Agencies

Looking at the CIA, FBI, and the NSA, Smist examines how the relationship between these agencies and the Congress has evolved in the 1947-94 time period. A former CIA officer, Smist has insights into intelligence that only an A-list insider could hope to possess.

Reviewed by ERSKINE CHILDERS in International Relations, Volume XIII, No 1, April 1996

The United Nations Charter was not going to have any Preamble in the draft that emerged from the powers' discussions at Dumbarton Oaks. It was to begin in the stentorian language of the Covenant of the League of Nations: 'The High Contracting Parties ...'. Jan Smuts of South Africa and a few other UN founders urged a beginning with the world's peoples, but it was when a young American woman, Virginia Gildersleeve, got her hands on the draft that the peoples got their opening page (at least).
In the US Constitution from which Dean Gildersleeve drew her inspiration, the people establish their new government. In the Charter, 'We, the Peoples of the United Nations' were not allowed to do the equivalent. The Peoples make the marvellous ethical invocations and first statements of what the UN must do. Then in bold capitals the Peoples proclaim that they 'HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS' - but abruptly, as though some thoroughly alarmed diplomat was shooing them from halls hallowed for his ilk, the Peoples say that 'accordingly, our respective Governments ... do hereby establish the United Nations', and disappear. Article 71 does provide for consultations by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Otherwise the Peoples of the United Nations are not seen in the Charter.
The Conscience of the World is the first book I know of to trace, in such substance and meticulous detail, the story of NGO efforts to bring the Charter's waiting words into practical working life. I had the privilege of working in the NGO community in various countries during the UN's first 20 years, then trying to build UN-system bridges with NGOs from within as a UN civil servant for the next 23, and I can vouch for many of the analyses and insights in this extremely valuable book.
After a good Introduction by Editor Peter Willetts, a retrospect from the Congress of Vienna to the founding of the UN by Bill Seary is followed by a masterly overview of NGO Consultative Status at the UN, again by Dr. Willetts. Then the reader is drawn into the dense undergrowth and complexities of the interplay of two cultures and dozens of sub-cultures - the intergovernmental and the non-governmental communities.
There are excellent historical reconstructions of the growth of NGO action and influence in the UN system in the controversial World Bank (Seamus Cleary), women's rights and other concerns (Jane Connors), Amnesty International (Helena Cooke), the environment (Sally Morphet), the Rights of the Child (Michael Longford), and Refugees (Angela Penrose and John Seaman), and a short and gentle Conclusion by John Sankey. This solid sequence of highly professional and expert-technical essays is nicely leavened by a less taxing yet intellectually challenging 'Memoir' about UNESCO and NGOs from Richard Hoggart who saw them from the inside as a UNESCO Assistant Director-General.
This book is not an 'easy read' and makes no claim to be. It is densely packed with statistical data and contains long strings of tight analysis. Since it is absolutely bound to have to go into a further edition I need not hesitate to suggest that rather more recurring assembly of key points, and the use of boxes of key facts and more crucial statistics would help. A more substantial and forward-reaching conclusion should be possible when more is clear about how the UN is going to cope with the NGO world's healthy besieging of its central machinery and its agencies. Meanwhile this edition is a 'must' for all NGOs that are serious about 'working' the UN system, and for government ministries, their diplomatic missions to the UN and Agencies, and the system's own civil servants.
A fairly mutual disdain was for several decades among the reasons why so many NGOs have had the kind of struggle to be heard in UN forums that this book so admirably recounts. My own reading of the history is that the origins of this disdain lie in the interplay of national civil services and national NGOs. Those experiences began between earlier class-dominated government and its hauteur-imitating civil servants on one hand, and often poor, scruffy and seldom well-trained NGO workers ('agitators' one and all!) on the other. These early-engendered perceptions of each other seem to have carried outwards into the intergovernmental and international-NGO dimension.
With the exception of such institution-oriented NGOs as the UN Associations and their global federation (WFUNA), until the 1970s most citizens' organizations held the UN at a suspicious and even contemptuous arm's length as 'just another great bureaucracy', meaning more of the same as with national civil services. Over a generation, mainstream Western media depicting the UN as helpless between the Cold War giants also helped to disenchant the growing NGO community.
Then NGOs began to mushroom all over the world on economic, social and environmental issues in the 1970s (each chapter in this book that deals with such issues traces their phenomenal growth). Still, however, except for lobbying at UN 'mega-conferences', issue NGOs found it difficult to perceive the importance of the ongoing machinery of the UN system for their goals and activities. This generated a further bouncing-off effect because, when they might suddenly need to penetrate the machinery, many did not know enough about it to get anywhere, but tended to blame 'the UN' for mysteries of their own making.
However, many diplomats at the UN could also be extremely haughty. Ever since the first Congress of Vienna they had developed a subtle culture of working with each other. For many NGO spokespersons these ways seemed absurd. The delicate nuances of diplomatic language could be maddening. It took time to discover that when one delegate spent long minutes praising the proposed amendment of another, this actually meant total opposition to it. It could take longer for NGO people to understand that, if diplomats had drafted the phrase 'in the context of', they did not want some stranger in blue jeans or tennis shoes asking them with best intentions, 'Why don't you just write 'because', since that's what you apparently mean?'
On the other hand, many UN diplomats who did believe in NGO voices being heard by delegations would privately express acute and often justified frustration: 'Its marvellous when an NGO comes whose representative really knows the subject and also knows what we're trying to do about it and how we have to work ... but may the Good Lord protect us from those who don't know either ...'
This book is full of descriptions by NGO experts of how much knowledge it takes to penetrate the UN intergovernmental culture and why amateurishness helps no one. Michael Longford, in his excellent essay on the history of NGO action for the Rights of the Child, gently points out the enormous difference in impact on the drafting of the UN Declaration thereon as between specialist NGOs who were really expert in the subject, and those who could advocate but could not hold their own with governmental specialists.
Far better strategic and tactical planning is also needed, and NGO practitioners will gain untold benefits in this from this book because it is so meticulously practical, while scholarly. I have for years implored NGOs trying to get the International Monetary Fund to make both economic sense and social equity, to realise that there is little use in demonstrating outside a plush annual IMF meeting if they have not already lobbied their national Ministry of Finance and their parliament's relevant committee. In her incisive, scholarly analysis of the experiences of Amnesty International, Helena Cooke points out how NGOs are often 'frustrated to discover [that] there may be limited scope for influencing governments at the meeting itself'.
Gaining consultative status in ECOSOC has often been fraught with international politics, especially those of the Cold War. Peter Willetts point

