GENERAL POST-WORLD WAR II

1960s

Generally

Alsop, Joseph W., with Adam Platt. "I've Seen the Best of It": Memoirs. New York: Norton, 1992.

Surveillant 2.4: The author "knew what CIA was up to in many places ... and had close ties to many senior figures in CIA in its early days.... The book's principal weakness lies in the author's too golden view of the Kennedy administration." Alsop includes a section on "CIA relations with press." See also, Yoder, Jr., Joe Alsop's Cold War (1995).

Alsop, Stewart. The Center: People and Power in Political Washington. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Petersen: "Useful information on intelligence officials and episodes."

Alsop, Stewart. "CIA, the Battle for Secret Power." Saturday Evening Post, 27 Jul. 1963, 17-21. [Petersen]

Blumenfeld, Yorick F. "Intelligence for Security." Editorial Research Reports, 28 Dec. 1961, 937-954. [Petersen]

Bradlee, Ben C. Conversations with Kennedy. New York: Norton, 1975.

Clark comment: Yes, presidents do discuss covert activities with uncleared friends. However, the stories touched on here are anecdotal in nature and do not significantly expand our knowledge of the events discussed.

Bundy, William. A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Administration. New York: Hill and Wang, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

Falk, Stanley L. The National Security Structure. Washington, DC: Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1967.

Fauth, James J. "Adversary Agent Radios." Studies in Intelligence 10, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 57-67.

Available samples of Communist bloc agent radios "range from crude, handmade, manually keyed transmitters to top-quality production-line automatic high-speed equipment... There is ... a real technical cleavage between the Eastern [Chinese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese] and Western Communist services corresponding to the discrepancy between the respective national technologies." Among the Europen Communist countries, "Bulgarian and to a degree Polish agent radios ... show an almost elementary approach to design and a handmade qualiy in thier fabrication."

Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Roberge, I&NS 17.4, calls this "the most insightful work yet produced on US national security policy during the early 1960s." However, the author's "detached style takes some of the drama out of the story."

Hadley, Arthur T. "Complex Query: What Makes a Good Spy?" New York Times Magazine, 29 May 1960, 12, 43-44.

Hanrahan, James. "Intelligence for the Policy Chiefs." Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 1-12.

Helms, Richard. "Intelligence in American Society." Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 3 (Summer 1967): 1-16.

Hersh, Burton. Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007.

Goulden, Washington Times, 23 Sep. 2007, finds that this book "does a serious disservice to history (and the truth)." The author has produced "a nose-holder of a book"; it is "laden with outlandish assertions.... Repeating nut stuff serves only to keep nonsense in circulation."

For Harter, Intelligencer 15.3 (Summer-Fall 2007), this is "a well-written hodgepdge, blending fact, rumor and innuendo." It "provides nothing new" about Hoover. Hersh "includes some mighty tell tales ... which stretch belief, and challenge common sense." Although it is "at times an interesting account," the author too often "allowed speculation to become fact; rumor and innuendo to masquerade as reality."

Hilsman, Roger. To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967. New York: Dell, 1968. [pb]

Abbot E. Smith, Studies 11.4 (Fall 1967), says that this "is an excellent book, well organized, well written, well worth reading.... There is a great deal about the CIA." Hilsman treats the CIA "fairly and judiciously.... He emphatically denies that the Agency is or was ... an Invisible Government." Pforzheimer finds that the parts of the book on President Kennedy and the CIA and the Cuban Missile Crisis "are of particular interest. Hilsman's comments are highly subjective and frequently very provocative and debatable."

Max Holland, "The Politics of Intelligence Postmortems: Cuba 1962-1963," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 20, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 426, argues that "Hilsman's position [at the time and in this book] was that of loyalty to the Kennedy administrarion rather than the facts."

Kochavi, Noam. "Washington's View of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1961-63: From Puzzle Prudence to Bold Experimentation." Intelligence and National Security 15, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 50-79.

Leary, William M.

1. "Robert Fulton's Skyhook and Operation Coldfeet." Studies in Intelligence 38, no. 5 (1995): 99-109.

Fulton's invention was a step beyond the modified mail-pickup system used for agent and other air-extraction operations. The system was developed under the auspices of Office of Naval Research (ONR). The operational target became an abandoned Soviet drift station, but a lack of funding led ONR to turn to the CIA for support. The drop of two men onto the drift was made on 26 May 1962, and extraction came on 2 June.

See also, John Cadwalader, "Operation Coldfeet: An Investigation of the Abandoned Soviet Arctic Drift Station NP 8," ONI Review 17 (Aug. 1962): 344-355.

2. And Leonard A. LeSchack. Project Coldfeet: Secret Mission to a Soviet Ice Station. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996.

According to Cutler, Proceedings, Dec. 1996, two U.S. intelligence officers were parachuted onto an abandoned Soviet ice station in 1962 to gather information on what the Soviets were up to and what they were capable of. This book is a "well-researched addition to the Naval Institute's Special Warfare series."

Bates, NIPQ, Spring 1997, finds the book to be more about U.S. and Soviet Arctic research than about intelligence. Nonetheless, the involvement of Intermountain Aviation, a CIA proprietary, in Project Coldfeet allows the author to introduce the story of two key Intermountain players and their involvement in a plan to rescue an imprisoned comrade in Indonesia.

To Van Nederveen, Aerospace Power Journal (Spring  2001), this work, "[w]ritten by a CIA historian and one of the mission’s participants,... mixes polar exploration, intelligence gathering, and exciting technological solutions to make a very readable account." The "entire development process and various tests carried out [of the Fulton Skyhook] are detailed in the book. This part alone makes for interesting and exciting reading."

Platt, Washington [BGEN/USA]. National Character in Action: Intelligence Factors in Foreign Relations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.

Pforzheimer: "Platt discusses both general concepts and specific cases" of the influence of national character in international relations.

Robarge, David S. "Getting It Right: CIA Analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War " Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (2005), 1-7.

Sometimes the intelligence process works "almost perfectly. On those occasions, most of the right information was collected in a timely fashion, analyzed with appropriate methodologies, and punctually disseminated in finished form to policymakers who were willing to read and heed it. Throughout those situations, the intelligence bureaucracies were responsive and cooperative," and the DCI "had access and influence downtown. One such example that can be publicly acknowledged" is the Six-Day War in 1967.

U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. Gen. ed., David S. Patterson. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968.

Yoder, Edwin M., Jr. Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Brinkley, WPNWE, 8-14 May 1995, says that "Yoder's engaging and perceptive book describes Alsop in his prime, from roughly the end of World War II to the early 1960s.... [I]t makes clear why Alsop was simultaneously so respected and so reviled -- and why he perhaps deserved to be both.... Alsop gravitated toward the famous and powerful and often failed to recognize the dissenting perspectives of less elite sources....

"Alsop was not a detached figure commenting on his time but an engaged activist working to defend the world he believed in.... Yoder is appropriately skeptical of Alsop's many flaws and eccentricities.... But this is an affectionate and admiring portrait nonetheless.... Yoder conveys both his strengths and weaknesses with the clear eyes of a good reporter and the sensitivity of a true friend."

Warren, Surveillant 4.4/5, concurs in this judgment, calling Joe Alsop's Cold War "a charming book about the distinctly uncharming Joe Alsop."

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