James Risen’s ‘Pay Any Price’

In “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” James Risen holds up a mirror to the United States in the 13 years since 9/11, and what it reveals is not a pretty sight. Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-­winning reporter at The New York Times, documents the emergence of a “homeland ­security-industrial complex” more pervasive and more pernicious than the “military-industrial complex” Dwight Eisenhower warned against. With the power and passion of Zola’s “J’Accuse,” he chronicles the abandonment of America’s cherished open society in a never-satiated search for security from an ill-defined threat.

Risen is not the first to comment on the wanton excesses of the war on terror. John Mueller of Ohio State University has repeatedly written about the extraordinary sums expended in America’s overreaction to the threat posed by Al Qaeda. Risen, however, brings home the costs by providing detailed accounts of specific operations and the individuals caught up in the counterterror gold rush. His focus is not on the ravages of war wrought in the countries invaded by the United States and its allies, but on the United States itself. This is a story of war profiteering, personal ambition, bureaucratic turf wars, absence of accountability and, always, secrecy.

With the well-honed skills of an investigative reporter, Risen takes us through the way $20 billion was sent to Iraq with little or no oversight and without any clear direction on how it should be spent. Most of this money was flown from East Rutherford, N.J., in bricks of $100 bills. Pallets of cash were distributed at will. Today $11.7 billion remains unaccounted for. Much of it made its way into private bank accounts; apparently about $2 billion is hidden in Lebanon. (I can’t help thinking what $20 billion, or even the missing $11.7 billion, would do for homelessness and for schools in America’s most blighted urban areas.)

We see how, in the post-9/11 era, a panic-stricken Congress threw cash at the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., at a rate so fast they had trouble spending it. Of course there were many volunteers eager to help them. A Pentagon report found that in the decade after 9/11, the Defense Department gave more than $400 billion to contractors who had been sanctioned in actions involving $1 million or more in fraud. One of the most extraordinary stories is that of a failed gambler, Dennis Montgomery, who managed to fool the C.I.A. into believing that he had devised a means for decoding Qaeda messages. The C.I.A. proved itself more gullible than the executives of both Hollywood and Las Vegas, who declined to invest in his technology. The combination of the code of secrecy, turf warfare among bureaucrats and personal ambition ensured that Montgomery’s claims went untested and made their way up through the intelligence ranks to the Oval Office. Even after he was exposed, the C.I.A. pretended it had never been involved, the Pentagon kept working with him and the Justice Department tried to prevent any information about the scheme from becoming public.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/books/review/james-risens-pay-any-price.html