Customer Reviews

Creating the Secret State

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This is an admirable and unusual work, of doctoral-level quality in its sources and methods, while also reflecting the professional intelligence career status of the author. It complements Amy Zegart's broader book, Flawed By Design, in an excellent manner. This book, focusing as it does on the CIA alone, and on internal sources not readily available to Zegart, fills a major gap in our understanding of the CIA's origins. The author excels at demonstrating both the actual as opposed to the mythical origins of the agency, and pays particular heed to the role of the Bureau of the Budget and that Bureau's biases and intentions. At the end of it all, the author notes that the agency was moving in controversial directions within four years of its birth, quickly disturbing Harry Truman, who is quoted as saying, twenty-years after the fact (in 1963), "For some time I have been distributed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of Government....I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations." The author himself goes on to conclude that "the nature of the new threats and the revolution in information acquisition and dissemination have thrown traditional ways of intelligence organization, collection, evaluation, and distribution into question. ... CIA has entered the second half-century of its existence striving to avoid the fate of its OSS parent. In the process, it is groping for new missions and purposes while blighted by the legacy of its past derelictions, and while operating amid a rapidly changing global environment and technological revolution that are rendering its sources, methods, organizations, and mystique obsolete." I would hasten to add, as my own book documents, that we will always have hidden evil in the world and will always needs spies and secret methods to some extent, but this book, combining academic rigor with insider access, must surely give the most intelligent of our policy, legislative, and intelligence managers pause, for it very carefully documents the possibility that 75% of what we are doing today with secret sources and methods need not and should not be done. This book has much to offer those who would learn from history.

This is a well balanced, well documented, and definitive book on the beginnings of the current U.S. intelligence system. It also provides an interesting smaller window on the development of the entire post WWII U.S. National Security Establishment. For all its merits, this book is not for the general reader because it deals with a very small and specialized slice of modern American history. A more general and equally important book, "Flawed by Design" by Amy Zugert (Amazon.com) would be a better choice for individuals who don't wish to deal with the impressive amount of detail that this book provides. Nonetheless this book is indispensable to any anyone wishing to understand the process by which the current U.S. Intelligence System and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created.

As the author makes clear, the intelligence system that was established was very much the product of the disinterest that senior policy makers and the U.S. Congress had in intelligence matters in the wake of WWII. Excepting for intelligence professionals and some far seeing bureaucrats there were no strong constituencies or lobbying groups who cared about a national intelligence system. The author demonstrates that the CIA in particular was very much a creature of good and bad compromises that were imposed by the legitimate concerns of the military intelligence establishments, the FBI and State Department. Reading this book one is impressed with intelligence and dedication of the military and civilians who ultimately still ended up creating the dysfunctional intelligence system that we have today.

In the course of recounting this story, the author quotes an all but forgotten bureaucrat of the immediate post war era, named John Ohly, who, after reviewing the proposals for a CIA, pointed out that there was a lack, "of an intelligence concept which has been carefully thought out and which serves as a clear guide to the various collection and sources and which permits and requires the establishment of priorities as to areas and subjects." This reviewer knows of no more succinct statement on what is presently wrong with the U.S. Intelligence System.