The Way Of The Knife Summary

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The Way of the Knife – The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth The author of this book, Mark Mazzetti, is a national security correspondent for the New York Times and a shared winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Washington’s response. He’s won numerous other journalism awards, including the Livingston Award, for breaking the news of the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes. He lives in Washington, D.C. He is also on speaking terms with Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, operations officer and founder of the Counterterrorist Center of the CIA, which most likely gave him access to much of the information inside this book in some way, whether directly …show more content…
He wanted to show how this change in role has progressed over the years, and he did not stray from this. He started in the 1970’s, describing the Senate investigations led by Senator Frank Church that led to the chastising of the CIA, and President Gerald Ford passing a ban on the CIA’s use of deadly force in 1976. In the 1980’s there were deep divisions within the agency over the use of lethal operations, but despite these concerns the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) was established in 1986. Mazzetti describes how during the 1990’s a lot of the agency, including the director at the time, Richard Helms, felt that they should be focusing on intelligence, not “fighting terrorism with terrorism,” because of their previous experiences in the 1970’s and 80’s. It wasn’t until September 2001, after the attacks on 9/11, that the CTC went under its “most dramatic expansion in its history” and basically became the center of the agency. The author also describes President Bush’s affection for and wide use of the agency, because it was much faster than the bureaucratic Pentagon and the “traditional wartime chain of command” could easily be …show more content…
Mazzetti notes that the CIA knew the White House would not support this and could not support the agency abroad or give their officers domestic immunity from criminal liability. This forced the CIA to explore other options, and they looked to spy drones and lethal operations, and the author considered this to be “offering a new direction for a spy agency that had begun to feel burned by its years in the detention-and-interrogation business.” This took on a number of forms, such as the first test-firing of a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone in 2001, intended to be used for assassinations of high value targets. Both the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have defended this tactic as a method of self-defense, not assassination, because the targets are members of terrorist groups plotting against America. The author goes on to describe how under Obama’s first CIA director, Leon Panetta, the lethal operations grew in scope even more. Obama said, “The CIA gets what it
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