Personal by Lee Child

Published 2014, acquired at a book sale 2018, read July 2019, 353 pages, and another Jack Reacher hit novel!  This novel finds  Jack pulled back from retirement by the State Department for the CIA, and off to London.  A sniper has missed a shot at the French President in Paris from 3/4 of a mile.  The suspected expert sniper is John Kott, an American gone to the dark side. Although a loner and preferring to work that way, Reacher is teamed with Casey Nice, a female rookie analyst on the international investigation.  

It begins, Chapter 1, " Eight days ago my life was an up and down affair.  Some of it good.  Some of it not so good.  Most of it uneventful.  Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something.  Like the army itself.  Which is how they found me.  You can leave the army but the army doesn't leave you.  Not always.  Not completely."  and the third paragraph, "The Army Times is a strange old paper.  It started up before World War Two and is still going strong, every week, full of yesterday's news and sundry how to articles, like the headline staring up at me right then:  New Rules!  Changes for Badges and Insignia?!  Plus Four More Uniform Changes on the Way!  Legend has it the news is yesterday's because it's copied secondhand from AP summaries, but if you read the words sideways you sometimes hear a real sardonic tone between the lines.  ..."  it begins with some interesting trivia, historical perspective.  Always something to learn in these Reacher novels.  Another example on Page 67,   "Pi times the radius squared.  I said. Very nearly 2 square miles."  "Average population density in major Western city centers?" Which was neither math nor arithmetic but general knowledge.  I said, "Forty thousand people per square mile?".."You're behind the times.  Closer to 50,000 now, plus or minus.  Parts of London and Paris are already 70,000.  ....."  I wonder how much it has increased today, 2019 as city centers swell to over capacity.  

This sniper could be one of 3 internationally known and stopping him from wreaking  evil at the the upcoming summit of world leaders has engaged not only the US, but British and Russian experts.  Another great read, page turner.        As every other  this was a 5 *****

 I  have only one more Reacher book on my shelf to read from the book sale bonanza I found last year, so far 11 read and not all in chronological order of publish, so I will soon be ordering more on Amazon, I have kept track of the  Reacher novels I have read.  The chronology of publication is #1 Killing Floor 1997, #2 Die Trying 1998, , #4 Running Blind 2000, #9 One Shot 2005, #13 Gone Tomorrow 2009, #14 61 Hours 2010, #15 Worth Dying For 2010, #16 The Affair 2011, #17 A Wanted Man 2012, #14 Personal  2014, #22 The Midnight Line 2017. 

See No Evil by Robert Baer

Picked up this in Port Isabel,Texas, February this year at a library sale, one of the library books cleared  from the shelves, a lucky find for me. This  2002 memoir by Robert Baer about his career in the CIA as a case worker/operative, is a paperback, 279 pages and reads as a good intrigue.  Once again this book proves that there are many good books out there not on current best seller lists, books from the past that I have not read. Fascinating, well written intrigue, timely today just as when it was written an released 15 years ago  If anything the political maneuvering by federal bureaucrats and politicians has likely become worse than what the author encountered.  It is frightening to think that we no longer have an effective CIA.   

Pages 229- 230, discuss the downward spiral consuming the CIA beginning with the FBI arrest of Rick Ames on February 1994...."I was in Dushanbe.  Watching on CNN as Ames stood handcuffed by the side of his new Jaguar XJ-6, my first reaction was that no one at the CIA owns a Jaguar......The officers who once could have afforded one--the investment bankers and lawyers who fought with the OSS in World War II and the few who'd stayed on to establish the CIA in 1947 were all gone.  Ames Jaguar must have been the only one in the CIA parking lot.  How could security have missed it?   But the lapse of internal security was just the beginning of the misery.  Rick Ames wasn't your average spy.  When he gave away a dozen Soviet agents at one liquor soaked lunch, he established himself as one of history's greatest traitors, in the company of Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, and Kim Philby.  Just as Britain's M-16 would never live down Philby, so the CIA would never live down Ames.  He had ratted out our crown jewels, the reason we existed.  ......The CIA had screwed up so badly with Ames that it could no longer be trusted to clean its own house..... Woolsey, turned the CIA over to its worst enemy in Washington--the FBI.  Way back at the beginning of the cold war, J.Edgar Hoover had wanted to keep all national security operations domestic and foreign under his heavy thumb.  Now it looked like his ghost was about to get its way......The executioner the FBI picked for the task was Ed Curran, a serving FBI agent.......His first act was to fire anyone who knew anything, especially the little old ladies in tennis shoes--the CIA's institutional memory on Soviet espionage...The idea was to spread fear and paranoia through out the CIA and in that he couldn't have been more successful." ." 

it was difficult to read all the Arab  names, but his story is centered in that part of the world and the author is very specific about names along with iterating the culture of tribalism and  family clans.  It is just one of the reasons why we are failing against the terrorists, their bloodline alliances are entrenched.   

