Customer Reviews

Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence

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This is a useful retrospective by Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence under President Jimmy Carter, but it is most useful if you are a Member of Congress, a sitting or future President, or perhaps being considered as a future DCI. For the general public, and even for intelligence professionals, this is an interesting personal recollection and evaluation that reflects a limited appreciation for the broader literature on intelligence reform and is less likely to be exciting to those seeking to understand the minutia of intelligence.

It could be very useful to the public under one condition or rather one hope: that the public react to this book as I did, to wit, the author may not have intended this, but his superb tour of the relations between Presidents and Directors of Central (or in today's terms, National) Intelligence has persuaded me that our national intelligence community must be removed from the Executive Branch. We need a new hybrid national intelligence community in which the Director is simultaneously responsive to the President, to Governors, to Congress, and to the public. It's budget must be set as a fraction of the total disposable budget of the federal government, on the order of 1%. This agency must be completely impervious to Executive or Congressional abuse, and must act as a national objective source of truth upon which to discuss policy and acqusition and liaison options. A national board of overseers could be comprised of former Presidents, former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Leaders of the House and Senate, as well as selected representatives of the public. Intelligence is now too important to be subject to the whims of politics. Intelligence is the revolutionary source of wealth as well as conflict resolution, and this author has made it clear that most Presidents simply cannot be trusted to either manage it or listen to it with wisdom. I would go so far as to suggest that national science and education also require a similar form of hybrid oversight and management. This is not to say that each Executive agency should not have its own intelligence and information operations (I2O) capabilities and functions, only that intelligence and science, like justice, need a court of last resort that cannot be undermined by ideology and personality.

This suggestion is probably too radical, BUT there is one opening for a first step: the DNI should recommend to the President and to Congress that the new planned Open Source Agency integrate the Library of Congress and be the first new hybrid organization, with the Director appointed for life, as are Supreme Court Justices.

The author has done an excellent job, albeit with some obvious gaps and a few errors, in focusing on the relationships between Presidents and Directors of Central Intelligence. However, the book suffers from the author's understandable but incorrect assumption that national intelligence should remain focused on secrets by, of, and for the President. In fact, not only is most intelligence today from open sources of information, but finished intelligence is a small fraction of Information Operations (IO), that larger matrix of all operational, logistics, geospatial, and other information (including information from non-governmental organizations, universities, and corporations as well as religions and labor unions), and thus the author's perspective and recommendations, while valuable, are relevant only to 10% of the challenge facing DNI John Negroponte and DDNI Mike Hayden.

A few notes from the margins:

The author's largely cursory review of past reform efforts completely ignores the earnest efforts of Senator Boren and Congressman McCurdy with the National Security Act of 1992. That Act was undone by Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, and Senator John Warner, then ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The author does correctly note that all of the recommendations of the Aspin-Brown Commission, a device used by Senator Warner to delay and stop reform, have not yet been implemented.

The author is incorrect when he credits Tenet with focusing on the operational side of the CIA, and for focusing on global coverage. In fact, Tenet appointed a White House mess buddy to be DDO, James Pavitt screwed up for seven years, and then Tenet has the temerity to tell the 9-11 Commission that he needed seven more years to get it right. Tenet also commissioned and then refused to follow the recommendations of a report called "The Challenge of Global Coverage," where Keith Hall, then Director of the National Reconnaissance Agency, among others, told Tenet directly that with the secret world's obession on seven hard targets, it desperately needed an insurance policy on the order of $10M a year for each of 150 countries or topics including terrorism and disease. Tenet is reported by one present to have said "we are in the business of secrets, speak no more of this report."

The author is politically correct but wrong to give the recent intelligence reform legislation a qualified "yes" when asking it makes us safer. It does not. The lead article in the Fall issue of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, by Michael Turner, is absolutely on target when it calls the legislation a loss for the American people and the widows and orphans of 9-11, and a victory for entrenched interests including Congressional pork rolling in Virginia.

