DARK SECRET

A DEATH IN WASHINGTON: WALTER G. KRIVITSKY AND THE STALIN TERROR, Gary Kern with an intro. by Nigel West

   Soviet master spy Walter G. Krivitsky was a small, dapper and very nervous man, who played a major role in Soviet espionage in the 1920s and 1930s and knew many of the most important spies embedded in European nations. He was also the first key Soviet defector to warn the West early on about the Stalin regime. He became friends with Whittaker Chambers, encouraging him to come forward and thus precipitating the Alger Hiss case. Krivitsky provided the British with clues that would certainly have unmasked the Philby spy group, but following his debriefing in London he was found out by Anthony Blunt, who warned Moscow. Krivitsky also had published a damning account of the sins of the Soviet regime in 1939, "In Stalin's Secret Service." He made the Soviet death list.  Krivitsky told the New York Times, "If they ever try to prove that I took my own life, don't believe it." The Times used that quotation in a story when Krivitsky was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a locked hotel room in the Bellevue Hotel near Washington's Union Station on Feb. 10, 1941. Washington police, after a cursory walk-through, dismissed the death as a suicide, sent the body to the morgue, and allowed the room to be cleaned. Arthur Koestler, a refugee from the communist system, speaking for many skeptics of the seemingly mysterious death of Walter Krivitsky which was deemed a "suicide" said "There's an old OGPU saying 'Any fool can commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a natural death.'

                This book is not simply the final word on the Krivitsky mystery it is also a model of how exciting and thrilling true espionage history can be when events themselves are allowed to take over and be recounted by a master of the subject. The author, Gary Kern, spent ten years researching the book, and covers all original documents released by the British archives and the FBI in 2002-2003. It would appear to be a fascinating read. (Jonkers) [WIN 15 August 2003]

The DECEIVERS: ALLIED MILITARY DECEPTION IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Thaddeus Holt

   Holt is a lawyer and former deputy secretary of the Army who has compiled a massive account of the many operations conducted by the Allies to deceive the Axis during the Second World War. The best known of the operations in misleading the enemy was persuading the Germans that the Allies would certainly land in France but not where the Germans were led to expect. Holt tells the reader about many other successes, such as Operation Mincemeat that inspired the book and film about The Man Who Never Was.  For scholars this work is a splendid compendium of information on the art of strategic deception. For the general public, it reads like a good spy thriller. (DKR) [WIN 12 January 2004]

DECISION FOR DISASTER: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, Grayston L. Lynch

DEVIL’S GAME: THE CIVIL WAR INTRIGUES OF CHARLES A. DUNHAM, Carman Cumming

   A showcase for political and military genius, the Civil War was also a breeding ground for epic frauds, according to this engaging historical study of a great period con-artist. A New York City lawyer and Democratic hack, Charles Dunham found the wartime atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria a perfect climate for his talents as forger, propagandist and agent provocateur. Working (probably) with Union officials, Dunham invented a stable of fictional identities, some of whom fomented fake Confederate raids, sabotage operations and assassination plans, while others reported on these imaginary plots in Northern newspapers to arouse public ire and smear Copperhead opponents of the war. The network of false personas grew so complex that at one point Dunham offered a reward for his own capture and was duly arrested. At war’s end, his machinations grew murkier, as he set up a “School of Perjury” to provide phony witnesses, including his wife and brother-in-law, to investigators looking for evidence to incriminate Jefferson Davis in Lincoln’s assassination. When that scam landed him in prison, he started a new one offering fake proof of Andrew Johnson’s complicity in the murder to Radical Republicans trying to impeach the President. Although Dunham’s labyrinthine schemes can sometimes be eye-glazing, his skillful lying and sheer chutzpah make for entertaining reading. His main historical interest, though, lies in the immense number of false leads he generated to tantalize Lincoln conspiracy theorists. Journalism professor Cummings, author of Secret Craft: The Journalism of Edward Farrer, does a fine job of untangling fact from fiction. His thorough research and careful judgments throw a revealing light on many outstanding controversies in Civil War covert operations and Lincoln conspiracy studies. Photos. [WIN 24 March 2004]

The DICTATORS: HITLER’S GERMANY, STALIN’S RUSSIA, Richard Overy

   Overy’s scholarly study looks at how the systems worked and differed in the two major totalitarian states that most threatened civilization in the last century. For example, the Nazis, for all the SS delusion of being the recreation of an aristocratic Order of Teutonic knights, came to increasingly appeal to workers for their support while the CPSU under Stalin, supposedly the international vanguard of the proletariat, relied more and more on middle-class technocrats. (DKR) [WIN 9 August 2004]

EDWARD LANSDALE: The Unquiet American, Cecil B Currey

ELIZABETH

ENDGAME, Scott Ritter

ENDGAME: THE BLUEPRINT FOR VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR, Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely, intro. by Oliver North

   Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely are both retired generals and pundits for Fox News -- and they both admire the way the Bush administration has been conducting the war on Islamist terrorism and especially its taste for regime change.

   Terrorism will not be defeated by a law-enforcement paradigm of counterterrorism or the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, they assert. What has to be done is to go after state sponsors of terrorism, among them Iran, North Korea and Syria. Application of soft power to encourage democracy where it does not exist and using public diplomacy to get out the American message and foster Islamic moderation is all well and good, but when it comes down to it, regime change is what is needed. If the present regimes in North Korea and Syria wish to survive, they must end nuclear programs and stop supporting terrorism otherwise they should be invaded.  Should the Islamist militants who regard the Saudi royal house as corrupt and insufficiently Muslim take over, well, then Saudi Arabia will have to be conquered. The authors grant that Iran is too big to be invaded, but embargoes and a naval blockade could to the trick.

   Not only are they enthusiastic for military solutions, they support Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of light, mobile forces, backed by increased spending on the latest weaponry when in the eyes of some nothing has contributed more to the problems the United States faces in Iraq than the Secretary’s dismissal of the need for more, many more boots on the ground. To many with direct experience of the Middle East, the book smacks of an earlier, more innocent time that vanished when the present circumstances in Iraq gave the lie to self-deception in high places. (DKR) [WIN 24 May 2004]

EXPLOSION ABOARD THE IOWA, Richard L. Schwoebel

The FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, William F. Buckley, Jr.

   Conservative historian Buckley provides text to a timeline of the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, which went up in August 1961, and down in November 1989. Without right or left bias, Buckley tells the story of the Wall through vignettes of separated families, those who tried to escape to freedom and made it, and those who didn't [Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy providing one of the best dramatizations of the latter]. "Buckley is at times funny, at times genuinely horrified by the Communist regime, and at times exultant over its fall. His lucid account celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit and the will to achieve freedom." -- Publisher's Weekly. [WIN 6 March 2004]

FEAR: THE HISTORY OF A POLITICAL IDEA, Corey Robin

   Robin, a professor of political science, has analyzed the political uses of fear and found it both a stimulant to economic growth and an excuse employed by regimes to justify repressive rule.

   Robin develops his argument through discussions of Hobbes, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville and Arendt and concludes that fear underpins contemporary liberal theory. He points out the threats fear inspires in the workplace and elsewhere in ordinary life. Robin predicts that when the war on terror finally ends, we will find ourselves still living in fear. (DKR) [WIN 30 August 2004]

The FINAL MONTHS OF WAR WITH JAPAN: Signals Intelligence, US Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision, Douglas MacEachin

FINAL REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

   AFIO members will be well aware of the debates over the perceived merits and faults of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. They should also be aware that whatever the fault finding, it appears to have received universal praise for the quality of its writing. But Marc Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA officer now with the American Enterprise Institute, finds the report fails to offer effective solutions to problems. He admits, however, that it is well written, incisive, and, he believes, politically damning.

