The recent revelations about NSA monitoring of US domestic communications have made this book highly topical. Rather than a general fishing expedition throughout past and current US intelligence activities, this book makes the wise decision to concentrate its analysis on one area where the sources are available and the record more transparent, that of past CIA domestic operations, and use this as a way to provide insights about larger issues.
The title is itself key to what the book is about. The Family Jewels were the name assigned to CIA-assembled documentation dealing with their past domestic operations; the source material that is the subject of this book. The name itself shows how the CIA thought about this material and, by extension, the whole of public perception of what they do. Family jewels, by definition, are private property and are only taken out of secure storage and revealed at a time and place and under conditions of the owners' choosing. Crown jewels, in contrast, stay out where they can be seen by the public, because that has been one of the ways the institution of the monarchy has legitimated itself for centuries. Of course that entails risks - you have not seen the Irish Crown Jewels recently because they've been stolen - but the return in contribution to legitimacy was seen to outweigh it long before tourist dollars and the heritage industry entered into the balance. If you want people to pay for it, they are going to want to see what they are paying for and are going to want to hear a narrative legitimating (in terms that the listener, not the teller, values) why paying for this is a good and necessary thing.
It also raises the key issue of civil-intelligence relationship, for however difficult civil-military relations are to get right and discuss, they benefit from a degree of transparency that is unattainable even in the most developed democracies when dealing with intelligence. If, to many in the US in 2013, it appeared that the intelligence community was able to assert and implement a degree of autonomy in policy formulation and execution incompatible with the safeguards provided by legislation, let along the Constitution, then imagine how difficult it is for weaker and less legitimate governments to control their intelligence assets rather than being controlled by them. There is a reason a KGB man is in charge in the Kremlin today.
In an age where state institutions are perceived as increasingly dysfunctional - however eagerly their patronage is sought - and distrusted, the US intelligence community's long-standing opposition to providing information where they cannot control is exhibition and swiftly lock it up again (family jewels again) comes with a cost. It has helped create a world where senior officials do not understand what intelligence can and cannot do and many perceive a political benefit in presenting intelligence in terms of an Internet-fueled dystopia, a vision of lethal UAVs and privacy-defeating intercepts.
Using the CIA's Family Jewels, this book has valuable insights that provide the depth that is too-often lacking in discussions that will shape the future of US intelligence policy.
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