Good Hunting: An American Spymaster s Story

Description

A MASTER CLASS IN SPYCRAFT FROM ONE OF ITS GREATEST PRACTITIONERS

Jack Devine is one of the legendary spymasters of our time. He was in Chile when Allende fell; he ran Charlie Wilson s war in Afghanistan; he had too much to do with Iran-Contra for his own taste, though he tried to stop it; he oversaw the effort to run down Pablo Escobar in Colombia. Devine served America s interests for more than thirty years in a wide range of covert operations, ultimately overseeing the Directorate of Operations, a CIA component that watches over thousands of American covert operatives worldwide.
Good Hunting is his guide to the art of spycraft, told with great wit, candor, and commonsense wisdom. Caricatured by Hollywood, lionized by the right, and pilloried by the left, the CIA remains one of the least understood instruments of the United States government. Devine knows more than almost anyone about the CIA s vital importance as a tool of American statecraft. In wonderfully readable prose, Good Hunting aims to set the record straight. This is a revelatory inside look at an organization whose history has not been given its real due.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Meet Jack Devine. Something of a real-life George Smiley, he is a 30-year veteran of the CIA who, among a lot of things, ran Charlie Wilson s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, knew a thing or two about the Iran-Contra affair long before the rest of us did (including the president?), and tangled with some of the agency s most notorious double-agents. In Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, Devine has written a fascinating memoir of his time overseeing the agency’s spying operations, while also critiquing its policies and direction--arguing that covert ops (i.e. actual undercover operatives on the ground) is the best, most effective use of the CIA’s talents, rather than its increasingly paramilitaristic role during a decade of war. Devine has managed an unlikely accomplishment: enhancing the aura of the agency while stripping away some of its myths, in the process producing a clear-eyed and forthright account from an intelligence insider. --Jon Foro