There is much in this book that I find compelling, disturbing, and meritorious. There is also much that is missing. On balance, it is essential reading.It's most important flaw is that the author completely discounts the possibility that suicidal terrorism might be both a rational strategy, and an inherent instinctive, acceptable means, for those groups whose religions and cultural dynamics literally groom children from birth for a glorious exit as a martyr. COnsider the following, inserted to document this most important flaw in the book, from US News U.S. expert: Suicide bombers are not crazy by Haaretz Via Virtual Jerusalem News (Israel)on 24 May 2003: SAN FRANCISCO – A top expert on the psychology of terrorism who spent two decades in the CIA said on Thursday that suicide bombers are not crazy and are often seen as models of exemplary behavior in their societies. Jerrold Post, who founded the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, presented his findings after interviewing 21 radical Islamic extremists in Israeli and Palestinian prisons. “We should not think of these individuals as crazed fanatics, as seriously psychiatrically ill,” he told the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting. … “These are very normal-sounding individuals who have basically been bred to hate from very early on,” he said.
I leave it at that. Having addressed the negative up front, I now will emphasize the positives that demand this book be in the forefront of any discussion about dealing with terrorism.
First off, of all the books I have read on terrorism, most by either researchers or investigators of former spies, this is the one whose author is, by any standard, the most educated, most logical, most grounded in the precepts of rational law, and most articulate on why governments need to have firm and constant policies for dealing with terrorism in such as way as to “discourage others.”
Second, the author's 22-page list of acts of Palestinian terrorism that went unchecked prior to 9-11, is alone worth the price of the book. While I do agree with one other reviewer who suggests that the author is obsessing on Palestinian terrorism (as opposed to Saudi or Pakistani or Egyptian-sponsored terrorism), he has a point and this list merits close attention.
Third, although I may not agree with all of his recommendations for imposing internal security while sacrificing considerable civil liberties, this is as close as I have seen anyone get to a comprehensive practical list of things that need to be done, to include controlling the media so that terrorists are not rewarded with publicity.
There is one minor shortcoming in the book–minor because so many of us have documented this across 15+ books in the 1999-2002 period: the author does not truly comprehend the ineptitude of the US Government, with its 1950's mind-sets, 1970's information technology, and 1990's ideologies that place cheap oil and tax cuts above homeland security and economic sustainability. As a remedy to the author's shortcomings in this area I recommend Robert Baer, SEE NO EVIL (on the CIA's inability to penetrate terrorist groups), and a combination of books on the FBI's ineptitude: Aqil Collins, My Jihad, and Anonymous, TERRORIST HUNTER–most interestingly, both a US mujahid that has lost a leg to combat, and an Israeli researcher on US terrorism, agree that the FBI is extraordinarly inept, and remains so two years after 9-11.
This is an intelligent book that requires discipline to appreciate–it cannot be accepted without question, but it also cannot be ignored. Highly recommended.
There are two very important themes running through this book, and they earn the author a solid four stars and a “must read” recommendation. First, the author is correct and compellinging clear when he points out that even the most senior intelligence professionals, including DCIs, simply do not understand the full range of intelligence organizations, capabilities, and problems that exist–just about everyone has spent their entire career in a small niche with its own culture. Second, the author is unique for focusing on an area that is both vital and ignored today: that of creating joint and combined intelligence concepts and doctrine to ensure that minimal common understandings as well as training competency levels are reached across varied jurisdictions; and to enable competent community resource management, also non-existent today.The author is positively instructive in this book, providing both trenchant indictments (for instance, of the National Reconnaisance Office for being oriented toward big budgets and inputs rather than missions and outputs), and many common sense observations that all need to be factored into whatever the Senate finally decides to do about intelligence reform.
Among the many important points that he makes, I especially agree with his pointing out the need to fully integrate the management of inputs and outputs within each of the major collection disciplines–as he notes, disconnecting the building of satellites, or aerial imagery vehicles, or unmanned aerial drones, from the actual needs of the end-user and the actual responsibility to produce imagery intelligence, leads to precisely what the National Imagery and Mapping Agency Commission Report of December 1999 noted as the major shortfall in national intelligence–close to a trillion spent on secret satellite collection, and nothing spent on tasking, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TPED). The author specifically identifies $6 billion in savings being achievable from the NRO budget over five years–savings that could be applied to enhancing analysis, creating competent clandestine collection capabilities, establishing global open source collection activities in each of the theaters, and creating a new national counterintelligence and homeland security intelligence program.