    One reviewer went so far as to suggest it is not a stretch to compare the report to The Federalist Papers, in the sense that the book is designed to foster the debate by which the country will re-imagine itself through its bureaucracy. Others have said it reads like an engrossing novel. So what more promising read is available for a mere $10? (DKR) [WIN 23 August 2004]

FINISHING BUSINESS: TEN STEPS TO DEFEAT GLOBAL TERROR, Harlan Ullman

   Ullman is a former naval officer who writes about national security affairs for the Washington Times. In his new book he proposes a variety of things to do to win the war on terrorism, some important, others unconvincing.

   On the plus side, he rightly urges that we admit that the war is not a general one on terror, but specifically a war against Islamist militants. As Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, general manager of the Arabiya TV news channel, recently said, "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims." This correctly indicates that we are not at war with the whole Islamic world. Rather we are fighting an enemy we share with those Muslims the Islamists find wanting and are seeking to conquer.

   Ullman is less persuasive when he calls for more serious U.S. support for the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. It is true that there are many Pakistani jihadi who admire Usama bin Ladin and would like to see the end of Musharraf – and were they to succeed in replacing him, they would acquire a nuclear arsenal. The question is how the United States can strengthen Musharraf's position more than it already does. As Iraq has shown, there are limits on the effectiveness of foreign intervention on behalf of those judged to be the good guys under attack by the bad guys in Islamic societies.

   As for Iraq, Ullman proposes international provision of economic and political aid, comparable in scope to the Marshall Plan. He is apparently blind to the profound disinclination in the industrialized world, the United States apart, to put money into Iraq which as yet shows no sign of becoming a secure country free of destabilizing violence and that offers few economic prospects to any country, other than the United States.

   Whoever occupies the White House next year, the Europeans are more than likely to continue to consider that the United States, as they see it, having broken Iraq, bears the responsibility for repairing it.

   Newt Gingrich contributes a foreword and Wesley Clark an afterword. (DKR) [WIN 27 September 2004]

FIXING THE SPY MACHINE: Preparing American Intelligence for the 21st Century:  Art Hulnick

FORTRESS AMERICA: ON THE FRONT LINES OF HOMELAND SECURITY – AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE COMING SURVEILLANCE STATE, Matthew Brzezinski

   Matthew is the nephew of Zbigniew Brzezinski and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He finds that the homeland antiterrorist effort has lost its drive while a revitalized U.S. intelligence Community has yet to emerge.

     Brzezinski posits a United States in 2008 where a student and his colleagues are under surveillance by radio and are considered guilty until proven innocent. Terrorist attack response drills show high levels of U.S. lack of preparation, he warns. Brzezinski’s writing reflects his solid abilities as a journalist and the high intelligence found in other members of his family. (DKR) [WIN 19 July 2004]

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER: THE REAL STORY BEHIND AMERICAN TALIBAN JOHN WALKER LINDH, Richard D. Mahoney

   Mahoney’s book charges the USG with treasonous dealing with countries that assist terrorists and asserts that the Washington was responsible for the rise of the Taliban when it assisted Islamists in their resistance to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Others would put the blame for the latter more on Washington’s disengagement from Afghan affairs once the Russians were gone and on its indifference to the struggles between warlords that followed and paved the way for the Taliban takeover. Lindh, captured among a group of Taliban and al-Qa’ida fighters in Afghanistan, was at first threatened with being tried as a traitor. But he never went to trial and instead struck a plea bargain that sent him to prison for 20 years. The court also imposed a gag order barring him from talking about his experience. Mahoney’s main thrust is that the Justice Department halted Lindh’s trial out of fear for what might become known. Readers may find Mahoney’s arguments less than convincing. (DKR) [WIN 21 June 2004]

GHOST WARS: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA, AFGHANISTAN, AND BIN LADEN, FROM THE SOVIET INVASION TO SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, Steve Coll

   Coll is a Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist who covered Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992. The publisher says he covers in this work the long and deep U.S. involvement America has had in that region. [WIN 15 October 2003]

GIDEON'S SPIES: The Secret History of the Mossad, Gordon Thomas

GOOD MUSLIM, BAD MUSLIM, Mahmood Mamdani

   Mahmood Mamdani, an East African of Indian Muslim descent and a professor of government at Columbia University, gives an account of the worst case of blowback in the last quarter century.

    In an anti-Soviet Cold War ploy, the CIA in what Mamdani calls its biggest covert operation ever, financed and armed jihadis fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to the tune of approximately $3 billion. In so doing, he believes, the Reagan administration rescued right-wing Islamism from a historical cul-de-sac.

    The Afghans and a flood of foreign Muslims, able to join the fray thanks to the United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, succeeded in forcing the Russians out the country and helping the Soviet Union along to its grave.

    The success of the Afghan and ‘Afghan Arab’ warriors also gave rise to an Islamist international, now attacking Western interests around the world. Although the United States did not assist Usama bin Ladin, it participated in creating a matrix of militant Islamism that favored the growth of al-Qa’ida -- with the results Americans became universally aware of on 9/11.

    Mamdani argues that the religiously founded war against the Soviets led to a concentration of violence within non-state actors, such as al-Qa’ida. While religiously based militant bodies such as Hamas and Lebanese Hizballah had existed for years, they had nothing like neither the reach nor the vast ambition, to revive a universal caliphate, of the new networks.

    Despite a Leftist slant, Mamdani’s book is a useful reminder of the origins of the harmful unintended consequences of the anti-Soviet struggle on the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West, origins too often ignored. (DKR) [WIN 30 August 2004]

The GRAND STRATEGY OF PHILIP II, Geoffrey Parker

THE GREAT GAME: THE MYTH AND REALITY OF ESPIONAGE, Frederick P. Hitz

   Hitz, a former CIA inspector general, provides a clear-sighted overview of 20th-century espionage. Now at Princeton University, his book grew out of a seminar in which works of spy fiction were compared to actual intelligence operations. The result is a singularly informative work that starts with Kipling, Conrad, Maugham and down to le Carré and other contemporaries. He concludes that real espionage cases are more bizarre than the fictional accounts.

   Hitz recounts that according to former DCI Robert Gates, and a renowned case officer, Dwight "Dewey" Clarridge, there was no significant recruitments of Soviet spies during their many years of service and that those Soviets who did become assets were all walk-ins, all of whom were initially suspected of being provocateurs. An extremely valuable asset, Oleg Penkovsky, spent months trying to convince the agency he was for real. The Russians, on the other hand, gave a ready welcome to Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.  While the West was cautious about using sexual favors to recruit assets, the Communist bloc used women operatives as honey traps, girls to catch men and men to catch women. (DKR) [EBBN August 2004]

GREEK FIRE, POISON ARROWS, AND SCORPION BOMBS: BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, Adrienne Mayor

   Yes, not a new phenomena. Mayor shows that ancient civilizations had considerable working knowledge of chemistry and natural poisons and she describes how animals, flammables, and poisons were used on the battlefields -- often with gruesome descriptions of immense animal cruelty. Pigs being covered with pitch, set on fire, and forced to stampede into approaching troops, being only one of several. [WIN 30 September 2003]

The HALLIBURTON AGENDA: THE POLITICS OF OIL AND MONEY, Dan Briody

   Briody uses his considerable investigative skills to rake up a good deal of mud about the Halliburton Corp. and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, both of which acquired vast no-bid contracts for work in Iraq but also been caught in less than scrupulous conduct.  Briody, who recounts the rise of the two companies from the oil fields of west Texas to the corridors of power in Washington, asserts that they bought politicians and manipulated the contracting process while raking in record profits.

