These days, it's rare to pick up a newspaper and not see a story related to intelligence. From the investigations of the 9/11 commission, to accusations of illegal wiretapping, to debates on whether it's acceptable to torture prisoners for information, intelligence—both accurate and not—is driving domestic and foreign policy. And yet, in part because of its inherently secretive nature, intelligence has received very little scholarly study. Into this void comes Reforming Intelligence, a timely collection of case studies written by intelligence experts, and sponsored by the Center for Civil-Military Relations (CCMR) at the Naval Postgraduate School, that collectively outline the best practices for intelligence services in the United States and other democratic states.
Vague references to the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘threat to national security’ are frequently used by venal politicians to cover-up criminal associations and covert illegal activity, ranging from money-laundering, narcotics trafficking, abduction and murder to the wholesale slaughter of non-combatant civilians. Their detritus is glibly dismissed or erased from mainstream media coverage of state terror around the world. But an awareness of what intelligence agencies are doing in the shadows is necessary if we are ever to grasp the true reality of momentous public events we wrongly think we understand. .
The issues in Understanding Shadows include how the bloody and brutal end of ‘democratic Islam’ in Algeria has facilitated the “fear and loathing” which has dominated the West’s security agenda since 9/11. The arrogance and political hubris of former British PM, Tony Blair, and the corrupt use of intelligence, took the UK to war in Iraq, and was a factor in the lonely death of WMD specialist, Dr David Kelly, while ‘off stage’ Israel continued its colonization of occupied Arab lands and upgraded its collective punishment of Gaza.
There is an account of the curious journey the CIA’s USSR ‘dangle’, Lee Harvey Oswald, made across Cold War Europe in June 1962, while the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa provided an opportunity for self-serving, power-hungry ANC politicians to ‘feather their own nests’ at the expense of the impoverished majority of their fellow citizens – a depressing example of a righteous liberation struggle turned sour. Meanwhile, the ‘long war’ continued.
This book on intelligence analysis written by intelligence expert Dr. Stephen Marrin argues that scholarship can play a valuable role in improving intelligence analysis.
Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Compared to the more established academic disciplines of political science and international relations, intelligence studies scholarship is generally quite relevant to practice. Yet a substantial gap exists nonetheless. Even though there are many intelligence analysts, very few of them are aware of the various writings on intelligence analysis which could help them improve their own processes and products. If the gap between scholarship and practice were to be bridged, practitioners would be able to access and exploit the literature in order to acquire new ways to think about, frame, conceptualize, and improve the analytic process and the resulting product. This volume contributes to the broader discussion regarding mechanisms and methods for improving intelligence analysis processes and products. It synthesizes these articles into a coherent whole, linking them together through common themes, and emphasizes the broader vision of intelligence analysis in the introduction and conclusion chapters.
The book will be of great interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, US national security, US foreign policy, security studies and political science in general,as well as professional intelligence analysts and managers.
Comment and Nine Other Linked Books Below the Line
The Routledge Companion to Intelligence Studies provides a broad of the growing field of intelligence studies, acting as a relection of the state of the art of the subdiscipline.
Focusing on the origins, practice and nature of intelligence studies, this Companion features essays by an array of international experts. It first explains the generic lessons of intelligence – what it is, how it is collected, and how it is processed. It then dedicates sections to the evolution of intelligence; to key episodes in modern history; and to contemporary and future threats. The importance of these three sections is to highlight how our understanding of ‘intelligence' has been shaped by the nature of the ‘threat'. A final section offers a comparison of national intelligence systems from around the world, grounding the book in an international context and opening up Western readers to accounts of hitherto fairly unexplored countries such as China, South Africa and Japan.
This Companion will be essential reading for students of intelligence studies and strategic studies, and highly recommended for students of defense studies, foreign policy, cold war studies, diplomacy, and International Relations in general.
Rob Dover is senior lecturer in International Relations and Director of Taught Postgraduate Programmes at Loughborough University. He is author of The Europeanization of British Defence Policy 1997-2005 (2007) and co-author, with Goodman, of Spinning Intelligence (2009).
Michael Goodman is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He is author of Spying on the Nuclear Bear: Anglo-American Intelligence and the Soviet Bomb (2008), and co-author of Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (2009).
Claudia Hillebrand is a lecturer in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.
Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.
The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.
I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.
The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.
Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That's where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It's rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.
Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Bean means well, but this is a three star book at best, losing one star for being grotesquely over-priced and a second for being completely out of touch with the Open Source Intelligence world outside the albino incest pit at CIA, while also completely oblivious to all that is going on across 90 different nations and the eight tribes of intelligence. The book's coverage of the US scene is mediocre, missing Bill Studeman, Joe Markowitz, Carol Dumain, Doug Dearth, and Ben Harrison, among many others–a simple comparison of Golden Candle Awards with those named in the index makes clear the very limited “official” range of views, most of them ranging from the totally unethical to the obliviously bureaucratic. A pre-quel to the book is available at the link below, as well as the riposte that was reviewed in draft by Studeman and Markowtiz.
