Norman Polmar

 

Polmar, Norman. "American Spy Ships." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 129, no. 10 (Oct. 2003): 117-118.

This is an excellent quick look at specialized U.S. intelligence ships, utilized by both NSA and the Navy from 1961 until after the Pueblo incident in 1968.

[NSA/Thru80s; MI/Navy/To90s]

Polmar, Norman. "The ASDS Is Sailing Rough Seas." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 132, no. 1 (Jan. 2006): 88-89.

On 30 November 2005, the U.S. Special Operations Command announced that it was cancelling "plans to acquire a fleet" of the Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) submersibles. The sole ASDS, delivered to the Navy in 2003, has been plagued with troubles throughout its trials. At present, "there is no schedule for the construction of additional submersibles."

[MI/Navy/00s; MI/SpecOps/00s]

Polmar, Norman. "'Here's Looking at You, Boris.'" U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 121, no. 12 (Dec. 1995): 87-88.

Polmar, Norman. Spyplane: The U-2 History Declassified. Osceola, WI: MBI, 2001.

Bath, NIPQ 17.4, sees this as "an exhausively detailed history of the U-2 in all its variants." The "remarkable record" of this aircraft is "well-served" by Polmar's "in-depth study."

[Recon/Planes]

Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen. "Decade of the Spy." U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 115, no. 5 (1989): 104-109.

See Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar, Merchants of Treason: America's Secrets for Sale (New York: Delacorte, 1988).

[SpyCases/U.S./Gen][c]

Polmar, Norman, and Thomas B. Allen. Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage. New York: Random House, 1997. London: Greenhill Books, 1997. Rev. ed. 1998. 2d ed. New York: Random House, 2004.

"Spy Book seeks to describe spies, their tradecraft, the agencies they work for, and the acts of espionage that they have performed. In the almost 4,000 years since the first mention of spies in the Old Testament, many thousands of men and women have spied and worked at breaking into others' communications; many thousands of spymasters and case officers have directed their efforts; and scores of intelligence agencies have served dozens of countries. From this multitude we have chosen those we believe have had the most influence on world events, as well as those we felt were the most interesting." (xi)

Click for a full-length REVIEW of Polmar and Allen.

Bates, NIPQ, Spring 1997, calls Spy Book "a fine addition to ... reference texts on intelligence." The "ample cross-references ... reduce redundancy and still make it possible for a researcher to get a complete story." He notes, however, that attempting a work of this type has its pitfalls, since "any intelligence professional can go to entries of his or her particular area of expertise and find things which, in their view, are incomplete or questionable."

To Kruh, Cryptologia 21.3, Spy Book is "a valuable reference work ... [that] will also provide hours of pleasurable browsing and learning." Jonkers, AIJ 17.1/2, believes that the work will prove "[u]seful for researchers and students."

Watt, I&NS 12.4, declares that Spy Book "is an excellent encyclopedia -- as far as it goes. But it reflects a narrow view and a narrow coverage of the sources available, and one which is particular to the United States." This view is shared by the reviewer for Newsletter 5.2 (International Intelligence History Study Group, at http://intelligence-history.wiso.uni-erlangen.de/newsletter.htm), who finds that the "selection of individuals to some extent concentrates on Anglo-American intelligence experts and uncovered spies for the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, as well as on the many defectors from both sides, and the European countries are a bit neglected."

For Price, Sea Power, Nov. 1998, Spy Book is "a thoroughly researched, authoritative, and well-written resource on espionage." He notes that the 1998 edition "includes information about the most recent spies to make the headlines."

Peake, NWCR, Winter 2000, finds that "[i]n most cases [the authors] have filtered out the fiction while presenting the material in a very reader-friendly format." Absent from the work are any mentions of "information warfare or of the problems that e-mail and the World Wide Web have created for counterintelligence." And Peake points to a number of errors, including an inaccurate reference to The Penkovsky Papers as black propaganda.

"[A] necessary source book for anyone who writes on intelligence" is how Goulden, Washington Times, 31 Oct. 2004, describes an expanded paperback edition of the earlier version of this work. "The reissue gave the authors an opportunity to clean up a handful of glitches that marred their earlier work."

Commenting on the second edition, Peake, Studies 49, no. 1 (2005), says that with the corrections made in this edition, Spy Book is "the most accurate" of the various encyclopedias of espionage. However, "[a] number of errors remain uncorrected and one should be cautious if detail is important to one's task.... [I]n the absence of a documented casebook on intelligence, Polmar and Allen have provided the next best thing."

[RefMats/Encyclopedias/Gen][c]

Polmar, Norman, and John D. Gresham. DEFCON 2. New York: Wiley 2006.

Brooks, NIPQ 22.2 (Apr. 2006), finds that this work "provides significantly more detail" on the Cuban Missile Crisis "than any existing books on the subject."

For Brenner, Proceedings (Oct. 2006), the authors' evidence "points to the conclusion that we avoided a calamity in 1962 by luck." The book provides "a detailed military analysis of the missile crisis in the context of the Cold War." It also offers "sophisticated political analyses, which tend to avoid simplistic characterizations." However, there are "several small errors which taken together mar" the book's reliability.

[GenPostwar/60s/Cuba]

Polmar, Norman, Mark Warren, and Eric Wertheim. Dictionary of Military Abbreviations. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994.

Kruh, Cryptologia 19.1, comments that this dictionary "will benefit anyone bewildered by the widespread use of acronyms in military ... publications."

[MI/Refs; RefMats/Dicts]

 

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