America's Secret Power: The CIA In A Democratic Society; Intelligence Requirements For The 1990s: Collection, Analysis, Counterintelligence And Covert Action
Johnson's book is a welcome addition to a spate of books published recently on this subject. An experienced congressional overseer of intelligence, he writes in clean, easy prose about the covert actions that grab the headlines but, happily, his book ranges across the agency's functions. It is imbued throughout with good sense about how secret intelligence and democratic society can be made to coexist. The Godson volume, a product of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, is dominated by the perspective of intelligence practitioners in the executive branch, but its chapters and discussion are a useful summary of the issues that confront American intelligence.
Related
Two new books on intelligence reform -- Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and Amy Zegart's Spying Blind -- distort the historical record. A third, by Richard Betts, rightly observes that no matter how good the spies, failures are inevitable.
Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.
"The most fundamental method of work ... is to determine our working policies according to the actual conditions. When we study the causes of the mistakes we have made, we find that they all arose because we departed from the actual situation . . . and were subjective in determining our working policies."-"The Thoughts of Mao Tse-tung."

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