Page 279, the last page last paragraph is haunting still today, 2017.:"  ..concerns me that I hear so little talk about doing something about future Ziyad Jarrahs and the groups they belong to.  They are our real problem. ...compounded by the fact that we know so little about these groups and have virtually no intelligence on how they are structured.......No doubt going after Saddam sounds like a good idea around the conference tables of Washington's think tanks and in the hallowed office suites at the National Security Council, but is he that enemy?  Are we not hitting the target we can rather than the target we should?  Shouldn't we be pulling from the roots the people who hit us on September 11 rather than going after the Gulf's bogeyman?  It seems to me it's always the evil we refuse to see that does us the greatest harm."


There are many reviews online  and I have copied this from Wikipedia :
 "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism is a 2003 memoir by Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations. Baer begins with his upbringing in the United States and Europe and continues with a tour of his CIA experiences across the globe. Approximately the first two-thirds of the memoir focus on the various experiences of Baer's two-decade (1976–1997) career at the CIA, while the last third depicts the growing cynicism brought on by the corruption and obliviousness encountered in Washington.

One of the main focal points of the story is Baer's obsession with uncovering the perpetrators of the unsolved 1983 United States Embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. Baer's memoir describes his own solution of the mystery.

The overall theme around which the memoir is built is his view of the CIA losing its prowess due to increasing diplomatic sensitivity in Washington's foreign policies in the aftermath of political fiascoes from active American involvement in foreign politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Baer describes how he believes the CIA steadily degenerated from a potent human-intelligence resource that often saved or spared lives, to a people-shy, satellite-obsessed, and politically oriented branch of a centralized government.

Other topics Baer discusses in the book include: the extent to which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been involved in anti-American terrorist activity, most publicly in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing (a death toll of over 300), but allegedly in a far more diverse range of terrorist operations. Baer also writes about how he believes the CIA failed in forecasting the September 11 attacks on America. Baer's story clearly lays out how the CIA came to the point of not even having a useful agent in the Middle East in the period leading up to the attacks. He goes on to describe the loss of effectiveness of the CIA in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the catastrophic treason of CIA agent Aldrich Ames, and the CIA's failure to identify the mole before lethal damage had been done to many of their operations worldwide.

The final section of the memoir deals with Baer's experience with oil politics in Washington, and the extended reach granted to oil's agenda by the politically fixated and strategically oblivious American government. At one point, Baer is stunned at being asked to approve the sale of a sophisticated American defense weapon to a former Soviet-bloc country as an incentive for participating in an oil deal, while that same country had recently obstructed the investigation of the murder of an American diplomat on their soil. Baer recalls his unwilling association with infamous oil businessman Roger Tamraz and the uneasy realities he extracts from his period of involvement in Washington politics.

The film Syriana (2005) was loosely based on the book."

I gave this 5 *****

The Survivor by Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills

Published in 2015, this was the last Mitch Rapp book that  author, late Vince Flynn had underway before his untimely death in 2013.  Kyle Mills continued it to  produce  another Rapp thriller.  Kyle melded this with characters from his own thriller novels apparently.  It was just as good as the Flynn created Rapp series bringing the Afghanis and that rugged country along with Pakistanis  and nuclear powers head to head.  In this thriller packed with action and intrigue, Rapp, CIA operative will face an old long time nemesis, lose his mentor Stan Hurley and battle cyber threats while fighting on the ground in the same rough physical pace this character portrays best.  Irene Kennedy may face the end of her career in humiliating circumstances. 

Some of my favorite passages are as follows. Page 69, "Rapp was the pinnacle.  Most people had become resigned to the fact that he was unkillable.  Gould was one of the few people on the planet who had tried and lived to tell the tale and even he had to admit that he'd been lucky.  Twice.....Rapp wasn't just unkillable, he was in many ways unstoppable..."    Page 264, reveals a chilling consideration, likely more truth than fiction,  "It was shortly thereafter that he had joined with Mitch Rapp and the Americans.   Not because he believed in their futile and unwelcome efforts to turn Afghanistan into a modern democracy.  No, he'd simply seen them as a powerful ally in his quest to kill the men responsible for taking away his life.....The Americans were a confused and naive people, but generally the champions of peace and stability.  Occupations were not in their nature.  Unlike the fanatics who had converged on his country, the Americans could be counted on to leave." 

Page 275 rings true especially with this current inept cowardly federal regime aka administration.  " The problem was that unimaginably stupid had become a job requirement in Washington.

It's a 5 ***** read and  hopefully Kyle Mills will continue this Rapp series, a character ala Jack Bauer of the former TV show 24, something of a marvel in this time of political correctness and wussiness.  .  

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