Vaults, Mirrors, and Masks: Rediscovering U. S. Counterintelligence Book

This book was enjoyable at the level of 3 stars, but I learned a lot from it. It gets a knowledge-added star.

In a recent course on visual journalism, we spent a few weeks talking about photojournalism and American foreign policy. In that class, I learned a little bit about a lot of armed conflicts from recent history. Iran/Contra (and the Sandinista uprising before it), the Iranian Revolution, Bay of Pigs, Desert Storm, and the War on Terror. I kept getting surprised by how many conflicts involved Americans and how little I knew about them. It was also apparent that my ignorance was by design. Americans don't spend a lot of time talking about some of the darker (or at least shadier) episodes in their recent past. Americans don't know a lot about those episodes either, for a variety of reasons.

That realization brought me to this book. Paglen tracks planes, visits Central America and the Middle East, visits people tracking spy satellites, and delves into the defense and intelligence budgets (as far as he can, since they're wrapped in secrecy). Along the way he talks to people affected by the hidden budgets, programs, and operations of the US government and dissects the success or failure of their attempts to understand or reveal those programs. He tracks the origins of our secret intelligence agencies (they're more recent than I would have thought) and outlines some implications of their continued existence and growth. His findings are fascinating, even though he clearly can only explore the edges of the vast, dark world of these hidden government agencies.