BOOK REVIEW: Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins
By Annie Jacobsen
Reviewed by former CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer, Ian Allen
In Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Albert Camus recalled “certain friends” – presumably Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – who had accused him of Utopianism for his refusal to sanction any ideology that may require him to kill. They argued that every political truth would eventually lead to killing if taken to the extreme, and if one wanted to make change in the world then one must accept this risk. This breezy acceptance of killing – murder, in his words – was odd to Camus, and he theorized as to the cause: “…they were unable to really imagine other people’s death. It is a freak of the times. We make love by telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness but lose in understanding.” In sum: whether love, work, or war, we don’t really touch anything.
Three-quarters of a century on, the trend continues toward cleanliness and distance, away from understanding and contact. What this means for work and love I know not, but I have long been interested in what it means for war. The trend is of course not new; an essay in the May/June 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs recalls Jan Bloch’s 1898 book, The Future of War, which anticipated what has “come to be known as the ‘revolution of military affairs.’” Or more accurately: revolutions, plural. As Foreign Affairs noted, Soviet and American planners have had many names for progress over the decades: military-technical revolution; reconnaissance-strike complex; network-centric warfare; transformation. Even with the “future military revolution… discredited amid nearly two decades” of counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism, “…the basic idea has remained the same: emerging technologies will enable new battle networks of sensors and shooters to rapidly accelerate the process of detecting, targeting, and striking threats, what the military calls the ‘kill chain.’”
But I still wonder about the practical and moral difference between cruise missiles and drones managed through a network of satellites and teams across multiple continents at the cost of millions of dollars, or a rifle shot at 10 meters. In Surprise, Kill, Vanish, author Annie Jacobsen wrote in the prologue that similar questions inspired her to write the book: Why would most Americans find “mechanized killing somehow more palatable,” but be repelled by close quarters killing? What is the moral difference between targeting a single person (either head of state or terrorist group) for assassination, vice dropping bombs on that person’s territory and fighters?
Before going further, I should note that (as a former CIA officer) I have a longstanding frustration with how CIA covert action and paramilitary operations have been portrayed in the media. I should also grant that it's the apparent prerogative of every former agency officer in history to complain about the fact that “the media doesn’t get it right,” then complain more when someone else from inside the agency breaks the code and does talk to the media, and then complain again when we (the royal we) talk to the media and they (the proverbial they) still get it wrong (or, “wrong”). In our defense, I only add that our proximity – proximity to the enemy, to our allies, to the bystanders and civilians, to the many others who are part ally and part enemy but mostly just trying to survive like anyone else – lends to an understanding, an uncleanliness, that is complex and contradictory and very difficult to capture, but we are so closely and emotionally connected to these stories that errors in their telling can be maddening. So, admitting guilt on all the above and conceding some hypocrisy to follow, I proceed.
Loathe as I am to judge a book by the cover, the breathless all caps italics SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH, do, it turns out, give an accurate impression of what follows. To wit, on page six the author writes about an acquaintance who worked in counterterrorism and whom she knew to be “an expert weapons handler” who “almost always travelled with gun cases.”
… I noticed there was one case he never opened. Later that evening, I asked him privately what was inside. He opened it, revealing a large serrated knife.
‘What’s that for?’ I asked, almost immediately realizing my mistake.
‘Sometimes a job requires quiet,’ he said. He closed the case.
There are many problems here, but I’ll leave it at this: never in the history of the United States has someone on orders from the CIA toted a large serrated knife in a black case overseas and back because “sometimes a job requires quiet.”
Past this vignette, Ms. Jacobsen continues with a brief history of the Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive. Through the rest of the book Ms. Jacobsen follows a broad history of assassinations and covert action programs from the U.S., Soviet Union, Iran, Israel, and Cuba. Throughout, we follow Billy Waugh, a former Green Beret who supported CIA programs as an active duty soldier and contractor around the world over six decades. The final chapters follow CIA Ground Branch officers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With this intertwined narrative, Ms. Jacobsen traces policy decisions at the White House, State Department, and CIA headquarters to the operators and intelligence officers on the ground. It is here where Ms. Jacobsen’s goal – understanding the policy and moral implications of targeted killing; the practical and moral difference when done from far or near, from strategic to proximal; whether it’s murder, killing, or assassination – is laudable. However, the bravado of much of the narrative and some of Ms. Jacobsen’s sources leaves little room for the gravity that the subject deserves. As such, it perpetuates the treasured “knuckle-dragger” storyline, giving critics of covert action much to confirm their existing cognitive bias about the paramilitary meatheads that they (the proverbial they again) keep locked up until it's time to do some quiet wet work with a large serrated blade. Which, I recognize, could seem callously semantic. The human on the other end of the rifle or missile (or blade) is still dead and does not wonder if he was killed, murdered, or assassinated. But I do agree with Camus that when we gain in cleanliness we lose in understanding. And understanding (defined here as an appreciation, apprehension, of the act) does to me seem essential to moral authority.
But a thousand questions remain, not least: is this something we should understand individually? Nationally? Probably both. What I do think is that CIA Ground Branch officers are working in close contact with the world, heads down, performing enormously dangerous and important missions with great subtlety, effectiveness, and understanding. As a country, this aids to our understanding through the elected representatives that send them – and, as these Ground Branch Officers are intelligence officers also, are in part informed by them. Thus, I welcome a book such as Surprise, Kill, Vanish as an effort toward understanding our current wars against terrorism, though I’m not sure it does much more than raise questions.
This book earns a disappointing one out of four trench coats.
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