BOOK REVIEW: The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House
By Nada Bakos
Reviewed by Jack Boger
The vast majority of stories that have emerged from the war on terror star a now-familiar main character: male, macho, a military and/or intelligence officer, preferably bearded and ball-capped. Hollywood depictions of driven female spies in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland introduced another archetype, albeit an amalgamated and airbrushed one. Nada Bakos’ new memoir The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists, and Challenging the White House tells the story of one of the real women who did the work celebrated on screen. It provides a timely reminder of the contributions that women have made to national security and a solid overview of the early days of American counterterrorism.
Bakos’ story begins in the central Montana cow town of Denton, where she grew up caring for the orphaned calves on her family’s ranch. A postgraduate fellowship studying at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, focusing on the agricultural feminist movement then flowering in the northern regions of India, sparked a love for adventure that eventually leads her to Washington and the CIA after a breakup in her late twenties. The idealism that compelled her to seek a job “that would let [her] make a difference in the world” propelled her into a role as an analyst supporting organizational development. A desire to get closer to “immediate” impact eventually brought her to the Directorate of Intelligence as an analyst hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the central protagonist of her CIA career.
As much as she clearly appreciated much of her time at the Agency, Bakos casts an often-unflattering light on her former employer. She details a “seemingly impenetrable patriarchal structure” and frequent harassment and “low-level sexism” during her time at the Agency. The Counterterrorism Center and Directorate of Operations receive particularly low marks for inclusion. Bakos cites several historical examples of the CIA’s issues with female employees, beginning with a recently declassified 1953 report on women’s employment at the CIA compiled by a group of officers known as the “petticoat panel”. A “bruising” 1986 class action lawsuit filed by several hundred CIA employees decrying a “pervasive culture of sexual discrimination” was settled quietly nearly a decade later. The late 1990s and early 2000s culture that Bakos experienced did not appear to have changed much.
Bakos also does not miss an opportunity to highlight women’s contributions to the Global War on Terror. She notes that the first strategic warning delivered to U.S. policymakers about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden’s organization came in a 1993 report authored by a young female State Department analyst (who in a twist of fate later becomes one of Bakos’ mentors). She fondly remembers the supportive “circles of women I would later meet on teams everywhere from Langley to Baghdad”. Bakos finds the characterizations of women in Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland to be affirming but limited. They merely “hint at a larger truth that reflects [her] own experiences: women initially made up the majority of the CIA targeters charged with hunting the most dangerous figures in the most dangerous terrorist organization the United States has ever known”- al Qaeda.
Though most of the prose, co-written with Davin Coburn, proved workmanlike, Bakos delivers lyrical imagery of environments like the Judith River banks in her native Wyoming, “with a view so vast the world seemed full of endless possibility”. The structure of the book felt scattered and episodic at times (though some anecdotes, like the story of the interrogation of Evil Hagrid, a towering Iraqi Intelligence Service official, are highly entertaining). I also wish that more time had been spent linking Bakos and her colleagues’ efforts to contemporary efforts against the Islamic State rather than reviewing the bin Laden raid.
I appreciated Bakos’ frequent self-deprecating perspective and efforts to shine a light on her peers who continue to toil “in quiet obscurity” as she once did. She makes a compelling argument for inclusion and diversity in intelligence analysis, highlighting the strengths that multiple viewpoints can bring. Bakos claims, rather credibly, that women may be more skilled than men at “measuring risk” and therefore critical to thoughtful analysis. At the very least, it is hard to discount her well-worn but nonetheless compelling argument for diversity as avoiding “a giant self-licking ice cream cone”.
My lasting impression of the book might be the murky (to borrow a favorite Bakos descriptor for CIA uncertainty) effectiveness of American foreign policy over the past two decades. After all, she notes, the reprieve of violence from al Qaeda in Iraq lasted just six days after Zarqawi’s death in 2006.
I recommend her fresh feminist take on the CIA and recent history to anyone seeking a new perspective on the war on terror.
This book earns a solid three out of four trench coats.
Jack Boger served as a Marine ground intelligence officer from 2013-2018. He deployed to Australia as a rifle platoon commander and to East Asia as an analyst focused on North Korea. Other work experience includes UNICEF Madagascar and international development projects in Jordan and Nepal.
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