I know that Goodreads classes three stars as "liked it", but really this is not appropriate here. This is not a likeable book. It is valuable and reasonably interesting, although very dry, but I find it difficult to differentiate between the book and the author. Given it's a memoir of sorts, however, this is not an insurmountable point.

Basically, McGehee worked for the CIA in South Asia before and during the Vietnam conflict, fighting communism during the Cold War. The appalling history of CIA involvement in that region is well-known; I feel disinclined to go into it here. Suffice to say that the author, grinding his way to some actual understanding of the situation, as opposed to the understanding the CIA had decided upon in advance, became severely disillusioned. If I am supposed to feel sorry for him I don't. One of the blurbs on the back describes him as "a principled man" but I'm not particularly feeling that either. But then, he was never trained to be - certainly not by the CIA.

There's a small section at the beginning of the book that talks about his recruitment and training. As part of that recruitment, McGehee had to undergo a number of intelligence and personality tests, as it took a certain type to work for the CIA, or so they thought. Notable here is the brief focus on two areas. The first is that McGehee was assessed as being rather more flexible than the average recruit; he expresses surprise that they let him through, arguing that flexibility was not a particularly valued trait. I beg to differ. I mean, yes, there is intellectual flexibility, which McGehee shows eventually, realising that the standard approach to intelligence is not working. I can see how that might cause difficulties for the agents in charge of him. But you simply cannot recruit people for this type of work without banking on a certain moral flexibility, and he has that in spades. There's one point where he's talking about his involvement in the interrogation of Thai villagers. One teenage boy was so distressed by the accusations he took his own life. One man had to listen to the mock execution of his father by CIA agents in order to get him to talk. A similar approach was taken with the child of a mother suspected of communist loyalties. McGehee comments, "I was not particularly disturbed by these violations of human rights" (106) and you can't tell me that moral flexibility is not one of his defining traits. You just can't. He justifies it on the old, tired grounds of ends, means, omelette, but if you can support threatening to kill a child in order to torture a mother you are not a principled man. You are just not.

McGehee goes on to feel guilt over the results of American intervention in Vietnam, along with frustration that his own work - which indicated the futility of such a conflict - was ignored. The argument seems to be "If they had only listened, all this suffering could have been prevented!" Yet clearly he had no real problem with suffering when it was his plans being implemented, as was the case in the Thai region under his control, so there's a strong part of me suspects that this turn to principles is fuelled - at least in part - by misplaced anger at being taken for a mug by the institution he has given his life to.

Because he is, frequently, and that's where the second characteristic of those personality tests comes in. Washed out of recruitment early were those people who showed a tendency to think for themselves. Closely related to this, I feel, is curiosity. The people described here seem to have none. Their intellect - impressive in other areas as it may be - is absolutely stagnant. The most shocking sentence in the book, a sentence far worse than the blase dismissal of torture, is this: "Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms" (182). HOW STUPID CAN YOU BE? HOW INSULAR, AND HOW INCURIOUS? He's working on China at one point, trying to stem Chinese communism, and he never bothers to read Mao.

If I'm trying to change someone's mind about something, I not only need to know what they think, but why they think it. How this very basic technique bypasses this author (and many of his colleagues) I do not know. Well yes, I do. They're unimaginative, intellectually lazy, and hold no more than superficial interest in the world around them. They are, in fact, recruited for these very failings.

I sincerely hope that the CIA has raised its standards since this book was published, but given the intellectual giant currently running that country, who is lionised by half its population, I very much fucking doubt it.

Principled intelligence my arse.