My Amazon Review of Chris Whipple's "The Spy Masters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future"

 

Inside the CIA

 

I am an avid reader of spy fiction and nonfiction. As a result, I looked forward to reading Chris Whipple’s history of the CIA through its directors from Richard Helms in the 1960’s through Gina Haspel of today. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Simply put his words do not come off the page and at times I was reluctant to pick up the book. The drama is not there.

 

The book is an outgrowth of a Showtime documentary written by Whipple with the same title. To be sure he covers the history highlighting the CIA’s initial success in Afghanistan and its massive failure to predict the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the disclosure of the “family jewels” during the congressional hearings of the 1970s. He interviews directors George Tenet of “slam dunk” fame, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and David Petraeus along with numerous high-level staffers.

 

A strength of the book is that he highlights the tension between the CIA with its masters in the White House and the Congress. In my opinion the two directors that successfully navigated those shoals were George H.W. Bush and Leon Panetta, both master politicians. Thus aside from being a master spy the CIA director has to be a master politician.

 

My problem with Whipple is that I believe he does not fully understand the how difficult the job is. There is so much information, much of it bad, coming at a CIA director making it extraordinarily difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. It would have been a far better book for him to sit in the shoes of a director during a period of crisis trying to evaluate the incoming information and then to deal with the process of presenting it to the president.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R27PBIIBLHD4J8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv