Anyone who reads this and is still a bit unsure should read Yevgeny Zamyatin's book WE and Djilas' The New Class: An Analysis Of Communist System. If they are looking for the philosophical approach to the book, they should read Voegelin and any of his works that deal with the philosophical underpinning of what Billington is addressing in this fantastic work. Billington is a Rhodes Scholar. He is a visiting Professor to Harvard and Princeton. His works on Russia are definitive. This book being his best, is his dedication to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Demons. It is scary and brilliant. It answers the question of the two opposing “secret” warring groups one the proponents of freewill the others proponents of the collective and or the secular super powerful state. All this and according to Billington's work, the most startling aspect, is that journalists are the very agents of this revolutionary activity. Puts a very scientism spin on things like global warming and afro-centrism.
This is a master work, and Retired Reader (retired NSA pioneer Richard Wright, who contributes to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) beat me to it. He is a reviewer worthy of being followed.
The author is as erudite as Alfred Rolington, and the book is completely different, one reason I recommend both books. The first, by Rolington, is a primer, and recommended for students. This book is for professionals, and could well be a primary text for properly managed mid-career courses where officers should be forced to reflect deeply on why their profession exists and how to better engage in that profession.
I am loading a few graphics from my briefing this past week to the Inter-American Defense Board (IADB) in Washington, D.C. as they illustrate some of the points I am going to make about where this book falls short. No critical comment lessens the value of the work as a whole. If I had to pick a dozen people to guide me in managing a new global intelligence agency tomorrow, the author of this book would be one of the first to be called.
The primary short-fall in this book is the author's no doubt judicious but still mis-leading avoidance of any criticism of his policy and political consumers. The UK's blind support of US lies leading to Iraq was not helpful. Nor is the reality that secret intelligence is safely ignored, and that intelligence has nothing at all to do with how the total budget of the nation is applied. Paul Pillar makes the point very ably in Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform. This book also does not address the fact that the City of London and the LIBOR scandal and the elite pedophile rings that in turn bless many other crimes against humanity, are outside the mandate of the secret world. I believe the 21st century is going to be about the juxtaposition of open source intelligence broadly shared, and absolutely ruthless ultra-secret counterintelligence that flushes the wicked from our own house.
The second shortfall of this book is its assumption, common among intelligence professionals, that intelligence is a government prerogative and comprised mainly of secrecy for policy. Related, not worthy of separation, is the book's disingeneous portrayal of terrorism as “the” threat against which “resilience” must be nurtured, while more and more surveillance must be undertaken. Terrorism is a tactic, not a threat, and what the US and UK do to others in the way of proliferation, trade in women and especially children, environmental degradation, disease including vaccines that contain hidden sterilization measures, and on and on and on, is vastly more threatening to humanity than a few pissed off Islamics, many of them, such as the retarded teen-ager in California, false-flag terrorists created to keep the insecurity of the public alive. I am quite sure the author is fully conscious of what the real threats are — starting with poverty among the people and corruption among the peers — and the book is not to be dismissed for this, but because it is such an important work, I feel it essential to draw this line in the sand. Until intelligence can provide decision support for ALL, and until counter-intelligence can keep the mandarins HONEST, it will be a below the stairs housekeeping function, not a principal at the high table.
This is a deep book, full of nuances (e.g. degrees of truth), and one of the most important values of this book is its defense of Human Intelligence (HUMINT), or in the author's terms, “single-source reporting.” He is correct. The US and UK have gone nuts on technical collection, mostly because it is a fantastic way to waste huge quantities of money that generate 5% kick-backs for Congress in the USA. Never mind that this collected information is not processed, not made sense of. Never mind that it is not done in all 183 languages that matter, 33 of them critical, including twelve dialects of Arabic. I share the author's appreciation for HUMINT done right, and only lament that the US is incapable of getting it right. (Side Note: Churchill drew a laugh when he told Pariament “The Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first.” What Churchill missed is that the Americans are absolute geniuses at thinking up new things to do wrong.] The US intelligence “system” is a $75 billion a year money pit that produces, according to General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), “at best” 4% of what a major consumers needs, to which I would add “and nothing at all for everyone else.”
There is a strong measure of ethical purity running through the book, of civic duty, and I cannot help but feel that the author has another great 20 years ahead of him, this time doing what he does best in a larger global context, using predominantly open sources, and being utterly committed to the PUBLIC service rather than the pro forma service to the mandarins.
He ends with an all too brief call for harnessing all the talent that is truncated (he is speaking of a joint intelligence college, not an eight tribes network (my eight tribes, illustrated in the image under the book cover above, include academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit) and for learning from history. He also has a chapter on intelligence design that I could easily discuss for a week, for now let me just suggest my current papers found by searching for the phrase 21st Century Public Intelligence 3.1.
I've decided to keep this book. After I donated my entire library to George Mason University during my brief tenure with the United Nations, I have traveled light and donate all books to the local library after reading and reviewing. This one I must keep. Put as directly as possible, I believe the author to be something of a genius at the professional of intelligence, but he has been playing with only a portion of the deck, the secret government half. I'd like to think more about how to apply that genius to the whole deck.
Those interested in most of my other reviews of books on intelligence can find them by searching for the phrase Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most) and also at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, use the middle column to browse my latest reviews not in this list, look for the categories (and number of review):
I have not done justice to this book, but over time may circle back and augment this review. Certainly I hope to meet the author one day and talk about what a multinational station in each region should look like, and how one might create a Centre for Public Intelligence in each district. There is so much yet to be done.
