Cia Killing Machine: The Inside Story Of A Professional Assassin

by June Colbert

If I calculate honestly, more than 50 percent of the people I've killed had no national security reason to die. Multiply that by the more than 100 snipers employed by the CIA. How do you sleep? A kid from rural West Virginia, K was the most patriotic guy in the world, when he was recruited into an elite unit of the Central Intelligence Agency at the age of nineteen. His job as a sniper was to eliminate anyone the CIA deemed a threat to national security. His targets included Angolan rebel leaders, Peruvian guerillas, high-level Vietnamese officials, Mossad agents, rogue Serb colonels, and Colombian drug lords. He was told each was to be eliminated in the name of democracy. But K was also required to bring down former CIA colleagues and innocent civilians, and he gradually realized that too much of the deadly work he was doing was done for the wrong reasons. This action-driven book reads like fiction but is shockingly true. K transports us into the murky inner workings of the world's most famous security agency. We follow him from grueling training and practice missions to stomach-churning real assassinations. From enthusiasm for any mission, no matter how reprehensible, to a growing sense of disbelief at just what the CIA requires from its highly trained snipers and other off-payroll employees, K experiences a shocking awakening. The story contained in these pages is a clear-eyed, no-holds-barred view of a dark profession. It's one man's true story, and an alarming expose of the CIA.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008