Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1994. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 509 p. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Hand written note on The Nation stationary by 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. "David Corn (born February 20, 1959) is an American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones. He has been Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio opposite James Pinkerton or other media personalities. In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the political reporting category. Corn's first book was a 1994 biography of longtime Central Intelligence Agency official Ted Shackley. The book used Shackley's climb through the CIA bureaucracy to illustrate how the Agency worked and to follow some of its Cold War-era covert operations. In the Washington Post, Roger Warner called it "an impressive feat of research." Derived from a Kirkus review: Nation Washington editor Corn delves thoroughly and with gusto into the career of Ted Shackley, one of the more shadowy CIA agents of the Cold War period. Shackley was the child of a broken home, son of an immigrant woman who bequeathed him his fluent Polish, a skill that landed him his first counterintelligence job in postwar Berlin. An intense but informed and intelligent patriot, he entered the CIA at its inception in 1947. His career, therefore, mirrors the development and fortunes of the agency itself. Shackley was in Miami to orchestrate assassination attempts on Castro; he was in Laos to organize the covert war against the Pathet Lao; he was in Vietnam, where, from his office in the Saigon embassy as chief of the East Asia Division, he earned the nickname ``Blond Ghost.'' (In 1975, back in the States, as he watched TV images of the embassy evacuation, his 11-year-old daughter found him weeping—a rare moment of emotion for a man portrayed here as cold, balanced, and ruthless.) Corn sounds a note of recrimination throughout this biography, which unfairly lays at Shackley's door such fiascos as the posting by an agency employee of a CIA-forged letter from a Thai Communist rebel to the Thai government in an attempt to foster divisions within that country's left (it was traced back to the CIA and caused a storm of anti-American protest in Thailand). Shackley did not consent to be interviewed. By his own admission, Corn has used Shackley's career to open a window into the world of intelligence, and his book succeeds more as an account of the CIA's workings in general than as a portrait of one agent. An absorbing read about the CIA. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: CIA, Philip Agee, Douglas Blaufarb, Frank Church, Thomas Clines, William Colby, Espionage, Covert Operations, William Harvey, Richard Helms, Hmong, Oliver North, Operation Mongoose, Thomas Polgar, Frank Snepp, Stansfield Turner, Edwin Wilson, Ted Sha
ISBN: 9780671695255
[Book #68839]
Price: $50.00