   The post–Cold War Pentagon has become enamored of outsourcing tasks previously undertaken by the military. Briody places Vice President Cheney, CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, at the heart of this shift back when he was Defense secretary in the cabinet of Bush Senior.  Despite poor editing that has left the book repetitive in places, Briody comes across as casting much needed light on how public need, private profit and the conduct of war interact in the present-day United States. [WIN 10 May 2004]

HARBOR, Lorraine Adams

   Adams reported for The Washington Post on the arrest of an Algerian, Abdel Ghani Meskini, and an FBI investigation into a millennium terrorist plot in which a car full of explosives was to have been driven across the Canadian border near Seattle and detonated at Los Angeles International Airport.

   Drawing on what she learned from her reporting, she has written a novel that explores the lives of illegal Algerian immigrants, who include criminals and Islamist terrorists, and FBI agents. The protagonist is the young Aziz Arkoun who has fled to Boston in 1999 as a stowaway to escape the violence of the Islamist insurgency in Algeria and the brutality and corruption of the country's regime. His neighbors in Boston are mostly secularized Muslims who drink, go to clubs, get involved with women and regard the call to jihad with contempt.

   When the Algerian community attracts the attention of the bureau, the agents dealing with the investigation are woefully incapable of understanding the Arabic-speaking world they are looking into. The result is that they put together an almost wholly inaccurate picture of what is going on. This in turn results in small fry being caught while the big fish get away.

   Adams has set down a vivid account of a culture that far too few of us understand. (DKR) [WIN 7 September 2004]

HATING AMERICA: THE NEW WORLD SPORT, John Gibson

   Fox News Channel's John Gibson goes after what he sees as the many Arabs who have a mindless hatred of the United States, Germans who take an addictive pleasure in anti-Americanism, Brits who hate themselves for not hating Americans enough and French who live in an anti-American nation. His main point is that other countries did not understand American feelings after 9/11 and so did not support the invasion of Iraq. Gibson reduces differences over matters of high policy to intense emotional dislike, springing from fear and envy or to irrational tribal antagonisms that are displayed in sports activities. All in all, a superficial, ranting attempt to deal with real and serious problems. For an enlightening study of European attitudes towards to the United States, Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order may be recommended; for Arab attitudes, Bernard Lewis' What went wrong? (DKR) [WIN 3 May 2004]

The HAUNTED WOOD: Soviet Espionage in America -- the Stalin Era, Allen Weinstein & Alexander Vassiliev

HEADQUARTERS GERMANY, Hans Klaus and Andreas Robert

HE WHO DARES: Recollections of Service in the SAS, SBS and MI5, David Sutherland

HIGH NOON IN THE COLD WAR: KENNEDY, KHRUSHCHEV, AND THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, Max Frankel

   Frankel is a former executive editor of the New York Times and his book is what one would expect from such a person. JFK is portrayed as the undeniable hero in the confrontation with Khrushchev and the United States and the Soviet Union are considered to have never truly been on the edge of war. Frankel's lessons learnt from the crisis are offered as sobering lessons for leading the war against Islamist jihadis. (DKR)

HITLER: The Pathology of Evil, George Victor

HITLER YOUTH, Michael H. Kater

   Kater, a historian of the Nazis, has produced a story of past evil that is also resonant with insights into the indoctrination employed by militant Islamists today.

    Drawing on letters, diaries and the testimony of Hitler Youth veterans, Kater concludes that the authoritarian nature of the Nazi regime and its racist ideology was combined with a sense of community that made this paramilitary organization appealing to adolescents, searching for certitudes.

    Where Nazi militaristic values were in conflict with German family values, the Hitler Youth tended to be the winner. Much the same phenomenon is discernible in current reports of Muslim families that appear genuinely shocked to find their young offspring have become involved in murderous activities, including suicide attacks. (DKR) [WIN 30 August 2004]

HUNTING DOWN SADDAM: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE SEARCH AND CAPTURE, Robin Moore

   Reviewers in Publisher's Weekly have called this rushed-to-print work a "jumbled but valuable set of accounts of crucial operations in the Iraq war."  The 78-yo author focuses on his findings with the Special Forces [being a former one] during visits he made in 2002 to Iraq to observe Task Force VIKING's actions with Kurdish forces, and TF DAGGER's activities in southern Iraq. The book will garner greatest interest in his account of the 4th infantry battalion's operations in Tikrit -- Saddam's hometown -- and ends with Saddam's capture.  It has many descriptions of the major players active in Iraq and how special operations are carried out in this atmosphere. (DKR) [WIN 9 August 2004]

IN THE COMPANY OF SOLDIERS: A CHRONICLE OF COMBAT, Rick Atkinson

   Rick Atkinson, who covered the Iraq war for The Washington Post, is the son of an army officer and is a military historian as well as a journalist. He was with Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the push to Baghdad. That is when he learned he had won a Pulitzer Prize for 'An Army at Dawn,' his history of the North African campaign during World War II. He has written a vivid and well-informed book about the 101^st and Petraeus in Iraq that is in keeping with such credentials.

   The soldiers of the 101^st, he writes, ''took hardship in stride and refused to let bloodlust, cynicism or other despoilers of good armies cheat them of their battle honors.” Petraeus, the son of a Dutch sea captain who took refuge in the United States during World War II, is remarkably tough. Atkinson rightly depicts him as a man of heroic stature. As the general has said of himself, he is outside the norm. The 101^st’s accomplishments under his command after the collapse of Saddam Husayn’s regime are among the most successful the occupation forces have achieved.  It is not surprising that having only just returned from Iraq, he is being sent back, according to Pentagon scuttlebutt, as chief of the Office of Military Cooperation. In that capacity he will oversee the organization and training of all the new Iraqi military and security forces.  

   Petraeus will be at the very heart of the conduct of coalition policy in the short time left before the transfer back to the Iraqis on June 30 of sovereignty over their country.

   Despite the weaknesses of the Iraqi forces during the war, which lacked among many other things an air force, the 101^st faced stiff resistance from some of the enemy that held out in several urban areas south of Baghdad and in attacks on coalition supply lines. Still, it needed less than half the number of the forces that fought the 1991 Gulf War to defeat the Iraqi this time. But it was a different picture once the major combat was over. As both then Army chief of staff Gen. Erik Shinseki and former Army secretary Thomas White said in the run up to the war -- and to the fury of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz -- several hundred thousand troops would be needed. Atkinson points out that contrary to the expectations of the Pentagon civilian leadership, there were 130,000 overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2003, with another 30,000 in Kuwait, rather than the mere 30,000 total they had predicted for the end of summer.

   Atkinson says he came to understand that ''victory in a global war against terrorism meant, at best, containing rather than vanquishing the enemy.'' U.S. forces, he writes, will for the foreseeable future be caught up in fights that are 'small, sequential, expeditionary and bottomless. [WIN 5 April 2004]

INFORMATION OPERATIONS: WARFARE AND THE HARD REALITY OF SOFT POWER, Edwin L. Armstead

   Nothing in recent years has changed the world of international relations and national security more than developments in the means of communications. This is the premise advanced by Lt. Cdr. Armistead, USN. His book demonstrates how modern means of communication have affected the delivery of critical information and influential content that shape perceptions, manage opinions, and control behavior. The electronic revolution includes a transcendence of the old psychological operations conducted by national governments.  Thus low-cost high technology allows non-governmental organizations and rogue elements, such as terrorist groups, to put across their views as well as enabling cyberattacks on computer networks and infrastructure.

