Agencies

The opening quotation from Harry Howe Ransom says it all-"Certainly nothing is more rational and logical than the idea that national security policies be based upon the fullest and most accurate information available; but the cold war spawned an intelligence Frankenstein monster that now needs to be dissected, remodeled, rationalized and made fully accountable to responsible representatives of the people."

Professor Johnson is one of only two people(the other being Britt Snider) to have served on both the Church Commission in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, and is in my view one of the most competent observer and commentator on the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community. The book is a tour d'horizon on both the deficiencies of today's highly fragmented and bureaucratized archipelago of independent fiefdoms, as well as the "new intelligence agenda" that places public health and the environment near the top of the list of topics to be covered by spies and satellites.

Highlights of this excellent work, a new standard in terms of currency and breadth, include his informed judgment that most of what is in the "base" budget of the community should be resurrected for reexamination, and that at least 20% of the budget (roughly $6 billion per year) could be done away with-and one speculates that this would be good news to an Administration actively seeking trade-offs permitting its promised tax cut program. His overviews of the various cultures within the Central Intelligence Agency, of the myths of intelligence, and of the possibilities for burden sharing all merit close review.

He does, however, go a bridge too far while simultaneously rendering a great service to the incoming Administration. He properly identifies the dramatic shortfalls in the open source information gathering and processing capabilities of the various Departments of the Federal government-notably the Department of State as well as the Department of Commerce and the various agencies associated with public health-but then he goes on to suggest that these very incapacities should give rise to an extension of the U.S. Intelligence Community's mission and mandate-that it is the U.S. Intelligence Community, including clandestine case officers in the field and even FBI special agents, who should be tasked with collecting open sources of information and with reporting on everything from disease to pollution. This will never work, but it does highlight the fact that all is not well with *both* the U.S. Intelligence Community *and* the rest of the government that is purportedly responsible for collecting and understanding open sources of information.

On balance I found this book to be a very competent, insightful, and well-documented survey of the current stresses and strains facing the U.S. national intelligence community. The conclusion that I drew from the book, one that might not be shared by the author, was that the U.S. Government as a whole has completely missed the dawn of the Information Age. From the National Security Agency, where too many people on payroll keep that organization mired in the technologies of the 1970's, to the U.S. State Department, which has lost control of its Embassies and no longer collects significant amounts of open source information, to the White House, where no one has time to read-we have completely blown it-we simply have not adapted the cheap and responsive tools of the Internet to our needs, nor have we employed the Internet to share the financial as well as the intellectual and time burdens of achieving "Global Coverage." More profoundly, what this book does in a way I have not been able to do myself, is very pointedly call into question the entire structure of government, a government attempting to channel small streams of fragmented electronic information through a physical infrastructure of buildings and people that share no electronic connectivity what-so-ever, while abdicating its responsibility to absorb and appreciate the vast volumes of relevant information from around the globe that is not online, not in English, and not free.

It was not until I had absorbed the book's grand juxtaposition of the complementary incompetencies of both the producers of intelligence and the consumers of intelligence that I realized he has touched on what must be the core competency of government in the Information Age: how precisely do we go about collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information, and creating tailored intelligence, when we are all inter-dependent across national, legal bureaucratic, and cultural boundaries? This is not about secrecy versus openness, but rather about whether Government Operations as a whole are taking place with the sources, methods, and tools of this century, or the last. To bombs, bugs, drugs, and thugs one must add the perennial Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

As the several reviews above have noted, this is the biography of Alexander Orlov, the pre-WWII Soviet foreign intelligence general whose flight from the reaches of the NKVD was broadly and mistakenly believed by the Americans (and most Soviets) to be a genuine defection. Costello and Tsarev, through reference to genuine KGB archives, convincingly show that belief to be completely incorrect, as Orlov deceived the West for many years.

This book, as it states on the cover, was the first history of espionage by a Western author actually based upon KGB files. Discussions from an earlier document request to the KGB by Costello led to a surprising agreement for him to co-author this book with his KGB press office contact, Oleg Tsarev, shortly before the failed coup attempt and fall of the Soviet Union. Tsarev was given wide latitude in utilizing and disseminating information from the KGB files on Orlov and his various colleagues and agents. Furthermore, Costello takes academic-level care to document accurately all sources for all facts and assertions in this book, a welcome contrast with the cursory, sometimes conclusory books by other British so-called "historians" of espionage such as West, Knightly and Pincher.

