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Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1996. ISBN 0521566363

Intelligence means many things to different people. Social scientists associate eight interpretations to the expression. Statecraft, or more mundanely government, requires knowledge both in a general and in a particular sense. Intelligence in government usually has a more restricted meaning than just information and its collection, processing and use. It is related to international affairs, defense, national security and secrecy and it works through specialized institutions labeled "intelligence." It constitutes its own particular kind of state power, which is sometimes demonized in democratic countries because of the official secrecy, clouding its information and hiding its actions. The media deal mainly with the sensational aspects of spy stories or indulge in the failure of intelligence. This book tries to analyze the intelligence system, the interaction of people in the intelligence organizations and the underlying processes, with special attention to the big, computer-based agencies, which are an important part of twentieth-century government. It is a scholarly study and for those readers who want to know about the internal workings of intelligence it provides more fascination than many of the "cloak and dagger" spy stories.
Michael Herman has been a professional intelligence practitioner whose career coincided almost exactly with the Cold War. His viewpoint developed into one of an Organization Man in the British intelligence system. Thereafter he wrote and taught about intelligence, made some forays into social sciences studies of organizations and their transmission and use of information and explored its literature. He is now a lecturer at Nuffield College Oxford.
The study about "Intelligence Power in Peace and War" falls into seven parts. Part I describes how the modern system has evolved, provides an outline model of it and describes the subjects with which it deals. Part II analyses the model in more detail and examines its components, collection sources and their characteristics, all-source analysis and its assessment, and their boundaries with each other and other government activities. Part III outlines the effects of intelligence on national and international action, security, threats and co-operation. Part IV, titled "accuracy," deals with the problem of intelligence judgement and suggests some principles for improving performance. Part V searches for principles to increase efficiency in the production process, in managing the intelligence community and focuses on the role of the agency manager. Part VI attempts to estimate the national and international importance of intelligence in the post-Cold War world. Conclusions about intelligence as a whole are summarized as Part VII in the final chapter. Ease of reading is assisted by a glossary of terms and abbreviations, 19 graphics and figures and an well-assembled index. The author’s "Suggestions for further reading," together with the pertinent and explanatory footnotes constitute an introductory guide to intelligence studies, which is nicely structured and explains the important works and their significance.
The author very clearly states the topics, which are not covered in his book. He is not dealing with the controversial issues of intelligence’s democratic accountability, legal status and implications for individuals’ rights. Herman draws from his British experience and restricts himself to the Anglo-American-Commonwealth intelligence model. However, this is not much of a restriction. The majority of published literature stems from Anglo-Saxon sources and the intelligence patterns of the "Western" countries, including Israel, resemble each other very closely.
The study of Michael Herman is a very valuable addition to the analytical intelligence literature. It provides a comprehensive overview how intelligence works and functions. As a former intelligence professional, the author knows that not only intelligence but also scholarly results need to be presented in a language, which appeals to the novice, the practitioner and scholar alike and he is very good at this. His thoroughly researched, well-structured and very readable book is highly recommendable.

Benjamin Fischer, ed., At Cold War’s End: US-Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989-1991. [Reston, VA]: Central Intelligence Agency, 1999. ISBN I929667027

As a contribution to the „Conference on US-Intelligence and the End of the Cold War" on the Texas A&M University Campus at College Station from 18 to 20 November 1999 the Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) prepared a Compendium of newly declassified US Intelligence Documents covering the years 1989-1991.
The compendium comprises 24 documents, 12 of them NIE´s and 4 SNIE´s. (National and Special National Intelligence Estimates – NIE´s and SNIE´s – are prepared for the President, his Cabinet, the National Security Council and Senior policymakers and officials. Estimates are issued over the signature of the Director of Central Intelligence and represent the coordinated view of the Community´s member agencies.)
The documents are divided into six chapters: The Soviet Crises – Gorbachev and the Perils of Perestroike; The End of Empire I – Eastern Europe; The End of Empire II – National Secession and Ethnic/Conflict in the USSR; New Thinking – Soviet Foreign Relations; The Military Balance I – Conventional Forces in Europe; The Military Balance II – Strategic Nuclelar Weapons.
The documents were selected and edited by Benjamin B. Fischer of CIA´s History Staff who also wrote the preface, commenting the documents. The preface is an utmost helpful guide through the documents and at the same time a well written and concise account of US. policy toward the the Soviet Union and the collapse of communismen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
European readers familiar with the overall political and economic issues surrounding the end of the soviet system will find the Estimates on military-strategic subjects of special interest; indeed they are unique. NIE 11-3/8, "Soviet Forces and Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict through the late 1990s" , according to Benjamin Fischer the bible on Soviet strategic nuclear weapons for US military planers, reveals facts and interpretations that were once among the Intelligence Community`s most highly classified secrets.
Still in late 1988 the Intelligence Community kept it`s skeptical and traditional conservativ approach vis a vis the Soviet military capabilities, concluding in NIE 11-3/8

