Reading List
Books
Former CIA operative Robert Baer holds nothing back in See No Evil, a retrospective look at his career in the CIA, where he became the first American intelligence agent to ever infiltrate the Hezbollah network in Lebanon. His blunt efficiency in his work comes through in writing, where he describes things in enough detail that the CIA censored pieces of the book. Where, exactly? Baer left the blacked-out lines in his book so readers could see the context.
See No Evil, while giving an insider view into the CIA, is a tale a frustration. At the end of his career, Baer saw the agency going down what he saw as the wrong path. Political correctness and a "Hear no evil, see no evil" approach to intelligence gathering was suffocating agents' abilities to do their jobs. A great read into one of America's least accessible entities.
Kevin Poulsen, former hacker and now news editor at Wired.com, digs deep in this tale of super-hacker Max Butler, who single-handedly took control of credit card fraud in the United States and abroad. The story follows Butler from his childhood in Idaho -- where his lack of self-control showed through to his friends -- to his safehouse, a San Francisco apartment so full of computer hardware that the heat became nearly unbearable.
It's details like this that make Kingpin read like a novel. Originally a story in Wired magazine, Kingpin takes readers on a wild ride through the dark passages of the internet most people don't see, where millions of dollars were stolen and exchanged.
As Butler hacked friends and foes alike, the F.B.I. sent a hacker of their own to combat the wave of crime that took hold even as the dot com bubble came and went. Poulsen's journalistic skills show through as the deeply reported story is full of analogies to help those of us who didn't ride the cyber-crime wave understand just what was happening.
Black Hawk Down speaks for itself. The story of American special forces operatives in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 is a tragic one, but as a story it is a benchmark in war reporting and storytelling, mostly for its expert recreation by author and journalist Mark Bowden. In hundreds of hours of interviews and unimaginable amounts of background research, Bowden was able to tell readers what these men thought as they went through the most violent, gritty hours in many of their lives. For some of them, those hours were the last.
For an issue so far from American focus when it all happened in 1993, the words Black Hawk Down hold a special significance now for movie buffs and historians alike. This horror story of American aid gone wrong in the horn of Africa was made into a blockbuster movie, worth seeing in its own right.
If Black Hawk Down isn't enough, Mark Bowden's other book, about the years and hours before the rise and fall of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar might be just the ticket. Despite an opening chapter that could lull a history professor to sleep, Killing Pablo gains momentum as it describes the fascinating world of Pablo Escobar, a man who lived like a king and died like a pig.
The honesty, sometimes painful, and detail of Mark Bowden's writing makes this story both enchanting and sickening. As it comes to its final moments, Bowden gets into his subjects' heads, telling readers their doubts and fears, and ultimately their elation. Despite a storybook ending, there are few absolutes in this tale, where it's at times equally easy to love and despise any character.
The beginning of the Iraq war, with its "Shock and Awe" campaign and rapidly advancing troops, was the easy part. Once American forces found themselves kicking back in Saddam Hussein's imperial palace, things got tricky. While the war was won in a traditional sense, a small group of civilian advisors and military personnel found themselves at the helm of a country bled dry of any sense of infrastructure, economy, or governance.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City is about the green zone, the place where memos, not bullets, carried the power and where corruption and cronyism, not I.E.D.s, were the danger. Veteran Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran shows his stuff, getting behind the great walls surrounding the green zone and its inhibitants and getting the real story of what went wrong in Iraq.
As a boy, like many of my peers, I played with G.I. Joes and sought out sticks in the woods that held the same shape as a rifle, mowing down onslaughts of imaginary enemies. But as I grew and the value of life became more apparent and its fragility more real, the allure of war didn't fade as it did for so many of my former playmates. To be fascinated by the idea of traveling to a foreign land, rappell out of a helicopter into my enemy's back yard and try with all my might to take his life is not normal.
This allure, which I was never able to fully embrace, is one that few people can describe with the accurracy and understanding that Sebastian Junger does in War. Junger, who also penned The Perfect Storm, spent months in Afghanistan with the most combat-intensive unit in the war during its most combat-intensive periods. The men in his book, who readers grow to fear and love and -- thanks to the powerful narrative strung together from anecdotes and intense research -- understand, die. They bleed and cry and shake and fight and suffer. With a title like War, it would be easy to fall short of the ambition or scale such a title demands. But though I have never been to war, the glory and moral absolutes of so many books and movies before do not appear on Junger's pages. There is only honesty and fear, so much fear that sometimes the only hope that a situation will end up okay is the knowledge that the man who was in it lived on to write this book.
If there is humanity in war, Junger has captured it here. The deep conflict between the logistics and politics and the personal interest of soldiers is on full display, as are the reasons behind many of the difficult decisions that are only made on a battlefield. To read this book is to understand with more depth and clarity than ever before why men go to war and what happens to them there.