5.0 out of 5 stars One of four essential books on the future of intelligence, February 2, 2013
I have been holding a gift copy of this book for over a month, waiting for it to be available on Amazon so I could post my review, and as a result have also read — and also recommend as an essential book — Sir David Omand's book Securing the State. I am rating both books at 5, both books are as erudite and perceptive as it gets.
Alfred Rolington can reasonably be considered “P” or the Public counterpart to “M” in the UK, as I have been to the secret world in the US. He is the master of BOTH the secret process of intelligence and its purposes, AND the very broad multi-lingual multi-cultural world of open sources in unpublished, analog, and digital form that the secret world is — to be blunt — arrogantly ignorant of. This book is one of a handful truly relevant to the future of intelligence (decision-support) done properly — which is to say, as decision-support for ALL threats and challenges, not as surveillance secrets protecting the few.
This book by Alfred Rolington, former CEO of Janes and someone I have known for over fifteen years — and whom I will testify has been the single most accomplished and imaginative speaker in my conference on international intelligence from 1992-2006, among over 750 speakers — is the better book for students and I strongly recommend it as required reading at the university level.
As I am one of the arch-critics of expensive secret “intelligence” that is done badly, and do not mince my own words, it is with some awe that I read strong critical views articulated in such a graceful manner that I can just see the US Director of National Intelligence with his pants down saying “Thank you, Sir, may I please have three more?” Naturally nothing in this book should be taken to be critical of the British intelligence community that is without peer.
“Deep politics” is scholar Peter Dale Scott's term for historical machinations such as drug-running and assassinations which form covert if systemic features of the contemporary state and which are all-too naively dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” A number of people who study such matters seriously have long suspected that the scandal centering on Omaha, Nebraska's Franklin Credit Union in the 1970s and `80s forms the conceptual linchpin to a truly critical understanding of the perverse, brutal and predatory nature of power in late-imperial America. Having read former Nebraska State Senator John DeCamp's brave if somewhat desultory 1992 book on the subject, THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP, and watched the unaired British television documentary CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE on the internet, we have also sensed, with a certain despair, that the nature and details of this scandal were so shocking, ugly, confusing and strange as to forever defy broader public credulity and scrutiny. It is with a profound sense of relief, admiration and gratitude, then, that one reads Nick Bryant's THE FRANKLIN SCANDAL, which accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an eminently gripping, thorough and accessible account of perhaps the grimmest aspect of contemporary U. S. history.
It is amusing to see the sole negative reviewer on these pages (as of this writing) suggest that Bryant has gullibly relied only on the apparent victims of the scandal, when in fact the author has taken pains to bolster accusations voiced in his book with the testimony of law-enforcement, governmental, mental health, legal and social-service officials, as well as journalists and others whose professions and/or personal relationships brought them into the orbit of this lurid story.
4.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Contribution–See the Table of Contents, January 30, 2013
This review is from: Open Source Intelligence Techniques: Resources for Searching and Analyzing Online Information (Paperback)
I started the modern Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement in 1988, picking up where earlier pioneers such as Jan Herring, former NIO for S&T, left off. We are still fighting this battle. The CIA Open Source Center (OSC) is retarded — it does less than 10% of what could be done by a proper Open Source Agency (see tiny url forward slash OSA2011), and compounds their ignorance by classifying what they produce.
I *like* this book. If you have any doubts at all, use the superb Inside the Book feature that is one of Amazon's signal innovations. If you believe — as the OSC believes — that OSINT is all about online surfing in English, this is a great book. It is a good complement to Ran Hock's stuff, or Arno Reuser's stuff, and Ben Benavides stuff, and I certainly also recommend the Super-Searcher series and anything by Mary Ellen Bates.
5.0 out of 5 stars Six Star Special — Poetic, Compelling — Sufficient to Indict George Bush Sr., January 18, 2013
I have reviewed a number of the non-fiction books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and received this film as a gift from an Amazon reader who appreciated my book reviews.
First off, the film is superbly professional and poetic in its opening, a panoramic survey of John F. Kennedy and why he mattered, as a President representing the 99%, as a President striving for peace and against the US military industrial complex (books show that Khruschev had the same problem with his own military complex).
Crucifies ABC's Peter Jennings for being part of a cover-up and nationally-televised propaganda film lying to the public. As an intelligence professional who has written extensively about information pathologies, I hold the captured corporate media in great disdain, and consider all of them to be craven to the nth degree.
I have to say that as good as the movie is, it absolutely had to be valued in the context of the books that provide vastly more detail. This movie is a summary — a very compelling and gifted presentation of the totality of the assassination including details and excellent photographic and video reviews, but the movie is only good enough to INDICT George Bush Senior, not enough to convict.
5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ, gift and share — a roadmap for true cost valuation at citizen level, January 12, 2013
I have long been a fan of Herman Daly's ecological economics and E.O. Wilson's concept of consilience, a form of holistic analytics, and of course Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff, among other systems thinkers. This book, just published, is quite extraordinary, and in the absence of a Look Inside the Book offering, one of Amazon's best features, I want to list the chapters here and point to an online resource that provides compelling information supportive of buying this book and then sharing it or gifting it to others.
Chapter 1: The Indispensable Dirt
Chapter 2: Life from Light
Chapter 3: Eco-innovation
Chapter 4: The Pollinators
Chapter 5: Ground Control
Chapter 6: Liquid Assets
Chapter 7: Sunken Billions
Chapter 8: Ocean Planet
Chapter 9: Insurance
Chapter 10: Natural Health Service
Chapter 11: False Economy?
To get right to the web page that does NOT offer the book for free, only provides the supporting references and comments on each reference, search for:
