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Portrait Of A Cold Warrior: Second Thoughts of a Top CIA Agent
HC DJ DJ IN 4 PIECES
448 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1976
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 22, 2023
I read this many years ago as a young man just getting to know what the world is about, and I have re-read it as a much older man, as a follow-on to reading the Jakarta Method and a precursor to reading The Killing Season, to re-acquaint myself with some of the details and backdrops to the Indonesian massacres.
The first time I read it I was amazed and somewhat shocked at what the CIA had been doing throughout Asian and Central and South America. The second reading left me feeling more disgusted than amazed/shocked. The author comes across as initially pretty naive about the world outside his own little corner, and was probably a bad fit for the job in the first place, but for all his purported Christian upbringing, he ends up being a pretty amoral character, never really thinking very hard about the larger picture of what his actions may be affecting. He is generally disgusted by living conditions in his overseas postings, never really gets to know or understand the people of a country beyond his professional contacts, and initially sees the world in an us-or-them point of view, and, like most of his contemporaries, seems driven by fear of Communists to the point where he adopts the "ends justifies the means" attitude towards his work, without ever really questioning what the ends are, until the very end, in a paragraph or two, where he wonders about the validity of his life's work.
The first time I read it I was amazed and somewhat shocked at what the CIA had been doing throughout Asian and Central and South America. The second reading left me feeling more disgusted than amazed/shocked. The author comes across as initially pretty naive about the world outside his own little corner, and was probably a bad fit for the job in the first place, but for all his purported Christian upbringing, he ends up being a pretty amoral character, never really thinking very hard about the larger picture of what his actions may be affecting. He is generally disgusted by living conditions in his overseas postings, never really gets to know or understand the people of a country beyond his professional contacts, and initially sees the world in an us-or-them point of view, and, like most of his contemporaries, seems driven by fear of Communists to the point where he adopts the "ends justifies the means" attitude towards his work, without ever really questioning what the ends are, until the very end, in a paragraph or two, where he wonders about the validity of his life's work.
March 18, 2015
The Cold War from the point of view of a midlevel clandestine bureaucratic operative. No earthshaking revelations, mostly stuff about trying to figure out which factions in more or less strategic nations were worth supporting.
April 14, 2022
Tells the reason for Korean War. He believes that America should have crossed the Yalu.
Explains the reason for the Vietnam War and why America entered the war.
Goes over his time in Indonesia, Philippines, Argentina, Venezuela.
Has a great story about Taft and the Philipphines.
Allen Dulles's Free mans burden.
Goes over the reason he believes the CIA failed during the Bay of Pigs and Cuba.
Explains the reason for the Vietnam War and why America entered the war.
Goes over his time in Indonesia, Philippines, Argentina, Venezuela.
Has a great story about Taft and the Philipphines.
Allen Dulles's Free mans burden.
Goes over the reason he believes the CIA failed during the Bay of Pigs and Cuba.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews