Agency-securities Books

THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: SECURITY UNDER SCRUTINY edited by Athan Theoharis and others joins others in the 'Understanding Our Government' series to provide college-level readers with a primer on the CIA's history, purposes, and activities. Chapters describe its organization, intelligence operations, controversies and events, considering the changing role and perception of secrets and intelligence work over the decades and spying and interception projects fostered by the CIA.

The explicit concept guiding this book is that intelligence failures (or successes) are not isolated events, but rather occur within the context of the national security processes. Or as Diamond succinctly puts it: "The biggest intelligence failures are usually the product of accumulating misjudgments and lapses..." at all levels of the national security establishment. He also makes the important point that there is a very thin line between intelligence successes and failures. These related concepts are the bases for Diamond's central argument that the legacy of real or perceived failures at CIA, its culture of failure, makes its intelligence production processes vulnerable to pressure from other elements of the national security establishment. Diamond believes this culture of failure leads to other intelligence failures that are caused by the reluctance of CIA analysts to make the same mistake twice or to present intelligence that may be counter to the thinking of senior policy makers.

Diamond also makes a very valuable observation that there is a wide gap between the line intelligence analysts and the senior intelligence officials who present the face of CIA to the executive branch and congress. Much of the problem of so-called "bad" intelligence stems from the reluctance of seniors to accurately reflect analytic positions if those positions run counter to the direction that policy formulation is taking. As
Diamond points out, analytic processes and conclusions are often by necessity convoluted and ambiguous. Therefore, both senior intelligence managers and their policy making clients find many accurate intelligence products confusing and frustrating. As a result, staff functionaries often will `scrub' intelligence products to eliminate contradictions and ambiguities. The resulting product may not be accurate, but it is much easier to understand than the original.

That said, Diamond also notes that CIA analytic tradecraft is sadly lacking. He cites numerous examples where CIA working analysts demonstrated a shocking lack of competence. For example, the CIA misinformation that caused the U.S. to execute a precision air strike that hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, instead of its intended target a Serbian military target was the fault of inexcusable carelessness of CIA analysts (this included failure to use readily available open sources, existing local CIA and U.S. Embassy sources, and an unwillingness to examine current information). Even allowing for all the mitigating factors, CIA has a sub-standard record for intelligence production that is as much due to poor analysis as to outside pressures and the complexities of the analytic craft.

This book is fair to CIA and to the national security establishment. Diamond is on the fringes of this establishment and not of it and this has enabled him to be objective about its failings and successes.

Outstanding insights into the state of the CIA and life from start to finish in the CIA. This book is a must read for anyone with interest in the CIA

You can get this information online for free--and there is a newer edition out, but it costs twice as much--but it's nice to have the reference material on your Kindle for browsing while you're stuck in some waiting room. The information is essentially factual, presented in a rigid format (all countries treated exactly the same); it's an encyclopedic compendium that any student needing to write a term paper would have a field day with.

I think the geographical coordinates are extremely helpful, because if you find an area you are interested in further exploring, you can call it up via Google Earth. I like, too, the fact that it discusses environmental treaties and issues for the various countries.

We're not too far from retirement and are dreaming about becoming American expatriates--not sure where yet; a lot will depend on the dollar's decline--so this fact book is very helpful in our researches.

James Major is a retired intelligence professional who spent years mentoring intelligence officers on how to write clear, concise papers, theses, and monographs that would be of use to policy makers in the Department of Defense and the academic community. This book adds to that mentoring effort and as a magnum opus for a widely respected author and intelligence officer it is essential reading for anyone who is looking to improve their writing skills or simply ensure that their substance and format will be one understood by those who make decisions within our government.

The book provides all of the tools that one will need in order to write a clear, well documented, easily understood, paper, briefing, monograph, or even a manuscript for a book. Major focuses on both the substance and format of what must go into a good work, and this book will be extremely useful for students attending Primary Military Education programs - or simply working on an important written product in any educational or governmental program.

