Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley And The CIA's Crusades

by David Corn

Based on once-secret government records and interviews with more than 100 ex-CIA personnel, this fascinating portrait of a real-life George Smiley takes a hard look at the inside workings of the CIA and its most important covert operations. 8-page photo insert.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Espionage, Biography

512 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

David Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, including Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Battled the GOP to Set Up the 2012 Election and Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (co-written with Michael Isikoff). He is also the author of the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades and the novel Deep Background.

Reviews

[Nick Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shackley's a hard man to write a biography for, in that there's only so much *there* there, but Corn does a good job getting to the heart of the man and, more importantly, of the CIA in its figure-it-out-as-we-go first couple of decades.

Corn is no conspiracy theorist; he lands where many other tales of the CIA end up -- that American Intelligence was often as inept as it was criminal or harmful; how the Cold War mentality made allies or enemies of the world's nations with no in-between, and how that mentality combined with a "just following orders" moral compass excused nearly any otherwise inconceivable actions.

Highly recommended.