Category: 4 Star

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Review: The Warroom Guide to Competitive Intelligence

4 Star, Intelligence (Commercial)

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4.0 out of 5 stars War Room Good, CIA “Tricks” Bad Business,

April 8, 2000
Steven M. Shaker
I have mixed feeling about these guys, and their book, but the bottom line is that it makes a contribution and must be read. They address, in a manner understandable by the complete layman, the intersection of competitive intelligence, corporate security, and WarRoom operations. They have a number of very useful and thoughtful figures. The book is unquestionably at the head of the class with respect to WarRoom operations and exploiting information technology and basic planning and execution and visualization concepts. Where I have a real problem with this book is in its advocacy of elicitation and other deceptive techniques, no doubt a hang-over from Steven's days as a CIA case officer. There is absolutely no place in U.S. competitive intelligence for such methods, and any discussion in that direction must be forcefully opposed if we are to succeed in creating a legal, ethical, overt network of intelligence professionals able to reinforce each other in providing open source intelligence to businesses as well as non-governmental organizations.
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Review: The Intelligent Corporation–Creating a Shared Network for Information and Profit

4 Star, Intelligence (Commercial)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Essential reference on making companies “smart”,

April 8, 2000
Ruth Stanat
Well before I got into the open source business Ruth was managing global business intelligence activities, and she wrote the book I would have written if I had had to choose one starting point. This is an essential reference for every manager, both in government and in business as well as in the non-profit arena, and I continue to regard Ruth as the dean of the practical business intelligence educators. Together with Jan Herring, Dick Klavans, Herb Meyer, and Leonard Fuld, she completes the de facto U.S. board of directors for real-world business intelligence.
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Review: A SPY FOR ALL SEASONS–My Life In The CIA

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Good Guy in a Very Bad System,

April 8, 2000
Duane R. Clarridge
Dewey was a Division Chief when I was a junior case officer, and I continue to admire him. His pocket handkerchiefs were amazing-you could parachute from a plane with one in an emergency. Dewey's bottom line is clear: he concludes that “the Clandestine Services (sic) is finished as a really effective intelligence service.” He has other worthwhile insights, ranging from the inadequacy of the information reaching CIA analysts from open sources (e.g. Nepal), to the “wog factor” dominating CIA analytical assessments (e.g. Pakistan will never attack India), to the sterile and politically-safe approaches to intelligence by the leadership of NSA and the some of the military intelligence services. My bottom line on Dewey is also clear: he was typical of the case officer talent pool, he tried very hard, and the system still failed. He was a good person in a very bad system.
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Review: The Sigint Secrets–The Signals Intelligence War, 1900 to Today–Including the Persecution of Gordon Welchman

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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4.0 out of 5 stars History Plus Insight = Future Themes,

April 8, 2000
Nigel West
Nigel has given us a lovely history, and also drawn out a number of themes that have meaning for the future. For instance, the superiority of amateurs from the ham radio ranks over the so-called professional military communications personnel, in the tricky business of breaking patterns and codes; the many “human in the loop” breaks of otherwise unbreakable technical codes, from the Italians with hemorrhoids (not in the code book, spelling it each day broke the code) to the careless Russians. He also touches on security cases in both the U.S. and England. In his conclusion, one sentence jumped out at me: “The old spirit of RSS, with its emphasis on voluntary effort, has been replaced by a bureaucracy of civil servants who preferred to stifle, rather than encourage, initiative.” As the current Director of NSA has discovered, NSA today is in mental grid lock, and its culture is oppressive in the extreme.
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Review: Blowback–The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The cold war, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy.

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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4.0 out of 5 stars We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us….,

April 8, 2000
Christopher Simpson
Very scary stuff. The bottom line is that for the sake of enhancing national security and national competitiveness, the U.S. Government, with approval from the highest levels, funded the wholesale introduction into U.S. citizenship of both Nazi scientists and Nazi participants in genocidal programs who were viewed in many cases as “essential” to our anti-Communist endeavors. The loss of perspective among selected senior intelligence and policy officials, and the long-term influence of this program on our obsession with Communism, give one pause.
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Review: In Search of Enemies–A CIA Story

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Clay Feet, Wrong Bullets, CIA's African War,

April 8, 2000
John Stockwell
By the former Chief of the Angola Task Force at CIA, this book is a classic on the Keystone Kops aspects of paramilitary operations as run by the CIA”s Special Operations Group within the Directorate of Operations, as well as the lack of contextual judgment that accompanies the CIA's decisions to “get into” local conflicts that are none of our business. Ammunition from the warehouses that doesn't fit the weapons in the field is just the beginning.
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Review: The Phoenix Program

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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4.0 out of 5 stars We Can Learn From Our Murderous Mistakes,

April 8, 2000
Douglas Valentine
This is as good an account I have found of how the CIA got into the business of helping Vietnamese kill each other off one by one. It is a disturbing and valuable book, and I took from it several lessons: 1) CIA puppies with no military background, and military detailees with no law enforcement background, have no business getting into the gutter with foreign thugs; 2) if we support indigenous arrest, torture, and assassination programs they need to have some serious multi-cultural analysis and counterintelligence support lest we simply give one faction the means of killing off the other without regard to our interests; and 3) our general approach to interference in the internal affairs of other nations is corrupt and increases local corruption. We throw money at personalities rather than insight at institutions. We train and equip local units to inflict covert violence, and then wonder why the situation destabilizes further.
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