For those who are looking for a much more easily digestable set of readings than the Chicago Manual of Style of the MLA format, I highly recommend this book. But it will be extremely useful for anyone who wants to become a better writer and briefer or simply is looking for a great resource for citing sources properly. It is vital reading for anyone who is looking to communicate clearly in intelligence, or who wants to write the very best works possible.

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.

Under Cover, or Out of Control? The New York Times November 29, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition (Review of 2 books, including The perfect failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, only this book review included here)

The torrent of revelations about the Iran-contra affair during the summer's televised hearings, and in the recently released report of the Congressional committees that conducted the hearings, has made Americans aware both of the importance of covert action in the foreign policy of their country and of its risks and costs. These two books do nothing to rehabilitate its reputation or to improve its image...

Both men show how much euphoria about covert action was created by two early successes of the C.I.A.: in Iran in 1953, when Kermit Roosevelt, with the help of what Mr. Treverton calls a ''strange assemblage'' - a pro-Shah mob controlled by one Iranian leader, ''complete with giant . . . weight-lifters recruited from Teheran athletic clubs'' - overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh's Government and consolidated the Shah's shaky power; and in Guatemala in 1954, when the regime of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was toppled by a small group of rebel soldiers moving in from Honduras. The action in Guatemala led officials to believe that such successes could be repeated elsewhere; it ''consolidated the ascendancy of covert action over espionage, and of operations over intelligence in the CIA,'' in Mr. Treverton's words - and it led directly to the Bay of Pigs and to the later operations in Chile that toppled that country's Government. Most of the men who planned these later activities had been involved in the Guatemalan affair.

''Covert Action'' is valuable not only for its brief, sharp accounts of covert enterprises (the one in Chile was undertaken even though none of the official assessments had concluded that the election of Salvador Allende Gossens in 1970 threatened any vital United States interest), but above all for the lessons Mr. Treverton draws from history, and for his own assessments. The lessons are stark. As the targets of United States action became more formidable (Fidel Castro learned from Arbenz's fate), the chances of success decreased. Success requires bigger operations - and big operations can't remain secret (as the Reagan arms sales to Iran demonstrated).

If the covert activities go on for a long time, as they have in Angola and, since 1981, in Nicaragua, the purposes tend to expand, along with the commitment and public knowledge. When the operations entail the manipulation of foreign elements with their own agenda (the Cuban exiles mobilized for the Bay of Pigs landing, or the Nicaraguan contras, or the anti-Allende factions in the Chilean military), American ability to control them is often limited. In any case, the fine-tuning of covert actions is difficult. In Chile, the United States Government tried to maintain a barrier ''between supporting opposition forces and funding groups trying to promote a military coup,'' but local realities made this ''a distinction built of sand.'' As a result, whatever restrictions and distinctions the United States may have tried to observe, in Chile and elsewhere, it ended up, in the eyes of foreign observers, being seen as responsible for the fall of Allende, or for the acts and fate of the Shah, or as colluding with South Africa against the Marxist regime in Angola.

Mr. Treverton deals at length with the problems of control over covert action. He shows that the enthusiasm shown for it by several Administrations resulted not merely from the ''operational behavior'' of the C.I.A. - its bias for action over mere espionage - but also, frequently, from Presidential pressures (especially from Presidents Nixon and Reagan). But the need to keep operations secret - and the need to protect Presidents by maintaining the possibility of so-called plausible denial - meant that the activities would be discussed only by a small number of people, that insufficient debate and criticism would lead to grievous errors (such as the mistaken belief that the Cuban people would support the invading exiles rather than Mr. Castro) and that only a small proportion of covert-action projects would be reviewed by the National Security Council system.

As for Congress, which went through a long period of complacency and complicity, it tried to reverse course after the Watergate crisis. The Hughes-Ryan Act of 1974 put an end to plausible denial by requiring a Presidential finding that each operation is important to national security, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 required that Congress be notified of all covert operations. But both laws are full of enough vague terms and escape hatches to allow the executive branch to thwart their authors' intentions, as the Iran-contra affair has shown. Indeed, the members of Congress are in a dilemma, highlighted by Mr. Treverton: when they are informed, they are in no position to stop the action - unless they leak its existence and thereby foreclose ''the option of covertness.''

