Jack Devine's 'Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story'

I interviewed former CIA official Jack Devine today. Devine is the author of Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story.

Devine's publisher, Macmillan, offers the below:

Jack Devine is one of the legendary spymasters of our time. He was in Chile when Allende fell; he ran Charlie Wilson's war in Afghanistan; he had too much to do with Iran-Contra for his own taste, though he tried to stop it; he oversaw the effort to run down Pablo Escobar in Colombia. Devine served America's interests for more than thirty years in a wide range of covert operations, ultimately overseeing the Directorate of Operations, a CIA component that watches over thousands of American covert operatives worldwide.

 Good Hunting is his guide to the art of spycraft, told with great wit, candor, and commonsense wisdom. Caricatured by Hollywood, lionized by the right, and pilloried by the left, the CIA remains one of the least understood instruments of the United States government. Devine knows more than almost anyone about the CIA's vital importance as a tool of American statecraft. In wonderfully readable prose, Good Hunting aims to set the record straight. This is a revelatory inside look at an organization whose history has not been given its real due.

Jack Devine (seen in the above photo) is a thirty-two-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served at the pinnacle of his career as the CIA’s top spymaster—Acting Deputy Director of the CIA’s operations outside the United States, in which capacity he had supervisory authority over thousands of CIA employees involved in sensitive missions throughout the world. He is also a founding partner and the president of the Arkin Group, an international risk consulting and intelligence firm. He lives in New York City with his wife, Pat.

Note: My interview with Jack Devine will appear in the next issue of The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International. 

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review of Jack Devine's Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story for the Washington Times.

When an expert such as Jack Devine, a three-decades-plus veteran of the CIA Clandestine Service, warns about myriad world troubles stretching into the foreseeable future, serious citizens should take heed — and those now running the agency, both in-house and as elected officials, should give “Good Hunting” a careful read in light of what can be done to protect the country.

In Mr. Devine’s expert opinion, the solution should be the wide — and intelligent — use of covert action. As do many CIA veterans, he decries the militarization of the agency in recent years, and its subordination to the post of Director of National Intelligence, created in the do-something fever that inflamed Congress after Sept. 11, 2001. He feels that the result has been a “muddled new intelligence bureaucracy with less coherence and more fractured leadership.” He urges that “Congress should revisit its utility and perhaps curtail its staffing and tasking.”

The capstone of Mr. Devine's career was overseeing the largest CIA covert operation ever, to run the Soviet military out of Afghanistan, a venture inaccurately termed “Charlie Wilson’s War” by the media. Although he and other agency officials praise the now-deceased Texas congressman’s tenacity in obtaining money and arms for the war, Mr. Devine’s colleague Milton Bearden is quoted as quipping, that it was “‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ only in Charlie Wilson’s mind.” In any event, the operation drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/26/book-review-what-it-takes-to-plan-covert-action/

Review Of Jack Devine's CIA Memoir "Good Hunting"

Philip Mudd, a retired CIA officer, reviewed Jack Devine's CIA memoir Good Hunting for The Nation.

Nearly two decades into Jack Devine’s career at the CIA, he was tasked with what was then the agency’s largest-ever covert program: the effort to aid the ‘mujahedeen’ fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Should the agency take a huge risk by providing the Afghan fighters with sophisticated shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles? Mr Devine and his colleagues decided that the answer was yes.

He remembers walking into the CIA director’s office in 1986 with a report on the controversial introduction of hundreds of these Stingers. “Mr Director,” he recalls saying, “we had a tremendous breakthrough yesterday. We deployed the Stinger and we shot down three helicopters.” Director William Casey, a passionate Cold Warrior, responded: “Jack, this changes it all, doesn’t it?”

“Good Hunting,” Mr Devine’s memoir, is a refresher course on the breadth of America’s covert campaigns against the spread of Soviet influence and ideology, and Mr Devine’s 32-year career is a microcosm of the secret thrust and counterthrust that defined those years.

The son of a blue-collar, Irish-Catholic family from Philadelphia, Mr Devine began at the CIA in the 1960s after reading a book about the agency and sending in a handwritten request for employment. He rose through the ranks, ultimately overseeing the entirety of the agency’s clandestine operations in the mid-1990s.   

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.nation.com.pk/international/12-Jun-2014/secret-agent-man

I interviewed Philip Mudd, who was the former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, for Counterterrorism magazine. You can read the interview via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/08/a-q-with-philip-mudd-former-deputy.html