Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 330 – Public Intelligence Blog

Extraordinary–Substantive History–Real World Good Stuff,

May 24, 2003

Milton Bearden

This book is a fine read, and to my surprise, the contributions from The New York Times are quite worthwhile. In essence the primary author, Milton Beardon, wrote the core of the book, on his experiences with the Soviet Division in the Directorate of Operations at the CIA, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan driving the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then journalist James Risen filled in the gaps with really excellent vignettes from the other side. The two authors together make a fine team, and they have very capably exploited a number of former KGB and GRU officers whose recollections round out the story.This is not, by any means, a complete story. At the end of thise review I recommend five other books that add considerable detail to a confrontation that spanned the globe for a half-century. Yet, while it barely scratches the surface, this book is both historical and essential in understanding two facts:

1) Afghanistan was the beginning of the end for USSR and
2) CIA made it happen, once invigorated by President Ronald Reagan and DCI William Casey

It may not be immediately apparent to the casual reader, but that is the most important story being told in this book: how the collapse of the Soviet effort in Afghanistan ultimately led to the collapse of Soviet authority in East Germany, in the other satellite states, and eventually to the unification of Germany and the survival of Russas as a great state but no longer an evil empire.

There are two other stories in this book, and both are priceless. The first is a tale of counterintelligence failure across the board within both the CIA and the FBI. The author excels with many “insider” perspectives and quotes, ranging from his proper and brutal indictment of then DCI Stansfield Turner for destroying the clandestine service, to his quote from a subordinate, based on a real-world case, that even the Ghanians can penetrate this place. He has many “lessons learned” from the Howard and Ames situations, including how badly the CIA handled Howard's dismissal, how badly CIA handled Yuchenko, to include leaking his secrets to the press, how badly both CIA and FBI handled the surveillance on Howard, with too many “new guys” at critical points of failure; and most interestingly, how both DCI Casey and CIA counterintelligence chiefs Gus Hathaway (and his deputy Ted Price) refused to launch a serious hunt for Ames and specifically refused to authorize polygraphs across the board (although Ames beat a scheduled polygraph later). The author's accounting of the agent-by-agent losses suffered by the CIA as Howard, Ames, and Hansen took their toll, is absolutely gripping.

The second story is that of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and how the anti-Soviet jihad nurtured by America and Pakistan ultimately turned back on both countries. It may help the reader of this book to first buy and read Milt Bearden's novel, “The Black Tulip,” a wonderful and smoothly flowing account in novelized terms. From the primary author's point of view, it was Afghanistan, not Star Wars, that brought the Soviet Union to its knees. The primary author provides the reader with really superb descriptions of the seven key Afghan warlord leaders; of the intricacies of the Pakistani intelligence service, which had its own zealots, including one who launched jihad across in to Uzbeckistan without orders; into how the Stingers, and then anti-armor, and then extended mortars (with novel combinations of Geographical Information System computers and satellite provided coordinates for Soviet targets, all 21st century equipment that was quickly mastered by the Afghan warriors) all helped turn the tide. As America continues to fail in its quest to reconstruct the road of Afghanistan, having severely misunderstood the logistics and other obstacles, one of the book's sentences really leaps out: the supply chain to the rebels “needed more mules than the world was prepared to breed.”

This book is a collector's item and must be in the library of anyone concerned with intelligence, US-Soviet relations, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi funding of terrorism. It is a finely crafted personal contribution from someone who did hard time in the CIA, and made an enormous personal contribution, in partnership with the hundreds of CIA case officers, reports officers, all-source analysts, and especially CIA paramilitary officers (including Nick Pratt and Steve Cash, forever Marines).

A few other books that complement this one: Thomas Allen & Norman Polmar, “Merchants of Treason”, Ladislav Bittman, “The Deception Game”, Vladimir Sakharov, “High Treason”, Victor Sheymov, “Tower of Secrets,” and Oleg Kalugin, “The First Directorate.” There are many more but these are my favorites.

