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5.0étoiles sur 5
Comments on book's portrayal of real people, Juil 10 2004
This is a wonderful novel; of course it is fiction, but it portrays many real people. I worked off and on from 1950 to the early '90s with defense and intel groups,and although my contact with CIA was limited, I have personal views about some of the real people, and here comment on how my views match (or don't) Littell's portrayal. First, though, I must observe that neither CIA nor KGB was consistently as clever as the book portrays; like any large organization, CIA and KGB had very many people who were barely competent, if that, along with some who were superb, so the effectiveness of neither CIA nor KGB was as great as that of some less well-known intel groups in both countries that chose and trained fewer people and did it better. That's not a criticism, just an observation about big organizations. In particular, both CIA and KGB suffered greatly from their habit of posting people to assignments where they couldn't speak or understand the local languages and didn't know local customs and courtesies; I met a few of those in surprising places, and wondered what on earth their bosses thought they could achieve. OK, on to real people.The portrayal of Bissell is perfect: a brilliant, hard-driving, opinionated risk-taker who didn't listen well to the views of others. (By the way, Bissell didn't fall on his sword after Bay of Pigs; he wound up with a responsible job that used his talent where he wouldn't do damage.) Richard Helms was much better than Littell's brief description would imply; Helms was indeed usually cautious, and could be bureaucratic, but he fought fiercely to make his considered judgment heard, and was perhaps the most effective person in CIA for many years. It's unfortunate that Kennedy didn't get Helms' carefully reasoned explanation of why Bay of Pigs wouldn't work; that was pigeonholed before it could get to Kennedy, and Kennedy had not yet learned to ask the questions that would have brought Helms' story to his attention. Casey is well portrayed: a fervent patriot with lousy judgment. It's little known that Adm. Bobby Inman, Casey's deputy between Inman's time as NSA Director and Inman's subsequent career, resigned because some of Casey's operations were unacceptable to Inman. (I know this both from Inman and from others.) Angleton deserves better than the portrayal in this book; he was abrasive, eccentric and paranoid, hated by many CIA people, but he did many good things for CIA besides a few bad things. Angleton did not destroy the capability of CIA's Ops Directorate, although he did do a bit of damage to it. The more serious damage, however, was inflicted later by James Woolsey's well-intentioned but ill-advised starvation of humint to emphasize technical means. Tenet tried to repair this, and humint is getting better again now, but that takes time, and unfortunately wasn't far enough along for the Iraq conflict, so Tenet had to take the fall. Littell portrays the KGB's inability to get the Politburo to recognize the facts of life about Afghanistan; I don't know whether Littell means to imply the CIA had the same problem about Viet Nam, but it did. In the late '60s I asked a senior US intel guy why US intel hadn't laid out for President Johnson the true state of affairs in Viet Nam, and he said, "We did, repeatedly, but he wouldn't listen; he didn't want to hear it." A perennial problem for intel shops is that national leaders (and top military people) often don't want to hear what the intel people have to say, for reasons having to do with problems of policy and of leadership; in the US, CIA and other intel shops often get badmouthed for not providing good analyses when in fact they did, but were ignored. I can think of only two post-WW-II Presidents who listened carefully to intel assessments that cast doubts on the President's policy of the time. I know little about Giancana, but I'm surprised if he was as foulmouthed and ignorant as Littell portrays; the few people I have known who were "managers" in organizations that systematically broke our criminal laws had to deal with the "respectable" world, and behaved in a way acceptable to those they dealt with; they left it to their goons to be grossly uncouth. I noted a couple of very minor errors in Littell's description of routine CIA procedures at Langley, but nothing major. All told, he has achieved a remarkably good book; if my comments above seem to conflict with some of Littell's characterizations, keep in mind that there are many knowledgeable people who would agree with Littell and not with me, or who would disagree with both of us.
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de Robert Littell
de Robert Littell
de Robert Littell
de Christopher Reich
de Martin Cruz Smith
