Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, the untold USA Today bestselling story of the CIA's secret paramilitary units. Surprise ... your target. Kill ... your enemy. Vanish ... without a trace. When diplomacy fails, and war is unwise, the president calls on the CIA's Special Activities Division, a highly-classified branch of the CIA and the most effective, black operations force in the world. Originally known as the president's guerrilla warfare corps, SAD conducts risky and ruthless operations that have evolved over time to defend America from its enemies. Almost every American president since World War II has asked the CIA to conduct sabotage, subversion and, yes, assassination. With unprecedented access to forty-two men and women who proudly and secretly worked on CIA covert operations from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day, along with declassified documents and deep historical research, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen unveils--like never before--a complex world of individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers, and saboteurs. Despite Hollywood notions of off-book operations and external secret hires, covert action is actually one piece in a colossal foreign policy machine. Written with the pacing of a thriller, Surprise, Kill, Vanish brings to vivid life the sheer pandemonium and chaos, as well as the unforgettable human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope that define paramilitary and intelligence work. Jacobsen's exclusive interviews--with members of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (equivalent to the Pentagon's generals), its counterterrorism chiefs, targeting officers, and Special Activities Division's Ground Branch operators who conduct today's close-quarters killing operations around the world--reveal, for the first time, the enormity of this shocking, controversial, and morally complex terrain. Is the CIA's paramilitary army America's weaponized strength, or a liability to its principled standing in the world? Every operation reported in this book, however unsettling, is legal.
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Community Reviews
PART I
1941
Chapter One: An Office for Ungentlemanly Warfare
7,5/10
There is a short intro chapter worth reading as it introduces the book topics perfectly. Great to see it! These type of books can get confusing fast without meta info. Basically, Jacobsen interviewed a ton of special agents and had to decide on who was telling the truth based on what evidence they could present. The book is largely stories from the most trustworthy sources.
The first chapter itself is a strong start. It's about Allied special units during WW2 and how they planned to kill Hitler after having killed a high ranking Nazi, Heydrich. Neither the US nor UK programs amounted to anything because there were laws against such hired killers even during wartime. And the war was ending anyhow before they could convince anyone.
There is a detailed description of the Heydrich assassination. He died of blood poisoning because a bit of horse hair from his car seat went into his wound. I watched Anthropoid (2016) some time ago. While the movie is overly dramatic and unfocused it's fine enough and the Czech assassination scene is pretty much spot on and follows the real event. I'm very impressed by that scene after having read exactly how it happened. Honestly, you should watch the scene as pure history.
Chapter Two: Tertia Optio
7/10
A bit about Stalin's secret death unit killing people he dislikes.
Chapter Three: Surprise Attack in Korea
7,5/10
Units are set up to kill Korean communists who want to take over the country. USA sees Kim Sung Il as a psychopath who must be removed. But everything is just a plan. No one can legally do anything and no plan is even concrete. It's just a bunch of cool ideas and training with no expertise behind it.
Later as CIA do their very first operations they go horribly wrong. Hundreds if not thousands die and CIA keeps it hidden because if it came out they were this incompetent their image would be ruined before they even started up. There is not much info on what they did or how all those agents died besides a single double-spy suicide bomber spy story. CIA just didn't know who the bad guys were amongst them.
Chapter Four: Special Forces
6,5/10
Special forces units being created in USA. It's all very vague as it's not fully known what happened so the chapter suffers for it. It's very interesting, but just not enough info to make it fully informative.
Chapter Five: Ruin and Rule in Guatemala
7/10
Guatemala has a new president and he experiences 25 assassination attempts. USA understands that this chaos may be used by USSR to take over the country and they create an assassination list. Yet again another loose plan/idea.
Chapter Six: Kings, Shahs, Monarchs, and Madmen
7/10
Middle East. Largely about Iran and the USA involvement there. USA doesn't want communism to spread in the Middle East and take control of the oil there.
Chapter Seven: The KGB’s Office of Liquid Affairs
7,5/10
KGB assassinations and agents fleeing USSR to USA/the West. USSR post-Stalin kills these agents and other people in the West with poison.
