Agency-securities Books

What the Amazon description fails to mention is that this CD is simply a compilation of pages copied off the CIA and NSA's own web sites and saved as PDF files.

You can get everything on the CD and more for free directly from the respective government websites. In addition, the graphics as saved on the CD are low resolution, causing some small items to become nearly impossible to read.

Don't waste [X amount] on this ripoff just go directly to the CIA's website

I am extremely impressed by this great CD-ROM collection of CIA and NSA documents. It is well organized and provides literally thousands of pages of reports and documents that I'd never have the time to get otherwise. The parts dealing with the history of the Cold War and the Soviet Union are especially fascinating. The publisher deserves credit for providing a very useful product that is sure to delight anyone interested in intelligence operations, history, or military affairs. The PDF format is ideal for reading at the computer or printing out interesting bits for reference. I highly recommend it!

This book was previously reviewed numerous times by various people who gave it very poor reviews. None of those negative reviews, however, is still posted. Bad for sales I guess. This author is a clown. The book is weak. He left the CIA after only a few years. Therefore, his knowledge is super limited and the patriotism he so loudly proclaims is greatly undermined. Anybody in the intelligence or law enforcement community will tell you this book is weak, poorly written, and self serving. He joined the CIA, got out, and wrote a weak book which will make him a quick buck. Save yours!!

For those that wonder what it might be like to enter training for the CIA'a Clandestine Service, this is your book. The author, otherwise an average American citizen, volunteered for the CIA soon after 9/11 in his mid-thirties. Along with a host of other men and women from all walks of life, Waters entered the training program for the Directorate of Operations to become a field operative in the war on terror. His depiction of training is fascinating, particularly with his perspective not as a gung-ho, wanted-to-be-a-spy-from-birth kind of guy, but as an average guy who was inspired to make a sacrifice to protect the country. I'm about halfway through the book now, but I can hardly put it down. Well-written and very interesting.

Didn't know Hoover was to blame for all the problems of the world...Thank God for people like President Clinton.

This is an excellent collection of documents that show what Hoover was really up to. He is shown to be the master of bureacracy that helped entrench him as FBI director. This book is a must to understand the director and his interests.

this book is a fairly interesting read however the author basically blends consipacy theories with fact, and treats them as fact. the book is also overtly opinionated. i do not condem the author or the book, but i think it should have been written in a manner that did not frequently display possibilities (even if they seem likely or at least plausible) as though they were known facts. that being said, i did enjoy reading the book. i dont know if i am with it all the way through but it was definitly interesting and did present a lot of facts about Lennon and about the history of the times that i, being born at the tail end of those days, didnt know much about. certainly whether or not all the conspiracy theories are true are not there are some fascinating similarities between various events discussed, odd coincidences, and really untidy loose ends that leave the possibilies open. i recomend this for those interested in such topics as sociology and history as well as the conspiracy theorists of the world, and for those interested in Lennon, although the books focus is really only on his death and only gives a brief overview of his life.

"John Lennon and the FBI Files" suggests that Lennon's assassin was not a deranged fan, but a programmed killer. Despite being this being the main objective of the book, it only occupies the latter third of the book's content. The majority of the book outlines the history of the CIA and FBI organizations and the various theories about mind control and programmed killers as pertaining to the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.
By comparing Lennon's murder to the murder's of JFK and MLK it only exposes the lack of tangible evidence. While there's much evidence to help fuel the conspiracy theories of those assassinations, there's not a great deal of evidence in the Lennon shooting. The authors make a rather thin case in this book for a conspiracy. It's an interesting idea, but the most interesting portion of this book is dealing with the history of the CIA, which is better discussed in other books.

Even though this book is being published five years after GCHQ Chinese linguist Katherine Gun leaked an American government memorandum calling for a joint British-American "surge" in electronic espionage directed against some countries who were sitting on the United Nations Security Council, there is precious little new in this book. One could get most of the gist of this book merely by reading back issues of British newspapers. This book really should have been just a long magazine article. What's more, the full, leaked memorandum itself is not even included in the book. (If you want to read the original memo you can find it at: [...]).

It is only in the second half of the book that we find out much about Katherine Gun's rather unique background. While Mrs. Gun publicly claims that if she had to do it all over again she would still leak the memo - and is hailed by many for her stance - I believe that she really would not do so, especially knowing now how much pressure she and here husband would be under. Mr. Gun (I expect his name is pronounced "goon") is an ethnic Turk who married Mrs. Gun only a few months before her getting caught up in a violation of the Official Secrets Act. In what seems like retaliation for his wife's actions, he was arrested for violating his visa and came witin an inch of deportation.

Inflamed by moral outrage at what the US Government was proposing to the British, Mrs. Gun was obviously not aware that at the United Nations, itself, most UN representatives automatically assumed that they were spied upon. And despite her own job in Signals Intelligence, Mrs. Gun apparently believed - sometimes, at least - that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Now that really is naive.

