Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins

Annie Jacobsen dives into a deluge of declassified documents and accounts from former CIA recruits to open our eyes to a world most know only in movies.

Author: Annie Jacobsen
Audiobook listen time: 19 hours, 5 minutes
Rating: 5/5

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been a controversial topic of dicsussion for the past many decades. Having left an invisible mark on many regime changes post World War 2, the agency also stamped its influence on US soil through horrifying programs like MK Ultra and the alleged assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The two are related through the assassin of JFK’s assassin, Jack Ruby, but that’s getting away from the essence of the book.

I first heard of Annie Jacobsen on JRE#1299, when she had come to talk about ‘Surprise, Kill, Vanish’, but ended up discussing more than a few of her other books. Jacobsen is an investigative journalist, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist from 2016. The two books that hooked me onto her work were this book, and another called ‘Operation Paperclip’, which was an intelligence program under which Nazi scientists were brought to the US and integrated into society, quietly exonerating them from their crimes against humanity.

‘Surprise, Kill, Vanish’ is a brilliantly researched and presented book with a plethora of firsthand accounts that keep the reader/listener on the edge. A lot of times you’re left wondering ‘does that actually happen in real life?’. Jacobsen goes chronologically from the formation of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in 1942 to the covert operations in Afghanistan since the early 2000s. The OSS was formed to assassinate Hitler, and even though that isn’t what the history books ended up writing, it did set the foundation for covert operations beginning in the cold war era. The motto of the OSS? Surprise, Kill, Vanish.

The book does not have a protagonist as such, but if anyone comes close, it is the author’s chief source, Billy Waugh. Waugh, who served the United States for five decades in 63 countries, was involved in every major war in which the US had a footprint – right from Korea in the late 1940s to Iraq and Afghanistan after the turn of the millennium. A lot of his covert work for the CIA was in the Middle East and Africa, gathering intel on CIA targets such as Muammar Gaddaffi and Osama Bin Laden. But the most horrific descriptions of war come from his time in MACV-SOG in Vietnam, where Waugh literally escaped because he lay unconscious after being shot, and the Vietcong thought he was dead. Towards the end of the book, Waugh makes a statement to the effect of how random everything is, with luck playing a huge factor. It is natural to think that way, when you’ve cheated death multiple times, all the while watching 20 somethings on both sides of a conflict lose their lives. Other sources that make multiple appearances in the book include Lewis Merletti, a green beret turned secret service officer who was in charge of the security detail for multiple US presidents, Felix Rodriguez, the officer in charge of the operation to capture Che Guevara, and multiple accounts from former CIA lawyer John Rizzo, who went on the record.

In addition to the firsthand accounts and information from hundreds of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, what makes this book fascinating is that it sheds light on geopolitics in the cold war era. It was an unstable period in many parts of the globe, and assassinations of prominent leaders was not uncommon. The CIA of course, had their part to play in it, with US presidents having free reign on whom to put on the United States’ kill list. Relative to the realizations I had from the book, the past three decades seem to have been a lot more docile. The agency had some of its power curbed after the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, but managed to get back the license to kill in the early 1980s.

Many US citizens are against the militaristic actions taken by the country, the most prominent example of which is the backlash against the Vietnam war. But while going through this book, my mind was stuck on the intense training the paramilitary officers have to go through, and how a lot of them forgo the appreciation to maintain the secrecy of missions and all the while, taking commands from someone who won a popularity contest. That has always been my stance on military personal, but it was amplified when Annie Jacobsen walked me through the accounts in the book. Taking out the equation the country for whom the assassins are working or the reason behind a mission, the courage of such individuals is unmatched.

The book mostly had positive reviews, but there were a few criticisms about mistakes the author has made regarding certain technical or weapon related terms. While that might be the case, it does not take away from the essence of the story. The other common criticism is that the sources haven’t necessarily been the most honest, which is not a surprise. It is human nature to make yourself appear more favorable, and in this case, the sources probably had to walk their way through a minefield to ensure they didn’t divulge any classified information. It is definitely a book worth reading, and at the end, it makes you wonder – if all this is based on declassified documents, it is probably just the tip of the iceberg, and one can only imagine what secrets from covert operations have been buried or destroyed that will never make their way to the surface.