Chapter Eight: Green Light
7/10
Small real atomic bombs. Special forces doing parachute jumps with one. They even lose one of these bombs on the seafloor and have to do a big search to find it.
Then a bit about South Vietnam and how North Vietnam sent assassins to kill over 1200 officials there in 1959.
Chapter Nine: The Special Group
7,5/10
Some Cuba plans. Nothing concrete that went into effect. Best thing about the chapter is the small passage about how violent Che and the Castros were. They murdered people without trials and called courts a bourgeois institution.
PART II
1961
Chapter Ten: An Assassination Capability
8/10
Bay of Pig disaster. CIA tried to use the Castro tactics. But they modeled the coup on the Guatamala coup which was a mistake. President Azbenz had 10k men in the army. Castro had a million. It was a huge disaster for JFK. They also had a spy in their group. Just like during the Korea time.
Chapter Eleven: JFK, KIA
7/10
Special unit Vietnam mission ends with a huge attack.
Chapter Twelve: The Studies and Observations Group
6,5/10
Asia stories.
Chapter Thirteen: Kill or Capture
6,5/10
Mote Vietnam/Asia related stuff. Then ends with Che being captured and killed. The Che story is interesting but too short.
Chapter Fourteen: Green Berets
7/10
Green Beret Affair. CIA tells some soldiers to execute a double-spy working for them. The story leaks to the news as one of the soldiers refused to take part in it.
The chapter ends with a bit too many personal anecdotes.
Chapter Fifteen: Revenge
9/10
The prior chapters were often just personal stories from soldiers. So they were often a bit too small in scope and only had 1 single source. Basically stuff you can't fully trust.
This chapter is finally a special agents and terrorist groups chapter. About Palestinian terrorists and Israeli special forces hunting them down. Yasser Arafat supposedly led Black September, a murderous torture group killing Israelies. They were responsible for the attack at the Munich 1972 Olympics. Israelies then slowly hunted the leaders down and killed them. But Arafat and others escaped.
There are also other stories about for example OPEC board members being kidnapped. The terrorists get to leave Austria on a plane to Algeria with the board members and other hostages. The lead terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, takes the bribe money and escapes to Sudan. A later chapter goes over his capture.
Some claims feel a bit too on the nose. Yasser Arafat was leading Black September? The guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize? The author claims it very convincingly and even cites letters he supposedly sent. But I'm not sure what to make of all of this. It's such an extreme claim that I for once could use more concrete and direct sources. It's a huge accusation, but we don't learn about what documents revealed this or how commonly accepted this knowledge is.
Chapter Sixteen: Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya
7,5/10
A former US soldier goes to Gaddafi's Libya to train his special forces. A terrible and lazy group. But his actual mission is to take photos of Gaddafi's Soviet weapon systems.
The chapter ends with a few other stories. One is an assassination attempt by a former Green Beret in USA indirectly hired by Gaddafi. Gaddafi is killing all his enemies all over the world.
The chapter is really good. But it's too many different stories yet again. It's 3 different stories. 2 of them belong together. The last one doesn't.
PART III
1981
Chapter Seventeen: Reagan’s Preemptive Neutralization
8/10
Reagan's assassination attempt with exploding bullets that didn't explode. 6 shots in 2 seconds.
More Middle East stories and the expansion of CIA. The collection of the various stories here is very strong so the chapter is good even though we do jump from place to place. The timeline is strong here as the Arab/Muslim terrorism vs. the West picks up and CIA starts to understand it much better.
Chapter Eighteen: Parachute Assassins, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden
7/10
Sudan and a single person mission to take the very first photos of Osama bin Laden. Back then he was not as extreme and largely focused on his building construction company.
It's largely still smaller personal interviews with agents and such. Fun stuff, but not anything huge or historically important.
Chapter Nineteen: Operation Love Storm
7,5/10
Bush assasination plan and a few more short stories about mainly Bush and White House protection.
Chapter Twenty: Carlos the Jackal
9/10
Single story chapter with few sources. This is great! You follow the story from start till finish and get interesting historical and cultural info along the way. It truly feels like being there with the spies. This feels real and not just like another magical story.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Engineer
8/10
Strong chapter with many stories about the US president his security group and how USA tackles the assassination of foreign terrorists morally and via laws. They for example could not assassinate Osama bin Laden as it was seen as immoral and not in the name of war or imminent security. You can attack and battle people, but not shoot them randomly for example. Missiles may be okay. But that's the issue, missiles kill the target and a bunch of civilians. A single shot kills only the target. Yet a single shot is seen as bad by the American public.
PART IV
2001
Chapter Twenty-Two: War in Afghanistan
7/10
More small stories. It's mostly vague descriptions of what they want to do. So this book mentions vague ideas and concepts and we just have to believe this is how successfully they worked day to day. It's a bit sad we don't hear about more mistakes because when mistakes become clear to the public we know that much info is revealed about the overall project. Here we still know very little. So the agents she interviewed just spun tales about how they are killing undefined terrorists and saving the world while being "super duper effective". Maybe, but a few decades before this CIA mostly just got their own agents killed. How did they become this effective?
Chapter Twenty-Three: Poke the Bear
7,5/10
Afghanistan. Some interesting but jumbled stories. We jump from place to place. Good points mentioned, but we don't really feel like we are in the war. We are just told some singular stories from the area.
Chapter Twenty-Four: War in Iraq
7/10
Iraq.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Imad Mugniyah
7/10
Good chapter about Mossad and single missions. A bit more spying.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Moral Twilight Zone
9/10
Great chapter about Afghanistan, focused on a single country and single war. This chapter is reveals a ton of stuff about the Afghan war. It's basically a really great intro to the war itself and since I've only seen docs and never read full books about the war it's a perfect intro for me. A lot of examples of how the people working with Americans are often spies and or just lazy or evil. Nearly all can't read. None are truly soldiers. They for example like to rape each other and let Americans wait outside. I'm not sure what rape means here. How are they raping each other without getting killed? Taliban is meanwhile deadly and effective.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Just War
7,5/10
Obama’s "just war" speech about how the war against terrorism is good. Obama wanted to make killing operations something the public would support. As he basically won the Nobel Prize before taking office and then was president when Osama bin Laden was killed it gave him some leeway. But making things public is a new idea. Often you have to wait 30 years or more for something to become public knowledge. There is a part about training with small atomic bombs and how USA always wants to use them but morally can’t.
The ending in Cuba is great. It’s the author telling her personal observations stories as she was traveling with a retired agent who told her stories for the book. This part makes this chapter much better.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Hidden Hand
7/10
Short ending.
My final opinion on the book
I'm going to read everything Annie Jacobsen writes. All her audiobooks are great and top of the line. It's very hard to find anything this good. This one is not her best one, but it's damn good anyhow.
Jacobsen does have a few "faults". She is one of those story collectors that does a ton of interviews and then puts them together in chapters. Yet often some short stories feel a bit random or small. Her longer stories are on the other hand amazing as she is an amazing historian with a deep focus on historical facts. A main fault with her style is that often the short stories are quite bombastic and extreme yet they contain so little extra info that you feel they are false.
For example, I looked up the Green Beret assassination story in USA. Gaddafi tried to kill his enemies. In the book the story sounds insane from start to finish. Just impossible in every way. I decided to look up the story online. All she said is 100% correct. But the extra info actually makes the story feel real. The assassin was a drunkard living by himself. A loser just taking jobs here and there as he is a former Green Beret needing money. An American Gaddafi supporter then hires him to hunt down/kill a student. As the assassin also works for CIA from time to time his defense attorney brings in 2 CIA agents as witnesses and they both refuse to answer questions. Well, the jury is obviously confused. Was he hired by CIA to rough up some Muslim? It then went wrong and he shot him? Or was he hired by Gaddafi to kill him? As CIA refuses to answer, the jury obviously knows they are involved somehow and therefore don't find him guilty of attempted homicide. Yet these 2 CIA agents just seem to refuse to answer questions overall. It doesn't prove they were fully involved in this specific murder attempt.