   Armistead’s book fills an important gap in IO literature by analyzing the military, technological, and psychological aspects of information operations and as such serves as a textbook for military IO professionals. The general reader, too, has much to learn from this work about how IO has affected foreign policy, military operations, and government organization in recent years. (DKR) [WIN 7 June 2004]

INSIDE STALIN'S KREMLIN: An Eyewitness Account of Brutality, Duplicity and Intrigue, Peter S. Deriabin with Joseph C. Evans

INSIDE THE LIES THAT LED TO WAR AND BETRAYED MY WIFE’S C.I.A. IDENTITY: A DIPLOMAT’S MEMOIR, Joseph Wilson

   Last July, the conservative newsman Robert Novak exposed Valerie Plame, wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, as a covert CIA operative. Novak attributed the disclosure to senior Bush administration officials.

   How Novak obtained the information about Mrs. Wilson has become a serious legal matter. It is, after all, a federal offense to disclose the identity of a CIA covert operative. In December, after a preliminary three-month inquiry by the Justice Department and the F.B.I., AG Ashcroft referred the matter to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago. Fitzgerald has conducted a grand jury investigation as a special counsel but no one has been charged. 

   Mrs. Wilson’s outing came a few days after the New York Times published an article by Wilson that questioned whether the administration had manipulated intelligence to support going to war with Iraq. Wilson also suggested a report he drew up in 2002 had been buried. The report cast doubt on a claim that Niger had supplied Iraq with raw uranium ore in the previous decade. President Bush referred to that claim in his 2003 State of the Union address.

   The CIA sent Wilson to Niger to investigate the claim and he concluded that it was false. The C.I.A. told him it had become involved because Vice President Cheney had asked whether there was any truth to the reports about Iraq's interest in Niger's uranium, Wilson writes. The White House has maintained that Cheney did not learn about Wilson's trip until the Times article appeared.

   Wilson writes that he believes Cheney's chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, and Bush's political mentor, Karl Rove, were key figures in orchestrating attacks against him.  Libby, he suggests, was quite possibly the person who exposed his wife's identity. He also believes that Elliott Abrams, who was involved in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan presidency and who now works in the National Security Council, may also have been involved.

   Wilson sees two likely motives for the leak. One is revenge, the other a wish to discourage other intelligence officials from speaking up. It was, Wilson writes in a passage characteristic of his dislike of the Bush administration, "the first salvo from an administration desperate to prevent the complete unraveling of the fabric of lies, distortions and misinformation that it had woven and fed the world to justify its war." 

   Some readers are likely to find the most interesting parts of the book are those where Wilson describes his youth and then various overseas postings, including that of being the acting U.S. ambassador in Iraq in the run up to the 1991 war on that country. Wilson writes grippingly about getting Americans out of the country before the fighting began and in holding his own with Saddam Husayn. (Cameron LC, DKR) [WIN 10 May 2004]

INTELLECTUAL MORONS: HOW IDEOLOGY MAKES SMART PEOPLE FALL FOR STUPID IDEAS, Daniel J. Flynn

   In his new book, Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America, targets what he calls intellectual morons, clever folk turned stupid by letting ideology do their thinking.

    Flynn presents a number of case histories that illustrate the disorder. They include Herbert Marcuse, Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. As well as the Lefties, he also has criticism for such distinctly non-Lefties as Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss.

    Flynn provides a useful corrective to sloppy and sentimental thinkers who have made their mark at dinner parties in Georgetown and beyond. (DKR) [WIN 7 September 2004]

INTELLIGENCE AND THE WAR IN BOSNIA 1992-1995, Dr. Cees Wiebes

   On 11 July 1995 the Bosnian Serbs captured the enclave Srebrenica. Thousands were executed. Claims were made that Western Intelligence agencies had foreknowledge of the attack and atrocities. Was it an intelligence failure? This book tries to answer this question, presenting as much detail as possible of the intelligence efforts by the various Western (and indigenous) services in Bosnia. The author, a Professor at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), was granted access to the classified archives of the Dutch services and also to still-classified UN archives. Foreign intelligence services gave him confidential briefings. He also interviewed more than one hundred intelligence officials from various countries. This book, unread by the editor, is of potential interest as a non-parochial view of intelligence centered on a landmark atrocity. (Jonkers) [WIN 27 June 2003]

INTELLIGENCE, ESPIONAGE AND RELATED TOPICS: An Annotated Bibliography, James Calder

INTELLIGENCE IN WAR: KNOWLEDGE OF THE ENEMY FROM NAPOLEON TO AL-QAEDA, John Keegan

   Keegan provides series of case studies in the operational significance of intelligence, ranging from Admiral Nelson's successful pursuit of the French fleet in 1805 Shenandoah Valley campaign, to the employment of electronic intelligence in the naval operations of WWI and its extension and refinement during WWII.  Expanding his analysis, Keegan discusses intelligence aspects of the German invasion of Crete, the U.S. victory at Midway and the defeat of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. A chapter focuses on the importance of human intelligence in providing information on the Nazi V-weapons, and his discussion concludes with a comparison of the difference between a Cold War in which central targets of intelligence gathering were susceptible to concrete, scientific methods, and more recent targets that -- lacking form and organization -- require penetration through understanding.  This last leads Keegan to conclude that intelligence data does not guarantee success. The outcomes of war, Keegan believes, are not determined by intelligence, but as a result of fighting. [WIN 21 November 2003]

INTELLIGENCE: From Secrets to Policy, Mark M. Lowenthal

The INTERROGATORS: INSIDE THE SECRET WAR AGAINST AL-QAIDA, Chris Mackey and Greg Miller

   Mackey is a nom de guerre for a former interrogator at military prisons in Afghanistan. His job was to extract the secrets held by suspected Taliban and al-Qa’ida members. He and Miller, a journalist, relate the mind games and battles of will with their often very tough prisoners in a book replete with the lore of interrogation.

   The authors also record the squalid conditions of the prison camps and the lack of skill often displayed by U.S. interrogators. They criticize the CIA for being, in their view arrogant, inept and incompetent.

    Mackey insists his unit never violated the Geneva Conventions. The book was vetted by the DoD. (DKR) [WIN 2 August 2004]

INVESTIGATOR'S INTERNET RESOURCE GUIDE, David Vine

The IRAQ WAR, John Keegan

   Sir John, Britain’s most prominent military historian, has no doubts that driving Saddam Husayn from power was justified on practical and moral grounds. Keegan makes the point that Saddam brought about his own downfall by his refusal to satisfy the demands of an increasingly angered international community. His account of the military campaign is divided into chapters on American and British efforts with praise for commanders of both forces with particular praise for the U.S. mastery of mechanized maneuver war. (DKR) [WIN 24 May 2004]

IRREPARABLE HARM: A Firsthand Account of How One Agent Took on the CIA in an Epic Battle over Secrecy and Free Speech, Frank Snepp

ISRAELI BOMB, Avner Cohen

KAPITALIZM: Russia's Struggle to Free Its Economy, Rose Bradley

The KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow, edited by William Burr

LAB 257: THE DISTURBING STORY OF THE GOVERNMENT’S SECRET PLUM ISLAND GERM LABORATORY, Michael Christopher Carroll

   Two miles off Long Island -- 85 miles from New York City -- sits Plum Island. On this island is a US government biological research center which studies exotic and virulent diseases: African swine fever, Rift Valley fever, foot-and-mouth disease and West Nile virus. From declassified files and interviews, New York lawyer Michael Carroll argues that the island is dangerously insecure, and suggests that Plum Island is unprepared for accidents or terrorist actions. He also asks if there might be a connection between Lyme disease and Plum Island research, since the initial outbreak of the disease in 1975 occurred in Old Lyme, CT, close to Plum Island. West Nile virus also appeared close to the Island. Carroll offers descriptions of the dangers inherent in studying deadly viruses that could race through human populations, disrupt the food supply or cripple industries and our economy --dangers heightened by the absence of real island security. The author recognizes that it is crucial the US have laboratories like USAMRID [United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease] in Frederick, MD and Plum Island, and provides suggestions on how to make the research lab safer. [WIN 16 February 2004]

The LESSER EVIL: POLITICAL ETHICS IN AN AGE OF TERROR, Michael Ignatieff

   Ignatieff is a Canadian descended from a prominent Russian family. Count Paul Ignatieff was the last Minister of Education under Czar Nicholas II. Michael is an acute commentator on historical and current affairs, a man of liberal inclination in a rare combination with a sense of the ethics of consequences rather than the more typically liberal ethics of intentions. He is Professor of the Practice of Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

   In this work, which originated in the Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh University in 20003, Ignatieff traces the history of terrorism and counter-terrorism from the nihilists of Czarist Russia and the militias of Weimar Germany to the IRA and the threat posed by al-Qa'ida.

