A Life Lived in CIA, the White House and the Two Koreas.

• Author: Wilkinson, Ted
• Position: Pot Shards: Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House and the Two Koreas - Book review

Pot Shards: Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House and the Two Koreas by Donald Gregg, New Academia Publishing, 2014, ISBN-13: 978-0990447115, 332 pages, $38.00 (Hardcover), $26.00 (Paperback), $7.99 (Kindle).

Apart from its considerable historical significance, this memoir is also succinct and entertaining, and frames a remarkable government career. Don Gregg is one of a handful of CIA veterans to have served as ambassadors. (One thinks of Walter Bedell Smith, Dick Helms, Jim Lilley, and Freck Vreeland, possibly one or two others.) Gregg is unique in having also spent a decade in National Security Council assignments in the White House.

What's most striking for the reader is how Donald Gregg managed to survive and advance as far as he did in government despite his many doubts about government policies and practices. Naturally his doubts weren't always expressed as freely and vehemently as they are here in these pages. If they had been, he would probably have been pushed aside as a whistleblower, but the memoir serves as a valuable critique of many aspects of U.S. Asia policy over half a century.

Skepticism about the "wild and woolly" early days at the CIA infuses his early chapters. After Army service in the Signal Corps as a cryptographer, he was offered an opening at the NSA, but opted instead for the CIA. He found little to respect in his CIA trainers or the training, which seemed drawn from adventure novels. At one point he and a team of trainees were drilled in survival near a mountain lake in Idaho, where they were given axes, safety pins, and parachute cord. The axes were to chop holes in the ice and the safety pins to be fashioned into fishhooks; the cords to make nooses to trap arctic hares. If real survival had been at stake, Gregg's conclusion was the group would have faced certain death.

Soon after, his first assignment was to join a group of young North Vietnamese exiles in Bangkok, to be parachuted into North Vietnam for a mission that he would only learn enroute to being dropped. Lacking French, Vietnamese or any area background, Gregg nevertheless accepted the assignment, lest he be considered spineless. In retrospect, he recognized that the mission was "utterly ridiculous," and was happy to have his "life expectancy extended" when it was revealed to be based on fraudulent intelligence and canceled. Less lucky was his friend and CIA colleague Jack Downey, who was sent on an ill-considered rescue mission over...