This fault is found in all her books. Most of her stories sound completely made up. They are not, but it's just her writing style making it seem so. A short and pointy style focused on the main points of a story making all stories feel bigger than life. It would be way better to have fewer stories but have them be more personal. What about kids and wives? Friends and hobbies? This small stuff makes it feel real. I get why she is avoiding it. Her goal is to write an amazing and deep intro to the overall history about CIA missions. That's all great too. If you want a deep historical overview this is the book for it. But unless you know a bit about the events you will feel confused. The stories all seem magical and impossible and you need the grounding from somewhere else as she is not supplying it
1941
Chapter One: An Office for Ungentlemanly Warfare
7,5/10
There is a short intro chapter worth reading as it introduces the book topics perfectly. Great to see it! These type of books can get confusing fast without meta info. Basically, Jacobsen interviewed a ton of special agents and had to decide on who was telling the truth based on what evidence they could present. The book is largely stories from the most trustworthy sources.
The first chapter itself is a strong start. It's about Allied special units during WW2 and how they planned to kill Hitler after having killed a high ranking Nazi, Heydrich. Neither the US nor UK programs amounted to anything because there were laws against such hired killers even during wartime. And the war was ending anyhow before they could convince anyone.
There is a detailed description of the Heydrich assassination. He died of blood poisoning because a bit of horse hair from his car seat went into his wound. I watched Anthropoid (2016) some time ago. While the movie is overly dramatic and unfocused it's fine enough and the Czech assassination scene is pretty much spot on and follows the real event. I'm very impressed by that scene after having read exactly how it happened. Honestly, you should watch the scene as pure history.
Chapter Two: Tertia Optio
7/10
A bit about Stalin's secret death unit killing people he dislikes.
Chapter Three: Surprise Attack in Korea
7,5/10
Units are set up to kill Korean communists who want to take over the country. USA sees Kim Sung Il as a psychopath who must be removed. But everything is just a plan. No one can legally do anything and no plan is even concrete. It's just a bunch of cool ideas and training with no expertise behind it.
Later as CIA do their very first operations they go horribly wrong. Hundreds if not thousands die and CIA keeps it hidden because if it came out they were this incompetent their image would be ruined before they even started up. There is not much info on what they did or how all those agents died besides a single double-spy suicide bomber spy story. CIA just didn't know who the bad guys were amongst them.
Chapter Four: Special Forces
6,5/10
Special forces units being created in USA. It's all very vague as it's not fully known what happened so the chapter suffers for it. It's very interesting, but just not enough info to make it fully informative.
Chapter Five: Ruin and Rule in Guatemala
7/10
Guatemala has a new president and he experiences 25 assassination attempts. USA understands that this chaos may be used by USSR to take over the country and they create an assassination list. Yet again another loose plan/idea.
Chapter Six: Kings, Shahs, Monarchs, and Madmen
7/10
Middle East. Largely about Iran and the USA involvement there. USA doesn't want communism to spread in the Middle East and take control of the oil there.
Chapter Seven: The KGB’s Office of Liquid Affairs
7,5/10
KGB assassinations and agents fleeing USSR to USA/the West. USSR post-Stalin kills these agents and other people in the West with poison.
Chapter Eight: Green Light
7/10
Small real atomic bombs. Special forces doing parachute jumps with one. They even lose one of these bombs on the seafloor and have to do a big search to find it.
Then a bit about South Vietnam and how North Vietnam sent assassins to kill over 1200 officials there in 1959.
Chapter Nine: The Special Group
7,5/10
Some Cuba plans. Nothing concrete that went into effect. Best thing about the chapter is the small passage about how violent Che and the Castros were. They murdered people without trials and called courts a bourgeois institution.