   The Abu Ghraib scandal has made us aware of the opposing demands faced by those whose task is to gather intelligence while still respecting the human decency that is a core value of liberal democracy. Ignatieff argues that the use of force, far from undermining such a political order, is necessary to its survival. But the use of force, he also believes, must be measured; there cannot be a simple approval of the use of torture. His position is that while we may need to kill in the struggle against Islamist terrorism, we must never pretend that doing so is anything better than a lesser evil. (DKR) [7 September 2004]

LINCOLN’S WAR: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA’S GREATEST PRESIDENT AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, Geoffrey Perret

   Of interest to intelligence bibliophiles is the author’s examination of Lincoln’s dealings with his spies. Also provides a look at his general and admirals, his controversial Secretary of War Henry Stanton, his idiosyncratic confidant, Secretary of the Navy Gidion Wells, and his dealings with manufacturers such as Samuel Colt. [WIN 30 September 2003]

LOST CRUSADE: America's Secret Cambodian Mercenaries, Peter Scott

A MAN OF INTELLIGENCE: Memoirs of War, Peace, and the CIA, General Charles P. Cabell, edited by Charles A. Cabell

The MASTER OF DISGUISE: My Secret Life in the CIA, Antonio Mendez

The MISSING PEACE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE FIGHT FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE, Dennis Ross

   Ross was chief U.S. negotiator for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the first President Bush, then President Clinton. He records the wheeling and dealing on all sides, the labor that goes into preparing any statement or gesture, and the one-step-forward, two-steps-back approach that characterized his ultimately ill-fated efforts from 1988 to 2001. Reading the Missing Peace makes one understand why Bush II began his administration by keeping his distance from the dispute in the Levant. (DKR) [WIN 26 July 2004]

The MISSION: CIA IN THE BALKANS, R.E. Estes

   As 25 year veteran Operations Officer (and AFIO member), Estes has created an "accurate portrayal of the CIA in action during the Cold War, and a story seldom told of the lives of case officers in the Clandestine Service."  Estes' The Mission develops around the story of Ivan Kolev -- a CIA asset recruited to become double agent in the Bulgarian Intelligence Service, and in doing so develops "haunting characters enmeshed in a web of international significance [that] create an intriguing first novel.  Mr. Estes knows all the aspects of the spy game and how it reacts to success or failure."  Anyone looking for a quick and compelling story, while interested in Agency operations as well as the cold war/Balkan environment, might consider The Mission. [WIN 5 April 2004]

MORTAL CRIMES: THE GREATEST THEFT IN HISTORY: SOVIET PENETRATION OF THE MANHATTEN PROJECT, Nigel West

   West will be known to many with an interest in twentieth century espionage; he has written prolifically about it. In his latest book, he calls on recently declassified information from both Soviet and U.S. archives to piece together the Russians efforts to acquire the secrets of the Allies’ development of the atom bomb and especially their effort in the United States.

   West painstakingly reconstructs the warren of espionage networks set up by the NKVD and its successor, the KGB, in the United States, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through World War II. The players are a myriad of shadowy characters that it has taken decades for investigators to track down and some of who will probably never the identified.

   At the heart of West’s story lie the Venona files, declassified by the United States in the 1990s.  West has written before about these files that provided the Soviet code names for British and American spies in the service of the Kremlin. But Mortal Crimes paints a much larger canvas that encompasses successes and failures on both sides. Among the failures was that of the FBI to comprehend as quickly as they might have the large scale of Soviet espionage on the West Coast. It was a failure that West sees as the result of the U.S. Army refusing to take the bureau into its confidence about the work being done at Los Alamos. What could be more relevant to the present day debate on reforming the Intelligence Community than this story of close holding secrets by one government agency from others? [WIN 31 May 2004]

NAVAHO CODE TALKERS

The NEW FACE OF WAR, Robert Chandler (Colonel, USAF ret)

NUCLEAR TERRORISM: THE ULTIMATE PREVENTABLE CATASTROPHE, Graham Allison

   A founding dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Allison asserts that the United States remains vulnerable to a nuclear terrorist attack. Once terrorists get hold of a nuclear bomb, its use against an American target may be nearly impossible to prevent, given the inadequacies of present security measures.

    The way to eliminate the threat from nuclear terrorism is through an international order in which there is no insecure nuclear material, no new facilities for processing uranium or enriching plutonium and no new nuclear states. Such policies, Allison believes, do not stretch beyond the achievable, if pursued with a mix of quid pro quos and intimidation in an international context of negotiation.  A U.S. foreign policy that is humble, he argues, will facilitate creating a worldwide alliance against nuclear terrorism. It will also help in acquiring the intelligence needed to cope with would be nuclear terrorists. (DKR) [WIN 19 July 2004]

The NUREMBERG INTERVIEWS: AN AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIST’S CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DEFENDANTS AND WITNESSES, Leon Goldensohn

   Goldensohn was a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to the Nuremberg trials in 1946. His experience with the Nazi war criminals was a kind of confirmation before the fact of what Hannah Arendt later called the banality of evil in her account of another Nazi criminal, Adolph Eichman.

   Goldensohn sought motivations in the defendants’ childhoods for their monstrous behavior as adults. He found little to go on, just as he found that most of them were ordinary people who had seized opportunities to improve their situation in the world. Few showed any repentance and tended to blame the failure of Hitler to deliver his thousand-year Reich on betrayal of Nazi ideals. (DKR) [WIN 16 August 2004]

OCCIDENTALISM: THE WEST IN THE EYES OF ITS ENEMIES, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit

   Gary Rosen, writing in Books of the Times on March 17, reminds us, as do the authors of this volume, that suicide attacks on American targets were carried out by young men who were hardly strangers to the West. University educated and relatively well to do, most of them were quite worldly, but that very worldliness led them to despise the United States, to see Americans as corrupters, comfort-loving cowards, spiritual eunuchs. Boarding the planes that they would turn into deadly missiles, they embraced the prospect of martyrdom in a holy cause.

   But these particular suicide pilots were kamikazes, what the Japanese called Tokkotai, or special attack forces, writes Rosen who is managing editor of the monthly Commentary.  For Buruma and Margalit, the parallels with 9/11 are not accidental. As they see it, imperial Japan and al-Qaeda are variations on one historically tenacious, deeply anti-liberal theme. Occidentalism, as they call it, is not a full-blown ideology but rather a cluster of prejudices: a way of demonizing and inciting violence against the bourgeois West. It is the shared parlance of Maoists and Nazis, Baathists and the Khmer Rouge, 19th-century Slavophiles and today's jihadis. And paradoxically, it too, they argue, is a creature of the West, the bastard child of Enlightenment rationalism and freedom.