Thus, covert action raises formidable issues in an open society. Mr. Treverton lists the realists' arguments on behalf of secret operations - especially the need to meet, if not to match, Soviet covert activities and to help one's friends in a harsh and dangerous world. But his own position is closer to that of the idealists. He recognizes that covert operations may be necessary at times. But he doubts they'll remain secret, warns about their unintended effects and long-term costs and argues against having them run from the White House or in contradiction of official policy (as in the case of Irangate). He also shows that much that is done covertly by the C.I.A. could be done overtly by private organizations (he notes the foundations established by West German political parties that have aided democratic forces in such countries as Portugal), and, above all, he concludes that most covert-action successes have been small, ambiguous and transitory (Iran and Guatemala in the 1950's, for example).''Covert Action'' is enlightening, thoughtful and wise.

Mr. Treverton, who writes elegantly, paints an often dirty scene in pastel colors.

---
1987 Foreign Affairs
1987 / 1988, Winter

RECENT BOOKS ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: The United States; Pg. 438
This is a succinct, authoritative history and critique of the government's use of covert action to shape or overthrow foreign regimes. Mr. Treverton's interest in the subject began in 1975 when he served on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee). His conclusion, based on deep knowledge of major actions (Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, Angola and others), is that covert action cannot be kept secret, usually has consequences far different from and less desirable than those intended, often ties the U.S. to clients who are not easily controlled, undermines the comparative advantage which the United States has as an open society, and is almost always a bad idea.
---
Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1987
THE SEARCH FOR A 'MAGIC BUTTON' IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY;

I first encountered CIA covert action operations in the early 1960s in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where I was serving my initial tour of duty as an American Foreign Service officer. A powerful anti-communist documentary film called "We Will Bury You" had been released commercially in several local theaters. On the second day of screenings, a teen-age boy who was bicycling reels from theater to theater was stopped by a gang of communist toughs. The can of film was stolen and the boy was shot in the head. A public uproar ensued. The U.S. Consulate quickly arranged for the boy to be flown to the U.S. Army hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, where mercifully he recovered.

Years later, when I headed an investigative task force for the Senate Intelligence Committee, I learned the true story of that incident. The "communist toughs" were CIA "assets" hired to create an incident to promote the film. But when the boy resisted and tried to get away with the film, they panicked and shot him.

Gregory F. Treverton's book, "Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World," is full of stories of CIA schemes gone wrong. In one surprising revelation, he describes how CIA Director William Casey, angry at his experts on terrorism for coming up with little evidence linking the Soviet Union to terror groups, ordered them to read Claire Sterling's famous book "The Terror Network." They did and found that virtually all of the examples she cited turned out to be CIA disinformation -- false stories planted in the foreign press that she unwittingly used in good faith.

But the book also examines operations that, in the view of many, went right -- like overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq in Iran in the 1950s. Treverton has little patience with arguments that the coup that ousted Mossadeq and restored the Shah to power lies at the core of our present conflict with Iran. He points out that the Shah was identified with the United States in many ways besides that one -- most prominently, wasteful arms purchases from the United States -- and that the CIA covert action that secured his throne brought about a quarter century of stability, no small feat in the turbulent Middle East.

Those initial successes set the pattern for other covert actions, some of which were disasters like the Bay of Pigs. This story has been told elsewhere, but Treverton treats us to new insights. Particularly shocking is his explanation that the invasion was considered foolproof because the exile brigade originally planned to land at the town of Trinidad, where, if something went wrong, they could melt into the mountains.

But, at the last minute, Secretary of State Dean Rusk objected, prefering a "quieter site" for the landing. The Bay of Pigs was finally chosen, the planners apparently overlooking the fact that the mountains would then be 80 miles away across a swamp!

Treverton, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, draws important lessons both for the public and for officials responsible for covert operations. He shows how the momentum of covert-action projects often carries them far beyond their original scope, citing not only the Bay of Pigs but efforts against Salvador Allende in Chile, which ultimately ended in the coup in which he was killed, and the Reagan Administration's undiminished stake in the contras. Treverton explains why covert actions are inherently difficult to control and often produce unintended results -- such as U.S. support for the Jonas Savimbi forces in Angola, putting us on the same side as South Africa and thus damaging our reputation throughout black Africa.

