Jacobsen opens and closes the book by claiming that the purpose of all the horrors recounted has always been to avoid WWIII, but never does she provide the slightest documentation or evidence or logic for that claim. She also claims that smaller-scale murders and sabotage are justified as a "third option" because sometimes war is a bad idea (when isn't it a bad idea? she never says) and sometimes diplomacy is "inadequate" or has "failed" (when? how? she never says). Wars go on failing on their own terms for decades but we're never told to resort to diplomacy. What counts as diplomacy failing and justifying a resort to war? The answer is not very little. The answer is: less than nothing.
Of course, Jacobsen also builds her case on the false and unargued claim that Pearl Harbor was a "surprise attack." In the same paragraph she suggests that Hitler invented the very idea of all-out war without proper rules and decency. She states in one sentence that Reinhard Heydrich was a main architect of the Final Solution, and in the next that he was at the top of a British kill list, as if to imply some connection between the two facts, playing into the propaganda that the allies fought the war to prevent murder. (She pulls the same trick with the nuclear bombings of Japan and the ending of the war, implying a causal connection to any indoctrinated reader.) Of course when the British killed Heydrich, the Nazis killed 4,000 people as revenge, and halted no other activities. Hurray!
From the beginning of the book to the end, the central character, Billy Waugh, is depicted as acting out a childish childhood fantasy about engaging in beneficial and dangerous violence. This is repeated so often that it's normalized. We're not supposed to despair that people acting out childish fantasies have been given the power to murder and wreak havoc. We're supposed to celebrate his good fortune in being able to act out his boyhood dream.
Two weeks after the killing of Heydrich, the U.S. government created the OSS and hauled the residents of what is now Prince William Forest Park outside of Washington, D.C., away from their homes and their land, kicking and screaming, in order to fence off an area in which to practice spying and murdering. What fun! (The area had contained a somewhat hopeful, somewhat integrated community that had prospered during reconstruction and suggested a better path forward, rather than something to brush aside so that grown men could make a game of murder.)
In Jacobsen's world, the Soviets started the Cold War when Stalin simply inexplicably ceased behaving as a friend. The Russians lost 20 million lives in WWII, by her count, rather than the 27 million more commonly reported (and the Vietnamese later lost 0.5 million rather than the 3.8 million a Harvard/University of Washington study found). But none of those lives had any impact on Soviet policy, in Jacobsen's telling, which was pure irrational aggression. So, in response to the commies, the CIA was created "to protect U.S. national security interests around the world" all of which acts of protection somehow failed to make it into Jacobsen's book.
And then "the unthinkable happened," as North Korea invaded South Korea. South Korea was ruled by a U.S.-educated puppet who was actively provoking North Korea with his own invasions, but "unthinkable" here doesn't mean the people involved couldn't think it; it means that we must not think they thought it. A mentally ill Frank Wisner led CIA efforts in Korea to get thousands of people killed killing thousands of other people to no other effect, before killing himself. Jacobsen believes this left "a black mark" on the agency. Yet, even as white-supremacist an outfit as the CIA, cannot really make a discernable black mark on an edifice of infinite black marks. Jacobsen's book rolls on through black mark after black mark, unrelenting, yet somehow unaware that there isn't something there other than the black marks.
Jacobsen promotes as plausible the CIA-idea that Kim Il Sung was an imposter and a soviet puppet as controlled by Stalin in this story as Trump is by Putin in the fantasies of Russiagate. During the war against North Korea, everything that could be imagined done wrong was. Double agents were widely employed and informed. Fighters were trained and parachuted pointlessly into enemy territory by the thousands. No information of benefit to any human population was gathered. The CIA found its own conduct "morally reprehensible" but kept such reports secret for decades in order to do more of the same in other parts of the world. Meanwhile the military thought it could do a better job and created its own criminal groups of special forces and green berets.
"What choice was there?" Jacobsen asks, typically, of the CIA decision to develop guerilla warfare corps. This is in the context of the Cold War paranoia that held that every liberation struggle around the world was a Soviet plot to take over the United States. What choice was there? Would dropping the paranoia have been out of line? In January 1952 the CIA began keeping lists of people to murder around the world. "Murder is not morally justifiable," the CIA's own instruction manual admitted. But the point was that "Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it," not that it shouldn't be done or that moral persons shouldn't go along with it from their comfortable desks.
