Extraordinary Contribution to National Sanity and Security,
May 31, 2001
The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Senator Moynihan applies his intellect and his strong academic and historical bent to examine the U.S. experience with secrecy, beginning with its early distrust of ethnic minorities. He applies his social science frames of reference to discuss secrecy as a form of regulation and secrecy as a form of ritual, both ultimately resulting in a deepening of the inherent tendency of bureaucracy to create and keep secrets-secrecy as the cultural norm. His historical overview, current right up to 1998, is replete with documented examples of how secrecy may have facilitated selected national security decisions in the short-run, but in the long run these decisions were not only found to have been wrong for lack of accurate open information that was dismissed for being open, but also harmful to the democratic fabric, in that they tended to lead to conspiracy theories and other forms of public distancing from the federal government. He concludes: “The central fact is that we live today in an Information Age. Open sources give us the vast majority of what we need to know in order to make intelligent decisions. Decisions made by people at ease with disagreement and ambiguity and tentativeness. Decisions made by those who understand how to exploit the wealth and diversity of publicly available information, who no longer simply assume that clandestine collection-that is, ‘stealing secrets'-equals greater intelligence. Analysis, far more than secrecy, is the key to security….Secrecy is for losers.”
The Ultimate Graduate/Policy Text on Intelligence,
January 10, 2001
Michael Herman
This is the textbook for the best and the brightest of both the academic world and the policy world. It is not an easy read, between the British language form and the deep thinking, but it is, as Christopher Andrew says, “the best overview” and “surely destined to become a standard work”. I especially liked its attention to components and boundaries, effects, accuracy, and evaluation. Perhaps most usefully within the book is the distinction between long-term intelligence endeavors that rely primarily on open sources and serve to improve state understanding and state behavior, and short-term espionage that tends to be intrusive and heighten the target state's feelings of vulnerability and hostility. No intelligence library is complete without this book–it provides a rock-solid foundation for serious thinking about the intelligence in the 21st Century.
Really Serious, Really Current, Combat Military Intelligence,
January 10, 2001
Samuel M. Katz
Use the out-of-print service, this book is a gem. This is a great book about the minutia and the value of a well-rounded military intelligence capability–it is relevant to U.S. and other operations going on right now. I was especially impressed with four aspects: the emphasis on prisoner interrogation; the development of easy to install tactical signals collection devices that could be carried in and installed by deep reconnaissance units; the over-all commitment to long-range patrolling; and the clearly authorized commitment to “behind the lines” covert violence (assassination), using all the tools of intelligence to identify and then kill very specific individuals such as the two Egyptian Colonels believed to be guiding the Palestinian terrorist actions against Israel. These are all areas where the U.S. military is weak (and in one case clearly forbidden to consider action), and I consider this book a helpful manual for military officers who wish to take a more active role in preparing defense intelligence for the future–we cannot do military intelligence the way the Israeli's do it, if we persist in thinking that desk-bound beltway analysts and overhead satellite collection are all that we need.
For Presidents, Cabinet Members, Commanders, & Senior Staff,
January 10, 2001
Christopher Andrew
“Over the past two centuries only four American presidents-Washington, Eisenhower, Kennedy (briefly), and Bush-have shown a real flair for intelligence.” This 660-page book documents this assessment, and ends with the conclusion “The presidents in the twenty-first century, like their Cold War predecessors, will continue to find an enormously expensive global intelligence system both fallible and indispensable.” His general findings in the conclusion are instructive: presidents have tended to have exaggerated expectations of intelligence, and have frequently overestimated the secret power that covert action might put at their command. For all that failed, both in intelligence not getting it right and presidents not listening when it did, intelligence undeniably helped stabilize the Cold War and avoid many confrontations. This book is extremely relevant to the emerging discussion, in 2001, about the need to depoliticize the position of the Director of Central Intelligence, and perhaps to consider a new National Security Act of 2001.
By the then (UK) Sunday Times Bureau Chief in Washington, a former defense correspondent, I found this book somewhat disappointing but never-the-less worthy of consideration. Although the author concludes that the end of the Cold War should have produced a massive upheaval and did not, leaving “too many of the old practices intact with little evidence that the intelligence community is ready to face the fast changing, frightening world that lies ahead,” my impression was that the author was completely taken in by the party line and overlooked most of the really trenchant intelligence reform literature, including the open source revolution. It is, however, replete with useful references, especially to what then DCI Bob Gates was thinking and talking about, and for that reason I would tend to include it in any serious intelligence library.
