Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Tell the Publisher!
I'd like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World [Hardcover]

William M. Arkin
2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)


Available from these sellers.


Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

January 25, 2005
The war on terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a secrecy explosion. In the 9/11 world the U.S. military and intelligence organizations have created secret plans, programs, and operations at a frenzied pace, each with their own code name. In a perfect world, all of this secrecy would be to protect legitimate secrets from prying foreign eyes. But in researching Code Names, defense analyst William M. Arkin learned that while most genuine secrets remain secret, other activities labeled as secret are either questionable or remain perfectly in the open. The sheer volume and complexity of these operations ensures that the most politically important remain unreported by the press and shielded from the scrutiny of the American electorate. Despite the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the questionable assumptions that led to the war in Iraq and govern the war on terrorism, the U.S. government argues for massive amounts of funding and resources, while at the same time claiming that public accountability would compromise their missions. Arkin didn’t accept this argument during the Cold War – when he published two books that revealed U.S. nuclear “secrets” and led directly to a healthier public discussion of a “nuclear warfighting” emerging in the Reagan era – and he is challenging it again today.

From “Able Ally” to “Zodiac Beauchamp,” this book identifies more than 3,000 code names and details the plans and missions for which they stand. Code Names is divided into five distinct parts:

Introduction: Will explain to the American public, for the first time, just what the explosion in the creation of secret code names after 9/11 reveals about overall strategies in the war on terror.

Cast of Characters: A brief description of all relevant federal departments, agencies, commands, and organizations. For each there is a discussion of their missions, roles, and activities, their contingency plans and their secret bases of operations. The emphasis is on what is not readily known to the public.

Country-by-Country Directory: Details worldwide U.S. military and intelligence operations and relations and briefly describes each country’s recent cooperation or discord with the United States in the war on terror.

The Code Names Dictionary: An alphabetical listing of more than 3,000 code names. The emphasis will be on names that are current since the end of the Cold War, are of historical importance, and are not otherwise in the public domain.

Acronym List and Glossary.

Code Names offers stunning revelations and its publication is sure to cause a major stir. But Arkin knows where to draw the line. The information in his book will not jeopardize individuals or operations. His intention is to inform the debate and to give people information they ought to have. Arkin has written Code Names firm in the belief that an informed citizenry is a prerequisite to wise decision-making by world leaders.


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Polo Step" is secret Pentagon code for classified material that is more sensitive than "Top Secret." When veteran military-affairs journalist William Arkin first publicly mentioned "Polo Step" in a 2002 column in the Los Angeles Times, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was apparently furious and ordered an investigation into the leak. Over 1,000 officials, military personnel, and contractors were ultimately interviewed, and the investigation even had its own code name, "Seven Seekers." Such is the zealousness, Arkin writes in his book Code Names, with which secrecy is protected in the 9/11 world. Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and long-time military commentator for NBC News, has come out with a fascinating retort to Washington's secrecy obsession. His 608-page tome is an encyclopedia of 3,000 U.S. national-security code names, some revealed for the first time, that tell a tantalizing hidden story about the American war on terrorism and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the code names in the book, listed in an alphabetic section that makes up the majority of the book, are "West Wing," a sensitive program to deploy 5,000 troops to Jordan to support the war in Iraq; a U.S. Air Force cyber-attack capability called "Project Suter," which is managed by a secretive unit called "Big Safari"; a CIA remote-viewing project called "Grill Flame"; and "Thirsty Saber," an ultra-secret project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a sensor "that would replicate human reasoning."

Arkin has a specific goal. He believes the post-9/11 drive for secrecy has imperiled American security and democracy. Information is often classified, he writes, not because of the danger of passing information to those who would harm the United States, but in order to close down public debate about controversial activities. The intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 to occur, Arkin writes, show that safety is better achieved when the national-security establishment is subjected to oversight and scrutiny. His book caused a small sensation even before it came out and is essential reading for understanding the mechanics of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus. --Alex Roslin

Review

"Full of useful information not only for scholars and practitioners of intelligence, but for any serious newspaper reader."

-- Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter, in the New York Review of Books

"William Arkin's Code Names will rock the National Security Community. We do not agree on any issue, my problem when we argue is that unlike most of his ilk, he researches the facts thoroughly and has impeccable integrity. Code Names scares the hell out of me because Arkin dredged up so many secrets and turned them into a comprehensive tour of our national security efforts around the globe. This book lays out for the reader what China, Israel, France and Russia probably spent billions trying to find out. It will become the basic reference book for those who study our foreign affairs, unfortunately that includes every spy agency around the world. This book shows the dysfunctional aspects of our all too frequent over-classification process that blocks our agencies from working together, hides waste and stifles debate of important issues. Most of all it proves we need to rethink how we protect our secrets in the information
age."
-- Charles A. Horner, General USAF (Ret.), commander of coalition air forces in Operation Desert Storm, and former commander, U.S. Space Command

Code Names "lays bare for the first time much of the secret infrastructure of defense and intelligence today."
-- Steven Aftergood in Secrecy News

"William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America's constantly expanding hidden world. Code Names is quite simply a stunning array of secrets and super-secrets that Arkin has put together in a way that makes it easy for any citizen to comprehend - and decide for himself or herself whether such activities are consistent with democracy and good government."
-- Seymour Hersh

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 624 pages
  • Publisher: Steerforth; First Edition edition (January 25, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1586420836
  • ISBN-13: 978-1586420833
  • Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.8 x 9.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Arkin is an analyst, author and journalist who has been working on the subject of national security for over 35 years. His unique career spans an early assignment in Army intelligence in Cold War Berlin to being a best-selling author today. He has worked as a military advisor to the most influential non-governmental human rights and environmental organizations, equally at ease heading Greenpeace International's response to the first Gulf War or teaching at the U.S. Air Force's premier strategy school. He is weirdly proud to say that he spent the night in Saddam General Hospital after being injured by an unexploded cluster bomb in Iraq and that some of his fondest memories were picking through the rubble of Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade villa and Mullah Omar's compound in Afghanistan. He is probably the only person alive who can say that he has written for both The Nation magazine and Marine Corps Gazette. He has authored or coauthored more than a dozen books and been both a columnist and reporter with The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. He has lived in Vermont since 1993, mostly because he detests Washington but also because if you don't live in a place like Vermont, you don't get it.

Arkin is co-author, most recently, of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Little Brown), a New York Times and Washington Post best-selling non-fiction book based up a four-part series Arkin and his writing partner Dana Priest wrote in 2010. The book and series are the results of a three-year investigation into the shadows of the enormous system of military, intelligence and corporate interests created in the decade after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The series was accompanied by The Washington Post's largest ever online presentation, earned the authors the George Polk Award for National Reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award for Public Service, was a Goldsmith finalist for Investigative Reporting and Pulitzer award nominee, as well as recipient of a half dozen other major journalism awards.

Over the years, Arkin's research and journalism has brought his work to the front pages on dozens of occasions and he has appeared on television and radio countless times. He has appeared multiple times on CBS' 60 Minutes, on Meet the Press, and other programs as an independent analyst. As a long-time military analyst for NBC News, one of the few regular on-air analysts who was not a retired general or admiral, he brought both a journalistic and "civilian" perspective to contemporary military affairs.

Arkin began his string of investigative successes in the early 1980's with his ground-breaking research on the nuclear era, including his best-selling Nuclear Battlefields (Ballinger/Harper & Row) which was a news sensation from the front pages of The New York Times to media in Italy, Germany, and Japan, and even earned Arkin a mention in a monologue on the Johnny Carson show. The Reagan Administration went as far as to seek to put Arkin in jail for revealing the locations of American (and Soviet) nuclear weapons around the world; those were the days.