The author is completely correct to suggest that "CIA" is an acronym ready for retirement. As I suggested in my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE (with a Foreword by Senator David Boren), CIA needs to be come the National Analysis Agency, and be stripped of its S&T and clandestine functions. [NSA needs to become the National Processing Agency--Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, and most of it is not online.]

There are two important recurring themes across the book that the author is extraordinarily qualified to address. The first is the long-term political, social, economic, and cultural costs of "covert actions" including assassinations, coups, and other nefarious interventions in foreign affairs. The second is the extremely negative impact on national intelligence of military ownership of three "national" agencies. He points out that we missed the Indian nuclear developments in part because the Department of Defense was demanding that all the satellite capabilities be focused on Iraq, and through ownership, was able to enforce its demands and neglect national priorities.

The author praises George Bush the First as a model President and director, and seems to hint that the son would do well to follow his father's active engagement. The author is brutal about Casey, suggesting (to this reader) that not until Karl Rove has there been a more negative employment of government assets for political advantage. The author is subtly critical of Henry Kissinger, calls Woolsey's tenure a lost opportunity to redirect CIA, and has many other insights that can only come from a DCI, about other DCIs. Overall this is a good read for anyone who cares deeply about the health and nuances of U.S. intelligence.

The book loses one star for gaps here and there. The sources used are very limited--in the critical Viet-Nam era, for example, the author does not cite George Allen's "NONE SO BLIND," and he does not mention at least 15 other retrospective books on intelligence that would have added substantially to his endeavor, which seeks to end with recommendations for the DNI and future reform legislation that remains needed.

From his position as Director of Central Intelligence during the Carter presidency Admiral Turner is able to present a view of the CIA from an inside that few of us have seen.

In this book he reviews the relationship between the agency and the president that they served. Sometimes the relationship has been cordial, sometimes you would use other words. Over the years there have been successes and failures, with the failures getting a lot more press.

While the main part of the book is a discussion of the relationship between each of the presidents since Truman and the agency, perhaps the most interesting part of the book is recommendations for strengthening the agency so that it provides more useful assistance to the Government.

His basic proposal is for more of the same. More authority for the director, more budget (of course) more control of the other agencies. There is also a suggestion to tie togeather the fifteen or so agencies that currently collect information. Needless to say, the other agencies have different opinions.

From an outsider point of view, the CIA has become very oriented to collecting intelligence from 'National Technical Means' that is satellites. This worked pretty well when the target was the Soviet Union. It has not worked so well against al Queda or Iraq. Changing the target, the procedures, the languages and perhaps some major changes in philosophy may be needed.

"Burn Before Reading" is comprised of twelve chapters, each covering relations between CIA directors (or equivalent) and their associated Presidents. Early on Admiral Turner makes the basic point that the relationship between the director and the President is crucial to good intelligence operation.

The "bad news" is that infighting over roles/relationships in U.S. intelligence-gathering and analysis has gone on from the days of FDR (Chapter One). The Armed Forces and FBI have been major opponents in this ongoing struggle, and they still are. Meanwhile, from time to time analysts (or the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) periodically have chosen to go beyond reporting the facts to also making recommendations - making the whole effort subject to political attack.

Curiously, Eisenhower was in a particularly good position to recognize the value of a strong DCI (and did), but allowed the position to deteriorate during his administration because Allen Dulles was not personally interested in such direction.

We've gone from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to India has the bomb (surprise!) to Pakistan has the bomb (surprise!), to WMD not in Iraq - has our intelligence gotten any better?

Not nearly as candid as in his first book, "Secrecy and Democracy". Admiral Turner's writing and thinking in this text is of minimal effort and this by a man who has had such a distinguished career. I would expect this kind of work from someone turning their dissertation into book length or a professor aiming for tenure, not a retired NATO commander and former DCI. Not only does he not provide anything new in terms of presidents and their relationships to central intelligence but bothers with little meaningful national security/ political analysis, and what technical analysis that exists is trite. He could of produced a seminal and critical work in the field of national security studies using his security clearance and the national security archives but instead writes something that will be quickly dismissed by both the public and scholars. But of all the issues I have with this book most important are the facts he ignores or is unaware of. An example of this is on pg. 84 when he says that Iran was Ike's and Dulles's first use of covert action. There are numerous errors and omissions in this text.

