Customer Reviews

Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda

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I'm writing this to counter the troglodytish review posted by the unnamed reader from Alexandria, Virginia. My career was in the national security establishment--defense industry and State Department. I, along with Forrester, also have "no connection or history within the intelligence world." The New York Review of Books serves intellectuals like myself, however, not intelligence professionals. As such, his reviews and this book provides a timely refresher course in the scandals and triumphs of American intelligence over the last some sixty years. It is especially welcome because of the arrival of more scandal in regard to 9/11 and Iraq weapons of mass destruction, and another triumph in the defeat of the Taliban. INTELLIGENCE WARS is stimulating, well written, and engrossing.

Despite the alluring subtitle boasting coverage from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, the bulk of the book (likely from the first edition - delineation of new material is not clear) is dedicated to cold war spying issues and the Soviet Union. Many of the stories covered of that time are done so in great detail, sometimes overly monotonous. As the book moves on, I was hoping to learn more about American intelligence efforts in other theaters, but the material is limited. Hitler, South American and the Middle East pre-9/11 are all given little attention and scant new information is available, even for a moderate follower of the subject. Further, as the coverage shifts more to the modern day and the post-9/11 world, the book takes on a sanctimonious tone on what, based on earlier writings on the subject, would still be considered limited information from the intelligence world. Material that likely makes up the revised edition appears sounds more of Monday morning quarterbacking thrown together quickly to take advantage of the current public interest.

This revised and expanded collection of Thomas Powers' reviews of books on intelligence and national security for the New York Review of Books is an excellent resource on a wide range of topics. Powers has a demonstrated knowledge of many aspects of the history of US intelligence gathering since World War II, and he shows it in this collection.

Beginning with a review of the life of Billy Donovan, the progenitor of WWII American espionage, and ending with a review of books on the current threat from international terrorism, Powers covers a broad spectrum of topics. Though he is much stronger on the Cold War history, the author is able to bring his background in history to comment on current threats. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in national security and the intelligence world.

Powers was a well-known writer and commentator on intelligence issues who has had valuable insights into the process of intelligence and the role of the CIA. This book was billed as a serious of essays but that is completely wrong. It is ONLY a collection of book reviews (from the late 1970s through 2002). Powers acknowledged in the introduction that the reviews "appear here with only small changes to correct minor factual errors" and "they address many episodes of American intelligence history, but make no attempt to settle controversies." It is a scam to call these "essays." The book is not worth even the price of shipping.

A remarkable book for those looking for a dispassionate and comprehensive review of the intelligence apparatus of the United States (read O.S.S./C.I.A.) from WW II to the recent past. The segment on the German Resistance to Hitler was particularly instructive and revelatory regarding the Allied Government's policy toward unconditional surrender of the Nazi state versus a negotiated settlement. [Real politik at its best or worst, depending on one's philosophical bent.] Again, a remarkable work and a must read.

I have been familiar with most of the facts presented in this book for quite a few years. But this book has added significantly to my understanding of how and why certain things happened. To be sure, much of what Mr. Powers writes in these long, essay-type book reviews is speculative, but he has a far better sense than I have ever had for the interplay among events and people. My knowledge has been so-to-speak "technical", i.e. the facts and nothing but the facts, thank you very much. To this, Powers adds insight into what else was going on that affected the various successes and failures of intelligence he discusses, and some useful thoughts on whether and how much these successes and failures mattered, anyway. This affects my thinking about various other international matters that he does not touch on. Well worth reading.

Having spent a number of years in the intelligence world, I anticipated Mr. Power's book and pre-ordered it. Unfortunately, what I soon realized is that Mr. Powers has no experience from which he can authoritatively speak.

While the book's title rather breathlessly promises to deliver the goods on intelligence operations since World War II, what it really serves up is a collection of reheated essays written by Mr. Powers for the New York Review of Books. Mr. Powers has no connection or history within the intelligence world - and it shows.

Like many outsiders, Mr. Powers infers and guesses - figuratively speaking, stumbling in the dark. He relies heavily on other writers, few of whom have any experience in the subject. This reliance on second hand, third hand and often unattributed sources of information might serve to whet the appetite of conspiracy theorists. But it ill serves a considered survey on the subject of intelligence matters. Worse, Mr. Powers writes continuously from outdated notions of how and why the government classifies information, streaming comments from equally uninformed members of Congress. Thankfully, these aren't the people in charge of our nation's security.

Where the books does get interesting is in Mr. Powers' views on the Gulf War, written from the perpsective of December 2002. The reader quickly surmises that Mr. Powers lack of experience on the subject disqualifies him as a reputable source.

There are far better writers on this subject. This book would have more accurately been titled "An Outsiders Collection of Guesses and Opinions, Apropos of Nothing"

i learned a lot about this history. was useful for the papers that we had to do in class.

This book is not for people with an amateur interest in American secret intelligence. I didn't make it past the third chapter so my review is based on the first two in which the author discusses some underground operations that occurred during WWII and a failed conspiracy to kill Hitler. The book is compiled of a collection of writings that the author did for the New York Review of Books. In these essays, the author often throws out the names of 10 or 12 people in only a few pages and it is difficult to keep track of who they are and what they did... "Smith and Clark got together and met with Jameson. Then on the third day they went to see Johnson and Clark and Smith told Johnson about their meeting with Williams and bla, bla, bla" He just begins talking about them as if they were big names in American history and discusses their involvement in the subject being discussed. He also refers to them by last name only which makes it even more difficult to follow. He'll mention a name once and you won't see it again for 8 more pages and you have to go back and see who the hell he's talking about. Aside from this, which I found really annoying, the subjects being discussed are not that interesting. A whole chapter is devoted to whether or not some of the members of the Manhatten Project (those involved in building the atomic bombs used on attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) may have been a communist. So what? He goes on and on for pages about one guy who had connections with communists in Russia. It's over and done with. Does it really matter 60 years later if a member of the Manhatten Project knew a communist? And when the author discusses a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, he writes as if this was the only attempt made. I'm sure that at the time, several hundred, if not thousands of people were plotting to kill Hitler. This one teeny tiny incident he mentions wasn't even significant enough to make it into elementary school history books. I want to know about real exciting stuff like who may have killed JFK. And I don't want to know about a grocery list that some guy wrote who was the friend of a cousin of Lee Harvey Oswald's babysitter. This book would make good kindling for the fire, but I think I will try and sell it to a used book store in an attempt to get some of the money back that I wasted on it.