Agencies

The book is more significant now than ever, since its publication in the 1980s. Government has grown substantially, especially the various "wars" on drugs and terror that have greatly increased the size of government and US government involvement in several aspects of domestic life and foreign affairs.

The scholarship is particularly good - mountains of empirical evidence, all relevant to his thesis, are well documented and presented concisely in this book. The book is straightforward and easy to understand; it should be accessible to economists and intelligent non-economists alike. If you've wanted to understand how government insidiously (or naturally) becomes larger regardless of constitutional constraints, read this book. It might fill you with rage, but maybe you can put that rage to good use. Are the ideas of limited government destined to be considered a failure in the far future, or can leviathan be chained down? If this is all government is about, in the United States or anywhere, do we really want a government at all?

Read this book. Libertarians will consider it a great read and invaluable intellectual ammunition; everyone else should read it, if for nothing else, to better understand the nature of the beast.

Within weeks of the initiation of the U.S. effort the administration has announced steps that will curtail the civil liberties of citizens and visitors alike, even circumventing the right to proper trial. There appears to be a good chance that U.S. citizens will be required to carry so-called national ID cards.

Higgs explains why this should come as no suprise since war is the grand historical excuse offered by politicians to increase their powers and diminish those of their subjects, whatever the merits of their original objectives. This is one of the essential books in the literature of liberty, and it could not be more pertinent as a siren and antidote to the threat to freedom posed by ever-larger government.

I happened to buy this book perchance while casually browsing the non-fic section at an airport. Now I recall my hair standing on its end as I read it on my flight. The only other book I recall seething with anger with while reading was "The Rape of Nanking".

"Gold Warriors" is more than a nail in the coffin of Japan's "serious, sober and deliberate" plundering of Asia's treasure from 1895 until 1945, and its collusion after the war with American officials to recover and use the loot as a secret political action slush fund to denounce communism. It is in fact a journey into the darkest recesses of history and the human soul.

The authors are not afraid to name names, and the excruciatingly detailed research is a marvel. The sheer scale and limits of the underlying deceit are mind blowing.

Some very minor observations. The authors may know their Philippines well, but their statements on Japan could be corrected. The book has some minor errors (that I could figure out) --

(1) The Japanese ship they repeatedly call the "Huzi" should actually be "Fuji"
(2) The important Japanese Sea port is "Maizuru" not "Maisaru"
(3) "Tairiki" is not a Japanese word: they probably meant "Tairiku Ronin", i.e., a Continental adventurer (in reference to Chinese carpetbaggers)
(4) Their mysterious "Lord Ichivara" should most likely be "Ishihara" (Ichivara is somewhat implausible)

Anyway, these are minor cavils. I highly recommend this book for any one interested in the shenanigans of power, it will leave you aghast. If this piques your interest, click over to the website bowstring.net and download two CD full of documents etc.

In June 2000, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) said, "You mean our federal government can just say, 'To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were mistreated (by the Japanese), we are just going to waive all your rights.'"

As disturbing and painful as it may be to read, this is a book all victims of the Japanese, and their next of kins, must read. It's documentation and research is beyond reproach. For many of us, this book will be our 'fall from innocence', if that is still possible.

Fred Baldassarre
Son of a Bataan Survivor

Although I know the CIA better than I do the FBI, I have spent time in the past ten years with law enforcement officers from over 40 countries including the US, and the bottom line is that the FBI bureaucracy (Supervisory Special Agents and the politically-motivated upper tiers of FBI management) are a worse threat to US security than individual terrorist groups, for the simple reason that as long as the FBI leadership remains in denial, in secret, and ineffective, the entirety of our homeland defense is incapacitated.

The earlier version of this book focused on the decades of historical enmity between CIA and FBI--in the early years, Edgar J. Hoover was clearly to blame for a culture of hostility between the two agencies and between the FBI and military intelligence--in one instance he actually suppressed early knowledge of Japanese intentions on Pearl Harbor obtained from a German agent tasked to fulfill their targeting requirements.

In later years the CIA took on more responsibility for shutting out the FBI, consistently refusing to brief them in to either internal counterintelligence failures, or foreign operations with a strong domestic counterintelligence matter.

What the author has done in the aftermath of 9-11 is update the book and make it even more relevant to every citizen and every elected official and every bureaucrat. The earlier edition made me very angry about how the senior FBI bureaucracy can sacrifice the national interest at the altar of its own selfish agenda of self-preservation and aggrandizement--from Special Agent Rowley to Special Agent Robert Wright, the FBI leadership consistently spends more time censoring and punishing its own people for honesty, than it does chasing terrorists. This new improved edition should make every citizen, every voter angry, and they should instruct their elected representatives that the time has come for a National Security Act that finally reforms national foreign intelligence, military intelligence, and law enforcement intelligence, and in passing, creates the homeland security intelligence act to create a federated system of state and local intelligence and counterintelligence cadres that operate under the jurisdiction of governors and mayors rather than the federal government.

Pogo had it right: we have met the enemy and he is us.

Riebling also takes a somewhat revisionist approach to the Cold War, implying in many places that the secret measures taken againt communist sympathizers by our government weren't that extreme, and noting that they were in fact more modest than those taken by Jefferson, Madison, et. al. against suspected British sympathizers in the early decades of the Republic.

There's a besetting contrarian current or draft in this work, which sometimes Riebling rides to great heights of interpretation (e.g., on KGB deception ops), but which sometimes blows him into dead-ends where the key data is still classified.

The book is rich in detail. There is tradecraft detail here one finds nowhere else -- e.g., Nazi spies' use of butterfly trays to smuggle microdots; the story of Project WALNUT, CIA's first foray into the computerization of its records; a fistfight between FBI agents and CIA officers over custody of a Soviet defector in a Washington, DC restaurant.

There are long stretches where one feels riveted as in the best spy novels. The material on Ian Fleming and the influence of the "James Bond" ethos is especially well done.

Expertly handled too is the vast amount of original mateiral on the colorful and controversial CIA spycatcher James Jesus Angleton, whose approach is explained with patience and precision. Riebling clearly had access to many who worked closely with Angleton, including FBI liaison officer Sam Papich, and as a result there is a sureness of touch where other writers have played false notes.

Overall, despite some disagreements with Riebling's interpretations, I found this book educating and entertaining. It's the only history of our intelligence community I know of which traces our current problems to our past ones. And unlike most other books in the field, it does NOT devolve into nonsenical claims that the U.S. is in imminent danger of becoming a police state simply because it must sometimes use secret weapons against ruthless foes.

The CIA takes the heat in this book but this story demonstrates an inherint weakness in our security within ALL agencies involved in dealing with sensitive issues.

I felt this book was well written and recommend it to anyone who wants to try and understand how this could have happened.

The book is organized into six parts: Organizations, Operators, Managers, Executives, Context, and Change. In the first part, Wilson's thesis is simply that organization matters. Organization must be in accordance with the objectives of the agency. In the second part, the author examines the operators' behavior (say, street-level bureaucrats) and how their culture is shaped by the imperatives of the situation they encounter in a daily basis. The third part deals with the issues peculiar to managers of public agencies. In this part, attention is focused upon the constraints that put the mangers in a stalemate (see chapter 7, this chapter is completely insightful!!). The fourth part is devoted to the Executives. This part clearly illustrates why the executives of government agencies compete with other departments and which strategies are used in the process of competition and/or cooperation (especially see the 10th chapter about Turf, insightful!!). In the fifth part, Wilson focuses on the context in which public agencies do their business (Congress, Presidents and Courts). In the last part, Wilson summarizes the problems and examines alternative solutions (the market alternatives to the bureaucracy) and concludes with reasonable and "little" propositions.