2003/05/012009/12/04

Review: Intelligence–From Secrets to Policy

5 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Primer for Presidents, Congress, Media, and Public,

May 1, 2003

Mark M. Lowenthal

Mark Lowenthal, who today is the Associate Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production (ADCI/A&P), was briefly (for a year) the President of OSS USA (I created OSS Inc., the global version). So much for disclosure and “conflicts of interest”. The previous review, after a year of being irritatingly present, needs to be corrected. Dr. Lowenthal was for many years the Senior Executive Service reviewer of intelligence affairs for the Congressional Research Service, then he went on to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence & Research (Analysis), and then he became the Staff Director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he supervised one of the two really serious really excellent studies on all that is wrong with intelligence and what needs to be fixed. OSS was lucky to have him contribute to its development for a year before he moved on to another corporation and then to the #5 position in the US Intelligence Community. He needs no help from me in either articulating his ideas or doing good work.What the previous reviewer fails to understand is that Dr. Lowenthal's book represents the *only* available “primer” on intelligence that can be understood by Presidents, Congressmen, the media, and the public. While my own book (The New Craft of Intelligence) strives to discuss the over-all threats around the world in terms meaningful to the local neighborhoods of America, Dr. Lowenthal's book focuses on the U.S. Intelligence Community itself–the good, the bad, and the ugly. He is strongest on analysis and the politics of intelligence, somewhat weaker on collection and counterintelligence covert action. There is no other book that meets the need for this particular primer, and so I recommend it with enthusiasm. It is on the OSS.NET list of the top 15 books on intelligence reform every written.

2003/03/292019/09/06

Review: High Noon–Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them

7 Star Top 1%, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions)

7 Star Life Transformative Holistic Analytics – Practical Bottom Line on Saving Planet–Do It or Lose It,

May 29, 2003

J.F. Rischard

Having read perhaps 20 of the best books on global issues and environmental sustainability, water scarcity, ocean problems, etc, over the past few years (most reviewed here on Amazon) I was prepared for a superficial summary, political posturing, and unrealistic claims. Not this book–this book is one of the finest, most intelligent, most easily understood programs for action I have ever seen. The book as a whole, and the 20 problem statements specifically, are concise, illustrated, and sensible.The author breaks the 20 issues into 3 groups. Group one (sharing our planet)includes global warming; biodiversity and ecosystem losses, fisheries depletion, deforestation, water deficits, and maritime safety and pollution. Group two (sharing our humanity) includes massive step-up in the fight against poverty, peacekeeping-conflict prevention-combatting terrorism, education for all, global infectuous diseases, digital divide, and natural disaster prevention and mitigation. Group three (sharing our rule book) includes reinventing taxation for the 21st century, biotechnology rules, global financial architecture, illegal drugs, trade-investment-competition rules, intellectual property rights, e-commerce rules, and international labor and migration rules.

The author's core concept for dealing with these complex issues intelligently, while recognizing that “world government” is not an option, lies with his appreciation of the Internet and how global issues networks could be created that would be a vertical complement to the existing horizontal elements of each national government.

The footnotes and index are professional, but vastly more important, the author's vision is combined with practicality. This is a “doable-do” and this book is therefore my number one reading recommendation for any citizen buying just one book of the 360+ that I have recommended within Amazon. Superb.

2003/03/082009/12/04

Review: Fixing Intelligence–For a More Secure America

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Useful Informed Opinion,

March 8, 2003

Gen. William E. Odom

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.

2003/03/082013/01/29

2003 IJIC 16/1 “The Citizen as ‘Intelligence Minuteman'”

Articles & Chapters, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

Alessandro Politi, “The Citizen as ‘Intelligence Minuteman‘”

2003/02/282009/12/04

Review: Statecraft as Soulcraft

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Culture, Research, Democracy, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Brilliant Insights into What Makes Nations Great,

February 28, 2003

George F. Will

Although George Will can be an extremist in some of his views, he has a good mind and is gifted as an author and orator. This is nowhere more evident than in this collection of 20th century essays, where he focuses on “statecraft as soulcraft.” Thomas Jefferson understood that an educated citizenry was a Nation's best defense, and the Vietnamese have clearly demonstrated that a nation with a strong strategic culture can defeat the United States when it practices the American way of war (lots of technology, little public support for the war). Today we are beginning to understand that the moral aspects of national character are 3-5 times more important than the physical and economic and technical aspects. Michele Borba's new book, Building Moral Intelligence, together with George Will's dated but still powerfully relevant book, comprise the urgently needed elementary education for all adults who would be responsibile citizens–or leaders of citizens.

