Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the C.I.A. 's Crusades.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg

David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine and an accomplished journalist, has expended enormous effort chasing down the life story of Theodore Shackley. Shackley was a leading Central Intelligence Agency figure from the onset of the Cold War until his semi-compelled retirement when Stansfield Turner purged the agency during the Carter administration, and later, Shackley's name surfaced as a secondary player in the Iran-contra scandal. The resulting book is an amazing compendium of C.I.A. fact and lore. Every paragraph is packed with names, dates, and specifics about the inner life of the American intelligence community. But every so often you run across a well-researched, well-written book that for some reason doesn't quite click. This is one.

Is the book a biography? Not really, since much of the text does not concern Shackley directly. Is the book a history of C.I.A. excesses? If so, the focus on Shackley becomes strained and artificial. Is the book an indictment of the (presumably now past) C.I.A. infatuation with dubious covert operations at the expense of worth-while intelligence gathering? Not really, since Blond Ghost paints covert operations in a bad hue, but never makes apparent what an intelligence agency would be justified in doing. The result is an interesting book, one for which Corn should be generously credited with undertaking and that is definitely worth reading, but one that left me feeling oddly unsatisfied.

Perhaps this result was dictated by the choice of Shackley as subject matter. In some ways he can appear to have been the personification of the C.I.A. gone bad. But in other ways Shackley's life meanders across the intelligence landscape toward no clear end beyond self-advancement, and in many of his exploits the line between bad idea from the start and good idea that got out of hand is impossible to draw. In this Shackley is like the C.I.A. itself: palpably creepy, but you can't be sure whether that stems from being sinister or just secretive. As the C.I.A. is vaporous and at many levels hard to draw conclusions about, Corn's book seems to have trouble coming to conclusions beyond straightforward ones, such as that intelligence operations should be lawful.

Joining the agency shortly after its creation following World War II, Shackley went on to become a senior C.I.A. official in pre-Wall Germany, when Berlin was the center of the espionage universe; in Miami, when the C.I.A. was preparing for the Bay of...