OVERVIEWS

United States

1990s

M - Z

Macartney, John.

1. "Intelligence: A Consumer's Guide." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 2, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 457-486.

Macartney emphasizes military intelligence and Defense Department consumers.

2. Intelligence: What It Is and How To Use It. McLean, VA: AFIO, 1991.

Surveillant 1.5: "More has been carefully poured into these 42 pages than would seem possible."

Martin, Fredrick Thomas. Top Secret INTRANET: How U.S. Intelligence Built INTELINK -- The World's Largest, Most Secure Network. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.

A Web Site for this work, which includes an abstract and the Table of Contents, is located at http://www.topsecretnet.com/ (last accessed 1/3/06).

From "Abstract": "The U.S. intelligence community has built one awesome intranet. 'Intelink' integrates and disseminates virtually every piece of information that goes into intelligence gathering, reporting, and analysis at the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, FBI, and eight other top secret agencies to their 'customers' -- from the White House to the Warfighter. It's just about as secure as intranets can be."

A number of case studies are used to illustrate the implementation of INTELINK: Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific (JICPAC), Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), National Security Agency (NSA), Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), and National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).

Kruh, Cryptologia 24.1, notes that the CD-ROM that comes with the book includes "actual Intelink pages, tools, and software."

Miller, Nathan. Spying for America: The Hidden History of U.S. Intelligence. New York: Paragon House, 1989. New York: Dell, 1990. [pb]

Surveillant 1.3 calls Spying for America a "lively history of U.S. intelligence operations ... [which] raises important ethical and legal questions." On the other hand, Naftali, I&NS 6.1, finds the book "disappointing" in that "there is no evidence that Miller makes any serious use of primary documents" and, by omitting too many "noteworthy cases," the book "fails to provide even a simple overview of important American special operations."

For Johnson, IJI&C 4.1, this book is a "useful contribution ... surveying the evolution of American intelligence from the days of the Revolutionary War to the contemporary era." Although "many of the 'revelations' in Miller's book [are] old hat" and "academicians will wish for more extensive documentation," the book is "well written and ... reaches sensible conclusions about modern intelligence."

Jeffreys-Jones, I&NS 6.4, finds "occasional oversights" in Miller's references, but adds that the work "is the best bibliographic guide in its field."

National Security Archive. U.S. Espionage and Intelligence: Organization, Operations, and Management, 1947-1996. Washington, DC: 1997. [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/ie/index.html]

This site describes a collection of documents for sale by the National Security Archive. Quoting from the site:

"U.S. Espionage and Intelligence: Organization, Operations, and Management, 1947-1996 publishes together ... recent unclassified and newly declassified documents pertaining to the organizational structure, operations, and management of the U.S. intelligence community over the last fifty years.... This set reproduces on microfiche 1,174 organizational histories, memoranda, manuals, regulations, directives, reports, and studies, representing over 36,102 pages of documents from the Office of the Director of Central Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, military service intelligence organizations, National Security Council and other organizations."

The complete microfiche document set, including Guide and Index, is $4,200. The Guide and Index alone are $900.

O'Toole, George J.A. Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, and Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991. 1992. [pb]

Clark Comment: Honorable Treachery covers from the American Revolution to 1962. The book reads well and presents its subject matter in an informed fashion. Used in a classroom setting, students should find it "user friendly."

To Hood, IJI&C 5.3, Honorable Treachery is the "best-documented and most comprehensive history of American intelligence yet written." Similarly, the MI 19.1 reviewer sees it as "an excellent starting point for further historical studies." It is the "best one-volume account of the evolution of American intelligence."

Bates, NIPQ 9.2, believes Honorable Treachery "would be a good text for intelligence or American history studies." However, because O'Toole "uses only secondary sources," his work "suffers from the inaccuracies of these sources.... His history is even-handed to January of 1946 and the creation of the Central Intelligence Group. After that, precious little is said about the rest of the intelligence community."

For Farwell, WPNWE, 23-29 Mar. 1992, the work is a "splendidly written, impeccably researched, and perfectly fascinating history" of American intelligence, while Surveillant 2.2 enthuses that this is a "magnificent, detailed review" that is "[h]ighly recommended."

A Choice, May 1992, reviewer comments that O'Toole gives a "good overview of popular sources, but he does not attempt to survey in depth the resources or scholarship for any period of intelligence history."

Booth, I&NS 8.2, says the author provides "almost too much detail" and the "importance of many spies and their exploits recounted ... is questionable.... Chapters 13 ... and 16 ... recount episodes of seemingly little importance in excessive detail." Although there is a "good deal of new information and insight," Honorable Treachery is "at best a stunted history ... [as it] carries the narrative only down to 1962." There is a "curious lack of perspective in his treatment of some of the more controversial aspects of the CIA's record.... Angleton ... merits only two brief sentences." Nevertheless, this book is the "product of exhaustive research and evocative writing."

Richelson, Jeffrey T. The U.S. Intelligence Community. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1985. [pb] 2d ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. 3d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. 5th rev. ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2007.

Clark Comment: This work is used in several intelligence or intelligence-related courses at U.S. colleges and universities. (See Fontaine, Teaching Intelligence in the 1990s.) When looking for a "nuts-and-bolts," organization-oriented text for an intelligence course, the choice is really between Richelson and Mark Lowenthal's U.S. Intelligence: Evolution and Anatomy (2d ed., 1992). The former is richer in detail, but the latter provides a better outline for teaching.

With regard to the third edition, Proceedings, Oct. 1995, suggests that this book "might be considered an order of battle of the U.S. intelligence community, in which the missions and organizational structures of its various components are described. Included are the more familiar organizations ... as well as the lesser-known components."

Friedman, Parameters, Summer 1997, agrees, noting that Richelson's work is "worth having as a reference even though some of the information was ... out of date even before the volume was printed.... [W]hile Richelson's approach may contain some errors, it nevertheless provides the user with a comprehensive overview of the topic. The author's bibliographic and specific notes will remain useful until the next revision."

Slightly less satisfied is Lowenthal, who comments that the author "is a dogged but somewhat indiscriminate researcher, when greater selectivity of sources might be useful."

Commenting on the fifth edition, Aftergood, Secrecy News (from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy), 13 Aug. 2007, says: "When I encounter an unfamiliar intelligence term, an odd acronym or a reference to an obscure office somewhere in the bowels of U.S. intelligence, I find that Richelson's book more often than not -- more often than Google -- provides the explanation and the needed background, typically with a footnote to an official source."

Peake, Studies 51.4 (2007), comments that this book "is mainly a descriptive rather than a critical account of operations and organizations, though the final chapter does discuss 'issues concerning recent intelligence performance.' ... Overall, the fifth edition of The US Intelligence Community is well organized and written to make a complex topic understandable. It is a valuable reference work."

Sherr, James. "Cultures of Spying." National Interest, Winter 1994/95, 56-62.

This potpourri gets off to a bad start, when the author states that "[d]uring the Second World War, the CIA's precursor, the OSS, mounted a vast cryptographic effort against Germany and Japan." This reader almost gave up on the article at this point. Nonetheless, Sherr makes several interesting observations, connected loosely by the argument that America needs to reexamine its cultural assumptions. One such observation is that Americans have "too much complacency in the view that technology, the weapon of the rich, will always prevail against resourcefulness and guile, the weapons of the poor."

Smith, Bradley F. "The American Road to Central Intelligence." Intelligence and National Security 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 1-20.

Smith sweeps through the ups and downs of U.S. intelligence from 1861 to 1942. With the establishment of OSS in June 1942 and the development of British-American intelligence cooperation over the following year, the United States had "a large and sophisticated intelligence system comparable to that of the other great powers."

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Consumer's Guide to Intelligence. Washington, DC: 1993. 1994.

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