PART II
1961
Chapter Ten: An Assassination Capability
8/10
Bay of Pig disaster. CIA tried to use the Castro tactics. But they modeled the coup on the Guatamala coup which was a mistake. President Azbenz had 10k men in the army. Castro had a million. It was a huge disaster for JFK. They also had a spy in their group. Just like during the Korea time.
Chapter Eleven: JFK, KIA
7/10
Special unit Vietnam mission ends with a huge attack.
Chapter Twelve: The Studies and Observations Group
6,5/10
Asia stories.
Chapter Thirteen: Kill or Capture
6,5/10
Mote Vietnam/Asia related stuff. Then ends with Che being captured and killed. The Che story is interesting but too short.
Chapter Fourteen: Green Berets
7/10
Green Beret Affair. CIA tells some soldiers to execute a double-spy working for them. The story leaks to the news as one of the soldiers refused to take part in it.
The chapter ends with a bit too many personal anecdotes.
Chapter Fifteen: Revenge
9/10
The prior chapters were often just personal stories from soldiers. So they were often a bit too small in scope and only had 1 single source. Basically stuff you can't fully trust.
This chapter is finally a special agents and terrorist groups chapter. About Palestinian terrorists and Israeli special forces hunting them down. Yasser Arafat supposedly led Black September, a murderous torture group killing Israelies. They were responsible for the attack at the Munich 1972 Olympics. Israelies then slowly hunted the leaders down and killed them. But Arafat and others escaped.
There are also other stories about for example OPEC board members being kidnapped. The terrorists get to leave Austria on a plane to Algeria with the board members and other hostages. The lead terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, takes the bribe money and escapes to Sudan. A later chapter goes over his capture.
Some claims feel a bit too on the nose. Yasser Arafat was leading Black September? The guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize? The author claims it very convincingly and even cites letters he supposedly sent. But I'm not sure what to make of all of this. It's such an extreme claim that I for once could use more concrete and direct sources. It's a huge accusation, but we don't learn about what documents revealed this or how commonly accepted this knowledge is.
Chapter Sixteen: Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya
7,5/10
A former US soldier goes to Gaddafi's Libya to train his special forces. A terrible and lazy group. But his actual mission is to take photos of Gaddafi's Soviet weapon systems.
The chapter ends with a few other stories. One is an assassination attempt by a former Green Beret in USA indirectly hired by Gaddafi. Gaddafi is killing all his enemies all over the world.
The chapter is really good. But it's too many different stories yet again. It's 3 different stories. 2 of them belong together. The last one doesn't.
PART III
1981
Chapter Seventeen: Reagan’s Preemptive Neutralization
8/10
Reagan's assassination attempt with exploding bullets that didn't explode. 6 shots in 2 seconds.
More Middle East stories and the expansion of CIA. The collection of the various stories here is very strong so the chapter is good even though we do jump from place to place. The timeline is strong here as the Arab/Muslim terrorism vs. the West picks up and CIA starts to understand it much better.
Chapter Eighteen: Parachute Assassins, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden
7/10
Sudan and a single person mission to take the very first photos of Osama bin Laden. Back then he was not as extreme and largely focused on his building construction company.
It's largely still smaller personal interviews with agents and such. Fun stuff, but not anything huge or historically important.
Chapter Nineteen: Operation Love Storm
7,5/10
Bush assasination plan and a few more short stories about mainly Bush and White House protection.
Chapter Twenty: Carlos the Jackal
9/10
Single story chapter with few sources. This is great! You follow the story from start till finish and get interesting historical and cultural info along the way. It truly feels like being there with the spies. This feels real and not just like another magical story.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Engineer
8/10
Strong chapter with many stories about the US president his security group and how USA tackles the assassination of foreign terrorists morally and via laws. They for example could not assassinate Osama bin Laden as it was seen as immoral and not in the name of war or imminent security. You can attack and battle people, but not shoot them randomly for example. Missiles may be okay. But that's the issue, missiles kill the target and a bunch of civilians. A single shot kills only the target. Yet a single shot is seen as bad by the American public.
