Denial and Deception

The reality for a woman agent working in the secret world of intelligence often leads to extraordinary obstacles and sacrifices. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a sixteen-year covert operative for the CIA in the Middle East, was the Agency's top-ranked female Arabist before she left in 2002. In Denial and Deception, Mahle not only describes the Agency's successes and failures, but details her life as a woman in one of the last professions that remain almost exclusively male-directed and dominated. The author has a unique vantage point from which to view the political and operational culture of the CIA in the post-Cold War climate, and reveals how it failed to anticipate the 9/11 attacks. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, she provides a vivid narrative of how the agency became a rudderless organization, lost in the post-Cold War world. Afraid to take risks that might offend Congress and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling " to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism."