Blown Cover: A CIA Memoir

Craig Osth served thirty-five years as a CIA clandestine operations officer, with eleven field tours on several continents, seven as Chief of Station. Blown Cover recounts what he coined "intel-fare": CIA's vaccine to prevent outright war by winning unseen battles covertly. Human intelligence is grueling, yet energizing, because hard-won success delivers presidents leverage to preempt war.

This is not a Washington memoir, but street-level espionage as practiced: dodging surveillance, grimy safehouses, suspect motivations, deception, juggling foreign languages. The listener meets a cast of fabricators, recruited assets, double agents, liaison partners, and adversaries.

This memoir spans 1980s Cold War-torn Central America to the full arc of the post-Soviet era: the fall of the Berlin Wall, illusory peace that briefly ensued, metastasis of Islamist radicalism into 9/11, counterterrorism wars, CIA moles, narcotrafficking, China's ascendancy, Iran's quest for the bomb, and cyber warfare's emergence. One arresting episode grapples with Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Engaging a shadowy intermediary with a direct line to an international arms dealer close to the Iraqi regime, Osth developed a unique opportunity—one that could, he argues, have proved before the United States went to war whether Saddam possessed WMD. Headquarters declined to pursue it. Saddam had none. The invasion followed in 2003, with catastrophic costs.

Osth is scrupulously frank about the low-percentage nature of intelligence work—good agents gone bad and compromised operations—affording the listener an unfiltered glimpse into timeless realities of the craft of intelligence.