Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links. This remains a core reference.
Ben Gilad, arguably one of the top five practitioner-scholars in the competitive intelligence arena (the others, in my opinion, are Jan Herring and Leonard Fuld, his partners; Babette Bensoussan in Australia, and Mats Bjore in Sweden), makes a very important contribution with this book. It is for business leaders what Kristan Wheaton's book, was and is for government leaders.
The author's earlier book, “Business Blindspots: replacing myths, beliefs and assumptions with market realities”, remains one of the single best references for business intelligence professionals (but only available from Infonortics UK), together with Babette Bensoussan and Craig Fleisher's Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition
I regard this book as being primarily for the manager of the business enterprise rather than the business intelligence professional, primarily because it is very helpful in breaking through old mind-sets and suggesting that very specific attitudes and activities must characterize those endeavors that wish to avoid costly surprises. I would say that this book, together with Yale business author Jeffrey Garten's book, The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders are “must reads” for the senior executive who desires to not just survive but to excel in the 21st Century.
The author, who has a solid understanding of the history of surprise in military or national security circles, makes the point that surprise does not occur for lack of signs that can be detected, but for lack of a culture and mind-set open to seeing and understanding those signals.
The book combines survey results from professionals attending the Academy of Competitive Intelligence (the single best offering in the world) with real-world accounts, “gray box” supplementals, and “manager's checklists” at the end of each chapter that are in essence an executive summary of the chapter.
This is a 2-3 hour read, and well-worth anyone's time, but especially well-worth the time of the executive who is willing to consider the possibility that they are grossly unaware of real-world external threats to their future bonuses, and that there might be some relatively simple low-cost solutions to dealing with the threat that require, rather than vast sums of money, a change in mind-set.
Uses Fiction to Illuminate Non-Fictional Scenario,
December 7, 2003
Dan Brown
Although I rarely read or review fiction, this book leaped into my consciousness, in part because I just reviewed a book on the Vatican and its use of spies as well as its vulnerability to spies from Italy and Germany, among others, and because I am very interested in the concepts of both institutional corruption vis a vis historical myths, and the alleged infallibility of the pope. More recently, I have taken an interest in religious subversion of national governments and policies, and strongly recommend Stephen Mumford's “The Life & Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U. S. Population Policy”, which is still available from Amazon via the used book channels.The Da Vinci Code is most interesting, not because of its bashing of Opus Dei, but because it addresses what may be the core injustice in Catholicism (I was raised a Jesuit Catholic in Colombia, with roots in Spain): the concealment of the normal sexuality of Jesus, his marriage, and the fact that until the mid-1800's, the Church did not dare to claim that the Pope was infallible, and that all that preceded that claim was based merely on a man's prophecies. Jesus, in other words, can not lay any greater claim to our faith than Mohammed.Most relevant to me, as I consider the need for elevating women to positions of power because they are more intuitive, more integrative, and less confrontational than men, was the book's discussion of the origins of paganism (not satanic at all, but rather worshiping Mother Earth and specifically the human female mothers from whom life obviously emerged) and the manner in which the Catholic Church deliberately set out to slander Mary Magdalene, making her out to be a whore rather than the spouse of Jesus (from whom issue came), and murdering five million women in a witch-hunt and global psychological operations against women that has been mirrored by Islam in many ways, and that must, if we are to survive, be reversed by thoughtful people willing to think for themselves.
This book, riveting in every way, suggested to me that we the people need to doubt the integrity and intentions of all our institutions, but especially the Catholic Church; and that we need to reverse the centuries of discrimination against women, restore the matriarchal roots of society, and again begin to respect the natural relationship between ourselves and the Earth that we have defiled precisely because we have allowed men to abuse women, and corporations to assume legal manly personalities abusive of governments and the tax-payer.
This is a revolutionary book. If it causes you to question authority and re-think your relationships, you cannot have made a better purchase.
Although I agree with some reviewer's who feel that this book is mostly about Howard Cutler's efforts to draw out the Dalai Lama, I also feel that the Dalai Lama is a full party to this effort, is no fool, and understands that lending his name to this book could be helpful in reaching many many more people than would every give a hoot about anything Howard Cutler, MD, might have to say. On that basis, I give the book a solid four stars.