I would not recommend this book to anyone (not even a newbie to national security studies); instead as a replacement "Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates 1952-1992" by John L. Helgerson (one of Turner's key sources by happenstance). But I also suggest reading "Keepers of the Keys" by John Prados, which concerns itself with the history of the National Security Council.

It would be nearly impossible to improve on Robert Steele's excellent review (below) so I won't even try. Instead I'll just mention a few conclusions that this book brought me to.

1. The events of 9/11 starkly illustrated that our Intelligence structure is broken. Infighting, lack of communication, personal rivalries and flawed methods all contributed to the greatest intelligence failure in our nation's history. Rearranging the deck chairs isn't going to fix it.

2. Adm. Turner's book is not about our intelligence failures (as I'd hoped) however; it's a history of Directors of National Intelligence and their relationship to their Presidents. It has been, as Steele noted, a rocky relationship -- and Turner is not above throwing a little monkey poo himself, calling Reagan's transition team "as unbalanced, opinionated, and unwilling to listen as any group I have ever encountered."

3. It is not a foregone conclusion that strengthening the DCI would have prevented 9/11, or any future terrorist act. Undoubtedly it would help, but there's only so much one man (or woman) could do against entrenched parochialism.

4. Nevertheless, both Turner and Steele feel obliged to offer suggestions for DNI strengthening. Steele's idea of making the position independent of the Executive branch has merit, but perhaps puts too much power (and influence over decisionmakers) in the hands of a non-elected official. Turner raises and dismisses both a ten-year fixed term (dismissed for the same reason, essentially) and making it a cabinet position (dismissed as making the position even MORE partisan). Turner's ultimate recommendation, spread throughout the last chapter, is to substantially strengthen the position without changing it, although he does not specify exactly how.

5. Finally, in the Appendix Turner lists the 15 agencies, offices and bureaus which make up the "Intelligence Community." But these are less a "community" than a collection of siloed bureaucracies, each fighting each other over priority and budget -- and therein lies the real problem. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 was intended to address this situation, and if it was allowed to be implemented in full it would do more to resolve the intelligence gridlock, I suspect, than redefining the role of the DNI.

A great book describing Presidential relationships with their respective DCIs and the Intelligence Community.

Hearing about the dynamics of these personal relationships and interactions beyond the shallow perceptions one gets from the media (printed, internet, television, talk shows) was very insightful and intriguing.

The book would also give the general public a little more of a pause before jumping to conclusions, as they do when watching television news and just reading only headline news. Then again, our short attention spans and selective memories probably wouldn't allow this to happen.

The book is a fast read and is worth your time.

This book is written by the former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Stansfield Turner, who served under Carter. It's an informative look at the evolution of the CIA from its beginning under FDR to its current embodiment (as of 2004). It is particularly concerned with the relationship of the DCI with the President, and how that influences how intelligence is gathered, and how it is used (and misused). The book also explores the myriad complex and controversial issues regarding exactly what the role of the CIA should be. Some examples:

(1) Should the CIA serve an analytical or operations function? Analytical functions of the CIA include analyzing economies, politics, geography, and current events and trying to predict the future. Then there's the "operations" side that includes covert operations (James Bond type stuff). What balance should be struck between these functions?

(2) Then there's the question of whether the CIA should present "just the facts," in as objective a manner as possible, OR whether they should form opinions based on those facts. On the one hand, we need an objective organization, because other people offering intelligence are military-based, and have their own agendas which muddy the waters. On the other hand, it seems silly for people with good intelligence skills to come up with all the data...and then avoid drawing any conclusions...particularly because many Presidents don't have time, or aren't smart enough to draw intelligent conclusions of their own.

