Presidents' Secret Wars
John Prados
480 pages including index
published in 1986

One of the things I've been kicking my head against in my other blog is the idea that George Bush and the Republicans are the fount of all evil and if only the Democrats come into power, the United States will once again become a force for good. Anybody with any knowledge of post-WW2 American history knows how wrong that idea is, yet far too many intelligent people still are found of this myth, which manifests itself in things like the idea that John F. Kennedy would've stopped the War on Vietnam if he hadn't been killed. All of this is why more people should read books like this, Presidents' Secret Wars, which traces the history of America's CIA initiated secret wars since 1945, up to the eve of the Iran-Contra Scandal. (An updated version has been published since, but the local library onluy had the original version.) It shows that liberal presidents have been just as guilty as conservative ones in unleashing dirty wars on other countries.

The CIA was created in 1947, as a succesor to the wartime OSS, with its main task being espionage. From the start however it also had a covert action function; not surprising as many of the early CIA officers came from the OSS, which had a long and largely succesful history of covert action against nazi Germany during WW2. 1947 was the year the Cold War officially got started, when it became clear that the enforced wartime alliance of Soviet Russia and the western powers was definately at an end.

At the time there were still several ongoing insurrections against Soviet rule going on in Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic States, desparate for any support. These were the first "covert wars" the CIA would be involved with, but not the last. In some ways, these first operations were more like practise runs than real operations, with no real expectations of succes. That would come with later actions.

And later actions there would be, very many more of them, as President's Secret Wars shows. Some of these operations are quite well known, such as the CIA involvement in Cuba, a major obsession to more than one president, as the two chapters devoted to it show. Others, like the decades long war in Tibet, where the CIA trained and supplied Tibetese insurgents against China, are almost unknown even now.

Prados makes clear that from the start, these sort of covert actions, secret wars, were largely pursued with presidental approval, but that there was always a certain ambiguity about this support. Such action was fine as long as it stayed deniable and wouldn't expose the US to unnecessary risks, or worse, the president to political exposure. He also makes it clear that the CIA often went beyond the limits the president had set them, if they could do so. Not to mention that they were often working with people and groups with their own agendas, often much more fanatical than the CIA agents themselves, for obvious reasons. With the operations against Cuba especially, where you had a president eager to get rid of Castro, CIA officers with a deep hatred of him and Cuban exiles desparately eager to liberate their homeland, this would lead to disaster after disaster culminating in the Bay of Pigs, after which the CIA quickly became the scapegoat, with presidential involvement largely covered up.

Over the decades the secret wars fought by the CIA became larger and larger, until Watergate. After Watergate the CIA came under sustained fire from an energised Congress fed up with all this skullduggery and abuse of power. The Church Committee especially helped curb a lot of the CIA's power, if only by bringing to light the many plots against third countries it had been involved with. For the rest of the seventies therefore the CIA lay low. That all changed with Reagan of course. President's Secret Wars was written before the Iran/Contra scandal broke, but the ongoing secret war against Nicaragua in the eighties is covered in great detail by Prados.

As I said, what President's Secret Wars shows is that both Republican and Democratic presidents eagerly made use of the CIA's capability to wage secret wars. It also shows how much trouble this capability has brought, to the US, but also to the countries the CIA waged its secret wars in. Recommended reading for any liberal who wants to disabuse themself from the idea that the Bush administration is unique in this.

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