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

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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

"Arkin dredged up our secrets and turned them into a comprehensive tour of our national security efforts around the globe." -- Charles A. Horner, General USAF (Ret.), commander of coalition air forces in Operation Desert Storm, and former commander, U.S. Space Command

"William Arkin makes amateurs of all of us who think we know something about America's constantly expanding hidden world." -- Seymour Hersh

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth (January 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586420836
• ISBN-13: 978-1586420833
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #623,839 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Handy reference book for those outside the establishment, February 1, 2005

By	P. J Lambert "pjlambert" (United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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"

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

By	David W. Southworth (Alexandria, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting reference, September 12, 2005

By	Brian A. Schar (Menlo Park, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Code Names" doesn't provide any major breakthroughs in pulling the veil off the secret world of Federal black programs. There are no UFOs, antigravity projects or Terminators here. What "Code Names" provides is a comprehensive list, by country, of the legal framework of the military/intelligence relationship between that country and the US, as well as the definitions of a lot of code names, 70% of which appear to be already-public names of war games of the past 30 years.

So what, you may ask? On its own, this is pretty dry stuff. As other reviewers have noted, this is more of a reference book than something you pick up and read like a novel. However, what "Code Names" does is put some meat on the bones of Chalmers Johnson's concept of the "empire of bases" from his book "The Sorrows of Empire." The agreements, the exercises, the cooperative activities - the mechanisms of imperial control are laid right out in "Code Names," as dry as they are.

You might wish to check this out from the library before you buy it, just to make sure it's something you would be interested in or could even use.