Though often critical of the CIA, the author makes clear that one reason Presidents turn to covert action is that the Agency is extremely competent and gets the job done. He points out that Presidents are not tools of the CIA; rather the White House is often the source of pressure to come up with covert operations and even originates some of the more ill-considered ideas, such as the Iran-contra caper.

I recall during my days as a Senate investigator finding a piece of yellow note pad with jottings from a meeting with White House officials during the Kennedy Administration that discussed an "Executive Action" or, in plain English, an assass-- capability. The notes referred to it as the "magic button."

This unfortunately is all too often the mind set of senior government leaders when they consider the "covert option"; namely, that somehow magically it will sweep away threats or obstacles to the success of U.S. policy. As Treverton points out, we have failed as often as we have succeeded, and even then our successes frequently cause us to forget about the underlying causes of the problems we face. For example, after Arbenz was deposed in Guatemala, we ignored Central America until the Sandinistas reminded us of the revolutionary potential of injustice in that region.

Treverton notes that the world's revolutionaries have also learned a thing or two about covert action. As in Nicaragua they have discovered how to use CIA pressure to rally their publics against U.S. intervention. Fledgling left-wing regimes turn more quickly to Moscow for protection. The contrast with the past is striking: Arbenz was overthrown with 300 men; at the Bay of Pigs we hoped to overthrow Castro with 750 exiles and a tiny air force; but now, the CIA is supporting an army of 10,000 contras and still nobody thinks they have a prayer of displacing the Sandinistas.

The striking change from the 1950s is that virtually all major covert actions now become public, often before they are concluded. Increasingly, the U.S. government doesn't care. American support for the Afghan resistance is not a secret, only unacknowledged. Still, bad decisions like trading arms for hostages are made without full appreciation of what will happen when, inevitably, the story leaks out.

The most important contribution of Treverton's brilliant analysis is to demythicize covert action. It is not a romantic "magic button" that does away with the need for sound military and diplomatic strategies. It does not allow us to ignore economic and social realities in the turbulent underdeveloped world. But neither are such CIA operations the cause of all our troubles or inherently evil, as many critics might suggest.

I firmly believe that covert action has a legitimate role in U.S. national security, but as Treverton makes clear, such operations are only as sound as the policy they seek to advance. The risks are always substantial and success is often fleeting.

Ultimately, I became chairman of the National Security Council subcommittee that was responsible for intelligence operations during the Carter Administration. I only wish I had been able to read Treverton's fascinating and compelling book before doing so. For all those who may in the future have a role in such clandestine intelligence operations, including the watchdogs in Congress, "Covert Action" is required reading.

This book is a masterpiece by diplomat/economist/revolutionary Mr. Lechuga Hevia. His extramarital son, Martin Hevia, obtained his SJD at the U of Toronto, with his doctoral thesis being indeed a masterpiece. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN.
GO LECHUGA GO

As stated above, Barnett was a staffer on the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in 1994 and thus had a first hand view of the workings/failure of the Secretariat, the Security Council, the United Nations and the international community as a whole.

Unlike so many other books about Rwanda, Barnett refuses to simply write off the UN or the international community as uncaring or unconcerned about the unfolding genocide in Rwanda. Rather, he shows that those involved were deeply concerned but trapped by their own rules and internal bureaucratic logic, leading eventually to paralysis and inaction.

Coming fast on the heels of Somalia and Bosnia, Rwanda was left to implode because everyone involved operated on a logical/ethical plane seemingly far removed from the actual humanitarian crisis on the ground. With the UN overstretched and concerned about its reputation/survival, the members states of the security council unwilling to send troops or supplies into a raging anarchy, and UN rules dictating when peacekeeping and intervention were justified, Rwanda was left to fend for itself.

Barnett does a great job of presenting the facts and their corresponding arguments and explaining just how impossible a situation the UN was facing. As he says, none of this justifies UN inaction, but it does help us to understand how and why the world stood by as nearly 1 million people were slaughtered.