The primary discovery made by the authors was that while Orlov did indeed flee to the U.S. with his family, he never genuinely defected. In 1938 during the height of the purges within the Soviet military and intelligence services, Orlov received cryptic instructions to rendezvous with another NKVD officer on a ship. He failed to keep that meeting, knowing it to be a trap to return him to Moscow for execution and fled to North America. Upon arrival in Canada, Orlov wrote to Stalin and NKVD chief Yehzov and set forth a simple blackmail to insure that he did not suffer the fate of Ignace Reiss, an NKVD deserter caught by his former service's assasination squads. Orlov listed the various operations he had planned or worked on, including political assasinations and kidnapping, the theft of the Spanish gold reserves to Moscow and the development of spy networks throughout Europe (along with a list of sixty Soviet agents) with the implied promise that this information would be released to Western intelligence services if he were assasinated or kidnapped. Both the Soviets and Orlov kept to their bargains.

Orlov was able to stay hidden in the U.S. for fourteen years before immigration problems and his release of a book condemning Stalin brought Orlov to the attention of the FBI and CIA in the early 1950's. Although interrogated extensively by American intelligence, he substantially downplayed his seniority, participation and knowledge of NKVD activities and never disclosed the names of dozens of Soviet agents who had infiltrated into Western governments, keeping loyal to communism to the end. The authors state that the CIA had substantial doubts about the true extent of knowledge that Orlov was disclosing, but somehow were never able to bring enough pressure upon him to divulge that information.

The major disappointment of this book (through no fault of the authors) is that aside from the revelation that Orlov deceived the U.S. for so many years, that there are no other major revelations. The authors do reveal many significant previously unknown details from KGB files concerning Orlov's involvement in the founding of the Cambridge spy ring (including the fact that Philby was the "first man' of the ring), the founding of the Rote Kapelle and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War as the NKVD resident and senior Soviet officer in the country. However, the Russian Intelligence Service refused to disclose any facts regarding agent names or missions that were never discovered by Western intelligence services, leaving readers impatient to know the identities of those sixty agents whose names were redacted from copies made from KGB files, particularly the completely undiscovered KGB Oxford spy ring. Hopefully, in not too many further years, the need to protect the individuals involved and operational strategies will no longer exist and the RIS will open up all of the KGB files.

Deadly Illusions is a very interesting history of Orlov and soviet foreign intelligence operations, but readers expecting it to read like a Forsyth spy novel will be disappointed; it is not a difficult read, but not at all a quick one. The faults of this book are minor: Costello has a sometimes annoying habit of diverting the reader on tangents that, while not uninteresting, are not logically and relevantly tied to the preceding text. I also felt that the authors downplayed Orlov's role in political terrorism too much; aside from a somewhat limited description of Orlov's involvement in the NKVD assasination of Andres Nin, the leader of the anti-Soviet Spanish Republican faction POUM, the authors failed to emphasize Orlov's real role in establishing Soviet dominance of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, via terrorism. Finally, I found Costello's admission of error with regard the main theory of his previous book Mask of Treachery (in which he claimed that Anthony Blunt was the "first man" of the Cambridge ring - see my Amazon.com review of Mask of Treachery) to be rather sparse and barely adequate.

Overall, this is an extremely significant book that should be part of any espionage historian's library.

What double dealing and hypocrisy from everyone from the Soviets to Kinnock though! I'm sure I feel more angry at the likes of Ron Todd (not mentioned much actually) Neil Kinnock and the whole TUC and Labour Party than I ever will about Thatcher and her despicable (but at least openly hostile)cronies.

Anyway, I was moved by the miners' story. I am ashamed on behalf of all the British people who voted for, and kept voting for, Thatcher.

I am only sad that a movie has not been made based on this book. It's nail-biting stuff reminiscent of Forsyth so why is there so little literature and film on what happened? Where's Ken Loach? Come on Ken, get a film made of it all!

Great piece of work Seamas!

Well it doesn't. It does fine all by itself. It gives some great insightful information to the reason behind some of U.S invasions, wars, and other candelstine efforts foreign and domestic.

Anybody that lived through the era that the book was covered will get bored easily as no true secrets are revealed. But for those born around the 80's, will become very informed.

A good book, but not that good. I give it three stars because the title does not match the book.

Who knows what the 4th book should be? Or the 5th? Maybe it has yet to be written. I suppose in continuing the education, it might be fair to turn next to a conventional account of the history, perhaps to Stanley Kutler; or to the perspectives of Dean or Magruder or Haldeman.