Shocked and Terrified: A Book Review
On Annie Jacobson’s Surprise, Kill, Vanish (2019)
I think my first exposure to Annie Jacobson was through one of Rogen’s podcasts. Since I first heard her interview there, I’ve always wanted to check out one of her books, all of which seem equally enticing and are about subjects that I don’t typically read about but have always wanted to (Nazis and aliens!). After looking at the lengths of each of her books, I settled on Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (Little, Brown and Company 2019), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer and appears to be the longest of her books. I don’t shy away from the long stuff, and I wanted to go as deep into the material as she had to offer.
Surprise, Kill, Vanish is, as the subtitle telegraphs, essentially a history of the CIA, starting with their WWII predecessors, the Jedberghs, whose mantra was Surprise, Kill, Vanish, and their evolution into the operational phantom that we tend to think of them, as typified in fiction and Hollywood. Expectedly, there’s plenty of world history and international politics covered here: WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and the rise and aftermath of the September 11th attacks, including the wars in Afghanistan.
Naturally, these wars and events are examined through the lens of the CIA, as well as a couple of key figures, most notably, a Green Beret turned CIA operative, Billy Waugh, who had a military career spanning more than 50 years, first seeing combat in Korea and then working surveillance, reconnaissance, and counterintelligence in the middle east, even into his 80s.
From a narrative perspective: it’s kind of mind-blowing. Expectedly, the story reads like a military and political thriller, except that this is not fiction, which really ratchets up the tension. There were a few times where I had to take a break and let my heart rate return to a normal pace, walk away and let the anxiety dissipate, such as when Billy Waugh witnessed the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, shoot down several US helicopters as he was trying to make contact and tell them to abort a mission, or when he was leading a team that was recovering the booby-trapped body of a young, fallen soldier, or when the NVA shot and nearly killed and captured him, or when the guys trying to rescue him were cut down.
Equally expected is the appearance of some of the greatest hits of 20th century American villains—from Hitler and Stalin, the Jongs of Korea—a shocking backstory itself that I was completely oblivious to, involving, basically, identify theft—the NVA, Castro and Che, Iran, Saddam, and Bin Laden. Additionally, she covers plenty of other key actors, just as villainous yet unknown to most of us, as well as the US presidents, their inner circles, and their involvement into decisions and protocols, as well as their successes and failures. Particularly fascinating are some of the declassified assassination plots against our presidents, both sitting and after their terms. During some of the storied operations, she sometimes goes into necessary but graphic detail about injuries, deaths, captures, and tortures.
There’s a particular salient section on Afghanistan and the operators’ experiences working with training the Afghan resistance fighters that really helps us understand why the situation there has always been nothing but disastrous, such as rife and widespread corruption, betrayals and double agents, open rape and pedophilia, abject illiteracy, and the complete absence of any recognizable societal infrastructure, all of which is completely normalized, and as one of her sources puts it, unknown to the modern world. And these were supposed to be the good guys.1
Jacobson weaves a complicated tapestry that is world conflict in the 20th century and into the first quarter of the 21st, all of which certainly adds nuance and understanding of all these major events and figures. Like anything else, everything is connected in a delicate spiderweb, and contact in one area has widespread reverberations.
From a writer’s perspective, what is also mind-blowing is the sheer amount of work that went into producing a work like this. Jacobson has a prologue where she reviews some of the hard numbers: the number of sources, the thousands of documents, the hundreds of hours of interviews and the thousands of correspondences, over 1,300 just with Billy Waugh2. At the end of the book, she goes on a trip to Cuba with Waugh, among others, and one of the people they meet up with is a man named Earnesto Guevara, the son of Che. There, Waugh also takes part in a final parajump.
Jacobson recently released a new book—Nuclear War: A Scenario—which I heard her speak about on Lex’s Friedman’s podcast and was tempted to start with, where she goes through a minute-by-minute sequence of what would happen in a nuclear war. Nuclear war is another subject that comes up from time to time in Surprise, Kill, Vanish —including parajumpers diving with nuclear bombs—yeah, that’s right— and it’s clear how some of the research here will spill over into that book, which, I might guess, acts like an accompanying volume to this one.
I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, from pragmatic nonfiction to subgenres of narrative non-fiction, and I have not been engaged to this level with a nonfiction story in recent memory, and it rivals some of the best fiction in terms of tension, conflict, and other pillars of storytelling.
This book has a bit of something for everyone. The history peeps will love it, obviously, as will military and political folks. It has recurring characters that come and go, show up and then disappear only to reappear years later. Other characters, who we come to like, such as young fighters who have bright futures ahead of them, have their flames extinguished prematurely. We get to know some low-key figures in and around some of the most significant events of our nation’s history. It has solid pacing, tension, context, so much conflict that it’s almost too hard to believe, and everything is consequential and causal, and there’s the ever-present possibility of ambushes, violence, and death, all of which narrative fiction readers will appreciate.
For students of narrative fiction, especially for those writing in the genres around military and government thrillers, Surprise, Kill, Vanish acts like a handbook. You’ll learn and understand all the required elements of writing these types of stories—covert operations, secret government plots, world-class villains, the incessant and relentless threat of violence and death, civilization-ending-stakes, as well as the understanding people’s motivations behind everything they do, on our side as much as on our antagonists’.
To have a glimpse into this shadow world is shocking and terrifying, as is imagining all that work that Jacobson clearly put into it. Frankly, the book should be requisite reading from a number of approaches. It really reminds us just how much sacrifice goes into the invisible and thankless jobs of secret operations. It puts some of our current political and cultural squabbling and bickering into perspective, and of which, frankly, we should be ashamed.
Although Jacobson gets into some of the moral and philosophical debates about certain practices and protocols, not herself but through the characters, sources, and figures in and around the stories and events, whether it’s deliberate on her part or not, the book also hammers home why we need secret operations and special activities divisions.
For my part, I just might love this book, and I appreciate Annie Jacobson’s work here, both as a reader and a writer myself.
Suffice it to say that I look forward to reading it again as well as cracking into some of her other books. And on the off-chance that I haven’t been clear, I emphatically and unabashedly recommend reading Surprise, Kill, Vanish.
Side story: I had a student a few years ago who was a veteran of the Army Infantry who had spent a couple of years on tour in Afghanistan. On one tour, his group was tasked with staying at and guarding some remote little outpost. There was no running water and no bathroom, so they all had to go in a hole outside but could do so only during the day because snipers would try to pick them off at night. (During the day, our guys could keep an eye on the surroundings, but at night, outside of the light they generated and the stars in the sky, it was as black as space, making them easy targets while covering their would-be killers.) He said he literally didn’t take a shower for six months, and the Afghani fighters they worked with were unapologetically Taliban and didn’t attempt to hide it.
She mentions the number of emails with Billy Waugh at the end of the book.