Although Peter Drucker and I have both written about “work as a calling” and the importance of finding joy in what you do, and that could serve as a one-sentence summary of the book, there is more to this book than that. Taken with patience, and used as a mind-calming exercise to slowly read a chapter or two and then apply it to one's own (presumably uncalm) work environment, the book could serve as a touchstone for “backing off” and reflecting.
There are a number of books on Zen Buddhism, and my very own all time favorite, not by a Zen Buddhist, on Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and they all seem to boil down to fulfillment within the circumstances, making the most of what you have, treating everyone as an equal, and being glad you are not in a Turkish jail on drug charges–life could be worse.
I bought the book, the Dalai Lama lent his name to it, it can't be any worse for you that a diet drink loaded with Nutra-Sweet.
My own discovery of how the threat changes depending on the levels of analysis would not have occurred without this brilliant book by Edward Luttwak. It was his careful and reasoned discussion of how specific capabilities and policies might not make sense at one level of analysis, but do when combined with others, that helped me understand why US (and other) intelligence communities continue to get so much wrong.
First to credit Luttwak: anti-tank weapons make no sense in isolation (tactical level), but if they slow the tank down enough to allow artillery and close air support to have an impact (operational level), they might close gaps and win victories (strategic level). Bottom line: nothing in war can be considered in isolation (including, one might add, the post-war needs that enable an exit strategy).
It was from Luttwak's work that the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today the Marine Corps Intelligence Command) developed the new model for analysis that distinguished between the four levels of analysis (strategic, operational, tactical, and technical), combined that with the three major domains (military, geographic, and civil), and then cross-walked that against every single mission area (infantry, artillery, tanks, aviation, etcetera).
One simple example of the importance of Luttwak's work to intelligence: at the time (1990) the Libyan T-72 tank was considered by the US Intelligence Community to be a very high threat because it was the best tank that money could then buy–but on reflection, we found this was true only at the technical level of optimal lethality. At the tactical level the tank was being stored in the open, poorly maintained by poorly trained crews, parts cannibalization occurring regularly, this dropped the threat to low. At the operational level there were a significant number of the tanks scattered around and available, this raised it to a medium threat at that level. At the strategic level, the tanks could not be sustained in battle for more than two weeks, and dropped again to low.
Edward Luttwak, in company with Colin Gray, Martin van Creveld, Ralph Peters, and Steve Metz, is one of the most brilliant and clear-spoken of the strategists writing in English, and this book will remain–for years to come–a fundamental building block in the learning and maturation of national security strategy.
This book is earth-shattering and faith-shaking, a well-documented tale of deceit at the highest levels of the US government. So controversial and potentially explosive are the findings of this book, to wit, that the White House recovered most of the Nazi and Japanese loot and created a secret slush fund for covert political operations world-wide, that the authors go the extra mile and offer, at a nominal price, two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 pages of supporting documentation including the Japanese treasure maps used by the US to recover the gold and other valuables.Major players include Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, both Allen and John Foster Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, John McCloy, and the famous unconventional warrior Edward Lansdale. What we learn from this book is that those writing about “blowback” (the consequences of unwise US actions) have barely scratched the surface. What we learn is that rather than truly seeking to help the Japanese, Chinese, and other looted nations recover in the aftermath of WWII, the most senior leaders of the US government, no doubt with the best of intentions, actually conspired with Nazi bankers and the Japanese imperial family to create a Black Eagle Trust controlled by a very select hand-picked cabal in Washington.
Originally used to fight communism, the Black Eagle Trust, according to the authors and as thoroughly documented by the book and the two CD-ROMS (which I am happy to have in hand), quickly became a global slush fund used to bribe national leaders and manipulate elections around the world. This fund remains in existence today, making the Swiss Holocaust funds seem like loose-change. According to the authors, major banks are “addicted” to the funds and would face collapse if public investigations resulted in a forced return of this gold and related certificates to the rightful owners.