In the book, I found especially some points very insightful to me. One of them is concerned with the distinction between government agencies. According to the typology Wilson forms the government agencies are classified into four groups. That is, production organizations, procedural organizations, craft organizations, and coping organizations. This distinction is chiefly based upon the visibility/measurability of the organizations' outputs and procedures. In this logic, the "production organization" is defined as having both measurable processes and visible/understandable outputs (i.e., Social Security Administration). "Procedural organizations" perform measurable processes, but they have no visible or easily measurable outputs. The "craft organization" is characterized by having immeasurable processes and visible outputs (i.e., the armies). However, the "coping organization" has neither measurable/controllable processes nor visible outputs (i.e., the Police Department, the Department of Education). This taxonomy is put forward and used in the rest of the book as one of the main determinants of the problems (and also successes) in the public sector.

The second important and insightful point made by Wilson is concerned with the efficiency in the public sector. To Wilson, measuring efficiency is a difficult project in the public sector. Wilson approaches the efficiency from a different perspective that we are not so accustomed. His question is that if the efficiency is the ratio of input to the output, what are the outputs of the public agencies and can those outputs be measured/quantified? "Contextual goals" sought by public organizations in addition to their main objectives make the efficiency measurement problem more complex and elusive. If contextual goals are taken into consideration the efficiency of the public organization incredibly increases.

The third important point is concerned with the organization mission. Wilson sees organizational mission in the public sector radically different from how we learned it in the organization theory courses. To Wilson, organization mission is same with the public agency's culture if the culture is widely and heartily shared by the most of the organization's members. To connect organizational mission to the organization culture provides the author with another insight that in public sector, the culture of public agencies defines their mission (not congressional mandates or paper enactments!!). Culture is formed mainly according to the situational mandates of the work being done (and also many other factors such as leadership). That is, in addition to the "organization", also the "situation" matters.

Wilson does not neglect to touch another (susceptible) problem in the public sector: "red tape". To the author, the main reason behind the red tape can be explained with the fact that since there are high risks at stake when the rules are violated there is a "tendency" to multiply the rules, as (big or small) scandals occur, so as to impede the future scandals and violations that consume the trust capital generously in the eye of the common citizens.

Wilson also asks the question why public agencies are not given specific and well-defined goals. The reply to this question is "multiplication of interests". According to Wilson, as time pass, different interests find a place in the mission of the organization and accordingly new goals (for new interests [supported by politicians] to be satisfied by the agency) are added to the "objectives" list of the agency (mostly, contradictory to each other). You can discern this dynamic by comparing the total page number of the some enactments today in enforcement with the original page number when the enactment was first adopted (maybe ten years ago).

Having reviewed the government bureaucracy comprehensively, Wilson develops some "little" reform propositions. Wilson believes that if a reform is to be successful, it must take into account the situational imperatives of the public sector organizations, and the "reward systems" must be suitable to the output expected (this point can be summarized with the motto that DON'T REWARD THAT YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE).

Once you have finished the book will you likely to ask this question: Is really "bureaucracy" not a simple phenomenon? It has always been difficult to summarize the "great books", and this book is one of them. This book must be read in its entirety. Highly recommended.

Wilson's review of how bureaucracies make policy is pretty comprehensive- he nods at almost all of the major contributors to the discipline. For this reason the book is an excellent introduction to Political Science for someone wishing to get beyond the 101 courses.

His most interesting work deals with the formation of institutional culture- how the definition of an agency's tasksm and the limitations of its capabilities influence its performance and can often produce seemingly "irrational" behavior.

The most interesting thisn, however, is his discussion of how institutions and organizations develop an "ethos" or organizational culture. What bureaucrats do depends not only on what they think their priamry task is, but to a large degree on who they think they are. It is an area often neglected in the field today.

Wilson is a giant, and I recommend him to anyone who is interested in policy, in academia, or outside of it.

Even more disturbing are Adams' insights into the CIA of the middle and late Sixties. Though deeply entrenched in war in Vietnam, they seemed to take an overall cavalier approach to the mission. Adams notes after Tet-1968 there were "considerably less than 6" CIA agent handlers in Vietnam who spoke vietnamese. These same case officers received a grand total of 2 hours orientation on Vietnam and their enemy prior to assignment.

This book is a MUST read for intelligence personnel, policy makers and anyone who wants to learn how, the hard way, not to run an intelligence organization.