Customer Reviews

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book should appeal to a variety of readers, from intelligence professionals, to strategists, to legislators and decision-makers, and, finally, to interested lay readers. Steele consistently has been well ahead of the pack in his appreciation of everything from open-source research to the implications of technology. While it is fashionable to belittle "inside the Beltway" experience, in this case the author's understanding of government, allied with his past military experience, makes his work practical and immediately applicable, rather than one more pipe dream from a campus ivory tower. Steele's thinking is always provocative and his work thrills with its insights and ideas. While such a book may not be as easy as a fictional thriller read on the metro, the author manages to make very complex concepts digestible to all. In the end, the quality of thought makes this far more exciting than any Clancy novel--at least for me as a former intelligence officer with extensive field experience. A solid, rewarding book from a very alert mind.

This is a very difficult review for me to write. I want all those in positions where they can have some effect on American Intelligence gathering and analysis to read this book, but the book's organization and construction will ensure that won't happen. Hence the four star rating.

The book (the Oct 2001 edition) looks to be the author's collection of lecture notes or lecture passouts organized in one or two hour presentations. They are full of one-liners and short paragraphs making sweeping statements, and I wanted space below them to write my comments and questions. Perhaps they are indeed lecture passouts that formerly contained those spaces in which listeners could jot notes on the author's detail comments and examples supporting those statements. Without such support, there is simply far too much to be taken on faith for the author's ideas to be accepted or implemented.

A simple example should suffice to make this point: Steele says on page 6: "Today there is insufficient emphasis on defining and meeting the intelligence needs of overt civilian agencies, law enforcement activities, and contingency military forces." OK, what would be sufficient? What are we doing wrong today (examples would be nice), and what agencies are doing such? What emphasis do we currently have, and how can that be morphed into something meeting the author's definition (unstated) of necessary and sufficient emphasis? What are we spending today on activities that must be de-emphasized or eliminated, and how much will it cost to achieve the proper necessary and sufficient emphasis? Without this level of detail, the author's statement is simply a platitude that will be roundly ignored by those agencies and personnel who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

This defect remains throughout the book. Although the author's statements have much merit and his recommendations for organizational structures and missions to achieve necessary and sufficient intelligence for US policy makers and general security are generally well considered and excellent starting points for implementating the necessary changes, the missing detail allows opponents to dismiss his points out of hand as being simplistic, unsupported by evidence, and dangerous.

Nor is the public ready for this book, even after 9-11 and seven years having passed since publication. There has been no political movement towards addressing any of Steele's charges or implementating any of his ideas discernible by the general public or myself -- quite the contrary, the intelligence agencies have become increasingly ossified, bureaucratic and bureaupathic. CIA employees now arrange their work schedules around their children's activities, and providing day care to the CIA's time-serving employees is more important than providing intelligence to the President of the United States. Steele cannot be an effective change agent until he gets his message (this book) out to the public, but it must be in a form that the public can comprehend -- which is not this book.

I agree with the author that turf wars are the primary activity of all intelligence agencies in the US (my words, he just inferred this), and they must be limited as much as possible. It seems impossible that the US possessed better intelligence on enemy and potential enemy activity before the computerization of information data bases than at present, but that is my conclusion. An example of how turf wars destroy is that the world's best data base management system, the multivalued system created by Dick Pick in the US in 1968, is not being used in US federal agencies but has experiences acceptance in Russia. Meanwhile we are saddled with cumbersome systems like Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's DB2, Oracle and others. The "free" marketplace doesn't always allow the best product to filter through the weeds -- powerful organizations protect their turf at the expense of the general welfare. Other examples would include the Christie suspension system for Soviet tanks and Deming's ideas seized by Japanese industry.

In short, the book's content is excellent but so many things must be taken on faith due to its organization and presentation that it almost neutralizes itself. It ends up being a handbook of ideas for the intelligence professional -- precisely the individual who will not implement any (or very few) or the ideas in the book. Steele would have done better to take his own advice and provide intelligence to the general population that "remain(s) desperately ignorant of history and culture (and what is happening in the intelligence community" (page 273).)

Nevertheless, BUY, READ & STUDY THIS BOOK.

By the way, the bibliography alone is worth the price of the book.

And lastly, it will take a powerful US President to force through any of this book's recommendations on the American intelligence community. His support will have to come from an informed populace to overcome the opposition certain to come from current organizations. It may be possible, or it may be too late. If this book does as well in the next four years as it has in the last eight, then it was too late.

The author of this book has produced one of the very best and most interesting books to date on intelligence reform and transformation. It is extremely well written and provokingly thoughtful on many critical issues as we decide what we want from our Intelligence Community in the 21st Century and how we want to achieve those results. His economic, business and organizational logic is right on track for a wide range of relevant and timely topics. One is amazed at how much detail the author provided without getting the reader "lost in the trees with no sense of the forest". His reference approach is also outstanding in two regards: (1) he carefully documents the source of many of the great authors and thinkers and practitioners sited, and (2) he gives the reader access to a much broader set of view points (some of which no doubt conflict with his own views). Whether you agree with all of Steele's ideas or not is irrelevant. This is just excellent stuff and should be required reading for all members and staff of all of the Congressional oversight committees as well as the various commissions that review aspects of one sort or another of our national intelligence community. Beyond that it will undoubtedly be of interest to anyone who is concerned about the role of Intelligence in National Security.

For over a decade, Steele has been trying to draw attention to the fact that intelligence needs in the post-Cold-War era require different strategy, organization and tactics. This book is a useful summary of his views.