The authors have produced a magnificent work of both scholarship and investigative journalism. They document the extent of Japanese looting of Korea (beginning in 1895) and China as well as the other countries in the “co-prosperity sphere.” They document the manner in which Japan hid most of the gold in the Philippines (some in Indonesia), and were forced to leave it there from 1943 onwards, when US submarine interdiction became too effective to risk shipments homeward.
I found the level of detail in this book to be quite gripping. The ingenious nature of the Japanese burial sites, with caverns below the more obvious tunnels, with sea-water protection, with maps created in reverse–and the in-bred cruelty of the Japanese, thinking nothing of burying all of the US and other national slave labor *and the Japanese engineers* alive as the final stage of protecting the looted treasure, leave one stunned.
The authors document the central role played by Lansdale in recognizing the opportunity and then briefing MacArthur and then President Truman. According to the authors, the architects of the Black Eagle Trust were three advisors to President's Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: John McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense), and Robert Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury). They made the case to Roosevelt, and presumably to Truman after Roosevelt died, that it would be impractical to return the looted gold to the rightful owners, in part because many of the looted countries were now under Soviet control.
The authors, who conducted many interviews in support of the work, including interviews of former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who they say was involved with Lansdale and the gold in the 1940's and remained involved with the black gold through the 1980's, provide copies of documents showing the redirection of the looted gold to 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. The gold was then used to support the creation of gold bearer certificates that were in turned used to bribe the most senior officials around the world.
The authors tell a shocking tale of how quickly MacArthur chose to collaborate with the very leadership of Japan that declared war on the USA and was responsible for genocide and looting in Asia on a scale rarely achieved by anyone else. Bringing the story up to date, the authors show how prior attempts to investigate the Black Eagle Trust have led to the ruin of individuals such as Norbert Schlei, at one time deputy attorney general to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. While I have no direct knowledge and cannot be certain myself, I believe the authors have provided a sufficiently compelling case to warrant an international investigation concurrently with a General Accounting Office investigation to be chartered by Congress with unlimited supeona powers specifically directed against classified personalities and archives.
If this story is true, and I personally think that it is, then the US government, in active collusion with the very people the American people fought to defeat in WWII, has been guilty of fraud and depravity on a global scale and against the best interests of both the American people, and the against the rightful owners of the looted gold and other treasures. The authors may well have uncovered the last really big secret of the post-WW II era, and in so doing, opened the way for a restoration of the balance of power among diverse nations, and a sharp delimitation of the abuses that appear to characterize American leadership when it thinks it can rely on secret gold and stolen oil to engage in imperial adventures and domestic improprieties. As an American citizen and voter, and as a person of faith who believes that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, I find this book to be shocking, credible, and a basis for popular outrage and demands for truth and reconciliation.
The Bible for Reconstruction & Military Operations,
September 24, 2003
Kent D. Lee
I am a very happy owner of this volume, and I will certify that it is easily worth $2,500 to $5,000 for any construction or paving company bidding for or awarded contracts in Afghanistan.I have known Kent Lee and East View Cartographic since 1995, when they were instrumental in supporting me in a competitive exercise to demonstrate all that could be done with “open sources” of information, versus narrowly-focused classified capabilities. The ability of this individual and this organization to acquire and then exploit Russian, Chinese, and other third-nation source material has made them the single most important geospatial entity in the world after the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
Every page is clearly printed and the maps, all in color, are extraordinary. The fine print can be a burden if you have to read more than a few sections at a time, but was a necessity–the book would not be easily portable otherwise.
I understand that similar books are in the works for Iraq and other countries where terrain analysis is a vital element of reducing costs and increasing profits and operational successes. This book is both essential to prior planning, and essential to on-going operations.
Unique Blend of Lessons Learned and Tutorial on Intelligence,
September 24, 2003
Cees Wiebes
This is a superb publication. An American, who would never have received the kind of direct official support provided to the author by the government of The Netherlands, could not have written it.This is the only book that I know of that fully integrates deliberate studies of UN intelligence; Western and NATO intelligence (which the author correctly notes does not exist); Dutch intelligence; and belligerent party intelligence.
