When the Pond was created in early 1942, the United States had very little experience with intelligence, and the notion of a spy agency which would be not only officially unacknowledged, but actually unknown, appealed to some people in Washington. These people were repelled by the larger-than-life publicity hound William Donovan and his “Oh So Social” intelligence agency. For a precedent they looked instead to foreign intelligence services such as the British MI-6, which they thought was more discreet and whose chief was never named in the press.

In accordance with this philosophy, the Pond spent most of its existence not as a government agency, but as a private sector organization, operating within real companies with names such as the Universal Service Corporation.3 This practice contributed substantially to obscurity and security. However, three successive government agencies found that having such an independent intelligence operation—and, worse yet, one run by a pugnacious, conspiratorial ideologue—was more trouble than it was worth, and the notion of having a truly secret intelligence organization never did catch on in the United States.

We wouldn’t know much about it except that records of a long-time Pond employee were found in a Virginia barn in late 2001. Too weird.

Kinzer would have been better off making a less sweeping judgment: that TPAJAX got the CIA into the regime-change business for good – similar efforts would soon follow in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cuba – but that the Agency has had little success at that enterprise, while bringing itself and the United States more political ill will, and breeding more untoward results, than any other of its activities. Most of the CIA’s acknowledged efforts of this sort have shown that Washington has been more interested in strongman rule in the Middle East and elsewhere than in encouraging democracy. The result is a credibility problem that accompanied American troops into Iraq and continues to plague them as the United States prepares to hand over sovereignty to local authorities. All the Shah’s Men helps clarify why, when many Iraqis heard President George Bush concede that “[s]ixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe,” they may have reacted with more than a little skepticism.

It was apparently issued on April 7, 2004, so one wonders when (or if) American intelligence agencies obtained a copy of the manual before seeing it in the South Korean press.

I have learned two important lessons from this book, and from its author Robert Young Pelton: First, trust no source that has not actually been there. He is not the first to point out that most journalists are “hotel warriors”, but his veracity, courage, and insights provide compelling evidence of what journalism could be if it were done properly. Government sources are even worse–it was not until I heard him speak candidly about certain situations that I realized that most of our Embassy reporting–both secret and open–is largely worthless because it is third hand, not direct.
Second, I have learned from this book and the author that sometimes the most important reason for visiting a war zone is to learn about what is NOT happening. His accounts of Chechnya, and his personal first-hand testimony that the Russians were terrorizing their Muslims in the *absence* of any uprising or provocation, are very disturbing. His books offers other accounts of internal terrorism that are being officially ignored by the U.S. Government, and I am most impressed by the value of his work as an alternative source of “national intelligence” and “ground truth”.