SOUTHCOM

National security historian John Prados offers a comprehensive history of the CIA's secret wars that is as close to a definitive account as is possible today. He draws on three decades of research to illuminate the men and women of the intelligence establishment, their resources and techniques, their triumphs and failures. In a dramatic and revealing narrative, Safe for Democracy not only relates the inside stories of covert operations but examines in meticulous detail the efforts of presidents and Congress to control the CIA and the specific choices made in the agency's secret wars. Along the way Mr. Prados offers eye-opening accounts of the covert actions themselves, from radically revised interpretations of classic operations like Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and the Bay of Pigs; to lesser-known projects like Tibet and Angola; to virtually unknown tales of the CIA in Guyana and Ghana. He supplies full accounts of Reagan-era operations in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, and brings the story up to date with accounts of more recent activities in Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq, all the while keeping American foreign policy goals in view.