   Buruma, who is a distinguished observer of Asia, and Margalit, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trace the often surprising pathways by which exposure to the West has been transformed into hatred of Western societies. The most valuable contribution Occidentalism makes, however, is to set out in detail its ugly lexicon. As the authors show, the fiercest opponents of bourgeois democracy have diverged much more in the alternatives they propose -- rule by the Volk, the vanguard, the community of true believers -- than in the images and metaphors they use to describe their common enemy. To the Occidentalist imagination, the modern West comes to life as a collection of weak, complacent merchants, slaves to comfort who know nothing of self-sacrifice; or as a cold, mechanical, ruthlessly efficient mind, crushing every higher ideal in the name of commercial and technological advance. In the eyes of the Occidentalist, the modern West is a problem whose only remedy lies in the redemptive power of revolutionary violence.

   Rose finds Occidentalism fails to draw any serious practical conclusion from its tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. Buruma and Margalit's portrait of the West's enemies, they insist, is not meant to serve as ammunition in a global war against terrorism. What is so glaringly absent from this work, says Rosen, is any notion of how our Western ideas, if not our arms, might be used to counter the violence and propaganda of the Occidentalists. [WIN 29 March 2004]

OKHRANA: The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police, Ben Fisher

ONCE AN EAGLE, Anton Myrer

OPERATION HOLLYWOOD: HOW THE PENTAGON SHAPES AND CENSORS THE MOVIES, David L. Robb

   Robb explores the conflicts between filmmakers and the Pentagon when the military are asked to provide everything from locations to Black Hawk helicopters.  He relates how in "Top Gun", Tom Cruise was not allowed to have a love interest in an enlisted woman; she was changed into a civilian. The Marine Corps obliged producers to cut a scene from "Windtalkers" that showed a leatherneck prying gold teeth out of dead Japanese. In "The Perfect Storm," the crew of a sinking boat is rescued by the Air National Guard, not the Coast Guard as happens in real life. Robb reports that the Pentagon even went so far as to have military elements written into the Disney television series, The Mickey Mouse Club. The intention, it seems, was to get kids to want to join up when they grew up. Does Hollywood have to make such deals? Robb points out that "Forrest Gump," "An Officer and a Gentleman," and "Platoon" were all made without military assistance. [WIN 12 April 2004]

OPERATIVES, SPIES, AND SABOTEURS: THE UNKNOWN HISTORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II’S OSS, Patrick K. O’Donnell

   There are been several books on the history of the OSS and the novel "Q-style" inventions used during covert operations, but O'Donnell does it here with great story-telling ability and a number of new insights, no doubt based on waves of files finally declassified in the past few years. From secret messages to exploding cigars, a slew of OSS operatives tell what it was like running missions before the era of high-tech: no satellites, cellphones, computers, or pure-as-snow operatives facing oversight at home. The good ol' days. Hardened criminals were recruited to black bag embassies, and the French who fled to North Africa and England were often brought into service. Women agents used womenly charms -- all of them -- to furtively obtain codes or mission plans while an exhausted lover slept, and these women were rewarded minus the double-standard tsk-tsk of today. There was wooden-leg encumbered Virginia Hall, who arranged constant sabotage missions against the Gestapo, to the seductress "Cynthia" using sabotage of another sort. Psyops against the Germans spread rumors of disease, defeat, and desperation. O'Donnell wraps it up with a chapter on the unusual weapons -- including umbrella pistols and exploding baseballs. [WIN 16 February 2004]

ORPHANS OF THE COLD WAR: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival, John Knaus

OSAMA: THE MAKING OF A TERRORIST, Jonathan Randal

   Randal is an astute journalist with long experience of the Middle East. His earlier work, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? (1999) is a powerful account of the travails of the Iraqi Kurds and an important source for understanding the present situation in Iraq. In his new study, he places the Qa’ida leader in the context of events in the Islamic world that he records with a sharp eye.  Among other things, Randal sets out the blowback from Clinton’s bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan that failed to kill UBL and resulted in many Muslims believing Allah had protected him, thus greatly enhancing his reputation. (DKR) [WIN 26 July 2004]

OVERCONFIDENCE AND WAR: THE HAVOC AND GLORY OF POSITIVE ILLUSIONS, Dominic Johnson

   Johnson, a member of Princeton’s Society of Fellows, asks, “Does a human tendency toward overconfidence lead us into wars when a more realistic assessment might keep the peace?” His answer is, more often than not, yes.

   Johnson sees this overconfidence as coming out of humankind’s evolutionary past and finds it to be an integral part of the human psyche. In a chapter that takes up the Iraq war, he finds it was the result of that overconfidence. (DKR) [WIN 20 September 2004]

OVERWORLD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A RELUCTANT SPY, Larry Kolb

   It would be easy to take Kolb's story as fiction in which only the names are real, names such as Muhammad Ali and Daniel Ortega. Kolb, however, is said really to be wanted in India in connection with a plot against a former prime minister. It lends credibility to his narration of international intrigue.

   Kolb tells us he is the son of a Cold War intel operative and grew up in Japan and Germany before being recruited by the famed Miles Copeland. After recounting how he was trained in spycraft, he goes on to relate many an amazing tale. Don't wait for sources to confirm, just read and enjoy. (DKR) [WIN 27 September 2004]

PARANOIA, Joe Finder

   (Now available in Audio --- Read by Jason Priestly, Audio Renaissance, abridged, four CDs, 5 hours, $29.95). Priestley reads the work in a gruff and cocky voice better suited to another kind of tale than this one of corporate espionage. Nevertheless, the listener will hear a good yarn about how a low-level minion at a telecom giant is blackmailed into being a mole inside his company’s biggest competitor. He takes on the task after appropriating unauthorized funds to give an old friend a retirement party. Once in place at the competitor, Adam Cassidy comes to have great respect for the corporation’s founder, leaving him a divided soul.  Priestley’s voice sounds the right age for the 26-year-old Cassidy, but fails to match the fast pace of Finder’s writing and fails to get across the tone of a small guy who has been put through the mill. Fortunately, Paranoia should be available in print from your bookstore. (Elizabeth B., DKR) [WIN 26 April 2004]

PARTNERS AT THE CREATION: THE MEN BEHIND POSTWAR GERMANY’S DEFENSE AND INTELLIGENCE ESTABLISHMENTS, James H. Critchfield

   This book offers a behind-the-scenes account of how a handful of former members of the German Army General Staff, under the watchful eye of Critchfield and others in U.S. Intelligence, planned a German postwar national security system.  Known as "Mr. Marshall," Critchfield was the career CIA operations officer in charge of the secret compound in Bavaria Germany, where Reinhard Gehlen and Adolf Heusinger worked with their staffs to put in place a new intelligence and defense apparatus.  Critchfield's gripping eight-year chronicle of creating these organizations, as Germany moved from enemy to ally, exposes readers to a new perspective on postwar development. [WIN 24 September 2003]

PATTERNS OF GLOBAL TERRORISM

The PENTAGON’S NEW MAP: WAR AND PEACE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, Thomas P.M. Barnett

   Barnett, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, argues in his forthcoming work that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the model of war between nation states that developed in the centuries following the Thirty Year War, ended by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The present century, he believes, will see the states of the world falling into one of two categories. One is a “Functioning Core” of economically developed, politically stable states integrated into global systems, The other is a “Non-Integrating Gap” comprised of Andean South America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and much of southwest Asia. Threats to international security are most likely to come out of the “gap” until, if and when, they become part of the core that has been integrated by globalism.  So Barnett proposes that the U.S. armed force be divided into two parts: one to conduct quick strikes to suppress hostile governments and non-government entities. The other part would be responsible for helping the “gap” countries make it into the “core,” something that seems very like “national building.” Doubtless the situation the coalition now confronts in Iraq would have been happier had the latter type of force been available and on the ground there in adequate numbers.

