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The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth
Penguin Press
April 2013
On Sale: April 9, 2013
400 pages ISBN: 1594204802 EAN: 9781594204807 Kindle: B00AEDDSUC Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s riveting account of
the transformation of the CIA and America’s special
operations forces into man-hunting and killing machines in
the world’s dark spaces: the new American way of war
The most momentous change in American warfare
over the past decade has taken place away from the
battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the corners of the
world where large armies can’t go. The Way of the
Knife is the untold story of that shadow war: a campaign
that has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies and
lowered the bar for waging war across the globe. America has
pursued its enemies with killer drones and special
operations troops; trained privateers for assassination
missions and used them to set up clandestine spying
networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, untrustworthy
foreign intelligence services, and proxy armies.
This new approach to war has been embraced by Washington
as a lower risk, lower cost alternative to the messy wars of
occupation and has been championed as a clean and surgical
way of conflict. But the knife has created enemies just as
it has killed them. It has fomented resentments among
allies, fueled instability, and created new weapons unbound
by the normal rules of accountability during wartime.
Mark Mazzetti tracks an astonishing cast of
characters on the ground in the shadow war, from a CIA
officer dropped into the tribal areas to learn the hard way
how the spy games in Pakistan are played to the
chain-smoking Pentagon official running an off-the-books spy
operation, from a Virginia socialite whom the Pentagon hired
to gather intelligence about militants in Somalia to a CIA
contractor imprisoned in Lahore after going off the
leash. At the heart of the book is the story
of two proud and rival entities, the CIA and the American
military, elbowing each other for supremacy. The CIA,
created as a Cold War espionage service, is now more than
ever a paramilitary agency ordered by the White House to
kill off America’s enemies—in the mountains of Pakistan and
the deserts of Yemen, in the tumultuous civil wars of North
Africa and the chaos of Somalia. For its part, the Pentagon
has become more like the CIA, dramatically expanding spying
missions everywhere. Sometimes, as with the raid that killed
Osama bin Laden, their efforts have been perfectly
coordinated. Other times, including the failed operations
disclosed here for the first time, they have not. For better
or worse, their struggles will define American national
security in the years to come.
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