Anyone interested in the place of mercenaries in U.S. policy in the developing world during the height of the Cold War will find this comprehensive analysis of the topic an essential introduction to the mass of sources on which Klaas Voß has drawn. Washingtons Söldner: tracks the role of the United States and of U.S.-organized mercenary operations in four civil wars—that in the Congo in the mid-1960s; those in Angola and Rhodesia a decade later; and finally the insurgency waged by the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. In all cases Washington attempted to keep its involvement hidden, but with increasingly limited success.
Voß is a young historian at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the foremost organization in Germany conducting research and publishing extensively on the history of the Cold War. Voß's book is a welcome and important contribution to the list of distinguished publications that...