... we judge however, that Soviet force decicions including arms control agreements will continue to be more strongly influenced by the requirements to meet military and political objectives than by economic issues.

The warning time we associate with possible Warsaw Pact preparations for war with NATO in Central Europe have increased significantly from those set forth in 1984.

The Warsaw Pact as a military alliance is essentially dead, and Soviet efforts to convert it in to a political alliance will ultimately fail

A united Germany however will move even more assertively into Eastern Eupope as an economic and political influence in the vanguard of the European Community. This will be a source of worry for most East Europeans, particularly the Poles.... German influence will be somewhat diluted as other Western countries also build economic and political ties to the region. Even so, Germany`s weight and occasional insensitivity will raise hackles.

West Europeans are better positioned to lead in shaping the East European future, but the United States has important advantages, among them the desire of East Europeans for an counterweight to Soviet and German influence.

James D. Calder, Intelligence, Espionage and Related Topics: An Annotated Bibliography of Serial, Journal, and Magazine Scholarship, 1844-1998. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. ISBN 0313292906

In a new Century characterized by the Internet, computerized databases and electronic archives, a new traditional hardcover bibliography may at first sound outmoded. But James Calder’s new addition to the world of intelligence studies seems to defy both time and scope. Indeed, this monumental bibliography fulfils a need that is long overdue, in covering not books but journal and magazine articles in its field. Whereas a series of books published by ABC Clio Press several years ago cover intelligence bibliographies of individual countries, notably Britain, France and Israel, this new bibliography is far wider in its scope and deals with all aspects of intelligence, espionage and security issues which are related to intelligence as well.
James Calder, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas, set out to chart articles dealing with intelligence and espionage, which appeared in scholarly journals and magazine from 1844 to 1998. Over 150 years of articles are listed by author, many with a brief summary or abstract. Also included is an extensive indexing by keywords and terms, as well as a co-author index.
The first thing the reader notices in this new book is its sheer size. The annotated bibliography part encompasses over 1200 pages and includes well over ten thousand individual entries. The meticulously-researched entries include dozens of well known journals, but it also covers numerous journals and sources which the average intelligence scholar may not be familiar with, such as the Colorado Quarterly, Criminal Law Bulletin, Government Publications Review, Joint Forces Quarterly, even the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations. Also included are dozens of journals in foreign languages, including French, Italian, Russian and many more.
Leafing through the entries, one is amazed by the amount of work that must have gone into locating numerous little known or even obscure sources. A quick search in connection with one of my current projects found J. Talmon’s article on the Lavon Affair, published in New Outlook of 1961, as well as Bradley Day’s article on American Civil War intelligence published in a 1968 issue of Quaker History. With so many thousands of entries, a quick search may however turn into a long night’s reading, so all you intelligence fans beware.
The book is easy to use and is not cluttered with mysterious acronyms or technical jargon. It does seem a pity, however, that the publishers did not include with the book a searchable version on CD-ROM. The production costs of CD-ROMs, even in small quantities, have fallen so much recently that more and more publishers are including a CD with books, for easy search capabilities. For its hefty price tag, a CD-ROM included with Calder’s book would have made searching this wonderful database so much easier. A second alternative could perhaps be to place the book’s database on the Internet and provide buyers with a password or a similar secure way to access the material.
With a price tag of 112.50 Pounds Sterling (about $180), Calder’s book may not fit everyone’s wallet. However, it is an essential book for any reference and university library dealing with intelligence. Calder’s extraordinary work will remain, for years to come, the standard bibliographic reference work for journal sources on intelligence. As such, it is highly recommended for scholars of intelligence and security, as well as for history scholars interested in espionage and its military or political contexts.

Aleksey Velidov, Pokhozhdeniya terrorista – Odisseya Yakova Blumkina. Moscow: Sovremmenik Publishers, 1998. ISBN 5270016265
Oleg Shishkin, Bitva za Gimalai. NKVD: Magiya i spionazh. Moscow: Olma Press Publishers, 1999. ISBN 5224002524

In the history of secret services human tragedy and unintended comedy are often not far apart. Proof of this is to be found in two books recently published in Russia. Velidov is the author of "The Adventure of a Terrorist – the Odyssey of Yakov Blumkin", the first biography substantiated by many hitherto unknown documents, of the Social Revolutionary and later agent of the GPU, Yakov Blumkin, notorious for his assassination of the German ambassador Count Mirbach in 1918. His life span was 29 years only. He was born in 1900 in a Jewish family, orphaned early in life and grew up in Odessa. He took an active part in the Russian Revolution an became a member of the Tcheka in 1918. On orders of the leadership of the Social Revolutionaries Party he assassinated the German ambassador in Moscow, but in 1919 he broke with the Social Revolutionaries, made an open confession and was pardoned. Blumkin took part in the civil war as a commander in the Red Army, he studied at a military academy, and in 1923, on the advice of Dzierzynski, he joined the foreign department of the secret police GPU, later called NKVD. He served as chief instructor of the state security service in Mongolia, as a resident in Palestine, Syria, Egypt and Turkey and on secret missions in Germany, France and China. Blumkin`s occasional emotional escapades were condoned in these years, but when he met with Trotsky, whom he admired, after Trotsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he was caught in the meshes of Stalin`s machinery of repression. Blumkin´s mistress, also a member of the secret police, mercilessly denounced him, he was lured into a trap and then executed. As a Jew, blumkin owed his emancipation to the Russian Revolution of 1917, but then he became one of its numerous victims.
Velidov briefly refers to the expeditions into the Himalayan made by the NKVD. They are dealt with in detail by O. Shishkin in his sensationally titled book "The struggle for the Himalayan – The NKVD : Magic and Espionage". Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Spiritists have a long tradition in Russia. Also after the Revolution of 1917 attempts were made to combine such trends with Buddhistic Ideas in order to develop a sort of high-minded communism. In the nineteen twenties the NKVD financed several expeditions into Tibet in search of the mythical city of Shambala whose inhabitants were reputed to possess telepathic faculties and ancient lore. These expeditions were led by the well-known artist Nikolai Rerikh and sponsored at first by Dzierzynski and after his death by Gleb Bokiy, head of the special department of the NKVD. Yakov Blumkin was a chief agent in all of them, disguised as a Buddhistic lama or as organizer of the Mongolian "Blumkin People`s University." The city of Shambala, however, was not to be found, and all the scientists and secret service man who took part in the search, including Bokiy, were put to death during the repressions of 1937. A touch of irony is added by the fact that in 1990 and 1991 the KGB, then headed by Kryutchkov, seriously considered posthumously conferring the title "Hero of the Soviet Union" on Blumkin for his merits in the struggle for Tibet.

David Kohnen, Commanders Winn and Knowles: Winning the U-Boat War with Intelligence, 1939-1943. Krakow: The Enigma Press, 1999. ISBN 8386110341

The author, archivist of the Mariner’s Museum at Newport News, Virginia, USA, found in our member Zdzislaw J.Kapera, of Krakow, Poland, a publisher much engaged in the history of the German cipher machine ‘Enigma’. David Kohnen centered his study on the two heads of the Submarine Tracking Rooms in London and Washington, Rodger (not Roger) Winn and Kenneth A. Knowles, reminding the readers of the most important role both men played during the decisive phases of the Battle of the Atlantic.
He starts out with a short description of the participation of American naval officers in operations of British warships and aircraft in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, so f.i. when a young Ensign Leonard B. Smith on 26^th May 1941 aboard a British ‘Catalina’ flyingboat sighted the Bismarck, running for a French base, which led to her interception and destruction. He also mentions the several meetings of high ranking officers on both sides of the ocean in preparing the joint war plans, and establishing the first contacts for close cooperation in intelligence gathering and its use by the operational staffs. But Kohnen does no evade the difficulties, the initial mistrust, the prejudices, the service rivalries, and so on, which had to be overcome first, until finally the ‘very special relationship’ between the Government Code & Cipher School at Bletchley Park and the Op-20-G, and especially the Submarine Tracking Room under Rodger Winn at the Admiralty in London and its American counterpart at COMINCH in Washington under Kenneth Knowles, was achieved. The establishment of the American tracking room was to a great extent a consequence of Winn’s visit to Washington and his meeting with the new C-in-C of the U.S. Navy and Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, in spring 1942, and Knowles’ tour in the summer of 1942 to learn how the British Operational Intelligence Centre and the Submarine Tracking Room worked. The resulting friendship between Winn, his assistant Patrick Beesly, and Knowles was the basis for a very close cooperation in the tracking of German U-boats, leading to increased successes from autumn 1942 to the end of the war. Kohnen does not forget mentioning the links to the Canadian tracking room under John B. McDiarmid at Ottawa. This writer remembers the impressive relationship between the ‘back room boys’, who had so decisive a part in the victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, when, unfortunately after the death of Winn-Beesly, Knowles and I presented papers under the chair of Sir Norman Denning (the founder and most important man in the O.i.C. in London) about the role of SIGINT in the Battle of the Atlantic at the Naval History Conference at Annapolis in 1977, and the meeting of Beesly, McDiarmid, and myself during the 70^th birthday colloquy of the Royal Canadian Navy at Royal Roads near Victoria in 1980. We must be very grateful to David Kohnen for reminding us of the development of the American-British-Canadian SIGINT cooperation and especially for providing us with a vivid description of Rodger Winn and Kenneth Knowles.

Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence. The Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre, 1939-1945. With a new introduction by W.J.R. Gardner and a new afterword by Ralph Erskine. London: Greenhill Books/Pennsylvania, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000. ISBN 1853673986.

When in late 1974 Frederick W. Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret was published, I immediately phoned Patrick Beesly, – we had corresponded for some years about the Battle of the Atlantic –, and asked him: "Patrick, is this true?", he answered: "Yes, but I was not allowed to tell you earlier, but what Winterbotham says about the Navy is not true." I said: "Patrick, sit down and write your story!" He started with some articles in the British Naval Review and in the Marine- Rundschau, and then his book Very Special Intelligence followed, translated by Captain Friedrich Forstmeier, Chief of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, for the German edition Geheimdienstkrieg der britischen Admiralität 1939-1945, presented to the public during a reception at the Rhein Hotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg at the great symposium "Die Funkaufklärung und ihre Rolle in Zweiten Weltkrieg", at which many participants in the cryptanalytic efforts in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany and other nations, as well as veterans from both sides of the Battle of the Atlantic participated. This meeting established a real ‘band of brothers’ working on the history of the signal intelligence in World War Two, and it was followed by many other colloquies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Patrick Beesly's well written volume, re-published now in the original form, gives a vivid description of the birth and the development of the Operational Intelligence Centre of the British Admiralty and the role of its founder and brain, Norman Denning. Now he could tell what his predecessor Donald McLachlan in his book of 1968 Room 39. Naval Intelligence in Action 1939- 1945 had to conceal, the important influence the decryption of the German naval cipher machines ‘M-3’ and ‘M-4’ had for the surface naval operations and especially for the Battle of the Atlantic. From his own experience, first as member of the surface division and from late 1941 as deputy head of the Submarine Tracking Room, but also with access to the first to the Public Records Office released ‘Ultra’ documents, he could meticulously describe the difficult times of the first two years, during which the German xB-Dienst was more successful, until, after first delayed breaks, in August 1941 the analytical decryption at Bletchley Park started and led to the successful routing of the convoys round the German ‘wolf packs.’ But he looks not only at the U-Boat war, where he shows the difficulties during the great ‘black out’ from February to December 1942, and the problems to find ways into the U-Boat cipher ‘Triton’ again with all the ups and downs, but also at the role signal intelligence played during the Bismarck-operation with all its mistakes, the failures with the Channel-Dash of the German battleships or the PQ- 17 convoy battle, and during the battle with the Scharnhorst and the sinking of the Tirpitz. Not less important are his many observations about the most important men in the British naval intelligence, his uncle, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, F. Harry Hinsley at Bletchley Park, Norman Denning at the O.I.C. and his chief at the S.T.R., Rodger Winn, but also the American and Canadian counterparts, Kenneth Knowles and John McDiarmid.
We must be very grateful to Lionel Leventhal of Greenhill Books for re-publishing this most important book about the naval war 1939-1945 as seen from the ‘back rooms’ of the British Admiralty, and for asking two great experts to write a new introduction and an afterword. ‘Jock’ Gardner from the Naval Historical Branch in London, who himself published articles and a most important and competent book on this topic, gives a broad and instructive overview about the historiography of the naval war and the Battle of the Atlantic and the role ‘Ultra’ was assigned to it by the authors since Patrick Beesly’s book, which he still considers ground breaking. And Ralph Erskine, well known for his many articles on the technical details of the ‘Enigma’ and the German rules to use this machine, as well as to the ways taken to break into this system, published in the journals lntelligence and National Security and Cryptologia, delineates in his afterword the results of the 25-years of research into the role of signal intelligence in the Battle of the Atlantic.
So even the owners of the original edition of Patrick Beesly’s book, but also all historians and readers interested in the naval warfare must read and use this new edition of Very Special Intelligence with its most important introduction and afterword, to be up to date!

Joseph Mark Scalia, Germany‘s Last Mission to Japan. The Failed Voyage of U 234. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000. ISBN 1557508119

For many years the story of U 234 and its voyage to Japan which ended in the United States, but especially its load of passengers and materials including 560 kilogram of ‘uranium oxide’ have captivated the international media, often with greatly distorted stories, f.i. in a joint American-Japanese-German TV-film The Last U-Boat, or in some articles and books, speculating about German assistance for a Japanese atomic weapon or even the use of the German 'uranium' in the two American atomic bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The American historian Joseph Mark Scalia, who served from 1989-1997 as an enemy ordnance disposal Seabee diver in the U.S. Naval Reserves, has tried with success to reveal the real history of the journey of U 234, its pre-history, the proceedings during the voyage, the background of the officers and passengers, and the events of the capture and the disposal of the loads.
He used all the relevant documents in the National Archives, finding many details which were not used by others before, and he interviewed all the still living participants of the events aboard the U-Boats and in the United States, as well as experts in Germany and Japan. He shows that the decryption of the Japanese messages between the Ambassador Oshima Hiroshi and his military attachés in Berlin and Tokyo as well as some decrypted German naval signals gave the Allied intelligence good knowledge about the planned task of U 234 and the identity of the passengers, including the two Japanese naval officers, Tomonaga Hideo and Shoji Genzo.
In the first part Scalia describes the development of the German-Japanese co-operation and the use of surface ships and submarines in the effort to transfer personnel and materials back and forth.
Then follows the preparation of the journey of U 234, the journey up to the messages about the end of the war and the decision of the commanding officer to surrender to the Americans, the suicide of the two Japanese, and the arrival at Portsmouth, with a critical description of the behaviour of some of the American guards against the now prisoners of war, and the unloading of the U-Boat. Most important is the second part with detailed personal stories of the officers and passengers and a painstaking description of their projected tasks in Japan in connection with the materials the U-Boat transported. lt becomes clear that the most important task was the German assistance for the Japanese air defense by the German experts, the blueprints of German weapons, including anti-air rockets, and dismounted German jet- and rocket planes (Me-262 and Me-163).
In a special appendix Scalia presents his research results about the 'uran oxide', starting with the information of Prof. Kigoshi Kunihiko, then a young assistant to Prof. Nishina Yoshio, the leading Japanese nuclear scientist, about the state of the Japanese nuclear research, which was far behind the Americans and even the Germans, and the background of the requests to Germany in 1943 to send 'uran oxide', which was to be used for experiments in the enrichrnent of uranium. Scalia then describes the sources for the diverse legends about the final disposal of the 'uranium oxide', and in a detailed comparison of all relevent materials comes to the conclusion that the 'uranium oxide' in July 1945 ended up in a warehouse in Brooklyn. Even if the final whereabouts of the material remains unclear, Scalia comes to the conclusion that "U 234‘s consignment of uranium oxide was not indicative of any large-scale Axis program, nor did it provide American authorities with any substantial windfall of unique value".