In passing, on page 146 the author “blows the whistle” on the deception imposed on the public by the CIA's clandestine service, which was actually largely incapable in Afghanistan in 2001, and was saved secretly by Russian sources & methods. My own sources tell me that there are some very ugly stories yet to be made public, and the author–whose access and credibility cannot be questioned–is helpful in sharing what he knows on this–America needs a competent clandestine service, not one that pretends that clerks mixed with cowboys, all working from official installations, are anything other than a joke.
The author demonstrates a very deep understanding of the shortfalls of the intelligence bureaucracy, the intelligence culture, intelligence leadership, and the policymakers that fail to direct or exploit intelligence on behalf of the Nation.
There are a few weaknesses in this book, costing the author one star, and they are mentioned to correct the record, as it were–in no way do these weaknesses reduce the value of the book or the importance of the author's views when we finally get around to fixing U.S. intelligence.
First, he is limited in his understanding of the importance of Global Coverage of lower tier issues that can be addessed by open source intelligence (OSINT), including commercial imagery and Russian military combat charts; and he is equally limited in his understanding of both OSINT, and the urgency of finding new means of supporting multilateral peacekeeping operations that mix both government militaries and government law enforcement missions with non-governmental and other private sector actors.
Second, he continues to have a modest obsession with technical solutions, and neglects to properly address the shortfalls in inter-agency information sharing and processing that could be partially resolved by enhancing the National Security Agency's considerable computational power to that it can become an all-source processing manager–at the same time, the author seriously over-states the availability of both bandwidth and tactical processing, while under-stating the enormous flood of unclassified information, including geospatial information, that must be processed if commanders are to be able to understand their combat environments in near real time.
Lastly, the author comes close to spasms of fury when referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to a lesser extent, to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of State. His anger and disdain with regard to these organizations are recurring He is clear in his view that the “all source analyst” cannot and should not be centralized, that analysts must work for the end-users, and that both CIA and DIA should be abolished. While I disagree with this viewpoint, it is a mature informed viewpoint that CIA and DIA managers must address–they ignore General Odom's concerns at their peril.
The book is based on the 1997 study by the National Institute for Public Policy that was chaired by the author and included such other thoughtful executives as LtGen James Clapper, today the head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The author has made his own statement in this book, and it is perhaps the most practical and the most focused on the public statements on the need for intelligence reform. This book has been added to the OSS.NET listing of the top books on intelligence reform.
Original Contributions to Intelligence Reform Dialog,
January 3, 2003
Ernest R. May
I stumbled across the reviews of this book by chance, and was quite stunned to see what almost appears to be an orchestrated trashing of what I regard as a useful barometer of informed professional opinion.Yes, some of the authors and some of the views of the authors are relatively conventional, but by and large I am not only quite pleased to have this book in my library, I find that the thoughts of Jennifer Sims, Douglas MacEachin, and Robert Kohler, and Britt Snider, to name just four–I like the others as well–are as essential a starting point for reform as the more radical ideas of myself, Senator Shelby, Senator Rudman, or others.
Bottom line: Roy Godson and these people have been troubled by intelligence ineffectiveness, and have done more than most to publish in this arena, than anyone else I know. This book is not the end all, but it is a vital historical reference point for any serious professional. I would not reprint it, but I would certainly recommend it as a used book acquisition, and I hope that a new set of authors comes together to provide a 21st Century “second look” in the aftermath of 9-11. In the meantime, I would point folks toward Godson's “Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards,” Allen's “None So Blind,” and Zegart's “Flawed by Design,” inter alia. If you want a list of my top 20 recommended books, send me an email.
As with many other Amazon[.com] reviewers, I received a personal appeal from the author of this book to buy and read his book, and did so. As a former infantry officer who also served in the CIA and knew something of the CIA's support for the anti-Soviet effort there, I was looking forward a deep look at what went wrong.The book appears to have been censored, both with respect to its content and with respect to its photographs, none of which actually depict Soviet encampments, combat results, or anything beyond the most mundane equipment. It offers little in the way of lessons learned or deep insights comparable, say, to “Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahiddeen Fighters.”
Having said that, I do recommend it for purchase because it is a personal memoire with many excellent black and white photographs of young Soviet men in Afghanistan, and represents, for the author, financial survival and emotional salvation.
Updated to correct my error–original words left to make an important point: that even very experienced CIA people are unaware of some of the very bad things that the author obliquely was referring to but did not document appropriately. New material below in brackets.
I found this book very much on target with its principal thesis, to wit, that the United States is too quick to take pre-emptory and often covert or illicit action against short-term threats, and that we pay a very heavy price over the long run for doing things like reinforcing despotic regimes, overturning anti-American regimes, and so on.