Arkin's then worked on the multi-volume Nuclear Weapons Databook series for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a set of references which the Reagan Administration also sought to prevent from publication. His subsequent revelation of "mini-nuke" research efforts by the Pentagon in 1992 led to a 1994 Congressional ban and ultimately a pledge by the U.S. government not to develop new nuclear weapons. His discovery of Top secret U.S. plans to secretly move nuclear weapons to a number of overseas locations shattered governments from Bermuda to Iceland to the Philippines. Foreign Affairs, the bible of the foreign policy establishment, commented about Arkin in 1997: "The author is well known (and in some government quarters, cordially detested) as an indefatigable researcher in military affairs, whose cunning and persistence have uncovered many secrets ..."

Working for the activist organization Greenpeace in its anti-nuclear hey-day, Arkin conceived a worldwide "Nuclear Free Seas" campaign, which combined research and action that proved so successful at dogging nuclear armed ships and submarines visiting foreign ports that the headache convinced the first Bush administration to remove nuclear weapons altogether from naval vessels.

Arkin then led Greenpeace International's research and action effort on the first Gulf War, being the first American military analyst to visit post-war Iraq in 1991, and the first to write about civilian casualties and the cascading effects of the bombing of electrical power. Gen. Charles A. ("Chuck") Horner, the commander of air forces during Desert Storm, said in a ten year anniversary interview in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings that the briefing Arkin gave him on the war and its civilian effects in Iraq was the best he'd ever received.

After the Gulf War, Arkin shifted his attention to the new era of conventional warfare. His groundbreaking research on the effects of the use cluster bombs in Iraq and Serbia formed the foundation for the international treaty that later banned their use. Arkin conducted the single most methodical assessment of the causes of civilian casualties after the Kosovo war (1999), a report done for Human Rights Watch that was accepted as authoritative by both NATO and the United States government. Arkin has also visited war zones in the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Israel on behalf of governments, the United Nations and independent inquiries.

Arkin's pioneering methods and meticulous work on the effects of conflict led also to a close collaboration with the United States Air Force, where he became a consultant. He was affiliated with the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies of the United States Air Force from 1992 to 2008 as lecturer and adjunct professor, and conceived and led the SAASS "Airpower Analyst" project to provide better tools for professional on-the-ground study. In 2007, he was National Security and Human Rights Fellow in residence at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he worked on a study "Why Civilians Die." He has also been a consultant to the Air Force Research Institute working on the history and impact of airpower.

All during his period, Arkin found room for independent journalism and writing. His New York Times op-ed in 1994 revealing the development of blinding laser programs led to a U.S. decision to agree to an international ban on such weapons. After 9/11, he was the first to write about the Bush administration's preemptive nuclear war concepts, provoking front page coverage in Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world. Before the 2003 Iraq war, he revealed the details of prospective war planning, provoking one of the largest leak investigations in the history of the Defense Department. Arkin revealed the fundamentalist religious activities of Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, then the architect of the global war on terrorism. As a columnist for the Times and The Washington Post online, Arkin reported on the growth of secret government and the darker sides of the national security enterprise.

Arkin's 2005 book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World (Steerforth), the product of years of research, was featured on the front page of The New York Times and in an Emmy-nominated History Channel documentary. His 2006 revelations of renewed domestic intelligence collection by the Pentagon provoked not only a change in policy to end the so-called "Talon" suspicious activity reporting program but also to the eventual closing of the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.

A 2003 Washington Post profile of Arkin commented: "From his home in the mountains of Vermont, William Arkin seems to have mastered one of the great juggling acts of the multimedia age -- persuading news organizations, advocacy groups and the Pentagon, through sheer smarts and a bulldog personality, to take him on his own terms."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
For anyone with a remote interest in the intelligence and military communities, this book will be an eye opener. In painstaking (sometimes too much) detail, Arkin has compiled a list of code names that run the gamut of the mundane to the extremely sensitive.

I concur with Arkin (based on his radio interview on NPR) that classifying something from Americans that is in the open for the rest of the world to see, is irresponsible. However, I would also have to say that pushing the envelope with some of the issues covered in this book is also not terribly responsible.

Does the government need to classify plans/programs/activities --absolutely yes. Does the government tend to err on the side of overclassification--of course.

Make the determination yourself by reading this book.