Several recurring themes of lasting value emerged from my reading of this book:
1) The UN is dangerously devoid of intelligence qua decision-support. The culture of the UN leadership, the UN bureaucracy, and the UN delegates is one that places a higher priority on the semblance–the mockery–of lip service to open sources and legal methods, while sacrificing the lives of UN forces in the field. One cannot read this book, and its superb documentation of how UN Force Commander after UN Force Commander pleaded for intelligence support, only to be told no by the staff in New York, without becoming very angry. This book makes it perfectly clear that the UN leadership failed the Croats, the Serbs, and the international peacekeepers, in every possible way. Toward the end of the book the author also focuses on the UN as a source for the belligerents, i.e. UN incapacity for operational security and secure communications in fact makes it a primary source for belligerents seeking to kill one another.
2) The West failed in Bosnia in part because it became over-reliant on technical intelligence (which it could not process or analyze with sufficient speed and reliability), and did not have adequate numbers of competent clandestine Human Intelligence (HUMINT) or even ground-truth observers in the region. A contributing source of failure was the evidently deliberate decision on the part of the Clinton White House to downplay the conflict and to withhold such intelligence warning as they did have from the UN, in the misplaced belief that sharing such information would interfere with the peace process. Tens of thousands died because of Clinton White House irresponsibility.
3) Intelligence “liaison” or structured sharing across national boundaries, was an ungodly mess made worse by the inherent biases and rose-colored glasses worn by the Americans and the British on one side, and the French and the Germans on the other. “Wishful thinking” by policy makers interfered with proper assessments of the relative condition and intentions of the various belligerents.
4) The CIA clandestine endeavor was split, with one Station operating out of Sarajevo and another out of Zagreb, and no overall coordination or integration of sources and reports.
5) Civil Affairs (CA) as a military occupational specialty is blown forever by CIA Directorate of Operations (DO) abuses, most without the permission of the U.S. European theater commander. CIA/DO managers should be disciplined for this breach of internal US government protocols.
6) The Dutch were not ready to field a major operational or tactical intelligence support architecture, and in-fighting among various elements prevented the various analysts from making the most of what little they could glean from varied sources. The same was actually true of all Western intelligence communities–all had other priorities and too few resources [although language deficiencies are not emphasized by the author, one presumed a grotesque lack of required competencies across the Croat and Serb dialects as well as Yugoslavian, Turkish, and Arabic]. In the view of a senior officer whose quotations close Chapter 3, heads should be rolling for dereliction of duty–although the subject refers only to the Dutch, the reviewer would add US and British heads as well.
7) The book excels–is remarkable and perhaps unique–for its discussion of the secret arms supplies–not only the routes, the providers, the landing zone delivery means–but the active violation by the US of the embargo, and the active role of US Special Forces in violating the embargo without a covert action “finding”, and hence also in violation of US law. Other nations were equally at fault. It is clear from the book that the UN needs not only operational and tactical intelligence for the specific area of operations, but an extended intelligence and operational capability sufficient to *interdict* incoming arms to the belligerents. This book may well be the single best reference on this topic.
8) The sections of the book on signals and imagery intelligence are a work of art, combining historical scholarship with original research and a very fine tutorial aspect. The listing of the 11 disadvantages of SIGINT (pages 224-228) is the finest I have ever seen. The bottom line in both instances is: too much collection, too little processing and analysis. The author uses a remarkable quote from a former Director of the National Security Agency to make this point: good news is that we can exploit a million messages a day; bad news is that we don't know which million out of the billions we capture to do… Also interesting is the detailed accounting of belligerent party competencies in SIGINT and IMINT, to include the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and advanced methods.
9) The book ends with two notes that I choose to emphasize, although the author makes many valuable observations in his conclusions that I will not repeat here: first, support to UN operations was the *fifth* priority for Western intelligence, coming after force protection, after ground truth observation, after support for air targeting, and after support for NATO ground troop planning; and second, Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization, was the *only* entity to get true validated warning of the Srebrenica genocide.
The index is terrible-names only. Properly indexing the book for references to all intelligence sources and methods as well as events and practices, would make it 2X to 3X more valuable as a basic reference.
This book is highly recommended and a “must have” for every national security and international affairs library, and for every professional interested in peacekeeping intelligence.
