Former Washington Post and NPR editor John Dinges is a winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in Latin American reporting. His latest book is The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents 

READING Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior, you can understand why it is so difficult for the CIA to shed its terrible reputation. The author, Enrique Prado, who goes by Ric, was a 24 year veteran of some of the shadiest of the agency’s operations against Latin American leftists and Middle Eastern Jihadists. The nasty looking switchblade pictured on the cover points us to Prado’s approach to his job, or at least to the tough guy image he paints of himself in this book.

A career-long paramilitary and counterterrorism operator and official, Prado dives right to it in describing his first job in Central America.  “I’d become a blunt instrument, at ease with a weapon in hand and a target to take out.” Whether he actually took anyone out is left …