However–and I am one of those who first learned to admire the author when he was an authority, in the 1970's, on the causes of revolution–I found the presentation spotty, with errors of fact and perception in those areas where I have a solid background, specifically the U.S. Marine Corps on Okinawa, and the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency. Neither of those two organizations is as evil or disorganized as the author seems to believe, and frankly, I found his bibliography with respect to both domains to be mediocre.
[Since reading this book I have been absorbed in a book not yet available in the US, Gold Warriors, by the Seagraves, and have been stunned by the crimes they document–to wit, the theft by the US, secretly and without the taxpayer finding out, of all the gold and other treasures looted by the Nazis and the Japanese during WWII, subsequently using this “black money” to fund global political corruption on a grand scale–all on the part of the U.S. Government, with specific assistance from the CIA, Treasury, and others. Their book comes with two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 documents in support. I am persuaded, and this book, among others I had forgotten on CIA money laundering and occasional drug running, causes me to credit Chalmers Johnson with more accuracy on his accusations than I in my naivete first appreciated. His documentation still leaves much to be desired, but I perceive that he is more on the mark than off.]
This is a helpful book. If it were the only one it would be important in its own right, but in the light of books such as Daniel Ellsberg's “SECRETS: A Memoire of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” or Derek Leebaert's much more profoundly researched and documented “The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory,” it falls from the front rank to the second shelf.
Among the critical points where the author is original and heed must be paid, is in his evalution of competing forms of economic management, and his very strong condemnation of the manner in which the US tries to impose a specific form of capitalism on the Asian economies, to their great detriment.
His book reinforces concerns others have articulated with respect to administrative secrecy enabling terrible policies to be enacted in the name of the people; to the military-industrial complex and its negative roles in arming and inciting to repression selected military around the world; to US guilt in human rights violations, to include the provision of encouragement for repression in both Indonesia and South Korea; and with respect to the value of North Korea to those in the US who want to fabricate a case for an anti-missile defense that most informed people agree is absurd in its concepts and extortionary in its pricing.
I am quite glad I read this book, quite glad to be reminded of the brilliant long-term contributions of the author to the field of Asian studies and the causes of revolution, and certain that those who specialize in studies the pathology of power–especially of imperial power such as is now enjoyed by the United States, will find much food for thought in this book.
Last year we had some exceptional works on water scarcity (de Villier), resource wars (Klare), corporate razing of the environment (Czech), among many others that I reviewed here on Amazon. This year we have two extraordinary books, this is the second of the two in my estimation (the other being Andrew Price-Smith's “The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development”- as both authors are from the University of Toronto, one can only applaud the collection of talent this organization seems to nurture).The author is brilliant and has a longer track record than most for being both prescient and meticulous about in the arena of environmental scarcity.
His book is effective in making the point, but very candidly, did not go the full distance that I was hoping for–he is, in a word, too general and the book lacks a single chapter that pulls it all together with very specific rankings of both the variables and the countries.
The general proposition is clear-cut: environmental scarcity has social effects that lead to violent conflict. However, the author takes a side road in exploring “human ingenuity” as an ameliorating factor, and while he makes reference to crass corporate and elitist carpet-bagging and the social structures of repression, he fails to draw out more fully and explicitly the inherent association between repressive corrupt regimes with extreme concentrations of wealth and power, scarcity, and violence.
For myself, I found two gems within this book: the first, a passing comment on the crucial role that unfettered urbanization plays in exacerbating scarcity and all that comes with it (migration, disease, crime); the second, the author's prescriptive emphasis, extremely importance, on the prevention of scarcity rather than adaptation or amelioration of scarcity.
The endnotes would have been more useful as footnotes but are quite good. The bibliography and index are four star rather than five star, and I was quite disappointed to not have a single page about the author, nor a consolidated bibliography of his many signal contribution over time in the form of articles and lectures.
Great details but ends with a sigh of *resignation*,
October 10, 2002
John S. McCain
I bought this book hoping to be inspired by some manifestation of John McCain's commitment to coming back, again and again, as a candidate for President of the United States.Instead, the book ends with what appears to me to be a sigh of *resignation*, a clear statement that he's had his run and will not run again. At a time when most of America is either Independent or opting out of politics, nothing could be more disappointing. This man has the power to lead, a fire in the belly, an intellect, a seasoning under pressure, and a compassion, that are too lacking in others.
This American hero survived North Vietnamese prison camps, but he evidently has been worn down by his own Republican bureaucracy and aristocracy. It is sad to see a hero triumph over foreign adversity only to be worn down by “friendly fire.”
As both a reader and a citizen, I would suggest that a better ending to the book, and the story, would be Winston Churchill's most famous (and shortest) speech to a university, the repetition, three times, each time with a smack of his cane against the podium: “NEVER GIVE UP.”