   Barnett does not believe his proposal implies making the United States’ a global policeman or creating an American empire. Rather the use of military power in the ways he suggests would merely reflect the role of the United States as the promoter of globalism and a concomitant need to prevent instability. To some such reasoning will seem precisely a justification for an American imperium. Be that as it may, Barnett’s globalism, which is rooted in free trade and a belief in the power of reasonable concern for material prosperity and stability, ignores the turbulent, hate-driven religious-nationalist sentiments that are currently the chief source of danger to the interests of the United States and other members of the “core.” [WIN 5 April 2004]

The PENTUM MISSION, Joe Fontana

PIERCING THE VEIL OF SECRECY, Janine M. Brookner

   Janine M. Brookner (Carolina Academic Press), discusses the obstacles she says CIA employees face in pursuing cases against an agency where personnel records are classified. Ms. Brookner, who once had (and won) her own legal dispute with CIA, argues that CIA and other intelligence agencies hold an unfair legal advantage in workplace disputes. Lawyers representing employees must obtain security clearances to read and discuss personnel files and related documents. But they must receive those clearances from the CIA -- giving the agency inordinate control over the lawyers representing their employees. [WIN 24 February 2004]

PHOENIX AND THE BIRDS OF PREY: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong, Mark Moyar

PHOTO FAKERY: A History of Deception and Manipulation, Dino Brugioni

PLAN OF ATTACK, Bob Woodward

   Woodward, the veteran Washington Post assistant managing editor, gives the reader a remarkable, step by step account of the run up to the war in Iraq. Woodward, sometimes perturbing, reports how planning for the war began in November 2001 in the wake of 9/11.  

                Bush, Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz, Woodward tells us, believed in an American mission to export democracy and to have the world see America as a strong and determined power. Colin Powell emerges as a pragmatic, warning voice among what Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff at State, has dismissively called utopians.

                Woodward, who conducted exhaustive research in writing this book, gives a chilling account of the CIA relying on faulty information on Iraq’s WMD and its manipulation of questionable intelligence to make the case for war. Plan of Action, understandably, reached the top of the best-seller list. (DKR) [WIN 17 May 2004]

POWER, TERROR, PEACE, AND WAR: AMERICA’S GRAND STRATEGY IN A WORLD AT RISK, Walter Russell Mead

   Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes that unrestrained global capitalism and a more robust American imperium are inevitable. In his book, to be published later this month, Mead supports unilateralism and pre-emptive war, but also calls for greater attention to be given to the “sticky,” “sweet” and hegemonic aspects of American power in the war on terrorism. These terms are Mead’s development of Joseph Nye’s concept of hard and soft power.  Mead divides hard power into two

categories: sharp, that is military, and sticky or economic power. Soft power divides between sweet or cultural influence and hegemonic, the totality of the United States’ agenda-setting power. In making his case, Mead provides useful insights into changes that distinguish the recent past from the likely future.  Referring to the automobile magnate, he writes of a “Fordist” bureaucratic welfare state in the last century and in this one individualistic “millennial capitalism,” rooted in Jacksonian rebellion against the professional classes that have administered American from the New Deal on. As always, Mead is at the very least intellectually stimulating. [WIN 12 April 2004]

A PRETEXT FOR WAR: 9/11, IRAQ, AND THE ABUSE OF AMERICA’S INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES, James Bamford

   WIN readers will know Bamford as the author of two well-received works, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, that dealt with the NSA. In A Pretext for War he is once again concerned with the NSA as well as other parts of the Intelligence Community.

   Bamford shows in meticulous detail and with fresh insights how 9/11 aircraft were hijacked, along with the failure to check al-Qa’ida's operation. Along the way, Bamford makes clear how unprepared and ill equipped the U.S. defense systems were to cope with attacks.  An example of these unhappy conditions noted by Bamford was that DCI Tenet did not learn of the 9/11 attacks until the second aircraft had slammed into the World Trade Center.

   Many readers are likely to find that the gravamen of this book comes in its last part. There, Bamford delivers a harsh judgment on the handful of individuals who dominated Bush Administration’s policy on Iraq. Not surprisingly, they include Richard Perle, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Policy Feith. Neoconservatives all, Bamford charges them with manipulating the CIA, DIA and the NSA in their determination to find pretexts for overthrowing Saddam Husayn, something they began thinking about doing long before 9/11. Indeed, Bamford traces the origins of the Bush Administration’s policy on toppling Saddam back to a plan devised by Perle, Feith and a senior State department adviser, David Wormser, when they were advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the mid-1990s. Netanyahu rejected the plan.

   Bamford believes that Bush, who he makes clear he dislikes, was determined to pay back Saddam for the latter’s attempt to kill Bush's father and that this played a part in the decision to invade Iraq. The Administration’s absorption with Iraq, and its sympathies for Israel, blinded it, Bamford argues, to the rage in the Arab world over the Palestinians treatment at the hands of U.S.-backed Israel. That rage was further intensified by the invasion of Iraq and continues to undermine Washington’s position both with the Arab street and ‘friendly’ regional leaders, concerned about their ability to continue to keep their people under control. That is a situation most glaringly obvious at the moment in Saudi Arabia and, beyond the Arab world, in Pakistan. (DKR) [WIN 14 June 2004]

PSYCHOLOGY OF INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS, Richards J. Heuer, Jr.

The PUPPET MASTERS: SPIES, TRAITORS AND THE REAL FORCES BEHIND WORLD EVENTS, John Hughes-Wilson

   When Col. Hughes-Wilson, then a captain in a British infantry regiment, was posted to the Intelligence Corps, he wanted to read a general history of the role of intelligence in warfare, but could not find one. So, now retired, he has written one.

    He opens with the story, from Herodotus, of Histiaeus, an Ionian prince, held captive by the Persians, who tattooed a message on a slave’s scalp, let the slave’s hair grow, and then sent him to Ionia with the verbal message that his head was to be shaved again. The result was a major war.

    He goes on to show how George Washington used deception as deftly as Churchill’s staff did in the war against Hitler. Napoleon would claim his strategic insight brought him victories that in fact were the result of work by his intelligence staff.  Then there was Julius Silber, at ease in both English and German. Employed by the postal censorship in London for most of the First World War, he regularly passed information to Germany, covered by

his own ‘Passed by Censor’ stamp. He was never detected.  

  Taking up the present, Hughes-Wilson explores how current Western intelligence efforts have developed. (DKR) [WIN 26 July 2004]

RAID OF THE SUN: INSIDE ISRAEL’S SECRET CAMPAIGN THAT DENIED SADDAM THE BOMB, Roger W. Claire

   Twenty years ago, eight American-trained Israeli pilots set off on a mission that seemed suicidal: fly 1000K below radar, take out Saddam’s nuclear reactor, and fly back – all on one tank of fuel. They made it, and now Claire gives the full, white-knuckle story. [WIN 30 September 2003]

RAIDERS OF THE CHINA COAST: CIA Covert Operations During the Korean War, Frank Holober

The READER OF GENTLEMAN’S MAIL: HERBERT O. YARDLEY AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN CODEBREAKING, David Kahn

   At the time of World War I when governments were increasingly transmitting message by radio, Herbert Yardley set up and ran the first U.S. agency to intercept foreign messages and break codes. By the time he died in 1958, aged 69, Yardley had made a good number of enemies but left an influential legacy of intelligence gathering. In David Kahn, a well-known intelligence scholar, Yardley has found first biographer. Kahn considers his subject, "the most colorful and controversial figure in American intelligence."

   Yardley came to Washington in 1914 from the Midwest to become a clerk at the State Department and so was introduced to diplomatic cables and codes.  Wondering why the United States did not have an agency of its own to read and decipher foreign messages, he set out to become a cryptographer. In April 1917, he persuaded the U.S. Army to set up such an agency and was given a commission, eventually attaining the rank of major. At the age of 28, he was running MI-8, the section of military intelligence that dealt with cryptography.

