David Corn. Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. 1994.

“I commend to you the attached. It is the best thing I have ever seen of its kind. I agree with its substance - and am dazzled by its crisp literary style and total lack of waffles.” (156)

Q: What brand of beer was the CIA’s top Vietnamese asset (code name HACKLE) drinking when debriefed in a Saigon safehouse on 17 April 1975?

A: Budweiser (289).

Sparse superfluous details such as these render almost literary this dense and impeccable 400 page book that feels like an 800 page book on the career of ladder climbing CIA bureaucrat Theodore Shackley, a tome which otherwise reads like a doppelganger of a high school history textbook, providing good overviews of (instead of the Cuban Missile Crises) the Bay of Pigs, (instead of the Vietnam war) the War in Laos, and (instead of Disco) attempts to control the democratic process in Chile, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Thailand, and other enemies and allies east and west. While Shackley, the subject of this book, is a persistently uninteresting person, (described as looking like an accountant who played football in high school), and has a professionally evasive and elusive personality, writing his biography was a great idea, because it provides a means to organize research on numerous foreign policy disasters, including the deaths of thousands in Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and let's not forget Chile. And yet Shackley is not a murderer at heart: all the man ever wanted was a promotion.

The impenetrable and uninteresting subject of this biography is thus not explored so much as used as a lens through which to examine the secret history of the late Twentieth Century. While many of the events Ted Shackley helped engineer came to the attention of the public, the man himself remained all but perfectly invisible up through the late 1970s. Not that he is any more visible as a result of this monstrous prehumous biography, written without his cooperation. All we ever learn of Shackley is a single character trait - cold steely ambition.

I agree with its substance – and am dazzled by its crisp pedantic style and precise waffles. And my eyes totally hurt.