Informing Intelligence: Intelligence For A New Century

The author, who served on the Senate intelligence committee, is a spear-thrower from the political right, but some of the spears are on the mark. His book is part primer, part history and part polemic. It is a little scattered, and he finds it hard to wrench the analysis into the 1990s from his preoccupations of the 1970s-Soviet missiles and defenses against them. But American intelligence has become bureaucratic-for reasons good and bad. Its satellites are technical marvels, but it never managed more than a handful of spies in Russia. Its analysts are dedicated and thoughtful, despite Codevilla's shots at the CIA "old boys," but the tracks of all that work on postwar American foreign policy are meager. His prescription is unassailable-it comes down to "a few very good people"-but, alas, probably not in the end very helpful.