This book would not serve as a good introduction of the genocide itself, as the focus is really on the United Nations and its handling of the situation. If it is the actual genocide you want to learn about, read another book ("We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" is a great introduction, as is Fergal Keane's "Season of Blood.") But if you want to understand how and why the international community so gravely failed Rwanda, this is the best book available.

This book is a contender for the title of "Best Book on the Vietnam War." This is not a "war story" book or a record of military fights on the battlefield. Instead, it recounts the struggles among the allies, both in Indochina and in Washington, D.C., to find and pursue a strategy. The fact that it took the U.S. so long to come to a winning strategy explains why the American Congress eventually lost enthusiasm for the war and pulled the plug just when the South Vietnamese had risen to the point of viability as an independent nation capable of self-defense against the determined enemy that controlled the people of the North.

The title of this book is questionable because it's not a good guide to the wide range of subjects treated authoritatively by the book, nor does it deal exclusively with the CIA's role as the title might suggest. It is taken from the name of the allied effort to crush the communists' war-directing apparatus among the thousands of South Vietnamese villages. That effort was intially conceived by a South Vietamese military officer who had served in the North Vietnamese military forces before becoming disillusioned with the communists' heavy-handed approach to dominion over all the nationalist groups working for independence. The author pegs his story around the history of that officer. The book's special strength is in the first-hand information obtained by the author's interviews of key actors in the key events of the war.

It is also of importance that the author picks up the story at the end of World War II. Without that background, it is difficult to put later developments into meaningful context, or to see the continuity of the French and American wars. The French had been in Indochina for over a century, and the drive to wrest independence from the French -- and, later, to maintain it in the face of well-intended but often misdirected U.S. invervention -- was fundamental to the Vietnamese motivations throughout the war.

From the Vietnamese point of view there was simply one war -- a 40-year war for independence. From the Western perspective, there was first the "French War" and then the "American War."

The major American strategic gaffes are made evident, along with the background that explains how they happened. The gaffes include America's misguided and high-handed killing of South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem (and the author provides the evidence that U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was instrumental in eliminating Diem and his entire government), the only South Vietnamese patriot of sufficient stature to have had a chance of rallying the moral opposition to the communists under Ho Chi Minh in the North; the introduction of American fighting forces onto a field that should have been occupied only by the contending North and South Vietnamese (and the corollary neglect of the essential political and military mobilization of the South Vietnamese); and, ultimately, the U.S.'s egregious abandonment of the South Vietnamese when the Southern people, relying on promised American military aid, had fully mobilized themselves to resist Northern aggression. The invidious role of the American media, some of whose leading representatives became involved to the point of taking sides in the strategic wrangling, is covered more explicitly and pertinently here than in most other accountings.

The author does not explore the possibility of an earlier military victory had American politics not precluded the allies cutting the enemy's supply lines into the South. That possibility, and the curious story behind it, is well told in "Laos: The Key to Failure." But the author does cover the events in Laos and Cambodia that were critical to the war in Vietnam. Indeed, for the commmunists it was all one war for control of Indochina. America's keeping the wars compartmentalized was another strategic error.

"Phoenix" nicely moves between the battlefields of Indochina and the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. And "Vietnam" cannot be understood without a grasp of that vital connection.

The four books that I would recommend for a basic grasp of the Vietnam War are 1) "A soldier Reports" by William Westmoreland (the Eagle Scout who lacked Asian experience and who had little sense of the complex political nature of the war he was fighting, but who made many crucial decisions during four critical years of the war); 2) "Lost Victory" by William Colby (who worked on Indochina longer than any other senior U.S. official, and who had a keener insight into what happened there and why; 3) "Laos: The key to Failure" by Norman Hannah (who saw the Indochina theater more strategically than most from his post in Hawaii with the Commander in Chief of the Pacific); and 4) the book here reviewed -- "Facing the Phoenix" by Zalin Grant. These four will provide an understanding of the hisorical background, the complex reasons for the U.S. taking the decisions it did, the people who played significant roles on all sides of the conflict, the mistakes that were made in pursuing American aims in Vietnam (and Southeast Asia more generally),and the strategic successes and failures of the undertaking.