Oleg, now a green-card resident of the U.S. is our most personable and enjoyable former opponent on the intelligence speaking circuit, and both Bill Colby and I supported him in his efforts to move permanently to America. His book is a marvelous account on the general details of his formidable career that culminated in his being elected to the Russian Parliament. Page 222, “Kill the dog!”, has a special meaning for professionals the world over.
Credible Useful Insights Into Israeli Intelligence,
April 8, 2000
Victor Ostrovsky
One of my atmospherics books, enjoyable for its description of Mossad training exercises for new Career Trainees, and for its insights into how Israeli fully integrates military assistance carrots and clandestine intelligence follow-ups. Some insights into Mossad's deliberate manipulation of U.S. intelligence and a few allegations regarding U.S. hostage situations where Mossad might have done more but chose not to.
This book is fun. It provides a look at the career of a KGB officer with a level of detail that makes one thing abundantly clear: the KGB and CIA are more alike than one might think, for the simply reason that they are both bureaucracies. Smoothly presented, enjoyable throughout.
Very special history highly relevant to present operations,
April 8, 2000
George C. Chalou
Twenty four distinguished authors, including Sir Robin Brook from England and William Colby, an original serving member of the OSS and later DCI, provide a really well-developed history of the OSS with special sections on OSS records and OSS research, as well as grouped contributions on OSS operations in various regional areas and reflections on today's circumstances. One contributor, Robin Winks, concludes that US intelligence (CIA) is not getting “the right stuff” now for four interlocking reasons: 1) academia by and large no longer cooperates with the intelligence community; 2) academia lost its interest in being helpful when it became apparent that the covert action tail was wagging the intelligence dog; 3) the intelligence community, apprehensive about recruiting from open institutions permitting violent war protests, made the clearance process so convoluted that it began averaging eighteen months; and 4) the agency began to recruit people who badly wanted to join and were willing to put up with a recruitment and clearance process that the best Yale students, the ones who withdrew from consideration, described as “curious, stupid, degrading, and off-putting”, with the result that the agency ultimate lost access to “the self-assured, the confident, the questioning, and the adventurous-precisely the qualities that has been so attractive to the OSS-in the process.” I myself know from discussions with the head of the office responsible for evaluating incoming Career Trainees, that the standard profile of a desirable candidate has always been “the company man” who goes along, except in two years-1979 and 1982-when they went after “self-starters.” Within five years, both those classes lost fifty percent of their numbers to resignation, and I believe that this problem continues to persist. I was in the 1979 class, and hung in there for nine years.
Vote on Review
Twenty four distinguished authors, including Sir Robin Brook from England and William Colby, an original serving member of the OSS and later DCI, provide a really well-developed history of the OSS with special sections on OSS records and OSS research, as well as grouped contributions on OSS operations in various regional areas and reflections on today's circumstances. One contributor, Robin Winks, concludes that US intelligence (CIA) is not getting “the right stuff” now for four interlocking reasons: 1) academia by and large no longer cooperates with the intelligence community; 2) academia lost its interest in being helpful when it became apparent that the covert action tail was wagging the intelligence dog; 3) the intelligence community, apprehensive about recruiting from open institutions permitting violent war protests, made the clearance process so convoluted that it began averaging eighteen months; and 4) the agency began to recruit people who badly wanted to join and were willing to put up with a recruitment and clearance process that the best Yale students, the ones who withdrew from consideration, described as “curious, stupid, degrading, and off-putting”, with the result that the agency ultimate lost access to “the self-assured, the confident, the questioning, and the adventurous-precisely the qualities that has been so attractive to the OSS-in the process.” I myself know from discussions with the head of the office responsible for evaluating incoming Career Trainees, that the standard profile of a desirable candidate has always been “the company man” who goes along, except in two years-1979 and 1982-when they went after “self-starters.” Within five years, both those classes lost fifty percent of their numbers to resignation, and I believe that this problem continues to persist. I was in the 1979 class, and hung in there for nine years.
“You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and then.” Harry Truman, as cited on the first page of the book. Well, in the U.S. Government, before you get a real housecleaning, it appears you have to build the vacuum cleaner from scratch every few years, and even then you only get the big dirt on the margins. This book is a very important book with all the more value today as we finally get serious about intelligence reform. Loch's professional and extraordinarily detailed account of the entire Church Committee investigation, its findings, White House attempts to avoid reform, and the rather bland outcomes that finally resulted, should be considered the key to understanding where we are today and why we so desperately need legislation to achieve substantive reform. Had Senator Church been chosen by Jimmy Carter as Vice President (Church was favored by the convention, with Mondale and Stevenson tied behind him), who knows what good might have come of his White House service.
Crystal-clear insights into intelligence failure in Viet-Nam,
April 8, 2000
Orrin Deforest
This is one of two books I regard as essential to an understanding of our intelligence failures in Viet-Nam. DeForrest was a former military enlisted man who ended up managing a great deal of the prisoner interrogation for a major Agency facility in-country. His story ties together a number of important themes, from the failure of Ivy League types to understand what they were dealing with to the inadequacies (and sometimes the superiority) of vast numbers of “contract” case officers who would normally not have been hired, to the very real value of systematically debriefing all prisoners and entering the results into a database amenable to search and retrieval, something we don't know how to do today. Across every major military operation since Viet-Nam, it has been my experience that we have no table of organization and equipment, completely inadequate numbers of trained interrogators and translators, and no commitment to the tedious but essential work of extracting knowledge from large numbers of hostile prisoners.
Essential reference on intelligence failure in Viet-Nam,
April 8, 2000
Bruce Jones
Sam Adams may be more famous as the whistle-blower on CIA and U.S. military falsification of the numbers of Viet Cong and regular North Vietnamese army personnel confronting the U.S. in Viet-Nam, but this book is the very best account I have found of the intimate details of how politics, bureaucracy, bad judgment, and some plain downright lying falsified the military intelligence process at all levels of the U.S. military in Viet-Nam.
