Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (review)

The sub-title of this comprehensive, densely packed book is something of a misnomer, for two reasons: First, John Prados explicitly asserts that "the secret wars of the CIA" were not affairs of the agency alone. Instead, the larger executive branch, including the White House (if not always the President in person) instigated some of them—and ratified and supported the rest. In various ways, at different times, Congress went along (or at least some of its leadership did); and by the middle of the Clinton administration, Congress had developed an almost co-equal power to get involved.

Second, the title implies many secret wars; and indeed the United States conducted many separate secret operations, all over the world, between 1945 and 2001. These included genuinely covert political and propaganda activities, political coups d 'état, as in Iran and Guatemala, and full-scale, if officially secret, irregular warfare in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. However, the concept of a single war against global Communism is central to the book's principal narrative, as the concept of near-feudal bureaucratic "baronies" within the CIA's Directorate of Operations is central to its assessment of agency management. In that sense, Safe for Democracy is a military history told largely through the political background of the various operations, the operational records of the various projects, and the perspectives of men (all men) who were the equivalent of senior generals, theatre commanders in this secret, global war.

The narrative focus, like the history it records, loses cohesiveness and coherence in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Prados uses it to support a thoughtful and fair-minded argument that if one's objectives are to "[enhance] the evolution of the democratic tradition" (p. 648), using covert operations (political action as well as psychological/paramilitary warfare) is counterproductive and, therefore, to be avoided.

Prados is not "unengaged," but (with the exception of his treatment of the Nixon-Kissinger assault on Salvador Allende's Chile) he expresses his outrage at his subjects with old-fashioned journalism and editorial disappointment. No anti-Agency screed, Safe for Democracy even pays appropriate passing respects to Henry Kissinger's observation (caught on a tape transcript, naturally enough) that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work." Yet if this is no indictment, it is a thorough and remorseless bill of particulars, largely supported by the evidence of memoirs, interviews, and a trove of once-classified government documents, and presented in a low-key tenor that conveys credibility.

Prados does not manage this without cost. Safe for Democracy's great strengths—its comprehensiveness, density, and command of voluminous sources over a field nearly half a century long—are its main weaknesses as well. This is not a page-turner. The cast of characters and the glossary of acronyms are occasionally bewildering. Simply reporting the entanglement of field operations with the internal workings of the CIA creates a maze of text, and the Agency's place in its external bureaucratic and political environments is always shifting. Those who follow the continuing saga of the CIA will find here all the usual stories—and suspects—along with accounts of Cold War and post-Cold War operations that few have previously encountered, all of them in great detail.

Still, Prados's work provides both a good look into the "operation" of covert operations and a very disturbing window on the corridors where spooks and statesmen meet.

Developing throughout his theme that the CIA was no "rogue elephant," Prados carefully draws the connections between Agency management, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. As expected by now, Eisenhower and Kennedy emerge as regular, knowing users of CIA covert operations, and Prados uses his account of their administrations to examine some of the chronic problems that come along with managing large enterprises that are supposed to be secret. Kennedy's efforts to...