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Stan Winer, If Truth Be Told: Secrecy and Subversion in an Age Turned Unheroic. 2003; Eastbourne: Antony Rowe, 2004. 174 pp., ISBN: 0954291336, £10

There exists a widespread misconception that anyone can write a history book. The problem is rooted in imprecise definitions: anyone can create a historical document, but the historical studies should be left to those who do systematic research and who adhere to basic conventions as regards the sources. This is not to say that a ‘layperson’ could never write an excellent monograph, nor is it true that all historians create outstanding works. But for the most part, it would be desirable that everyone stick to their own broom.
Stan Winer’s book offers a case in point. He starts off with the observation that we need “a new kind of critical analysis and an enhanced quality of historical interpretation” (ix). Indeed, without new approaches, the writing of history stagnates. However, Winer envisions the new method as “one that is not based in the view that history must be told on the basis on offi-cial [sic] documents or not be told at all” (ix). He intends to construct a history by referring exclusively to alternative sources, though he does not even specify the latter. Besides, alternative source work can only be acceptable if the documental history that is to be criticized is actually cited. Thus, starting from a diametrically opposed premise, he commits the very mistakes that he criticizes in established historiography. Winer postulates the notion of possible all-embracing human control in a universe clearly defined by good and evil. He attempts to give credit to his claims by a for a historian frighteningly lax use of sources and a pseudo-authentication of himself as a qualified historian.
Total control: Winer presents a pattern of repeated deception on the part of Western governments (notably the British and the US-American) since the sinking of the Lusitania that is to explain a current distrust in politics on the part of the population (introduction). The reason is given as an anxiety on the part of Western governments to stretch their national spheres of influence. Yet Winer excuses similar desires on the part of the Soviets during the Cold War (64). It seems impermissible for the author to accept that with an ideological enemy who showed expansionist tendencies, both sides might have wanted to secure their interests. According to Winer’s pattern of intentional deception that is repeated during WW II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, the Western high-ranking official is not liable to commit mistakes and thus is in total control of the human experience. However, can we exclude miscalculations and errors from human judgment? Winer also dresses old facts in a differently biased outlook. He comes to fuzzy if not dangerous conclusions, e.g. when he excuses Stalin’s purges of the 1930s that killed thousands and incarcerated millions in the Gulag (89). Winer argues that during the Cold War the ‘bad’ West had a far-reaching influence as to actively manipulate events in the ‘maltreated, good’ East. That analysis is as one-sided and unacceptable as would be the reverse claim of an ‘innocent good’ West and an ‘incredibly evil’ East.
Lax use of sources: On page ix, Winer claims to have accumulated for his book a “great variety and depth of official and declassified military documents, memoirs and other relevant published material in the public domain” (ix). Still, his use of sources is limited, incomplete and generally unsatisfactory:
• Journals and newspapers are cited as documental evidence of governmental acts of deception. Winer substantiates the claim that in March 1952 US aircraft dropped bacteria over Northern Korea by a newspaper bulletin dated winter 1951 (75, 133 n. 30). A more precise date of publication in connection with additional evidence as to the incident would be more credible. Furthermore, disregarding the impact of political opposition or critical foreign nations, the singular statement of a Democratic Congresswoman in a foreign newspaper is taken as proof for the deception of a Republican government (102, n. 13; 65/66 for a similar example).
• Documents are cited from secondary literature rather than in the original. When Winer uncovers that Hamburg was bombed “on the very day that final work commenced on assem-bling the first atomic bomb” – whatever that means – he cannot believe entirely in a “coincidental” happening. He cited secondary sources (39, 126 n. 2). It should be added that documental evidence is not entirely non-existent in his book (2, 118, n. 6).
• Claims are not annotated: “At least one prominent American academic approvingly described this ...” Who? When? Where? No answers given (82). A quote from Time referring to the death of 180,000 civilians in Tokyo during just one night in WW II as “a dream come true” is given without exact source or context of the statement (59).
Winer makes factual errors, i.e., it was Franklin D. Roosevelt and not Harry S. Truman who represented the United States at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 (63). James J. Angelton was “destined” to become a counterintelligence legend of the CIA rather than the agency’s director (70). If we do not stick to the facts, we are back in George Orwell’s 1984.
Pseudo-authentication: As the cover explains, Winer is a journalist who also worked for the “information departments of various United Nations Agencies”. That would qualify him to compose a first-hand historical account or document. Unfortunately, Winer chose to turn historian.

Anja Becker
Leipzig

Andrew Wilkie, Axis of Deceit: The Story of the Intelligence Officer who Risked all to Tell the Truth About WMD and Iraq. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2004. ISBN: 0975076922, pp. 196, AU$ 30.00

It is too early to say what the long-term effects of the invasion of the Iraq by the ‘coalition of the willing’ will be. But some conclusions can be drawn about the way in which the invading governments, such as Australia’s, either ignored or distorted the reports they received from their intelligence agencies countering their views that the invasion was necessary to protect against a greater evil. The internal political reasons for the UK and Australian governments supporting the Bush administration’s invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi government, while not revealed thus far, can be guessed at. In the case of Australia, impending general elections were an important factor; the excitement generated by preparations for war have rarely failed to win support for conservative governments in Australia. The open distortion by governments of the reports from their respective intelligence agencies represented a new trend in the government/intelligence relationships. During the Cold War, when such agencies flourished, both governments and agencies could exaggerate and distort information about the communist foe because threats from communism, whether imagined or real, was the dominant and overwhelming theme at all levels of Western governance. While the events of 11 September 2001 galvanised the American public in feelings similar to the Cold War years, the same mood was not reflected among the people in other countries, including those like Britain and Australia that enrolled in the ‘coalition’. That scepticism infected the intelligence agencies and the dedication of the Cold War years when such agencies backed their governments, even if they were acting wrongly, has come to be greatly tempered. This reluctance in intelligence agencies to uncritically fall-in with the distortions of their governments’ political policies is a dominant theme running through Andrew Wilkie’s book Axis of Deceit.
Andrew Wilkie was an Australian army officer specialising in intelligence who took up a civilian appointment in the Office of National Assessments (ONA). He resigned in a blaze of publicity in protest at the decision of the Liberal Party-led government of John Howard to join the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. ONA had been established in 1977 in the post-Vietnam War years to provide intelligence reports to the Prime Minister’s office as a measure for bringing together information from Australia’s military and diplomatic sources as well as from the allied intelligence agencies in the US, UK and Canada. One of the reasons for its establishment was to prevent Australia being embroiled in another Vietnam War through steady escalation and uncritical adherence to the American alliance. There is a nice irony in ONA’s inability to prevent that happening again, this time in Iraq. Wilkie resigned when he realised that the many documents and reports he had handled in ONA were being misused by the government to justify a war. As an experienced military officer, he foresaw such a war to be indefensible and that it would create untold harm for the Iraqi people. He draws on Bob Woodward’s account Plan of Attack to demonstrate how President Bush, seemingly on the spur of the moment, ordered the invasion of Iraq and how the Australian and British Prime Ministers responded to the invitation to join. The fact that Howard’s resolution to commit forces was voted down in the Australian Senate and that protest marches were joined by tens of thousands Australian people, failed to deter Prime Minister Howard committing the Australian military to the war.
In these early days of pre-war planning, Wilkie read intelligence reports from the leading US and UK intelligence sources casting great doubt on the existence of WMD in Iraq, that Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger was a fiction and that the aluminium tubes imported by Iraq could be not be used for building gas centrifuges. In spite of these misreports (and forgery in the case of Niger), Wilkie was amazed to watch TV news each night to see Bush, Blair and Howard declare such incidents to be evidence of Saddam Hussein arming for another Gulf War. In February 2003, Wilkie had to sit openmouthed while watching images of the hapless Secretary of State, Colin Powell, displaying large photographs to the Security Council of the alleged decontamination trucks which Wilkie and his other colleagues could clearly see to be mere water trucks or possibly fire trucks. And so the deceptions went on, week after week. The Director-General of ONA soon fell into line with the government and actually provided briefing notes for the Ministers’ speeches to back their arguments for their war policy. “Who is left to keep our democracies honest when the politicians turn feral and the bureaucrats roll over?” asks Wilkie. Not always the press, he answers, showing how the New York Times “degenerated into a mouthpiece for White House disinformation” in the early stages of the war and Murdoch’s Fox News empire unfailingly endorsed the Bush administration.
The book gives a valuable overview of how the intelligence services of the English-speaking countries inter-operate and provides interesting insights for intelligence historians. It demonstrates how the interchange of secret intelligence, far from rendering Australia more independent in its defence and foreign policy, binds it in more closely to the American strategic intentions. Andrew Wilkie is one of those rare individuals in public service who acted out of a sense of his own convictions when clearly perceiving how his nation was being taken in the wrong direction. His book is a worthwhile contribution to the history of these highly significant events, and intelligence historians in particular will be forever in his debt.

Frank Cain
Canberra

Maria Keipert, Peter Grupp, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871-1945, [Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service, 1871-1945], Volume 1, A-F. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000. xlvii, 632 pp., ISBN 3506718401, €138.00

This finely linen-bound and very attractively laid out volume is the first of five planned to constitute the first edition of the Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service, 1871-1945. Presumably, the Index of names, institutions, and organizations will be part of volume five.
Most historians working on intelligence-related events and developments have either come from diplomatic history or are concerned with foreign posts and the diplomats and agents attached to such posts. All of these historians at one time or another have been frustrated by documents containing only last names or even just initials. The search for the missing first name or for the official who initialled the piece can be rather stressful and in many cases the historian is forced to go through what at best might be called educated guess work. Similar difficulties are likely to be encountered when it may be significant to know just what position or rank someone held when certain decisions were taken. The same is true of the length of tenure a diplomat may have had in a position when significant decisions were taken or forced upon a person.
That such difficulties are likely to occur in foreign depositories has been a part of routine research experience. Being unable to reliably identify individuals in the more recent history of one’s own country, can be more than trying. The results all too often are unreliable indices, false identifications in cases of more common names, and, worst of all, erroneous conclusions based on such incomplete or false personnel data.
The German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt, until 1945 in Berlin, until recently located in Bonn, and now reinstalled in Berlin) has taken the extraordinary step of creating a biographical reference work for persons in its service during the period from the founding of the German Empire (Deutsches Reich) following the Franco-Prussian War to the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945. Undoubtedly, users of this in many aspects remarkable publication will not find all names looked for and, as is the case with most reference works, specialists will have questions about the criteria for inclusion or rather the reasons why one or the other person has not been named, not to mention eventual differences of interpretation of the service or disservice performed by those listed. Historians of diplomacy and intelligence have reason to be immensely grateful that the editors responsible for the undertaking were not deterred by the almost certain prospect of some degree of imperfection. As it is, it should be pointed out that the editors of the Biographical Handbook are among the best and most experienced German archivists, and it is no exaggeration to state that a great number of valuable studies in the field of diplomatic and international history would have been less distinctive without their expert advice.
Included in the handbook are all Beamten and Angestellte (officials and civil servants/employees) whose salaries came from the Foreign Office, including the Dragoman service (translators in the Mideast) and special appointees in areas such as trade, agriculture, culture or the press. Not included are employees of other government offices, organizations and institutes, even if for a time they may have appeared under the jurisdiction of the foreign Office or its diplomatic posts. Very regrettable, of course, is the exclusion of the military and police attachés (the latter in some cases during the Nazi period were persons with certain political connections and influence at home and abroad). Excluded also are low level employees such as messengers and office workers.
Not surprising, the most significant source for the information listed in the handbook are the personnel files of the Foreign Office. Specialists are aware of the circumstance that German personnel files, if they originate in the period before 1945 and if they are part of the so-called Captured Records, have been accessible for bona fide researchers in the Political Archive (Politisches Archiv) of the German Foreign Office since their return to the Federal Republic of Germany under the Quadripartite Agreement. Evidently, however, some records pertaining to the personnel files were lost or destroyed, particularly in the course of World War II. Fortunately, such losses appear to have been less than extraordinary, and there are numerous other sources from which to sift personnel and career data. The editors, for instance, report on their use of office records from different departments of the Foreign Office and cooperative efforts of the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv, now located largely in Koblenz and Berlin) as the holder of the valuable Nazi records returned to the German Government upon the dissolution of the Berlin Document Center. Also, often unknown to historians and authors abroad, the German Foreign Office is a depository for numerous personal papers of important personages from German diplomatic and political history, and the editors appear to have made excellent use of these collections.
The most important consideration, namely what to include in the biography of a person listed in the handbook, was attended to by constructing what the editors thought to be a useful biographical sketch. This construct was then used in all cases, regardless of the availability of the desired data. Evidently an employee of the Foreign Service who joined during the early part of his professional life and stayed until he reached the age of retirement would have a more extended biography than someone who served only a brief span of time or in the course of specific assignments.
The biographical construct begins with the family name (alphabetical listing), the first or Christian names, possible aristocratic titles, birth and death dates and places, posible earlier other than German citizenship, the religious affiliation as declared by the employee in his personnel forms (including “gottgläubig”, i.e. unbelieving, not uncommon during the Nazi years), detailed data on parents, data on marital partner and children, education and possible career prior to joining the foreign service, a very detailed and precisely dated professional career inside the foreign service naming assignments and locations, and possible military service and respective data. If the listed person was active in other ministries or organizations following retirement from the foreign service, such information is also included.
The biographies close with helpful data relating to publications by the listed person, publications by others about the listed person, and, historians will be grateful, the names of archives and libraries where papers of the concerned have been deposited.
Where all desired parts of the ideal biographical construct are available, these biographies are extremely helpful and conducive to further research in other sources. Where the data are less than complete, users of the handbook may have an occasional unkind comment, but across the board readers will gratefully acknowledge that what is offered here in most cases appears to be more complete and reliable than other readily available handbook type publications. The completeness and exactitude of the dates of functions performed and assignments executed by diplomats and other representatives of the Foreign Office are probably the most noteworthy contribution of this publication.
The reviewer would like to illustrate some of his reactions to a number of biographical constructs. Even recognizing that each user’s reactions will be quite different, these examples may well illustrate some general aspects of the handbook. One is delighted, for instance, to find the Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, included presumably because as German chancellor he was also “Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs” until July 1917. One is equally pleased to find Bernhard Dernburg, included because in 1907 he was director of Department IV (Colonies) of the Foreign Office. The fact that Dernburg was also chief of the Imperial German propaganda office in the U.S. in 1915, however, is not part of his biography (pp. 414-15), but turns up as a kind of incidental information in the biography of [Karl] Alexander Fuehr who is identified as being active in “political propaganda” in the “Pressebüro Dernburg” (press office) beginning September 25, 1914 (p. 628). That it was Fuehr who in 1931 tried to block publication of the memoirs of Franz Rintelen, one of Germany’s star agents in the U.S. in 1915, cannot be mentioned under his name here, and Rintelen, of course, was an officer of the Imperial German Navy, not of the Germany Foreign Office. That Albrecht Count von Bernstorff’s death is given as “shot by the SS” (p. 130) is a sad detail in the biography of a German diplomat who understood Anglo-Saxon democracy and was accepted in British society. The well-known academic economist Moritz Julius Bonn may indeed have been guest professor at several American universities from 1914 to 1917 (p. 223), but he was also working with Heinrich Albert and Bernhard Dernburg in the German propaganda campaign in the neutral United States. Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff’s less than remarkable but politically volatile publication Zur Vorgeschichte des Roosevelt-Krieges (1943) is just one of many listings demonstrating that the editors have tried to be complete even in cases where it would have been easily possible to be a little less than complete. Historians will be grateful that many of the entries of the handbook also contain less than complementary data and information of this nature. The fact that Heinrich Albert is not listed may seem curious to some users because no other German representative has left such a multitude of documentary traces in American archives. The explanation is rather simple, if disappointing to the historian: Regardless of the question whether the German ambassador wrongly declared Albert to be a Commercial Attaché, attachés or diplomats declared to be such are not included in the Biographical Handbook unless they served in other diplomatic positions – and Heinrich F. Albert clearly did not.
One could go on commenting the entries of this Biographical Handbook and list what may be read as kudos or critique. Whatever the specialist’s reaction in each individual case, there can be no doubt that the editors have accomplished what they set out to do, that is the creation of a long desired and reliable reference work for German diplomats and employees of the Foreign Service. That through the rigorous maintenance of their biographical construct they have also reached their goal of producing a “collective biography” of the German Foreign Service (p. viii) should be mentioned here as a welcome quality of the publication.
This biographical reference work will become a standard research tool in libraries and archives around the world. Some individual historians and authors in international, diplomatic, and intelligence history will be hard put to resist acquisition.

Reinhard R. Doerries
Nuernberg

Jeffrey White, “Shakespeare for Analysts: Literature and Intelligence.” Occasional Paper No. 10. Joint Military Intelligence College: Center for Strategic Intelligence Research. Washington, July 2003. 63 pp.

Jeffrey White aims high. He hopes that intelligence analysts will better understand their world by studying some of the world’s most insightful literature. The intention is laudable. And, indeed, everyone can benefit by reading Shakespeare. But I question whether White’s ambition can be fulfilled. Book learning can never replace experience and intuition. Some analysts have a feel for the situation, the politics, the personalities, the background – and some don’t. Reading Shakespeare isn’t going to change that.
White discusses seven aspects of Shakespeare for Analysts: heroic leadership (Henry V), failure at the top (Richard II), “the biography of force” (Richard III), civil war (Henry VI), the plotting of a coup (Julius Caesar), family intrigues (Henry VI and Richard III), women (Margaret of Anjou), and loyalty and honor (in King John). It is very questionable that any of these relate in any way to the world that analysts must appraise. What does Henry V’s great Crispin’s day oration say to men or women studying the speeches of the charismatic leaders of today, from Osama bin Laden to Fidel Castro to John F. Kennedy? Would knowledge of Cassius, Brutus, and the other conspirators against Caesar have shed any light on the plot leading up to 9/11? Not specifically, of course, not even in the most general terms. Even to ask the question shows how ridiculous is any suggestion that it would have.
The technique of citing just salient points is like one of those CDs that give the arias without embedding them in the opera. I understand that White wants to give readers, who may not have the time to read entire plays, a feel for the plot and its characters. And it is better for them to have read these excerpts than not to have read any Shakespeare at all. But it gives the work – to me, at least – the feel of a Cliff’s Notes.
The best result of analysts reading more Shakespeare, barely mentioned by White, is that they would write better. His hope that studying Shakespeare would much help them better illuminate the world is very doubtful indeed. But one quotation, not mentioned here, might, more than any other, keep analysts’ feet on the ground. Puck said it. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

David Kahn
Great Neck, NY

John Prados, ed. America Confronts Terrorism: Understanding the Danger and How to Think About It. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. 436pp., ISBN: 156663444x, $28.95

John Prados has carried out a valuable service with this collection. Taking a jaundiced view of the public and political hysteria since 9/11, he set out to assemble the major US government documents of the past fifteen years that have examined and analysed the terrorist threat. Before we get carried away by the moment and act on impulse, Prados asks us to consider where we have come from and what we already knew. Of course, events have moved so fast since this book was compiled that it now makes the reader reflect more on what has occurred in the last three years rather than on what occurred pre-9/11. Also, much of its content has since been superceded by the 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States and other assessments. Prados, a seasoned researcher into the failings and murky corners of US foreign policy, this time lets the documents speak for themselves, only adding minimal (but generally telling) observations at the beginning of each section. The repetition of material over several documents only helps to emphasise the lack of a developing understanding within the US government on terrorism as a whole. The presentation of the documents may therefore appear neutral, but the message is definitely critical.
Prados limits his prime subject-matter to reports on terrorism and specific terrorist acts by executive departments, advisors, and congressional committees. There are some gems, in particular Admiral Harold Gehman’s assessment of the USS Cole bombing, and an FBI report that relates several cases of American citizens illegally obtaining nuclear and biological material within the United States. To make the book coherent Prados focused on texts covering terrorism as a general phenomenon and deliberately avoided analyses of WMD as a specific threat. Significantly, he looked for but could not find a single government-related document that examined the broader background to terrorism and the need to address the reasons why individuals become terrorists. Terrorism is defined by the State Department as politically motivated violence against civilian targets by subnational groups, yet the political dimension is absent here. The closest reference comes in the CIA’s report on Global Trends 2015 from December 2000, which acknowledges that continuing US military and technological dominance will generate increasing asymmetrical threats from groups looking to damage US interests with unconventional means. Prados refers to George Tenet’s testimony from July 1998 on the impact that long-term poverty, alienation, and ethnic hatred could have, and his remark that no solution for the terrorist problem could be found without dealing with these underlying causes. These comments were dropped from the final report. Prados’ book illustrates plainly how the lack of such a broader vision necessarily allows for only a limited understanding of terrorism and a narrow military-heavy strategy to deal with it. The orthodoxy demands that terrorism must be outlawed and destroyed, and accepting that broad underlying causes can be identified only leads to creeping legitimisation, a wholly unacceptable outcome.
The book is arranged around several loosely-organised sections: Appreciations of the Threat of Terrorism, Countering the Changing Threat, Patterns of Global Terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorist Groups and Methods, The Record of the 1990s, and United States Responses. The time-scale for sources covers roughly the last fifteen years. What is immediately apparent is how the Reaganite, Realist focus on state-sponsored terrorism never fully dissipated through the 1990s. Changes to the posture and priorities of the US intelligence apparatus in the first decade after the end of the Cold War were marginal at best. Several documents in the collection point to an awareness of the shifts in identity and transnational capabilities of certain terrorist groups, but this was not enough to dislodge the orthodoxy. The main exception to the rule was the Report of the National Commission on Terrorism, submitted by its chair L. Paul Bremer in June 2000. The report clearly stated that the organisations posing the most deadly threat to the United States were less dependent on state sponsors, more difficult to isolate in terms of location, operated sophisticated transnational financial and logistical networks, and were more determined to strike indiscriminately. Bremer, who had been Reagan’s roving counter-terrorism chief in the late 1980s, indicated clearly that the changing environment of international terrorism was rapidly making the state-sponsored label inadequate. Along with its other recommendations on improving human intelligence and coordinating the various counter-terrorist arms of the US government, the report was a prescient call to arms. Yet, tellingly, it was delivered in the middle of an election year and with attention directed elsewhere no action was taken.
Aside from the fixation with state-sponsored terrorism, the other motif that runs through the entire book is the problem of coordination between the many different (and often competing) sections of the US government. There is little talk of intelligence failure or inadequate awareness in the assessments of Khobar Towers, the East Africa embassy bombings, or the USS Cole. What was always lacking was not just specific data on time, date, and location. The failures came in either responding too slow to safety recommendations or the slackness of the various agencies to put their particular pieces of the jigsaw together to form the whole. Prados makes this point himself concerning the various pieces of information that were known by the CIA, FBI, and US Customs prior to 9/11. Already following the 1993 WTC bombing the recognition that the existing bureacracy was a handicap led to efforts to plug the gaps in information assessment and distribution. Yet the mushrooming of new centres for analysis and security liaison channels (particularly related to the FBI) only emphasises the lack of a central point to hold it all together. The arrival of the Department of Homeland Security in early 2002 added yet another spoke to an over-taxed wheel. Likewise, the National Intelligence Reform Act and the creation of a Director of National Intelligence will provide an extra layer to an already bloated apparatus. Vested interests trump national interest, leading to a waste of resources and an inability to correlate, analyse, and act upon the vital information from the stream of global noise.
The report on the USS Cole, with the criticism of its unprepared presence in a highly dangerous location, did not conclude that US forces should avoid such hotspots or restrict their movements due to an evident threat. On the contrary, the demand once again was for better coordination both within the military and between the military and the diplomatic service concerning location assessment. The assumption is never made that the US presence in any corner of the world should be reconsidered. This would only raise the legitimacy of terrorism question again, a path forbidden by the orthodoxy. Yet at the same time the conclusion is made that while better precautions can be implemented, defending the US homeland and all US installations and in-transit military around the globe is impossible. Aiming for total security is not a feasible policy goal. Therefore, the attacks on the WTC in 1993, Khobar Towers, the East African embassies, USS Cole, and the WTC 2001 were leading towards only one outcome - the greater use of US force abroad to destroy the terrorist threat. This was already signposted in late 1998 soon after the embassy bombings, when Al Qaeda for the first time became singled out as the organisation posing the greatest challenge. A report from Raphael Perl of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division in September 1998 argues strongly that the unique retaliatory missile strikes and general posture of the Clinton administration was pointing towards a more unilateral, military-focused, globally-orientated, and pro-active anti-terrorist policy for the future. While terrorism may be a threat to all nations, only some were committed to take on the financial burden and potential consequences to deal with it. The ‘coalition of the willing’ mentality already existed, albeit in embryonic form, more than six years ago. While the USS Cole was not enough to trigger it into full operation, 9/11 obviously was. Certainly, the neocons of the Bush administration were responsible for seizing the initiative and shifting the emphasis from mere retaliation to a re-ordering of international affairs in the Middle East. But reading between the lines of this collection reveals how the intent was there long before.

Giles Scott-Smith
Middelburg, The Netherlands

George W. Allen. None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001, 296 pp., index.

On 8 January 1969, President-elect Nixon sent Henry Kissinger a note asking for “a precise report on what the enemy has in Cambodia … .” The military had considerable evidence that tons of arms had entered the country through Sihanoukville making Cambodia a major North Vietnamese logistics sanctuary. The CIA analysts disputed the military position arguing that adequate supplies were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Who was right? “The CIA’s economist-logisticians … turned out to be dead wrong” (p. 272) writes George Allen with characteristic candor in his memoirs None So Blind.
Often, however, the situation was reversed and Allen makes this clear as he tells three intertwined stories concerning intelligence and policy failures in Vietnam. The first is about his own career as an Indochina intelligence analyst who served in three of the main U.S. intelligence agencies during the that war. The second story deals with American intelligence in Washington and South East Asia during the early Cold War. The third is a subset of the first two – North Vietnamese and Viet Cong order-of-battle or strength estimates and how intentionally biased estimates affected the intelligence profession, if not the conduct of the war. Each was influenced by a complex mix of rivalries among the intelligence agencies and the principal international players – France, North and South Vietnam, and America. Allen sorts it out based on first hand experience beginning in WWII.
After Pacific service in the Navy, George Allen attended the University of Utah and initially studied Russian. He decided to pursue government service and in 1949 the only opportunity available in Washington was with Army intelligence, so he became a civilian order-of-battle analyst and reserve Army officer specializing in Indochina. In 1954 Allen made the first of several extended trips to Vietnam, both North and South, spending time with the French and Vietnamese forces. After a tour in Hawaii where he worked on the intelligence support structure for the Far East Command, he returned to Washington as the Army’s leading civilian expert on Vietnam. When DIA was formed in 1961 Allen transferred to the new Agency. By this time he had acquired a reputation as an analyst who often reached conclusions contrary to the military and political official views. He survived because he worked within the system and his judgments were right and well documented.
In 1962 Allen returned to Vietnam for DIA to establish a Joint Evaluation Center in the Military Assistance Command (MACV) staffed by military, Embassy and CIA personnel. Learning about and working against the North Vietnamese was a daunting task. “Some ten-thousand hard-core Communist covert agents – a clandestine network – remained in the South to organize and lead opposition groups. ....” (p. 85) Despite the need, Allen was not enthusiastically received by MACV and the infighting he describes is disturbing. The antipathy followed from resentment of his civilian status compounded by his assessments that the North Vietnamese political determination and military strength were greater than the official estimates. Similarly, his observation that the South Vietnamese government lacked a unifying motivation or political rationale was considered unhelpful. In short his conclusion “that MACV’s intelligence effort was flagging” (p. 155) did not sit well with the generals. To make matters worse, by 1963, it became clear that he was in broad agreement with press accounts of deteriorating conditions in the Diem government of South Vietnam. On his return to Washington, when asked by the DIA director for suggestions to improve intelligence in Vietnam, Allen replied in considerable detail – naming names – with specifics about both weak practices and marginal personnel. The Director, a general, was not pleased, asking “who the hell that civilian thought he was to call into judgment the competence of an air force Colonel.” (p. 156) After a few more incidents of that nature, Allen decided it was time to go and accepted a senior analyst position with CIA in 1964.
At the CIA the professional atmosphere improved but the intelligence problems Allen faced regarding Vietnam were much the same, especially the constant turf battles between the military and civilian analysts. (p. 172) Allen spent more than two of the next four years of his CIA career in South Vietnam. He explains in some detail, how the war escalated, the impact of the pacification programs in their various forms, what the Gulf of Tonkin incident looked like from South Vietnam at the time, and the problems resulting from poor coordination among American and South Vietnamese intelligence elements. Throughout this period, perhaps the most professionally frustrating aspects of the analysts’ role at the national level were the unsupported political judgments imposed on them by not so subtle decision makers. Allen gives many examples, several describing the refusal of the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to accept critical comments about the war and the extensive “editing” of the estimates with negative assessments of the military situation, before they were allowed to be released. (pp. 143, 193-94).
A variation of this problem persisted throughout the 1960s. It concerned the estimates of strength, composition and location of the North Vietnam forces – the order-of-battle (OB) issue, with which Allen had considerable experience. Separate OB estimates were prepared in Washington and South Vietnam by military and civilian intelligence analysts—they did not come close to agreeing. By 1967, the former defined the North Vietnamese forces to be about 248,000 for political reasons, and adjusted their intelligence estimates to support that figure – intelligence to please (pp. 173, 248). The CIA estimates developed by analyst Sam Adams and based on both CIA field reporting and MACV’s submissions, were double the military figure. (p. 264) Nevertheless, MACV would not concede and Allen tells how, in November 1967, after several high level conferences, the CIA caved in. (p. 252) Allen knew Adams was correct, but could do little to help once the DCI had made his decision. An infuriated Adams was subsequently fired for insubordination and went public. Allen leaves to historians the answer to the question: would anything have changed had the military accepted the actual OB figures?
In 1966, after the completion of his two year hardship tour in Vietnam, Allen returned to CIA headquarters as Deputy to the DCI’s special assistant for Vietnamese Affairs, George Carver. It was here that he worked on a study about Vietnam’s will to persist, (p. 211) requested by Secretary of Defense McNamara. Allen gives a fascinating account of a quasi-unofficial extended discussion on the situation in Vietnam he had with McNamara, who was beginning to realize things were not going well in the war. When pressed by the secretary, Allen recommended America should stop the military build-up, halt the bombing, and negotiate – military victory didn’t seem possible he concluded. Seven years later negotiations brought the war to an end.
In discussing what would be his final two years working on Vietnam related matters, Allen tells of developing analytic methods for evaluating the progress of the Strategic Hamlet and pacification programs, commenting en passant, on the value of each. The methods developed were functional in principle but ignored in the field – too complex. He writes also of the South Vietnamese need for its own political program, one with specific objectives that provided motivation for supporting South Vietnam and making clear that America’s role was different from the French. This coupled with the fact that none of the various South Vietnam governments even tried to mobilize their own country to fight the Communist insurgency, preferring instead to rely on the United States, spelled doom in the end. The effects of these policies were especially evident during and after the Tet offensive of 1968. Allen discusses this event in terms of the degree of surprise – not great – the nature of the intelligence failures, and the political consequences.
From 1968 until his retirement in 1979, Allen worked in non-Vietnam related assignments that he describes briefly. But in the final chapter, The U.S. Failure in Vietnam, Allen returns to the topic that consumed most of his career. Here he looks at the American misperceptions and misjudgments about the worldwide Communist movement as applied to Indochina. He offers some summary assessments about the consequences of the Vietnam endeavor as reflected in the viewpoints of the various presidents whose policies rationalized U.S. involvement. Looking back from the perspective of 2001, he considers the intelligence experience in Vietnam as an “aberration” but leaves unasked, the question of whether that aberration is currently being repeated.This review is not the first to conclude that None So Blind is one of the most important accounts of intelligence in Vietnam war even though it does not have source citations. If the reader can only read one book about the problems of strategic intelligence in Vietnam, this one is recommended.

Hayden B. Peake
Alexandria, VA