   At the end of the war, Yardley next persuaded the Army, and the State Department, to support a permanent Cipher Bureau that came to be known as the American Black Chamber. In 1929, however, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson uttered his famous words, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail" and closed down the bureau. Out of a job and with his income from property dealing dried up by the Depression, Yardley wrote a book to make some money.

   As well as his personal experience, he drew on numerous documents he had retained illegally and when The American Black Chamber, as the book was titled, appeared in 1931, it created a sensation. In the years that followed, he sold "Yardleygrams" to magazines, wrote pulp spy fiction, made and marketed secret ink, had a radio show and spent time in Hollywood, ran a restaurant in Washington and was hired as a codebreaker by China and Canada.

   The year before he died, he brought out another book, The Education of a Poker Player. It is considered a classic of its kind.  Yardley was accused of treason, which he hotly denied. Indeed he was not a traitor, he did not sell secrets. But he did betray the government's trust by publishing The American Black Chamber. (Washington Post, DKR) [WIN 26 January 2004]

RECENT ESPIONAGE CASES: Summaries and Sources

RED: MCCARTHYISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, Ted Morgan

   Post WWII hysteria actually began in aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, says Morgan. With the Palmer raids in 1919, the American struggle against communism began in earnest, through the Dies Committee in the 1930s, and HUAAC post-WWII. Hoover carried it forward in the 1960s and 1970s at FBI.  Morgan warns that Ashcroft might be introducing another round of McCarthyism through our war on Islamic terrorism. Or is this more from those who want security, but no locks on any of the doors?  Probably the latter. [WIN 5 December 2003]

RUMSFELD’S WAR: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA’S ANTI-TERRORIST COMMANDER, Rowan Scarborough

   If there were an official Donald H. Rumsfeld Admiration Society, Scarborough would be a leading candidate for its president. The Washington Times Pentagon reporter has written a paean to the Secretary of Defense that all but paints a big “S” on his chest. To Scarborough’s credit, though, he makes his opinion immediately clear: “History will surely judge [Rumsfeld] one of America’s most important defense leaders,” he writes in the introduction. Nevertheless, Scarborough casts a revealing eye on “Rummy’s” campaign to make the Pentagon heel to his foreign policies. The book is full of juicy tidbits -- most of them in the first two chapters -- gleaned from classified documents. For instance, a full six months before asking the United Nations to endorse the use of force in Iraq, Scarborough writes, President Bush signed a secret National Security Directive establishing the goals and objectives for going to war with the country. Scarborough also relates how a top secret military unit code-named “Grey Fox” contributed to the assassination of Al Qaeda planner Qaed Senyan al Harthi by turning on his satellite phone without his knowledge and exposing his position in a convoy speeding across the Yemini desert.  Other anecdotes serve to emphasize Rumsfeld’s “preference for military, special forces solutions to law enforcement scenarios.” A later chapter is devoted to his skills as a manager. “In assessing Rumsfeld, clichés work,” Scarborough writes. “His life is an ‘all-American story.’ He does not ‘suffer fools gladly.’ And, Donald H. Rumsfeld is ‘the right man at the right time.’” Readers already convinced of Rumsfeld’s talents as a leader will enjoy this enthusiastic book, but those looking for a balanced assessment of the Defense Secretary’s job performance may prefer James Mann’s level-headed study The Rise of the Vulcans. [WIN 17 March 2004]

THE SAVAGE WARS OF PEACE: SMALL WARS AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN POWER, Max Boot

   This is an eminently readable survey of America's small wars, an almost incessant enterprise from the Revolution onward (putting to rest the notion of a democracy as non-violent or inherently peaceful), written by Wall Street Journal editor Boot. As the merits and limitations of the US taking on the role of an imperial police force are increasingly debated, it is useful to recall that this is not the first time America has attempted to do so. Interestingly, the US marines were the service of choice for the great majority of these conflicts. (It resulted in a USMC "Small Wars Manual" published in 1941, that might have been usefully read in Vietnam and still applicable.) Boot covers both the successes and some of the darker aspects (charges of war crimes, use of torture to extract information, and troop mutinies). What makes the book timely are the tie-ins the author provides between wars of the past and the realities of the present.  Issues such as exit strategies, expected casualties, the difficulties of working with local allies, and the complexities of state building, are not things the US is facing for the first time. Well written, timely and provocative, and well worth reading. [WIN 18 July 2003]

SECRECY, Daniel Patrick Moynihan

SECRET COMMANDOS: BEHIND ENEMY LINES WITH THE ELITE WARRIORS OF THE SOG, John L. Plaster

   Plaster has written a powerful memoir of the Studies and Observations Group, a Green Beret unit specializing in secret reconnaissance forays into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. He recalls his own and his comrades’ exploits leading eight-man teams of local people behind North Vietnamese lines to scout, sabotage transport, and take prisoners along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

   The book is full of stirring war stories and, away from hostile territory, lively accounts of the commandos hard-partying and their solidarity against more decorous officers. Nor does Plaster omit the somber mourning rituals for comrades killed in action. In fact, SOG reconnaissance teams were often enough found and attacked by the North Vietnamese with little to show for their efforts and the casualties they took. (DKR) [WIN 10 May 2004]

The SECRET WAR AGAINST HANOI: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam, Richard H. Shultz, Jr.

The SECRET WIRELESS WAR: THE STORY OF MI6 COMMUNICATIONS 1939-1945, Geoffrey Pidgeon

   Geoffrey Pidgeon tells the story of MI6 Section VIII, the communications division of the Secret Intelligence Service, set up in 1938, only a year before World War II began. No British radio traffic was more important during the war than that handled by Section VIII, headed by Brig. Richard Gambier-Parry.

   Pidgeon, a participant in the wireless activities he describes, recounts the work of agents in British embassies and German occupied territories and includes and account of Winston Churchill’s personal wireless operation as well as an Afrika Corps soldier operating an Enigma machines at Field Marshal Rommel’s headquarters in the desert.  Other accounts concern the ‘Black Propaganda’ beamed to the enemy and how ULTRA military traffic was deliver to Allied commanders in the field who included Montgomery, Patton, Bradley, Spaatz, and others.

   Personal tales by those who were part of this most secret of units abound in the book. The technical side of the operation is dealt with without being allowed to dominate this book that Nigel West --a highly regarded specialist in British intelligence services and author of books on MI6, MI5 and GCHQ-- calls The Secret Wireless War a splendid publication that has impressively assembled information about Section VIII. "It really is a very important contribution to the literature and gave me great pleasure when reading it," says West. [WIN 26 April 2004]

SECURITY STUDIES FOR THE 21st CENTURY, edited by Richard Shultz

SEPARATED AT BIRTH: HOW NORTH KOREA BECAME THE EVIL TWIN, Gordon Cucullu

   Cucully, a former Pentagon official and Fox News commentator, is more interested in the good twin, South Korea, than the bad twin to the north, although he lists its interminable offenses to its neighbors and its own people.  So he gives over much of this book to a critical evaluation of the south, particularly during the Park dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s.

   This was the period in which the state-directed economic development of a capitalist system turned South Korea into one of the Asian tigers and at the same time, he believes, prepared the way for the country’s present democratic system. He makes no secret of what he considers Jimmy Carter’s inept carping about Seoul’s human rights record and Carter’s conduct on a ‘peace mission’ to Pyongyang in 1994. (DKR) [WIN 13 September 2004]

SILENT RUNNING: My Years on a World War II Attack Submarine, James F. Calvert (VADM, USN ret)