Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

GOOD HUNTING: AN AMERICAN SPYMASTER'S STORY has made me far more appreciative of the essential role of CIA's covert operations both in the past and, especially, as the United States confronts a potpourri of global threats in the coming years. Jack Devine is not a disinterested writer. He served 32 years in CIA covert operations, ranging from junior office field assignments to multiple station chief posts and top-level assignments, including Acting Deputy Director of Operations.Published 16 years after Devine retired from CIA (does anyone fully retire from CIA?), GOOD HUNTING is the best insider's book on CIA that I have ever read.During my years in the Middle East and in the Foreign Service (Congo & Chile), I have met and worked with (and against) dozens of CIA professionals. I find Devine an exceptional professional and individual, with a breadth and integrity that makes me proud that he represented the United states in many trouble spots for over three decades. This is as close to a 'tell all' book that CIA would ever clear for publication.Devine provided detailed descriptions of some past CIA operations that often correct the general public's misinformed perceptions. In Chile (where I served from 1966 to 1969), for example, I find credible his account that CIA was not directly involved in the Pinochet coup against the Allende government in 1973. However, I was surprised, given his apparent frankness, that he spoke of CIA's resounding success in reinstating the Iranian shah in Iran and in assuring a Christian Democratic victory in Italy in 1948, when other studies have minimized the role of CIA.Devine wrote with specifics and self-deprecating humor about his role as a covert agent. He was staccato in stressing the importance of a professional covert corps. He steadfastly insisted that all covert activities should adhere to specific U. S. objectives, as determined at the highest levels. He stated that CIA has been apolitical, although the government, on occasion, had ordered CIA to engage in operations for political rather than strategic-interest reasons. His examples included activities related to Iraq, in which CIA bore the brunt from a misconceived, White-House-directed operation.What I found most valuable were the many situations in which covert operations were integral to clearly defined U. S. strategic objectives. Covert operations, by its nature, are a vexing business. How does one train people to recruit individuals to work against their government? How does seeking out seamy people affect those who are the seekers? What is the cumulative impact on an organization whose raison d'etre is to subvert others and to work within a veil of secrecy?For me, Devine demonstrated that CIA covert personnel could conduct their 'dirty work' and also maintain their individual integrity. Of course there can be 'rogues' in any organization. Also, there were moles, such as CIA's Aldrich Ames and the FBI's Robert Hanssen. I found Devine's profiles of numerous colleagues persuasive evidence that the professionalism of CIA's covert personnel is something of which they and I can be proud.Devine makes a strong case that extensive covert operations are an essential component of the American military, diplomatic, and economic arsenal. His description of how he managed the arming of the mujahideen with Stinger missiles against the Soviets in Afghanistan detailed an extraordinarily complex and successful operation that was trivialized in the movie CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR. We outsiders will never fully be able to appreciate the accomplishments of CIA's covert operations. All too often the failures make headline news, while the successes remain buried in the halls of Langley. For those who find 'distasteful' that the United States engages in cover activities, it is important to remember that, during CIA's infancy, presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy authorized major, massive covert activities. In our post-Cold War era, recent presidents have continued to utilize this covert arsenal, with such efforts as seeking to deter Ira's nuclear program an ongoing priority.Devine made a strong case for the primacy of CIA in the covert field. He acknowledged that, in a major military operation, the military should have primacy. He often favored CIA-military cooperation in which military personnel would be attached to CIA paramilitary groups.Devine highlighted distinctions between intelligence and operational perspectives. I appreciate this from my years in the State Department Office of Intelligence & Research. Not infrequently the analysis by me and my colleagues conflicted with assessments by the geographic departments My sense is that this was even a greater problem within CIA. Devine, on various occasions, sought to integrate intelligence and operations staff.I applaud his initiatives, but doubt that there is any perfect solution in combining these distinct functions.Devine was highly critical of post- 9/11 efforts to create a new superstructure for intelligence management. He wrote with distain of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created in 2005. He expressed concern with the increasingly important role given to the military within the national intelligence community.I share Devine's concern with the over-bureaucratization of the intelligence process. I recall, during the 1964 Congo foreign hostage crisis, how I could work directly and professionally with my CIA counterpart and how we both dismissed the Defense Intelligence Agency as irrelevant. Timeliness and professionalism are essential in intelligence. As the 'least worst alternative,' I tend to favor Devine's arguments that the Central Intelligence Agency should be America's central intelligence organization.Devine concluded with an incisive tour d'horizon of likely hot spots and the role that covert operations should play. He foresaw few major U. S. military involvements. His ongoing priority problem list included: terrorism, a Middle East religious cockpit, a Pakistan that could ooze into 'failed state' status,and such flash points as Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and China, as well as the global drug trade.These are all ingredients of a U. S. policy bouillabaisse that, in Devine's view, will require heavy reliance on sustained cover activities.Both for his personal insights into the 'business' of CIA's covert activities and his shrewd insights on what America might anticipate in the coming years, I consider Devine's book a must read for anyone interested in the formulation, the implementation, or the assessing of U. S. foreign policy.

Dear Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison:You can call off your hacking dogs! Retired career CIA operative and super sleuth, Jack Devine, has written an overt,patriotic account of his almost half-century of covert activities in the loyal service of his country, and how, at six feet six- and- a- half inches, he was able to remain incognito all that time is truly baffling.GOOD HUNTING has a knockout opening.Then, on p. 3, Devine brashly asseverates, "It's fair to say that, [although I'm retired from the Central Intelligence Agency], I can put a tail on someone just about anywhere in the world faster than most spy agencies."John J. "Jack" Devine was an intrepid officer in the CIA for 32 years (1967-1999). He was in Santiago de Chile during the fall of Salvador Allende in 1973. He witnessed the embarrassment of the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s, and he was the agent most responsible for the delivery of stinger missiles to the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the late- 1980s. In the 1990s, he was the head of the Agency's Latin American counter narcotics division that ultimately brought down Pablo Escobar. He retired from the CIA after having served as the Agency's Acting Director of Foreign Operations in which he had supervisory authority over thousands of Agency employees involved in worldwide missions. In retirement, he now serves in the corporate intelligence business, in which he helped to assess such insidious matters as the chemo-bio attack on Madison Square Garden.In the years following the 9/11 attacks, he was one of the few analysts who tirelessly insisted on "finding and killing Osama Bin Laden" as a means to demoralize the al-Qaeda jihadists. He has been a bold advocate of the use of drones.In this, his autobiography, he reveals the "warts and all" about the middle years of CIA history. As he tells it, "I lived it, breathed it, and loved it!"It was during those times (p.3) that he and his comrades ended many of their international cables with the catchphrase "Good Hunting," which referred to the covert, relentless recruitment of their enemies as sources of intelligence.Among the "warts,"Devine goes into some detail about Aldrich Ames whom he had the displeasure of knowing personally and the FBI's mole, Robert Hanssen, with whom he did not have contact. He also reveals the embarrassing details behind CURVEBALL (Kansi Mir Aimal)who promulgated the specious information about WMDs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq that precipitated the U.S. invasion of that country in 2003, perhaps permanently staining the legacies of both Colin Powell and George W. Bush.Victor L. Moteemeritus Professor of geography, Russian studies, and political science atThe University of Houston Central Campus (1971-2011)Author of 150 scholarly works, includingSIBERIA WORLDS APART(Boulder,CO:Westview/Perseus, 1998),256 pp.;AN INDUSTRIAL ATLAS OF THE SOVIET SUCCESSOR STATES(Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources, Inc., 1994), 300 pp.; andCoauthored with Theodore Shabad, GATEWAY TO SIBERIAN RESOURCES(New York: Wiley, 1977), 198 pp.;In 2011, upon my retirement from academia,I self-published as V Traven, MEMOIRS OF A DROMOMANIAC (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp.), 256 pp.

The supplier was fine; the book, itself, was poor. A much better book by a contemporary colleague of the author is by Richard Holm--available on Kindle. Whilst the author must be fairly capable given his accomplishments in Afghanistan, we learn little of how he overcame significant obstacles to achieve the success that he did.He employed his wife on at least one instance on an operation that he mentioned. Not certain how they'd view such tradescraft at the Farm. From such you do begin to understand how many of the Company's ops went awry over the years. The low point of the book for me came at the end when we learn that the author served on a campaign committee for this guy, Obama. No wonder!As I say, the supplier performed much better than the author.

In order to give a focus to what follows, let me explain I am an Englishman and a private citizen with no experience of the secret world. This book was not primarily written for people like me. It is a most disquieting book but was not intended to be so. I suspect the reasons for its publication are multi-layered - part of an ongoing CIA political and public relations misinformation process. A man of the rank of Devine, who knows so much of the truth of the last thirty or more years, could only write and publish with the consent of the Directors of the CIA. Every word of this book has been carefully examined and edited by intelligence-service experts, every described event fully sanitised. It is certainly no exposé. It is not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.Such is the omnipotence that becomes ingrained in the participants in this clandestine world, they firmly believe that they fool all of the people all of the time. They are concerned to emphasise: that their every plan and action is approved, in advance, at the very top of national authority; that the civil rights of every citizen is never abused; that they act only to preserve the free world. Yet they are engaged in a war of far greater intensity, complexity, immediacy and duration than that executed by the Armed Forces. The CIA bears no resemblance to Arthur Conolly’s ‘Great Game’ of quiet undercover jousting. They are a separate (parallel) living human force in American national life that is red in tooth and claw, and that has become too big to curtail.That we need reliable intelligence on all of our enemies (particularly terrorism) is not disputed, but the ramifications of the secret-gathering apparatus that has evolved (in the USA and UK) over the years since WWII is now beyond democratic management. If the many politician-lawyers who govern the USA think they possess the ultimate sanction in their financial control over intelligence gathering, they must think again. These CIA masters of the ‘three-card-trick’ are of a superior intellectual league. Many a simple sentence by Mr Devine carried the implication that it would be most insightful to the initiated – both spy and politico.But given these impressions and reservations this is a good read (essentially conducted between the lines). On occasions (if you stop being a sceptic) it is even an exciting page turner.

Sucinto direto ao ponto quanto as atividades secretas e sua legitimidade pelo Estado. Exemplificado pelas memórias do autor na CIA, em especial período envolvendo antes e após golpe militar no governo Allende no Chile, e a Guerra as Drogas e subseqüente caçada à Pablo Escobar.

Very pleased