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 reader meets a cast of fabricators, recruited assets, double agents, liaison partners, and adversaries—no two alike—rendered with palpable granularity and dry humor. 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.