One point of emphasis is "open source" intelligence--the information that is available from sources outside of the secret intelligence community. Steele argues that the institutional secretiveness of the FBI and CIA is a hindrance rather than a help.

Another point of emphasis is language translation. A further point of emphasis is the fact that threats no longer exclusively take the form of powerful nation-states. I wish that the book focused more specifically on Islamic terrorism, since the other potential threats seem more remote at the moment.

Yet another point of emphasis is database integration. Writing this review in the aftermath of the DC sniper investigation, this seems to be an important point. Before the suspects drove to Maryland, they were involved in a murder in Alabama at which one of them left a fingerprint. Had the Alabama police been able to access a national database, they would have been able to identify the murderer and perhaps apprehend him. Instead, the fingerprint was matched only after a dozen more murders and after the suspects themselves told police to connect the dots to Alabama.

Lack of database integration kills.

The author of ON INTELLIGENCE is an experienced US intelligence expert. Robert Steele's main suggestion to the Intelligence Community is augmented openness. The existing culture of secrecy needs to be changed, because its methods are not effective enough to protect US national security in the 21st century. Openness would create a new environment of understanding intelligence and detect subversive activities. Using open source intelligence means exploiting pluralistic knowledge from universities, research facilities and private companies, which is available at comparable low cost. Classified intelligence often failed to support political decisions, because the policy-maker might not be cleared for such information. Unclassified intelligence can solve this particular problem of compartmentalized dissemination. Therefore, the author advises to link classified information with national competitiveness, making intelligence the apex of the knowledge infrastructure. Part three of his book lays out the core concept of "Creating a Smart Nation" through "Presidential Intelligence".

As a book, it's rather ugly. The pages are obviously printed out by an inkjet printer or something (you can actually see some jaggies in the font), and the index is created by MSWord indexing menu, which has multiple entries of the same item, and the way he indexes whole phrases makes it very hard to look up.

It's contents are extremely repetitive. You'll see the same ideas and examples expressed over and over and over and over again, in almost exact same wording. With proper editing, this book would have become 1/3 the volume that it is. The ideas are interesting, although some part, like his suggenstion that the US government should engage in industrial spying, seems questionable. Also, when he uses the word "Open Source", it's not the open source that the people in the software community is used to, so be careful. But it's a book worth skimming through.

Robert Steele is the one man crusade for the importance of open source intel. This and his more recent New Intelligence tell and show why open source intel is the most useful means of understanding the world around us and at the same time maintaining our personal liberties. To him each citizen should be running their own open source collection in in the areas of their personal interest. Read both of these books. Buy both of these books. Then go to the OSS convention in Washington. You'll quickly see how muth the professionals think of him.

Robert Steele's book is an excellent companion for any intelligence officer. Steele's insight comes from many years of experience, much of it trying to beat down old paradigms, out dated ideas and dogma at departmental and government level.

"On Intelligence" is written from the 'bottom up' with a 'top down' brain and shows a passion for, and knowledge of, a subject which few can aspire to.

Anyone buying this book will be amazed at the depth and richness of it's content. Each page is packed with gems of intelligence, insight and planning.

I found myself revisiting my concept of the Intelligent World as passage after passage challenged my conventional perceptions and made me re-think much of what I held to be correct. It's a shame that such vision may not be fully appreciated until ALL dinosaurs are extinct!

This book is a goldmine of ideas , suggestions ,possibilities .I bought it for information purposes ,only. Now I realise that I have purchased a book for life . Day-in-day-out I have to go back to it -to double-check, to confirm , to look for references ."On intelligence " has got a self-perpetuating quality - the more you read it , the more you realize how much you need it.One needs creative courage coupled with an open mind to read this book . Although it is based on the US factual substrata , it should be read in Europe , in Asia ,in Africa... In other words - it is the genuinely GLOBAL piece of writing of the highest probe.

Most current and objective risk assessments indicate that the risk environment faced by the U.S. during the Cold War has drastically changed. The risk of conventional war with peer nation states has been greatly reduced while the risk of asymmetrical war by non-state actors has greatly increased. Further because of the dynamics of the globalization, regional instability, failed states, pandemics, poverty, and immigration all have become serious risks to U.S. National Security. This new risk environment clearly needs a new carefully crafted National Security Strategy based among other things on timely and accurate strategic intelligence.

Which brings us to this altogether remarkable book by Robert David Steele. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the many recent efforts at reform the U.S. Intelligence System remains culturally moribund. Steele offers a rather detailed plan to rebuild this system into an open, flexible, and relevant source of knowledge about the threats and risks faced by the U.S. in the 21st Century. It is necessary not just to read this book, but to think carefully about what Steele is proposing. For example, this reviewer had to really contemplate such strange concepts as a "Global Knowledge Foundation" and "University of the Republic", before fully understanding how such institutions are vitally important to the sort of Intelligence System that Steele is advocating.

Now Steele has written a number of books that offer innovative, if radical, ideas about reforming intelligence, but this is the only one of his books that provides sufficient details to understand how he really would like to transform the U.S. Intelligence System into a system capable of dealing with both military and non-military threats and risks to U.S. security. The opportunities and risks of the phenomenon called "Globalization" are fluid and often elusive. It will take an intelligence system such as the one Steele is advocating to provide the knowledge needed to formulate an effective National security Strategy to deal with both the opportunities and risks.

This book is not an easy read. Readers need to be pro-active in critically thinking about what Steele presents. This effort will be rewarded with new and original insights on the state of U.S. security. More to the point Steele will provide the reader with a clear and unique understanding of the often arcane world of intelligence.