Rare and Deep Insights into Intelligence Grid-Lock,
December 19, 2000
Loch Johnson
The opening quotation from Harry Howe Ransom says it all-“Certainly nothing is more rational and logical than the idea that national security policies be based upon the fullest and most accurate information available; but the cold war spawned an intelligence Frankenstein monster that now needs to be dissected, remodeled, rationalized and made fully accountable to responsible representatives of the people.”
Professor Johnson is one of only two people(the other being Britt Snider) to have served on both the Church Commission in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, and is in my view one of the most competent observer and commentator on the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community. The book is a tour d'horizon on both the deficiencies of today's highly fragmented and bureaucratized archipelago of independent fiefdoms, as well as the “new intelligence agenda” that places public health and the environment near the top of the list of topics to be covered by spies and satellites.
Highlights of this excellent work, a new standard in terms of currency and breadth, include his informed judgment that most of what is in the “base” budget of the community should be resurrected for reexamination, and that at least 20% of the budget (roughly $6 billion per year) could be done away with-and one speculates that this would be good news to an Administration actively seeking trade-offs permitting its promised tax cut program. His overviews of the various cultures within the Central Intelligence Agency, of the myths of intelligence, and of the possibilities for burden sharing all merit close review.
He does, however, go a bridge too far while simultaneously rendering a great service to the incoming Administration. He properly identifies the dramatic shortfalls in the open source information gathering and processing capabilities of the various Departments of the Federal government-notably the Department of State as well as the Department of Commerce and the various agencies associated with public health-but then he goes on to suggest that these very incapacities should give rise to an extension of the U.S. Intelligence Community's mission and mandate-that it is the U.S. Intelligence Community, including clandestine case officers in the field and even FBI special agents, who should be tasked with collecting open sources of information and with reporting on everything from disease to pollution. This will never work, but it does highlight the fact that all is not well with *both* the U.S. Intelligence Community *and* the rest of the government that is purportedly responsible for collecting and understanding open sources of information.
On balance I found this book to be a very competent, insightful, and well-documented survey of the current stresses and strains facing the U.S. national intelligence community. The conclusion that I drew from the book, one that might not be shared by the author, was that the U.S. Government as a whole has completely missed the dawn of the Information Age. From the National Security Agency, where too many people on payroll keep that organization mired in the technologies of the 1970's, to the U.S. State Department, which has lost control of its Embassies and no longer collects significant amounts of open source information, to the White House, where no one has time to read-we have completely blown it-we simply have not adapted the cheap and responsive tools of the Internet to our needs, nor have we employed the Internet to share the financial as well as the intellectual and time burdens of achieving “Global Coverage.” More profoundly, what this book does in a way I have not been able to do myself, is very pointedly call into question the entire structure of government, a government attempting to channel small streams of fragmented electronic information through a physical infrastructure of buildings and people that share no electronic connectivity what-so-ever, while abdicating its responsibility to absorb and appreciate the vast volumes of relevant information from around the globe that is not online, not in English, and not free.
It was not until I had absorbed the book's grand juxtaposition of the complementary incompetencies of both the producers of intelligence and the consumers of intelligence that I realized he has touched on what must be the core competency of government in the Information Age: how precisely do we go about collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information, and creating tailored intelligence, when we are all inter-dependent across national, legal bureaucratic, and cultural boundaries? This is not about secrecy versus openness, but rather about whether Government Operations as a whole are taking place with the sources, methods, and tools of this century, or the last. To bombs, bugs, drugs, and thugs one must add the perennial Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Brad, a respected scholar in his own right, was given unique access to all past publications of the CIA's internal journal, Studies in Intelligence, and has produced an absolutely lovely collection of the best thoughts inside CIA from 1955-1992, organized into sections for imagery intelligence collection, overt human intelligence collection, clandestine human intelligence collection, human intelligence and its consumers, the analysis function, analysis and its consumers, and counterespionage. I regard this book as an essential supplementary reading for teaching both students and practitioners.
