Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987
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Veil is the tale of the covert wars that were waged in Central America, Iran and Libya in a secretive atmosphere and became the centerpieces and eventual time bombs of American foreign policy in the 1980s.
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As an historian, this book fails in many ways. Woodward has strong liberal leanings, and he continually allows his own biases to show through in his research. If he had used this book for a doctoral dissertation, it would have gotten slammed by his dissertation committee.
Fortuantely for him, American readers are much more attracted to unsubstantiated dirt than they are to hard past research.
Something that troubles me throughout this book is how Woodward takes Casey to task for his slurring of words during his public language, only to mention in passing at the very end of the book that Casey had been suffering from an unknown cancerous growth in his brain.
Another appealing point. Woodward hammers the CIA for allowing a few of their employees to get away with spying (and they should have been hammered for this), but he sees nothing incorrect with the press publishing as many secrets as they can. In some ways, it appears the Russians were wasting their money on paying spys, when the Washington Post was effective so hard to provide all these secrets for the fee of a subscription.
My final note is that Woodward obviously sees himself as the bright star protecting the American public from political powerbrokers in our nation’s capital. Sorry to say, he has been noticably silent in regards to the many treacherous and threatening policies place into the world by the Clinton Administration.
My final comment. I establish this book to be very flawed and biased.
Rick Varley University of Hawaii
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Woodward’s tale of Casey’s years at the helm of U.S. state terrorism centers around Casey and his British-bred, WWII-honed perspective used to justify government covert actions that include torture, disappearance, and death. We learn that America did not start her slide down the slope to Nazi Germany with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the Twenty-First Century. It started when Hitler’s faults started to take revenge on the Allies through the creation of the OSS in London, predecessor to CIA. Under Reagan’s two terms as President with Casey at the helm of CIA, U.S. state terrorism ran rampant in its aim to set up a system of Anglo/U.S.-sponsored authoritarian states.
Woodward is appealing to read because he provides information along with disinformation, twisted around more information and more disinformation, so that unraveling it becomes a challenge. Beginning on page 6, Woodward lets us know that he intends to take the uninitiated for an Orwellian ride. Stansfield Turner was Director of the CIA when Jimmy Carter was President, but either the CIA did not keep him completely informed of its covert activities; or Turner did know – but Woodward described him as not knowing in the interest of disinformation. According to Woodward, Turner wanted “to funnel covert money or help to some groups or individuals inside” Cuba, Libya, and Iran “to oust three leaders who were troublesome to U.S. interests – Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini, and Libya’s Muammar [sic] Qaddafi. The response from the DDO was: No, . . . Turner had been surprised at the depth of their reluctance” (p6).
The fact is that all three leaders were place into office by CIA and received subsequent CIA covert support to maintain their regimes. The Le Monde reported in 1979 that Khomeini had been stashed in France as part of a CIA Number Two back-up plot that, in the event that Shah Pahlevi and his SAVAK lost control in Iran, envisioned the CIA’s Ayatollah Khomeini telling the Iranian people what they wanted to hear and duping them with Islamic speechifying. And that is precisely what happened after the Shah fled Iran in October of 1979. Two weeks later the CIA personnel in Teheran were predictably taken hostage after CIA intentionally leaked the fake rumor that they were going to reinstall the Shah. The hostage-takers wanted a swap – to exchange the CIA personnel for the Shah so he could be executed for his heinous crimes and Iranian fears could be place to rest that the Shah would wreak terror again. CIA subsequently sent Khomeini to do a Ross Perot on the Iranian people – to drug them with words they longed to hear, words of peace through submission to God. The CIA’s Ayatollah duped many with his Islamic speechifying, but the socialists could not be fooled – he later killed tens of thousands of them and caused a resulting diaspora of Iranian socialists around the globe. Once secure in his new position as Caesar in the new Iranian Roman-style republic engineered by CIA, the Ayatollah’s Iranian F4 fighters were subsequently provided covert U.S. AWAC support against Iraqis MIGs during the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian scrutiny stations were maintained along the Soviet border, and oil flowed from Iran to Europe and Japan. Despite the camouflaging anti-U.S. speechifying from Khomeini (“The U.S. is an evil `Shaytaan’”), nothing changed in terms of U.S. strategic interests. The average man would do well to remember Tom Paine’s truism – “war is the gambling table of governments, citizens the dupes of the game”.