Ultimately, Mrs. Gun is a very lucky young woman. If she had been in the old Russian intelligence service she would very likely have been executed for what she did. As it is, she risked years in British prison. In retrospect, her gesture seems to have been misguided, Quixotic, and rash, and ultimately had almost no effect on the British-American rush to war. It does not - and did not - take a rocket scientist to understand that the US and Britain were committed to attacking Iraq, UN Security Council resolution or not.

I also believe that Mrs. Gun is being used, not least by the people who are profiting from this book and from her appearances on the lecture circuit. I wish Mrs. Gun all the best, but I think she should return to life as a teacher, linguist, and mother, and not be drawn in by all the hype about what a heroine she was. In all honesty, I believe it's time for this young wife and mother to thank her lucky stars and stand back from the fray.

Taut, crisp, and intriguing. I enjoyed it as an exercise in psychology. What motivates someone to throw the wrench into the process?

And this is the whole point of this book, nevertheless interesting and well written : Interviewed are only CIA former Directors. So it's really the Bosses pont of view rather than the field operative's one. Mislead by the title, I was not that impressed by the book content. Most of the stories are already old news (some interviews have been published at length), about overtold events such as JFK's assassination or the Bay Of Pigs. If you wanna hear it from the guys doing the actual work, stay away.

I wouldn't have bought it if I had seen it on a shelf. But I guess it's one of the risks of online purchasing.

I suppose all I have ever thought of the CIA is the mysterious "wet ops" assassination stuff. This book certainly gave me a LOT more insight!

"America's Secret Power" is Loch Johnson's 1989 study of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premier U.S. intelligence agency. Johnson, an academic by trade, had extensive experience working as a staffer in Congress, most notably on the 1974-75 Church Committee investigations of CIA excesses.

The good news is that Johnson has compiled extensive unclassified research on the CIA, based on a variety of sources, and made a meaningful effort to analyze, for the general public, the attributes of an agency which by necessity conducts most of its business out of public view. Johnson discusses the many functions of the CIA, including its controversial responsibility for covert action and its contentious relationships with academia and the media. Johnson is to be commended for having gone the extra mile in trying to provide constructive criticism for the many faults he finds.

The bad news is that Johnson tends to undercut the value of his own work:
First, he is sometimes careless in his fact-checking, ranging from the merely annoying (Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japanese naval aviation, not the Japanese Air Force) to the fairly significant (confusing "counterinsurgency"-a method-with "paramilitary"-a tool).

Second, Johnson places too much credibility in the media accounts he relies upon in his study of CIA actions. An author who implies, for example, that the New York Times is "an organ of unfettered expression of fact" has made a remarkable assertion given the longstanding political activism of that paper.

Third, Johnson is challenged to maintain his objectivity throughout the book. He is prone to characterize various CIA activities as illegal, without actually documenting that any competent authority has found a particular activity to be illegal (as opposed to merely objectionable). Sometimes, he indulges in hyperventilating prose. The Iran-Contra Scandal, an admittedly botched attempt to ransom American hostages out of Lebanon coupled with an illegal diversion of funds to support anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, is characterized as somehow threatening the very existance of American democracy, instead of merely the careers of the individual officials involved. Johnson seems blind to the highly partisan nature of some Congressional criticism of the CIA, rooted as much in policy differences with a President as in real or alleged wrong-doing.

"America's Secret Power" has much value as a textbook on the Central Intelligence Agency for the student who has the background and skepticism to weed through Johnson's occasional failures of objectivity and the limitations of his sources. Johnson has posed many very useful questions about the value of secret intelligence organizations in a democracy. It is to Johnson's credit that he acknowledges that many of these questions have no useful permanent answer.

Many apologists for the Bush administration argue that warrantless wiretaps are necessary to catch terrorists. They also claim that the Clinton administration weakened America's security. If they only looked a little closer, they'd realize that Slick Willie laid the groundwork for Bush's unconstitutional violations of your privacy.

The FBI under Attorney General Janet Reno used a program called CARNIVORE to monitor internet communications. Naturally many privacy advocates recognized this as a dangerous road to go down. Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) introduced the Digital Privacy Act of 2000, which would have made it easier to "watch the watchers". This piece of legislation would have required the Attorney General to regularly report to congress about the nature, necessity and frequency of CARNIVORE usage. Too bad it died in committee!

It is true that the CARNIVORE system isn't as bold of a violation as, say the PATRIOT Act. But let's be honest, the person intercepting your emails is no more honorable than the one who sends agents to "sneak and peak" in your apartment. Anybody looking for the golden years of privacy should look straight past the Clinton~Bush years.

An excellant reference book but not good for much else...if you want more modern information try the internet.

If you just want a quick, broad overview of cryptography in the American Revolution then this book should suffice. It was compiled by the Army Signal Corps in 1945 so obviously there is nothing discovered after that included here. Also, as stated in the foreword, there was no original research done in the preparation of this book; it is based on other works, 3 of which appear in the 3 appendixes. Serious Revolutionary War cryptography scholars should turn their attention to the Ralph Weber book, "American Diplomatic Codes" for a much more in-depth analysis.