When the CIA overthrew the government of Guatemala in 1954 on behalf of exploitative corporations, and not in defense against any threat to the United States, it lied that only 1 fighter, rather than 48, had been killed. This somehow made it a success rather than a failure, and thus a basis for more such crimes. But the blowback, as with the earlier coup in Iran, and the one before that in Syria which Jacobsen doesn't mention, was extensive. Turning Che Guevara into a revolutionary was the least of it. The coup turned the United States into an enemy of the people of Latin America, whom it fought on behalf of dictatorships for decades to come, generating great suffering, resentment, crime, and refugee crises. After the CIA later murdered Guevara and cut of his hands and mailed them to Fidel Castro, they were brought out to inspire anti-U.S. fighters.
Jacobsen's telling of the 1953 coup in Iran seeks to justify it in the context of scary Islamic terrorism. She claims "Diplomacy wasn't working, and military intervention was unwise." Therefore, thou shalt "legally" overthrow the government. But what did "working" mean? Iran was not bothering the United States in any way. Iran was resisting exploitation by oil corporations. Diplomacy is said to not be "working" not because there isn't peace, but because some horrible agenda is not being accomplished. Out of this coup came horrendous suffering, militarization, Middle-Eastern hatred of the United States, the Iranian revolution, and the CIA's lovely (and oh-so-successful) strategy of encouraging religious fanatics as an alternative to atheist commies.
It's always a struggle to decide whether to interpret world affairs as evil or incompetent. "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it," is a quote incompetently attributed to Mark Twain. Jacobsen recounts training exercises in which U.S. government employees acting in our name have parachuted with nuclear bombs strapped to them in pieces, landed, assembled, and pretended to set off or actually set off the nuclear bombs something they seriously contemplated doing as part of the war on Vietnam and who knows where else. They also advertised such plans in the North of Vietnam as a way of supposedly motivating people to move south and befriend the monsters who were about to nuke the North.
Even when they were not to actually set off the nukes, they practiced using real nukes. Once they accidentally dropped one of these nukes into the sea on the coast of Okinawa. "These kinds of mishaps are always resolved," says Billy Waugh meaninglessly and falsely as we know even from those that have not been hidden from us because they've happened in the United States. But not to worry, as Jacobsen refers to something comfortingly called a "precision nuclear strike."
Woodrow Wilson wouldn't meet with Ho Chi Minh publicly or privately, as the man wasn't even white. But the OSS trained Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, who fought the U.S. with weapons the U.S. had left behind in Korea, after Eisenhower was compelled, in Jacobsen's telling, to stir up violence in Indochina because "diplomacy was out of the question."
Surprise, Kill, Vanish contains lengthy discussions of crimes committed by Russia and Cuba, presumably meant to somehow excuse crimes committed by the United States. Yet nowhere is there any discussion of turning in the other direction and supporting the rule of law. There are also lengthy discussions of the Secret Service protecting U.S. presidents, presumably meant to make us imagine that there is something defensive about the CIA. And there are very lengthy sections recounting various military actions in detail, apparently intended to make us appreciate bravery even when put to evil ends. Yet, for every Bay of Pigs disaster recounted, there are a dozen more similar disasters.
And each disaster meant well. "Kennedy lost the battle for a democratic Cuba," Jacobsen tells us, without citing any plan by Kennedy to support democracy in Cuba. Then she quotes Richard Helms suggesting that one or more foreign governments killed Kennedy. No evidence required.
Jacobsen recounts the U.S. murder of one of the many double-agents that U.S. fighters were using against themselves in Vietnam, and spends a great deal of time trying to justify it. Basically, insane ideas like making the guy a trustworthy triple-agent didn't pass the laugh test, and nothing else could be imagined. Even the existence of prisons had escaped their brains. The U.S. government was even going to prosecute this murder as murder until it understood that in the course of the prosecution it would be forced to reveal much larger crimes. So it dropped the case. But everything was "legal"!
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