Since CIA hijacked the Iranian coup and installed Khomeini, how could a Director of CIA not know what was really happening in Iran? Either Turner did know and Woodward did not want his readers to know what Turner knew; or Turner didn’t know. The thought of Turner not knowing is absurd considering the extent that CIA was complicit, but this is the disinformation that Woodward wants his readers to judge. Woodward writes: “When the Shah of Iran came to the United States for medical treatment in October 1979, two weeks before the American hostages were taken in Iran, . . . Turner realized . . . that he was isolated both from his own agency and from the President he served” (p8). The fact is, according to the Le Monde in 1979, that Iranians reacted predictably to intentionally leaked CIA reports that CIA was going to reinstall the Shah, and predictably the Iranians grabbed the CIA personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran in order to later do a swap for the Shah – that way they could lock the Shah away and not worry about him reviving his CIA-maintained Hitlerite SAVAK regime. Woodward would have us judge that Turner is oblivious to what his CIA is doing or what Le Monde is adage about his CIA.
Woodward’s disinformation quickly mounds up: “He and his CIA had studiously misread Khomeini as a compassionate, senile cleric, and now he held the United States hostage”(p11). The reality was that CIA had orchestrated the realization of the hostage crisis so that their number two man – Ayatollah Khomeini, could take over where the Shah left off by singing a different tune.
Having customary himself as a disinformationist and probably a wordpusher on the CIA payroll in addition to his job at the Washington Post, Woodward’s tale progresses toward its main character William J. Casey. Casey came from the OSS – “the ancient-hand, ancient-boy network” that started in London, England during World War II. “These men were the operators, the inner agency, the band of brothers . . . the dedicated secretive operatives who did the dirty work . . . a club that didn’t meet”(p4). Woodward clarifies “They had been trained by the British, and CIA traditions were British traditions”. Woodward says Casey “sat in London headquarters making a spy network” (p37). American-powered British empire was the result, although the British have remained discreetly behind the scenes (See Nicolas John Cull’s “Selling War”).
After WWII, Casey made one unsuccessful stab at running for election to public office when he sought the Republican Party appointment to be their Long Island candidate for Congress in 1966 and they chose a name else. Afterward, “Casey returned to behind the scenes, where . . . many . . . thought he belonged” (p19). By early 1980, he became Ronald Reagan’s battle manager when Casey was “writing a book on the OSS” (p17).
Ronald Reagan won the election and Carter lost his bid for reelection. Stansfield Turner was hoping Reagan would keep him on as CIA chief, but that was not to be. Woodward relates an appealing aside about a warning from French intelligence chief Colonel Alexandre de Marenches that was agreed to President-Elect Ronald Reagan after he and Vice President-Elect George Bush won the election and waited for Carter to place the White House – “`Don’t trust the CIA’”(p22). Woodward further relates “Reagan repeated Marenches’ warning – `Don’t trust the CIA’ – to George Bush, who had been CIA chief in 1976-77. Bush thought it was hogwash, but all the same it obviously left a deep impression on Reagan” (p22). Reagan then questioned Casey to head the CIA and he later agreed, but Reagan was shot anyway weeks later by the son of Bush’s close friend in a deadly assassination attempt that was thwarted by the surgical prowess of Dr Rodman from Alliance, Ohio. Subsequently, Vice-President George Bush sat in the driver’s seat at the White House while Reagan and his “voodoo economic” was on the mend. Bush, as ex- director of CIA, and Casey, as the current director of CIA, remained right to their OSS roots and British traditions.
On page 55, Woodward says that CIA chief Turner, prior to Casey, believed the Soviet economy was in distress and that any alleged military superiority was fake. If what Woodward says about Turner is accurate, then I can say that Turner was right in thinking that the Soviets were in distress because in 1980 the Soviets were certainly in distress from my viewpoint on Shemya Island. That year I learned that Reagan’s Red Scare was largely balderdash. He was scaring U.S. taxpayers into giving up large amounts of cash to his bomb-building corporatist friends to defend ourselves from a largely imagined threat. On page 56, Woodward says “That meant that the Soviet advantage was not real”.
Woodward’s tale carries on for over 500 more pages and is chock full of information and more disinformation. My review can’t possibly due justice to it all. Read the book and discern for yourself whether Bob Woodward is a CIA wordpusher or not.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is primarily about the war of words inside the government concerning how things should be done. Because of this, it was different than I had expected.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Woodward does a excellent job of giving you a glide’s eye view of the ancient CIA
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
While this book may be a small ancient now, having been written prior to the first George Bush’s Presidency, there are still insights into government operations as well as tidbits that are significant today. Veil follows the tenure of the Director of the CIA Bob Casey. It starts with Reagan’s election and ends with Casey’s death. The book is written mostly from firsthand interviews (Casey wanted some of what he was adage to be place directly in the book).
During the course of the book readers will see names like Ariel Sharon appear (no Osama is never mentioned). For persons interested in wondering how some of today’s issues came into being you will see a glimpse herein.
There are, but, many operations that are discussed and at one point it is simple to lose track of which one is being discussed. Furthermore, for persons readers who did not live through the time period or who were too young to care then, some of the names and events will seem very unfamiliar.
This is indeed a book full of Woodward’s writing style with many events two decades ancient. That does not mean, but, that it doesn’t offer pertinent insight .
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5