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REVIEWS

Robert David Steele. On Intelligence – Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. FCEA International Press, Fairfax: 2000. 495 pp.

The author of On Intelligence is an experienced US intelligence and defense professional. Robert D. Steele’s main suggestion to the Intelligence Community (IC) is augmented openness. The existing culture of secrecy needs to be changed. New international threats and the globalization of information demanding adequate methods of information gathering, processing, analyzing and dissemination. Openness would create a new environment of understanding intelligence and its importance to foreign policy-making. Within state security efforts, openness can help to educate its citizen and make them aware of national security risks. But this requires new intelligence expertise, pluralistic knowledge and information from universities, research facilities, institutions and private companies. Considering Steele’s description of intelligence dissemination to policy-makers, it appears that classified intelligence often failed to assist strategic decisions, because the secret subject did not reach the high-policy level. The reason for insufficient dissemination is information security following the strict principle of compartmentalization. Steele argues that Open Source Intelligence (OSCINT) can solve this very particular problem of dissemination. Beside collateral unclassified intelligence support, the private sector can also deliver some crucial geographical and technical data to military operational planning. But how to incorporate open available knowledge into the analytical craft of routine intelligence production? That particular performance can be fulfilled by a nationwide generic network of experts and researchers sustaining the inner societal intelligence base. Here, it is necessary to link classified intelligence with national competitiveness, making intelligence the apex of the knowledge infrastructure.

Steele’s work is truly a new practical approach to the art of intelligence and to open sources available to security studies. Scholars of Intelligence Studies can call his approach "New Intelligence," meaning a new intelligence paradigm for the post Cold War era. His view is implicitly shared by two other publications done by distinguished professionals, Bruce D. Berkowitz and Allan Goodman, Strategic Intelligence for American National Security, and Best Truth – Intelligence in the Information Age. To students of political science, especially to those who have a strong interest in national security and political decision-making, the book can be recommended. But reading this book requires sound knowledge about intelligence theories and methods to understand its thematic value.

Beside structural thoughts, Steele criticizes the current intelligence policy that unsatisfactorily strives to service essential public interests. He also advocates enhanced HUMINT and OSCINT competence and a closer observation of Third World countries. Since the September attack on US soil, his programmatic outline increases in importance for the political, military, and administrative executives – on both sides of the Atlantic!

The first part of On Intelligence contains five chapters contributed to national security in a fast changing world. He further addresses the question of how to avoid strategic intelligence failures by a critical evaluation of intelligence capabilities, including an alternative model that "focuses on objectives and outcomes rather than sources and methods." Steele’s new paradigm "integrates ethics, ecology, evolution, and unclassified intelligence." This alternative, but radical paradigm is named "E³I" and should prepare the USA for future challenges (e.g. asymmetric threats). The author understands intelligence as information with processed added value. And its value growths with adequate distribution to decision-makers at the top but also at lower managerial levels. In the second part, Steele disapproves the Intelligence Community for avoiding necessary reforms sponsored by the Clinton-Gore administration and discusses the implications of the information revolution to the concept of in-time intelligence support, further private sector potentials for substantial global coverage. Other very important conceptual ideas are "Virtual Intelligence for Diplomats" and "Information Peacekeeping." Part three lays out the core concept of this book, which is called "Creating a Smart Nation" through "Presidential Intelligence" with the indispensable authority to lead such endeavor. The core concept debates the changing nature of command and control, the changing relationship between politicians and citizens, investments and budgetary implications. Intelligence specialists in the US and also in the European Union will find this part very useful examining intelligence. The EU has to strengthen cooperation and increase spending for intelligence potentials, because the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) will not operate well until effective intelligence capabilities has been put into service. To avoid intelligence failures – which are historically evident in the US system – Europe can learn from the Smart Nation proposal and safe not just money but reduce military risks.

Wolfgang Braumandl, Vienna

Ralph Erskine and Michael Smith, eds. Action this Day. London: Bantam Press 2001. xv, 542 pp.

For more than 25 years, there has been a flood of publications on work and consequences of the British cryptanalytic center Bletchley Park (B.P.) and the breaking of the German Enigma cipher systems, leading to the impression that we know everything what was going on there. Now, there is a new book showing us that there were still many gaps to fill. Ralph Erskine and Michael Smith collected and edited 22 new papers of Bletchley Park participants, SIGINT-experts and historians, containing a great amount of new information on how things were achieved at B.P.

The volume is introduced by the letter four of the cryptanalysts of B.P. wrote on 21 October 1941 to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill about the pressing needs of B.P. and by a copy of WSC’s note to General Ismay with the note "Action this Day." 16 authors contributed to this most impressive volume, and it is impossible in a short review to mention all the new information in this book.

Of special interest are the papers of the B.P. veterans, who reveal not only where they worked, but what they really did and how they achieved their successes. Hugh Foss, the senior, tells his reminiscences about the Enigma. Derek Taunt and Rolf Noskwith describe their work in huts 6 and 8 where the Enigma ciphers of the German Army, Air Force, and Navy were broken. Shaun Wylie provides details about the breaking of the German teleprinter cipher machine Lorenz SZ 40/42, called "Tunny" at B.P., and the introduction of the "Colossus" computer. Mavis Batey and John Chadwick show how the Italian codes and ciphers were cracked, and Batey provides additional details about Dilly Knox’s work on the German Abwehr Enigma ciphers, and James W. Thirsk, a former log-reader, introduces us to the role of traffic analysis in B.P.’s work.

Also of great interest are papers by experts and historians, who go very much into the details of the cryptanalytic work. The two editors contribute several of these papers: Ralph Erskine, who has published many articles about the German naval ciphers and how they were broken, here provides details about the breaking of the Air Force and Army Enigma before the Naval Enigma received any attention (not only at B.P., but on both sides of the Atlantic), and about the information the Germans had about the security of their ciphers. Michael Smith delineates the story of the Government Code and Cypher School before the war and provides us with new information about the British efforts to break the Japanese codes.

The development of the co-operation between the British and the Americans is the topic of David Alvarez’ and Stephen Budiansky’s contributions witch provide many new details. John Cripps’s discusses the almost unknown side-show of the influence of SIGINT in Churchill’s change of support for the Serbian resistance from Draza Mihailovic to Josip Broz Tito, and the role of the "fifth man" of the Soviet spy ring, John Caimcross.

On the initial use of the first computers in cryptanalytic work, B. Jack Copeland delineates the development of "Colossus," Philip H. J. Davies and Richard J. Aldrich analyze the change from amateurish to professional work, the building of the institutions for SIGINT, and the continuing work during the first part of the Cold War. All this is imbedded by two papers written by the British historian Christopher Andrew on B.P. from a pre-war and a post-war perspective.

Historians of World War II and the SIGINT buffs will be very grateful to the two editors for taking on the great work of compiling this collection of papers which greatly extends our knowledge about the work done at B.P.

Jürgen Rohwer, Weinstadt

Alan Stripp. The Code Snatch. Cambridge: Vanguard Press 2001. 224 pp.

Alan Stripp, well known as the author of Codebreaker in the Far East, and as co-editor with the late Sir F. Harry Hinsley of Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, now tells the story of how a Japanese code book was captured in one of the most unusual operations of World War II.

In a author’s note he writes, "in order to soothe the sensibilities of the Ministry of Defence, ... I have taken the liberties with some of the technical details ... and with the identities of those involved in it." He thus tells the story, in which he participated in, in the literary form of a novel.

As he has described in Codebreakers in the Far East, Alan Stripp was involved in breaking the Japanese Army and Air Force codes in India in 1944/45. In late 1944, they learned from broken signals that the Japanese planned to change their Army-Air Force code-book. Because the decrypts from this code were the most important sources on the intentions of the Japanese Army in Burma, General Slim, the commander of the British 14^th Army, needed pertinent information most urgently for the preparation of his offensive to liberate Burma. To break a new code-book would be a very time consuming job, as the experience with "2244" had shown and the idea came up to try and steal a copy of this new code-book. With a captured, very modern Japanese Mitsubishi Ki-67 Hiryu (Flying Dragon) bomber, eight officers of different Allied nations who could speak Japanese flew to the Japanese air base Mingaladon near Rangoon. With a very cleverly devised radio signal, sent in Japanese on the correct frequency, they ordered the local intelligence officer to the utmost secrecy, to bring the two volumes of the new code-book to the airplane, and to hand it over to the "General from the Imperial Headquarters" on the plane.

Alan Stripp tells the story of this operation in a very thrilling and colorful way, mentioning the difficult preparations in bringing together the crew, in pushing back the intrusions of some staff officers, in devising the signal in the correct Japanese way, and in preparing the airplane – as well as the dramatic circumstances of the flight, the stress and tension when the Japanese major came to the plane to deliver the code-books, and the difficult flight back witch included an air fight between Japanese Zero-fighters and escorting British Spitfires, and, finally, the belly-landing on the last drop of fuel.

Alan Stripp’s book fills a gap in the history of SIGINT in World War II.

Jürgen Rohwer, Weinstadt