(3) Then there's questions of whether the CIA should be allowed to think about domestic military matters. This is typically the purview of military departments who (naturally) understand those matters best. But if the CIA is specifically prevented from understanding the domestic situation...then how can they judge international matters, which are often influenced by domestic matters.

(4) Who should run the CIA, and who should coordinate intelligence efforts with other intelligence heads in the army, navy, air-force, DoD? What relationship should all these people have to cabinet members like the Secretaries of State and Defense...and the President for that matter!

I found this book to be really informative, if a trifle dry.

Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of the CIA 1977-81, has written a very valuable book that cannot be labeled a history but more of a survey of the Agency he once led. To further refine his focus Admiral Turner looks at the relationship between the CIA directors and the Presidents starting with Roosevelt and "Wild Bill" Donovan and concluding with George W. Bush and George Tenet. Unquestionably upon that relationship pivots the trust and the corresponding utility of the intelligence provided.
The real value of this book is to enlighten the readers of those key intelligence topics faced by each administration. Have said that I was disappointed with the very thin bibliography. I would of like to have seen included a listing of those key books that address intelligence topics such as the U-2 over flights and the Pearl Harbor attack just for example.
Students and general readers looking for a readable, short overview of intelligence issues and Key CIA players will find this a helpful book.

Written by Jimmy Carter's CIA director, this book chronicles the history of the CIA through a unique perspective: the relationship between the president and the head of the CIA. Turner documents how the various presidents (Truman through GW Bush) have taken many different positions toward the CIA. While some like Eisenhower and Kennedy wanted to use the CIA to "make things happen" in foreign countries, some like Johnson and Clinton were distrustful of the agency. Nixon and Reagan took a more hands-off approach, while the two Bushes greatly appreciated the importance of intelligence.

Some CIA directors had constant contact with the president, most notably George Tenet under George W. Bush. Some had no contact at all, like James Woolsey under Clinton. But this book makes a bigger point: the relationship between the man in the Oval Office and the man leading the CIA directly correlates to the role of intelligence in the administrations policy-making process. This book is short, in no way a thorough history of the agency itself. But for what it is, it's a great study.

Admiral Stansfield Turner's 2005 tome is entitled `Burn Before Reading,' a tongue-in-cheek expose about the often tempestuous relationship between a DCI and his boss, the president, since the agency's creation as the main intelligence gathering agency for the executive branch.
Turner's book offers a realistic, yet sometimes humorous examination of how the DCI works for his president and tries to explain the often combative relationship between each DCI and their respective boss. He candidly reveals that many chief executives did not trust or even like their CIA chief which seems odd because the DCI is hired and works at the president's own behest.
He writes that Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton refused to see their DCI's on a regular basis and Richard Nixon had apparent contempt for his three DCI's whom he viewed as the enemy.
The Watergate debacle occurred on Nixon's watch yet the true role of the CIA in that political scandal have never been fully explained. But, with Gerald Ford taking over after Nixon's resignation, the agency was forced to disclose the `family jewels' of its worldwide covert operations and the nation was appalled at what was revealed.
The CIA was then blamed for all sorts of nefarious activities for the previous thirty years. Some were true, some were fanciful tales. Yet all put a negative light on those working in Langley.
Turner writes that his own time as DCI under the newly elected and CIA reform minded Jimmy Carter in 1977 was a unique challenge because of the many changes in intelligence gathering as required by the new laws enacted by the Congress at that time in an attempt to restore the agency's credibility that took place during his watch.
But he admits that while he was trying to make those changes he was in constant conflict with the military bureaucrats at the Pentagon who wanted matters done their particular way, even if it was to later prove detrimental to a president's specific policy.
Turner's greatest accomplishment as DCI took place during the 1979-80 crisis with Iran when the CIA was able to get six of America's embassy personnel out of Tehran through subterfuge after the rest had been detained by the invading student hostage takers who had overrun the U.S. Embassy.