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

This is a nonfiction book about complex individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers, and saboteurs. In reporting this book I sat for hundreds of hours with sources who recounted to me situations of sheer pandemonium and chaos entwined with the human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope.

Some interviews took place in sources homes, others in the anonymity of roadside diners. One interview took place on horseback up in the mountains, an off-the-grid location where that particular source felt comfortable speaking. Halfway into our outing, as we were riding along in the otherwise quiet forest, we heard screamingunmistakably a womans voice. A figure on horseback rounded the bend, the terrified rider hanging on for dear life as her horse galloped out of control, reins dangerously askew. My source, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operator, leapt off his horse, positioned himself in the wide path, and deftly grabbed the reins of the thousand-pound animal as it charged by. I knew he had a background with horses, but it was extraordinary to witness how quickly and intuitively he brought a dramatic and potentially dangerous situation under control.

There you go, maam, my source said to the breathless rider, handing the reins back to her. He asked if she needed further assistance, which she declined. In the chaos of the action his shirt came untucked and I noticed he carried a SIG Sauer P320 semiautomatic pistol at his back, near his buttocks. He checked it for safety and climbed back on his horse, and we rode on.

Reporting a book about the shadow world of CIA covert-action operations requires determining first who can be trusted and then how to fact-check their stories. Covert action is, by its very nature, designed and orchestrated to remain hidden from public scrutiny. The majority of the covert-action operations around the world that I describe were orchestrated to be plausibly denied. And yet forty-two men and women with firsthand knowledge of these events allowed me to interview them for this book. Dozens of other individuals who played ancillary roles in the action were also interviewed.

Every primary source came to me by referral, which is how Ive reported and written four previous nonfiction books. To verify facts, I reviewed sources military service records, exceptional performance awards, medals, passports (real and pseudonymous), identification cards, journals, diaries, and more. How to fact-check sources stories? The CIA and its intelligence community partners guard their secrets through a complex array of code words, cover stories, and operational names. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and preexisting declassification efforts, I accessed thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, the Departments of Defense and State, and other government entities, housed in the National Archives and elsewhere, cited in the notes and bibliography. And this book would not exist without the work of other journalists, scholars, and historians whose books, monographs, papers, and news articles I have duly cited.

Those interviewed for this book served thirteen presidents (seven Democrats, six Republicans) from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. They include two surviving members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); eight individuals who served the CIA at the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) level, equivalent to an ambassador at the State Department or a general at the Defense Department; eleven chiefs of station from countries on five continents; numerous chiefs of base who served in some of the worlds most dangerous outposts, including in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan; nineteen operators from the Special Activities Division (SAD), Ground Branch; and an attorney at the CIA who wrote scores of classified Presidential Findings, starting with those on the Iran hostage crisis, and was uniquely helpful in clarifying Executive Officelevel decision making. Every operation reported in this book, however shocking, was legal. Other sources shared information with me on background, to assist in my understanding of the subject matter but without direct attribution to them.