years hung on the by now well-known narrative of the Iraq invasion and, due to the nature of the spy business, no names are named and there's no way to verify any of the more juicy episodes.
Risen is on solid ground writing about how the rank and file in the intelligence community had serious doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had WMD. He attributes much of the skewed CIA reports we all saw to CIA Director George Tenet's obsessive desire to please President Bush by telling him what he wanted to hear. He also writes about how Vice President Cheney was unhappy with CIA reports expressing doubts about his theory that Saddam was reconstituting his weapons programs and how he bypassed the intelligence community by relying on charlatans like Chalabi and Curveball.
But that’s all stuff we've seen in the papers. What makes the book really interesting are the tales of intelligence operations in Iraq and elsewhere. But, again, there's no way to verify the veracity of the stories.
If you're unfamiliar with how the Bush administration skewed and subverted America's intelligence community, it's an eye-opener. If you're looking for new revelations of the skewing and subverting, the book is rather disappointing. But it is written in a dramatic manner that I found very readable. This would have been really interesting to me a couple years ago, and if you're just waking up to the possibility that the Bush administration may have been less than diligent during the run up to the Iraq invasion, you may find it interesting now.