Corn, David. Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 509 pages.

David Corn, the thirty-something Washington editor of The Nation magazine, spent five years on this biography of Theodore Shackley. He interviewed over 250 people, including 100 former CIA officials, while Shackley himself cooperated only to the extent of one brief interview. With 70 pages of end notes, and chapters liberally sprinkled with unpublished CIA names, this is a durable contribution to intelligence history.

For most of his career, Shackley was in the field administering operations from behind a desk. After Germany in the 1950s, he directed the huge Miami station during the war against Castro. Then it was off to Laos, and later Saigon, at the height of those wars. When not in the field, Shackley was administering from CIA headquarters: during the 1970s he helped with the overthrow of Allende in Chile and Whitlam in Australia (both of them elected leaders), and also directed damage control against Philip Agee. This may look like a string of failures, but not for an Agency that prides itself on deniability rather than accountability. Then came the Edwin Wilson scandal -- ironically inconsequential when compared to Shackley's career of covert war-mongering. As an associate of Wilson, Shackley was damaged goods, and Stansfield Turner had all he needed to shunt Shackley's fast-track career off to the side. Blessed deliverance for the world's people.
ISBN 0-671-69525-8

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