CLOAK AND AMERICAN DAGGER
A pacy narrative of CIA’S dark arts and the death of the spy romance
Engrossing is the word that describes this book in one word, and the story it tells is historical as well as contemporary. The story is about the evolution of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) into a paramilitary hit squad running assassination operations. The CIA was born out of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II outfit that launched sabotage missions against Nazi Germany. Even as its myth grew about interference in every part of the world, the CIA did everything to perpetuate that global impression. The war against communism pitted the CIA against Third World dictatorships, Latin American drug regimes, and of course, the source of it all, the Soviet Union.
In the 1970s a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church was looking into the functioning of the CIA when an off- the- cuff remark by President Gerald Ford changed the focus of the committee, from domestic abuses like phone tapping to global assassination attempts. Even before its report was out, President Ford had already “signed an executive order banning the government from carrying out assassinations of foreign heads of state or other foreign politicians”. But it was a ban that wouldn’t last more than a couple of decades. For 9/ 11 brought new challenges to a new war.
Two characters stand out from the hundreds that the author has brought into the picture, because they characterise the changing nature of CIA’s activities. Ross Newland appears as the epitome of the old- world spy: Genteel, affable and learned. Much travelled in childhood as a result of which he spoke fluent Spanish, Newland began his career in the cocaine fields of Bolivia.
The Way of the Knife begins with the character who in many ways is the epitome of the new CIA— a captivating account of what happened in that Lahore police station after Raymond Davis is brought in having killed two young men. His shooting skills should have been enough to let anyone know that Davis wasn’t simply a diplomat even if he carried a diplomatic passport. A former Special Forces soldier, Raymond Davis was contracted by the CIA to undertake covert operations in Pakistan. There were many in Pakistan like him, and there may still be some. That tale is a fascinating account of pulls and tugs between two spy agencies that “had all the worst qualities of a failing marriage: Both sides had long ago stopped trusting each other but couldn’t imagine ever splitting up”.
The distrust was caused by the same thing that prevented a split- up— terrorism. The changing nature of the CIA is attributed to the rise of global terrorism, and since there is plenty of that in Pakistan, much of the book is based in the badlands there. It is also in Yemen, Somalia, and any other place the CIA believes enemies’ territory. The book is also about mundane bureaucratic turf wars, the kind that happens in all governments. The turf war with the Pentagon, and the eventual cohabitation makes for fascinating reading. The CIA finds solutions to its problems through technical means, drones, or human, the myriad world of US Special Forces assets. Not all of the actions, however, are launched on accurate or verified information, the saddest case being that of a skinny 16- year- old Abdulrahman Al- Awlaki, a US national, killed by a missile strike in Yemen. His guilt was that he left home to look for his father, Anwar Al- Awlaki, already killed by a US drone strike. Both were US nationals, and that is how murky this war has become, led and largely conducted by the CIA.