Re-examining the Cold War Book

Having read his book about US contingency plans to nuke the Viet Minh on behalf of France in the fifties, Prados' President's Secret Wars caught my eye at the Children's Memorial Hospital resale shop. I bought it, brought it home with a few other volumes purchased there and read it soon thereafter.

The first four-fifths of this book is a straightforward history of covert military operations conducted by the Executive Branch from the end of WWII through our first adventure in Afghanistan in the eighties. So doing, Prados gives the history of the CIA and its predecessors with an emphasis on its murky legal basis and the various fitfull experiments with oversight and control. The last fifth of this edition of the book concerns the war against Nicaragua conducted during the Reagan administration, a war still going on at the time of publication. Here, in this last part, what had been a flowing overview becomes a detailed accounting of the evolving scandal of Executive criminally defying Congress and the law. This was, in my opinion, the weakest part of the text, causing me to rate the whole as a four while otherwise I would have given it a five.

The ostensible point of this book is to discuss the history of such black operations with an eye to evaluating their efficacy. Prados' condlusion is that while some operations have been tactically successful, most have proven to be strategic failures, often setting up the conditions for totally unintended consequences. Our overthrow of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Iran and Chile all led to years of dictatorship. Our attempted overthrow of the Cuban government pushed its leadership into the arms of the Soviets. Our turn to Islamic fundamentalism against the Soviets led...well, we all know where that led.

Throughout most of the text Prados avoids making moral judgments, confining himself to questions of efficacy. This objective pose fall apart in the last sections about Nicaragua where the Reagan administration comes in for scathing, almost overwhelming, criticism on all counts. Not only were they breaking both domestic and international laws and agreements, repeatedly lying to the Congressional bodies responsible for oversight and directly involving the President in unconstitutional crimes, but they rather incompetently backed the wrong horse.

Prados conclusion is that the CIA should return to being what Truman originally intended: an apolitical intelligence agency reporting to the President and responsible to Congress. Covert operations should be eschewed except as adjuncts to actual declared wars and then they should probably be closely coordinated with, if not entirely run by, the military.