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The 2000 Life Safety Code is the most through and enlightening edition I have ever used. The analysis of Safety requirements in how they relate to Life Safety is a must for all Building designers.

"For 25 years David Atlee Phillips stood "the night watch" for the CIA."

But according to Donald Freed and the simple facts, Phillips was an active spook after he retired and founded the AFIO or ARIO -- Association of Retired Intel Officers -- putting Claire Booth Luce on the board of directors, and acting through the association to manage the South Florida cuban-exiles at arms length, since they were becoming a liability to the company.

"Phillips details his experiences in 18 countries. Along the way, we learn much about the 'Company' . . ."

Phillips writes about his "experience" in certain countries, when he was actually in other countries. You don't learn anything about the "Company" until you realize the level of censorship to which CIA authors subjected their work; you won't learn much about Phillips' role in the "Company" until you realize the full implications of his efforts to be a playwright and an author, and his ongoing activity as a community theater actor during his CIA career.

But if you accept the possibility that Phillips was somewhat narcissistic, and that he had a real itch to cleverly reveal yet conceal his participation in the greatest crime of the twentieth century, then "The Night Watch" becomes a real treasure. One might actually conclude that it is a Rosetta Stone to Dealey Plaza and the sheep-dipping of Lee Harvey Oswald. And when you turn over in your mind the implications of Phillips' "specialty" for the "company" -- that of "propaganda specialist" -- it raises to new, quantum levels the insidious nature of the Dealey Plaza assassination and the coverup that continues into 2001.

This book should become a collector's item, and probably is a collector's item, to people who understand something about it. None of the symbols and images and strange anecdotes included in the book would ever be admitted as evidence in court if Phillips were still alive, but that observation is a moot one, since he has been dead since 1987.

Parodying the title "Tibetan Book of the Dead", I like to call it the "Texan Book of Lies". I am not a really superstitious person, but Phillips was born on Halloween; he often joked that he was "born to be a spook"; he printed the book with a black-on-orange jacket; and he had worked his way through college selling cemetery plots to little old ladies in Fort Worth, Texas.

You could let your kids read it, and they would never suspect anything, nor would it do any harm. But when I see it, sitting on my coffee table, I imagine I hear a swarm of flies buzzing around it. And he was a good writer, although I think he betrayed his personality, so it makes for pretty darn good reading.

No Backup: A Female Agent's Life
in the FBI©
by
Rosemary N. Dew and Pat Pape

A fascinating read which combines the personal experiences of Special Agent Rosemary Dew who spent thirteen years with the FBI. She was in a unique position to gain insight and has produced a detailed analysis of the culture of the FBI and has delved into the reasons behind some of it's more infamous failures. The overall thrust of the book suggests that the FBI's problems reside within the culture of the organization. Rosemary Dew contends that the FBI will continue to be plagued by embarassing episodes,e.g., the mole in its counter intelligence section who was able to escape detection for decades. Approximately half of the book covers one embarassing episode after another which calls into question the ability of the FBI to learn from its own mistakes. In the world described by the author...the agents who warned of suspicious events before 9-11 might have been taken more seriously if they had been working out of a higher status office like New York City. The book is not just a critical analysis of the Bureau but cites specific episodes from the author's life as an agent. She uses these illustrations as a backdrop to suggest why many of the recent problems within the Bureau are the result of long standing practices and norms where the preservation of one's own job within the organization takes priority and common sense seems to be in rather short supply. She describes in painful detail... blatant examples of racism, sexism and harassment which would not be tolerated in modern law enforcement agencies. The FBI is portrayed as a bureacracy which has lost its moral compass while at the same time trying to occupy a higher moral position through a masterful public relations campaign. Rosemary Dew has gone to great lengths to open up her own life and will probably take some heat from those who are sure that the Bureau can do 'No' wrong. Definitely, worth the read but disturbing. There have been other books which have exposed the FBI but this one is unique.

Dr. Peter Kassebaum

The North Carolina Gazetteer is amazing! The book has historical information about any place and any area in the state! The amount of time it must have taken to compile this information is mind-blowing! This book is a must for anyone interested in North Carolina and the state's history. This book IS North Carolina!

For anyone wanting a comprehensive overview of North Korea and the information that makes this reclusive state tick, you don't want to miss this book. An invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in East Asia or doing business in this part of the world. It includes everything you'll ever need to know.

This book tells about a secret operation that "succeeded", but was a failure in the end, after many deaths and the destruction of many lives. The author pieced together this story from a variety of sources; he had been a diplomatic correspondent and foreign editor.

Th Potsdam Treaty carved up the world just like the Versailles Treaty after an earlier war. But unlike the latter, a new Cold War began (p.19). America shed its traditional isolationism and began its long march towards a New World Order - to replace and surpass the now declining British Empire.

The death and destruction in Eastern Europe fixated their leader's minds on security from another war. Their leaders were composed of two dissimilar type: those who spent years in underground activities (Tito), and those beholden to Moscow. It also included adventurers who joined the winning side, those with experience from the pre-war regimes, and some double agents.

