Way of the Knife, The

A Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter’s explosive account of the transformation of the CIA and America’s special forces into competing covert manhunting and killing operations—the new American way of war

Osama bin Laden’s demise was merely one sensational moment in the first decade of America’s shadow war, the transformation of the national security apparatus into a machine calibrated for manhunting operations. Beyond the “big wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, America has pursued its enemies with killer robots and special operations troops; trained privateers for assassination missions and used them to set up clandestine spying networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services, and ragtag proxy armies. The shadow war has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies, lowered the bar for waging war around the globe, and changed for good how America fights its battles: This is the new way of war. A new military-intelligence complex has emerged.

The CIA, created as a Cold War espionage service, is now more than ever a paramilitary agency ordered by the White House to kill off America’s enemies: from the sustained bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of Yemen and North Africa to the simmering clan wars in Somalia. For its part, the Pentagon has turned into the CIA, dramatically expanding spying missions in the dark spaces of U.S. foreign policy, like Iran. The countries where radical groups have carved out wide, remote swaths of territory are often the very places most openly hostile to American intervention. Where the soldiers can’t go, the United States sends drones, proxies, and guns for hire.

Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Mazzetti examines these secret wars over the past decade, tracking key characters from the intelligence and military communities across the world. Among the characters we meet in The Shadow War are a young CIA officer dropped into the tribal areas to learn the hard way how the spy games in Pakistan are played, an Air Force test pilot who fired the first drone missile in the Nevada desert, a chain-smoking Pentagon official who ran an off-the-books spying operation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a woman from the horse country of Virginia who became obsessed with Somalia and convinced the Pentagon to hire her to gather intelligence about al Qaeda operatives there. Gripping, newsbreaking, and powerfully told, The Shadow War reveals the true nature of American warfare in the twenty-first century—a model that is here to stay.