I am not sure who to attribute this quote to, but in the game of politics in Washington, this may not always necessarily be the case..."those who know do not talk, those who talk do not know"
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An Encyclopedia of US Military Activities Worldwide February 4, 2005
Format:Hardcover
William Arkin published this book out of concerns over the culture of hyper-secrecy that is rampant in Washington, DC today. In his introduction he anticipates concerns that he is disclosing information that will be harmful to US national security by stating that he is more fearful of a government that may not be supporting the public interest by protecting the dirty laundry of some of our allies than of the possibility that terrorists may learn secrets in this book that could kill Americans. He wants to shine a light on the dark underworld of the national security state.

Besides the introduction, this book is not written in the traditional narrative format. It is a reference book of military and intelligence outfits. It is broken into sections discussing activities in nearly every country in the world, a glossary of terms, and an overview of US national security units and agencies. This is a useful book that I would recommend to others interested in the topic.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but... February 22, 2005
Format:Hardcover
Anyone labelling Arkin a traitor is either pretty ignorant about special access programs, and/or is just trying to help him sell more books.

No doubt he reveals some sensitive project names, and some of the associated details are accurate, and I'm aware that the topic is something that'd be incredibly difficult to find valid, primary-source information on.

But having been plugged-in to some special access programs myself, when I came across Arkin's book at a bookstore I resisted my first urge to simply buy it & take it home, and instead, I sat down for about 20 minutes and flipped through it at the bookstore.

For a couple of the 'code names' that I am very familiar with, the info he shares for them in his book was completely wrong, and I'm at a loss to explain how in the world he came up with what he did, including some grammatical errors in the way the 'code names' were worded. In a couple other cases, I was happy to see that he merely came across and 'revealed' the project's cover-story instead of the truth. In a few cases, he seemed to just go with info he found on various speculative web pages, including what I think was some near-verbatim text taken off a web page without permission or proper credit.

I'm looking forward to buying this book when I find it on the bargain shelf, but only because I maintain a rather extensive collection of books pertaining to command, control, communications and intelligence matters.
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected
Code names is exactly what it says. I can't express anymore to you than that.
Missing alot in this book.
Published 5 months ago by Carmela Emerson
1.0 out of 5 stars Arkin is a traitor
"Intelligence?" That's what every office pogue says he did. No matter. Some of those ops are still current. To reveal their existance is treason.
Published on February 6, 2007 by Joe Garshae
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Reference
Only a smidgen more charming than the telephone book, but just as accurate and useful, this is a groundbreaking contribution to "truth in government. Read more
Published on March 12, 2006 by godwillen
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting reference
"Code Names" doesn't provide any major breakthroughs in pulling the veil off the secret world of Federal black programs. Read more
Published on September 12, 2005 by Brian A. Schar
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference work
This book must be considered in its correct context: that of a reference book. If you're not interested in reading what is basically a dictionary of covert ops codenames and... Read more
Published on June 26, 2005 by Dr. Banzai
3.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, not so good to read straight through...
Through some source which I've now forgotten, someone recommended the book Code Names - Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World by William M. Read more
Published on May 30, 2005 by Thomas Duff
2.0 out of 5 stars Not useful, Not Interesting, Not Amusing
This book could have been so much more. Darn shame about the writing.

The book is divided into three sections. Read more
Published on May 7, 2005 by Gregory Paul Adkins
4.0 out of 5 stars Night Blue
I am a USAF retiree who finished with my final three year assignment aboard the Looking Glass, page 417. This book met my expectations. Read more
Published on March 22, 2005 by Michael Makar
1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing new here
The book contained lists of code words that all can be found on the internet. Make yourself a cup of tea and a bagel and spend a lazy Sunday afternoon in winter cruising the... Read more
Published on February 26, 2005 by Gerald Oleson
5.0 out of 5 stars The A-Z of classified projects
Code Names has been thoroughly researched and is mandatory reading for anyone with a professional interest in national security analysis. Read more
Published on February 23, 2005 by J. Rosenberg
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Forums

There are no discussions about this product yet.
Be the first to discuss this product with the community.
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 



So You'd Like to...



Look for Similar Items by Category