Volume 34, Number 18 · November 19, 1987
Casey's Case
By Thomas Powers
Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 543 pp., $21.95
The Russians have only a walk-on part in Bob Woodward's history of the world according to William Casey. The KGB fabricated a will for Zhou Enlai, we are told; twenty-five spies were reporting to Casey's CIA from the Soviet bloc by 1984; and one of them reported the death of Konstantin Chernenko to the CIA two days before it was officially announced in the Soviet Union. This is Chernenko's sole appearance in Woodward's book. The three other Soviet leaders during Casey's tenure as director of central intelligence are cited in passing a total of eight times. Even Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB and thereby Casey's principal opponent in the secret war until 1982, makes only a single appearance—as one of the 'three dying men' who preceded Gorbachev. There is generally a Soviet angle to Casey's preoccupations, as reported by Woodward, and the cold war provides a kind of unobtrusive background music of the sort commonly heard in elevators and supermarkets, but the 'secret' wars that Casey hoped to prove we could fight and win were all conducted in the odd corners of the world, where the Russians had as much trouble with the local languages as we did.
Review, 4013 words
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