Jan Masaryk said that Czechoslovakia's votes with Poland and Yugoslavia had not harmed the United States but benefitted Czechoslovakia by preventing Soviet interference there (p.26). But the Soviets demanded political support in return for noninterference in internal affairs, and America demanded political support in exchange for aid. Can a servant serve two masters?

Page 30 makes two mistakes in talking about disbanding the OSS by Truman, and a decoding organization by Stimson. The former was due to bureaucratic struggles within government, the latter to drop a high-cost unofficial group. You can be sure the regular agencies continued with this work!

Page 37 tells of the activities of "Michael Sullivan", the head of a British relief agency who set up a spy network in Poland. Prisoners were extracted, incidents of sabotage and terrorism were created, rumors of shortages created runs on shops, rural riots were created by rumors of collectivization. In 1945 agents incited anti-semitic riots in Kielce and Krakow. The purpose of all this was to create a revolution; it failed. But he recruited the deputy director of Department Ten (Jozef Swiatlo), whose function was to police the policemen of the police state; it had unlimited powers.

The devil in all these details was Allen Welsh Dulles, grandson and nephew of Secretaries of State, senior partner of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and head of the OSS mission in Berne during World War II. From 1946 to 1948 Allen Dulles ran private intelligence operations in Eastern Europe, using funds from companies and the wealthy (page 53 does not list their special interests). Like his brother John he was involved with a number of religious and charitable institutions which were used to cover and conceal their secret activities.

Dulles chose to use Noel Field as a pawn to taint national Communists as US spies, ensuring their destruction by Stalin. Dulles would use Swiatlo to help incriminate many with planted evidence (p.99). Evidence would show that Field recruited Communists as American agents, that others were followers of Tito or Trotsky. Stalin checked out these stories with their double agent in Washington - it was verified. But their double agent was a triple agent! Recruited in the 1930s, he was being saved for an event like this (p.101). To complete the deception, Dulles "leaked" the news that the CIA had agents in the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. The result was widespread investigations, purges, imprisonment, and executions. Years later the victims would be "posthumously rehabilitated".

Didn't DeTocqueville once say that a regime is likely to be overthrown once it begins to liberalize its rule?

"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" was a fictional story based upon this real incident. They made it appear that an important Eastern government official was a spy for the West in order to get him purged, and his rival promoted; but the rival was the real spy!

Transaction cost theory has been applied to public administration since early 1980s. However, most of these researches are not very sucessful, thus making many public administration theorists suspect the promises of using transaction cost theory to public administration. It is at this critical point that Horn prove to us that transaction cost theory is an attractive theory for public administration research. The Horn model is concentrated on the legislature institutional choices. To him, institutional choices of the legislature will be affected by various transaction costs, and the legislature must trade-off among these transaction costs. It is obvious that the Horn model had followed the Williamsonian transaction cost theory rather than North's perspective of transaction cost theory. However, different from other theorists using Williamsonian transaction cost theory to public administration, Horn had not limited himself to the narrowing category of Market and Hierarchy. In sum, this Horn model combined recent work of Williamson (Private and public bureaucracy: perspective of transaction cost theory, 1999)has convinced students like me that transaction cost theory is a productive perspective for public administration research.

Jonathan Koppell has written a fine and subtle analysis of hybrid organizations, ones which combine elements of the private firm with those of the government agency. He shows how such organizations -- Amtrack, the mortgage intermediaries Fredie and Fannie -- can be harder to control from Washington than regular public agencies. He also explores ways in which hybrids can sometimes be very productive instruments for public goals. This is a first-class study of an increasingly important topic.

This book covers mainly the fifties and sixties of last century, when the author was an important CIA agent in Indonesia, the Philippines and Central and South America.
It clearly shows how the CIA (the author) tried to influence directly the political situation in those countries. It supported financially the political party, that it thought would best represent the anti-communist and /or business interests of the US / transnational companies, and it tried to intervene in the composition of govenments.
Contrary to other sources, the author denies vehemently that the CIA was behind or committed assassinations.

The author explains distinctly the real seasons behind the Vietnam War or the Bay of Pigs disaster and reveals some famous names as CIA creatures: Nasser (Egypt) and Frei (Chile).
We meet some very well known people at the beginning of their (in)famous career: Ferdinand Marcos, Sukarno, Lee Kuan Yew, Howard Hunt, Han Suyin.

At the end, disillusioned, Joseph Smith turns his back on the Agency; firstly, for personal reasons (people got promotion for their incompetence), and secondly, because of the Vietnam disaster, Watergate, the bureaucratisation of the CIA (at one point drifting to a Gestapo status) and its spying on US citizens (the CHAOS program).

This work contains also some comic scenes of how the CIA tried to lure KGB agents in their nets.
Fundamentally, it confirms the statement of an old Englishman in Malay:'There are struggles for money, for power, for lust, for greed, because of just plain meanness. But there is no such thing as the ideological struggle...'.

A must read in order to understand the ploys of a secret agency.