Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA Book

On the one hand, this is a highly detailed account of a ~60 year history of CIA covert actions spanning everything from political manipulations in Italy to the Bay of Pigs to Black Hawk Down-era Somalia. On the other hand, it is a hell of a slog to get through. This is not a CIA history writ large, as the analysis and espionage sides of the organization are discussed only tangentially, but the observational lens is set squarely on the CIA and its relationship with the rest of U.S. government, much more than the impact of its activities and the actions of its partners and opponents.

The author's central message comes through fairly clearly (and repetitively) through each case: covert action almost never accomplishes any of the purposes it's touted to achieve, often reinforces or creates local actors who take advantage of U.S. largess to pursue their own aims, and is almost invariably carried out with little to no close scrutiny from the presidents who commission the action or from Congress, upon whom the final chapter hangs its oversight hopes.

This is a narrative heavily driven by - and driven at - the individual personalities that populated the CIA covert action program, and often feels like a 650 page Washington reader for anyone looking for ammunition on how one particular CIA official or the other screwed things up on their watch (as many, many of them did).

The post 9/11 era is not really discussed, although in some respects the concerns raised in the book over the para-militarization of the CIA are quite prescient; but for my reading, this was overwhelmed by a prosecutorial focus on which officials lied about what and who should have known better.

If you ever need a companion reference for a history of the Bay of Pigs or U.S. intervention in Guatemala, or any of several other Cold War episodes, this is worth consulting; but as a whole it felt both too dense and too quickly sketched out to fit the whole 60 year history in.