Contours of Agency is a great book in several respects. First, the essays by several philosophers summarize aspects of work covering the career of Harry Frankfurt. Second, almost every essay in this volume is offering something critical of Frankfurt's work. The best part is not only are these criticisms coming from some of the brightest philosophers in the field, but one gets to see how Frankfurt responds to each of them. So, if you are interested in autonomy, freedom, personal identity, action, and all issues related, this is a must have book. Jonathan Lear's paper, "Love's Authority," states:

"However contentious the analytic-philosophical community tends to be, I think everyone would agree with this claim: that Harry Frankfurt is interesting. He is interested in interesting ways about interesting things. For over thirty years he has been delighting us with deep and fascinating thoughts about what is involved in being a person. And if we reflect on that delight, I think we shall see that Frankfurt has elicited a response that comes from the best of ourselves."

In my opinion, Jonathan Lear is correct. The papers and responses in this book are evidence of this truth.

The only word forthis book is OPULENT.Imagine a book whose subject is the first half of the cold war.Now imagine that it reads like a novel, has a cast of characters any Hollywood producer would drool over, is informed by enough primary research to supply a shelf of books, brims with enough ORIGINAL, never published archival revelations to keep twenty academics in grants for a decade.Furthermore, imagine that it approaches it's highly politicized subject with no axe to grind, no kowtowing to this pundit or that one, and is primarily driven by the twin ideals of NARRATIVE and RESEARCH. That's what this is. What a read! Is bound to draw the ire of mousier historians who will resent it's independence from a whole industry of secondary sources. This is the Iliad of the Cold War, not some bundle of commentary.

A great work in regards to politics...
A must read!

To understand why the U.S. government works, and works relatively well, a bridge of understanding is needed between the principles of the founding fathers and the massive bureaucratic machine that is the modern United States. Richard Stillman's "Creating the American State: the Moral Reformers and the Modern Administrative World They Made" provides such a bridge. Stillman builds a cogent case that seven "founders" of the modern administrative state shared and applied common Protestant values of work, duty, and idealism. These founders -- little known public officials -- essentially provided functional amendments to the theoretical skeleton of the Constitution. George William Curtis influences the adoption of a merit system over patronage. Charles Francis Adams (of the other Adams family) pioneers the sunshine commission. Jane Addams parlays her Protestant beliefs into social reforms that are ultimately rewarded with the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. And, Frederick W. Taylor pioneers a system of scientific management that is still sending shock waves through government and industry. (Think TQM and Deming.) Combining biography and political science, Professor Stillwell provides a fascinating portrait of the emerging U.S. administrative state. Taken as a whole, his book provides an insight into why a complex bureaucracy is a necessary component of a successful modern society. This review provided by Dr. R. Kirk Jonas, who uses "Creating the American State" in his University of Richmond class "Reinventing Government, Again." Comments to rkjona@aol.com