PART IV
2001
Chapter Twenty-Two: War in Afghanistan
7/10
More small stories. It's mostly vague descriptions of what they want to do. So this book mentions vague ideas and concepts and we just have to believe this is how successfully they worked day to day. It's a bit sad we don't hear about more mistakes because when mistakes become clear to the public we know that much info is revealed about the overall project. Here we still know very little. So the agents she interviewed just spun tales about how they are killing undefined terrorists and saving the world while being "super duper effective". Maybe, but a few decades before this CIA mostly just got their own agents killed. How did they become this effective?
Chapter Twenty-Three: Poke the Bear
7,5/10
Afghanistan. Some interesting but jumbled stories. We jump from place to place. Good points mentioned, but we don't really feel like we are in the war. We are just told some singular stories from the area.
Chapter Twenty-Four: War in Iraq
7/10
Iraq.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Imad Mugniyah
7/10
Good chapter about Mossad and single missions. A bit more spying.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Moral Twilight Zone
9/10
Great chapter about Afghanistan, focused on a single country and single war. This chapter is reveals a ton of stuff about the Afghan war. It's basically a really great intro to the war itself and since I've only seen docs and never read full books about the war it's a perfect intro for me. A lot of examples of how the people working with Americans are often spies and or just lazy or evil. Nearly all can't read. None are truly soldiers. They for example like to rape each other and let Americans wait outside. I'm not sure what rape means here. How are they raping each other without getting killed? Taliban is meanwhile deadly and effective.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Just War
7,5/10
Obama’s "just war" speech about how the war against terrorism is good. Obama wanted to make killing operations something the public would support. As he basically won the Nobel Prize before taking office and then was president when Osama bin Laden was killed it gave him some leeway. But making things public is a new idea. Often you have to wait 30 years or more for something to become public knowledge. There is a part about training with small atomic bombs and how USA always wants to use them but morally can’t.
The ending in Cuba is great. It’s the author telling her personal observations stories as she was traveling with a retired agent who told her stories for the book. This part makes this chapter much better.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Hidden Hand
7/10
Short ending.
My final opinion on the book
I'm going to read everything Annie Jacobsen writes. All her audiobooks are great and top of the line. It's very hard to find anything this good. This one is not her best one, but it's damn good anyhow.
Jacobsen does have a few "faults". She is one of those story collectors that does a ton of interviews and then puts them together in chapters. Yet often some short stories feel a bit random or small. Her longer stories are on the other hand amazing as she is an amazing historian with a deep focus on historical facts. A main fault with her style is that often the short stories are quite bombastic and extreme yet they contain so little extra info that you feel they are false.
For example, I looked up the Green Beret assassination story in USA. Gaddafi tried to kill his enemies. In the book the story sounds insane from start to finish. Just impossible in every way. I decided to look up the story online. All she said is 100% correct. But the extra info actually makes the story feel real. The assassin was a drunkard living by himself. A loser just taking jobs here and there as he is a former Green Beret needing money. An American Gaddafi supporter then hires him to hunt down/kill a student. As the assassin also works for CIA from time to time his defense attorney brings in 2 CIA agents as witnesses and they both refuse to answer questions. Well, the jury is obviously confused. Was he hired by CIA to rough up some Muslim? It then went wrong and he shot him? Or was he hired by Gaddafi to kill him? As CIA refuses to answer, the jury obviously knows they are involved somehow and therefore don't find him guilty of attempted homicide. Yet these 2 CIA agents just seem to refuse to answer questions overall. It doesn't prove they were fully involved in this specific murder attempt.
This fault is found in all her books. Most of her stories sound completely made up. They are not, but it's just her writing style making it seem so. A short and pointy style focused on the main points of a story making all stories feel bigger than life. It would be way better to have fewer stories but have them be more personal. What about kids and wives? Friends and hobbies? This small stuff makes it feel real. I get why she is avoiding it. Her goal is to write an amazing and deep intro to the overall history about CIA missions. That's all great too. If you want a deep historical overview this is the book for it. But unless you know a bit about the events you will feel confused. The stories all seem magical and impossible and you need the grounding from somewhere else as she is not supplying it
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