Michael Burleigh

Lethal Intelligence

Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016

By

Allen Lane 757pp £25 order from our bookshop

Directorate S is a covert department within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. It is dedicated to supporting Islamist radicals, Kashmiri separatists and the Afghan Taliban. ISI has always been led by a three-star army general, answerable to the chief of the general staff. For much of the period covered by Steve Coll’s book, General Ashfaq Kayani loomed large, serving as director-general of ISI from 2004 to 2007, before becoming chief of army staff. He figures prominently in Coll’s account, often veiled by a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us