This is an admirable and unusual work, of doctoral-level quality in its sources and methods, while also reflecting the professional intelligence career status of the author. It complements Amy Zegart's broader book, Flawed By Design, in an excellent manner. This book, focusing as it does on the CIA alone, and on internal sources not readily available to Zegart, fills a major gap in our understanding of the CIA's origins. The author excels at demonstrating both the actual as opposed to the mythical origins of the agency, and pays particular heed to the role of the Bureau of the Budget and that Bureau's biases and intentions. At the end of it all, the author notes that the agency was moving in controversial directions within four years of its birth, quickly disturbing Harry Truman, who is quoted as saying, twenty-years after the fact (in 1963), "For some time I have been distributed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of Government....I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations." The author himself goes on to conclude that "the nature of the new threats and the revolution in information acquisition and dissemination have thrown traditional ways of intelligence organization, collection, evaluation, and distribution into question. ... CIA has entered the second half-century of its existence striving to avoid the fate of its OSS parent. In the process, it is groping for new missions and purposes while blighted by the legacy of its past derelictions, and while operating amid a rapidly changing global environment and technological revolution that are rendering its sources, methods, organizations, and mystique obsolete." I would hasten to add, as my own book documents, that we will always have hidden evil in the world and will always needs spies and secret methods to some extent, but this book, combining academic rigor with insider access, must surely give the most intelligent of our policy, legislative, and intelligence managers pause, for it very carefully documents the possibility that 75% of what we are doing today with secret sources and methods need not and should not be done. This book has much to offer those who would learn from history.

Culture and Agency is a very useful book to understand social change. The Author provides several analitical tools to examine the relation between systems of beliefs and values and the stuctural opportunities individuals have to support or contest them. In doing so, she opens new ways to think sociological problems like the change in the role of woman in society, or the reinterpretations of culture proposed by new social movements, in spite of the fact that the book maintains itself in a theoretical level, without adressing substantive issues. I am a Ph.D. student, and the book was extremely helpful to iluminate my object of research, the women's movement.

A very interesting account of the intrigue, plotting, and scheming done by the Zionists in their bid to garner U.S. political, military and economic support for Israel. Highly recommended, very well written and well researched.

Ralph W. McGehee spent 25 years in the CIA; he joined as an idealist, and left as a cynic. The crisis happened in Dec 1968. RWM wondered why we had to bomb the people we were trying to save? Why did the CIA report lies instead of the truth? He thought of his earlier work in Thailand, where his reports were first accepted, then denied in spite of his accuracy. The Agency preferred the old methods that resulted in more killings. RWM decided then to tell what he found out and warn the American people. The CIA is the covert action arm of the Presidency. It is not an intelligence agency because it only seeks the information that supports existing policies. Its propaganda uses disinformation to fool the US public, and justify policies by distorting reality.

RWM was class president and in the honor society, and All State as a football tackler. An ardent Baptist, he went to Notre Dame and played on an undefeated football team that won national championships; he graduated cum laude. A telegram recruited him to fight communism and save our way of life. RWM went to Washington and passed the tests. The chapters in the book tell about his career in the agency. Chapter 5 tells of his "Life at Langley" when he returned to Headquarters. His knowledge of the Bay of Pigs came from television news. It seemed they relied too much on an assumed uprising of the Cuban people. Could such a mistake ever happen again? Pages 57-8 tells how the CIA promoted a bloody extermination campaign in Indonesia. (Read L Fletcher Prouty's book on this.) Page 59 tells of agency coups in South America. American training of the military and police created traitors who overthrew their governments; was this the definition of subversion?

Page 61 quotes Howard Hunt on gathering "any and all information" on Presidential candidate Goldwater for delivery to the White House. Page 63 tells of the CIA's insertion of individuals into dissident circles in order to establish their credential for foreign operations. (Could this explain W J Clinton's success?) Page 64 tells how RWM was transferred to Thailand, and page 80 tells of the sad results. Pages 111-6 tells of his successful survey of Thailand. This "good news" resulted in his quick removal! Years later the truth dawned on him: the CIA didn't want the truth! This tells of the management trick of offering a transfer to a better job, then eliminating the job after the employee transfers. RWM became another paper pusher. Page 120 shows the bureaucratic faults of the CIA. Page 128 tells of the fatal flaws of our presence in Vietnam. Pages 129-135 gives Vietnamese history in a nutshell. Page 146 summarizes the problem: how was it that one junior officer was better informed and had a clearer picture of the reality out there than all the rest of the Agency? Is this unique to a government agency? The bottom of page 159 tells of the results of his experiences. Chapter 14 concludes and summarizes this book.

The Appendix is the last part, but you should read it first to understand the writing of this book. His secrecy agreement let the CIA review and censor any information that they did not want revealed. When his writing was censored, he was allowed to substitute information from open sources. (See page 35 in Chapter 3 on the use of agents.) When RWM found a published book with the same opinions he was then allowed his critical comments. The CIA's secrecy agreement stops critics from explaining their actions to the American people.