Safe for Democracy, The Secret Wars of the CIAby John Prados. Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2006. 696 pp.
In Safe For Democracy, The Secret Wars of the CIA, John Prados offers a well-researched, detailed and vivid account of the work and inner workings of the primary US intelligence agency. Starting in 1947 with the creation of the CIA, when the Cold War with the Soviet Union was just beginning, the author traces the successes and failures of the CIA well into the post-Cold War era during the Clinton presidency. Prados proves a master of his subject. Through the meticulous use of archival information and other key sources, he achieves the main aim of the book which is to de-mythologize a subject that is still much obscured by stereotypes and half-truths from enemies and friends alike. Thus, Prados manages to place the CIA in a real historical context in which different political forces and ideas compete for supremacy and as a part of a wider governmental machinery that presidents try to control and put into good use and Congress strives to effectively supervise.
The book’s narrative is comprised of a series of episodes as the author traces the evolution of the CIA with the coming and going of presidents and the ups and downs of the Cold War and in which the reader learns a lot about long-forgotten operations starting with British Guiana. Prados writes with a certain dramatic flair, often including too many, otherwise fascinating, details that might divert attention and tire the reader. Nevertheless, the narrative is held together by an underlying paradox that forms the central theme of the book: how to reconcile the presidents’ rhetoric and the American peoples’ preference for the spread of democracy worldwide with the practical, often expedient and cynical, exercise of US power in the world.
This is a paradox that remains unresolved to the present day and has cost the CIA dearly. In the developing world the CIA is much hated and feared as a symbol of American imperialism. The global left has demonized it for the role it played in overthrowing democratically elected but independent-minded leaders and for the support it lent to anti-communist, and often to anti-anti-colonial, forces in the fight against the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the CIA is also loathed by much of the American right which thinks of it as a nest of incompetent liberal internationalists. It is no accident that the administration of George W. Bush has sidelined the CIA, by upgrading further the DOD’s authority and capabilities in intelligence and by creating an overarching position of a Director of National Intelligence.
However, Prados avoids dealing with the current dilemmas with which the CIA and the wider US intelligence community are faced as they struggle to deal with new, elusive challenges. The book remains mostly historical but in a way that is useful for today. Prados is highly critical of the CIA’s covert operations. For him, as for many others, even the most successful one, Afghanistan in the 1980s, had serious negative repercussions with which the US and its allies are still dealing today. In trying to make the Soviet Union bleed to a strategic withdrawal, the US helped foster a militant Islamic movement that has used global terror and destabilized Pakistan and much of the Middle East. For Prados “covert action is best left in the toolbox” of US policymakers.
Overall, this is a useful study on a controversial subject for both the experts and the general public. As the reader learns or is reminded of current enemies collaborating in the recent past, as was the case, for example, with Israel selling weapons to revolutionary Iran and with the US courting Saddam Hussein, manipulating the voting public only becomes harder. Memory, after all, is a critical precondition so that the governed may wisely judge their governors.
Dimitris Keridis
Tufts University/University of Macedonia