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James Risen’s ‘Pay Any Price’

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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.

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Risen’s fast-paced, accessible prose and his finely drawn detail make the book read like an implausible thriller. The tragedy is that, however implausible, it all appears to be true. There is much to generate righteous indignation in “Pay Any Price,” like the $39.5 billion that went to the private contractor KBR, notwithstanding its apparently casual accounting and seemingly shoddy workmanship, which may have endangered the health or cost the lives of American servicemen and -women. With 50,000 personnel and subcontractors on the ground, it was too big to fail.

Then there is the role of the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in justifying torture, as well as the pusillanimity of the American Psychological Association in providing cover. Not to mention the wholesale violation of the right to privacy by the N.S.A. But there are uplifting stories of tenacious heroes too, ordinary people like Diane Roark and Steven Coughlin, who tried, and generally failed, to get others to do the right thing.

While this is an enormously impressive book, it does have some weaknesses. I’ll mention three. Risen makes clear at the outset that he has relied upon many anonymous sources. Fair enough. But he has also relied on many open sources while rarely naming them. He says, for example: “One 2012 estimate concluded that the decade of war had cost Americans nearly $4 trillion.” Why not provide the source for this estimate, and for others mentioned throughout the book? Doing so would enable readers to evaluate the reliability of the source, and to conduct further research on their own.

Another weakness is that Risen, whose moral indignation is kept in check but rarely far below the surface, does not make distinctions that might be drawn between those he labels kleptocrats, oligarchs and the simply greedy. He rightly points out that the corporate leaders of the security industry are the true winners of the war on terror. He names them “the New Oligarchs.” It is certainly true that General Atomics, which produces drones and in 2012 received $1.8 billion in government contracts, has benefited financially. But it can hardly be blamed for that. President Obama’s policy of aggressively using drones is open to criticism on many grounds, but the argument should be with the government policy, not with the company that makes the drones.

Finally, while Risen is devastating in his criticism of the profligacy of government agencies and the “oversight-free zone” they operated, he acknowledges that this was because they were overwhelmed, that Congress was panicking and that the public was whipped up into an unwarranted fear of terrorism. He points to the role of self-appointed terrorism experts in promoting this fear while drawing lucrative consulting contracts for themselves. But he makes no mention of the press. I would argue that many in the news media were at least as guilty as others in his book of stirring up public anxiety for private gain. Risen himself, and the paper for which he works, are notable exceptions. Still, an account of the corruption engendered by endless war that doesn’t include the role of a complicit media is incomplete.

This is an important and powerful book that should be read by anyone who believes it is time to take stock after 13 years and re-evaluate the nature of the threat the country faces and its response to the atrocity of 9/11. I would also make it required reading for policy makers. As they plan the response to the next terrorist attack, they should put in place mechanisms to ensure that longstanding principles of oversight and accountability are not jettisoned, and that the need for security is not deployed as a pretext for casually abandoning the openness on which American society thrives.