2003/02/162009/12/04

Review: American Jihad–The Terrorists Living Among Us

5 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Terrorism & Jihad

Gives Citizens More Intelligence Than FBI Can Handle,

February 16, 2003

Steven Emerson

The FBI–as shown by the recent Congressional testimony of its Director–is still hapless, flailing and clueless when it comes to understanding the specifics of terrorist fund-raising, recruiting, training, and planning based in the USA. Pakistanis are fleeing to the Canadian border as this review is being written, because they know something the FBI is unwilling to compute: the greatest threat is not Al Qaeda, but rather Hamas and militarized Pakistanis, most of whom are legitimate US residents.Steve Emerson, who first made history in the mid-1990's with his Public Broadcast Service documentary on mullahs in American mosques calling for the murder of Americans deep in the heartland of America, has produced a “citizen's handbook” that is vastly superior to anything the FBI or the White House has been able to offer its taxpayers–and we can buy this for under $12, which compares rather favorably with the $3 billion or so we pay for the FBI, and the $35 billion or so we pay for national intelligence overall.

There are really three stories in this book, which I urge every American–and every other citizen of the world–to read.

First, and most importantly, the book documents the wide-spread and robust network of Islamic “charities” and other front organizations–the most important based in Texas where they have been ignored–that do fund-raising for terrorism overseas as well as terrorist recruiting and training in the US. The map at the end of the book showing over 50 terrorist nodes in over 30 US cities, is along worth the price of the book. *More than 20% of the addresses and phone numbers in a top terrorist's phone book, when captured, where in the US.*

Second, the book provides insights into why the US Government is failing in the war on terrorism. The reasons for failure are balanced between policy failures–a pure unwillingess to confront Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and other governments that nurture terrorists–and intelligence failures, including such mundane things as refusing to demand police record checks on individuals from countries known to be exporting terrorists, and poor relations (and a lack of unilateral clandestine penetrations) with key intelligence services such as the Sudanese, which knew about the “Day of Terror” well in advance but did not tell us…and if it did tell us, our Intelligence Community failed to notice and failed to communicate the warnings.

The third story in this book is about sources and methods and mindsets, and the bottom line is this: an open mind can use open sources of information to such advantage, that it makes our closed source and closed mind bureaucracy look pitiful in comparison. The US taxpayer is not getting their money's worth from the US Government with respect to national security expenditures.

Finally, although perhaps not intended by the author, his insights are helpful in identifying four specific strategic psychological operations (PsyOp) or “cultural outreach” themes that the US should have been pursuing these many years since the Soviets left Afghanistan: 1) Arab-Afghans isolated and despised; 2) Arab arrogance in relegating all Pakistani's to “untouchable” nonentity status; 3) Oneness of umma fanatically pursued actually attacks and undermines the many varied Muslim cultures, especially non-Arab Muslim cultures; and 4) US has made mistakes–in crime, in morality, in support for repressive regimes–and seeks to change in the true spirit of the Koran.

The book's documentation of the crimes against the US of the American Muslim Council, to name just one ostensibly legitimate organization that is revealed in this book (which has been “lawyer-checked” and is bullet-proof against false claims of slander), and other similar “charitable” organizations, constitutes “citizen intelligence” at its best. Every Muslim in America should read this book before donating another dollar to any organization pupporting to be helping Muslims.

There is one other cautionary note: the book addresses the specific strategy of bin Laden and other terrorist leaders of deliberately seeking out Muslim youth with US passports who can be used as couriers and suicidal volunteers. The actual examples provided–real people with real terrorist support missions–easily destroy the common misperceptions of terrorists as “foreign.” As the author documents, they are within us, they are of us, and what we are doing now to defend ourselves is not likely to work in this context.

This is an easy to read, informative book with an excellent map, several tables of Islamic extremist organizations based in America, good notes and a good index. I recommend it without reservation.

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: The Main Enemy–The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB