Denial and Deception An Insiders View of the CIA from IranContra to Nation Books

A former clandestine agent specializing in the Middle East, Mahle begins with September 11th (she was doing intake on prospective applicants), but the bulk of her work recounts the CIA's involvement in such low watermarks of American intelligence as the Iran-Contra and the Ames affairs, and what she says have been their the devastating internal consequences. This is not just a memoir; Mahle joined the agency in 1988, and she pings back and forth in time, covering events and periods with which she was not directly involved. She decries what she characterizes as indiscriminate Congressional investigations, as well as political pressures to tailor conclusions to the biases of superiors. Both have led, she says, to demoralization and to a serious reduction in the CIA's overall capabilities-with the effects being fully felt now, as the U.S. finds itself in dire need of HUMINT (or human intelligence) from the Middle East and elsewhere. Reading the book is like talking to one of Seymour Hersh's sources, but with the relevance filter off; there's tons of information here-with a good deal on pre- and post-September 11th al-Qaeda-but very few readers will find all of it engaging. Nevertheless, as a major debriefing from an insider, one who writes clearly and often wryly, it succeeds.
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A former clandestine agent of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO), the author was posted in the Middle East in the 1990s. In this memoir, Mahle includes autobiographical anecdotes as well as analyses of the CIA's organizational and leadership problems in that decade. According to Mahle, the CIA's biggest problem was figuring out what to do after the cold war. Mahle details reforms proposed by successive directors from Robert Gates to George Tenet, and the extent to which these filtered down the line to the DO. She also imparts the flavor of her career--its operational excitement and sense of participating in history (one startling example: her proposal, eventually denied, to snatch a future 9/11 terrorist, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad). Although Mahle is generally supportive of the CIA, she delivers criticism bound to be pertinent to her core audience--potential CIA applicants--concerning an internal-security system she regards as unaccountable. She ran afoul of that system, which terminated her career. She also criticizes the conditions facing women in the male-dominated DO. Gilbert Taylor
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