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Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. By David Corn. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 509 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-671-69525-8.)
Historians who study the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) need archives. Because Washington still releases so few of them, and frequently only in sanitized form, we also need investigative journalism. With the publication of Blond Ghost, David Corn joins a select group of nonscholars who have written books without which scholars could not write theirs.
Corn, an editor of the Nation, chose as his subject Theodore Shackley, whose twenty-eight-year career in the CIA spanned the front lines of the nation's secret war and the backrooms of Langley headquarters. Hence this biography both illuminates key episodes in the history of the Cold War and further unmasks the myth of the daring spook or mole. Shackley was no James Bond or even George Smiley. He...